The King's Henchman

by Edna St. Vincent Millay. New York: Harper & Bros. 1927. 12mo. xi+130 pp. $2.00.

THE poetry and the imaginative setting create the values of Miss Millay’s play — these, and the haunting sense of music that pervades it, even for one who has not heard the opera. For the theme is trite enough, — the friend who, when sent as a messenger, speaks for himself, —nor is there any of that worming about in the consciousness of the characters by which many a modern novelist prolongs a hackneyed subject. As for the situations, the climax alone interests. Æthelwold has betrayed Eadgar, his king, by falsely reporting as unlovely the daughter of the Thane of Devon, whom Eadgar has sent him to woo, and has himself wedded the fair Elfrida. Presently the king descends on Devon in friendly visit, and light Elfrida, instead of disguising her beauty as she had promised, appears in all her radiance before him. Then comes an unexpected turn, for the first thought of the king is simply that he is thwarted in his life’s work, ‘building England,’ if his best friend, who is her most trusted son, can so prove unworthy. Æthelwold stabs himself. King Eadgar and the rest turn in scorn from the woman, and the play ends in dignity and tragic grief, with solemn keening for Æthelwold. It is a moving finale.

For the rest, what matter if the theme be trite? Poetry makes all things new, and here it accomplishes the ancient miracle. The opening song of the harper, with its swinging lines, archaic, fierce, elegiac, is as successful as Tennyson’s ‘Brunanburgh.’ Cædmon himself might well sing in Eadgar’s hall, nor need it trouble us that Miss Millay slightly overdoes her alliteration. The details are well in keeping, even to briefest lyrical phrase (‘ Up, sun! Stir in thy straw!’), the gnomic sayings a pleasure to the student. No wonder that already college chesses in Old English are given the refreshing exercise of analyzing the language of the play. The skillful technique, moreover, is perfectly controlled by the spirit, which is the true spirit of that old forefather life, so precious an element in the eternal past that we really inhabit.

It is piquant to have this wild and stark existence shown through a woman’s mind. Never did dainty feminine touch more exquisitely indicate gross manners than in the opening scene of deep drinking and coarse jesting. What a pity that the opera omits the jokes! An effective glimpse of Dunstun suggests the thin veneer of Christianity over Paganism. The tenacious continuity of Anglo-Saxon life is finely hinted in the marching song, with its memories of the Romans: —

The best passage in the first act, the pledging of Æthelwold and Eadgar, is true to ancient custom. The fitful moon shining through dank November fogs in Act II is good setting for an idyll of old England, and Elfrida’s incantation catches the tone of all magic spells that have drifted down to us. A moon in a mist is the eeriest sight earth offers, and we understand why the lovers mistake each the other for a creature of vision; but the weird quality hardly fades when they are revealed as mortal man and maid. Yet it slips naturally into the homeliness of Act. III, where married Elfrida, bent on domestic cares and very ill-natured, begs her husband not to make love to her in the morning, when her mind is ‘full of thimbles and churns.’ From this point, the developing tragedy is nobly and simply wrought, in the true spirit of old saga.

The verse is admirably rhythmed, though the recitative might at times grow monotonous or even a little jerky if it did not insist on singing itself to the inward ear. It breaks naturally here and there into delightful lyric. On the whole, here is a beautiful thing, which satisfies our sophisticated twentieth-century hunger for the primitive, artificially presented, and delicately lifts the stark life of our forbears into the purest atmosphere of romance.

VIDA D. SCUDDER