Mrs. Meynell: A Study

I

WITH the death of Mrs. Meynell there has passed a spirit of absolute importance. Hers is a voice to which we have listened for forty years with a habit of respect unmarred by scruple. It was heard, a fine, firm note, in the English journalism of the eighteeneighties — a note already individual, not of a cult, with something of the solitude which she has felt to be the likely sign of genius, small or large. It was greeted with bold recognition by the great editor who seldom erred on the side of praise, W. E. Henley; it was revered with touching and beautiful devotion by the two veterans of letters, Coventry Patmore and George Meredith; till in the flush of her early fame Mrs. Meynell was acclaimed, even by the ruefully laughing protest of Max Beerbohm, the literary queen of the nineties.

Those were the days of glad discovery. Honor has moved sometimes since to a quieter measure. Some reaction there has been from an extravagance of claim which Mrs. Meynell would never have made for herself; some charge here and there of a dallying preciosity by writers ludicrously ignorant of the pressure under which Mrs. Meynell’s little masterpieces have usually been produced. But criticism has never seriously disputed her fine and private eminence. One point of stability has remained, while younger names have shone out and grown dim, while little systems have had their day and ceased to be: here, in the slim volumes of Mrs. Meynell, is prose not of a fashion but of quality, and poetry which needs no commentary to be known for poetry.

Our deference has been accorded above all to her sureness. This has been no gift uncertain of its way and end. This is no mere registry of temperament. Each small work of prose or verse has been the product of an alert vitality, in charge, aware of itself, whether the record of acute perception in the world of fair things under the sun or of thought in the chambers of an exquisite imagery. Where another has liked to perceive a cloud or a mist, she has willed to descry always a certain shape. She has been known therefore as a maker of fine distinctions.

From the very fineness of her stroke comes the ‘obscurity’ sometimes felt by the easy-going reader of her prose. She has called George Meredith master, and we see why. We understand too Meredith’s unqualified honor for her early essay. Here is, to be sure, no Meredithian stenography, but an ‘instancy’ of approach alien to our normally slack vocabularies. The kinship with Charles Lamb is plain enough in the knack for the lucky word and the will to work for it. The kinship is plain besides with the literary ancestry of Lamb and the phrases ‘choicely good ’ of the seventeenth century. Here are no recondite obliquities. But as we turn the modern pages we remember ever more genially the good Sir Thomas Browne, ‘differencing himself more nearly and drawing into a lesser circle.’ Even more nicely differenced are the phrases of Mrs. Meynell.

Hence her importance in the abundant flowering of the literary essay in the eighteen-nineties. For the mot juste, which Max Beerbohm has called the ‘Holy Grail of the nineties,’ was as infrequently achieved as any grail, albeit most energetically sought. Here, as always, Mrs. Meynell was of her age and yet curiously separate within it. She was, as she has said, unaware of the religion of the word which had its ritual in the London about her. She had read for her edification no page of Flaubert, was conscious indeed of no literary influence upon her prose except, as Americans will be glad to hear, the influence of Lowell. She lived, careless of the movement of which she was so influential a part, with the single interest alone — to write ‘modern prose’ in a way to be found by herself, free of hereditary conventions.

Thus we understand the forever ‘unexpected’ quality in her language. For the original phrase — foolishly socalled — is, as one sadly reflects, only the right one. And till her death Mrs. Meynell remained, as many will be bold to assert, easily superior amid her generation in one thing — in her truth to the sheer word. Many are called to literary honesty, but few are chosen to the verbal sincerity of genius. We go our literary ways, ‘seeking inventions fine.’ We handle our dormant vocabularies, hoping for some strange combination which shall raise that mass of faded metaphor to a better resurrection. Mrs. Meynell has recalled us always to the difficult way; she has applied with consistency her creed — that the most finely exact word of thought, the most accurately responsive word of sense, is the only word which can forever make all things new. ‘The style is in the very conception of a word, in its antenatal history. Else is it neither choice nor authentic.’

