Cara. It’s more wicked
Than anything that’s done....
And it is such a lie! The king would laugh?
He had a still, grave face; I am quite sure
That he would never laugh at anything
So terrible and sudden. Why, the oak
Has a white, bony bough amid the leaves;
That’s where the lightning struck. I do not laugh,
I think what it must suffer ’neath the green,
So scathed and ugly.
Hubert. Cara, do not put
Such hatred in your eyes; if the great lady
Who loves the king—;
Cara. Great ladies cannot love.
You must be poor and famished to be hungry.
. . . . .
If you meet him,
Oh, tell him I am his, a weary child,
Tired out since yesterday.
[Exit Hubert mournfully.
I’ll go along
The wood, and say it over to myself,
He cannot, cannot love me; but I know
Deep in my heart he does. There was a gift—;
The king had something for me in his eyes;
And when he waved good-bye ... I am quitesure
God made him for me: he will come again.
The Tragic Mary (1890) returns to chronicles for its subject, and belongs to our first category for that reason only. It has no specifically intellectual theme, and for its tragic motive should rather be classed in the third group of dramas, where “passions spin the plot.” Not that the poet has neglected the element of fatal circumstance in Mary’s life, nor the very intricate machinery of action in which she was involved. The incidence of political intrigue, domestic plot, and religious feud is clearly shown, and their mere data are used to carry forward the brisk movement of the play. The Marian legend is, in fact, handled boldly; some of the blackest charges against the Queen are confronted, even those on which the historian has pronounced that there is no evidence. But the whole tragedy is seen in its relation to character, with Mary as the centre and source of it, not merely because she is a beautiful queen precariously enthroned among false enemies and falser friends, but because she carries in her nature the seed of tragedy. Admirable balance is kept in picking a path through the mazy inconsistencies of the old story: neither extreme of antithetical judgment is adopted. And if Michael Field has not plucked out the heart of Mary Stuart’s mystery, she has at least brought it out of the region of the incredible. Her Mary is human: of such vivid humanity, indeed, as to draw for that reason the lightnings of fate. She is a richly dowered nature, capable of intense love and fierce anger and deep tenderness, free and frank to the world’s measure of indiscretion, sensitive, eager, and responsive to the world’s measure of excess; and of clemency wide enough for the silly and the cynical to ban as complaisance. 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.
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 as a lure to attract a lover. Raised as it is, in Mary Stuart, to the measure of her human stature—;the range of her sympathies, the keenness of her perception, her gift of understanding, the goodwill that prompts her clear intimacy of approach—;it is a power that becomes a danger in a circle which could not rise to the same height. But it was a danger primarily to herself: she was its chief victim.
“Terrible in love: no compromise between ecstasy and death,” says one of her Maries; and another, speaking of her manner to those she deems her friends, that she is “fond and familiar”; while a third declares of her sympathy and insight, “There is not a balmy nook of one’s soul undiscovered of her.” Thus, too, after she has dismissed Bothwell, indignant at his proposal of marriage so soon after Darnley’s death, her anger ebbs as she remembers how natural it seems to hear the man’s love in his voice. And on another occasion, when she is thinking of him after Darnley has deserted her:
... It was for courtesy
I stooped and let Lord Bothwell kiss my hands,
For sweet to me is love in human eyes,
As daylight to the world.
Act III, Scene 1
One observes, too, how the feminine author has perceived the incidence of the feminine instinct of self-accusal on Mary’s tragedy, arriving by intuition at a truth of psychology which the mental doctors declare to be invariable. To a sensitive nature that instinct will often give the colour of guilt, or will at least render disavowal impotent. Thus the ancient lie attributing complicity in Darnley’s murder credibly takes its rise in an access of remorse for an imagined sin—;as when Mary, in the shock of the news of Darnley’s death, remembers how she had once wished him such an evil fate, on the night that he murdered David Riccio: