Margaret L. Woods

Chaste and remote, so tiny and so shy,So new withal, so lost to any eye,So pac't of memories all innocent....

Then, reminiscent of the dear friendliness of those banished human souls, desolation comes upon the solitary Being. He remembers that he is eternal and ringed round with Infinity. He sends thought flying back through endless centuries, but cannot find the beginning of Time. He ranges North and South, but cannot find the bounds of Space. He is most utterly alone—save for his silly singing angels—in the monotonous glory of his heaven.

... Many days I spedHard to the west, a thousand years I fledEastwards in fury, but I could not findThe fringes of the Infinite....—till at lastDizzied with distance, thrilling to a painUnnameable, I turned to Heaven again.And there My angels were prepared to flingThe cloudy incense, there prepared to singMy praise and glory—O, in fury IThen roared them senseless, then threw down the skyAnd stamped upon it, buffeted a starWith My great fist, and flung the sun afar:Shouted My anger till the mighty soundRung to the width, frighting the furthest boundAnd scope of hearing: tumult vaster still,Thronging the echo, dinned my ears, untilI fled in silence, seeking out a placeTo hide Me from the very thought of Space.

There was once a reviewer who compared the genius of this poet to that of Homer and Æschylus. Now comparisons like that are apt to tease the mind of the discriminating, to whom there instantly appear all the gulfs of difference. But, indeed, this poet does share in some measure, with Æschylus and our own Milton and the unknown author of the Book of Job, a sublimity of vision. His conceptions have a grandeur of simplicity; and he makes us realize immensities—Eternity and Space and Force—by images which are almost primitive. Like those other poets too, whose philosophical conceptions were as different from his as their ages are remote, he also has made God in the image of man. But the comparison does not touchwhat we may call the human side of this newer genius; and it only serves to throw into bolder relief its perception of life's comedy, its waywardness, and its mischievous humour. This aspect, strongly contrasted as it is with the poet's imaginative power, is at least equally interesting. It is apparent, in the earlier work, in the realism of such pieces as "The Dancer" or "The Street." There is a touch of harshness in these poems which would amount to crudity if their realism were an outward thing only. But it is not a mere trick of style: it proceeds from indignation, from an outraged æsthetic sense, and from a mental courage which attains its height, rash but splendid, in "Optimist"—

Let ye be still, ye tortured ones, nor striveWhere striving's futile. Ye can ne'er attainTo lay your burdens down.

This poet is not a realist at all, of course—far from it. But he loves life and earth and homely words, he is very candid and revealing, and he has a sense of real values. His humanity, too, is deep and strong, and often supplies his verse with the material of actual existence, totally lacking factitious glamour. Thus we have "To the Four Courts, Please," in which the first stanza describes thedeplorable state of an ancient cab-horse and his driver. Then—

God help the horse and the driver too,And the people and beasts who have never a friend,For the driver easily might have been you,And the horse be me by a different end.

This humane temper is the more remarkable from being braced by a shrewd faculty of insight. There is no sentimentality in it; and that the poet has no illusions about human frailty may be seen in such a poem as "Said The Old-Old Man." It is ballasted with humour, too; and has a charming whimsicality. Hence the lightness of touch in "Windy Corner"—

O, I can tell and I can knowWhat the wind rehearses:"A poet loved a lady so,Loved her well, and let her goWhile he wrote his verses.".....That's the tale the winds relateSoon as night is shady.If it's true, I'll simply stateA poet is a fool to rateHis art above his lady.

O, I can tell and I can knowWhat the wind rehearses:"A poet loved a lady so,Loved her well, and let her goWhile he wrote his verses."

.....

That's the tale the winds relateSoon as night is shady.If it's true, I'll simply stateA poet is a fool to rateHis art above his lady.

