'IN the Royal Galley of Divine Love there is no galley-slave: all the rowers are volunteers.' This saying of Saint Francis de Sales, quoted by Louise Imogen Guiney, is significant of the gallant spirit, the steady devotion to high impersonal aims, which, combined with generous sympathies and spontaneous brilliance of expression, gave to her life and works a charm, an inspiration, a unity in diversity, difficult to sum up in an epigram, but vividly felt by all who came in contact with her.

Often, the lives of authors make gloomy reading, and sometimes an author when encountered in the flesh is less attractive than the creations of his muse. But admirers of Miss Guiney's poetry and essays, who knew her first through her published utterances and afterward won her friendship, would agree that her literary ideals and personal characteristics were admirably in accord. She did not conserve her most illuminating criticisms, her poetic imaginings, her frequent flashes of wit, to hoard them for print: her letters to her friends, even her most casual notes, all bear the stamp of a mind in which sincerity and graciousness, fastidiousness of taste and ardent enthusiasm, keen artistic sensibilities and pungent gaiety were irradiated by the steady light of a spirit uncompromisingly opposed to the superficial, half-hearted, or mercenary and self-seeking elements in life and letters.

Seldom has any author been more conspicuously free from vanity. Those who were privileged best to know her loved her for her blending of humility with robust moral courage, of refreshing 'common sense' with uncommon scorn of mere expediency; of deep piety with humorous horror of cant, of gentle manners and melodious voice with warrior-swift insight into the characters of saints, men of action, and heroic poets of different eras and races.

Whimsical as her talk and writing sometimes seemed for she had certain antique principles and preferences which appeared to some prosaic persons scarcely consistent with her American citizenship - beneath the dancing play of her fancy there was a rock of immutable faith; and on this was built the fortress of her life. Her affection for the active saints, Saint Paul, Saint Sebastian, Saint George, Saint Patrick, Saint Martin of Tours, and the tardily canonized Jeanne d'Arc-saints who were not just edifying names to her, but perpetual 'fire and wings' to cheer and to inspirit was characteristic of one who never forgot she was a soldier's daughter. Her father, General Patrick Robert Guiney, died when she was a young girl; but the happy memory of his companionship was with her always. The Boston home of her youth must have provided a stimulating milieu for a poetess who attained distinction when not long out of her teens; yet her main ideas seem to have been evolved more from devotion to her mental

affinities in the invisible army of the heroic dead, than by the influence of any relation or friend (however dear) among the living.

'What a delightful letter you have given me,' she wrote in 1914 from her beloved Oxford, when invited to a Kentish country house that had weathered the storms of centuries: 'When you say "old manors" and "Claverhouse" you call me to the portcullis to salute. (I assure you I live in the cockloft or the dungeon, for the most part

being of a hermitical turn whenever

I get the chance). . . . Not many days ago, by way of taking a needed rest, I walked many miles to Great Tew, where Falkland's lovely walled gardens are a-bloom near his unlocated grave. Oh, those Seventeenth Century friends.'

Interested in moral and spiritual progress, she could recognize no virtue in the type of material progress which consists in ruthless extinction of the graces; nor would she tolerate the class of literature' from which everything exalted, ardent, or exquisite, is drastically excluded, on the pretext that 'realism' would be outraged by such flights:

The play which leaves us miserable and bewildered, the harrowing social lesson leading nowhere, the transcript from commonplace life in which nothing is admirable but the faithful skill of the author- these are bad morals because they are bad art. . . . Many of the Elizabethan dramas are dark and terrible; but they compel men to think, and teach more humanities than a university course.

'Wilful sadness in literature' she denounced as 'nothing less than an actual crime.' But 'sadness which is impersonal, reluctantly uttered, and adjusted (in the utterance) to the eternal laws, is not so. . . . Melancholy, indeed, is inseparable from the highest art. We cannot wish it away; but we can demand a mastery over it.

Art is made of seemly abstinences. The moment it speaks out fully, lets us know all, ceases to represent a choice and a control of its own material, ceases to be, in short, an authority and a mystery, and prefers to set up for a mere Chinese copy of life,- just so soon its birthright is transferred.'

Her own poem "To an Ideal' wafts us back into the atmosphere of some of her 'starry gentlemen' of the Seventeenth Century (reminiscent as it is of Henry Vaughan, of whose work she was preparing a critical appreciation when her final illness smote the pen from her hand):

That I have tracked you from afar, my crown I call it and my height,

All hail, O dear and difficult star! All hail, O heart of light!

No pleasure born of time for me,
Who in you touch eternity!

If I have found you where you are,
I win my
mortal fight.

