Mrs. Meynell

Extract

I have never found the pen move with greater difficulty than in trying to record the impression which is left with me of Mrs. Meynell’s life and death. It is as hard as writing of her poetry and her prose —the prose with which she enamelled Life, the poetry which she laid up as Death’s garland. If the supremely important moment of a saint’s life is the last, to which every thought and deed has long paved the way, the extreme ecstacy of the poet no less is death. Then the last rhythm of life is rendered and the last measure of the soul is counted. If poesy is a divine gift, then God will call account for the poetic stewardship, not for the false rhymes and broken feet—for He forgives technicalities—but for fine arts wasted and supreme inspiration thrown to the dogs.

Great poets have deliberately given their powers to evil, and petty rhymesters toss their jingles to perdition. But the great poetry of the world is ever religious. Great prose need not be so. Poetry to be great requires the sublimer touch which only religion can give. Prose can be ironical, fantastical, wise, comic, solemn, almost sublime; but sublimity demands the rushing music, the piercing note, the ordered cadence, the organ’s diapason.

Alice Meynell’s prose, culled into a life’s sheaf of Essays, covered all those moods and forms. Out of them could be composed a little Breviary of country life and common-joy things.