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If you are not located in the United States, you'll have -to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. - -Title: Louise Imogen Guiney - -Author: Alice Brown - -Release Date: March 24, 2016 [EBook #51541] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY *** - - - - -Produced by Emmy, MWS and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive) - - - - - - - -[Illustration] - - - - -LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY - - BY - ALICE BROWN - - New York - THE MACMILLAN COMPANY - 1921 - - _All rights reserved_ - - - - - PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - - - COPYRIGHT, 1921, - BY NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION. - - COPYRIGHT, 1921, - BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. - - Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1921. - - Press of - J. J. Little & Ives Company - New York, U. S. A. - - - - -LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY - -A STUDY - - -Louise Imogen Guiney was born in Boston on January 17, 1861, and died -at Chipping Campden, England, on November 2, 1920. Of Chipping Campden -she had, in 1913, done, in a few strokes, a beguiling little picture -comforting now to hang in the mind beside that stark record of her -death: - -It is, she says, “a stone-built paradise of a village not far from -Oxford. There is an April wind blowing, and forty-three roses adorn -one cottage doorway just out of sight from here. The old collie and I -had a walk yesterday, and I dipped my stick in Shakespeare’s Avon at -Fledbury.” - -This was the woman, yet not much changed in high intent and gayest -vagabondage from the girl New England—and, indeed, this western -world—uniquely loved. Still, to us, is she a figure of bright -beginnings and the swiftest road to her is that backward pathway to her -youth. - -Her father, General Patrick Robert Guiney, a soldier of the Civil War, -was her exemplar and her adoration, and his death an overwhelming -grief. “My _preux chevalier_ of a father,” she was proud to call -him, in a quick flaming up of passionate remembrance. Though he died -in her girlhood—and died of his wound, as it fed her ardent soul to -remember—she never ceased to feel a living allegiance to him. Her -plastic inner life had been molded by him, the picture her mind made -of him touched into enduring colors by the manner of his death. There -was between them that “marriage of true minds” which is more lastingly -productive than the tie of blood, and she was proud if you could -trace in her the reflex of those qualities she held highest in him: -his active patriotism, his slack hold on life, if it could be nobly -given, and a tenacity of devotion to the brave fight. Of her remoter -background she says, with a pleasing touch of swagger, a slightest -waving of the plume: - -“My grandfather and great gran’, too, were ‘out’ in the ’98; and the -old man had been ‘out’ in the ’45. I hope to make his acquaintance in -the sojer-boy’s Paradise, which is my bourne, if I be good.” - -In one of her earliest essays, “A Child in Camp,” she makes her bow -thus, with a pretty grace: - -“Like the royal personages in the drama, I was ushered on the stage of -life, literally, ‘with flourish of trumpets.’ The Civil War was at its -bursting point, the President calling for recruits: it was impertinent -of me, but in that solemn hour I came a-crowing into the world. And -since I was born under allegiance, a lady whom I learned to love with -incredible quickness, - - ‘O bella Libertà! O bella!’ - -rocked my fortunate cradle.” - -This was Irish stock with a strain of English, Scots and French, a -quicksilver blend of buoyancy and happy wit, duly tempered by a special -potency of Gallic grace with its apprehension of the _mot juste_ and -its infallible divination in forms of art. The road between the two -boundary dates of her life ran without much incident we vitally need to -know. Her portrait, painted here chiefly for the friends who marveled -at her and equally at their own luck in the fortunate incident of ever -so slight a knowledge of her, may best be done with the broad strokes -of a brush dipped in remembrance, against a blurred background of time -and place. She herself, in her life of Hurrell Froude, quotes the -expert dictum of George Tyrrell, who guessed what sort of biography is -likely to live longest: - -“We have cause to care less for a full inventory of the events which -make up a man’s life or for the striking nature of those events in -themselves, than for such a judicious selection and setting of them as -shall best bring out and explain that individuality which is our main -interest. We care less for what a man does and more for what he is; and -it is mainly as a key to what he is that we study the circumstances -which act upon him and the conduct by which he acts upon them.” - -Louise Imogen Guiney, poet, essayist and scholar, was an -extraordinarily limpid and valiant soul, whose death seems, in no -sense referable to our own responsive emotion, but one of bare fact -and calm inevitableness, a rebirth into a sort of present immortality -in letters, a new affirmation of response to her unique accomplishment -even among those to whom she had become only a name out of the -many-syllabled past. For the last third of her life she had been living -in England, with breaks of a few months each in America, and though -the remembered vision of her was not dimmed among us, still that -impalpable medium made up of the day’s demands, the helter-skelter of -this world of disordered strivings and later the wreckage of the war, -had risen between her and her western affiliations. The rude stumbling -servitors of life had crowded between her and the America she loved -with a passion lineally her own. Time and circumstance had been as -remorseless to her as to us. She was, in these later years, “every -day i’ the hour” when her somewhat unstable balance of health would -allow it, immersed in work, the scholar’s drudgery, the pain that ends -in perfectness: and yet it made her studious delight, this rescue of -half-forgotten names, unwearied research upon long trails where only -the spirit of the born antiquary never tires nor falters. The warm, -persistently light-hearted letters came to us less frequently; but -they came, unfailingly at Christmas, like gay holly sprays flung from -December to young January, as if in token of the lastingness of things. -She was so rare a creature, our common memories had been so mingled -of life and laughter, that she had become one of the certainties in a -fleeting and tumultuous world. We were stupidly used to her, as you are -used to sunrise or a star. Then without warning the news came, and the -word went from lip to hushed lip: “Lou Guiney is dead.” That was the -name, Lou Guiney, as it had been in the day of her youth. And at once -we became poignantly alive to her with a more sensitive appreciation, -a new awareness. We turned renewedly to her work and found in it a -more quickly breathing presence. We had been recalled, in a shock of -haste, to crown it before our own hands should be too lax to lift the -heaviness of laurel. So it was that she seemed to have stepped at once -into that porch of continued being which is the house of an immortality -of love and praise, the only thing the world has really to offer the -spirits of its dead. - -To recall the form and color of her youth is the eager task likely to -give her oldest friends their first imperfect solace. For it is the -pathetic human instinct to catch at the mantle of time past, as if -to assure itself of something in the web of life that holds. Those -who knew her at twenty and thirty need not err widely in their guess -at her at fifteen. For being one of that gay fellowship for whom “a -star danced” and who buoyantly refuse infection from the “hungry -generations” that “tread” us “down,” she stayed, in every sense, except -that of the disciplined mind and an acquired patience of the heart, -unaffectedly young. Age, the age of mere years, brutal to attack and -vanquish, could never, even in his ultimate assaults, if they had been -permitted him, have withered her bright fecundities of speech and -glance. For there is something in a certain quality of youth that will -not be downed. It is the livingness of a mind refreshed at wells of -immortalities. Of outward vain pretense—the affectation of a persisting -juvenility—it is divinely innocent. You could hardly imagine her, at -any age, without her girl’s grace, her mystic smile. A long-legged romp -in petticoats far beyond the milestones when childhood is apt to slink -away abashed before oncoming desires and dignities, she was early in -love with the sweet seclusion of books and equally with gay adventure -out of doors. The fields, on a day of spring, the river under skies -dull or bright, were her abiding joys. Her “winding Charles” was the -young navigator’s track to seas of pleasure. She - - “could not have enough of this sweet world.” - -Those who knew her soon enough to play with her the duplex game of -bodily delight and mental inebriety, remember hours so near the wild -sanity of natural life that only old Arcadian names are spacious -enough to bound them. There was the summer day of riotous vagary when -she and her young chum set forth to navigate the Charles, a block of -ice in the boat for adventurous but uncatalogued uses, and the delays -and mishaps of the voyage, and all the long, insect-thridded night -spent in the boat, the two inventive young heads on the ice which -was their diminishing pillow. There was the tramp across fields from -Auburndale (the Auburndale transmuted by James Jeffrey Roche, in a -gallant paraphrase, to “loveliest village of the prepossessing”) into -an iris-blue swamp, this after earnest debate whether it is a more -delirious fun to dash in “accoutred as you are,” to the ruination -of shoes and stockings or make the assault barefooted with skirts -kilted away from the blessed unction of black mud. To the everlasting -richness of memory, it was barefooted the two hoydens made their -plunge, and sank, with every sucking step, from sun-warmed mud above -to icy cool below. Wild with the bliss of it they waded furiously, and -the day was of so ineffable a light and texture as to lull them into -forgetfulness of the iris itself for which they had adventured, and it -was left behind, piles of withering beauty, entrancing, like fabrics -and translucent gems. Only that night were they remembered, and she who -was Lou Guiney wrote in magnificent surety: - - “You shall have them in Paradise.” - -There was the adventure of the field, in company with her dog, he “so -big and so unsophisticated,” and the imminence of a heifer with an -inherited prejudice against dogs of all degrees. - -“She’ll chase him,” said Lou Guiney, from her liberality to varying -events. “We shall have to run for it.” - -There was no conceivable need of crossing the field, and equally there -was nothing, to her simple fearlessness, in the least eccentric -in wilfully creating a situation you might have to use your wits -to abandon; and so infectious was her unthinking bravery that, as -occasion and she determined, you fought or ran. As it was prophesied, -so it was. The incursion was made, the heifer attacked in good form, -the trio fled in close formation, and the safe side of the fence was -vaultingly attained with no loss of heart but, gloriously, the guerdon -of a memory. All manner of robust childish adventures were natural in -her company. Fields were made to be invaded, swamps to be forded, and -rivers followed until you found they beat your endurance and were going -to make their harbor of the sea and you’d have to leave them to that -blest consummation and go home to supper. She was Atalanta at a race -in the days when a heart, as yet untired, backed her to the limit. -In her reminiscent essay On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket, -when my gentleman had adroitly abstracted her purse and she almost -ran him down, she celebrates, with some just pride, “my legs (retired -race-horses, but still great at a spurt).” And her fearlessness, the -robust handmaid of reckless action, may have been an unthinking bravado -of youth; equally it may have been the result of a rapid fire of prayer -and answer between her and her defending saints. She anticipated -danger as little as a child. To entertain suspicion was to admit evil -company to her inviolate mind. But, from whatever delicately abstruse -causes, she wore a brave decorum of courage, a feather in the cap, a -sword of high behavior. On lonely roads she would walk unconcerned, -her mind coursing over the centuries, her whimsical smile responsive -to warnings from the more circumspect and foreboding. She was the -child of nature, the child of God; should she quake in a world which -was, though uncoveted, her inheritance? Then, as in later life, she -sometimes seemed to be walking through “worlds not realized,” “whether -in the body or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth.” And this is -no matter for wonder. Thin silvern echoes from the past were always -chiming on her inward ear, majestic syllables drew on her imaginings, -and while she dwelt on “old, unhappy, far-off things” the new wine of -her youth and the immediate loveliness of this present life mingled an -intoxicating cup. And suddenly the spell of the past would fall from -her, and she would be as irresponsibly alive to the bright beauties of -the challenging day as a dryad on holiday out of her tree. - -As a girl, she was uniquely dear to the older men and women pleasurably -stirred by the literary event of her early blossoming into essays -and verse, and charmed anew, when they had found her out in her shy -fastnesses, by the unstudied simplicities of her modest behavior. Mrs. -James T. