Two
Faces"--our suspicions would have been strengthened. But we did not
turn; or if we did, they forced us into no questioning mood. It was left
for this tell-tale volume of "Gathered Leaves" to press the question
insistently, and to answer it. The spell is broken. We know now both why
the poems are good and why they are not better.

No one will blame Miss Sichel for setting the truth before all things:
clearly, by publishing these stories and essays she supplies an
opportunity of correcting a too flattering estimate; but, foreseeing, no
doubt, that we shall avail ourselves of it, she supplies also a memoir
of fifty pages on which our final estimate is to be based. That this
memoir is a competent piece of work need hardly be said. Miss Sichel's
competence is notorious; as an efficient biographer her reputation is
secure. Not every subject, however, is suited to her pen. Miss Coleridge
did not develop along conventional lines; in fact, she differed so
disconcertingly from the type with which we have grown agreeably
familiar in the "English Men of Letters" series, that, without violence,
she could never have been fitted into the traditional mould. Her
biographer has done the work thoroughly, but she is a thought heavy in
the hand; she is too literary, not to say professional; she is definite
at all costs. She has "restored" Miss Coleridge as a German archaeologist
might restore a Tanagra figure. Indeterminate lines have been ruthlessly
rectified and asymmetry has grown symmetrical. Though we do not suggest
that she misunderstood her friend, we are sure that the lady exhibited
in the memoir is not the lady who reveals herself in the poems.

Of the author of the poems we catch a glimpse in the fragments of
letters and diaries which form the penultimate section of the volume.
But here, again, we find cause for discontent. If private reasons
forbade fullness, was it wise to print scraps? Why tantalize us? In the
letters we should, perhaps, have recaptured the lady we have lost in the
essays and stories; but these fragments, though suggestive, are too
slight to be consolatory: besides, Miss Coleridge was no coiner of
aphorisms and epigrams who could give her meaning in a handful of
sentences. Here is the first "detached thought" in the book:

"'Whom the gods love die young' and whom they hate die old, but
whom they honour, these they take up to their eternal habitations
in the ripe summer time of existence."