Scene 5 of this act is masterly. It is a wild night, and the King,

crouching over the fire of a room high up in the castle, hears the wind shriek outside and thinks of his boy, whom he believes to be merely shut up like a naughty child to recover from his rage:

_K. Robert._ My poor lad, My David, who is fearful of the dark, Would he were here this bleak and scolding night! He used to throw a cushion on the floor, And lay him down as featly as the hound, His foolish yellow head against my knee; And so he’d laugh and chat and sing old songs, Or gaily sneer at our last grave debate, Drop sudden crude suggestions that anon Our older counsel ripened into act; Until for some light word I’d give rebuke, When either with a peal of raillery He’d toss me back a penitent bright face, Or with a shaded humour spring apart, No place from me too far. Good Albany, You would not have our Rothsay longer shut In such grim-tempered darkness? _Act IV, Scene 5_

_William Rufus_ (1885), a full-dress drama of five acts, is without a woman character. It is based on Freeman’s history of Rufus, and was suggested to the poet, as she explains in the preface, by a visit to the New Forest. There she found the stone which marks the spot where Rufus fell, pierced by an arrow glancing from an oak, “as if directed,” to use her own phrase, “by Nature’s anger at the destruction of her food-bearing fields for the insolence of pleasure.”

So there, again, peeps out the ulterior motive. The idea of the play is explicitly to be the land question; and that it had, in fact, a political bearing is confirmed by the poet’s letters on the subject. Yet one is glad to discover, as we quickly do, that here as elsewhere in her intellectual drama Michael Field has been better than her creed: her dramatic instinct has subdued the idea to itself. So that, if we had no other evidence than that of the play, we should be convinced that the idea grew out of the theme, and was not imposed upon it. It was never a case of the poets’ exclaiming, “Go to, we will write a problem-play!” but rather of a sudden perception, in their travels or their reading, “What a subject for drama!” and then, as an afterthought, “And see what profound significance!” But as a fact all the evidence points in the same direction: a character would arrest them, they would be attracted by its story, would absorb themselves in the study of it, and become literally possessed by it--working out the implicit idea as something subsidiary.

In this play the idea is completely assimilated to imagination. There is no bald presentation of it on the plane of everyday existence, for that surely is a function of comedy. And though the King’s cruelty in appropriating the peasants’ land is shown in its effect upon the lives of individuals, a larger vision of the problem is presented in the figure of one old man, Beowulf, who is, as it were, the wronged spirit of the Earth in human shape. In him the idea is made both concrete and spiritual, as the genius of poetry can make it. He is a very real, rough-hewn old countryman, with a vigorous part in the movement of the drama; and yet there is a touch upon him that is weird and supernatural, which relates him to fierce elemental forces and makes him at one and the same time a rustic and an avenging deity. He is blind; his eyes were put out long ago for trespass; and he feels his way to the gallows where the body of his grandson has now been hanged for killing a deer:

_Beowulf._ I feel it’s here; I have no need to see. I’m glad they murdered him, not made him dark; For now he’s dead the Earth will think on him As she unweaves his body bit by bit. She’ll have time like the women-folk at work To turn all over in her mind, and get His wrongs by heart. ... Who is here?

_Wilfrith._ Wilfrith! I often come to pray for him!...

_Beowulf._ Pray! Pray! Are you a wench to chatter so? Does not your tongue grow rigid in your head, A corpse to bear that silence company? Have you no death in you? Oh, say your prayers; I will keep mourning in my ruined ears The passing of his voice. _Act II, Scene 1_

_Beowulf._ Do you think the Earth’s a thing that makes your flesh Soft for the worms?--the harvests lie asleep Upon her bosom; she has reared the spring; The seasons are her change of countenance; She lives, and now for many thousand years Hath ruled the toiling and the rest of men. ... She’ll judge.

_Old Man._ Do thou make known this matter to the Lord; He will avenge.

_Beowulf._ The Lord! Oh, He’s above! There’s something lying at the roots of things I burrow for. _Act IV, Scene 1_

_Beowulf_ [_his last speech, after Rufus has been killed_]. Yea, bear him through the woods like a gashed boar, Present him dripping to your angry God; He may not be implacable. In haste Cloak the foul thing beneath the minster tower; Heap soil on him.... ... There are worms About his darkness; I am satisfied. _End of Act V_

The people of this drama are vigorous creatures, as sharply drawn and clear-cut as types, but very far from the merely typical. The poet has created, and not constructed, them; and each one possesses his own soul. Rufus is a credible villain, a man and not a monster. He can melt at the sight of filial piety, unbend to a jest, warm to affection. Anselm may stand as a figure which shall represent the insulted Church, but he is a very holy and gentle old priest. Philosopher and saint, he was, of course, historically studied; but he is, despite verisimilitude, an almost complete embodiment of the two qualities of our poet’s mind which make so rare a combination--her religious temper and her philosophic intellect. Two short quotations from him may help to illustrate this:

_Anselm._ God gives His bread to children who are sweet With golden faith; to thinkers and to men Of striving reason He presents a stone.