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett were hers admiringly, Mrs. Louise -Chandler Moulton, known by the affectionate brevet of Godmam, adopted -her into a special sanctity of literary and personal regard, and T. W. -Parsons hailed her as a compeer with whom he was eager to count over -the pure coin out of their scholarly acquisition. It was he who, in -some form of words not to be precisely recalled, confirmed her right -to legitimacy in a bright succession in the arts, by telling her she -was, in the genius of her, “Hazlitt’s child.” Edmund Clarence Stedman, -Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Richard Watson Gilder, Henry Mills Alden, gave -her work that generous welcome the noblesse of any art have in waiting -for the acolyte bringing the cup new filled. And _les jeunes_, poets -or pretenders, were hers to command. There were banners waving; only -this was not in the fashion of present day acclaim when a new actor -challenges his due. These were the dark chaplets and fragrant posies -the Muses love: no canopies and red carpets and the blare of jazz. -There were individual voices, low-pitched, grave, and their verdict -holds. Time may have snowed it under and his jealous lichen sought to -eat it up, but still it holds. - -In those early years she published a bit of work, anonymous but -signalized by her unique charm, and a magnate of the critical world -saluted it. - -“Your praise,” she wrote him, “is a charming Cinderella slipper, and -here’s my shy foot to fit it.” - -To rehearse the names that were her sponsors at this entrance into -recognition would give you a brilliant list, with hardly a gap, of -the intellectuals of some thirty to thirty-five years gone. In her -simplicity of response to this rare quality of praise, her genius of -fancy and acquisition flowing, like a magic ichor, through the veins of -her artless Americanism, there was something as new as it was piquing. -She belonged to the “dewy beginnings” of a fresh decade of literature, -a phase authoritative and unique. If her head was not turned by the -response she got to the fine timidities of her first achievement, it -was because that symmetrical treasury of perfectly classified fact -and fancy was permanently set, eyes to the past, where dwell the -ever-living forerunners of literary glories, the authentic names that -are “eternal blazon,” the exemplar and despair of lesser men. She was -timid, not before the contemporary critic, but the great witnesses -of all time—simply, and in her reverent mind tremulously, a child of -promise, heir to those old authentic glories, but not presuming on that -lineage. Tremendously believed in, she trod her earth lightly, yet -becomingly, and carried her full cup with steady hands. No taint of -ambition was in her, no trace of the base alloy of prize-getting and -wearing. She had seen the “cloud capp’d towers” of the halls of light -where the blessed everlastingly dwell, she had guessed at the shades -and green valleys, the refuge of those “ordained to fail,” and she knew -thus early, through reverent intuition, that “it has become almost an -honor not to be crowned.” Even then at the beginning, when chaplets -were being woven for her, she might have written that later recital of -her secular creed: - - “To fear not possible failure - Nor covet the game at all.” - -At that time the game was in her hands: the game of youth and gayety -and a blameless resolve to make the most of it all in the only way the -great unseen censors, the Fates that spin and weave, allow. - -She was a goodly picture of girlhood, Diana not so likely to be -enamoured of Endymion as sandalled for the chase. Not tall, yet -long-legged enough to give her advantage on the road or the English -downs, she had a free grace of movement, untrammeled by the awkwardness -of fear. Even so early, she was slightly deaf, and one of her prettiest -individual poses—yet how unstudied!—was, standing, bent slightly -forward like Atalanta ready for the race, the rounded cup of her palm -behind her ear, beseeching almost whimsically in the low voice that -was half whisper without its sibilance: “Please!” Her misfortune was -not a blemish; she made it a grace. Over that and the drawback of eyes -ineffectual without the help of glasses she never wasted a breath -of impatience: she adopted instead a humorous acceptance of these -latter extraneous servitors as personified faculties of her own. The -act of vision she ascribed to her spectacles alone, and took a never -diminished joy in reminding you how Thackeray did it before her. - -“If one dastard of a misplaced comma has escaped me,” she writes, of -printers’ proofs corrected to the last degree of accuracy, “these -spectacles fail to find it.” - -Upon one victorious error, chased down and down and still cropping up -in the last proof, she declares: - -“Tragedy! how could it have come about? I’d give my spectacles to know.” - -Probably nobody so unspoiled and humble in willingness to share -the common lot, or with less respect for the subterfuge called -temperament, ever had less practical acquaintance with the domestic -functions exalted into dull shibboleths, or was more irreconcilably -estranged from the art of the _modiste_ and the rites whereby the -incomprehensible gods of “style” are commonly propitiated. If you could -boil an egg acceptably and enliven it with an agreeable quota of salt -and pepper, she would have made you _cordon bleu_ on the spot. That -the sleeve of a garment could be removed by the simple adjunct of a -pair of scissors and replaced again with a symmetry more conformable -to the arm, was a mystery before which she frankly quailed, and any -force of self-confidence she might have brought to bear went down -like nine-pins. Running rivers of verse, pinnacles of dates, names, -cosmogonies of thrones, principalities and powers, found room in that -exquisitely ordered world which was her brain: yet you could throw her -into a cold sweat of apprehension by confronting her with some homely -task or implement as familiar to the Marthas of civil life as the use -of fork and spoon. And this was no affectation of sensitiveness to -crumpled rose leaves, no arrogance of privilege. She had an appetite as -responsive to good things as if their chemistry had not been as dark to -her as that of lost elixirs, and for some inconspicuous ribbon of her -dress she would cherish an affection almost poignant in its childlike -intensity. She was herself alternately petrified and convulsed by -accumulating instances of her unfitness for the monstrous requisitions -of a concrete world. Returning again and again to the assault, she -is uniformly worsted. She sees, with an eye momentarily sharpened -to recognition, in a modest kitchen, the commonest adjuncts to -dishwashing, and leaves early that she may buy the duplicates of the -magic implements and set them up before the gods of home. And forthwith -she writes, in a rollicking delight: - -“And behold! their like had been in this house from of old, and I was -subject to much scorn.” - -Helpful kindness itself, she dashes into town to buy a flannel wrapper -for an exacting old lady for whom she has a kindness and who is sick -and destitute, and next day explains, between helpless gusts, “those -spectacles” dashed with tears: - -“And lo! it should have been a female garment and I bought a male.” - -And these things are to be remembered of her, not because the ox may -take brute pleasure in deploring the delicacy of his brother, the -race-horse, not only that they made her an irresistibly fascinating -blend of power and helplessness, but because her natural inability to -deal with the drudgery that smooths the way of life bore hard upon -her in those later years when she was like a butterfly bound upon the -wheel of this difficult world. She was simply a creature of highly -specialized aptitudes, and the eyes of her mind, they that needed -no fortifying lenses, were set so steadily upon the brightness of -an inward achieving that they could never be focused for the clear -perception of a certain type of immediate needs. To the inequalities -of the road of usage over which her feet obediently traveled, she was -blind, unless indeed the road began to wave green branches, and there -were vistas of beauty, and the birds sang. Then the human awoke in her -and also sang in untrammeled lusti-hood and she was at once that earth -spirit who gathered iris and squandered and forgot it, yet knew all -such forgettings should be hers in Paradise. But even then she was the -vagabond of the road as she conceived it: a matter of smoothly running -caravans and magic camp fires,—not corners of ingenious torment where -one shaped garments and boiled eggs. - -And this antagonism was inevitable: for the earth, as it is made, is -forever hostile to that other earth, immortal, invisible, where alone -the highly imaginative can live without nostalgia. If they have to -fight the rude conditions of the visible world, they do it pining “for -what is not.” The imps of time and place have an implacable enmity for -the angels of thought and pure imagination and hinder them at every -step. They devote their mischievous activities to the clipping of -wings, especially of pinions tipped with rose or gold. And the facts of -the case are forever on their side. Man must be fed. And unless he has -been born the darling of sheer luck, he must set his hand to wresting -from the earth the bare right to live. The product of Louise Guiney’s -genius was not, in any large sense, marketable. The most fantastically -hopeful of partisans could not have predicted for her work any valid -recognition whatever, save from the few who have themselves caught the -gleam of Hesperidean fruit and know by natal wisdom that this is no -gold to be minted into coin. Inevitably she was among the - - “delicate spirits pushed away - In the hot press of the noonday.” - -And she had the open palm. Money ran away from her like a rillet -down a slope. She would give beyond prudence and reason, and gladly -acquiesce in her own resultant leanness. She demanded as little of that -complexity of cunningly ornamented indulgence which is luxury as her -own saints, and although she could not, without a distress deadening -to her legitimate activities, fight with any efficacy the battle of -keeping the world a house of ordered rooms, she made brave thrusts at -it. Appointed to the post-office at Auburndale, and later to a position -in the Boston Public Library, she briskly clapped harness on her horses -of the sun and was anxiously intent on doing well. But the only road -for her was still the path of escape to the open, to the free fields of -thought and the fellowship of the written word. - -Hers was a youth of picturesque loyalties, one of them to the -lost cause of the Stuarts, a confessed congenital bias. The Irish -Jacobities, of whom there were many, had “claimed the Stuarts as of the -Milesian line, fondly deducing them from Fergus.” Born into that direct -succession of race loyalty, she was in addition, (and this seems to be -the true argument) incalculably beguiled by the sheer fascination of -that luckless house. Her Inquirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts -of His Late Majesty King Charles the Second ties you a pretty nosegay -of the oak twig and the white rose. How should she not have loved -Charles II., if only that he was, in her own words, “a choice wag?” -“Charles might have confessed with Elia, ‘How I like to be liked, and -what don’t I do to be liked!’” Certainly His ill-starred Majesty could -have desired no liking more whole-hearted, albeit discriminating, more -merrily tolerant than hers. He had cast his magnetic spell upon her pen -and it turned to some good-natured vindicating of his varied parts. -Perhaps she never took her adherence very seriously, off the printed -page. She was beguiled by picturesqueness, not so much concerned with -lineal rights; perhaps, also, it tickled an impish fancy to repudiate -the “dull Georgian farce.” But Charles never had a more humorous -apologist, one who gave him full value as an apostle of good taste and -of a “wheedling charm.” - -The sum of her appraisement is of a captivating genius who had found -himself “in the king business” and got addled and spoiled. And who -knows how she must have loved him for his adaptability to portraiture -of a pen like hers, and for the rush and glow of the Restoration, the -very circumstances that inspired her Hazlitt to his glorious inventory -of rustling silks and waving plumes, of gems and people! The time and -the gay immortalities of it go to her head. - -“There was an astonishing dearth of dull people; the bad and bright -were in full blossom, and the good and stupid were pruned away.” - -She adores “the sworded poets of the Civil Wars, with their scarcely -exerted aptitude for the fine arts, whose names leave a sort of -star-dust along the pages of the anthologies.” And it was, this -star-dust of the period, immediate to one of her own dreams, a labor -she delighted in: the making of a perfect anthology of the seventeenth -century. - -Her first book was Songs at the Start (1884) and the first collected -essays Goose-Quill Papers (1885). The essays, despite a wilful -archaism, an armored stiffness of light attack learned out of library -shelves, are astonishingly mature for a pen so young—if by youth or -age we mean the mere cumulative sum of time passed. Indeed, the author -thought well enough of the scintillant little papers to include two of -them, An Open Letter to the Moon, and On Teaching One’s Grandmother to -Suck Eggs, in her later Patrins. You have but to love Louise Guiney to -find Goose-Quill Papers a jovial self-betraying little book to recur -to when you long for her whimsical face again or the cascading gamut -of her laugh. It is spiced with playfulness, a learned playfulness, -it must be owned, and yet, if you know her, you know also how much -learning was waiting in her teeming mind, eager to get into the book -and cram it, cover to cover, and you are grateful for the sense of -just values that let you off so gently. For she had one of those -fructifying minds which absorb like a sponge; everything they draw in -breeds something else, and the two, fact and mother wit, breed again -until you are swept along on a stream of rushing lineage. And over her -happy selection of topics quaint and gay, her own illuminating humor -plays like a thread of gold in tapestry moved lightly by a wind. We may -not, of course, actually assume, so objective is she even then, that -her whimsies of the first person are literally self-betraying; but they -do sometimes open a window upon her as we know her, the gay relish of -life that was hers, the ardor for the great game of chasing a happy -fancy to its born destiny of an ultimate end, and stroking it into the -gentle complaisance of the willing captive; the healthy, untrammeled -revolt against bugaboos “nature itself cannot endure”—notably -mathematics when she “roars you” like any lion (albeit smiling behind -his whiskers as begging to remind you he has no idea of resorting to -the argument of claws). - -When she has mounted her gaily caparisoned jennet of unforced humor, -she takes the world by inversion; you shall follow her circumspectly, -or her steed will throw up his heels in your face and gallop off in the -dust of his own making. “My novitiate page,” she ruefully confesses, -invoking the influence of