Chapter VII: Appendix: B

"THE CRIER BY NIGHT" was first performed by Mr. Stuart Walker's Portmanteau Theatre Company in Wyoming, U.S.A., in September 1916, and in New York at the Princess Theatre on 18 December 1916, with the following cast:

Hialti Mr. McKay Morris.
Thorgerd Miss Judith Lowry.
Blanid Miss Florence Buckton.
An Old, Strange Man Mr. Edgar Stehli.

Play produced by Mr. Stuart Walker and mounted by Mr. W. J. Zimmerer.

_SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF_

KING LEAR'S WIFE AND OTHER PLAYS. 1920. 4to. With binding design by Charles Ricketts. Pp. 209. 15_s._ net. (_Out of print._)

A special edition of 50 copies signed by the author, in white and gold binding. 31_s._ 6_d._ net. (_Out of print._)

* * * * *

Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie (Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Liverpool) in _The Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury_.

This volume has been long overdue. It was the great
good fortune of "Georgian Poetry" that it was
permitted to give this remarkable tragedy of "King
Lear's Wife" to the world, and thus to have the
privilege of pioneering Mr. Bottomley's reputation
among those who are unable to do much experimental
reading. It was obviously not only a dramatic poem but
an actable play; so actable, indeed, that it had the
extraordinary fortune of being acted; and what was
perhaps even more remarkable of a poetic play
nowadays, it showed itself capable of being acted
precisely and entirely as it had been written, the
technique of the poet contriving to be, with a
completeness not to be paralleled anywhere to-day
except in Italy, simultaneously the technique of the
playwright.

The other plays contained in this volume are still to
be staged. They would certainly be not less effective
than "King Lear's Wife" ... the cunning elaboration of
supernaturalism in "The Crier by Night" and "The
Riding to Lithend," its combination in the former with
the elemental humanities, in the latter with vivid
character and strangely heroic passion; the deft
lucidity of "Laodice and Danae," which might serve as
a type of dramatic suspense passing at the exact
moment into inevitable catastrophe: these things, one
would think, should be eminently practical politics
for the theatre. If any manager wants plays in which
exciting action is at the same time profound
significance, here they are.

However, we are only able to speculate on this aspect
of Mr. Bottomley's work. But we can console ourselves
by simply reading the plays as poetry.... In the days
when theurgy was still an honourable profession,
Apollonius of Tyana said "Knowing what people say is
nothing; I know what people don't say." That might be
put as motto for such poetry as Mr. Bottomley writes.
It is the art of exhibiting realities. What people
don't say is what they really are; and they don't say
it because they can't get hold of it. But he can, and
he can make them say it ... they speak and act as
unconstrainedly as the folk of the everyday world; yet
every word and every gesture is a flashing revelation
of spiritual destiny. And not only men and women, but
nature also: tarns and mountains, winds and the night,
trees and stars--of these, too, Mr. Bottomley "knows
what they don't say."

To the technical beauty of Mr. Bottomley's poetry I
have not alluded. It is extraordinary; but, as in all
great poetry, it is no more than the sign that the
reality of things is being successfully exhibited.

Mr. John Drinkwater in "The Nature of Drama" ("Prose Papers": London, Elkin Mathews, 1917, p. 220).

I do say that the capital power of the commercialised
theatre in England to-day is so great that it has been
able to impose its standard on nearly all the people
who are habitually in contact with its merchandise ...
so that one piece of catchpenny insincerity after
another is extolled by what passes for expert opinion
as a valuable contribution to the great art of the
dramatist, while a piece of work like Mr. Gordon
Bottomley's "King Lear's Wife," which ... is for
vigour of imagination, poetic eagerness, and dramatic
passion not to be excelled by anything that has been
put on to the English stage since the Elizabethans, is
met with a clamour of ignorance ... in most cases
(1915-16) we find no standard whatever being brought
to the judgment of an original work of art other than
a spurious morality.

Solomon Eagle in _The Outlook_.

The various societies which desire to regenerate the
theatre talk a good deal about the poetic drama of the
future, but they do not seem to take much trouble to
find it.... Of Mr. Gordon Bottomley's fine plays only
one, to the best of my knowledge, has yet been
produced in this country.... There is certainly the
possibility of a great play in their author, and one
at least of them is better than any play in verse
which has been staged for many years, and is likely to
live longer than most of the so-called masterpieces of
our time. If "Midsummer Eve" had been by Claudel, or
"The Riding to Lithend" by some German (a most
unlikely supposition) all the coteries would have been
talking about them years ago....

"Midsummer Eve" is original, and the work of a
poet.... There is fine meditative poetry in it,
poetry, moreover, not grafted or glued on to its main
structure, but growing out of the dialogue naturally,
in an inevitable manner.... "Laodice and Danae" is
equally good reading, and it is dramatic. But none of
these plays is equal to the two latest, "The Riding to
Lithend" and "King Lear's Wife."...

Enough has been written about the grimness of "King
Lear's Wife," the fine bursts of poetry in it, and the
remarkable character of Goneril.... "The Riding to
Lithend" is, up to the present, the best of Mr.
Bottomley's plays; and its superiority is a
superiority which, I think, would be still more
evident on the stage than it is in print.... It comes
straight out of an old tale; the characters are
recreated and enriched.... The diction is, as a rule,
perfect in its propriety and often striking in its
beauty. And, above all, Gunnar is a hero, his fight a
heroic fight, his courage, his generosity, his
humanity (a few sentences to wife and hound are
wonderfully chosen), and even his weaknesses are such
as to move the heart. His fall is like the fall of all
noble and fighting things; the sense of defeat comes
with it, but above that a feeling of exultation. On
the stage the end, I fancy, would be profoundly
moving, and the fight exciting to a degree, though
there is no obvious rhodomontade about it.

