II. THE LYRICS

Michael was then immensely vivacious, full of vitality and curiosity. When young she had doubtless been very pretty, and for years kept traces of colour in her white hair. But if Michael was small, ruddy, gay, buoyant and quick in word and temper, Henry was tall, pallid, singularly beautiful in a way not appreciated by common people, that is, white with gray eyes, thin in face, shoulders and hands, as if touched throughout with gray long before the graying of her temples. Sudden shadows would flit over the face at some inner perception or memory. Always of fragile health, she was very quiet and restrained in voice and manner, a singularly alive and avid spectator and questioner, occasionally speaking with force and vivacity, but instinctively retiring, and absorbed by an intensely reflective inner life.

Yet it is clear that she, as well as Michael, loved the give-and-take of social intercourse within their circle. She too liked to catch up and pass on an amusing story about a contemporary, and thoroughly enjoyed a joke. After the austere Bristol days, when their gravity might have been at least a thousand years old, they grew steadily younger through the next fifteen years. “Michael had,” says Father John Gray, “the look, the laugh, andmany of the thoughts of a child.” Both were witty, but Michael, the richer and more spontaneous nature, had a warm gift of humour almost Rabelaisian. She loved fun, and jesting, and mimicry. With her frequent smile, her sparkling eyes, and her emphatic tones and gestures, she was an extremely animated storyteller. Henry’s wit had a more intellectual quality: it was quicker and sharper in edge than Michael’s, and it grew keener as she grew older, till it acquired almost a touch of grimness, as when she said to a friend during her last illness: “The doctor says I may live till Christmas, but after thatI must go away at once.”

Henry was not a sedulous correspondent: indulged by Michael, she only wrote letters when a rare mood prompted her to do so. But the fortunate friend who heard from her at those times received a missive that was like an emanation from her soul, tender, wise, penetrative, gravely witty and delicately sweet. One would like to give in full some of those letters, but must be content to quote characteristic fragments of them. Thus, in March of 1888, she wrote to Miss Alice Trusted:

I feel you will never let yourself believe how much you are loved by me.... Your letter is one of the most precious I have ever received. Ah! so a friend thinks of one; would that God could think with her!But it is a deep joy to me to be something to the souls that live along with me on the earth....

In May she wrote to the same friend an account of a visit to their “dear old friend, Mr Browning”:

He came in to us quite by himself, with one of his impetuous exclamations, followed by “Well, my two dear Greek women!” We found him well, lovingly kind, grave as ever. His new home is well-nigh a palace, and his famed old tapestries (one attributed to Giulio Romano) have now a princely setting.... He fell into a deep, mourning reverie after speaking of the death of Matthew Arnold, whom he called with familiar affection—;Mat. Then his face was like the surface of a grey pool in autumn, full of calm, blankintimité.

Another visit is described in July of the same year:

We have again been to see Mr Browning, and spent with him and his sister almost the only perfect hours of this season. Alice, he has promised me to play, the next time we meet, some of Galuppi’s toccatas!... He read to us some of the loveliest poems of Alfred de Musset, very quietly, with a low voice full ofrecueillement, and now and then a brief smile at some touch of exquisite playfulness. He is always the poet with us, and it seems impossible to realise that he goes behind a shell of worldly behaviour and commonplace talk when he faces society. Yet so it is: we once saw it was so.In his own home, in his study, he is “Rabbi ben Ezra,” with his inspired, calm, triumphant old age. His eyes rest on one with their strange, passive vision, traversed sometimes by an autumnal geniality, mellow and apart, which is beautiful to meet. Yet his motions are full of impetuosity and warmth, and contrast with his steady outlook and his ‘grave-kindly’ aspect.

One finds acute artistic and literary estimates in these letters. Thus, after an appreciation of Whistler’s nocturnes, she remarks of his Carlyle portrait, “It is a masterpiece; the face has caught the fervid chaos of his ideality.”

Of Onslow Ford’s memorial of Shelley she says: “The drowned nude ... is an excellent portrait of the model, and therefore unworthy of Shelley, to my mind. The conventional lions and the naturalistic apple-boughs don’t coalesce. The Muse is but a music-girl. I like the bold treatment of the sea-washed body.”

She sketches an illuminating comparison between the art of Pierre Loti’sPêcheur d’lslandeand that of Millet; and declares that Huysmans’ work “is the last word of decadence—;the foam on the most recent decay—;and yet there is something of meagre tragedy about it.”

