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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78729 ***
+
+
+
+
+                            MICHAEL FAIRLESS
+
+
+
+
+                         _BY W. SCOTT PALMER._
+
+
+                         =FROM THE FOREST.
+                         PILGRIM MAN.
+                         A MODERN MYSTIC’S WAY.
+                         WINTER AND SPRING.=
+
+                          By W. SCOTT PALMER.
+
+                      _Uniform with this Volume._
+
+                    _Fcap. 8vo_, 2s. 6d. _net each_.
+
+                            DUCKWORTH & CO.,
+                    3 HENRIETTA STREET, LONDON, W.C.
+
+
+                      =THE DIARY OF A MODERNIST.=
+
+                          By W. SCOTT PALMER.
+
+                        _Crown 8vo_, 5s. _net_.
+
+                             EDWARD ARNOLD,
+                  41 AND 43 MADDOX STREET, LONDON, W.
+
+[Illustration: Drawn from life, July 1901.]
+
+
+
+
+                            Michael Fairless
+                         Her Life and Writings
+
+
+                                   By
+                     W. Scott Palmer (M. E. Dowson)
+                                  and
+                             A. M. Haggard
+
+                           With Two Portraits
+                                   by
+                             Elinor Dowson
+
+                                   ❦
+
+                                 London
+                            Duckworth & Co.
+                        3 Henrietta Street, W.C.
+                                  1913
+
+
+
+
+                                CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                    PAGE
+ INTRODUCTION                                                          3
+ HER LIFE                                                             13
+ HER WRITINGS—
+    THE ROADMENDER                                                    45
+    THE GATHERING OF BROTHER HILARIUS                                111
+    THE GREY BRETHREN                                                120
+
+
+
+
+                              INTRODUCTION
+
+
+                                   I
+
+_On ne doit jamais écrire que de ce qu’on aime._ It is my happy fortune
+that I love Michael Fairless; and although, before I began to write of
+her, I thought the demand anything but happy that compelled me to break
+the silence she desired, I have come to think even this a part of my
+good fortune too. I have come indeed to feel that, since her wish to
+remain unknown must be set aside in face of circumstances she could
+never have foreseen, this may bring new fulfilment to a desire that lay
+far nearer to her heart—the desire to give away all she had, to hoard
+nothing, not even her own self.
+
+Much that Mrs. Haggard says of her sister’s early childhood is new to
+me; but all is congruous, as the bud is congruous with the rose. The
+child with her pet animals I have seen in the woman for whom all
+animals, even the very fierce, were friends, telling each its own secret
+and able to receive something of the great human secret offered them in
+her. They grew, these creatures, grew in spirit, under the magic of her
+hands and in the stirring warmth of her heart. The wild ones knew her as
+they knew the little poor man upon the Umbrian hills. Birds would perch
+about her, rabbits play; even the ‘tramp cats,’ as she calls them in her
+Christmas Idyll—cats who had taken to the woods and become worse than
+wild—learnt from her the graces of home life and laid savagery down.
+‘She had a way with her,’ as they say in Ireland. And this way stretched
+beyond the kingdom of the beasts and bees and birds. When I first learnt
+to know her she had a little cottage on a high road, the great Bath road
+of many tramps. It had been the lodge of an abandoned manor house, and
+was, of course, close to the gateway. There she tamed her tramp men and
+made them friends. Every man who came had a table and chair under
+shelter; the plainest, simplest food; materials for mending his clothes,
+tea or cocoa to drink, her smile, her wonderful eyes upon his, her open
+heart and word. Never a thing was stolen from her doors, her wide
+windows; never a penny did she give; but many a man begged leave to chop
+wood for her, to dig in her garden—some little thing to show what she
+had done for him.
+
+It seemed to me illuminating; it pointed me to the one great hope for
+this world, the hope of the coming of the kingdom of God in the power of
+man’s self-sharing, fearless, love for men.
+
+
+Mrs. Haggard alludes very briefly to Michael Fairless’s ‘psychic’ gifts.
+Of these I had said nothing; she herself made nothing of them. But they
+were strong, too strong to be overlooked by anyone who knew her well. It
+would lead me outside my province if I were to attempt here an adequate
+discussion of the matter. I will say only that she was ‘telepathic’ in a
+high degree, had that sympathetic insight which reveals actual facts
+hidden from the physical senses. The connexion of this with power over
+animals is a problem of great interest for which, again, there is no
+place here. How far her insight—her interior vision—reached I cannot
+say; that it went beyond animals, tramps, and her best friends I am
+assured by my experience of her. There is an instance given in ‘A Modern
+Mystic’s Way’ which is true to the letter. The account given there was
+transcribed in every point from notes taken at the time and signed by
+her as correct.
+
+She was one whom we who knew her do not try to measure by ordinary
+standards, the rules of everyday, in any of the relations of life. Need
+I say that there were people whom she puzzled, bewildered? Or that there
+were others who not only failed to understand, but wholly misunderstood
+her? They always do it; they will do it still, no doubt, even when they
+have read every word Mrs Haggard and I have written here.
+
+                                                                W. S. P.
+
+  HARTFIELD, _January 1913_.
+
+
+                                   II
+
+It has always been a matter of wonder to the writer that the affection
+of the public for a favourite author should stop short of observing his
+wishes. Michael Fairless most straitly charged those who would represent
+her to abstain from the publication of her identity. But demand creates
+supply, and the interest in her has become so extended that if
+authorised information about her is not forthcoming, something of an
+unauthorised and incorrect nature will probably be produced. Only one
+thing would have made Michael Fairless more vexed than the publication
+of the truth about her, and that thing would have been the publication
+of untruth. So many garbled statements, inaccurate assertions and pure
+fictions have appeared about her that it is time for uncertainty to be
+dispelled. Death has left absolutely authentic knowledge in the hands of
+two people only—the writers of this volume. Her eldest sister has
+chronicled such of the very simple happenings of Michael Fairless’s life
+as have left some record of her character, and save for brief mention,
+is confidently leaving the treatment of her work and its effect in the
+competent and devoted hands of Mrs Dowson, her dear friend and literary
+executor.
+
+                                                          A. M. HAGGARD.
+
+  CHELSEA, _January 1913_.
+
+
+
+
+                                HER LIFE
+
+
+                                   BY
+
+                             A. M. HAGGARD
+
+[Illustration: Drawn from a photograph.]
+
+
+
+
+                                HER LIFE
+
+
+Margaret Fairless Barber was born on the 7th of May 1869 at Castle Hill,
+Rastrick, in the W. Riding of Yorkshire, in the house that had been her
+grandfather’s, and where her father was also born. She was the youngest
+of the three daughters of the late Fairless Barber and Maria Musgrave,
+his wife, and was christened after the great-grandmother, whose violet
+eyes she inherited, eyes that had reappeared in one member of each
+generation, though in Margaret’s case the violet gradually turned to a
+most beautiful grey. It is perhaps worth recording for the curious in
+such matters, that this family of five members had but three birthdays.
+The eldest and youngest girls were born on the same day at a nine years’
+interval, and the second girl on her father’s birthday: only the mother
+had a day to herself, a fact for which the children used to feel it
+appropriate to offer affectionate sympathy as being such a lonely
+condition. A grandchild—her eldest daughter’s first child—subsequently
+removed this reproach by appearing within a few hours of the
+anniversary. As Michael Fairless undoubtedly inherited many of their
+tendencies, it may not be inappropriate to give a slight description of
+her parents and the home in which she spent her earlier years.
+
+Her father was educated at St Peter’s at York, where he distinguished
+himself in mathematics, painting, and poetry, writing the Prize Poem one
+year. He subsequently took up his father’s profession of the law, and
+acquired a large practice. All the work which this entailed did not,
+however, prevent him from the pursuit of his private tastes, which were
+antiquarian and literary. He collected old oak and books, and gradually
+amassed a library of his favourite subjects: archeology, topography,
+travels, essays, poetry; standard novels and the Cornhill Magazine,
+which in those days contained the work of Thackeray, George Eliot,
+George Meredith, Mrs Browning, and others. He was gentle, quiet, and
+studious, well-read, an excellent Latin scholar, and a man with a keen
+sense of humour, absolutely devoted to his home and family.
+
+Her mother had received an unusually liberal education for early
+Victorian days, and had studied French, German, and Italian; she was a
+highly cultivated woman, with a fine taste in literature. Tennyson,
+Ruskin, Eugénie de Guérin, Schiller, Pascal’s Pensées and Jeremy Taylor
+recur to the memory as being amongst others on her shelves. She was also
+an exquisite needlewoman, and an admirable housekeeper and accountant.
+In her younger days Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism were being socially
+discussed, and she discovered herself possessed of great mesmeric power.
+But she never pursued the matter as a study, and mention is only made of
+it because it is probably from her mother’s tendencies that Michael
+Fairless derived the germs of her own psychic development. Parents and
+children were most deeply attached, and husband and wife so completely
+wrapped up in each other that their devotion was almost proverbial in
+the neighbourhood. The children used to show their mother all their
+various little efforts in sewing, painting, or scribbling, and due
+encouragement was always given. But they were never allowed to think
+that it was quite the best they could do, or that anything they did was
+at all wonderful. Thus the spirit of ambition was fostered, and any idea
+of precocity discouraged, for Mrs Barber had the greatest objection to
+anything in the nature of an infant phenomenon. The household was a very
+quiet one, in outward observances almost what would now be considered
+puritanical; in mental outlook extremely wide-minded, liberal and
+unprejudiced. Since environment counts for a good deal in development,
+this sketch will enable the reader to trace the source of some of
+Michael Fairless’s characteristics.
+
+The house stood in a large garden and was a long, irregular building, on
+the site of an ancient Danish fort. It was fronted with a large and
+extremely solid porch, and its rooms were spacious and mostly lined with
+books. The bedroom windows were hung from spring to autumn with white
+dimity, after the old fashion, and this was replaced, when the brief
+Yorkshire summer ended, by curtains of dark crimson woollen which shut
+out the wild inclement weather, when the days drew in, and sent the
+children clustering round the fire, and making tales, as all children
+do, about the visions they saw in its glowing depths. That large snug
+nursery saw many games; with the two elder girls housekeeping was a
+favourite one, in the course of which the baby came in very handily as a
+baby instead of the doll which had hitherto served. She was also taken
+out driving and sailing—the nursery sofa serving equally well for a
+steamer or a carriage.
+
+Michael was called Baba until she was four or five years old, when she
+became Marjorie, which name she afterwards retained. At this time she
+was a very pretty child with fair hair, a rather snub nose, a large but
+quite perfectly shaped mouth, and a pair of most beautiful eyes. An
+enterprising and enquiring disposition found, perhaps, its earliest
+manifestation in a large and surreptitious bite at the soap during a
+bath, in spite of her old nurse’s warnings, who had vainly tried to
+check an inclination for this experiment. It was the first and last
+bite, for a certain clear shrewdness and common sense were early
+developed and retained. When she was about three years old her mother
+went abroad for three months, and during her absence the child developed
+croup, terrifying her father, who was the most devoted of parents, and
+went far towards spoiling her. Indeed, beyond a mild scolding, he never
+found it in his heart to inflict a more severe punishment than shaking
+his closed umbrella at her on an occasion when—just ready to go out—he
+had been recalled to deal with some extra naughtiness; Baba howled with
+rage, but it is to be feared that the proceeding did not act as much of
+a deterrent. She always knew exactly what she wanted, and seldom
+regretted her proceedings in those very youthful days. Once, when in
+charge of an aunt, she killed a fly on the window with a dab of her
+little fist. The aunt sought to improve the occasion, “See what you have
+done, Baba; how cruel! You killed that poor little fly, and if you try
+and try you can never make it alive again.” “No,” returned Baba, “I know
+I can’t; I don’t want to.”