Hazlitt, “smelled hard of that dear name, -likewise of Browne, Taylor, and Cowley, and Lamb, and of one R. L. -S., a Romany chal then utterly unknown, whom I had found in secret -and in secret worshiped.” It was a brave beginning, this slender book -of little essays, and it was dedicated to Oliver Wendell Holmes. How -charmingly, with what engaging gallantry he must have taken it! - -To leap the fecund years to the Patrins of her later youth is to -follow the same whimsical and reflective vein. This book, deriving its -fortunate title from patrin, “a Gypsy trail: handfuls of leaves or -grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to denote, to those behind, the -way which they have taken,” is primarily for him whom reading “maketh a -full man.” The style, with a scholarship better tempered and easier to -carry, being, as it were, woven into chain mail, not the armor of her -earliest adventuring, is the despair of the less agile and instructed -mind. It is tinctured with her personal quality, and is incredibly -rich, the richer when you return to it after absence and intercourse -with more immediate things, to find fruits of her commerce with far -off civilisations and loving sentience to the “hills of home.” Like -the buyer in Goblin Market, she drips with juices from the very fruits -of life, antidote for our dull ambitions: the years “wasted in prison -on casuist industries.” It is full of a not too quaint and bookish but -an altogether delicious persiflage. She praises the scholar’s right -to “fall back with delight upon a choice assortment of ignorances.” -Yet, with whatever innocent suavity she puts it, you suspect her of -having few scholarly ignorances of her own to fall back upon. So -absolutely four-square was her tower of recondite knowledge that you -imagine her as having some ado to prevent its shadow from falling on -the reader less equipped and terrifying him into escaping her spell -altogether. It is a book of praise. Most of all does she advertise the -great narcotic of out-of-doors: the enchanting diversion of walking -until the rhythm of the first arduous stretch dulls into the monotony -of muscles settling into their slowly apprehended task. She betrays -an unimpeachable bodily sanity. Though urban by birth, she is also, -through adoptive kinship of Pan and all the nymphs, a sylvan, to her “a -dear Elizabethan word.” You may find her beside the sea until conscious -response to it ebbs into that trance of wonder which is the withdrawal -of the soul into ultimate chambers, the inviolable retreat whence it -comes forth washed clean of the injuries time has dealt it. She sings -a remorseful dirge over the “defeated days” of captive animals. She -quickens her pace, at moments, to the measures of a hilarious mind. -Throughout that mischievous “encourager of hesitancy,” the Harmless -Scholar, she all but dances. - -“The main business of the scholar,” she informs you, with a wicked -twinkle behind her spectacles, “is to live gracefully, without mental -passion, and to get off alone into a corner for an affectionate view of -creation.” - -This she concedes you as an egg warranted to hatch into something you -don’t expect, or a bomb likely to burst harmlessly, if disconcertingly, -under your chair. For she knows, by diabolic instinct, just what your -idea of the scholar is: the conserver of chronologies and sapient -conclusions fit chiefly to be waved in pedagogical celebrations or -trumpeted at authors’ readings. No such sterile destiny as this for -her, as she shall presently “fructify unto you.” - -“Few can be trusted with an education.” This she tells you with a -prodigious lightness of self-assurance. “The true scholar’s sign-manual -is not the midnight lamp on a folio. He knows; he is baked through; all -superfluous effort and energy are over for him. To converse consumedly -upon the weather, and compare notes as to ‘whether it is likely to hold -up tomorrow,’—this, says Hazlitt, ‘is the end and privilege of a life -of study.’” - -Mark you how humbly she proceeds, this multi-millionaire of the mind. -Her intellectual barns are bursting with fatness, her cattle are on -a thousand hills; yet she spares you not only the inventory of her -acquisitions but any hint of her respect for them. One is smilingly -glad to note that sometimes the challenge of the world’s intellectual -penury is really too much for her, and she cannot help rushing to the -rescue with armies of notable names and historic data. Still she did -converse consumedly upon the weather also, and it is one of the happy -incredibilities of her delightful disposition that she never repudiated -the intercourse of honest minds, even if they were dull. She adroitly -refrained from tossing them the ball she knew they could never return, -though with a curve imperfectly transcribed. She talked with them -about dogs and mushrooms—for there also she was sapient in a lore that -could be worn lightly and the more easily concealed—and the merciful -recipe for killing a lobster painlessly before you plunge him in the -ensanguining pot, of kittens and young furry donkeys and the universal -boon of weather. And she had a store of absurdities, never anecdotes -in the dire sense of cut-and-dried obstructors of the traffic between -mortal minds, but odd quips and spontaneous incongruities she was ready -to shower you withal. No less pretentious scholar ever walked a world -more suavely aware of her gracious charm, more happily oblivious of -the breaches she could make in worn conventions if she brought up her -artillery. - -The personal revelations in Patrins are unmistakable to those who knew -her. She writes On the Delights of an Incognito. Who can fail to see L. -I. G. herself in the person of the hypothetical R., walking home after -“the day at a library desk” where he “had grown hazy with no food and -much reading?” And passing the house where he was always delightedly -welcome and where he loved to be, he looked in at the shining dinner -table where sat the family, unconscious of him and yet—he knew it—only -to be the merrier if he dropped in, and “hurried on, never quite so -paradoxically happy in his life as when he quitted that familiar -pane without rapping, and went back to the dark and the frost, -unapprehended, impersonal, aberrant, a spirit among men.” For Louise -Guiney, prettily as she conformed herself to accepted rules, was by -nature a vagrom under conventional roofs, a wandering breeze, an addict -of fern seed, a cloud, a rainbow fancy, whatever could make itself, as -speedily as might be, impalpable to the eye and only a memory to the -too-inquisitive mind. As to the inner philosophy of her, the cup of -strength she kept ever by her in intimate stillnesses, there it stands -in another essay, The Precept of Peace. This bears much dwelling on, -not only by the mystic but the honest mind distraught in the terrifying -assaults of modern life. How to serve the world while renouncing it, -how to possess your own soul, in the peace that lets it grow and ripen -seed! She is in love, not with indifference, but the brave behavior it -endows you with. - -“A very little non-adhesion to common affairs,” she tells you, “a -little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide -the moral immunity which is the only real estate.” - -A benevolent receptiveness surrounds her. She lets you interrupt her -because you cannot actually reach her inner strongholds; she is at -heart and head so engrossed in intimate concerns so far from you that -you cannot possibly borrow or steal the key to burst in and stumble -about in them. Out of her general kindliness she will deal gently with -you, hospitably even, that, being dulled and satisfied, you may go -away the sooner and leave her to the only aims worth, to her special -aptitudes, pursuing eagerly. This, it must be remembered, was the -gay bravado of youth, with so much in its treasury it could afford -to squander time and a rain of friendliness on even the invading -bore. The day came later when the world jostled her and she had to -double and turn to avoid it; but always she cherished a philosophy -of courteous endurance. Personages nobly nurtured learn early not to -whimper. So, when Demos finds a use for their heads, they die with -a grace seemingly reserved for kings and martyrs. And the use Demos -finds for the heads of the nobly born in the arts is to weary them -with much crowning and to sap them with the foolish requisition that -they shall appear in public arenas. But the great brotherhood our L. I. -G. subscribes to “hold the world but as the world” and make no outcry -over these hindrances to a consecrated life. They do not shy at uncouth -contraptions on the road. They have adopted the blinders of a mind -inwardly withdrawn, and—to o’erleap the metaphor!—they smile in their -daily dying. This book, Patrins, smiles all through. It informs you, -chiefly by an innocently indirect implication, that the phenomenon of -being, while it may be taken by schoolmen and moralists for a balance -between good and ill, is a whimsical business, and the more you see of -it the more firmly you will determine to view it aslant, with an eye to -pleasing paradox. - -As the tree of her mental life grew and broadened into wider air, it -cast a shade not even her votaries were always zealous to penetrate. -She tended more and more to the obscure, the far-off and dimly seen. -In her biographical work she was the champion of lost causes, the -restorer of names dropped out of rubricated calendars through sheer -inattention of an unlearned world, or rusted by time in chantries no -longer visited. She would sail, not for those known islands on every -map where harbors are charted and the smallest craft can coal and -water, but for some lost Atlantis, even if she might only moor in its -guessed neighborhood and hear, at least, the plash of ripples over it. -She was always listening, the generous hand to the responsive ear, to -echoes from “forgotten or infrequent lyres.” - -“Apollo,” she says, “has a class of might-have-beens whom he loves: -poets bred in melancholy places, under disabilities, with thwarted -growth and thinned voices; poets compounded of everything magical and -fair, like an elixir which is the outcome of knowledge and patience, -and which wants, in the end, even as common water would, the essence of -immortality.” - -It is not quite easy to tell why she delighted so absolutely in digging -for ore in spots of incredible difficulty. It was not that she was -ill-grounded in the greater, more entirely accepted cults. Shakespeare -was hers and Milton, and in Dante she did authoritative work. And it is -idle to wonder whether, so many of the big critical jobs being done, -she had a keen eye to the market value of such unconsidered trifles -as were left. The practical worth of a task would never have been an -incentive; it might have been a deterrent. Like Mangan, there was -that in her which bade her not to cross the street to advance her own -interests; it persuaded her to what seemed even wilful adoption of -the losing cause. (That she did, in many senses, harness herself to -drudgery, as life drove her the more pitilessly to the wall, is the -more to her lasting renown; by nature she was single in devotion to -the tasks she loved and ready to forswear the body’s ease.) Nor was -her attachment to the imperfectly known by any means the pleasure of -the chase, the exhilaration of the hunt when dates and genealogical -and critical sequences had “gone away” from her hounds of scent and -swiftness. It was simply true that she had an inextinguishable love -for the souls “ordained to fail.” As it made no difference to her -whether a lasting line of verse were hers or another’s, so she had the -patience of the born annalist in picking up and conserving every least -coin of the realm of letters or of manly and romantic deeds. - -One of the floating bits of wreckage she gave a hand to confirming in -the illustrious place given him by a few discerning minds, was Mangan, -the uniquely brilliant author of an authoritative version of My Dark -Rosaleen, a perverse and suffering soul, prey to a blackness of mind -and the Nemesis of his own wandering will. There were “two Mangans,” -she quotes from a previous biographer, “one well known to the Muses, -the other to the police; one soared through the empyrean and sought the -stars, the other lay too often in the gutters of Peter Street and Bride -Street.” - -He was a worshipper of that which is above us, and prey to what is -below, the body’s slave, the poor brain’s mistaken ministrant, striving -alternately to fire it to new apprehensions and drug it with a despair -of its own possibilities. In this Study, James Clarence Mangan, (1897) -Louise Guiney says: - -“One can think of no other, in the long disastrous annals of English -literature, cursed with so monotonous a misery, so much hopelessness -and stagnant grief. He had no public; he was poor, infirm, homeless, -loveless; travel and adventure were cut off from him, and he had no -minor risks to run; the cruel necessities of labor sapped his dreams -from a boy; morbid fancies mastered him as the rider masters his horse; -the demon of opium, then the demon of alcohol, pulled him under, body -and soul, despite a persistent and heart-breaking struggle, and he -perished ignobly in his prime.” - -Could a combination of evils have been imagined more poignantly -appealing to this young champion of shipwrecked souls? My Dark Rosaleen -alone was enough to enlist her generous pen. As Mangan himself rescued -it from the indifferent fame of an archaic fragment, a norm of beauty, -and clothed it with the flying draperies of a glorifying fancy, so -she unfolded its history and holds it up to new appreciation in a -world not given to dwell upon the historically obscure. Mangan, she -tells us, “was a pattern of sweet gratitude and deference, and left -his art to prosper or perish as heaven should please.” How this moved -her as an appeal she understood! for she also was of those who sow -their seed in the wild garden of the world’s indifference and pass on, -meekly unaware of any right of mankind, born to heavenly destinies, -to stay and gather. He was dear to her. She treated him tenderly, yet -his strange humors moved her to a smile. He was “so ludicrous and so -endeared a figure that one wishes him but a thought in Fielding’s -brain, lovingly handled in three volumes octavo and abstracted from the -hard vicissitudes of mortality.” - -This Study of hers reflects, with an especial clarity, the form and -color of her own critical genius. In the comparison of masterpieces and -the measurement of values by accepted standards, she