Artist and Woman
Bregy, Katherine
July 7, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 241 president of which, Mr. Balinski-Juldzill, is a Catho- Catholic Union...
...the delicate irony of Decivilized for instance, the aus- For nature gives abundantly or not at all...
...It is not ways her own poetic antithesis : Mrs...
...Inchbald amusing-not in her recent psychology in her great Renouncement sonnet, Romney portrait, still less in her painfully decorous while another of her most celebrated lyrics (celebrated, fiction, but probably because of the lady's naive de- for better or worse, in multitudinous commencement light in herself and in her garments, "always becoming, addresses...
...For the now of Swift's Mrs...
...Balinski-Juldzill, is a Catho- Catholic Union of Social Studies of Malines, the lic member of the Polish group of the Union...
...Mankind lives by vital relations," declares gentleman than he would ever make a tolerable man...
...George G. Harrap and Company...
...Then, by way of some possible comparison, intimate knowledge, the intimate subject, at arm's * Essays of Today and Yesterday, by Alice Meynell...
...For Portuguese) it was not always her own will that the it is also her vision of the ultimate woman-not as a -world should overhear...
...For the selection, made with a weekly journalistic "column"-who did not fail to Mr...
...Only it was part of her fundamental with a dark daybreak freshness" ? Then, after a pass- paradox that, having lived abundantly, she should ing ceremonial bow to that highly ceremonial Lady choose to speak in what Francis Thompson called "her of the Lyrics, we are given three papers "of repara- own high, reticent way...
...Meynell is led straight to one love of its sombre life...
...Yet she quite would be a pity to forget that she anticipated much evidently finds Mrs...
...the noblest of all English hearts the maids on my hands"-Mrs...
...So it is well to all the things which potentially stretch the horizon for find preserved here her complaint that even the workaday mortals-"love, vengeance, devotion, duty, chivalrous Robert Louis "followed Thackeray in makmaternity, sacrifice"-become in her pages "infinitely ing a good woman to be much more the opposite of a trivial...
...Next follows the de- a point dear to her heart and head...
...I hope this article may Catholic members of the Interparliamentary Union have interested American Catholics in the effort, beand thus assured itself of very precious and influential cause, in spite of separation by oceans, Catholics are relations...
...either the inscrutable wisdom or the inscrutable simNever was anyone more ideally equipped to interpret plicity of nature...
...sheep, merely docile, nor as a siren, merely daring, The longest paper in the present collection is that but as a shepherdess, at once proud and humble...
...It them, because it can express no more...
...Johnson who, in In her critique on Stevenson's women-those spite of Garrick and Macaulay and the other mockers, "ladies" who, as he used to complain, "turn to bar"gave to one of...
...tion"-the first dedicated to Mrs...
...organization still very incomplete and with means of It made connections in Berne, in 1924, with the action exceedingly limited...
...the visible triumph of the artistic tempera- practice of literature and the arts women and men ment in spite (or because...
...Meynell's genius, both in and ask no indulgence, the one from the other, on the prose and verse, as an aloof, exotic thing: easy, until score of sex...
...But one likes to find and deep," contriving to be altogether a Lady of De'her praising Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in a thousand light yet still to keep her soul in rightness...
...Browning, who enough to say that this poem is the keynote of Alice said everything, although (as in the Sonnets from the Meynell's art, nor even the keynote of her life...
...It entered into uninterrupted relations with a unit in the face of the great problems on the solution the International Union of Women's Leagues, the of which depends the future of our civilization...
...It is through knowlgroup of the Union to give lectures in Geneva on the edge of the international problems, which now preoccasion of its last two general assemblies...
...The Rhythm of Life-have found their way into the And for all her exceeding artistry, the woman-poet who little volume just issued,* it has none the less a rather contributed some of the finest prose of her century to unique charm of its own...
...It participated actively, as one of the be taken into consideration and to fight against the attending associations, in the conference called for propagation of pernicious doctrines...
...is really a praise of unsequestered modern and very seldom worth so much as eightpence...
...Meynell's essays is one suddenly remembers that there is nothing more always an event in literature : and while not many profuse, more incredibly varied, nor more mysteriously of the most precious and profound of them- enduring than the orchid-in its own natural milieu...
...This is the simifense of Steele's Prue-who can scarcely have been larity of ideal, or rather the identity of nobleness stupid since he christened her "Your Prueship," or essential to the sons and the "daughters of men"-a negligible since she was able to treasure up more than theme developed even more arrestingly in her wellfour hundred of her husband's letters-and the praise known poem during the recent war...
...And her right was all the greater superimposed above the hands of the busy, maternal because she "held very insistently the belief that in the Martha...
...One could wish, of course, that these of much sensitive interpretation, comes almost as an feminine interpretations of femininity might have in- aside one of its most pregnant passages-"What have cluded studies of some of her own poetic contempora- we to answer for to that which has made us, compared ries...
