Michael Fairless

Michael Fairless was an artist, with the artist’s longing for creative expression. But while she was able to move about among her fellows her imaginative force, together with such strength of body as she had and her fine intellectual endowment, was spent on their behalf. She gave herself without stint and, it appeared, without regret for much that must consequently stand aside. Men and their miseries, their poverty, pleasures, joys and pain, seemed to take the place for her of the artist’s material in language or clay or colour. The 46material she chose was life, life in all its crudity or evasiveness, its stubborn resistance, forbidding weakness, its failures and faults; and with the far-reaching promise upon which only faith as strong as hers can keep a constant hold. In each man she saw, through disfigurement and disguise, his proper reflexion of the divine image, as a sculptor sees in the block of marble the one beauty that he is to set free.

There were times when I thought this passion of hers would always be enough. I thought the fountain of charity in her heart would never allow her artistic longings to be carried into any field but that of life. When the claims of human needs and suffering for the moment slackened, I saw that there was always the attraction of a perennial love and carefulness for every creature of the earth, even the very lowest. From the blade of grass and the clod on which it 47grew, to every beast and bird, all things entered her soul to become her own, to become centres of the active, self-devoted interest that one gives only to one’s own. I might well think that she would live and die without any disturbing recognition of another longing unfulfilled. Moreover, her enjoyment of the creative work of others was never tainted by self-pity, or by that base alloy of envy which kills delight in many of us, whose gifts and executive powers are far inferior to hers. It seemed reasonable to think that her love of beauty would be satisfied with what her indomitable eagerness and energy enabled her to absorb from literature, painting and sculpture, from music and, above all, from the symbolism of religion in its poetry of psalm and stately hymn, and in those lovely myths with which the childlike heart of man has clothed his intuitions of divine things. But I was 48wrong. The impulse to create, though often overborne, was very masterful.

Out of that impulse sprang the crucifix now in St John Baptist’s church in London (Pimlico Road). In this she shewed a promise of what might have been had she been trained and practised in a plastic art. But I am sure, nevertheless, that nothing short of inability to go out into the highways of life, to seek and find, or at the least to be sought and found by, troubled men and women, would have turned her finally to any engrossing work other than that which she could do for them.

Twenty months before she died the opportunity came—as mortal sickness. To most of us it would hardly have been an opportunity. Among our writers only a few unconquerable spirits, of whom Robert Louis Stevenson perhaps is chief, have been able to overcome 49flesh and its hindrances by the governance of the soul, when the weight of Death’s heavy hand has been laid upon them. For men of this rank, life, when it meets new difficulty in a body nearing to the grave, rises against that difficulty in a fresh uplifting of power. The men themselves are carried beyond the atmosphere of oppression caused by the disabilities of mortal sickness; and we watch them working miracles, as though these were trifles light as air. Of that rare company was Michael Fairless. But she knew when and how she was beaten; for there is another thing to be noted of that company—an illuminated common sense. They work miracles, it is true; but they are not often found trying impossibilities. Their faith is potent, but it is neither superstitious nor absurd. Behind what looks to many of us a reckless venture and a foolish hope it seems that there is, in 50reality, something which takes the place of a prudent man’s prudent calculation. It seems that where other men must calculate they see—yet without knowing that they see. They know what they can and what they cannot do; but it is as though by a concealed interior vision, not by mere guess, that they make discoveries. Their decisions are, for the most part, not to be justified by the maxims and habits of ordinary usage in life, yet are very often crowned with good success and are richly productive as ordinary ways are not. They have, as I said, their common sense.

So, when Michael Fairless met defeat, she laid down her arms, the wonted weapons of her charity, but took up others. And with these she made a way, not only to hearts beyond any range of hers before, but also for her artist-soul, frustrate in the years gone by. We who looked on thought that 51but for the help she could give to friends able to come to her bedside, most likely she would do nothing more. Again we were wrong.

We took her away from London to the Down country that she loved, hoping for some recovery—against hope and against her own conviction. There, in her ‘cool light room on the garden level’ with windows opening to the ground, day after day she looked ‘across the bright grass—il verde smalto—’ and beyond ‘the promise of coming lilies,’ to the Gate of her symbolic fancy:—‘I know now,’ she says in “The Roadmender,” ‘that whenever and wherever I die my soul will pass out through this white gate.’

There, beside the gate, the roadmender was born. I suppose he was fully grown in the spirit of her meditation before she spoke of him. Certainly it was her own 52soul, mind, heart, and life’s experience that he embodied. He was conceived of her, bone of her bone, spirit of her spirit. Who knows him knows her; in following his life and death we follow hers. His realized ideal is hers that was unrealized. But indeed in him she touched realization. ‘I am a roadmender,’ she said to me, ‘there, by the white gate.’ As in all true artists, life passed from her into her creation, virtue went forth from her, and she with virtue: she was that roadmender.

I think she would have been content with giving him life thus, within her own artistic cognizance, but for another thing. She wanted to earn money, little or much; had a hundred uses for it; saw that perhaps some would come into her hands this way. So she demanded of me pencil and paper, and wrote down (with her left hand, the right being disabled; and without being lifted up 53in bed) the first chapter of ‘The Roadmender.’ She wrote easily, it appeared, and as well and clearly, almost as quickly, as before this last disabling sickness. She hardly ever paused for thought or word, and made small correction. To the best of my present memory the second chapter was written next day and with the same swift facility.

Neither of these, nor any that followed, was thought of by her (or for that matter by me) as a chapter; each was no more than a sketch, a little paper telling of the roadmender she was. Not until much later, in fact just before the end, did it occur to either of us that she had been writing a book.

We sent those sketches, the first and second, to Mr Lathbury, the editor of The Pilot, who accepted them with encouraging, and to her surprising, readiness. They were published; and from that time to this their readers, in a fast 54increasing number, have asked for news, facts, about the writer. Unquestionably The Roadmender’s appeal, whatever it was, went home there and then and has never ceased to find response. But this is not the place in which that appeal should be discussed; it shall be dealt with later. Here I only allude to it in passing, as a significant piece of the short history of an all too short literary life.

For anyone who knew the previous life of the author, the fitness of her roadmender to present herself and her ideals was obvious. ‘After all,’ he says for her in that opening chapter, ‘what do we ask of life, here or indeed hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our fellow-men and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into the face of God?’ That aspiration to service and communion 55had been in her no affair of mere aspiration; it had been a burning force, not a quietistic scheme. Yet always her heart and soul rested gladly in ‘the lap of earth’; and she turned her face towards the face of God as she discerned that vision everywhere, in earth and earth’s little ones, and in the face of man. But a new peacefulness came with the laying down of arms, and she could picture herself quietly at work on the common road, serving ‘the footsteps of her fellows’; indeed joining with contentment ‘the company of weary old men who sit on the sunny side of the workhouse wall and wait for the tender mercies of God.’

Death it is that in truth she waits for in the pages of ‘The Roadmender.’ You will find death everywhere, a friend, a ‘strong angel’ and, as here, ‘the tender mercies of God.’ The road, too, although the common road of service 56and of the common labour of man, is the one that leads into the great silence; the mysteries of God and man cast shadows in the sunshine of its ‘white highway.’ This is the background, or the chorus if you will, even of the first part of the book, where she is giving a picture of the man and herself, and furnishing his experience from her own experience in past days. There is the snake, bringing in Melampus and the revealing of secrets by the fatal kiss; there is the old widow, waiting, as she herself was waiting, for death and a ‘“kind” burial’ in ‘the little churchyard which has been a cornfield, and may some day be one again.’ The sea brings memories of ‘its secret dead in the caverns of Peace,’ and of ‘the still and silent Sea of Glass’ and ‘the Voice as the voice of many waters.’ But withal there is love, the constant love of earth’s fair face, and its living adornment; 57the love for which she thanks God as ‘the Brotherhood of the Poor’; even the bitter-sweet love of death itself:—‘Very pleasant art thou, O Brother Death, thy love is wonderful, passing the love of women.’

