As for the authorship, there is a woman's influence, an artist's
poorly concealed bias in the foreign letters; and for the rest a
man's blunders--so much easier to see in another than to avoid
oneself--writ large from cover to cover. King Cophetua, who sends
"profoundly grateful remembrances," has most surely written the
letters he would wish to receive.
"Mrs Meynell!" cries one reviewer, triumphantly. Nay, the saints
be good to us, what has Mrs Meynell in common with the
"Englishwoman's" language, style, or most unconvincing passion?
Men can write as from a woman's heart when they are minded to do so
in desperate earnestness--there is Clarissa Harlowe and Stevenson's
Kirstie, and many more to prove it; but when a man writes as the
author of the "Love Letters" writes, I feel, as did the painter of
the frieze, that pattern-making has gone too far and included that
which, like the grass, should be spared such a convention.
"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess, "and the moral of that
is--'Be what you would seem to be'--or, if you'd like to put it
more simply--'never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what
it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was
not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to
be otherwise.'" And so by way of the Queen's garden I come back to
my room again.
My heart's affections are still centred on my old attic, with
boarded floor and white-washed walls, where the sun blazoned a
frieze of red and gold until he travelled too far towards the
north, the moon streamed in to paint the trees in inky wavering
shadows, and the stars flashed their glory to me across the years.
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