After a visit to the opera she writes:

We went to see Gluck’sOrfeo. Julia Ravogli attaches one to her with that love which is almostchivalry, that one gives to a great and simple artist. Her hands are as expressive as a countenance, and her face is true, is pliant to ideal passion. Her voice is lovely, and she sits down by her dead Euridice and singsChe faròas a woodland nightingale sings her pain.

She exclaims at the “elegant Latin” used by Gerbert in his letters, “written in the dark tenth century”; agrees with Matthew Arnold that Flaubert has “neither compassion nor insight: his art cannot give us the verity of a temperament or soul”; but adds of his (Flaubert’s) correspondence, “To me each letter in which he writes of art is full of incitement, help, and subtle justness.”

She gives her impressions of Pater when delivering a lecture in December 1890:

He came forward without looking anywhere and immediately began to read, with no preface. He never gave his pleasant blue eyes to his audience.... There is great determination, a little brutality (in the French sense) about the lower part of his face; yet it is under complete, urbane control. His voice is low, and has a singular sensitive resonance in it—;an audible capacity for suffering, as it were. His courteous exterior hides a strong nature; there is something, one feels, of Denys l’Auxerrois in him—;a Bacchant, a Zagreus.

A criticism of the comedy of the nineties,and its manner of production, is thrown off lightly in a letter to Miss Louie Ellis:

We went to Pinero. He was taken at snail’s pace, and so much that was disgraceful to humanity had to be endured at that rate that we groaned. Satire should always be taken with rapier speed—;to pause on it is to make it unendurable. The malice and anger must sparkle, or the mind contracts and is bored.

On an Easter visit to the country, in 1894, she wrote to Miss Trusted:

Yesterday we saw our first daffodils: they were growing in awful peace. The sun was setting: it had reached the tranquil, not the coloured stage; the air held more of its effect than the sky yet showed. We did not pluck a daffodil: they grew inviolable. After sunset, as we came thro’ the firs, we saw a round glow behind them—;it was the Paschal moon rising. A chafer passed, like the twang of one string of an Æolian harp. The sound of the wind in the firs is cosmic, the gathering of many waters etherealized; and the sharp notes of individual birds cross it with their smallness, and with a pertinacity that can throw continuance itself into the background.

Writing to another friend at a much later date, she says:

We have seen Tagore for a quarter of an hour—;seen the patient and quiet beauty of a lustrous-eyed animal. He is full of rumination, affability; and his smile is a jewel, the particular jewel of his soul.

And in 1913, the last year of her life, when Mr Rothenstein had been making a sketch of her head for a portrait, she wrote him thanks which were both critical and appreciative, concluding:

It is a lovely and noble drawing: it is such a revelation of a mood of the soul—;so intense, I said, seeing it at first—;that is how I shall look at the Last Judgment, “When to Thee I have appealed, Sweet Spirit, comfort me.”

It is significant that, wherever they went, the servants fell in love with Henry. Her manner, always gracious, was to them of the most beautiful courtesy and consideration. Michael was more imperious, more exigent. Warm and generous in her friendships, she yet was capable of sudden fierce anger for some trivial cause—;when, however, she would rage so amusingly that the offender forgot to be offended in his turn. She might banish a friend for months, for no discoverable reason, or might in some other rash way inconsiderately hurt him; but, though she would be too proud to confess it, she would be the unhappiest party of them all to the quarrel. “Of the wounds she inflicts, Michael very frequently dies,” she once wrote in a letter.

But of her devotion to Henry, its passion, itsdepth, its tenacity and tenderness, it is quite impossible to speak adequately. From Henry’s infancy to her death—;literally from her first day to her last—;Michael shielded, tended, and nurtured her in body and in spirit. Probably there never was another such case of one mind being formed by another. There surely cannot be elsewhere in literature a set of love-songs such as those she addressed to Henry; nor such jealousy for a comrade’s fame as that she showed to the reviewers after Henry’s death; nor such absolute generosity as that with which she lavished praise on her fellow’s work, and forgot her own share in it. But there is not room, even if one could find words, to speak of these things. One can only snatch, as it were in passing, a few fragments from her letters. And this I do, partly to bring home the other proof of Michael’s devotion, namely, that she always did the very considerable business involved in the collaboration, and wrote nearly all the social letters: but chiefly so that some direct glimpses may be caught of her warm human soul.