‘“Surely all men should be roadmenders,”’ the parson says. ‘O wise parson, so to read the lesson of the road!’ That is her heart-felt comment.

The first part of the book ended with the ending of autumn, when we brought her back to London—to our house, 91 Cheyne Walk. She was borne to the station on a mattress laid in the bottom of a covered cart, the tilt thrown open at the back. As the cart went on, she watched through this opening, the receding lane—‘lay as in a blissful dream,’ she says. ‘The looped-back tarpaulin framed the long vista of my road with 58the downs beyond; and I lay in the cool dark, caressed by the fresh breeze in its thoroughfare, soothed by the strong monotonous tramp of the great grey team and the music of the jangling harness.’ ‘It is like Life,’ she goes on, ‘this travelling backwards—that which has been, alone visible—like Life, which is, after all, retrospective with a steady moving on into the Unknown, Unseen, until Faith is lost in Sight and experience is no longer the touchstone of humanity.’

I believe she thought, then, that she would never come back to her road, to the green fields she loved so well, the garden that was ‘an epitome of peace,’ the sycamore-tree that made a microcosmic world for her as she lay beneath it, caressed by the sunlight scattered through its leaves. She thought, I believe, that Brother Death would meet her among the close-set 59houses of the town, while she lay isolated in the great city. So she said farewell, not only with the roadmender to roadmending, but to the country of her love. Yet she says it with a characteristic qualifying:—‘It is scarcely a farewell, for my road is ubiquitous, eternal; there are green ways in Paradise and golden streets in the beautiful City of God. Nevertheless, my heart is heavy; for, viewed by the light of the waning year, roadmending seems a great and wonderful work which I have poorly conceived of and meanly performed: yet I have learnt to understand dimly the truth of three great paradoxes—the blessing of a curse, the voice of silence, the companionship of solitude—and so take my leave of this stretch of road, and of you who have fared along the white highway through the medium of a printed page.

60‘Farewell! It is a roadmender’s word; I cry you Godspeed to the next milestone—and beyond.’ In her mind, I am sure, these words were the last she was to write.

The roadmender, however, had become part of herself, and as her life went on so he in her went on. But we cease to watch the moving picture of a fictitious experience at the roadside where men and the sacrificial beasts—the procession of a common life—went by. We are embarked upon the swiftly flowing river of her own life, as it passes to the sea. Henceforth the author speaks of herself almost undisguised; she is still the roadmender, but he lives, moves towards his death, rejoices, suffers, contemplates, reflects, as she does, 61in the actual process of her being. What happens happens here and now—this is a day-book we are reading, very faithful, very candid, and only the more pathetic to us when we know it as it really is.

‘The next milestone’ marked for her the entrance to the valley of the shadow of death. She knew that still the days might but slowly drag out their tale, and she be long, yet, in passing through; she was assured now, and not only by her own conviction, that never would she pass from beneath that shadow until the gate of earth closed behind her, and she found herself in some such ‘brave new world’ as she had seen before in dream or vision, where the inner world of spirit, of the joy and light and hope in which her spirit dwelt while she was here, would show itself more plainly, less confused.

‘Out of the Shadow’ the new set of papers came, and thus they were headed 62when she wrote the first. ‘I am no longer a roadmender,’ she says; ‘the stretch of white highway which leads to the end of the world will know me no more; the fields and hedgerows, grass and leaf stiff with the crisp rime of winter’s breath, lie beyond my horizon; the ewes in the folding, their mysterious eyes quick with the consciousness of coming motherhood, answer another’s voice and hand; while I lie here, not in the lonely companionship of my expectations, but where the shadow is bright with kindly faces and gentle hands, until one kinder and gentler still carries me down the stairway into the larger room.’

There, in an old house fronting the Thames, she watched from her bed no longer the green grass, the meadows and the white gate with the roadmender’s road, but the highway of water, ‘the silent river of my heart’ she calls 63it, ‘with its tale of wonder and years.’

Her love of roads and of running water is significant for the understanding of her character and mind. She is of those for whom life is movement, and time is real.

Nothing for her stands still, is fixed—static, as we say now; the whole creation moves with the movement and communicated freedom of the purposes of God, and with the outpouring of the divine spirit in the spirits of men. Even in the flux of earth she sees the flowing of the great rivers of the heavenly love; and all earth’s roads and streams are but ways of that eternal journey of man, of which his temporal journeys are at once the cloak and sacrament.

As she looks upon the landscape of the world it grows transparent for her, and paradise, with its lucent life and many-coloured waters, shines through. The 64life of the spirit is more real to her than any life beside, more real, more powerful, constraining. When she writes of little things you see that for her there are no little things; each touches the eternal and has its endless depth of meaning there. And because there is this endless meaning, this unfathomed background, this movement of all within the movement that is carrying all, roads have magic in her eyes—or rather are symbols of a more than magical truth. She watches the multitude travelling there along the ages in the pilgrimage of life that every man must share. No event, no spectacle in earth or heaven stands alone; she has the mystic’s sense of wholeness and continuity, as of the dark impenetrable wonders underlying everything that can be seen even by the mystic’s eye. Therefore, that which is seen signifies, carries with it, all the rest; every road ‘leads to the 65end of the world,’ every river has ‘its tale of wonder and years’ and flows into the sea where its waters shall be transformed.

She tells us that to meet death in the town was not what she had desired. ‘I, a shy lover of the fields and woods, longed always, should a painless passing be vouchsafed me, to make my bed on the fragrant pine needles in the aloneness of a great forest; to lie once again as I had lain many a time, bathed in the bitter sweetness of the sun-blessed pines, lapped in the manifold silence; my ear attuned to the wind of Heaven with its call from the Cities of Peace. In sterner mood, when Love’s hand held a scourge, I craved rather the stress of the moorland with its bleaker mind imperative of sacrifice. To rest again under the lee of Rippon Tor, swept by the strong peat-smelling 66breeze; to stare untired at the long cloud-shadowed reaches, and watch the mist-wraiths huddle and shrink round the stones of blood; until my sacrifice too was accomplished, and my soul had fled. A wild waste moor; a vast void sky; and naught between heaven and earth but man, his sin-glazed eyes seeking afar the distant light of his own heart.’

But these moods had passed, and although the scourge Love held now in his hand was heavy and the sacrifice long of its accomplishment, she was, as she says, content to lie patiently in the great capital, with its stir of life and death, of toil and strife and pleasure, which she had thought ‘an ill place for a sick man to wait in’; and there find ‘the fulfilment by antithesis of all desire.’ ‘“It is not good that the man should be alone,” said the Lord God.’

Day and night she follows the great 67barges on the waterway, as she followed in her mind the coming and going on the road near her white gate. ‘Throughout the long watches of the night I follow them; and in the early morning they slide by, their eyes pale in the twilight; while the stars flicker and fade, and the gas lamps die down into a dull yellow blotch against the glory and glow of a new day.’ ‘It is like Life,’ she would have said again had you asked her; but she tells you nothing of her weariness in those night-watches nor of her pain.

On the wooden cross that marks her grave there are these words: ‘Lo, how I loved thee!’ They are taken from her last gift to me, Mother Julian’s ‘Revelations of Divine Love.’

