Mary Sturgeon

“ But the seed comes to its fruit through the logic of events: the grace and sweetness of humanity wither as, one by one, those whom he loved and trusted prove traitors. His deepest affection had been for Lucilla, and her plot to murder him shakes him to the soul. But he cannot bring himself to sentence her, and it is only under the shock of another perfidy that he is hardened sufficiently to order her death. That act is the spiritual crisis of his life, for in committing it he sins against the last ray of light left in him. ”

“ Such an eye as Meredith’s could perceive that, and, catching sight of some reviewing stupidity about it, would flash lightnings of wrath in that direction, and send indignant sympathy to the poets.
There is strangeness, too, of another kind in the passion which was the impulse of this poetry. Under the restraint that art has put upon it, it is, as we have seen, an elemental thing. It is a creative force akin to that of Emily Brontë or of Byron, and is tamer than their wild genius only in appearance. ”

“ For these exquisite love-scenes, these magnanimous friends and lovers, and this clear greatness of thought issuing simply in noble action might bear some relation to a ‘marriage question’ in Utopia, but would have little enough to do with such a problem in the actual world. That, however, is rather a cause for rejoicing to those who can delight in the ideal beauty of the work, and who can see in its ethical audacity an innocence which only could dare to follow up so boldly a logical attack upon the conventions of morality. ”

“ She has a swift, gay temper; but underneath the flashing faults of incaution and a rapier wit there lies an innocence which is from its nature incapable of suspecting evil in others, or of calculating beforehand how her ardour and friendliness would appear to meaner eyes. She is, in short, an imperfect but large-hearted human creature; and she discovers that to be one inch greater than a small world is to draw inevitably, if not the bolts of Jove, at any rate the slings and arrows of a punier race. ”

“ The art of the Renaissance enters, with Pintoriccio and Michelangelo and others, to foster Cesare’s love of exquisite handicraft. Its poetry comes in the person of Cavaliere; its science in the engineering works of Leonardo; its statecraft in that astute and watchful envoy from Florence, already brooding upon his Il Principe. And its very atmosphere clings about the scene, bright with a kind of glare, almost dazzling the spiritual sight; hot, heavy, and enervating to the moral sense. The poets were apparently well justified in calling their Borgia a period play. ”

“ Even the poets’ journeys now were less disinterested than their early jaunts in France and Germany for the pure pleasure of seeing masterpieces. Thus, in these later days, if they went to Edinburgh, it was for the Marian legend; to the New Forest, it was for some faint sound of Rufus’s hunting-horn; to Italy, it was for innumerable haunting echoes of Imperial Rome, of the Borgia, of the Church; to bits of old France, for memories of Frankish kings; to Ireland, for a vanishing white glimpse of Deirdre ”

“ Technically, the drama must, of course, be considered as a chronicle-play; and this cancels a criticism which might otherwise hold, that the end of the play, when Mary gives herself up and Bothwell flees, is weak. But the five acts go with a swing till that point is reached, and the energy of movement gets into the verse. That is often vehement to the measure of the vehement passions it expresses; and the relief of a character like Lethington, ironical, subtle, sceptical of the whole world but the innocence of his queen, is proportioned to the emotional intensity of the play as a whole. ”

“ It is clear that Michael Field, in the noble unity of her life and work, represented something that was finest in the dying era; and yet she was, in certain respects, aloof from that Victorian Age, and in advance of it. It is profoundly moving to see how, even in extremity, her genius remained true to itself. It was so true, indeed, that in her pitiful, scanty record of those days one may catch a glimpse, through her winging spirit, of the moments of greatness to which the spirit of England rose in that crisis. ”

“ Yet, as our poet has re-created Conchobar, he is a human soul driven this way and that in a running fight with passion; pitiable in his hopeless love for Deirdre, comprehensible in his wrath against Naisi, sinister and terrifying in his revenge. And underneath the overt drama lies a profounder irony; for while he is plotting in his heart the enormous treachery, Lebarcham tells of the young god who was betrayed by his friends, and he says:
Hush, woman, for my heart is broken. ”

“ She is very clearly and strongly drawn, a nature that clings with racial tenacity fast to the ties of family, and which therefore cannot forget the dead grandfather and brother who lie between herself and Herod. She does not wish to avenge them: she possesses an integrity which holds her loyal to the man her husband “who had slain her kin”; but she cannot love him, and she finds it impossible to be polite to his relatives. That intriguing Idumean set! Mariamne the Maccabee, impolitic and proud, allows herself to sneer at their Edomite origin and their creeping ways. ”

“ In this play the idea is completely assimilated to imagination. There is no bald presentation of it on the plane of everyday existence, for that surely is a function of comedy. And though the King’s cruelty in appropriating the peasants’ land is shown in its effect upon the lives of individuals, a larger vision of the problem is presented in the figure of one old man, Beowulf, who is, as it were, the wronged spirit of the Earth in human shape. In him the idea is made both concrete and spiritual, as the genius of poetry can make it. ”