Of fine shades in language therefore she has become the appropriate recorder. Nor need she consider such interpretation beneath the scope of high criticism, finding in language a master-creation, revelation of our incremental human process. Born ‘an international child,’ early free of foreign cities, she has been exempt from the curse of Babel, hearing every man with readiness in his own tongue. Language has been to her not a barrier but an enfranchisement. She has been sensitive to the paradox of linguistic counterchange, the value of the verbal turn most choicely relished by the foreigner. She has been sensitive to courteous idiom, in some special tongue, ‘freighted with such feeling as the very language keeps in store,’has caught a buoyant snatch of essential Italian or the sunny word of France. She has heeded, none better, the dual ancestry of our English, the splendor of foreign encounters within our sentence, holding by preference to ‘the remoteness of Latinity.’ With comprehension too she has remembered the limitation of the homely and the inexpressive — the ‘shelter’ of dialect, the gallantry of children not to be baffled in the adventure of speech. With tenderness she has pitied the ‘narrow house’ of the inarticulate, its lack of ‘the ultimate syllable,’ and of the ultimate experience therefore: ‘For doubtless right language enlarges the soul as no other power can do.’

She has liked best with her own right language to name the ‘spirit of place.’ It challenges us all and then eludes like a melody returned into the air. But to her who has had ‘the love of altering speech, of frontiers in the blood,’ it has allowed discovery, drifting in bell tunes from campanili tops, shining on clear horizons.

Abstemious even in beauty, Mrs. Meynell has preferred the lesser aspects of place which refuse excess — the sun that rises on the plain of Suffolk, ‘nearer the dew of his birth than the sun that leaps from the mountain-top.’ She has cared little for English lawns reserved for beauty, preferring ‘the ascetic lines of Italy,’ the ‘scenery moulded by the industry of man.’ For the luxurious richness of the English park she has felt sometimes distaste: ‘It is only in a landscape made for beauty that beauty is so ill achieved.’ This is the paradoxical ‘lesson of landscape.’

Mrs. Meynell’s real lesson of landscape has been the lesson of the ‘vigilant senses.’ There is delight in line which loves the point of fine grassblade or parallels of ‘tethered rushes swept to a single attitude.’ There is frank pleasure in the tactile, the joys of sensitive hands, the feel of flowers through the bare feet of children. But her special sense has been for the fine vitalities of the mobile world. For Mrs. Meynell has achieved a good paradox which she has not named: accepting for her own the narrow method of detail, she has delivered her readers into the liberty of light and air. There is the tremble of translucent aspens with which ‘the very sun and breath of earth are entangled.’ There is the always differing sky. And aloft is the holiday of the cloud, ‘distributing the sun.’ There are the ‘winds of the world.’

Here the paradoxes are at hand: the rise of the horizon as we mount, the shadow lurking in the light. This last fancy has reached its most distinguished phrasing in her lines ‘To Tintoretto,’ who seized the head of art and made her face the sun: —

Here the paradox of the visible day has become a symbol.

II

To her paradox we recur perforce in any comment upon Mrs. Meynell, although she has maintained with her generation a pleasant quarrel for its paradoxical excesses, its panting for the ‘unexpected phrase.’ It would not occur to anybody to deny our predilection. We have long been amorous of the shock in literary sensation, from the needle-prick of the Wilde epigram to the rude sting of the Shaw ‘gadfly.’ And the paradox as commonly conceived, the spark of contradiction, is no longer a secret. Thanks to the popularity of Mr. Chesterton, his method, though by no means his vision, has ceased to be a mystery.

But the revelation of the unexpected is always a primary, if unconscious, demand upon the faculty of genius. To transcend the commonplace, we are pretty well agreed, is to acclaim the miracle. And our glad salute for art achieved is always in some sense the spirit of delight rushing upon discovery. The act of creation is always in one way or another a new act. It carries a surprise like the surprise of sunshine — giver of illusion perhaps; ‘sun without which everything would look just like what it is’; or, again, searcher of reality, quickening to the recognition of unregarded truth.

