Part 2

Hers was a youth of picturesque loyalties, one of them to the lost cause of the Stuarts, a confessed congenital bias. The Irish Jacobities, of whom there were many, had “claimed the Stuarts as of the Milesian line, fondly deducing them from Fergus.” Born into that direct succession of race loyalty, she was in addition, (and this seems to be the true argument) incalculably beguiled by the sheer fascination of that luckless house. Her Inquirendo into the Wit and Other Good Parts of His Late Majesty King Charles the Second ties you a pretty nosegay of the oak twig and the white rose. How should she not have loved Charles II., if only that he was, in her own words, “a choice wag?” “Charles might have confessed with Elia, ‘How I like to be liked, and what don’t I do to be liked!’” Certainly His ill-starred Majesty could have desired no liking more whole-hearted, albeit discriminating, more merrily tolerant than hers. He had cast his magnetic spell upon her pen and it turned to some good-natured vindicating of his varied parts. Perhaps she never took her adherence very seriously, off the printed page. She was beguiled by picturesqueness, not so much concerned with lineal rights; perhaps, also, it tickled an impish fancy to repudiate the “dull Georgian farce.” But Charles never had a more humorous apologist, one who gave him full value as an apostle of good taste and of a “wheedling charm.”

The sum of her appraisement is of a captivating genius who had found himself “in the king business” and got addled and spoiled. And who knows how she must have loved him for his adaptability to portraiture of a pen like hers, and for the rush and glow of the Restoration, the very circumstances that inspired her Hazlitt to his glorious inventory of rustling silks and waving plumes, of gems and people! The time and the gay immortalities of it go to her head.

“There was an astonishing dearth of dull people; the bad and bright were in full blossom, and the good and stupid were pruned away.”

She adores “the sworded poets of the Civil Wars, with their scarcely exerted aptitude for the fine arts, whose names leave a sort of star-dust along the pages of the anthologies.” And it was, this star-dust of the period, immediate to one of her own dreams, a labor she delighted in: the making of a perfect anthology of the seventeenth century.

Her first book was Songs at the Start (1884) and the first collected essays Goose-Quill Papers (1885). The essays, despite a wilful archaism, an armored stiffness of light attack learned out of library shelves, are astonishingly mature for a pen so young—if by youth or age we mean the mere cumulative sum of time passed. Indeed, the author thought well enough of the scintillant little papers to include two of them, An Open Letter to the Moon, and On Teaching One’s Grandmother to Suck Eggs, in her later Patrins. You have but to love Louise Guiney to find Goose-Quill Papers a jovial self-betraying little book to recur to when you long for her whimsical face again or the cascading gamut of her laugh. It is spiced with playfulness, a learned playfulness, it must be owned, and yet, if you know her, you know also how much learning was waiting in her teeming mind, eager to get into the book and cram it, cover to cover, and you are grateful for the sense of just values that let you off so gently. For she had one of those fructifying minds which absorb like a sponge; everything they draw in breeds something else, and the two, fact and mother wit, breed again until you are swept along on a stream of rushing lineage. And over her happy selection of topics quaint and gay, her own illuminating humor plays like a thread of gold in tapestry moved lightly by a wind. We may not, of course, actually assume, so objective is she even then, that her whimsies of the first person are literally self-betraying; but they do sometimes open a window upon her as we know her, the gay relish of life that was hers, the ardor for the great game of chasing a happy fancy to its born destiny of an ultimate end, and stroking it into the gentle complaisance of the willing captive; the healthy, untrammeled revolt against bugaboos “nature itself cannot endure”—notably mathematics when she “roars you” like any lion (albeit smiling behind his whiskers as begging to remind you he has no idea of resorting to the argument of claws).

When she has mounted her gaily caparisoned jennet of unforced humor, she takes the world by inversion; you shall follow her circumspectly, or her steed will throw up his heels in your face and gallop off in the dust of his own making. “My novitiate page,” she ruefully confesses, invoking the influence of Hazlitt, “smelled hard of that dear name, likewise of Browne, Taylor, and Cowley, and Lamb, and of one R. L. S., a Romany chal then utterly unknown, whom I had found in secret and in secret worshiped.” It was a brave beginning, this slender book of little essays, and it was dedicated to Oliver Wendell Holmes. How charmingly, with what engaging gallantry he must have taken it!