+
+Later, when she was seven years old, her sisters went to school, and
+then came the time she speaks of as her lonely childhood. The
+neighbourhood was singularly wanting in children of her own age, and she
+was obliged to play by herself and find her own amusements. It was at
+this period too that she fraternised with the frog, who lived in the
+little brook that ran through the home-field. She was still very much of
+a pet, and, though independent in character, had no objection to be run
+after and waited on. Sometimes, however, even affectionate supervision
+had serious drawbacks; on one occasion, a Sunday evening, the maid who
+put her to bed being out, that duty was undertaken by Franklin, the
+cook, usually regarded as a firm friend. On this particular evening Baba
+did not at all wish to go to bed, and was caught for the purpose after
+some chasing and insistence; she was quiet, but most dignified during
+the disrobing process, and said her prayers with much unction, adding an
+additional petition, “And pray, God, forgive Franklin for being so
+unkind to me!”
+
+She learnt to read when very young, and reading was always her favourite
+occupation; she did not care much for dolls or toys. When she was about
+nine her eldest sister, who had then left school, taught her the moves
+of chess, and she picked up the game very rapidly. Her sister, it is
+true, was a slow mover, and by no means a formidable opponent, and the
+child very soon became able to give her checkmate. She would sit at the
+board with a book beside her, which she read between moves, looking up
+when it was her turn to play and giving a rapid glance at the pieces.
+Then swiftly and unhesitatingly the move was made and she returned to
+the book. She probably won two-thirds of the games.
+
+Although she was but a child she greatly resented what she called being
+made into a baby. Her eldest sister, who often undertook to give her her
+lessons, insisted one day on a dictation being written on a slate
+instead of on a piece of paper, since Marjorie was careless with ink.
+Like the man in Calverley’s poem, Marjorie “argued right, she argued
+left, she also argued round about her.” The sister, who had already been
+through painful experiences with Marjorie’s use of pens and ink, stood
+firm, and, ruling lines on the slate, placed it before her reluctant
+pupil, who was by this time much out of breath from the length and
+variety of her conversation on the subject of being treated as a baby.
+Seizing the slate Marjorie waved it dramatically above her head, and
+shouted, “Aggie! when I was a child, I thought as a child, I understood
+as a child, but when I became a man” (here the slate was banged down
+upon the table), “I put away childish things.”
+
+On another occasion Marjorie was forbidden to bring two favourite
+playthings to lessons. They were two small balls of home manufacture and
+surprising powers of bounce, and she called them Winkie and Nobbs. After
+considerable delay W. and N. were most unwillingly put out of sight and
+reach—physical reach—and with strangely sudden docility a dictation was
+begun. It concerned Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn, and Marjorie wrote on,
+with the most praiseworthy attention. When correction time came her
+sister’s feelings may be imagined, as she made the discovery that
+whenever Henry VIII. was in question, he was alluded to as King Winkie,
+while the unhappy Anne had become Queen Nobbs! The effect was so
+ludicrous that the sisters laughed over it together until they cried.
+
+About this time Marjorie took up hero-worship with a zest and
+thoroughness which she devoted to all her pursuits, and if anyone
+ventured to suggest that even her own particular heroes had their weak
+points, she would wax quite fierce in their defence. In this way
+Horatius Cocles (she had just been introduced to the Lays of Ancient
+Rome), Julius Cæsar, and Napoleon all had their day; she cried with
+anger when certain indisputable faults were pointed out to her in the
+last-mentioned personage. She had now developed remarkable powers of
+expression, and wrote quite interesting letters. Her father being
+suddenly taken ill, and it becoming necessary to keep the house quite
+quiet, she was invited by an elderly relative, who lived a few miles
+away, to stay with her for a short visit. Marjorie was not at all
+anxious to go, but finally consented, one of the inducements being that
+she might help with the fowls which her cousin kept, and that there
+would be beautiful new-laid eggs for breakfast. Her letter, after a few
+days’ stay, was most amusing. It was a very old-fashioned house, and she
+had been put to sleep in a four-post bedstead, which she said reminded
+her of a hearse, while the newspapers, placed upon the top to keep off
+the dust, “rustled like the flowers at the funeral.” “As for eggs,” she
+continued, “I haven’t seen as much as the white of an egg since I came.”
+
+Like her sisters she had read omnivorously; the nursery shelves, though
+well furnished, did not last her long, and she browsed in the library.
+She had got through all Dickens and most of Sir Walter Scott before she
+was twelve. She read very quickly, and had the knack of mastering the
+essentials of her reading with extraordinary rapidity, so that in a very
+short time she could discuss her subject even when it chanced to be
+rather more serious than fiction. Natural history she was extremely fond
+of, and with all animals she was an instant friend. Some time later,
+Whiskey, the white rat, and a tamed starling, fallen from the nest and
+picked up half-fledged, were the objects of great devotion. They
+involved a tiny tragedy too, for to the faithful Whiskey it appeared
+that overmuch affection was bestowed upon the bird, and he, who had
+hitherto lived in amity with his feathered companion, flew at him one
+afternoon and fatally injured him. His mistress never quite forgave
+Whiskey, though after a temporary estrangement, due to that unfortunate
+fit of temper, the rat was readmitted to fellowship. In her later years
+there was Trilby, a stray cat, who somehow suggested a depressed
+charwoman; Phœbus, a magnificent orange Persian, who purred under his
+daily brushing if she undertook it, but growled and swore in other
+hands. There was also a poor dancing bear whose sore foot she dressed at
+the street door, while his owner looked on expecting to see her attacked
+in spite of the muzzle, but watched Bruin fawn on her instead. You can
+trace her understanding of all living things whenever she writes of
+them. Who can forget the anxious hen in “The Roadmender,” or “The
+Follering Bürd,” or the tortoise, making “a stately meal of buttercups,”
+or the sense of myriad life which came to her as she lay under the great
+tree on her last day in the garden?
+
+Her father died in 1881, when she was twelve years old; and her mother,
+never a very strong woman, was completely prostrated by her loss. At
+about thirteen Marjorie went to school at Torquay with a relative for a
+few months, and subsequently spent a short time in another school near
+London, whose principal was far from appreciating her. Except for
+home-teaching and wide and constant reading this was all the education
+she had.
+
+Between 1882 and 1884 Marjorie’s health became affected by her rapid
+growth, and some spinal weakness was disclosed. Her rather delicate
+condition, as well as her mother’s invalidism, and the fact that one of
+her sisters was already married and the other away from home, finally
+decided Mrs Barber to give up the house in Yorkshire, now so much too
+large for the diminished family, and settle somewhere experimentally
+until a final residence could be fixed on. Marjorie’s health then
+improved, and she went to a small children’s hospital on the outskirts
+of London maintained by the private generosity of two ladies. Here she
+began training as a sick-nurse, a profession for which she had much
+natural aptitude, and here she went through the ordeal of being present
+at her first operation. It did not affect her as much as she had
+imagined might be the case, but she did not stay more than a few months
+at the hospital as her own health was too indifferent to permit of
+longer training. About this time she joined a modelling class, and her
+master, when shown her work, refused to believe that it was her first
+effort, and that she had never previously had a lesson. Between 1886 and
+1891 she spent a certain amount of time in Torquay, where she helped to
+nurse a relative in failing health, and after her death became for a
+time parish nurse. She also worked in the East End for a short time, in
+the district well (or ill) known as the Jago. In 1891 her mother died in
+the small Suffolk town where she had taken a house; it was the Bungay so
+faithfully described as the goal of the blind friar’s journey in Brother
+Hilarius. Here Marjorie used to enjoy rowing herself on the river, and
+here the tradespeople still remember her as ‘so nice to talk to.’ She
+was intuitive to a high degree, and therefore could sympathise with
+widely divergent joys and griefs. Her keen sense of humour, too,
+prevented her ever being depressed or unamused, and probably in all her
+life she never felt bored.
+
+Marjorie was twenty-two years old when her mother died. She was very
+tall, with a fair complexion, a good deal of brown hair, very large grey
+eyes full of expression—an index indeed of whatever she was speaking or
+thinking about. They could beam with serene pleasure, grow tenderly
+sympathetic or dance with mischievous fun as the spirit moved her. Her
+face and appearance were most arresting and her conversation quite
+fascinating, for she was extremely witty. Quick to see the humorous side
+of a thing, she yet responded to any mood of her companions. Her eldest
+sister once heard her described by a bluff and frank naval officer as
+‘rattling good company,’ and the words were apt.
+
+After her mother’s death, which occurred rather unexpectedly, Marjorie
+lived for a time a somewhat varied existence partly in England and
+partly in Germany, where with a friend she stayed for a while in a
+quaint little place on the Rhine. Their lodgings were in an old tower,
+where they were one night serenaded by students to Marjorie’s great
+delight and amusement. She was also for some time in Wiesbaden under
+treatment for her eyesight, which was just then giving her trouble. She
+was here overtaken by a sudden and serious attack of illness, during
+which she was most devotedly nursed by the little Sister of Charity, a
+“scant five feet” high, described in “A German Christmas Eve.”
+
+After her recovery and return to England she again took up philanthropic
+work, and it was an errand of this nature which first introduced her to
+the household into which she was afterwards adopted. The family’s
+interests were literary, scientific, and artistic, and they were not
+slow to appreciate the combination of rare and valuable qualities which
+they perceived in Marjorie. Her position at the time was an independent
+but singularly lonely one. Both her sisters were married, one always
+abroad, and she had no especial claim on any of her other relatives. She
+was financially independent; her health was already most uncertain, and
+she was subject to distressing and painful attacks of illness. Here was
+a home whose doors were open for her; a circle of friends with hands
+outstretched in welcome and invitation. When she decided to enter the
+one and accept the other, many of her own relatives disapproved, and
+when, with characteristic thoroughness of accomplishment, she dropped
+her own family name and took that of her adopted one, sundry hard things
+were written and spoken. To her eldest sister, however, the “adoption”
+brought nothing but relief and approval; to feel that one so needing it
+would for the future have every care and attention that could be given
+in either sickness or health; that she would live among the most
+congenial surroundings and be able to follow her artistic bent in
+whatever direction it might suggest itself—these things weighed heavier
+than the superficial loss of identity which the change of name entailed.
+Nor was her content ever disturbed. As time passed and Marjorie’s health
+grew feebler, redoubled care was exercised, and every expedient which
+science could supply or affection suggest, was used in the endeavour to
+ease, when, alas, it became apparent that her deathward way could only
+be smoothed but by no means arrested.
+
+Marjorie’s temperament was essentially creative; the need for expression
+was so strong that as her health broke down, and one pursuit after
+another became impossible, she found fresh outlets. When she could no
+longer go about much she took up her modelling again, and executed,
+among other things, a really wonderful crucifix. Her power of entering
+into the spirit of her work was extraordinary; she became, as it were,
+obsessed with it. On seeing the crucifix a good judge of mediæval work
+asked its owners where they got their “14th century” work? Marjorie’s
+mind, at the time she executed this, was full of Florentine work of that
+period, and it set its sign on what she wrought.
+
+When she became too ill to go on with her modelling, she began to write;
+when writing could not be done in a sitting position, she propped the
+paper on her chest and wrote lying down; by and by the right hand could
+no longer be used, so she wrote with her left, a beautiful legible
+script. When increased physical weakness made writing in every way
+impossible, she dictated.
+
+
+She lived in those days in an old Georgian house on Chelsea Embankment,
+a house from which she could hear the gulls scream over the Thames,
+recalling “Daddy Whiddon” and “The Follerin’ Bürd,” and where, under her
+window, grew the grimy tree in which the sparrow brethren chattered and
+squabbled. Round her room one of her adopted sisters had designed the
+frieze of flowers which was “Like the Rose tree in Alice in Wonderland.”
+For many, many weeks she lay, suffering acutely, yet always writing,
+piecing together that exquisite literary mosaic called “The Roadmender.”
