13 
LAND & WATER 
October ii-, 191 7 
i£ifc ant) iteltcrs 
Mrs. Meynell 
By J. C. Squire 
MRS MEYNELL'S .4 rather of Wanien, and 
other Poem (Burns and Gates. .2s. net), is a sniall 
paper-covered book. It contains sixteen poeniN 
ten of which appeared neariy two years ago in 
H i,rnatelv issued volume. Several of these Po^ms ;ire 
noi unexpectedly, topical. And he who knows Mrs. Meynell s 
work will know that no topical poem ol hers, even it ""^"^^cess- 
lul (which these are not), could fail to afford a plam demon- 
stration o£ one of her greatest qualities, namely, liei iianu 
of thinking for herself and avoiding (to use her own phias< 
•• the facile literary opportunity." She writes for ^^^^frnP"'; 
on the Shakespeare Tercentenary. So did ten thousaiul ot u r 
poets. Thev taxed the compass of tiie obvious, as to un. 
manner born— which, indeed, most of them were. 1 Hev 
told Sliakespeare, «rf nauseam, that he was the bwan of .Won 
(a term which should l)v now be reserved as a designation 
for public-houses) and theytpld us, with monotonous iteia- 
tion. that he was Britain's greatest glory ; that he was t lie 
common property of "the English-speaking peoples; and that, 
take him lor all in all. we should not look upon his like again. 
Onh' two writers— Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mrs. Meynell - 
broke silence merely because they had something to say. 
These were thinking about Shakespeare before they wrote 
And Mrs. Mevnells reflections on the fact that she had liveil 
through the tercentenaries of Shakespeare's birth and deatli. 
and might, with such a length of days, have seen him m his 
cradle and closed the earth on him, the image of that magni- 
ftcence and fullness thus enclosed as it ivere within her own 
comparative waste (as she sees it), are very charactcnstic 
of her complete inability to write like a hack. 
***** 
One may take another example. She has a poem on the 
liarly Dead in Battle. But it is neither a lamentation over 
the young who have died before their prime, nor a thanks- 
giving that they died well. Her mind travels its own road, 
and she discovers to us, surprisingly but convincingly, that 
he who dies in early manhood has actually the. longest part 
. of life behind lum, that time is never so long, and joy never so 
deep as in childhood, and tliat as we grow older our childhood 
seems a tract of almost immeasurable extent, but the later 
years much more fleeting and much less full : 
What have you then foregone ? 
A history' ? This you had. Or memories ? 
Thcsp, too, you had of your far distant dawn 
No further dawn seems liis, 
Tlie old man who shares with you, 
But has no more, no more. Time's mystery 
]>id once for him the most that it can do ; 
Ho has had infancy. 
And all his dreams, and all 
]{is love for mighty Nature, sweet and few, 
Arc but the dwindling past he can recall 
Of what his childhood knew. 
■ He counts not any more 
His brief, his pre.sent years. But Oh, he knows 
How far apart the summers were of yore. 
How far apart the snows. 
Ihcrcfore be satisfied 
l.ong life is in your treasury ere you fall ; 
Yes. and first love, like Dante's. O, a bride 
For ever mystical ! 
Irrevocable good 
You dead, and now about, so young, to die, 
Your childhood was, there Space, there Multitude, 
There dwelt Antiquity. 
***** 
There arc several beautiful poems in the book, but it is 
too small to be more than a supplement to the Collected Poems 
and the Collected Essays, two volumes which contain fewer 
imperfectly executed sentences and fewer misty thoughts 
than, perhaps, any of our time. She does not in the new 
Nohime publish anything equal to Christ in the Universe or 
.1 Girl's Letter to her o<e!n Old Age. hnt she leaves us in no doubt 
as to her continued capacity to equal them. Her heart is 
as fresh and responsive jls ever it was, and her craftsmanship 
remains most scrupulously caicful. Concentration on the 
rightness of every sentence ana e\'ery word is a risk\' thing 
to .some wiiters : and the tiresome talk of the decadents has 
'resulted in its being regarded as something approaching a sin. 
