revealing at once the springs of action. The sensuous basis of her
nature, her strong will and quick temper, may be seen to set in motion
the forces which will presently overwhelm her. Her widowed state is
irksome--therefore she will marry. She hates authority--therefore she
will make her own choice in the matter of a husband. And finer threads
already begin to complicate the issues. She is really fond of Darnley,
the weak youth whom she is determined to marry; but that motive is
intricately mixed with the satisfaction of insulting Elizabeth through
him; while her ready wit gives a spice to her malice which, in dialogue
at least, is very refreshing. When she enters the audience-chamber she
calls Darnley to her side and, with a gesture towards the gloomy faces
of the disaffected nobles, says in merry mockery:
... look you there
On these good gentlemen, all friends of ours,
The earls of Morton, Ruthven, and Argyll:
For friends they are--upon their countenance
We see it written.
She turns to the English ambassador:
... Here's Sir Nicholas.
What news of our dear cousin? Has she come
At last to give that virgin heart away
Into another's keeping, that brave Archduke,
Who'd bite your hand, they say, as soon as kiss it--
Such manners are in Austria--or Charles,
My dear French brother, who is well enough,
And only fourteen years her junior?
Not yet the happy moment? Patience, then,
Another day you'll have that news for us.
Sir Nicholas states formally Elizabeth's objections to Darnley, who
interjects:
By my beard!
MARY. No! No!
Not by your beard, dear Henry, or your oath
Is emptier than a prince's promises--
Some princes we have heard of, we would say,
Though cannot think it truth. Nay, let me hear
What is it that my sister Princess wills
Out of the largeness of her heart for me?
The complexity of Mary's character is well brought out. There is, for
instance, the little scene with Mary Beaton at the beginning of Act II.
Here the Queen, discovering Darnley's infidelity, passes rapidly through
half a dozen moods--from satirical bitterness to a fury of pride, and
then to tears in which humiliation, gratitude, and tenderness are
mingled. Mary Beaton has just said that the people pity their Queen:
MARY. ... On my life,
I'll not be pitied: pity is a chafe
On open wounds of pride. To pity me
Makes me a beggar--dare you pity me?
BEATON. Sweet lady, I would not, but must perforce!
MARY. Nay, would you have me weep? What thing am I
That three soft words should drive the tear drops forth
Like floods in winter? Nay, nay, good my girl,
This is my body's weakness, not my soul's.
The gentleness of that gives place at the entrance of Darnley to intense
scorn, changing to indignation when he compels her to answer him, and to
provocative coquetry at his insult to Rizzio. In the second scene of
this act a new aspect of her mentality develops. The action here,
dramatically splendid in its speed and emotion, grows out of Mary's
recklessness, and proceeds directly, through the jealousy of Darnley,
to Rizzio's murder and Mary's secret plot to avenge him. It would seem,
in the astonishing duplexity of her nature, that there could be nothing
more to reveal; yet the profounder forces of it only begin to be
operative from this point. Bothwell, as she designs the scheme, is to be
merely the tool of her shrewd intelligence. But she is betrayed by the
force of her own passion, which transforms Bothwell into the means of
her destruction. The finest achievement of this portrayal is that which
shows the Queen conscious of her infatuation, and perceiving the tragedy
which it is preparing, but incapable of stemming the flood that is
carrying her away. Intelligence remains acute: reason holds as clear a
light to consequence as ever it did, but both are ineffectual against
the storm of instinct. Here is a passage from the end of Act III in
which Bothwell after a rebuff has protested his love for the Queen:
MARY. Nay, swear not; nay, I know you what you are--
Hotter than flame in your desires; false--
Falser than water.
BOTHWELL (_embracing her_). Be a salamander,
To live for ever in the midst of fire.
MARY. Oh, Bothwell! Oh, my love! I am bewitched
To love you so. You are a deadly poison
That's crept through all my veins; you are the North,
And I the needle; I must turn to you
From every quarter of the hemispheres.
... I am yours
Utterly, wholly; when I walk abroad,
Jewelled and brocaded, I feel all men's eyes
Can see me naked, and, from head to foot,
Branded in red-hot letters with your name.
BOTHWELL. This is indeed love!
MARY. You may call it so!
It is not that which most men mean by love--
A moment's idle fancy. No, this love
Is like a dragon, laying waste the land
Of all my life; it is a deadly sickness,
Of which we both shall die; it is a sin,
Of which we both are damned, the saints of God
Not finding mercy; there's no pleasure in it,
But dust in the mouth and saltness in the eyes.
