is an art of delight as well as a means of instruction, and she protests against the attempt to turn the muse into a schoolmaster. She touches many subjects deftly and quickly, and her touch makes a clear impression on the mind of her readers. This collection of essays is for those who love literature for its own sake, for those who like the flavor of an individual style." 1 From a feminine admirer 2 came this graceful tribute : "This way she went, with Iris for her guide Here lies her track upon the uplands dun, This way she passed, for, at the crossing, see Here was her camp-fire: from its embers grey O happy vagrant, singing as you pass, 1 "Some American Essayists" in The Outlook, July 3, 1897. 2 Emily Huntingdon Miller, in The Dial, 1897. CHAPTER VIII THE MARTYR'S IDYL THE mental stimulus received by Louise Guiney from the praise of discriminating readers, and fair-minded writers, was an encouragement much needed; for her work, despite its leisurely manner, was frequently brought into being amid circumstances so fatiguing that it was often more in the nature of a battle than of an intellectual delight for its much-harassed creator. Illnesses, anxieties, interruptions, uncongenial drudgery, worry about ways and means, combined to menace that outward and inward peace without which creative achievement, or even fine interpretive writing, is more difficult than anyone can entirely realise who has not at some time been similarly impeded. Alluding to her reluctance to publish in book form anything less than her best, she makes clear that her toil at the Post Office not only left her scant time, but scant strength for her own lute. But, bless us, the fine things get written all the same. We have life enough in us to love them, and know them wheresoever springing; and so may it ever be. In A. B.'s 1 verses I like best Wood-Longing,' Mariners,' 'Heimgegangen,' and 'The West-Country Lover.' These I think extremely fine." 2 In her correspondence with the poet of Storm Drift," Herbert E. Clarke, beginning in the 'eighties (when he sent her one of his books from an Unknown Friend"), and continuing till his death in 1912,—we see not only her readiness 1 Alice Brown's "The Road to Castaly" (1896), dedicated to her. (Reprinted with new poems in 1917 (the Macmillan Company).) 'To Herbert E. Clarke. to appreciate the achievements of others, but also her perfect amiability under adverse criticism. Acknowledging Mr. Clarke's condemnation of her "Lover's St. Ruth's," she answers: "Thank you for not liking the stories. I hate 'em.. You don't know how they (the stories) were dragged out of the obscurity I thought best for them. The publishers, Herbert Copeland whom you never met, and Fred Day whom you did, are great old friends of mine, and simply badgered me into printing them.... I ought to have stood fast, and kept out of the wood of fiction where I never can be even moderately skilled." But though the gift of creative prose of the narrative kind was not among her many endowments (when her fiction is interesting it is for some personal quality other than that of the story), the translation of an excellent French historical novel, "The Secret of Fougereuse," in 1898,1 was one of the tasks in which her responsive sympathies are evident. Set in the days of 'good King René,'-whose Book of Tournaments and frank delight in poetry and pageantry made him more popular with his beauty-loving people than many a more strenuous monarch,-Monsieur Louis Morvan's story, in which a vocation is sought and found, and victory won by renunciation, was rightly praised at the time and is undeservedly neglected to-day. The same year that "Fougereuse appeared in America, a London publisher 2 had brought out a little volume of Louise Guiney's shorter lyrics, "England and Yesterday." The comments in the British press were numerous and varied: Exasperatingly obscure," complained the Daily News; pensive and tender," said the New Age. "Straight from the heart," remarkable for "grace, feeling and something of magic," said some; of an "academic stateliness," said others; while "pedantic," "involved" and "stilted were the epithets bestowed by the unsympathetic. The verdict seems to have depended mainly upon whether the reviewer's mind was harmonious to the choice of subjects. It would hardly be possible to improve upon the following summary: 1 Amid the melancholy dulness of so much minor verse of to-day, I find it a pleasant relief to meet with such uniformly accomplished and distinguished work. Meditation calm pensive meditation is the characteristic of Louise Imogen Guiney. Not that there is a lack of enthusiasm in her verse. Her loves are many : England, London, Oxford, old institutions, antique architecture, Celtic legends. But her sympathies seem with the quiet cloistral life of a University City or an old Cathedral town. Even her London pictures avoid the rush and hurry of metropolitan existence and fix on some restful sight: the peace of the Abbey, the doves of St. Paul's, the lights of London from Hampstead, the quadrangles of the Temple, Sunday chimes in the city, the reading-room of the Museum. . . . "Naturally to such a worshipper of fine culture, scholarly leisureliness and old-world loveliness, Oxford makes an irresistible appeal. New College Gardens, the panorama of spires and towers viewed from Radley way, the quietude of Port Meadow, the old dial of Corpus, the undertones of Magdalen, are sketched with most wonderful observation." Although described by another critic as "scarcely of a kind to catch the general ear or command popular affection," the little volume won lovers perhaps all the more ardent because not overwhelmingly numerous. Early in 1899 Louise Guiney had the satisfaction of editing, for the Riverside Literature Society, a small but representative selection of the poems of Matthew Arnold. Her deep admiration for the author of Sohrab and Rustum finds expression in the preface : "His life, which looks busy, brave, happy, was also 'lonely as a cloud.' His real life, his poetic career, began and ended inside of twenty years. It is all of a piece and all of the first order. Despite his wonderfully intimate love of nature, his poems did not and do not appeal to everybody. . . . Intense gravity, restraint, asceticism, concentration, possess his every page; but below them, there is what severe wisdom, what energy, what a glow of ethic and lyric fire!... The affinities of Arnold's austere art are with Wordsworth and with Goethe." In 1900 "The Martyr's Idyl and Shorter Poems"1 yet further increased the reputation already acquired by A Roadside Harp.” Opinions differed as to the degree of power of the blank verse drama which gave its title to the slender grey and golden volume; but as to the fascination of the lyrics, if there were any dissenting voices their echoes are now inaudible, whereas the testimonies of competent critics ring out with no uncertain note. But what, we may ask, is a "critic," and what is "criticism"? That the critics are "those who have failed in literature " is an oft-quoted epigram; and if criticism were merely a synonym for fault-finding, a favourite occupation of the unsuccessful, Disraeli's mot would be singularly apt. But the best criticism is enlightened enthusiasm," as was said by one of Disraeli's most brilliant contemporaries, the first Lord Lytton; 2 and this definition recurs to memory in reading Miss Jessie Rittenhouse's "Younger American Poets," in which she who is herself a poet luminously interprets, rather than coldly analyses, the songs and souls of her contemporaries. "It is the sign of a mediocre mind to measure out praise grudgingly," said a gallant French officer in that Seventeenth Century which was Louise Guiney's intellectual home. Miss Rittenhouse, however, needs no such warning, 1 Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co. " 2 This dictum is quoted approvingly by Herbert Paul in Men and Letters," p. 204. 3 Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1904. 4 Captain the Marquis of Vauvenargues. |