And the paradox explicit, the paradox of contradiction, is no vain thing, though we may make of it a jugglery or stretch it to the deadness of automatism. It is at its cheapest sign of a mental stirring, worthy at least in dexterity. In right health it is product of a mind alert to significant relations. At best it is a master-word, shaped to apparent incongruity by the pressure of interior powers. It records a touch from the depths of the commonly impalpable obscure. For the truly questing spirit brushes as it passes the hidden infinitude of contradiction.

Mrs. Meynell indeed would never have wished her ridicule to be taken literally, for she has confessed the habit when she most derided, and has attacked in better paradoxes than most of us can make. Paradox, indeed, special, lightly resonant, has come to be acknowledged the essential quality of her work at its best.

The deeper paradox cleared to ‘spiritual sense’ is a recurrent theme in her reflective essays, best read with her poetry as gloss. ‘Commentaries,’ she has called them; but the word suggests too local a habitation for their content. They record a consciousness passive but listening for news below the obvious and the familiar, awaiting a vagrant but sure enlightenment. The mystery is recalled of the hours for sleep ‘when the mind by some divine paradox has a deeper sense of light.’ The rhythm of our interior life is remembered, the flux and flow of the ‘tides of the mind,’ the sense of presence dependent upon our experience of absence, the alternate visitation to even the most ‘single’ spirits of ‘ecstasy and desolation.’ She broods most reverently upon the wonder of maternity, the sacred union in solitude of mother and child, the continuity of personal life in generation. Late as early she is possessed by the mystery of time, realized alone in the sense of antiquity remembered from the interminable years of childhood.

III

Childhood remains with her a mystery visited by revelation. Here is another witness, valid because unsentimental, to the inner sight of privileged children. Mrs. Meynell’s kinship seems with the seventeenth century again, with Traherne, who celebrated in simplicity and in philosophy a childhood of unimaginable powers: ‘ My essence was capacity.’ This was the beginning and end of his intimations. She remembers too with Wordsworth the exultation over beauty of the child’s soul ‘at its daybreak in the dark.’ She derives ‘from the ministration of a boy,’ from Dante, poetry’s highest reach of spiritual love. Childhood holds and transcends the complete experience of maturity. ‘Therefore be satisfied,’she bids the early dead of modern battle: —

But the children of Mrs. Meynell’s essays are not oppressed by the weight of their immortalities. Theirs is a reality of flesh, surprised by too careful an approach to scare them. She waits in patience upon the opening consciousness of these new spirits, without forcing, without impertinence. She waits, not to feel the future in the instant, some far culmination in the last of life for which the first has been fondly supposed to be made. She cares rather for childhood essential, for the characteristic, slow unfolding.

She watches the beginnings of the personal life, ‘the hasty, huddled outcry of birth,’ ‘ the first uncertain sketch of a smile, private, dry.’ As the early years draw on, she has compassion for the unready mind in a too quick world, for the tumult and penitence of a gusty spirit not yet prepared for its own danger. She recaptures for our memory the intensity of sight within the narrow range — the swarming details of the ground to which we moved so close, the endless events of the unimaginable hour, the keen impression of place or of face beloved, the recoil from grotesque. She respects with a delicacy which will not press or handle the distance of childhood from our alien lives revealed by the reticence of the growing boy or by some inscrutable childish answer. She defends the intelligence of the starting mind, its refusal of absurdity. Only the child of sentiment is never met in her pages. Her child, the true child, is never ’posed in some form of grace’; he stands on both feet, ‘getting what grip he can of the earth.’

IV

As a critic of life Mrs. Meynell has been, as one might expect, finely fastidious. She has turned from the touch of vulgarity with the recoil that marks the limitation of the daintier sense. She has written boldly, grown to confident taste from long habit of gracious living among gracious things. Natural then but sometimes unsparing has been her derision for our modern world with its incurable leaning toward things ‘mentally inexpensive.’

