Louise Imogen Guiney
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And these things are to be remembered of her, not because the ox may take brute pleasure in deploring the delicacy of his brother, the race-horse, not only that they made her an irresistibly fascinating blend of power and helplessness, but because her natural inability to deal with the drudgery that smooths the way of life bore hard upon her in those later years when she was like a butterfly bound upon the wheel of this difficult world. She was simply a creature of highly specialized aptitudes, and the eyes of her mind, they that needed no fortifying lenses, were set so steadily upon the brightness of an inward achieving that they could never be focused for the clear perception of a certain type of immediate needs. To the inequalities of the road of usage over which her feet obediently traveled, she was blind, unless indeed the road began to wave green branches, and there were vistas of beauty, and the birds sang. Then the human awoke in her and also sang in untrammeled lusti-hood and she was at once that earth spirit who gathered iris and squandered and forgot it, yet knew all such forgettings should be hers in Paradise. But even then she was the vagabond of the road as she conceived it: a matter of smoothly running caravans and magic camp fires,—not corners of ingenious torment where one shaped garments and boiled eggs. And this antagonism was inevitable: for the earth, as it is made, is forever hostile to that other earth, immortal, invisible, where alone the highly imaginative can live without nostalgia. If they have to fight the rude conditions of the visible world, they do it pining “for what is not.” The imps of time and place have an implacable enmity for the angels of thought and pure imagination and hinder them at every step. They devote their mischievous activities to the clipping of wings, especially of pinions tipped with rose or gold. And the facts of the case are forever on their side. Man must be fed. And unless he has been born the darling of sheer luck, he must set his hand to wresting from the earth the bare right to live. The product of Louise Guiney’s genius was not, in any large sense, marketable. The most fantastically hopeful of partisans could not have predicted for her work any valid recognition whatever, save from the few who have themselves caught the gleam of Hesperidean fruit and know by natal wisdom that this is no gold to be minted into coin. Inevitably she was among the “delicate spirits pushed away In the hot press of the noonday.” And she had the open palm. Money ran away from her like a rillet down a slope. She would give beyond prudence and reason, and gladly acquiesce in her own resultant leanness. She demanded as little of that complexity of cunningly ornamented indulgence which is luxury as her own saints, and although she could not, without a distress deadening to her legitimate activities, fight with any efficacy the battle of
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