LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY

[1]

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY A STUDY

It is, she says, “a stone-built paradise of a village not far from Oxford. There is an April wind blowing, and forty-three roses adorn one cottage doorway just out of sight from here. The old collie and I had a walk yesterday, and I dipped my stick in Shakespeare’s Avon at Fledbury.”

This was the woman, yet not much changed in high intent and gayest vagabondage from the girl New England—and, indeed,[2] this western world—uniquely loved. Still, to us, is she a figure of bright beginnings and the swiftest road to her is that backward pathway to her youth.

Her father, General Patrick Robert Guiney, a soldier of the Civil War, was her exemplar and her adoration, and his death an overwhelming grief. “My preux chevalier of a father,” she was proud to call him, in a quick flaming up of passionate remembrance. Though he died in her girlhood—and died of his wound, as it fed her ardent soul to remember—she never ceased to feel a living allegiance to him. Her plastic inner life had been molded by him, the picture her mind made of him touched into enduring colors by the manner of his death. There was between them that “marriage of true minds” which is more lastingly productive than the tie of blood, and she was proud if you could trace in her the reflex of those qualities she held highest in him: his active patriotism, his slack hold on life, if it could be nobly given, and a tenacity of devotion to the brave fight. Of her remoter background[3] she says, with a pleasing touch of swagger, a slightest waving of the plume:

“My grandfather and great gran’, too, were ‘out’ in the ’98; and the old man had been ‘out’ in the ’45. I hope to make his acquaintance in the sojer-boy’s Paradise, which is my bourne, if I be good.”

In one of her earliest essays, “A Child in Camp,” she makes her bow thus, with a pretty grace:

“Like the royal personages in the drama, I was ushered on the stage of life, literally, ‘with flourish of trumpets.’ The Civil War was at its bursting point, the President calling for recruits: it was impertinent of me, but in that solemn hour I came a-crowing into the world. And since I was born under allegiance, a lady whom I learned to love with incredible quickness,

rocked my fortunate cradle.”

This was Irish stock with a strain of English, Scots and French, a quicksilver blend of buoyancy and happy wit, duly tempered by a special potency of Gallic grace with its apprehension[4] of the mot juste and its infallible divination in forms of art. The road between the two boundary dates of her life ran without much incident we vitally need to know. Her portrait, painted here chiefly for the friends who marveled at her and equally at their own luck in the fortunate incident of ever so slight a knowledge of her, may best be done with the broad strokes of a brush dipped in remembrance, against a blurred background of time and place. She herself, in her life of Hurrell Froude, quotes the expert dictum of George Tyrrell, who guessed what sort of biography is likely to live longest:

“We have cause to care less for a full inventory of the events which make up a man’s life or for the striking nature of those events in themselves, than for such a judicious selection and setting of them as shall best bring out and explain that individuality which is our main interest. We care less for what a man does and more for what he is; and it is mainly as a key to what he is that we study the circumstances which act upon[5] him and the conduct by which he acts upon them.”

Louise Imogen Guiney, poet, essayist and scholar, was an extraordinarily limpid and valiant soul, whose death seems, in no sense referable to our own responsive emotion, but one of bare fact and calm inevitableness, a rebirth into a sort of present immortality in letters, a new affirmation of response to her unique accomplishment even among those to whom she had become only a name out of the many-syllabled past. For the last third of her life she had been living in England, with breaks of a few months each in America, and though the remembered vision of her was not dimmed among us, still that impalpable medium made up of the day’s demands, the helter-skelter of this world of disordered strivings and later the wreckage of the war, had risen between her and her western affiliations. The rude stumbling servitors of life had crowded between her and the America she loved with a passion lineally her own. Time and circumstance had been as remorseless to her as to us. She[6] was, in these later years, “every day i’ the hour” when her somewhat unstable balance

