Louise Imogen Guiney

								

too-inquisitive mind. As to the inner philosophy of her, the cup of
strength she kept ever by her in intimate stillnesses, there it stands
in another essay, The Precept of Peace. This bears much dwelling on,
not only by the mystic but the honest mind distraught in the terrifying
assaults of modern life. How to serve the world while renouncing it,
how to possess your own soul, in the peace that lets it grow and ripen
seed! She is in love, not with indifference, but the brave behavior it
endows you with.
“A very little non-adhesion to common affairs,” she tells you, “a
little reserve of unconcern, and the gay spirit of sacrifice, provide
the moral immunity which is the only real estate.”
A benevolent receptiveness surrounds her. She lets you interrupt her
because you cannot actually reach her inner strongholds; she is at
heart and head so engrossed in intimate concerns so far from you that
you cannot possibly borrow or steal the key to burst in and stumble
about in them. Out of her general kindliness she will deal gently with
you, hospitably even, that, being dulled and satisfied, you may go
away the sooner and leave her to the only aims worth, to her special
aptitudes, pursuing eagerly. This, it must be remembered, was the
gay bravado of youth, with so much in its treasury it could afford
to squander time and a rain of friendliness on even the invading
bore. The day came later when the world jostled her and she had to
double and turn to avoid it; but always she cherished a philosophy
of courteous endurance. Personages nobly nurtured learn early not to
whimper. So, when Demos finds a use for their heads, they die with
a grace seemingly reserved for kings and martyrs. And the use Demos
finds for the heads of the nobly born in the arts is to weary them
with much crowning and to sap them with the foolish requisition that
they shall appear in public arenas. But the great brotherhood our L. I.
G. subscribes to “hold the world but as the world” and make no outcry
over these hindrances to a consecrated life. They do not shy at uncouth
contraptions on the road. They have adopted the blinders of a mind
inwardly withdrawn, and—to o’erleap the metaphor!—they smile in their
daily dying. This book, Patrins, smiles all through. It informs you,
chiefly by an innocently indirect implication, that the phenomenon of
being, while it may be taken by schoolmen and moralists for a balance
between good and ill, is a whimsical business, and the more you see of
it the more firmly you will determine to view it aslant, with an eye to
pleasing paradox.
As the tree of her mental life grew and broadened into wider air, it
cast a shade not even her votaries were always zealous to penetrate.
She tended more and more to the obscure, the far-off and dimly seen.
In her biographical work she was the champion of lost causes, the
restorer of names dropped out of rubricated calendars through sheer
inattention of an unlearned world, or rusted by time in chantries no