A XIX MRS. MEYNELL T rare intervals the world is startled by the phenomenon of a woman whose qualities of mind and heart seem to demand a revision of its conception of womanhood and an enlargement of those limitations which it delights in regarding as essentials of her very nature, and as necessary to her beauty and attractiveness as woman. She belongs to a species quite distinct from that of the typical sweet companion of man's life, the woman who is so sweet and so companionable, even because, as Thomas Aquinas affirms, "she is scarcely a reasonable creature." A Lady Jane Grey, a Mrs. Hutchinson, a Rachel Lady Russell, or a Madame de Hautefort is, however, not less but more womanly for owing her exceptional character to the possession of qualities which are usually the prerogative of the ideal man; a fact which corroborates a theory, not unknown to philosophy and theology, that sex in the soul lies in aspect rather than in substance. "Spirits, at will," says Milton, can either sex assume, or both"; and women of the grander type, who prefer their womanhood to the assertion of their right to a masculine attitude towards the world, have always had the world in worship at the feet of their greater and sweeter femininity. "Originally," says Plato, "there were three sexes." The Church teaches the same thing. God is the great prototype and source of sex: the Father being the original masculine intellect, the Word its feminine reflection, consciousness, or "glory," while the Holy Spirit is defined to be "the embrace," or synthesis, "of the Father and the Word," the Creator Spiritus, that aspect (Persona) of God (who is "one in substance") which is the immediate source of all life, love, joy, and power. In man, the express image of God, genius is that divine third, quickening, and creative sex, which contains and is the two others, and which is so rare, owing to the loss of balance in man's nature, that Plato speaks of it as no longer existing. In the realms of art and letters genius is, in its initial stage, perceptive reason, the rare power of seeing self-evident things; and its modes of expression correspond with its character. A strong and predominatingly masculine mind has often much to say, but a very imperfect ability to say it; the predominatingly feminine mind can say anything, but has nothing to say; but with the double-sexed insight of genius, realities and expressions are wedded from their first conception, and, even in their least imposing developments, are living powers, and of more practical importance than the results of the highest efforts of mind when either of its factors greatly predominates over the other. I am about to direct the reader's attention to one of the very rarest products of nature and grace — a woman of genius, one who, I am bound to confess, has falsified the assertion which I made some time ago, that no female writer of our time had attained to true "distinction." In the year 1875, Miss Alice Thompson (now Mrs. Meynell), the sister of Miss Thompson (Lady Butler), the painter of the famous "Roll Call," published a volume of poems, which were as near to being poetry as any woman of our time, with the exception of Miss Christina Rossetti, has succeeded in writing. But though this volume, in the opinion of some critics-Ruskin, D. G. Rossetti, Aubrey de Vere, and myself among others-far surpassed the work of far more famous "poetesses," it was not poetry in the sense which causes all real poets, however subordinate in their kind, to rank as immortals. There is sufficient intellect and imagination in Mrs. Meynell's Poems to have supplied a hundred of that splendid insect, Herrick; enough passion and pure human affection for a dozen poets like Crashaw or William Barnes; they breathe, in every line, the purest spirit of womanhood, yet they have not sufficient force of that ultimate womanhood, the expressional body, to give her the right to be counted among classical poets. No woman ever has been such a poet: probably no woman ever will be, for (strange paradox!) though, like my present subject, she may have enough and to spare of the virile intellect, and be also exquisitely womanly, she has not womanhood enough. The feminine factor in the mind of the great poet is, indeed, a greater thing than woman-it is goddess. Keats and Shelley, in their best works, were wholly feminine; they were merely exponents of sensitive beauty; but into this they had such an insight, and with it such a power of self-identification, as no woman has ever approached. Mrs. Meynell's verses are full of delicate and original thought, for the most part faultlessly expressed. Witness this sonnet, called "Renouncement," which has deservedly found a place in most of our many modern anthologies :— "I must not think of thee; and tired yet strong I shun the thought that lurks in all delight— The thought of thee-and in the blue heaven's height, Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng This breast, the thought of thee waits, hidden yet bright; I must stop short of thee the whole day long. But when sleep comes to close each difficult day, With the first dream that comes with the first sleep This, like all Mrs. Meynell's verse, is true, beautiful, tender, and, negatively, almost faultless; but it does not attain the classical standard. Compared with that which is classical in the writings of second or even third-rate poets, like Herrick, Crashaw, and William Barnes, it is "as moonlight unto sunlight." Our admiration is, indeed, strongly awakened by it, but we think of and admire the poetess still more than her poetry. It does not strain to rival man's work, as Mrs. Browning's does, nor to put forth the great, impersonal claims of great poetry, nor claim to have mastered the arduous technique whereby every phrase becomes a manifold mystery of significance and music. Mrs. Meynell's thoughts and feelings seem to be halfsuffocated by their own sweetness and pathos, so that, though they can speak with admirable delicacy, tenderness, and—that rarest of graces-unsuperfluousness, they cannot sing. With extraordinary power of self-judgment, she discovered this fact while she was as yet a mere girl, and, disdaining to do anything which she could not do, not only well, but best, and notwithstanding the encouragement to persevere in poetry which she received from a large and high class of critics, she gave up the attempt, and has hardly since written a line. But, in a very small volume of very short essays, which she has just published, this lady has shown an amount of perceptive reason and ability to discern self-evident things as yet undiscerned, a reticence, fulness, and effectiveness of expression, which place her in the very front rank of living writers in prose. The greater part of this little volume is classical work, embodying, as it does, new thought of general and permanent significance in perfect language, and bearing, in every sentence, the hall-mark of genius, namely, the marriage of masculine force of insight with feminine grace and tact of expression. Of the "sweetness and wit," which are said, by Donne, I think, to be woman's highest attainment, there is in these little essays abundance, but they are only the living drapery of thought which has the virile qualities |