was at ease in a -large activity. If we would understand her method, we may look on it -here. The shallow conception of the critic’s task, as an expression -of personal preference, was not even germane to the richness of -preparation she brought to even the most inconsiderable reviewing. Here -are no snap judgments, ingenuous betrayal of temperamental likings. -The genesis of criticism is the tool in her hands. Lead her to the -slenderest rill of poetry and, out of her witch-hazel magic, she -locates the spring that fed it. She bows before “the few whose senses -are quick at literary divination.” In this Study learning ran, not -wild, but at a splendid even pace over the road of past achievement, -saluting guideposts by the way. Literary resemblances, the least -intentional, are rarest joys to her. She is enchanted to find some of -Mangan’s lighter verse rattling on like a Gilbertian libretto. - -“Behold the exhumed precursor of The Mikado!” - -Nothing rewards her more indubitably than the discovery of even a -quasi-lineage, a shadow of likeness not to be developed into the -actual relationship supported by time and place. She does not often -floor you with unimpeachability of dates, but she knows the very -complexion of her time, “his form and color.” She remembers what wings -beat the air of fortunate decades, dropping pinions more than one -imitator snatched in falling and wore brazenly in his cap. She can -rehearse the unbroken descent of metres. Her parallel between Mangan -and Poe, their dependence on the haunting adjunct of the refrain, does -revolve about chronology; but chiefly she relies upon the convictions -of her divining mind. She compares the “neck and neck achievements -of Mangan and Poe.” She traces both back to the colossus Coleridge, -with his wells of color. His was the spring of youth, and they bore -away full flagons. It is hardly possible to overrate her value to the -student of literature in these learned but uncharted flights all over -the visible sky of the periods where her subjects moved. Literature, -she knows, is a species of royal descent. The Titans may not live to -see the faces of their own children, yet out of those rich fecundities -of authentic utterance children are born and show trace of august -lineage. And it is hers, the “abstract and brief chronicler” of values, -to find it. - -To Louise Guiney, there were two transcending realities: poetry and -what men call, with varying accent, religion. She believed in poetry -as, in the old sense, an ecstasy. She loved archaic phrases and grieved -because fit words should perish, mourning them as men would mourn if, -believing there were children of immortal lineage among them, they -discovered these could die. To her there were archetypes of beauty, -the living heavenly substance we have, with an unshaken prescience, -learned to call undying. Wandering evanescences, we persuade them down -to us or snatch at them and cage them in our heavier atmosphere with -the hope, sometimes bewilderingly justified, of their singing on and -on. One condition of our even hearing the beat of those wings bending -their swallow flight to the responsive mind, is the high vibration in -ourselves, the intense activity of what we call imagination. And this -vibration is so often the effervescence of youth, the overplus of a -richness of physical life—the speed of the blood, a quick sensibility -of the brain—that after the pulse slows and the brain responds less -eagerly the poet sings no more; or he clouds his verse with moralities -and loads it with the stiff embroidery of intellectual conceits. Louise -Guiney’s singing life was not long, because, after the impulse, in its -first capricious spontaneity, had left her, she did not urge it back -again. It would have been impossible for her, at any period, to select -desirable subjects for poetry as the landscape painter marks a lovely -spot in his mind’s eye, to return with tubes and brush. Once she did -own to the tempting exercise of composing a poem in cold blood. It -turned out to be compact of beauties appealing to the public mind, and -she viewed it thenceforth from a hurt and wistful wonder. You might say -she cherished a distaste for it, as being a child of indirect lineage, -a mood disloyal to the greater gods. She was ever the acolyte in that -temple, never beseeching at the altar, but serving it. For she was of -those pilgrims of destiny who are perpetually referring this world to -the pattern of worlds existing before time began. To her, poetry is an -unspoken allegiance to the very essence of mysticism, magic, glamourie. -It is the echo from far hills of space. It is never without the -witchery of the unknown, the guessed-at, the adored but never seen. Not -all its dances are woven under the sky we scan chiefly for the weather, -but in the elusive gleaming where not we but our dreams are denizens. -It is perpetually looking from “magic casements.” It brings the -twilight feeling. It may not be melancholy, yet it inspires melancholy. -It may not be joyous, yet the pleasure it awakens is more exquisite -than it has words to celebrate. These are matters far from the market -where we buy and sell and measure our worth by cleverness in exploiting -it. These are courts where our poet’s “shy foot” dared penetrate with -the confidence of a daughter of the house. - -From Songs at the Start to Happy Ending (1909) this last bearing -her stamp as comprising “the less faulty half of all the author’s -published verse,” her work hardly varies in a certain cool, limpid, -sometimes austere content. Songs at the Start is distinctly unlike the -familiar books of perfervid and unbridled youth. Almost childlike, in -some instances, the songs are always restrained within due measure. -The gusts of a too tempestuous heart, the revolt of youth against -a world ready made for it, are not hers. She might be the child of -a pagan ardency of simple joy, singing to the echo in some waking -spring. These are the dewy recognitions of a world “not realized.” The -faults she showed in this first printing are the ones that plagued her -throughout, though she recognized them with a rueful self-dispraise and -mock extravagance of remorse. They are the infrequent lapses of a not -invariably musical ear. To the end, she would, from stanza to stanza, -unconsciously change her cadence. It might be a fault for her to -redress; but who among her lovers would complain of it now? It was an -individual flaw, the little human imperfection like a mole on beauty’s -cheek; the too studied reverse of it might have been something not -only “icily regular” but “splendidly null.” - -The White Sail, part legend and part lyric, with an academic ballast -of sonnets, sang out in fuller tone, though with no less individual a -measure. The legends ring curiously scholastic in these days when the -industrious versifier celebrates the small beer of his own “home town” -in untrained eccentricities all too faithful to his villageous mood. -Her legends were the tall pines of the fairy grove she wandered in. -There were pillared aisles and porticos, not New England dooryards, -tapestries shaken by winds of the past, not leaves, red and gold, -blown her from the swamps and hills she knew. Yet her bookish fetters -were straining from within, and in Daybreak she sings out with a more -individual note, a faint far music, as if some young chorister dared -part the antiphonal ranks of ordered service and try the song he heard -that morning when he and the lark together saluted the hills of dawn. - - “The young sun rides the mists anew; his cohorts follow from the sea. - Let Aztec children shout and sue, the Persian lend a thankful knee: - Those glad Auroral eyes shall beam not anywhere henceforth on me. - - “Up with the banners on the height, set every matin bell astir! - The tree-top choirs carouse in light; the dew’s on phlox and lavender: - Ah, mockery! for, worlds away, the heart of morning beats with her.” - -This she did not reclaim for the authorized last printing, and none can -say whether she would let us snatch it out of its young obscurity. But -it is so unmistakably one of the first trial flights of the pure lyric -in her, it sings so melodiously, that the mere chronology of her work -demands it. In the same book beats the haunting refrain: - - “Youth is slipping, dripping, pearl on pearl, away.” - -And as you are about to close the door on this virginal chamber of -April airs and cloistral moonlight, of ordered books breathing not -leather only but the scent of “daffodilean days,” your heart rises up, -for here is The Wild Ride, a poem which first beat out its galloping -measure in a dream, and continued, with the consent of her own critical -mind, to the last book of all. The beginning and the end are like -nothing so much as the call of youth and the answer of undaunted age. -It was, one may guess, her earliest lyric runaway, the first time she -lost herself in the galloping rush of a stanza’s trampling feet. - - “I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses - All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, - All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing. - - “Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle - Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion, - With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him. - - “The trail is through dolour and dread, over crags and morasses; - There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us: - What odds? We are Knights of the Grail, we are vowed to the riding. - - “Thought’s self is a vanishing wing, and joy is a cobweb, - And friendship a flower in the dust, and glory a sunbeam: - Not here is our prize, nor, alas! after these our pursuing. - - “A dipping of plumes, a tear, a shake of the bridle, - A passing salute to this world and her pitiful beauty: - We hurry with never a word in the track of our fathers. - - “(I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses - All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses, - All night, from their stalls, the importunate pawing and neighing.) - - “We spur to a land of no name, out-racing the storm-wind; - We leap to the infinite dark, like sparks from the anvil. - Thou leadest, O God! All’s well with Thy troopers that follow.” - -In The Roadside Harp (1893) (and this she calls, as late as 1911, “my -best book”) she is in full swing of that individual color and form -of verse that were hers thenceforth, hall-marked, inimitable, of a -delicate yet imperishable fragility of loveliness, unique as the hand -they were written in. Here sounds her own true note. Here were more -plainly distinguishable the defined colors of the braided strands of -destiny that made her so rare a nature and were perhaps—it is well to -put it softly, this question—to hinder her in robustness and variety of -performance. Irish by birth, she had not to the full, what she finds -in Mangan, that “racial luxuriance and fluency.” And, like him, her -“genius is happier on Saxon than on Celtic ground.” She was too subject -to varied impulses to be the exponent of one. Her love in letters ran -passionately to the Anglo-Saxon; the seventeenth century was her home. -She was devoutly Catholic, yet living fibres in her knew the earth as -it was in its unsymbolized freshness before the Great Deliverer came. - -“You are a natural Christian,” she wrote once to a friend poor in the -consolations of belief, “with a birthright of gladness and peace, -whether you seize it or not; whereas I am the other fellow, a bed-rock -pagan, never able to live up to the inestimable spiritual conditions to -which I was born.” - -This was humility only, no wavering from her transcending faith. Yet -the wholesome natural man in her was acutely sensitive to that earth -which saw the immortal gods. You find her listening, responsive, to -the far heard echoes of Greek harmony. She was ready with her cock to -Æsculapius, the tribute of her gentle allegiance to those kingly pagans -who loved the light of the sun and shrank from the “dishonor of the -grave,” who knew the face of Nemesis and were, above all, disciples of -the law of Aidôs, the negation of excess. In the rich exposition of -Gilbert Murray: - -“Aidôs implies that, from some subtle emotion inside you, some ruth or -shame or reflection, some feeling perhaps of the comparative smallness -of your own rights and wrongs in the presence of the great things of -the world, the gods and men’s souls and the portals of life and death, -from this emotion and from no other cause, amid your ordinary animal -career of desire or anger or ambition, you do, every now and then, at -certain places, stop.” - -Now this, of course, concerns emotion, conduct. But the same sense of -just limit concerns also art. Your emotion must be “recollected in -tranquillity” lest it drag the hysteric Muse into frenzied measures. We -must—stop. Louise Guiney knew this through a flawless intuition, but -she went pace by pace with the Greeks while they counselled her anew. -It is not merely her choice of Attic subjects, like Simoisius, or -the Alexandriana that are, we are told, so faithful in spirit, though -she had no Greek. It is that in this book we are renewedly conscious -of the oneness of mortal longing and earth loveliness, so tightly are -they entwined. Here is a sentience to the throes of that earth which -is not solely the earth set to man’s uses, but mysteriously made and -mysteriously continued, with its uncomprehended language of light and -dark and its ebb and flux eternally in sway. Christian in belief, she -was pagan in her listening nerves. And her harp, hung in the window -opening on what we call eternity, thrilled to many breezes. Being -Christian, she was, as in her life, all devotion, all pure obedience, -rapt celebrant of the story of the Birth and the Cross, a vowed Eremite -to the belief that counts all things loss, save One. Hands of diverse -angels reached out of the sky and touched her harp to song or Litany. -There was the spirit of an assured immortality. There was, too, the -voice of Erda, the Earth, crooning from the root caverns in abysses of -time past. The pagan heart of her, the heart that was still immovably -centred in the gentle certainties of Christ, is embedded in The Still -of the Year. She knows the earth, because she has entered into the -very spirit of created things and her mortal part suffers the pang of -awakening which, to the earth, is spring. But what is it to the soul? - - “Up from the willow-root - Subduing agonies leap; - The field-mouse and the purple moth - Turn over amid their sleep; - The icicled rocks aloft - Burn saffron and blue alway, - And trickling