BOOKS.

MICHAEL FIELD'S NEW PLAYS.* THOSE who found in Michael Field's first work the evidence of strength and genius such as are very rare in our generation, will be confirmed in that estimate by the first of these two plays,— that on Canute the Great. Whether it quite equals the play of Fair Rosamund, we are not sure. Bat it certainly surpasses even the best of those which Michael Field has since written, not excluding Brutus 171tor. It is, indeed, a fine study of a fine subject,—the conflict in a great ruler's mind when solicited by the fierce instincts of his Scandinavian ancestors on the one hand, and by the claim of a subduing and civilising Christian faith, the great aptitudes of which for founding a new order he fully appreciates, on the other. We were at first disposed to think that Michael Field had lost a great opportunity in painting Emma, Ethelred's widow, and Cannte's Christian wife, as the worldly, passionate, scheming, guilty woman she un- doubtedly is in this Play, instead of delineating in her the just and gentle Christian spirit by which Canute, when he finds it in monks and priests, is so profoundly attracted. There must be sufficient excuse, we fancy, to be found in the Encomium Emma, written at St. Omer by one who knew Canute at the time of his pilgrimage to Rome, for such a picture. And it would undoubtedly have diminished the marvel of the change in Canute, if Emma, instead of throwing all her influence with the Danish King on to the heathen side, had been the powerful ally of the Christian Church. But we hesitate to say that Michael Field's artistic instinct in making Emma the reckless worshipper of masculine force and animal beauty, and filling her with all the intriguing craft of an unscrupulous woman in pushing Cannte's fortunes, may not, after all, be justified, if not by history in this particular case, at least by a good deal of experience of human nature. Such experience may, perhaps, excuse him for this striking but very disagreeable picture of a beauty ten years older than the King, who used all her skill in statecraft to make men betray and even murder those to whom their honour was pledged, in his interest. For it may be reasonably said that though the Christian teaching had sunk deep enough into Canute to make him

• Canute the Great The Cup of Water. By Michael Meld. London George Bell and Bons. Clifton J. Baker and Bone.

reproach himself for his sudden acts of passion, and to yearn intensely to become the just ruler he aspired to be, his nature would nevertheless have been too little trained in moral and spiritual discrimination, to love a woman raised above the lower qualities which still had so much power over him ; and that his admiration would be attracted rather by the superficial effects of Christian culture on the intellect,—namely, the self-control, the reticence, the subtlety which it had imparted, rather than by true goodness. This would have been a far pleasanter play if Emma's character had been modelled on the Christian type, for the part which concerns Emma is its most repelling element,—worse even than the part which concerns the fourfold traitor Edric. But it it is possible enough that the profound admiration for Canute himself which a truly Christian woman could not have felt, might have been necessary to stir the Norse blood in Canute as it seems to have been stirred by Emma's ripe and passionate nature. At all events, Michael Field, who seldom succeeds with a simply beautiful character as he does with one penetrated by darker threads, has made a splendid sketch of the widow of Ethelred scorning and even hating the feeble and unready husband she had lost, and eager to win the love of the heroic and relentless barbarian in whom she saw all the kinds of great- ness she could appreciate, and at first failed to see one kind of greatness which she did nut at all appreciate. Take this speech addressed to the corpse of the weak and helpless husband whom she had just lost :—

" [ETHELRED'S corpse, on a great bed, in a large room.] (Enter EMMA.) EMMA. Then infamy, the harlots found thee fair !

Vindictive, mercenary, treacherous, vile, A laggard, and a waverer ; how well Did nature fit thee for thine enemies, Thy mistresses, and all corrupting things.

The worm that eats thy body will revolt At the nnvirgiu soil. Yea, I will speak.

Death gives us widows opportunity To put such questions as at jadgment-day Will rise in accusation. From my anger Thou canst not hide; thy face is bare and fixed Before my eyes and lips. Didst thou not sport With other women, while I bore thee sons With Saxon faces, boys so like their father I loathed to give them sock, young heritors Of thy unfeatared kingship, timid lads, For whom I begged a refuge at the table Of my great Norman brother ? Dust thou hear ?

Wilt thou not bribe me from my inquisition?

Nay, bat thy Danish foe shall take thy place, In my own inmost bower. Ah me, ah me !

Bride to the Viking ! What deep modesty

Restrains me from the thought ? I grew a girl,

When, from the walls of London, I looked down On his young, glittering, tempestuous face, And blushed, and gave him all the terms besought To win one smile. I look about the chamber ; Do I resign my queenship ? I am fair, My finger-tips can thrill men to their doom, And my whole body is for empery.

I do not crave to rule; I crave to spend

The flower o' my years, my faculties, my grace, In service of a simple, king-like man,

Clean as the ocean, and as terrible

I' the day of tempest.

