her gifts—and make it perhaps in secret—by naming one of them the ultimate. What, for novelty? what, for singleness? what, for separateness, can equal the last? Of many thousand kisses the poor last—but even the kisses of your mouth are all numbered."
It is as old—as sweet and as sad—as the world!
Art to Mrs. Meynell has been a thrice-holy thing; a vocation of priestly dignity, of priestly pain, as her poems witnessed. More than once have her words likened the convent-bell, imperious, not to be foregone, to the poet's elect fetters. "Within the gate of these laws which seem so small," she tells us, "lies the world of mystic virtue." Now here is a viewpoint of the highest and rarest insight. What urbanity, what sweetness, what prevailing harmony it carries into the troublous matter of living. It has attained perspective: and perspective is the end as well as the means of life. Surely it is for this prize alone that we wrestle and run. To treat life in the spirit of art—that, declared another artist-seer, Walter Pater, is not far from the summum bonum: not far from the kingdom of Heaven, one might add, since the ultimate artist is God alone.
Truth, then, has been the first of Mrs. Meynell's equipments. First truth of seeing (which only the few may ever attain), and then truth of speaking—a rare enough accomplishment. With her work, as with that of Henry James, the fancied obscurity rises mainly from this exceedingly delicate truthfulness; a fastidious requirement of the word—the word—without exaggeration, without superfluity—only with Mr. James this desire has led to repetition; with Mrs. Meynell, to reticence. Having called her contemplative, we now perceive her to be ascetic. The "little less," both in matter and manner, has seemed to her a counsel of perfection.
