Louise Imogen Guiney

								

intentional, are rarest joys to her. She is enchanted to find some of
Mangan’s lighter verse rattling on like a Gilbertian libretto.
“Behold the exhumed precursor of The Mikado!”
Nothing rewards her more indubitably than the discovery of even a
quasi-lineage, a shadow of likeness not to be developed into the
actual relationship supported by time and place. She does not often
floor you with unimpeachability of dates, but she knows the very
complexion of her time, “his form and color.” She remembers what wings
beat the air of fortunate decades, dropping pinions more than one
imitator snatched in falling and wore brazenly in his cap. She can
rehearse the unbroken descent of metres. Her parallel between Mangan
and Poe, their dependence on the haunting adjunct of the refrain, does
revolve about chronology; but chiefly she relies upon the convictions
of her divining mind. She compares the “neck and neck achievements
of Mangan and Poe.” She traces both back to the colossus Coleridge,
with his wells of color. His was the spring of youth, and they bore
away full flagons. It is hardly possible to overrate her value to the
student of literature in these learned but uncharted flights all over
the visible sky of the periods where her subjects moved. Literature,
she knows, is a species of royal descent. The Titans may not live to
see the faces of their own children, yet out of those rich fecundities
of authentic utterance children are born and show trace of august
lineage. And it is hers, the “abstract and brief chronicler” of values,
to find it.
To Louise Guiney, there were two transcending realities: poetry and
what men call, with varying accent, religion. She believed in poetry
as, in the old sense, an ecstasy. She loved archaic phrases and grieved
because fit words should perish, mourning them as men would mourn if,
believing there were children of immortal lineage among them, they
discovered these could die. To her there were archetypes of beauty,
the living heavenly substance we have, with an unshaken prescience,
learned to call undying. Wandering evanescences, we persuade them down
to us or snatch at them and cage them in our heavier atmosphere with
the hope, sometimes bewilderingly justified, of their singing on and
on. One condition of our even hearing the beat of those wings bending
their swallow flight to the responsive mind, is the high vibration in
ourselves, the intense activity of what we call imagination. And this
vibration is so often the effervescence of youth, the overplus of a
richness of physical life—the speed of the blood, a quick sensibility
of the brain—that after the pulse slows and the brain responds less
eagerly the poet sings no more; or he clouds his verse with moralities
and loads it with the stiff embroidery of intellectual conceits. Louise
Guiney’s singing life was not long, because, after the impulse, in its
first capricious spontaneity, had left her, she did not urge it back