she whose inner mind, when it was not musing in mediæval cloisters,
was hedged about with tolerances, who was not shaken by the tempestuous
prejudice and fierce resisting passions of which drama is made? Was
she lax in a certain remote acceptance of mankind so long as it would,
like Alexander, get out of the sun whereby she was regarding the Middle
Ages or the soul? Not always: there was in her a sudden unexpected
fierceness that amazed you, after you thought yourself used to her
self-preservative withdrawals. On a delicate piece of literary work
where a wife, hideously used, had suffered all things and forgiven all
things, she commented tersely:
“Not right. It hinders justice.”
But as to the book of stories, she entered upon it with premonitory
omen and probably did it under a stress of will. For tasks not native
to her mind, as well as those remotely capable of being construed
into pot boilers, she began “with a little aversion,”—indeed, with so
much more than a little that the mere suggestion of them was usually
declined as soon as offered.
Like Henry James, she was an expatriate, though not even under the
argument of our aloofness from Europe between 1914 and 1917 did
she, like him, bear testimony to her love for England by becoming
naturalized. Still an ardent American, her answering love flowed back
to us as in 1898, when she dedicated one of the most breathlessly
beautiful of her poems to The Outbound Republic. There had come the
challenge to enter world counsels and world clashes. We heard, and she
heard it with us:
“As the clear mid-channel wave,
That under a Lammas dawn
Her orient lanthorn held
Steady and beautiful
Through the trance of the sunken tide,
Sudden leaps up and spreads
Her signal round the sea:
_Time, time!
Time to awake; to arm;
To scale the difficult shore!_”
This was first published anonymously and one reader, at least,
instantly detected her hand. It took no special acumen. Lines were
never written more intensely charged with personal quality.
And if we think her heart, in its love for England, ever grew alien to
us, we may go back to the last of the twelve stately London Sonnets:
In the Docks. What a banner she waved there of an implied creed, a
passionate belief!
“Where the bales thunder till the day is done,
And the wild sounds with wilder odors cope;
Where over crouching sail and coiling rope,
Lascar and Moor along the gangway run;
Where stifled Thames spreads in the pallid sun,
A hive of anarchy from slope to slope;
Flag of my birth, my liberty, my hope,
I see thee at the masthead, joyous one!
O thou good guest! so oft as, young and warm,
To the home-wind thy hoisted colors bound,
Away, away from this too thoughtful ground
Sated with human trespass and despair,
Thee only, from the desert, from the storm,
A sick mind follows into Eden air.”
Our inherited traditions were like wine to her, our lapses drained
her soul; and as it was in 1890, when that sonnet was written, so it
continued to be through the years when our star sank, in 1914, to be
so long in rising. In 1915, she wrote:
“I have been disappointed over our country’s official attitude: there
should be no ‘neutrality’ of opinion where rights and wrongs are as
plain as the nose on one’s face!”
And in February, 1917:
“‘Come, let your broadsides roar with ours!’ as Tennyson says. Only
I never shall get over the unexpected and staggering vision of my
own idealistic land having behaved for nearly three solid years in
this selfish, provincial way, with the masterly vision of a village
schoolmaster who sees as far as his village pump, and not one inch
beyond it.”
When she went to England for the second time, lights were burning,
just lighted then: Lionel Johnson, soon to die, William Watson, Arthur
Symons, Aubrey Beardsley, Nora Hopper, Katherine Tynan, Dora Sigerson,
in her young beauty, (afterward married to Clement Shorter, another
devoted friend of L. I. G.) and W. B. Yeats—their glittering names are
many. And there was Herbert Clarke, tragic figure of non-fulfilment,
without mention of whom no footnote to her life would be complete,
because they were mirrors of kindred tastes and proud aloofness from
the market-place. He died before he knew the heart-break of the War,
and Louise Guiney wrote:
“And now his bright thwarted star is out, at least in this world where
he never had his dues. . . . Thinking of him gone away is to think of
what Dickens calls in Bleak House ‘the world which sets this world
right.’”
Edmund Gosse, Richard Garnett, Mrs. Meynell,—the list of her
friendships rivals in fulness that of her beginnings in America.
And those of the first years were but the beginning. Today they are
numbered “in battalions.”
Though so ardent an American, England was her spirit’s home. The odor
of musty archives was as delicious in her nostrils as “hawthorn buds
in May.” Half effaced inscriptions were dearer to her than whole
broadsides of modern pæans to success. A crusader knight on his back in
some immemorial dimness was as immediate to her soul as Apollo walking
down the aisles of song. London, when she was away from it, haunted
her “like a passion.” To come upon her great little picture of pre-war
London makes a blessed interlude in the shrieking present. For we have
gained the motor car, and the price the smiling gods exacted is that
we have lost the broodingness of cities—their murmurous tranquillity.
That essay, Quiet London, dated 1890, has heart-break in it, as well
as beauty, for those who knew the London of old and who will see
it no more. Here are the very lineaments of that great fog-soaked,
rain-darkened beneficence and terror which once was London. You walk in
it with her and are at home in an inherited peace.