of health would allow it, immersed in work, the scholar’s drudgery, the pain that ends in perfectness: and yet it made her studious delight, this rescue of half-forgotten names, unwearied research upon long trails where only the spirit of the born antiquary never tires nor falters. The warm, persistently light-hearted letters came to us less frequently; but they came, unfailingly at Christmas, like gay holly sprays flung from December to young January, as if in token of the lastingness of things. She was so rare a creature, our common memories had been so mingled of life and laughter, that she had become one of the certainties in a fleeting and tumultuous world. We were stupidly used to her, as you are used to sunrise or a star. Then without warning the news came, and the word went from lip to hushed lip: “Lou Guiney is dead.” That was the name, Lou Guiney, as it had been in the day of her youth. And at once we became poignantly alive to her with a more sensitive[7] appreciation, a new awareness. We turned renewedly to her work and found in it a more

quickly breathing presence. We had been recalled, in a shock of haste, to crown it before our own hands should be too lax to lift the heaviness of laurel. So it was that she seemed to have stepped at once into that porch of continued being which is the house of an immortality of love and praise, the only thing the world has really to offer the spirits of its dead.

To recall the form and color of her youth is the eager task likely to give her oldest friends their first imperfect solace. For it is the pathetic human instinct to catch at the mantle of time past, as if to assure itself of something in the web of life that holds. Those who knew her at twenty and thirty need not err widely in their guess at her at fifteen. For being one of that gay fellowship for whom “a star danced” and who buoyantly refuse infection from the “hungry generations” that “tread” us “down,” she stayed, in every sense, except that of the disciplined mind and an acquired patience of[8] the heart, unaffectedly young. Age, the age of mere years, brutal to attack and vanquish, could never, even in his ultimate assaults, if they had been permitted him, have withered her bright fecundities of speech and glance. For there is something in a certain quality of youth that will not be downed. It is the livingness of a mind refreshed at wells of immortalities. Of outward vain pretense—the affectation of a persisting juvenility—it

is divinely innocent. You could hardly imagine her, at any age, without her girl’s grace, her mystic smile. A long-legged romp in petticoats far beyond the milestones when childhood is apt to slink away abashed before oncoming desires and dignities, she was early in love with the sweet seclusion of books and equally with gay adventure out of doors. The fields, on a day of spring, the river under skies dull or bright, were her abiding joys. Her “winding Charles” was the young navigator’s track to seas of pleasure. She

[9]Those who knew her soon enough to play with her the duplex game of bodily delight and mental inebriety, remember hours so near the wild sanity of natural life that only old Arcadian names are spacious enough to bound them. There was the summer day of riotous vagary when she and her young chum set forth to navigate the Charles, a block of ice in the boat for adventurous but uncatalogued uses, and the delays and mishaps of the voyage, and all the long, insect-thridded night spent in the boat, the two inventive young heads on the ice which was their diminishing pillow. There was the tramp across fields from Auburndale (the Auburndale transmuted by James Jeffrey Roche, in a gallant paraphrase, to “loveliest village of the prepossessing”) into an iris-blue swamp, this after earnest debate whether it is a more delirious fun to dash in “accoutred as you are,” to the ruination of shoes and stockings or make the assault barefooted with skirts kilted away from the blessed unction of black mud. To the everlasting[10] richness of memory, it was barefooted

the two hoydens made their plunge, and sank, with every sucking step, from sun-warmed mud above to icy cool below. Wild with the bliss of it they waded furiously, and the day was of so ineffable a light and texture as to lull them into forgetfulness of the iris itself for which they had adventured, and it was left behind, piles of withering beauty, entrancing, like fabrics and translucent gems. Only that night were they remembered, and she who was Lou Guiney wrote in magnificent surety:

There was the adventure of the field, in company with her dog, he “so big and so unsophisticated,” and the imminence of a heifer with an inherited prejudice against dogs of all degrees.

“She’ll chase him,” said Lou Guiney, from her liberality to varying events. “We shall have to run for it.”

