The Poetry of Alice Meynell

Llewellyn Jones

Not least among the stirring events of our present poetical renaissance are the publication of the collected editions of the works of Alice Meynell and Francis Thompson (Scribner). Spiritually akin, mutually influencing one another in material as in more subtle ways, their poetry stands in vivid contrast to the muse of our younger singers, the makers of what English critics hail as a new Georgian Age. That this difference gives them an added significance, and not as some critics have said, a lessened one, is the burden of the present appreciation of the poems of Alice Meynell. For there is a tendency for the reader who is intoxicated with poetic modernity to reason somewhat after this fashion. Here, he will say,—as indeed Mr. Austin Harrison has said of Francis Thompson—is a “reed pipe of neo-mediaevalism ... a poet of the gargoyle,” not of this modern world, and so neither in sympathy of thought or melody with us of the twentieth century, its free life and vers libre. All this, of course, because, Francis Thompson was—as is Mrs. Meynell—a child of the Catholic Church. Our supposititious reader will continue to the effect that there is no spiritual profit to be had in reading these poets when the modern attitude is to be found in such writers as W. W. Gibson, Masefield, and Hardy. But in so arguing, our reader will be entirely wrong as to the facts, and mistaken in his whole manner of approach to the realm of poetic values.

Mr. Max Eastman, in his charming book, The Enjoyment of Poetry, lays stress on the fact that poetry is not primarily the registering of emotions but the expression of keen realizations. A mathematical concept may arouse an emotion, but the poet makes the actual emotion transmissible by his selective power in picking out the focal point of the experience by which it is aroused. If poetry is essentially realization of life, then we have no longer any excuse for asking our poets to share our doctrinal views before we consent to read them. On the contrary, we should be more anxious to read Mrs. Meynell than Mr. Gibson, if we are modernists, for Mr. Gibson may, conceivably, not be able to tell us anything we have not already felt. Mrs. Meynell, on the other hand, can inform our feelings with fresh aspects of experience, and she does so abundantly. Her Catholicism is not mediaevalism, but, in so far as it is translatable into her poetry it is simply a vocabulary for the expression of certain emotional realizations of life which we modernists find it very hard to express because we do not have the necessary vocabulary. What can be more modern than the doctrine of the immanence of God and his abode in man, that much-discussed “social gospel?” Yet the following poem, not in spite of but through its Catholic terminology, heightens our realization of brotherhood and dependence one upon another. It is entitled The Unknown God:

The spectacle of a general communion again gives Mrs. Meynell inspiration for a poem whose last two stanzas apply equally as well to the secular, evolutionary view of salvation as they do to the ecclesiastical view, and whose last stanza is most suggestive in the light it throws upon the puzzling discrepancy between the littleness of man and the unlimited material vast in which he finds himself a floating speck:

Even so typically modern a philosopher as Henri Bergson would find one of his leading and rather baffling ideas beautifully realized in one of Mrs. Meynell’s sonnets. Matter, Bergson tells us, in all its manifestations is moulded by a spiritual push from behind it, so that the sensible world is not a mosaic of atoms obeying fixed laws but rather a cosmic compromise between matter and spirit, a modus vivendi the operation of which would seem very different to us were our viewpoint that of pure spirit. Says Mrs. Meynell in To a Daisy:

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:

The second stanza describes the missions of mercy to the stricken city, and ends:

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

To have the sense of creative activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive, and it is not denied to criticism to have it; but then criticism must be sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.—Matthew Arnold in Essays in Criticism (First Series).