But the poem in which, unconsciously, she reveals most of herself is "The Knight Errant,' where Saint George speaks with the voice of Louise Imogen Guiney:

Spirits of old that bore me,

And set me, meek of mind,
Between great deeds before me,
And deeds as great behind,-

sword,

O give my youth, my faith, my
Choice of the heart's desire:
A short life in the saddle, Lord!
Not long life by the fire.
Self-revealing, too, is the 'Ode for a
Master-Mariner Ashore':

There in his room, where the moon looks in,
To silver now a shell, and now a fin,
And o'er his chart glides like an argosy,-
Quiet and old sits he.

Danger! He hath grown heart-sick for thy smile!

And Danger, whom the old seaman erstwhile wooed as a bride, is adjured to whirl him out · even if only in a dream from dull drab safety into welcome storm, and grant him a ship in which to go down, dauntless to the end.

Age, in Louise Guiney's poems, is always lovable, always tenderly depicted; perhaps most conspicuously so in her imitations of epitaphs from the Greek Anthology:

Me, deep-tressed meadows, take to your loyal keeping,

Hard by the swish of sickles, ever in Aulon sleeping,

Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping.

When Charles Lamb was told that his work did not 'suit the age,' he responded cheerfully, 'Damn the age! I'll write for antiquity!' And this retort Miss Guiney delighted to remember. She had much in common with Elia, even to her love for the Bodleian, which she described as her 'Mecca,' and from which she could not endure to remain long absent. But never was there any book-lover less of a proverbial dry as dust. Wearing her scholarship with as debonair a gaiety as one of her Cavalier poets would have worn his jewel-hafted rapier, she was never supercilious to the unlearned.

Perhaps her versatility and charm were partly owing to the contrasting nationalities which went to the making of the mortal part of her. Protesting against being described as an 'IrishAmerican,' she pointed out that she was an 'Irish-French-Scots-EnglishAmerican!' Certainly, she had some of the elements of all these races, blended in a manner which was entirely her own.

'My father,' she declared, 'used to say, my character was "wholly unIrish"; and I am sure my tight, unfertile, law-and-order muse is so. But in Ireland, in its history and people, I have an unchanging interest.' 'Tight, unfertile,' are hardly the epithets which fall most readily from the lips of a reader who remembers "The Wild Ride':

Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle,

Weather-worn and abreast, go men of our galloping legion,

With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.

Yet, in spite of (or perhaps because of) this keen zest in life, this love of movement, the gift of timely tranquility also was hers; and however busy, however strenuous, she never appeared perturbed or in a hurry. In some of her idylls there is a hush so exquisite as to be almost unearthly: the moonlit 'Nocturne,' the antique Christmas Carols,' the stately cadences of 'Beati Mortui,' the concentrated calm power of 'The Inner Fate' are notable instances; and in a few graphic lines she could paint pictures of rural peace - whether in New England or Old seemingly so spontaneous in their dewy freshness that they shine like mirrored nature rather than conscious art. Three slender books of her verse, The White Sail (1887), A Roadside Harp (1893), England and Yesterday (1898), have long been numbered among bibliographical rarities as is her brilliant, tender, and stimulating prose sketch of Monsieur Henri (Henri de la Rochejacquelin, of Vendée fame: 'a dear fellow and a hard hitter,' as one of his friends lovingly remarked). Even Happy Ending, the most recent of her books, containing what she modestly described as 'the less faulty half' of all her published verse, is out of print.

Of her most characteristic prose works, her edition of James Clarence Mangan (1897), her introduction to some of the lyrics of Lionel Johnson, her monograph on the heroic Jesuit Campion, and her sparkling, wise, and

witty series of essays (Patrins: to which is added an Inquirendo into the Wit and other good Parts of His late Majesty King Charles the Second), only the Campion biography is now to be had. Unprocurable also is The Scent of Lilies, a romantic soul-drama of a conversion, cast in the form of a short story. To allow it to remain buried in the back files of a periodical will be a loss to literature. Miss Guiney's own family was one which never departed from the Catholic faith:

It is all but certain [she told the present writer] that we come from the old Gyneys of Norfolk and Rutland; but it can't be proved. There is a great gap, bridged only by tradition: the gap due to the fact that too many of my ancestors, generation after generation, died while their children were very young. My father only remembered hearing from his father one remark of a genealogical nature: 'Cressy was a good battle, Rob, and we were in it.' Long after he quoted this to me, I looked the matter up and found there was a Sir Roger Gyney at Cressy, and also his brothers Robert and Thomas, all of Norfolk.

