The mystery of my memories
And all I crave to be.
VIII
EDITH M. THOMAS
AN earnest idealist is Miss Edith Thomas, who commits to her song a vital word and sends it as a courier to arouse that drowsy lodge-keeper, the soul, and bid him give ear to the importunate message of life. Not by outwardly strenuous numbers, however, is this end achieved; on the contrary, Miss Thomas is a quiet singer whose thoughtful restraint is one of her chief distinctions. The spiritual tidings which she intrusts to her song are destined to be delivered in the silence of the soul; none the less are they sent to awaken it, and none the less do they bide and knock at the door of one’s spirit until one rise and open to them.
The ideality of her work has been from the outset its most informing quality; the thoughts beyond the thrall of words that pass, in Maeterlinck’s phrase, “like great white birds, across the heart,” had brushed with their unsullied wings the thoughts of every-day and left a light upon them, giving assurance, when the
art was still unshapen, that the vision had been revealed. One seldom reads a poem by Miss Thomas without bringing away from it a suggestive thought or a spiritual stimulus, sometimes introduced so subtly that it breaks upon one in the after-light of memory rather than at the moment of reading; for Miss Thomas is not a homiletic singer, obtruding the moral. She is too much the artist for that. She delivers no crass counsel, does no obvious and commonplace moralizing; but she has the nature that resolves every phase of life into its spiritual elements, and, seen imaginatively, these elements are material for Art. When once they are wrought into song by Miss Thomas, they have lost none of the force of the original idea, none of the thought-giving value; but into them has been infused the spiritual value in a subtly philosophical way, by which the experience is resolved into its personal import to the soul.
Miss Thomas has written many beautiful lyrics, but her characteristic expression is too thoughtful to be set to the lighter and more purely musical rhythms. She has a finely cultivated style, inventive in form, and often employing richly cadenced measures, but one feels rather that the cadence is well tested, the
form well fitted to the theme, than that the impulse created its own form and sang itself into being. One cannot, however, generalize upon such varied work as that of Miss Thomas. Because one feels back of the work the thinker, the analyst, weighing even the emotion in the balance of reflection, is not to say that the work is cold or unemotional; on the contrary, it is deeply human and sympathetic, and in such inspirations as are drawn directly from life it is often highly impassioned; but in many of the poems the motive is drawn from some classic source, such as, “At Seville,” “Ulysses at the Court of Alcinous,” “The Roses of Pieria,” “Timon to the Athenians,” “The Voice of the Laws,” being Socrates’ reply to Crito,—and while each of these poems, and particularly the last, has both beauty and strength, they naturally lack the warmth and impulse that accompany more personal themes.
As compared with the large body of Miss Thomas’ work, that for which the inspiration has been sought far afield is slight; but it is sufficient to set the mark of deliberate intent upon many of the poems and detract from the spontaneity of the work as a whole. Miss Thomas is so accomplished and ready a technician that the temptation to utilize such allusions