MICHAEL FIELD'S "LONG AGO."*

TELE author's plan has been to expand the fragments of Sappho into lyrics, a plan which the literary friend to whom she submitted it considered, she tells us in her preface, to be "delightfully audacious." It is audacious, of course, for a modern, of however well-established reputation, to put herself into apparent competition with a writer who stands by common consent in the front rank. The fragments them- selves are sufficiently easy to manipulate. Mostly they consist of a line, or even a single phrase ; occasionally we have a couplet, and once or twice a stanza. And they are generally quoted for a lexicographical rather than a literary purpose. Hence a restorer has a free hand with them. He is not bound, as the comparative anatomist is bound when he

undertakes to construct out of a single bone an ichthyosaurns or a deinotherium. "Be not thou proud of thy ring," or "Nightingale of the passionate voice," or "These pleasant songs will I sing to my comrades," suggest themes which may be easily worked into poems. The boldness of the attempt, from the literary point of view, is that the poem when worked out is expected to be not unequal to the fairly complete "Blest as the immortal gods is he," or the more fragmentary "Hymn to Aphrodite." But it is from what may be called the ethical point of view that "Michael Field's" attempt may be more truly called audacious, and that, we feel bound to say, without the qualification expressed in the word "delightfully." Rightly or wrongly, the taste of mankind has always revolted from the unrestrained expression by a woman of the passion of love. It is only in some supreme necessity, as when a Queen declares what an inferior has not the right to ask, that in actual life she is allowed to open her mind first ; and this social law, which cannot be supposed to be a mere convention, has its counterpart in the world of letters. Of course, neither with the man nor the woman is the poem taken to be the out- come of personal experience,—at least, so far as that experi- ence is individualised. The lovers whom the poet celebrates in his verse are ideals. We do not accuse him of inconstancy because he sings now of a Madeline, now of an Eleanore, and then, again, of a Lilian. They are the various forms in which the woman to whom the man's heart goes out is embodied. But this same general expression of passion has been refused, by a general consent, to woman. Sappho ventured on it in the early days of literature; and though the supremacy of her genius was allowed, she paid the penalty of her daring in the sinister associations which came to be connected with her name. "I have turned," says the poet of Long Ago in her preface, "to the one woman who has dared to speak un- falteringly of the fearful mastery of love." This, then, is the real " audacity " of her attempt. It may be an augury, as there are not wanting other auguries in the world of to-day, of another order of things in the future, when, according to the prevision of the Princess—yet untouched, it must be remembered, by love—women may ally with men,—

" Their fortunes, justlier balanced, scale with scale,"

and may claim along with the freedom of choice in life, a corresponding freedom of expression in Art. But this order of things is still, we do not hesitate to say, happily in the future, and probably in the distant future, if one may venture so far in speaking of a world which moves so quickly down the "ringing grooves of change."

When we come to estimate the poet's actual accomplish-

ment of her purpose, we find it less " audacious " than might have been expected. Her boldest flight is in the fifty-second poem, where she takes the very general .words, ;yap Epairref Toirro etivotta, as a motto, so to speak, for an adaptation of the legend of Tiresias, who, like Ccenens among Virgil's victims

of love, was now man, now woman ("rnrsus et in vetere in fate revoluta fignram"). The Tiresias legend in the shape in which it has come down to us is rude and coarse, nor has Michael Field's art been able to refine or spiritualise it. It remains among the gif)Orree : and we wish that it had not found expression by a writer for whose power we entertain, as we have more than once avowed, a profound respect. But when a critic has to own that he would like to see the most characteristic poem of a volume blotted out, he cannot deny that his general judgment is unfavourable. To put the case briefly and plainly, the author of Long Ago seems to na most deserving of praise where she is most remote from her own aim. We do not think

Long Ark By Michael Meld. London: George Bell and Ban. MG.

that, apart from the general objection which we have urged, she is at her best in poetry of this kind. It is in dramatic verse that she has won her laurels, and she would do well to keep to it. Still, the poetical fire and the power of expression in which she has so few rivals among the writers of the day, show themselves even in forms that are not wholly congenial to her peculiar gifts, though we sometimes miss the finish that is essential to the perfect lyric. Here is a specimen in which the second stanza is fine ; the first far inferior. "Basking in immortality" is not the legendary conception of the "white- haired shadow" whom "a cruel immortality consumes :"—

Tkrvia caws.

"Queen Dawn, in immortality doth bask Tithonus ; youth for him thou dids't not ask; He lives in never-fading ago apart : Dione's child, less careful in her joy, Spent her wild passion on a mortal boy, Then watched him dying with a broken heart.

0 Queen of Love, I blame thee not ; The sweet things of a mortal's lot Are these : to win the rapture and to lose ; To learn the morrow brings not back to-day; To bind the cup with roses while we may, To drink, or die athirst if we refuse."

Perhaps a more uniformly favourable specimen of her powers

is :—

Mil 'civil x‘paBas-

" Stir not the shingle with thy boat, It groans beneath the keel ; Still on the senseless waters float, Until thy heart can feel ;

Keep to lEgtean tracts of fair, Invulnerable sea; The land cries out in pain to bear One who from love is free.

Yea, linger 'mid the barren foam, Ungreeted, out of reach Of those who watch the sailor home On Mitylene's beach.

Oh, I forget that Love's own Queen Is called the Ocean-born ; Forth from the wine-dark waves, first seen, She sprang in grace forlorn : Forget that once across the sea, Thou, with thy swinging oar, Did'st row the goddess mightily, Careless of coin, to shore.

She gave thee beauty—love's delight Would give thee. Sail away !

Learn from the natal waves her might, Then joyous seek the bay."

The volume:has a graceful appearance within and without ; but we cannot:admire the Greek type. The aspirates especially are difficult to distinguish.