In the groaning and travailing of creation she bore her part, but never alone; always God was there bearing his part and the part of every one. 68Across the whole world there lay for her the light of the glory of divine sacrifice. Not for her was any picture of a serene and far-away God without ‘parts or passions,’ looking on at the world’s pain; it was the glory of her God to share all pain. There was nothing, no weariness of hers or any man’s, no suffering, even of the beasts, that was not his. And faith in God gave her also faith in suffering, in the value of a sacrifice to be accomplished, of a travail that should bring forth fruit to all eternity, of groaning that was the utterance of slaves working towards their manumission and the freedom of divine sons. ‘Lo, how I loved thee!’ All men shall hear this when their own sacrifice is indeed accomplished, and their ‘sin-glazed eyes’ open to see who it is that has sacrificed himself in them. This was her strength.

Why, then, should she tell us of the 69suffering she bore, as she went through the valley of the shadow comforted in the strength of the divine Companion of her way, the Love that so loved her and all the world?

It is fitting that she writes here the story of Gawdine, the organ-grinder whom it was once her ‘privilege to know’; it is fitting that I repeat it now.

‘He was a hard swearer, a hard drinker, a hard liver, and he fortified himself body and soul against the world: he even drank alone, which is an evil sign.’

‘One day to Gawdine sober came a little dirty child, who clung to his empty trouser leg—he had lost a limb years before—with a persistent unintelligible request. He shook the little chap off with a blow and a curse; and the child was trotting dismally away, when it suddenly turned, ran back, 70and held up a dirty face for a kiss.

‘Two days later Gawdine fell under a passing dray which inflicted terrible internal injuries on him. They patched him up in hospital, and he went back to his organ-grinding, taking with him two friends—a pain which fell suddenly upon him to rack and rend with an anguish of crucifixion, and the memory of a child’s upturned face. Outwardly he was the same save that he changed the tunes of his organ, out of long-hoarded savings, for the jigs and reels which children hold dear, and stood patiently playing them in child-crowded alleys, where pennies are not as plentiful as elsewhere.

‘He continued to drink; it did not come within his new code to stop, since he could “carry his liquor well”; but he rarely, if ever, swore. He told me this tale through the throes of his 71anguish as he lay crouched on a mattress on the floor; and as the grip of the pain took him he tore and bit at his hands until they were maimed and bleeding, to keep the ready curses off his lips.

‘He told the story, but he gave no reason, offered no explanation: he has been dead now many a year, and thus would I write his epitaph:—

Love the supreme Sculptor at work on Gawdine, as on herself in her weariness and pain, at work too on the welter of all this world, calling forth from the rudest marble the divine Beauty that love is—this she sees. Love, too, looking from the face of a child and searching out his own image, his own response, from behind the battered mask that hides it from every other eye. And pain, the friend of sinners, the opportunity 72of love human and divine, love no less divine in that it has entered into man—this, too.

The whole philosophy to which Michael Fairless had attained is written in the true tale of Gawdine; a living, vibrant philosophy it was, entering into herself, her action, her judgements whether of reflective thought or of intuitive discovery.

It is not her way to see in an ill-driven dray the miraculous handiwork of God or a punishment for sin. “All things,” she would have told us, as she tells us here, “work together for good” in those who do not resist good when it comes. The dray and the face of the child are for her instruments and channels of God; yet neither is constrained, compelled—each is free according to its measure, each follows the law of its own being. So both are sacraments of the universal sacrament in which our lives are set 73and, according to their different measure, become mediators of the divine. The opportunity for both God and man is to be found everywhere by those who are willing to receive a gift; in pain or pleasure, riches or poverty, good hap or disaster. You have not to go in search of it; but neither must you turn away, or deny it even when it comes as the bitterest drop in the cup that you must drink. ‘Two friends—an anguish of crucifixion, and the memory of a child’s upturned face.’

One thing more this story brings out—a conviction which establishes for her, once for all, that without the law there is no sin. A new law is born in Gawdine telling him, through the wound he gives to a little child, that he must ‘keep the ready curses off his lips.’ But he could “carry his liquor well,” he was still guiltless of offence in that, still waiting 74for a new law concerning that. And his judges must wait too.

This is of her abiding sense of movement in every man’s life—a movement that gathers as it goes, and in which the man changes, not as a dead thing, a tool, or toy, is changed, but by a free and living creation, in which nothing is made actual and real that does not spring from the creative heart of his own character. You do not make a character as you build a house, laying one stone upon another; nor do you alter it as you might alter a house, pulling out these stones, and putting others in. It grows by inherent power, assimilating, rejecting, amplifying or transmuting, as though that which comes to it were food, which indeed it is—food from heaven or from hell. And every particle of this food that is truly incorporated in the man’s life goes to change character through and through, may be trusted 75to do it. Therefore, behind laws outworn and habits that should be outgrown, the charity that believes all things and hopes all things discovers the man as he really is, with promise of the man that he will be. Therefore, too, it is a charity that works for men in the light of knowledge of the men, and works wonders—as did Michael Fairless by its means. She says of the thirteenth century bishop about whom she writes a little later, that ‘he has known darkness and light and the minds of many men; most surely, too, he has known that God fulfils Himself in strange ways.’ We may say the same of her, for she never forgot the ‘strange ways’ of God with men.

Winter drew towards its end, and she still lived to enjoy once more winter’s promise of the spring and the memories alive in her of springs gone by. ‘On 76Sunday,’ she writes, ‘my little tree’ [the tree outside her window-panes] ‘was limned in white and the sparrows were craving shelter at my window from the blizzard. Now the mild thin air brings a breath of spring in its wake and the daffodils in the garden wait the kisses of the sun. Hand-in-hand with memory I slip away down the years, and remember a day when I awoke at earliest dawn, for across my sleep I had heard the lusty golden-throated trumpeters heralding the spring.’

Verily I believe she had heard those golden-throated trumpeters, for the blood of the plants ran in her veins, as did the blood of beasts and birds, and of all the common life. She was of the community of earth and nothing could ever set her apart. ‘The earth called,’ she says, ‘the fields called, the river called—that pied piper to whose 77music a man cannot stop his ears. It was with me as with the Canterbury pilgrims:—

In memory she sped on, ‘light of heart and foot with the new wine of the year,’ until she heard ‘the voice of the stream,’ as with her body’s ears, and as with her body’s eyes saw spring’s pageant; ‘green pennons waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming “Victory” to an awakened earth.’

Then—so like her—she notes the solitary flower, one growing apart close to the old tree’s side. ‘I sat down by my lonely little sister, blue sky overhead, green grass at my feet, decked, like the pastures of the Blessèd, in glorious sheen; a sea of triumphant golden heads tossing blithely back as 78the wind swept down to play with them at his pleasure.’

‘It was all mine,’ she says, from one of her deepest convictions, ‘to have and to hold without severing a single slender stem or harbouring a thought of covetousness; mine, as the whole earth was mine, to appropriate to myself without the burden and bane of worldly possession.’

---

‘The river of God is full of water. The streets of the City are pure gold. Verily, here also having nothing we possess all things.’

Thus she comes back to her sick-room in the dreadful yet beautiful city of earth, possessing ‘all things.’

The gulls from the river sought the open sea; ‘the swoop and circle of silver wings in the sunlight’ was for her to be no more; and with her heart 79she followed them ‘to the free airs of their inheritance, to the shadow of sun-swept cliffs and the curling crest of the wind-beaten waves.’

The little lime-tree before her window spoke to her of the green country—was ‘gemmed with buds, shy, immature, but full of promise.’ With the glory of that promise her desire went forth, but upborne by another promise—that of the greater spring for which her spirit waited looked and longed from the valley of the shadow. Of that she writes in the last chapter of this part, as the coming of a new life and a new light.

