Louise Imogen Guiney

								

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