To leap the fecund years to the Patrins of her later youth is to follow the same whimsical and reflective vein. This book, deriving its fortunate title from patrin, “a Gypsy trail: handfuls of leaves or grass cast by the Gypsies on the road, to denote, to those behind, the way which they have taken,” is primarily for him whom reading “maketh a full man.” The style, with a scholarship better tempered and easier to carry, being, as it were, woven into chain mail, not the armor of her earliest adventuring, is the despair of the less agile and instructed mind. It is tinctured with her personal quality, and is incredibly rich, the richer when you return to it after absence and intercourse with more immediate things, to find fruits of her commerce with far off civilisations and loving sentience to the “hills of home.” Like the buyer in Goblin Market, she drips with juices from the very fruits of life, antidote for our dull ambitions: the years “wasted in prison on casuist industries.” It is full of a not too quaint and bookish but an altogether delicious persiflage. She praises the scholar’s right to “fall back with delight upon a choice assortment of ignorances.” Yet, with whatever innocent suavity she puts it, you suspect her of having few scholarly ignorances of her own to fall back upon. So absolutely four-square was her tower of recondite knowledge that you imagine her as having some ado to prevent its shadow from falling on the reader less equipped and terrifying him into escaping her spell altogether. It is a book of praise. Most of all does she advertise the great narcotic of out-of-doors: the enchanting diversion of walking until the rhythm of the first arduous stretch dulls into the monotony of muscles settling into their slowly apprehended task. She betrays an unimpeachable bodily sanity. Though urban by birth, she is also, through adoptive kinship of Pan and all the nymphs, a sylvan, to her “a dear Elizabethan word.” You may find her beside the sea until conscious response to it ebbs into that trance of wonder which is the withdrawal of the soul into ultimate chambers, the inviolable retreat whence it comes forth washed clean of the injuries time has dealt it. She sings a remorseful dirge over the “defeated days” of captive animals. She quickens her pace, at moments, to the measures of a hilarious mind. Throughout that mischievous “encourager of hesitancy,” the Harmless Scholar, she all but dances.

“The main business of the scholar,” she informs you, with a wicked twinkle behind her spectacles, “is to live gracefully, without mental passion, and to get off alone into a corner for an affectionate view of creation.”

This she concedes you as an egg warranted to hatch into something you don’t expect, or a bomb likely to burst harmlessly, if disconcertingly, under your chair. For she knows, by diabolic instinct, just what your idea of the scholar is: the conserver of chronologies and sapient conclusions fit chiefly to be waved in pedagogical celebrations or trumpeted at authors’ readings. No such sterile destiny as this for her, as she shall presently “fructify unto you.”

“Few can be trusted with an education.” This she tells you with a prodigious lightness of self-assurance. “The true scholar’s sign-manual is not the midnight lamp on a folio. He knows; he is baked through; all superfluous effort and energy are over for him. To converse consumedly upon the weather, and compare notes as to ‘whether it is likely to hold up tomorrow,’—this, says Hazlitt, ‘is the end and privilege of a life of study.’”

Mark you how humbly she proceeds, this multi-millionaire of the mind. Her intellectual barns are bursting with fatness, her cattle are on a thousand hills; yet she spares you not only the inventory of her acquisitions but any hint of her respect for them. One is smilingly glad to note that sometimes the challenge of the world’s intellectual penury is really too much for her, and she cannot help rushing to the rescue with armies of notable names and historic data. Still she did converse consumedly upon the weather also, and it is one of the happy incredibilities of her delightful disposition that she never repudiated the intercourse of honest minds, even if they were dull. She adroitly refrained from tossing them the ball she knew they could never return, though with a curve imperfectly transcribed. She talked with them about dogs and mushrooms—for there also she was sapient in a lore that could be worn lightly and the more easily concealed—and the merciful recipe for killing a lobster painlessly before you plunge him in the ensanguining pot, of kittens and young furry donkeys and the universal boon of weather. And she had a store of absurdities, never anecdotes in the dire sense of cut-and-dried obstructors of the traffic between mortal minds, but odd quips and spontaneous incongruities she was ready to shower you withal. No less pretentious scholar ever walked a world more suavely aware of her gracious charm, more happily oblivious of the breaches she could make in worn conventions if she brought up her artillery.