‘The dawn breaks, but it does not surprise us, for we have watched from the valley and seen the pale twilight. Through the wondrous Sabbath of faithful souls, the long day of rosemary and rue, the light brightens in the East; and we pass on towards it with 80quiet feet and opening eyes, bearing with us all of the redeemed earth that we have made our own, until we are fulfilled in the sunrise of the great Easter Day, and the peoples come from north and south and east and west to the City which lieth foursquare—the Beatific Vision of God.’

Then her heart sings with one of the old hymns that she delighted in:—

Great indeed is the reward that could match with the desire of her soul, with its need and its capacity; yet having nothing she possessed all things even here, and I do not doubt that she does so still.

Spring came, and in May she bade her last farewell to London. With infinite difficulty, and at the cost of an unforeseen agony of pain, we took her once more into the country, where she could see the white gate again from her garden room, and sometimes, on good days—more rarely than we hoped—be carried out to lie ‘on a green carpet, powdered yellow and white with the sun’s own flowers; overhead a great sycamore where the bees toil and sing; and sighing shimmering poplars golden grey against the blue.’ There, at the White Gate, she wrote the last chapters of ‘The Roadmender,’ beginning, if I remember well, in June.

‘A great joy has come to me’; she says, in the first of those papers, ‘one of those unexpected gifts which life 82loves to bestow after we have learnt to loose our grip of her. I am back in my own place very near my road—the white gate lies within my distant vision; near the lean grey Downs which keep watch and ward between the country and the sea; very near, nay, in the lap of Mother Earth.’... ‘The day of Persephone has dawned for me, and I, set free like Demeter’s child, gladden my eyes with this foretaste of coming radiance, and rest my tired sense with the scent and sound of home. Away down the meadow I hear the early scythe song, and the warm air is fragrant with the fallen grass. It has its own message for me as I lie here, I who have obtained yet one more mercy, and the burden of it is life, not death.’

Then the roadmender must be himself again and go a-haymaking in another reminiscence, one that tells her a secret 83of the ‘rain upon the mown grass’ and the ‘failure’ of the fallen swathes. “My ways are not your ways, saith the Lord.” ‘I remember how I went home along the damp sweet-scented lanes through the grey mist of the rain, thinking of the mown field and Elizabeth Banks [a sinner blessed through her very sin], and many, many more; and that night, when the sky had cleared and the nightingale sang, I looked out at the moon riding at anchor, a silver boat in a still blue sea ablaze with the headlights of the stars, and the saying of the herdsman of Tekoa came to me—as it has come oftentimes since:—

‘“Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night; that calleth for the waters of the sea and poureth them out upon the face of earth; the Lord is His name.”’

84She was within a very little of the end, we thought, even then while it was still possible to carry her into the garden and lay her in the shelter of her tree, where, the last time but one that she was out, she wrote the second paper of this part. She thought so herself, as her meditation shews. ‘I feel not so much desire for the beauty to come,’ she says, ‘as a great longing to open my eyes a little wider during the time which remains to me in this beautiful world of God’s making, where each moment tells its own tale of active, progressive life in which there is no undoing. Nature knows naught of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but goes steadily on in ever widening circle towards the fulfilment of the mystery of God.

‘There are, I take it, two master keys to the secrets of the universe, viewed sub specie æternitatis, the Incarnation 85of God, and the Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the pantheistic little man of contemptible speech, that “all things are ours,” yea, even unto the third heaven.

‘I have lost my voracious appetite for books;’ she goes on, ‘their language is less plain than scent and song and the wind in the trees; and for me the clue to the next world lies in the wisdom of earth rather than in the learning of men. “Libera me ab fuscina Hophni,” prayed the good Bishop, fearful of religious greed. I know too much, not too little; it is realisation that I lack, wherefore I desire these last days to confirm in myself the sustaining goodness of God, the love which is our continuing city, the New Jerusalem whose length, breadth, and height are all one.’

The cares of this world, such as they were for her, and the most part of 86them were other people’s, had slipped away:—‘It is a time,’ she says, ‘of exceeding peace. There is a place waiting for me under the firs in the quiet churchyard; thanks to my poverty I have no worldly anxieties or personal dispositions; and I am rich in friends, many of them unknown to me, who lavishly supply my needs and make it ideal to live on the charity of one’s fellow-men. I am most gladly in debt to all the world: and to Earth, my mother’—she writes, as though having suddenly turned her eyes to the loveliness around—‘for her great beauty.’ Then, with a backward reflexion on the long history of the human spirit in its groping after the divine, she exclaims:—‘There is more truth in the believing cry, “Come from thy white cliffs, O Pan!” than in the religion that measures a man’s life by the letter of the Ten Commandments, and erects 87itself as judge and ruler over him, instead of throwing open the gate of the garden where God walks with man from morning until morning.’

The end of that paper is a breath of her heart’s longing for rest:—‘As I write the sun is setting; in the pale radiance of the sky above his glory there dawns the evening star; and earth, like a tired child, turns her face to the bosom of the night.’

Once more she wrote from beneath the tree on one of the last days of June:—‘The poplar has lost its metallic shimmer, the chestnut its tall white candles; and the sound of the wind in the fully-leaved branches is like the sighing of the sea.’ Summer was coming to fullness; yet she lingered still. The eyes of her soul sought day by day a land whose boundaries begin where those of this world end:—‘Looking across at the 88white gate I wonder concerning the quiet pastures and still waters that lie beyond, even as Brother Ambrose wondered long years ago in the monastery by the forest.’ She asked for the manuscript of her little book, ‘Hilarius,’ not thinking that it would ever see light in print; and copied what she had written there of the vision of Brother Ambrose, monk and painter. In ‘a still night of many stars’ he saw, ‘from a great and high mountain,’ a radiant path in the heavens, and between the stars, as they ‘gathered themselves together on either side until they stood as walls of light,’ he beheld ‘the Holy City with roof and pinnacle aflame, and walls aglow with such colours as no earthly limner dreams of, and much gold;’ until to his great grief, ‘a little grey cloud came out of the north and hid the city from his sight.’

The end of that vision is an expression 89on her part of the perennial, universal sorrow of the artist of every kind. ‘Brother Ambrose fell sick because of the exceeding great longing he had to limn the Holy City, and was very sad; but the Prior bade him thank God, and remember the infirmity of the flesh, which, like the little grey cloud, veiled Jerusalem to his sight.’

Just as she was writing these words the monastery bell of St Hugh rang out, and another, yet harmonious, note sounded in the many-stringed instrument of her soul:—

‘They still have time for visions behind those guarding walls,’ she says, ‘but for most of us it is not so. We let slip the ideal for what we call the real, and the golden dreams vanish while we clutch at phantoms: we speed along life’s pathway, counting to the full the sixty minutes of every hour, yet the race is not to the swift nor the battle 90to the strong.... And yet, looking back to the working days, I know how much goodness and loving kindness there is under the froth and foam. If we do not know ourselves we most certainly do not know our brethren: that revelation awaits us, it may be, first in Heaven. To have faith is to create; to have hope is to call down blessing, to have love is to work miracles.’

Then, back to the mystic’s and the artist’s wide-eyed longing:—‘Above all let us see visions, visions of colour and light, of green fields and broad rivers, of palaces laid with fair colours, and gardens where a place is found for rosemary and rue.’

The dominant note in Michael Fairless’s religion was mystical, as any man may see; and she had the large freedom of judgement, the understanding of and patience with sin, imperfection, failure, 91that are given only by the insight of the heart.