One would like to indicate further the truth with which the character is
studied through the last two acts, providing the material as it does for
scenes of great power and range of effect. Particularly one would wish
to convey some idea of the scene of the final tragedy, broadly conceived
against a background of the angry Edinburgh populace, and throbbing with
the defiance of the Queen. Psychological imagination here is no less
than brilliant, and one could cull perhaps half a dozen passages to
illustrate it. But a single extract must suffice; and that is chosen for
the additional reason that its closing sentences contain the very root
of the tragedy. It is from Act IV, and the scene, following upon Mary's
marriage to Bothwell, is designed to show her last desperate struggle
against him and against herself. Already she is remorseful,
disillusioned, and bitter; she knows the marriage to be hateful to her
people, and she has found Bothwell cruel and treacherous. Before the
nobles, who are assembled to receive them, she taunts Bothwell that he
is not royal; flouts him for Arthur Erskine; declares that she will
never wear jewels again; and at last provokes from Bothwell angry abuse
and threats of violence. The nobles interpose to protect her, and beg
her to let them save her from him. It needs but one word of assent to be
rid of him for ever. She is almost won; she takes a few steps towards
them, and actually gives her hand to one of them. Then she hesitates,
turns, and looks at her husband:--
MARY. I am yours, Bothwell.
BOTHWELL. Will you go with me?
MARY. Ay, to the world's end, in my petticoat.
BOTHWELL. Let go her hands, my lord.
MORTON. Ay, let them go,
And let _her_ go, for naught can save her now.
Not ours the fault.
MARY. Not yours, nor his, nor mine.
'Tis not the fault of floods to drown, nor fire
To burn and shrivel--no, nor beasts to bite,
Nor frosts to kill the flowers--not the fault,
Only the property. There's something here
That's stronger than our wishes and our wills.
There is no going back; our course is laid,
And we must keep it, though it lead to death.
Good-bye, my lords. My husband, let us go.
_James Stephens_
One does not put a poet like Mr Stephens into a group--it cannot be
done. If you try to do it, weakly yielding a wise instinct to mere
intelligence, one of two things will happen. You will return to your
careful group the moment after you thought you had made it, to find
either that Mr Stephens has vanished or that the others have. Either he
has broken away from the ridiculous frail links which bound him, and is
already disappearing on the horizon with a gleeful shout, or his
unfortunate companions have vanished before so much exuberance.
That is why this poet was not included in the Irish chapter where, if
the thing were possible at all, one would have hoped to catch him. There
are many fine racial strands out of which you would think a net could be
woven. They appear to enmesh an Irishman and an Irish poet. We think we
recognize that eye, critical and appreciative, for a woman--or a horse.
We believe we know that wit, with a touch of satire and another touch of
merry malice. We are surely not mistaken in that adoration of beauty and
its converse hatred of ugliness; while we have no doubt whatever about
that passion for liberty.
But the true poet will transcend his nation, as he does his manhood, at
times of purest inspiration; and Mr Stephens has those happy
seasons--happy, surely, for those to whom he sings, though, doubtless,
each with its own agony to him. In many of the slighter poems, however,
all of them good and most of them quite beautiful, the signs of
nationality are obvious. They are comically clear, in fact, proceeding
as they do directly from the quick, keen perception of the Comic Spirit
itself. Only a blessed simpleton whose name was Patsy, could see the
angel who walks along the sky sowing the poppyseed. The word 'Sootherer'
sounds like English; and indeed individuals of the species are not
unknown in this country. But they, like the word, are native to the land
of the born lover. Has anybody heard of a Saxon who could fit names like
these to his sweetheart--Little Joy, Sweet Laughter, Shy Little Gay
Sprite? or who could woo her with such a ripple of flattery--
... You are more sweetly new
Than a May moon: you are my store,
My secret and my treasure and the pulse
Of my heart's core.
But, on the other hand, no mere English boy could hope to match the glib
rage of spite in this disappointed youth--
You'll go--then listen, you are just a pig,
A little wrinkled pig out of a sty;
Your legs are crooked and your nose is big,
You've got no calves, you have a silly eye,
I don't know why I stopped to talk to you,
I hope you'll die.
