Michael Field and the Bells

...Can this be the reason your mediaeval monastic chronicler or artist so frequently fails to distinguish one age from another, as all the centuries blend and blur about him, till in his illuminated psalters he could paint with meticulous hand King David robed and crowned, playing upon bells, till Duke Virgil of Naples might at any moment step out on the page to join hands with Morgan-le-Fay and King Arthur...

...Thus the Gild of Saddlers in the time of King Henry III paid eight pence to ring the bells of St...

...With the soft chimes of Chester or Lincoln ringing over one, a man could afford to lose his sense of time...

...Change-ringing grew popular—even the great Burleigh counted it among his accomplishments...

...whatever the cause, during the latter half of their careers they had to work steadily against an almost complete lack of public interest in them...

...One's mind is suffused with memories at the thought of bells named for the witty chancellor, for gentle Fisher, and the brave Carthusian martyrs, sounding again aver English fields after a silence of 300 years, to mark the same Mass about which all those furious, bright centuries we call the middle-ages whirled and flowed as about an unmoved centre...

...Martin-le-Grand...

...Once they were chrismed, bells became holy things...

...In the wide range of English verse, and one speaks after some reflection, I can think of no more sustained and lovely expression growing root and blossom out of suffering than this later poetry of Michael Field...

...Perhaps it was the hourly chime of bells that caused them to confuse the changing and the unchanging years, which made all centuries beyond the living present, which held Christ, seem vague and trivial...

...It was a happy thought to memorialize them by bells...

...The rest is silence...

...and the "ring of a new voice" was announced, "likely to be he£rd far and wide among English-speaking peoples...

...It is easy to imagine that the minds of those present must have echoed one of their last lyrics, "She is singing to Thee, Domine!," which was strangely enough almost the death- or life-cry of both poets...

...Miss Bradley and Miss Cooper have already taken their places in a small and very select company of English lyricists, with spirits like Isobel Pagan, Emily Bronte, and Christina Rossetti...

...489 It was no ordinary change of belief that brought these two vivacious, vivid creatures ("my two dear Gped, Women," Browning had called them) into the Catholic Church...

...The loss and destruction of English bells between 1535 and 1545 was not the least of the tragedies of the Reformation...

...Certainly the world does not turn backward...

...Their poetry changed and deepened also: one looks in vain through the earlier books to find anything that really foretells the lyric plash and flow, the rich and mystical utterance of the last two volumes of religious verse, Poems of Adoration, and Mystic Trees, published not so long before the tragic deaths of the poets from cancer, that of Miss Cooper in 1913, and of Miss Bradley, a year later...

...To your genuine mediaevalist it was no more incongruous for Huon de Bordeaux, home from Babylon with the fair maid Esclarmonde, "with a thousand bears, a thousand hawks, a thousand young varlets and maidens a handful of the prophet's beard and four of his greatest teeth," to sail up the Tiber amid the pealing or bells, than for all the bells on earth to ring as the Holy Family sailed into Bethlehem on Christmas morning...

...they had been inconsistent before, but not now...

...As young women in the early 'eighties they had commanded and kept the enthusiastic admiration of such various persons as the Brownings, George Meredith, A. C. Swinburne, and Havelock Ellis, yet the joint pseudonym, chanced upon in whimsical humor in 1885, brought them a flattering attention they could hardly have hoped for...

...Later, for some reason still obscure, the praise turned to resentment and then to indifference...

...The bells of monasteries, collegiate churches, and religious houses were plundered and confiscated, turned to secular uses, and so frequently shipped beyond the seas that Parliament passed acts against the practice...

...Field was greeted witfa acclaim by critics who spoke of his "brilliant distij{c_ tion" and "Shakespearean penetration...

...Yet it was altogether appropriate a few weeks ago in England, when the old mediaeval ceremony of consecration of bells was observed at St...

...Bridget's, Isleworth, near London, probably for the first time since the reign of Mary Tudor, that the first bells blessed should be named for the poets, Michael Field...

...The miracle is, certainly, that it is young poets' poetry, written by poets who have found their youth again...

...the chimes of St...

...From the time of Charlemagne onward, bell and romance rang together through French forest and English meadow, from the bells of Whitby, ringing at the death of Saint Hilda, to the chapel of Launcelot and the Green Knight, from Laon to Roncevaux and back to merry Lincoln, whose bells were rung by unseen hands...

...From the first English centuries onward, the pleasant jangle and peal of bells was over all the land, and in a country where a traveler could go scarcely five miles in any direction without passing some religious house or other, it seems hardly too much to say that all England lived within physical hearing of their sounds, from the earliest lady bell before dawn through the long litany of saunce, ave, gabriel, and vesper bells till the last chime at night called in the darkness for prayers for the souls in purgatory...

...For, of course, as everyone now knows, Michael Field the poet was not a man at all, but two beautifully educated and cultured Englishwomen, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, aunt and niece respectively, who labored together for over forty years in a poetic partnership so completely one in imaginative impulse and effort that, we are told, the poets themselves could on occasion hardly identify their own work...

...The famous Society of College Youths was one of the many organizations dating almost from the time of Sir Richard Whittington who have left behind wise and witty rules in rhyme, manifesting an admirable devotion to skyey music...

...To ring them was a task so honorable that a special order of the Church, that of ostiarius, was entrusted with it...

...In the latter middle-ages, special gilds and confraternities were organized for the purpose and paid for the privilege...

...Occasionally they were drowned, as at Wells, Lynn, and Yarmouth, and legends grew up about their ringing underseas...

...But in an age of shifting standards we may permit ourselves to wonder what sort of an age the bells of Isleworth will usher in...

...Perhaps the knowledge of the true sex of the poets was not revealed with sufficient tact to the tender susceptibilities of the reviewers of those days, perhaps the poets put themselves outside any groups even mildly engaged in literary log-rolling...

...In 1907 they became Catholics, that event being occasioned by the death of a chow-dog and the reading of the missal, and their biographer tells us, "it was only then that they ceased, or almost ceased to be, tragic poets...

...In their case it meant so complete a transformation of intelligence and sympathy that indignant friends accused them of inconsistency, and they joyously agreed...

...Another English church, that at Lowe House, Lancaster, will soon begin the installation of a carillon of sixty-two bells, to be completed by 1929, to mark the centenary of Catholic emancipation...

...Time was, of course, when such a ceremony was common in England, during those intense centuries when the spires of all Europe burgeoned and blossomed with spikes and clusters of bells...

...The themes they had touched upon in a succession of books from the early Sight and Song to Wild Honey, printed about the time they became Catholics, are touched on again here, but with such a difference—the difference between creative sympathy and the conviction of a personally experienced belief, the difference between mere distinction and authentic poetry...

...The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were far from being periods of naive, undisciplined thought and expression, yet to them Troy had been but yesterday, and eternity seemed all about them...

...Bridget's, Isleworth, will, indeed, be vocal of them...

...The unknown Mr...