MARGARET LOUISA WOODS HATEVER the rail has done for the race, it has destroyed the racy. In the old days a man carried his county in his face. Every village had its individuality of speech. Lower Gornal was suspicious of Upper Gornal, and was ready to resent its doings with fists, when in sufficient force and liquor. The surrounding hills were the bourn beyond which no traveller pierced. You were born and buried in the ground where your family grew; the burr or lisp or drawl of your habitat stayed with you all your life; you thought it and spoke it, breathed it in and out; it was your scent and savour; you were of Warwick or of Bideford almost as decisively as you were English or French. It is of ill-meaning to a series of county poets that the counties have given way to lines and junctions; that poets fly far, and sing of strange sunsets and un-native woods and fields. If Warwickshire poets had only kept at home they would have given the world a poetry rich, exquisite, their very own. Margaret Louisa Woods (née Bradley) is a poet of great distinction and, although born at Rugby, does not taste of her county. The influences that shaped her were the central intellectual forces of her day. Her father, successively Headmaster of Marlborough College, Master of University, Oxford, and Dean of Westminster, was one of the great scholars and educationalists of his time, at whose table more than bread of the body was broken. There the thinkers, workers and dreamers came together, and you might have Browning to talk, and Lawrence to inspire, and Tennyson to hold his tongue. Almost all her life she has been close to thought, close to culture; she has inhaled the mellow leather of old editions and the sacred ink of private presses; distinguished speech, fastidious opinion. But she has never stuck in the rut of learned leisure, never worn the straight corsets of preciousness; she has never made the little world the great world; she has never narrowed her heart or her head. If she has loved Oxford-where, a daughter at University, she became wife and hostess at Trinity-she has loved the slums, too, and the world's wide spaces, and its strange folk. She has explored Rhodesia, wandered in Spain, and jolted through Irish lanes with a travelling circus. If her soul rejoices in the right word found, the rare word won, the fresh cadence taught to flow, it rejoices even more in the right thing done. Literature has not smothered humanity. In spite of her unusual learning, her long intimacy with French and German, her varied and adventurous life, it is at the heart of things that Margaret Woods is at home. She may study periods, as she has done, with minute observation, with imaginative realisation, enabling her, as in Esther Vanhomrigh, Sons of the Sword, and The Princess of Hanover, not only to upholster them, but to reincarnate them: yet this is not the vital achievement of her genius. She has dwelt in simple souls; she has filled her pitcher at the fountain of tears; she has felt the suck of the great tides, and heard the crying of lonely sorrows, as they pass between earth and heaven. Mrs Woods has achieved two masterpieces: A Village Tragedy, in prose, and Wild Justice, a dramatic poem. I don't know where she found herself at home in Wales, but she was there long enough to give one of its forlorn coasts a heritage and home in story. Wild Justice, like all dramas that grow and are not made-that are the work of the poet, and not of the joiner-is sole, simple, indivisibly one. Its story, like that of all real dramas, is not a plot; it has no involutions, evolutions, or convolutions; you don't see the carts come with the loads of bricks and timber; you hear no sound of trowel or hammer; you see a deadly flower unfold; you see an infernal soul sowing and reaping hell. The scenery and the character and the destiny are all one. The mournful sands stretch to a fatal sea; the damned soul can go only one way; the human hands are fierce tools in the cold hands of Fate. The hideous man has made his wife and his children his enemies, inexorable, inevitable; his iron will is the cage of their spirits; it is a doom upon them all; death or dishonour lies upon the touch of his hands. One by one the dreadful call reaches his housefolk; one by one they bow to its necessity; one by one they are woven into the fate that says, "This man must die; the Eternal will have it so." The changed lantern that lures to the quicksand, and gives Gryffith Gwyllim to the death that saves the rest, shines like a lamp before a shrine. So deeply is the righteousness, the necessity, of the riddance driven home that repentance when the deed is achieved strikes us as merely weakness. It is a pity that Mrs Woods bowed to conventions, and paid the ten commandments compliments; you can't whistle off the hounds of Fate like good little dogs, with nice waistcoats and manicured toes; you must not begin with Wild Justice and end with tame morality. Mrs Woods' more elaborate play, The Princess of Hanover, has been much praised, and a little overpraised. It is enormously clever, but it is rather heavy; it leans a little to the overfulness of the elector. It is finely tempered literature, but it sets you remembering. What excellent Webster, that ! What capital Tourneur there! Beddoes could not make the Elizabethans live again, and Mrs Woods has only given us a brilliant study in the great manner. And, really, people should not make the fates so easy to mislead; virtue should not lie at the mercy of a borrowed wig or a stolen domino; you must dig your destiny deep in character acting on character; you must not hang it like a tassel to a bellrope, or it will come off in your hands. Mrs Woods has reared the altar, laid the wood, and slain the victim, but one thing is wanting still-the fire has never come. And yet it is full of fine stuff; it gives us admirable historical pictures; it has passages of splendour, and scenes of flame and tears. The lovers are real lovers, and you hear their hearts beat. If only the elector had been a little thinner, the humour a little less conscientious, the effort a little less obvious! Well, we can't have everything in this apology for a world. Mrs Woods has a delicate palate for phrase: a jewelworker's joy in the splendid light, a scholar's need to prove the notable lineage of an illustrious word. And she is somewhat of a pioneer in the technique of verse. She upholds and embodies the theories of the poet laureate, seeking to release our English prosody from Greek and Latin chains, and to establish it in the freedom of its native stress. Perhaps she is a little too fond of her theory, and labours a little too hard at liberty. But Mrs Woods cannot be commonplace, and finds it difficult to be conventional. Distinction is a primal need of her soul. In her non-dramatic poems Mrs Woods has done admirable work in three modes of verse. Her lyrics are clear and flawless, often a little touched by quaintness, often a little influenced by memories of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans, and the later poets whose verse carried a jingle of the spurs, a flash of the keen light of a consecrated sword. Her ballads have almost always a haunting spirit at their heart-and their strange scenery is in the dim land that lies just beyond the touch of certain knowledge, within the touch of intuitions, dreams and fears. Hear this: "In the dead of the night the children were weeping. The shrill of the lark, the screams of the owl, The third phase of her work seems to me the highest and best. Non-rhymed poems have fought for a footing in English verse since the days of Macpherson, and we of more than middle-age remember our Tupper. Matthew Arnold experimented constantly with classical measures, but never shook himself free-never got beyond a sword dance, or a dance with shackles on his feet. Mrs Woods has slipped off the shoes of rhyme to walk barefooted with the grace of an Eastern woman poising a pitcher on her head. The Builders, a nocturne in Westminster Abbey-one of many pieces informed by a wide patriotism-is a great poem, through which a great thought flows with the sound of a proud river under the light of clear and beckoning stars. "Who has beheld them, the feeling tenuous hands, About the stones clinging, the carven crumbling Work that they wrought ere they lay in forgotten graveyards? Poor blind hands! As wan sea- And the sullen booming of an unpacified sea, So do the phantoms cling on thy wind-worn ledges Ah if Walt Whitman could have learnt to touch unrhymed cadences like that! Ꮓ |