+By and by when the summer came and the heat, when London noises wearied
+ear and brain alike, she sighed for the green peace of the country. Her
+condition was then such that no one could tell how long she might still
+be spared. Every precaution against fatigue or shaking could not really
+eliminate either from the journey, which was an awful strain on an
+enfeebled frame. But once among the Sussex fields, with the downs in
+sight, her contentment grew daily in spite of terrible pain and
+exhaustion. She had the clear sunshine, the clean air, the swallows that
+twittered from their nests above her windows, and her cup of
+satisfaction was full. The watchers knew their task would be but a brief
+one, yet none could know when the end might come. She was extremely
+happy with those she loved around her; her dear animal friends were
+there too, for Phœbus, the big cat, and Jacob, most faithful of little
+bull-dogs (he was of the French breed), had migrated to the country
+also. Marjorie was almost unable to take any nourishment of any kind by
+now, yet her courage and cheerfulness never failed, and she showed the
+keenest interest in any subject discussed. The proofs of “Brother
+Hilarius” were coming in daily for correction, and she weighed every
+word as it was read to her; she would insert a comma here, begin a fresh
+paragraph there, and secure the cadence of every sentence. She would
+sometimes add or take away even a syllable in some phrase which struck
+her sensitive ear as not properly balanced or harmonious. At this time
+she was failing very rapidly, and it seemed doubtful if she would finish
+the proofs. But her interest was unabated though she was in the last
+stages of intense weakness, and it seemed as if she could not leave her
+work until it was done. She lived to complete the task; and a few days
+later, after many hours of unconsciousness, she passed through that
+white gate whence her words have echoed back with such gracious
+insistence. Her suffering had been awful, her courage wellnigh
+incredible, but none could regret the peace she had won, and it was not
+without reason that her eldest sister, roaming the garden for flowers in
+the twilight of early dawn, chose out of all blossoms the heartsease
+that fashioned the first cross laid on her breast. She died on the 24th
+of August 1901, in her thirty-third year.
+
+Looking back over the time which has elapsed since she cried her
+farewell, it is comparatively easy to give some idea of her marvellous
+development during her last six years of life, the years, that is to
+say, when experiment had taught relative importance, and experience had
+brought certainty. During her time of comparative health, when able to
+work and travel, to make acquaintances and friends—and how many and
+faithful they were—to strive after the betterment of poverty and
+sickness, during that time Marjorie had accumulated a magnificent series
+of what may be called mental photographs. All her days she had been a
+keen and humorous observer, with an extraordinary and retentive memory,
+and when ill-health narrowed the circle of physical activity her
+mentality asserted itself more strongly. She turned, as it were, to the
+portfolio of her memory and looked over its pictures, seeing them now
+more truly because she was their spectator, and no longer swayed or
+diverted by the momentary action which had made them hers. She dipped
+the brush of imagination into the colours of reality, and lo, they
+became living as they limned forth those scenes which her life and its
+happenings had gathered; for Michael Fairless’s art, in whatever
+direction, owed its rare loveliness to its absolute truth, and it is the
+width of appeal in the truth as she set it forth which has won her so
+many readers. Her subjects were never out of the way or far-fetched, yet
+her unerring instinct set the seal of speciality on whatever subject she
+touched. Page after page of her writing reveals fresh beauty in the
+simplest things; the busy little German nun, the child trotting with its
+cats to seek counsel, the London sparrows, old Gawdine, “Luvly Miss” and
+her owner, a pathetic little bundle in cotton wool, dying of her burns,
+and cheered at the last by the resurrection of her treasure; the old man
+on his way to the workhouse, the woman haymaking and nursing her
+love-child in the field-corner, the parson who stayed to talk with the
+roadmender and bestowed rare tobacco—they are a veritable
+portrait-gallery. Think, too, of that scene at the inn when Brother
+Hilarius guides the blind friar, and Piping Hugh of Mildenhall whistles
+like a bird on his oaten straw. The pictures are produced without
+effort; Michael Fairless saw with the inner vision, and to her
+expression was easy. Hers was a delicate and a subtle gift, perfect of
+its kind, a gift that has drawn many after her along the road she
+mended, ay, the gift that for many has changed a darksome portal into a
+white gate, framed in clustering boughs, and set in the gracious
+sunlight of summer.
+
+
+
+
+                              HER WRITINGS
+
+
+                                   BY
+
+                            W. SCOTT PALMER
+
+                             (M. E. DOWSON)
+
+
+                             THE ROADMENDER
+
+
+                                   I
+
+Michael Fairless was an artist, with the artist’s longing for creative
+expression. But while she was able to move about among her fellows her
+imaginative force, together with such strength of body as she had and
+her fine intellectual endowment, was spent on their behalf. She gave
+herself without stint and, it appeared, without regret for much that
+must consequently stand aside. Men and their miseries, their poverty,
+pleasures, joys and pain, seemed to take the place for her of the
+artist’s material in language or clay or colour. The material she chose
+was life, life in all its crudity or evasiveness, its stubborn
+resistance, forbidding weakness, its failures and faults; and with the
+far-reaching promise upon which only faith as strong as hers can keep a
+constant hold. In each man she saw, through disfigurement and disguise,
+his proper reflexion of the divine image, as a sculptor sees in the
+block of marble the one beauty that he is to set free.
+
+There were times when I thought this passion of hers would always be
+enough. I thought the fountain of charity in her heart would never allow
+her artistic longings to be carried into any field but that of life.
+When the claims of human needs and suffering for the moment slackened, I
+saw that there was always the attraction of a perennial love and
+carefulness for every creature of the earth, even the very lowest. From
+the blade of grass and the clod on which it grew, to every beast and
+bird, all things entered her soul to become her own, to become centres
+of the active, self-devoted interest that one gives only to one’s own. I
+might well think that she would live and die without any disturbing
+recognition of another longing unfulfilled. Moreover, her enjoyment of
+the creative work of others was never tainted by self-pity, or by that
+base alloy of envy which kills delight in many of us, whose gifts and
+executive powers are far inferior to hers. It seemed reasonable to think
+that her love of beauty would be satisfied with what her indomitable
+eagerness and energy enabled her to absorb from literature, painting and
+sculpture, from music and, above all, from the symbolism of religion in
+its poetry of psalm and stately hymn, and in those lovely myths with
+which the childlike heart of man has clothed his intuitions of divine
+things. But I was wrong. The impulse to create, though often overborne,
+was very masterful.
+
+Out of that impulse sprang the crucifix now in St John Baptist’s church
+in London (Pimlico Road). In this she shewed a promise of what might
+have been had she been trained and practised in a plastic art. But I am
+sure, nevertheless, that nothing short of inability to go out into the
+highways of life, to seek and find, or at the least to be sought and
+found by, troubled men and women, would have turned her finally to any
+engrossing work other than that which she could do for them.
+
+
+Twenty months before she died the opportunity came—as mortal sickness.
+To most of us it would hardly have been an opportunity. Among our
+writers only a few unconquerable spirits, of whom Robert Louis Stevenson
+perhaps is chief, have been able to overcome flesh and its hindrances by
+the governance of the soul, when the weight of Death’s heavy hand has
+been laid upon them. For men of this rank, life, when it meets new
+difficulty in a body nearing to the grave, rises against that difficulty
+in a fresh uplifting of power. The men themselves are carried beyond the
+atmosphere of oppression caused by the disabilities of mortal sickness;
+and we watch them working miracles, as though these were trifles light
+as air. Of that rare company was Michael Fairless. But she knew when and
+how she was beaten; for there is another thing to be noted of that
+company—an illuminated common sense. They work miracles, it is true; but
+they are not often found trying impossibilities. Their faith is potent,
+but it is neither superstitious nor absurd. Behind what looks to many of
+us a reckless venture and a foolish hope it seems that there is, in
+reality, something which takes the place of a prudent man’s prudent
+calculation. It seems that where other men must calculate they _see_—yet
+without knowing that they see. They know what they can and what they
+cannot do; but it is as though by a concealed interior vision, not by
+mere guess, that they make discoveries. Their decisions are, for the
+most part, not to be justified by the maxims and habits of ordinary
+usage in life, yet are very often crowned with good success and are
+richly productive as ordinary ways are not. They have, as I said, their
+common sense.
+
+So, when Michael Fairless met defeat, she laid down her arms, the wonted
+weapons of her charity, but took up others. And with these she made a
+way, not only to hearts beyond any range of hers before, but also for
+her artist-soul, frustrate in the years gone by. We who looked on
+thought that but for the help she could give to friends able to come to
+her bedside, most likely she would do nothing more. Again we were wrong.
+
+
+We took her away from London to the Down country that she loved, hoping
+for some recovery—against hope and against her own conviction. There, in
+her ‘cool light room on the garden level’ with windows opening to the
+ground, day after day she looked ‘across the bright grass—_il verde
+smalto_—’ and beyond ‘the promise of coming lilies,’ to the Gate of her
+symbolic fancy:—‘I know now,’ she says in “The Roadmender,” ‘that
+whenever and wherever I die my soul will pass out through this white
+gate.’
+
+There, beside the gate, the roadmender was born. I suppose he was fully
+grown in the spirit of her meditation before she spoke of him. Certainly
+it was her own soul, mind, heart, and life’s experience that he
+embodied. He was conceived of her, bone of her bone, spirit of her
+spirit. Who knows him knows her; in following his life and death we
+follow hers. His realized ideal is hers that was unrealized. But indeed
+in him she touched realization. ‘I am a roadmender,’ she said to me,
+‘there, by the white gate.’ As in all true artists, life passed from her
+into her creation, virtue went forth from her, and she with virtue: she
+_was_ that roadmender.
+
+I think she would have been content with giving him life thus, within
+her own artistic cognizance, but for another thing. She wanted to earn
+money, little or much; had a hundred uses for it; saw that perhaps some
+would come into her hands this way. So she demanded of me pencil and
+paper, and wrote down (with her left hand, the right being disabled; and
+without being lifted up in bed) the first chapter of ‘The Roadmender.’
+She wrote easily, it appeared, and as well and clearly, almost as
+quickly, as before this last disabling sickness. She hardly ever paused
+for thought or word, and made small correction. To the best of my
+present memory the second chapter was written next day and with the same
+swift facility.
+
+Neither of these, nor any that followed, was thought of by her (or for
+that matter by me) as a chapter; each was no more than a sketch, a
+little paper telling of the roadmender she was. Not until much later, in
+fact just before the end, did it occur to either of us that she had been
+writing a book.
+
+We sent those sketches, the first and second, to Mr Lathbury, the editor
+of _The Pilot_, who accepted them with encouraging, and to her
+surprising, readiness. They were published; and from that time to this
+their readers, in a fast increasing number, have asked for news, facts,
+about the writer. Unquestionably The Roadmender’s appeal, whatever it
+was, went home there and then and has never ceased to find response. But
+this is not the place in which that appeal should be discussed; it shall
+be dealt with later. Here I only allude to it in passing, as a
+significant piece of the short history of an all too short literary
+life.
+
+
+For anyone who knew the previous life of the author, the fitness of her
+roadmender to present herself and her ideals was obvious. ‘After all,’
+he says for her in that opening chapter, ‘what do we ask of life, here
+or indeed hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our
+fellow-men and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into
+the face of God?’ That aspiration to service and communion had been in
+her no affair of mere aspiration; it had been a burning force, not a
+quietistic scheme. Yet always her heart and soul rested gladly in ‘the
+lap of earth’; and she turned her face towards the face of God as she
+discerned that vision everywhere, in earth and earth’s little ones, and
+in the face of man. But a new peacefulness came with the laying down of
+arms, and she could picture herself quietly at work on the common road,
+serving ‘the footsteps of her fellows’; indeed joining with contentment
+‘the company of weary old men who sit on the sunny side of the workhouse
+wall and wait for the tender mercies of God.’