Returning, however, to the larger implications of this poetry, one may find a passion for liberty in it, and a courageous faith in the future of the race.Here we have, in fact, a pure idealist, one of the invincible few who have brought their ideals into touch with reality. One does not suspect it at first—or at least we do not see how far it goes—largely for the reason that it is so deeply grounded. The poet's hold on life, on the actual, on the very data of experience, is unyielding: his perception of truth is keen and his intellectual honesty complete. And then the way in which his imagination moulds things in the round, as it were, leaves no room to guess that there is a limitless something behind or within. True, we have felt all along what we can only call the spiritual touch in this poetry. It is always there, lighter or more commanding, and sometimes it will come home very sweetly in a comic piece, as for instance when "The Merry Policeman," appointed guardian of the Tree, calls reassuringly to the scared thief:

... "Be at rest,The best to him who wants the best."

We have observed, too, a faculty of seeing the spirit of things—a habit of looking right through facts to something beyond them. But still we did not quite understand what these signs meant; and if we tried to account for them in any way, we probably offered ourselves the all-too-easy explanationthat this was the playful, fanciful, Celtic way of looking at the world. Well, so it may be; but that charming manner is, in all gravity, just the outward sign of an inward grace. And if anyone should doubt that it points in this case to a clear idealism, he may be invited to consider this little poem which prefaces the poet's second volume, called "The Hill of Vision":

Everything that I can spyThrough the circle of my eye,Everything that I can seeHas been woven out of me;I have sown the stars, and threwClouds of morning and of eveUp into the vacant blue;Everything that I perceive,Sun and sea and mountain high,All are moulded by my eye:Closing it, what shall I find?—Darkness, and a little wind.

Now it must not be inferred that Mr Stephens is an austere person who propounds ideals to himself as themes for his poetry. We should detect his secret much more readily if he did—and it may be that we should not like him quite so well. Hardly ever do you catch him, as it were, saying to his Muse: "Come, let us make a song about liberty, or the future." The very process of his thought, as well as the order of his verse, seems often to beby way of an object to an idea. He takes some bit of the actual world—a bird, a tree, or a human creature; and tuning his instrument to that, he is presently off and away into the blue.

Once, however, he did sing directly on this subject of liberty, and about the external, physical side of it. It was, of course, in that early book; and there may also be found two studies of the idea of liberty in its more abstract nature. They both treat of the woman giving up her life into the hands of the man whom she marries. And in both there is brought out with ringing clarity the inalienable freedom of the human soul. Thus "The Red-haired Man's Wife," musing upon the inexplicable changes that marriage has wrought for her—on her dependence, and on the apparent loss of her very identity, wins through to the light—

I am separate still,I am I and not you:And my mind and my will,As in secret they grew,Still are secret, unreached and untouched and not subject to you.

Thus, too, "The Rebel" finds an answer to an importunate lover—

You sob you love me—What,Must I desert my soulBecause you wish to kiss my lips,.....I must be I, not you,That says the thing in brief.I grew to this without your aid,Can face the future unafraid,Nor pine away with griefBecause I'm lonely....

You sob you love me—What,Must I desert my soulBecause you wish to kiss my lips,

.....

I must be I, not you,That says the thing in brief.I grew to this without your aid,Can face the future unafraid,Nor pine away with griefBecause I'm lonely....

It is, however, in "A Prelude and a Song" that this ardour of freedom finds purest expression. Not that the poem was designed to that end. I believe that it was made for nothing on this earth but the sheer joy of singing. How can one describe this poem? It is the lyrical soul of poetry; it is the heart of poetic rapture; it is the musical spirit of the wind and of birds' cries; it is a passion of movement, swaying to the dancing grace of leaves and flowers and grass, to the majesty of sailing clouds; it is the sweet, shrill, palpitating ecstasy of the lark, singing up and up until he is out of sight, sustaining his song at the very door of heaven, and singing into sight again, to drop suddenly down to the green earth, exhausted.—And I have not yet begun to say what the poem really is: I have a doubt whether prose is equal to a definition. In some degree at any rate it is a pæan of freedom: delighted liberty lives in it. But we cannot apply our little distinctions here, saying that it is this or that or the other kind of freedom which is extolled;because we are now in a region where thought and feeling are one; in a golden age where good and evil are lost in innocency; in a blessed state where body and soul have forgotten their old feud in glad reunion.