She has been less happy when she has derided. Hers was neither the high gayety nor the indignant passion required for derision at its best. In such sallies her style is sometimes hurried or voluble, less sustained for all its timber. Enlightened gravity has been the right source of her unquenchable wit. A gentle spirit committed to satire may often force the note from unconscious reluctance. ‘ To be clever and sensitive, and to hurt the foolish and stolid! Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world ? ’

She has had none the less a sure aim against the paradoxes of insincerity despised most heartily by whoso loves best ‘the paradoxes of truth.’ She has ridiculed a static theatre confirmed in slowness till its idea of advance becomes a perpetual retard. She has girded at our willed and premeditated laughter adopted as conventional morality. She has dissected with admirable spirit our addiction to pathos, our predestined sensibility. We live, it sometimes seems, in a ‘world decivilized.’

For America, which she has loved with a romance humbling to the patriot, Mrs. Meynell has had a word of wholesome laughter. Stout champion of American culture, genial friend even of its ’liberal ignorances,’ she has had sufficient perspective as a reviewer of American fiction to set in the light some unsuspected sins. She has not liked our ‘best parlor emulations,’ our hope to be valued for a certified address. She has not liked the parlors themselves in the farmhouses of our countryside, though she should have done us the justice to remember that they were never meant to be used. She has not liked in our country folk ‘the energetic provincialism, the distressing household industry.’ She has not liked our ‘affections made vulgar by undemonstrativeness, kindness by reticence, religion by candor.’ Here is paradox for us to eat.

Some of us find it too in her formula for American literary gift. — exquisiteness. ‘In ripeness and not in rawness consists the excellence of Americans.’ The critic did not expect her dictum to be popular; she found us ambitious for a poetry gigantic and elementary — such a poetry as can never be ours, heirs as we are, not of some heroic age, but of the English centuries. To such ambition she ascribed our pride in Walt Whitman, pronounced with intrepidity ‘the poet of mediocrity,’‘clamorous, not thunderous.’ She wrote boldly, in a style taut and steady, conscious of danger. She wrote and survived. But with healing praise she has summoned us to recognize our powers as she sees them, ‘the conscious and delicate achievement of American letters.’ More especially, she has known Emerson the poet. She has measured the fineness of Father Tabb, his ‘ immediacy,’his melody. She has loved best the catholic mind of Lowell, most congenial as most entirely man of letters.

Mrs. Meynell’s discrimination is usually finest in her literary interpretations. Of other arts she has written variously as amateur by the sanction of a refined and intimate vision. But of letters she has spoken with authority, dealing justice with assurance. For the most part we accept that verdict with a deference granted to competence alone.

The most enlightened dogma may err, to be sure. Shortly before the resurrection of Traherne she wrote: ‘We know that there does not lurk another Crashaw contemned, another Vaughan disregarded, another George Herbert misplaced.’

Even Olympian assertion takes a risk when it meddles with history; but the wise will not commonly dispute with Mrs. Meynell the paradoxes of her qualitative analysis. The self-effacement of the Ruskin study we respect, but respect still more the great interpretive sentence: that the student most grieved for that lamentable spirit must wish him to have been, ‘not less, but more a man sacrificed.’ We must enjoy, whether we like it or not, the superb castigation of Swinburne, ‘who took the treasure of the language and put it in his pocket for the fatal purpose of sound, not of sense’; whose thoughts had ‘their origin, their home, their authority, their mission, in two places, his own vocabulary and the passions of other men.’ Here is finality, perhaps too frequent with Mrs. Meynell, suggestive of her admiration for Dr. Johnson. But we can all rejoice at our recovery of Tennyson, misunderstood in the possession ‘at the same time of both a style and a manner,’ the style of radiance freed from captivity at the chaste touch moist and cold, the purity of poetical criticism.