+
+Death it is that in truth she waits for in the pages of ‘The
+Roadmender.’ You will find death everywhere, a friend, a ‘strong angel’
+and, as here, ‘the tender mercies of God.’ The road, too, although the
+common road of service and of the common labour of man, is the one that
+leads into the great silence; the mysteries of God and man cast shadows
+in the sunshine of its ‘white highway.’ This is the background, or the
+chorus if you will, even of the first part of the book, where she is
+giving a picture of the man and herself, and furnishing his experience
+from her own experience in past days. There is the snake, bringing in
+Melampus and the revealing of secrets by the fatal kiss; there is the
+old widow, waiting, as she herself was waiting, for death and a ‘“kind”
+burial’ in ‘the little churchyard which has been a cornfield, and may
+some day be one again.’ The sea brings memories of ‘its secret dead in
+the caverns of Peace,’ and of ‘the still and silent Sea of Glass’ and
+‘the Voice as the voice of many waters.’ But withal there is love, the
+constant love of earth’s fair face, and its living adornment; the love
+for which she thanks God as ‘the Brotherhood of the Poor’; even the
+bitter-sweet love of death itself:—‘Very pleasant art thou, O Brother
+Death, thy love is wonderful, passing the love of women.’
+
+‘“Surely all men should be roadmenders,”’ the parson says. ‘O wise
+parson, so to read the lesson of the road!’ That is her heart-felt
+comment.
+
+
+The first part of the book ended with the ending of autumn, when we
+brought her back to London—to our house, 91 Cheyne Walk. She was borne
+to the station on a mattress laid in the bottom of a covered cart, the
+tilt thrown open at the back. As the cart went on, she watched through
+this opening, the receding lane—‘lay as in a blissful dream,’ she says.
+‘The looped-back tarpaulin framed the long vista of my road with the
+downs beyond; and I lay in the cool dark, caressed by the fresh breeze
+in its thoroughfare, soothed by the strong monotonous tramp of the great
+grey team and the music of the jangling harness.’ ‘It is like Life,’ she
+goes on, ‘this travelling backwards—that which has been, alone
+visible—like Life, which is, after all, retrospective with a steady
+moving on into the Unknown, Unseen, until Faith is lost in Sight and
+experience is no longer the touchstone of humanity.’
+
+I believe she thought, then, that she would never come back to her road,
+to the green fields she loved so well, the garden that was ‘an epitome
+of peace,’ the sycamore-tree that made a microcosmic world for her as
+she lay beneath it, caressed by the sunlight scattered through its
+leaves. She thought, I believe, that Brother Death would meet her among
+the close-set houses of the town, while she lay isolated in the great
+city. So she said farewell, not only with the roadmender to roadmending,
+but to the country of her love. Yet she says it with a characteristic
+qualifying:—‘It is scarcely a farewell, for my road is ubiquitous,
+eternal; there are green ways in Paradise and golden streets in the
+beautiful City of God. Nevertheless, my heart is heavy; for, viewed by
+the light of the waning year, roadmending seems a great and wonderful
+work which I have poorly conceived of and meanly performed: yet I have
+learnt to understand dimly the truth of three great paradoxes—the
+blessing of a curse, the voice of silence, the companionship of
+solitude—and so take my leave of this stretch of road, and of you who
+have fared along the white highway through the medium of a printed page.
+
+‘Farewell! It is a roadmender’s word; I cry you Godspeed to the next
+milestone—and beyond.’ In her mind, I am sure, these words were the last
+she was to write.
+
+
+                                   II
+
+The roadmender, however, had become part of herself, and as her life
+went on so he in her went on. But we cease to watch the moving picture
+of a fictitious experience at the roadside where men and the sacrificial
+beasts—the procession of a common life—went by. We are embarked upon the
+swiftly flowing river of her own life, as it passes to the sea.
+Henceforth the author speaks of herself almost undisguised; she is still
+the roadmender, but he lives, moves towards his death, rejoices,
+suffers, contemplates, reflects, as she does, in the actual process of
+her being. What happens happens here and now—this is a day-book we are
+reading, very faithful, very candid, and only the more pathetic to us
+when we know it as it really is.
+
+‘The next milestone’ marked for her the entrance to the valley of the
+shadow of death. She knew that still the days might but slowly drag out
+their tale, and she be long, yet, in passing through; she was assured
+now, and not only by her own conviction, that never would she pass from
+beneath that shadow until the gate of earth closed behind her, and she
+found herself in some such ‘brave new world’ as she had seen before in
+dream or vision, where the inner world of spirit, of the joy and light
+and hope in which her spirit dwelt while she was here, would show itself
+more plainly, less confused.
+
+‘Out of the Shadow’ the new set of papers came, and thus they were
+headed when she wrote the first. ‘I am no longer a roadmender,’ she
+says; ‘the stretch of white highway which leads to the end of the world
+will know me no more; the fields and hedgerows, grass and leaf stiff
+with the crisp rime of winter’s breath, lie beyond my horizon; the ewes
+in the folding, their mysterious eyes quick with the consciousness of
+coming motherhood, answer another’s voice and hand; while I lie here,
+not in the lonely companionship of my expectations, but where the shadow
+is bright with kindly faces and gentle hands, until one kinder and
+gentler still carries me down the stairway into the larger room.’
+
+There, in an old house fronting the Thames, she watched from her bed no
+longer the green grass, the meadows and the white gate with the
+roadmender’s road, but the highway of water, ‘the silent river of my
+heart’ she calls it, ‘with its tale of wonder and years.’
+
+Her love of roads and of running water is significant for the
+understanding of her character and mind. She is of those for whom life
+is movement, and time is real.
+
+Nothing for her stands still, is fixed—static, as we say now; the whole
+creation moves with the movement and communicated freedom of the
+purposes of God, and with the outpouring of the divine spirit in the
+spirits of men. Even in the flux of earth she sees the flowing of the
+great rivers of the heavenly love; and all earth’s roads and streams are
+but ways of that eternal journey of man, of which his temporal journeys
+are at once the cloak and sacrament.
+
+As she looks upon the landscape of the world it grows transparent for
+her, and paradise, with its lucent life and many-coloured waters, shines
+through. The life of the spirit is more real to her than any life
+beside, more real, more powerful, constraining. When she writes of
+little things you see that for her there are no little things; each
+touches the eternal and has its endless depth of meaning there. And
+because there is this endless meaning, this unfathomed background, this
+movement of all within the movement that is carrying all, roads have
+magic in her eyes—or rather are symbols of a more than magical truth.
+She watches the multitude travelling there along the ages in the
+pilgrimage of life that every man must share. No event, no spectacle in
+earth or heaven stands alone; she has the mystic’s sense of wholeness
+and continuity, as of the dark impenetrable wonders underlying
+everything that can be seen even by the mystic’s eye. Therefore, that
+which is seen signifies, carries with it, all the rest; every road
+‘leads to the end of the world,’ every river has ‘its tale of wonder and
+years’ and flows into the sea where its waters shall be transformed.
+
+
+She tells us that to meet death in the town was not what she had
+desired. ‘I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should
+a painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the fragrant pine
+needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie once again as I had
+lain many a time, bathed in the bitter sweetness of the sun-blessed
+pines, lapped in the manifold silence; my ear attuned to the wind of
+Heaven with its call from the Cities of Peace. In sterner mood, when
+Love’s hand held a scourge, I craved rather the stress of the moorland
+with its bleaker mind imperative of sacrifice. To rest again under the
+lee of Rippon Tor, swept by the strong peat-smelling breeze; to stare
+untired at the long cloud-shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths
+huddle and shrink round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too was
+accomplished, and my soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void sky;
+and naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes seeking
+afar the distant light of his own heart.’
+
+But these moods had passed, and although the scourge Love held now in
+his hand was heavy and the sacrifice long of its accomplishment, she
+was, as she says, content to lie patiently in the great capital, with
+its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and pleasure, which she
+had thought ‘an ill place for a sick man to wait in’; and there find
+‘the fulfilment by antithesis of all desire.’ ‘“It is not good that the
+man should be alone,” said the Lord God.’
+
+Day and night she follows the great barges on the waterway, as she
+followed in her mind the coming and going on the road near her white
+gate. ‘Throughout the long watches of the night I follow them; and in
+the early morning they slide by, their eyes pale in the twilight; while
+the stars flicker and fade, and the gas lamps die down into a dull
+yellow blotch against the glory and glow of a new day.’ ‘It is like
+Life,’ she would have said again had you asked her; but she tells you
+nothing of her weariness in those night-watches nor of her pain.
+
+
+On the wooden cross that marks her grave there are these words: ‘Lo, how
+I loved thee!’ They are taken from her last gift to me, Mother Julian’s
+‘Revelations of Divine Love.’
+
+In the groaning and travailing of creation she bore her part, but never
+alone; always God was there bearing his part and the part of every one.
+Across the whole world there lay for her the light of the glory of
+divine sacrifice. Not for her was any picture of a serene and far-away
+God without ‘parts or passions,’ looking on at the world’s pain; it was
+the glory of her God to share all pain. There was nothing, no weariness
+of hers or any man’s, no suffering, even of the beasts, that was not
+his. And faith in God gave her also faith in suffering, in the value of
+a sacrifice to be accomplished, of a travail that should bring forth
+fruit to all eternity, of groaning that was the utterance of slaves
+working towards their manumission and the freedom of divine sons. ‘Lo,
+how I loved thee!’ All men shall hear this when their own sacrifice is
+indeed accomplished, and their ‘sin-glazed eyes’ open to see who it is
+that has sacrificed himself in them. This was her strength.
+
+Why, then, should she tell us of the suffering she bore, as she went
+through the valley of the shadow comforted in the strength of the divine
+Companion of her way, the Love that so loved her and all the world?
+
+
+It is fitting that she writes here the story of Gawdine, the
+organ-grinder whom it was once her ‘privilege to know’; it is fitting
+that I repeat it now.
+
+‘He was a hard swearer, a hard drinker, a hard liver, and he fortified
+himself body and soul against the world: he even drank alone, which is
+an evil sign.’
+
+‘One day to Gawdine sober came a little dirty child, who clung to his
+empty trouser leg—he had lost a limb years before—with a persistent
+unintelligible request. He shook the little chap off with a blow and a
+curse; and the child was trotting dismally away, when it suddenly
+turned, ran back, and held up a dirty face for a kiss.
+
+‘Two days later Gawdine fell under a passing dray which inflicted
+terrible internal injuries on him. They patched him up in hospital, and
+he went back to his organ-grinding, taking with him two friends—a pain
+which fell suddenly upon him to rack and rend with an anguish of
+crucifixion, and the memory of a child’s upturned face. Outwardly he was
+the same save that he changed the tunes of his organ, out of
+long-hoarded savings, for the jigs and reels which children hold dear,
+and stood patiently playing them in child-crowded alleys, where pennies
+are not as plentiful as elsewhere.
+
+‘He continued to drink; it did not come within his new code to stop,
+since he could “carry his liquor well”; but he rarely, if ever, swore.
+He told me this tale through the throes of his anguish as he lay
+crouched on a mattress on the floor; and as the grip of the pain took
+him he tore and bit at his hands until they were maimed and bleeding, to
+keep the ready curses off his lips.
+
+‘He told the story, but he gave no reason, offered no explanation: he
+has been dead now many a year, and thus would I write his epitaph:—
+
+        ‘He saw the face of a little child, and looked on God.’
+
+
+Love the supreme Sculptor at work on Gawdine, as on herself in her
+weariness and pain, at work too on the welter of all this world, calling
+forth from the rudest marble the divine Beauty that love is—this she
+sees. Love, too, looking from the face of a child and searching out his
+own image, his own response, from behind the battered mask that hides it
+from every other eye. And pain, the friend of sinners, the opportunity
+of love human and divine, love no less divine in that it has entered
+into man—this, too.
