Elizabeth Rachel Chapman, whose sonnets are now republished as a
memorial volume, was born at Woodford, Essex, in February, 1850. She was
descended through her father from a Yorkshire family associated, in many
of its generations, with Whitby, and was connected through both father
and mother with the Gurneys of Earlham. She was a great-grand-daughter
of Elizabeth Fry, and was said to bear her a noticeable resemblance.
That this likeness was also in her mind is attested by the “genius for
benevolence” which she inherited from her ancestress, and by the
tenderness of her affection and pity for all sufferers. In her _Book of
Sibyls_ Mrs. Ritchie (Miss Thackeray) describes the Gurneys of Earlham
as ordained to “a sort of natural priesthood.” Elizabeth Chapman was of
that company of devoted spirits. Her love for children was boundless;
and the _Wreath_ was consecrated to the memory of a little nephew,
tenderly loved, in whose grave she now lies.
Miss Chapman’s writings were published between the years 1881 and 1897;
at earlier date appeared her first work, _Master of All_, and at the
later her last, _Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction_. Meanwhile she
wrote what was perhaps her best-known work, _A Companion to “In
Memoriam,”_ which drew from Tennyson the letter published in the _Life_:
“I am grateful to you,” he says, “for your book ... excellent in taste
and judgment. I like, too, what you say about Comtism. I really could
almost fancy that page 95 was written by myself. I have been saying the
same thing for years in all but the same words.” The passage treats of
her perfect belief in immortality, and her sense of the mockery of life
without a future. Again, he said that her commentary on his poem was
“the best ever done.” _A Tourist Idyll and other Stories_, _The New
Godiva and other Studies_, and _A Comtist Lover and other Studies_ had
followed each other at intervals of a year or two, and in 1887 appeared
a volume of verse, _The New Purgatory and other Poems_. _A Little
Child’s Wreath_ was published in 1894 and reprinted in the year
following.
There is a sense in which the simplest things of literature are the most
difficult. The primary and original griefs and felicities of the heart
need to-day something more than the original emotion, if poetry is to
re-tell them. We know too well the formula in literature, whereas in the
heart there is no formula; and thus the simple and primitive passion
inclines to be more silent now than at any earlier day. Women no longer
cry out at a funeral, and they say little when a child dies. The outcry
has ceased to reach the sensibility of the hearer, and the phrase of
grief has grown relaxed and dull by custom. Therefore it is with some of
the courage of unconsciousness, and of a grief secluded in its own
completeness, that a writer takes up the old history of the loss of a
beloved child. For this sorrow is so constantly with us—with mankind—as
to have become the ready subject of another kind of literature. The
sentimentalist has used it, and the sincere mourner, who had at hand
only a sentimentalist’s diction, has vainly essayed to convey the true
feeling in the strained and depreciated phrase. When Elizabeth Rachel
Chapman undertook her _Little Child’s Wreath_, she must have been well
aware that two kinds of insincerity—the insincerity of the
sentimentalist, which is insincerity of character, and that other sort
which is merely insincerity of literature, and may be the disabled
utterance of a true heart—had made much, especially in the course of the
nineteenth century, of the death of children. But she forgot or
disregarded all this unworthiness, for it can always be put aside; and
freshly and tenderly arranged her thoughts and rhymed her phrases,
writing out of a heart doubly sincere.
Obviously her work must have been done in the after-time of grief. Her
sorrow for the little boy, which no mother could have excelled, had
grown, when she began to write, not gentler—for we can hardly imagine it
anything but gentle even in the first speechless hours—but more able to
endure. She had the literary sincerity which led her to this expression,
and made the craftsmanship of verse a natural exercise in the leisure of
her loss. There is no rhetoric, no mere borrowing of excessive language,
no violence of feeling or of diction. The laws of poetry, spiritual as
well as metrical, control, or rather direct, the writer’s statement of
love and loss, and she has given the right of this discipline to a form
of verse—the Shakespearian sonnet—long neglected, but better fitted than
the Petrarchan to the quantity and quality of English rhyme. The poems
do not profess despair or revolt; they have the dignity of another
spirit, older, newer, and doubtless more perdurable. Miss Chapman’s
studies of _In Memoriam_ had instructed her in the responsibilities of a
profound affliction.
Slightly, with the slightness of tenderness, she reveals the portrait of
a wonderful child, one of whom the world was not worthy. His death at
seven years old silenced the doubts, not whether he would be good, but
whether he would be strong, whether he would have the force, the
enterprise to face the strife, to grapple with the ill. The imminence of
death was evidently visible in him as it has been in so many children
who have died, as it is visible even in an infant who is not to survive
infancy—a greater sweetness, a lovelier smile, not imagined by a
mother’s memory after the child’s death, but noted during his life and
during his health, and confessed then as the inevitable sign of near
mortality. The portrait in _A Little Child’s Wreath_ is an exquisite one
of an exquisite subject; and unconsciously the author—now that she too
has passed from this world we may say it—has shown her own beautiful and
noble soul to have been marked for a too early, though a later, passage.