Love doth never know
Why it is beloved,
And to ask were treason;
Let the wonder grow!
Were its hopes removed,
Were itself disproved
By cold reason,
In its happy season,
Love would be beloved.
No; it hurts sharper. I must just sit down
On the edge of the bed, and comb my hair and wait—;
. . . . .
I cannot think at all. How beautiful
This gold made silver in the moonlight! What!
Would Heaven age me for my Love? Let’s look
In the mirror. Rosamund, you’re worshipful.
[Starting back.] ’Tis thus,
Even thus, he swore that he should come to me.
His very words! The prophecy’s fulfilled,—;
I’ll comb my hair down to my very feet.
A step!—;my heart, some patience. Henry, speak;
Bid it take courage! [Enter Elinor.] God! the Queen!
Q. Elinor. The Queen, who’ll give you access to your God;
The wife, who’ll doom the leman.
Act II, Scene 8
But coming now to the plays which are completely representative of the poets in this period, we may glance at The Father’s Tragedy, William Rufus, Canute the Great, The Cup of Water, and The Tragic Mary. These, with three others, appeared within the dates 1885 and 1890—;not a poor record of five years’ work, and one which reminds us that our poets laboured at their art as only the genuine artist does. They drew the themes of these plays mainly from English history and Scottish chronicles; and they selected them, all except that of The Tragic Mary, ultimately for an idea that lay behind them. Obviously, therefore, this work is not entirely disinterested art: it anticipates, to that extent, the problem-play, the intellectual drama, and even (so far as concerns his influence in this country) Ibsen. Indeed, a remarkable aspect of the group is the way in which, despite its romantic tone and its Elizabethan form, it yet foreshadows the movement that English drama was about to make toward a ‘realistic’ presentment of life. There may be a piquancy in thinking of Michael Field the romantic as the forerunner of Mr Bernard Shaw and Mr John Galsworthy: and it is not certain which would be the less pleased at the comparison, ancestress or descendants. The latter, following a poetic age with inevitable comedy—;inevitable if only from reaction—;were compelled to decline upon prose as their medium; and the great merit of Michael Field is that, belonging to the poetic age and possessed of the poet’s ardour and imagination, she yet kept near enough to the actual world to see the evils that existed there. Happily removed from them by circumstance and temperament, she yet kept her eyes clear and her sympathies alert. Her prologue to The Father’s Tragedy is apt to this point, for there she warns
the light and easy-souled
Who shun the joyless truth in human things
to turn to more congenial pages than her tragedies. It is evident that she was concerned, thus early, with the joyless truth which was to take possession—;absolute and somewhat depressing possession—;of the dramatists who came after her. Unlike them, however, by giving her truth the form of poetry she endowed it with the joyousness of art. She saw it, too, in the round: there is a largeness in her conception of it which gives her ‘intellectual drama’ greater dignity, and one would suppose greater permanence, than later ‘realistic’ work. Yet when one observes the ideas that govern some of her plays in this kind—;parental tyranny, the land question, marriage, or the conflict between an older and a newer order of civilization—;one recognizes at once the likeness to the motives of much more recent drama. Indeed, we might go further and demonstrate a rather later play—;Attila—;as an anticipation of Freud and the psycho-analysts.
The Father’s Tragedy, a play in five acts and a great many scenes, was written almost entirely by the younger of the two poets. Some parts of it were composed by her at the age of sixteen, and were in fact the means by which Michael discovered her dramatic talent. At the date of its publication (1885) Henry was only twenty-three, and it had been completed some months before. The play is, therefore, the work of a very young mind, and one is not surprised that its main feature is a vigorous and sympathetic study of youth. 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 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. There is something Brontesque in the sombre power of this tragedy; something too much of horror, barely relieved by two or three short scenes of hectic gaiety when the young prince has escaped temporarily to his boon companions. But only imagination of the highest kind could have conceived it.
The plot comes from Scotichronicon and the old chronicler Wyntoun, whose words are in one place almost exactly quoted. Robert III is shown to be pious, weak, superstitious, affectionate, desiring only the ‘good’ of his heir, the young Prince David, Duke of Rothsay. But David, intensely alive in his buoyant young manhood, loathes the dour ‘good’ that is forced upon him, and combats it. He has, in fact, more strength than his father, and the struggle becomes bitter and tragic only when Albany, the King’s brother, backs the King with a strength equal to David’s own, overbears the father’s weakness and perverts his affection, and eventually compasses the Prince’s death. The crisis is the enforced marriage of David to a bride whom he detests, he having been literally sold to her father as the highest bidder for a great match. He breaks into the council-chamber at the moment when the King and Albany are settling the price that the bride is to pay for him. Albany bids him be seated.