One hesitates to quote from the poem. It is long, and as the title implies, it is in two movements. But though every stanza has a lightsome grace which makes it lovely in itself—though the whole chain, if broken up, would yield as many gems as there are stanzas, irregular in size and shape indeed, but each shining and complete—the great beauty of the poem is its beauty as a whole. It would seem a reproach to imperil that. Yet there is a culminating passage of extreme significance to which we must come directly for the crowning word of the poet's philosophy. From that we may take a fragment now, if only to observe the reach of its imagination and to win some sense which the poem conveys of limitless spiritual range.

Reach up my wings!Now broaden into space and carry meBeyond where any lark that singsCan get:Into the utmost sharp tenuity,The breathing-point, the start, the scarcely-stirredHigh slenderness where never any birdHas winged to yet!The moon peace and the star peace and the peaceOf chilly sunlight: to the void of space,The emptiness, the giant curve, the greatWide-stretching arms wherein the gods embraceAnd stars are born and suns....

There follows hard upon that what is in effect a confession of faith. It is not explicitly so, of course. Subjective this poet may be—is it not a virtue in the lyricist?—but he does not confide his religion to us in so many words. He has an artistic conscience. But the avowal, though it is by way of allegory and grows up out of the imagery of the poem as naturally as a blossom from its stem, is clear enough. And is supported elsewhere, implicitly, or by a mental attitude, or outlined now and then in figurative brilliance. There can be no reason to doubt its strength and its sincerity—and there is every reason to rejoice in it—for it reveals Mr Stephens as a poet of the future.

One pauses there, realizing that the term may mean very much—or nothing at all. It may even suggest a certain technical vogue which, however admirable in the theory of its originators, apparently is not yet justified in the creation of manifest beauty. Our poet has no association with that, of course, except in that he shares the general impulse of the poetic spirit of his generation. Thatis, quite clearly, to escape from the tyranny of the past in thought and word and metrical form; and therein he is at one with most of the poets in this book. We may grant that it is an important exception: that the movement which is indicated here may be the sober British version of its more daring Italian counterpart. Yet there remains still a difference wide enough and deep enough to disclaim any technical relationship.

The root of the matter lies there, however. In Mr Stephens what we may call the poetic instinct of the age works not merely to escape from the past, but to advance into the future—and it has become a conscious, reasoned hope in human destiny. It does not with him so much influence the form of the work as it directs the spirit of it. And that spirit is an absolute and impassioned belief in the future of mankind. Therein he stands contrasted with many of the younger English poets, and with his own compatriots. With many of his compeers the escape has been into their own time, and the noblest thing evolved from that is a grave and tender social conscience. Some, of course, have not escaped at all, and have no wish to do so. Their work has its own soft evening loveliness. But whilst Mr Yeats lives delicately in a romantic past, whilst poor Synge lived tragically in a sardonic present, thispoet stands on his hill of vision and cries to the world the good tidings of a promised land. Here it is, from the closing passage of "A Prelude and a Song":

There the flower springs,Therein does growThe bud of hope, the miracle to comeFor whose dear advent we are striving dumbAnd joyless: Garden of DelightThat God has sowed!In thee the flower of flowers,The apple of our tree,The banner of our towers,The recompense for every misery,The angel-man, the purity, the lightWhom we are working to has his abode;Until our back and forth, our life and deathAnd life again, our going and returnPrepare the way: until our latest breath,Deep-drawn and agonized, for him shall burnA path: for him prepareLaughter and love and singing everywhere;A morning and a sunrise and a day!

About one half of the poetry in Mrs Woods' collected edition is dramatic in character. There are two plays in regular form, tragedies both. One,Wild Justice,is in six scenes which carry the action rapidly forward almost without a break. The other, calledThe Princess of Hanover, is in three acts, which move with a wider sweep through the rise, culmination, and crisis of a tragic story. These two dramas, which are powerfully imagined and skilfully wrought, are placed in a separate section at the end of the book—quite the best wine thus being left to finish the feast.