Thus we may find, in her correspondence with Mr Elkin Mathews aboutSight and Songin 1892, one proof out of many which the poets’ career affords of their concern for the physical beauty of their books. Theydesired their children to be lovely in body as well as in spirit; and great was their care for format, decoration, binding, paper, and type: for colour, texture, quality, arrangement of letterpress, appearance of title-page, design of cover. In every detail there was rigorous discrimination: precise directions were given, often in an imperious tone; experiments were recommended; journeys of inspection were undertaken; certain things were chosen and certain others emphatically banned. But in the midst of exacting demands on some point or other one lights on a gracious phrase such as “We know you will share our anxiety that the book should be as perfect as art can make it”; or, this time to the printers, “I am greatly obliged to you for your patience.”

Again, Michael is discovered, in 1901, when a beautiful view from the old bridge at Richmond was threatened by the factory-builder, rushing an urgent whip to their friends. That which went to Mr Sydney Cockerell ran:

If you think our rulers incompetent, prove yourself a competent subject. The competent subject does not plead evening engagements when a buttercup piece of his England, with elms for shade and a stretch of winding stream for freshness, is about to be wrenched away. He toddles over to the Lebanon estate, notes the marked trees, learns what trees are already felled,makes himself unhappy ... and then goes home and writes to the papers.

In a letter to Mr Havelock Ellis, in May 1886, there is a picturesque but concise statement of the manner of the poets’ collaboration:

As to our work, let no man think he can put asunder what God has joined.The Father’s Tragedy, save Emmeline’s song and here and there a stray line, is indeed Edith’s work: for the others, the work is perfect mosaic: we cross and interlace like a company of dancing summer flies; if one begins a character, his companion seizes and possesses it; if one conceives a scene or situation, the other corrects, completes, or murderously cuts away.

To the same correspondent she wrote in 1889, on the subject of religion:

If I may say so, I am glad of what you feel about the Son of Man, the divineness of His love and purposes towards the world. There is an atrocious superstition about me that I am orthodox ... whereas I am Christian, pagan, pantheist, and other things the name of which I do not know; and the only people with whom I cannot be in sympathy are those who fail to recognize the beauty of Christ’s life, and do not care to make their own lives in temper like His.

And in 1891, because Henry was recovering from her Dresden illness, Michael wrote in jocular mood:

As you are a follower of Dionysos, I charge you get me Greek wine. The Herr Geheimrath has ordered it for several weeks for Edith, and in England they make as though they know it not.

One finds in letters to Miss Louie Ellis amusing evidence of both our poets’ love of beautiful clothes, as well as of Michael’s gift of humorous expression. Thus, in 1895, just before a visit to Italy, she wrote:

I dream an evening frock to wear at Asolo. It is of a soft black, frail and billowy, and its sleeves are in part of this, with silvery white satin ribbon tied about. If you have a better dream, send word; if not, tell me how much (I mean how little) the gown would be. I want this to be not expensive—;nottheevening gown, butanevening gown.

And later, after the frock was received, she wrote:

How often, from “Afric’s coral strand,” will a voice of praise go up to Louie for thatperfectsilk gown; I shall want to be in little black frills for ever.... Do you know where in the city I can get a big shady hat to wear with it in Italy? Not a monster, but of a kind Theocritus would admire.

The following too brief passages are from some of Michael’s letters to the Rothensteins: the occasion of the first being to commiserate them on the discomforts of a removal:

February 1907.—;Unhappy ones! Take care of your everlasting souls! I have got my soul bruised black and blue, beside some still ridging scars, in removals.Yet there was once a transportation that was a triumph. It was suggested we should be drawn by pards to Richmond in a golden chariot. The pards was a detail not carried out; but of Thee, O Bacchus, and of Thy ritual, the open landau piled high with Chow and Field and Michael, doves and manuscripts and sacred plants!—;all that is US was there; and we drove consciously to Paradise.

February 1907.—;Unhappy ones! Take care of your everlasting souls! I have got my soul bruised black and blue, beside some still ridging scars, in removals.

Yet there was once a transportation that was a triumph. It was suggested we should be drawn by pards to Richmond in a golden chariot. The pards was a detail not carried out; but of Thee, O Bacchus, and of Thy ritual, the open landau piled high with Chow and Field and Michael, doves and manuscripts and sacred plants!—;all that is US was there; and we drove consciously to Paradise.

There are delightful letters about the Rothenstein children, in particular of an unfortunate catastrophe to a parcel of birds’ eggs sent to a certain small John in January 1907:

Leaving home on Monday in great haste, I besought Cook to pack the tiny gift to John, and to blow the eggs. This may have been ill done, I fear. Poets are the right folk for packing....My heart goes out to your son. It is so odd—;in a play we are writing there is half a page of Herod Agrippa (the highly revered slaughterer of the innocents, though that’s ‘another story’). He talks exactly like John—;and the FUTURE will say I copied him!...Two days later.—;Furious am I over the smashed eggs. But what can we hope? It is the office of a cook to smash eggs. More eggs will be born, and John shall have some whole.January 20th, 1907.—;Say to John—;if Nelson hadpromised a postcard to a lady, he would not have kept her waiting. He would have gone forth, in the snow, with guns being fired at him all round, and a lion growling in front, to choose that postcard. Say, I am quite sure of this.