Mrs. Meynell’s honor has been given with least scruple and reserve to Coventry Patmore. The criticism indeed of our Roman Catholic poets for one another has been of a cult, accepted by the initiate, but seeming to the laity ignorant of the mysteries over-consummate in praise. They have seen more in one another than we, greatly venerating too, could always find. The critics, however, have been poets of instructed sensibility, which may well give us lessons in reverence. ‘ Ask saints of heaven,’ said Chaucer, ‘for they can tell.’ And the poets have as likely authority for poetry. Nowhere at least has the prose of Mrs. Meynell a surer distinction than in her respect for this ‘poetry of pathos and delight.’ Her language takes on a dignity gnomic and oracular, rising to a solemn tension in the candor of a high admiration.

V

The prose of Mrs. Meynell is commonly perceptive, sensuous; her poetry is even beyond the use of lyric, inward, personal. From the fine-strung impressionism of her essay we might with logic expect an exquisite objectiveness of verse. Better than another, indeed, can Mrs. Meynell, when she wishes, fuse and temper the phrase for verse, the phrase of golden lustre lit with the truth of sunshine, or the phrase bare and searching like the wind of her Rainy Summer. But the registry of the senses, chosen by more than one modern school as its very stuff of poetry, is to her its mere beginning, its proper but casual felicity. Her poetry issues at its best from what she calls the ‘exalted senses,’ from her apprehension for spiritual significance.

We pass with her on familiar ways, but we pass in the presence of prophetic beckonings, with a summons to the uplifted heart. Her poetry finds through things visible and lovely a transmission from august levels — not indeed a revelation, but an assurance of divine secrecy. The beauty of the visible world is the channel of spiritual grace — like her thrush before dawn, singing ignorant, passionless, but singing of ancient knowledge and ancient desire. The body, then, is the creature on which creation depends, for which creation functions, sought by a divine approach. Poetry of such sort, fervid, grave, tuned to outward perception, turns inward for its essential content.

Her art brooded young over the mystery of its own poetic consciousness. She liked to fancy a continuity in poetic generation, a communion of all the saints of poetry, in which as in eternity there is no distinction of time. She greeted in kinship the singers yet to come, whose melody lay still unstirred, implicit in field and hill. The girl hailed in her future her own sure election to poetic privilege, recognized with the sacrificial and exultant passion of a neophyte.

The spirit of poetry in its eternal renewal she has felt to be divinity. So wayward it may seem in its approach that a lonely poem in a barren season may be the dropping of a past harvest or harbinger of spring. But it is ever recurrent, potential, giver of immortal answers to the ‘mortal guess.’

The very mystery of the self, the loneliness of human personality, is a wonder persistent to her poetry. She has imagined the isolation of our separated spirits, parted in a cleavage resisted vainly by mortal wistfulness. Here is a poetry of desire, stretching hands beyond the personal limit, rejoicing at each slight bridging of the gulf, the impalpable obscure between soul and soul. The running of the tides is her symbol for the reach and withdrawal of the human spirit, ‘inhastening dear and desired,’ to flood the shore and brim the inland pools, waning as surely with the ebb, without consent but of necessity, returning ‘with lessening farewells’ to the inaccessible distance.

The excellence of this intuitive poetry Coventry Patmore called, long ago, its feminine quality. Its excellence and its limitation! For by a Patmorian oracle the feminine principle reaches its full stature in poetry only when it is achieved in the soul of man. Just what this means we shall know only when the feminine principle zieht uns hinan. Perhaps it is but a riddling guise of the Miltonic suggestion that human nature in Eden completeness is not Adam and Eve, but Adam plus Eve, each partial, together a whole being. But for temporal criticism we may recognize without too vain analysis the feminine poet within her own psychology.

