Or must too bold desires be quieted?
Only to ease you, never to reprove you,
I will go back to heaven with heart unfed:
Yet sisterly I turn, I bend above you,
To kiss (ah, with what sorrow!) all my dead.”
Next to the Golden City of belief she had, as she began, continued to
love poetry, the making of it, the “love of lovely words.” And though
an initiate world had hailed her, when, like a young shepherd wandered
into town, a bewildering “strayed reveller,” she came “singing along
the way,” man had been finding out many inventions and kept no ear
for strains out of Arcady or long notes prophetically echoed from the
New Jerusalem. He was laying the foundations of a taste which was to
flower in jazz and the movies and the whirling of wheels on great
white ways. She had her own small public always. To these, her books
were cool colonnades with the sea at the end. But she had learned, now
with no shadow of doubt, that there would never be any wider response
from the world of the printed word. She was not, in the modern sense,
“magazinable.” Editors were not laying up treasure in the safety
deposits of the immortalities; they were nursing their subscription
lists. If she had kept on singing, it would have been into that
silence whence the poet’s voice echoes back to him with a loneliness
terrifying to hear. Need that dull his fancy and mute his tongue? Not
in youth, perhaps. When the blood flows boundingly, you write your
verses on green leaves, so they are written, and if nobody wants the
woven chaplet of them, you laugh and cast it on the stream. Through the
middle years it is different. You must be quickened by an unquenchable
self-belief or warmed at the fire of men’s responsive sympathy to write
at all. There is something in the hurt an unheeding world can deal you
that, besides draining the wounded heart, stiffens the brain and hand.
And Atalanta’s pace may be slackened by the misadventures of the way.
Her sandal may come loose, or she slips on a pebble and strains the
tendon of that flying foot.
For poetry is a matter of the mounting blood as well as the tempered
mind. It has, in spite of those who have suffered the horrible
disaster of physical overthrow and yet have kept on singing, something
intimately dependent on the actual coursing of the blood, the beat
of the physical heart. The only verse Louise Guiney prized, was the
verse with wings, spontaneous as the gestures of childhood or the
oriole’s song. She could knock her lines into a wild ruin and rebuild,
but that was after the first swift assembling of stone on stone. Any
idea of verse soberly and slowly evolved, as an intellectual feat,
was afar from her. “Our best things,” she said, “are the easiest.
They’re no trouble.” They did cost, in the last sweet pangs of intent
consideration, of rearranging, polishing, and hunting down the best
and only word. When the poetic impulse seized her, she bent to it in
obedient delight. She never coaxed or beckoned. Only into the living
spring did she dip her cup: no thrifty piping it to the house in
forethought of the day when the frost creeps and “no birds sing.” The
greatest beauties in her verse were as spontaneous as they dropped
from the skies and she set them in their chaste enduring gold. Though
she was so unwearied in polishing and changing, in their general scope
and temper the poems came as from the hand of God, and when her own
hand fell too laxly to receive them, they did not come. Her resultant
loneliness of mind she accepted with a decorum due the gods who give
and take away again; you might almost have called it unconcern. For
she was not greedy of life: only grateful for its temperate dole. She
might own, under anxious accusation, to having “no luck, no leisure, no
liberty,” but that was only for the intimates who inevitably “knew.”
“As to the Muse,” (this in 1916) “she has given me the go by. No
matter: this dog has most hugely enjoyed his day, which was Stevenson’s
day, and Lionel Johnson’s, and Herbert Clarke’s, and Philip Savage’s.”
Though the last years of her middle age were the less robust, as to
the intellectual life she had no waning. Her mind was no less keen
nor, except in the sudden exhaustion of a tragic illness, were her
activities dulled. She died young. And though the heart that is the
bravado of sheer courage was never allowed to fail her, the bodily
heart did fail. Those who had walked with her knew its weakness, and
that, a race-horse on the road, she was speedily exhausted in a climb.