[Going up to the corpse.] Redeless thing, thou'rt dead. My soul peals to the echo—dead, dead, dead

No one can ignore the masculine power in that passage,—a passage which we should think grand if it occurred in Shakespeare. "On his young, glittering, tempestuous face" has (mite the Shakespearian ring about it. And yet Canute's passion for such a woman as this, certainly does render his sensitiveness to the Christian teaching concerning justice, forgiveness, purity, a still greater paradox than it would otherwise have been. We must assume, we suppose, that he saw the subtlety, the self-control, what we may call the culture which the Christian teaching had given to Emma's intellect, and was fascinated by it; while the passionate and pagan side of Emma had some hold upon his lower nature that a Christian Queen would hardly have found it easy to fasten upon him. The picture of Edrie, too, the villain of villains, is very powerful, if not entirely like human nature even at its worst. Shakespeare gives Iago some sort of excuse,—excase, at least, in his own suspicions,—for his villainy ; but Michael Field gives Edda no such excuse for his. Here is his picture of the man who had deserted Edmund Ironsides to give the victory to Canute, and who then counts on degrading Canute to be his tool. The passage we are about to quote begins with the lamentations of two of Canute's followers on the Christian tendencies which are becoming visible in their master;-

THOROEIN. The Viking is a Christian, And the great virtne of revenge is dead.

I sing the fiery current of the blood.

Its rapids, its revulsion,. Let him learn The mournful metres of tear-dropping women, And mourn each mighty deed.

HARDEGON. I give him up.

Great men can get the virtue out of good And wickedness; they know that right and wrong Work well together. I have seen old Gore, Cry like a baby, lint no whit the worse

Next day, and ready for a massacre.

This lad is hopeless ; be will come to terms.

[Re.enter Enure.] Here is his enemy, a man to crumble, And eat into his soul.—What brings you here ?

You seek for year old master 'mong the dead ?

You will not find him, no best spare your pains.

EDEIC. Well, it would have saved trouble; he will aoarcely take me into favour again,—but it is with my new master I mast parley. I am the hero of the day. He owes everything to me ; and I and my Mercian troops look for reward. I want money and dignities. Ala, there is the royal tent. Just tell our young conqueror I must break on his privacy. [Exit HARDEGON.] The dogged, old creature! —lint I sent him trudging on my errand. Now I come to a bit of work I shall relish. This high-bred sea-king thinks he can use me contemptuously. He shall be my dependent. He has a notion of keeping faith; and the oaths he shall break ! Oh, it rejoices me to dye folks my own colour, and to see them wince at the discovery of their vileness. You can do it easily with a woman. Bat it is difficult to menace a keen man, with a conscience, and intrepid. I mist con- vince him he owes everything to me ; and a just king rewards his servants ; ingratitude is the part of a barbarian. He shall set me in the rank and place I like to name, and then I can degrade him step by step. I will force him to look inwards when he feels contempt. That is how I dominate."

That is a fine description of the unscrupulousness in men of power,—" Great men can get the virtue out of good and wicked- ness; they know that right and wrong work well together." But Edric is not one of these, he does not recognise the distinc- tion at all, except so far as the sense of wrong which he sees in others gives him a new hold over them which he is eager to use. The defect, as it seems to us, in the picture of Edric, is that there is no sufficient motive given for his malevolence. You can hardly depict malevolence deeper than this last sentence :—" I will force him to look inwards when he feels contempt. That is how to dominate." But would the love of domination alone ever bring a man, without some vindictive sense of wrong to avenge, to malevolence so pure and intense ?

Michael Field is not, as a role, powerful in his delineation of the higher characters of his play. Edmund Ironsides is great and dignified, but hardly impressive ; and Elgiva and Edith, the only good women, are faintly drawn. Still, the most powerful thing in the play is the main subject of it, the study of Canute torn by the conflicting claims of furious passion and of religions remorse and repentance. There is a very fine scene in which his old Norse bard, Thororin, and the Scandinavian prophetess, Gunhild, seek to convince him that a change of faith is as impossible as it is impious, that the old Norse blood will assert itself against his efforts, however much he endeavours to act on his new creed, and make him feel how helpless is one who tries to break with his ancestors, and with his own nature as those ancestors have shaped it:— " HARDEGON. At his learning!

Deal with him, spare him not.

CANUTE. Whom bast 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 an she breathes.

OUNRILD. 0 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.

CANITTE. 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 ?

GUNTULD. Hearken ! I wandered out

Among the brake.fern, and the upright flags,

And snatching brambles, when the sun was gone, And the west yellow underneath the night.

A fir-bough rolled its mass athwart my way,

With a black fowl thereon. 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 in Odin's seal

That men should know them not, you cast the billows Behind your back, and leap npon the horse.

