Chapter III: Part 3

Though so ardent an American, England was her spirit’s home. The odor of musty archives was as delicious in her nostrils as “hawthorn buds in May.” Half effaced inscriptions were dearer to her than whole broadsides of modern pæans to success. A crusader knight on his back in some immemorial dimness was as immediate to her soul as Apollo walking down the aisles of song. London, when she was away from it, haunted her “like a passion.” To come upon her great little picture of pre-war London makes a blessed interlude in the shrieking present. For we have gained the motor car, and the price the smiling gods exacted is that we have lost the broodingness of cities—their murmurous tranquillity. That essay, Quiet London, dated 1890, has heart-break in it, as well as beauty, for those who knew the London of old and who will see it no more. Here are the very lineaments of that great fog-soaked, rain-darkened beneficence and terror which once was London. You walk in it with her and are at home in an inherited peace.

“There is no congestion of the populace; yet the creeks and coves of that ancient sea remain brimmed with mortality, hour after hour, century after century, as if in subjection to a fixed moon. It is the very poise of energy, the aggregation of so much force that all force is at a standstill; the miraculous moment, indefinitely prolonged, when achieved fruition becalms itself at the full, and satiety hesitates to set in.”

Here is the rain-swept atmosphere:

“The hushing rain, from a windless sky, falls in sheets of silver on gray, gray on violet, violet on smouldering purple, and anon makes whole what it had hardly riven: the veil spun of nameless analogic tints, which brings up the perspective of every road, the tapestry of sun-shot mist which Théophile Gautier admired once with all his eyes. . . . At the angles of the grimiest places, choked with trade, we stumble on little old bearded graveyards, pools of ancestral sleep; or low-lying leafy gardens where monks and guildsmen have had their dream: closes inexpressibly pregnant with peace, the cæsural pauses of our loud to-day.”

In her ecstatic browsings, her rapt withdrawal into old centuries, she was the best Londoner of them all. And here is her gay tribute to English weather:

“The mannerly, vertical showers . . . fall sudden and silent, like unbidden tears, while you look forth from the wild purple coast of Ireland at the slant and tawny fishing sails, or lean against the wall of a ruined abbey in the fold of the Mendip Hills. Always at your side is this gentle, fickle, sun-shot rain, spinning itself out of an undarkened sky, and keeping the grass immortal and the roads pure of dust. You reach, before long, to a full sympathy and comprehension of what good Bishop Jeremy Taylor had before him when he drew his simile of ‘a soft slap of affectionate rain.’ It is the rain of the Plantagenets, Tudors, Stuarts, and Hanoverians, the immemorial law-giver, and the oldest inhabitant of the isles. Wheresoever it descends, there are perpetual freshness and peace.”

To walk with her was to add day to storied day in a calendar rubricated from end to end.

“Nor ever can those trees be bare.”

Still living in the English landscape is that alert figure, rapt yet ready for the absurdities of the moment, silent in understanding withdrawals and, in her own words of another, “almost as good company as a dog.” This was a masterpiece of praise by inversion, and “those spectacles” gleamed over it prodigiously. One remembers her by the crested blue of Devon and Cornish seas, subdued into stillness and then breaking out in a wild hail of the

“cruel, crawling foam!”

One remembers her on a Midland road, sticking a pheasant’s feather in her hat and swaggering rakishly, or walking into Shrewsbury, so disheveled from the rain and dust of varied weathers, that landladies looked askance, and one, more admittedly curious than the rest, queried:

“Is there a play to-night?”

For the two wayfarers did look the ancient part of rogues and vagabonds, no less.

One remembers her climbing the slope, blue with wild hyacinths, at Haughmond Abbey, or taking the straight “seven long miles” across Egdon Heath, the sun darkened in a livid sky and floods of rain to follow before the wayfarers found refuge in the little church where D’Urbervilles lie, significant in nothing now save an envious immortality on Thomas Hardy’s page. The clouds in that thunderous sky were piled into imperial semblances, Emperors of old Rome, and out of their brief pageant sprang Louise Guiney’s poem of Romans in Dorset, the first three stanzas as illuminative as the sun and dark that ruled the air:

“A stupor on the heath,
And wrath along the sky;
Space everywhere; beneath
A flat and treeless wold for us, and darkest noon on high.

“Sullen quiet below,
But storm in upper air!
A wind from long ago,
In mouldy chambers of the cloud had ripped an arras there,

“And singed the triple gloom,
And let through, in a flame,
Crowned faces of old Rome:
Regnant o’er Rome’s abandoned ground, processional they came.”

One remembers her, a last rite before leaving England, not knowing she should return, feeding the doves in Paul’s Churchyard and, again at Shrewsbury, packing, among dear mementoes, a sod of English earth.

