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 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 archÆologist 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."

One wonders how it came there.

The suspicions which this volume helps to confirm, the melancholy guesses it answers, are that Miss Coleridge, with all her imagination, had not the constructive imagination of an artist, and that, in spite of her gaiety and spirits, fundamentally she was feeble. The imagination of an artist, if we may be allowed a seeming paradox, works logically. Not fortuitously, but by some mysterious necessity, does one vision follow another. There is a rational, if unconscious, order in the pageantry of images; there is an inevitableness in their succession closely allied to the logical necessity by which one idea follows another in a well-reasoned argument. In Miss Coleridge's mind images arranged themselves in no progressive order; one bears no particular relationship to another; they are disconnected, sporadic. Great imagination is architectural; it sets fancy upon fancy until it has composed a splendid and intelligible whole—a valid castle in the air. Miss Coleridge could not build; ideas broke in her mind in showers of whims, and lay where they fell at haphazard; she has bequeathed no castles, but a garden strewn with quaint figures, where every thought is tagged with gay conceits. Her short poems are often successful because she could pick at choice a thought or fancy and twist it into a stanza; but when she attempted a tale or an essay she gathered a handful of incongruous oddments and made of them a patchwork.

This first defect was, we conjecture, a consequence of that other and more fundamental flaw to which we have already drawn attention. If Miss Coleridge's artificers played truant, it was because she lacked strength to keep them at their task. For an indolent and lawless imagination force of character is the only whip, force of intellect the only guide. Miss Coleridge was deficient in both respects, and so her fancy sat playing with chips and pebbles, making mud-pies when it should have been making palaces.

Miss Coleridge never created a real work of art because she could not grasp emotions, or, if she grasped, failed to hold them. Perhaps she was too much of a Victorian lady to do more than express the culture of an imperfect age imperfectly. At any rate, it is clear that a shrinking fastidiousness excluded from her world much of the raw material from which great art is made. Stray reflections on Greek life and thought, though in themselves trivial, are interesting for what they betray of a state of mind familiar and always slightly distressing to people who take art seriously. She was a fair scholar Miss Sichel tells us; certainly she studied under an excellent master—the author of "Ionica"; yet she could say of the "BacchÆ": "The Hallelujah Lasses get drunk on the wine of the spirit, not the wine of the grape"; and of the "Medea":

"Medea is thoroughly fin de siÈcle; says she would rather go into battle three times than have a baby once, pitches into men like anything. But there's too much Whitechapel about her. How are you to be seriously interested in a woman who has murdered her mother and boiled her father-in-law before the play begins?"

What is this but the shy jauntiness, the elaborate understatement, of something small in the presence of something great? That uneasy titter, caught from time to time as one turns Miss Coleridge's pages, we seem to have heard before in the Arena chapel or at the end of a Bach fugue. It is the comment of sophisticated refinement that can neither sit still nor launch out into rapturous, but ill-bred, ecstasies, of the weakling who takes refuge in slang or jocularity for fear of becoming natural and being thought ridiculous. Miss Coleridge stood for Kensington and Culture, so she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at Medea, and called the BacchÆ "Hallelujah Lasses." She and Kensington admired Greek literature and art, of course, with enthusiasm tempered by taste; but the "glory that was Greece," the merciless honesty and riotous passions, the adventurous thought and feeling, were meat too strong for a society whose happiness depended on gazing at one half of life with closed eyes and swallowing the other in sugar-coated pills.

So we shall not turn again to "Gathered Leaves," though we shall sometimes read the poems. Henceforth, they will conjure up a less elusive figure. They will show us a pensive lady, rather well dressed in the fashion of five-and-twenty years ago, who sits in a Morris drawing-room, the white walls of which are spotted with Pre-Raphaelite pictures, and muses on what her surroundings represent. She is intelligent and graceful; witty in season, fantastic in measure. Her mind is ruffled by the perplexities appropriate to her age and state; she searches Canon Dixon's latest poem for light on Holman Hunt's last picture. Her life is an exquisite preoccupation with the surface of truth and the heart of unreality. Her poems suggest once more the atmosphere of an age already dead and half-forgotten; of Sunday afternoons in large rooms with long blinds, behind which men yawn and cultivated women are earnest and playful; of a world in which people must pretend courageously that life is very important for fear of discovering that it hardly signifies. It is a strange world, faded, friendly, urbane, and, we are happy to think, already infinitely remote.