[Illustration]
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
BY
ALICE BROWN
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1921
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW CORPORATION.
COPYRIGHT, 1921,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1921.
Press of
J. J. Little & Ives Company
New York, U. S. A.
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY
A STUDY
Louise Imogen Guiney was born in Boston on January 17, 1861, and died
at Chipping Campden, England, on November 2, 1920. Of Chipping Campden
she had, in 1913, done, in a few strokes, a beguiling little picture
comforting now to hang in the mind beside that stark record of her
death:
It is, she says, “a stone-built paradise of a village not far from
Oxford. There is an April wind blowing, and forty-three roses adorn
one cottage doorway just out of sight from here. The old collie and I
had a walk yesterday, and I dipped my stick in Shakespeare’s Avon at
Fledbury.”
This was the woman, yet not much changed in high intent and gayest
vagabondage from the girl New England—and, indeed, this western
world—uniquely loved. Still, to us, is she a figure of bright
beginnings and the swiftest road to her is that backward pathway to her
youth.
Her father, General Patrick Robert Guiney, a soldier of the Civil War,
was her exemplar and her adoration, and his death an overwhelming
grief. “My _preux chevalier_ of a father,” she was proud to call
him, in a quick flaming up of passionate remembrance. Though he died
in her girlhood—and died of his wound, as it fed her ardent soul to
remember—she never ceased to feel a living allegiance to him. Her
plastic inner life had been molded by him, the picture her mind made
of him touched into enduring colors by the manner of his death. There
was between them that “marriage of true minds” which is more lastingly
productive than the tie of blood, and she was proud if you could
trace in her the reflex of those qualities she held highest in him:
his active patriotism, his slack hold on life, if it could be nobly
given, and a tenacity of devotion to the brave fight. Of her remoter
background she says, with a pleasing touch of swagger, a slightest
waving of the plume:
“My grandfather and great gran’, too, were ‘out’ in the ’98; and the
old man had been ‘out’ in the ’45. I hope to make his acquaintance in
the sojer-boy’s Paradise, which is my bourne, if I be good.”
In one of her earliest essays, “A Child in Camp,” she makes her bow
thus, with a pretty grace:
“Like the royal personages in the drama, I was ushered on the stage of
life, literally, ‘with flourish of trumpets.’ The Civil War was at its
bursting point, the President calling for recruits: it was impertinent
of me, but in that solemn hour I came a-crowing into the world. And
since I was born under allegiance, a lady whom I learned to love with
incredible quickness,
‘O bella Libertà! O bella!’
rocked my fortunate cradle.”
This was Irish stock with a strain of English, Scots and French, a
quicksilver blend of buoyancy and happy wit, duly tempered by a special
potency of Gallic grace with its apprehension of the _mot juste_ and
its infallible divination in forms of art. The road between the two
boundary dates of her life ran without much incident we vitally need to
know. Her portrait, painted here chiefly for the friends who marveled
at her and equally at their own luck in the fortunate incident of ever
so slight a knowledge of her, may best be done with the broad strokes
of a brush dipped in remembrance, against a blurred background of time
and place. She herself, in her life of Hurrell Froude, quotes the
expert dictum of George Tyrrell, who guessed what sort of biography is
likely to live longest:
“We have cause to care less for a full inventory of the events which
make up a man’s life or for the striking nature of those events in
themselves, than for such a judicious selection and setting of them as
shall best bring out and explain that individuality which is our main
interest. We care less for what a man does and more for what he is; and
it is mainly as a key to what he is that we study the circumstances
which act upon him and the conduct by which he acts upon them.”
Louise Imogen Guiney, poet, essayist and scholar, was an
extraordinarily limpid and valiant soul, whose death seems, in no
sense referable to our own responsive emotion, but one of bare fact
and calm inevitableness, a rebirth into a sort of present immortality
in letters, a new affirmation of response to her unique accomplishment
even among those to whom she had become only a name out of the
many-syllabled past. For the last third of her life she had been living
in England, with breaks of a few months each in America, and though
the remembered vision of her was not dimmed among us, still that
impalpable medium made up of the day’s demands, the helter-skelter of
this world of disordered strivings and later the wreckage of the war,
had risen between her and her western affiliations. The rude stumbling
servitors of life had crowded between her and the America she loved
with a passion lineally her own. Time and circumstance had been as
remorseless to her as to us. She was, in these later years, “every
day i’ the hour” when her somewhat unstable balance of health would
allow it, immersed in work, the scholar’s drudgery, the pain that ends
in perfectness: and yet it made her studious delight, this rescue of
half-forgotten names, unwearied research upon long trails where only
the spirit of the born antiquary never tires nor falters. The warm,
persistently light-hearted letters came to us less frequently; but
they came, unfailingly at Christmas, like gay holly sprays flung from
December to young January, as if in token of the lastingness of things.
