weighed heavily upon a spirit ardent and dauntless by nature, but sensitive and easily chilled. Now and then, though rarely, she speaks out, and defines what she supposes to be her position : "The British Public values you," she wrote to Mr. Clement Shorter: "But fix it in your kind heart that it does not want me, and that I have stopped appealing to a general public of any sort. You are the only English editor who will look at verse and prose of mine. I have tried them all; the Nation and Spectator more than once.... Everything comes back with a printed slip. I would rather have written a life of W. H.1 than had a barrel of apples from the Hesperides, any time between 1885 and 1905; but I have long given up the notion, on the ground that there is here no general public for me. . . . I still seem to be good enough for my own country: but of course we are Goths and Vandals!" Very seldom did she show such weary despondency. Despite her growing belief that England which she loved so whole-heartedly, the England of her youthful ecstatic adoration and her calm mature devotion, cared nothing at all either for her poetry or essays, she continued to consecrate her time and strength to the laborious task of reviving certain unjustly neglected English poets. Gallantly she remained true to the impersonal principle of hope, though the personal emotion of hope, starved almost to extinction, was only the pale shadow of what once had been a mighty inspiration. 1 William Hazlitt. CHAPTER XXI THE END OF THE FIGHT "I HAVE no biography except that I was born in war, and hope to die in peace," Louise Guiney had said 1 in the days when an elder American poet 2 had sketched her as "a slight blue-eyed girl, delicate as a wild rose, elusive as a thistledown." It was usually her way to parry enquiries about herself by some spontaneous epigram or friendly counterthrust; but about a year before her death, when she was staying in an old Kentish manor, the talk veered round to the subject of dreams; and by fire-light and candle-light she was lured into telling a personal anecdote, It came up in relation to FitzGerald's rendering of some lines in Calderon's 'La Vida es Sueno': 'They say Dreams are rough copies of the waking soul, So that men sometimes in their dreams confess "Obviously," said one of her friends, "there are dreams and dreams some mere crazy patchwork from the events and worries of daily life; others rising from who knows what of ancestral deeps, and seeming for a while more real than waking life. When I was a child, sleep opened for me the gates of a kingdom where I adventured always as a grown man; usually as a soldier. The mournful thing was 1 To Jessie B. Rittenhouse (quoted in Buffalo, N.Y., Express, June 28, 1896). 2 Louise Chandler Moulton. to wake from one of these mature experiences of battlefield or scaffold, and fall back into tutelage and the laborious horrors of arithmetic." Louise Guiney's eyes gleamed: "Yes, I know! I also had adventures in dreams, and not long ago I dreamt the identical dream which used to thrill and tantalise me many years back, years before you were born!" A chorus of voices pleaded for the story. "There is no story," she said: "It is a fragment. I used to become vividly aware that I was being chased. That I must be run to ground at last, by troops sent to catch me, I knew perfectly well. I had no doubt whatsoever that the game was up; but to have one last race-even though the winning post could never come in sight,-seemed worth while. So I ran like a hare. Shots flew past me, and I laughed; my pursuers were unskilful marksmen. Yet in the dream I always knew that this had happened before, and that no matter how often they missed, they must hit in the end. None the less, I dodged and doubled and ran for the sheer sport of the thing." She paused. The logs on the stone hearth flared up in a glory of red-golden flame; then one fell forward with a resounding crash. It was pushed back into place with the log-fork. Well? "Next? Amidst undulating country (English country, I think), I reached a noble-looking Church, empty, desolate, ruinous. It was roofless; and its many pillars cast deep shadows. My pursuers gained on me; I was tired; but in and out of those shadows I elected to play hide and seek with them. They came nearer, nearer; shooting at random, wasting their powder and shot. Still I dodged them. It had been a good run but near a certain pillar—always the same pillar-I knew the light would so fall slantwise across me that I should be an easy target. Yet an irresistible fascination impelled me invariably into that fatal patch of light. Then I used to feel a sudden shock,—and waken.” Her hearers speculated afterwards amongst themselves whether her dream might not be the last act in the life drama of some forefather, some spirited Recusant, loyal to the old faith, after Henry VIII. had dismantled the shrines, dispersed the religious Orders, and wrecked many of the stately churches. Or perhaps some later ancestor in 1715 or 1746 had given chase in the gay and sporting fashion thus described. But no matter what the explanation, it was a dream which fitted the dreamer. The work on the Recusant Poets advanced, but slowly. To pay for typing was now beyond Louise Guiney's resources; and every page on which corrections or amplifications had to be made, needs must be copied and re-copied a laborious process for one around whom hovered the goblin Neuritis,— that modern substitute for the rack, which let those regard philosophically who have never felt its tearing violence nor experienced its demoniacal tendency to time its fiercest onslaught just at the moment when some cherished project or long-contemplated labour of love is reaching the crucial stage. The problem of where to find a home was a continuous worry. A penchant for 'a winding road' and the joys of uncertainty, appertained to holiday moods. In the throes of a magnum opus, she longed for comfort, quiet, a peaceful hermitage. The biographers of a certain world-famous German manof-letters pay him the doubtful compliment of stating that he was able to remain engrossed in his literary avocations all through the Napoleonic Wars, unruffled by the rise or fall of Empires, unagitated by the agony and deaths of millions of human cannon-fodder.' Unlike the eminent philosopher in question, Louise Guiney had a heart tender for the sorrows of her friends; she suffered vicariously in the griefs of those who had to give their nearest and dearest to die that the world might be saved from the modern barbarians. Devoted lover of England, it was not she who sat unmoved, feet on fender, sunk in smooth oblivion of the countless fighting men whose life-blood even then was purchasing her safety. When the curtain of secrecy shut out the doings of the Grand Fleet and its sweepings across the vast North Sea, when no civilian could tell how the Submarine Flotillas were faring on the "front of the Naval front," it was not she who said peevishly, " And what is the Navy doing?" It was not she who could hear with indifference how, when some of the injured British seamen were landed after the tremendous fight off Jutland, certain pacificist loafers, believing the R.N. defeated, hissed and sneered at the wounded! To the sister of a young officer killed in 1916 after much strenuous service in command of his submarine, she wrote: "I am truly distressed that you must face life now without your beloved brother. I can't tell you how it touches me to see the spirit in which you take that loss : the true Christian and heroic spirit about which you have written much with ink, and in which you write 'Fiat Voluntas Dei' now with heart's blood. I treasure the biographical sketch: it glows with truth and feeling. The portrait shows a grand young head. You are happy indeed, and rich, in such a memory.' When America broke free from the "too proud to fight of a notorious epigram, Louise Guiney expressed unbounded relief that her country at last was taking a place among the nations warring to save the world from Pan-German aggression and Turkish brutality. "I shall be proud to see my product in Khaki,'" she wrote to the Naval and Military Editor of the war magazine of that name, in response to a request for permission to make use of "The Knight Errant," her St. George, destined to be warmly appreciated by modern members of St. George's great profession. When at last the hard-won' peace' came, in a fashion less conclusive than her hopes had anticipated, there surged up in one of her private letters a foreboding protest which showed how much soldierly ardour and sorrowful clearsightedness underlay the seemingly feminine sweetness of her everyday mood: |