Fine as they are, however, the plays do not completely represent the poet's dramatic gift. And when we note the comic elements of two or three pieces which are tucked away in the middle of the volume, we may admit a hope that Mrs Wood may be impelled on some fair day to attempt regular comedy. There is, for instance, the fun of the delightful medley called "Marlborough Fair." Here are broad humour and vigorous, hearty life which smells of the soil; little studies of country-folk, incomplete but vivid; scraps of racy dialogue, and the prattle of a child, all interwoven with thegrotesquer fancies of a fertile imagination, endowing even the beasts and inanimate objects of the show with consciousness and speech. Hints there are in plenty (though to be sure they are in some cases no more than hints) that the poet's dramatic sense would handle the common stuff of life as surely and as freely as it deals with tragedy. In this particular poem, of course, the touches are of the nature of low comedy; the awkward sweethearting of a pair of rustic lovers; the showman, alternating between bluster and enticement; the rough banter of a group of farm lads about the cokernut-shy, and the matron who presides there—

Swarthy and handsome and broad of face'Twixt the banded brown of her glossy hair.In her ears are shining silver rings,Her head and massive throat are bare,She needs good length in her apron stringsAnd has a jolly voice and loudTo cry her wares and draw the crowd.—Fine Coker-nuts! My lads, we're givingClean away! Who wants to win 'em?Fresh Coker-nuts! The milk's yet in 'em.Come boys! Only a penny a shot,Three nuts if you hit and the fun if not.

—Fine Coker-nuts! My lads, we're givingClean away! Who wants to win 'em?Fresh Coker-nuts! The milk's yet in 'em.Come boys! Only a penny a shot,Three nuts if you hit and the fun if not.

The effects are broad and strong, the tone cheery. But in another piece where the dramatic element enters, "The May Morning and the Old Man,"the note is deeper. There is, indeed, in the talk of the two old men on the downland road, a much graver tone of the Comic Spirit. One of them has come slowly up the hill and greets another who is working in a field by the roadside with a question. He wants to know how far it is to Chillingbourne; he is going back to his old home there and must reach it before nightfall.

First Old Man.It bean't for j'y I taäk the roäd.But, Mester, I be getten awld.Do seem as though in all the e'thThere bean't no plaäce,No room on e'th for awld volk.Second Old Man.The e'th do lieYonder, so wide as Heaven a'most,And God as made unMade room, I warr'nt, for all Christian souls.

First Old Man.It bean't for j'y I taäk the roäd.But, Mester, I be getten awld.Do seem as though in all the e'thThere bean't no plaäce,No room on e'th for awld volk.

Second Old Man.The e'th do lieYonder, so wide as Heaven a'most,And God as made unMade room, I warr'nt, for all Christian souls.

It is, however, through the medium of tragedy that the genius of Mrs Woods has found most powerful expression. Not her charming lyrics, not even the contemplative beauty of her elegiac poems, can stand beside the creative energy of the two plays to which we must come directly. But the best of the lyrics are notable, nevertheless; and two or three have already passed into the common store of great English poetry. Of such is the splendid hymn, "To the Forgotten Dead," withits exulting pride of race chastened by the thought of death.

To the forgotten dead,Come, let us drink in silence ere we part.To every fervent yet resolved heartThat brought its tameless passion and its tears,Renunciation and laborious years,To lay the deep foundations of our race,To rear its mighty ramparts overheadAnd light its pinnacles with golden grace.To the unhonoured dead.To the forgotten dead,Whose dauntless hands were stretched to grasp the reinOf Fate and hurl into the void againHer thunder-hoofed horses, rushing blindEarthward along the courses of the wind.Among the stars along the wind in vainTheir souls were scattered and their blood was shed,And nothing, nothing of them doth remain.To the thrice-perished dead.

To the forgotten dead,Whose dauntless hands were stretched to grasp the reinOf Fate and hurl into the void againHer thunder-hoofed horses, rushing blindEarthward along the courses of the wind.Among the stars along the wind in vainTheir souls were scattered and their blood was shed,And nothing, nothing of them doth remain.To the thrice-perished dead.

