13 
LAND & WATER 
October II, 1917 
Stfc anil Erltrrs 
Mrs. Meynell 
By J. C Squire 
MRS MEYNELL'S A Father oj Women, and 
other Poems (Burns and Oatcs. 2s. net), is a small 
paper-covered book. It contains sixteen poems, 
ten of which appeared nearly two years ago m 
a privately issued vohime. Several of these poems are. 
not unexpectedly, topical. And he who knows Mrs. Meyneii s 
work will know that no topical poem of hers, even if unsuccess- 
ful (which these are not), could fail to afford a plain demon- 
stration of one of her greatest qualities, namely, hei haDit 
of thinking for herself and avoiding (to use her own phrase) 
•• the facile literary opportunity." She writes, for example, 
on the Shakespeare Tercentenary. So did ten thousand other 
poets. They lx)xed the, compass of the obvious, as to tne 
manner born—which, indeed, most of them were. They 
told Shakespeare, rtrf nauseam, that he was the Swan of Avon 
(a term which should by now be reserved as a designation 
for public-houses) and they told us, with monotonous itera- 
tion, that he was Britain's greatest glory ; that he was th," 
common property of the English-speaking peoples; and that, 
take him for all in all, we should not look upon his like again. 
Only 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. Meynell's reflections on the fact that she had lived 
through the tercentenaries of Shakespeare's birth and death, 
and might, with such a length of days, have seen him in his 
cradle and closed the eailh on him, the image of that magm- 
liccnce and fullness thus enclosed as it A-ere within her own 
comparative waste (as she sees it), are veiy characteristic 
of her complete inability to write like a hack. 
One may take another example. She has a poem on the 
Eariy Dead in Battle. But it is neither a lamentation over 
the young who have died before their prime, .nor a thanks- 
gi\'ing that they died well. Her mind travels its- own road, 
and she discovers to us, surprisingly but convincingly, that 
he who dies in early marthood has actually the longest part 
of life behind him. that time is never so long, and joy never so 
deep as in childhood, and that as we grow' older our childhood 
seems a tract of almost immeasurable extent, but the later 
years much more fleeting and much less full : 
W'hat have you then loregone ? 
A history ? This you h^d. Or memories ? 
These, loo, you had o£ your far dista,nt dawn 
Ko further dawn seems his, 
"1 he old man who shares with you. 
But has no more, no niore. Time's mystery 
]l)id once for him the most that it can do ; 
He has had infancy. 
And all his dreams, and all 
His love for miglity Xature, sweet and few. 
Arc but the dwindling past he tan recall 
Of what his childhood knew. 
He counts not any more 
His brief, his present years. But Oh. he knows 
How far apart the summers were of yore. 
How far apart the snows. 
Iherofore be satisfied 
l.ong life is in your treasuiy ere you fall ; 
Yes, and hrst love, like Dante's. O, a bride 
For ever mystical ! 
Irrevocable good 
Ycni dead, and now about, so voung, to die. 
Your childhood was, there Space, there Multitude, 
There dwelt Antiquity. 
There are several beautiful poems in the book, but it is 
too small to be more than a supplement to the Collected Poems 
and the Collected lissays, two volumes which contain fewer 
imperfectly executed sentences and fewer misty thoughts 
than, perhaps, any of our time. She does not in the new 
\olume publish anything equal to Christ in the Universe or 
A Girl's Letter to her own Old Age, hvit she leaves us in no doubt 
as to her continued capacity" to equal them. Her heart is 
as fresh and responsive a-i ever it was, and her craftsmanship 
icmauis nxost scrupulously careful. Concentration on the 
rightness uf every sentence ana every word is a risky thing 
to some writers : 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 liever 
writes save when deep springs of experience are flov.ing, 
is never in danger of polishing nothings or of seeking painfully 
to string together a series of mere agreeable noises or curiosity- 
shop words. All of lier work is of cmo piece, and at its finest 
— in the poems mentioned and in such essays as The Spirit 
0/ Place and Composure —it is of it^ kiiid 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 divineness of souls 
excepted, will not seem much other than an ant-hill, where 
.Some ants carry 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 angr\- : Anatole 
France, the sentimental cynic, does so in order to procure 
a cheap pathos and a cheap amusement for them and him- 
self. " The divineness of souls excepted " is a large reser\ ation, 
and. with Mrs. Meynell, so large that it almost might cancel 
the rest. Almost,' but not altogether. She too, alter her 
manner, retires into the immensities of Time and Space and 
contemplates pain and pleasure, birth and death, as small and 
transient things : not forjierverse amusement or the conscious- 
ness of superiority, but for a refuge and a consolation. She 
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 been in captive flight all day " : 
the delicate fluttering tree, stirred by everv 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 l\Tic 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 
pain leads there even more surely than delight. Sometimes 
expressed, more often implicit, is the steady outlook upon 
all the worlds which makes so permanent an impression upon 
the reader of her beautiful Collected Essays, and of which 
a tA-pical expression is the concluding paragraph of The Rhythm 
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 cunrulative experience ujX)n which cumulativo; 
experience is long lacking. It is in the atter-part of each 
life that the law is learnt so definitely as to do. 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. Fife seems so long, 
and its capacity .so great to one who knows notliing of all the 
intervals it needsmust hold — the intervals between aspirations, 
between actions, pau.ses as inevitable as the pauses of sleep. 
.\nd 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 
lommands all things — a sun's revolutions and the rh\-thmic 
pangs of maternity. 
F'rom 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 an}-. " The di\-ineneS5 
of souls e.xcepted " makes a difference : but Mrs Meynell, 
although she has written some of the finest modern devotional 
poetry, seldom brings in faith to queer the pitch of reason. 
. She is, if one may seize " the facile literary-opporttuiity," a 
Christian Stoic. 