Leaving home on Monday in great haste, I besought Cook to pack the tiny gift to John, and to blow the eggs. This may have been ill done, I fear. Poets are the right folk for packing....

My heart goes out to your son. It is so odd—;in a play we are writing there is half a page of Herod Agrippa (the highly revered slaughterer of the innocents, though that’s ‘another story’). He talks exactly like John—;and the FUTURE will say I copied him!...

Two days later.—;Furious am I over the smashed eggs. But what can we hope? It is the office of a cook to smash eggs. More eggs will be born, and John shall have some whole.

January 20th, 1907.—;Say to John—;if Nelson hadpromised a postcard to a lady, he would not have kept her waiting. He would have gone forth, in the snow, with guns being fired at him all round, and a lion growling in front, to choose that postcard. Say, I am quite sure of this.

In the spring of 1908 the poets went on one of their frequent country visits, which were often rather in the nature of a retreat, and this time they put up at an inn called the Tumble-Down-Dick. Thence they wrote:

You must some day visit us here, in our bar-parlour. The masons have been having a grand dinner next door—;smoke and excellent knife-and-fork laughter, discussion, the pleasure of all speaking at once—;how these things enchant the poets from their muttered breviaries!

And a few days later:

If Noli wants a jest, tell her Edith has heard from a Richmond priest—;our reputation is completely gone in Richmond.... A lady had said to him she did not understand how anyone with self-respect could put up at the Tumble-Down-Dick Inn! The priest, who is Irish and sent us here under counsel of a Benedictine friar, is in great bliss!!

And in March 1910, having both been ill, they conclude thus an invitation:

Try to come on Wednesday. We are gradually gathering together the teeth, glasses, wigs, and complexions that may enable us again to greet our friends. Henry is among the flowers. Henry sees the flowers: I see Henry, I have little to say. Speech, I suppose, will go next!! “Yet once,” as Villon says....

From the time of theDialcontributions Mr Ricketts became their adviser in matters of book-production. It was on his suggestion, too, that they removed from Reigate to the small Georgian house at 1 The Paragon, Richmond, which overlooks the Thames from its balconies and sloping garden, and remained their home until their death. That was in 1899, after the death of Henry’s father had left them free to choose another home. It was in this year that they published their masque,Noontide Branches, from the Daniel Press at Oxford. They had been in Oxford two years earlier, in October 1897, while they were still under the shadow of Mr Cooper’s uncertain fate. He had been lost on the Riffelalp in June, and his body had not yet been recovered. But the beauty of Oxford brought them peace, and the kindliness which met them there, in particular from Mr and Mrs Daniel, lightened the cloud that lay on their spirits. Michael wrote afterward from Richmond to Miss Trusted to record gratefully how Mr Daniel, though she had been quite unknown to him,had consented to print the masque and warmly befriended them.

They would joke about the minute size of the house at Richmond, which nowadays has dwindled to a mere annexe. “Do not squirm at the lowly entrance,” they wrote in an invitation to a friend; “within the snail-shell are two poets most gay and happy”; and added, referring to their dog, “Docome! Chow says you will, or he will know the reason why.” Probably there never was so modest a shell with so exquisite an interior; but of this it is Mr Gordon Bottomley who can best speak:

Their rooms were not less flawless than their poems. Their interiors showed a rarer, wider, more certain choice than those of the Dutch painters. The silvery, clear lithographs of their friend Mr C. H. Shannon were hung all together in a cool northern room, which they seemed to permeate with a faint light; and in another room the gold grain of the walls, alike with the Persian plates that glowed on the table as if they were rich, large petals, seemed to find their reason for being there in the two deeply and subtly coloured pictures by Mr Charles Ricketts on the walls.But always there was the same feeling of inevitable choice and unity everywhere: in a jewelled pendant that lay on a satin-wood table, in the opal bowl of pot-pourri near by on which an opal shell lay lightly—;a shell chosen for its supreme beauty of form, and taken from its rose-leaf bed by Miss Cooper to be shown to avisitor in the same way as she took a flower from a vase, saying, “This isIris Susiana,” as if she were saying “This is one of the greatest treasures in the world,” and held it in her hand as if it were a part of her hand.

