I !<->/

EW AND OLD,

BRADLEY

LOND« VAND COMP 1917

1

NEW AND OLD,

EDITH SICHEL

WITH AN INTRODUCTION^ BY

A. C. BRADLEY

LONDON,

CONSTABLE LAND COMPANY LTD, 1917

Printed in Great Britain

PREFATORY NOTE

THE ' Old ' in this volume is the matter previously pub- lished. It begins at page 97, and for permission to reprint it acknowledgments are due to the owners and editors of The Cornhill Magazine, The Anglo-Saxon Review, The Monthly Review, The Nineteenth Century and After, The Pilot, The Nation, and The Times Literary Supplement.

I must also thank Mr. Edward Armstrong, Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, who revised my choice of articles from The Times Literary Supplement.

As I had the happiness of friendship with Edith Sichel only towards the close of her life, it would not have been possible for me to write my short Introduction without the aid of others, and especially of Miss Emily Ritchie. The reader will see that this Introduction makes no pre- tence to furnish a Memoir, or even such recollections as he may find in an article by the late Vice-Provost of Eton in The Cornhill Magazine for August 1915.

The portrait which forms the frontispiece reproduces a * snapshot ' taken in 1913. That which faces page 96 is from a photograph taken when Edith Sichel was about twenty-five.

A. C. B.

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION . . . . . .1

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS . -. . . 19

THOUGHTS . . . . . .61

POEMS ....... 75

GLADYS LEONORA PRATT . . . . .82

WOMEN AS LETTER- WRITERS . . . .97

A FRENCH GOVERNESS . . . . 116

CHARLOTTE YONGE AS A CHRONICLER . . .141

EMILY LAWLESS . . . . . .151

ARTICLES FROM ' THE PILOT/ ETC. : —

'LOIZA . . . . . .180

'SAMUEL': CHRISTMAS EVE . . . .183

THE CONFESSIONS OF AN AMATEUR PHILANTHROPIST . 185 THE ART OF CONVERSATION IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE 191 JOSEPH JOACHIM: A REMEMBRANCE . . . 197

ARTICLES FROM ' THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT ' : —

THE LETTERS OF A SAINT . . . . 203

A MEDIEVAL GARNER . . . . . 207

QUEENS, KNIGHTS, AND PAWNS . , . 214

VINCENT DE PAUL . . . . 219

A HEROINE OF CORNEILLE . . . 226

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PAGE

LOUIS xiv ...... 233

DUCHESS SARAH ... . 23,9

ROUSSEAU ...... 246

THE UNSELFISH EGOIST .... 255

HANNAH MORE ..... 263

THE AGE OF LOUIS XV ....

MADAME DU DEFFAND AND HORACE WALPOLE . . 275

MADEMOISELLE DE LESPINASSE . . . 285

A KEEPER OF ROYAL SECRETS . . . 2Q3

ALWAYS A BOURBON ..... 302

ROBERT SOUTHEY ..... 309

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING . . .318

THE BRAHMAN OF CONCORD .... 328

SAINTS AND MYSTICS ..... 333

THE FRENCH POINT OF VIEW .... 342

ZOLA, MANET, AND THE ART OF EFFECTS . . 350

THE FANTASTIC ELEMENT AND MR. BARRIE 356

INTRODUCTION

EDITH SICHEL was born in December, 1862, and died in the summer of 1914. Her parents were Jewish by descent, and in religion Christians. London, her birthplace, con- tinued throughout her life to be her home. She was known to the reading public as a writer of books and of papers in magazines ; and she also contributed unsigned articles to the Pilot in 1901, and to the Literary Supplement of the Times from that year onwards. To a large circle of acquaint- ances and friends she was known as a hostess, guest, or companion, whose society was made delightful by her buoyancy and gaiety, her spontaneous and sometimes exuberant flow of wit and humour, her quick and vivid intellect, the width and keenness of her interests, her pleasure in discussion, her entire freedom from vanity or egotism, her kindness, and her enjoyment of other people's enjoyment. By the members of her family and by her intimate friends she was deeply loved and (strange as the word would have sounded to her) revered. Finally, she was known to a host of poor people, and especially of poor girls, to whom she gave without stint her time, her means, her mind and her heart. And in all these aspects of her lif e, on which I will say something in turn, she showed, in an eminent degree, one and the same nature, character, and way of regarding life.

Though Edith Sichel's love of books could hardly have been stronger than her love of Nature and of Art, the subjects of most of her own writings came to her through books. And

A

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the majority of these subjects, though she read widely in various languages, were either English or French. She was versed in German literature, enjoyed greatly her visits to picture-galleries and museums in Germany, and supremely the musical festivals she attended there ; and, as it happened, in the last months of her life was delighting two young friends by the lessons she gave them on Faust. During some years of her earlier life she went from time to time, with Mary Coleridge and other companions, to the house of the old scholar-poet, William Cory, to read Greek authors with him.1 But in her writings she never dealt with, and rarely referred to, the history or literature of Germany or of Greece. Italy, again, certainly filled a large space in her mind and affections. Her letters show that she was intensely happy there, and how truly she felt and could render in words the spirit of its towns, of the country surrounding them, and of the artists or the saints to whom she was most drawn ; and in writing her last book, a little volume on the Renaissance, she especially welcomed the chance of speak- ing something of her mind on Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael.2 Yet it remains true that, for the purposes of her work, her main studies were French and English ; and further, that, although in short articles she dealt with various English authors (not often her special favourites), the sub- jects of her principal books were almost exclusively French. In the later eighties her favourite French authors seem to have been George Sand and Sainte-Beuve ; and it was partly to the latter, partly to her friend, Emily Ritchie, that she owed her introduction to French memoirs. On

1 See Mary Coleridge's very interesting notes of Mr. Cory's remarks, Gathered Leaves, pp. 287-336. The authors named are Xenophon, Plato, and Sophocles.

8 I do not mean to imply that the last of these three was among the artists who attracted her most. It is right to add that this book was composed in enforced haste, and, though brilliant in parts, in other parts and in respect of accuracy fails to reach her usual level,

INTRODUCTION 3

the study of these she began, about 1890, to concentrate ; and this study, extending its bounds, led to the com- position of her best-known and most valuable works. The first two volumes of the series, the Story of Two Salons (1895), and the Household of the Lafayettes (1897), dealt with the era of the Revolution. From this she went back to the sixteenth century, and produced in 1901 Women and Men of the French Renaissance, in 1905 Catherine de Medici and the French Reformation, in 1907 The Later Years of Catherine de Medici, and finally, in 1911, Michel de Montaigne. Thus the French Renaissance may be described as her principal subject, and one on which she made herself an authority. But during the years of her work on it she found time for the Life of her friend Canon Ainger (1906), for the beautiful memoir of Mary Coleridge which forms the Introduction to Gathered Leaves (1910), and also for a large number of articles on a great variety of topics, not confined to history and literature.

Edith Sichel studied the subjects of her principal books with conscientious labour, and these books were warmly praised by judges competent (as I am not) to estimate their value as contributions to French biography and history. But she did not write primarily for experts ; nor again was she specially interested in political movements and events. What chiefly attracted her was the spirit of a time and country, and even more the minds, characters, and sur- roundings of individuals. Into these she entered with an alert imagination and almost unfailing zest. She treated them with a degree of impartiality surprising in a writer of such decided sympathies and antipathies. And she so depicted them that the reader's interest is caught at once, continues to increase, and is left unexhausted. There were several reasons for this result. Her own mind was so vivacious that no amount of research could diminish its animation or retard the alacrity of its movement. She was

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an artist in selection and in the disposition of the selected material. And she wrote fluently, commanding a rich vocabu- lary, and a style which was individual and readily recognised, but quite free from mannerism or traces of design. These merits far outweigh some corresponding defects. She had not in youth the severe training which makes for perfect accuracy. Nor were her judgments always fully considered. William Cory told her not to 'make such leaps' ; and, though she took his warning to heart, her eager mind never ceased to need it.

The characteristic qualities visible in the longer works reappear in the review-articles taken from the Times Literary Supplement.1 Indeed, Edith Sichel was nowhere more fully and uniformly successful as a writer than in these articles. Her first object — it is one too frequently neglected by reviewers — was to let the reader know what kind of matter he might expect to find in the book, and, if necessary, from what point of view it is treated there. As her interests were catholic, and her gift of seizing quickly and present- ing vividly the essential features of a subject was remark- able, the effect on the reader generally is that he not only gets this information, but enjoys reading the article and often wishes to pursue the subject further, while he can judge from the critical remarks, usually brief and decided, whether he had better pursue it in the book under review.2 This is the effect even when he can see from the article that the reviewer herself had no expert knowledge of the matter in hand (and of such articles a few are included in the present volume) ; but naturally a stronger personal interest and a more lasting value belong to those in which the writer deals with her own subjects. This personal interest is heightened in the case of the Thoughts and the Extracts from Letters. In these two sections of the present volume there

1 The articles reprinted here form perhaps a fifth of the total contributed. * These have sometimes been omitted in the reprint.

INTRODUCTION 5

appear, more prominently than elsewhere, and in a more distinctly stated form, the chief ideas and beliefs which governed both her view of life and her way of living it. The Letters, which differ comparatively little in style from the published writings, show how easily and naturally she wrote. They recall her conversation at once, and indeed are so characteristic that they give an almost perfect picture of her. The Thoughts were written down merely for herself or for a few friends, and, though there are good aphorisms among them, they were not essays in aphoristic art. Indeed, the title which she gave to the little manuscript book from which most of them are taken, was not Thoughts but Fool-Flashes.

Almost, if not quite, the first thing that Edith Sichel wrote for publication was Jenny, the story of a girl in Wapping, which appeared in the Cornhill for December, 1887. In her earliest book, Worthington Junior (1893) — a novel which, in spite of its merits, did not point to a vocation for that form of literature — the most successful incidents and characters belonged to Whitechapel. Some twenty years later she composed, and intended to publish, the remarkable story Gladys Leonora Pratt, printed in this volume. In all these cases she wrote from an intimate knowledge gained in the East End ; and, during the whole period of her literary production, she was incessantly busy in work of various kinds on behalf of the poor. The fact is so characteristic of her that a brief record must be given of these practical activities.

They began when, in her twenty-third year, she joined the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants.1 She had to find in their own homes the girls whom she

1 She joined the Whitechapel Branch, and so came into contact with Canon and Mrs. Barnett. The paper on Saints and Mystics, printed in this volume, contains a reference to Canon Barnett, of whose inspiring influence she spoke at a memorial meeting in the last year of her life.

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befriended, and also the mistresses, usually in somewhat humble life, who took them into service, and from whom they often ran away. Thus she was led into what she called * the mad world ' of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, or Shadwell, * the world of raging mistresses, frenzied Elizas, and perturbing Carolines.' Her reports show into what noisome quarters of this world she sometimes penetrated ; what courage, persistence, and sound judgment accom- panied her passionate desire to help ; and on what perfectly friendly terms this desire may stand with an irrepressible sense of humour. In spite of the weakness of her health she pursued this work with the utmost fervour until, after some years, the doctor's orders brought it to an end.

It ceased, however, only to be continued in a less exacting shape. Through it she had formed her lifelong friendship with Miss Emily Ritchie ; and when, in 1889, the two friends began to share a cottage at Chiddingfold, there soon began also the experiment of transplanting into the country girl- children from an East End workhouse, with others who had no responsible parent. For such children she started at Chid- dingfold a Home, afterwards moved to Hambledon when the friends built their own cottage there. In this Home they were trained for domestic situations, which in due time were found for them, and in which her tender hold on them was maintained. A few years later she went on to set up, close by, a second Home, with a laundry, for older girls iin poor health. But this experiment proved less successful and, after five years, was abandoned, while the children's Home was still flourishing when she died.

Always preferring to work independently of committees, and ready to give away half her income, she sought for no outside help in these enterprises, which naturally involved a great deal of labour in the way of business as well as much anxious responsibility. Yet to this she added, soon after her own Home was founded, the duties of treasurer to

INTRODUCTION 1

an admirable Home for Boys in Islington, kept by a friend whose striking gifts did not include any marked capacity for business. For twenty-two years, until this Home was closed, she not only acted as its treasurer, but exerted herself indefatigably in maintaining and enlarging the sub- scriptions on which it depended.

Another of her interests was education. From 1893 to 1905 she acted as a manager of Ashburnham and Park Walk Schools in Chelsea ; and adding, as usual, to her official duties, she made personal friends among the teachers, herself took classes (at one time a weekly class in history), gave parties to the children ; and whether she came to her class or her party, the head-mistress tells us, she ' scattered joy.'

By 1905 she had become deeply impressed by the import- ance of starting young people, on leaving school, in some employment ; and so she began to work with this object. For five or six years she carried on the work single-handed, finding for her proteges training-places, situations, and, in case of need, the money required for apprenticeship ; with the result that, when her private enterprise was merged in that of the Chelsea Apprenticeship Committee, the names of sixty or seventy boys and girls were counted in her books.

Finally, towards the end of 1911, she made what may be called a return, with a difference, to the kind of social work with which in her girlhood she had begun. Her sister, Mrs. Hopkins, had been for some time a visitor at Holloway Gaol, and Edith was now invited by the chaplain to hold a class there for female prisoners. Once a fortnight, when she was in London, during these last years of her life, she held this class of young women and girls. Her plan was to read to them, or, more often, to tell them in her own words, stories taken, it might be, from Tolstoi's Parables or the Lives of the Saints, and presenting a picture of truth-

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fulness or purity or kindness ; and then, without attempt- ing to enforce a moral, she would ask the question : ' Now, don't you think that nice of her ? ' or, ' Wouldn't you like to do a kind thing like that ? ' or, ' Wouldn't you like some- body to say that of you ? ' She had undertaken this task with much diffidence, and nothing that she had ever done tried her more. But it was not her way to count the cost of love ; and this, the most painful of her labours, was among the most successful. In it, too, as in the others, she was not content to make a gift and pass on, but, so far as time and strength allowed, continued to follow with her help and guidance those whose trust or affection she had won.

Edith Sichel's practical activities were, naturally, un- known to the great majority of those who read her books ; but this is not the only reason why they are recounted here. The fact that she carried them on side by side with continuous literary work was very characteristic of her ; while her ability to combine with apparent ease, and in spite of the weakness of her health, two occupations so different and usually found so conflicting, was a source of wonder to her friends. How it was that she was able to do this may incidentally appear if I now try to recall some traits of her character and of her way of looking at life.

Those philanthropic activities, it will have been noticed, were almost all concerned with children or young people. Her love for the young, her joy in them, and her hold on them, were no less marked in her private life. To little children she was a fairy godmother. She showered gifts on her girl-relatives and girl-friends, and enjoyed nothing better than devising treats and jaunts for their pleasure. I have mentioned the weekly lessons on Faust that she was giving in the last months of her lif e ; and she had been holding such small classes in literature or history then for

INTRODUCTION 9

ten or twelve years. Nor did she merely teach. To the end she never lost the power of entering, with eager sym- pathy and on terms of free discussion, into that mental world of a new generation which, to its predecessors, is commonly a region rather surmised than known. Such conversations might leave her amused or perturbed as well as enlightened, but she came to them as a comrade and fellow-seeker, whose experience might be of use, but who had herself plenty to learn.

Her older friends — her contemporaries or seniors — if they read what has been said of her relations with the young, will feel that, mutatis mutandis, it holds good of her relations with themselves. They will echo the words of M. Andre Beaunier, * Elle avait la religion de 1'amitie,' and may say that to describe her would be to describe a perfect friend. To do this is needless, but a word of caution may be added. She had that passion for giving which makes giving-up a pure pleasure, and the way to delight her was to ask of her ; but to give to her was to delight her too, and there was in her no trace of the disagreeable quality sometimes sug- gested by the words * self-effacing,' ' humble,' or ' saintly.' In discussion, for example, though she was not controversial and liked companionship in thinking, her attitude was — as indeed it was everywhere — direct and sturdy. If she found a statement obscure she said so ; if she doubted or demurred to it you knew that at once ; if it touched any idea that she valued, she refused to leave it in abeyance. She could think and feel as impersonally as any man, but she had plenty of personality.

To be habitually helpful, loving, and a good friend comes to no one by instinct, but still a strong impulse to be so lay in Edith Sichel's nature. One may, perhaps, signal out three other marked traits of her native disposition. Those who knew her well in her youth unite in speaking of her fervour, and the ardour with which she threw herself

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into all that appealed to her. One of them applies to her Wordsworth's line, ' A creature of a fiery heart ' ; and, even thirty years later, it was impossible to imagine her lethargic or tepid. At the same time she was inclined by nature not merely to serious but to brooding thought. ' She used to remind me,' wrote an early friend, ' of Michael Angelo's Penseroso, not only in the cast of her countenance, but in the sidelong droop of the head, when " entering on thoughts abstruse." ' She never lost this look in moments of abstrac- tion, and the resemblance was no mere fancy. ' But,' the writer goes on, ' the power of enjoyment was as vivid, the sudden lighting of the face into humour or delight as striking.' And this last trait, usually the most obvious at a first meeting with her, was far from being merely super- ficial. Her temperament, ardent and yet deeply serious, was also buoyant, gay, one might almost add mercurial ; her expression frequently one of brilliant animation ; fun danced in her beautiful eyes ; her talk sparkled with wit and humour, and she was never more typically herself than at times when she let herself loose in hilarious nonsense and extravagant gambols of the mind. In her youth, we are told, her companions at such moments * sat round her in fits of laughter ' ; and so it was to the last. To reproduce her talk at these moments is impossible, but some notion of it may be gathered from the farcical description of an Eisteddfod in one of her letters (Extract 5), or even from the following passage in a Whitechapel report (the names are changed, though the report is thirty years old) :

' Eliza Smith. — I went to her home and, for the first time, have ceased to wonder that she is so dirty. Any one with such pitch-black parents could not be otherwise. An inkier couple does not tread Africa. I saw Mr. S. for the first time. . . . The usual hunt for Eliza's address came off, Mrs. S. darting about here and there, like an Ethiopian

INTRODUCTION 11

weasel, and diving into pots and pans, corners and tea-cups, from which she fished out countless envelopes smothered in dust — none of them Eliza's. At last she gave a frantic leap towards the ceiling and snatched piles of black papers from behind all the pictures and frames — jumping up and down with sudden jerks and quips — and giving short pants for breath — looking, for all the world, like a large acrobatic smut. One longed to brush her away. I believe that she, Pere Smith, and Eliza are all made out of fog, and that it was the fact of Eliza's being in a temper that caused all those fogs last week. She is going to leave her place, as the son of the house hit her across the shoulders ; and I have written to her to come to us.'

The report from which this extract is taken is full of sordid and painful facts, and is laden with sorrow and pity ; but it was pure gain, both to the writer and to those whom she longed to help, that her heart and her sense of humour were active together, and did not impede each other ; and to this happy union and the buoyancy of her temperament she doubtless owed in part her success in habitually combining philanthropic with literary work, and the apparent ease with which she passed from one to the other.