Her purity is the purity of woman, circumspect, conscious, but natural and ‘unprofaned’; articulate, too, for all its reticence. Her serenity, when she has it, is the serenity of woman with her soul at quiet, moving in light and beauty, but still, guarded, ‘shepherding’ her thoughts like her own lady of delight. Her intuition too is of the woman, subtle, eager, unshrinking from the consequence of its own sensitiveness. From the depths of woman’s pity, from woman’s need to suffer in surrounding suffering, has come the poignancy of her verse, always sadder as years have deepened her ruth at human haplessness. With her advance into experience, therefore, her verse uncovered more and more the paradox of unexpected grief, till the very sacrifices of natural tenderness appear gifts of tragic destiny upon which God has forever multiplied sorrow. Motherhood itself, to Mrs. Meynell life’s best endowment, becomes, from this sad side of truth, a responsibility pitiful beyond our thought, till the very caresses of childhood are received with gratitude as ‘unhoped, undeserved,’ and the gift of birth is but the gift of death, since

The crucifixion of Christ, to her the extreme act of human suffering, is interpreted by afresh and daring symbolism. The cry of the forsaken Christ is not the solitary lament of a mortal despair; it is the birth-cry of immortal understanding, the first recoil of dying man entering the knowledge of divinity, seeing for the first time and for the moment hesitating to accept ‘God’s infinite capacity for woe.’ In such poems as this, relentless in the contemplation of sorrow, is the surest token of the feminine spirit, which, since it may not heal them, must bear the sins of the world. For when other Madonnas shall have been forgotten, Our Lady of Sorrows will remain, holding swords to her breast.

The early verse of Mrs. Meynell had indeed the native limitation of woman’s poetry, the tremor of a too unquiet sensibility. It had still the fine flurry of the blood, the palpitation not indeed of essential weakness but of unfulfillment. Not always were the ‘wild thoughts’ shepherded. Always repressed but never entirely stilled was the straining of which Mrs. Meynell herself accuses woman, her eagerness for the point of rest among the chances of our mortal life. The imperfection of woman’s spirit she defined and renounced in her poem of the war, ‘A Father of Women,’ wherein she calls upon the powers which attend on mortal thought, not indeed to unsex her, but to grant her reënforcement for unimaginable endurance. With selfknowledge she rejected the extreme pang of woman’s sympathy, praying for a transfusion of the father’s blood, strength for compassion, quiet for the rash will, and the tenderness which can ‘pause and prevail.’ The complete woman, she would say, who would sustain both the sharpness of life and ‘the pierced heart of the poet,’ must remember herself daughter of man.

But this feminine poetry had touched in fact its fulfillment, coming to rest in religion, its right and predestined theme. In the poetry of devotion she found, with no loss of her essential fineness, her needed liberation — the point of stable equilibrium reached and held. She found at her very best the simplicity that draws from peace, the simplicity that she holds to be ‘ultimate poetry.’ It is prophecy of a woman’s poetry able to achieve at once a sufficient power and a sufficient tenderness. It may in some measure foretell a service to man like the sanctity of her Saint Catherine, valorous in pity, receiving the fainting head of man upon her breast — the breast not alone of the potential mother, but ‘the breast where beat the heart of Christ.’ Here, at least in some few verses, is a poetry ‘erect in tears,’ strong for redemption.

VI

In religion Mrs. Meynell’s poetry found fulfillment for the personal self, craving to escape its bondage, to merge its desire within another life. Man may not find union with man. The mystery of the secret soul must abide. But the incalculable mystery, union with God, is an easier matter. And for common man, untouched by poetry, but ‘intent, devout,’ there is, by the message of the Roman Catholic poet, a union with God, forever offered, forever received, in the sacramental rite of the Church. In ‘ A General Communion ’ is answered with simplicity the protest of man’s isolation. ‘Struck apart’ are the worshipers, prisoned soul from soul, but each offered in the gift of the sacrament union with Very God; each receiving in his lonely self the ministration of ineffable powers. This poetry of intuition becomes then, at its finest, — if one may risk the word in whose name critical crimes are most easily committed, — the poetry of mysticism.

