Maude Egerton King - A Portrait in Miniature Part 4

The Portrait in Miniature of Maude Egerton King's life continues:

"In her verse quite as much as in her fiction-portraiture - and much of her best poetry was written before and just after her twentieth year - her power is realized.  Thus "Forgiven Sin" (My Books of Songs and Sonnets, p.20) has all the vigour, even in its strange imagery, of William Blake, though it is quite free of his obscurity.  I am assured by more than one of her sisters and contemporary friends that many years elapsed before she knew anything of that sublime rebel but his "Songs of Innocence"; otherwise a tendency to imitation, of which her art was quite incapable, might be suspected.  The poem is too long to quote, but, remembering that a botanical diagram may tempt a student to search for its flower, I may be pardoned if I epitomise it and venture an interpretation:  A good man once sinned, yet, forgiven by God, became happy again and died in honour, unaware that the tears of spirits watching around that sin's grave were so moistening its seed that it sprang up into a tree, from whose deadly wood they fashioned a cradle for his first-born.

My Book of Songs and Sonnets, Maude Egerton King, 1893

Then they watched the blameless young life as the poison infected it, till in manhood it burst into

                                "Fiercest flame,
And drove him for its fuel through shame to shame."

Next this damaged man left a child who became "mere ashes of his father's fire," but was still follows by the spirits, who made him a coffin from the "branches dire" of that same tree.  At last -

"Alone of all that race, one little child
Played in the meadows, glad and undefiled
Fresh as their flowers..."

Yet the pursuing spirits said-
                             "the tale is told,"
And stirred the hearts of men, and made them wild
For his young blood: "His sires", they said, "of old
Planted this tree now grown hundred-fold;
It shades our land, it shuts out heaven's light,
We weary of the race, and of the blight,
Therefore he dies!" They found him in his glee,
And wreaked on him long ages of despite
Who least deserved it, all too brutally,
And crucified his body on the tree."

"Had this been written some years later, it might be conjectured that she had in mind the doom of Piers Ploughman (which doom is the leading note in her only love, The Archdeacon's Family, 1909) or had read Maurice Hewlett's "Song of the Plow".  Yet, however one may interpret "Forgiven Sin", even if we take it only as symbolic of the pharisaism in all religions, one point can hardly be disputed, namely her belief in the elemental purity of life, however marred by things alien to itself, and however scorned and hated by a worldly law which claims from it the uttermost farthing to the third and fourth generation.  Indeed in everything she wrote, or spoke, or wove on her loom (were it possible, pictorial quotations of her own lovely weavings and textile designs ought to be given along with specimens of her writing), this passionate belief in the purity and beauty of life is manifest - as over against money, machinery and the coarsening which comes from unprotesting acceptance of their service ; it remains the source of all her inspiration.

"One reason why she published comparatively little, even though constantly approached by editors, was her conscientious devotion to an inexorable Muse.  Some who were privileged to see her stories in their first script could not but regret the merciless pruning and re-writings of much that was beautiful - a habit intensified, if it did not date from, a passing intimacy with a well-known novelist.  While obeying her Muse, she failed to realise that she herself was hardly other than that Muse.  In this distrust of her own pen - contrasting notably with the gentle if keen criticism and generous help which she gave so freely to inexperienced writers (one of her near followers and lovers says: "She made us all feel that we ourselves as well as our work - 'all we could never be '- were somehow required in the divine scheme.") - one sees how impersonal to her was ordinary success.  She must serve her Art and its high intent in entire humility : the while she lavished domestic tending and pity upon, well, simply anyone needing her.  Her recognition by the world was of no more account to her than her typewriter, or than, say, were his pigments and brushes to her father, that consummate interpreter of the South Downs' magic, Henry George Hine, V.P.R.I.  Just as he, so I am told by another of his daughters, refused highly remunerative transactions with picture-dealers lest they should endanger his powers, so she was never tempted to supply the market with what might prove second-rate work.  Perhaps some of her writing might appeal less instantly to uncritical readers because of this meticulous doubting of her powers; yet whether because of or in spite of this ruthlessness one consequence was very notable and again akin with her father's work: though much was never finished, nothing was poor, trivial or unvital.  And there are few great writers or painters of whom as much as can be said."

