"MARK RUTHERFORD " FROM WITHIN.
The Groombridge Diary. By Dorothy V. White. (Humphrey Milford. 10s. 6d. net.)
Letters to Three Friends. By William Hale White (" Mark Rutherford "). (Humphrey Milford. 10s. 6d. net.) THESE two books do more than fill in the details of the per- sonality of " Mark Rutherford." They show that the battle
'which he fought out to a successful conclusion in the characters of his novels and the medium of art he came desperately near losing in his own person and the medium of life: They deepen the significance of that battle and they introduce .us
to a new character as real as any in his books, but with this difference, that for six years she may be said to have given life to the creator of Clara Hopgood and Miriam Tacchi. Hale White's letters are not brilliant or quotable as Byron's • or Mrs. Carlyle's, because he distrusted profoundly the cynical, the affected and the smart, everything, in fact, which revealed the showman at his trade of self-advertisement. " I can't help being serious," he confessed, and he meant by this, not solemnity, but a scrupulous adjustment of himself to life, an incessant effort of understanding, a knowledge of how difficult it is to reconcile justice with egotism. And it was because he felt that such seriousness as his embarrassed most people that he hid himself from the world. This enforced and to him essentially unnatural retirement seems to us to explain all that these two books prove him to have suffered, and the triumphant interest of The Groombridge Diary is its perfectly uncalculated account of how late in life and through the sympathetic genius of a woman he came out from the prison of himself. Hale 'White's last years were illuminated by an ideal and to some extent poignant attach- ment for the woman, forty years his junior, whom he married shortly before his death. That her diary leaves an impression kindred to imaginative writing suggests the sublimity of their relationship. For nothing can be so much a test of quality as the exposure of a vein of personal devotion. But here! the frank sincerity, the devout good sense of the author make the love of two fine natures, so curiously placed in the scale of time and circumstance, an experience like the breaking, of the woods into leaf, which all the world should share. And the analogy is exact. For before Miss Horace Smith came into Hale White's life, he had begun to pay for his Puritanism. Deeply emotional, eager, boyish, enthusiastic, he had imposed upon himself a rigid discipline. Me Mill, he had realised; Puritanism in its fineness, and he was entangled in its dangers and duress. He felt the fetters and could not break them. The standards so loyally preserved were becoming fixed, the mute tension was slowly strangling him, and as life began to ebb, the ideal of self-suppression seemed less than satis- factory, seemed in league with death rather than death's solution.
" Old age stares me in the face," he wrote, " and no answer is possible to it." And then suddenly came the miracle of liberation—the gift of a personality exactly tuned to deliver him, to invite him out of himself into the light and movement of the spiritual and yet natural world for which he had always secretly hungered. Here was one who could " include things which I cannot," who could " open doors and draw back curtains," who could teach him to expand; to reverse customs, doctrines and creeds, to accept life without being constantly on guard. " I did not imagine," he wrote, " I had so much in me which could be assisted, enlightened, set straight, solved." It was no easy liberation : there were inevitably many setbacks ; for physically Hale White was by this time a shattered man, subject to acute attacks of nervous depression. How much this fight for life cost both of them is here absorbingly written, and it was only Mrs. Hale White's valiant and vigilant devotion which insisted on a victorious issue. But perhaps the most important thing in this intimate chronicle is the light which it throws on Hale White's religion. For his whole life was an attempt to create a personal religion in opposition to that of creeds and conventions. In this he was only carrying a step further the nonconformity in which he had been reared and which he had discarded at such cost to himself. And the difficulties in which as a consequence he became involved• and which underlie almost all his novels are his essential contribution to our experience. The want of reality in the established religion of his time compelled one who held that " there is no theological dogma so important as the duty of veracity " to go out into the wilderness and persistently to arm himself even there against " whole continents of cant," against respectability that denied all fine distinctions and casuistry that corrupted them. It is, perhaps, the most sincerely religious who in hypocritical times fed this necessity most and suffer most from a social refusal, in which only the sceptic can take pleasure. For withdrawal from the world is only one side of religious experience of which joyous communion is the other. Hale White discovered how hard it is to stand and regulate life alone, to reject the support of the crowd and custom without confining the spirit which longs to be diffused, how easily mental tyranny may become as tyrannous as dogma and true mysticism be sacrificed with sentimental supernaturalism. And• beneath the disciplined surface he cherished a deep mysticism, for which he craved a practical outlet. For one who "felt Christianity in his very blood" and " all his thoughts coloured by it," who valued the " abso- kite and awful sincerity of the Bible " above all books, to turn his back on all organized Faith, was no cynical gesture, and it is, perhaps, not fanciful to see in the hysteria which haunted high the price he paid for his lonely stand against cant and compromise. The release which The Groombridge Diary shows him eventually to have achieved, largely through his wife's inspiration, was an aesthetie one.- " More and more," he wrote, " my love of God is a love of beauty," and he bid others escape the dilemma of faith and reason by
making the study of beauty a business." This, maybe, is the ultimate solution of our modern spiritual, intellectual and physical entanglements. To sublimate and reinforce science by imagination, to make reason creative without blurring its lines, to give form and precision to the vague generosities and license of instinct—that, it seems clear, was the aesthetic gospel which grew for Hale White out of the ruins of conventional piety and the soil of self-reliant veracity. And to such a one literary and religious values were necessarily involved, the morals of life and art were one. " Sensibility to poetry," he wrote. " may be deadened and lost by neglect of a handshake or a smile," and " the moment we try to speak or write beautifully ' we become humbugs." Beauty he realised could no more be indulged in than God. It resided in reality, in the harmonious realization of truth, and to its pursuit Hale White, so strangely blent of fervour and restraint as even his love of such opposites as St. Francis and Dr. Johnion, Mazzini and Landor goes to show, bent himself through a life which these books prove to have been an
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