It is true, no doubt, that in every religious man an acute realization of one of the three great elements in religion—the mystical, the intellectual, and the institutional—naturally carries with it some degree of subordination of the rest. The mystic is apt to undervalue reflective thought; for his soul opens to him avenues of vision, which are but poorly represented by the attempts of theologians to formulate the poetic utterances of the prophets and the symbolic pictures of saints. He is apt, also, to think too little of the outward sign, however effectual it may be, simply because, in an intimate awareness of his soul, the spiritual grace sweeps it aside. He may forget, in his wordless communion with God, the need there is for utterance—for the language of rite or word or ceremonial gesture—if men of 92different intellectual and spiritual ranks or stages in development are to bear each his proper part in a common religious life, and to make clear, even to themselves, the depth and height and breadth of their emptiness without God. Even those among us not justly to be called mystics, in an eminent or distinguishing sense, rarely attain anything near an equal balance between what they apprehend by intellect—by reasoning—and what the institution gives them, as it were, ready made; very many so hold the scales as to let the religion of the heart—of experience of the real, which is all men’s mysticism—be outweighed by one or other of those two, perhaps by each. In Michael Fairless heart knowledge and worship, the spirit’s admiration and pursuit, ruled all the rest. But from the character of this pursuit and worship in her, from its intensity and inclusiveness, sprang her high appreciation 93and glad sharing of the rest. The love of the brethren, of all brethren, of all that lives, was as the breath of her own soul’s life. She knew, by her hold upon the inner truth for spirit of a material world, the significance for spiritual growth awaiting every man in the least of little things. These material things, small or great, were hers, of her flesh and of her spirit; she could no more give them up, set them aside from her religion, than she could give up God or man. Therefore she sought, as the temple of her worship, a place where there should be room for all; not only for angels and archangels, saints and prophets, but for the sinful and the foolish among men, and for the common things of earth close by and the far-away revealing of the stars. In her Church—by implication at least and promise—all the worlds of life and death, of the spirit and the flesh, should be embraced and 94held together. Pan on his white cliffs—‘we can never be too Pagan,’ she says, ‘if we are truly Christian’—the ancient Mysteries, Jewish sacrifice, the ancient world-wide myths—those ‘eternal truths held fast in the Church’s net’—for all these and more there must be hands held out in a temple of the God whose witness was everywhere and in all, whose Spirit fills not only the whole round world but the spaces of the spheres.

By implication and promise, in principle you may say if not in practice, she found what she sought in the English Church; although like the rest of us she had to carry promise forward, by hope and faith, to a fulfilment she could not look for now. But she found sacraments now, bringing to her more than promise. These, in her institutional life, she must have—she for whom all life was sacramental—and especially the 95greatest, ‘the most social sacrament,’ she called it. There in the Church they were for every one of us, as she demanded them; with a meaning plain to be read by men obliged to run; calling aloud upon the ignorant and the blind; showing beacon-lights for those who wandered from the way. There earth and heaven met and the sinner and the saint; there the life of man was taken up into the life and manhood and love of God. The universe was focussed there; and there she worshipped in peace, as one at home.

You see how by disinterestedness she escaped the fate of mystics who lack that sovran antiseptic against self-corruption. You see, too, how it was that she never ceased to value—some might say to over-value—the institutional element in religion. But she was far from thinking that she had discovered, or ever would discover, a Church as it ought to be. She knew too well what 96the very promise of catholicity entails of past and present and long-lasting imperfection. She could not help but know and see that an ecclesia, a gathering in which all nations and generations should be embraced, and which needed from every man the gifts of the divine spirit that were his, must be marred for want of them. Here was a noble but ill-shapen body composed of ill-shapen members whose number reached back into the dim ages of the life of man, and would stretch into the yet dimmer ages of his life to come—a slowly organizing body, shaping itself and being shapen always anew, suffering, wounded, bearing the marks of scars and of disease that had eaten into its flesh. How could it be anything but as and what it was, even though its Head were the eternal Christ himself, the Humanity of God sharing that scarred and injured flesh? She knew something of what all 97this implies of beauty and truth to come slowly, very slowly; she saw something of what sin and folly, ignorance and weakness bring to every work and all the assemblies of mankind. Seeing clearly and confessing that in the greatest religious experiment ever tried upon this earth these things must be reckoned with, must qualify judgement, set a pause upon both complacency and too ready condemnation, she was content, nay happy, to remain where promise opens out an endless way. Can any one of us do more or better?

So much for her attitude towards the institution of the Christian Church. With regard to the intellectual element in religion—especially the schematic and scientific interpretation which we call theology—she was wholly without fear. She had neither leisure nor taste nor scholarship for historical or documentary criticism, but when the results of criticism 98came her way she was, as always, eager to learn. Serious work of this kind, she was sure, could do the cause of religion nothing but good. Theological interpretation must, of course, emphatically and above all things make sense when face to face with the saints and prophets; an interpretation that did not must go. But it must also make sense in face of better knowledge, whether of history, of science, or of philosophy. Her mind was as hospitable as her heart; and with a delicate and rational discrimination, a power of sifting and rejection, that over and over again served her well in her adventurous career of thought. You wrote in marble, not in sand, when you corrected her mistakes; or rather you wrote as though with some fluent leaven that ran through all the living stuff of her. You found its traces everywhere long after, and learnt to wonder why such vital receptivity was so 99rare. She sought truth and ensued it. Moreover, her sense of the height and depth of mystery in man’s life and experience precluded for her the easy satisfaction of those superficial dogmatists who ‘need no repentance.’ ‘The universe,’ she writes, ‘is full of miracle and mystery: the darkness and silence are set for a sign we dare not despise.’ She was among those for whom that sign is sacramental, conveying that which it declares, bearing with it the ineffable promise embraced for men within the darknesses and silences of God. These, for the mystic, are no barrier, but rather the ocean where his love finds the immense waters of the love of God. ‘A sign,’ she says, ‘that we dare not despise’—one that tells us to set our hand before our lips, lest we blaspheme God with our little self-made rules for him. The one rule to which she clung was the rule of Love and Faith 100and Hope, the all-sufficing rule of men who feel the stir of the mighty winds of that spirit which blows where it listeth and cannot be stilled.

Summer was going fast when the last scene of her long act of death opened. In the early days of August she grew much worse; after the third she was unable to take any food—only a few drops of water now and then. On the twelfth she told me she must try to keep a promise she had made to Mr Lathbury that she would write something more for him if she could. By this time she was almost blind, and speech was very difficult and painful to her. In spite of this she succeeded in dictating to me, after nine days of starvation and months of wasting, the last chapter of ‘The Roadmender.’ It was a deed of heroism.

Her mind travelled from the sound of rain after drought, outside her window, 101and the roused and eager business of the little birds she loved, back to the panorama of past years. She revived her childhood—‘the scent of the first cowslip field under the warm side of the hedge’ where she sang to herself ‘for pure joy of their colour and fragrance’; bluebells ‘like the backwash of a southern sea’; Watcombe Down—‘a stretch of golden gorse and new-turned blood-red field, the green of the headland, and beyond, the sapphire sea.’ Fragrance, music, above all colour—these surged from out her distant memories. And as the roll unfolded and later years revived, it was still the same. Germany, ‘the warm-scented breath of the pines,’ ‘the tiny shifting lamps’ of glow-worms ‘pale yellow, purely white, green as the underside of a northern wave,’ and in Switzerland a solitary blue gentian—her first—‘what need of another, for 102finding one I had gazed into the mystery of all.’

Then the past slipped away, giving place to ‘the uneventful road’ on which she was travelling now. ‘Each day questions me as it passes; each day makes answer for me “not yet.”’