She was so rare a creature, our common memories had been so mingled
of life and laughter, that she had become one of the certainties in a
fleeting and tumultuous world. We were stupidly used to her, as you are
used to sunrise or a star. Then without warning the news came, and the
word went from lip to hushed lip: “Lou Guiney is dead.” That was the
name, Lou Guiney, as it had been in the day of her youth. And at once
we became poignantly alive to her with a more sensitive appreciation,
a new awareness. We turned renewedly to her work and found in it a
more quickly breathing presence. We had been recalled, in a shock of
haste, to crown it before our own hands should be too lax to lift the
heaviness of laurel. So it was that she seemed to have stepped at once
into that porch of continued being which is the house of an immortality
of love and praise, the only thing the world has really to offer the
spirits of its dead.
To recall the form and color of her youth is the eager task likely to
give her oldest friends their first imperfect solace. For it is the
pathetic human instinct to catch at the mantle of time past, as if
to assure itself of something in the web of life that holds. Those
who knew her at twenty and thirty need not err widely in their guess
at her at fifteen. For being one of that gay fellowship for whom “a
star danced” and who buoyantly refuse infection from the “hungry
generations” that “tread” us “down,” she stayed, in every sense, except
that of the disciplined mind and an acquired patience of the heart,
unaffectedly young. Age, the age of mere years, brutal to attack and
vanquish, could never, even in his ultimate assaults, if they had been
permitted him, have withered her bright fecundities of speech and
glance. For there is something in a certain quality of youth that will
not be downed. It is the livingness of a mind refreshed at wells of
immortalities. Of outward vain pretense—the affectation of a persisting
juvenility—it is divinely innocent. You could hardly imagine her, at
any age, without her girl’s grace, her mystic smile. A long-legged romp
in petticoats far beyond the milestones when childhood is apt to slink
away abashed before oncoming desires and dignities, she was early in
love with the sweet seclusion of books and equally with gay adventure
out of doors. The fields, on a day of spring, the river under skies
dull or bright, were her abiding joys. Her “winding Charles” was the
young navigator’s track to seas of pleasure. She
“could not have enough of this sweet world.”
Those who knew her soon enough to play with her the duplex game of
bodily delight and mental inebriety, remember hours so near the wild
sanity of natural life that only old Arcadian names are spacious
enough to bound them. There was the summer day of riotous vagary when
she and her young chum set forth to navigate the Charles, a block of
ice in the boat for adventurous but uncatalogued uses, and the delays
and mishaps of the voyage, and all the long, insect-thridded night
spent in the boat, the two inventive young heads on the ice which
was their diminishing pillow. There was the tramp across fields from
Auburndale (the Auburndale transmuted by James Jeffrey Roche, in a
gallant paraphrase, to “loveliest village of the prepossessing”) into
an iris-blue swamp, this after earnest debate whether it is a more
delirious fun to dash in “accoutred as you are,” to the ruination
of shoes and stockings or make the assault barefooted with skirts
kilted away from the blessed unction of black mud. To the everlasting
richness of memory, it was barefooted the two hoydens made their
plunge, and sank, with every sucking step, from sun-warmed mud above
to icy cool below. Wild with the bliss of it they waded furiously, and
the day was of so ineffable a light and texture as to lull them into
forgetfulness of the iris itself for which they had adventured, and it
was left behind, piles of withering beauty, entrancing, like fabrics
and translucent gems. Only that night were they remembered, and she who
was Lou Guiney wrote in magnificent surety:
“You shall have them in Paradise.”
There was the adventure of the field, in company with her dog, he “so
big and so unsophisticated,” and the imminence of a heifer with an
inherited prejudice against dogs of all degrees.
“She’ll chase him,” said Lou Guiney, from her liberality to varying
events. “We shall have to run for it.”
There was no conceivable need of crossing the field, and equally there
was nothing, to her simple fearlessness, in the least eccentric
in wilfully creating a situation you might have to use your wits
to abandon; and so infectious was her unthinking bravery that, as
occasion and she determined, you fought or ran. As it was prophesied,
so it was. The incursion was made, the heifer attacked in good form,
the trio fled in close formation, and the safe side of the fence was
vaultingly attained with no loss of heart but, gloriously, the guerdon
of a memory. All manner of robust childish adventures were natural in
her company. Fields were made to be invaded, swamps to be forded, and
rivers followed until you found they beat your endurance and were going
to make their harbor of the sea and you’d have to leave them to that
blest consummation and go home to supper. She was Atalanta at a race
in the days when a heart, as yet untired, backed her to the limit.
In her reminiscent essay On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket,
when my gentleman had adroitly abstracted her purse and she almost
ran him down, she celebrates, with some just pride, “my legs (retired
race-horses, but still great at a spurt).” And her fearlessness, the
robust handmaid of reckless action, may have been an unthinking bravado
of youth; equally it may have been the result of a rapid fire of prayer
and answer between her and her defending saints. She anticipated
danger as little as a child. To entertain suspicion was to admit evil
company to her inviolate mind. But, from whatever delicately abstruse
causes, she wore a brave decorum of courage, a feather in the cap, a
sword of high behavior. On lonely roads she would walk unconcerned,
her mind coursing over the centuries, her whimsical smile responsive
to warnings from the more circumspect and foreboding. She was the
child of nature, the child of God; should she quake in a world which
was, though uncoveted, her inheritance? Then, as in later life, she
sometimes seemed to be walking through “worlds not realized,” “whether
in the body or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth.” And this is
no matter for wonder. Thin silvern echoes from the past were always
chiming on her inward ear, majestic syllables drew on her imaginings,
and while she dwelt on “old, unhappy, far-off things” the new wine of
her youth and the immediate loveliness of this present life mingled an
intoxicating cup. And suddenly the spell of the past would fall from
her, and she would be as irresponsibly alive to the bright beauties of
the challenging day as a dryad on holiday out of her tree.
