THE important fact concerning Michael Field is, of course, that she is a tragic poet. The truth may seem too obvious to need stating, when we glance down the list of her works and observe that of the twenty-seven complete plays created within thirty years every one has a tragic theme. But the attributes of a tragic poet are not necessarily revealed in the externals of his art: more than another he is difficult to recognize by his theme, form, and manner. If he could be confidently measured by a rule and appraised on a formula, many anomalies might be drawn to our net, including the urbane and essentially comic spirit of the author of Cato, and (not using too fine a mesh in the net) the mere dramaturgic facility of the author of Herod. With such as these, behind the formula of tragedy nothing remains—;no tragic vision, no sense of inimical and warring forces, no terror at their subtle and formidable power, no pity for human creatures doomed to live. But surely it is in these imponderable things that the tragic poet is made manifest, whether they take the garment of tragedy or, as often with Thomas Hardy, gleam sombrely in a lyric. It is in possessing them, and possessing them intensely, with a fierce dramatic impulse driving them, that the greatness of Michael Field consists.
Yet, once assured of the nature of our poet’s genius, the mere data of manner become significant. All the plays are tragedies, some of them in Elizabethan form, of five-act length. The very titles are eloquent. Michael Field took thought for the naming of her plays; and although she was often content to adopt simply the name of the protagonist, that is always resonant. Thus Attila, Borgia, Mariamne, Deirdre, Tristan, Fair Rosamund are words with solemn echoes; but, more than that, they indicate the vast issues to which this mind was drawn, and suggest the range of which it was capable. Sometimes a phrase was chosen for a title, as The Tragic Mary. This was lifted, with acknowledgments, from Walter Pater; and no apology is needed on that score, for surely it is no minor part of a poet’s equipment to know how “to take his own wherever he finds it.” In that sense The Race of Leaves may be said to have been lifted too—;from Homer and Marcus Aurelius; The World at Auction possibly from Gibbon or some much earlier historian, and In the Name of Time certainly from Shakespeare.
A complete list of the plays, with their dates, will be found in the Bibliography at the end of this book. There are, as I said, twenty-seven of them; and they were wrought between the years 1881 and 1911. The last four were not published until after the poet’s death; but of these In the Name of Time, which did not appear until 1919, was being written so long before as 1890; and A Question of Memory was first printed for the actors when the play was performed at the Independent Theatre in October 1893.
Besides complete plays, however, there is a masque called Noontide Branches (printed at Oxford by the Daniel Press in 1899), which has charming associations with the late Provost of Worcester and Mrs Daniel. And there is a trialogue called Stephania which was published in 1892. Indeed, the bibliographical interest of this poet’s work is very great, and would touch the history of several private printing-presses during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus Fair Rosamund and the poet’s Roman trilogy (The Race of Leaves, The World at Auction, and Julia Domna) were issued from the Vale Press of Mr Charles Ricketts, and nobly decorated by him. His border for Fair Rosamund is more than a lovely symbol; it expresses with the last fine touch of perception the wild-rose exquisiteness of the spirit of the play. The Tragic Mary was printed at the Chiswick Press in 1890: its binding was designed by Professor Selwyn Image, as also was the frontispiece of Stephania. Whym Chow, the rarest of the Michael Field books and the most curious in content, can hardly be said to have been published at all. It was printed in 1914 at the Eragny Press of Mr and Mrs Lucien Pissarro. Only twenty-seven copies were printed, and of these perhaps not more than half a dozen were given to intimate friends who might be trusted, if not to understand the poems (for they are extravagant and obscure), at least to sympathize with the occasion of them.
For all of their books, with one exception, the poets took pains to secure a comely form and adequate binding, often of white vellum. Even the group which appeared anonymously and in temporary covers between 1905 and 1911 (Borgia, A Question of Memory, The Tragedy of Pardon, Diane, The Accuser, A Messiah, Tristan) were printed with distinction on good paper. That the poets had sufficient means and leisure to indulge their taste may rejoice the bibliophile; but there is no doubt that the cost of books so produced was too high to gain them a large public. At one time they themselves suspected this, and experimented with a cheaper form. Hence the one exception (Brutus Ultor) to their practice. This work was published in 1886 as a small paper-covered booklet at the price of ninepence. Michael wanted, in her own phrase, “to reach the Demos”; and it is possible that she did so. But the Demos did not respond sufficiently to cause her to break her rule a second time.
Here, then, is a very large body of poetic drama, engaged upon subjects drawn from the literature and the history of many countries and many epochs. How to arrive at the significance of a total so extensive and various? A coherent impression of it would be difficult in any case; and within these narrow limits it may well be impossible. There is, however, one helpful fact, for the tragedies divide themselves almost automatically into three groups. The division is, indeed, so simple as almost to be suspect, and so definite as almost to be mechanical. It corresponds, too, in the most approved manner, with the early, middle, and later periods of the poet’s life. Thus there are, in progressive order from the beginning of her career, her English, Latin, and Eastern periods. The first deals with themes from Scottish chronicles and English history, and extends from 1881 to about 1890. In the second group, published from 1892 to 1903, the subjects are mainly drawn from Roman history; and the third, published from 1905 until the end, has for its outstanding features two plays of a projected trilogy from Josephus, another called A Messiah, and one which handles an Abyssinian love-tragedy.
Yet these categories are not quite so clear-cut, after all. One soon finds plays which do not correspond to the order to which they are supposed to belong, and discovers, on investigation, that they were not written in that order. But one makes at the same time the much more satisfying discovery that there are, within each group, affinities which hold the plays by a stronger bond than the arbitrary likeness of theme. Thus in the English period, the stage of the poet’s grave and strenuous youth, ideas are a motive force. This body of drama, if too dynamic to be ‘high-brow,’ may be justly defined as ‘intellectual,’ with a strange pouring of the new wine of modern thought into the old bottles of Elizabethan form. But with the approach of the Latin period the centre of power shifts from ideas to art. Form is now as important as, or more so than matter; and the two cannot be separated. The value of the work now is in its unity of beauty and truth. But when the last phase has come, and tragic vision has ranged far enough among the elements of its universe to make a final synthesis, it wheels back to close the cycle upon the idea of destiny. 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. It is a fact which at first glance threatens to embarrass our nice clear categories; but we remember in time that there is something almost absurdly native in the familiar spectacle of a Greek subject in the hands of a young English poet. Of course! What else, what other, could one expect?—;at least down to the epoch of yesterday to which our poet belonged. Was not this dependence upon the classics largely responsible for the revolt of contemporary poets—;as witness Anna Wickham:
We are outwearied with Persephone,
Rather than her, we’ll sing Reality.
The story of Callirrhoë comes from Pausanias; but our poet has modified the original by basing the motive of the plot upon the origin of the worship of Dionysos, which, as she admits, must have been much earlier. The anachronism is deliberate, however, and does not vitiate the theme, which is already un-Greek in its preoccupation with romantic passion. For Callirrhoë, a maiden of Calydon, is beloved to distraction by the Dionysiac priest Coresus. She loves him in return (or at least our poet makes us suspect so), but will not marry him because she cannot worship the new god. He thereupon calls down a curse upon her city, and the people begin to sicken and die of the plague. They send to consult the oracle at Dodona, and it is decreed that Callirrhoë must be sacrificed to Dionysos unless some one else will die in her stead. No one offers, however, and she goes to the altar prepared to die. Coresus makes ready to slay her, but when the moment comes to strike he kills himself instead of her. His sacrifice convinces Callirrhoë of the truth of his religion. Now that he is dead she realizes that she had loved him, and she kills herself as an offering to his god.