and tinkling - The snows of the drift decay. - Oh, mine is the head must hang - And share the immortal pang! - Winter or spring is fair; - Thaw’s hard to bear. - Heigho! my heart’s sick.” - -Some of the verse from this middle period is so fragile and austerely -tremulous, like bare boughs moved by a not unkindly wind, that you -are aware of what has, in another sense, been called “scantness.” -Not only does she adventure delicately in her shallop, she is fain -of archaic brevity and pauses that do unquestionably halt the -accompanying voyager, to his discomfiture. A Ballad of Kenelm was such -as they chanted “on a May morning” in other days than ours. It has the -consonance of prose trembling into verse. We are too luxurious for it. -We want to be borne along on a lilting wave, we who have not found it -possible to accommodate ourselves to the peg-leg-to-market of free -verse (what our poet herself once called, in a mischievous snap-shot of -judgment, “the rag-tag of _vers libres_”). Even the loving apostrophe -to Izaak Walton is more chant than song, justified rather by the spirit -than the form. One who knew her unceasing pains with verse and prose, -how a stanza could never count itself finished beyond possibility of -being smashed into unrecognizable fragments and remade, remembers this -as an instance of her ruthlessness to her children even after they -had grown up and gone their ways into the ultimate stronghold of the -printed page. Here the opening lines run: - - “What trout shall coax the rod of yore - In Itchen stream to dip?” - -Months after printing, the incorrigible dissonance of the two opening -words struck her and, having no smallest modicum of professional -vanity, she must needs admit a friend immediate to her to the excellent -fooling of the discovery, and went about shouting, between gusts of -mirth: “What trout! what trout!” - -The harsher the discord she could lend the unfortunate twain, the more -gustily she laughed, and in Happy Ending the choppy sea subsided into -unimpeachable cadence: - - “Can trout allure the rod of yore - In Itchen stream to dip?” - -But in The Roadside Harp, though her metres were sometimes inhospitable -to the ear unprepared, she did attain the topmost reaches of the hills -of words’ delight. The Two Irish Peasant Songs ran with a light step, -and a breath as sweet as the whispers over Ireland’s harp. Here also -is an imperishable beauty of a lyric, fit for some ecstatic anthology, -so rare in form and color that the listening ear scarce cares for the -meaning, so its music may go on and on. - - “When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken, - And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar, - Or when my lattice opens, before the lark hath spoken, - On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star, - - “I think of thee, (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!) - Whose great and noonday splendors the many share and see, - While sacred and forever, some perfect law is keeping - The late, the early twilight, alone and sweet for me.” - -What is the piper piping when the thin sweet sound comes down the -valley like water dripping from stair to rocky stair, or “petals from -blown roses on the grass”? You do not need to guess. You know it is -in absolute accord with the night breeze and the long shadows and the -hylas fluting in the year. It is music only, and all your heart answers -is: - - “Piper, pipe that song again.” - -Here, too, is that poignant lament, To a Dog’s Memory. - - “The gusty morns are here, - When all the reeds ride low with level spear; - And on such nights as lured us far of yore, - Down rocky alleys yet, and through the pine, - The Hound-star and the pagan Hunter shine; - But I and thou, ah, field-fellow of mine, - Together roam no more.” - -All Matthew Arnold’s musical place names in Thyrsis and The Scholar -Gypsy: the “Ilsley Downs”, “the track by Childsworth Farm”, “the Cumner -range”, “the stripling Thames at Bablock Hythe”—these are emulated in -a not inferior accent in the sombre music of this threnody. Almost, -remembering the flowers in Lycidas, you long to strew them on her -darling’s grave. - - “There is a music fills - The oaks of Belmont and the Wayland hills - Southward to Dewing’s little bubbly stream,—— - The heavenly weather’s call! Oh, who alive - Hastes not to start, delays not to arrive, - Having free feet that never felt a gyve - Weigh, even in a dream?” - -For those who knew her this poem carries a footnote of poignant -history. She was in London when letters came from home, and were -opened in a quaint restaurant, the Apple Tree Inn, a vegetarian -resort where three merry souls were met to be glad over lentils and -strange innocences of diet cunningly spiced to resemble the ensanguined -viands repudiated and abhorred. She opened her letter and read, and -her young—always young and childlike—face trembled into an unbelieving -grief. She could not speak. The day was dead for her and those for -whom she would have made the constant spark in it and afterward the -memory. On the heels of the ill tidings she went with one friend to -whom she could not tell the news, but whom she asked not to leave her, -to Hampstead Heath, and the two sat all the afternoon in silence on a -secluded slope, their feet in English green and her eyes unseeingly on -the sky. Her dog was dead. - -There are those for whom the conduct of life, either a passion or a -malaise, according to individual temperament, transcends even the magic -of pure fancy. For them there are trumpet calls in this book, perhaps -the most widely known and praised, The Kings, its last stanza the -battle-cry of the faint yet brave: - - “To fear not possible failure, - Nor covet the game at all, - But fighting, fighting, fighting, - Die, driven against the wall.” - -This is metal for sounding clarions. And so too is The Knight Errant: -the second stanza an epitome of grand quotable abstractions: - - “Let claws of lightning clutch me - From summer’s groaning cloud, - Or ever malice touch me, - And glory make me proud. - Oh, give my youth, my faith, my sword, - Choice of the heart’s desire: - A short life in the saddle, Lord! - Not long life by the fire.” - -You find admonishing whispers from a mind grown expert in counsel: - - “Take Temperance to thy breast, - While yet is the hour of choosing, - As arbitress exquisite - Of all that shall thee betide; - For better than fortune’s best - Is mastery in the using, - And sweeter than anything sweet - The art to lay it aside.” - -Here is the reflective, the scholastic, penetrating the hall of song -and hushing more abounding measures to its own consecrating uses. -She was in love, not with death as it was the poetic fashion to be -in a past era of creative minds, but with gentle withdrawals, fine -appreciations of ultimate values, cloistral consecrations. Her steady -hand on the reins of her horses of the sun, they took the heavenly -track of world-old orbits, not galloping at will, now high, now low, -from sunrise to the evening star. And this not because she feared, like -Icarus, to fall, but that she was perpetually referring beauty to its -archetype; she had, to paraphrase her own words, “eternity in mind.” - - “Waiting on Him who knows us and our need, - Most need have we to dare not, nor desire, - But as He giveth, softly to suspire - Against his gift with no inglorious greed, - For this is joy, though still our joys recede.” - -If she had been more rather than less in love with life, not as a -trinket she could relinquish with no ado, but a mysterious ardor it -was anguish to dream of losing, if she could have besought her Lord, -in moments of a child’s resistless longing, to give even the gifts -that are not solely to His glory, her song might have a fuller sweep, -a wilder melody. Out of earthly hungers the music of earth is made. As -she grew in spiritual aspiration, her verse attuned itself more and -more to the echoes of a harmony heavenly if austere. Some of these -devout lyrics are so individual her very personality flashes out before -you, and you hear her own lips chanting her own song. She is the figure -in the stained glass window, saint or warrior, dimming the outer light -to woo the eye to the ecclesiastical richness of the surrounding red -and gold. Or she is a young knight riding at twilight to service in -the chantry you have never sought, and you look up from your table -spread with meat and wines and watch him in bewilderment of spirit; -and the figures on the arras tremble, as it might be from the wind of -his passing. And having once seen the erect slender body riding to his -passion of prayer, you turn to the moving figures of the arras with -new eyes, wondering if, begot of earthly looms, they are as beautiful -as you had thought. Here is no passion but the unfed passion of the -soul, the life sustained not through plethora but lack, the everlasting -verity of renunciation which is the pale reflex of the face of Christ. -Her later work, the greater part of it, is again like the trembling of -bare exquisite branches against a sunset sky, the sky of a gold and -green limpidity a world away from roseate dawns. She was like a spirit -withdrawn from a turmoil she would neither recognize nor enter, sitting -in her tower above the world, spinning flowers out of frost. - -The Martyr’s Idyl (1899) she wrote with a fervor of devotional -conviction, and in the same volume, a fringe upon the hem of its -brocaded stateliness, is An Outdoor Litany, a cry full of earth’s blood -and tears, and more immediate to earth’s children who also suffer than -the high counsels of the abstinent: - - “The spur is red upon the briar, - The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore; - The wind shakes out the colored fire - From lamps a-row on the sycamore; - The bluebird, with his flitting note, - Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat; - The mink is busy; herds again - Go hillward in the honeyed rain; - The midges meet. I cry to Thee - Whose heart - Remembers each of these: Thou art - My God who hast forgotten me!” - -Here are beauties dear to the mortal mind to which an anguish of -discontent is comprehensible because “it is common.” Here is the -sum and circle of nature, tagged with the everlasting paradox: the -mindlessness and indifference of the beauty wherewith we are surrounded -and our hunger to which it will not, because it cannot, minister. -This is great writing: for here the soul walks unabashed, articulate, -impassioned, the finite crying to the infinite, the perishing atom -appealing to the sky of the universal over him. Perhaps there can -be nothing greater in a dramatic sense, in our prison-house under -the encircling sky, than the accusatory or challenging voice of the -creature, through the unanswering framework of his mortal destiny, -to the God Who created both him and it. Lear, in the storm that was -unmindful of him, set his breath against its blast. When the cry breaks -into hysteria, then the man is mad. The merciful reaction that lies in -nature’s anodynes sets in to counteract and dull. But our poet, though -she can write: - - “Help me endure the Pit, until - Thou wilt not have forgotten me,” - -never challenges her God with mad interrogation. It is not His justice -she assails; she but beseeches the quickening of His will to save. -There is an immeasurable distance between entire overthrow and the -sanity of the creature who, though sorely wounded, has lost no jot of -faith in divine medicaments. Her plea is only that she may share the -wholesome life of His birds and trees. - - “As to a weed, to me but give - Thy sap!” - -The poem may have been written in the period she calls “my calendar of -imprisonments,” perhaps in the two years given over to “nerves.” This -includes the eight years from 1894, when she entered the Auburndale -post-office, through 1902. They were weighted with the routine work she -desperately essayed at post-office and library. The summer of 1895, -given to a walking trip in England, she illuminates by a rapt “_annus -beatus_,” and two years were eaten into by the illness and death of -the aunt she dearly loved, “the only being,” she writes, “who was all -mine from my birth.” It was a cruelly large gulp for the dragon of -time to make at the precious substance of her later youth. There was -some fugitive versifying, but little of the steady routine of pen and -book to make her life as she loved it. Some of her most significant -verse did come in here, bright splashes of sunset red on the flat marsh -lands of her way. Especially in the _annus beatus_ there was exquisite -writing and some immediately after in that surge of remembered passion -risen over and over again in those who love England and have said -good-bye to her, only to return in homesick thought. Of this period -Arboricide stands alone and stately, like the tree of her lament. - - “A word of grief to me erewhile: - _We have cut the oak down, in our isle_. - - “And I said: ‘Ye have bereaven - The song-thrush and the bee, - And the fisher-boy at sea - Of his sea-mark in the even; - And gourds of cooling shade, to lie - Within the sickle’s sound; - And the old sheep-dog’s loyal eye - Of sleep on duty’s ground; - And poets of their tent - And quiet tenement. - Ah, impious! who so paid - Such fatherhood, and made - Of murmurous immortality a cargo and a trade.’ - - “For the hewn oak, a century fair, - A wound in earth, an ache in air.” - -But the actual crown of the book is in the two stanzas called -Borderlands. Within the small circle of recurrent rhythm this poem -holds the ineffable. It is a softly drawn and haunting melody on the -night wind of our thoughts, it hints at the nameless ecstasies that may -be of the rhythm of the body or the soul—but we know not!