The personal revelations in Patrins are unmistakable to those who knew her. She writes On the Delights of an Incognito. Who can fail to see L. I. G. herself in the person of the hypothetical R., walking home after “the day at a library desk” where he “had grown hazy with no food and much reading?” And passing the house where he was always delightedly welcome and where he loved to be, he looked in at the shining dinner table where sat the family, unconscious of him and yet—he knew it—only to be the merrier if he dropped in, and “hurried on, never quite so paradoxically happy in his life as when he quitted that familiar pane without rapping, and went back to the dark and the frost, unapprehended, impersonal, aberrant, a spirit among men.” For Louise Guiney, prettily as she conformed herself to accepted rules, was by nature a vagrom under conventional roofs, a wandering breeze, an addict of fern seed, a cloud, a rainbow fancy, whatever could make itself, as speedily as might be, impalpable to the eye and only a memory to the too-inquisitive mind. As to the inner philosophy of her, the cup of strength she kept ever by her in intimate stillnesses, there it stands in another essay, The Precept of Peace. This bears much dwelling on, not only by the mystic but the honest mind distraught in the terrifying assaults of modern life. How to serve the world while renouncing it, how to possess your own soul, in the peace that lets it grow and ripen seed! She is in love, not with indifference, but the brave behavior it endows you with.

“A very little non-adhesion to common affairs,” she tells you, “a little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide the moral immunity which is the only real estate.”

A benevolent receptiveness surrounds her. She lets you interrupt her because you cannot actually reach her inner strongholds; she is at heart and head so engrossed in intimate concerns so far from you that you cannot possibly borrow or steal the key to burst in and stumble about in them. Out of her general kindliness she will deal gently with you, hospitably even, that, being dulled and satisfied, you may go away the sooner and leave her to the only aims worth, to her special aptitudes, pursuing eagerly. This, it must be remembered, was the gay bravado of youth, with so much in its treasury it could afford to squander time and a rain of friendliness on even the invading bore. The day came later when the world jostled her and she had to double and turn to avoid it; but always she cherished a philosophy of courteous endurance. Personages nobly nurtured learn early not to whimper. So, when Demos finds a use for their heads, they die with a grace seemingly reserved for kings and martyrs. And the use Demos finds for the heads of the nobly born in the arts is to weary them with much crowning and to sap them with the foolish requisition that they shall appear in public arenas. But the great brotherhood our L. I. G. subscribes to “hold the world but as the world” and make no outcry over these hindrances to a consecrated life. They do not shy at uncouth contraptions on the road. They have adopted the blinders of a mind inwardly withdrawn, and—to o’erleap the metaphor!—they smile in their daily dying. This book, Patrins, smiles all through. It informs you, chiefly by an innocently indirect implication, that the phenomenon of being, while it may be taken by schoolmen and moralists for a balance between good and ill, is a whimsical business, and the more you see of it the more firmly you will determine to view it aslant, with an eye to pleasing paradox.

As the tree of her mental life grew and broadened into wider air, it cast a shade not even her votaries were always zealous to penetrate. She tended more and more to the obscure, the far-off and dimly seen. In her biographical work she was the champion of lost causes, the restorer of names dropped out of rubricated calendars through sheer inattention of an unlearned world, or rusted by time in chantries no longer visited. She would sail, not for those known islands on every map where harbors are charted and the smallest craft can coal and water, but for some lost Atlantis, even if she might only moor in its guessed neighborhood and hear, at least, the plash of ripples over it. She was always listening, the generous hand to the responsive ear, to echoes from “forgotten or infrequent lyres.”

“Apollo,” she says, “has a class of might-have-beens whom he loves: poets bred in melancholy places, under disabilities, with thwarted growth and thinned voices; poets compounded of everything magical and fair, like an elixir which is the outcome of knowledge and patience, and which wants, in the end, even as common water would, the essence of immortality.”

It is not quite easy to tell why she delighted so absolutely in digging for ore in spots of incredible difficulty. It was not that she was ill-grounded in the greater, more entirely accepted cults. Shakespeare was hers and Milton, and in Dante she did authoritative work. And it is idle to wonder whether, so many of the big critical jobs being done, she had a keen eye to the market value of such unconsidered trifles as were left. The practical worth of a task would never have been an incentive; it might have been a deterrent. Like Mangan, there was that in her which bade her not to cross the street to advance her own interests; it persuaded her to what seemed even wilful adoption of the losing cause. (That she did, in many senses, harness herself to drudgery, as life drove her the more pitilessly to the wall, is the more to her lasting renown; by nature she was single in devotion to the tasks she loved and ready to forswear the body’s ease.) Nor was her attachment to the imperfectly known by any means the pleasure of the chase, the exhilaration of the hunt when dates and genealogical and critical sequences had “gone away” from her hounds of scent and swiftness. It was simply true that she had an inextinguishable love for the souls “ordained to fail.” As it made no difference to her whether a lasting line of verse were hers or another’s, so she had the patience of the born annalist in picking up and conserving every least coin of the realm of letters or of manly and romantic deeds.