“There is no congestion of the populace; yet the creeks and coves
of that ancient sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour after hour,
century after century, as if in subjection to a fixed moon. It is the
very poise of energy, the aggregation of so much force that all force
is at a standstill; the miraculous moment, indefinitely prolonged,
when achieved fruition becalms itself at the full, and satiety
hesitates to set in.”
Here is the rain-swept atmosphere:
“The hushing rain, from a windless sky, falls in sheets of silver on
gray, gray on violet, violet on smouldering purple, and anon makes
whole what it had hardly riven: the veil spun of nameless analogic
tints, which brings up the perspective of every road, the tapestry
of sun-shot mist which Théophile Gautier admired once with all his
eyes. . . . At the angles of the grimiest places, choked with trade, we
stumble on little old bearded graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or
low-lying leafy gardens where monks and guildsmen have had their dream:
closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our
loud to-day.”
In her ecstatic browsings, her rapt withdrawal into old centuries,
she was the best Londoner of them all. And here is her gay tribute to
English weather:
“The mannerly, vertical showers . . . fall sudden and silent, like
unbidden tears, while you look forth from the wild purple coast of
Ireland at the slant and tawny fishing sails, or lean against the wall
of a ruined abbey in the fold of the Mendip Hills. Always at your
side is this gentle, fickle, sun-shot rain, spinning itself out of an
undarkened sky, and keeping the grass immortal and the roads pure of
dust. You reach, before long, to a full sympathy and comprehension
of what good Bishop Jeremy Taylor had before him when he drew his
simile of ‘a soft slap of affectionate rain.’ It is the rain of
the Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians, the immemorial
law-giver, and the oldest inhabitant of the isles. Wheresoever it
descends, there are perpetual freshness and peace.”
To walk with her was to add day to storied day in a calendar rubricated
from end to end.
“Nor ever can those trees be bare.”
Still living in the English landscape is that alert figure, rapt yet
ready for the absurdities of the moment, silent in understanding
withdrawals and, in her own words of another, “almost as good company
as a dog.” This was a masterpiece of praise by inversion, and “those
spectacles” gleamed over it prodigiously. One remembers her by the
crested blue of Devon and Cornish seas, subdued into stillness and then
breaking out in a wild hail of the
“cruel, crawling foam!”
One remembers her on a Midland road, sticking a pheasant’s feather
in her hat and swaggering rakishly, or walking into Shrewsbury, so
disheveled from the rain and dust of varied weathers, that landladies
looked askance, and one, more admittedly curious than the rest, queried:
“Is there a play to-night?”
For the two wayfarers did look the ancient part of rogues and
vagabonds, no less.
One remembers her climbing the slope, blue with wild hyacinths, at
Haughmond Abbey, or taking the straight “seven long miles” across
Egdon Heath, the sun darkened in a livid sky and floods of rain
to follow before the wayfarers found refuge in the little church
where D’Urbervilles lie, significant in nothing now save an envious
immortality on Thomas Hardy’s page. The clouds in that thunderous sky
were piled into imperial semblances, Emperors of old Rome, and out of
their brief pageant sprang Louise Guiney’s poem of Romans in Dorset,
the first three stanzas as illuminative as the sun and dark that ruled
the air:
“A stupor on the heath,
And wrath along the sky;
Space everywhere; beneath
A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high.
“Sullen quiet below,
But storm in upper air!
A wind from long ago,
In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an arras there,
“And singed the triple gloom,
And let through, in a flame,
Crowned faces of old Rome:
Regnant o’er Rome’s abandoned ground, processional they came.”
One remembers her, a last rite before leaving England, not knowing she
should return, feeding the doves in Paul’s Churchyard and, again at
Shrewsbury, packing, among dear mementoes, a sod of English earth.