* * * * *

Faith is the child’s gift, and Philosophy The man’s achievement. Blessèd toil, to walk Where babes are carried past on angel-wings. ... It is Philosophy That knocks at Heaven’s gate: Faith finds the door Wide open. _Act II, Scene 2_

But of all the characters, one supposes Leofric to have engaged the poets’ affection most. He is a ‘mason’: which is to say he is the architect, sculptor, and builder all in one who was the medieval artist. It is evident that the poets had particular joy in imagining him, absorbed and happy in his real world of art, with the actual world as mere stuff for his modelling. If Leofric ever allows himself to be disturbed by the King’s greedy inroads, it is from no ‘political’ reason, but simply that the noisy hunters make such havoc of the woodland peace:

_Leofric._ ... A horn! Methinks the forest hath another use These precious hours of morning, when the world Is at some process of its perfecting ’Twere well to learn the trick of. Wilfrith toils, Tearing yon fibre from the ground a-sweat With effort; while for me!--my eyes are full; I have no want; the world is excellent; There is no prickle in the holly wrong. How bossily it clusters! ... Oh do not think We travel so untreasured in resource We needs must earn the bread of every joy By sweat of soul. If life’s a desert--Ah! There’s manna in the waste; it lies about, And the wise idle soul is satisfied. _Act I, Scene 4_

The motive of _Canute the Great_ (1887) presents a curious difficulty. For if we are to accept the poet’s own statement of what she meant by the play (and it does seem as if she ought to have known), then we are forced to conclude that she attempted the impossible, and therefore failed. But one has the suspicion that she did _not_ quite know what she meant by it--which is not so impertinent as it sounds, and only means that her artistic instinct was stronger and truer in this case than her philosophy. For in the preface she declares that she is here dealing with the theory of evolution; and she elaborates an idea which, had it really operated as a motive force, would surely have paralysed her Muse and struck it dumb. Canute, however, is no paralytic: on the contrary, he has his creator’s vehement life and passion, at least for the first half of the drama. But in those scenes he is far enough from any abstract theory. Yet when his vitality flags, as it does sometimes, and when the play becomes, as a consequence, to that extent unsuccessful, the cause lies in a certain resemblance which the theme does bear to the poet’s definition of it. For it is possible to regard the character of Canute in the abstract as a transition between two ages and a link between two orders of civilization. That is, of course, the meaning which the poet saw in it--when she was writing her preface. But in the process of making the drama the wise æsthetic impulse seized and worked upon something simpler, more definite, and more moving--the potential conflict that exists everywhere and always among human creatures between their instincts and their reason. That, surely, is a tragic motive of universal validity; and it may precipitate at any moment, and at any stage of civilization, the revolt of the half-tamed instincts which is true stuff of tragedy, whether it be enacted within the small orbit of an individual soul or in the insane immensity of a world-war. So long as Canute is at grips with the rebel powers--dramatized in his struggle with Edmund--he is a great dramatic figure; but when his creator raises the conflict--with his penitence for Edmund’s death--to the plane of pure thought, the life goes out of him and he becomes but a type, though a very noble one, of spiritual struggle. Even at those moments, however, one may find passages where the æsthetic sense has subdued theory to itself with fine effect. Thus the poet has touched Canute’s love for Emma with symbolism, seeing her as the gentler and riper civilization into which Canute is adopted; and again, the wild Northern land of his origin, the elements which went to the making of his race, the secret compulsive urge of heredity, are embodied in the figure of a weird prophetess who is to him his other self, the incarnate spirit of those ancient forces. The speech which follows is made by Canute when he is recalling his first meeting with Emma. There are passages with her, love-scenes between the young sea-king and the mature queen, which are adroitly and boldly handled, and are drama in essence and in fact. But here, in a reverie, is the poet’s opportunity for putting her theory into a symbol:

_Canute._ ... Above me bent A sweet, soft-shouldered woman, with supreme, Abashing eyes, and such maturity-- The perfect flower of years--such June of face.... So ceremonious, and yet so fearless In passionate grace, that I was struck with shame, And knew not where I was, nor how to speak, Confounded to the heart. She made me feel That I was lawless and uncivilised,-- Barbarian! In all my brave array I shrank from her, as she had caught me stripped For some brute pastime. Is this womanhood? There’s more to see each time one looks at her, There’s music in her; she has listened much, Pored o’er the lustrous missals, learnt how soft One speaks to God.... _Act I, Scene 4_

Another and more powerful example of our poet’s genius for giving form to the abstract, and triumphing dramatically over a most stubborn theory, is in her creation of Gunhild, the Scandinavian prophetess. Gunhild is something more than a symbol--though she is that, and stands for ancestry, the ancient gods, and the wild fight with nature of the barbaric order which Canute is renouncing. But she is, besides, a terrifying old witch: an ugly, clinging creature who will not be cast off. She enters to Canute just at the moment when he is thinking of Emma:

_Canute [to Hardegon]._ Whom hast thou brought? A brooding face, with windy sea of hair, And eyes whose ample vision ebbs no more Than waters from a fiord. I conceive A dread of things familiar as she breathes.