But there were much deeper causes of this success, and they concerned her whole outlook upon life, her attitude towards it, and her preferences in art and literature. She was not inclined to any facile form of optimism, but still she believed in human nature and did not fear it. In her view it contains nothing inherently evil. The whole stuff of it is capable of being moulded by sufficient effort into some- thing fine, and is the opportunity of this transforming action. Hence she faced, not without distress but without dismay, the evils which she laboured to lessen ; and one might even say that her sympathy was diminished by nothing that had in it life and energy, and that, if she could have despaired

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of any one, it would not have been the sinner but the sluggard or the frivolous. I well remember her deep anxiety and unremitting efforts on behalf of a poor girl imprisoned for a violent crime due to jealousy ; but the crux of the matter for her was not the crime, but her failure to make the criminal see that the crime was bad ; and when at last she succeeded in this she was sure that the upward way was open. As her writings show, she was much attracted by the saintly character; but its ardour, its love, and its happiness were the sources of the attraction, and any mere asceticism repelled her. Among writers, too, the rich, expansive, forward-looking natures appealed to her most. In the Women and Men of the French Renaissance there is an admirable chapter on Rabelais, an author whom, accord- ing to Besant, no woman can read, but, for her, a prophet with a vision of the liberated human spirit. It was this that she missed in Montaigne, of whom she wrote with sympathy and insight but with much less gusto, and whom she calls (in a letter) a ' mountain-hating thinker,' * Montaigne who understood Monday so well and Sunday so little.'

There was nothing one-sided or extreme in the tendency I am describing, though it was occasionally expressed in terms which might mislead. For instance, in the Thoughts (68-72), the ' love ' in which she believed is sharply con- trasted with ' morality,' the laws of which are said to mean only ' extended fear.' What is here called ' morality ' is obviously one particular kind of morality, and what is contrasted with it is a higher and more adequate kind. Her preference for the latter, for ' goodness ' or * love,' is thor- oughly characteristic, but her language might suggest that she sympathised with the fashion of * a-moralism,' or even that * love ' meant for her something sentimental or some- thing reckless. No idea could have less foundation. The description of life as an adventure appealed to her strongly,

INTRODUCTION 13

but the adventure, for her, was like that of Rabbi Ben Ezra, a ' high enterprise ' or ' spiritual romance.' l Though she often enjoyed it with all her heart and believed it should be happy, she never supposed that the possibilities of human nature could be elicited without effort, abnegation, or pain. If she had been asked to name the first gift she would choose to give, were such things giveable, to the young people whom she tried to help, she would probably have answered, ' Self- control.' * Love,' she wrote, ' is the most austere discipline of life, as well as its sweetest balm.' She herself was as strong as she was kind. She delighted to * scatter joy ' ; no bound was set to her sympathy either with sorrow or with failings ; the words of a friend, ' you could say anything to her,' are true ; but so are the words of another, ' she had the uncompromising sternness of love.' Hence she recog- nised the presence of love in shapes that may seem its enemies, and called duty ' love hardened and extended beyond the personal sphere.' She regarded Tolstoi with the utmost veneration, and much of his gospel was a gospel for her; but the application of some of his ideas she decisively rejected. Punishment, she said, is not the oppo- site of forgiveness, it is ' the reversed torch of love, and none the less a light in darkness because it is reversed ' ; and, while private judgment on the sinner is wrong, judg- ment of the sin is love of the sinner.

Thus her attitude to life may perhaps best be defined as one of glad and grateful acceptance on condition of trans- formation. Life, in her view, brings much that is pure and unsought joy, more perhaps that needs this transforming effort, little or nothing that cannot be made to contribute to an inward and abiding happiness. It was in this spirit that she aided others, and strove to deal with her own life. For example, she was well acquainted with pain, but she

1 Her own phrases, about work in the East End, in the memorial speech on Canon Barnett and the character of his influence,

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neither yielded to it nor rebelled against it ; she used it. ' I have been travelling,' she wrote once, ' in my own father- land of Pain, which has its special prospects and experi- ences, though the inns there are uncomfortable and expensive.' l Again, the law of our life, as of nature, is

change :

Nothing can be as it has been before ; Better, so call it, only not the same :

and this hurts us ; but every present, as it comes, has its unique good to offer, and we should not only accept it but welcome it with hospitality, and should give the same welcome to that which succeeds it.2 ' I am glad,' she wrote in a birthday letter to Mary Coleridge, 4 that you are getting older, as I know it means greater happiness for you than youth could pos- sibly mean . . . and that is the greatest compliment one could pay to any human being.' It is so because this in- crease of happiness implies in the human being who possesses it that constant work of transformation. And this again — it is another main point in her faith — means a continuous growth, in which the past lives on, and which is as secure as anything human can be against the accidents of the future. ' The most blessed thing in it all,' she wrote in another letter, ' seems to me that, in spite of outward circumstances and personal ills and aches, something mysterious keeps on growing inside one, which makes more and more for happi- ness.' This real ' happiness,' which is sharply contrasted with mere ' pleasure,' and which frivolity can never know, cannot be lost : ' when happiness has once sat upon the hearth, the fire is always alight ' (Thoughts, 17) ; ' the comforting thing in life is that happiness comes from within, not from without, and that it lives apart from sorrow or any of the assaults of life and death ; and that, the more we love, the more it comes to the strange rolling

1 See Poems, 4.

1 See the opening numbers in the series of Thoughts.

INTRODUCTION 15

years. . . . Amidst all the deep floods of sorrow, it is a blessed fact that to wholesome and unselfish minds life itself is holy, and its real interests do not jar with death.' And so, as she undoubtingly believed, whatever the change called death may involve, it cannot mean the cessation of this continuous growth and happiness.

The way of regarding life which I have been describing and illustrating, was partly formed and constantly sus- tained by meditation and reflection, and it amounted to a belief or faith. And was not this, it may be asked, also a religious belief or faith ? No one who knew Edith Sichel at all intimately could hesitate in answering this question, and a single sentence in one of her letters may give the answer : ' The immanence of God and the life of Christ are my treasures.' But this religious belief was not a theo- logical creed. Neither the native cast of her mind nor the course of her studies inclined her in any marked degree to philosophical or theological theory ; and the value of her faith does not lie in the systematic connection or complete- ness of her ideas. Theories, moral, theological, or aesthetic, are frequently of small account because their authors, with an unusual gift for analysis or system, have only an average personal experience of the matter they attempt to theorise. Hers was the opposite case. Her religious faith, her ways of looking at life and art and literature, her atti- tude to the human beings whom she saw with her eyes or imagined from the record left of them, sprang directly from her experience, and were in turn tested by it. This experi- ence, whether grave or gay, was exceptionally vivid and whole-hearted ; while the variety of her own nature and interests, the number of her friends and protegts, and her wonderful power of imaginative and practical sympathy, gave it also an unusual width. And, since it was both truly and happily expressed in what she wrote, the follow- ing pages will show her to strangers infinitely better than

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any words of mine, and to others will recall at every turn hours and days and years radiant with the light of her wit and laughter, and glowing with the warmth of her generous and loving heart.

A. C. BRADLEY.

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I OFTEN think, when I am wandering through the picturesque mire of Wapping, that there would be far more essential good in the work if the picturesqueness were taken away ; if the poor were quite respectable though just as needy, the streets clean, the hovels houses. Picturesqueness — moral, mental, and outward — lends a glamour which detracts from the disinterestedness of one's work. I always feel wholesomely humiliated in the East-end by the fact of the people I see being much better than me ; they rise so much higher above their circumstances than I do over mine, and ought to be visiting me 1

If one could only implant in them the idea of loving fellowship among themselves, which, after all, is Christianity ; if one could teach them through the human to reach the Divine ! (1885.)

2

TALKING of beams reminds me that I have lost my heart ... to Shrewsbury. Twice during my migrations I have had to wait for my train there, and have employed these spare hours, like a good busy little girl, by getting on hand- shaking terms with Shrewsbury. It suits me perfectly, and presently, when Shadwell has been reduced to a Belgravian

1 [With a few exceptions the following extracts are arranged in chrono- logical order, an arrangement which has a biographical value, though it pro- duces some sharp contrasts in subject and tone. They have been chosen mainly to illustrate characteristics of the writer, and in particular some which do not fully appear in the reprinted papers, or are barely mentioned in the Introduction ; for example, the delight in natural beauty and in works of art, which was obvious even on a slight acquaintance with her.]

18

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stolidity and Whitechapel to a Mayfair monotony, I shall migrate there. What a dear ramshackle old place it is, with harum-scarum houses and ill-regulated shops and streets running no man knows why, for some lead nowhere at all. And the oddest houses, black and white and lattice- windowed, jump out upon you where you expect them least. And the streets are called ' Mardol ' and * Dog pole ' and ' Butcher's Row ' and ' Pride Hill.' The cakes were made in Eden, and the market is full of real, live, farmers' daughters, selling real golden butter and ruddy plums. . . .

Here I still pasture a la sheep and return to my muttons daily. Do you find that one's feeling to Nature changes with advancing years ? I used to believe in your * great progenitor's

O Lady, we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live.

But now I don't any longer. The great Mother of us all has a holy charm to soothe me which nobody else has. If we come to her determined to make her into a Proteus who changes form with every one of our passions, our thoughts, our feelings, she will act like a wise mother, and teach us our folly by complying with our request. But if we come to her like wayward children as we are, and lie down in her lap and let her do as she will with us, surely she will hush us to rest almost like rest eternal, and to the peace which passeth all understanding. (1885.)

3

[Report of Whitechapel Girls] HARRIET WEBB

Oh, what a black and tangled web we weave When first with Webb we practise to deceive, And fondly dream we may reclaim her youth And tame her — savage, smutty and uncouth,

1 [The letter was addressed to Mary Coleridge.]

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 21

With surly visage dyed by ebon soot,

And voice deep-buried in her left-hand boot ;

Then flee from hope, nor yet to learn refuse

That Guardian-angels aren't the slightest use.

And this is all the cheer we dare rehearse,

That, though she can't improve, she can't be worse.

Poor thing ! her mistress is really an angel to keep her. She told me wonderful legends of how Harriet rails at her if she stops out, and opens the door on her return with * It 's me 'as 'ad the pleasure, isn't it now ? ' and how she rushes into the work-room and makes all the ' young ladies ' cry by her winged words, and how she ' makes herself so familiar with all the visitors that they run away from the house,' especially one whom she described coyly as ' a superior visitor — a gentleman from Northampton,' who appears to have been so alarmed by Harriet's noises after his depar- ture that he returned to look at her with alarm over the window-blind.

I am really sorry for the mistress. She is a pathetic instance of lonely woman in reduced circumstances, still clinging to the pathetic rags of polysyllabic gentility, salts her sentences with 'nevertheless,' shows a patrician contempt for * no,' and says ' nay ' instead. Her boarding-school smile is a matter for tears. She is very brave, too, for a sempstress's life is a .hard one, and she is rudely treated by her employers. That seems to me a tragedy, the struggle for bread of people who have only "been brought up on callisthenics and painting on china, and surely they need visiting more than the girls. (1886.)

THE Sandown races were the first I had ever seen, and it was like reading six pages of Tolstoi — or rather vice versa — though not so exciting. Still it was very wonderful — the rush and the light and the colour of it, the rainbow jockeys

22 NEW AND OLD

on their glossy-coated steeds straight out of the Arabian Nights, pawing, arching their royal necks, flying across the smooth-shaven turf. And the breathless pause before the winner outstrips his comrades ! And then the people — so different from one's everyday experience — overstrung old gentlemen with vicious waistcoats ; burly old ladies with very golden hair ; queer young ladies with hats as high as their manners ; octogenarian Adonises with sly, bald faces, who looked as if they had been born and bred in Bond Street at five o'clock of a June afternoon ; and hundreds of walking chessboards with voices as loud as their checks and hats on one side (why do horsey people always wear their hats on one side ? I can get no one to solve this mystery for me). What a good thing it is for one to see a wholly different side of life from that which one is accustomed to — even if it only teaches one that there are things wholly out of one's own taste and experience, in which people take an absorbing interest. . . . All the same, and priggishness apart, the way races take place (not the races themselves, nor the bare fact of seeing them) is quite out of keeping with Christianity. Straight upon the hideous din of the betting, and the visible fact that thousands are spent on the mere keeping of horses, came poor starving Mrs. Payne's plaintive, ' Yes, Miss, I know the rich 'ave their troubles — they trouble about the poor ' ; and one knew that the turning of the Temple into a den of thieves was by no means a story of the past alone. (1886.)

5

TO-DAY was the last and the least good day of the Eisteddfod. It has been very fine — a glorious performance of the Elijah, and a Bach Chorus which was sublime. The Gladstone day was unparalleled ; they took £1100 that one day instead of the usual £800. As he was going into the Pavilion a poor old woman threw a parcel at him, which he caught

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 28

anxiously, not seeing the donor and imagining it was some missive of importance. On opening it he found that it was a red handkerchief for him to tie round his head in case of a draught ; the ardent old dame thought this the most acceptable guise in which to express her Liberalism.

My general idea of the Eisteddfod to-day, when we got inside the tent, was that of a large show of old men : every kind of old man in Wales — lean old men with coal-black eyes, fat old men with crumpled cuffs, middling old men with insignificant gestures, poetical old men with half- open mouths, discreet old men with tight-shut lips, business- like old men, polite old men and rude old men. They were all herded on a rough wooden platform with a background of red cloth.

I subsequently discovered that they were all ' Bards.' Every Bard is apparently subject to two conditions : he must abjure soap eternally, and light an undying fire in his black, black eye.

The central figure to-day was a hugely stout gentleman with a Beethovenish head, long grey hair anointed with priestly oil which ran over to his coat in the absence of a beard, on to which, scripturally speaking, it ought to have fallen. He had an air of cheap but ineffable Mystery about him, and of a secret in his Eye (which can only be spelt with a capital to give the faintest idea of its power). His nom de plume was Huffa Mone (which his real name was Williams, but every Bard has a nom de plume), and he was the Chief Bard of Anglesea.

There was also present the oldest Bard on record, with a snow-white beard ten miles long like a nursery-rhyme, who made a speech (also ten miles long) in a weak pipey inaudible voice, and who was deafeningly applauded for his age and for his inaudible words. Both he and the Bard of Anglesea presented broad coat-fronts smothered in old Eisteddfod medals and blue ribbons,

«4 NEW AND OLD

The Bards were complimented by a good many dusky prelates— the Revd. LLBGWST-Hueffdwx, Canon Plllmn Teddy, and others of like names. They were all cracking wonderful consonantine jokes and guttural quips with the Bards. A few Shropshire curates in low hats represented England in the audience.

Roughly speaking, the Eisteddfod seemed to me to consist in a succession of things like this : — as I said, to begin with, an Old Man Show — swarms of hale old gentlemen clinging together : deafening applause from the audience : the smallest old gentleman leaps up without any warning, roars out a dozen consonants in a gigantic voice, and throws himself passionately on the neck of the largest old gentleman: they embrace : they weep : the Welsh prelates snort and sniffle some gutturals : the old men bow proudly to the audience : the audience rises and screams : the old gentlemen retire arm-in-arm blinded with tears ; and a brass-band strikes up a tune quite enough to finish them off in their infirm and highly nervous condition. Then a nimble gentleman leaps down from the platform, seizes a coy lady from the audience, leads her on to the platform, drags the two old men back from their retirement, and lays their hands on her kid glove ; they kneel ; other old gentlemen stand round her, like post-Raphaelite angels, with their coat- tails for wings outspread ; she wags her purple bonnet over the kneeling ones ; a cheap brass-trumpet is blown over both, and she alternately crowns their heads and pins green favours in their button-holes. Then you find that there have been competitions and that these prone octogen- arians are the winners, the preucc chevaliers of this Land of Frumps. The provincial Rowenas and Clotildas in slate- coloured flounces, from whom they receive their guerdon, approach this greatest occasion in their lives as a High and Holy Festival. The trumpet is supposed to increase the impression of a joust.

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 25

Oh what would you have said if you had seen me on my bench suddenly pounced upon, dragged on to the platform on the arm of a Welshman with an order in his button-hole, and led forward before the crowded Hall ? If you had beheld me first bowing and smirking and pinning a red, white, and blue rosette on to the coat of a Cymric divine — then clasping his hand and murmuring low intense con- gratulations in his down-bent ear ? (Though why I pinned that favour on or congratulated him, or what I said or what he said, I shall never know till the end of the chapter, and I 'm certain he won't either.) I only know that he made a long speech in Welsh at which everybody roared, and that I retired, again on the arm of Citoyen Taffy, and that it was terribly formidable to be watched by an audience of at least a thousand, especially with a disrespectful little sister in fits of laughter just below. (1888.)

I HAVE plunged into Borrow — you would adore him. His first picture of the Gipsies in Lavengro sticks to one and, like all racy great things, appeals to all ages and tastes. Such a curious combination of magic and reality, dream and adventure ! One feels all at the same time like a child and like an old man in reading him. ... I can't conceive what a spell is in the man, and how it is that he holds you breathless over rat-catching, ' bruisers ' and philology. The Romany part and the Thief part and the Tramp part, etc., speak for themselves, and so does the authorship part. He makes the commonplace uncommon and the uncommon commonplace in the most extraordinary way. (1889.)

TO-DAY the banks on the Witley Road are glowing with amethystine heather dripping with raindrops ; the corn-

26 NEW AND OLD

fields are turning gold, and shine out in glistening strips as far as one can see amongst the green meadows and patches of purple soil and russet field, so that from the distance the land looks like Dame Earth's regalia, brimming over with jewels and guarded by the opal wings of Seraphim — at any rate that is what the clouds look like to-day — iridescent and watery. Everything is much deeper in colour than when you and I took the walk together which I have just been.

I felt exceedingly contemplative, and thought how the leaves and the fields had changed and how nothing can remain the same by an immovable law, and remembered Browning's

Nothing can be as it has been before ;

Better, so call it, only not the same. To draw one beauty into our heart's core,

And keep it changeless ! such our claim ; So answered, — Never more !

And I thought, too, how the comfort and strength, as well as the sorrow of life, lies in this, and how thanks are most of all due to God for such a law, which may make one year full of grief and labour but the next full of soothing and rest ; which creates our very weakness that it may grow into strength ; which changes our relations and positions in life, that our souls and sympathies may widen and that we may not stick always in the same form in the Big School ; which takes away the crushingness of grief and the sore- ness, and makes it the holiest place in life ; which takes away pure lives that they may remain more steadfastly, and that love may grow the stronger for their absence. . . . I think one grasps more and more that it is the sweetness of a life which lives on and is strong, and has power over others.

George Sand's sunset certainly borders on sunrise, and, as she grows old, her judgement gains more of the Prome-

27

thean fire. She and Mrs. Kemble surely have the same flaming judgement ? It seems as if by strength of passion for life (no longer for living) and its problems she pierced through them and saw beyond the veil, because she could use both heart and head and therefore had Fire, which is both light and warmth.

And as old Age, in which the passion of love, as it is usually understood, has no place, gradually came upon her, it seems as if she were left to us in all the dignity of her one pure passion, glorious in tenderness, her heart purified and facing the truth. ... I suppose people are never truly adorable till they are patient, and they are never truly patient till they are old, great and generous. (1889.)

8

SUCH an Easter — the whole earth rising again into a miracle of hope and the promise of fuller life to come !

A sweet little Service, with the usual Easter combined smell of primroses, mackintosh and school-children (which I heard defined lately as ' 1'odeur du bon Chretien '), and the sea outside to lead the choir. One is filled with ardour here by the great Easter-tide going on outside the four Church walls, with the pulpit where a joyless Curate prates of Easter Joy with limpest lips ; the Easter of Nature and the truth behind it all — the * Sterben und Werden ' which is the law of all being, human as well as that of woods and meadows ; the unceasing Resurrection of the Dead that goes on in the midst of life.

The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways,

seems the best Easter text. . . . The most blessed thing in it all seems to me that, in spite of outward circumstances and personal ills ancl aches, something mysterious keeps

28 NEW AND OLD

on growing inside one which makes more and more for happiness. Even though one loses grasp of it for a time, one gains a more sustained belief in the morning, and a hope which may not be so impetuous as at the spring of life, but will endure more surely since it has faced experi- ence. It is curious how Faith grows unseen and by no observable process — certainly by no actual reasonings (often in spite of them) — but by living and feeling and, above all, by waiting in silence. It sometimes seems as if waiting perfectly were the real science of life, and patience the highest secret of the soul, and that if we do not interrupt God's order by irreverent fretful impatience we shall perhaps ' see partly,' and find and fulfil the true meaning of our lives, instead of forestalling it wrongly and turning our- selves into futilities.