Mr. John Freeman in _The Bookman_.

This comely volume at last makes public what has been
too long a fugitive and cloistered pleasure.... These
five plays show the author in the most powerful
exercise of his faculties. Imagination here is free
and moves with growing ease, music enlarges like a
splendid wind through the verse; and the common
reproach of mere "poetic plays" has been avoided in
these, where character and action develope as surely
as music itself. Gordon Bottomley has remembered that
his plays can have no life except in the activity of
his characters.... Fine careless raptures alone will
not produce a play like "The Riding to Lithend" ...
you may quote almost any lines from this fierce
Icelandic play and find that what you are reading is
vital and essential to the expression of character and
action. And in this poetry, too ... the beautiful
images flow in and out with the ease of light on
water; the rhythms have the natural movement of
thought, and the secret discipline of masculine habit.
"King Lear's Wife" will be familiar to many readers,
but to others it will come with the delicious shock of
a new creation.... The new play is a beam of light
crossing the darkness of the old. Few passages of
modern verse reach the beauty of Goneril's
hunting-narration; and it is no isolated beauty.

Mr. William Rose Benet in The Literary Review of the _New York Evening Post_.

"The Crier by Night" is one of the most powerful and
eerie poetic dramas of the supernatural that have been
written in the last two decades. To me the best-known
translations of Maeterlinck pale beside it.... I hold
"The Riding to Lithend" his greatest achievement. To
me it is like a piece of gorgeous tapestry blurred by
wood-smoke and sea-mist and hung on a granite wall.
The dramatic structure is knit as compact as a rock.
Across the shimmering imagery of the diction blows a
chill and foreboding wind of the spirit.... The verse
is nobly distinguished. "King Lear's Wife" is also a
notable piece of work.... It possesses convincing
reality.... Again the dramatic structure satisfies
completely. "Midsummer Eve" is packed with fragrant
beauty ... that creeps around the heart.... The
atmosphere is the important thing about this play and
is unforgettable. "Laodice and Danae" is more usual
(for Bottomley, for very few other writers), but it is
the work of a sure dramatic craftsman with an
enthralling tale to tell.... There is a splendid
artistic austerity about his work ... yet mixed with
this there is an entirely full-blooded love of the
earth, a delight in intensely human detail.... He has
indeed displayed many gifts imperishably bright. His
name should stand high in the roster of modern English
verse.

_The Morning Post._

The rare beauty and distinction of these works have
been ungrudgingly acclaimed by many critics, but they
have hitherto lacked that wider recognition for which
they are indubitably destined.... But now the bringing
of them together in one volume permits us all to
appraise the quality of what is the most significant
accomplishment of our Georgians. It is impossible to
be impervious to the strength and beauty, knit
together, of these dramas.... Criticism may note with
admiration the unerring skill of dramatic structure;
with delight the mastery of language, which constrains
the simplest words to the greatest needs; with wonder
the reading of the human heart.... The man who can
handle character and emotion with such mastery both of
language and imagination is indeed a poet.... In Mr.
Bottomley the Georgian era has found an authentic
voice--a veritable interpreter.

_The Times Literary Supplement._

We must honour the devoted writers who keep alive the
desire for the poetic drama, and none more than Mr.
Gordon Bottomley.... He is a poet and justifies his
use of poetic speech; he is eloquent, incisive, has a
blank verse of his own which he writes with increasing
mastery.... In "The Riding to Lithend" he rises with
his story ... the death of Gunnar is well done; you
read it breathlessly, for he makes it the death of
Gunnar indeed; and even the slayers feel the greatness
of it. Mr. Bottomley, in a more fortunate age, might,
we think, have been a dramatic poet like Fletcher; he
has Fletcher's eloquence though not his fun,... but
not, of course, Fletcher's familiarity with the
stage.... If he had been bred in the theatre, he
might, we think, have had Fletcher's real and
delightful success.

_John O' London's Weekly._

The cumulative effect of a re-reading of Mr.
Bottomley's work is to convince one that he is a real
poet who can write real drama. In the matter of
construction these plays approach perfection; the
building up is masterly, and the verse is full of
variety and imagination.... The finest as drama is
"King Lear's Wife," though for sheer beauty and
spiritual significance I should be inclined to place
"Midsummer Eve" first. Only one of these plays has
been acted in England. If we had a live stage they
would all be acted.

_The New Statesman._

Mr. Gordon Bottomley's plays are good art. There are
moments in "King Lear's Wife" when he approaches
greatness.... It contains passages of very rare force,
and the dramatic power ... is of a very high quality.
In this play and in "The Crier by Night" he recalls to
us not the late Elizabethans so much as that strange
uneasy genius Thomas Lovell Beddoes.... He is a purer
poet, dramatically, than was Beddoes, and his song has
a clearer richer quality, more imaginative, though
not quite so fantastic; but he resembles Beddoes in
his stern saddened preoccupations with the passing of
mortals. Few plays have a greater unity of atmosphere
or a more boding one than has "The Riding to Lithend."
In all the plays, however, one finds a real poet who
is also a real dramatist; there is little of
decoration in any of the plays, and nothing of that
windy seasonal rhetoric which is so common in some
poetic plays.