As a girl, she was uniquely dear to the older men and women pleasurably
stirred by the literary event of her early blossoming into essays
and verse, and charmed anew, when they had found her out in her shy
fastnesses, by the unstudied simplicities of her modest behavior. Mrs.
James T. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett were hers admiringly, Mrs. Louise
Chandler Moulton, known by the affectionate brevet of Godmam, adopted
her into a special sanctity of literary and personal regard, and T. W.
Parsons hailed her as a compeer with whom he was eager to count over
the pure coin out of their scholarly acquisition. It was he who, in
some form of words not to be precisely recalled, confirmed her right
to legitimacy in a bright succession in the arts, by telling her she
was, in the genius of her, “Hazlitt’s child.” Edmund Clarence Stedman,
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Richard Watson Gilder, Henry Mills Alden, gave
her work that generous welcome the noblesse of any art have in waiting
for the acolyte bringing the cup new filled. And _les jeunes_, poets
or pretenders, were hers to command. There were banners waving; only
this was not in the fashion of present day acclaim when a new actor
challenges his due. These were the dark chaplets and fragrant posies
the Muses love: no canopies and red carpets and the blare of jazz.
There were individual voices, low-pitched, grave, and their verdict
holds. Time may have snowed it under and his jealous lichen sought to
eat it up, but still it holds.
In those early years she published a bit of work, anonymous but
signalized by her unique charm, and a magnate of the critical world
saluted it.
“Your praise,” she wrote him, “is a charming Cinderella slipper, and
here’s my shy foot to fit it.”
To rehearse the names that were her sponsors at this entrance into
recognition would give you a brilliant list, with hardly a gap, of
the intellectuals of some thirty to thirty-five years gone. In her
simplicity of response to this rare quality of praise, her genius of
fancy and acquisition flowing, like a magic ichor, through the veins of
her artless Americanism, there was something as new as it was piquing.
She belonged to the “dewy beginnings” of a fresh decade of literature,
a phase authoritative and unique. If her head was not turned by the
response she got to the fine timidities of her first achievement, it
was because that symmetrical treasury of perfectly classified fact
and fancy was permanently set, eyes to the past, where dwell the
ever-living forerunners of literary glories, the authentic names that
are “eternal blazon,” the exemplar and despair of lesser men. She was
timid, not before the contemporary critic, but the great witnesses
of all time—simply, and in her reverent mind tremulously, a child of
promise, heir to those old authentic glories, but not presuming on that
lineage. Tremendously believed in, she trod her earth lightly, yet
becomingly, and carried her full cup with steady hands. No taint of
ambition was in her, no trace of the base alloy of prize-getting and
wearing. She had seen the “cloud capp’d towers” of the halls of light
where the blessed everlastingly dwell, she had guessed at the shades
and green valleys, the refuge of those “ordained to fail,” and she knew
thus early, through reverent intuition, that “it has become almost an
honor not to be crowned.” Even then at the beginning, when chaplets
were being woven for her, she might have written that later recital of
her secular creed:
“To fear not possible failure
Nor covet the game at all.”
At that time the game was in her hands: the game of youth and gayety
and a blameless resolve to make the most of it all in the only way the
great unseen censors, the Fates that spin and weave, allow.
She was a goodly picture of girlhood, Diana not so likely to be
enamoured of Endymion as sandalled for the chase. Not tall, yet
long-legged enough to give her advantage on the road or the English
downs, she had a free grace of movement, untrammeled by the awkwardness
of fear. Even so early, she was slightly deaf, and one of her prettiest
individual poses—yet how unstudied!—was, standing, bent slightly
forward like Atalanta ready for the race, the rounded cup of her palm
behind her ear, beseeching almost whimsically in the low voice that
was half whisper without its sibilance: “Please!” Her misfortune was
not a blemish; she made it a grace. Over that and the drawback of eyes
ineffectual without the help of glasses she never wasted a breath
of impatience: she adopted instead a humorous acceptance of these
latter extraneous servitors as personified faculties of her own. The
act of vision she ascribed to her spectacles alone, and took a never
diminished joy in reminding you how Thackeray did it before her.
“If one dastard of a misplaced comma has escaped me,” she writes, of
printers’ proofs corrected to the last degree of accuracy, “these
spectacles fail to find it.”
Upon one victorious error, chased down and down and still cropping up
in the last proof, she declares:
“Tragedy! how could it have come about? I’d give my spectacles to know.”