I have a fancy for reading George Sand just now (this time last year I was deep in Vol. iv. of I'Histoire de ma Fie) and find her as bracing as ever. She writes to Prince Napoleon : ' Soyez done heureux puisque le bonheur est une conquSte. — Les jours de degout et de la fatigue reviennent, le bonheur a 1'etat de realite complete n'est pas une chose permanente, mais la morale est qu'il faut combattre toujours pour augmenter votre tresor de force et de foi.' Is not that a Baptism of fire ? I came upon it just after I had been writing that rigmarole last night, which was curious. (1889.)

9

LUCCA, Easter Sunday.

I HAVE been thinking of you so much ever since I touched the soil and consommes of France ; and at Nervi, which reminded me so much of Cannes, it was all I could do to refrain from running upstairs to fetch you for a walk. And now here we are in this most mediaeval of all places — ducal palaces, mullioned windows, Lombard churches,

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 29

Basilican churches, open shops and narrow winding streets whose houses nearly meet — all set in a framework of old red walls and violet hills, fold upon fold. So mediaeval is it that yesterday evening, in our first walk to the Duomo, when the city was wrapped in mysterious twilight, not only did we see an old couple in deep mourning kneeling in fervent prayer on the stone outside the Cathedral door (I am almost sure they were murderers in mourning for the murdered), but also we actually beheld a gleamingly hand- some Italian in a dissembling cloak climb up to a mullioned window, look in passionately, and descend. We imagined he was looking to see whether his love was alone, but it is probable he was only spying whether there was veal or beef for dinner : the Italian's look for love and veal, I have long since discovered, is one and the same. But this is a digression, and the fact is I don't feel I can describe the indescribable : the only adequate thing to do would be to send you one of the enchanting glimpses we get at every turn through a crumbling archway — a glimpse of garden and russet wall — of a mist of pink peach-blossom, bare fig- trees, and the glossy leaves and pale fruit of the lemon- groves. Or I should like to forward you a whole long narrow street of girls and women in scarlet and gold and faded green, with bright kerchiefs on their heads, as they walk along, dragging rainbow babies by the hand, or stand in groups round the splashing fountains gossiping, their copper jugs in their hands.

As for the Campo Santo, I will not bore you with its wonders or the sculpture of Nicolo Pisano, all of which doubtless you know. Pisa impressed me sadly as a town. It seemed a dead city, with this one live secret of Art throb- bing deep in its soul, like a faded woman who has once been beautiful, now only kept alive by a passionate hidden thought. I am writing utter nonsense, but the combina- tion of cathedrals and risotto makes me high-flown. (1891.)

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10

ROME.

OH, it is difficult to write here ! When one isn't possessed one is resting, and when one isn't resting one is thinking, and when one isn't thinking one is sleeping.

What a region it is — this Caesar-world, one with this Nature-world, and then this Art-world ! I feel as if I had been confirmed by Apollo on the steps of the world — There!

You can't imagine the ineffable beauty of the Caesars' Palace, and its ineffable pathos — the blackbirds singing their hearts out in the empty halls carpeted with young grass !

I can't write about the statues ; of the immortal white world in the Vatican and the Capitol I shall love to tell you. You can't think how Cory-like the room of Philosophers' Busts made me feel. It was like shaking hands — no, not hands but souls, with them. ... I am happy, and getting quite well. (1891.)

11

ROME.

You certainly ought to be here in this place without a beginning or an end, without anything but a silent, speak- ing eternity, peopled by still white citizens, instinct with an inexpressible kind of life beyond life — the ineffable enchantment of marble. It is the world of sculpture here which seizes me most, I think — always excepting the world of nature ; but that belongs to the city and includes it, as one includes a person's atmosphere in speaking of his existence.

Every Titan wall of russet-brown is seen through a mist of pink peach-blossom ; every jagged archway is a frame for violet hills and Judas-trees in ardent full blossom ; the sheep-skinned shepherd-boys drive their flocks that wander

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS SI

in and out between the broken columns and grass-grown tombs on the Appian Way, nibbling the violets without any respect of persons. To a sheep the dust of a Mr. Jones is the same as that of Caecilia Metella. And so to me the mighty walls and sculptured arches and the giant battle-field of a Forum are part and parcel of the nature of Rome and of her very essence — if you come to ask me about them from their historical side I should say it is the Art world which possesses me most here.

You ask me for one description of a statue, but, as I can't put them into prose, I will send you the one I have put into verse. Ilaria Caretta, in the Cathedral at Lucca, is like a Browning poem cut in white marble — a very young woman, heavenlily lovely and serene in the sleep of death — all rest and no pain.

Death and the Sculptor both a lady loved : Death and the Sculptor wrestled hand to hand : The Sculptor conquered Death, as it behoved , Since Art holds Life and Death at her command. Death took the lady, but the Sculptor kept The beauty and the blossom of her youth, And gave her back to men as if she slept, A marble mystery of peace and truth. Thou still white woman, sleeping evermore, Eternity of silence and of grace ! Time spell-bound stands afar, and we before Such rest would kneel as in a holy place, Thankful thy sleep can never finish, or Life bring a shadow to that perfect face.

(1891.)

12

SIENA, May 1891.

SINCE Rome I seem to have lived a lifetime of beauty — of lights and shadows, of golden suns and white moons turning the olive-trees to silver as they bend and sway to each other, half angelic and half courtly, for all the world like Perugino's Seraphs. The sight I almost like the best is that of the

32

Madonna-faced women here, gay-skirted, with figures of such gracious curves, who watch their flocks in the fields and work the while at their distaffs (real old fairy-tale distaffs), or stand up to their waists in the bright green barley, or walk in company of their fierce, sunny husbands behind the carts drawn by great white oxen, born for mythological characters to sit on.

One of the things I enjoyed most was going to Assisi and moving about where St. Francis actually did tread. What those Churches of Assisi are you can't think. You seem to have entered a solemn rainbow, and then discover that every crannied wall, arch, apse, roof is smothered in frescoes, three-quarters of them Giotto at his very best. I can only say that it is more like Dante in colour than anything else : the same dewy childhood of mind, the same manly power — almost grim, — the same godly courage, the same severity of judgement and sober truth, — not quite the same might of horror.

St. Francis wedding Poverty is perhaps the most wonder- ful— the bride is so grim, and yet so pure that she becomes beautiful, with a purely spiritual beauty. Her face and figure are quite white ; the bridegroom's clothes are grey- black ; and all about them is the crowd of citizens and nobles, in their coifs and birettas and Chaucer head- dresses, whom Browning alone knew intimately. In one corner, robed in lilac-grey, is a figure like Dante, beautiful, uncompromising and full of religion.

One does so strongly realise here, in the fiery Baptisms of Art one is having, that religion is born only of simplicity and depends on it, and that, whatever these people believed, they were bound to be religious because they were as simple as babes. I feel that Giotto is the one who, above all, through his mastery managed to convey soul as foremost, together with beauty of body and without any rudeness. Cimabue, and the early masters here at Siena, are sublime

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 38

in their pathos, because they have no body or (at best in a Cimabue) a body of glorious rudeness, and so they express nothing but soul piercing through the crude Lines. But it seems to me infinitely greater to possess the power of beauty and yet to make soul the foremost impression. And, to my ignorant mind, that is Giotto's crown of masterdom. Giotto must have believed ardently in dogma as well as spirit, and that dogma in painting is a divine sensation. One can only return to ' just like Dante.'

13

RENAN is at present employing — I can't say absorbing — my mind. After reading Martineau it is like chewing rose- leaves when one has been eating daily bread, however heavily baked. I like his history, but his joie and charme bother me, and there is — from whatever point of view Christ be taken — a kind of golden blasphemy about his yachting parties on the Lake of Galilee and ' courses ' among the mountains. He cooks French dishes out of divide truths, and makes the disciples on their apostolic mission into a species of French excursionist !

But he gives one infinite amusement and much interest, so one ought not to grumble, — only I wish he didn't un- simplify and un-sublimify things so much. (1891.)

14

I AM truly thankful to have seen Mrs. Colman.1 One cer- tainly can say of her that ' Life is perfected in Death,' though one would rather say something simpler. Specu- lation seems more than ever vain after a sight like that of her faith and suffering, and the only solution we can seek about final things is to be found in humble life, in action and endurance, far from the tangle of words. After all

1 [A poor woman dying in Whitechapel.] C

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it is the pure in heart, not the talkers, who see God. And how strange it is that the same bodily suffering should destroy faith in some and confirm it in others ' Behold, these things are a mystery. (1892.)

15

[Tennyson's Funeral}

I HAVE just returned from the Abbey, and I am sure you would have felt with me that it bore a wonderful impression of that kingly personality — of his state and his simplicity. Every inch of standing-room was thronged by 11.30, and every place seemed full of a noble sorrow. The Gordon boys were outside and presented arms when the coffin arrived, covered by the Union Jack and having only laurel wreaths down its centre. . . . Poet's Corner was flooded with sunshine. When the procession moved there from the Altar-steps, all the poets seemed to be waiting for their mighty brother and to be stretching white arms of welcome to him. . . . And they and he seemed so much more alive than most of the people around that one could only reverse the usual words and say, ' In the midst of Death we are in Life.' (October 12, 1892.)

16

THERE is some support, not consolation — is there not ? — in the thought that the real things of life are sacred and one with death and all that is beyond ; that, in feeling for them, we are one with that which God has taken to himself. . . . Theo's swift, tender insight, her fantastic grace, her distinction of soul, her genius for companionship, and her dainty mirth have put a fragrance into my life which will always make the world a sweeter place for me. . . . One knows, in thinking of her, why the world has lived on the faith that God was made a little child. . , . For any one

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who has known her there is no need to quarrel about creeds. . . . Genius for life such as hers must include the life beyond, beside every form of life here from highest to lowest. (1896.)

17

[After visiting a dying woman in Whitechapel, a protegee for sixteen years.]

IT was all profoundly moving and heartrending. The doctor had given her up, and she seemed to be dying, and had that look of dignity and beauty which Death gives alike to kings and beggars. The strangely faithful love — so undeserved and so bountifully given — of a simple un- trained heart like hers humbles and blesses one. (1898.)

18

MY Lafayette experience has been wonderful in charm if not in bulk. I started early from Fontainebleau, got out at Montgeron, and of course found the distance more like five than two kilometres. I first travelled in a sort of coach to the dear, drowsy village of Ydres, which might be buried ten fathoms deep in the Provinces instead of being near Paris. The road to it runs by the silver river Yeres, a tributary of the Seine, bordered by pollarded willows. In the heart of the slumbrous little place is an ancient feudal tower with turrets, and opposite to it a Renaissance fountain. The tower, I find, is all that remains of a castle, of which it formed the gateway and which belonged to Charles vin.'s secretary ; the fountain was formerly in the garden. The whole village became so much excited by my arrival and the fact that there was nothing for me to eat within a radius of some miles, that it seemed likely an emeute would ensue. At last, as I was still wander- ing about in search of food, two opulent old gentlemen in

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straw hats (a kind of French Brothers Cheeryble) peered over their villa-wall and directed me to a funny little pot- house, where two Jacques-Bonshommes from the fields were munching, and there I found bread and cream-cheese. I hired the only carriage and drove about a mile, with beat- ing heart, down the stately sycamore avenue of La Grange, on either side the whitening wheat-fields which Lafayette was so sanguine about ninety years ago.

The chateau is beautiful and wonderfully impressive ; red-brick faced with white ; built in Henry iv.'s time, and surrounded by a deep moat ; with endless broad grassy avenues on either side, like those at St. Cloud, and breezy meadows with elms beyond them. It belonged at one time to the murdered Guise's widow, then to Louis xm. It is now let to a tenant — no descendant of Lafayette — who has been there for twenty-five years. All approach is forbidden, entrance inside impossible, and I had to bribe the lady of the Bakery to allow me to go, accompanied by her, round to the other side of the house ; and there I sought and found Fox's ivy-tree.1 No one knows any- thing about it. It is the only one on the house. I was separated from it by the moat, so I had to pick some leaves growing near the bridge — one for you and one for me. I came away, still more I stood there, with tears in my heart if not in my eyes, and felt the spirit-touch of the noble souls that haunt that avenue and hover over those sun- tanned walls. The air was full of the scent of limes, and the shifting clouds and lights and shadows seemed all one with the house and its history.2 (1897.)

1 [Fox and his wife stayed for some time with the Lafayettes in 1802, and he planted against the house an ivy-tree, which had overrun its walls before Lafayette died in 1834. — The Household of the Lafayettes, p. 304.]

1 [La Grange in later years was inhabited, and is so still, by the Marquis de Lasteyrie, great-grandson to Lafayette. Edith Sichel met the Marquis and Marquise in London, was much gratified by their appreciation of her book, and paid a delightful visit to them at the chateau. ]

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19

THE most formidable person in Paris is the old waiter who guards the Eden of the Cafe Foyot with his violent whiskers, for all the world like a fierce old prawn. I am sure that he was born at the bottom of a Foyot sauce-pan in an ocean of Bouillabaisse and had a prawn for his Papa. However, the savants and charming French literary world still gather comfortably together and dine beneath his awful aegis. I seem to have dwelt rather disproportionately on him, but he represents one whole side of Paris, the Olympian, matter- of-fact side that makes them take food so seriously and evoke so much from material life. (1898.)

20

TOURS.

WE began with Matthew Arnold's Church at Brou, the most moving and lovely rendering of love in marble that ever I beheld. Margaret of Parma herself is masculine, regal, almost stern, excepting for her long rippling hair, but her husband was not called Philibert le Beau for nothing. He lies with his beautiful face turned tenderly towards his mother, a lovely marble woman sleeping amongst sculp- tured Saints a few yards behind him. His figure is sur- rounded by stately child-angels, one holding his helmet, another his gauntlet, the four others only looking at him — not sad, only contemplative. Margaret's Oratory, where she came every day to pray after she had built the Church, is now behind his tomb. It touched me doubly because it had a fireplace, which gave it the feeling of a home ; one felt that she lived there. The Church used to stand in the midst of a wood, but now the forest has receded.

The whole thing brought before one the immensity and endurance of love and the presence of death in so intense a way that poetry would have been the only relief. The thought was almost a weight of beauty and melancholy.^

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21

HOTEL DE I/UNIVERS, I TOURS, June 1898.

TAKE care of this crumpled leaf — for where do you think it comes from ? From the garden of Nohant — from George Sand's own shady path. Suddenly, at the junction of Moulins, Emily and I discovered that we could arrive in a few hours at La Chatre if we deserted our luggage, which we knew to be safe, and arrived with the bag that we had in the railway-carriage. After lunching at a dear small Bour- bonnais village called Bessay we caught our train and duly arrived. I can never describe to you the romance of that twilight journey through Berri, with the Indre winding like a silver scroll, and the poplars bordering its banks, and the elder-scent almost heavy on the evening breeze. Then the rapturous, if flea-bitten, night at the pot-house of the little town of La Chatre, wiled away by Berrichon songs and brawls in the Cabaret two yards off ; then morning chicory and water, and 8 o'clock start for Nohant. Our host was the intimate friend of George Sand, a Berrichon like a foaming bottle of French wine, who called us ' mes enfants ' ; and he drove us in the same Americaine in which he had driven her constantly to and from Nohant. An Americaine, let me tell you, is a kind of run-to-seed buggy with the front of a cart and the other half a landau. It took us at a trot through page after page of her books ; past wide and gentle sweeps of country — generous uplands and rich meadows — with the charming Indre at every turn, fragrant hedgerows, grey-green oat-fields thronged with poppies and cornflowers — whilst gardeuses de troupeaux, knitting as they walked after their flocks or sate beneath clumps of elder, met the eye constantly, their hair covered by the square white bonnet she so often describes. Sometimes it was a cartful of laughing Berrichons who crossed our road, their sunny

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faces full of traditions and honesty and shrewdness. Every- body who spoke to us of George Sand talked as if she had died yesterday. Our driver said he used to see her almost daily in the lanes. ' Elle marchait a travers les champs — toujours comme ga ' (wide gesture of the arms), in her man's clothes unless she was on the high-road, * et toujours, toujours une cigarette a la bouche.' He and his wife had been real comrades of hers. ' Elle venait chez nous pour tout ; elle menait un grand train, souvent 25 pour le diner. " Avez-vous des ecrevisses pour moi aujourd'hui, mes amis ? " elle demandait, et elle prenait ce qu'elle voulait.' The wife dwelt most on the ' grand train ' of her existence, but the man had accepted her personality and her genius, if not as God made them, at any rate as a pro- duction peculiar to Berri in which he had a share. What was striking was that everybody spoke of her as one of them, greater than they but quite as much a Berrichon as a celebrity, and as giving much employment to all the country-side. ' Ah, elle faisait du bien, celle-la, il y avait toujours des gens qui allaient et venaient de Paris.' Our host had driven Alexandre Dumas Fils, Theophile Gautier (je 1'ai connu bien, celui-la), Victor Hugo, another whose name ended in o — he could get no nearer than that — et tout ga. He showed us the actual Mill of Angibeau, as white as the Berri cows which pasture everywhere ; and then came the vine-covered Cabaret where she took her 8 A.M. glass of wine, during her morning stroll.

Nohant itself is all that one has fancied, and much more lovable than imagination could make it — a long low ram- bling white house with a grey slate roof and a comfortable rather ramshackle (or rather ungirt) look. The garden is a delightful mixture of potager and wood, with one long path untidily edged by roses, pinks, columbines and sweet- briar, at the end of which are two small rustic benches without backs and opposite each other, embodying in their

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every inch untold hours of absorbing topics, and evidently expressly intended for G. S. and (let us say) Flaubert. Near this comes a large yard and then a charming broad grassy plot, studded by huge elms. Here she used to make the village lads and lasses dance to the comemuse. It is surrounded on three sides by tumbledown farm-buildings. Behind the flower-walk is the little family burial-ground. Her tomb has a simple slab with ' Georges Sand ' — nothing more — written on it; the 8th of June had been her birth- day, and the slab was piled high with wreaths. The graves of Maurice and two grandchildren are there too. Maurice's widow and her two daughters, Aurore and Lucie, live there, but are absent just now. Aurore is artistic, and is said to look like her grandmother.

One of the most vivid things was the village Cabaret where George Sand used to go every night with her com- rades, and for which she had painted a sign-board (very badly) ; a house with ' Si nous allions boire une bouteille ' written underneath. It is kept by an old crone who had been her waiting-maid for years and had served at table. 4 Ah, je Vaimais,' she said, ' elle etait bonne envers tous . . . non, non, elle n'etait pas coquette, pas du tout ; elle se coiffait tout simplement en bandeaux comme mes sreurs, j'en avais seize, moi (here followed spasmodic photographs of sisters in groups). Seulement quand le Prince Napoleon ou peut-etre M. Dumas venait, elle mettait une belle robe et se coiffait tres-bien.' The gardener, who had been her farm-man, showed us a little old summer-house where she sometimes sat up all night writing, and told us that she had ' toujours etc bonne et juste envers ses gens, quoiqu'elle avait 1'abord un peu rude.'

I must cease these emotions, and wish I had left room to describe our lovely Chateaux — Chinon, Azay-le-rideau, Usse, Langeais, or the Library of Tours where I read to-day, 01 the Cathedral.

