The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

By Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell was an English editor and suffragist who is now best known for her poetry, much of which is still read today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Krill Press
• Release date: Jan 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781518387623

Alice Meynell

Alice Meynell (née Thompson) was born in Barnes, Surrey (now London), in 1847 to a middle-class family of artistic and intellectual inclinations. She and her sister Elizabeth, later Lady Butler, a celebrated historical painter, were brought up in somewhat Bohemian style in various locations, including Liguria and the Isle of Wight. In 1868 Alice converted to Roman Catholicism and at around the same time fell in love with Father Dignam, the priest who received her into the Church. This impossible love informed many of her early poems. Her first volume of verse, Preludes, was published by Henry S. King in 1875 with illustrations by her sister. In the following year she met Wilfrid Meynell, a young journalist and fellow Catholic convert who admired her poems, and they married in 1877. (The name is pronounced to rhyme with ‘fennel’.) The Meynells worked both jointly and independently on journalistic work, co-editing and copywriting for several periodicals as well as writing literary and critical essays, signed and unsigned, for others. They became important figures in the London literary world. Approached by the Catholic poet Francis Thompson, a homeless opium-addict seeking publication, they published and promoted his work and supported him financially and morally for the rest of his life. They had eight children, of whom one died in infancy. Several of the Meynell children became involved in literary life. Alice Meynell became established as a prolific and highly respected essayist, especially from the 1890s when her work began to be collected into books. The republication early in that decade of her youthful poems, along with a small number of more recent ones, also raised her reputation, and in later life she returned to more frequent writing in verse. Her books of essays and poems, published at first mainly by John Lane at The Bodley Head and from 1913 by Burns and Oates, were many times reprinted, and she was in high demand as a columnist and reviewer. An outspoken advocate for women’s suffrage as well as other political causes, she was President of the Society of Women Journalists and Vice-President of the Women Writers’ Suffrage League. On two occasions she was proposed for the role of Poet Laureate. She inspired ardent and devoted friendships, notably in the poet Coventry Patmore (whose passionate love for her necessitated a painful break in their friendship) and in George Meredith during his final years. In 1911 the Meynell family moved to Greatham, Sussex. Alice Meynell died in 1922 at the age of seventy-five.

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THE RHYTHM OF LIFE, AND OTHER ESSAYS

..................

Alice Meynell

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Copyright © 2016 by Alice Meynell

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Rhythm of Life and Other Essays

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

DECIVILISED

A REMEMBRANCE

THE SUN

THE FLOWER

UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM

THE UNIT OF THE WORLD

BY THE RAILWAY SIDE

POCKET VOCABULARIES

PATHOS

THE POINT OF HONOUR

COMPOSURE

DR. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

DOMUS ANGUSTA

REJECTION

THE LESSON OF LANDSCAPE

MR. COVENTRY PATMORE’S ODES

INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE

PENULTIMATE CARICATURE

The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

By

Alice Meynell

The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays

Published by Wallachia Publishers

New York City, NY

First published circa 1922

Copyright © Wallachia Publishers, 2015

All rights reserved

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THE RHYTHM OF LIFE AND OTHER ESSAYS

..................

The Rhythm of Life

Decivilised

A Remembrance

The Sun

The Flower

Unstable Equilibrium

The Unit of the World

By the Railway Side

Pocket Vocabularies

Pathos

The Point of Honour

Composure

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes

James Russell Lowell

Domus Angusta

Rejection

The Lesson of Landscape

Mr. Coventry Patmore’s Odes

Innocence and Experience

Penultimate Caricature

THE RHYTHM OF LIFE

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IF LIFE IS NOT ALWAYS poetical, it is at least metrical.  Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts.  Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known.  Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure.  What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year.  Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind.  Disease is metrical, closing in at shorter and shorter periods towards death, sweeping abroad at longer and longer intervals towards recovery.  Sorrow for one cause was intolerable yesterday, and will be intolerable tomorrow; today it is easy to bear, but the cause has not passed.  Even the burden of a spiritual distress unsolved is bound to leave the heart to a temporary peace; and remorse itself does not remain—it returns.  Gaiety takes us by a dear surprise.  If we had made a course of notes of its visits, we might have been on the watch, and would have had an expectation instead of a discovery.  No one makes such observations; in all the diaries of students of the interior world, there have never come to light the records of the Kepler of such cycles.  But Thomas à Kempis knew of the recurrences, if he did not measure them.  In his cell alone with the elements—‘What wouldst thou more than these? for out of these were all things made’—he learnt the stay to be found in the depth of the hour of bitterness, and the remembrance that restrains the soul at the coming of the moment of delight, giving it a more conscious welcome, but presaging for it an inexorable flight.  And ‘rarely, rarely comest thou,’ sighed Shelley, not to Delight merely, but to the Spirit of Delight.  Delight can be compelled beforehand, called, and constrained to our service—Ariel can be bound to a daily task; but such artificial violence throws life out of metre, and it is not the spirit that is thus compelled.  That flits upon an orbit elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically curved, keeping no man knows what trysts with Time.

It seems fit that Shelley and the author of the Imitation should both have been keen and simple enough to perceive these flights, and to guess at the order of this periodicity.  Both souls were in close touch with the spirits of their several worlds, and no deliberate human rules, no infractions of the liberty and law of the universal movement, kept from them the knowledge of recurrences.  Eppur si muove.  They knew that presence does not exist without absence; they knew that what is just upon its flight of farewell is already on its long path of return.  They knew that what is approaching to the very touch is hastening towards departure.  ‘O wind,’ cried Shelley, in autumn,

They knew that the flux is equal to the reflux; that to interrupt with unlawful recurrences, out of time, is to weaken the impulse of onset and retreat; the sweep and impetus of movement.  To live in constant efforts after an equal life, whether the equality be sought in mental production, or in spiritual sweetness, or in the joy of the senses, is to live without either rest or full activity.  The souls of certain of the saints, being singularly simple and single, have been in