+
+The whole philosophy to which Michael Fairless had attained is written
+in the true tale of Gawdine; a living, vibrant philosophy it was,
+entering into herself, her action, her judgements whether of reflective
+thought or of intuitive discovery.
+
+It is not her way to see in an ill-driven dray the miraculous handiwork
+of God or a punishment for sin. “All things,” she would have told us, as
+she tells us here, “work together for good” in those who do not resist
+good when it comes. The dray and the face of the child are for her
+instruments and channels of God; yet neither is constrained,
+compelled—each is free according to its measure, each follows the law of
+its own being. So both are sacraments of the universal sacrament in
+which our lives are set and, according to their different measure,
+become mediators of the divine. The opportunity for both God and man is
+to be found everywhere by those who are willing to receive a gift; in
+pain or pleasure, riches or poverty, good hap or disaster. You have not
+to go in search of it; but neither must you turn away, or deny it even
+when it comes as the bitterest drop in the cup that you must drink. ‘Two
+friends—an anguish of crucifixion, and the memory of a child’s upturned
+face.’
+
+
+One thing more this story brings out—a conviction which establishes for
+her, once for all, that without the law there is no sin. A new law is
+born in Gawdine telling him, through the wound he gives to a little
+child, that he must ‘keep the ready curses off his lips.’ But he could
+“carry his liquor well,” he was still guiltless of offence in that,
+still waiting for a new law concerning that. And his judges must wait
+too.
+
+This is of her abiding sense of movement in every man’s life—a movement
+that gathers as it goes, and in which the man changes, not as a dead
+thing, a tool, or toy, is changed, but by a free and living creation, in
+which nothing is made actual and real that does not spring from the
+creative heart of his own character. You do not make a character as you
+build a house, laying one stone upon another; nor do you alter it as you
+might alter a house, pulling out these stones, and putting others in. It
+grows by inherent power, assimilating, rejecting, amplifying or
+transmuting, as though that which comes to it were food, which indeed it
+is—food from heaven or from hell. And every particle of this food that
+is truly incorporated in the man’s life goes to change character through
+and through, may be trusted to do it. Therefore, behind laws outworn and
+habits that should be outgrown, the charity that believes all things and
+hopes all things discovers the man as he really is, with promise of the
+man that he will be. Therefore, too, it is a charity that works for men
+in the light of knowledge of the men, and works wonders—as did Michael
+Fairless by its means. She says of the thirteenth century bishop about
+whom she writes a little later, that ‘he has known darkness and light
+and the minds of many men; most surely, too, he has known that God
+fulfils Himself in strange ways.’ We may say the same of her, for she
+never forgot the ‘strange ways’ of God with men.
+
+
+Winter drew towards its end, and she still lived to enjoy once more
+winter’s promise of the spring and the memories alive in her of springs
+gone by. ‘On Sunday,’ she writes, ‘my little tree’ [the tree outside her
+window-panes] ‘was limned in white and the sparrows were craving shelter
+at my window from the blizzard. Now the mild thin air brings a breath of
+spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden wait the kisses of
+the sun. Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away down the years, and
+remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn, for across my sleep I had
+heard the lusty golden-throated trumpeters heralding the spring.’
+
+Verily I believe she had heard those golden-throated trumpeters, for the
+blood of the plants ran in her veins, as did the blood of beasts and
+birds, and of all the common life. She was of the community of earth and
+nothing could ever set her apart. ‘The earth called,’ she says, ‘the
+fields called, the river called—that pied piper to whose music a man
+cannot stop his ears. It was with me as with the Canterbury pilgrims:—
+
+               ‘“So priketh hem nature in hir corages;
+               Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.”’
+
+In memory she sped on, ‘light of heart and foot with the new wine of the
+year,’ until she heard ‘the voice of the stream,’ as with her body’s
+ears, and as with her body’s eyes saw spring’s pageant; ‘green pennons
+waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters
+proclaiming “Victory” to an awakened earth.’
+
+Then—so like her—she notes the solitary flower, one growing apart close
+to the old tree’s side. ‘I sat down by my lonely little sister, blue sky
+overhead, green grass at my feet, decked, like the pastures of the
+Blessèd, in glorious sheen; a sea of triumphant golden heads tossing
+blithely back as the wind swept down to play with them at his pleasure.’
+
+‘It was all mine,’ she says, from one of her deepest convictions, ‘to
+have and to hold without severing a single slender stem or harbouring a
+thought of covetousness; mine, as the whole earth was mine, to
+appropriate to myself without the burden and bane of worldly
+possession.’
+
+                  *       *       *       *       *
+
+‘The river of God is full of water. The streets of the City are pure
+gold. Verily, here also having nothing we possess all things.’
+
+Thus she comes back to her sick-room in the dreadful yet beautiful city
+of earth, possessing ‘all things.’
+
+
+The gulls from the river sought the open sea; ‘the swoop and circle of
+silver wings in the sunlight’ was for her to be no more; and with her
+heart she followed them ‘to the free airs of their inheritance, to the
+shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of the wind-beaten
+waves.’
+
+The little lime-tree before her window spoke to her of the green
+country—was ‘gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise.’ With
+the glory of that promise her desire went forth, but upborne by another
+promise—that of the greater spring for which her spirit waited looked
+and longed from the valley of the shadow. Of that she writes in the last
+chapter of this part, as the coming of a new life and a new light.
+
+‘The dawn breaks, but it does not surprise us, for we have watched from
+the valley and seen the pale twilight. Through the wondrous Sabbath of
+faithful souls, the long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in
+the East; and we pass on towards it with quiet feet and opening eyes,
+bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made our own,
+until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and the
+peoples come from north and south and east and west to the City which
+lieth foursquare—the Beatific Vision of God.’
+
+Then her heart sings with one of the old hymns that she delighted in:—
+
+                  _Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
+                  Cuius pax iugis et summa ucunditas;
+                  Ubi non prœvenit rem desiderium,
+                  Nec desiderio minus est prœmium._
+
+Great indeed is the reward that could match with the desire of her soul,
+with its need and its capacity; yet having nothing she possessed all
+things even here, and I do not doubt that she does so still.
+
+
+                                  III
+
+Spring came, and in May she bade her last farewell to London. With
+infinite difficulty, and at the cost of an unforeseen agony of pain, we
+took her once more into the country, where she could see the white gate
+again from her garden room, and sometimes, on good days—more rarely than
+we hoped—be carried out to lie ‘on a green carpet, powdered yellow and
+white with the sun’s own flowers; overhead a great sycamore where the
+bees toil and sing; and sighing shimmering poplars golden grey against
+the blue.’ There, at the White Gate, she wrote the last chapters of ‘The
+Roadmender,’ beginning, if I remember well, in June.
+
+‘A great joy has come to me’; she says, in the first of those papers,
+‘one of those unexpected gifts which life loves to bestow after we have
+learnt to loose our grip of her. I am back in my own place very near my
+road—the white gate lies within my distant vision; near the lean grey
+Downs which keep watch and ward between the country and the sea; very
+near, nay, in the lap of Mother Earth.’... ‘The day of Persephone has
+dawned for me, and I, set free like Demeter’s child, gladden my eyes
+with this foretaste of coming radiance, and rest my tired sense with the
+scent and sound of home. Away down the meadow I hear the early scythe
+song, and the warm air is fragrant with the fallen grass. It has its own
+message for me as I lie here, I who have obtained yet one more mercy,
+and the burden of it is life, not death.’
+
+Then the roadmender must be himself again and go a-haymaking in another
+reminiscence, one that tells her a secret of the ‘rain upon the mown
+grass’ and the ‘failure’ of the fallen swathes. “_My ways are not your
+ways, saith the Lord._” ‘I remember how I went home along the damp
+sweet-scented lanes through the grey mist of the rain, thinking of the
+mown field and Elizabeth Banks [a sinner blessed through her very sin],
+and many, many more; and that night, when the sky had cleared and the
+nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon riding at anchor, a silver
+boat in a still blue sea ablaze with the headlights of the stars, and
+the saying of the herdsman of Tekoa came to me—as it has come oftentimes
+since:—
+
+‘“Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow
+of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that
+calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the face of
+earth; the Lord is His name.”’
+
+She was within a very little of the end, we thought, even then while it
+was still possible to carry her into the garden and lay her in the
+shelter of her tree, where, the last time but one that she was out, she
+wrote the second paper of this part. She thought so herself, as her
+meditation shews. ‘I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come,’
+she says, ‘as a great longing to open my eyes a little wider during the
+time which remains to me in this beautiful world of God’s making, where
+each moment tells its own tale of active, progressive life in which
+there is no undoing. Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that
+acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening
+circle towards the fulfilment of the mystery of God.
+
+‘There are, I take it, two master keys to the secrets of the universe,
+viewed _sub specie æternitatis_, the Incarnation of God, and the
+Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic
+little man of contemptible speech, that “all things are ours,” yea, even
+unto the third heaven.
+
+‘I have lost my voracious appetite for books;’ she goes on, ‘their
+language is less plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees;
+and for me the clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather
+than in the learning of men. “_Libera me ab fuscina Hophni_,” prayed the
+good Bishop, fearful of religious greed. I know too much, not too
+little; it is realisation that I lack, wherefore I desire these last
+days to confirm in myself the sustaining goodness of God, the love which
+is our continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and
+height are all one.’
+
+The cares of this world, such as they were for her, and the most part of
+them were other people’s, had slipped away:—‘It is a time,’ she says,
+‘of exceeding peace. There is a place waiting for me under the firs in
+the quiet churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties
+or personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them unknown
+to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to live on the
+charity of one’s fellow-men. I am most gladly in debt to all the world:
+and to Earth, my mother’—she writes, as though having suddenly turned
+her eyes to the loveliness around—‘for her great beauty.’ Then, with a
+backward reflexion on the long history of the human spirit in its
+groping after the divine, she exclaims:—‘There is more truth in the
+believing cry, “Come from thy white cliffs, O Pan!” than in the religion
+that measures a man’s life by the letter of the Ten Commandments, and
+erects itself as judge and ruler over him, instead of throwing open the
+gate of the garden where God walks with man from morning until morning.’
+
+The end of that paper is a breath of her heart’s longing for rest:—‘As I
+write the sun is setting; in the pale radiance of the sky above his
+glory there dawns the evening star; and earth, like a tired child, turns
+her face to the bosom of the night.’
+
+
+Once more she wrote from beneath the tree on one of the last days of
+June:—‘The poplar has lost its metallic shimmer, the chestnut its tall
+white candles; and the sound of the wind in the fully-leaved branches is
+like the sighing of the sea.’ Summer was coming to fullness; yet she
+lingered still. The eyes of her soul sought day by day a land whose
+boundaries begin where those of this world end:—‘Looking across at the
+white gate I wonder concerning the quiet pastures and still waters that
+lie beyond, even as Brother Ambrose wondered long years ago in the
+monastery by the forest.’ She asked for the manuscript of her little
+book, ‘Hilarius,’ not thinking that it would ever see light in print;
+and copied what she had written there of the vision of Brother Ambrose,
+monk and painter. In ‘a still night of many stars’ he saw, ‘from a great
+and high mountain,’ a radiant path in the heavens, and between the
+stars, as they ‘gathered themselves together on either side until they
+stood as walls of light,’ he beheld ‘the Holy City with roof and
+pinnacle aflame, and walls aglow with such colours as no earthly limner
+dreams of, and much gold;’ until to his great grief, ‘a little grey
+cloud came out of the north and hid the city from his sight.’
+
+The end of that vision is an expression on her part of the perennial,
+universal sorrow of the artist of every kind. ‘Brother Ambrose fell sick
+because of the exceeding great longing he had to limn the Holy City, and
+was very sad; but the Prior bade him thank God, and remember the
+infirmity of the flesh, which, like the little grey cloud, veiled
+Jerusalem to his sight.’
