Other Roman work of this period is Stephania (1892), a trialogue dealing not very convincingly with the vengeance taken by the wife of the Roman consul Crescentius on Otto III. There is much interest and not a little beauty in this play, but no dramatic conviction. One comes, therefore, finally, to Attila, my Attila! (1896), which refuses to be passed over in complete silence, though it does not lend itself to quotation. The intellectual motive here is much more conscious than in the other plays of the group. Indeed, the play is in spirit a survival from the earlier period, and belongs to this one only in external things of matter, form, and date.
Honoria, the heroine, is described by the poets as “the new woman of the fifth century,” and the mere record of that fact is enough to indicate the nature of the problem which will be dealt with. But Michael Field did herself a greater injustice than usual in trying to define the meaning of this drama in terms which suggest a local and temporary phase. For just as neither Honoria nor the ‘new woman’ of the nineteenth century was really new and transitory, but rather a reassertion of very old and permanent things, so this play belies its preface; and instead of treating a mere ‘movement’ in a given epoch, it is found to deal with perennial human stuff.
Honoria, the little princess of A.D. 450, to whom even Gibbon was sympathetic, is no mere smasher of windows—;though she does that too in her own way, by an illicit union with a young chamberlain of the palace whom she loves against prudence and convention. She is, however, in her complete significance, something more than a rebel against convention. The poet wrought better than she knew, and gave in her Honoria a woman’s presentation of the woman’s right to love and motherhood. She had formulated the idea before, tentatively and somewhat in disguise, in The Cup of Water; and her letters at that time amusingly reveal both trepidation lest her real meaning should be discovered, and anger at the blunderers who did not detect it. She need have had no fear: no one guessed. The time was not ripe; and now, ten years after, with the production of Attila, it still was not ripe. It may even be that we have had to wait for the teaching of Freud to make plain all that is implied in this play. Of him the poets knew nothing; and could they have known, would have disliked intensely, as most healthy minds do, his obsession with the idea of sex. Yet they have done the poet’s work so well—;which is to say, they have observed so carefully, thought so fearlessly, and so vividly imagined—;that they have presented (without in the least intending to do so) an almost pathological study of suppressed instinct: one which illumines and is in its turn illuminated by the residuum of truth which does underlie the fantastic theories of the psycho-analyst.
Yet once again it is necessary to qualify an impression of too stark a problem. One repeats, therefore, that the problem, though distinct and weighty, is implicit; it grew up in the artist’s despite. Honoria is not a peg on which to hang a theory or a puppet with which to illustrate one. She is a creature of great vitality who wins our affection and our pity by her eager challenge of life and her disastrous defeat. We watch her developing from an immature and impulsive girl who follows innocently her newly awakened maternal instinct into a woman whose rich emotional power and mental strength have been thwarted by repression and perverted to an insane infatuation for the Hun king, Attila. But it follows from those elements that the chief value of the play is its psychology and not its dramatic power. The work will charm for half a dozen reasons—;its sympathy with the youthful rebel, its gem-like utterances on love, its mental courage, its penetration, its dramatic truth; but it never rises to the force of the great scenes of the trilogy.
V. THE TRAGEDIES—;III
THE last group of tragedies is that which was published from the year 1905 onward to the poets’ death—;and afterward; but it was not a product of their latest creative activity. That activity was lyrical: or, if it ventured at all into the region of tragedy (as in an unpublished piece called Iphigenia in Arsarcia) it was with tragic genius shorn and subdued by Christian hope, Christian meekness, and Christian triumph over death—;which is to say, that it was tragedy no longer.
One may not assert in round terms that, of the eleven plays in this last group, not one was written after Michael Field entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1907. But the evidence suggests that they were all conceived before that date; and although certain revision may have been done afterward to some of them, the more important plays were completed before the poets’ conversion.
After that event their minds were possessed by the exaltation of the mystic, and their days were largely occupied in devotional exercises. Obviously they were not in the mood for the objective imagining of the dramatist; and an artistic cause is thus added to the philosophic one for the suspension of dramatic impulse.
In the Name of Time, as I have elsewhere stated, must be put back as far as 1890; A Question of Memory was written and played in 1893. Deirdre in its first form was in existence years before they died, and with Borgia would rank in style with their earlier chronicle-plays. These two belong to the last dramatic phase only in their tragic motive. Mariamne was finished in 1905, The Accuser by January 1907, and one at least of the Tristan plays by 1903.
I have called these plays an Eastern group, because the most prominent of them are Eastern in theme—;and for another reason. But several come much nearer home for their subject. Two of them, Tristan de Leonois and The Tragedy of Pardon, deal with different aspects of the Tristan legend; and one treats (en fantaisie) of that great lover, Diane de Poytiers. Nevertheless, whatever the theme, all possess the characteristic which makes a second reason for describing them as Eastern—;namely, an almost Oriental violence of passion. Thus Cesare Borgia is hurled to the abyss down the immense ascent of his ambition. Deirdre’s love—;too noble for caution, too great to calculate, and too proud to dissemble—;compels catastrophe. Herod’s passion passes into a destroying madness. Ras Byzance consumes his universe in the hell of his own jealousy; and the messiah Sabbatai, distilling a cold spiritual pride, cries from its lonely central ice, “I am a god,” only to shrivel incontinently at the first touch of the world’s derision. It is as though Michael Field were consciously ruled in this last phase of her Tragic Muse by the lines from the Antigone which she has set upon the first page of her Deirdre, “Nothing that is vast enters into the life of man without a curse.” For it is with the vast, the excessive, the overwhelming that she deals here; and since she is a tragic poet, she sees the vast forces accompanied by their curse, and life persistently followed by its attendant shadow.