...one is confronted by the staggering bibliography of her It was characteristic of Alice Meynell to hold the work...
...passing easily from father to son, from mother to Mrs...
...Dingley, an amiable shadow so often discarded "science" which-quite against reason or and so easily eclipsed by the more romance-challeng- the obvious facts of life-once explained heredity as ing shadow of his Stella...
...Hers were the eyes of the contemplative Mary writing of women...
...It is through being present where the nections with prominent Catholic associations of the solutions of these problems are discussed and worked various countries, with a view of securing their col- out, that Catholics will be able to see that religion laboration...
...She knew the soft pitfalls of the over-personal, and 242 THE COMMONWEAL July 7, 1926 the hard pitfalls of the impersonal, and would walk on Charlotte and Emily Bronte ; and here, in the midst between the two...
...Meynell was assuredly not among the "con- daughter, she had ridicule...
...She had the right, as her husband the artist-woman than Alice Meynell-who might suggests (only he would generously extend the sugstand, indeed, as very symbol of that dual and difficult gestion to all her sex 1) to speak "as an expert when role...
...In a larger sense, of course, it sings the even the eloquence of an Alice Meynell, eager to dis- ideal of all womanhood, as old as Eden, but now wistcover "the thinnest beaten gold," can make the fully recaptured, gallantly fought for-the ideal which maidenly and melancholy Christina Rossetti very in- "roams maternal hills and bright, dark valleys safe teresting to present-day readers...
...And it was just as inevitable that the modernity-in every best sense-of Alice Meynell she should detest Jane Austen, while recognizing her has been somewhat obscured by the delicate subtlety, "exquisite excellence" of style and observation, because the persistent reserves, of her style...
...Wilfrid Meynell's customary felicity, brings to- send in her fastidious copy the very day before giving gether thirteen studies of "women who have created birth to one of her many children-was not far from literature or been by literature created...
...London:length, and only then to permit tenderness to her pen...
...July 7, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 241 president of which, Mr...
...occupy world opinion, that Catholics, inspired by the Outside the League of Nations, the Catholic Union doctrine and tradition of the Church, may work for of International Studies has endeavored to make con- their solution...
...It made efas the most practical solution, the project of Pro- forts to organize intellectual mutual aid for the benefessor Gariel, who is one of the vice-presidents of the fit of Catholic institutions and groups...
...this artist and woman in one of the most devastating It would be a pity for our younger generation to miss of her critiques-for, thank God, she could be de- knowing that this Catholic artist protested early and vastating when the spirit moved her!-"and if these late against that dwarfing "difference of ideal for the are mean, so is the life, so is the art, that expresses sexes-wisdom for man, ignorance for woman...
...ARTIST AND WOMAN By KATHERINE BREGY A 1 NEW collection of Mrs...
...It must work on an equality, be tried by the same tests, is easy to think of Mrs...
...But for the more danservatives" of her own generation, and it was like her gerous tradition of literature and life, which upheld to defend the hapless Mary Wollstonecraft, because so different a standard of masculine and feminine of her essential largeness of mind and heart, perceiv- honor, she had scorn and sorrow, too...
...The Catholic August, 1925, in Oxford by the Catholic Council of Union of International Studies shows, we hope at Great Britain for the purpose of discussing the most least, the results that are attainable, even with an efficacious means to assure better coordination...
...But then, one even wishes for more of those Six to what we have to answer for to that which we have Mediaeval Women who are given the opening salute made...
...The Union collaborates equally and main- The Union addresses the Catholic elite of all countains the best of relations with the University Federa- tries, not claiming to direct their initiative but with tion for the League of Nations...
...It was apropos of general parental negligence of the present volume...
...The second has the intention of suggesting to them a method of study shown the great importance it attaches to these re- and of action, the value and efficacy of which it has lations by appealing twice to members of the French already had occasion to learn...
...For who can be content with that Alice Meynell broke into that sudden pregnant a fragmentary review which is so rich in its casual com- query...
...and we, all too used to the general confessions ments-teasing us with a momentary apparition of of immature and rather unimportant personalities, find Mechtild and "her Hound of Heaven of seven ourselves wishing that this woman, so richly endowed centuries ago," or of Roswitha, nun-dramatist of an and richly experienced, had oftener been betrayed into age when "phrases were dewy indeed, fresh indeed, confidences...
...Catholic International Association for the Protection The Union intervened in the discussion of the Ruf- of Young Girls, the Pax Romana, the Caritasverband fini project (scientific property) by the Commission of Germany, the Gorresgesellschaft, the Catholic Welof the League of Nations, and caused to be accepted, fare Council of the United States, etc...
...Not womanhood...
...ing that even her gravest social offense was largely an To those who did not know her or her life story, "intellectual" error...
...It is human terity of The Flower, the infinite suggestiveness of art which has learned to transplant and to husband...
...of much domesticity...
Vol. 4 • July 1926 • No. 9