Again, no Jack Robinson, though the dull smother that he would call his
imagination were fired by plentiful beer, could ever have conceived of
"What Tomas an Buile Said in a Pub"; or could have accompanied Mac Dhoul
on his impish adventure into heaven, to be twitched off God's throne by
a hand as large as a sky, and sent spinning through the planets--
Scraping old moons and twisting heels and head
A chuckle in the void....
These outward marks are unmistakable; and so, too, are certain qualities
in the essence and texture of the work. His lyric moods may be as tender
and fanciful, though always more spontaneous, than those of Mr Yeats.
And one may find the arrowy truth, the rich earthiness and the profound
sense of tragedy of a Synge. But the filmy threads which seem to stretch
between Mr Stephens and his compatriots have no strength to bind him.
They are, indeed, only visible when he is ranging at some altitude that
is lower than his highest reach. When he soars to the zenith, as in
"The Lonely God" and "A Prelude and a Song," their tenuity snaps. He has
gone beyond what is merely national and simply human; and has become
just a Voice for the Spirit of Poetry.
Nevertheless the affinities of this poet with what is best in modern
Irish literature would make a fascinating study. Foremost, of course,
there is imagination. You will find in him the true Hibernian blend of
grotesquerie and grandeur, pure fantasy and shining vision. But each of
these things is here raised to a power which makes it notable in itself,
while all of them may sometimes be found in astonishing combination in a
single poem. In the book called _Insurrections_, which is dated 1909,
and appears to represent Mr Stephens' earliest efforts in verse, there
is the piece which I have already named, "What Tomas an Buile Said in a
Pub." Already we may see this complex quality at work. Tomas is
protesting that he saw God; and that God was angry with the world.
His beard swung on a wind far out of sight
Behind the world's curve, and there was light
Most fearful from His forehead ...
.....
He lifted up His hand--
I say He heaved a dreadful hand
Over the spinning Earth, then I said "Stay,
You must not strike it, God; I'm in the way;
And I will never move from where I stand."
He said "Dear child, I feared that you were dead,"
And stayed His hand.
You will see--a significant fact--that there is no nonsense about a
dream or a transcendent waking apparition. In the opening lines Tomas
says, with anxious emphasis, that he saw the 'Almighty Man'--and that is
symbolical. It has its relation to the mellow tenderness with which the
poem closes; but apart from that it is a sign of the way in which the
creative energy always works in this poetry. It seizes upon concrete
stuff; and that is fused, hammered and moulded into shapes so sharp and
clear that we feel we could actually touch them as they spring up in our
mental vision. This is not peculiar to Mr Stephens, of course. It would
seem to be common to every poet--though to be sure they are not many--in
whom sheer imagination, the first and last poetic gift, is preeminent.
Mr Stephens has many other qualities, which give his work depth, variety
and significance; but fine as they are, they take a secondary place
beside this ardent, plastic power.
We quickly see, even in the early poem from which I have quoted, the
mixed elements of this gift. Now the grotesquerie which seems to lie in
the fact that Tomas tells about the majesty and familiar kindliness of
God 'in a pub,' may be apparent only. It probably arises from one's own
sophistication and painful respectability. We have lost the simplicity
which would make it possible to talk about such a subject at all; and as
for doing it in a pub...!
Yet there is something truly grotesque in this work. That is to say,
there is a juxtaposition of ideas so violently contrasted that they
would provoke instant mirth if it were not for the grave intensity of
vision. Sometimes, indeed, they are frankly absurd. We are meant to
laugh at them, as we do at Mac Dhoul, squirming with merriment on God's
throne with the angels frozen in astonishment round him. But generally
these extraordinary images are presented seriously, and often they are
winged straight from the heart of the poet's philosophy. Then, the
driving power of emotion and a passion of sincerity carry us safely over
what seems to be their amazing irreverence. There is, for instance, in
the piece called "The Fulness of Time," a complete philosophic
conception of good and evil, boldly caught into sacred symbolism. The
poet tells here how he found Satan, old and haggard, sitting on a rusty
throne in a distant star. All his work was done; and God came to call
him to Paradise.
Gabriel without a frown,
Uriel without a spear,
Raphael came singing down
Welcoming their ancient peer,
And they seated him beside
One who had been crucified.
It is not irreverence, of course, but the audacity of poetic innocence.