Probably nobody so unspoiled and humble in willingness to share
the common lot, or with less respect for the subterfuge called
temperament, ever had less practical acquaintance with the domestic
functions exalted into dull shibboleths, or was more irreconcilably
estranged from the art of the _modiste_ and the rites whereby the
incomprehensible gods of “style” are commonly propitiated. If you could
boil an egg acceptably and enliven it with an agreeable quota of salt
and pepper, she would have made you _cordon bleu_ on the spot. That
the sleeve of a garment could be removed by the simple adjunct of a
pair of scissors and replaced again with a symmetry more conformable
to the arm, was a mystery before which she frankly quailed, and any
force of self-confidence she might have brought to bear went down
like nine-pins. Running rivers of verse, pinnacles of dates, names,
cosmogonies of thrones, principalities and powers, found room in that
exquisitely ordered world which was her brain: yet you could throw her
into a cold sweat of apprehension by confronting her with some homely
task or implement as familiar to the Marthas of civil life as the use
of fork and spoon. And this was no affectation of sensitiveness to
crumpled rose leaves, no arrogance of privilege. She had an appetite as
responsive to good things as if their chemistry had not been as dark to
her as that of lost elixirs, and for some inconspicuous ribbon of her
dress she would cherish an affection almost poignant in its childlike
intensity. She was herself alternately petrified and convulsed by
accumulating instances of her unfitness for the monstrous requisitions
of a concrete world. Returning again and again to the assault, she
is uniformly worsted. She sees, with an eye momentarily sharpened
to recognition, in a modest kitchen, the commonest adjuncts to
dishwashing, and leaves early that she may buy the duplicates of the
magic implements and set them up before the gods of home. And forthwith
she writes, in a rollicking delight:
“And behold! their like had been in this house from of old, and I was
subject to much scorn.”
Helpful kindness itself, she dashes into town to buy a flannel wrapper
for an exacting old lady for whom she has a kindness and who is sick
and destitute, and next day explains, between helpless gusts, “those
spectacles” dashed with tears:
“And lo! it should have been a female garment and I bought a male.”
And these things are to be remembered of her, not because the ox may
take brute pleasure in deploring the delicacy of his brother, the
race-horse, not only that they made her an irresistibly fascinating
blend of power and helplessness, but because her natural inability to
deal with the drudgery that smooths the way of life bore hard upon
her in those later years when she was like a butterfly bound upon the
wheel of this difficult world. She was simply a creature of highly
specialized aptitudes, and the eyes of her mind, they that needed
no fortifying lenses, were set so steadily upon the brightness of
an inward achieving that they could never be focused for the clear
perception of a certain type of immediate needs. To the inequalities
of the road of usage over which her feet obediently traveled, she was
blind, unless indeed the road began to wave green branches, and there
were vistas of beauty, and the birds sang. Then the human awoke in her
and also sang in untrammeled lusti-hood and she was at once that earth
spirit who gathered iris and squandered and forgot it, yet knew all
such forgettings should be hers in Paradise. But even then she was the
vagabond of the road as she conceived it: a matter of smoothly running
caravans and magic camp fires,—not corners of ingenious torment where
one shaped garments and boiled eggs.
And this antagonism was inevitable: for the earth, as it is made, is
forever hostile to that other earth, immortal, invisible, where alone
the highly imaginative can live without nostalgia. If they have to
fight the rude conditions of the visible world, they do it pining “for
what is not.” The imps of time and place have an implacable enmity for
the angels of thought and pure imagination and hinder them at every
step. They devote their mischievous activities to the clipping of
wings, especially of pinions tipped with rose or gold. And the facts of
the case are forever on their side. Man must be fed. And unless he has
been born the darling of sheer luck, he must set his hand to wresting
from the earth the bare right to live. The product of Louise Guiney’s
genius was not, in any large sense, marketable. The most fantastically
hopeful of partisans could not have predicted for her work any valid
recognition whatever, save from the few who have themselves caught the
gleam of Hesperidean fruit and know by natal wisdom that this is no
gold to be minted into coin. Inevitably she was among the
“delicate spirits pushed away
In the hot press of the noonday.”
And she had the open palm. Money ran away from her like a rillet
down a slope. She would give beyond prudence and reason, and gladly
acquiesce in her own resultant leanness. She demanded as little of that
complexity of cunningly ornamented indulgence which is luxury as her
own saints, and although she could not, without a distress deadening
to her legitimate activities, fight with any efficacy the battle of
keeping the world a house of ordered rooms, she made brave thrusts at
it. Appointed to the post-office at Auburndale, and later to a position
in the Boston Public Library, she briskly clapped harness on her horses
of the sun and was anxiously intent on doing well. But the only road
for her was still the path of escape to the open, to the free fields of
thought and the fellowship of the written word.
Hers was a youth of picturesque loyalties, one of them to the
lost cause of the Stuarts, a confessed congenital bias. The Irish
Jacobities, of whom there were many, had “claimed the Stuarts as of the
Milesian line, fondly deducing them from Fergus.” Born into that direct
succession of race loyalty, she was in addition, (and this seems to be
the true argument) incalculably beguiled by the sheer fascination of
that luckless house. Her Inquirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts
of His Late Majesty King Charles the Second ties you a pretty nosegay
of the oak twig and the white rose. How should she not have loved
Charles II., if only that he was, in her own words, “a choice wag?”