Maude Egerton King & the jocund daffodil

Now that Maude Egerton King's grave has been cleared, I have decided to plant some bulbs there.  Remembering the words of Maude's poem 'Young Tree in Spring', I have planted some daffodils:

I grew aware of life, an inner fire

            Of memory and belief

Ran upwards, outwards, in a great desire,

             And lo! Then leaf by leaf,

Remembering my other springs, I rose;

And earth around remembers too, and grows            

            Into her ancient grace,

With ‘here my daisies – there before it froze

            A tiny rill did race.’

The wild young wind that ever caught me so

            Still takes me at his will,-

The dark, sweet violet, still hiding low, 

And over the hedge in golden dance and glow

            The jocund daffodil,-

The bird that in my budding branches sings,

            The happy, happy bird,

A creature careless, being blessed with wings,

How far a-field his mid-air foothold swings (extract)

Hopefully the flowers will come up this Spring and multiply for plenty more to come.  I do hope that she likes them!  I think her grave now looks a little more loved.  The bulbs planted are: Narcissus 'Bittern', Narcissus 'Rippling Waters' and Mascari 'White Magic'.

Maude Egerton King- A Portrait in Miniature Part 3

The booklet commemorating Maude Egerton King's life (Greville MacDonald, 1927) continues:
"Nevertheless hair-shirts and infelicitous duty may monopolise all opportunity for creative work.  Fortunately, after devoting herself with Joseph King, her husband, for many months to slum work, even taking into their home a hopelessly abandoned girl for reformation, she realised the danger to her art - as sacred to her as any other divine gift.  She put this question to their life-long friend, Dr. Robert F. Horton: whether Wordsworth could have done his work for humanity, if he had devoted his genius to the cleansing of its sewers.

"And her chief's answer was to set her free of the worst duties he had assigned her.  It cannot be right to cage a lark though he might still sing of the sun even in a dark cellar.  Other restraints she gladly accepted, transforming them into new opportunity.  None who knew how happy she could in self-denial, can doubt this.  Her devotion for several long periods to her husband's altruistic political labours, though politics in the,selves were always distasteful to her, provided of utmost help[ to him, and so presumably her country.  Later came her editing for eight years to that felicitous yet commercially failing magazine, The Vineyard, the organ of the Peasant Art Guild - a publication she was spiritually and technically responsible for.  Whoever wrote for it - and among its contributors were Selma Lagerlof, Peter Rosegger, G. K. Chesteron, R. L. Gales, Maurice Hewlett, Ernest Rhys, Katharine Tynan, Anatole France, Lord Dunsany - it always stood for these her convictions: that the redemption of man is inseparable from the purification of his work; that the salvation of the land will never come without devotion and sacrifice; and that machinery, with its loveless labour and unearned dividends, making politics necessary to counter its blight upon the people's souls and bodies, gives no sign of any divine sanction.  This newest of demon powers, even though many while hating it submit perforce to its iniquity, must be forever unhesitatingly disbelieved in and fought: Apollyon must be met in the open and closed with, even if he cannot be slain.  Such was the creed that supported Maude King's ingrain sense of obligation towards the Kingdon, and had large share in fortifying her will and its sweetness, her humour and her literary charm.

"Here let me give a prose specimen - a poetic wayside flower - to instance her knowledge of life, nd the intuitive religion - intense and cloistral yet all-embracing - that kept her mind incapable of the plea. so dangerous as apology, that Powers greater than our own may bring good out of evil.  The people she describes in the story are a cook and a cow-man:

"Tis wonderful night with its many minsters ...the stately, starry, sapphire night was holding her passionate heart in its quiet hands, divinely meddling, divinely moulding, there.  Much poor stuff if found and revealed - petty cruelties, tyrannies, vulgarities, grossnesses, mingled with something whiter, shaming her sadly while kindling a bright hope too. ..Surely there as no waste here.  Surely it was entirely blessed and practical that the infinite beauty and solemn appeal of the night should pass into the simple soul, translated into its mother-tongue, pointing to homely duty and inspiring its drudgery - a whole universe conspiring to bing about better relations between a cook and her underlings...(The Country Heart and other Stories 1911, p.33.  This particular story appeared in The Century Magazine and again in The Vineyard, January 1911.)