But always there was the same feeling of inevitable choice and unity everywhere: in a jewelled pendant that lay on a satin-wood table, in the opal bowl of pot-pourri near by on which an opal shell lay lightly—;a shell chosen for its supreme beauty of form, and taken from its rose-leaf bed by Miss Cooper to be shown to avisitor in the same way as she took a flower from a vase, saying, “This isIris Susiana,” as if she were saying “This is one of the greatest treasures in the world,” and held it in her hand as if it were a part of her hand.

It is true that at Paragon they were gaily and happily busy: the years there were fruitful of mellow achievement. Nevertheless, it was there that the spiritual crisis of their life came, when in 1907 both poets entered the Roman Catholic Church. Henry was received into the Church at St Elizabeth’s, Richmond, on April 19th of that year; and Michael went to Edinburgh on May 8th to be received by their old friend the poet Father John Gray.

The crisis had been prepared for partly by Henry’s ill-health, which encouraged her contemplative habit of mind—;that in turn operating upon the religious sense which had always underlain their rationality. It was Henry who first made the great decision when, after reading the Missal in Latin, she suddenly exclaimed: “This is sacrifice: from this moment I am a Catholic.” But their curious small volume calledWhym Chowsuggests (and the suggestion is confirmed by the facts) that the course of that event was strongly influenced by the death of their Chow dog. It was a mental process of great interest for the student of the psychology of religious conversion, but toointimate and subtle to be discussed here; andWhym Chow, printed privately in an exquisite small edition in the Eragny Press, was intended only for the eyes of friends. The chief value of the book is therefore bibliographical. Yet, in order to comprehend how the rationalists of the year 1887 and the declared pagans of 1897 became the Catholics of the year 1907, one thing may at least be said—;that in the manner of the death of the little creature they loved both the poets came to realize sacrifice as the supreme good. It was not by any means a new idea to them; on the contrary, it will be seen that it was their earliest ideal. And the reason for its triumphant force at this stage lay precisely in the fact that what had been an instinct then, an intuitive, hardly conscious, but integral element of character, became now a passionate conviction.

In February 1911 Henry was attacked by cancer; and in one of the few letters that she wrote she says (to the Rothensteins):

Of course the shock was great and the struggle very hard at first. I write this that you may both understand our silence.... We had to go into Arabian deserts to repossess our souls.

At the same time her fellow was writing to their friend Miss Tanner:

Think of us as living in retreat, as indeed we are.... Henry has very sharp pains, with moments of agony every day to bear. The Beloved is showing her how great things she must suffer for His Name’s sake.... For the rest, I am all dirty from the battle, and smoked and bleeding—;often three parts dragon myself to one of Michael—;and sometimes I have only clenched teeth to offer to God.

Michael’s sufferings, through the long ordeal of Henry’s illness, were not, however, confined to spiritual anguish. She herself was attacked by cancer six months before Henry’s death on December 13th, 1913. But she did not reveal the fact; no one knew of it save her doctor and her confessor, and they were under a bond of secrecy. She nursed her fellow tenderly, hiding her own pain and refusing an operation which might have been remedial, encouraging Henry in the composition that she still laboured at, attending to the details of its publication, and snatching moments herself to write poems which are among the most poignant in our language. Neither poet would consent to the use of morphia, for they desired to keep their minds clear; and to the last, in quiet intervals between attacks of pain, they pursued their art. In a cottage in the village of Armitage, near Hawkesyard Priory, where they stayed for a few weeks in the summer of 1911, I stood inthe small sitting-room they occupied, and there, so the good housewife told me, Miss Cooper, though very weak, sat day after day—;writing, writing. All through 1912, with occasional weeks of respite and certain visits to Leicester and Dublin, the work went on:Poems of Adoration, Henry’s last work, was published in that year. In the summer of 1913, from the Masefields’ house at 13 Well Walk, Hampstead (taken for the poets by the generosity of Mrs Berenson), Michael wrote to Miss Fortey:

Henry has now fearful pain to bear, and the fighting is severe. Pray for me, dear Emily.Mystic Treesis faring horribly.

YetMystic Trees, Michael’s last written book, was published in that year.

When December brought release at last to Henry’s gentle spirit, Michael’s endurance broke down. A hæmorrhage revealed her secret on the day of Henry’s funeral; a belated operation was performed, and for some weeks Michael was too ill to do more than rail angrily against the Press notices of her fellow:

Nothing in the least adequate has yet been done—;nothing of her work given. I am hovering as a hawk over the reviewers.