“Charles might have confessed with Elia, ‘How I like to be liked, and
what don’t I do to be liked!’” Certainly His ill-starred Majesty could
have desired no liking more whole-hearted, albeit discriminating, more
merrily tolerant than hers. He had cast his magnetic spell upon her pen
and it turned to some good-natured vindicating of his varied parts.
Perhaps she never took her adherence very seriously, off the printed
page. She was beguiled by picturesqueness, not so much concerned with
lineal rights; perhaps, also, it tickled an impish fancy to repudiate
the “dull Georgian farce.” But Charles never had a more humorous
apologist, one who gave him full value as an apostle of good taste and
of a “wheedling charm.”
The sum of her appraisement is of a captivating genius who had found
himself “in the king business” and got addled and spoiled. And who
knows how she must have loved him for his adaptability to portraiture
of a pen like hers, and for the rush and glow of the Restoration, the
very circumstances that inspired her Hazlitt to his glorious inventory
of rustling silks and waving plumes, of gems and people! The time and
the gay immortalities of it go to her head.
“There was an astonishing dearth of dull people; the bad and bright
were in full blossom, and the good and stupid were pruned away.”
She adores “the sworded poets of the Civil Wars, with their scarcely
exerted aptitude for the fine arts, whose names leave a sort of
star-dust along the pages of the anthologies.” And it was, this
star-dust of the period, immediate to one of her own dreams, a labor
she delighted in: the making of a perfect anthology of the seventeenth
century.
Her first book was Songs at the Start (1884) and the first collected
essays Goose-Quill Papers (1885). The essays, despite a wilful
archaism, an armored stiffness of light attack learned out of library
shelves, are astonishingly mature for a pen so young—if by youth or
age we mean the mere cumulative sum of time passed. Indeed, the author
thought well enough of the scintillant little papers to include two of
them, An Open Letter to the Moon, and On Teaching One’s Grandmother to
Suck Eggs, in her later Patrins. You have but to love Louise Guiney to
find Goose-Quill Papers a jovial self-betraying little book to recur
to when you long for her whimsical face again or the cascading gamut
of her laugh. It is spiced with playfulness, a learned playfulness,
it must be owned, and yet, if you know her, you know also how much
learning was waiting in her teeming mind, eager to get into the book
and cram it, cover to cover, and you are grateful for the sense of
just values that let you off so gently. For she had one of those
fructifying minds which absorb like a sponge; everything they draw in
breeds something else, and the two, fact and mother wit, breed again
until you are swept along on a stream of rushing lineage. And over her
happy selection of topics quaint and gay, her own illuminating humor
plays like a thread of gold in tapestry moved lightly by a wind. We may
not, of course, actually assume, so objective is she even then, that
her whimsies of the first person are literally self-betraying; but they
do sometimes open a window upon her as we know her, the gay relish of
life that was hers, the ardor for the great game of chasing a happy
fancy to its born destiny of an ultimate end, and stroking it into the
gentle complaisance of the willing captive; the healthy, untrammeled
revolt against bugaboos “nature itself cannot endure”—notably
mathematics when she “roars you” like any lion (albeit smiling behind
his whiskers as begging to remind you he has no idea of resorting to
the argument of claws).
When she has mounted her gaily caparisoned jennet of unforced humor,
she takes the world by inversion; you shall follow her circumspectly,
or her steed will throw up his heels in your face and gallop off in the
dust of his own making. “My novitiate page,” she ruefully confesses,
invoking the influence of Hazlitt, “smelled hard of that dear name,
likewise of Browne, Taylor, and Cowley, and Lamb, and of one R. L.
S., a Romany chal then utterly unknown, whom I had found in secret
and in secret worshiped.” It was a brave beginning, this slender book
of little essays, and it was dedicated to Oliver Wendell Holmes. How
charmingly, with what engaging gallantry he must have taken it!
To leap the fecund years to the Patrins of her later youth is to
follow the same whimsical and reflective vein. This book, deriving its
fortunate title from patrin, “a Gypsy trail: handfuls of leaves or
grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to denote, to those behind, the
way which they have taken,” is primarily for him whom reading “maketh a
full man.” The style, with a scholarship better tempered and easier to
carry, being, as it were, woven into chain mail, not the armor of her
earliest adventuring, is the despair of the less agile and instructed
mind. It is tinctured with her personal quality, and is incredibly
rich, the richer when you return to it after absence and intercourse
with more immediate things, to find fruits of her commerce with far
off civilisations and loving sentience to the “hills of home.” Like
the buyer in Goblin Market, she drips with juices from the very fruits
of life, antidote for our dull ambitions: the years “wasted in prison
on casuist industries.” It is full of a not too quaint and bookish but
an altogether delicious persiflage. She praises the scholar’s right
to “fall back with delight upon a choice assortment of ignorances.”