Mrs. Meynell reached most surely her fulfillment in religious verse, since the paradox, the natural shape of her thought, is the most daring expression of the mystic consciousness. The human speech is broken when ‘the deadly flesh begins to behold spiritual things.’ Greatest mystics, as we know, have often been content to say nothing. Or if they will to speak that they do know and to bear witness to that they have seen, they struggle somewhat vainly, like true children of heaven’s kingdom, for the unknown words of eternal life. They are articulate in symbols, the flame, the light, the voice, the pilgrimage — witness, perhaps, in their perpetual return to the oneness of their truth. But by and beyond the combination of symbols, there remains for religious expression the paradox, a more gallant utterance, since it seeks, unlike the evasive symbol, not alone to suggest but directly to affirm; honest in defeat, since it confesses failure by its essential contradiction.

The Christian consciousness has repeatedly chosen the paradox to express its inexpressible. Man has known himself to be ‘in the assaulted stronghold of his will’ a battle of warring principles called ineffectually the flesh and the spirit, the Psychomachia enduring through the ages, where he takes at once both sides, choosing apparently at the same time good and evil. Old and familiar is his protest at the paradox of his slavery: ‘What I hate, that I do.’ Recurrently the saint has striven to name the miracle of deliverance from self, the enfranchisement-in-bondage, the death-in-life, the joy-in-grief, the loss-in-gain, the strength made perfect in weakness, the revelation of wisdom unto babes when the things of naught are chosen to confound the things that are. He has known the paradox of prayer, the desire for the unpalatable good which the praying soul at the very moment of petition abhors. And no claimant for human beatitude has found to declare the oneness of all experience a better language than a sheaf of contradictions: —

says Emerson for Brahma. And, answering the Greek hymn from behind the centuries, —

Mrs. Meynell confesses for the modern mystic a bolder creed: —

The paradox held a special relish for the English seventeenth century, to which Mrs. Meynell seems often curiously akin. An age profoundly religious for all its whims, it chose the paradox with deliberation and reverence. An age which waited with idolatry upon the singular and the clever, loving the paradox as the quintessence of wit, it held the religious paradox an offering acceptable unto God, the best act of ‘holy facetiousness.’

There are few pleasanter suggestions of poetical friendliness than the record of Cowley and Crashaw, exchanging the paradoxes of hope, —

The natural maker of seventeenthcentury religious paradox is Crashaw, himself ‘undaunted’ spirit of desire, turning ecstasy into epigram in lyric chant: —

Crashaw left sufficient sanction for a core of paradox in our Roman Catholic poetry. Francis Thompson indeed, rather than Crashaw, is its representative. The poetry of Crashaw, rising from the altar of an exquisite spirit, is a flame indeed, but a flame for its own small altar. The Christian paradox of Thompson is of a richer and larger consciousness, potent with splendid imaginings, driven by the dynamic of a complex emotion. It speaks with authority in the divine riddles of ‘Assunta Maria.’ It echoes variously to the running of The Hound of Heaven. It strikes out once a primary simplicity, chanting the superb creed of the mystic assumption: —

The religious paradox of Mrs. Meynell, with whom we so closely associate the genius of Francis Thompson, is a smaller but more subtle thing. It carries none of the headlong gusto, the multitudinous melody; it is but the shaping force of a little lyric, still at the end like a bird with throbbing heart just alighted. It trails no cloud of splendor. It has the compression of the epigram, compact, reserved. Less emotional for all its intensity than the regal contradictions of Thompson, hers is a paradox of intellectual fibre, which gives strength and distinction to her intuitive flights.