You love no more the North that fashioned yon, The ancestors whose blood is in year heart :- These things you have forgotten.

CANUTE. Yee.

GUMMI/. But they Will have a longer memory. Alas, The mournfulness that draws about my breasts !

Woe, Wee! There is a justice of the Horn, Who sings about the cradle.

CANUTE. Speak thy worst.

[Aside, rising and pacing apart.] How different my queen ! How liberal

The splendour of her smile ! Thin woman's frown Is tyrannous. So will my country look, When I sail back next year ; for I shall feel A dread, a disappointment, and a love I loathe, it comes up from so deep a well, Where I am sod and darkness.

GUNHILD. At thy birth Sang Iffid of foregone things, of thy wild race, Of rocks and fir-trees that for ages past Stood in thy native bounds, of creeping seas, That call thy countrymen to journey forth Among strange people ; and her song went on As flesh was woven for thee in the womb; It cannot be forgotten, for she sang Beginnings.

Callum. 0 grey-headed tyrannies Of yore, I will escape you.

GUNHILD. Verily, They have requital. Thou wilt get a child Will it not draw from the deep parts of life; Will it not take of thee that disposition, Old as the hills, and as the waterfall, Whose foam alone was ever seen by man ?

Thou wilt produce a being of thy past, And all thy change avail not.

HARDEGON. How these women Can Bing foundations!

CANUTE. If in those I breed It work no bleasing, to myself this new, Unsettled energy within my brain Is worth all odds. I cannot understand Half that is meeting me. Go hence, year face Is sheer confusion to me ; it brings back The load of ignorance, the brutishness, The fetters of nativity.

Gcmutn. I go Bat wrathful leave behind me what was told When the crow bent from the swirled plume of fir, And held use like a statne.

Gertcru. 0 my past, I loved thine aspect once, but now my mind Drives thee away. It seems to me that thought

Is as a moving on along the air—

I cannot yet find language. You oppress, And hinder me; but when I brood alone, Hope stirs, and there is tumult of a joy, That flashes through my nature, like a sword, Cutting the knots.

GUNUILD. 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.] CANUTE. She tarns away

With rigid shoulders, and is vanishing For ever. 'Tie in wrestles with her like We are transformed."

That seems to us a truly fine scene, though it is deeply tinctured by modern ideas concerning heredity of which the world of Canute's time was not possessed. Still, it contains a noble assertion of the power of the present to detach itself from the past,—a power not given by that past.

Still finer is the scene in which, after the murder of Edmund Ironsides, which had been agreed upon between Edric and the Queen, not without some guilty knowledge on Cannte's part that this was in Edric's contemplation, they come to him to declare him King of all England. We can only quote the opening portion :—

"CANCTE. Sunset! The air is ominous. I muse

On Danish majesty, my splendid fleet, England's great city-river, and my Ravens Flapping across ; yet by King Edmund's favour

I winter in the Thames.

[Enter THOROILIN.]

0 Thororiu, Be near me, play to me; I am beset By terrible temptations.

TIIORORIN. English priests Shonld teach you their religion ; or your lady,

Your Christian queen, can she not give instruction, And settle you in conduct ? We are friends, Love binds us; she is satisfied to listen Hoar after hour to the triumphant verse I sang when you were pagan. Look at her ! [Emma and EDRIC are seen landing.]

She gives her hand to Streona. Confess Your misery to that line, oading face,

And it will cure despondency.

[Ttioaoam withdraws as EMMA and Enstc approach.]

Cawurs. He hurts Deep, deep,—for he has visions, and should know

That I was crying untie mortal pain

For divination insight, such as poets

Should draw divination, open gazing on the world.

What means my queen ? Although her lips are rigid, A stormy secret plays about her brows, And, passing Edrio's hand, she speeds to me, Urgent, despotic.

EMMA. Ring of England, ball!

My all-possessing, worshipful, young lord. An, ah, a regal flush ! Wilt thou to London ? It is an air I love. Come, a behaviour Lass frank in its disclosures; feign surprise !

CANUTE. What means this greeting ? Edmund is not

dead ?

Esau. All, all his lands are joined this day to yours;

I give you half a kingdom, for you took me

Without a dowry.

CANUTE. Did he die by nature ?

His cheek was withered when I saw him last ; Six battles had he fought, and swept like fire Now here, now there, calling slow country-folk To gather to his wars. A noble ruler !

[To Beam] He died at peace,—with honsel ?

EDRIC. What a question !

When I sit down to feast, I know a sheep Has bled for my repast.

CANUTE [seizing EDRIC]. What, you have slain

Your very lord, who pardoned you your vileness, Who trusted you ?

EDRIC. Ay, ay, he was a fool;

He trusted everybody, even you ; He treated you like one of the old stock, Who knew the strength of covenant.