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22

WE have been choosing a hedge to protect our border. I wish you knew the charming nursery-gardener we deal with, a regular Surrey pippin, always emitting unconscious proverbs, who speaks of his plants as ' he ' or ' she.' Yester- day he showed us a weeping beech. ' You wouldn't believe it,' he said, ' wot that tree was ; he would not do nohow ; we tried him flat, we tried him upright ; then sudden we put him on a stand and tried him as a weeper, and he 's done beautiful.' Isn't this like a certain sort of human being ? I can count the ones who can't lie flat or stand upright, but do beautiful as weepers. (1898.)

23

IN the National Gallery I chiefly gave myself up to Piero della Francesca. How subtle and how naif he is, both at once ! He seems to foreshadow the moderns in his love of the queer type, and in seeing what he painted in a way that belongs to a special attitude of mind. What an appeal- ing attitude ! And what a world of difference between him and them ! He gives us beauty, and his love of the strange comes from fresh morning senses, not from restless and sated ones.

Certainly the outburst of the Italian painters has no counterpart for simultaneousness except in our Elizabethan outburst. Both keep the same glorious level for their second-rates. So many could paint one picture or one figure in a picture, could write one poem or play or one passage in it, that belong to the best, if they could not keep up their highest level for long. Sustained fertility at the highest level must be the mark of the Titans alone, and even they have their more or less. (1898.)

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24

THE sweet little class has just departed. B. arrived, very alert historically and covered with aspinall physically, as she had been blacking soldiers. H. and G. discussed Drake's morals deliriously, and appealed to B. as umpire ; she was modest but decided in Drake's favour. C. only answers questions connected with the Magellan Straits. The class might really have been defined to-day as a game of Ducks and Drake. (1899.)

25

I HAVE been finishing my book [Women and Men of the French Renaissance], and I blush to think how much it means to me. I shall indeed feel rewarded if you find an improvement. The older one grows the more one finds the great secret in art and in life is the same one — to forget self, or rather lose yourself that you may find yourself. And the work of the mediocre with the wish to write — like myself — is to sacrifice anything and everything to the subject in hand.

The Rabelais chapter was a joy to work at, and I enjoyed Ronsard and Du Bellay. (1900.)

26

I HAVE just been wandering in exquisite Corot and Diaz woods and meadows and along the banks of a perfect Daubigny river — a land which is, alas, to vanish this week. Mary actually consented to come with me, and what I am fullest of is the new Piero di Cosimo which we saw first in Ryder Street, the battle of the Centaurs — very exciting, full of fantastic beauty and fantastic ugliness and intel- lectual wine — altogether the quintessence of the Renais- sance spirit. We looked at it for half an hour to the tune of Roger Fry's charming and humorous comments.

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The Robe Rouge was very enjoyable last night — a fine literary satire by Brieux on the administration of Law in France. Rejane's acting was very fine, though perhaps a shade too violent, as the peasant woman ruined by Justice. . . . How is it that French actors can put worldly success or failure into their very beards and whiskers — simply through some actor's mastery of expression ? The whiskers of the magistrate who cannot rise because he is honest were a study of dejection. (1902.)

27

I HAVE been enormously uplifted by reading the Life of Pasteur . . . the most Christ-like life it has been my fortune to meet. His endless, victorious struggle with suffering and disease for Humanity's sake, his simple patience and infinite compassion, his intense faith in God and the Life Eternal, make it a holy book and a much richer one than the lives of other men of science.

Nothing helps sorrow — does it ? — like goodness and your l healing Nature ; words, even words of prayer, are bound to ring thin at moments, often for much longer . . . and how well do I realise that sense of futility which comes and overwhelms you. But the life of Love and the Permanence of Love are always there, often powerless to the eye, never really so, and ever surrounding even the poor body with kingly dignity. (1902.)

28

THE two things that strike me most about people just now are their incapability of changing and their faculty for surprise at nothing at all, at utterly unimportant coinci- dences, while they are quite unaffected by the really sur- prising things of life — the sky and the trees and our own stolidity, and the extraordinary temperings of the wind to

1 [The letter was written to Mary Coleridge.]

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the shorn lambs, and the marvellous way in which one year is made utterly different to another — and the patience of God and the presumption of us mannikins. And this dis- proportionate surprise is offensive because it is a sort of vulgar relation to Awe and Reverence, keeping some sort of outward resemblance to them but losing all their soul and dignity. (1902.)

29

ROME.

IT was beautiful on Christmas Eve to drive along the Appian Way, by crumbling walls of giant girth, sad tombs standing out against the silver sky in the silver and brown ocean of the Campagna, with all the mystery of Rome pressing on one's soul, yet enchanting it. There we met a Cardinal in scarlet stockings hobnobbing with his coachman, and that is the most Christian sight we have seen. ... I can pray better in the Coliseum than in St. Peter's unless I am just under Michael Angelo's Pieta. But what was really sweet was hearing the children ' preach,' one after the other, on their traditional wooden rostrum at Ara Coeli — tiny curates of four and five, briskly reciting their hymns to the Manger ; and getting nervous ; and smiling and shaking their heads ; and being lifted from the pulpit by their waiting congregation of parents — such dear shepherds and Madonnas and St. Elizabeths from the Campagna, all so devout and at home in their vast candle-lit temples. God bless you all in 1904. (1903.)

30

DRESDEN.

I HAVE been to the Meistersinger with Scheidemantel singing. I have sate in the 1.50 Mark gallery next a fat lady in a plaid-silk blouse, who perpetually said ' Ach Gott, es zieht,' and rushed out to shut all the doors of that suffocating but

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happy place. I have adored the pictures ; I have bought toys and Wunder-Knauel from a woman like a lighted Christmas-tree ; I have bought cakes for three pence from a woman like a delicious bun ; I have become so absorbed in contemplating a drab-flannel jacket with a saque, marked ' Hochst Modern,' that I was nearly run over by a Stadts- Tram — I have in short led the Dresden life. One of the things that has fascinated me most is that magic collection of Chinese China — its heart-searching colours, and fairy- like charm, and Great-Mogul vases, dead-blue and lilac and gold. Those jars look for all the world like wicked potentates condemned to stand on shelves, transformed — superb and impotent.

The latest chic among the Dresden ladies is to dress like travelling-bags neatly trimmed with straps. I actually saw one in a dark green Russia-leather collar and revers. The waiters, in face and manner, have been influenced by China of a bad period, and mince and flourish like commercial little shepherds. This hotel is in the pocket of the Opera and of the Picture Gallery, and looks upon the river with its evening stream of lights, like an urban heaven of sweet sophisticated stars.

Prague was grim and fascinating — like a wild and fasci- nating person with a secret grudge. One wants to leave it at once, and yet it haunts one. I felt this especially in the Jewish Cemetery — the oldest, proudest and most desolate place I have seen. It gave me a strange feeling to stand at the tombstone of our tribe, 900 A.D., and see its symbol (each headstone has the name in a picture, the name never written) ; in our case (the tribe of Levi) a tall jug — which it pleased me to fancy was for ever full. The sign of those learned in the Talmud is a bunch of grapes. The oldest scholar's grave is 600 A.D., and heaven knows how many great old Rabbis lie there, memorable and forgotten, below their stone clusters of fruits. The sign of Aaron's tribe is

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two hands, and Mr. Hahn lies interred beneath a crowing cock.

And the wind and the rain were sobbing all round the place, and all the melancholy of my race seemed to rise up and answer them. (1905.)

31

PADUA.

WE are just back from a divine day at Castelfranco. Giorgione's picture glowed in the mellow light, the St. George and his armour so vital with beauty that he made every- thing out of the picture seem mere shadow. The Madonna on her throne is so beautiful that the restoration doesn't seem to matter so much as I dreaded, and the whole is such a heaven of tone and harmony as one could never realise from any description. Then we had coffee in the sun- flooded street, opposite the great red-brick city-wall, with a tide of burning creeper flowing over it ; and so back through the little tiny New Jerusalem, with the sunset over the Alps and over the grape-hung festoons that link the mulberry-trees together, while here and there were groups of graceful peasants garnering in their vintage.

To-morrow we go for the day to Vicenza and pursue Montagna, that most fascinating painter, in his own Palla- dian city.

Padua is entirely sympathetic. Every stone seem sim- printed with learning, the glorious early-morning learning of the first Renaissance, when every scholar came here to learn with all the force of maturity and the passionate curiosity of youth. There on their tombs they still look forth from sunny cloisters and shady churches, sculptured at their desks or in their pulpits with square caps and University robes. (1906.)

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32

MANTUA.

A LUCKY star guided us at Mantua, for directly we arrived we sailed out into the great mere that surrounds it, and into depths of sunset amid fantastic armies of bulrushes and fleets of water-lily leaves — rose-fire above and below us, every spike and blade reflected also, and behind us the city wrapped in deep blue mist : then the sharp crescent of the moon above and below, and the evening star like a spiral flame (by some secret of refraction), and so back by moon- light— a most weird enchanted impression. We seemed to have seen the ghost of the city of Mantua before we saw its dead and cold body. (1906.)

88

1 HAVE finished the appetising Fenelon. What a Frenchman he is — the very root of all the spiritual chic in the R. C. Church which some find so alluring ! Yet his central doctrine that love is all — that it is not the path we tread that matters, but the foot that treads it — is beautiful, wise and consoling. All the same, the path that he trod was a little slippery sometimes. He had, I think, in petto both Montaigne (as to sense and wit, but the wit is sharper than in Montaigne) and St. Francois de Sales, but no Pascal. What do you think of his ' Our days are short, but our hours are long ' ? A profound saying, I think. (1907.)

LIFE certainly does seem the most hateful of things ; but au fond it isn't. It will always be lovable because of love, will it not ? And, after all, duty is only love hardened and extended beyond the personal sphere. I suppose we don't easily grasp, in earlier life at least, that love is a hard

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discipline — both love of God and love of man, and that it leads us into dark places while it glorifies them. It certainly makes us stick to our post.

Sometimes it seems to me as if life and this planet meant a long duel between God and Nature ; as if hitherto omni- potence had been incompatible with all-goodness, and God has renounced Power in order to be Goodness itself ; as if omnipotence and goodness could only be one when man himself had grown perfect and stood on the confines of infinity — and then Nature would be conquered by God, and happiness would begin ; so that perhaps we are building up God's omnipotence by our bitter combat. Man, at all events, seems to go through some such struggle, and for ever provides the field on which Nature and the Spirit fight for victory. And each advance that he makes is a fresh victory over matter, so that perhaps, in the most mysterious trials of all and the dustiest, the spirit is going strongest by the very awfulness of the wrestling. Anyhow, or so it seems to me, we must stick by our own spirits in the conflict.

Forgive this rhodomontade. When one tries to express definitely what one means, which is inexpressible, one always ends by writing apparent nonsense. (1908.)

85

AT St. Thomas's I found the Brave, walking on

two arms, shawl-less, across the yard to the Hospital, like a Vi-Queen, after an operation. The Hospital (not the Nursing Home) Christmas was one of the most beautiful sights aesthetically as well as spiritually that I have ever seen. The Babies' Ward made me feel choky. In the middle was an immense Tree of the Knowledge of Sweet- ness and Light, and the highly-polished floor reflected the lights as if it were water. And in the midst of these opal

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pools of light sate bunches of babies in spotless white shawls, like clustered Bambini-angels, all round little low tea-tables, each presided over by an older baby pouring out tea. Round the room were the beds, full of prostrate cherubs, too ill to get up ; before them trays laden with presents ; and here and there the house-surgeons hi white linen coats, beaming and ministering, did not look so very unlike the Saints.

Everywhere down the long shadowy corridors — like aisles of some great Church of Humanity — one caught vistas of other Wards, their floors also a mirror of colour and misty brilliance ; and outside through the windows across the grey river there moved, as if in space, fresh bunches of luminous grapes, borne apparently by huge chariots which turned out to be Trams or Buses. (1908.)

86

I HAVE no business to have dumps after the Hippocrene elixir of Anatole France last night — wine of the Gods, or rather music. Wit hardly seems the word for the con- tinuous warm tempered light which flowed from him — never flashing or spasmodic, but like nature itself.

I agree with every word you say about Anatole France and the metallic quality in him. My mind enjoys his Hippocrene when my soul and heart rebel and hate. But he is so much bigger than his books. I went only expect- ing amusement, and was not prepared for a man who seemed pushed by some force outside himself, instead of by talent inside. And he looks like a Don Quixote who cannot be Don Quixote because he cannot take windmills for any- thing but what they are. His eyes are sad, but he has a smile like winter sunshine over a frosty landscape. And his voice is like a violin. And I am like a fiddle-de-dee. (1912.)

D

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87

To come back to Law, I agree with every word you say, and you hit upon the passages I love best in the Liberal and Mystical Writings.1 I quite agree with you that these later writings grew out of the earlier ones, and that his capitula- tion to Boehme was natural growth and not conversion. I suspect the intellectual side of him was too monochrome, too much wanting in imaginative power outside religion, to make him understand the true relation of the mind to God. Nearly all mystics seem to me weak in this, that they exclude the fact that we owe all our powers to God — that the holy thing is to turn them towards Him and bathe them in His light, not to get rid of them ; and that it is in using them thus that we can make goodness attrac- tive, not by stripping our beings. That is only a short cut. Tolstoi makes the same mistake, and it is bound to end in a certain loss of force. As you say, it needs a very holy man to throw away knowledge. Law could do it, but who shall say that Law, whose path was light, would not have shed his light more widely had he given it more channels ? It always makes me uneasy when inspiring writers leave out the sense of beauty. But ' stars are of mighty use,' and Law is a star. And he has got hold of the great truth that being is the main business of life, and that deeds only count when they spring from being. I think I tend to believe that mystics are born mystics : St. Theresa, St. Augustine, that (to me) most tiresome Juliana of Norwich, and St. Catherine of Siena. I don't count Madame Guyon. She seems to me a kind of manufactured mystic and rather smack-worthy ! Of course there must be many who come to the mystic faith after much experience, but don't you think that the seed was lying passive far down in their

1 [Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law, ed. Scott Palmer and Du Bose, 1908.]

51

souls till life brought it forth ? If it is grown from experi- ence, then it is to be ranked with other structural growths. But if it is really vision — God-given — then there is more in it. Only to me that kind of vision appears to be given to so very few, and then it is a fountain of life, not a rule of conduct. It seems to me, as does all exceptional truth, like Rabelais' wine in the temple of Bacbuc, which the priestess gave alike to all seekers of her altar, but which tasted different to the lips of each. . . . What a bore I am. — Forgive me !

Here we are in detestable Switzerland on the way to adorable Italy. I can't bear its ugly beauty. I like ugly ugliness and beautiful ugliness, but not ugly beauty. (1912.)

38

PERUGIA.

I SHOULD like to be able to send you a slice of the celestial Valley of Perugia which I see from my window. To the east Assisi shines like a pearl upon the hill girt with vineyards. The vintage has begun. Piero della Francesca men and women stand like kings and queens upon ladders, and throw down the heavy purple bunches, and little Bacchuses of four with tiny Ariadnes leap about crowned with vine- leaves and shout something very like lo to the jolly lean black pigs which they herd. One's soul becomes one's senses here. It is very agreeable.

One of the most blessed things we did was to drive to the Monte Cavale and sit there. Every inch of mountain- path and brown earth and violet valley we looked at had been trodden by St. Francis's feet, and the air, too, is still alive with tales of his miracles — puerile often, heavenly also ; and they and the little cell and the silent rocks are still aggrandised by his faith — a greater miracle than all the miracles. It was a pendant to our day at Port Royal. And what a South Pole to Pascal's North Pole (ice burns,

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so the N. P. is all right for Pascal) ! I do so like your calling Pascal a Matterhorn. I wish the light had made him happier. I always feel, but I say it in abject humility, that he made one terrible mistake — he hated evil more than he loved his fellows. And his invention of the Omnibus for the poor, always cited as a proof of his ' Agape,' does not mend matters at all. In one way I feel as if he were like Tolstoi ; he vents his repentance for his own sins upon mankind, and lays down methods very suitable to those who have intel- lectual pride, but not the rest. Yet nothing, nothing, beats the Pensees, and I well understand bearing them when one can bear nothing else. If only he and St. Francis could be welded together ! For St. F. leaves out the mind, and prob- ably doesn't help those whose minds get in the way of their loving their brethren. In the letter that was living in the depths of my trunk when I last wrote, you said so truly that goodness must seem a difficult thing till it is found, and then it would seem the simplest. And that applies to St. Francis, but not to Pascal, who never found goodness simple and never quite found it. St. Francis was certainly a mystic who did apply his mysticism to conduct. I quite agree with what you say of the need of ' daily bread unity ' as one gets older, and I rather suspect mysticism ought to work as unconsciously as love — as a presence which makes action vital, not as a creed. Isn't mysticism like wine, only dangerous when we drink it without food ? Every Sacra- mental thought should be made of bread and wine together. It (mysticism) might easily degenerate into a short cut to goodness, and mistake monotony for unity. ... I expect that the whole awful secret of life lies in the true placing of being and doing. The average man overrates doing, and the mystics see this and, knowing that being is the main thing, they virtually make it the only one. I do feel as if they had got hold of a truer end of life than the Christian- job end. (1912.)

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39

BOROO SAN SEPOLCRO.

You cannot think what a sensation is Monte Casale with its Monastery built on to the little stone hermitage hewn out of the rock, to which St. Francis came after the Stigmata. There you find him on the rude steep little staircase leading up to the stone where he slept, with the great wooden Madonna he brought with him and his rough primitive Crucifix still there. And those big bare mountain-tops, those boulders round which blue butterflies play, the whole landscape austere yet smiling, is so wonderfully like him. Not an inch of ground that he looked upon, either on the heights or in the valley below, that had not been trodden upon by his unwearying feet. Borgo was the last place he stayed at before he returned to die at Assisi.

I saw a large brown butterfly in Franciscan dress embrace a blue thistle. And now we are in divine Perugia, and our walk in the valley yesterday was enough to make one cry for beauty. Why is one so piercingly happy in Italy ? One's senses become one's soul, and one's soul one's senses, and the weary old battle between them ceases to be.

I send you three Umbrian Angels to take care of your year. (1912.)

40

BARMOOK CASTLE.

SUCH an exciting arrival at Berwick, still quite light at 9.30, the hills and Abbey-towers silver and grey, and the broad stately river flowing silver under the strong grey spanning bridges — all force and beauty. It is such a congenial town to me, the town of middle-age, brave and strong and come unto itself — grey without gloom, silver- grey indeed with lights of its own, still full of contrasts but without violence, large in its outlook, fortified enough, but not walled.

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It looked unearthlily beautiful as I sped through it in the motor, and so did the long Northumberland roads encased in full-blossomed hawthorn all silvery in the twilight ; silver, too, the little fairy rabbits that sate in the wood with the motor-light full on them, and scuttled off like elves of the North to their homes in the down-like fields. Thrilling was the first sight of the sea over which the Danes once came sailing — a grim, dim, resolute sea ; and thrilling the sight of Durham Cathedral from the train, where I dined in the Restaurant off fried leather. At Berwick the motor (con- ducted by an angel of a chauffeur who will, I hope, drive me on the Last Day) conveyed me to this haven of goodness and pleasure, where I 'm being degenerately pampered. (1912.)