‘Do I travel alone,’ she asks, with a glance at the passage in the Odyssey, ‘or am I one of a great company?’ The voices of Penelope’s suitors send her to the chorus of the voices of earth, the language of worship that ‘lies very nigh’ to man:—‘What better note can our frail tongues lisp than the voice of wind and sea, river and stream,’ those grateful servants giving all and asking nothing, the soft whisper of snow and rain eager to replenish, or the thunder proclaiming a majesty too great for utterance? ‘Here, too, stands the angel with the censer gathering up the fragrance of teeming earth and forest-tree, 103of flower and fruit, and sweetly pungent herb distilled by sun and rain for joyful use. Here, too, come acolytes lighting the dark with tapers—sun, moon, and stars—gifts of the Lord that His sanctuary may stand ever served.’

She comes back to the earth, this child of earth, bearing sheaves of the harvest of heaven. For her there was no gulf set between these two—was not the Incarnation of God one of her ‘master-keys’? Heaven and earth were joined in one for her by the life and love that men might share, in which all things are made one. When, at the very last, earth fills her memory and mind with its scent and colours and sound, it is an earth transmuted and transparent. And beyond earth and even heaven is greater marvel still, that which she never forgot—the mystery of the darkness and silence of God, ‘the silence greater than 104speech, darkness greater than light.’ So, this memory dominating all, she says her last farewell.

We think, or may well think, of Rabindra Nath Tagore:—

‘I have got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers. I bow to you all and take my departure.

‘Here I give back the keys of my door—and I give up all claims to my house. I only ask for last kind words from you.

‘We were neighbours for long, but I received more than I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my journey.’

The after-history of ‘The Roadmender’ is worthy of note. Messrs Duckworth published it on February 10528th, 1902, in the now familiar green covers. Six times in that year it was reprinted; ever since, impression has followed impression until now, when, in the last month of 1912, its thirty-first appears. It had no adventitious aids when it was sent out into the crowded, jostling world of books, where so many good things are lost, crushed by mere numbers. No ‘log-rolling,’ no powerful trumpeter of its merits, made a way for it. Why, then, did it make one for itself that has widened and gone farther through eleven years, and seems as though it would grow wider and go farther still for many a year to come? Journalists have learnt to call this little book a ‘classic’; they use it to condemn or praise a new man’s style; it has become for critics a standard in its class. But the more or less professional literary judgement is of small importance and easy to account for. The question that 106is of real value for us who read this book, without even the desire, much less the skill, to frame a literary judgement on it, is why it is our own book, why, as I heard the traveller of a great publisher say, ‘it is everybody’s book.’ You may see workmen reading it in omnibuses and trams, hear of queens commanding it, find it ready for you in all the shops for selling books that are new, waste your time if you look for copies in those dusty treasure-houses where they sell them only second-hand. ‘Everybody’ buys it; nobody throws it away. There is a hard-headed prince of commerce, I am told—there may be many another, for anything I know—who keeps a pile of those little green volumes of mingled poetry and religion, that he may give one to any friend who has unaccountably passed it by. In the States it is served out to millionaires on Japanese vellum or fine hand-made paper, with heaven 107knows what outside glory. Certain reviewers, at first—before they had learnt caution or, may be, taken pains—said that ‘this kind of thing’ had been done before. Many of them have told us that it has been all too abundantly done since. Yet the history of ‘The Roadmender’ is unique among histories of what people mean by ‘this kind of thing.’ We have to account for that uncontested fact.

For my part I allow myself to think that the reviewer’s diagnosis is wrong. ‘The Roadmender’ is not that kind of thing; it stands by itself, it is a thing of personal and individual life. That is one reason why it calls forth so living a welcome when we handle it, it seems to breathe in our hands. We learn to love it as something that accepts us and responds to us; understands us and finds out our needs in a way of its own.

Here we touch the bottom of the 108problem, I believe. Nothing, in fact, is heartily welcomed anywhere unless either a real or an artificial need exists for it and, either openly or secretly, demands it.

I think we may say at once that ‘The Roadmender’ does not meet artificial needs, such as those created by idleness of body or, especially, of soul, or by the faults and follies of a civilization that has hardly yet begun to grow up. For myself—and I believe I represent a large consensus—I say unhesitatingly that it meets real needs rooted deeply in every one of us, so deeply that very many of us live and die without discovering that they are there. It is addressed, in its profound simplicity, to what is common to man, what is discovered in all men who are truly men, by those who have learnt to read secrets of the heart.

We do not know ourselves; we have 109no suspicion, very many of us, that we are not only in need of beauty, let us say, but are craving for it, starved for want of it, going hungry and empty while we try to satisfy ourselves with a thousand worthless mockeries of the real. It is the same with goodness: we are satiated but not satisfied with its substitutes, with imitations and travesties, or rank blasphemies and denials; our appetite is tricked and we are deceived. Even when we have the good will not the bad, goodness, above all holiness (especially the Christian sort), has no charm, we think; it is a mawkish affair, or a fearful and greedy hypocrisy, as Nietzsche tells us. But when we meet it—meet the real thing, noble as well as sweet—then we discover a new region of ourselves and find it empty. We too are able, nay, despite our baser selves, willing and desiring, to worship reality, to follow after goodness, beauty, and 110truth—the modes and manners of the almighty Love that searches out our secrets. Yet, until some magic touch releases us from the enchantment of our slavery to lower things and from a far too low esteem of our own spiritual capacity, we do not know it.

So, when the magic touch comes we are a little stirred; weakly perhaps, but yet with true response, we thrill in answer to it. We may go to sleep again, but nothing can ever be as though we had not felt that touch; we may be the worse for it, as they are who shut their eyes to light, or we may be the better through all the lives and worlds to come. ‘The Roadmender’ has given and will give this touch—rousing the real self of men and women everywhere; or coming to them with the outstretched and friendly hand of one who can speak as like to like and by heart to heart.

This, I think, is why it lives.

‘Hilarius’ (as we have always called the book) was written first as a shorter story, a mere sketch, and later filled in and amplified. It was meant to be a parable, a lesson delicately conveyed to a young painter of high artistic promise and sincere religious feeling, but prone to rigid judgements and the use of an inflexible and all too simple moral standard—in fact, Hilarius himself.

So, in her story, Michael Fairless sends this young man—boy indeed he was, even in years—forth from an arranged and sheltered life in the cloister, and from a benumbing established scheme of thought and things, to the rude world, the many-coloured, confused, 112everchanging world of men and women and children, of transforming values, of sin that is not sinful and condemnation that does not condemn—a real world where God is and works, joins in the strife of men, treads with them the dust of the highway, is known by them who seek him not, and in fashions very strange to those righteous who need neither repentance nor redeeming love.

Tracts (this tale was avowedly written as a tract) do not always pierce their mark; but the arrow of a tract is not often so sharply pointed or feathered with such grace. I incline to think that this one has found the joints of many a man’s armour besides his at which it was aimed.

Assuming, for the moment, the attitude of the critic, I am bound to admit—the writer herself would be the first to admit—that she is an author of one book, as 113we say; the book of her life and death, written in a fine disinterestedness and from the fullness and with the candour of her heart. But that is the one book which for any author would either crown his work or cast everything else into the shade. Moreover, this author wrote under disabilities that for most people would have made writing out of any question; and these disabilities chiefly affected work done ‘for a purpose’—not welling, as it were, from her creative soul. In a sense, Hilarius is made, not born like the roadmender; and you will think the book skilfully or unskilfully made according to the standard of your taste. But if you choose you may enjoy it well and find in it beautiful things—the singular grace of style its author seemed to possess as a natural gift; her real mind; her vision too; and something of the wit and gaiety in which we who knew her found continual delight, and for 114which there was no place when she wrote at the White Gate and from the Valley of the Shadow.

