Michael Field

by Mary Sturgeon

Lebarcham. O Deirdre! She is hidden by that cloak.
O shattered loveliness of Erin, hidden
From the ages, evermore! Thy Lebarcham,
Who saw thee come from hiding to our light,
Will go with thee along
To thy last screening cover, to thy tomb.
[Exit, following the chariot led by Fergna.
Conchobar. The land!... I wended hither: car and horses
Are wending from me. Did I move like that,
So solitary, dark above the grass?—;But
to no goal. In one of those near graves
She will be with him, one of them will open;
There can but be one tomb. The chariot lingers
Its way in happy sloth: so wheat is carried
Till night-fall to the barn....
[He remains watching in the silence.
The car
Has turned the cromlech....
So wheat is carried.

* * *

In concluding this very brief survey of Michael Field’s life and poetry, one turns back with a sense of illumination to her sonnet called The Poet, which has been already quoted. For therein Michael Field has indicated the nature of her own genius and the conditions of its activity. She was not thinking of herself, of course, but of the poetic nature in the abstract, when she declared in the first two lines of the sestet that the poet is

a work of some strange passion
Life has conceived apart from Time’s harsh drill.

Those verses apply in some degree to the whole race of poets, which is, indeed, the test of their truth. Yet it is significant that in choosing precisely that form of expression for the truth, Michael Field has inadvertently stated the essential meaning of her own life, of her long service to literature, and of the peculiar greatness and possible limitation of her poetry.

“A work of some strange passion.” Strange, indeed, and in many ways. For, first, it is no common thing to find, in a world preoccupied with traffic and ambition, two souls completely innocent of both. Not small souls, nor stupid nor ignorant ones—;as clever people might aver in order to account for the phenomenon—;but of full stature, intelligent, level-headed, and with their sober measure of English common sense. They knew themselves, too—;were aware that they possessed genius, that they had first-rate minds and were artists of great accomplishment. Moreover, for the larger part of their life they were on terms with ‘the world’; they welcomed experience as few Victorian women dared, gathered knowledge eagerly wherever it was to be found, and had business ability sufficient to direct prudently their own affairs.

They would have denied that there was anything of the fanatic or the visionary in the dedication of themselves to their art, believing fanaticism to be incongruous with the undiluted English strain of which they boasted. And, indeed, there is something typical of the race in this deliberate setting of a course and dogged persistence in it. Yet there is hardly an English precedent for their career; and it is to France one must look—;to the Goncourts or to Erckmann-Chatrian—;to match the long collaboration, or to find similar examples of their artistic method. And not even there, so far as I know, will be found another such case of disinterested service.

But the lines we have noted have an application to the work as well as to the life of Michael Field. They may be used almost literally, to summarize in a convenient definition the nature of her poetry. For in this body of work one sees passion as an almost over-powering element, and it is of surprising strangeness. However fully one may recognize the truth that there is no sex in genius, I suppose that we shall always be startled at the appearance of an Emily Brontë or a Michael Field. They seem such slight instruments for the primeval music that the earth-mother plays upon them. And their vehemence mingles so oddly with tenderer and more delicate strains that it will always be possible for a reviewer to sneer at what is “to the Greeks foolishness”—;he having no perception of the fact that in gentleness added to strength a larger humanity is expressed. Such an eye as Meredith’s could perceive that, and, catching sight of some reviewing stupidity about it, would flash lightnings of wrath in that direction, and send indignant sympathy to the poets.

There is strangeness, too, of another kind in the passion which was the impulse of this poetry. Under the restraint that art has put upon it, it is, as we have seen, an elemental thing. It is a creative force akin to that of Emily Brontë or of Byron, and is tamer than their wild genius only in appearance. Its more ordered manner grew from two causes: that one of the collaborators blessedly possessed a sense of form, and that both of them lived withdrawn from the brawl of life. They were placed, perhaps, a little too far from “Time’s harsh drill.” Their lives were, on the whole, easier and happier ones than are given to most people. That is why the loss of their Chow dog caused them a grief which seems exaggerated to minds not so sensitively tuned as theirs. Until the agony of the last three years overtook them, their share of the common lot of sorrow had been the barest minimum: adversity did not so much as look their way: poverty laid no finger on them, and was but vaguely apprehended, in the distance, as something pitiful for its ugliness. Therefore, secure and leisured, they envisaged life, in the main, through art, through philosophy, through literature, and hardly ever through the raw stuff of life itself. And thence comes the peculiar character which the passion of their poetry acquired, as of some fierce creature caught and bound in golden chains.

It may be that this seclusion from life will be felt in Michael Field’s poetry as a limitation; that the final conviction imposed upon the mind by the authority of experience is wanting; and that the work lacks a certain dry wisdom of which difficult living is a necessary condition. It may be so; but I do not think the stricture a valid charge against their work, first because of our poets’ great gift of imagination, and second because they chose so rightly their artistic medium. Comedy may require the discipline of experience, the observing eye constantly fixed upon the object, and a rich knowledge of the world; but surely tragedy requires before everything else creative imagination, sympathy, and a certain greatness of heart and mind. Those gifts Michael Field possessed in very large degree; so large that one often stands in amazement before the protagonists of her drama, demanding, in the name of all things wonderful, how two Victorian women “ever came to think of that.” A Renaissance pope, a Saxon peasant, or a priest of Dionysos—;decadent emperors, austere Roman patriots, or a Frankish king turned monk—;those are only a few of the surprising creatures of her imagination, conceived not as historical figures merely, but as living souls. And by the range of her women characters—;from the dignity of a Julia Domna to the wild-rose sweetness of a Rosamund; from the Scottish Mary, with her rich capacity for loving, to the fierce chastity of an Irish Deirdre, or the soul of goodness in a courtesan; from the subtlety of a Lucrezia Borgia to the proud singleness of a Mariamne; from the virago-venom of an Elinor to the sensitive simplicity of a country-girl, or the wrong-headedness of a little princess whose instincts have been perverted by frustration—;Michael Field has greatly enriched the world’s knowledge of womanhood.