Louise Imogen Guiney

								

bursting point, the President calling for recruits: it was impertinent
of me, but in that solemn hour I came a-crowing into the world. And
since I was born under allegiance, a lady whom I learned to love with
incredible quickness,



    ‘O bella Libertà! O bella!’
rocked my fortunate cradle.”
This was Irish stock with a strain of English, Scots and French, a
quicksilver blend of buoyancy and happy wit, duly tempered by a special
potency of Gallic grace with its apprehension of the mot juste and
its infallible divination in forms of art. The road between the two
boundary dates of her life ran without much incident we vitally need to
know. Her portrait, painted here chiefly for the friends who marveled
at her and equally at their own luck in the fortunate incident of ever
so slight a knowledge of her, may best be done with the broad strokes
of a brush dipped in remembrance, against a blurred background of time
and place. She herself, in her life of Hurrell Froude, quotes the
expert dictum of George Tyrrell, who guessed what sort of biography is
likely to live longest:
“We have cause to care less for a full inventory of the events which
make up a man’s life or for the striking nature of those events in
themselves, than for such a judicious selection and setting of them as
shall best bring out and explain that individuality which is our main
interest. We care less for what a man does and more for what he is; and
it is mainly as a key to what he is that we study the circumstances
which act upon him and the conduct by which he acts upon them.”
Louise Imogen Guiney, poet, essayist and scholar, was an
extraordinarily limpid and valiant soul, whose death seems, in no
sense referable to our own responsive emotion, but one of bare fact
and calm inevitableness, a rebirth into a sort of present immortality
in letters, a new affirmation of response to her unique accomplishment
even among those to whom she had become only a name out of the
many-syllabled past. For the last third of her life she had been living
in England, with breaks of a few months each in America, and though
the remembered vision of her was not dimmed among us, still that
impalpable medium made up of the day’s demands, the helter-skelter of
this world of disordered strivings and later the wreckage of the war,
had risen between her and her western affiliations. The rude stumbling
servitors of life had crowded between her and the America she loved
with a passion lineally her own. Time and circumstance had been as
remorseless to her as to us. She was, in these later years, “every
day i’ the hour” when her somewhat unstable balance of health would
allow it, immersed in work, the scholar’s drudgery, the pain that ends
in perfectness: and yet it made her studious delight, this rescue of
half-forgotten names, unwearied research upon long trails where only
the spirit of the born antiquary never tires nor falters. The warm,