An English Poetess

Alice Meynell. By Viola Meynell. (Cape. 15s.)

" Straight as a stalk of lavender, Soft as a rope of silk."

COVENTRY PATMORE wrote this of his fellow poet, Mrs. Meynell. The lines describe her looks and personality exactly and serve as an introduction to her poetry.

Her parentage was interesting—Charles Dickens among, many others, was wildly in love with her charming mother, who seems to have been a type of the innocent and devout Bohemians of which the Victorian era produced a very few.

Gay, sentimental, instructed and sweet, she never broke the bonds of the period, but she dressed in a very untidy manner, to hide them. Of the father, his talented daughter has left an inimitable portrait. He was an exceedingly pleasant dilettante. He could talk well, but he knew the value of silence, he could write well, but he shirked the toil of much writing. " He had an exquisite style from which to refrain." Things ignoble " never approached near enough for his refusal." Lastly, " he always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes."

This pair produced a poetess and brought her up largely in Italy, where they seemed to have lived in such a hugger- mugger manner as to quench poor Dickens's admiration. In every soul born into the world there is a new piece, a something not inherited. Mrs. Meynell had the slightest possible touch of genius, an immense power of hard work, and the orderliness which is so often the result of rebound. Her own generation put her on an equality with Mrs. Browning, but the new critics have not left her in such high company. Who was right ? She has great men on her side. Often more banal than Tennyson at his extreme worst, she could now and then write a line or two of which no Victorian poet need have been ashamed. She was without variety, "a poet of one mood in all my lays " ; as it were " a garden charmed from chang- ing." She could describe a scene to perfection if only she would not have gone on about it." She wrote, looking on to Kensington Gardens in the evening, of :-

" A narrow silence in the park, Between the lights, a narrow dark."

Where is the London lover, whether he wield the brush or the pen, who will not take his hat off before the sketch ? In prose she could produce exactly the same effect. Watching slum-children bathing in sparkling summer water, she wrote : " All the squalor is gone, kicked off with the last boot." She could suggest religious experience in as first-hand a manner as a mediaeval saint, but she could write at times hardly better than a modern spinner of hymns. Surely this rings abso- lutely true :—

" Thou art the Way,

Hadst Thou been nothing but the Goal, I cannot say If Thou hadst ever found my soul."

And this :-

" New every year.

Newborn and newly dear, He comes with tidings and a song, The ages long, the ages long.

Even as the cold Keen winter grows not old, As childhood is so fresh foreseen, And Spring in the familiar green ; Sudden as sweet come the expected feet,

All joy is young and new all art,

And He, too, Whom we have by heart."

Miss Viola Meynell has given us a picture of her mother in relation to her home which is of real value. She has described the drawing-room life of the period at its very best. How

many good things have come out of the drawing-room ! Mr. and Mrs. Meynell were journalists by profession. Both worked equally hard to make " an adequate income." She knew how to lead her own life as well as any independent woman of to-day, but she was not a specialist. She knew how to make a home as well as how to write an essay. She created and maintained a happy and beautiful place for her children to live in, and that not only in holiday times. She worked to make friends for them and for herself by exercising a kind of hospitality which present conditions are rendering as impossible as the rougher hospitality of two hundred years ago. The friends changed places a little, but were never dropped. We find Coventry Patmore sighing because he has " lost his supremacy in her friendship." It was a position never held for very long. Her husband and children filled her heart, all other loves were in reality literary enthusiasms personified, or merely congenial or interesting acquaint- ances.

She loved " a party," though she was shy. She gave thought to the food and the flowers, and more to the subtle game of Victorian conversation. Like her father, she knew how to listen. " I missed your silence," said Coventry Patmore, when upon some festive occasion he was disappointed of her society. She loved the " dropping in " company which the revolt of the servants and the rise in rents has made a thing of the past. She liked to be worshipped, but she gave her children her friends, and her friend-dependents, like poor inspired Francis Thompson, " the gentle, late, voluble, flushed, dozing visitor of every-day," something to worship her for. Her children loved her profoundly and intimately. She asked great things for herself, but she denied herself habitually to get them. She had a sense of humour, but it seldom burst into fun. Fun had little place in the soul of the best Victorian women. She could, however, be funny on occasion, witness the following sudden expression of sympathy with Mr. Chesterton and admiration for his work : " Had I been a man and large, I should have been Chesterton." She could also appreciate a funny situation, and tell with gusto

how her father, after dining with the Shelleys, could never cease to marvel at what was the strange effect of hearing the poet, the "eternal child," referred to by elderly respectability as my poor father." But as a rule her humour was of the incisive and indulgent kind, as when she said of a writer who

used to send manuscripts for her approval, " She is a woman of brief, but not small, thoughts."

- We have quoted enough to show the great attraction of this " Life." Miss Meynell, in writing it, has done something quite out of the common. Close relationship has sealed neither her eyes, her lips, nor her heart. She has spoken the truth in love, probably the only way in which full biographical truth can be spoken. It is a remarkable achievement.