Yet, with whatever innocent suavity she puts it, you suspect her of
having few scholarly ignorances of her own to fall back upon. So
absolutely four-square was her tower of recondite knowledge that you
imagine her as having some ado to prevent its shadow from falling on
the reader less equipped and terrifying him into escaping her spell
altogether. It is a book of praise. Most of all does she advertise the
great narcotic of out-of-doors: the enchanting diversion of walking
until the rhythm of the first arduous stretch dulls into the monotony
of muscles settling into their slowly apprehended task. She betrays
an unimpeachable bodily sanity. Though urban by birth, she is also,
through adoptive kinship of Pan and all the nymphs, a sylvan, to her “a
dear Elizabethan word.” You may find her beside the sea until conscious
response to it ebbs into that trance of wonder which is the withdrawal
of the soul into ultimate chambers, the inviolable retreat whence it
comes forth washed clean of the injuries time has dealt it. She sings
a remorseful dirge over the “defeated days” of captive animals. She
quickens her pace, at moments, to the measures of a hilarious mind.
Throughout that mischievous “encourager of hesitancy,” the Harmless
Scholar, she all but dances.
“The main business of the scholar,” she informs you, with a wicked
twinkle behind her spectacles, “is to live gracefully, without mental
passion, and to get off alone into a corner for an affectionate view of
creation.”
This she concedes you as an egg warranted to hatch into something you
don’t expect, or a bomb likely to burst harmlessly, if disconcertingly,
under your chair. For she knows, by diabolic instinct, just what your
idea of the scholar is: the conserver of chronologies and sapient
conclusions fit chiefly to be waved in pedagogical celebrations or
trumpeted at authors’ readings. No such sterile destiny as this for
her, as she shall presently “fructify unto you.”
“Few can be trusted with an education.” This she tells you with a
prodigious lightness of self-assurance. “The true scholar’s sign-manual
is not the midnight lamp on a folio. He knows; he is baked through; all
superfluous effort and energy are over for him. To converse consumedly
upon the weather, and compare notes as to ‘whether it is likely to hold
up tomorrow,’—this, says Hazlitt, ‘is the end and privilege of a life
of study.’”
Mark you how humbly she proceeds, this multi-millionaire of the mind.
Her intellectual barns are bursting with fatness, her cattle are on
a thousand hills; yet she spares you not only the inventory of her
acquisitions but any hint of her respect for them. One is smilingly
glad to note that sometimes the challenge of the world’s intellectual
penury is really too much for her, and she cannot help rushing to the
rescue with armies of notable names and historic data. Still she did
converse consumedly upon the weather also, and it is one of the happy
incredibilities of her delightful disposition that she never repudiated
the intercourse of honest minds, even if they were dull. She adroitly
refrained from tossing them the ball she knew they could never return,
though with a curve imperfectly transcribed. She talked with them
about dogs and mushrooms—for there also she was sapient in a lore that
could be worn lightly and the more easily concealed—and the merciful
recipe for killing a lobster painlessly before you plunge him in the
ensanguining pot, of kittens and young furry donkeys and the universal
boon of weather. And she had a store of absurdities, never anecdotes
in the dire sense of cut-and-dried obstructors of the traffic between
mortal minds, but odd quips and spontaneous incongruities she was ready
to shower you withal. No less pretentious scholar ever walked a world
more suavely aware of her gracious charm, more happily oblivious of
the breaches she could make in worn conventions if she brought up her
artillery.
The personal revelations in Patrins are unmistakable to those who knew
her. She writes On the Delights of an Incognito. Who can fail to see L.
I. G. herself in the person of the hypothetical R., walking home after
“the day at a library desk” where he “had grown hazy with no food and
much reading?” And passing the house where he was always delightedly
welcome and where he loved to be, he looked in at the shining dinner
table where sat the family, unconscious of him and yet—he knew it—only
to be the merrier if he dropped in, and “hurried on, never quite so
paradoxically happy in his life as when he quitted that familiar
pane without rapping, and went back to the dark and the frost,
unapprehended, impersonal, aberrant, a spirit among men.” For Louise
Guiney, prettily as she conformed herself to accepted rules, was by
nature a vagrom under conventional roofs, a wandering breeze, an addict
of fern seed, a cloud, a rainbow fancy, whatever could make itself, as
speedily as might be, impalpable to the eye and only a memory to the
too-inquisitive mind. As to the inner philosophy of her, the cup of
strength she kept ever by her in intimate stillnesses, there it stands
in another essay, The Precept of Peace. This bears much dwelling on,
not only by the mystic but the honest mind distraught in the terrifying
assaults of modern life. How to serve the world while renouncing it,
how to possess your own soul, in the peace that lets it grow and ripen
seed! She is in love, not with indifference, but the brave behavior it
endows you with.
“A very little non-adhesion to common affairs,” she tells you, “a
little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide
the moral immunity which is the only real estate.”