But a thinker so conscientious as Mrs. Meynell, one who never 
writes save when deep springs of experience are flowing, 
is never in danger of polishing nothings or of seeking painfully 
to string together a series of mere agreeable noises or curiosity- 
shop words. .\11 of .her work is of one piece, and at its finest 
■hi the poems mentioned and in such essays as 77k' Spirit 
ot Place and Composure— it is of its kind perfect. 
The poet's attitude, her " outlook on life," is unchanged 
and could not change : and one may attempt to approach a 
definition. There is a sentence in Bacon's Advancement of 
Learning which runs thus : 
So certainly, if a man meditate upon the universal frame of 
nature, the' earth with men upon it, the (li\ineness of souls 
e.\cepted, will not .seem much other than an ant-hill, where 
some ants cany corn, and some carry their young, and some 
go empty, and all to and fro on a little heap of dust. 
This detached "meditation" is not uncommon. Swift 
cultivated it in order to make the ants angry : Anatole 
l-'rancr. the sentimental cynic, does so in order to procure 
a clieap pathos and a cheap amusement for them and him- 
self. " Thedivinenessof souls excepted " is a large reservation, 
and, with Mrs. Meynell, so large that it almost might cancel 
the rest. Almost^ but not altogether. She too, after her 
manner, retires into the immensities of Time and Space and 
contemplates pain and pleasure, birth and death, as small and 
transient things : not for perverse amusement or the conscious- 
ness of superiority, but for a refuge and a consolation. Slie 
has at once an extraordinarily sensitive heart and a perfectly 
balanced brain : a capacity for an intolerable excess of feeling 
but a permanent check in the steadiness and sagacity of her 
thought. She reminds one of her own exquisite casual 
image, " the aspen poplar had b^en in captive flight all day" : 
the delicate fluttering tree, stirred by every little wind, reflect- 
ing every alternation of sunshine and cloud, governed some- 
times for long periods by one mood and one direction, but 
anchored firmly to its immovable roots. She scarcely ever 
writes even a short lyric which is spontaneously emotional 
throughout : her first pleasure in the smallest thing, in a 
girl's eyes, in a thrush's song, in a weed upon a ruined arch, 
in the wind over the grass, leads always to "meditation" : and 
jiaiii leads there even, more surely than delight. Sometimes 
expressed, more often implicit, is the steady outlooic upon 
all the worlds which makes so permanent an impression upon 
the reader "of her beautiful Collected Essays, and of which 
a typical expression is the concluding paragraph of The Rhylh m 
of Life : 
For man — except those elect already named — is hardly aware 
" of periodicity. The individual man either never learns it 
fully, or learns it late. And he learns it so after, because it 
is a matter of cumulative experience upon which cumulative 
experience is long lacking. It is in the afterrpart of each 
, life that the law is learnt so definitely as to dcj away with 
the hope or fear of continuance. That young sorrow comes 
so near to despair is a result of this young ignorance. So is 
the early hope of great achievement. Life seems so long, 
and its capacity -so great toone who knows nothing of all the 
intervals it needs roust hold— >-the intervals between aspirations, 
between actions, pauses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. 
And life looks impossible to the young unfortunate, unaware 
of the inevitable and unfailing refreshment. It would be for 
their peace to learn that there is a tide in the affairs of men, in a 
sense more subtle — if it is not too audacious to add a meaning 
to Shakspeare — than the phrase was meant to contain. Their 
joy is flying away from them on its way home ; their life will 
wax and wane ; and if they would be wise, they must wake and 
rest in its phases, knowing that they are ruled by the law that 
commands all things — a sun's revolut'ons and the rhythmic 
pangs of maternity. 
From a pagan philosopher this would be roughly equivalent 
to " Hope thou not much and fear thou not at all," which, 
as pagan mottoes go, is as good as any. " The divineness 
of souls excepted " makes a difference : but Mrs Meynell. 
although she has wTitten some of the finest modern devotional 
poetry, seldom brings in faith te queer the pitch of reason. 
She is, if one may seize " the facile literary opportunity," a 
Christian Stoic. 
