The love-story of Henry’s life was not so frankly revealed; she was never so forthcoming as Michael. Nevertheless, there was such a story, and in outline it seems to have been one of the convergence of kindred minds, of friendship growing to passion, of love declared and reciprocated, but not fulfilled because of some other tie which bound both lover and beloved.
It is not difficult to see how such a crisis might arise in Henry’s life. Delicate in health and shy of temperament, she was from her childhood sheltered by Michael, and surrounded by a love which she was accustomed to accept as simply as the air she breathed. Just so unconsciously she would receive the homage offered by their friends, drifting into a closer relation with one of them, both of the lovers cheated by the tranquil air which overlay her depth of feeling, until a sudden surprising passion overtook them. That the awakening for Henry meant renunciation sounds a little old-fashioned to a current philosophy which sees no virtue in the verb ‘to renounce,’ and demands fulfilment, not only as the highest good, but as the holiest duty of the human creature. But either that modern doctrine is not so new as it sounds, or these two ladies were in advance of their time, for they held it, and (at least in their art) persuasively commended it. They wrote a charming play, The Cup of Water, deliberately to claim the woman’s right to love, and to demonstrate the cruelty and waste of frustration. And they once said, in a whimsical letter to a friend:
Doing and being good is all very well in its way; but it is not the same thing as doing and being happy. If the Lord had a lion’s mouth (like the one at Venice), how many complaints I should drop into it about his treatment of young women. All the plants have some sunshine: why not some love in each woman’s life?
Nevertheless, when it came to the test of action, theory went to the winds, and Henry renounced her lover for her fellow. She held herself bound by every tie of tenderness and gratitude, and no other course was conceivable save to shut the gates of the fortress and bar them against that clamorous joy.
Speak not, reveal not.... There will be
In the unchallenged dark a mystery,
And golden hair sprung rapid in a tomb.
Human instinct may rebel at the spectacle of life so baffled; and common sense, in its short way with problems, may deny a valid cause for the sacrifice. But a longer vision is compelled to observe that fulfilment was not, after all, withheld. It came on the spiritual plane, however; for it is safe to say that we owe the finest work of Michael Field to the fact that Henry did not marry her lover:
Then let a mourner rise and three times call
Upon our love, and the long echoes fall.
Before leaving the volume called Underneath the Bough it is convenient to take examples of lyrics in a different kind from those we have been considering. Thus we may select two or three pieces which an easy label would describe as nature-poems. There are not a great many which answer fully to that description, for although our poets adored the beauty of the physical world, their Muse was too prepossessed by the movement of human life to surrender itself completely to Nature. Yet by certain aspects of Nature they were deeply stirred—;great spaces, lofty skies measured by masses of moving cloud, trees blown by the wind—;in short, by just those features in which in old Italian painters people have agreed to see the signs of a religious sense:
O Wind, thou hast thy kingdom in the trees,
And all thy royalties
Sweep through the land to-day.
It is mid June,
And thou, with all thine instruments in tune,
Thine orchestra
Of heaving fields, and heavy, swinging fir,
Strikest a lay
That doth rehearse
Her ancient freedom to the universe.
All other sound in awe
Repeals its law;
The bird is mute, the sea
Sucks up its waves, from rain
The burthened clouds refrain,
To listen to thee in thy leafery,
Thou unconfined,
Lavish, large, soothing, refluent summer-wind!
The two pieces which follow are chosen because they illustrate the touch of fantasy which our poets often added to their nature-poetry—;a touch which gives such grace and charm to the lyrics of their earlier plays.