THE ART OF MRS. MEYNELL I AM soberly convinced that the prose of Alice Mey- nell is absolutely the most perfect produced in our language for at least the last twenty years. There have been louder instruments than hers ; there has been orchestration more complex ; and there have been artists, no less honourable, who have parted with some purity of tone for the sake of a wider range of keys or strings. But unless it be some of the early work of Mr. W. B. Yeats (the essays he wrote in Ideas of Good and Evil), I can think of no prose- tissue — no, not even that of Mr. James — which pre- sents a surface so free from the faintest falsity or blur, and that clings with so exquisite a closeness and transparency to the rippling body of the swiftly moving thought. And even in Mr. Yeats's case the purity is much more evident than the precision, for he was dealing with abstractions, ambiguities, shadowy mysteries, and it is as difficult to judge of the exact- ness of an image of vagueness as it would be to tell how perfectly a mirror reflected the dark. Moreover, the purity of Yeats's prose is a cozened and monastic purity, preserving its innocence by all kinds of organ- ized denials. You will find no wit in any of his pages, no humour, no gaiety, no reference to the franker moods of common men ; every word is chosen from a vocabulary of consecrated tokens, diligently 214