It will be seen that the lyric gift of the poet moves at the prompting of an imaginative passion. It is nearly always so in this poetry. Very seldom does the impulse appear to come from intimate personal emotion or individual experience; and the volume may therefore help to refute the dogma that the poetry of a woman is bound to besubjective, from the laws of her own nature. Occasionally, of course, a direct cry will seem to make itself heard—the most reticent human creature will pay so much toll to its humanity. And it is true that in such a spontaneous utterance the voice will be distinctively feminine—life as the woman knows it will find its interpreter. Thus we see austerity breaking down in the poem "On the Death of an Infant," mournfully sweet with a mother's sorrow. Hence, too, in "Under the Lamp" comes the loathing for "the vile hidden commerce of the city"; and equally there comes a touch of that feminine bias (yielding in these late days perhaps to fuller knowledge and consequent sympathy) which inclines to regard the evil from the point of view of the degradation of the man rather than that of the hideous wrong to the woman. Or again, there is "The Changeling," perhaps the tenderest of the few poems which may perhaps, in some sense, be called subjective. Through the thin veil of allegory one catches a glimpse of the enduring mystery of maternal love. The mother is brooding over the change in her child: she has not been watchful enough, she thinks; and while she was unheeding, some evil thing had entered into her baby and driven out the fair soul with which he began.

Perhaps he called me and I was dumb.Unconcerned I sat and heardLittle things,Ivy tendrils, a bird's wings,A frightened bird—Or faint hands at the window-pane?And now he will never come again,The little soul. He is quite lost.

She tries to woo him back, with prayer and incantations; but he will not come; and when at last she is worn out with waiting, she seeks an old wizard and begs him to give her forgetfulness. But it is a hard thing that she is asking: it needs a mighty spell to make a woman forget her son; and the mother has to go without the boon. She has not wealth enough in the world to pay the Wise Man's fee. But afterwards she is glad that she was too poor to pay the price:

Because if I did not remember him,My little child—Ah! what should we have,He and I? Not even a graveWith a name of his own by the river's brim.Because if among the poppies gayOn the hill-side, now my eyes are dim,I could not fancy a child at play,And if I should pass by the pool in the quarryAnd never see him, a darling ghost,Sailing a boat there, I should be sorry—If in the firelit, lone DecemberI never heard him come scampering postHaste down the stair—if the soul that is lostCame back, and I did not remember.

Such poetry reveals the woman in the poet, and is precious for that reason: it brings its own new light to the book of humanity. But it is not especially characteristic of Mrs Woods' work, for much more often it is the poet in the woman who is revealed there. Powers which are independent of sex—of imagination, of sensibility, and of thought, have gone to the making of that which is finest in her verse; and surely these are gifts which, in varying degree, distinguish the poetic soul under any guise. They are not equally present here, of course. Imagination overtops them, darting with the lightness of a bird, or soaring majestically, or sweeping, strong and rapid, through a storm-cloud, or putting a swift girdle round the earth. Thought is a degree less powerful, perhaps. It is brooding, museful, tinged with a melancholy that may be wistful or passionate; and though it commonly revolves the larger issues of life within the canons of authority, it is keen and clear enough to see beyond them, and even, upon occasion, to pierce a way through. But it is not always sufficiently strong to control completely so fertile an imagination; and thereis no acute sense of fact to reinforce it with truth of detail. Instead of watching, recording, analyzing, after the method of so many contemporary poets, this is a mentality which contemplates and reflects. It leans lovingly toward the past, and has a sense, partly instinctive and partly scholarly, of historic values: while, for its artistic method, it passes all the treasure that fancy has gathered, and even passion itself, through the alembic of memory. So is created a softer grace, a serener atmosphere, and a richer dignity than the realist can achieve—and we will not be churlish enough to complain if, at the same time, the salt of reality is missing.

