ANNIE KEARY.*
THE first thing needful to be said of this touching and beautiful memoir, which has been written by the person best qualified to write it, is that it stands in need of no apology, but justifies by its existence its right to exist. We have never been able to see why biography should concern itself mainly with people of noteworthy achievement, or to feel the justice of the remark, so often made, that the performances of such or such a person have not been sufficiently remarkable to make his life an object of interest to the world. It would, indeed, be far from difficult to defend the seeming paradox that those whom we call dis- tinguished people are the least fitted to be chosen as subjects for biography. The politician's enactments and the soldier's victories belong to history, the painter's pictures and the poet's, verses provide material for criticism ; but, as a man, the politi- cian or the soldier, the painter or the poet, may not be more- interesting than his fellows ; and it is far from improbable that the amount of force expended in " work" which is before the- public has left the private remainder of his life somewhat impoverished. Carlyle, in a well-known sentence, attributes the charm of biography to the fact that "all men are, to an unspeakable degree, brothers ;'' and it can hardly be denied that the sense of brotherhood is appealed to most strongly by lives which, in virtue of their simple humanness, touch our own lives oftener and more keenly than they can possibly be touched by the records of those who have been called from the crowded, highway to the solitary mountain path.
Annie Keary's was one of these highway pilgrimages, awl this simple history of her uneventful progress through the dusty lanes of life seems while we read it to make the very same lanes- less dusty for us who follow, the familiar hedge-rows greener- and sweeter than we have been wont to think them, the blue of' heaven intenser and its grey. tenderer than they have ever- seemed before, the whole journey a more solemn, and yet a gladder and a sweeter thing. As we close the volume, the life- spreads itself before us, like a picture such as William Blake, • Mnneir of Annie Marg. By her Slater. London: Macmillan and Co.
might have painted,—the picture of a little procession, with the angels of Faith, and Hope, and Love leading the way for Annie Keary who, holds by one hand a tiny child and by the other one of the little servant maidens of the Bessborough Home, and is followed by a crowd of friends, whose hopes, and fears, and joys, and sorrows are all her own. Readers of her pleasant novels, and of her delightful stories for the children whom she loved, End them full of tender touches and gleams of happy insight, which they would not willingly let slip from grateful recollec- tion; but those who knew her in life, or who learn to know her
from these pages, will think of her not as the author of Tames Home and A Doubting Heart, but as the "Aunt Annie" of so many nurseries, the "Sister Keary," who brought a flush of 'welcome to pale little faces in the East-end Children's Hospital, the woman whose heart was rich enough to meet every claim, not of love only, but of need.
No one who knows anything of, or cares anything for, the inner life of little children, will think that Miss Eliza Keary has made a mistake in devoting so many pages to the exquisite sketch of Annie Keary's childhood. Since Mrs. Gaskell told the story of the four marvellous children who wrote romances and talked high-Tory politics in the lonely Haworth parsonage, we know of no more realizable picture of those fascinating chambers of imagery in which the imaginative child lives so much of his life than that which is painted for us here. The sur- roundings were indeed different, the solitary moorland York- shire parsonage had little in common with that other par- sonage in the crowded Yorkshire street ; but a child's fancy can deal as potently with unpromising material as the fairy godmother with the pumpkin which served for Cinderella's state-carriage, and even in Hull the little Annie created a fairy- land, a perfect region of romance. It was she who called out of the realm of nothingness into the nursery myth-kingdom that mysterious fairy-potentate, Mrs. Calkill, who since those days has been the delight of innumerable little ones ; it was she who set on foot the conversational stories of which the heroes were Alcibiades, and Plato, and Pericles (concerning whom were told many things not recorded by Plutarch), and Themistocles, and Socrates, who met for the first time in the Hull playroom, and became friends at once ; while to her childish imagination was due the fascinatingly terrible story of the persecuted nun, who was imprisoned in a subterranean passage in the very house where they were living, and of whom—delightful thought ! —she and her playmates were the appointed rescuers. The carrying-out of this achievement was attended by one little incident, so beautifully characteristic of the strength of a child's faith and the utter simplicity of its natural piety, that we must End place for it. Miss Eliza Keary tells how, when the hour _for the great enterprise had fully come, and,—
" The sceptics had been talked into something like the submission of their private lodgment, and had agreed to assist in the great act of the drama, twilight had given place to darkness, and a chill, eerie feeling was creeping over us all. There was one sweet little girl in the group. Fanny by name, who had been among the first to take the matter seriously, and yet had not given way to childish fears ; she soothed and strengthened her sisters and cousins, she looked so sweet snd wise and reliable that the halters began to look up to her as a sort of leader, and when the darkness drew us all into closer fellow- ship, she made us kneel down, while she offered up a prayer for the success of our undertaking. After this, with lighted candle, with chisel and hammer, we all, Annie and Fanny leading the way, pro- ceeded to the scene of danger."