To speak of her letters, those floating immortalities she cast about with so prodigal a hand, is to wonder anew at an imaginative brilliancy even beyond what she put into her considered work. To open one was an event. Almost you were miserly over the envelope itself, and treasured it, the script on it was of so rare a beauty. For her handwriting had an individual distinction. Done in haste or at leisure, it was the same. Her tumultuous jottings on margins of print or bits of scribbling paper kept the line of grace. And the subject matter! it was as varied as flowers and jewels and shells. In some cases, her books may have suffered from too anxious a care. Her affluent learning, deeply as it enriched her poetic gift, may have done something toward choking it, burying it under the drift of yesterdays. For having at her memory’s call the immortal lines of our English tongue, a despair may well have overtaken her with the impulse to enter that great company. She lacked the crude yet wholesome audacity of those to whom the world is young. But if her considered work may possibly have suffered from “much cherishing,” her letters made their bright advent unhindered. In them she lost her sense of studious responsibilities and—strange paradox of time!—it is they who may go farthest toward making her immortal. She was simply not self-conscious about them, and the haste with which they left her hand for the post was what saved them in their living delightfulness. And they were plentiful as leaves in Arden. Never did she let her correspondence “come tardy off.” Courteous, good-natured, ever the prey of bores and sympathetic listener to requests and comment, she wrote you promptly and with the most engaging personal touch. If you sent her your book, she read it with a painstaking intentness and returned you, not a formal note of thanks, but a full and rich review wherein you were praised to the top of your deserts, your failings touched lightly but honestly and your errors spotted with the scholar’s acumen. And if she could commend you whole-heartedly, and with no even courteous reservations, then she was as happy in the writing as you in reading it. There was no smallest trace in her of carping for the satisfaction of showing how brave a critic she could be, no sense of blustering privilege. But the letters! written in a gush of mental exuberance, sometimes the faster the better, a tumultuous beauty of diction,—you shook the tree and you got such fruit; the wind of your favor blew her way and unloosed on you that petalled or ripened shower. Those were the spontaneities of her life; those, in their lasting evanescence, she has yet to bequeath us, a priceless legacy.

What did the war do to her? We cannot wholly say. We know how deeply she had breathed in the life of Oxford, and that she was among those who suffered pangs over

“the Oxford men
Who went abroad to die.”

There are tenderest and most admiring allusions to this or that boy who stayed not upon the order of his going into khaki.

“War, war!” was one of the first cries from her. “It is unbelievable, yet it is. England is on the defensive: God save her, I say! Boys I know are being rushed off in the Territorials and Reserves to keep the coast; and there are already rumors that there will be no October Term for the University. . . . Terly-terlo! as the trumpets say in the old Carol. ‘If it be not now yet it will come: the readiness is all.’”

And again, in 1915:

“It enrages me to be an Alien ‘neutral.’ You’ll remember the passionate affection I have ever shown for everything German. Bah!” (No need of indicating to those who knew her the thread of irony in this last!) “Would I were at the front. . . . If England doesn’t pull through, no more will liberty and civilization.”

And she had her prophetic despondencies. In March, 1919, she wrote with a bitterness unfamiliar from her bounding pen:

“Oh, what a rabble of a world it is! and why did the wretched soft-soapers interrupt Foch by granting that armistice when another three weeks of him would have cut the claws of all the Devils forever! _A bas les civiles!_”

There spoke the unhesitating mind of one who knew the grim job ought to have been effectively ended, the tongue of one who came of soldier blood.

We may guess that the strain of those last years sapped and undermined her in ways the soldier spirit would not betray. We know she qualified in them for that Paradise she most desired, of those who

“die, driven against the wall.”

If we seek about for mitigation of our bewilderment over her loss to earth, the way seems to be not only the old road of unquestioning thankfulness when a soul arrives at sanctuary from pain, but the solace of a more intimate friendship with her work. Curiously personal to her sounds that exquisite translation from Callimachus on the death of his friend, the poet Heraclitus:

“They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead:
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept, as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

“And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but these he cannot take.”

Of this Edmund Gosse says, in a prose so authoritatively beautiful that it hangs level in the balance with the rich “poetry of elegiacal regret”:

“No translation ever smelt less of the lamp and more of the violet than this. It is an exquisite addition to a branch of English literature which is already very rich, the poetry of elegiacal regret. I do not know where there is to be found a sweeter or tenderer expression of a poet’s grief at the death of a poet-friend, grief mitigated only by the knowledge that the dead man’s songs, his ‘nightingales,’ are outliving him. It is the requiem of friendship, the reward of one who, in Keats’s wonderful phrase, has left ‘great verse unto a little clan,’ the last service for the dead to whom it was enough to be ‘unheard, save of the quiet primrose, and the span of heaven, and few ears.’”

This picture, delicately austere, is fitted, line for line, to the obedient humility of Louise Guiney’s life. She wrought in seclusion, asking nothing save the silent approval of the unseen gods; and still, in the mysterious thicket of our mortal life, are her “nightingales” awake.

In what niche shall we set her statue of renown? She has done the most authentic and exquisite verse America has yet produced. Is it not rather to its honor and our defeated fame that no widespread recognition of it could have been predicted? Is Hazlitt largely read? Does Charles Lamb sell by the million or the seventeenth century lyrists by the hundred thousand? Louise Guiney was, like so much that is austerely beautiful in the modern world, a victim of majorities. The democracy of taste and intellect is perhaps the master, perhaps the puppet, of this ironic time. But the time itself has its martyrs in these children of illustrious line who cannot, sadly willing as they may be, quite speak the common tongue. It is the suffrages of the purchasing majority that determine what publishers shall print. And for us,—Diana’s chariot in the heavens means less to us than a limousine on earth. But the gods who endowed Louise Guiney with something ineffable out of their treasury alone know about these things. Under their eyes stands her slender last collection among its peers. And the book itself says:

“Unto the One aware from everlasting
Dear are the winners: thou art more than they.”