A benevolent receptiveness surrounds her. She lets you interrupt her
because you cannot actually reach her inner strongholds; she is at
heart and head so engrossed in intimate concerns so far from you that
you cannot possibly borrow or steal the key to burst in and stumble
about in them. Out of her general kindliness she will deal gently with
you, hospitably even, that, being dulled and satisfied, you may go
away the sooner and leave her to the only aims worth, to her special
aptitudes, pursuing eagerly. This, it must be remembered, was the
gay bravado of youth, with so much in its treasury it could afford
to squander time and a rain of friendliness on even the invading
bore. The day came later when the world jostled her and she had to
double and turn to avoid it; but always she cherished a philosophy
of courteous endurance. Personages nobly nurtured learn early not to
whimper. So, when Demos finds a use for their heads, they die with
a grace seemingly reserved for kings and martyrs. And the use Demos
finds for the heads of the nobly born in the arts is to weary them
with much crowning and to sap them with the foolish requisition that
they shall appear in public arenas. But the great brotherhood our L. I.
G. subscribes to “hold the world but as the world” and make no outcry
over these hindrances to a consecrated life. They do not shy at uncouth
contraptions on the road. They have adopted the blinders of a mind
inwardly withdrawn, and—to o’erleap the metaphor!—they smile in their
daily dying. This book, Patrins, smiles all through. It informs you,
chiefly by an innocently indirect implication, that the phenomenon of
being, while it may be taken by schoolmen and moralists for a balance
between good and ill, is a whimsical business, and the more you see of
it the more firmly you will determine to view it aslant, with an eye to
pleasing paradox.
As the tree of her mental life grew and broadened into wider air, it
cast a shade not even her votaries were always zealous to penetrate.
She tended more and more to the obscure, the far-off and dimly seen.
In her biographical work she was the champion of lost causes, the
restorer of names dropped out of rubricated calendars through sheer
inattention of an unlearned world, or rusted by time in chantries no
longer visited. She would sail, not for those known islands on every
map where harbors are charted and the smallest craft can coal and
water, but for some lost Atlantis, even if she might only moor in its
guessed neighborhood and hear, at least, the plash of ripples over it.
She was always listening, the generous hand to the responsive ear, to
echoes from “forgotten or infrequent lyres.”
“Apollo,” she says, “has a class of might-have-beens whom he loves:
poets bred in melancholy places, under disabilities, with thwarted
growth and thinned voices; poets compounded of everything magical and
fair, like an elixir which is the outcome of knowledge and patience,
and which wants, in the end, even as common water would, the essence of
immortality.”
It is not quite easy to tell why she delighted so absolutely in digging
for ore in spots of incredible difficulty. It was not that she was
ill-grounded in the greater, more entirely accepted cults. Shakespeare
was hers and Milton, and in Dante she did authoritative work. And it is
idle to wonder whether, so many of the big critical jobs being done,
she had a keen eye to the market value of such unconsidered trifles
as were left. The practical worth of a task would never have been an
incentive; it might have been a deterrent. Like Mangan, there was
that in her which bade her not to cross the street to advance her own
interests; it persuaded her to what seemed even wilful adoption of
the losing cause. (That she did, in many senses, harness herself to
drudgery, as life drove her the more pitilessly to the wall, is the
more to her lasting renown; by nature she was single in devotion to
the tasks she loved and ready to forswear the body’s ease.) Nor was
her attachment to the imperfectly known by any means the pleasure of
the chase, the exhilaration of the hunt when dates and genealogical
and critical sequences had “gone away” from her hounds of scent and
swiftness. It was simply true that she had an inextinguishable love
for the souls “ordained to fail.” As it made no difference to her
whether a lasting line of verse were hers or another’s, so she had the
patience of the born annalist in picking up and conserving every least
coin of the realm of letters or of manly and romantic deeds.
One of the floating bits of wreckage she gave a hand to confirming in
the illustrious place given him by a few discerning minds, was Mangan,
the uniquely brilliant author of an authoritative version of My Dark
Rosaleen, a perverse and suffering soul, prey to a blackness of mind
and the Nemesis of his own wandering will. There were “two Mangans,”
she quotes from a previous biographer, “one well known to the Muses,
the other to the police; one soared through the empyrean and sought the
stars, the other lay too often in the gutters of Peter Street and Bride
Street.”
He was a worshipper of that which is above us, and prey to what is
below, the body’s slave, the poor brain’s mistaken ministrant, striving
alternately to fire it to new apprehensions and drug it with a despair
of its own possibilities. In this Study, James Clarence Mangan, (1897)
Louise Guiney says:
“One can think of no other, in the long disastrous annals of English
literature, cursed with so monotonous a misery, so much hopelessness
and stagnant grief. He had no public; he was poor, infirm, homeless,
loveless; travel and adventure were cut off from him, and he had no
minor risks to run; the cruel necessities of labor sapped his dreams
from a boy; morbid fancies mastered him as the rider masters his horse;
the demon of opium, then the demon of alcohol, pulled him under, body
and soul, despite a persistent and heart-breaking struggle, and he
perished ignobly in his prime.”