—it is of the -texture of the veil between sense and the unapprehended spirit. - - “Through all the evening, - All the virginal long evening, - Down the blossomed aisle of April it is dread to walk alone; - For there the intangible is nigh, the lost is ever-during; - And who would suffer again beneath a too divine alluring, - Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown? - - “Yet in the valley, - At a turn of the orchard alley, - When a wild aroma touched me in the moist and moveless air, - Like breath indeed from out Thee, or as airy vesture round Thee, - Then was it I went faintly, for fear I had nearly found Thee, - O Hidden, O Perfect, O Desired! O first and final Fair!” - -The line: - - “Keen as the ancient drift of sleep on dying faces blown,” - -is one of those pervasive beauties which, though in a perfect -simplicity, invoke the universal that is beauty’s self. You see in -it—or you fancy, for it falls on the sensitive plate of emotion that -far outranks your intellect—all the faces of all the dead from the -shepherd slain outside Eden past the Pharaohs and queens that “died -young and fair” to him “that died o’ Wednesday.” - -Happy Ending is her renewed hail and her farewell. Here are some of -the old beauties and, gathered up with them, the later buds of a more -sparsely blossoming fancy, snowed under time and yesterday. It is a sad -book, for all its nobility; it breathes the accent of farewells. To a -friend who challenged the appositeness of the title she said, smiling, -it was, on the contrary, exact, for her life of verse was done. In -1917, she wrote: - -“The Muse, base baggage that she is, fled long ago. (I knew what I was -up to when I called it Happy Ending.)” - -The additions of this later period are slightly more involved, much -more austere. The world does not call to her now in the manifold -voices of that vernal time when she and her dog went field-faring. It -is a spot, though still dearly loved, to leave. In Beati Mortui she -celebrates the “dead in spirit” who, having renounced the trappings of -a delusive day, are henceforth like angel visitants in a world where -they hold no foot of vain desire. The sonnet “Astræa,” her actual -farewell, has the poignant sestette: - - “Are ye unwise who would not let me love you? - Or must too bold desires be quieted? - Only to ease you, never to reprove you, - I will go back to heaven with heart unfed: - Yet sisterly I turn, I bend above you, - To kiss (ah, with what sorrow!) all my dead.” - -Next to the Golden City of belief she had, as she began, continued to -love poetry, the making of it, the “love of lovely words.” And though -an initiate world had hailed her, when, like a young shepherd wandered -into town, a bewildering “strayed reveller,” she came “singing along -the way,” man had been finding out many inventions and kept no ear -for strains out of Arcady or long notes prophetically echoed from the -New Jerusalem. He was laying the foundations of a taste which was to -flower in jazz and the movies and the whirling of wheels on great -white ways. She had her own small public always. To these, her books -were cool colonnades with the sea at the end. But she had learned, now -with no shadow of doubt, that there would never be any wider response -from the world of the printed word. She was not, in the modern sense, -“magazinable.” Editors were not laying up treasure in the safety -deposits of the immortalities; they were nursing their subscription -lists. If she had kept on singing, it would have been into that -silence whence the poet’s voice echoes back to him with a loneliness -terrifying to hear. Need that dull his fancy and mute his tongue? Not -in youth, perhaps. When the blood flows boundingly, you write your -verses on green leaves, so they are written, and if nobody wants the -woven chaplet of them, you laugh and cast it on the stream. Through the -middle years it is different. You must be quickened by an unquenchable -self-belief or warmed at the fire of men’s responsive sympathy to write -at all. There is something in the hurt an unheeding world can deal you -that, besides draining the wounded heart, stiffens the brain and hand. -And Atalanta’s pace may be slackened by the misadventures of the way. -Her sandal may come loose, or she slips on a pebble and strains the -tendon of that flying foot. - -For poetry is a matter of the mounting blood as well as the tempered -mind. It has, in spite of those who have suffered the horrible -disaster of physical overthrow and yet have kept on singing, something -intimately dependent on the actual coursing of the blood, the beat -of the physical heart. The only verse Louise Guiney prized, was the -verse with wings, spontaneous as the gestures of childhood or the -oriole’s song. She could knock her lines into a wild ruin and rebuild, -but that was after the first swift assembling of stone on stone. Any -idea of verse soberly and slowly evolved, as an intellectual feat, -was afar from her. “Our best things,” she said, “are the easiest. -They’re no trouble.” They did cost, in the last sweet pangs of intent -consideration, of rearranging, polishing, and hunting down the best -and only word. When the poetic impulse seized her, she bent to it in -obedient delight. She never coaxed or beckoned. Only into the living -spring did she dip her cup: no thrifty piping it to the house in -forethought of the day when the frost creeps and “no birds sing.” The -greatest beauties in her verse were as spontaneous as they dropped -from the skies and she set them in their chaste enduring gold. Though -she was so unwearied in polishing and changing, in their general scope -and temper the poems came as from the hand of God, and when her own -hand fell too laxly to receive them, they did not come. Her resultant -loneliness of mind she accepted with a decorum due the gods who give -and take away again; you might almost have called it unconcern. For -she was not greedy of life: only grateful for its temperate dole. She -might own, under anxious accusation, to having “no luck, no leisure, no -liberty,” but that was only for the intimates who inevitably “knew.” - -“As to the Muse,” (this in 1916) “she has given me the go by. No -matter: this dog has most hugely enjoyed his day, which was Stevenson’s -day, and Lionel Johnson’s, and Herbert Clarke’s, and Philip Savage’s.” - -Though the last years of her middle age were the less robust, as to -the intellectual life she had no waning. Her mind was no less keen -nor, except in the sudden exhaustion of a tragic illness, were her -activities dulled. She died young. And though the heart that is the -bravado of sheer courage was never allowed to fail her, the bodily -heart did fail. Those who had walked with her knew its weakness, and -that, a race-horse on the road, she was speedily exhausted in a climb. -One day, lost on Exmoor, her walking mate, looking back for her, would -find the world empty of her altogether. Knowing the sort of spirit -she was, it was easy to guess the Little People had kidnapped her or -an archangel hidden her in the brightness of his wings while they -discoursed together on topics of the upper sky. But the heather had -simply closed over her; she had lain down to rest her tired heart. And -as the physical world, out of the strange jealousy of its predestined -enmities, is forever fighting the spirit, so the feebler action of a -weakening heart might dull those swift spontaneities that are man’s -answer to the beauty of things—his protest to the earth that cajoles -and challenges the while it fulfils its mysterious hostility and -overthrows him in the end. In her prose work of editing and reviewing, -the blade was sharper as time wore upon it and she grew more recondite -in knowledge and more desperately exact, omitting no extreme of patient -scrutiny. But poetry was her youth, and youth was gone. And youth is -not a matter of years. It is what the years have done to us. - -If we may borrow a tag of appreciation for her verse, we could hardly -do better than quote her resumé of Hurrell Froude’s, the “clearness, -simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity” she found in him. - -His poems “have a strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of -them a little chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful; -. . . abstinent, concentrated, true.” - -Now primarily Froude’s verse is not in the least like Louise Guiney’s. -It is scarcely more than the first note leading up the scale. In the -amazed apprehension of beauty, he is leagues behind her. Yet the -“almost Virgilian” of her comment fits her to perfection. And if she is -not always “clear” she is, marvelously again, “a little chilly,” with -the chill of spring twilights when earth scents are in the air, the -lily-of-the-valley just bloomed out of the cold, or the damp richness -of the April woods. - -Two little volumes, Monsieur Henri, the story of the Count of La -Rochejaquelein (1892) and A Little English Gallery (1894) are of the -essence of that exhaustive research and fine rehabilitation which -were the fruit of her later years. The war of the Vendée, with its -religious appeal, its romance of feudal catchwords, took irresistible -hold on her, and the young Count of La Rochejaquelein, blazoned in -youthful ardor, shone as the sun. In thus regilding a futile struggle -she strives, by discarding political minutiæ, to “romanticize such dry -facts as we mean shall live.” “A background,” she concludes, “may be -blurred for the sake of a single figure. I tried, therefore, to paint -a portrait, willing to abide by the hard saying of Northcote: ‘If a -portrait have force, it will do for history.’” Nor could she have -resisted him of whom history says, as he mounted and rode away to his -feat of arms: - -“Then first came the eagle look into his eyes which never left them -after.” - -To Louise Guiney, born to the love of good fighters, the eagle look of -courage and consecration was as thrilling as, to the soldier himself, -the call to arms, and the little “footnote to French history” is -written on such a sustained level of affectionate enthusiasm that -it strikes you, despite its theme of blood and loss, as almost a -gay little book. Monsieur Henri is one of her own chosen exemplars, -a gallant figure in the martyrology of the world, of those who, to -paraphrase her almost envious tribute, are willing to spill their lives -as a libation to the gods. - -The Little English Gallery, six biographical essays in her individual -manner of a condensed bewilderment of research, holds the seed of -what might be accounted her life work. For not only does her portrait -pen paint you a fine enduring picture of Lady Danvers, Farquhar, -Beauclerk, Langton and Hazlitt, but here also is the preface, as -it might be called, of her Henry Vaughan, to whose gentle service -she bent the intermittent work of later years. During that English -summer of 1895, she went on pilgrimage to the grave of Vaughan, at -Llansaintffread. This was a part of Wales hardly touched by tourists, -for the ubiquitous motor car had not begun its devil’s business of -shedding profanation over silent ways. To walk here was to withdraw as -deeply as you would into the fragrance of past simplicities. Louise -Guiney was reft away into a trance of inward peace. She trod the paths -her poet loved, and she was, also with him, where her mind would ever -be, in the seventeenth century. This was one of her ardent quests, -her passionate rescues: for Vaughan was forgotten on his own familiar -ground. Literally the places that had known him knew him no more. -Even his grave had been desecrated by the slow attrition of neglect. -A coal shed had encroached on it, coal had fallen on his stone, cans -and broken glass littered the sacred spot. The two Americans, in a -haste of ruth, cleared the stone with hands and walking sticks, and -Louise Guiney drew to her two bent and blear-eyed Hodges working near -and preached to them Vaughan, the good physician, and his right to -the seemliness of an ordered resting-place. And she stayed not in her -doing, but called later upon England and America for a fund to put -the grave in order and suitably to commemorate the poet. The Vaughan -essay, in her own copy of the Little English Gallery, grew thick with -notes, confirmatory or expanded, in this browsing over Welsh ground, -and the Vaughan editing ran on and on through following years into what -must be the authoritative edition of his work. Why did she so love and -serve him? Not only because his thoughts take hold on heaven and, like -the breath of man, fly upward, that spirit of devotion—the negation of -earthly desires so intoxicating to her—but because he might otherwise, -as in his own elegies, “stop short of immortality.” His silent footstep -seemed to have left no mark beside his darling Usk. His soul, like her -own, in never questioning acceptance, perpetually sought eternity. He -loved learning, and he had an “eye and ear for the green earth.” He -had also a “sweet self-privacy,” and his inexhaustible delight in the -created world was not impaired or qualified by his childlike love of -heaven. He is temperate, he is remote. Louise Guiney would have loved -to walk and laugh with him, for he was one of the few with whom she -chose to dwell. To know him a little is to know her better, not so much -from their likeness, but to learn what minds were dear to her. - -Hazlitt, too, was dear. He, it must be remembered, like Charles Lamb, -Izaak Walton and the more authentic of the older worthies, was her -godfather in letters. He, too, had remoteness, though of another sort -than Vaughan’s. Not for him withdrawal into the heaven of heavens, but -to Winterslow Hut, to write his Lectures in a passionate privacy. Him, -too, in 1895, she sought in his familiar haunts, and relished her cold -chicken at Llangollen in a happy maze, in that Hazlitt had sat down -there to the same fare and the New Eloïse. At Wem, in Shropshire, where -he had his immortal meeting with Coleridge, she came, through much -pains, upon an oldest inhabitant who could give her faint shrilling -echoes of “Billy ’Azlitt” in his youth, yet nothing more pertinent -than that the yeasty Billy used to “lie under the ’edges and frighten -the maids a-going to market.” To Winterslow Hut she went, on Salisbury -Plain, an enchantment of larks and heather, and fain would have carried -away the old discarded sign of the Pheasant Inn it had become save that -it was “so mortal heavy.” - -If her own Goose-Quill Papers show the parentage she owns, it is -preëminently of Hazlitt. She was enamored of him, his amiable and -delightful style that is not too homespun for the scholar nor in -any wise too recondite for men of lowlier apprehension. And if the -intellect of man has loves of its own, quite apart from inclinations -of the heart, Hazlitt may be said to be the friend and comrade of -affectionate minds. Indeed, his authoritative note in criticism was -the less beguiling to her who could be outspoken herself, on high -occasion, than some personal quality of sensitive receptiveness to -life. This was, to her, most endearing. He had, moreover, the courage -of withstanding great upheavals and lamenting lost causes; she loved -his love of walking, and one line she is never tired of quoting or -prompting her friends to quote for the enhancement of some page: “a -winding road and a three-hours’ march to dinner.” His aloofness, -albeit with the foil of the kindest of hearts, his sensitiveness that -could, by a word or a look askance, be cut to the raw,—do not these -perhaps