From God’s side even of such a simple thing?
The sense of what might, perhaps, be called restrained paradox in that sonnet, is frequently met with in Mrs. Meynell’s writings, and it corresponds to aspects of reality which the old religious phraseology she has so freshly minted for us is alone fitted to convey. The Young Neophyte is a beautiful sonnet enshrining the fatefulness of every human action, the gift of the full flower which is implicit in the gift of the smallest bud, the preparation we are constantly making for crises which are yet hidden in the future. Thoughts in Separation also deals with the paradoxical overcoming of the handicaps of personal absence of our friends through community of thought and feeling. Not only are these paradoxes in human psychology delicately set forth by the poet, but those darker ones of human work and destiny are consolingly illuminated in such a poem as Builders of Ruins—which does not depend for its quality of consolation upon anything foreign to its poetic truth.
One poem in the book is, perhaps, most remarkable for the light it throws upon the sense in which the term poetic truth may be used, and as showing the difference between the poetic, the realizable, and, therefore, the true side of a religion—the side Matthew Arnold was so anxious to keep—and the mere theological framework, always smelling of unreality and always in need of renovation. The poem may stand as a warning against confusing real poetry—in whose truth we need not be afraid to trust because its author does not inhabit our own thought world—with versified theology. If all of Mrs. Meynell’s work were like her Messina, 1908, then the critic and reader who now mistakenly shun her would be right. And the poem is a curious commentary upon Mr. Eastman’s insistence that poetry is realization. For in her other poems the author has presented those aspects of her religion which are verifiable in experience. Perhaps the quotations given above bear out that point. But one aspect of religious thought has now been pretty generally abandoned, not because it has ever been proven false, but because we have never succeeded in realizing it for ourselves. The God of orthodox church theodicy never did “make good”; Christ, the Saints, and even the very material form of the cross itself had to mediate between man and the divine. And it is precisely in the one case in this book where Mrs. Meynell tries to present the governing rather than the immanent God to us that she fails—as, if poetry be realization, we should expect her to fail. The first stanza of the poem addressed to the Deity describes in a few bold strokes the wreck of Messina, and ends with the lines:
Destroyer, we have cowered beneath Thine own
Immediate unintelligible hand.
The second stanza describes the missions of mercy to the stricken city, and ends:
... our shattered fingers feel
Thy mediate and intelligible hand.
The essential weakness of this dependence for poetic effect upon the two adjectives and their negatives is no less obvious than the weakness of the poet’s attribution of such apparently impulsive and then retractatory conduct to a God whose ways must either be explicable in terms of a human sense of order or not made the subject of human discourse at all.
Mrs. Meynell describes herself in one of these poems as a singer of a single mood. Some of her critics have taken her at her word and saved themselves some trouble thereby in their task of appreciation. But as a matter of fact, she should not be taken at her own modest estimate, for her one mood is such a pervasive one, such a large and sane mood, that it pays to look at more than one aspect of life through its coloring. And in truth, besides her better-known poems which need no further mention here, The Lady Poverty and Renouncement, for example, there will be found within the small compass of her beautifully-housed collection of verse many aspects of nature, all of them instinct with a mystic shimmer of life, as well as aspects of the innermost life of man which it is given to few spirits to sing in words—only, in fact, to those spirits whose effort it is to make their poetry