III

"TWO began, in a low voice, 'Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here

ought to have been a _red_ rose-tree, and we put a white one in by

mistake.'"

As I look round this room I feel sure Two, and Five, and Seven, have

all been at work on it, and made no mistakes, for round the walls runs

a frieze of squat standard rose-trees, red as red can be, and just

like those that Alice saw in the Queen's garden. In between them are

Chaucer's name-children, prim little daisies, peering wideawake from

green grass. This same grass has a history which I have heard. In the

original stencil for the frieze it was purely conventional like the

rest, and met in spikey curves round each tree; the painter, however,

who was doing the work, was a lover of the fields; and feeling that

such grass was a travesty, he added on his own account dainty little

tussocks, and softened the hard line into a tufted carpet, the grass

growing irregularly, bent at will by the wind.

The result from the standpoint of conventional art is indeed

disastrous; but my sympathy and gratitude are with the painter. I see,

as he saw, the far-reaching robe of living ineffable green, of whose

brilliance the eye never has too much, and in whose weft no two threads

are alike; and shrink as he did from the conventionalising of that

wind-swept glory.

The sea has its crested waves of recognisable form; the river its eddy

and swirl and separate vortices; but the grass! The wind bloweth where

it listeth and the grass bows as the wind blows--"thou canst not tell

whither it goeth." It takes no pattern, it obeys no recognised law; it

is like a beautiful creature of a thousand wayward moods, and its voice

is like nothing else in the wide world. It bids you rest and bury your

tired face in the green coolness, and breathe of its breath and of the

breath of the good earth from which man was taken and to which he will

one day return. Then, if you lend your ear and are silent minded, you

may hear wondrous things of the deep places of the earth; of life in

mineral and stone as well as in pulsing sap; of a green world as the

stars saw it before man trod it under foot--of the emerald which has

its place with the rest in the City of God.

"What if earth

Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein,

Each to each other like, more than on earth is thought?"

It is a natural part of civilisation's lust of re-arrangement that we

should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world into

decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents. It is a phase, and will melt

into other phases; but it tends to the increase of artificiality, and

exists not only in art but in everything. It is no new thing for jaded

sentiment to crave the spur of the unnatural, to prefer the clever

imitation, to live in a Devachan where the surroundings appear that

which we would have them to be; but it is an interesting record of the

pulse of the present day that 'An Englishwoman's Love Letters' should

have taken society by storm in the way it certainly has.

It is a delightful book to leave about, with its vellum binding, dainty

ribbons, and the hallmark of a great publisher's name. But when we seek

within we find love with its thousand voices and wayward moods, its shy

graces and seemly reticences, love which has its throne and robe of

state as well as the garment of the beggar maid, love which is before

time was, which knew the world when the stars took up their courses,

presented to us in gushing outpourings, the appropriate language of a

woman's heart to the boor she delights to honour.

"It is woman who is the glory of man," says the author of 'The House

of Wisdom and Love,' "_Regina mundi_, greater, because so far the less;

and man is her head, but only as he serves his queen." Set this sober

aphorism against the school girl love-making which kisses a man's feet

and gaily refuses him the barren honour of having loved her first.

There is scant need for the apologia which precedes the letters; a

few pages dispels the fear that we are prying into another's soul.

As for the authorship, there is a woman's influence, an artist's

poorly concealed bias in the foreign letters; and for the rest a man's

blunders--so much easier to see in another than to avoid oneself--writ

large from cover to cover. King Cophetua, who sends his "profoundly

grateful remembrances," has most surely written the letters he would

wish to receive.

"Mrs Meynell!" cries one reviewer, triumphantly. Nay, the saints be

good to us, what has Mrs Meynell in common with the "Englishwoman's"

language, style, or most unconvincing passion? Men can write as

from a woman's heart when they are minded to do so in desperate

earnestness--there is Clarissa Harlowe and Stevenson's Kirstie, and

many more to prove it; but when a man writes as the author of the

"Love Letters" writes, I feel, as did the painter of the frieze, that

pattern-making has gone too far and included that which, like the

grass, should be spared such a convention.

