I think of his men as with broad brows and golden beards and mild eyes and
tranquil speech, and of his good women as like 'The Bride' in whose face
Rossetti saw and painted for once the abundance of earth and not the
half-hidden light of his star. They are not in love with love for its own
sake, with a love that is apart from the world or at enmity with it, as
Swinburne imagines Mary Stuart and as all men have imagined Helen. They
do not seek in love that ecstasy, which Shelley's nightingale called
death, that extremity of life in which life seems to pass away like the
Phoenix in flame of its own lighting, but rather a gentle self-surrender
that would lose more than half its sweetness if it lost the savour of
coming days. They are good house-wives; they sit often at the embroidery
frame, and they have wisdom in flocks and herds and they are before all
fruitful mothers. It seems at times as if their love was less a passion
for one man out of the world than submission to the hazard of destiny, and
the hope of motherhood and the innocent desire of the body. They accept
changes and chances of life as gladly as they accept spring and summer and
autumn and winter, and because they have sat under the shadow of the Green
Tree and drunk the Waters of Abundance out of their hollow hands, the
barren blossoms do not seem to them the most beautiful. When Habundia
takes the shape of Birdalone she comes first as a young naked girl
standing among great trees, and then as an old carline, Birdalone in
stately old age. And when she praises Birdalone's naked body, and speaks
of the desire it shall awaken, praise and desire are innocent because they
would not break the links that chain the days to one another. The desire
seems not other than the desire of the bird for its mate in the heart of
the wood, and we listen to that joyous praise as though a bird watching
its plumage in still water had begun to sing in its joy, or as if we heard
hawk praising hawk in the middle air, and because it is the praise of one
made for all noble life and not for pleasure only, it seems, though it is
the praise of the body, that it is the noblest praise.
Birdalone has never seen her image but in 'a broad latten-dish,' so the
wood woman must tell her of her body and praise it.
'Thus it is with thee; thou standest before me a tall and slim maiden,
somewhat thin as befitteth thy seventeen summers; where thy flesh is bare
of wont, as thy throat and thine arms and thy legs from the middle down,
it is tanned a beauteous colour, but otherwhere it is even as fair a
white, wholesome and clean as if the golden sunlight which fulfilleth the
promise of the earth were playing therein.... Delicate and clean-made is
the little trench that goeth from thy mouth to thy lips, and sweet it is,
and there is more might in it than in sweet words spoken. Thy lips they
are of the finest fashion, yet rather thin than full; and some would not
have it so; but I would, whereas I see therein a sign of thy valiancy and
friendliness. Surely he who did thy carven chin had a mind to a master
work and did no less. Great was the deftness of thine imaginer, and he
would have all folk who see thee wonder at thy deep thinking and thy
carefulness and thy kindness. Ah, maiden! is it so that thy thoughts are
ever deep and solemn? Yet at least I know it of thee that they be hale
and true and sweet.
'My friend, when thou hast a mirror, some of all this shalt thou see, but
not all; and when thou hast a lover some deal wilt thou hear, but not all.
But now thy she-friend may tell it thee all, if she have eyes to see it,
as have I; whereas no man could say so much of thee before the mere love
should overtake him, and turn his speech into the folly of love and the
madness of desire.'
All his good women, whether it is Danaë in her tower, or that woman in
_The Wood beyond the World_ who can make the withered flowers in her
girdle grow young again by the touch of her hand, are of the kin of the
wood woman. All his bad women too and his half-bad women are of her kin.
The evils their enchantments make are a disordered abundance like that of
weedy places and they are cruel as wild creatures are cruel and they have
unbridled desires. One finds these evils in their typical shape in that
isle of the Wondrous Isles, where the wicked witch has her pleasure-house
and her prison, and in that 'isle of the old and the young,' where until
her enchantment is broken second childhood watches over children who never
grow old and who seem to the bystander who knows their story 'like images'
or like 'the rabbits on the grass.' It is as though Nature spoke through
him at all times in the mood that is upon her when she is opening the
apple-blossom or reddening the apple or thickening the shadow of the
boughs, and that the men and women of his verse and of his stories are all
the ministers of her mood.