41

E. and I have both absorbed with deep interest the Rutherford Paper. He interests me more and more. His mind was so strangely morbid for its vigour — a remarkable vigour. And he is always as sincere as man can be, and never sentimental — another spiritual feat in a man of his

introspective faculty. was describing to me his

impression of M. R. It 's a curious game to take the two men who have tried to talk quite sincerely in these last twenty years — the one with reverence, the other without — and to reflect that, on the whole, they sum up this generation

— Mark Rutherford and Samuel Butler, I mean. thinks

their faces alike. Are they ? They both strip their thought naked ; at least old Butler thought he did, but he often put on petticoats of wit again, without knowing it. But M. R. has suffered so much more in his heart, and S. B. in his vanity, that the analogy has to stop.

Yet S. B. was at something serious even when he most tried to shock — like a Frenchman ; and he had a passion for truth — or perhaps it was a loathing for falsehood, rather

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a different thing and less sympathetic ? M. R. had the passion for truth.

42

I AM particularly grateful for Mark Rutherford in this Valhalla.1 All round me are sprawling the inmates — the larvae of living beings — who literally sit all day doing nothing, only stirring their spines when they hear the gong or are told of something to be bought cheaper somewhere than somewhere else. We have been celebrating the Lord's Day by eating more and better than on other days, and I am writing in what I call the Cattery, presided over by two old spinsters (we call them Castor Oil and Pollux) who look as if they were holding Life in their pursed-up mouths and found it nasty, but were too genteel to put it out. Now two French folk, living, I think, in sin for purely business purposes (a hairdresser's firm or the like), are quarrelling about some very concrete point and are alive enough to be refreshing ; at any rate they do mind when the pepper- box doesn't pepper. (1913.)

43

IT seems to me that Mark Rutherford was so personal a man chiefly from his dependence on human sympathy, and also from the inrootedness of his early soaking in the per- sonal religious atmosphere of Evangelicalism ; and that he rather confused the issues of the word ' personal ' and stuck to our present sense-bound — at any rate limited — definition. But if we believe anything to be beyond us — as I do — we must believe that our perception of the personal will change ; that it will be, perhaps, nearer to what we now call the impersonal, though infinitely warmer, and that we shall awake in its likeness, and not miss what we now feel

1 [A hotel.]

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as if we should miss so badly. I wish we had more words. The essential seems to me the truly personal, and whatever there is of essence in us is surely here and now immortal, much more then and there as well as here. (1913.)

44

I FIND Lady Ponsonby, the wise judge, the firm Liberal, more and more delightful. At last one feels she is growing old — she is eighty-two. She is like a fine flame kindled by sea-logs and sandal-wood — good to watch and good to warm the mind at and the heart too.

I have met such a charming Director of * Le vieux Colombier ' Company, who has offered me seats whenever I go to Paris. How pleasant it is to talk fluent and incom- prehensible bad French with one who does not frown or move a polite muscle. (March, 1914.)

45

I AM a heretic, you know, and it seems to me that all who call Christ Master with adoration of that life are of the same band, whatever the view taken of the manner in which that life came to us. The spiritual miracle of it was — is — greater than all miracles, as Emily Lawless says so well ; and it has never seemed to me that whence Christ was should so trouble men, when what Christ was is so all-important, so compelling, so life-filling. (June, 1914.)

46

HUMBLY and passionately I dare call him Master. And I can't say more than that. The immanence of God and the life of Christ are my treasures. They warm existence and help one's worst hours. Buddha, Socrates, Mahomet, all the long chain of revelations of God so dear to the Broad

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 57

(and rightly), do rank for me hi a long chain of evolution, bat they seem the more to show how much greater, wanner, more mysterious, more near to God Christ was. They never make one glow. (July, 1914.)

47

{The foUcnting short extracts care not in chronological order. The fir nt taso come from an address to young people gixen in 1912, the rest from letters.]

I WANT to lay stress upon the importance of the Graces, and upon their sincerity. They are only insincere when they express nothing behind them and become gentilities. But gentilities are only the poor relations of the Graces. The real Graces smooth and sweeten Kfe as much as the baskets of daffodils and hyacinths at the street-corners in the spring-time. They are generosities — something that we give beyond that which is exacted of us : they are part of the fine art of living.

WE all think a great deal now of the health of our bodies, and of the importance of opening our windows and airing our rooms. I wish we thought as much of airing our imaginations. To me poetry is just like that. It is like opening the window daily, and looking out, and letting in the air and the sunlight into an otherwise stuffy little room ; and if I cannot read some poetry in the day I feel more uncomfortable than I can tell you.

WHAT a curious feeling it is when a book finds you out and knows you better than your family and friends !

THERE is nothing one is so impatient with as one's own foibles when one sees them in others.

58 NEW AND OLD

I FEEL a great wish to see again, only probably it would

not be so nice. Those meetings don't repeat themselves. A strange Maeterlinck-like fact about intercourse is that people never know when they really do something for one, because, perhaps, they are only being something that comes naturally to them ; deeds are so often cross.

SHE is indeed a tangled skein of shreds of immortality. If one could only unravel her and wind her into a tiny ball !

As for that novel, I can only feel again that, to approach the deepest tragedies in humanity, one must either be entirely and diabolically an artist and the heart must be out of it, as in the case of Maupassant (and then one hates it), or must be supremely pitiful. I can't bear such a deep gulf sounded with a mere fishing-rod instead of with a plummet.

IT seems to me rather curious that the silent worship of the Quakers encloses much the same idea as a passage of George Sand's on prayer — and she the most unquakerish person that ever existed ! She never feels so worshipful as when silence is made for her, at sunset or in the pauses of nature when she is waiting for the Fiat of God.

[Christmas Day.] I have just come back from Church. As I heard the Athanasian Creed sung in the highest of spirits in that prosperous Church, I felt life rather an untidy hash till I remembered that the one force that gave it unity was Love, and that Love ran through the day and the sordid church, and through all that was best inside those sealskin- jacketed Mamas and blowsy old gentlemen.

ALL the clergymen in the world cannot make one disbelieve in God,

EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS 59

[Christmas Day.] Surely, surely, however Christ is looked upon, if the life be looked upon at all, the world may rejoice in it to-day, in the ineffable wisdom, the bound- less love for love's sake, the deep humility which alone is true dignity, the ideal so divine and so human that it compels sanctity. Never was there a Personality that so consecrated the obvious or made the ideal so much a matter of every day.

WHEN we lose ourselves and find ourselves we find God ; and negations, like death, vanish before Him. We seem to find Him in such strange ways — in the lowest depths as much as in the highest heights — through badness, through goodness — any way so long as it is real.

TENNYSON is a great witness to immortality, for he has passed through the high tide of sorrow and sees things as they are. He is a seer seeing, not only a poetic soul dallying with truth, all feeh'ng and no reason. Perhaps it is when the heart thinks that the greatest truths are come by ; at any rate it is the men who have written their conviction straight from the fire of pain that are the best comrades in grief.

THE only comfort, I should say the only rampart, is one's passionate conviction of an Infinite Mystery, of the truth we dare not profane by intimate explanation, — that loss of life here may mean gain of fuller and intenser life there, in the next stage towards God ; that Carlyle's ' Everlasting Yea ' is affirmative and therefore Life, and not ' der Geist der stets verneint ' and therefore destruction ; and that the very powers of enjoyment and vividness which give the sting to death may be the powers which alone can give full realisation of the free-er, less entangled, life that our beloveds even now are leading.

60 NEW AND OLD

I CAN only pray for you — not that He will take away the pain which is part of love and the tax of mortality, but that He may give you His and your best consolation, the life of love with all it brings, compared to which all else is as the * shadow of a magnitude.'

GRIEF is a most sacred possession and belongs to the back of one's soul, and becomes part of one, behind life, a holy place where one can sit apart. And, to ' make the best of life,' one must remember Death, for that means Love and memory. Do what one will, Death has so much of one's ' best ' that one dare not touch life without it.

GRIEF is a strange country — is it not ? — with its own ebb and flow, its own radiance from the past, so that some days, those upon which one lights on a forgotten memory, seem almost festal, like summer.

How the happiness of those we have loved and lost grows more and more vital to us, their unhappiness less 1 I suppose it is happiness which is real life, and we must will through to it even here.

THOUGHTS1

WE should rather be Life's good comrades than its passion- ate lovers ; neither easily offended, nor imagining evil, yet not taking its affairs too lightly. Let us hold Life faithfully by the hand, loving it through fair and ill repute ; as good travellers, grumbling little, praising much, and sharing sun and shadow and wayside inns.

Life exacts good manners. If we importune her with demands, she treats us like poor relations. If we smile at her coldness, she smiles back again.

3

The art of living is an effort to gain style, to know where to express and where restrain. In this we only follow Nature, who strives to win beauty and order by unceasing experiments in giving forth and in elimination.

4

Mind is the best screen to hold between the emotions and life.

***

1 [These are taken from two notebooks, and, as far as might be, arranged. See Introduction, p. 5.]

61

63 NEW AND OLD

5

In a changeful world, a person with an unchanging heart has no choice but to become a poet or a bore.

6 Youth goes ; childhood need never be lost.

In youth there is a period of discomfort, because then the whole battery of a man's energies, meant for many, is directed upon himself.

8

Whilst we walk through the Valley of Youth, its beauty, its variety, its pleasant greensward and dancing lights and shadows, make us forget that it lies low. As we climb into Middle Age the road is steep, but we know that each step takes us nearer the sun.

9

The power of being amused is the power of middle-age, and to be content with being amused where we should once have intensely enjoyed is the first sign that youth is past.

10

The aim of middle life should be to cut one's coat accord- ing to one's cloth. The point is to be a good tailor and to have a distinguished cut.

11 (For my thirtieth birthday.)

It is not enough to accept the present ; we should welcome it with hospitality.

THOUGHTS 6S

12

(For my fortieth birthday.)

Life is sometimes delightful, often disgusting, always infinitely worth living.

13

It is more difficult to love well as we grow older. Our conception of love becomes bigger and our sensibility acuter, because they are no longer blinded by the glorious egoism of youth.

14

The person who only regards one Tense of Life is bound in some degree to lose sanity.

15

The dangerous moment in life comes when men begin to over-value the past at the expense of the present. It is the moment for religious controversies, for ancestor-worship, for narrowing in, for exalting one set of people and excluding another. When we reach it, it means that we are growing old. But we need never reach it.

16

You must have been happy before you can give happiness.

17

When happiness has once sat upon the hearth, the fire is always alight.

18

The secret of happiness, as of art, lies in circumscription, in the power to confine an infinite idea within right limits.

64 NEW AND OLD

Men must learn to restrain happiness within the boundaries of pleasure, as surely as music and poetry are fenced in by the laws of composition. But confinement must not be- come imprisonment, or the idea will lose life and stiffen into formalism.

19

The most mortal blunders in life arise from the confusion of pleasure with happiness.

20

Enjoyment should not be the screen by which we shelter our eyes from the light, but the sunshine which warms our blood.

21

Enjoyment lies in a sense of the value of what is enjoyed ; it implies the power of seriousness. Frivolity implies an ignorance of enjoyment, together with the show of it.

* *

22

Les hommes marchent, les f emmes sautent. Elles arrivent done plus vite au bout, mais en ne se rendant pas compte du chemin.

28

II y a une difference prof onde entre les amities des hommes et celles des femmes. Les hommes sont lies par leurs plaisirs, les femmes par leurs chagrins.

24

C'est peut-6tre une ordonnance de Dieu que les femmes ne peuvent etre Pretres, puisqu'elles ont deja, un peu trop, la nature des Pretres, et par leurs qualites et par leurs defauts.

THOUGHTS 65

Les femmes naissent le plus souvent directrices devouees, casuistes exaltees. Les meilleures sont nees avec le besoin d'ecouter les confessions, de guerir, d'aider, de veiller sur les ames. Dieu leur en a donne un brevet naturel. II ne veut pas qu'elles se formalisent, qu'elles se petrissent dans une hierarchic.

25

When good women love power they generally confound it with the power of doing good.

26

The art of painting does not offer women the same kind of opportunity for their special endowments — those of critics and interpreters rather than of originators — as that of poetry, intense and personal poetry, and of novel- writing ; still less

does music.

* *

27

There are two sorts of people, those who want to be like their kind and those who want to be different from it.

28

Some people add to the depth of life, others to its bright- ness. And brightness is not necessarily more shallow than the depths — only more accessible.

29

Some people are like life-buoys, and weather the storm by dancing over the waves ; others are like the spars of a wreck lying tragically in mid-ocean for others to cling to. But more men are helped by the life-buoy, and wisdom is with the dancers.

66 NEW AND OLD

30

Every deep nature has its stupidity, but to be absolutely clever is to be shallow-souled. The world wounded Pascal when it made Voltaire laugh.

31

There are people who always want to cut your coat according to their cloth.

32

Dull people are without an atmosphere. Therefore persons (among them many philanthropists) who are all character and no temperament are often the dullest of all.

33

II y a des personnes comme des albums, dans lesquels tout le monde ecrit. Tout le monde croit aimer Palbum, tandis qu'en verite il n'aime que ce qu'il y a inscrit.

84

Small people make small things into mysteries and explain away the mystery of big things.

85

To the superficial everything is superficial.

86

There is nothing that cannot be imagined by people of no imagination.

37

Civilisation provides a vast apparatus of mechanical facilities for the unimaginative.

THOUGHTS 67

38

It is dangerous to sanity when perceptive people have no imagination.

39

Frivolity is the art of avoiding set ties and lasting emotions.

40

Educated people often deceive themselves and others by putting business as a screen between their eyesight and reality. A Committee may be as frivolous as a gaming- table.

41

Work is a natural appetite of mankind ; even the most frivolous make a business of pleasure.

42

It is the intellectual and the frivolous who feel the need of conversation. The majority — the practical — seek col- leagues rather than friends.

43

Talkers may be divided into those who wish to be amused and those who wish to be interested. If the two moods clash friction or boredom must ensue.

44

The power of self-expression is the essential thing in intercourse ; language is only the lesser part of it.

45

Free-trade in intercourse is the only law of companion- ship. A bore is a person who breaks it.

68 NEW AND OLD

46

There is nothing that can spring such a gulf between one man and another as a laugh ; nothing that can so bridge it over as a tear.

47

Laughter partakes of the nature of what is laughed at.

* *

48

If we take people wisely as they are, we go far towards making them what they should be.

49

j^Too much admiration judges more truly of character than too much severity. The former wakens possibilities of good ; the latter rouses faults that need never have appeared.

50

In philanthropy one must go on believing oneself to be of use in order to become so, on the same principle that one pursues in religion, acting its central truths as if they had already been proved, and thus alone verifying them.

***

51

The danger of the enthusiastic temperament is an un- conscious exactingness from the bodies and spirits of others. The danger of the lymphatic temperament is to confound philosophy with indifference, and calm with a shrinking from emotion. The best things in the world spring from the union of both elements in one person.

THOUGHTS 69

52

A man's most dangerous fortress is his arm-chair, his most dangerous moment when he has no wish while sitting in it.

53

The calm which is reposeful is the calm of victory. It is force at rest.

54

Stillness is a force when it implies poise ; otherwise it is stagnation.

55

Most people who think that they love liberty love no more than the choice of their chain.

56

He who really loves liberty must walk alone.

57

The service of an idea is cloistral. It needs vocation ; it needs the austerity of a novitiate to prove its reality.

58

The only practical man is he who can attempt the impossible.

59

Moving off the rails may be better than not moving at all.

60

The man who is in the swim is one who does not get out of his depth. He is concerned with his own strokes and with the current. The drowning man knows more of the waters beneath, and of the sky above his head*

70 NEW AND OLD

61

Those who depend on what 4 people ' think, depend on the thought of those who do not think.

62 Les bien-pensants sont souvent ceux qui ne pensent pas.

68

What we do not believe is of no importance. The secret of life is to discover what we believe.

64

The part of a man's beliefs which is based upon disillu- sion is not the valuable part of them.

65

A cynic is one who assigns unworthy causes to great things.

66

Some men are born and some are made cynics. The natural cynic is far worse to deal with than the man who has become one through disappointment. La Rochefoucauld was more immovable than Swift.

* *

67

Hope is Faith in action.

68

The world is riddled by fear. Men fear their souls and their bodies ; they fear Love and God. The laws of morality only mean extended fear, and the earth will not grow better until fear turns into love,

THOUGHTS 71

69

Most of the confusions of life spring from a wrong use of the verb must.

70

Morality is the grammar of goodness.

71

Goodness is bound to strain at the leash of morality till it learns how to lead.

72

Preventive religion, the religion of fear, is a primitive form of faith bound to break before enlightenment. Be- tween its fall and the dawn of incentive religion, the religion of love, there must be a time of moral disintegration. After the Middle Ages came the Renaissance ; after Puritanism the Restoration.

73

We can tell a man by his friends as surely as we can not tell him by his loves.

74

In friendship everything and nothing must be taken for granted.

75

To those who come to stay in our hearts we can offer no less than our best ; and our best is the truth.

76

(Of friendship.) What was, is. What is not, can never be. What shall

be, was.

* *

72 NEW AND OLD

77

The world would be a different place if we realised that Love is the most austere discipline of Life as well as its sweetest balm.

78

Great hearts should remember that their hunger is due to their own voracity, not to the deficiency of others. A genius for Love, like any other genius, must be content to exist for its own sake, not for what it receives. Love must be for ever loving or it would be miserable. This is the treaty it has made with happiness, and happiness honestly keeps the bargain.

79

When we cry out that we have loved too much, it is a sign that we love too little.

80

Love is of little help unless you can draw small cheques upon it,

*

81

The work of religion is to clear the will of desires and to set it free.

82

There are two conceptions of religion : that which adapts God to the needs of man ; that which fashions man to the needs of God.

88

Poetry and religion are truer than fact, because they attest the solidarity of life, and its permanence, through love.

THOUGHTS 73

84

The confusion of truth with fact is at the root of most of the mischief in the world.

85

There are men who always believe that a measure can kill an idea.

86

The poor man who sacrifices his food rather than go without his Music-hall is a misguided witness to the dominance of spirit over matter.

87

Men talk as if reality were outside us, as if it were more real to make shoes than to write books. But reality comes from within : it is what we bring to life : it is the currency of experience.

88

Sorrow does not really change people, it only develops what is already in them : that which they bring to it they will reap from it.

***

89

Life lies in experience, not in movement. To-day we are too apt to reduce life to movement, and our art is bound to grow narrower and more external — dependent upon science rather than upon ideas.

90

It might be well for the modern realist to remember that literalness is not the same as truth, nor curiosity as courage.

74 NEW AND OLD

91

Art is an attempt to wrest what is permanent out of the transitoriness of things. The attempt to arrest what is transitory kills art and makes journalism.

92

The aesthete and the artist are often hostile one to another. The aesthete depends upon externals, the artist upon the inner life as well as the outer. The artist at work reacts upon his surroundings ; he is free. The aesthete is the passive prey of his impressions.

98

Fastidiousness is a kind of asceticism of the intellect. Men can be as austere from taste as from religion.

94

The ugliness that comes from an individual way of seeing, or from the absence of adequate means, is attractive : it is disinterested. The ugliness that comes of a general way of living, or from the use of superfluous means, is repellent, and it is utilitarian. The one is grotesque, the other vulgar. There is a difference between the gargoyle and the advertise- ment.

95

An inspiring human being, rich in instinct, is often an excellent writer who yet wholly lacks the vital spark of spontaneity ; while others, in life elaborate or inhuman, become natural and convincing when they write. Litera- ture is their element, their emotion. They make good creators and shocking lovers.

96

There are two kinds of literary creator : there is the creative writer and there is the creative reader. The creative reader is the true critic : he sees all he reads anewt

POEMS

i GRASSE

THE milk-white town comes climbing,

Climbing over the hill, With a grace that is past the rhyming,

And smiles at its own sweet will ; The crystal dawn rejoices,

The cock crows silver-shrill, And a din of sweet small noises

Wakes up where all was still.