Her religious poetry disputes with the challenge of unconditioned faith the cruelty of fact. To the inscrutable horrors of fortuitous disaster wrought by the ‘immediate and unintelligible’ act of some natural destroying force, she opposes the redemptive rush of human compassion, the ‘mediate and intelligible hand’ of a retrieving God. The extreme of asceticism is here, a clinging to an incalculable value in all renouncement, constraint to search the depths of spiritual poverty lest some priceless treasure be missed. There is a dread more than mediaeval of life untormented, distrust of ease — not alone as a peril but as a denial; desire to entertain fear and pain as angelic guests and to wrestle with them in the dark, lest some necessary blessing be foregone. With a daring beyond orthodoxy she insists on the special privilege of sin committed, a possession ignoble, sorrow-weighted, none the less to be cherished as access to life or as first stage already of a rebirth in beauty. The outer bound of renunciation is reached in the question, ‘Why wilt thou chide?’ wherein is enshrined as spiritual treasure the very failure of spiritual achievement, wherein the darkness of the soul rejected by divine Love is held priceless beyond mortal joy. In such a world of spiritual values only, ‘The Divine Prerogative’ refused to the desire of man is but the privilege of sacrifice — the one unbearable sight, the spectacle not of injustice but of justice; ‘the merited scourge.’

But the supreme paradox of the Godin-man, of the Word-made-flesh, is Mrs. Meynell’s inevitable theme. Here at least she ceases to let down her ‘melancholy lead’ into the depth of sorrow, but brings instead annunciation of grace. Orthodox in her acceptance of dogma, poet in her imagination for its significance, she is a philosopher too in her recognition of the infinities of secrecy withheld from mortal ken. So ‘Christ in the Universe,’ a poem of literal Christianity, reverent for the human visitation of ‘an entrusted Word,’ is nobly aware of mysteries beyond the knowledge of ‘our wayside planet,’ of revelations perhaps given otherwhere of ‘a million alien gospels,’all essential to true knowledge, conceivable by us maybe in some eternity, —

The doctrine of the Incarnation, this core of dogmatic Christianity, makes most natural poetry to the Roman Catholic, used as he is to the dramatic sacrament, schooled to believe in some sense the immediate transcendence of the material element. This at least is the sublime paradox which comes readily to our Roman Catholic poets — from the staid and gentle childishness of Southwell to the hieratic chantings of Thompson. To Mrs. Meynell’s imagination, the figure of the Mass is ever present. In all nature, indeed, she sees made ready and offered the sacrament of the divine feast. To her the God driven by human ordinance from human altars is present wherever grows and comes to harvest the wheat and the grape, already in mystery the bread and wine, the ‘lonely unconsecrated Host,’ awaiting the privilege of sacrifice.

In ‘The Unknown God’ we have Mrs. Meynell at her highest. Here is one poem ‘plain beyond oracles’ and ‘past all symbols’ simple, where, in the life of a stranger at Communion, fed at the altar, the present Deity is recognized incarnate, realized, worshiped in the mind and faltering will, but the God confessed: —

In the sacramental reading of this poem is, indeed, if we may use the thought without irreverence, a transubstantiation of paradox, paradox become the literalness of simple truth.

The message of ‘ The Unknown God ’ may be the authentic, is at least the present message of Mrs. Meynell. To appraise our full debt to her latest verse we must await its final garnering. And we turn to-day with some wistfulness the exquisite pages of her early verse, even of her prose unchallenged in distinction. Both seem sometimes strangely remote, like many another fine thing, relic of choice hours in an England that is changing.

‘Shall not the Thing,’ wrote Mrs. Meynell once, ‘as we compose ourselves to literature, assume more and more the honor, the hesitation, the reconciliation of the Word?’

Nothing appears at present less likely. A fastidious leisure seems just now the least probable asset of our uncertain future. But as we advance into years of difficulty and unlovely turbulence, we shall find at least one dogma essential, however diverse the language of its mysteries — the dogma of an Incarnation, of a divinity alive within the human mould, the perception of the Unknown God in the heart of common man. For one paradox immemorial and prophetic is necessary to us, if the paradox of hope forever resurgent and creative is to remain: Verbum caro factum est.