One of the floating bits of wreckage she gave a hand to confirming in the illustrious place given him by a few discerning minds, was Mangan, the uniquely brilliant author of an authoritative version of My Dark Rosaleen, a perverse and suffering soul, prey to a blackness of mind and the Nemesis of his own wandering will. There were “two Mangans,” she quotes from a previous biographer, “one well known to the Muses, the other to the police; one soared through the empyrean and sought the stars, the other lay too often in the gutters of Peter Street and Bride Street.”

He was a worshipper of that which is above us, and prey to what is below, the body’s slave, the poor brain’s mistaken ministrant, striving alternately to fire it to new apprehensions and drug it with a despair of its own possibilities. In this Study, James Clarence Mangan, (1897) Louise Guiney says:

“One can think of no other, in the long disastrous annals of English literature, cursed with so monotonous a misery, so much hopelessness and stagnant grief. He had no public; he was poor, infirm, homeless, loveless; travel and adventure were cut off from him, and he had no minor risks to run; the cruel necessities of labor sapped his dreams from a boy; morbid fancies mastered him as the rider masters his horse; the demon of opium, then the demon of alcohol, pulled him under, body and soul, despite a persistent and heart-breaking struggle, and he perished ignobly in his prime.”

Could a combination of evils have been imagined more poignantly appealing to this young champion of shipwrecked souls? My Dark Rosaleen alone was enough to enlist her generous pen. As Mangan himself rescued it from the indifferent fame of an archaic fragment, a norm of beauty, and clothed it with the flying draperies of a glorifying fancy, so she unfolded its history and holds it up to new appreciation in a world not given to dwell upon the historically obscure. Mangan, she tells us, “was a pattern of sweet gratitude and deference, and left his art to prosper or perish as heaven should please.” How this moved her as an appeal she understood! for she also was of those who sow their seed in the wild garden of the world’s indifference and pass on, meekly unaware of any right of mankind, born to heavenly destinies, to stay and gather. He was dear to her. She treated him tenderly, yet his strange humors moved her to a smile. He was “so ludicrous and so endeared a figure that one wishes him but a thought in Fielding’s brain, lovingly handled in three volumes octavo and abstracted from the hard vicissitudes of mortality.”

This Study of hers reflects, with an especial clarity, the form and color of her own critical genius. In the comparison of masterpieces and the measurement of values by accepted standards, she was at ease in a large activity. If we would understand her method, we may look on it here. The shallow conception of the critic’s task, as an expression of personal preference, was not even germane to the richness of preparation she brought to even the most inconsiderable reviewing. Here are no snap judgments, ingenuous betrayal of temperamental likings. The genesis of criticism is the tool in her hands. Lead her to the slenderest rill of poetry and, out of her witch-hazel magic, she locates the spring that fed it. She bows before “the few whose senses are quick at literary divination.” In this Study learning ran, not wild, but at a splendid even pace over the road of past achievement, saluting guideposts by the way. Literary resemblances, the least intentional, are rarest joys to her. She is enchanted to find some of Mangan’s lighter verse rattling on like a Gilbertian libretto.

“Behold the exhumed precursor of The Mikado!”

Nothing rewards her more indubitably than the discovery of even a quasi-lineage, a shadow of likeness not to be developed into the actual relationship supported by time and place. She does not often floor you with unimpeachability of dates, but she knows the very complexion of her time, “his form and color.” She remembers what wings beat the air of fortunate decades, dropping pinions more than one imitator snatched in falling and wore brazenly in his cap. She can rehearse the unbroken descent of metres. Her parallel between Mangan and Poe, their dependence on the haunting adjunct of the refrain, does revolve about chronology; but chiefly she relies upon the convictions of her divining mind. She compares the “neck and neck achievements of Mangan and Poe.” She traces both back to the colossus Coleridge, with his wells of color. His was the spring of youth, and they bore away full flagons. It is hardly possible to overrate her value to the student of literature in these learned but uncharted flights all over the visible sky of the periods where her subjects moved. Literature, she knows, is a species of royal descent. The Titans may not live to see the faces of their own children, yet out of those rich fecundities of authentic utterance children are born and show trace of august lineage. And it is hers, the “abstract and brief chronicler” of values, to find it.