admit him to the list of the humanly ill-equipped who enlist -her chivalry? Or was it his humor that was the living bond, that and -his clarity of English? To his Unitarian cast of temperament she is -handsomely generous, and though not always averse to giving those who -wear their rue of faith with a difference a sly dig on occasion (“the -timid, domestic and amateurish thing which Anglicanism must be, even -at its best!” that, one must believe, with a twinkle behind “those -spectacles”) she tolerates his ignorance of sacerdotal certainties and -not too curtly deprecates his “imperfect development.” - -“As Mr. Arnold said so patiently of Byron, ‘he did not know enough.’” - -Yet she could have better spared a more ecclesiastic man, and in -her affectionate summing up she decorates him with her heartfelt -thankfulness that he is what he is: - -“He stalks apart in state, the splendid Pasha of English letters.” - -She is forced to judge him as the pure intellectual must judge the man -of tumultuous and undirected genius. His confidential egoism might well -have been her own despair, so disinclined is she really to open her -heart to you save under pretty disguises, and you would hardly have -thought his style, soaring “to the rhetorical sublime” or dropping to -“hard Saxon slang” to be the style she loved. Yet this was she who -did not choose her friends for the intellectual rightness in them but -something pure human, as wayward, when you would define it, as the tang -of the weather. Toward the close of this essay she rushes into some -fine direct English of her own. Hazlitt’s diction, she affirms, is -“joyously clear,” “sumptuously splendid” and concludes that “no right -style was ever founded save out of a sincere heart.” This, later on -when life had taught her things hard to learn, she said, in a fuller -form, as touching not style but letters in their entirety: - -“After all, life, not art, is the thing.” - -To that same growing conviction it was that Hazlitt appealed, a “born -humanist,” with a “memory like a loadstar, and a name which is a toast -to be drunk standing.” - -Her bright light—perhaps not the guiding light, for her genius was -ever an individual one and moved, for the most part, unperturbed in -its own orbit—was Robert Louis Stevenson. The youth of his day will -remember how he took hold on even the popular imagination, fighting -his predestined fight with disease and weather, doubling on death, -and, while he fled—the hovering fate bound, in the end, to clutch -him—setting his mind to the weaving of bright adventure and his hand to -the writing of it. That gayety of temperamental bravado, that piquing -drama of a man tied to his bed for helpless intervals and sending -out his mind to roam the seas and centuries, were intoxicating to -venturesome spirits. In 1895, Louise Guiney writes of hearing from a -“most brilliant boy” in San Francisco: - -“He says something that has set me up for life: that Mrs. Stevenson -told him R. L. S. had a great fancy for my little doings, and used to -‘search for them in such magazines as came to Samoa.’ I will keep on -writing, I will; I shall never despair after that.” - -To Robert Louis Stevenson: A Study, privately printed in 1895, she -contributed a notable sonnet, the sestette beginning: - - “Louis, our priest of letters and our knight,” - -and a longer Valediction of a metre disturbing to the unpractised ear, -but full of isolated lines of an individual beauty and also of a real -grief: the lament of the pupil over his master, signalized in the -significant line: - - “The battle dread is on us now, riding afield alone.” - -There is a light-heartedness, too, about the poem, like burnished -fringes on a mourning robe. For youth is in it as well as sorrow. Her -lamentation can break into the iridescent foam of a stanza like this, -where she pre-figures the living spirit of Tusitala absorbed into the -island life he loved and blossoming from it forever: - - “There on summer’s holy hills - In illumined calms, - Smile of Tusitala thrills - Through a thousand palms; - There in a rapture breaks - Dawn on the seas, - When Tusitala from his shoon unbinds the Pleiades.” - -Who could spare that outburst of young extravagance at the end? - -It was she who, in the first shock of the news, when the wondering word -went from lip to lip, “Stevenson is dead!”—as if long apprehension -could never have prepared us for a calamity so amazing—said to those at -one with her in Stevenson worship: - -“Let us wear a band of crêpe.” - -And they did, this group of mourning followers. - -The complete bibliography of her work would include introductions, -studies, notes, all characterized by her unhastened scrutiny of -“passionate yesterdays”: Matthew Arnold, Robert Emmet, Katherine -Philips, Thomas Stanley, Lionel Johnson, Edmund Campion,—these were -a few of those whose memory she illumined and clarified. No estimate -could overrate her continuing and exhaustless patience; she was content -with nothing less than living within arm’s length of all the centuries. -Poet first, poet in feeling always, even after the rude circumstance -of life had closed her singing lips, she was an undaunted craftsman at -prose. It is true she did expect too much of us. She did, especially in -those later days, more than half believe we could delight in pouncing, -with her own triumphant agility, on discoveries of remote relationships -and evasive dates. Her multiplicity of detail had become so minute -and comprehensive, especially as touching the Restoration, that even -literary journals could seldom print her with any chance of backing -from the average reader. It was inevitable to her to run on into the -merely accurate data prized by the historian and genealogist alone. -Who can expect the modern spirit, prey to one sociological germ after -another, to find antidote in the obscurities of seventeenth century -English? Yet she never veered from the natal bent of her trained mind. -Still was she the indomitable knight errant of letters. She had to go -on rescuing though the damsels she delivered died on her hands. Where -did her anxiety of pains find its limit? not with the printing: there -she had always striven untiringly for perfection of form, unblemished -accuracy. One remembers exhaustive talks with her on the subtleties -of punctuation. The Wye Valley, the Devon lanes, were vocal, in that -summer of 1895, with precepts of typography. The colon especially -engaged the attention of these perfervid artisans. Was it not, this -capricious and yet most responsive of all marks of punctuation, widely -neglected in its supremest subtlety? Something of this argumentation -was afterward echoed in her paper on Lionel Johnson: - -“Nothing was trivial to this ‘enamoured architect’ of perfection. He -cultivated a half mischievous attachment to certain antique forms of -spelling, and to the colon, which our slovenly press will have none -of; and because the colon stands for fine differentiations and sly -sequences, he delighted especially to employ it.” - -There were serious conclaves, in those years, when excerpts for the -Pilgrim Scrip, a magazine of travel, were concerned, whether a man’s -punctuation, being the reflex of his own individuality, should not be -preserved in exactness. An English essayist of the nomad type, who was -a very fiend of eccentricity, proved an undevoured bone of contention. -His stops were enough to make the typographically judicious grieve. But -had not he his own idea of the flow of his prose, and should not his -punctuation be inviolate? Her own corrected proofs were a discipline to -the uninitiate in scholarly ways, a despair, no doubt, to the indurated -printer, and her ruthlessness toward her own work such as Roman and -Spartan parents would have gasped at and found themselves too lax to -emulate. Yet through these excesses of literary precision she went -merrily. She was no Roundhead of the pen, taking her task in sadness. -The ordinary proof reader, of set intentions and literal meanings, was -her delight. In Songs at the Start is the line: - - “O the oar that was once so merry!” - -One of the battles she fought untiringly was over the vocative O, -contending that it should never be followed by the intrusive comma. Yet -the comma would sneak in, - - (“Abra was ready ere I called her name; - And though I called another, Abra came!”) - -and in this case author and printer had fought it out, forward and -back, unwearied play of rapier and bludgeon, until she wrote, properly -enisled in the margin, after the careted O: “no comma.” And behold! the -line appeared, in the final proof: - - “O no comma the oar that was once so merry!” - -And when, after another tussle with her mulish adversary, she thought -she had him, the book itself fell open in her hand at his victorious -finale: - - “O no, the oar that was once so merry!” - -The tale of her defeat was perennially delightful to her. She was never -tired of telling it. - -Once, quoting the line: - - “Hoyden May threw her wild mantle on the hawthorn tree,” - -she was enraptured to see the innocent hawthorn walking back to her -personified into “hoyden Mary.” The vision of hoyden Mary, concrete as -Audrey and her turnip, was thenceforth one of the character studies on -her comedy stage. Her own copies of her books were flecked with spear -dints from the battles she had waged in their doing and undoing. The -“passion for perfection” left her in no security in an end seemingly -attained. Her pen knew no finalities. When she had reached the goal -and you ran to crown her, she simply turned about to go over the -course again at a more uniform pace or with a prettier action. Her -biographical and critical work was never finished, even when it reached -the final fastnesses of print. A new shade of insight would be cast -by some small leaf of data just sprung up, to be noted in the margin. -And how moved she was over the restoration of an old word to active -use or shy experiment with one of valid lineage yet unaccustomed form! -One remembers serious, even anxious, conversation with her on the word -“stabile.” It was more poetic than other derivatives of the same root -and had a subtly dignified access of meaning. Should it be used? Could -one venture? And she did use it in the first printing of what became -the last Oxford Sonnet, only, in her anxious precision, to revert to -the authorized “stable” in the last printing of all. - -Of her one book of stories, Lovers’ Saint Ruth (1894) written in a -rather wistful response to optimistic persuasion, she says: - -“I had no hold whatever on narrative.” - -And how should she have taken hold on beguiling and effective drama, -she whose inner mind, when it was not musing in mediæval cloisters, -was hedged about with tolerances, who was not shaken by the tempestuous -prejudice and fierce resisting passions of which drama is made? Was -she lax in a certain remote acceptance of mankind so long as it would, -like Alexander, get out of the sun whereby she was regarding the Middle -Ages or the soul? Not always: there was in her a sudden unexpected -fierceness that amazed you, after you thought yourself used to her -self-preservative withdrawals. On a delicate piece of literary work -where a wife, hideously used, had suffered all things and forgiven all -things, she commented tersely: - -“Not right. It hinders justice.” - -But as to the book of stories, she entered upon it with premonitory -omen and probably did it under a stress of will. For tasks not native -to her mind, as well as those remotely capable of being construed -into pot boilers, she began “with a little aversion,”—indeed, with so -much more than a little that the mere suggestion of them was usually -declined as soon as offered. - -Like Henry James, she was an expatriate, though not even under the -argument of our aloofness from Europe between 1914 and 1917 did -she, like him, bear testimony to her love for England by becoming -naturalized. Still an ardent American, her answering love flowed back -to us as in 1898, when she dedicated one of the most breathlessly -beautiful of her poems to The Outbound Republic. There had come the -challenge to enter world counsels and world clashes. We heard, and she -heard it with us: - - “As the clear mid-channel wave, - That under a Lammas dawn - Her orient lanthorn held - Steady and beautiful - Through the trance of the sunken tide, - Sudden leaps up and spreads - Her signal round the sea: - _Time, time! - Time to awake; to arm; - To scale the difficult shore!