rring a kindness; it is as if a great surgeon were
operating on a woman he loved."

Such things, we had imagined, could only be written by members of the
Academie francaise.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] "Henrik Ibsen: a Critical Study." By R. Ellis Roberts. (Secker.)

MISS COLERIDGE[3]

[Sidenote: _Athenaeum July 1910_]

The greatest art is, in a sense, impersonal. We have no biographies of
Homer and Sophocles, nor do we need them. Of Milton and Keats we know
something; yet, knowing nothing, should we enjoy their work the less? It
is not for what it reveals of Milton that we prize "Paradise Lost"; the
"Grecian Urn" lives independent of its author and his circumstances, a
work of art, complete in itself.

Precisely opposite is the case of Miss Mary Coleridge's poems: they,
when in 1908 Mr. Elkin Mathews produced a more or less complete
edition, excited us, not because, as verse, they were particularly good,
but because they discovered, or seemed to discover, an attractive
character. Indeed, Miss Coleridge's art was anything but exciting: her
diction was not beautiful, her rhythms pleased the ear but moderately,
one looked in vain for that magic of expression which transmutes thought
and feeling into poetry. But if the expression wanted magic, that which
was expressed seemed an enchantment almost. The gentle spirit, with its
vein of tender pessimism, in puzzled revolt against the wrongness and
cruelty of a shadowy world, the brooding thought too whimsical to be
bitter, the fancy too refined to be boisterously merry--all these
conspired to fascinate us as we came to perceive and appreciate them
beneath the rather stiff little verses. To read Miss Coleridge's poems
was to make acquaintance with a charming and delicate soul that wished
to be understood and was willing to be intimate. Life astonished her,
and her comments on life are her poems. They are often mystical, not to
say obscure; and the obscurity, as a rule, is caused by vagueness rather
than profundity, by the fact that she hardly knows herself what she
feels, or thinks, or believes. But from so gracious a spirit one
accepts without demur that which from another would not have passed
unchallenged. Miss Coleridge bewitched us with her personality; we knew
that her poems were slight, we felt that they revealed a part of her
only, we had suspicions, but we held our peace. Had we turned to her
novels, in spite of the brilliancy of one of them--"The King with