I should think that "The Builders, A Nocturne in Westminster Abbey," most fully represents this poet's lyrical gift. Individual qualities of it may perhaps be observed more clearly elsewhere; but here they combine to produce an effect of meditative sweetness and stately, elegiac grace which are very characteristic. The poem is in ten movements, of very unequal length and irregular form. It is unrhymed, and stanzas may vary almost indefinitely in length, as the verse may pass from a dimeter, light or resonant, up through the intervening measures to the roll of the hexameter. But this originality of technique, leaving room for so many shades of thought and feeling, was certainly inspired; andbelow the changeful form runs perfect unity of tone. The creative impulse is subdued to the contemplative mood induced in the mind of the poet as she stands in the Abbey at night and broods upon its history. Her thought goes far back, to the early builders of the fabric whose pale phantoms seem to float in the shades of the 'grey ascending arches.'

When the stars are muffled and under them all the earthIs a fiery fog and the sinister roar of London,They lament for the toil of their hands, their souls' travail—"Ah, the beautiful work!"It was set to shine in the sun, to companion the starsTo endure as the hills, the ancient hills, endure,Lo, like a brandIt lies, a brand consumed and blackened of fire,In the fierce heart of London.

Or, like Dante, this poet will follow the old ghosts to a more dreadful region, and bring them news of home—

Fain would my spirit,My living soul beat up the wind of deathTo the inaccessible shore and with warm voiceDeep-resonant of the earth, salute the dead:.....I also would bringTo the old unheeded spirits news of Earth;Of England, their own country, choose to tell them,And how above St. Edward's bones the MinisterGloriously stands, how it no more beholdsThe silver Thames broadening among green meadowsAnd gardens green, nor sudden shimmer of streamsAnd the clear mild blue hills.Rather so high it stands the whole earth underSpreads boundless and the illimitable sea.

Fain would my spirit,My living soul beat up the wind of deathTo the inaccessible shore and with warm voiceDeep-resonant of the earth, salute the dead:

.....

I also would bringTo the old unheeded spirits news of Earth;Of England, their own country, choose to tell them,And how above St. Edward's bones the MinisterGloriously stands, how it no more beholdsThe silver Thames broadening among green meadowsAnd gardens green, nor sudden shimmer of streamsAnd the clear mild blue hills.Rather so high it stands the whole earth underSpreads boundless and the illimitable sea.

The steps of the sentry, pacing over the stones which cover the great dead below, remind her of those other builders who lie there, makers of Empire.

Over what dust the atom footfall passes!Out of what distant lands, by what adventuresSuperbly gatheredTo lie so still in the unquiet heart of London!Is not the balm of Africa yet clingingAbout the bones of Livingstone? ConsiderThe long life-wandering, the strange last journeyOf this, the heroic lion-branded corpse,Still urging to the sea!And here the eventual far-off deep repose.

This poem is characteristic, both in the way it blends imagination and profound feeling with pensive thought, and in its literary flavour. One may note the opulent language, enriched from older sources, the historical lore and the allusive touch so fascinating to those who love literature for its own sake. But the poet can work at times in avery different manner. There is, for instance, another piece of unrhymed verse, "March Thoughts From England," which is a riot of light and colour, rich scent and lovely shape and bewitching sound—the sensuous rapture evoked by a Provençal scene 'recollected in tranquillity.' Or there is "April," with the keen joy of an English spring, also a glad response to the direct impressions of sense. Imagination is subordinated here; but if we turn in another direction we are likely to find it paramount. It may be manifested in such various degrees and through such different media that sharp contrasts will present themselves. Thus we might turn at once from the playful fancy of "The Child Alone" (where a little maid has escaped from mother and nurse into the wonderful, enchanted, adventurous world just outside the garden) to the thrice-heated fire of "Again I Saw Another Angel." Here imagination has fanned thought to its own fierce heat; and in the sudden flame serenity is shrivelled up and gives place to passionate despair. In a vision the poet sees the awful messenger of the Lord leap into the heavens with a great cry—

Then suddenly the earth was whiteWith faces turned towards his light.The nations' pale expectancySobbed far beneath him like the sea,But men exulted in their dread,And drunken with an awful gleeBeat at the portals of the dead.I saw this monstrous grave the earthShake with a spasm as though of birth,And shudder with a sullen sound,As though the dead stirred in the ground.And that great angel girt with flameCried till the heavens were rent around,"Come forth ye dead!"—Yet no man came.