Only an imagination pure of convention and ceremonial would dare so
greatly. And the remarkable thing is that this naîveté is intimately
blended with a grandeur which sometimes rises to the sublime. The
noblest and most complete expression of that is in "The Lonely God."
That is probably the reason why this poem is the finest thing that Mr
Stephens has done--that, and the magnitude of its central idea. There
is, indeed, the closest relation here between the thought and the
imagery in which it is made visible. But, keeping our curious,
impertinent gaze fixed for the moment on the changing form of the
imaginative essence of the work, let us take first the opening lines of
the poem:
So Eden was deserted, and at eve
Into the quiet place God came to grieve.
His face was sad, His hands hung slackly down
Along his robe ...
... All the birds had gone
Out to the world, and singing was not one
To cheer the lonely God out of His grief--
There follow several stanzas of exquisite reverie as the majestic figure
paces sadly in Adam's silent garden and pauses before the little hut
Chaste and remote, so tiny and so shy,
So new withal, so lost to any eye,
So pac't of memories all innocent....
Then, reminiscent of the dear friendliness of those banished human
souls, desolation comes upon the solitary Being. He remembers that he is
eternal and ringed round with Infinity. He sends thought flying back
through endless centuries, but cannot find the beginning of Time. He
ranges North and South, but cannot find the bounds of Space. He is most
utterly alone--save for his silly singing angels--in the monotonous
glory of his heaven.
... Many days I sped
Hard to the west, a thousand years I fled
Eastwards in fury, but I could not find
The fringes of the Infinite....
--till at last
Dizzied with distance, thrilling to a pain
Unnameable, I turned to Heaven again.
And there My angels were prepared to fling
The cloudy incense, there prepared to sing
My praise and glory--O, in fury I
Then roared them senseless, then threw down the sky
And stamped upon it, buffeted a star
With My great fist, and flung the sun afar:
Shouted My anger till the mighty sound
Rung to the width, frighting the furthest bound
And scope of hearing: tumult vaster still,
Thronging the echo, dinned my ears, until
I fled in silence, seeking out a place
To hide Me from the very thought of Space.
There was once a reviewer who compared the genius of this poet to that
of Homer and Æschylus. Now comparisons like that are apt to tease the
mind of the discriminating, to whom there instantly appear all the gulfs
of difference. But, indeed, this poet does share in some measure, with
Æschylus and our own Milton and the unknown author of the Book of Job, a
sublimity of vision. His conceptions have a grandeur of simplicity; and
he makes us realize immensities--Eternity and Space and Force--by images
which are almost primitive. Like those other poets too, whose
philosophical conceptions were as different from his as their ages are
remote, he also has made God in the image of man. But the comparison
does not touch what we may call the human side of this newer genius;
and it only serves to throw into bolder relief its perception of life's
comedy, its waywardness, and its mischievous humour. This aspect,
strongly contrasted as it is with the poet's imaginative power, is at
least equally interesting. It is apparent, in the earlier work, in the
realism of such pieces as "The Dancer" or "The Street." There is a touch
of harshness in these poems which would amount to crudity if their
realism were an outward thing only. But it is not a mere trick of style:
it proceeds from indignation, from an outraged æsthetic sense, and from
a mental courage which attains its height, rash but splendid, in
"Optimist"--
Let ye be still, ye tortured ones, nor strive
Where striving's futile. Ye can ne'er attain
To lay your burdens down.
This poet is not a realist at all, of course--far from it. But he loves
life and earth and homely words, he is very candid and revealing, and he
has a sense of real values. His humanity, too, is deep and strong, and
often supplies his verse with the material of actual existence, totally
lacking factitious glamour. Thus we have "To the Four Courts, Please,"
in which the first stanza describes the deplorable state of an ancient
cab-horse and his driver. Then--
God help the horse and the driver too,
And the people and beasts who have never a friend,
For the driver easily might have been you,
And the horse be me by a different end.
This humane temper is the more remarkable from being braced by a shrewd
faculty of insight. There is no sentimentality in it; and that the poet
has no illusions about human frailty may be seen in such a poem as "Said
The Old-Old Man." It is ballasted with humour, too; and has a charming
whimsicality. Hence the lightness of touch in "Windy Corner"--
O, I can tell and I can know
What the wind rehearses:
"A poet loved a lady so,
Loved her well, and let her go
While he wrote his verses."
.....
That's the tale the winds relate
Soon as night is shady.