+
+Just as she was writing these words the monastery bell of St Hugh rang
+out, and another, yet harmonious, note sounded in the many-stringed
+instrument of her soul:—
+
+‘They still have time for visions behind those guarding walls,’ she
+says, ‘but for most of us it is not so. We let slip the ideal for what
+we call the real, and the golden dreams vanish while we clutch at
+phantoms: we speed along life’s pathway, counting to the full the sixty
+minutes of every hour, yet the race is not to the swift nor the battle
+to the strong.... And yet, looking back to the working days, I know how
+much goodness and loving kindness there is under the froth and foam. If
+we do not know ourselves we most certainly do not know our brethren:
+that revelation awaits us, it may be, first in Heaven. To have faith is
+to create; to have hope is to call down blessing, to have love is to
+work miracles.’
+
+Then, back to the mystic’s and the artist’s wide-eyed longing:—‘Above
+all let us see visions, visions of colour and light, of green fields and
+broad rivers, of palaces laid with fair colours, and gardens where a
+place is found for rosemary and rue.’
+
+
+The dominant note in Michael Fairless’s religion was mystical, as any
+man may see; and she had the large freedom of judgement, the
+understanding of and patience with sin, imperfection, failure, that are
+given only by the insight of the heart.
+
+It is true, no doubt, that in every religious man an acute realization
+of one of the three great elements in religion—the mystical, the
+intellectual, and the institutional—naturally carries with it some
+degree of subordination of the rest. The mystic is apt to undervalue
+reflective thought; for his soul opens to him avenues of vision, which
+are but poorly represented by the attempts of theologians to formulate
+the poetic utterances of the prophets and the symbolic pictures of
+saints. He is apt, also, to think too little of the outward sign,
+however effectual it may be, simply because, in an intimate awareness of
+his soul, the spiritual grace sweeps it aside. He may forget, in his
+wordless communion with God, the need there is for utterance—for the
+language of rite or word or ceremonial gesture—if men of different
+intellectual and spiritual ranks or stages in development are to bear
+each his proper part in a common religious life, and to make clear, even
+to themselves, the depth and height and breadth of their emptiness
+without God. Even those among us not justly to be called mystics, in an
+eminent or distinguishing sense, rarely attain anything near an equal
+balance between what they apprehend by intellect—by reasoning—and what
+the institution gives them, as it were, ready made; very many so hold
+the scales as to let the religion of the heart—of experience of the
+real, which is all men’s mysticism—be outweighed by one or other of
+those two, perhaps by each. In Michael Fairless heart knowledge and
+worship, the spirit’s admiration and pursuit, ruled all the rest. But
+from the character of this pursuit and worship in her, from its
+intensity and inclusiveness, sprang her high appreciation and glad
+sharing of the rest. The love of the brethren, of all brethren, of all
+that lives, was as the breath of her own soul’s life. She knew, by her
+hold upon the inner truth for spirit of a material world, the
+significance for spiritual growth awaiting every man in the least of
+little things. These material things, small or great, were hers, of her
+flesh and of her spirit; she could no more give them up, set them aside
+from her religion, than she could give up God or man. Therefore she
+sought, as the temple of her worship, a place where there should be room
+for all; not only for angels and archangels, saints and prophets, but
+for the sinful and the foolish among men, and for the common things of
+earth close by and the far-away revealing of the stars. In her Church—by
+implication at least and promise—all the worlds of life and death, of
+the spirit and the flesh, should be embraced and held together. Pan on
+his white cliffs—‘we can never be too Pagan,’ she says, ‘if we are truly
+Christian’—the ancient Mysteries, Jewish sacrifice, the ancient
+world-wide myths—those ‘eternal truths held fast in the Church’s
+net’—for all these and more there must be hands held out in a temple of
+the God whose witness was everywhere and in all, whose Spirit fills not
+only the whole round world but the spaces of the spheres.
+
+By implication and promise, in principle you may say if not in practice,
+she found what she sought in the English Church; although like the rest
+of us she had to carry promise forward, by hope and faith, to a
+fulfilment she could not look for now. But she found sacraments now,
+bringing to her more than promise. These, in her institutional life, she
+must have—she for whom all life was sacramental—and especially the
+greatest, ‘the most social sacrament,’ she called it. There in the
+Church they were for every one of us, as she demanded them; with a
+meaning plain to be read by men obliged to run; calling aloud upon the
+ignorant and the blind; showing beacon-lights for those who wandered
+from the way. There earth and heaven met and the sinner and the saint;
+there the life of man was taken up into the life and manhood and love of
+God. The universe was focussed there; and there she worshipped in peace,
+as one at home.
+
+You see how by disinterestedness she escaped the fate of mystics who
+lack that sovran antiseptic against self-corruption. You see, too, how
+it was that she never ceased to value—some might say to over-value—the
+institutional element in religion. But she was far from thinking that
+she had discovered, or ever would discover, a Church as it ought to be.
+She knew too well what the very promise of catholicity entails of past
+and present and long-lasting imperfection. She could not help but know
+and see that an _ecclesia_, a gathering in which all nations and
+generations should be embraced, and which needed from every man the
+gifts of the divine spirit that were his, must be marred for want of
+them. Here was a noble but ill-shapen body composed of ill-shapen
+members whose number reached back into the dim ages of the life of man,
+and would stretch into the yet dimmer ages of his life to come—a slowly
+organizing body, shaping itself and being shapen always anew, suffering,
+wounded, bearing the marks of scars and of disease that had eaten into
+its flesh. How could it be anything but as and what it was, even though
+its Head were the eternal Christ himself, the Humanity of God sharing
+that scarred and injured flesh? She knew something of what all this
+implies of beauty and truth to come slowly, very slowly; she saw
+something of what sin and folly, ignorance and weakness bring to every
+work and all the assemblies of mankind. Seeing clearly and confessing
+that in the greatest religious experiment ever tried upon this earth
+these things must be reckoned with, must qualify judgement, set a pause
+upon both complacency and too ready condemnation, she was content, nay
+happy, to remain where promise opens out an endless way. Can any one of
+us do more or better?
+
+So much for her attitude towards the institution of the Christian
+Church. With regard to the intellectual element in religion—especially
+the schematic and scientific interpretation which we call theology—she
+was wholly without fear. She had neither leisure nor taste nor
+scholarship for historical or documentary criticism, but when the
+results of criticism came her way she was, as always, eager to learn.
+Serious work of this kind, she was sure, could do the cause of religion
+nothing but good. Theological interpretation must, of course,
+emphatically and above all things make sense when face to face with the
+saints and prophets; an interpretation that did not must go. But it must
+also make sense in face of better knowledge, whether of history, of
+science, or of philosophy. Her mind was as hospitable as her heart; and
+with a delicate and rational discrimination, a power of sifting and
+rejection, that over and over again served her well in her adventurous
+career of thought. You wrote in marble, not in sand, when you corrected
+her mistakes; or rather you wrote as though with some fluent leaven that
+ran through all the living stuff of her. You found its traces everywhere
+long after, and learnt to wonder why such vital receptivity was so rare.
+She sought truth and ensued it. Moreover, her sense of the height and
+depth of mystery in man’s life and experience precluded for her the easy
+satisfaction of those superficial dogmatists who ‘need no repentance.’
+‘The universe,’ she writes, ‘is full of miracle and mystery: the
+darkness and silence are set for a sign we dare not despise.’ She was
+among those for whom that sign is sacramental, conveying that which it
+declares, bearing with it the ineffable promise embraced for men within
+the darknesses and silences of God. These, for the mystic, are no
+barrier, but rather the ocean where his love finds the immense waters of
+the love of God. ‘A sign,’ she says, ‘that we dare not despise’—one that
+tells us to set our hand before our lips, lest we blaspheme God with our
+little self-made rules for him. The one rule to which she clung was the
+rule of Love and Faith and Hope, the all-sufficing rule of men who feel
+the stir of the mighty winds of that spirit which blows where it listeth
+and cannot be stilled.
+
+
+Summer was going fast when the last scene of her long act of death
+opened. In the early days of August she grew much worse; after the third
+she was unable to take any food—only a few drops of water now and then.
+On the twelfth she told me she must try to keep a promise she had made
+to Mr Lathbury that she would write something more for him if she could.
+By this time she was almost blind, and speech was very difficult and
+painful to her. In spite of this she succeeded in dictating to me, after
+nine days of starvation and months of wasting, the last chapter of ‘The
+Roadmender.’ It was a deed of heroism.
+
+Her mind travelled from the sound of rain after drought, outside her
+window, and the roused and eager business of the little birds she loved,
+back to the panorama of past years. She revived her childhood—‘the scent
+of the first cowslip field under the warm side of the hedge’ where she
+sang to herself ‘for pure joy of their colour and fragrance’; bluebells
+‘like the backwash of a southern sea’; Watcombe Down—‘a stretch of
+golden gorse and new-turned blood-red field, the green of the headland,
+and beyond, the sapphire sea.’ Fragrance, music, above all colour—these
+surged from out her distant memories. And as the roll unfolded and later
+years revived, it was still the same. Germany, ‘the warm-scented breath
+of the pines,’ ‘the tiny shifting lamps’ of glow-worms ‘pale yellow,
+purely white, green as the underside of a northern wave,’ and in
+Switzerland a solitary blue gentian—her first—‘what need of another, for
+finding one I had gazed into the mystery of all.’
+
+Then the past slipped away, giving place to ‘the uneventful road’ on
+which she was travelling now. ‘Each day questions me as it passes; each
+day makes answer for me “not yet.”’
+
+‘Do I travel alone,’ she asks, with a glance at the passage in the
+Odyssey, ‘or am I one of a great company?’ The voices of Penelope’s
+suitors send her to the chorus of the voices of earth, the language of
+worship that ‘lies very nigh’ to man:—‘What better note can our frail
+tongues lisp than the voice of wind and sea, river and stream,’ those
+grateful servants giving all and asking nothing, the soft whisper of
+snow and rain eager to replenish, or the thunder proclaiming a majesty
+too great for utterance? ‘Here, too, stands the angel with the censer
+gathering up the fragrance of teeming earth and forest-tree, of flower
+and fruit, and sweetly pungent herb distilled by sun and rain for joyful
+use. Here, too, come acolytes lighting the dark with tapers—sun, moon,
+and stars—gifts of the Lord that His sanctuary may stand ever served.’
+
+She comes back to the earth, this child of earth, bearing sheaves of the
+harvest of heaven. For her there was no gulf set between these two—was
+not the Incarnation of God one of her ‘master-keys’? Heaven and earth
+were joined in one for her by the life and love that men might share, in
+which all things are made one. When, at the very last, earth fills her
+memory and mind with its scent and colours and sound, it is an earth
+transmuted and transparent. And beyond earth and even heaven is greater
+marvel still, that which she never forgot—the mystery of the darkness
+and silence of God, ‘the silence greater than speech, darkness greater
+than light.’ So, this memory dominating all, she says her last farewell.
+
+
+We think, or may well think, of Rabindra Nath Tagore:—
+
+‘I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers. I bow to you all and
+take my departure.
+
+‘Here I give back the keys of my door—and I give up all claims to my
+house. I only ask for last kind words from you.
+
+‘We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now
+the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A
+summons has come and I am ready for my journey.’
+
+
+                                   IV
+
+The after-history of ‘The Roadmender’ is worthy of note. Messrs
+Duckworth published it on February 28th, 1902, in the now familiar green
+covers. Six times in that year it was reprinted; ever since, impression
+has followed impression until now, when, in the last month of 1912, its
+thirty-first appears. It had no adventitious aids when it was sent out
+into the crowded, jostling world of books, where so many good things are
+lost, crushed by mere numbers. No ‘log-rolling,’ no powerful trumpeter
+of its merits, made a way for it. Why, then, did it make one for itself
+that has widened and gone farther through eleven years, and seems as
+though it would grow wider and go farther still for many a year to come?
