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New Zealand Tablet, Volume LI, Issue 49, 10 December 1924, Page 34

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Alice Meynell The worth of Alice Meynell’ s contribution to English letters may to some extent be gauged by the numerous laudatory articles and reviews which appeared (both in the British and the American press after her death. One of the 'best appreciations we have seen is that of Agnes Repplier in the Catholic World for March. Miss Repplier is a writer of beautiful essays, in which profound insight, spiritual, literary, and human, is evident, and there is, perhaps, no American better qualified to write from a Catholic literateur’s point of view about Alice Meynell. While regretting that wo cannot publish the entire paper we cannot refrain from giving our literary readers some extracts which will shew in what high esteem the dead poetess and essayist was held by her gifted American admirer. Mrs. Meynell’s Early Success “There was never,” says Miss Repplier, “an unsuccessful period in Mrs. Meynell’s life there were no eager abortive efforts, no vain flights, and tragic, salutary falls. Her first published poems were praised by critics sure of a respectful hearing. She pleased Ruskin by the seriousness of her thoughts, and Rossetti by the sweetness of her lines. She bad it in her to win the friendship and admiration of men so dissimilar as George Meredith and Coventry Patmore. She also had it in her—and it is well remembered now—to extend a helping hand to others less fortunately placed, or less richly endowed than she was. Of all the appreciations published after her death in England, there was none so spontaneous and so heartfelt as the testimony of fellow journalists whom she had befriended, encouraged, and discrim inately praised.” ’ Her Journalism “It is hard to think of Mrs. Meynell as even a beatified newspaper writer. Her genius does not seem to have been of the order which rejoices an editor’s heart, or wins the careless approval of a hurried and preoccupied public. But she brought to bear upon journalism the qualities of conscientious care which distinguished all her work, the clean-cut thoughts, in clean-cut, polished sentences. It seemed to her worth while to write with this precision, and she was eminently wise. When Mr. Oust organised in the Pall Mall Gazette the daily column known as “The Wares of Autolycns,” he entrusted each column to the care of a distinguished woman author, who once a week produced a different set of “Wares,” differing widely from the assortment of her contemporaries, but of an unvaried excellence. There was not a writer on the staff that did not take a keen personal pride in this work ; and the result was a happy com* bination of journalism and literature ' which to the French seems a matter of course,' but which English and Americans are apt to consider as a forced and unnatural alliance. The

Friday column of “Autolycus” was contributed by Mrs. Meynell, and many of the papers were reprinted in the volumes of selected essays which she deemed worthy of preservation.” Her Place “Critics, with on© accord, have ranked Mrs. Meynell’s vers© above her prose. It is more direct, more spontaneous, more creative. The Saturday llcview unhesitatingly places her among the best of England’s minor poets, and this is high praise, for England has not for three hundred years been richer in minor poets than she is to-day. If there is no one voice raised above its fellows, there is a mighty antiphon of less voices stirring the air with beauty. In this strong chorus Mrs. Meynell holds her place with ease, partly because of inspiration, the inspiration born of spiritual intensity and enriching faith. Fervent thoughts clothed in the language of austere purity and distinction characterise her verse, while here and there are lines of exceptional loveliness : Ancestral childhood long renewed, And midnight of invisible rain.” Francis Thompson To her power of sympathy, no less than to the critical acumen of Wilfrid Meynell, we owe the redemption of Francis Thompson, and the brief flowering of his genius. To have rescued that wandering soul, to have lifted him from the bitter waters of despair, to have given to the World his treasures of prose and verse, is a benefaction for which the gratitude of generations is an all too feeble return. Mr. Thompson made over and o\ei again a. full acknowledgment of his debt. In those lilting lines in which he dedicates the poems of 1893 to Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, he flings his wares at their feet as something not offered, but returned; To you, 0 dear givers I I give your own giving. It is interesting to note in this connection the closeness of the appeal in Mrs. Meynell’s poem, “The Lady Poverty,” and in Francis Thompson s passionate and imaginative handling of the same theme. Mrs. Meynell is ever graceful and controlled: The Lady Poverty was fair; But she has lost her looks of late, With change of time and change of air. Ah ! slattern, she neglects her hair, Her gown, her shoes; she keeps no state As once her pure feet were bare. “Francis Thompson, snatching his words red hot from the mint, and his figures from the deep wells of imagination, shows us the same picture of a Poverty that was once the innocent child of God: All men did admire Her modest looks; her sweet attire, In which her ribboned shoe could not compete W ith her clear, simple feet.”

Her Essays “Mrs. Meynell’s essays suffer from undue ybrevity, a brevity doubtless entailed by V; journalism. They are no shorter than were 1 the eighteenth-century essays; but they are J more critical, and criticism calls for scope. | Moreover, the eighteenth-century essayists, when they wanted to be exhaustive, carried a subject through half-a-dozen or a dozen papers, until the picture was rounded and complete. Mrs. Meynell’s papers are for the • most part snatches of thought, expressed in carefully and admirably chosen words. She j was in the best sense of the term a precieusc, ' valuing the manner of the saying as highly as she valued the thing said. She has never made this plainer than in a superb paragraph describing the imprisoned waters brought to Rome, over the steady, level flight of arches, to give their magnificence to the imperial city; ‘ None more splendid came bound to Rome, or graced captivity with a more invincible liberty of the heart. And the captivity and the leap of the waters have outlived their captors. They have remained in Rome, and remained alone. Over them, the victory was longer than the empire, and their thousands of loud voices have never ceased to confess the cold floods, separated long ago, drawn one by one, alive, to the heart and front of the world.’ No one who has listened by day or by night to the Roman fountains can remain insensible to the beauty of those few lines which celebrate with unerring eloquence their triumphant subjection.” <*>