By March 1914, however, she was at work again, collecting early poems of Henry’s topublish in a volume calledDedicated, and about this time she wrote to Miss Fortey:

You will rejoice to know I have written a poem or two—;one pagan. I am reverting to the pagan, to the humanity of Virgil, to the moods that make life so human and so sweet.

The poems she mentions appeared in theDedicatedvolume shortly afterward.

As the summer grew her malady gained the mastery; and, knowing that death was approaching, she removed to a house in the grounds of Hawkesyard Priory, in order to be near the ministration of her friend and confessor, Father Vincent McNabb, a Dominican priest who was at that time Prior at Hawkesyard. One of the few recorded incidents of her last days (it was on August 24th, 1914, just a month before she died) is touchingly characteristic. Father Vincent had taken tea with her, and Michael, propped by her pillows, yet contrived to add dignity and grace to the little ceremony with which she presented to him a copy of Henry’sDedicated. One can imagine the scene—;the long, low room on the ground floor in which her bed had been placed for greater convenience in nursing her; the windows giving on to an unkempt lawn and a tangle of shrubs; summer dying outside, andinside the dying poet reading to the white Dominican poem after poem by her fellow, in a voice that must have shaken even as the feeble hand shook in writing the record down. Finally the priest, taking the book in his turn, read to her her own poemFellowship, and, hearing her soft prayer for absolution on account of it, turned away his face and could find no answer.

In the old accents I will sing, my Glory, my Delight,In the old accents, tipped with flame, before we knew the right,True way of singing with reserve. O Love, with pagan might,

White in our steeds, and white too in our armour let us ride,Immortal, white, triumphing, flashing downward side by sideTo where our friends, the Argonauts, are fighting with the tide.

III

Let us draw calm to them, Beloved, the souls on heavenly voyage bound,Saluting as one presence. Great disaster were it found,If one with half-fed lambency should halt and flicker round.

O friends so fondly loving, so beloved, look up to us,In constellation breaking on your errand, prosperous,O Argonauts!...... Now, faded from their sight,We cling and joy. It was thy intercession gave me right,My Fellow, to this fellowship. My Glory, my Delight!

The weeks of Michael’s passing witnessed the passing of the age to which she belonged, for they were those in which the Great War began. It is clear that Michael Field, in the noble unity of her life and work, represented something that was finest in the dying era; and yet she was, in certain respects, aloof from that Victorian Age, and in advance of it. It is profoundly moving to see how, even in extremity, her genius remained true to itself. It was so true, indeed, that in her pitiful, scanty record of those days one may catch a glimpse, through her winging spirit, of the moments of greatness to which the spirit of England rose in that crisis.

She was desolated at the thought of the killing, the suffering, the destruction of beauty. But she too felt the stimulus which the vastness of the danger gave to the national spirit,and she longed to serve. “I want to live now the times are great,” she wrote to Mrs Berenson. “There are untended wounds to think of—;that makes me ashamed”—;ashamed, she meant, of the tendance that her own wound was receiving. Again, on August 13th:

But Michael cannot join with Jenny the cook. “What news of the war, Jenny?” ... “Good news; fifty thousand Germans killed!”

She followed with desperate anxiety the calamitous events in Belgium, writing on August 28th:

I am suffering from the folly of our English troops being wasted, and making fine, orderly retreats.... Namur gave me a shock from which I cannot recover.

And finally, on September 19th:

Father Prior mourns Louvain even worse than Bernard—;the destruction of the precious beauty. Tell me, is Senlis safe?

After that day little or nothing more was written. Every morning she rose at seven o’clock, and, assisted by her nurse, dressed and was wheeled in a chair through the Priory park to hear Mass at the chapel. On September 23rd the nurse wrote at Michael’s bidding to Miss Fortey:

Miss Bradley is anxious about you: she fears you may be ill. She is frightfully weak to-day, but had a splendid night and is very happy.

On September 26th Michael for the first time did not appear in the chapel at her usual early hour. Father Vincent, seeing her vacant place, had a sudden certainty of the end. “Consummatum est” rushed to his lips as he ran down the grassy slopes to the house. He found Michael stretched on the floor of her room, dead, with her head on the bosom of the kneeling nurse. She had sighed her last breath one moment before. She had succeeded in dressing ready to go to Mass, but the effort to step into the carriage had been too much. She sank down and died quietly in the nurse’s arms.