My grandfather Guiney, born in Ireland (husband of a Scots wife, Judith Macrae), was far more drawn to Ireland than to any other country, and managed to work 'Patrick' into the name of every one of his seven sons, except the youngest who was plain 'William.' Only two of the seven lived to grow up and marry. The old Gyney Christian names, Roger, John, Robert, William, we have never lost.

My grandfather Guiney's grandfather was born in France (near Marseilles) of a French mother, so you see we are rather 'mixed' on that side. Holding to the Catholic faith had a lot, almost everything, to do with our getting poorer and poorer. I sold the last acre I owned, in 1910, at the death of my American mother (whose people were Lancashire Holdens and County Carlow Dowlings and Doyles).

The essay headed 'Irish' (in the outof-print Patrins, Boston, 1901) reveals on every page its author's love for the past:

The country is full of ruins and traditions. . . . A gander off on a holiday, with his white spouse and their pretty brood, lifts his paternal hiss at the passer-by from a Druid's altar; and where the young lambs lie, in a windy spring, to lee of their mothers, is a magnificent doorway.

But, perhaps her warmest personal preference was for her 'Seventeenth Century friends,' the English Cavaliers, whom in some respects she so much resembled. For boys of all ages she had a tireless sympathy; and there are many at Oxford and elsewhere who are proud to owe to her their first awakening to the enchantments of poetry and the perennial human interest of history. She realized more acutely than most, the unity of past, present, and future; and for her the past remained always vividly alive: The soul hath sight

Of passionate yesterdays, all gold and large, Arisen to enrich our narrow night.

Sunny-tempered, sweetly scornful as she was of 'wilful sadness,' yet the chill breath of bygone tragedies, 'the winds of old defeat,' breathed on her across the gulf of ages:

inspires, uplifts, and strengthens was the keynote of her life. Her heroes were not always those who had been victorious, but necessarily those who were inviolably faithful. Very poignant in its calm beauty surging up into sudden tragic foreboding at the end is her 'Vigil-at-Arms':

Keep holy watch, with silence, prayer, and fasting,

Till morning break and every bugle play.
Unto the One aware from everlasting
Dear are the winners: thou art more than they.
Forth from this peace on manhood's way thou
goest,

Flushed with resolve, and radiant in mail;
Blessing supreme for men unborn thou sowest,
O Knight elect! O soul ordained to fail!

That he who is led captive may be yet greater than his conqueror was said very long ago: and the KnightErrant fired by the 'passion for perfection' must go down into the Valley of the Shadow, and face the Dark Night of the Soul, before he may hope to see the mystic dawn or gather the golden rose:

A man said to his angel,

'My spirits are fallen thro',
And I cannot carry this battle;

O brother, what shall I do?'
Then said to the man his angel,
"Thou wavering foolish soul,
Back to the ranks! What matter
To win or lose the whole,
As judged by the little judges

Who harken not well, nor see?
Not thus by the outer issue

The wise shall interpret thee!' . .
Thy part is with broken sabre

To rise on the last redoubt;
To fear not sensible failure
Nor covet the game at all,
But fighting, fighting, fighting,

Die, driven against the wall.

True to this standard, 'the Paladin' kept her banner afloat to the last, through dragging and difficult years which to a less gallant spirit might have seemed gray with the shadow of defeat- such material defeat as disinterested lovers of letters must not

flinch from facing, in an age when literature has become so organized a trade that the handicap is ever increasingly heavy for those few who still approach it devotedly as a vocation.

Such writers as Louise Imogen Guiney follow a star invisible as yet to the oft-quoted 'man in the street,' who not only in politics but in art and letters is being prematurely pressed into the part of world-dictator. Despite the appreciation given her in Boston and among an unostentatious but faithful audience this side of the Atlantic, her fame if by 'fame' we mean popularity will be a revenue payable chiefly to her ghost. It now remains to be shown whether her natal continent America, or her second home Oxford, will be the first to produce a collected edition of her complete works. When the word 'education' is on everybody's lips, the assumption that what pleases the fastidious few must necessarily forever fail to fascinate the many, is no dazzling homage to the goddess Progress.

Sooner or later 'Time's old daughter Truth' must distinguish between writers who caricature her in the fashionable costume of the changing moment and those who worship reverently at her hidden shrine and then go bravely forth into the world to champion her eternal beauty. In which rank stands Louise Imogen Guiney there can be no question. And, like Spenser's angels, she spent herself ungrudgingly, 'All for love and nothing for reward.'

[The Manchester Guardian] AN ARNOLD BENNETT NOTEBOOK

BY P.

THE world is so full of a number of things, and Mr. Bennett is interested in so many of them, that the wonder is he ever found time to write all the vol