_Gunhild._ O King.

_Canute._ Ay, Scandinavia.

_Gunhild._ He sees How with a country’s might I cross his door; How in me all his youth was spent, in me His ancestors are buried; on my brows Inscribed is his religion; through my frame Press the great, goading forces of the waves.

_Canute._ Art thou a woman?

_Gunhild._ Not to thee. I am Thy past.

_Canute._ Her arms are knotted in her bosom Like ivy stems. What does she here, so fixed Before my seat?

* * * * *

_Gunhild._ Hearken!... All eve I stood And gathered in your fate. You raise your hands To other gods, you speak another tongue, You learn strange things on which is Odin’s seal That men should know them not, you cast the billows Behind your back, and leap upon the horse. You love no more the North that fashioned you, The ancestors whose blood is in your heart-- These things you have forgotten.

_Canute._ Yes.

_Gunhild._ But they Will have a longer memory.

* * * * *

... Oh, indestructible Are the first bonds of living. Fare thee well. Thou wilt engender thine own ancestry; Nature will have her permanence.

_Canute._ And I Will have my impulse.

_Gunhild._ Oh, the blue fir-bough, The bird, the fern, and iris at my feet! The whole world talks of birth, it is the secret That shudders through all sap. [_Exit._ _Act I, Scene 4_

In illustrating poetic drama, one chooses inevitably such passages as these, where poetic imagination is concentrated at high power. But they, by their nature, cannot represent the suppler and swifter dramatic qualities of this poetry. And they do no more than hint at what is, in our poet, a very great gift--psychological insight flashing into expression as vivid and as true as itself. It is well-nigh impossible to illustrate this by quotation, because the effect is cumulative. The phrase which darts into the mind is full of what the mind already holds, but which was dark and inchoate until the flash came. One or two minor examples may be given from this play, as when Edric (conceived by the poet as entirely base) is sounding Canute on the subject of a marriage with Emma:

_Canute._ I have no doubt But I shall marry.

_Edric._ Where’s the wife to match An eagle of your plumage?

_Canute._ All the world Is full of stately women.

_Edric._ I have seen But one, the late king’s widow. She is prime Among all dames.

_Canute._ You think that you have seen her, Because you know she has a radiant skin, And strange, proud eyes!

And again, when Edric asks for some message, a “sugared speech” to take to Emma:

_Canute_ [_aside_]. The fool! I cannot speak.--Take her my silence, Thane.

_Act I, Scene 4_

_The Cup of Water_, published in the same volume with _Canute_, is an idyll whose delicate beauty one almost fears to touch. That it too astonishingly carries a problem one would hardly guess; and even in face of the poet’s confession of the fact, and her anxiety lest the problem should be misunderstood, one would demur that here again her practice has been better than her precept. For these exquisite love-scenes, these magnanimous friends and lovers, and this clear greatness of thought issuing simply in noble action might bear some relation to a ‘marriage question’ in Utopia, but would have little enough to do with such a problem in the actual world. That, however, is rather a cause for rejoicing to those who can delight in the ideal beauty of the work, and who can see in its ethical audacity an innocence which only could dare to follow up so boldly a logical attack upon the conventions of morality.

The theme was adopted from a projected poem of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; but in taking it over our poet has moralized it far from its origin. The story as she tells it is concerned with the love of a young king, Almund, for a peasant-girl, his renunciation of her from motives of loyalty, and his ultimate discovery that in giving her up he has sinned against something in her and in himself which has a deeper sanction than loyalty--that, in a word, fulfilment is a higher good than renunciation. But this he finds out too late:

_Almund._ I shall find All the great years of Hell inadequate To mourn this mighty error and defeat-- To put such gift away, and youth and manhood Stirring within me! _Act III, Scene 2_

* * * * *

Oh, we must learn To drink life’s pleasures if we would be pure, Deep, holy draughts.... _Act III, Scene 2_

* * * * *

Love, Love, Love, Without which we are made of the mere clay Of the world’s agèd floor. _Act II, Scene 1_

In the first scene the King and his friend Hubert have encountered Cara in the forest, and have begged of her a drink of water. She does not know them, and is unconscious that both are enchanted by her wild prettiness. She fills her cup with water, and brings it straight to Almund, though Hubert teasingly tries to intercept it; and the King desires her to serve his friend first. The merest touches put us in possession of the tragic knot--that both of the young men love her and that she loves Almund; but that he, in the moment of realizing his passion, feels upon him the bonds of honour to his betrothed wife and loyalty to his friend. As they ride away, his mind is full of the conflict:

_Almund_ [_aside_]. She is mine. The water came not straighter from the earth, Than she herself to me.

_Hubert._ You are unmindful. I vainly prate to one in reverie-- Indifferent to my fortune.

_Almund._ May you win her! You are my friend.

_Hubert._ I doubt not she will listen; The small, cold cheek grew ruddy. We shall wed, When you espouse your Millicent.

_Almund_ [_aside_]. Thus God Severs, without the clemency of death.

_Act I, Scene 1_