The dewy sounds of labour

Arise most debonair ; The bell calls each good neighbour

To say his morning prayer ; The faithful hammer's clinking

Rings out a measured beat, And the daisies open blinking

Amongst the young green wheat.

The little red roofs, they quiver

In the golden light of noon, And the lowly voice of the river

Is heard both late and soon ; A jocund noise of laughing

Rings up the sunny street, Where the burghers sit a-quaffing

And sing that life is sweet,

76

76 NEW AND OLD

The black-stoled priests come sweeping

Adown the moss-grown stair, Where the market-place lies sleeping

In the shining evening air ; And old age steals a-creeping

Whilst two grey gossips croon, And the children rush home leaping

By the light of the rising moon.

Two tardy nuns step-keeping

Come wagging their holy heads, And a white-souled star out-peeping

Will light them to their beds. The reaper leaves his reaping,

The lambkins go to rest, And a young bird rustles cheeping

To its olive-cradled nest.

But, as day's hum dies, sinking

Below the great red sun, The little gold lights come winking

And flash out one by one ; Sweet day in grey is hooding,

There 's not a soul that frets, And over all is brooding

The breath of violets.

1888.

A SONATA OF BEETHOVEN'S

WHO knoweth whence we come and what we are ? This Man of Music had eternal eyes, And on these wings of Melody there lies The echo of an answer from afar.

POEMS 77

It tells how round a Soul stand mists of morn,

And still it knoweth not the morning nigh,

But gropes through doubts and does not see the sky,

Yet travels to the East where it was born ;

And how that Soul is purified by Pain,

And, learning perfect Love, f orgetteth Fear ;

Still soars and loves, half-free ; yearns once again ;

Then turns to flame celestial, crystal-clear,

And, standing rapt beyond our Now and Here,

Cries out to men to suffer and attain.

1888.

3 A WISH

DEATH, when I die, in Autumn let it be,

In Autumn when across the spiky furze

There floats the film of silver gossamers ;

In early Autumn, when the cherry-tree

Is touched with flame, the beech with russet gold,

And o'er the fallow field and purple lea

The starlings scream, and swallows put to sea,

And woolly mists hang light on wood and wold ;

Now when no sound is heard, unless it were

The thud of acorns on the wrinkled earth,

While thoughts of summer linger in the air

Sweet with the smell of apples ; now when Mirth

Is grey as Grief, and Peace is everywhere,

Bring me, O Death, into the arms of Birth.

1896.

4

THE Path of Love is made for twain ;

Hate walketh not alone : The Path of Death and the Path of Pain

Are only trod by one.

78 NEW AND OLD

Yet he who hath ta'en the Path of Pain

Hath found both friend and foe ; The depths of weakness, the power of meekness,

The strength to overthrow.

1902.

5 AFTER MARY COLERIDGE'S DEATH

A LATE day of summer is over ;

It has not been long. The bee has gone out of the clover ;

Hushed is the song.

Yet the sweetness grows sweeter and lingers,

While the form of it dies ; And the song does not cease with the singers,

Though night close their eyes.

When dark falls a light shines the stronger,

A flame burns more clear ; The day would grow grey were it longer —

It is past — it is here.

1907.

6 IN THE STATUE-HALL AT THE LOUVRE

THE generations of the dead,

White and free and very still,

Wait us in infinite halls, until

We too grow strangely quieted.

Their number who stand above good and ill,

Their measureless number who hath said ?

POEMS 79

For each of these did the salt tears flow,

And the head was bowed and the heart was sore,

Hundreds and thousands of years ago,

Hundreds and thousands of years and more :

Yet we are weeping for one as though

No man had ever wept before.

1907.

7 MEMORY

THE memory of that which was Floats like a water-lily leaf Over the tideless depth of grief, Dark and cold and still as glass, There where no change can ever pass, Where shadows are long and light is brief.

The living thought of the days gone by, With roots deep down below the deeps, Gently rocks and gently sleeps, Shining and green where the waters lie, Until to him who vigil keeps What was is the life that cannot die.

1907.

8 DEATH AND THE DAWN

DAMP and dying and dark

Was the night ; Closely shrouded and stark

Lay the light : And the tale of the stars was told,

Save for a tremulous spark

80 NEW AND OLD

In a streak of misty white.

The earth was heavy and cold As a mourner's heart, and the sight

Of the dawn seemed far from the wold.

When — from the deeps of the dew

And the dark, Sudden, up, out of view,

Shot the lark. Swift as a flame she flew

To her invisible mark, Swift as a soul that knew

Where the dawn would be : The lark pierced through to the blue

And the soul was free.

3908.

9 THE LAVENDER HEDGE

ALL day long like things of light, All day long without noise or stir, Flutter and float the butterflies white Over the hedge of lavender. Blue is the sky, a milky blue, Silvery blue is the lavender too, Sweeter than honey, richer than myrrh.

Poets' souls are the butterflies white, Dancing spirits come from afar, Come from the land of lost delight Where all the ancient raptures are ; Poets return to float and fly Over a blossoming memory, Over a hedge of lavender.

HAMBLEDON, 190M.

POEMS 81

10

TRIANON

THE hand of Autumn rests upon

The dreaming woods of Trianon ;

On silver birch and on beech turned gold,

The woods of pleasure long since grown old,

And of youth still playing at games that are dead

On a floor strewn thick with brown and red,

Where Death himself cannot fall cold

Or lay him down in a quiet bed.

For here, where white mists rise from the mould,

Young Love once stopped in the midst of a song,

And Life broke off in a tale half-told

Before Life knew that the tale was wrong.

And now nought stays but a floating swan

To guard the silence of Trianon.

October 1913.

11

AND I, who know what Love, what Beauty is, I might have been a poet, might have told Of all the pain and all the summer bliss Earth and the heart contain a thousandfold. I might have been a poet but for this, That He who fashions spirits did withhold The final tip of flame — the flame all His — Which turneth thought to words of molten gold. For ever must I aim, for ever miss, Wanting the gift that 's neither bought nor sold. Yet have I that which frees from Life's caprice, And makes the day fresh and the footstep bold ; Mine are the dreams that bring a central peace, And mine the joy that never can grow old.

1901, F

GLADYS LEONORA PRATT

THE existence of Gladys Leonora Pratt was a series of dull dislocated sensations. She led a ' gay life,' as it was called in her professional terminology ; and she led it in a dirty little room with a curtained window that would not open, at 259 Brecon Street, Euston, a dingy narrow street that ended in a blind wall. The dull sensations were many, but there was no thread to bind them together or give them sequence ; she did not know the reason why she did this or that, unless it were to eat or drink or get warm. She could not count upon herself from one hour to another ; she was the prey of each passing impression ; and she felt no wish to be different. Her consciousness indeed was like a sheet — none too white — across which were thrown, now blurred, now clearer, a number of incoherent lantern-slides. Among them, it is true, there were some more vivid than the rest — spots of light which punctuated the dead level of the days ; but what these particular images were Gladys Leonora alone could tell, and, as far as may be, she must tell them for herself.

There were the evenings when your ' chap ' took you to the picture palaces, or to the halls, or to some theatre over the river, where a lovely lady in yellow satin, a real lady, just like the poster on the hoardings, committed a real crime. And the night would end up with a drink in a jolly bar, brilliant with electric light, where every one forgot drab to-morrow and drab yesterday ; and sometimes you danced and men were sweet on you, although they were not always pleasant, until your own chap grew jealous and hit you —

GLADYS LEONORA PRATT 83

only you didn't know much what happened till next morn- ing. Or sometimes he was in a good mood and gave you a set of glass beads, or cigarettes, or some liquorice sweets ; or Mother Mack, ' her wot keeps the house,' was in a good temper and cooked a currant pudding for dinner, and you had the taste of it in your mouth long afterwards. And then there were the bad hours, equally distinct on the lantern sheet. In the first place there were your fears — shapeless, indefinite terrors which jumped out upon you, you didn't know how, and made you feel sick and scream. You got them when you were alone in the dark, or in hot close weather and in thunderstorms, or when you had had nobody to talk to for some time. And there were the days when your chap came home drunk and gave you a black eye ; or when Mother Mack was in a bad temper and starved you ; or, worse still, when the weather was bad and you ' got no work,' and brought no one home, and she beat you, and you had the hump.

And then there were other slides — pictures, some of them, from times remoter and more confused ; but those pictures were the strongest of all. They were very few, though. There was a wood of blue-bells where you had seen a big butterfly : it was at home when you were eight, and it was near Stroud. And there was a pearl necklace you had once caught .sight of on the neck of a Jewess who was looking out of a window over a tailor's shop in the Charing Cross Road. And there was a child with fair curls that ran to you in the street, because it took you for its mother. And there was a big fight in Hampstead Road, when young Muriel's bloke licked old Lily's bloke, and ' Golly, it was a bloody game.' And there were those words, ' Far, far away,' from the poetry- piece you once learned at school, that came into your head, you couldn't say why, and went on sounding there like a tune — but it made you feel nice and comfortable. And there was the teacher with the blue eyes — at school too — the one

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you thought so sweetly pretty. And there was your chum at the beginning * here,' Sally Riley, who was taken off to ' the Castle ' (Quod, that is) as a ' drunk and disorderly,' and had to wear a cap and number ; and her it was wot told you how dreadful it was not to talk or hear no noise, and how it made you scream. And, of course, there was your mother — but she gave you an odd feeling when you thought of her. You didn't want to, and yet you did. You were so proud of having a respectable mother, different from most of the girls ; but you couldn't bear to think of her ; and you couldn't really remember her, because she died when you were nine ; only you knew she had a terrible cough. And you knew, too, she had stuck to your father, though he had never kept his word to marry her and was cruel bad to her. And after she died — and before it — he brought back strange women with loud laughs, who carried on with him, and were fearful unkind to you ; till one day you were sick of it all, and you had a young man of your own, and you stayed out late with him two nights, and your father gave you a hiding, and the third night you were afraid of going home (home was Marylebone way), and your bloke treated you at the 4 Angel,' and you got pretty well screwed, and you laughed a good deal and said ' yes ' to all he asked, and you remembered nothing more and woke up ' here.' And ' here ' you had stayed ever since, you didn't quite know how long, only when you came it was before Christmas, and now Christmas was past again. (That last picture was longer than a picture — it was a memory, one of the very few in Gladys Leonora's possession.)

And after the first strangeness — you were frightened and excited for a week — it didn't seem very different from home, except that you got better food and worse colds. It was cruel work standing out at night in all weathers, and Mother Mack didn't leave you much money, scarcely enough for ostrich feathers or a plush ' pallytoe,' and hardly ever

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enough for cheap scents. It was duller here in the day, because at home you used to go and work at the sweet- factory, and here you only slaved for old Mack till the nights came ; and they were monotonous too, and you were dog- tired, and men were brutes and often you hated them, and all the same there seemed no doing without them. As for your pals, sometimes you liked them and walked arm-in-arm with them in the Euston Road ; and sometimes, when Mother Mack favoured them or they riled you, you hated them, and wanted to hurt them. Now and then you did, and they hurt back again. But if they were ill or hungry, you stood by them and went without yourself. And you never would have taken the smallest thing belonging to them, or to any one, not you ! You were as honest as the day. That was perhaps the one fact that you knew about yourself. But did you know it ? Directly you tried to put things together, the thread somehow snapped.

Now and again you had ' wishes.' They drifted like aimless winds across this waste of rubble, and yet, aimless though they were, they carried something like a fragrance from afar : for one moment they made an air-current. You got them most often in the spring, at the time when you would suddenly burst out crying and your shoulders shook with sobs for nothing at all ; or else odd things set you off — a basket of daffodils at the street corner, or a barrel-organ playing a slow tune. You frequently laughed, too, for no reason, excepting that others near you were laughing ; or because when you went out walking you saw somebody different from the rest — a coloured man, or a very tall one, or a woman with a squint. The crying, however, was different ; it made you feel better, and your ' wishes ' often came along with it. Not wishes for finery or motor-cars — another sort. You wished to see some green grass and some trees (Mother Mack never let you get as far as the parks), and you wanted to have a baby of your own ; it was when

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you saw the children playing, above all when that little girl ran up to you and put up its face to be kissed. And occasion- ally, at rare intervals, you vaguely wished to be good. You didn't know how, or even try to know ; but you thought of your mother, and once when you felt like that you gave Mother Mack the go-by and, when none of the girls was anywhere about, you nipped into a church. Gawd ! wouldn't they have jeered and pinched if they had seen you ! But when you got inside you couldn't understand a word. Still, the organ and the flowers and the smell of fur and heat was very nice, and you liked the quiet when the ladies put their faces down.

Church was tabooed by all self-respecting ladies of Brecon Street and other streets like Brecon Street : church and chapel and kind ladies — kind ladies, perhaps, most of all. What had they got to do with the other ladies of Brecon Street ? And they thought they had. They seldom got at them, but when they did they used silly words like ' pure * and ' save ' and ' religious ' — words that had nothing to do with anything. If they spoke to you, you knew what to do : you let fly a volley of your own language, and you made one of your own jokes — and serve them jolly well right for interfering. Outside such volleys, Gladys com- prehended few words and possessed fewer, not enough to make ideas with ; and when she read, if they began with the same letter and were of about the same length, one looked much the same to her as another.

But when she felt angry with kind ladies she generally stopped, suddenly checkmated by something else. The something was almost the most vivid of all her odd set of lantern-slides. It was a sight she had seen, and it had left a picture which lasted — an indelible picture which came back oftener than the rest and with greater force. She had seen it one late afternoon in November in Roach Lane, next turning but two from Brecon Street. It was a Satur-

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day, and Roach Lane market was in full swing. The dark had fallen and yellowish fog hung in the air, so that the flaring torches, stuck in each of the crowded stalls — so crowded that you could hardly thread your way between them, threw a tawny light on the blackness, and strange shadows on the faces of the jostling buyers and sellers. The kerb-stone was thick with them, elbowing and pushing one another with good-natured oaths and loud hagglings, while they fingered the dried haddocks or felt the quality of second-hand plush with the hands of connoisseurs. Gladys was the quicker to notice the incongruous figure of a * kind lady ' issuing rather precipitately from a door down the Lane. A woman with dishevelled hair, ' more than half seas over,' Gladys noted, ran after her and struck her, so that the lady staggered against a stall, and it would have gone worse with her had not the woman's attention been caught by the sight of a man bargaining at the clearer end of the alley. She made for him at once, and the lady, though she gave a wince of pain, said no word. She was a queer one, thought Gladys, to come along here and get that, when she might stay comfortable in the West End minding her own business. What for did the bloomin' idiot want to go and meddle with them as she had no con- cern with ? It must be that she got somethink out of it, a pryin' in other ladies' houses like that ! But there was no time for further comment, for at this moment the atten- tion of Roach Lane was diverted. The woman who had made for the man was catching it hard from him with a stick, and she was crying — crying at the top of her voice. The sight and sound were so common in Roach Lane that no one stirred from his place, but the little groups stopped marketing and looked on, half-curious, half-indifferent, as they might watch a hackneyed play. Only the lady did anything. She suddenly ran across the road, caught the man's arm, and, taking him by surprise, contrived to knock

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the stick out of his hand. The woman fell upon her at once with her fists. ' It 's you agin, yer sniveller, is it ? I '11 teach yer, by Gawd, I will 1 ' she cried ; and the man, stung to fury, lashed out blindly and threw the interloper down. This was a new sensation, even in Roach Lane. A crowd gathered round her, Gladys among the rest. * Well, I 'm darned if this ain't a rum go,' she muttered. But a policeman came up, and then there was a rummer go still. The lady, who had struggled to her feet, her hat crushed in, her clothes all splashed with mud, refused to give the couple in charge. ' It was my fault,' she said, ' I attacked him first ' ; so the policeman did nothing but support her, and she passed away, limping, down the street. Only, as she did so, Gladys caught sight of her face ; and she never forgot it. It was the face of an angel she had once seen hi a shop on a Christmas card. She did not look angry, only pitiful and very quiet, and her hat had a bunch of lovely Farmer voylets in it, and they was all bashed in and spoilt, which was a dreadful shame ; she had turned orful white, too, and yet she had never made one sound. Any gurl she knew would have screamed — wouldn't they jist ? It was the look in her eyes, though, which gave Gladys that queer feeling — one she had never had before — a kind of feeling as if she were going to choke. What on earth did she go and do that for ? She couldn't have anything to make out of that ; and the woman had hurt her just a moment ago. Well, she 'd be blowed if it wasn't the rummest go ! She was a plucky one, no mistake. Then that look in her eyes returned to Gladys, and the queer choked feeling came again, and deep down in her, where she could not get at it, there rose, or there tried to rise, a wish that she could do a spunky thing like that — something handsome ; and still more that she could look like that about the eyes, and have pale Farmer voylets in her hat. Yet all the time she knew that the lady belonged to Church and the West End, and

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all the things in life that were most against the code of Brecon Street.

This had happened weeks since, and weeks were ages to Gladys ; but the picture had not faded in the least when it recurred to her vision, although the lantern had since then added other slides to the confused store of her im- pressions— the impressions of which she seemed to be made up. For such, in some measure as she stands here, was Gladys Leonora Pratt.

That is to say, as far as her inward self was concerned. There was also the outer woman. Her appearance was not adventurous. She seemed as like to many other Gladys Leonoras as is one sparrow to another. Rather short and thick-set she was, with shapely hands and arms, round which jingled cheap gilt bangles ; with heavy cheeks, sallow complexion and nondescript features, except that her small brown eyes always looked you straight in the face. She had tried to dye her indistinguishable brown hair, straight hair, parted on one side, that lay flat and heavy upon her forehead as if it had no life left ; but the gold dye had not taken properly and remained in patches that showed the brown underneath. Mother Mack had let her know what she thought of it ; she had also let her know what she thought of her cough.

For, at the moment when we find her, Gladys was cough- ing pretty badly. She was sitting in her stuffy little room where everything was soiled — bed-linen, and yellow plush divan, and close-drawn muslin blinds, and the folk who entered there. There was a looking-glass, and a shaky chest of drawers, of which one foot was wanting. A man's bowler lay upon it, with three cigarette-ends and a cheap cigarette-box, empty, an oriental beauty's head upon the lid. On the mantel-shelf stood Gladys's one treasure, a biscuit china ornament — a little girl holding a large hat. You put flowers into the hat, only she never had any to

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put there ; but she thought it the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, and sometimes she imagined a red rose in it. She had looked at it for a fortnight in a fancy-shop off Tottenham Court Road, and once — in the early days of Brecon Street — she had asked a chap to give it her, and he had. But that seemed long ago. For the dingy little room had, since then, seen a series of dingy inmates, chiefly under-clerks and shop-assistants ; and she had not liked one of them more than another, until three weeks ago.

And then there was an exception. The exception was in the jewellery line ; he ' travelled ' for a city firm, and he was German. It is not to be supposed that Gladys nourished an interesting passion, or even any feeling that came near what we call love ; but there was within her some faint sluggish stirring of life, some movement of a half-sentient germ that might, somewhere else, with sun and rain have struggled towards birth. Her soul for one moment had turned in its sleep. The traveller in jewellery had given her a kind of sense of home — an inarticulate desire to settle, even to marry him, the first of such desires that she had experienced. He had talked politely to her and asked after her cough, just as if she had not lived in Brecon Street ; and one evening he had had a cold and had let her put on a mustard-leaf. And he was clean and fair, and wore a real white collar, not a paper one ; and he had given her his photo- graph, quite the gentleman, with his hand in a cuff resting upon a marble table, an india-rubber plant by his side. He had come back every evening for a week and more ; then he had gone off, like the rest. It had not made her unhappy ; but the first day or two she felt restless and rather uncom- fortable, as if she had lost something, and even now his clean face came up before her eyes. It was one of the clear-cut images in her gallery.