One day, lost on Exmoor, her walking mate, looking back for her, would
find the world empty of her altogether. Knowing the sort of spirit
she was, it was easy to guess the Little People had kidnapped her or
an archangel hidden her in the brightness of his wings while they
discoursed together on topics of the upper sky. But the heather had
simply closed over her; she had lain down to rest her tired heart. And
as the physical world, out of the strange jealousy of its predestined
enmities, is forever fighting the spirit, so the feebler action of a
weakening heart might dull those swift spontaneities that are man’s
answer to the beauty of things—his protest to the earth that cajoles
and challenges the while it fulfils its mysterious hostility and
overthrows him in the end. In her prose work of editing and reviewing,
the blade was sharper as time wore upon it and she grew more recondite
in knowledge and more desperately exact, omitting no extreme of patient
scrutiny. But poetry was her youth, and youth was gone. And youth is
not a matter of years. It is what the years have done to us.
If we may borrow a tag of appreciation for her verse, we could hardly
do better than quote her resumé of Hurrell Froude’s, the “clearness,
simplicity, orderly thought and noble severity” she found in him.
His poems “have a strong singleness and sad transparency, the tone of
them a little chilly, yet almost Virgilian, and arrestingly beautiful;
. . . abstinent, concentrated, true.”
Now primarily Froude’s verse is not in the least like Louise Guiney’s.
It is scarcely more than the first note leading up the scale. In the
amazed apprehension of beauty, he is leagues behind her. Yet the
“almost Virgilian” of her comment fits her to perfection. And if she is
not always “clear” she is, marvelously again, “a little chilly,” with
the chill of spring twilights when earth scents are in the air, the
lily-of-the-valley just bloomed out of the cold, or the damp richness
of the April woods.
Two little volumes, Monsieur Henri, the story of the Count of La
Rochejaquelein (1892) and A Little English Gallery (1894) are of the
essence of that exhaustive research and fine rehabilitation which
were the fruit of her later years. The war of the Vendée, with its
religious appeal, its romance of feudal catchwords, took irresistible
hold on her, and the young Count of La Rochejaquelein, blazoned in
youthful ardor, shone as the sun. In thus regilding a futile struggle
she strives, by discarding political minutiæ, to “romanticize such dry
facts as we mean shall live.” “A background,” she concludes, “may be
blurred for the sake of a single figure. I tried, therefore, to paint
a portrait, willing to abide by the hard saying of Northcote: ‘If a
portrait have force, it will do for history.’” Nor could she have
resisted him of whom history says, as he mounted and rode away to his
feat of arms:
“Then first came the eagle look into his eyes which never left them
after.”
To Louise Guiney, born to the love of good fighters, the eagle look of
courage and consecration was as thrilling as, to the soldier himself,
the call to arms, and the little “footnote to French history” is
written on such a sustained level of affectionate enthusiasm that
it strikes you, despite its theme of blood and loss, as almost a
gay little book. Monsieur Henri is one of her own chosen exemplars,
a gallant figure in the martyrology of the world, of those who, to
paraphrase her almost envious tribute, are willing to spill their lives
as a libation to the gods.
The Little English Gallery, six biographical essays in her individual
manner of a condensed bewilderment of research, holds the seed of
what might be accounted her life work. For not only does her portrait
pen paint you a fine enduring picture of Lady Danvers, Farquhar,
Beauclerk, Langton and Hazlitt, but here also is the preface, as
it might be called, of her Henry Vaughan, to whose gentle service
she bent the intermittent work of later years. During that English
summer of 1895, she went on pilgrimage to the grave of Vaughan, at
Llansaintffread. This was a part of Wales hardly touched by tourists,
for the ubiquitous motor car had not begun its devil’s business of
shedding profanation over silent ways. To walk here was to withdraw as
deeply as you would into the fragrance of past simplicities. Louise
Guiney was reft away into a trance of inward peace. She trod the paths
her poet loved, and she was, also with him, where her mind would ever
be, in the seventeenth century. This was one of her ardent quests,
her passionate rescues: for Vaughan was forgotten on his own familiar
ground. Literally the places that had known him knew him no more.
Even his grave had been desecrated by the slow attrition of neglect.