Among all the pictures of child-life with which we are acquainted, we can recall none prettier, or, in a way, more touching, than this of the little group 'kneeling in the fading light to ask the aid of the great Helper in their deed of high emprise.
As Annie Keary grew older, she passed from the life of the 'Hull playroom to that of the boarding-school, a narrower life, on the whole, but made happy to her by the love of her com- panions, and not seriously troubled by want of appreciation on
the part of her teachers, who regarded with sad severity her loose renderings of "dear Mr. Baker's sermons," which deafness prevented her from hearing, and mourned over the worldly.
mindedness which indulged itself in frivolous conversations on such unspiritual topics as "gravitation and the stars." It was during these school years that Annie Keary's life of human -service may be said to have begun. One school custom, which gave a certain graciousness to an otherwise unsympathetic training, was the adoption of the younger children by their older companions, who filled, in a sweet, girlish way, the place of mothers to their little charges. There were many who loved to call Annie Keary "mother," and her sister tells us that the children who came to her share were the very troublesome ones, "those whom everybody else had tried and been tired out by, and she loved them quite as' well as if they had been so many cherubs. It might seem to outsiders that they imposed upon her good-nature, but, after all, the unruly spirits did grow tamer with her, and the weakly ones stumbled less often in her company. It was astonishing how many good points came to the front, how teachers and scholars alike began to hope where she had first believed."
It was this all-believing and all-hopeful charity which made every one who came near to Annie Keary feel that it was good to
be there. And it was good, for love has the happy alchemy
which makes or tends to make its objects loveable; and it is not hard to believe that the understanding gentleness which never saw the worst side of others chiefly, or first, or indeed at all, or could ever be persuaded "that any one was out-and-out base, hypocritical, unworthy," had a wonderful sanative quality, and was full of health and strength and stimulation. Accompanying this boundless trust in others, which must have added largely to her happiness, was a haunt- ing distrust of herself, which at times was, doubtless, a source of pain, or at any rate of disquiet. This revealed itself most clearly with regard to her literary work, and "whenever the voice from the world outside seemed to confirm the mistrustful voice within, a slight recoil upon herself began, which arrested to a certain extent her progress, and drew a veil of reticence over her spirit which was injurious to her as an artist." But • this distrust was interwoven with the whole fabric of her being ; she was altogether wanting in self-sufficiency, in the good, as well as the evil sense of the word; but had, nevertheless, a beautiful sanity and reality of nature, which prevented her attitude of dependence from assuming the appearance of unworthy weakness. Her spiritual history is full of peculiar interest. She never altogether lost her feeling of the need of help, of some external sanction for her own: spiritual instincts ; and she found such help and sanction in places far removed from each other, and in views which seem at first to have no common ground. She found help, or teaching, or spiritual stimulus in the words of Charles Kingsley, touching the larger hope, which at first she held lovingly, but tremblingly ; in the more sharply outlined teaching of the Sisters with whom she worked so devotedly among East-London slums ; in the counsels of perfection uttered by teachers from the Western hemisphere, who came with their gospel of entire sancti- fication; and even from the thaumaturgic revelations of spiritual- ism she was able to extract something which in a passing mood was, in its way, nutritive, and not poisonous. A bald summary of these things does her injustice ; the book must be read, in order to feel how natural and right were these seekings after perfect light in her journey through the shadows. We do not think of her as blown helplessly about by every wind of doctrine, but rather as wandering calmly through a fair orchard, guided by a sure instinct, and finding each fruit in its turn pleasant to the eye, and good for food.
Of Annie Keary's work in literature we have said nothing, for there is nothing that it would now avail to say. It has a delicate charm, like the charm of wild-flowers ; but we do the wild - flower better justice by enjoyment than by praise, and there is a kind of artistic product which stands
not above or below the range of ordinary criticism, but simply outside of it. Nor has our space allowed us to make any extracts from the letters which add 80 much to the value of Miss Eliza Keary's memoir. Some of the most beautiful are among those addressed to young girls who had gone out to service from the Home in Bessborough Gardens in which Annie Keary took such loving interest; and it is noteworthy that in them the literary form is as exquisite as in the work which she finished for a critical world. Even to a little "general servant," Annie Keary could give nothing less than her best; and if we may in conclusion make one suggestion, we would express a decided opinion that a selection from these and other letters, such as could be purchased for a few pence, could hardly fail to find a large welcome among the perplexed, the tempted, and the sorrowful, to whom the " Life " as a whole will be specially precious.
Previous page