* * *

There are questions of intense interest involved in the life of the Michael Fields—;personal, psychological, literary—;which one must put aside, angry at the compulsion of restricted space. But their life was in itself a poem, and the beauty of it is unmistakable. These were heroic and impassioned souls, who, in honouring their vow to poetry, gave life, it is true, “a poor second place”; and yet they fulfilled life itself, with a completeness few are capable of, in love and sacrifice. Michael wouldquote from her copy of St Augustine: “Aime, donc, et fais ce que tu voudras ensuite”; and love was her gift to the fellowship, as Henry’s was intellect. But the collaboration was so loyal, the union so complete, that one may search diligently, and search in vain, for any sign in the work both wrought that this is the creation of two minds and not of one. It is possible to sift the elements, of course, seeing in this work vividly contrasting qualities; that it is at one and the same time passionate and intellectual, exuberant and dignified, swift and stately, of high romantic manner and yet psychologically true; that it is fierce, sombre, vehement, and at the same time gentle, delicate, of the last refinement of perception and feeling. One can even identify the various elements (when one knows) as more characteristic of one poet or the other; perceiving that Michael was the initiator, the pioneer, the passionate one from whom the creative impulse flowed; and that to Henry belonged especially the gift of form, that hers was the thoughtful, constructive, shaping, finishing genius of the fellowship. But it is not possible, in the plays on which the two worked, to point to this line or that speech, and say “It is the work of Michael” or “It is the work of Henry.” You cannot do it, because the poets themselves could not havedone it. The collaboration was so close, so completely were the poets at one in the imaginative effort, that frequently they could not themselves decide (except by reference to the handwriting on the original sheet of manuscript) who had composed a given passage.

In like manner it is possible to follow the poets through the facts of their existence, and to see that existence shape itself, despite mental vicissitude and apparent change, triumphantly of one piece throughout—;generous in colour, rich in texture, graceful in design. It might seem that gulfs were fixed between their grave, austere, studious girlhood, the joyous blossoming of their maturity with its pagan joy in beauty, and the mysticism of their last years. They appeared to go through many phases, and even to pass, under the eyes of astonished and indignant friends, out of all mental resemblance to what they were believed to be. A friend of Bristol days, Miss Carta Sturge, writing in a strain of regret for this apparent inconsistency, adds generously:

Perhaps the fine flavour of their genius, its subtle sensitiveness to impressions, its unspoilt bloom, might have suffered had they had more ... consistency and stability. It is enough that their genius was great, their spirit beautiful, and their companionship of unexampled delight. And that is how we gratefully remember them.

That is finely true; and yet it may be that the tone of regret is unnecessary; for on a complete survey it will be found that Michael Field was deeply consistent from first to last. Through perhaps a hundred changes—;of opinion, of taste, and of deeper things—;she remained the same; and those changes were but steps toward the fulfilment of what she had been from the beginning. Thus one sees the ending of the poets’ life as the inevitable outcome of that which they always were—;of a magnificence touched with grace. The Dionysian wine of those early days was poured at last to the Man of Sorrows; the Bacchic revel was turned to tragedy. But it was the same wine; the same energy of enthusiasm; and the latest-written lyrics, devotional pieces composed in suffering and very near to death, have often the audacity and abandon of the worshipper of the vine-god. The poet is Mænad still.

THE lyrical poetry of Michael Field is much smaller in bulk than her dramatic work; yet there are eight volumes of it. On the other hand, it is more perfect in its kind than her tragedies, and yet its chiselled, small perfection cannot approach their grandeur.

A story is told about one of the books of lyrics which is amusingly characteristic of the poets.Underneath the Boughmade its appearance first in the spring of 1893, and was well received. TheAthenæumreviewer even went so far in admiration as to suggest, of obvious defects, that Michael Field probablypreferredto write in that way! Soon after the book came out, however, the poets went on an Italian journey with some friends who took a different view of the function of criticism, and who dealt with them faithfully about the weakness of some of the pieces. Thereupon, with a gesture that is entirely their own in its grace and emphasis, the poets confessed their repentance for the defective work by immediately cutting the book to the extent of one-half, and reissued it in the autumn of 1893 with the careful legend “Revised and Decreased Edition.” The story, however, does not close on that access of humility which, on a comparison of the two editions, would certainly appearsomewhat excessive. But humility was not, at any rate with Michael, a pet virtue. Repenting at leisure of their hasty repentance, they brought out yet another edition, and reinstated many of the poems which they had rejected from number two—;this with a word of defiance to the critics of number one, and a recommendation to them to look for a precedent toAsolando.