A coal shed had encroached on it, coal had fallen on his stone, cans
and broken glass littered the sacred spot. The two Americans, in a
haste of ruth, cleared the stone with hands and walking sticks, and
Louise Guiney drew to her two bent and blear-eyed Hodges working near
and preached to them Vaughan, the good physician, and his right to
the seemliness of an ordered resting-place. And she stayed not in her
doing, but called later upon England and America for a fund to put
the grave in order and suitably to commemorate the poet. The Vaughan
essay, in her own copy of the Little English Gallery, grew thick with
notes, confirmatory or expanded, in this browsing over Welsh ground,
and the Vaughan editing ran on and on through following years into what
must be the authoritative edition of his work. Why did she so love and
serve him? Not only because his thoughts take hold on heaven and, like
the breath of man, fly upward, that spirit of devotion—the negation of
earthly desires so intoxicating to her—but because he might otherwise,
as in his own elegies, “stop short of immortality.” His silent footstep
seemed to have left no mark beside his darling Usk. His soul, like her
own, in never questioning acceptance, perpetually sought eternity. He
loved learning, and he had an “eye and ear for the green earth.” He
had also a “sweet self-privacy,” and his inexhaustible delight in the
created world was not impaired or qualified by his childlike love of
heaven. He is temperate, he is remote. Louise Guiney would have loved
to walk and laugh with him, for he was one of the few with whom she
chose to dwell. To know him a little is to know her better, not so much
from their likeness, but to learn what minds were dear to her.
Hazlitt, too, was dear. He, it must be remembered, like Charles Lamb,
Izaak Walton and the more authentic of the older worthies, was her
godfather in letters. He, too, had remoteness, though of another sort
than Vaughan’s. Not for him withdrawal into the heaven of heavens, but
to Winterslow Hut, to write his Lectures in a passionate privacy. Him,
too, in 1895, she sought in his familiar haunts, and relished her cold
chicken at Llangollen in a happy maze, in that Hazlitt had sat down
there to the same fare and the New Eloïse. At Wem, in Shropshire, where
he had his immortal meeting with Coleridge, she came, through much
pains, upon an oldest inhabitant who could give her faint shrilling
echoes of “Billy ’Azlitt” in his youth, yet nothing more pertinent
than that the yeasty Billy used to “lie under the ’edges and frighten
the maids a-going to market.” To Winterslow Hut she went, on Salisbury
Plain, an enchantment of larks and heather, and fain would have carried
away the old discarded sign of the Pheasant Inn it had become save that
it was “so mortal heavy.”
If her own Goose-Quill Papers show the parentage she owns, it is
preëminently of Hazlitt. She was enamored of him, his amiable and
delightful style that is not too homespun for the scholar nor in
any wise too recondite for men of lowlier apprehension. And if the
intellect of man has loves of its own, quite apart from inclinations
of the heart, Hazlitt may be said to be the friend and comrade of
affectionate minds. Indeed, his authoritative note in criticism was
the less beguiling to her who could be outspoken herself, on high
occasion, than some personal quality of sensitive receptiveness to
life. This was, to her, most endearing. He had, moreover, the courage
of withstanding great upheavals and lamenting lost causes; she loved
his love of walking, and one line she is never tired of quoting or
prompting her friends to quote for the enhancement of some page: “a
winding road and a three-hours’ march to dinner.” His aloofness,
albeit with the foil of the kindest of hearts, his sensitiveness that
could, by a word or a look askance, be cut to the raw,—do not these
perhaps admit him to the list of the humanly ill-equipped who enlist
her chivalry? Or was it his humor that was the living bond, that and
his clarity of English? To his Unitarian cast of temperament she is
handsomely generous, and though not always averse to giving those who
wear their rue of faith with a difference a sly dig on occasion (“the
timid, domestic and amateurish thing which Anglicanism must be, even
at its best!” that, one must believe, with a twinkle behind “those
spectacles”) she tolerates his ignorance of sacerdotal certainties and
not too curtly deprecates his “imperfect development.”
“As Mr. Arnold said so patiently of Byron, ‘he did not know enough.’”
Yet she could have better spared a more ecclesiastic man, and in
her affectionate summing up she decorates him with her heartfelt
thankfulness that he is what he is:
“He stalks apart in state, the splendid Pasha of English letters.”
