The door is open; you are free to go.
Why do you tarry? Are you not afraid?
Go, ere I hate you. I'll not hinder you.
I would not have you bound to me by fear.
Don't fear to leave me; rather fear to bide
With me who am my father's very son.
Go, lass, while yet I love you!
ESTHER (closing the door). I shall bide.
I have heard all; and yet, I would not go.
Nor would I have a single word unsaid.
I loved you, husband; yet, I did not know you
Until your mother spoke. I know you now;
And I am not afraid.
The first piece in Stonefolds represents the tragic helplessness of those newly born and those very old, a favourite theme with Maeterlinck. A lamb and a child are born on the same night, and both die before dawn. The lamb is a poetic symbol of babyhood. Nicholas, the aged shepherd, who longs to go out into the night and do his share of the work that must be done, but who is unable even to move, thus addresses the dying lamb:
Poor, bleating beast! We two are much alike,
At either end of life, though scarce an hour
You've been in this rough world, and I so long
That death already has me by the heels;
For neither of us can stir to help himself,
But both must bleat for others' aid. This world
Is rough and bitter to the newly born,
But far more bitter to the nearly dead.
In Daily Bread (1908-09), there are eighteen brief plays, written not in orthodox blank verse, like Stonefolds, but in irregular, brittle, breathless metres. Here is where art takes the short cut to life, sacrificing every grace to gain reality; the typical goal and method of twentieth-century poetry. So long as a vivid impression of character and circumstance is produced, the writer apparently cares nothing about style. I say "apparently," because the styleless style is perhaps the one best adapted to produce the sought-for effect. There is ever one difference between life and "art"—between drama and theatre—that Mr. Gibson has, I suppose, tried to cancel in these poems of daily bread. In art, the bigger the drama, the bigger the stage; one could not mount Götterdämmerung in a village schoolhouse. But Life does not fit the splendour of the setting to the grandeur of the struggle. In bleak farm cottages, in dull dwellings in city blocks, in slum tenements, the greatest of life's tragedies and comedies are enacted—love, hate, avarice, jealousy, revenge, birth, death—the most terrific passions known to human nature are fully presented, without the slightest care for appropriate scenery from the Master of the show. Thus our poet leads us by the hand into sea-girt huts, into hovels at the mouths of mines, into garrets of noisy cities, and makes us silent witnesses of elemental woe. Here Labour, man's greatest blessing, takes on the aspect of the primal curse, since so many tragedies spring from the simple root of poverty. The love of money may be the root of all evil, but the lack of it is the cause of much pain.
It was a happy inspiration that made Mr. Gibson call these scenes Daily Bread; for it is the struggle, not for comfort, but for existence, that drives these men from mother, wife, and child into the thick of the fight. Many novels and plays are written nowadays against "big business," where, among other real and imagined evils, the Business itself is represented as the villain in the home, alienating the husband's affections from wife and children. Whatever may be the case with the private soldiers, the Captain of Industry does not, and by the nature of things cannot, confine his labours to an eight-hour day—when he finally comes home, he brings the business with him, forming a more well-founded cause of jealousy than the one usually selected for conventional drama. Mr. Gibson, however, is not interested in the tragic few, but in the tragic many, and in his poems the man of the house leaves early and returns late. The industrial war caused by social conditions takes him from home as surely and as perilously as though he were drafted into an expeditionary force. The daily parting is poignant, for every member of the family knows he may not come back. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this corroding worry is seen in The Night-Shift, where four women with a newly-born baby spend a night of agonized waiting, only to have their fears confirmed in the dawn.
The wife, weak from childbirth, sits up in bed, and speaks:
Will no one stop that tapping?
I cannot sleep for it.
I think that someone is shut in somewhere,
And trying to get out.
Will no one let them out,
And stop the tapping?
It keeps on tapping, tapping….
Tap … tap … tap … tap….
And I can scarcely breathe,
The darkness is so thick.
It stifles me,
And weighs so heavily upon me,
And drips, and drips….
My hair is wet already;
There's water all about my knees….
As though great rocks were hanging overhead!
And dripping, dripping….
I cannot lift my feet,
The water holds them,
It's creeping … creeping … creeping….
My wet hair drags me down.
Ah, God!
Will no one stop that tapping….
I cannot sleep….
And I would sleep
Till he comes home….
Tap … tap … tap … tap….
These poems were, of course, composed before the war. In the greater tragedy, some of the lesser ones disappear. For example, Mr. Gibson represents young, able-bodied, healthy and temperate men as unable to find work of any kind; their wives and children starve because of the absence of employment. Surely, since August, 1914, this particular cause of suffering has been removed.
In Womenkind (1909), dedicated to Rabbi and Mrs. Wise, we have a real play, not only dramatic in character and situation, but fitted for stage representation without the change of a word. The theme is just the opposite of Middleton's old drama, Women Beware Women. Here the two young women, one the mistress-mother, and one the bride, join forces against the man, and walk out of his house on the wedding-day. They feel that the tie between them is stronger than the tie which had united them severally to the man, and depart to live together. The play closes on a note of irony, for Jim, his blind father, and his weary mother repeat in turn—but with quite different emphasis—the accusation that women are a faithless lot.