_” - -This was first published anonymously and one reader, at least, -instantly detected her hand. It took no special acumen. Lines were -never written more intensely charged with personal quality. - -And if we think her heart, in its love for England, ever grew alien to -us, we may go back to the last of the twelve stately London Sonnets: -In the Docks. What a banner she waved there of an implied creed, a -passionate belief! - - “Where the bales thunder till the day is done, - And the wild sounds with wilder odors cope; - Where over crouching sail and coiling rope, - Lascar and Moor along the gangway run; - Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun, - A hive of anarchy from slope to slope; - Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope, - I see thee at the masthead, joyous one! - - O thou good guest! so oft as, young and warm, - To the home-wind thy hoisted colors bound, - Away, away from this too thoughtful ground - Sated with human trespass and despair, - Thee only, from the desert, from the storm, - A sick mind follows into Eden air.” - -Our inherited traditions were like wine to her, our lapses drained -her soul; and as it was in 1890, when that sonnet was written, so it -continued to be through the years when our star sank, in 1914, to be -so long in rising. In 1915, she wrote: - -“I have been disappointed over our country’s official attitude: there -should be no ‘neutrality’ of opinion where rights and wrongs are as -plain as the nose on one’s face!” - -And in February, 1917: - -“‘Come, let your broadsides roar with ours!’ as Tennyson says. Only -I never shall get over the unexpected and staggering vision of my -own idealistic land having behaved for nearly three solid years in -this selfish, provincial way, with the masterly vision of a village -schoolmaster who sees as far as his village pump, and not one inch -beyond it.” - -When she went to England for the second time, lights were burning, -just lighted then: Lionel Johnson, soon to die, William Watson, Arthur -Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, Nora Hopper, Katherine Tynan, Dora Sigerson, -in her young beauty, (afterward married to Clement Shorter, another -devoted friend of L. I. G.) and W. B. Yeats—their glittering names are -many. And there was Herbert Clarke, tragic figure of non-fulfilment, -without mention of whom no footnote to her life would be complete, -because they were mirrors of kindred tastes and proud aloofness from -the market-place. He died before he knew the heart-break of the War, -and Louise Guiney wrote: - -“And now his bright thwarted star is out, at least in this world where -he never had his dues. . . . Thinking of him gone away is to think of -what Dickens calls in Bleak House ‘the world which sets this world -right.’” - -Edmund Gosse, Richard Garnett, Mrs. Meynell,—the list of her -friendships rivals in fulness that of her beginnings in America. -And those of the first years were but the beginning. Today they are -numbered “in battalions.” - -Though so ardent an American, England was her spirit’s home. The odor -of musty archives was as delicious in her nostrils as “hawthorn buds -in May.” Half effaced inscriptions were dearer to her than whole -broadsides of modern pæans to success. A crusader knight on his back in -some immemorial dimness was as immediate to her soul as Apollo walking -down the aisles of song. London, when she was away from it, haunted -her “like a passion.” To come upon her great little picture of pre-war -London makes a blessed interlude in the shrieking present. For we have -gained the motor car, and the price the smiling gods exacted is that -we have lost the broodingness of cities—their murmurous tranquillity. -That essay, Quiet London, dated 1890, has heart-break in it, as well -as beauty, for those who knew the London of old and who will see -it no more. Here are the very lineaments of that great fog-soaked, -rain-darkened beneficence and terror which once was London. You walk in -it with her and are at home in an inherited peace. - -“There is no congestion of the populace; yet the creeks and coves -of that ancient sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour after hour, -century after century, as if in subjection to a fixed moon. It is the -very poise of energy, the aggregation of so much force that all force -is at a standstill; the miraculous moment, indefinitely prolonged, -when achieved fruition becalms itself at the full, and satiety -hesitates to set in.” - -Here is the rain-swept atmosphere: - -“The hushing rain, from a windless sky, falls in sheets of silver on -gray, gray on violet, violet on smouldering purple, and anon makes -whole what it had hardly riven: the veil spun of nameless analogic -tints, which brings up the perspective of every road, the tapestry -of sun-shot mist which Théophile Gautier admired once with all his -eyes. . . . At the angles of the grimiest places, choked with trade, we -stumble on little old bearded graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or -low-lying leafy gardens where monks and guildsmen have had their dream: -closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our -loud to-day.” - -In her ecstatic browsings, her rapt withdrawal into old centuries, -she was the best Londoner of them all. And here is her gay tribute to -English weather: - -“The mannerly, vertical showers . . . fall sudden and silent, like -unbidden tears, while you look forth from the wild purple coast of -Ireland at the slant and tawny fishing sails, or lean against the wall -of a ruined abbey in the fold of the Mendip Hills. Always at your -side is this gentle, fickle, sun-shot rain, spinning itself out of an -undarkened sky, and keeping the grass immortal and the roads pure of -dust. You reach, before long, to a full sympathy and comprehension -of what good Bishop Jeremy Taylor had before him when he drew his -simile of ‘a soft slap of affectionate rain.’ It is the rain of -the Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians, the immemorial -law-giver, and the oldest inhabitant of the isles. Wheresoever it -descends, there are perpetual freshness and peace.” - -To walk with her was to add day to storied day in a calendar rubricated -from end to end. - - “Nor ever can those trees be bare.” - -Still living in the English landscape is that alert figure, rapt yet -ready for the absurdities of the moment, silent in understanding -withdrawals and, in her own words of another, “almost as good company -as a dog.” This was a masterpiece of praise by inversion, and “those -spectacles” gleamed over it prodigiously. One remembers her by the -crested blue of Devon and Cornish seas, subdued into stillness and then -breaking out in a wild hail of the - - “cruel, crawling foam!” - -One remembers her on a Midland road, sticking a pheasant’s feather -in her hat and swaggering rakishly, or walking into Shrewsbury, so -disheveled from the rain and dust of varied weathers, that landladies -looked askance, and one, more admittedly curious than the rest, queried: - -“Is there a play to-night?” - -For the two wayfarers did look the ancient part of rogues and -vagabonds, no less. - -One remembers her climbing the slope, blue with wild hyacinths, at -Haughmond Abbey, or taking the straight “seven long miles” across -Egdon Heath, the sun darkened in a livid sky and floods of rain -to follow before the wayfarers found refuge in the little church -where D’Urbervilles lie, significant in nothing now save an envious -immortality on Thomas Hardy’s page. The clouds in that thunderous sky -were piled into imperial semblances, Emperors of old Rome, and out of -their brief pageant sprang Louise Guiney’s poem of Romans in Dorset, -the first three stanzas as illuminative as the sun and dark that ruled -the air: - - “A stupor on the heath, - And wrath along the sky; - Space everywhere; beneath - A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high. - - “Sullen quiet below, - But storm in upper air! - A wind from long ago, - In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an arras there, - - “And singed the triple gloom, - And let through, in a flame, - Crowned faces of old Rome: - Regnant o’er Rome’s abandoned ground, processional they came.” - -One remembers her, a last rite before leaving England, not knowing she -should return, feeding the doves in Paul’s Churchyard and, again at -Shrewsbury, packing, among dear mementoes, a sod of English earth. - -To speak of her letters, those floating immortalities she cast about -with so prodigal a hand, is to wonder anew at an imaginative brilliancy -even beyond what she put into her considered work. To open one was an -event. Almost you were miserly over the envelope itself, and treasured -it, the script on it was of so rare a beauty. For her handwriting -had an individual distinction. Done in haste or at leisure, it was -the same. Her tumultuous jottings on margins of print or bits of -scribbling paper kept the line of grace. And the subject matter! it -was as varied as flowers and jewels and shells. In some cases, her -books may have suffered from too anxious a care. Her affluent learning, -deeply as it enriched her poetic gift, may have done something toward -choking it, burying it under the drift of yesterdays. For having at -her memory’s call the immortal lines of our English tongue, a despair -may well have overtaken her with the impulse to enter that great -company. She lacked the crude yet wholesome audacity of those to whom -the world is young. But if her considered work may possibly have -suffered from “much cherishing,” her letters made their bright advent -unhindered. In them she lost her sense of studious responsibilities -and—strange paradox of time!—it is they who may go farthest toward -making her immortal. She was simply not self-conscious about them, -and the haste with which they left her hand for the post was what -saved them in their living delightfulness. And they were plentiful -as leaves in Arden. Never did she let her correspondence “come tardy -off.” Courteous, good-natured, ever the prey of bores and sympathetic -listener to requests and comment, she wrote you promptly and with the -most engaging personal touch. If you sent her your book, she read it -with a painstaking intentness and returned you, not a formal note of -thanks, but a full and rich review wherein you were praised to the top -of your deserts, your failings touched lightly but honestly and your -errors spotted with the scholar’s acumen. And if she could commend -you whole-heartedly, and with no even courteous reservations, then -she was as happy in the writing as you in reading it. There was no -smallest trace in her of carping for the satisfaction of showing how -brave a critic she could be, no sense of blustering privilege. But the -letters! written in a gush of mental exuberance, sometimes the faster -the better, a tumultuous beauty of diction,—you shook the tree and you -got such fruit; the wind of your favor blew her way and unloosed on you -that petalled or ripened shower. Those were the spontaneities of her -life; those, in their lasting evanescence, she has yet to bequeath us, -a priceless legacy. - -What did the war do to her? We cannot wholly say. We know how deeply -she had breathed in the life of Oxford, and that she was among those -who suffered pangs over - - “the Oxford men - Who went abroad to die.” - -There are tenderest and most admiring allusions to this or that boy -who stayed not upon the order of his going into khaki. - -“War, war!” was one of the first cries from her. “It is unbelievable, -yet it is. England is on the defensive: God save her, I say! Boys I -know are being rushed off in the Territorials and Reserves to keep the -coast; and there are already rumors that there will be no October Term -for the University. . . . Terly-terlo! as the trumpets say in the old -Carol. ‘If it be not now yet it will come: the readiness is all.’” - -And again, in 1915: - -“It enrages me to be an Alien ‘neutral.’ You’ll remember the passionate -affection I have ever shown for everything German. Bah!” (No need of -indicating to those who knew her the thread of irony in this last!) -“Would I were at the front. . . . If England doesn’t pull through, no -more will liberty and civilization.” - -And she had her prophetic despondencies. In March, 1919, she wrote with -a bitterness unfamiliar from her bounding pen: - -“Oh, what a rabble of a world it is! and why did the wretched -soft-soapers interrupt Foch by granting that armistice when another -three weeks of him would have cut the claws of all the Devils forever! -_A bas les civiles!_” - -There spoke the unhesitating mind of one who knew the grim job ought -to have been effectively ended, the tongue of one who came of soldier -blood. - -We may guess that the strain of those last years sapped and undermined -her in ways the soldier spirit would not betray. We know she qualified -in them for that Paradise she most desired, of those who - - “die, driven against the wall.” - -If we seek about for mitigation of our bewilderment over her loss to -earth, the way seems to be not only the old road of unquestioning -thankfulness when a soul arrives at sanctuary from pain, but the solace -of a more intimate friendship with her work. Curiously personal to her -sounds that exquisite translation from Callimachus on the death of his -friend, the poet Heraclitus: - - “They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead: - They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed. - I wept, as I remembered how often you and I - Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. - - “And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, - A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, - Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; - For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take.” - -Of this Edmund Gosse says, in a prose so authoritatively beautiful -that it hangs level in the balance with the rich “poetry of elegiacal -regret”: - -“No translation ever smelt less of the lamp and more of the violet than -this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English literature -which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal regret. I do not -know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer expression of -a poet’s grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief mitigated only -by the knowledge that the dead man’s songs, his ‘nightingales,’ are -outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship, the reward of one who, -in Keats’s wonderful phrase, has left ‘great verse unto a little clan,’ -the last service for the dead to whom it was enough to be ‘unheard, -save of the quiet primrose, and the span of heaven, and few ears.’” - -This picture, delicately austere, is fitted, line for line, to the -obedient humility of Louise Guiney’s life. She wrought in seclusion, -asking nothing save the silent approval of the unseen gods; and still, -in the mysterious thicket of our mortal life, are her “nightingales” -awake. - -In what niche shall we set her statue of renown? She has done the -most authentic and exquisite verse America has yet produced. Is it -not rather to its honor and our defeated fame that no widespread -recognition of it could have been predicted? Is Hazlitt largely read? -Does Charles Lamb sell by the million or the seventeenth century -lyrists by the hundred thousand? Louise Guiney was, like so much that -is austerely beautiful in the modern world, a victim of majorities. -The democracy of taste and intellect is perhaps the master, perhaps -the puppet, of this ironic time. But the time itself has its martyrs -in these children of illustrious line who cannot, sadly willing as -they may be, quite speak the common tongue. It is the suffrages of the -purchasing majority that determine what publishers shall print. And for -us,—Diana’s chariot in the heavens means less to us than a limousine on -earth. But the gods who endowed Louise Guiney with something ineffable -out of their treasury alone know about these things. Under their eyes -stands her slender last collection among its peers. And the book itself -says: - - “Unto the One aware from everlasting - Dear are the winners: thou art more than they.” - - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Louise Imogen Guiney, by Alice Brown - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY *** - -***** This file should be named 51541-0.txt or 51541-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/5/1/5/4/51541/ - -Produced by Emmy, MWS and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was -produced from images generously made available by The -Internet Archive) - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United -States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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