She is forced to judge him as the pure intellectual must judge the man
of tumultuous and undirected genius. His confidential egoism might well
have been her own despair, so disinclined is she really to open her
heart to you save under pretty disguises, and you would hardly have
thought his style, soaring “to the rhetorical sublime” or dropping to
“hard Saxon slang” to be the style she loved. Yet this was she who
did not choose her friends for the intellectual rightness in them but
something pure human, as wayward, when you would define it, as the tang
of the weather. Toward the close of this essay she rushes into some
fine direct English of her own. Hazlitt’s diction, she affirms, is
“joyously clear,” “sumptuously splendid” and concludes that “no right
style was ever founded save out of a sincere heart.” This, later on
when life had taught her things hard to learn, she said, in a fuller
form, as touching not style but letters in their entirety:
“After all, life, not art, is the thing.”
To that same growing conviction it was that Hazlitt appealed, a “born
humanist,” with a “memory like a loadstar, and a name which is a toast
to be drunk standing.”
Her bright light—perhaps not the guiding light, for her genius was
ever an individual one and moved, for the most part, unperturbed in
its own orbit—was Robert Louis Stevenson. The youth of his day will
remember how he took hold on even the popular imagination, fighting
his predestined fight with disease and weather, doubling on death,
and, while he fled—the hovering fate bound, in the end, to clutch
him—setting his mind to the weaving of bright adventure and his hand to
the writing of it. That gayety of temperamental bravado, that piquing
drama of a man tied to his bed for helpless intervals and sending
out his mind to roam the seas and centuries, were intoxicating to
venturesome spirits. In 1895, Louise Guiney writes of hearing from a
“most brilliant boy” in San Francisco:
“He says something that has set me up for life: that Mrs. Stevenson
told him R. L. S. had a great fancy for my little doings, and used to
‘search for them in such magazines as came to Samoa.’ I will keep on
writing, I will; I shall never despair after that.”
To Robert Louis Stevenson: A Study, privately printed in 1895, she
contributed a notable sonnet, the sestette beginning:
“Louis, our priest of letters and our knight,”
and a longer Valediction of a metre disturbing to the unpractised ear,
but full of isolated lines of an individual beauty and also of a real
grief: the lament of the pupil over his master, signalized in the
significant line:
“The battle dread is on us now, riding afield alone.”
There is a light-heartedness, too, about the poem, like burnished
fringes on a mourning robe. For youth is in it as well as sorrow. Her
lamentation can break into the iridescent foam of a stanza like this,
where she pre-figures the living spirit of Tusitala absorbed into the
island life he loved and blossoming from it forever:
“There on summer’s holy hills
In illumined calms,
Smile of Tusitala thrills
Through a thousand palms;
There in a rapture breaks
Dawn on the seas,
When Tusitala from his shoon unbinds the Pleiades.”
Who could spare that outburst of young extravagance at the end?
It was she who, in the first shock of the news, when the wondering word
went from lip to lip, “Stevenson is dead!”—as if long apprehension
could never have prepared us for a calamity so amazing—said to those at
one with her in Stevenson worship:
“Let us wear a band of crêpe.”
And they did, this group of mourning followers.
The complete bibliography of her work would include introductions,
studies, notes, all characterized by her unhastened scrutiny of
“passionate yesterdays”: Matthew Arnold, Robert Emmet, Katherine
Philips, Thomas Stanley, Lionel Johnson, Edmund Campion,—these were
a few of those whose memory she illumined and clarified. No estimate
could overrate her continuing and exhaustless patience; she was content
with nothing less than living within arm’s length of all the centuries.
Poet first, poet in feeling always, even after the rude circumstance
of life had closed her singing lips, she was an undaunted craftsman at
prose. It is true she did expect too much of us. She did, especially in
those later days, more than half believe we could delight in pouncing,
with her own triumphant agility, on discoveries of remote relationships
and evasive dates. Her multiplicity of detail had become so minute
and comprehensive, especially as touching the Restoration, that even
literary journals could seldom print her with any chance of backing
from the average reader. It was inevitable to her to run on into the
merely accurate data prized by the historian and genealogist alone.