I saw this monstrous grave the earthShake with a spasm as though of birth,And shudder with a sullen sound,As though the dead stirred in the ground.And that great angel girt with flameCried till the heavens were rent around,"Come forth ye dead!"—Yet no man came.

But from the intensity of that we may pass to the dainty grace of the Songs, where the poet is weaving in a gossamer texture. Or we may consider a love-lyric like "Passing," a fragile thing, lightly evoked out of a touch of fantasy and a breath of sweet pain.

With thoughts too lovely to be true,With thousand, thousand dreams I strewThe path that you must come. And youWill find but dew.I break my heart here, love, to dowerWith all its inmost sweet your bower.What scent will greet you in an hour?The gorse in flower.

With thoughts too lovely to be true,With thousand, thousand dreams I strewThe path that you must come. And youWill find but dew.

I break my heart here, love, to dowerWith all its inmost sweet your bower.What scent will greet you in an hour?The gorse in flower.

In the plays there are lyrics, too, delicately stressing their character of poetic drama, and giving full compass to the author's powers in each work. Indeed, the combination of lyric and dramaticelements is very skilfully and effectively managed. There is a ballad which serves in each case to state themotifat the opening of the play: not in so many words, of course, but suggested in the tragical events of some old story. And snatches of the ballad recur throughout, crooned by one of the persons of the drama, or played by a lutist at a gay court festival. But always the dramatic scheme is subserved by the lyrical fragments. Sometimes it will fill a short interval with a note of foreboding, or make a running accompaniment to the action, or induce an ironic tone, or, by interpreting emotion, it will relieve tension which had grown almost too acute. But, fittingly, when the crisis approaches and action must move freely to the end, the lyric element disappears.

"The Ballad of the Mother," which precedes "Wild Justice," creates the atmosphere in which the play moves from beginning to end. It prefigures the plot, too, in its story of the dead mother who hears her children weeping from her grave in the churchyard; and, after vainly imploring both angel and sexton to let her go and comfort them, makes a compact with the devil to release her.

"Then help me out, devil, O help me, good devil!""A price must be paid to a spirit of evil.Will you pay me the price?" said the spirit from Hell."The price shall be paid, the bargain is made.".....Boom! boom! boom!From the tower in the silence there sounds the great bell."I am fixing the price," said the devil from Hell.

"Then help me out, devil, O help me, good devil!""A price must be paid to a spirit of evil.Will you pay me the price?" said the spirit from Hell."The price shall be paid, the bargain is made."

.....

Boom! boom! boom!From the tower in the silence there sounds the great bell."I am fixing the price," said the devil from Hell.

The mother in the play is Mrs Gwyllim, wife of a vicious tyrant. For twenty-one years she had borne cruelty and humiliation at his hands. She had even been patient under the wrongs which he had inflicted on her children: the violence which had maimed her eldest son, Owain, in his infancy; which had hounded another boy away to sea and had driven a daughter into a madhouse. But at the opening of the play a sterner spirit is growing in her: meekness and submission are beginning to break down under the consciousness of a larger duty to her children. We find that she has been making appeals for help, first to their only accessible relation; and that failing, to the Vicar of their parish. But neither of these men had dared to move against the tyrant. They live on a lonely little island off the coast of Wales, where Gwyllim practically has the small population in his power. He had built a lighthouse on the coast; and at the time of the action, which is early in the nineteenth century, he is empowered to own it and to take toll from passingvessels. Thus he controls the means of existence of the working people; and the rest are deterred, by reasons of policy or family interest, from putting any check upon him.

In the first scene the mother announces to her daughter Nelto and her favourite son Shonnin the result of her appeal to the Vicar. His only reply had been to affront her with a counsel of patience, though Gwyllim's misconduct is as notorious as his wife's long-suffering. We are thus made to realize the isolation and helplessness of the family before we proceed to the second scene, with its culmination of Gwyllim's villainy and the first hint of rebellion. He comes into the house, furious at the discovery of what he calls his wife's treachery. Owain, the crippled son, is present during part of the scene; and Nelto passes and repasses before the open door of an inner room, hushing the baby with stanzas of the ballad which opens the play. In the presence of their children, Gwyllim raves at his wife, taunts her with her helplessness, boasts of his own infidelity, and flings a base charge at her, of which he says he has already informed the parson; while Nelto croons—

The angels are fled, and the sexton is sleeping,And I am a devil, a devil from Hell.