You will find, too, reminders, echoes, of ‘The Roadmender.’ When she speaks of ‘this peace of prayerful service, where the clang of the blacksmith’s hammer smote the sound of the Office bell,’ you have the roadmender spirit:—‘After all, what do we ask of life, here or indeed hereafter, but leave to serve, to live, to commune with our fellow-men and with ourselves; and from the lap of earth to look up into the face of God?’

There is the same rejoicing in ‘fair colours,’ in music and the fragrant incense of the earth; the happy knowledge of little children and their transparency to God; the eye that sees the great sacrament of life. And here, as in ‘The Roadmender,’ the divine sacrament includes, as life includes, our 115misshapen world and the sinful men and women in it.

Hilarius is blind; his eyes shall be opened to the meaning of love and of the craving needs of men, his good will roused to new accomplishment, both head and heart stirred to a widening range. “Blind eyes!” are the parting words of the dancer in the forest, who sows in him the seed of promise, yet is ‘a sight for gods, but not for monks; above all, not for untutored novices’ like him:—‘“Blind eyes, the very forest could teach thee these things an thou would’st learn. Farewell, good novice, back to thy Saints and thy nursery; for me the wide wide world; hunger and love—love—love!”’

Hunger and love will tutor Hilarius, tell him secrets of the world, of himself, of those other strange selves, and of God whom he knows too easily under a false name. ‘“Hast thou ever loved?”’ 116asks the ‘flower incarnate’ when he found her dancing in the wind of the woods. Then, answering his shocked surprise:—‘“Why, boy, the world is full of love, and not all for the Saints and the Brethren, and it is good—good—good! ’Tis the devil and the monks who call it evil. Hast thou never seen the birds mate in the springtime, nor heard the nightingale sing?”’ ‘“Did’st thou ever hunger, master?”’ the dancer’s brother asks, rebuked by Hilarius out of the Ten Commandments for stealing ‘the Convent’s hens.’

Hunger and love in body and soul, coming to man from earth his mother and from the earthly creatures who are all his kin; the nature he shares with them as the ground of his sin and also of his holiness—these Hilarius shall learn. He shall learn that without knowledge and interior acceptance of a law of the spirit there is neither holiness 117nor sin. This is to learn of the charity and justice of God; to learn to see that only the writing scored by a man on the roll of his self-created character makes or mars him. Nature waits in every man, from the first fathers of us all to the last of our sons, for the conversion of spirit. It is as the earth, this unconverted nature of ours; it is turned neither one way nor the other, is neither virtuous nor vile, until we make it so. But without the ground of nature there would be no standing for the spirit, no place from which it could either soar or sink. Hilarius must learn of nature and of spirit too. He must learn of the slow learning of the law and of man’s slow growth into even a possibility of sin. But above all he must learn of the infinite humility of the love of God as he stoops to find a way into the human heart.

Meanwhile ‘he plucked aside his skirts and walked in judgement,’ 118calling, blind-eyed, on the judgement of God to ratify his poor decisions. ‘“’Tis an evil, evil world,” quoth young Hilarius.’

The judgement of God he finds easily enough, as when we are blind we do. ‘London, that light-minded city, was a heap of graves’ filled by the great reaper of the wrath of God with the plague-smitten corpses of the judged. Wherefore Hilarius, ‘having seen much evil and the justice of the Almighty,’ turns his back on it and will learn to be a great painter, and then return to his monastery in peace. He had watched the falling of a Tower of Siloam that had crushed the evil-doers and confirmed the faith of the righteous. And then the true judgement of God, which is new light in the soul of him who is judged, smote him on the way he had chosen; and he learnt to steal that he might have food for the child of a woman taken in 119adultery. ‘“See,” said the dancer, “thou hast learnt to hunger and to love.”’

Myself, I would have had the story stop there; where, as my memory serves, it stopped in the original version, the painter’s tract. But it would never have been published if it had; and that, of course, its author soon discovered. Mr John Murray kindly hastened on the preparation of proofs, and they came just in time for her to read some herself and have others read to her when she could no longer see. The book appeared shortly after her death, some months earlier than ‘The Roadmender,’ in book form. Mr Murray has recently added to his many kindnesses by allowing it to be produced by Messrs Duckworth uniform with the rest of her work. He has also produced it himself in a new and cheaper edition.

For the collection of the stories, poems and sketches published under this title I alone am responsible. There is no need to repeat what I said in the preface about their previous publication in this or that magazine or weekly paper. I had rather, and I think more fitly, discuss some few of them in relation to aspects of the author’s character that they point to or reveal.

In ‘A Song of Low Degree’ she speaks from the heart of her philosophy, as of her religion:—

It is the same note that we hear as the roadmender chants the glories of the 121daffodil-field, and here too it rouses deeper harmonies.

‘We who are made Kings after His likeness,’ she wrote in ‘The Roadmender,’ ‘possess all things, not after this world’s fashion but in proportion to our poverty.’ Only as we are kings, she saw—masters, not slaves, to the things that we own—do we in fact own, instead of being owned by, either the outer gifts of the world, or the nature and passions in ourselves. So she tells us; and it is the burden of every inclusive mystic’s song.

All these mystics are of one family and speak the same language. They are great and small, eloquent or halting in their speech—everywhere they have one mind and one tongue, whether they 122stammer, or utter music of the spheres. You may take, for example, one of the very great, Rabindra Nath Tagore; and, turning over the slender volume of his songs, you will find the fulfilment of the voice of the soul of Michael Fairless. Take this, the first in his ‘Gitanjali.’

‘Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.

‘This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

‘At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.

‘Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.’

Of one family are these, elder and 123younger, little or great; of one family and—marvellous to record—of the same family as every one of us. Do we not know it when their word finds its echo in us or an answering thrill, however faint and quickly dying away?

Even when they sing of earth and its joys, we, who ruin those joys at their source and are blind to the real earth, making for it a cloak of thick darkness of our stupidity and sins, find that our blood stirs in answer.

‘The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

‘It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

‘It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow.

124‘I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.’

East or West, the voices join in one, and we are able to listen—that is the wonder of us and the ground of our hope.

There are charming pieces in ‘The Grey Brethren,’ notably ‘A German Christmas Eve,’ and ‘A Christmas Idyll,’ with the sermon that is Michael Fairless telling (through the mouth of the Forest Recluse) news of the Kingdom of God and Man. ‘My brothers and sisters,’ she says to us, ‘to-night we keep the Birth of the Holy Babe, and to-night you and I stand at the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven, the gate which is undone only at the cry of a little child. “Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter.”

125‘The Kingdom is a great one, nay, a limitless one; and many enter in calling it by another name. It includes your own hearts and this wonderful forest, all the wise and beautiful works that men have ever thought of or done, and your daily toil; it includes your nearest and dearest, the outcast, the prisoner, and the stranger; it holds your cottage home and the jewelled City, the New Jerusalem itself. People are apt to think the Kingdom of Heaven is like church on Sunday, a place to enter once a week in one’s best: whereas it holds every flower, and has room for the ox and the ass, and the least of all creatures, as well as for our prayer and worship and praise.

‘“Except ye become as little children.” How are we to be born again, simple children with wondering eyes?

‘We must learn to lie in helpless dependence, to open our mouth wide 126that it may be filled, to speak with halting tongue the language we think we know; we must learn, above all, our own ignorance, and keep alight and cherish the flame of innocency in our hearts.