Could a combination of evils have been imagined more poignantly
appealing to this young champion of shipwrecked souls? My Dark Rosaleen
alone was enough to enlist her generous pen. As Mangan himself rescued
it from the indifferent fame of an archaic fragment, a norm of beauty,
and clothed it with the flying draperies of a glorifying fancy, so
she unfolded its history and holds it up to new appreciation in a
world not given to dwell upon the historically obscure. Mangan, she
tells us, “was a pattern of sweet gratitude and deference, and left
his art to prosper or perish as heaven should please.” How this moved
her as an appeal she understood! for she also was of those who sow
their seed in the wild garden of the world’s indifference and pass on,
meekly unaware of any right of mankind, born to heavenly destinies,
to stay and gather. He was dear to her. She treated him tenderly, yet
his strange humors moved her to a smile. He was “so ludicrous and so
endeared a figure that one wishes him but a thought in Fielding’s
brain, lovingly handled in three volumes octavo and abstracted from the
hard vicissitudes of mortality.”
This Study of hers reflects, with an especial clarity, the form and
color of her own critical genius. In the comparison of masterpieces and
the measurement of values by accepted standards, she was at ease in a
large activity. If we would understand her method, we may look on it
here. The shallow conception of the critic’s task, as an expression
of personal preference, was not even germane to the richness of
preparation she brought to even the most inconsiderable reviewing. Here
are no snap judgments, ingenuous betrayal of temperamental likings.
The genesis of criticism is the tool in her hands. Lead her to the
slenderest rill of poetry and, out of her witch-hazel magic, she
locates the spring that fed it. She bows before “the few whose senses
are quick at literary divination.” In this Study learning ran, not
wild, but at a splendid even pace over the road of past achievement,
saluting guideposts by the way. Literary resemblances, the least
intentional, are rarest joys to her. She is enchanted to find some of
Mangan’s lighter verse rattling on like a Gilbertian libretto.
“Behold the exhumed precursor of The Mikado!”
Nothing rewards her more indubitably than the discovery of even a
quasi-lineage, a shadow of likeness not to be developed into the
actual relationship supported by time and place. She does not often
floor you with unimpeachability of dates, but she knows the very
complexion of her time, “his form and color.” She remembers what wings
beat the air of fortunate decades, dropping pinions more than one
imitator snatched in falling and wore brazenly in his cap. She can
rehearse the unbroken descent of metres. Her parallel between Mangan
and Poe, their dependence on the haunting adjunct of the refrain, does
revolve about chronology; but chiefly she relies upon the convictions
of her divining mind. She compares the “neck and neck achievements
of Mangan and Poe.” She traces both back to the colossus Coleridge,
with his wells of color. His was the spring of youth, and they bore
away full flagons. It is hardly possible to overrate her value to the
student of literature in these learned but uncharted flights all over
the visible sky of the periods where her subjects moved. Literature,
she knows, is a species of royal descent. The Titans may not live to
see the faces of their own children, yet out of those rich fecundities
of authentic utterance children are born and show trace of august
lineage. And it is hers, the “abstract and brief chronicler” of values,
to find it.
To Louise Guiney, there were two transcending realities: poetry and
what men call, with varying accent, religion. She believed in poetry
as, in the old sense, an ecstasy. She loved archaic phrases and grieved
because fit words should perish, mourning them as men would mourn if,
believing there were children of immortal lineage among them, they
discovered these could die. To her there were archetypes of beauty,
the living heavenly substance we have, with an unshaken prescience,
learned to call undying. Wandering evanescences, we persuade them down
to us or snatch at them and cage them in our heavier atmosphere with
the hope, sometimes bewilderingly justified, of their singing on and
on. One condition of our even hearing the beat of those wings bending
their swallow flight to the responsive mind, is the high vibration in
ourselves, the intense activity of what we call imagination. And this
vibration is so often the effervescence of youth, the overplus of a
richness of physical life—the speed of the blood, a quick sensibility
of the brain—that after the pulse slows and the brain responds less
eagerly the poet sings no more; or he clouds his verse with moralities
and loads it with the stiff embroidery of intellectual conceits. Louise
Guiney’s singing life was not long, because, after the impulse, in its
first capricious spontaneity, had left her, she did not urge it back
again. It would have been impossible for her, at any period, to select
desirable subjects for poetry as the landscape painter marks a lovely
spot in his mind’s eye, to return with tubes and brush. Once she did
own to the tempting exercise of composing a poem in cold blood. It
turned out to be compact of beauties appealing to the public mind, and
she viewed it thenceforth from a hurt and wistful wonder. You might say
she cherished a distaste for it, as being a child of indirect lineage,
a mood disloyal to the greater gods. She was ever the acolyte in that
temple, never beseeching at the altar, but serving it. For she was of
those pilgrims of destiny who are perpetually referring this world to
the pattern of worlds existing before time began. To her, poetry is an
unspoken allegiance to the very essence of mysticism, magic, glamourie.
It is the echo from far hills of space. It is never without the
witchery of the unknown, the guessed-at, the adored but never seen. Not
all its dances are woven under the sky we scan chiefly for the weather,
but in the elusive gleaming where not we but our dreams are denizens.
It is perpetually looking from “magic casements.” It brings the
twilight feeling. It may not be melancholy, yet it inspires melancholy.
It may not be joyous, yet the pleasure it awakens is more exquisite
than it has words to celebrate. These are matters far from the market
where we buy and sell and measure our worth by cleverness in exploiting
it. These are courts where our poet’s “shy foot” dared penetrate with
the confidence of a daughter of the house.