He had given her more than his photograph. In the first place there was a treat at the theatre ; and the play was

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about a pore gurl like her, wot married a bloomin' toff and had a face like the lady's in Roach Lane, the same as the angel's on the Christmas card ; and her sister was cruel jealous and wanted the oof ; so she strangled the bride in her bed with the coverlet, and the strangling was finished that clever and easy — every bit of it done on the stage — till Gladys felt she was a doin' of it herself. And then there came the bride's scream — quite 'orrible — and the sister stifled that too. But after the play was ended it went on ringing in her ears ; and so it had done since, though it was just over a week ago that she had heard it.

Besides the treat, ' he ' had made her a wonderful present ; it had superseded the china vase ; it was her most precious possession, such as she had never thought to own. For it was a brooch — a real gold brooch ; one of those shaped like a merry-thought bone, and on it was ' Mizpah ' in false rubies. She could not think much of the giver ; she soon liked the brooch a great deal more. It came to be almost her only thought all day — how she would look wearing it, and how the gurls would envy her, but most of all how she could hide it from Mother Mack : you never knew what old Mack would grab.

Especially just now. For soon after she got it (the day before he left), her cough became worse, and her cheeks grew pale and thin, and her ' work ' fell off, and Mack, the old Devil, began to threaten her and to say she did not pay her way. So Gladys tied the brooch up in a stocking at the back of her drawer, where no one could get at it, and felt quite easy in her mind.

The day after she had done this, the calamity happened. Her cough was constant and she felt too bad to move. There had been a hand-to-hand set-to with Mack, who was the worse that afternoon for neuralgia and for drink. She had heaped vile names upon Gladys Leonora, had hit her about the head and pushed her out of doors ; she would

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have no ugly devils as couldn't pay their keep, she shouted. And when in the late afternoon Gladys came back, she found her drawers rifled and the brooch gone. Mother Mack had stolen it, curse her ! And it was only too clear what she would say if she were asked for it ; she had taken it as her right, to pay what was owing to her for food. It was a damned lie ; she owed her nothing, bloody thief that she was ; and so she would tell her. But at the very thought she cowered and knew she could not ; she felt the blows of that big thick arm raining upon her back ; she was powerless against her. No, she would run away, she would. Yet where had she to go ? 259 Brecon Street was the only roof she could think of that would shelter her. She did not dream of informing the police ; they were the natural enemies of herself as well as of Mother Mack — of herself and of all her clan. There is a code of honour in Brecon Street — limited, no doubt, like the locality, but more rigorous than many wider codes.

Gladys Leonora was seized with a paroxysm of blind helpless fury. She tried to scream, but her cough had made her hoarse, and the words stuck in her throat. Then she beat the floor with her fists, and she got up and beat the door too, and she knocked her poor head against the wall. After which, thoroughly exhausted, she sank in a heap upon the ground. Her chest heaved with loud, dry sobs, and she cried till she thought she would break in half. As she lay there, the room grew dark and dreadful. Mechanically she heard the rain drip outside, and the bell of a Baptist chapel some way off sound on with a muffled regularity ; mechani- cally, too, she heard young Muriel and Lily go downstairs. ' Mother Mack 's that bad with her neuralgy, she 's gone to bed,' Muriel was saying, and the words entered Gladys's ears without her taking in their meaning ; then the house- door shut, and all was quiet again.

At last she got up, stiff and aching from the hard boards ;

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she had not had a crumb since morning, and her hands and legs were trembling. As she stood there, the first thing her eye fell upon was the open drawer where the brooch had been. An awful wave of hatred swept over her, such as she had never before experienced. It had her — she turned giddy and reeled. She must do something to old Mack, something at once. But, again, what ? And how could she do it ? Mack was three times as strong as herself. All of a sudden the words she had heard automatically came back into her head. * Mother Mack is in bed with her neuralgy,' and when she had the neuralgy they always called her the Hell-cat, it made her double as bad as usual ; besides, the gurls had gone out — even they would not be there to defend her ; she was alone in the house with Mother Mack. . . . Still she would do something. The fierceness and giddiness grew worse. Yes, she would do something. What, she had no idea. She only felt that she must rush downstairs, out, vaguely, into the dark, and smash. What she would smash, she did not know.

Downstairs then she ran, Maenad-like, her hair half fallen on her shoulders. Her pals' black empty room stared at her across the landing till it frightened her, but she was running so fast that she had little time for any sensation. She did not even notice the strange suffocating smell there was on the staircase — an extraordinary smell, strong enough even to overpower the usual stale perfume of paraffin and onions which was chronic in the house. As she made for the front-door, it reached even her benumbed senses ; it gave her nerves a kind of awakening shock. She had smelled it * here ' once before in the kitchen ; somewhere the gas must be escaping. What did that matter to her ? She had her hand upon the door, when her attention was really arrested. From Mother Mack's room on the right of the entry passage there came a strange muffled groan ; then another groan as if from one unconscious ; then the

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heavy broken gasps again. Curiosity, savage curiosity, took hold of Gladys. Old Mack was evidently asleep ; she could not spring out and beat her. Stealthily she opened the bedroom door and stood upon the threshold. But at first she staggered, almost falling backwards, choked by the fumes that met her. It was here then that the gas was escaping — from the jet near the mantel-shelf. Mother Mack's bedstead was opposite the fireplace, along the wall, with its foot towards the door. The street-lamp outside shed through the window a fitful half-light upon the room, and when Gladys had stood there a moment her eyes got used to it and she saw. As she looked upon the heavy, helpless, prostrate form, that wild hatred surged up in her again, and it passed into an active thirst for vengeance. Yes — she must do something to pay her out. You had only to glance at old Mack's grey face to know that she could not jump up. She was drugged, stifled by the gas ; she knew nothing ; if it went on long enough it would finish her ; she would have gone by now, very likely, if the jet had been nearer and if there were not such a draught from the door. Yes, she must pay the old brute out.

Then, as Gladys stood there, something happened. There rose before her, till she seemed in it, of it, the strang- ling scene upon the stage. The figure in the bed here was lying in the same position as the figure had lain there ; the light was the same, falling from without on the dark room within. And Gladys was waiting on the threshold of the room in just the same place as the sister had waited. What easier than to go on with the part — to take the rug off the bed as the sister had done, get your fingers round that un- resisting neck, and make an end of her ? She might revive if she were left ; Muriel and Lily, or their chaps, might come in and save her. But Gladys was scarcely conscious of these thoughts, she was so much part of the play.

Children, Geniuses, Gladys Leonoras put nothing between

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idea and action — there where the average man puts reason. Children, Geniuses and Gladys Leonoras get suggestions and at once convert them into life. With children they become games, with geniuses creation, with Gladys Leonoras crimes or heroisms — the kind of heroisms that makes news- paper-readers exclaim at the wonder of them in such surroundings. As Gladys advanced relentless, like one who was walking in a dream, the deed was nearly done.

And then, again, something happened. Without reason, in the flash of a moment, another picture put itself over the scene on the stage, and obliterated it. It was the picture of the lady limping painfully across Roach Lane — the lady with the angel-face outlined clearly on the tawny darkness, as she passed between the flaring stalls and dis- appeared. The image was so strong and unexpected that the other image yielded before it, faded off the sheet. Gladys was no longer on the stage ; she was absorbed in the lady. And once more that queer wish came over her — the sense how nice it would be to feel ' like that.' Her muscles relaxed, her arm fell. In an instant, vision changed to action. She ran to the jet and turned the gas off ; then to the window. With forces strained to the utmost, she wrenched the tightly- jammed bolt and flung it open, and she threw the door open too : she had seen these things done when the gas escaped before in the kitchen. Next, she turned to Mother Mack. Brandy she knew was what the ambulance men — them in medals and uniforms — gave to people who fainted in a crowd. And the brandy-bottle wa§ never far from Mack ; no difficulty in finding it now, for it stood, half-empty, on a chair near the bed. She poured some down her throat : her mouth, which was all swollen, was still open, but her breathing, although it was laboured, was getting better. Presently her eyelids fluttered, and she moved ; then she turned on her side and made an indistinct muttering. It was high time for Gladys to be

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off. If Mack woke to find her there, she 'd play Old Nick and suspect her of taking the brandy, or anything else. No, she hadn't no mind to stick out that. She slipped away to the front-door and opened it. Their neighbour, a pendant to Mack, was standing as usual on her doorstep. ' So Mrs. Mack had the neuralgics, pore dear ? Oh, no, she wouldn't mind comin' in and givin' an eye to her while the gurls were out.' Gladys mentioned no word of what had just happened. She was in a tremor lest it should be discovered that she had been in Mack's room.

By now it was the hour for her to go out on her usual beat. Only she did not feel as usual. She was no longer tired and sick of everything. Her cough had stopped, and she had a sense of peace foreign to her — peace that was almost pleasure. For the moment, as she went up to her room, she had even forgotten about the brooch. So she stood quite cheerful before the glass (it had a crack across the middle), and put a patch of cheap rouge upon either cheek; after which she tousled her hair, pinned it up, cocked her big velvet hat with its uncurled green feather at the professional angle upon her head, and went out into the drizzling mist. ' We shan't get much work to-night, it 's raining,' said Irene from next door. Gladys only nodded and walked on, for nothing seemed to matter much this evening. And she went to wait at her customary corner.

The germ of the spirit lay dormant again in the inchoate body with which nature had provided it — the muddy tenement where, in spite of all things, it had kept itself alive. And there was joy in heaven. The Angels felt no need of waiting till Gladys Leonora Pratt should repent.

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WOMEN AS LETTER- WRITERS

* A LETTER behoves to tell about oneself,' writes Mrs. Carlyle to John Sterling, and she could certainly speak as one having authority. She hits the truth, for women at any rate. Good letters need not necessarily talk of their writers, but they must, consciously or unconsciously, tell about them ; must, above all else, transmit their personality. And the means of transmission becomes almost as important as the matter in hand. It is one thing to have something to say and another to have the art of saying it ; an art which must always be individual to the writer, and which, in a flash, conveys the essence of his subject in so intimate a manner that the reader feels like his confidant. It is an art hard to regulate by any general rules, except that of simplicity, especially in the case of letter-writing. The sweetest and most pensive of correspondents, Dorothy Osborne, said all there was to say about it as long ago as 1653 : ' All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one's discourse ; not studied, as an oration, nor made up of hard words, like a charm. "Tis an admirable thing to see how some people will labour to find out terms that may obscure plain sense, like a gentleman I know, who would never say " the weather grew cold," but that " winter began to salute us." I have no patience with such coxcombs, and cannot blame an old uncle of mine that threw the standish at his man's head, because he writ a letter for him where, instead of saying (as his master bid him) " that he would have writ himself, but he had the gout in his hand," he said that " the gout in his hand would not permit him to put pen to paper." '

G

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Dorothy Osborne herself here gives the best proof that not only simplicity but also spontaneity is needed, if a letter is to be perfectly satisfactory — spontaneity, which is a matter of the heart as well as the head, and implies the invaluable possession of mental sympathies. The best letter-writers, indeed, give the impression of their correspondents' per- sonality along with their own and vary, almost imper- ceptibly, with each of them. A brilliant critic of ' The Art of Letter-writing ' x has recently told us that * as a jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears, so a letter must depend upon the person to whom it is addressed.' Many of the persons thus addressed have been women, and in this way alone they have exercised a great influence on letter- writing — on the letter-writing of men. Letter-receiving has been a calling for them, and, skilled in the arts of evoking and provoking alike, they have become as good as a School for style, and an Academy of nimble wit.

But they have been far from playing only a passive part. Letter-writing seems, indeed, an art especially invented to suit the talents of women, and (since their defects are often their graces) even to suit their foibles. Women are not creators ; they are interpreters, critics ; their best qualities, sympathy and insight, are the essence of criticism; and good letter-writing is criticism — of life, of people, of art, as the case may be. The quick perceptions and elusive grace that are natural to women, their habit of producing and their gift for expressing themselves, their mastery of detail, their power of subtle suggestion and of intuition, their very inability to sustain thought and therefore to become heavy, their faculty for intimacy which sums up all the rest — these are so many qualifications for the writing of letters, and of personal letters in particular.

Generally speaking, correspondence can be divided into

1 'The Art of Letter-writing,' by H. W, Paul, Nineteenth Century for July 1898,

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two chief kinds — the letters written for one, and the letters written for more than one. The first are the intimate letters, often from people comparatively unknown ; only existing to reveal individual character, and bringing with them a particular and penetrating charm, a sense of personal discovery. Those of the second sort are written with an eye to an audience, whether it consist of posterity, of the public, or only of a coterie. They are literary achievements that belong to all the world, and we have no desire to appropriate them, no enjoyment of them as private property. They are not so much loved as admired, especially by men, and it is perhaps by men that they are best written. The lovable, intimate letter, on the contrary, comes most naturally from a woman's pen, and, as often as not, the masculine mind thinks it trivial. But the foremost letter-writers of the world have contrived to combine both set form and personal distinction. Madame de Sevigne, of course, achieved this and, in herself, includes almost every sort of letter-writing. It is dull however to discuss the unquestionable, and to comment upon Madame de Sevigne's position in this respect is as futile as comment upon Shakespeare's position as a dramatist.

If we come to the letters that aim at being literature, and to such women as have written them, we find any kind of classification impossible. Eloquent letters, political letters belong to this province, such as Madame Roland's heroic and persuasive epistles to the Girondins, which are neces- sarily written from a platform. But the great era of corre- spondence in France immediately preceded Madame Roland and the Revolution. It was the period of writing for a coterie — the most elaborate kind of writing ; for nothing can be more self-conscious than sentences penned for the perusal of a group of critical intimates, whose opinion is vital to the writer. Not a note could be composed in certain circles without being read aloud to them, and this in the days

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when one lady alone sent sixteen thousand letters to one gentleman ; when not only gentlemen wrote to ladies, but adoring ladies wrote to each other, once, sometimes twice, in twenty-four hours, on topics as often as not impersonal. The queen of these brilliant but rather malicious Muses was Madame du Deffand, the most brilliant, the most malicious of them all. Her physical blindness seemed to endow her with an extra acuteness of mental vision, and her pen darts like lightning, withering wherever it passes. Byron him- self could not be more bored or more unkind than Madame du Deffand, and she had none of the high spirits which often redeemed his sallies. In her day kindness was too often confounded with stupidity. She certainly fulfilled Mrs. Carlyle's injunction to letter- writers, and her letters may be cited as masterpieces of self-revelation. They are chiefly written to her friend the Duchesse de Choiseul ; to Voltaire, on whom she practised platonics ; and to Horace Walpole, with whom, when she was seventy, she had an arduous flirtation. She demanded a heart from others, but did not care to possess one herself ; she tried to replace it by a large and lucid mind, which wielded epigram like a sword and forced upon her a panoramic view of the evils of life, without any cloud-effects to soften them down. Her letters seem made up of mind and decorum — sceptical decorum — and sound no higher note than an enthusiastic avoidance of discomfort.

Here, for instance, is her description of her day. She has 4 torn herself out of bed that her frisure, begun the day before, may be completed.' Her ' poor head is overpowered by four heavy hands . . . her curling-irons resound in her ears.' An officer and an archbishop are chattering to her ; her head-dress and panier are being prepared. Suddenly a voice from the next room announces that the King is passing on his way to Mass ; it is church time. ' Aliens ! ' she cries in her letter, ' quick, my head-gear, my muff, my fan, my

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prayer book ! Ne scandalisons personne ! My chair ! My porters ! One, two, three, off ! ' Or if we want her philosophy, ' There is but one decision to make about the world,' she says : ' to let it be as it is ; to laugh at it without pretending to reform it ; and to abandon la Marechale to her levity, her low instincts, and her inconsequences, without bothering one's head about her.'

' Elles sont comme il plait a Dieu, comme elles vous vien- nent ; et si vous avez de 1'esprit ce n'est pas votre faute,' says Madame du Deffand to a witty Abbe about his letters. She and her contemporaries often thought they were admir- ing spontaneity when they were carefully cultivating light- ness, for the prevailing worship of mind made self-con- sciousness natural. Her seriousness — and she could be admirably serious — is so artistic that it seems simple, almost obvious, and one finds oneself wondering why such essential things have not been said before. The quality of unosten- tatious gravity is the distinction of French writers, and we sometimes find these ladies of last century having the most delicate literary discussions on paper.

It was the fashion of the times also (and Madame du Deffand was its leader) to write pages of analysis of one's friends' characters — and of one's own. Women are audaci- ously interested in themselves, and therefore audaciously personal, even in such deliberate epistles as these. They are also unabashed by detail, and can trifle to profound purpose. Certain letters, like thistle-down, live only by virtue of their lightness, and skim over Time too quickly for him to lay hold on them. What man — what Horace Walpole even — would dare to confide to an audience such a tissue of gossamer scandal and delicate intuition as most of these letters represent ? Yet in these airy nothings lies the secret of French genius — the Genius of Intercourse.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was more ambitious than Madame du Deffand. She did not confine her attention

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to a coterie, but wrote for posterity, and rather rashly pro- claimed that her letters would be read long after Madame de Sevigne's were forgotten. In other respects she reminds us of the blind old Frenchwoman, especially in her power of epigram and Book of Ecclesiasticus wisdom. But she, at any rate, regarded her race with a cold kindness which made her take pains to help it ; her philosophy, too, was no mere shield against spiritual discomfort and showed some of the real Stoic's courage and austerity. Her letters reveal a curious mixture of later Rome and modem London ; they seem to be written by an Epicurean who is watching Christianity with approbation. If they are less amusing than Madame du Deffand's, they are also more solid and not so fatiguing to the spirit. But then, unlike that lady, she is never bored and is gifted with an endless curiosity, an endless interest in fact. Her flirtation by correspondence with Pope was probably as great a piece of vanity as that of Madame du Deffand with Horace Walpole ; but it was more abstract and better disciplined. In all her letters, but especially in those to him, she is mistress of classical description and of a precision which is refresh- ing. The modern quality of humour, of seeing things through a personal atmosphere, was as unknown as it would have been repugnant to her. She never paints, she engraves; and her best accounts are like intaglios, clear-cut and excel- lently designed. She is a scholar even in her frivolities, and there is the same nicety in her account of a rakish card- party as in her sober pictures of Oriental scenes. She writes to Pope from Belgrade in 1717 : ' This place . . . perfectly answers the description of the Elysian Fields. I am in the middle of a wood consisting chiefly of fruit-trees watered by a vast number of fountains . . . and divided into many shady walks upon short grass. . . . The village is only inhabited by the richest among the Christians, who meet every night at a fountain, forty

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paces from my house, to sing and dance. But what per- suades me more fully of my decease is the situation of my own mind, the profound ignorance I am in of what passes among the living (which only comes to me by chance), and the great calmness with which I receive it. Yet I have still a hankering after my friends and acquaintances left in the world. . . . And 'tis very necessary to make a perfect Elysium that there should be a River Lethe, which I am not so happy as to find. . . . The reflection on the great gulph between you and me cools all news that comes hither. I can neither be sensibly touched with joy nor grief when I consider that possibly the cause of either is removed before the letter comes to my hands.'

