Louise Imogen Guiney

								

full man.” The style, with a scholarship better tempered and easier to
carry, being, as it were, woven into chain mail, not the armor of her
earliest adventuring, is the despair of the less agile and instructed
mind. It is tinctured with her personal quality, and is incredibly
rich, the richer when you return to it after absence and intercourse
with more immediate things, to find fruits of her commerce with far
off civilisations and loving sentience to the “hills of home.” Like
the buyer in Goblin Market, she drips with juices from the very fruits
of life, antidote for our dull ambitions: the years “wasted in prison
on casuist industries.” It is full of a not too quaint and bookish but
an altogether delicious persiflage. She praises the scholar’s right
to “fall back with delight upon a choice assortment of ignorances.”
Yet, with whatever innocent suavity she puts it, you suspect her of
having few scholarly ignorances of her own to fall back upon. So
absolutely four-square was her tower of recondite knowledge that you
imagine her as having some ado to prevent its shadow from falling on
the reader less equipped and terrifying him into escaping her spell
altogether. It is a book of praise. Most of all does she advertise the
great narcotic of out-of-doors: the enchanting diversion of walking
until the rhythm of the first arduous stretch dulls into the monotony
of muscles settling into their slowly apprehended task. She betrays
an unimpeachable bodily sanity. Though urban by birth, she is also,
through adoptive kinship of Pan and all the nymphs, a sylvan, to her “a
dear Elizabethan word.” You may find her beside the sea until conscious
response to it ebbs into that trance of wonder which is the withdrawal
of the soul into ultimate chambers, the inviolable retreat whence it
comes forth washed clean of the injuries time has dealt it. She sings
a remorseful dirge over the “defeated days” of captive animals. She
quickens her pace, at moments, to the measures of a hilarious mind.
Throughout that mischievous “encourager of hesitancy,” the Harmless
Scholar, she all but dances.
“The main business of the scholar,” she informs you, with a wicked
twinkle behind her spectacles, “is to live gracefully, without mental
passion, and to get off alone into a corner for an affectionate view of
creation.”
This she concedes you as an egg warranted to hatch into something you
don’t expect, or a bomb likely to burst harmlessly, if disconcertingly,
under your chair. For she knows, by diabolic instinct, just what your
idea of the scholar is: the conserver of chronologies and sapient
conclusions fit chiefly to be waved in pedagogical celebrations or
trumpeted at authors’ readings. No such sterile destiny as this for
her, as she shall presently “fructify unto you.”
“Few can be trusted with an education.” This she tells you with a
prodigious lightness of self-assurance. “The true scholar’s sign-manual