between this and Christmas I do not look for a moment's leisure to write, even if the Muse were (which she won't benot she !) on the latch." Her day's work was often eleven hours, and occasionally even sixteen hours! Her cheerfulness, her seeming contentment, her gently humorous jests at her own expense, blinded many to the inward strain of her existence, the burden of the dreary discouragement which falls so heavily upon natures made for gladness, created seemingly to give lavishly and to receive joyously, but doomed to be, as someone said of her, "like a racehorse put between the shafts of a tradesman's cart." Outwardly she kept around her that halo of "sweetness and light" which worked like a charm on all who came within the orbit of her influence. But actually the call to high adventure sounded ever-hauntingly in her ear; and her sympathy, expressed in one of her most graphic essays, for "Captives "-animals caged in the zoo-has an almost personal passion in its fierceness. Every hardship would have been sanctified could it have been due to the stress of a soldier's loyal service or a sailor's struggle with the elements; but to toil at uncongenial drudgery merely for daily bread, was an ironic fate for one whose delight would have been to lavish princely benefits upon others. Later on, when she had left the Post Office and was working in the Boston Public Library,-straining her tired eyes over dreary tasks, trying resolutely to "like" her chore," but longing secretly for freedom, she received one of the most graceful of the many poems addressed to her from time to time by the chivalrous among her countrymen : " "I often muse on one small form that flits There she goes! 'A vision, a delight, and a desire,' Yet wholly of the spirit! Could men see They'd drag her in a chariot each dawn, With clarion, 'mid shoutings of the throng." 1 1 Joseph Lewis French, "To Louise Imogen Guiney," The Literary Review, June, 1900. CHAPTER VII A GYPSY TRAIL 3 NEXT, after " A Roadside Harp," appeared "A Little English Gallery "1 of character sketches dedicated to Edmund Gosse and in the following year (1895) "Lover's Saint Ruth's" and the privately printed "Nine Sonnets written at Oxford"; also the Prelude and "Postlude " to "Robert Louis Stevenson, a Study, by A.B. Issued for private distribution." One of the proudest moments in Louise Guiney's literary career was when she was told how Stevenson had noticed and admired her poems in the periodical press. This more than compensated for the way some of the American critics appeared affronted that her "Little Gallery" of portraits was entirely English. She could surely find topics nearer home, they complained. In 1896, her critical and biographical introduction to a new translation of Prosper Merimée's "Carmen" attracted considerable attention. Extracts cannot indicate the symmetrical construction of the whole, but they show the clarity and conciseness with which she could write when she elected to avoid complexity. A Gallic lucidity, an epigrammatic brevity, suited the subject, and appealed to many who were afterwards to prove imperfectly able to enjoy or understand her spontaneously elaborate essays. The "Carmen Carmen" has 1 See Bibliography, p. 304. 2 The Postlude' is here reproduced in fac-simile from the original MS. See p. 220. Alice Brown, see Bibliography, p. 319-320. become so rare that the only way of introducing Louise Guiney's comments to present-day readers is by quotation : Opportunity was always at Merimée's elbow: he had a smooth career, a competence, leisure varied by agreeable occupations, exquisite resources ... Distinction and sense, wit and breeding were his ... He was a critic of men and women, and a finished archaeologist; he had a distinct turn for art; he was master of six languages and of the history and poetry of each of them, and was the founder of the modern appreciation of Russian literature. . . . "With all his gifts, Merimée lacked the material for mental happiness. He was too timid, too restless, and, though without vanity, too fearful of ridicule and misconception. (yet) he never hid the evil which was in him, but carefully cherished and catalogued it, beating it out thin and broad, in the super-sincere manner of his country. His fatal disease, fatal in all cases, was indifferentism. You feel wrath at him that he went out of the world, not like a veteran from a battlefield, but like a girl from a ball-room, in smiling weariness and without a scar. . . . " Merimée was no visionist, no spiritual nomad homesick for ideals. A dilettante to the marrow, he amused himself by producing a few masterpieces, and ended by becoming the callous inscrutable Mephisto he had all his life tried to be. He suffered from his innate discord, and he makes others suffer." His mother was a 'free thinkeress,' a cynic whose favourite axiom, inherited by her son, was Remember to mistrust." "An only darling, secluded from schoolfellows, and reared on negations, . . . the little fellow with the auspicious name, born in 1803, was of course never baptised; ... he was given to boasting of that omission, in the dubiously Christian salons of the Second Empire. . . . "He had a style of gold and steel. . . . But Merimée, who has Kipling's power, and, in addition, his own scholar's sensitiveness and finish, has none of Kipling's fresh tenderness. In letters as in life, it must be the loving spirit which wins. Now, Merimée is a ruthless writer." The best effect of "Carmen" can never come from seeing it acted, only from reading it as Merimée wrote it," with interludes, perhaps, of Bizet's ominously gay music." As for that "invincible gypsy minx," Carmen herself, "the light bright tiger-moth," she is " enchanting and appalling." Her lover "may bungle and waver, and make conditions, and proffer peace, and even take sardonic forethought for her inconceivable soul; but not she!... Death has become, at last, for Carmencita, the artistic necessity; and she chooses it, in her beauty, as she might choose a fresh ribbon for her bodice." So ends the preface. In 1897 Louise Guiney's edition of the poems of one of the most ill-starred of all the luckless Celtic Irish song writers, James Clarence Mangan,1 embodied some results of that same visit to Ireland which had previously suggested the Peasant Songs, and the Irish essay already quoted. More remarkable, however, than her biographical preface to Mangan, was her volume of original essays brought out in the same year under the curiosity-provoking title of, "PATRINS: To which is added An INQUIRENDO into the WIT and Other Good Parts of HIS LATE MAJESTY KING CHARLES the Second." Her thoughts on "His Late Majesty " will be considered when treating of her views in English literature and history.3 In Puritan New England some of her critics were, or professed to be, too decorous even to read of such a rakish subject as the Saturnine " Merry Monarch." But even if 1 Summarised in Chapter XIII., "Dark Rosaleen," pp. 172-178. |