"The last sentence might well recall the trenchant appeal of a certain poet preacher, "when shall a man dare to say that God has done all He can!" (George MacDonald, Maude King's uncle by marriage) - one to whose fairy tales, along with Hans Christian Anderson's her childhood owed much of its at-homess in the Kingdom.  The story of The Country Heart, from which the quotation is taken, is minute in understanding of the gross flesh that hems in the vulgar cook, its nastiness in kitchen and servants' hall; while it is absolutely tender over there poor flickering womanhood, and the uneducated cowman with hs labour's sweetening influences.  The characters are drawn from life: yet only eyes like their painter's could see into the depths once of their degradations and their clouds of glory.  Just as Beethoven's spiritual hearing carries him into realms of mystery and translates their wonder into language intelligible in some measure to almost everyone, o our poet's candle penetrates conditions of life into which she certainly never had entry either direct or through other's eyes.  Many of her writings reveal this power - for instance the short stories, Salvation (The Country Heart and other Stories, p.142), The Junction (The Vineyard, October 1910, and The Country Heart and other Stories, p.78) and perhaps more remarkably, some terribly true and precise sketches she would never publish, yet which, because she had as it were clairvoyantly witnessed them, somehow had to be set down, if only to be instantly destroyed.  But in everything she proclaimed this truth, that human nature is perfectly human only when breathing and depending upon its spiritual atmosphere.  Thus alone can it fearlessly penetrate the clouds, get vision and power for creative work and utterance: courage too to face yet again the horrors below."

Maude Egerton King Obituary Part 2

Following on from my previous post of Greville MacDonald’s Maude Egerton King 1867 – 1927 – A Portrait in Miniature 'Maude Egerton King 1867-1927', MacDonald continues:

Maude Egerton King 1867 - 1927
A Portrait in Miniature

"Maude King’s writings, verse or prose, would have ranked perhaps with the greatest had her ceaseless upholding of those who were sorrowful, foolish or crippled, allowed more freedom to her pen.  Nevertheless she gave us many poems that were perfectly cut gems, as well as a fine array of stories and essays rich with her own poetic wayside flowers –

“The dark sweet violet, still hiding low,

And over the hedge in golden dance and glow

The jocund daffodil, -"
(Young Tree in Spring, My Book of Songs and Sonnets)

wayside imagery and radiance that still must brighten the future for us.

"Though subscribing to no creed or dogma, her faith in an all-pervading, immanent Beauty, whether in men, women and children, or in fertile valleys and snow-clad mountains piercing the eternal blue, or in folk-lore and great literature, tempts us to rank her religion as more convincing, saner in its appeal to and hold upon us, than much that relies upon ecclesiastic interpretation.  In the simplicity of her belief and her almost Calvinistic submission to duty in great and smallest things, we understand the purity and strength of her vision as well as the facility of her art, the spontaneity of her pathos and wit.  For this vision was fearless.  Indeed it was almost ruthless in its penetration, and her satire could be scathing when it had to be, though never bitter, never cynical.  Her eyes, no more astigmatic or myopic than their lovely physical counterparts, need no smoked glasses to protect them from the sun, nor rose-coloured to beautify the commonplace.  They never misled her in anything she did or criticised; and this in spite of environmental exactions which in many less faithful would endangered their art:

“When Fate, blindfold and move we are not whence,

Smites greatest men, oftimes they, disendowed

Of common life’s completeness, wander bowed

Through gates of loss to some large recompense;

As when, with passion and insight thrice intense,

Blake’s holy madness wrapped him from the crowd

To show him heavens in hells, and there allowed

Sight of life’s central firs: or, reft of sense

To outer noise, Beethoven clothed in sound

All love, all loss, all life’s supremest dower:

Or Milton in his house of lasting night

With God and his great heart, there within found

Large liberty and comfort, and the power

Of prophet vision undistraught of sight.”
 (My Book of Songs and Sonnets)

"In the little ballad also, “The Making of the Poet”, she claims that it is not enough to be born a poet : he must suffer also.  Here only the breaking of his lyre – the discovery perhaps that even his artistic facility is of small worth – and then the death of his lady, set him free with his hitherto unfathomed power:

“There he stood, his hair’s young golden

Dragged with thorns and dank with dew,

Wan and wild his face and olden,

Then the God Apollo knew,

Though the music had arisen

That the dart that oped its prison,

Pierced his heart, and lay there letting

Throbbing life-blood fall with song;

And its hidden fiery fretting

Made the music sad, and strong;

Till in tears of rapture glistening

Gods and men alike were listening.
(My Book of Songs and Sonnets)”

Maude Egerton King 1867 - 1927

The Haslemere Educational Museum hold a copy of Greville MacDonald’s Maude Egerton King 1867 – 1927 – A Portrait in Minature.  This short book was “Printed privately for friends” for Christmas 1927.  The museum’s copy is inscribed “With Dr MacDonald’s Christmas Greetings”.   

I think that there is no better way to understand Maude's impact on her family and peers than to read this book.  It is interesting to observe that in the year of Maude's death, Greville MacDonald also lost his wife, and yet I have found no record of another publication being produced for Christmas in her memory.

The book begins with a poem which I believe Greville wrote specifically about Maude:

“In my long life there be just three or four

Of women who, now shrined as saints, do wait

To ope for me their minster’s cloister-gate –

And One, perchance, its sunny western door.

So weary now, her dear help I implore,

Lest, faithless to my spade and hoe, I bate

My golden dream that, very soon or late,

I’ll doff the cowl and cross the immortal floor.

“Those peerless saints!  Of whom that One doth glow

Still with her ruby heart of flame, her eyes

Of speedwell blue.  Angelic her emprise

To make red roses e’en in my garden grow!

Herald of Beauty here, she trod God’s ways,

And now has left to Him all Death’s dismays."

And then the book formally begins:

“Portrait painters should be poets, for although, say, a rose’s outward visible form may be glowingly portrayed in a drawing, its inward spiritual beauty will for some find surer expression in a song.  Similarly while the writings of Maude Egerton King, and her devotion to Peasant Arts with the Guild of that name, do give close understanding of herself; yet and although the skill of poet and painter be lacking, it seems right to venture this record of her peerless nature, especially as it expresses the convictions of those most intimate with her person and her life (footnote 1– I have been helped much by the sanction and criticisms of her husband, sisters and some oldest friends).  If, to quote William Blake, “the fool sees not the same tree that the wise man sees”, it is no less true that two angels may behold the same tree’s beauty quite differently, the perception of beauty being always subjective.  So, while the impossibility of doing justice to the present theme will be realized in its very endeavour, the general accuracy of it will not be questioned.

Perhaps some day her whole story may be told, for the simplest details of a noble life often prove entrancing literature (footnote 2 – This fact is nowhere better shown than in her first prose-work, Round About a Brighton Coach Office, 1896).  At present it can only be affirmed from the words of sisters and earliest friends, how Heaven lay about her in her infancy, and how it has been given to them, and to others of us, to recognize that influence in all her writings, as well as in the social world she fashioned and ruled so sweetly with unseen sceptre.  Many say they won a renewal in education, even inspiration, from her very person and atmosphere; a revelation, indeed an unveiling of the Kingdom.  “The spirit of man is a candle of the Lord searching out the innermost parts”, wrote Solomon.  Hers was a candle with neither smoke nor flicker in its flame.  Not to many is it given thus to hold the torch through the terrestrial way, even for their intimates.  Yet some illuminate worlds themselves perhaps had not yet fully seen ; and in such wise that their torches still flame, perhaps with increasing brightness, even after they have left us weeping.  Thus indeed, as with all great musicians, painters and poets,

“The future brightens on our sight,

For on the past hath fallen a light

That tempts us to adore (Wordsworth, Elegiac Stanzas)”

To be continued!