ALICE MEYNELL1

I

WHEN Alice Meynell died in 1922, she was said, I believe, to be over seventy years of age. Anybody less like seventy it would be difficult to imagine. I had been honoured with her acquaintance - I think I might almost say friendship, certainly her good-will-for some twelve years. It was not easy, perhaps, to think of Alice Meynell as a girl or a young woman, but it was impossible to associate her with anything of old age. Witty, generous, of the simplest and most tender humanity, there was also in her some austerity, not of personality, but of spirit, that suggested the women of Greek tragedy. I have never known anyone so ageless. Youth, maturity and fullness of years were here strangely at one. It was in no chance moment of vision that she wrote, when she was a little over twenty, 'A Letter from a Girl to her own Old Age.' At twenty she was as old as she would ever be; at her death nothing of young freshness or wonder had gone from her. In her home, humorously intent upon the succession of family cares and gossip, she she was yet the seer always. To be with her was to be at ease in the presence of a great lady.

1 Read to the Royal Society of Literature from the Chair of Poetry.

Let the talk be of what it might, she was never withdrawn or indifferent; but behind the gayest of her occasions there was a quietness of mood that gave precision and authority to everything she said. Here was a perfect example of the original as distinguished from the eccentric mind. She never startled you, but she never failed to delight your

attention.

II

THE custom, at present in disfavour, of printing in a poet's books good opinions of his work has been much abused. But, observed with decency, it has its uses. We may want no judgment between our own and the poetry, but we may as well not be too nice about it. It depends upon whose judgment it is. We may not need Shelley to tell us that Keats was a good poet, but we are glad that Shelley does tell us that all the same. Alice Meynell will never be with Herrick and Burns and Tennyson for everybody's reading. Her subtlety and the rareness of her manner will rather set her in public estimation with Donne and Marvell and the best of Landor. Her artistic aims were such that popular assessment is of little moment, but because of this the views of the elect among her contemporaries take on an added interest, so that there is nothing unbecoming in the page at the end of her poems that

tells us what Rossetti and Francis Thompson and Coventry Patmore and Meredith had to say about her. And these and other commanding voices are emphatic in agreement that here was not merely a woman writer of talent to be courteously received, but a poet of the very finest essence. Rossetti knew her sonnet, 'Renouncement,' by heart, repeating it with high praise to the chosen; Ruskin found in her first book the finest things he had seen in modern verse; Francis Thompson foresaw the certain gathering of the best judgment of coming times in homage to her genius; Coventry Patmore, unqualified in admiration for her prose, found himself, by rather fine-spun argument, confined to saying that she was as near being a poet among the immortals as any woman could hope to be. Patmore was a poet whose best work will take a far higher. place yet than it has done, but I fancy that his House of the Angels was just a touch Persian in character, and nothing is so upsetting to the intellectual Shahs of this world as the Alice Meynells. George Meredith, bringing to her a devotion from genius to genius, exquisitely revealed in the newly published volume of his letters, said of her verse, It has the swallow's wing, and challenges none,' and again, 'of your little collection [the first privately printed issue of a selection from the "Later Poems" of 1896] all passes into my blood, except "Parentage." We need not go further. By right

of one slender book she was admitted, when she was no older than Keats at his death, to equal fellowship with the masters of her age.

III

THIS first volume was 'Preludes,' by A. C. Thompson, published by Henry S. King and Co. in 1875, with illustrations by the poet's sister, Elizabeth Thompson, afterwards Lady Butler, the painter of "The Roll Call.' The book contained thirty-seven poems, and it shows the poet already in the full maturity of her powers. It is, indeed, difficult to think of any English poet who in early youth has published a book in which the fulfilment of design is so complete. Other poets in their first efforts may have had a more universal, perhaps a more passionate aim, but none has subdued his intention, whatever it might be, to a more perfect mastery. The workmanship of the book is exact and unfailing from the first page to the last, and although in the poems that were to come later there was no falling away from the exquisite standard set in the beginning, there could be no development of an art that seemed to have had no probation days. It was with Alice Meynell's poetry as with her personality - first and last were one, so that we might recall the seventeenth-century epitaph:

'Lo, huddled here together lie

Green youth, grey age, white infancy.'

'Preludes' at once displays the characteristics that have become familiar to the poet's admirers. Its general mood is one of affectionate resignation, with neither bitterness nor even regret. Throughout there is a spiritual humility that reminds us how little of true pride there is in the common selfassertions. There is here a surrender of soul, but it is consciously a surrender of something so rare and lovely that it can be made only to a supremely imagined purity. The poet is humble only because of the divine company in which she moves. This accounts for the fact that one note for which we commonly look in the poetry of youth, that of revolt, is entirely absent from 'Preludes.' Anger and protest and denunciation, those ardours of rebellion that stir most generous young minds as they first realize the tyrannies of a stupid world, were nothing to this poet, who, however she might look upon the vulgar errors of society, could not conceive of them as food for the imagination. Not that she was careless of these errors on the one hand, or that her poetry was mere placidity on the other nothing could be wider of the mark than to suppose either of these things. She took always a very practical, and even argumentative, interest in the thousand ways in which man teases and confounds himself in the ordering of his communities, but these were matters for the tea-table, not for the seclusions of art. Such conflicts as these implied