NOTES

New Zealand Tablet, 3 April 1919, Page 26

NOTES

Mrs. Meyilell In spite of an almost classic perfection, or because of a sort of classic coldness, we admire Mrs, Meynell’s work respectfully from a great distance. Reading her poems or her essays one can not doubt of their excellence, but one is not warmed by them. All that she wrote bears the stamp of a refined, cultured mind, and of wide sympathies ; and the subconscious recollection of a great kindness to a great poet is always with the reader. Nevertheless, she is a writer to* whom we turn rarely and in whom we find but little inspiration. Her prose and verse are as work done in cold marble; she is as flawless as Tasso and as aloof. We read that in his old age Coventry Patmore, who was particularly hard to please, made her the muse of his predilection. It has been suggested that association with that fastidious person had no slight effect on Mrs. Meynell, and, haply accounts for her own shade of pedantry and pieciosjjty. The latter quality was exemplified when she excluded from her anthology of English verse, Grey s Elegy, on the ground that it was too obvious ! ! Her Salon Nothing more approaches a French salon of the old regime than the home over which Mrs, Meynell presides. Herself, a poet of no small merit and a writer of impeccable prose, her husband, no less distinguished and no less infallible in his literary tastes, and in later years, the daughter Viola, becoming a novelist of distinction if not of popularity, were the nucleus’ of a cultured circle that had no like in England, and excepting the home of Dr. Sigerson, not in Great Britain. Among the visitors were, of course, Mrs. Meynell’s sister, Lady Butler, famous as a painter of war pictures and gifted as a writer, and her husband, who was as great an ornament to any literary circle as he was to the profession to which his chivalry added as much lustre as his military genius. For one splendid charity the Meynells will be remembered forever. They found poor Francis Thompson in the lowest depths of London’s Inferno. He was earning his living, or rather his lodging, as a cab-tout at the doors of a theatre; sometimes there was no lodging at all for him. In his pocket was a tattered Homer, in the original. This aroused curiosity and led to identification of the writer of a poem which had appeared anonymously in a magazine in which they were interested. Thenceforward he became one of the family and the child that he was to his death never again lacked mothering. In his affectionate gratitude he has framed the mother and the daughters in immortal songs in which they would live even if their own genius failed to raise a monument more lasting than brass. Prue ” Viola, who was the "Prue” of Thompson’s songs, has written now half a dozen novels herself. We have read them and we find in them somewhat of the preciosity and the aloofness that spoil, for us, her mother’s work. They are clever ; there is genius in them j but they lack light and heat. They contain fine writing and fine thought, wonderful pictures of “the nerve system of a woman’s soul.’’ Yet there is something lacking, something leaves us dissatisfied when the book is laid down. The author of John Street says of them : “The mind reels under their will and their won’t till they begin to suggest nothing more edifying than another breed from Mars. Human souls ought not to be handled in such a way as to suggest arguments against the abuses of vivisection. Can it be a new

terror of the obviousness in her mother’s child?”; In spite of her charm of her conscious art, of her love of the country and her delicate feeling for all its phases, Viola Meynell’s books will never become favorites; like her mother’s they will remain a class to themselves. However, we do not think the people who meet in the happy Sussex home are likely to worry about popularity. They have their high ideals and, as Padraig Pearse used to say concerning, his school at St, Enda’s, it is for us to come up to the ideals, not for them to come down. r—,■■■ , j| The Heart - Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne conn ait pas. Reason raise o’er instinct as you will, too often the reason is wrong and the heart is right. Pascal, deepest thinker, visionary who saw into sheer depths whither other men could only follow him by painful descent, concentrated a great deal of sound philosophy in that one phrase. In our time of supermen and superwomen, of efficiency and hyper-culture, what we need most of all, from a human point of view, is heart. We still follow effete systems which have brought ruin upon France and Germany. They have found it out, but our political owls go on hooting blissfully, hooded in their own conceit and ignorance, and seem incapable of finding out anything. Our system is reducing men and women to machines, with all the defects of machines and none of their perfections. A dead level is the highest ideal to which Stale schools from which God is banished and in which the Ten Commandments arc unknown can attain. It is not a high level: there can be a level at the bottom of a pit, and there, rather than on the heights, will ours be. Modern educationalists leave out of their calculations that men and women have hearts; they aim at cultivating the reason —or rather the memory which is by no means the same thing, and which a parrot possesses as well as a man or a woman. No account of the soul is taken at all. It is fox-gotten that character is largely a matter of heart and soul, and that cold reason of itself can never uplift either individuals or peoples. Proper Pride A man has legitimate grounds for pride in the fact that his ancestors deserved well of the State ; he has none in the fact that they dwelt in marble halls and had a big bank account. Hackneyed but true is the couplet—- “ The gardener Adam and his wife Smile at the claims of high descent.” Decent parents are more than royal parents, who are by no means always either decent or respectable, and about whom opinion changes in a year or two as much as it did about our cousin, the Kaiser, whom we once held up as a model of -what a gentleman ought to be (vide the Harmsworth press before the war). The lineage of which one has best right to feel proud is that of ancestors who were good Catholics and -who were, as far as we can tell, rewarded for good service by the Lord of Hosts. As Montsabrc points out, descent from religious parents is one of the ways in which grace is conveyed to the soul, and there is some good ground for holding that religious nobleness—if we may put it so— transmitted as frequently as the good breeding that is supposed to go with blue blood. It is a great favor to have come of a good Catholic stock. It is ten times more if the stock be a line of martyrs who have treasured their faith above gold and rubies. We can never insist enough on the fact that no Irish Catholic ought to be ashamed of his race, which is the thing that he has best reason to be proud of. It is only the worthless, contemptible seonin ... who forgets, or could forget, what Irish parents were, and what were the parents of many who pose as superior beings. When a renegade is a nobler thing than a true man, when to sell one’s soul for gold is better than to die for God’s sake, the stonin’s view will be the right one. We hold that the man who avoids his Catholic brethren

and who apes the ways and customs of those whose ancestors persecuted ours is not a person to be trusted. Breeding tells: Noblesse oblige.

Sane t a superbia, Hommem occupa! Discat in quant as Grea tus sit spes. Discat a corpora mentem secernere : Animal, anima Dune sunt res.