[Csxure relaxes his hold.] We settled At Olney I should do this bit of work ; And now perform your part ; the Mercian earldom, And that respect you pay a man who serves At some great crisis !

CANUTE. Caitiff, did I give you A word or a command that day I swore ?

EDRIC. The solemn oaths were all for Edmund's ears;

With me connivance was enough. Come, come, No temper ! There is sunset on the towers Of London; all those gilded battlements Are yours, and no suspicion :in a fit Of lunacy my lad, while bedfellow To his good uncle, stabbed him as he slept.

The childish actor had been ably prompted, And terror made him perfect at the art ; His guilt is palpable. Be roams the fields, A jabbering little devil, full of secrets To make Beelzebub an eaves-dropper.

[Aside.] I waste my breath ; a change is on his features.

I know this quiet; it arrests the sense,

Like the appeasing movement of a storm,

That paralyses, ere it devastate.

Best let her feel its fury. [Turns to EMMA, who remains

breathlessly staring at CaxrrE] 'Tis a sickness Needs the domestic touch ; I take my leave.

When it is opportune recall my service, Urge my desert.

CAMITE. I fear to deal the blow, And make a lightning end. I would call forth My feasting jarls—they would bespatter him

With such disgraces, ridicule, and flaunts, That he wonld die, unstuck, of countless gibes, And feel by prophecy his corpse would serve For next day's merriment. [Seiring Enam suddenly.] Thou haat offended Beyond the bounds of nature, and the darkness Shall never cover thee ; for thee no grave, But infinite exposure in the son; Corruption blazon thee the thing thou art, Abhorred and dissolute!

[Cmwre strangles Boise, flings his boey into the stream, and

gases out.]

EMMA. To look at it

The male's fierce nature in its nakedness, With passions that dumb creatures in their lairs Conceive in solitude ! How break it in ?

Wild as the waters that engulfed the world, It rages in its hour of dominance, And all familiar outlines are destroyed; There is no sky, no comfort, no relief, No streak in the great wilderness. 0 God, Thou gayest us our beauty and our guile

To win these creatures. I will try a touch,—

'Tin softer than the voice, more powerful."

It would not be easy, we think, to compress into words so few so much foreboding, passion, remorse, and madness.

To our mind, the weakest part of the play is its conclusion. We are not made to realise why Canute is reconciled to the Queen who had involved him in this guilt, or what he means by speaking of Emma as "the dearer for her wicked- ness, the more to be desired." Is that a relapse into his paganism,—it does not seem to be so intended,—or some distorted view of theological teaching ? Canute says that he has learned " Sin " to be "a mighty bond 'twist God and man," because it gives God something to forgive, and because God loves him whom he has forgiven better than he loves him whom he has had no need to forgive. That surely is not only a pagan version of the teaching about there being more joy over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety-and-nine who need no repentance, but hardly one at all appropriate in the month of a strong and passionate penitent like Canute. We under- stand neither Canute nor Emma clearly in the last scene. Indeed, it seems to us that a most powerful play, of which hardly a line is weak before the last scene, closes feebly with an inadequately imagined reconciliation between the guilty husband and the more guilty wife.

Of The Cup of Water we have very little to say. It contains some fine poetry, but is a very poor play. The plot is taken, we are told, from that poet whose literary genius seems to the present writer to have been a genius chiefly for the diagnosis of disease, and who had no genius for the delineation of strong and natural feeling, the late D. G. Rossetti. The plot is worthy of such a master, and is repellent from beginning to end. Nor is there any of that strength in the conception of character in which Michael Field is generally so prodigal. A play in which a wife so entirely suppresses herself as to become the sympa- thetic confidant of her husband's irrepressible passion for

another, in which she entreats him to speak "all in your writhing heart, renew its passions, and fear no impious jealousy, no pride of injured charms," and is rewarded by his addressing her as "0 my woman-friend !" in grateful recognition of her magna- nimity, is rather nauseous. This is, to our mind, the very rage and tatters of overstrained passion :—

"Atramln [throwing himself on the ground, and burying his face in the grass]. I cannot bear to hear

The foot-fall of her voice. God ! she will come, And bleat for me ;—lambs wander over graves, And atop, and bleat, and shake their woolly heads.— I will be buried from per sight."

Nevertheless, the play has many fine passages, of which this perhaps is the finest :— " CARA. I wonder what I had to think about Before I MX yen. Now I have no time For sleep ; I dare nob go to bed at all, Lest I should find it altered in my heart When I awake ; and sometimes in my bosom I lose all breath, and dare not think of you, The world is grown so large."

But as a whole, The Cup of Water is weak, unnatural, and, to our mind, quite unworthy of the poet who calls himself "Michael Field."