Michael Field

by Mary Sturgeon

Raoul. But I am come,
An angel sent to carry her to hell;
She is misplaced among the just, and if
You would escape damnation with the damned,
Light me to fling her down the great abyss.
Unbar your arms.

Anna. She rests beneath my roof,
The tower I raised, and, as I am a Queen,
Her life shall be untouched.
Act III

In the Name of Time is the most exciting of Michael Field’s plays, because it presents the high adventure of a soul. It is the work of her mid-career, the expression of a mature philosophy, and of fine, though not faultless, technique. It was conceived and in great part written when she was in love with life, a worshipper at the altar of her art, and—;this is the most significant condition of its being—;when she was entirely free from theological prepossession. For the play is concerned with an idea—;the greatest of all, perhaps, since it is the idea of God. Carloman, the protagonist, determines in its first lines to possess the Great Reality; and the drama follows him through one avenue after another of baffled quest until, dying in a prison, he murmurs his latest creed:

... I for myself
Drink deep to life here in my prison cell.
Fellowship, pleasure,
These are the treasure—;
So, I believe, so, in the name of Time....

One sees why, after the poets became Roman Catholics, they hesitated to publish this work; for the protagonist is that Carloman (son of Charles Martel, King of the Franks to A.D. 741) who renounced a kingdom for the monastic life. But in Michael Field’s presentation of him he is no submissive son of the Church. He has the independence and audacity of intellect of the poets themselves at this period; and he is the absolute visionary which they were capable of being and sometimes were. Nevertheless the play is not a polemic; and though it is vastly interesting on the speculative side, it is no philosophical treatise. It is genuine drama, and a striking example of the way in which our poets could at this stage fuse thought and form. Carloman’s spiritual adventures move us because they are enacted in human stuff; the events of his life utter his character. We see them through the renunciation of his royalty, the abandonment of his faithless wife and their child, the first convent life and its disillusion, the craving for freedom and the reawakening of ambition, the journey to Rome and dismissal to a second monastery, the revolt against bondage, the escape and armed rebellion against the Pope, the return to his home and his now prostituted wife, his recapture, imprisonment, and death. But being thus true to life, these spiritual adventures are, in their primary quest, inconclusive. 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 discovers how to live—;that human existence to be tolerable must be sweetened by fellowship and ennobled by pleasure. Those bare elements are all that he attains; but he throws off, in the process of arriving at something so simple, hints and gleams of truth more complex and more vivid. To gather merely those flashes may do an injustice to the work as drama; but one must risk that, for its thought is at least of equal importance. And since these fragments express the character of Carloman as he passes stage after stage of his quest, it follows that they cannot be a coherent philosophy.

There is no vanity in life; life utters
Unsparing truth to us,—;there is no line
Or record in our body of her printing
That stamps a falsehood. Do not so confound,
Father, life’s transience and sincerity.
* * *
The thing to do
Is simply just the sole thing to be done.
* * *
There should have been no tears, no taking leave,
A freeman can do anything he will.
* * *
Oh, do not put your trust in Time;
Put on at once forever, leap to God!
Have done with age and death and faltering friends,
Assailing circumstance, the change of front
That one is always meeting in oneself,
The plans and vacillations—;let them go!
And you will put on immortality
As simply as a vesture.
* * *
Heaven detests
A beggar’s whining. God is made for Kings,
Who need no favours, come to Him for nothing
Except Himself.
* * *
We must escape
From anything that is become a bond,
No matter who has forged the chain—;ourselves,
An enemy, a friend: and this escape,
This readjustment is the penitence....
* * *
But there is no such thing—;
A vow! As well respect the case that sheathes
The chrysalis, when the live creature stirs!
We make these fetters for ourselves, and then
We grow and burst them. It is clear no man
Can so forecast the changes of his course
That he can promise so I will remain,
Such, and no other. Words like these are straws
The current plays with as it moves along.
* * *
... You cannot see that Time
Is God’s own movement, all that He can do
Between the day a man is born and dies.
... Think what the vines would be
If they were glued forever, and one month
Gave them a law—;the richness that would cease,
The flower, the shade, the ripening. We are men,
With fourscore years for season, and we alter
So exquisitely often on our way
To harvest and the end.
* * *
It never is too late for any seeing,
For any recognition we are wrong.
* * *
Earth’s wisdom will begin
When all relationships are put away,
With their dull pack of duties, and we look
Curious, benignant, with a great compassion
Into each other’s lives.
* * *
Pepin. And are you not a rebel?

Carloman. I am, I am, because I am alive—;
And not a slave who sleeps through Time, unable
To share its agitation.
* * *
The God I worship. He is just to-day—;
Not dreaming of the future,—;in itself,
Breath after breath divine! Oh, He becomes!
He cannot be of yesterday, for youth
Could not then walk beside Him, and the young
Must walk with God: and He is most alive
Wherever life is of each living thing.
To-morrow and to-morrow,—;those to-days
Of unborn generations.

The Roman trilogy dramatizes the epoch in which the decline of the Empire began, and covers, in the period from A.D. 180 to 212, the disastrous reigns of Commodus, of Didius Julianus, and the co-emperors Caracalla and Geta. The interlude of Pertinax and his heroic effort to stop the downward movement is not treated, except that his assassination is the starting-point of The World at Auction; and the military adventures of Septimius Severus offered the poets no suitable material. The three plays have not, therefore, a common protagonist: royal persons were killed off too quickly to be of service in this respect. But there is, nevertheless, a real bond between the three plays in the idea of the State; and there are physical links in certain persons of the drama. Thus Marcia, the noble Christian slave who was so closely associated with Commodus that her figure appears engraved with his on certain coins of the period, plays a very important part in the two first tragedies, with Eclectus her lover. Fadilla, sister to Commodus, and Pylades, a Greek dancer and pantomime, appear in all three plays—;Pylades giving the poets a welcome opportunity to present the character of artist that they always delighted in.

The first play of the trilogy, The Race of Leaves, is concerned simply with the downfall of Commodus. There is, of course, no deliberate presentation of a problem in any of these plays of the second period, though a problem of some sort is implicit in every one. It is not, in the trilogy, capable of statement as one clear force fighting another to a single issue; but as the complex, fluctuating, diverse elements of the epoch, making for conflict of morals, of religion, of class, of political and Imperial interests. And if it be protested that that is altogether too vague and abstract as a motive for drama, the reply is, of course, that it is by no means presented as theory. It is wrought into the persons of the drama and impels them. Imagination has so possessed itself of the historical situation that what was rotten in the State has crept insidiously into the life of the play, which goes to its tragic end in consequence.

It would be a fascinating study, illuminative of the different mental processes of the historian and the poet, to compare, throughout the trilogy, what Gibbon made of the same materials. One must not be beguiled far along that path; but in respect of Commodus, he is for Gibbon (and, of course, the evidence supports his judgment) an unnatural monster with “every sentiment of virtue and humanity extinct.” Which is to say that the historian has collated the facts and fitted them together into a certain pattern. The poet has done more than that. She has absorbed the spirit of the time; she has penetrated to the very soul of each of the persons of her drama, and that sympathetically: she has felt not only their individual reaction to the forces of their age of transition, but the subtle, disintegrating influence of the age itself.