There was no conceivable need of crossing the field, and equally there was nothing, to her simple fearlessness, in the least eccentric[11] in wilfully creating a situation you might have to use your wits to abandon; and so infectious was her unthinking bravery that, as occasion and she determined, you fought or ran. As it was prophesied, so it was. The incursion was made, the heifer attacked in good form, the trio fled in close formation, and the safe side of the fence was vaultingly attained with no loss of heart but, gloriously, the guerdon of a memory. All manner of robust childish adventures were natural in her company. Fields were made to be invaded, swamps to be forded, and rivers followed until you found they beat your endurance and were going to make their harbor of the sea and you’d have to leave them to that blest consummation and go home to supper. She was Atalanta at a race in the days when a heart, as yet untired, backed her to the limit. In her reminiscent essay On a Pleasing Encounter with a Pickpocket, when my gentleman

had adroitly abstracted her purse and she almost ran him down, she celebrates, with some just pride, “my legs (retired race-horses, but still great at a spurt).” And her fearlessness,[12] the robust handmaid of reckless action, may have been an unthinking bravado of youth; equally it may have been the result of a rapid fire of prayer and answer between her and her defending saints. She anticipated danger as little as a child. To entertain suspicion was to admit evil company to her inviolate mind. But, from whatever delicately abstruse causes, she wore a brave decorum of courage, a feather in the cap, a sword of high behavior. On lonely roads she would walk unconcerned, her mind coursing over the centuries, her whimsical smile responsive to warnings from the more circumspect and foreboding. She was the child of nature, the child of God; should she quake in a world which was, though uncoveted, her inheritance? Then, as in later life, she sometimes seemed to be walking through “worlds not realized,” “whether in the body or out of the body, I know not; God knoweth.” And

this is no matter for wonder. Thin silvern echoes from the past were always chiming on her inward ear, majestic syllables drew on her imaginings, and while she dwelt on “old,[13] unhappy, far-off things” the new wine of her youth and the immediate loveliness of this present life mingled an intoxicating cup. And suddenly the spell of the past would fall from her, and she would be as irresponsibly alive to the bright beauties of the challenging day as a dryad on holiday out of her tree.

As a girl, she was uniquely dear to the older men and women pleasurably stirred by the literary event of her early blossoming into essays and verse, and charmed anew, when they had found her out in her shy fastnesses, by the unstudied simplicities of her modest behavior. Mrs. James T. Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett were hers admiringly, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, known by the affectionate brevet of Godmam, adopted her into a special sanctity of literary and personal regard, and T. W. Parsons hailed her as a compeer with whom he was eager to count over the pure coin out of their scholarly acquisition. It was he who, in some form of words not to be precisely recalled, confirmed her right to legitimacy in a bright succession in the arts, by telling her she was, in the[14] genius of her, “Hazlitt’s child.” Edmund Clarence Stedman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Richard Watson Gilder, Henry Mills Alden, gave her work that generous welcome the noblesse of any art have in waiting for the acolyte bringing the cup new filled. And les jeunes, poets or pretenders, were hers to

command. There were banners waving; only this was not in the fashion of present day acclaim when a new actor challenges his due. These were the dark chaplets and fragrant posies the Muses love: no canopies and red carpets and the blare of jazz. There were individual voices, low-pitched, grave, and their verdict holds. Time may have snowed it under and his jealous lichen sought to eat it up, but still it holds.

In those early years she published a bit of work, anonymous but signalized by her unique charm, and a magnate of the critical world saluted it.

“Your praise,” she wrote him, “is a charming Cinderella slipper, and here’s my shy foot to fit it.”

To rehearse the names that were her sponsors[15] at this entrance into recognition would give you a brilliant list, with hardly a gap, of the intellectuals of some thirty to thirty-five years gone. In her simplicity of response to this rare quality of praise, her genius of fancy and acquisition flowing, like a magic ichor, through the veins of her artless Americanism, there was something as new as it was piquing. She belonged to the “dewy beginnings” of a fresh decade of literature, a phase authoritative and unique. If her head was not turned by the response she got to the fine timidities of her first achievement, it was because that symmetrical treasury of perfectly classified fact and fancy was permanently set, eyes to the past, where dwell the ever-living forerunners of literary glories, the authentic names that are “eternal blazon,” the exemplar and despair of lesser men. She was timid, not before the contemporary critic, but the great witnesses of all time—simply, and in her reverent mind tremulously, a child of promise, heir to those old authentic

