'Come rack, come rope,' Campion endured to the end.1 The felon's death that he faced with so much dignity had an effect precisely opposite to what his judges intended. "The populace. ... went home through the winter mists, in tears... The Government sent forth publication after publication in lame defence of its action. Soon France, Austria, Italy, were inundated with accounts of the event; these everywhere produced the deepest impression. At home, a great tidal wave of conversion to the old Church swept in. Campion's death, last and best of his wonderful missionary labours, bore the most astonishing fruit. . . "No remote mystic was Edmund Campion, but a man of his age. Caring for nothing but the things of the soul, he had yet caught the ear and eye of the nation. "He had sacrificed his fame and changed his career. He had spent himself for a cause the world can never love, and by so doing he had courted the ill-will of what passed for history up to our own day." Not till December 9th, 1886, was he beatified by Pope Leo XIII. Blessed Edmund Campion was a 'religious genius.' But in his kinship with his place and time, his peculiar gentleness, his scholarship lightly worn, his magic influence, his fearless deed and flawless word, he was a great Elizabethan too. . . . No serious student now mistakes the reason why his own England found no use for her 'diamond' other than the one strange use to which she put him." In the Church to which-after hesitation, struggles, and misgivings he gave himself so wholeheartedly at last," that name of his will have a never-dying beauty." 1 At Stonyhurst is preserved the rope with which this martyr was fastened to the hurdle. CHAPTER XV HAPPY ENDING "Now and then, in portraits of persons unknown to us, we catch a certain impression, or, rather, conviction of reality... The same very singular witness is often. borne by a book. It is not a game of mere inferences : the book's secret, rather, is fired at us like a pistol shot. We see as inerrably as the Recording Angel into the author's interior. The metaphysical data are so direct and authentic that the page, like the picture, stands up and blurts out I am true.' A trained reviewer, if he be worth his salt, must often, perhaps even almost always, be able to tell how much heart's blood went into his author's ink." 1 This, of course, entirely depends upon whether the critic has blood or ink in his own veins; for it may be questioned whether such perception is a matter of training at all: it is more a matter of sympathy and heart. A man, be he professional critic or that elusive personage the general reader,' sees only what is in him to see. Just as it must obviously be futile to play sweet melodies to the deaf, or show the glory of the summer sunrise to the blind, so to the morally and spiritually blind, so to the unheroic and unloving, the great thoughts, great words, great actions, of the poets, saints and heroes, will be ununderstood, unheard, unvalued. Criticism. is oftener the measure of the critic's capacity than any final judgment on the subject criticised. 1 Louise Imogen Guiney, on “Literary Spying," Catholic World, Aug. 1907. There are, however, natures able to lose themselves in the griefs and joys of others. Who shall say how much of Shakespeare's own heart went into the tragic error and colossal anguish of Othello? who shall tell whether Hamlet's coldness to Ophelia was born of Shakespeare's own disgust with the dark lady of the sonnets? who knows whether it was Rosalind or Cordelia, Miranda, Perdita, or Imogen,-Princesses all,-who embodied Shakespeare's own ideal of the woman he would have sought had he been born a prince instead of destined to meet princes only as a player? It is the gift of genius to be, for the time, the character it feels. Did we not know Shakespeare's parentage and life, we would say he must have experienced in his own person such warrior-pride as glowed in the heart of Henry the Fifth at Agincourt, such grief as tortured the forsaken and deposed King Richard II., such 'vaulting ambition' as racked and ruined the Thane of Glamis and Cawdor, such madness as overwhelmed King Lear. Moreover, if we were not sure he had been a man, we might assume that only a woman could have understood at the same time Beatrice and Juliet, Lady Macbeth and Desdemona, Constance, Duchess of Brittany, and Hamlet's mother. And as in Shakespeare, so in a lesser degree-even though differing as the candle from the star,— must it be in all dramatically creative temperaments. Therefore it would be a bold critic who could dare to say, "This was the writer's own especial grief; the cry of his baffled ambition or the pang of his martyred love." But of a lyrical poet there is always an excuse for the belief that he or she is voicing a personal emotion and in the case of Louise Guiney, whose genius (" Tarpeia,” “ The Martyr's Idyl," and King Ægeus 1 notwithstanding) was not primarily dramatic, it would seem as if a great number of the poems were the outcome of some individual impression, experience, preference, or dream. Some appear to have what might be called the unmistakable autobiographic note, -were it not rash, in any art, to use so absolute a word as "unmistakable." 1" The White Sail," 1887. Take for instance this remarkable sonnet, "Friendship Broken": 1 "We chose the faint chill morning, friend and friend, Soul calling soul to judgment; and we spoke It was not wrath, it made nor strife nor smoke : Farewell, in peace. We of the selfsame throne, Each a wise skeptic of the other's star. The steadfast sun, whom no poor prayer deters, Who was this friend? We do not know. It is not necessary we should know. Few of us have escaped the discovery that not death but life is the separator of hearts. Each one who reads that poem will read with different eyes. Try again at random, and still the note sounds personal : "April seemed a restless pain, While the furrowed field was red, While the roses rioted, While a leaf was left to shed, There was storm in the air. Now that troubled heart is dead, All is fair." 2 1" A Roadside Harp," p. 19, and "Happy Ending,” p. 85. 2" Winter Peace." (Written in 1902-3.) "Happy Ending," page 114. Who can doubt that " To one who would not spare himself ” was written to some living mortal, dear to the writer. A censer playing from a heart all fire, A flushing racing singing mountain stream Full to the grave be thy too fleeting way, Louise Guiney herself could never have been one of "dull desire." But, despite grave abiding griefs and stinging gadfly worries, she attained every now and then an inner peace, a capacity for rest; and by this capacity we may feel and understand the nature of her faith: "I knew not my wild heart, nor Who with me With thankless clay! that all of these were Thee. The same spirit breathes through “ Deo Optimo Maximo.” 3 All else for use, One only for desire ; Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee : 1 In "Happy Ending," p. 113. 2 Christo Sacramentale, in The Crucible, Sep. 20, 1905. |