"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess, "and the moral of that

is--'Be what you would seem to be'--or, if you'd like to put it more

simply--'never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it

might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not

otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be

otherwise.'" And so by way of the Queen's garden I come back to my room

again.

My heart's affections are still centred on my old attic, with boarded

floor and whitewashed walls, where the sun blazoned a frieze of red and

gold until he travelled too far towards the north, the moon streamed

in to paint the trees in inky wavering shadows, and the stars flashed

their glory to me across the years. But now sun and moon greet me only

indirectly: and under the red roses hang pictures, some of them the

dear companions of my days. Opposite me is the Arundel print of the

Presentation, painted by the gentle "Brother of the Angels." Priest

Simeon, a stately figure in green and gold, great with prophecy, gazes

adoringly at the Bambino he holds with fatherly care. Our Lady, in robe

of red and veil of shadowed purple, is instinct with light despite the

sombre colouring, as she stretches out hungering, awe-struck hands for

her soul's delight. St Joseph, dignified guardian and servitor, stands

behind, holding the Sacrifice of the Poor to redeem the First-begotten.

St Peter Martyr and the Dominican nun, gazing in rapt contemplation

at the scene, are not one whit surprised to find themselves in the

presence of eternal mysteries. In the Entombment, which hangs on the

opposite wall, St Dominic comes round the corner full of grievous

amaze and tenderest sympathy, but with no sense of shock or intrusion,

for was he not "famigliar di Cristo"? And so he takes it all in; the

stone bed empty and waiting; the Beloved cradled for the last time on

His mother's knees to be washed, lapped round, and laid to rest as if

He were again the Babe of Bethlehem. He sees the Magdalen anointing

the Sacred Feet; Blessed John caring for the living and the Dead; and

he, Dominic--hound of the Lord--having his real, living share in the

anguish and hope, the bedding of the dearest Dead, who did but leave

this earth that He might manifest Himself more completely.

Underneath, with a leap across the centuries, is Rossetti's picture;

Dante this time the onlooker, Beatrice, in her pale beauty, the

death-kissed one. The same idea under different representations; the

one conceived in childlike simplicity, the other recalling, even in the

photograph, its wealth of colour and imagining; the one a world-wide

ideal, the other an individual expression of it.

Beatrice was to Dante the inclusion of belief. She was more to him

than he himself knew, far more to him after her death than before.

And, therefore, the analogy between the pictures has at core a common

reality. "It is expedient for you that I go away," is constantly being

said to us as we cling earthlike to the outward expression, rather

than to the inward manifestation--and blessed are those who hear and

understand, for it is spoken only to such as have been with Him from

the beginning. The eternal mysteries come into time for us individually

under widely differing forms. The tiny child mothers its doll, croons

to it, spends herself upon it, why she cannot tell you; and we who are

here in our extreme youth, never to be men and women grown in this

world, nurse our ideal, exchange it, refashion it, call it by many

names; and at last in here or hereafter we find in its naked truth the

Child in the manger, even as the Wise Men found Him when they came from

the East to seek a great King. There is but one necessary condition

of this finding; we must follow the particular manifestation of light

given us, never resting until it rests--over the place of the Child.

And there is but one insurmountable hindrance, the extinction of or

drawing back from the light truly apprehended by us. We forget this,

and judge other men by the light of our own soul.

I think the old bishop must have understood it. He is my friend of

friends as he lies opposite my window in his alabaster sleep, clad in

pontifical robes, with unshod feet, a little island of white peace in

a many-coloured marble sea. The faithful sculptor has given every line

and wrinkle, the heavy eyelids and sunken face of tired old age, but

withal the smile of a contented child.

I do not even know my bishop's name, only that the work is of the

thirteenth century; but he is good to company with through the day, for

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, so with the

shadow of his feet upon the polished floor he rests in peace.