The mother does not answer; but Owain isgoaded to protest. This only excites Gwyllim further, and he strikes Owain as he sits in his invalid chair; while Shonnin, coming in from the adjoining room, brings the scene to a climax by asking of his father the money that he needs to go away to school. Gwyllim replies, taking off his coat meanwhile, that there is a certain rule in his family. When a son of his is man enough to knock him down he shall have money to go out into the world; but not before. He invites Shonnin to try his strength:

Gwyllim.... Come on. Why don't you come on? I'm making nodefence.Shonnin.Mother?Gwyllim.Leave her alone. Strike me, boy. I bid you do it.Shonnin.Then I will; with all my might, and may Godincrease it!Owain.There is no God.

Gwyllim.... Come on. Why don't you come on? I'm making nodefence.

Shonnin.Mother?

Gwyllim.Leave her alone. Strike me, boy. I bid you do it.

Shonnin.Then I will; with all my might, and may Godincrease it!

Owain.There is no God.

Shonnin strikes three times; and is then felled by a blow from his father, who goes out, shouting orders to wife as he retreats. The scene closes in a final horror. Nelto, a pretty, high-spirited girl, has hitherto taken little part in the action. Her character, however, has been clearly indicated in one or two strong touches. We realize that she is young, impulsive, warm-hearted; keenly sensitive to beauty, wilful and bright; thrilling to her fingertips with life that craves its birthright of liberty and joy. But we see, too, that with all her ardour she is as proud and cold in her attitude to love as a very Artemis. And when she declares that she also has reached the point of desperation, and that sooner than remain longer in the gloom and terror of her home she will fling herself into a shameful career, we feel that the climax has indeed been reached.

In the third scene the plan of wild justice is formulated. It had originated in the mind of Owain, who had fed his brooding temper on old stories of revenge. To him the dreadful logic of the scheme seemed unanswerable. No power on earth or heaven could help them; either they must save themselves, or be destroyed, body and soul. He puts his plan before Shonnin—to lure their father by a light wrongly placed, as he rows home at night, on to the quicksands at the other side of the island. But Shonnin, if he has less strength of will than Owain, is more thoughtful and more sensitive. He is appalled at the proposal. Owain reminds him of their wrongs; asks him what this monster has done that he should live to be their ruin. And Shonnin, seeing the issues more clearly, replies

... Nothing;But then I have done nothing to deserveTo be made a parricide.

But Nelto has been listening, and hers is a nature of a very different mettle. Besides, as she has put the alternative to herself, it means but a choice between two evils; and this plan of Owain's seems at least a cleaner thing than the existence she had contemplated. She declares that she will be the instrument of the revenge.

The rest of the play is occupied with the execution of the plan. Scene IV shows us Nelto going on her way down to the sea at night with the lantern that is to lead Gwyllim on to the sands. She is trying not to think; but the very face of nature seems to reflect the horror that is in her soul—

... Down slips the moon.Nelto.Broken and tarnished too? Now she hangs motionlessAs 'twere amazed, in a silver strait of skyBetween the long black cloud and the long black sea;The sea crawls like a snake.

The figure of a woman suddenly appears in the path. It is her mother; she has overheard their plans, and for a moment Nelto is afraid that she has come to frustrate them. But Mrs Gwyllim has a very different purpose: she intends to take upon herself the crime that her children are about to commit—

All's fallen from me nowBut naked motherhood. What! Shall a hareTurn on the red-jawed dogs, being a mother,The unpitying lioness suckle her whelpsSmeared with her heart's blood, this one law be stampedFor ever on the imperishable stuffOf our mortality, and I, I only,Forbidden to obey it?

But Nelto sees that she is too frail and weak for the task; and entreats her mother to return to the house. Time is slipping, and her father is waiting for the boat.

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