+Journalists have learnt to call this little book a ‘classic’; they use
+it to condemn or praise a new man’s style; it has become for critics a
+standard in its class. But the more or less professional literary
+judgement is of small importance and easy to account for. The question
+that is of real value for us who read this book, without even the
+desire, much less the skill, to frame a literary judgement on it, is why
+it is our own book, why, as I heard the traveller of a great publisher
+say, ‘it is everybody’s book.’ You may see workmen reading it in
+omnibuses and trams, hear of queens commanding it, find it ready for you
+in all the shops for selling books that are new, waste your time if you
+look for copies in those dusty treasure-houses where they sell them only
+second-hand. ‘Everybody’ buys it; nobody throws it away. There is a
+hard-headed prince of commerce, I am told—there may be many another, for
+anything I know—who keeps a pile of those little green volumes of
+mingled poetry and religion, that he may give one to any friend who has
+unaccountably passed it by. In the States it is served out to
+millionaires on Japanese vellum or fine hand-made paper, with heaven
+knows what outside glory. Certain reviewers, at first—before they had
+learnt caution or, may be, taken pains—said that ‘this kind of thing’
+had been done before. Many of them have told us that it has been all too
+abundantly done since. Yet the history of ‘The Roadmender’ is unique
+among histories of what people mean by ‘this kind of thing.’ We have to
+account for that uncontested fact.
+
+For my part I allow myself to think that the reviewer’s diagnosis is
+wrong. ‘The Roadmender’ is not that kind of thing; it stands by itself,
+it is a thing of personal and individual life. That is one reason why it
+calls forth so living a welcome when we handle it, it seems to _breathe_
+in our hands. We learn to love it as something that accepts us and
+responds to us; understands us and finds out our needs in a way of its
+own.
+
+Here we touch the bottom of the problem, I believe. Nothing, in fact, is
+heartily welcomed anywhere unless either a real or an artificial need
+exists for it and, either openly or secretly, demands it.
+
+I think we may say at once that ‘The Roadmender’ does not meet
+artificial needs, such as those created by idleness of body or,
+especially, of soul, or by the faults and follies of a civilization that
+has hardly yet begun to grow up. For myself—and I believe I represent a
+large consensus—I say unhesitatingly that it meets real needs rooted
+deeply in every one of us, so deeply that very many of us live and die
+without discovering that they are there. It is addressed, in its
+profound simplicity, to what is common to man, what is discovered in all
+men who are truly men, by those who have learnt to read secrets of the
+heart.
+
+We do not know ourselves; we have no suspicion, very many of us, that we
+are not only in need of beauty, let us say, but are craving for it,
+starved for want of it, going hungry and empty while we try to satisfy
+ourselves with a thousand worthless mockeries of the real. It is the
+same with goodness: we are satiated but not satisfied with its
+substitutes, with imitations and travesties, or rank blasphemies and
+denials; our appetite is tricked and we are deceived. Even when we have
+the good will not the bad, goodness, above all holiness (especially the
+Christian sort), has no charm, we think; it is a mawkish affair, or a
+fearful and greedy hypocrisy, as Nietzsche tells us. But when we meet
+it—meet the real thing, noble as well as sweet—then we discover a new
+region of ourselves and find it empty. We too are able, nay, despite our
+baser selves, willing and desiring, to worship reality, to follow after
+goodness, beauty, and truth—the modes and manners of the almighty Love
+that searches out our secrets. Yet, until some magic touch releases us
+from the enchantment of our slavery to lower things and from a far too
+low esteem of our own spiritual capacity, we do not know it.
+
+So, when the magic touch comes we are a little stirred; weakly perhaps,
+but yet with true response, we thrill in answer to it. We may go to
+sleep again, but nothing can ever be as though we had not felt that
+touch; we may be the worse for it, as they are who shut their eyes to
+light, or we may be the better through all the lives and worlds to come.
+‘The Roadmender’ has given and will give this touch—rousing the real
+self of men and women everywhere; or coming to them with the
+outstretched and friendly hand of one who can speak as like to like and
+by heart to heart.
+
+This, I think, is why it lives.
+
+
+
+
+                   THE GATHERING OF BROTHER HILARIUS
+
+
+‘Hilarius’ (as we have always called the book) was written first as a
+shorter story, a mere sketch, and later filled in and amplified. It was
+meant to be a parable, a lesson delicately conveyed to a young painter
+of high artistic promise and sincere religious feeling, but prone to
+rigid judgements and the use of an inflexible and all too simple moral
+standard—in fact, Hilarius himself.
+
+So, in her story, Michael Fairless sends this young man—boy indeed he
+was, even in years—forth from an arranged and sheltered life in the
+cloister, and from a benumbing established scheme of thought and things,
+to the rude world, the many-coloured, confused, everchanging world of
+men and women and children, of transforming values, of sin that is not
+sinful and condemnation that does not condemn—a real world where God is
+and works, joins in the strife of men, treads with them the dust of the
+highway, is known by them who seek him not, and in fashions very strange
+to those righteous who need neither repentance nor redeeming love.
+
+Tracts (this tale was avowedly written as a tract) do not always pierce
+their mark; but the arrow of a tract is not often so sharply pointed or
+feathered with such grace. I incline to think that this one has found
+the joints of many a man’s armour besides his at which it was aimed.
+
+Assuming, for the moment, the attitude of the critic, I am bound to
+admit—the writer herself would be the first to admit—that she is an
+author of one book, as we say; the book of her life and death, written
+in a fine disinterestedness and from the fullness and with the candour
+of her heart. But that is the one book which for any author would either
+crown his work or cast everything else into the shade. Moreover, this
+author wrote under disabilities that for most people would have made
+writing out of any question; and these disabilities chiefly affected
+work done ‘for a purpose’—not welling, as it were, from her creative
+soul. In a sense, Hilarius is made, not born like the roadmender; and
+you will think the book skilfully or unskilfully made according to the
+standard of your taste. But if you choose you may enjoy it well and find
+in it beautiful things—the singular grace of style its author seemed to
+possess as a natural gift; her real mind; her vision too; and something
+of the wit and gaiety in which we who knew her found continual delight,
+and for which there was no place when she wrote at the White Gate and
+from the Valley of the Shadow.
+
+You will find, too, reminders, echoes, of ‘The Roadmender.’ When she
+speaks of ‘this peace of prayerful service, where the clang of the
+blacksmith’s hammer smote the sound of the Office bell,’ you have the
+roadmender spirit:—‘After all, what do we ask of life, here or indeed
+hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our fellow-men
+and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into the face
+of God?’
+
+There is the same rejoicing in ‘fair colours,’ in music and the fragrant
+incense of the earth; the happy knowledge of little children and their
+transparency to God; the eye that sees the great sacrament of life. And
+here, as in ‘The Roadmender,’ the divine sacrament includes, as life
+includes, our misshapen world and the sinful men and women in it.
+
+Hilarius is blind; his eyes shall be opened to the meaning of love and
+of the craving needs of men, his good will roused to new accomplishment,
+both head and heart stirred to a widening range. “Blind eyes!” are the
+parting words of the dancer in the forest, who sows in him the seed of
+promise, yet is ‘a sight for gods, but not for monks; above all, not for
+untutored novices’ like him:—‘“Blind eyes, the very forest could teach
+thee these things an thou would’st learn. Farewell, good novice, back to
+thy Saints and thy nursery; for me the wide wide world; hunger and
+love—love—love!”’
+
+Hunger and love will tutor Hilarius, tell him secrets of the world, of
+himself, of those other strange selves, and of God whom he knows too
+easily under a false name. ‘“Hast thou ever loved?”’ asks the ‘flower
+incarnate’ when he found her dancing in the wind of the woods. Then,
+answering his shocked surprise:—‘“Why, boy, the world is full of love,
+and not all for the Saints and the Brethren, and it is good—good—good!
+’Tis the devil and the monks who call it evil. Hast thou never seen the
+birds mate in the springtime, nor heard the nightingale sing?”’ ‘“Did’st
+thou ever hunger, master?”’ the dancer’s brother asks, rebuked by
+Hilarius out of the Ten Commandments for stealing ‘the Convent’s hens.’
+
+Hunger and love in body and soul, coming to man from earth his mother
+and from the earthly creatures who are all his kin; the nature he shares
+with them as the ground of his sin and also of his holiness—these
+Hilarius shall learn. He shall learn that without knowledge and interior
+acceptance of a law of the spirit there is neither holiness nor sin.
+This is to learn of the charity and justice of God; to learn to see that
+only the writing scored by a man on the roll of his self-created
+character makes or mars him. Nature waits in every man, from the first
+fathers of us all to the last of our sons, for the conversion of spirit.
+It is as the earth, this unconverted nature of ours; it is turned
+neither one way nor the other, is neither virtuous nor vile, until we
+make it so. But without the ground of nature there would be no standing
+for the spirit, no place from which it could either soar or sink.
+Hilarius must learn of nature and of spirit too. He must learn of the
+slow learning of the law and of man’s slow growth into even a
+possibility of sin. But above all he must learn of the infinite humility
+of the love of God as he stoops to find a way into the human heart.
+
+Meanwhile ‘he plucked aside his skirts and walked in judgement,’
+calling, blind-eyed, on the judgement of God to ratify his poor
+decisions. ‘“’Tis an evil, evil world,” quoth young Hilarius.’
+
+The judgement of God he finds easily enough, as when we are blind we do.
+‘London, that light-minded city, was a heap of graves’ filled by the
+great reaper of the wrath of God with the plague-smitten corpses of the
+judged. Wherefore Hilarius, ‘having seen much evil and the justice of
+the Almighty,’ turns his back on it and will learn to be a great
+painter, and then return to his monastery in peace. He had watched the
+falling of a Tower of Siloam that had crushed the evil-doers and
+confirmed the faith of the righteous. And then the true judgement of
+God, which is new light in the soul of him who is judged, smote him on
+the way he had chosen; and he learnt to steal that he might have food
+for the child of a woman taken in adultery. ‘“See,” said the dancer,
+“thou hast learnt to hunger and to love.”’
+
+
+Myself, I would have had the story stop there; where, as my memory
+serves, it stopped in the original version, the painter’s tract. But it
+would never have been published if it had; and that, of course, its
+author soon discovered. Mr John Murray kindly hastened on the
+preparation of proofs, and they came just in time for her to read some
+herself and have others read to her when she could no longer see. The
+book appeared shortly after her death, some months earlier than ‘The
+Roadmender,’ in book form. Mr Murray has recently added to his many
+kindnesses by allowing it to be produced by Messrs Duckworth uniform
+with the rest of her work. He has also produced it himself in a new and
+cheaper edition.
+
+
+
+
+                           THE GREY BRETHREN
+
+
+For the collection of the stories, poems and sketches published under
+this title I alone am responsible. There is no need to repeat what I
+said in the preface about their previous publication in this or that
+magazine or weekly paper. I had rather, and I think more fitly, discuss
+some few of them in relation to aspects of the author’s character that
+they point to or reveal.
+
+In ‘A Song of Low Degree’ she speaks from the heart of her philosophy,
+as of her religion:—
+
+                  ‘Lord, I am small, and yet so great.
+                  The whole world stands to my estate
+                  And in Thine Image I create.’
+
+It is the same note that we hear as the roadmender chants the glories of
+the daffodil-field, and here too it rouses deeper harmonies.
+
+                  ‘All, all are mine; and yet so small
+                  Am I, that lo, I needs must call,
+                  Great King, upon the Babe in Thee.’
+
+                         ·       ·       ·       ·       ·
+
+‘We who are made Kings after His likeness,’ she wrote in ‘The
+Roadmender,’ ‘possess all things, not after this world’s fashion but in
+proportion to our poverty.’ Only as we are kings, she saw—masters, not
+slaves, to the things that we own—do we in fact own, instead of being
+owned by, either the outer gifts of the world, or the nature and
+passions in ourselves. So she tells us; and it is the burden of every
+inclusive mystic’s song.