To speak of her letters, those floating immortalities she cast about
with so prodigal a hand, is to wonder anew at an imaginative brilliancy
even beyond what she put into her considered work. To open one was an
event. Almost you were miserly over the envelope itself, and treasured
it, the script on it was of so rare a beauty. For her handwriting
had an individual distinction. Done in haste or at leisure, it was
the same. Her tumultuous jottings on margins of print or bits of
scribbling paper kept the line of grace. And the subject matter! it
was as varied as flowers and jewels and shells. In some cases, her
books may have suffered from too anxious a care. Her affluent learning,
deeply as it enriched her poetic gift, may have done something toward
choking it, burying it under the drift of yesterdays. For having at
her memory’s call the immortal lines of our English tongue, a despair
may well have overtaken her with the impulse to enter that great
company. She lacked the crude yet wholesome audacity of those to whom
the world is young. But if her considered work may possibly have
suffered from “much cherishing,” her letters made their bright advent
unhindered. In them she lost her sense of studious responsibilities
and—strange paradox of time!—it is they who may go farthest toward
making her immortal. She was simply not self-conscious about them,
and the haste with which they left her hand for the post was what
saved them in their living delightfulness. And they were plentiful
as leaves in Arden. Never did she let her correspondence “come tardy
off.” Courteous, good-natured, ever the prey of bores and sympathetic
listener to requests and comment, she wrote you promptly and with the
most engaging personal touch. If you sent her your book, she read it
with a painstaking intentness and returned you, not a formal note of
thanks, but a full and rich review wherein you were praised to the top
of your deserts, your failings touched lightly but honestly and your
errors spotted with the scholar’s acumen. And if she could commend
you whole-heartedly, and with no even courteous reservations, then
she was as happy in the writing as you in reading it. There was no
smallest trace in her of carping for the satisfaction of showing how
brave a critic she could be, no sense of blustering privilege. But the
letters! written in a gush of mental exuberance, sometimes the faster
the better, a tumultuous beauty of diction,—you shook the tree and you
got such fruit; the wind of your favor blew her way and unloosed on you
that petalled or ripened shower. Those were the spontaneities of her
life; those, in their lasting evanescence, she has yet to bequeath us,
a priceless legacy.
What did the war do to her? We cannot wholly say. We know how deeply
she had breathed in the life of Oxford, and that she was among those
who suffered pangs over
“the Oxford men
Who went abroad to die.”
There are tenderest and most admiring allusions to this or that boy
who stayed not upon the order of his going into khaki.
“War, war!” was one of the first cries from her. “It is unbelievable,
yet it is. England is on the defensive: God save her, I say! Boys I
know are being rushed off in the Territorials and Reserves to keep the
coast; and there are already rumors that there will be no October Term
for the University. . . . Terly-terlo! as the trumpets say in the old
Carol. ‘If it be not now yet it will come: the readiness is all.’”
And again, in 1915:
“It enrages me to be an Alien ‘neutral.’ You’ll remember the passionate
affection I have ever shown for everything German. Bah!” (No need of
indicating to those who knew her the thread of irony in this last!)
“Would I were at the front. . . . If England doesn’t pull through, no
more will liberty and civilization.”
And she had her prophetic despondencies. In March, 1919, she wrote with
a bitterness unfamiliar from her bounding pen:
“Oh, what a rabble of a world it is! and why did the wretched
soft-soapers interrupt Foch by granting that armistice when another
three weeks of him would have cut the claws of all the Devils forever!
_A bas les civiles!_”
There spoke the unhesitating mind of one who knew the grim job ought
to have been effectively ended, the tongue of one who came of soldier
blood.
We may guess that the strain of those last years sapped and undermined
her in ways the soldier spirit would not betray. We know she qualified
in them for that Paradise she most desired, of those who
“die, driven against the wall.”
If we seek about for mitigation of our bewilderment over her loss to
earth, the way seems to be not only the old road of unquestioning
thankfulness when a soul arrives at sanctuary from pain, but the solace
of a more intimate friendship with her work. Curiously personal to her
sounds that exquisite translation from Callimachus on the death of his
friend, the poet Heraclitus:
“They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead:
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
“And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take.”
Of this Edmund Gosse says, in a prose so authoritatively beautiful
that it hangs level in the balance with the rich “poetry of elegiacal
regret”:
“No translation ever smelt less of the lamp and more of the violet than
this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English literature
which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal regret. I do not
know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer expression of
a poet’s grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief mitigated only
by the knowledge that the dead man’s songs, his ‘nightingales,’ are
outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship, the reward of one who,
in Keats’s wonderful phrase, has left ‘great verse unto a little clan,’
the last service for the dead to whom it was enough to be ‘unheard,
save of the quiet primrose, and the span of heaven, and few ears.’”
This picture, delicately austere, is fitted, line for line, to the
obedient humility of Louise Guiney’s life. She wrought in seclusion,
asking nothing save the silent approval of the unseen gods; and still,
in the mysterious thicket of our mortal life, are her “nightingales”
awake.
In what niche shall we set her statue of renown? She has done the
most authentic and exquisite verse America has yet produced. Is it
not rather to its honor and our defeated fame that no widespread
recognition of it could have been predicted? Is Hazlitt largely read?
Does Charles Lamb sell by the million or the seventeenth century
lyrists by the hundred thousand? Louise Guiney was, like so much that
is austerely beautiful in the modern world, a victim of majorities.
The democracy of taste and intellect is perhaps the master, perhaps
the puppet, of this ironic time. But the time itself has its martyrs
in these children of illustrious line who cannot, sadly willing as
they may be, quite speak the common tongue. It is the suffrages of the
purchasing majority that determine what publishers shall print. And for
us,—Diana’s chariot in the heavens means less to us than a limousine on
earth. But the gods who endowed Louise Guiney with something ineffable
out of their treasury alone know about these things. Under their eyes
stands her slender last collection among its peers. And the book itself
says:
“Unto the One aware from everlasting
Dear are the winners: thou art more than they.”