‘It is a tired world, my brethren, and we are most of us tired men and women who live on it, for we seek ever after some new thing. Let us pass out through the gate into the Kingdom of Heaven and not be tired any more, because there we shall find the new thing that we seek. Heaven is on earth, the Kingdom is here and now; the gate stands wide to-night, for it is the birthnight of the Eternal Child. We are none of us too poor, or stupid, or lowly; it was the simple shepherds who saw Him first. We are none of us too great, or learned, or rich; it was the three wise kings who came next and offered gifts. We are none of us 127too young; it was little children who first laid down their lives for Him; or too old, for Simeon saw and recognised Him. There is only one thing against most of us—we are too proud.

‘My brethren, “let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known to us.”’

Here is the authentic message of the mystic and of religion. It is the proclamation of sovran Love; from which nothing is shut out, by which nothing can ever be forgotten or ignored. ‘There is only one thing against most of us—we are too proud.’ But for that,—say Michael Fairless and the whole mystical chorus,—but for that, we too should be proclaiming the beauty of the Lord and of his kingdom within us and without.

Of Michael Fairless, as she is in the last of the four stories told to children, 128the last thing in the book, I wrote thus in the original preface:—

‘Some of the many readers who have found her there will understand me when I say that the story of her life and death, and of her life too (as I believe) after death, is written down in the little tale of “The Tinkle-Tinkle,” first told to her best beloved in the wild garden at Kew, among blue hyacinths and shining grasses of the spring that spoke to her of Paradise.’

I have told the story of her life and death at greater length now and with comments and comparisons. But I still think that it is all in ‘The Tinkle-Tinkle,’ and far better told than I can tell it. There will be some who will not agree with me; but they have never known her as I do. They do not see her looking upon herself and every one in the world, and saying, ‘I cannot tell you what he was like, because no man knows, not 129even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself.’ For anyone who had not watched her infinite variety, her swift transitions, her adaptability, the surprises of her, there would be little enough sense in being told that her very self is there when she says:—‘Sometimes he lived on the ground, sometimes in a tree, sometimes in the water, sometimes in a cave; and I can’t tell you what he lived on, for no man knows, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself.’

We find her, as well as her interpretation of life, from the beginning of this little tale to the end. And here in this refrain of ignorance, ‘no man knows, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself,’ we find an expression of her always reverent agnosticism, the agnosticism of the mystic—of him who sees too deeply to be able to persuade himself that he sees all.

It is she, too, who hears ‘a piteous 130weeping’ from the least and lowest of the lost creatures of the earth, and would lead each one of them to its own home— but I cannot tell you how he went, for no man knows, not even the ‘Tinkle-Tinkle.’ No man really knows the secret of the irresistible power of love; no man knows, even when it is at work in him and is working by him.

Yet man, as the Tinkle-Tinkle knows, must be ever a seeker; therefore ‘it was a great grief to the Tinkle-Tinkle not to know what he was, or how he lived, or where he was going,’—the grief of the metaphysician, with his ever-repeated questions, whence and what? why? whither?—the grief, too, of every honest thinker who does not answer himself with lies. Yet here is the lofty and special privilege of these two, as Michael Fairless was aware; and they must hide both their privilege and their grief:— ‘It often made him depressed, but he 131always concealed it from the dormice, appearing a most cheerful and contented creature.’ This is of the tenderness that guards bruised reeds and the smoking flax. But of the privilege and indeed of the grief there comes to the like of Tinkle-Tinkle an opening of wonders. ‘Now it happened on a certain evening that the Tinkle-Tinkle was travelling over the sea, when suddenly in the depths he caught sight of a most beautiful creature. It was all sorts of colours—white, rosy pink, and deep crimson, and pale blue fading into white and gold. It had no face but a bright light; and it had quantities of beautiful iridescent wings, like the rainbow; and the most lovely voice you ever heard, like the sighing of the waves in the hollow of the sea.’

(‘Thy sunbeam,’ says the great Indian poet and seer, ‘comes upon this earth of mine with arms outstretched, and 132stands at my door the livelong day to carry back to thy feet clouds made of my tears and sighs and songs.

‘With fond delight thou wrappest about thy starry breast that mantle of misty cloud, turning it into numberless shapes and folds and colouring it with hues everchanging.

‘It is so light and so fleeting, tender and tearful and dark, that is why thou lovest it, O thou spotless and serene. And that is why it may cover thy awful white light with its pathetic shadows.’)

‘And the beautiful Creature cried out to him, and its voice made Tinkle-Tinkle remember a dream he had once had of sunshine, and forest trees, and the song of birds; and the Creature said, “Ah, Tinkle-Tinkle! you are lonely and perplexed and sad, and you do not know whence you came nor 133why you are here; but the dormice know and the green bird knows, and I know, and we are glad for your being. Go on, Tinkle-Tinkle, and do not sorrow, for some day you shall come back to me, and I will wrap you in my wings and take you where you belong, and then you will understand.”’

Love knows and love shall reveal, and the beginning of the tale of love makes its hearer ‘glad with a strange new gladness’; so that when he returns to ‘his cave’ he is ‘not alone, for the spirit of hope’ goes with him.

Not only the metaphysician hidden in other men as in Michael Fairless speaks in this child’s tale, but the artist too. ‘The Tinkle-Tinkle had one gift—he could sing—how, no man knew, not even the Tinkle-Tinkle himself; and this is how he discovered his gift.

134‘One day in a secluded spot in the forest he found a dying stag, and the Tinkle-Tinkle was moved with great compassion and yet could do nothing.

‘The great stag’s head drooped lower and lower till even the sun melted in a mist of pity, and the trees sighed, and the breezes hushed their voices. Then suddenly the Tinkle-Tinkle crept close and began to sing, why or how he knew not. As he sang, the birds and the stream were silenced and the breezes ceased, and the great stag’s breathing grew less and less laboured, and his eyes brightened, and presently he rose slowly to his feet and paced away to join the rest of the herd, and the Tinkle-Tinkle went with him.

‘When the stag’s companions heard the story, they wept for all that had befallen their leader, but rejoiced also and blessed the Tinkle-Tinkle; and he sang once more for them, and the star-spirits 135leaned out of their bright little windows to listen, and the night was glad.’

A dumb poet, a frustrate artist, the singer of this child’s song was when she sang it. She could not know that her swan-song would travel through all the world of her own people and bring her blessing; but she knew the artist’s longing and had felt, too, not a little of the strength of the power of beauty in his hands.

The end of the story comes as the Tinkle-Tinkle began ‘to feel very old and worn and weary,’ and the spirit of hope, that went back with him to the world’s cave when he had seen in a vision the light of its day, stirred within his heart. ‘Then he remembered the promise of the beautiful Creature, and went slowly over the sea hoping the time had come for it to be fulfilled, 136and it had. The beautiful Creature stretched out its lovely rose and purple wings and wrapped the Tinkle-Tinkle in their warm soft greatness, and bore him down and down through the depths till they came to the Great Gate. At the beautiful Creature’s voice it swung slowly back, and they passed down the Blue Pathway, which is all ice, cut and carved into lovely pinnacles and spires, very blue with the blue of the summer sky and the southern seas. The Tinkle-Tinkle could just see it from between the beautiful Creature’s wings, stretching away in the blue distance, and at the end one star.

‘Presently—and though the time had been one thousand years it had not seemed long to the Tinkle-Tinkle—they came out into a beautiful place that was nothing but light, and the beautiful Creature set the Tinkle-Tinkle down. He looked around him and saw 137many other Tinkle-Tinkles, and he knew them for what they were and loved their beauty; and the Creature gently swept one of its purple pinions across him, and the Tinkle-Tinkle took form. He had many, many little soft, strong hands and many little white feet, and long sweeping wings and a face which shone with something of the light of the beautiful Creature; and the Tinkle-Tinkle saw and understood and sang for joy.’