+
+All these mystics are of one family and speak the same language. They
+are great and small, eloquent or halting in their speech—everywhere they
+have one mind and one tongue, whether they stammer, or utter music of
+the spheres. You may take, for example, one of the very great, Rabindra
+Nath Tagore; and, turning over the slender volume of his songs, you will
+find the fulfilment of the voice of the soul of Michael Fairless. Take
+this, the first in his ‘Gitanjali.’
+
+‘Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou
+emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
+
+‘This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and
+hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
+
+‘At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in
+joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
+
+‘Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine.
+Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.’
+
+Of one family are these, elder and younger, little or great; of one
+family and—marvellous to record—of the same family as every one of us.
+Do we not know it when their word finds its echo in us or an answering
+thrill, however faint and quickly dying away?
+
+Even when they sing of earth and its joys, we, who ruin those joys at
+their source and are blind to the real earth, making for it a cloak of
+thick darkness of our stupidity and sins, find that our blood stirs in
+answer.
+
+‘The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs
+through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
+
+‘It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in
+numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves
+and flowers.
+
+‘It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of
+death, in ebb and in flow.
+
+‘I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
+And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this
+moment.’
+
+East or West, the voices join in one, and we are able to listen—that is
+the wonder of us and the ground of our hope.
+
+
+There are charming pieces in ‘The Grey Brethren,’ notably ‘A German
+Christmas Eve,’ and ‘A Christmas Idyll,’ with the sermon that is Michael
+Fairless telling (through the mouth of the Forest Recluse) news of the
+Kingdom of God and Man. ‘My brothers and sisters,’ she says to us,
+‘to-night we keep the Birth of the Holy Babe, and to-night you and I
+stand at the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven, the gate which is undone
+only at the cry of a little child. “Except ye be converted and become as
+little children, ye shall not enter.”
+
+‘The Kingdom is a great one, nay, a limitless one; and many enter in
+calling it by another name. It includes your own hearts and this
+wonderful forest, all the wise and beautiful works that men have ever
+thought of or done, and your daily toil; it includes your nearest and
+dearest, the outcast, the prisoner, and the stranger; it holds your
+cottage home and the jewelled City, the New Jerusalem itself. People are
+apt to think the Kingdom of Heaven is like church on Sunday, a place to
+enter once a week in one’s best: whereas it holds every flower, and has
+room for the ox and the ass, and the least of all creatures, as well as
+for our prayer and worship and praise.
+
+‘“Except ye become as little children.” How are we to be born again,
+simple children with wondering eyes?
+
+‘We must learn to lie in helpless dependence, to open our mouth wide
+that it may be filled, to speak with halting tongue the language we
+think we know; we must learn, above all, our own ignorance, and keep
+alight and cherish the flame of innocency in our hearts.
+
+‘It is a tired world, my brethren, and we are most of us tired men and
+women who live on it, for we seek ever after some new thing. Let us pass
+out through the gate into the Kingdom of Heaven and not be tired any
+more, because there we shall find the new thing that we seek. Heaven is
+on earth, the Kingdom is here and now; the gate stands wide to-night,
+for it is the birthnight of the Eternal Child. We are none of us too
+poor, or stupid, or lowly; it was the simple shepherds who saw Him
+first. We are none of us too great, or learned, or rich; it was the
+three wise kings who came next and offered gifts. We are none of us too
+young; it was little children who first laid down their lives for Him;
+or too old, for Simeon saw and recognised Him. There is only one thing
+against most of us—we are too proud.
+
+‘My brethren, “let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing
+which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known to us.”’
+
+Here is the authentic message of the mystic and of religion. It is the
+proclamation of sovran Love; from which nothing is shut out, by which
+nothing can ever be forgotten or ignored. ‘There is only one thing
+against most of us—we are too proud.’ But for that,—say Michael Fairless
+and the whole mystical chorus,—but for that, we too should be
+proclaiming the beauty of the Lord and of his kingdom within us and
+without.
+
+
+Of Michael Fairless, as she is in the last of the four stories told to
+children, the last thing in the book, I wrote thus in the original
+preface:—
+
+‘Some of the many readers who have found her there will understand me
+when I say that the story of her life and death, and of her life too (as
+I believe) after death, is written down in the little tale of “The
+Tinkle-Tinkle,” first told to her best beloved in the wild garden at
+Kew, among blue hyacinths and shining grasses of the spring that spoke
+to her of Paradise.’
+
+I have told the story of her life and death at greater length now and
+with comments and comparisons. But I still think that it is all in ‘The
+Tinkle-Tinkle,’ and far better told than I can tell it. There will be
+some who will not agree with me; but they have never known her as I do.
+They do not see her looking upon herself and every one in the world, and
+saying, ‘I cannot tell you what he was like, because no man knows, not
+even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself.’ For anyone who had not watched her
+infinite variety, her swift transitions, her adaptability, the surprises
+of her, there would be little enough sense in being told that her very
+self is there when she says:—‘Sometimes he lived on the ground,
+sometimes in a tree, sometimes in the water, sometimes in a cave; and I
+can’t tell you what he lived on, for no man knows, not even the
+Tinkle-Tinkle himself.’
+
+We find her, as well as her interpretation of life, from the beginning
+of this little tale to the end. And here in this refrain of ignorance,
+‘no man knows, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself,’ we find an
+expression of her always reverent agnosticism, the agnosticism of the
+mystic—of him who sees too deeply to be able to persuade himself that he
+sees all.
+
+It is she, too, who hears ‘a piteous weeping’ from the least and lowest
+of the lost creatures of the earth, and would lead each one of them to
+its own home— but I cannot tell you how he went, for no man knows, not
+even the ‘Tinkle-Tinkle.’ No man really knows the secret of the
+irresistible power of love; no man knows, even when it is at work in him
+and is working by him.
+
+Yet man, as the Tinkle-Tinkle knows, must be ever a seeker; therefore
+‘it was a great grief to the Tinkle-Tinkle not to know what he was, or
+how he lived, or where he was going,’—the grief of the metaphysician,
+with his ever-repeated questions, whence and what? why? whither?—the
+grief, too, of every honest thinker who does not answer himself with
+lies. Yet here is the lofty and special privilege of these two, as
+Michael Fairless was aware; and they must hide both their privilege and
+their grief:— ‘It often made him depressed, but he always concealed it
+from the dormice, appearing a most cheerful and contented creature.’
+This is of the tenderness that guards bruised reeds and the smoking
+flax. But of the privilege and indeed of the grief there comes to the
+like of Tinkle-Tinkle an opening of wonders. ‘Now it happened on a
+certain evening that the Tinkle-Tinkle was travelling over the sea, when
+suddenly in the depths he caught sight of a most beautiful creature. It
+was all sorts of colours—white, rosy pink, and deep crimson, and pale
+blue fading into white and gold. It had no face but a bright light; and
+it had quantities of beautiful iridescent wings, like the rainbow; and
+the most lovely voice you ever heard, like the sighing of the waves in
+the hollow of the sea.’
+
+(‘Thy sunbeam,’ says the great Indian poet and seer, ‘comes upon this
+earth of mine with arms outstretched, and stands at my door the livelong
+day to carry back to thy feet clouds made of my tears and sighs and
+songs.
+
+‘With fond delight thou wrappest about thy starry breast that mantle of
+misty cloud, turning it into numberless shapes and folds and colouring
+it with hues everchanging.
+
+‘It is so light and so fleeting, tender and tearful and dark, that is
+why thou lovest it, O thou spotless and serene. And that is why it may
+cover thy awful white light with its pathetic shadows.’)
+
+
+‘And the beautiful Creature cried out to him, and its voice made
+Tinkle-Tinkle remember a dream he had once had of sunshine, and forest
+trees, and the song of birds; and the Creature said, “Ah, Tinkle-Tinkle!
+you are lonely and perplexed and sad, and you do not know whence you
+came nor why you are here; but the dormice know and the green bird
+knows, and I know, and we are glad for your being. Go on, Tinkle-Tinkle,
+and do not sorrow, for some day you shall come back to me, and I will
+wrap you in my wings and take you where you belong, and then you will
+understand.”’
+
+Love knows and love shall reveal, and the beginning of the tale of love
+makes its hearer ‘glad with a strange new gladness’; so that when he
+returns to ‘his cave’ he is ‘not alone, for the spirit of hope’ goes
+with him.
+
+
+Not only the metaphysician hidden in other men as in Michael Fairless
+speaks in this child’s tale, but the artist too. ‘The Tinkle-Tinkle had
+one gift—he could sing—how, no man knew, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle
+himself; and this is how he discovered his gift.
+
+‘One day in a secluded spot in the forest he found a dying stag, and the
+Tinkle-Tinkle was moved with great compassion and yet could do nothing.
+
+‘The great stag’s head drooped lower and lower till even the sun melted
+in a mist of pity, and the trees sighed, and the breezes hushed their
+voices. Then suddenly the Tinkle-Tinkle crept close and began to sing,
+why or how he knew not. As he sang, the birds and the stream were
+silenced and the breezes ceased, and the great stag’s breathing grew
+less and less laboured, and his eyes brightened, and presently he rose
+slowly to his feet and paced away to join the rest of the herd, and the
+Tinkle-Tinkle went with him.
+
+‘When the stag’s companions heard the story, they wept for all that had
+befallen their leader, but rejoiced also and blessed the Tinkle-Tinkle;
+and he sang once more for them, and the star-spirits leaned out of their
+bright little windows to listen, and the night was glad.’
+
+A dumb poet, a frustrate artist, the singer of this child’s song was
+when she sang it. She could not know that her swan-song would travel
+through all the world of her own people and bring her blessing; but she
+knew the artist’s longing and had felt, too, not a little of the
+strength of the power of beauty in his hands.
+
+
+The end of the story comes as the Tinkle-Tinkle began ‘to feel very old
+and worn and weary,’ and the spirit of hope, that went back with him to
+the world’s cave when he had seen in a vision the light of its day,
+stirred within his heart. ‘Then he remembered the promise of the
+beautiful Creature, and went slowly over the sea hoping the time had
+come for it to be fulfilled, and it had. The beautiful Creature
+stretched out its lovely rose and purple wings and wrapped the
+Tinkle-Tinkle in their warm soft greatness, and bore him down and down
+through the depths till they came to the Great Gate. At the beautiful
+Creature’s voice it swung slowly back, and they passed down the Blue
+Pathway, which is all ice, cut and carved into lovely pinnacles and
+spires, very blue with the blue of the summer sky and the southern seas.
+The Tinkle-Tinkle could just see it from between the beautiful
+Creature’s wings, stretching away in the blue distance, and at the end
+one star.
+
+‘Presently—and though the time had been one thousand years it had not
+seemed long to the Tinkle-Tinkle—they came out into a beautiful place
+that was nothing but light, and the beautiful Creature set the
+Tinkle-Tinkle down. He looked around him and saw many other
+Tinkle-Tinkles, and he knew them for what they were and loved their
+beauty; and the Creature gently swept one of its purple pinions across
+him, and the Tinkle-Tinkle took form. He had many, many little soft,
+strong hands and many little white feet, and long sweeping wings and a
+face which shone with something of the light of the beautiful Creature;
+and the Tinkle-Tinkle saw and understood and sang for joy.’
+
+                  _Vere Ierusalem est illa civitas
+                  Cuius pax iugis et summa iucunditas;
+                  Ubi non prœvenit rem desiderium,
+                  Nec desiderio minus est prœmium._
+
+                               PRINTED BY
+                          TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
+                               EDINBURGH
+
+[Illustration: Back cover]
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+
+
+ ● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
+ ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78729 ***