Who can expect the modern spirit, prey to one sociological germ after
another, to find antidote in the obscurities of seventeenth century
English? Yet she never veered from the natal bent of her trained mind.
Still was she the indomitable knight errant of letters. She had to go
on rescuing though the damsels she delivered died on her hands. Where
did her anxiety of pains find its limit? not with the printing: there
she had always striven untiringly for perfection of form, unblemished
accuracy. One remembers exhaustive talks with her on the subtleties
of punctuation. The Wye Valley, the Devon lanes, were vocal, in that
summer of 1895, with precepts of typography. The colon especially
engaged the attention of these perfervid artisans. Was it not, this
capricious and yet most responsive of all marks of punctuation, widely
neglected in its supremest subtlety? Something of this argumentation
was afterward echoed in her paper on Lionel Johnson:
“Nothing was trivial to this ‘enamoured architect’ of perfection. He
cultivated a half mischievous attachment to certain antique forms of
spelling, and to the colon, which our slovenly press will have none
of; and because the colon stands for fine differentiations and sly
sequences, he delighted especially to employ it.”
There were serious conclaves, in those years, when excerpts for the
Pilgrim Scrip, a magazine of travel, were concerned, whether a man’s
punctuation, being the reflex of his own individuality, should not be
preserved in exactness. An English essayist of the nomad type, who was
a very fiend of eccentricity, proved an undevoured bone of contention.
His stops were enough to make the typographically judicious grieve. But
had not he his own idea of the flow of his prose, and should not his
punctuation be inviolate? Her own corrected proofs were a discipline to
the uninitiate in scholarly ways, a despair, no doubt, to the indurated
printer, and her ruthlessness toward her own work such as Roman and
Spartan parents would have gasped at and found themselves too lax to
emulate. Yet through these excesses of literary precision she went
merrily. She was no Roundhead of the pen, taking her task in sadness.
The ordinary proof reader, of set intentions and literal meanings, was
her delight. In Songs at the Start is the line:
“O the oar that was once so merry!”
One of the battles she fought untiringly was over the vocative O,
contending that it should never be followed by the intrusive comma. Yet
the comma would sneak in,
(“Abra was ready ere I called her name;
And though I called another, Abra came!”)
and in this case author and printer had fought it out, forward and
back, unwearied play of rapier and bludgeon, until she wrote, properly
enisled in the margin, after the careted O: “no comma.” And behold! the
line appeared, in the final proof:
“O no comma the oar that was once so merry!”
And when, after another tussle with her mulish adversary, she thought
she had him, the book itself fell open in her hand at his victorious
finale:
“O no, the oar that was once so merry!”
The tale of her defeat was perennially delightful to her. She was never
tired of telling it.
Once, quoting the line:
“Hoyden May threw her wild mantle on the hawthorn tree,”
she was enraptured to see the innocent hawthorn walking back to her
personified into “hoyden Mary.” The vision of hoyden Mary, concrete as
Audrey and her turnip, was thenceforth one of the character studies on
her comedy stage. Her own copies of her books were flecked with spear
dints from the battles she had waged in their doing and undoing. The
“passion for perfection” left her in no security in an end seemingly
attained. Her pen knew no finalities. When she had reached the goal
and you ran to crown her, she simply turned about to go over the
course again at a more uniform pace or with a prettier action. Her
biographical and critical work was never finished, even when it reached
the final fastnesses of print. A new shade of insight would be cast
by some small leaf of data just sprung up, to be noted in the margin.
And how moved she was over the restoration of an old word to active
use or shy experiment with one of valid lineage yet unaccustomed form!
One remembers serious, even anxious, conversation with her on the word
“stabile.” It was more poetic than other derivatives of the same root
and had a subtly dignified access of meaning. Should it be used? Could
one venture? And she did use it in the first printing of what became
the last Oxford Sonnet, only, in her anxious precision, to revert to
the authorized “stable” in the last printing of all.
Of her one book of stories, Lovers’ Saint Ruth (1894) written in a
rather wistful response to optimistic persuasion, she says:
“I had no hold whatever on narrative.”