This is admirable of the academic kind, the charm of which lies in the absence of strong contrasts. Lady Mary never sinks below cheerfulness, or gets beyond the ' sprightly folly ' she ' thanks God she was born with.' Perhaps the art of aphorism suits her best of all. ' Our proverb that knowledge is no burden may be true as to oneself,' she writes, ' but knowing too much is apt to make one trouble- some to other people.' Or, ' We are little better than straws upon the water ; we may flatter ourselves that we swim, when the current carries us along.' Or, ' Does not King David say somewhere that man walketh in a vain show ? ' she writes on another occasion ; ' I think he does, and I am sure this is peculiarly true of the Frenchman ; but he walks merrily and seems to enjoy the vision, and may he not therefore be esteemed more happy than many of our solid thinkers, whose brows are furrowed by deep reflec- tion, and whose wisdom is so often clothed with a rusty mantle of spleen and vapours ? '

If Lady Mary was born scholarly and classical, Dorothy Osborne, her predecessor by sixty years, was born classical and natural. The daughter of a Cavalier and plighted to a Roundhead's son, she has about her style a kind of sober

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grace which seems to express her relation to both parties. Besides, she lived within hail of the Elizabethans, and her words * have the dew still upon them.' She is a dainty preacher, and nurses wisdom with a kind of maternal tender- ness ; the thoughts that she sends forth from the lonely Bedfordshire home, where she tends a sick father and pacifies a quarrelsome brother, are scented with lavender. There can be no more pleasant contrast than that between Lady Mary's Ottoman Elysium and Dorothy Osborne's English Arcadia. ' About six or seven o'clock,' she writes, ' I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most com- monly, when we are in the midst of our discourse, one looks about her and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run, as if they had wings at their heels.'

But Dorothy Osborne really belongs to the intimate letter-writers and wrote for one eye alone — that of her betrothed, Sir William Temple. Her letters, properly speaking, form part of the most personal of all provinces, that of love-letters and letters of sentiment ; but she writes as a wife rather than as a lover, and this is as well for the reader. EgoHsme a deux is as unallowable and as tedious in correspondence as it is in society, and the most charming letters are those that introduce us to a hospitable and friendly circle. Dorothy Osborne was at once too modest and too observant to be guilty of egoism. She liked to know many people of different kinds, and described, or rather suggested them with a pretty humour of her own. Her mind has an English climate, and though her pages are rich in tender expressions of love, they still keep the temperate sweetness of an English landscape. She reminds us of one of Shakespeare's gentler heroines, in whom devo-

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tion and fidelity take the place of passion, and playfulness that of spirits. ' 'Tis not that I am sad,' she says, ' I thank God I have no occasion to be so, but I never appear to be very merry, and if I had all I could wish for in the world I do not think it would make any visible change in my humour.'

If we want a more fervid feeling we must go to France in the last century ; the letters of Madame d'fipinay, for instance, are a Journal of Sensibility, though not of Despair. We shall find that quality in the letters of Heloiise to Abelard — in 1131 — terrible and beautiful in their concentration ; or if we seek chronicles less remote, there are the corre- spondences of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, once Madame du Deffand's ' companion,' or of Madame Desbordes Valmore in our own day. Letters of passion should never be collected in a volume, and not more than two or three from the same person should be read, for passion is naturally monotonous. The death song of the swan is a beautiful thing, but when he goes on singing ad infinitum without dying, it becomes tiresome. The right medium for the expression of passion is poetry, which arrests thought and feeling at white heat and crystallises it, compelling it to brevity. Madame Des- bordes Valmore's love poems, for example, are much finer interpretations of love than her letters on the same theme, which are so intense as to become oppressive.

As far as style goes, the love letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse to M. Guibert may be taken as a model of elo- quence and of fiery grace. She is in turns reckless and restrained, and there is something splendid — something of the grand manner — in the way she risks herself, in her prodigal and daring simplicity. ' Cette ame de feu et de douleur, c'est votre creation,' she writes to her lover ; ' 1'esprit trouve des mots, l'ame aurait besoin de trouver une langue nouvelle.' But with the best will in the world one is wearied by these pages of egoism— ego'isme h une in this case — and it is difficult to sympathise with a woman

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who kept a pair of passions ; who was broken-hearted about her first love (then dying of consumption) when she adopted her second, to whom all these letters (one hundred and eighty in two years) were addressed.

There is another kind of personal confession, often as self-centred as the love letter, but deeper and of far wider interest — the letter of religious experience. It is dangerous to remove the spiritual from the realms of the imagination to those of colloquial prose and colloquial imagery, where materialism too often overtakes it, as evangelical corre- spondences abundantly testify. It would perhaps be better if religious letters also could be turned into poetry, or at least written by poets. Eugenie de Guerin, whose poems deserve to be better known, has given us letters which fulfil this condition, and show us how graceful, how hospit- able religion can be; pages rich in spiritual delicacy, and therefore impossible to quote from without injuring them. It is equally difficult to cite the correspondence of Madame Guyon, the reactionary saint of Louis xiv.'s reign, not because it is too subtle, but because it is too rhapsodical. It is full of startling effects, for she was a mystic of intense inward vision, and therefore a realist about the unreal, and over-familiar with the invisible.

Madame Swetchine and Caroline Fox should hardly be reckoned amongst religious letter-writers, although they wrote religiously. Both lived on the borderland of religion, but their atmosphere is more intellectual than that of the religious world, and their intellect was foremost in the search after truth. The writer really representing this sort of metaphysical correspondence is Sara Coleridge, who inherited her father's voracity for abstraction even in doctrine. Her letters can scarcely be called letters — they are treatises ; far from falling into Madame Guyon's error, they make even the visible invisible and obscure it by a fog of speculation.

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The history of letter-writing would make an interesting volume ; like the history of comedy it is practically that of society, and a good letter is an epitome of civilisation. The letter of feeling, whether of passion or religion, is the most primitive expression of the art, as Abelard and Heloiise testify ; and it is only as family grows and expands into social life that amusing letters become possible. The Paston letters in Caxton's time are the first, and there are others that date from Elizabethan days and abound in Elizabethan grace ; but their interest is mostly historical, and they do little to disclose character. The personal letter can only come later, when personality has room to develop and culture has affected women as well as men. Nearly all the letter-writing of women is due to the last hundred and fifty years, and during that period they have written every kind of letter, excepting that of whims and crotchets, for which their minds are perhaps too constant ; a Charles Lamb, an Edward FitzGerald, has never yet been translated into the feminine. The most difficult letter to write, and the one generally best unwritten, is certainly the letter on Nature. The Lake school, including Dorothy Wordsworth, were alone adequate to it. Since their time one or two others have partially succeeded, but on the whole who would not exclaim with Mrs. Carlyle : ' Oh, my dear ! if " all about feelings " be bad in a letter, all about scenery and no feelings is a deal worse !'...' Such a letter,' she goes on, ' as I received from you yesterday, after much half anxious, half angry waiting for, will read charmingly in your biography, and may be quoted in Murray's Guide Book ; but for " me, as one solitary individual," I was not charmed with it at all.'

Mrs. Carlyle, at any rate, could not have existed in any century but her own, any more than the sort of human letter which she creates for us. She inverts Jeffrey's advice to young writers, ' If you think you have a good thing to

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say don't say it,' for she never thinks she has a good thing to say, and always says it. More almost than any other woman letter-writer she has humour, the most personal of all qualities and the most modern, for it grows with our taste for character-study and our sense of life's incongruities. Too many things have already been said about humour and its relation to wit, but thus much may, perhaps, be hazarded here : humour is an atmosphere of the mind ; humour is colour, wit is form ; humour has to do with the character, wit with the head. Madame du Deffand and Lady Mary wrote letters essentially witty; Mrs. Carlyle does not so often condense her humour into wit, but she can do so whenever she wishes. She writes on one occasion that she is not up to visitors, not even to ' an angel awares? like G., and one might quote a dozen more of her racy phrases. Humorous description, however, is what she enjoys, and the peculiar flavour of her humour is that it attaches itself mostly to the limitations of existence and to minute domestic drawbacks. ' She is not what is called a thorough servant,' she says of one of her many ' generals,' ' but that will be no objection to signify, as I am not a thorough lady, which Grace Macdonald defined to be " one who had not entered her own kitchen for seven years."

Nothing can be more succinct than her humour, and yet no letters seem more haphazard — it is one of their chief charms. The fact is she was a great artist in her own way, and her power of selection was instinctive, — a much more finished production than when it is artificial. She was quite as good a housekeeper of her wits as of her home. ' It is not only a faculty with me,' she says, ' but a necessity of my nature to make a great deal out of nothing.' Her thrift is like that of the bee ; she darts into the centre of each subject she touches, and returns with its honey packed into the smallest possible space. She can be bold, too, and vivid in a large way when she attempts large subjects,

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as, for instance, in her description of Father Mathew's Temperance Meeting in the East End ; and, like most humorists, she can be sentimental — none more so.

' Blessed be the inventor of photography ! ' she writes ; ' I set him above even the inventor of chloroform. It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything that has " cast up " in my time, or is like to, this art by which even the " poor " can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favourably on the morality of the country ? I assure you I have often gone into my own room in the devil's own humour — ready to swear at " things in general " and some things in particular — and, my eyes resting by chance on one of my photographs of long-ago places or people, a crowd of sad gentle thoughts has rushed into my heart, and driven the devil out, as clean as ever so much holy water and priestly exorcisms could have done.'

Here, as elsewhere, Mrs. Carlyle just falls short of the poetic ; the sense of poetry was the one mental equipment she did not possess, and if she had possessed it she would oftener have been able to look beyond the moment. ' You are the most concrete woman I have ever known, Jane,' a friend once said to her ; and ' concrete,' not * matter of fact,' is the word which expresses her.

The same epithet might, with equal justice, be applied to another letter-writer and another ' Jane ' — Jane Austen. In some ways she may be compared to Mrs. Carlyle. Her mind also enjoys playing upon the limitations and incon- veniences of daily existence with sustained vivacity. But in her case, form, neatness, and occasionally wit are more prominent than humorous description. She had not so rich a nature as Mrs. Carlyle, and needed her own creations to bring out her full brilliance. Her letters are sprightly but rather cold chronicles of family plans, illnesses, meals, acquaintances — here and there enriched by flashes of fun

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and epigram and by the almost imperceptible threads of her cobweb malice, in which she caught so many buzzing flies. She is perfect in the art of implication, and nobody can imply a bore as mercilessly as she does. ' A widower with three children,' she writes, ' has no right to look higher than his daughter's governess ' ; ' I am forced to be abusive for want of subject, having really nothing to say.' Here are a few of her nothings : ' Charles Powlett has been very ill, but is getting well again. His wife is discovered to be everything that the neighbourhood could wish for, silly and cross as well as extravagant.' ' At the bottom of the Kingsdown Hill we met a gentleman in a buggy who, on minute examination, turned out to be Dr. Hall, in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.' 4 We had a Miss North and a Mr. Gould of our party ; the latter walked home with me after tea. He is a very young man, just entered Oxford, wears spectacles, and has heard that Evelina was written by Dr. Johnson.'

Miss Austen seldom shows her sweeter side in her letters, but, when she does, her sweetness has a brilliance which gives it a charming distinction. Most of them were written to her beloved sister Cassandra, during their yearly separations. If they are sometimes monotonous in their detail, they certainly have the virtue of absolute spontaneity. Nobody could detect a genius in them, still less the genius of the family. There are few letters from famous women of which this can be said. Those of Charlotte Bronte and Mrs. Brown- ing are indeed equally unconscious ; but Miss Bronte's letters are more characteristic of the whole woman than Miss Austen's — of her passion and her austerity — while in Mrs. Browning's we are aware of the poet, beside the lovable companion.

There is a very different sort of letter written by the great — more edifying and less intimate — which, for want of a better term, may be called the Sibylline letter. Madame de

\

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Stael was probably its first parent, but she is too much of a Muse to be reckoned with, and George Sand is the High Priestess who has given us the best of such oracles, a High, Priestess rich in human love for human correspondents. Beautiful thoughts on Life and Death and Immortality, tender wisdom, eloquent political outbursts and pleadings for freedom — such is the poetry in prose which makes up her correspondence. It is unsatisfactory to give fragments of it, and her letters should be read as wholes. The same cannot be said of George Eliot's correspondence, for she is a Sibyl too deeply versed in German philosophy, too much weighed down by the responsibilities of utterance, to make a letter- writer. It is often the Minor Prophetesses who have the finer turn for expression — Fanny Kemble, for instance, whose letters frequently have the Delphic ring. But they are always natural, always abundant, and enrich us with the wealth of her varied experience.

There is one large region of letter-writing which remains to be touched on, a region which lies between the unconscious intimate letter and the conscious literary one, and partakes of both ; this is the world of social letters, and social letters are identical with the graceful correspondence of the eigh- teenth century in England. It was the only time when our reserved island could boast of an outburst of letter-writing. French influence, French expression, and travels in France were then the fashion, and no doubt intercourse with our neighbours schooled our taste and taught us to formulate more readily. The practice of letter-writing was almost as universal as in Madame du Deffand's France, and much less self-conscious than in her circles. Like their French contemporaries, too, these English letters are typical rather than individual. If one had to express them by a single comprehensive epithet, one would choose the word ' sprightly.' ' Sprightly ' often rises to ' brilliant,' and that not only in the best hands. The great Hannah More, Miss Burney, and

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Mrs. Piozzi amaze us by the vitality of their pens ; but many of the less known ladies, Maria Holroyd and Mrs. Boscawen in particular, are not far behind, and there does not seem to be one of them who was guilty of a dull page. They always write letters ' of the news sort,' never of ' the inner-woman sort ' — purely external chronicles of external things described with animation and intelligence.

Most of the charmers of that time knew the same people and had the same tastes as well as the same style, so that it is often hard for the reader to tell one from another. Beside the Drums and Routs, the quizzings and scandals, and all the gay bustle which go on in their correspondence, it is also full of the fashionable curiosity about travellers and remote facts from foreign lands. ' Miss Harris, I hope,' writes one lady, ' will tell you next winter how she skaited [sic] through the northern climate almost to every Court over frozen seas.' Miss Harris and her ' skaiting ' were doubtless discussed in twenty drawing-rooms, over twenty cups of bohea. Those were elegant days, when the object of life was ' to be enter- tained,' and even Captain Cook and his savages were de- scribed elegantly ; days so elegant, indeed, that we find one of Hannah More's feminine correspondents anxious to address her as Hercules, but refraining on the score of delicacy.

All these writers belonged to distinguished circles, and the real value of their letters lies in their familiar pictures of great men and of great events. Their pages are pages of history, and as such they should be read. The presentation of some striking scene shows them, perhaps, at their best ; such, for example, as the trial of Warren Hastings, which Hannah More witnessed. 4 Poor Hastings,' she wrote, ' sitting and looking so meek, to hear himself called " villain " and "cut-throat." . . . The orator (Edmund Burke) was seized with a spasm . . . and I did not know whether he might not have died in the exertion of his powers, like Chatham,*

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' Mrs.' More's correspondence is not nearly so well known as Miss Burney's, and yet, though its writer is not so attrac- tive, it is quite as sparkling and representative. No one had better matter for her letters. Until her conversion in early middle age, she led a life as brilliant as it was possible for a Sabbatarian to lead ; and a great deal of brilliance can be put into six days out of seven. She spent several months of each year with the Garricks — who adored her — met everybody of interest, and spent her nights, as she tells us, ' raking it ' in a hackney coach with Dr. Johnson, or hearing him talk at Sir Joshua's. She was a thorough bluestocking and much enjoyed stately badinage with Bishops, or Gothic compliments from periwigged divines.

Blow, blow, my sweetest rose,

For Hannah More will soon be here !

so writes the learned Dr. Langhorne to her, and her letters to him are as liturgically flirtatious as he could desire. Her correspondence does not show much change even after her conversion, for she was one of those fortunate people who can regard their social position as a Means of Grace, and the more she used it the holier she felt. When a couple of illustrious Turks came to visit her, she writes, they sat down on the carpet and tried to convert her to the Koran, in return for which attention she pressed White's Sermons upon them. It is true she had some passing qualms about Horace Walpole's free-thought, but she continued her witty budgets to him on the chance of their effecting his reform — unlike her French rival, who would have written for the opposite purpose. The sincere Evangelicalism of this busy and popular Pharisee makes her letters rather distincter, perhaps also more amusing, than those of her amiable compeers ; and her copious sheets to her courtiers, who were often of her own sex, can be safely recommended as excellent company for a solitary evening by the fire.

H

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The publication of family correspondence has lately come into vogue, and it is to be hoped it may continue. We have had the private letters of the Verney family, and also those of the Newdegate ladies, first in the time of Elizabeth, then in the time of the Georges.1 These simple communications from unknown people make quite as valuable a chapter in social history as the letters of celebrities ; more so, perhaps, because they are not brilliant and only give us a picture of comfortable average people. Public spirit is a rare and may be a conceited quality ; as a motive for correspondence it is, at any rate, impossible. But how charming would it be if, from any motive whatever, more members of more families would write full chronicles of their doings — and if other members would keep them 1 The clothes, the walks, the jam-making — even the jam-eating — of a hundred years ago are vitally interesting. It requires, of course, much greater self-suppression to figure namelessly as one of many corre- spondents than to write a novel, the unfailing vent for every young lady with a pen. But then there is this compensation : a letter is bound to give pleasure at least to one, but there is no such certainty about a novel.

The qualities too which mar a book may often make a letter; and letter-writing is the legitimate channel for immediate expression, of which women feel so much greater a need than men. Then it is a craft which is peculiarly adapted to a woman's avocations and the life of little inter- ruptions which usually falls to her lot. There is no solemn thread of Fate to spin when we take up our correspondence — no thread, indeed, that we may not comfortably lose, and find again half an hour later. Letter-writing has another advantage : it fulfils the first condition of any feminine occupation ; it includes men and admits of all the finer shades of their relations to women. It is an interesting

1 Gossip from a Muniment Room and The Cheverels of Cheverel Manor, both edited by Lady Newdegate.

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question whether women write best to men or to women, and one which either sex will probably settle differently. It is evident enough that men write best to women, for women alone have power to draw out their tenderer side — to make them most themselves. But, excepting in love-letters, it is just this side which disappears when women write to men ; chameleon-like, they try to write from the brain, to condense more, to become less personal, and consequently least them- selves. Such letters are more artistic than those they send to each other, but they have not the frankness and vitality that these possess. Lady Mary is nicer when she writes to her sister or daughter than when she writes to Pope ; and Mrs. Carlyle reveals herself more vividly in her letters to her Scottish women friends than in those to Sterling and to Forster.

However that may be, a paper such as this can have but one ending, a plea for the Employment of the Pen. Every- body knows the reasons against it. There is no School of Art where we can all learn it and take ourselves seriously ; there is no leisure ; and there are newspapers, railway trains, high pressure — those often-quoted lions in the way. But, after all, there is a constant demand for the revival of other and less useful crafts — handlooms, lace-making, and the like. Why not then for that of letter- writing, which cannot fail, as these do, because of insufficient funds ? There is no real reason why the women of to-day should not produce as good letters as their great-grandmothers, and every reason why they should. And if they have grown too far-seeing to write for the moment and need a nobler purpose, let them write for the poor unamused ' unborn generations ' who will have nothing but postcards to divert them. (1899.)

A FRENCH GOVERNESS

THE race of governesses is now almost extinct, driven out by the invading hordes of university teachers. The gover- ness of the last generation — the lady born in Central Germany and offended about many things — she who taught the glorious motions of the universe by means of an orange and a knitting-needle — is fast disappearing from the planet that she dealt with thus intimately. If only there were time and space to write about every interesting subject, some one might give us a remarkable book on the Evolution of Governesses. It is a more fruitful theme than would at first sight appear, for governesses have gone through many periods. They seem to have begun in France, where, as early as the fifteenth century, we read of the Court Chaperone or ' Gouvernante,' who superintended the * Chamber of the Damsels ' and never left them except at the approach of