The third edition is rare, but a copy of it may be seen at the British Museum. It was published in Portland, Maine, in 1898. It still omits about thirty of the pieces from the first edition, but it introduces a number of new ones and restores, among others, theIn Memoriamverses for Robert Browning which appeared first in theAcademyfor December 21st, 1889, on the occasion of Browning’s death:

Slowly we disarray,Our leaves grow few,Few on the bough, and many on the sod.Round him no ruining autumn tempest blew;Gathered on genial day,He fills, fresh as Apollo’s bay,The Hand of God.

It would appear from the preface, however, that there was an additional motive for publishing a third edition in an invitation from theUnited States to contribute a volume to the “Old World” series, and the poet adds a note of gratitude to her American readers who, as she says, “have given me that joy of listening denied to me in my own island.”

Considering the lyrical work as a whole, it is seen to cover Michael Field’s poetical career from beginning to end. Not that the lyric impulse was constant (for there were times when the poets’ dramatic work absorbed them almost completely); but it never entirely failed. It was, as one would expect, strongest in their early years: it recurred intermittently through the period of the later tragedies, and returned in force when, toward the end of their life, tragic inspiration gave place to religious ardour. Thus, although this poetry is subjective in a less degree than lyrical verse often is, most of the crucial events of the poets’ lives are reflected there. The lover of a story will not be disappointed, and the student of character will find enough for his purpose in personal revelation both conscious and unconscious. Moreover, a spiritual autobiography might, with a little patience, be outlined from these eight volumes; and it would be a significant document, illuminating much more than the lives of two maiden ladies in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Such a spiritual history would be complete, in extent at least, for it would begin with Michael’s earliest work inThe New Minnesinger(that title at once suggesting the German influence in English life and letters at the moment, 1875), with its strenuous ethic of Unitarian tendency based on a creed so wide as to have no perceptible boundary; and it would end only with the devotional poetry of her last written volumes where, with no concern for ethics as such, the poet stands at the gate of the well-fenced garden of the Roman Church with a flaming sword in her hand and a face of impassioned tenderness. But in the interval it would pass through her pagan phase, when she revelled in joyful living—;and in the classics, turning their myths into pleasant narrative verse; when inLong Ago(1889) she daringly rehandled the Sapphic themes; and when inSight and Song(1892) she tried to convey her intense delight in colour and form by translating into poetry some of the old master-pictures that she loved. More important, however, than those books are in such an autobiography is the human record of joys and loves and sorrows contained in the volume calledUnderneath the Bough(1893); whileWild Honey(1908), a collection covering about ten years of her life, brings us down to the epochof religious crisis and reconciliation with the Church of Rome. Then, with tragic inspiration quelled by Christian hope and submission, all her creative energy flowed into the Catholic lyrics contained inPoems of Adoration(1912) andMystic Trees(1913).

One does not pause long onThe New Minnesingerin this survey of the lyrics, because it was published by Katharine Bradley as Arran Leigh, and is not, therefore, strictly a work of Michael Field. Nor shall we deal with the lyrics inBellerophôn, a volume published by the two poets as Arran and Isla Leigh in 1881. Not that either book is unworthy of study; on the contrary, there are some fine pieces in both. But the poets having elected to leave them in limbo, where one has had to grope for this mere reference to them, there, for my part, they shall remain. Except to note in passing that, following Swift’sAdvice to a Young Poetto “make use of a quaint motto,” the poet has inscribed on the front ofThe New Minnesingerthe phrase “Think of Womanhood, and thou to be a woman.” That has a significance which is elaborated in the name-piece, whose theme is of love and of the woman-poet’s special aptitude to sing about it; and where it is insisted that the singer shall be faithful to her own feminine nature and experience. All throughthe work of the two poets it will be seen that the principle stated thus early and definitely by the elder one ruled their artistic practice; so that we are justified in extracting this, at least, from Michael’s earliest book, and noting it as a conscious motive from the beginning.

I think, too, we are entitled to recover from the shades one small song. For, after all, a great literary interest of the work of the Michael Fields is the amazing oneness of the two voices. The collaboration, indeed, deserves much more space than it is possible to give it here. But it is something to the good if we can glance, in passing, at undoubted examples of each poet’s work, hoping to see hints of the individual qualities which each contributed to the fellowship. We have already told how, after Henry’s death and when Michael knew that she too must soon die, she hastened to gather together certain early pieces by her fellow, and published them, with a poignant closing piece of her own, in the book calledDedicated(1914). That closing poem,Fellowship, closed her artistic life: it is Michael’s last word as a poet. But the point for the moment is that she has given us inDedicatedthe means of recognizing Henry, and distinguishing between the two poets in their youthful work. One may take fromThe New Minnesinger, therefore, as characteristic ofthe younger Michael, such a piece asThe Quiet Light:

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