“ So long as she does not swerve a hair’s breadth from impartiality, and so long as her wit can devise means to soothe and flatter each in turn, she can hold them from violence. But secretly she is not quite impartial. For Geta, her younger son, with his sunnier and gentler nature, she has a deeper tenderness. And that betrays itself when, taking Caracalla in what seems a propitious mood, she proposes to him a reconciliation with his brother. His wrath is the more deadly in that he had felt himself, a moment earlier, alone and secure in his mother’s affection. ”

“ We have again been to see Mr Browning, and spent with him and his sister almost the only perfect hours of this season. Alice, he has promised me to play, the next time we meet, some of Galuppi’s toccatas!... He read to us some of the loveliest poems of Alfred de Musset, very quietly, with a low voice full of recueillement, and now and then a brief smile at some touch of exquisite playfulness. He is always the poet with us, and it seems impossible to realise that he goes behind a shell of worldly behaviour and commonplace talk when he faces society. ”

“ Yet one may claim for Michael Field that she has achieved the re-creation with a high degree of truth to fact; and further, that the poetic truth of her creation comes surprisingly near, in its implicit judgments, the final verdict of the historian. There is, of course, no overt judgment in her work: the human spectacle holds us too fascinated, pitiful, and terrified to leave room for censure. We are not concerned to weigh the guilt of Lucrezia, allured and appalled as we are by her fatal suppleness and passivity. ”

“ Deirdre is no Helen, though her legend has features so similar. The mere outline of her which the old story gives indicates a creature who will compel destiny rather than suffer it; and our poet has but completed, imaginatively, what the original suggests—;a girl whose instinct of chastity drives her away from marriage without love; whose ardour and courage claim her proper mate; whose fidelity keeps her unalterably true; and whose head is at least as sound as her heart is tender. For although she is a rather tearful creature, she is also very astute ”

“ Ras Byzance consumes his universe in the hell of his own jealousy; and the messiah Sabbatai, distilling a cold spiritual{199} pride, cries from its lonely central ice, “I am a god,” only to shrivel incontinently at the first touch of the world’s derision. It is as though Michael Field were consciously ruled in this last phase of her Tragic Muse by the lines from the Antigone which she has set upon the first page of her Deirdre, “Nothing that is vast enters into the life of man without a curse.” ”

“ Thus one sees the ending of the poets’ life as the inevitable outcome of that which they always were—;of a magnificence touched with grace. The Dionysian wine of those early days was poured at last to the Man of Sorrows; the Bacchic revel was turned to tragedy. But it was the same wine; the same energy of enthusiasm; and the latest-written lyrics, devotional pieces composed in suffering and very near to death, have often the audacity and abandon of the worshipper of the vine-god. ”

“ For, first, the leader of the sally was herself a flame of Dionysiac fire; and the inscription on the banner of her life, from its beginning to its end, was love. There would appear to be a real resemblance between Michael’s intensity, her exuberance and quick lyrical impulse, and the legendary Sappho. ”

“ For all the passion of pursuit, the vehement rejection of the outworn, the eager clutch at experience, the joyful confidence at every new turn of the road that now at last the Great Reality is in sight do but lead Carloman back to the common things of life, and only furnish him with light enough to keep a foothold in the actual world. Carloman does not find the Great Reality, though glimpses of its nature fitfully shine on him. But he dis{175}covers how to live—;that human existence to be tolerable must be sweetened by fellowship and ennobled by pleasure. ”

“ You cannot ‘laugh deep’ unless you are.” In the phrase I have italicized Michael is surely confessing, though it may be without intent to do so, that her religion is now awaking in her the same ecstasy which had formerly been awakened by the poetic impulse. To herself it seemed that she had suffered an enormous change, and that she was no longer the old Michael. And it is true that for a time the tragic inspiration of her art was suspended. Perhaps that follows of necessity from the nature of the Christian doctrine, its hope, its humility, its vicariousness, and its consolation. ”

“ Perceiving that it is coming near the verge of sanity, it draws back in time to leave the vision distinct and credible.
To the strict eye of criticism these poignant facts may appear irrelevant. I cannot bring myself to think that such splendour of soul has no relation to the art that it produced; but those persons who insist on cleaving the two asunder may be reassured as to the technical accomplishment of this poetry. Often cast into something of the poets’ earlier dramatic form, its music is sweet, its measures are rhythmical, and its language has force and clarity. ”

“ She is a creature of great vitality who wins our affection and our pity by her eager challenge of life and her disastrous defeat. We watch her developing from an immature and impulsive girl who follows innocently her newly awakened maternal instinct into a woman whose rich emotional power and mental strength have been thwarted by repression and perverted to an insane infatuation for the Hun king, Attila. But it follows from those elements that the chief value of the play is its psychology and not its dramatic power. ”

“ Long Ago possesses a unity which they lack, and which characterizes the spirit as well as the form of the book. The fact of its having been designed as a whole and wrought to a finish without any long interruption may account for its effect of singleness in impulse and style; but its more satisfying inner unity no doubt arises from the harmony that existed between the poets and their theme, Sappho. Critics notwithstanding, it was not so audacious as it seemed for two Victorian ladies to plunge into the task of rendering Sapphic ecstasy. ”