If it's true, I'll simply state
A poet is a fool to rate
His art above his lady.
Returning, however, to the larger implications of this poetry, one may
find a passion for liberty in it, and a courageous faith in the future
of the race. Here we have, in fact, a pure idealist, one of the
invincible few who have brought their ideals into touch with reality.
One does not suspect it at first--or at least we do not see how far it
goes--largely for the reason that it is so deeply grounded. The poet's
hold on life, on the actual, on the very data of experience, is
unyielding: his perception of truth is keen and his intellectual honesty
complete. And then the way in which his imagination moulds things in the
round, as it were, leaves no room to guess that there is a limitless
something behind or within. True, we have felt all along what we can
only call the spiritual touch in this poetry. It is always there,
lighter or more commanding, and sometimes it will come home very sweetly
in a comic piece, as for instance when "The Merry Policeman," appointed
guardian of the Tree, calls reassuringly to the scared thief:
... "Be at rest,
The best to him who wants the best."
We have observed, too, a faculty of seeing the spirit of things--a habit
of looking right through facts to something beyond them. But still we
did not quite understand what these signs meant; and if we tried to
account for them in any way, we probably offered ourselves the
all-too-easy explanation that this was the playful, fanciful, Celtic
way of looking at the world. Well, so it may be; but that charming
manner is, in all gravity, just the outward sign of an inward grace. And
if anyone should doubt that it points in this case to a clear idealism,
he may be invited to consider this little poem which prefaces the poet's
second volume, called "The Hill of Vision":
Everything that I can spy
Through the circle of my eye,
Everything that I can see
Has been woven out of me;
I have sown the stars, and threw
Clouds of morning and of eve
Up into the vacant blue;
Everything that I perceive,
Sun and sea and mountain high,
All are moulded by my eye:
Closing it, what shall I find?
--Darkness, and a little wind.
Now it must not be inferred that Mr Stephens is an austere person who
propounds ideals to himself as themes for his poetry. We should detect
his secret much more readily if he did--and it may be that we should not
like him quite so well. Hardly ever do you catch him, as it were, saying
to his Muse: "Come, let us make a song about liberty, or the future."
The very process of his thought, as well as the order of his verse,
seems often to be by way of an object to an idea. He takes some bit of
the actual world--a bird, a tree, or a human creature; and tuning his
instrument to that, he is presently off and away into the blue.
Once, however, he did sing directly on this subject of liberty, and
about the external, physical side of it. It was, of course, in that
early book; and there may also be found two studies of the idea of
liberty in its more abstract nature. They both treat of the woman giving
up her life into the hands of the man whom she marries. And in both
there is brought out with ringing clarity the inalienable freedom of the
human soul. Thus "The Red-haired Man's Wife," musing upon the
inexplicable changes that marriage has wrought for her--on her
dependence, and on the apparent loss of her very identity, wins through
to the light--
I am separate still,
I am I and not you:
And my mind and my will,
As in secret they grew,
Still are secret, unreached and untouched and not subject to you.
Thus, too, "The Rebel" finds an answer to an importunate lover--
You sob you love me--What,
Must I desert my soul
Because you wish to kiss my lips,
.....
I must be I, not you,
That says the thing in brief.
I grew to this without your aid,
Can face the future unafraid,
Nor pine away with grief
Because I'm lonely....
It is, however, in "A Prelude and a Song" that this ardour of freedom
finds purest expression. Not that the poem was designed to that end. I
believe that it was made for nothing on this earth but the sheer joy of
singing. How can one describe this poem? It is the lyrical soul of
poetry; it is the heart of poetic rapture; it is the musical spirit of
the wind and of birds' cries; it is a passion of movement, swaying to
the dancing grace of leaves and flowers and grass, to the majesty of
sailing clouds; it is the sweet, shrill, palpitating ecstasy of the
lark, singing up and up until he is out of sight, sustaining his song at
the very door of heaven, and singing into sight again, to drop suddenly
down to the green earth, exhausted.--And I have not yet begun to say
what the poem really is: I have a doubt whether prose is equal to a
definition. In some degree at any rate it is a pæan of freedom:
delighted liberty lives in it. But we cannot apply our little
distinctions here, saying that it is this or that or the other kind of
freedom which is extolled; because we are now in a region where thought
and feeling are one; in a golden age where good and evil are lost in
innocency; in a blessed state where body and soul have forgotten their
old feud in glad reunion.