glories, but not presuming on that lineage. Tremendously believed in, she trod her[16] earth lightly, yet becomingly, and carried her full cup with steady hands. No taint of ambition was in her, no trace of the base alloy of prize-getting and wearing. She had seen the “cloud capp’d towers” of the halls of light where the blessed everlastingly dwell, she had guessed at the shades and green valleys, the refuge of those “ordained to fail,” and she knew thus early, through reverent intuition, that “it has become almost an honor not to be crowned.” Even then at the beginning, when chaplets were being woven for her, she might have written that later recital of her secular creed:

At that time the game was in her hands: the game of youth and gayety and a blameless resolve to make the most of it all in the only way the great unseen censors, the Fates that spin and weave, allow.

She was a goodly picture of girlhood, Diana not so likely to be enamoured of Endymion as sandalled for the chase. Not tall, yet long-legged enough to give her advantage[17] on the road or the English downs, she had a free grace of movement, untrammeled by the awkwardness of fear. Even so early, she was slightly deaf, and one of her prettiest individual poses—yet how unstudied!—was, standing, bent slightly forward like Atalanta ready for the race, the rounded cup of her palm behind her ear, beseeching almost whimsically in the low voice that was half whisper without its sibilance: “Please!” Her misfortune was not a blemish; she made it a grace. Over that and the drawback of eyes ineffectual without the help of glasses she never wasted a breath of impatience: she adopted instead a humorous acceptance of these latter extraneous servitors as personified faculties of her own. The act of vision she ascribed to her spectacles alone, and took a never diminished joy in reminding you how Thackeray did it before her.

“If one dastard of a misplaced comma has escaped me,” she writes, of printers’ proofs corrected to the last degree of accuracy, “these spectacles fail to find it.”

Upon one victorious error, chased down[18] and down and still cropping up in the last proof, she declares:

“Tragedy! how could it have come about? I’d give my spectacles to know.”

Probably nobody so unspoiled and humble in willingness to share the common lot, or with less respect for the subterfuge called temperament, ever had less practical acquaintance with the domestic functions exalted into dull shibboleths, or was more irreconcilably estranged from the art of the modiste and the rites whereby the incomprehensible gods of “style” are commonly propitiated. If you could boil an egg acceptably and enliven it with an agreeable quota of salt and pepper, she would have made you cordon bleu on the spot. That the sleeve of a garment could be removed by the simple adjunct of a pair of scissors and replaced again with a symmetry more conformable to the arm, was a mystery before which she frankly quailed, and any force of self-confidence she might have brought to bear went down like nine-pins. Running rivers of verse, pinnacles of[19] dates, names, cosmogonies of thrones, principalities and powers, found room in that exquisitely ordered world which was her brain: yet you could throw her into a cold sweat of apprehension by confronting her with some

homely task or implement as familiar to the Marthas of civil life as the use of fork and spoon. And this was no affectation of sensitiveness to crumpled rose leaves, no arrogance of privilege. She had an appetite as responsive to good things as if their chemistry had not been as dark to her as that of lost elixirs, and for some inconspicuous ribbon of her dress she would cherish an affection almost poignant in its childlike intensity. She was herself alternately petrified and convulsed by accumulating instances of her unfitness for the monstrous requisitions of a concrete world. Returning again and again to the assault, she is uniformly worsted. She sees, with an eye momentarily sharpened to recognition, in a modest kitchen, the commonest adjuncts to dishwashing, and leaves early that she may buy the duplicates of the[20] magic implements and set them up before the gods of home. And forthwith she writes, in a rollicking delight:

“And behold! their like had been in this house from of old, and I was subject to much scorn.”

Helpful kindness itself, she dashes into town to buy a flannel wrapper for an exacting old lady for whom she has a kindness and who is sick and destitute, and next day explains, between helpless gusts, “those spectacles” dashed with tears:

“And lo! it should have been a female garment and I bought a male.”