CHAPTER III

“TWO began, in a low voice, ‘Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake.’”

As I look round this room I feel sure Two, and Five, and Seven, have all been at work on it, and made no mistakes, for round the walls runs a frieze of squat standard rose-trees, red as red can be, and just like those that Alice saw in the Queen’s garden. In between them are Chaucer’s name-children, prim little daisies, peering wideawake from green grass. This same grass has a history which I have heard. In the original stencil for the frieze it was purely conventional like the rest, and met in spikey curves round each tree; the painter, however, who was doing the work, was a lover of the fields; and feeling that such grass was a travesty, he added on his own account dainty little tussocks, and softened the hard line into a tufted carpet, the grass growing irregularly, bent at will by the wind.

The result from the standpoint of conventional art is indeed disastrous; but my sympathy and gratitude are with the painter. I see, as he saw, the far-reaching robe of living ineffable green, of whose brilliance the eye never has too much, and in whose weft no two threads are alike; and shrink as he did from the conventionalising of that windswept glory.

The sea has its crested waves of recognisable form; the river its eddy and swirl and separate vortices; but the grass! The wind bloweth where it listeth and the grass bows as the wind blows—“thou canst not tell whither it goeth.” It takes no pattern, it obeys no recognised law; it is like a beautiful creature of a thousand wayward moods, and its voice is like nothing else in the wide world. It bids you rest and bury your tired face in the green coolness, and breathe of its breath and of the breath of the good earth from which man was taken and to which he will one day return. Then, if you lend your ear and are silent minded, you may hear wondrous things of the deep places of the earth; of life in mineral and stone as well as in pulsing sap; of a green world as the stars saw it before man trod it under foot—of the emerald which has its place with the rest in the City of God.

“What if earth Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein, Each to each other like, more than on earth to thought?”

It is a natural part of civilisation’s lust of re-arrangement that we should be so ready to conventionalise the beauty of this world into decorative patterns for our pilgrim tents. It is a phase, and will melt into other phases; but it tends to the increase of artificiality, and exists not only in art but in everything. It is no new thing for jaded sentiment to crave the spur of the unnatural, to prefer the clever imitation, to live in a Devachan where the surroundings appear that which we would have them to be; but it is an interesting record of the pulse of the present day that ‘An Englishwoman’s Love Letters’ should have taken society by storm in the way it certainly has.

It is a delightful book to leave about, with its vellum binding, dainty ribbons, and the hallmark of a great publisher’s name. But when we seek within we find love with its thousand voices and wayward moods, its shy graces and seemly reticences, love which has its throne and robe of state as well as the garment of the beggar maid, love which is before time was, which knew the world when the stars took up their courses, presented to us in gushing outpourings, the appropriate language of a woman’s heart to the boor she delights to honour.

“It is woman who is the glory of man,” says the author of ‘The House of Wisdom and Love,’ “Regina mundi, greater, because so far the less; and man is her head, but only as he serves his queen.” Set this sober aphorism against the school girl love-making which kisses a man’s feet and gaily refuses him the barren honour of having loved her first.

There is scant need for the apologia which precedes the letters; a few pages dispels the fear that we are prying into another’s soul. As for the authorship, there is a woman’s influence, an artist’s poorly concealed bias in the foreign letters; and for the rest a man’s blunders—so much easier to see in another than to avoid oneself—writ large from cover to cover. King Cophetua, who sends “profoundly grateful remembrances,” has most surely written the letters he would wish to receive.

“Mrs Meynell!” cries one reviewer, triumphantly. Nay, the saints be good to us, what has Mrs Meynell in common with the “Englishwoman’s” language, style, or most unconvincing passion? Men can write as from a woman’s heart when they are minded to do so in desperate earnestness—there is Clarissa Harlowe and Stevenson’s Kirstie, and many more to prove it; but when a man writes as the author of the “Love Letters” writes, I feel, as did the painter of the frieze, that pattern-making has gone too far and included that which, like the grass, should be spared such a convention.

“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess, “and the moral of that is—‘Be what you would seem to be’—or, if you’d like to put it more simply—‘never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.’” And so by way of the Queen’s garden I come back to my room again.

My heart’s affections are still centred on my old attic, with boarded floor and white-washed walls, where the sun blazoned a frieze of red and gold until he travelled too far towards the north, the moon streamed in to paint the trees in inky wavering shadows, and the stars flashed their glory to me across the years. But now sun and moon greet me only indirectly, and under the red roses hang pictures, some of them the dear companions of my days. Opposite me is the Arundel print of the Presentation, painted by the gentle “Brother of the Angels.” Priest Simeon, a stately figure in green and gold, great with prophecy, gazes adoringly at the Bambino he holds with fatherly care. Our Lady, in robe of red and veil of shadowed purple, is instinct with light despite the sombre colouring, as she stretches out hungering, awe-struck hands for her soul’s delight. St Joseph, dignified guardian and servitor, stands behind, holding the Sacrifice of the Poor to redeem the First-begotten.

St Peter Martyr and the Dominican nun, gazing in rapt contemplation at the scene, are not one whit surprised to find themselves in the presence of eternal mysteries. In the Entombment, which hangs on the opposite wall, St Dominic comes round the corner full of grievous amaze and tenderest sympathy, but with no sense of shock or intrusion, for was he not “famigliar di Cristo”? And so he takes it all in; the stone bed empty and waiting; the Beloved cradled for the last time on His mother’s knees to be washed, lapped round, and laid to rest as if He were again the Babe of Bethlehem. He sees the Magdalen anointing the Sacred Feet; Blessed John caring for the living and the Dead; and he, Dominic—hound of the Lord—having his real, living share in the anguish and hope, the bedding of the dearest Dead, who did but leave this earth that He might manifest Himself more completely.

Underneath, with a leap across the centuries, is Rossetti’s picture; Dante this time the onlooker, Beatrice, in her pale beauty, the death-kissed one. The same idea under different representations; the one conceived in childlike simplicity, the other recalling, even in the photograph, its wealth of colour and imagining; the one a world-wide ideal, the other an individual expression of it.

Beatrice was to Dante the inclusion of belief. She was more to him than he himself knew, far more to him after her death than before. And, therefore, the analogy between the pictures has at core a common reality. “It is expedient for you that I go away,” is constantly being said to us as we cling earthlike to the outward expression, rather than to the inward manifestation—and blessed are those who hear and understand, for it is spoken only to such as have been with Him from the beginning. The eternal mysteries come into time for us individually under widely differing forms. The tiny child mothers its doll, croons to it, spends herself upon it, why she cannot tell you; and we who are here in our extreme youth, never to be men and women grown in this world, nurse our ideal, exchange it, refashion it, call it by many names; and at last in here or hereafter we find in its naked truth the Child in the manger, even as the Wise Men found Him when they came from the East to seek a great King. There is but one necessary condition of this finding; we must follow the particular manifestation of light given us, never resting until it rests—over the place of the Child. And there is but one insurmountable hindrance, the extinction of or drawing back from the light truly apprehended by us. We forget this, and judge other men by the light of our own soul.

I think the old bishop must have understood it. He is my friend of friends as he lies opposite my window in his alabaster sleep, clad in pontifical robes, with unshod feet, a little island of white peace in a many-coloured marble sea. The faithful sculptor has given every line and wrinkle, the heavy eyelids and sunken face of tired old age, but withal the smile of a contented child.

I do not even know my bishop’s name, only that the work is of the thirteenth century; but he is good to company with through the day, for he has known darkness and light and the minds of many men; most surely, too, he has known that God fulfils Himself in strange ways, so with the shadow of his feet upon the polished floor he rests in peace.