“ Mystic Trees, the last book which Michael gave to the world, is more strictly theological than Henry’s. Always less the philosopher than her fellow, she took her conversion to Catholicism, in externals at least, more strenuously. She developed, for example, a proselytizing habit which a little tried the patience of her friends, especially those who remembered her as a joyful pagan. That her Christian zeal was as joyful, to her, as her paganism had been did not much console them, or soften the onslaught of her blithe attacks. ”

“ Michael’s authentic love-story, however, is that which centres upon Henry; and the poems to Henry express a master-passion. There was an element of her nature as strong and as constant as its poetic impulse, and that was her affection for her fellow. Indeed, she was greater as a lover than as a poet; for her life was her finest poem, and Henry was its inspiration. It follows that she was never so happy as when she was engaged upon this theme; and that the sequence I have mentioned is a joyful record of the fellowship. ”

“ And again, when she is thinking of Bothwell’s wooing and her growing love for him:
I never shall grow holy among men,
And yet I wish them ever good, not evil,
And long to give them pleasure of such portion
Of wit or beauty as were made my dower.
It is significant, too, that Mary’s motherhood is seen to be a deep force in her, and therefore in the tragedy. She is found to be an instinctive mother, not only in the primary{156} fact of rejoicing to bear a child, but in a profound sense of the value of life and an urgent impulse to protect it. ”

“ One may be prepossessed; one may, with the cumulative weight of the whole tragedy in one’s mind, see more in a phrase than the poets intended to put there. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that Caracalla’s answer to his mother, “Rise from your knees,” and her frightened rejoinder, “I am not kneeling,” are supreme touches, awful in their brief, pregnant, startling rightness.
Caracalla, happy to find his mother alone, has been protesting his love for her:
Caracalla. ”

“ And by the range of her women characters—;from the dignity of a Julia Domna to the wild-rose sweetness of a Rosamund; from the Scottish Mary, with her rich capacity for loving, to the fierce chastity of an Irish Deirdre, or the soul of goodness in a courtesan; from the subtlety of a Lucrezia Borgia to the proud singleness of a Mariamne; from the virago-venom of an Elinor to the sensitive simplicity of a country-girl, or the wrong-headedness of a little princess whose instincts have been perverted by frustration—;Michael Field has greatly enriched the world’s knowledge of womanhood. ”

“ They have all confessed the unique charm of the poets (a charm which consisted with “business ability and thoroughly good housekeeping”) ; and Mr Bottomley has contrived, by reflecting it in a poet’s mirror, to rescue it from Lethe:
The marvellous thing to me is the way in which their lives and their work were one thing: life was one of their arts—;they gave it a consistency and texture that made its quality a sheer delight. ”

“ Of the final scene, and of the rendering of Herod’s madness after Mariamne’s execution, one can only say that history provided the poets with a magnificent opportunity and that they rose to the height of it. But it is necessary to quote at least one other passage to illustrate the progress of the plot through the development of character. Accident plays no part in the march of the story: intrigue notwithstanding, the protagonists are betrayed from within, and events proceed inevitably, like a conspiracy of life itself. ”

“ Julia Domna, the last of the three plays, is terrible in the fierce truth of its imagination, and contains in Act II the most powerful bit of drama that these poets have written. Once again they have taken the bare bones of history and made of them human creatures of almost appalling vitality and strength. The emperors Caracalla and Geta pursue a vague and erratic course through the scene of the historian, and a dry phrase about “fraternal discord” does not much illumine it or make it comprehensible. ”

“ It is, however, in comprehending Mary Stuart’s womanhood and its bearing upon the tragedy that this study by a woman poet may claim its proper value. No Cleopatra this: no male apprehension of femininity as sheer sex-impulse. Mary’s love of loving and of being loved is shown to be profound and instinctive, an impulse to give, to cherish, and to bless which every normal woman shares in some degree. Michael Field has seen it for the complex and subtle power it is, and not merely{154} as a lure to attract a lover. ”

“ Vast passions are now the poet’s theme. Destiny, consisting in some overmastering elemental force, is now her inspiration. But it is no external, supernatural, or superhuman force. It subsists in nature, and resides within humanity: it belongs inalienably to the stuff of which man is made: it is the tragic shadow of life itself.
Coming at once to the English group, it is amusing to find that this starts off with a Greek play! That is to say, the earliest work published by the poets as Michael Field, Callirrhoë, has a Greek theme. ”

“ What does surprise one, however, is that the study of age in this struggle between a father and a son is also sympathetic; and although it is the son who is the victim of the father, the play is called, significantly, the father’s tragedy. Which is to{132} say that the profoundest depth of the tragedy is seen to be the moral defeat (one ought rather to say the moral annihilation) of the father. That is a conception not so youthful, perhaps, as the age of the author; just as the fierce dark strength of the drama would not appear to accord with her sex. ”