The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays — Context and Discussion

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Authors: Meynell, Alice, 1847-1922 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 1998 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: English essays Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 22,453

Reading time 98 min

Text sections 2

This digital edition of The Rhythm of Life, and Other Essays — Context and Discussion is described by source-level measurements including 22,453 words, 1 hr 38 min estimated reading time, and 2 detected text sections.

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Source: Project Gutenberg record #1276

Alice Meynell's 1893 essays use rhythm, periodicity, and metrical patterns as a lens to examine mental experience, literary criticism, and the natural world, with a distinctive voice that blends poetic observation with sharp, temperate humour.

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Men said that he led a _dilettante_ life. They reproached him with the selflessness that made him somewhat languid. Others, they seemed to aver, were amateurs at this art or that; he was an amateur at living. So it was, in the sense that he never grasped at happiness, and that many of the things he had held slipped from his disinterested hands. So it was, too, in this unintended sense; he loved life. How should he not have loved a life that his living made honourable? How should he not have loved all arts, in which his choice was delicate, liberal, instructed, studious, docile, austere? An amateur man he might have been called, too, because he was not discomposed by his own experiences, or shaken by the discovery which life brings to us-that the negative quality of which Buddhism seems to accuse all good is partaken by our happiness. He had always prayed temperate prayers and harboured probable wishes. His sensibility was extreme, but his thought was generalised. When he had joy he tempered it not in the common way by meditation upon the general sorrow but by a recollection of the general pleasure. It was his finest distinction to desire no differences, no remembrance, but loss among the innumerable forgotten. And when he suffered, it was with so quick a nerve and yet so wide an apprehension that the race seemed to suffer in him. He pitied not himself so tenderly as mankind, of whose capacity for pain he was then feelingly persuaded. His darkening eyes said in the extreme hour: 'I have compassion on the multitude.'

Nowhere else does the greater light so rule the day, so measure, so divide, so reign, make so imperial laws, so visibly kindle, so immediately quicken, so suddenly efface, so banish, so restore, as in a plain like this of Suffolk with its enormous sky. The curious have an insufficient motive for going to the mountains if they do it to see the sunrise. The sun that leaps from a mountain peak is a sun past the dew of his birth; he has walked some way towards the common fires of noon. But on the flat country the uprising is early and fresh, the arc is wide, the career is long. The most distant clouds, converging in the beautiful and little-studied order of cloud-perspective (for most painters treat clouds as though they formed perpendicular and not horizontal scenery), are those that gather at the central point of sunrise. On the plain, and there only, can the construction--but that is too little vital a word; I should rather say the organism--the unity, the design, of a sky be understood. The light wind that has been moving all night is seen to have not worked at random. It has shepherded some small flocks of cloud afield and folded others. There's husbandry in Heaven. And the order has, or seems to have, the sun for its midst. Not a line, not a curve, but confesses its membership in a design declared from horizon to horizon.

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Alice Meynell opens her collection with an essay that treats life not as a narrative but as a metrical pattern: 'If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical.' This governing idea—periodicity in mental experience—shapes the voice throughout the volume. Meynell writes as a critic of interior states, observing that happiness, sorrow, and even remorse 'return' rather than persist. She invokes Thomas à Kempis and Shelley as fellow perceivers of these recurrences, yet notes that no one has made 'the records of the Kepler of such cycles.' The prose itself moves with a measured, almost tidal rhythm, alternating between declarative statements and speculative asides.

The Metrical Mind

Meynell's title essay establishes a vocabulary of recurrence: 'periodicity,' 'orbit,' 'elliptically or parabolically or hyperbolically curved.' She applies this framework to disease, distress, and gaiety, arguing that emotional states follow predictable arcs even if unmeasured. The voice is confident but not dogmatic; she admits that 'distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured.' This restraint gives the prose authority without overreach. In later essays, the same attention to pattern appears in literary judgments. Discussing Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, she praises his 'temperate' humour and notes that 'fifty per cent. of the things they say—no more—are good enough to remain after the bloom of their vulgarity has worn off.' The numerical precision echoes the metrical theme, applying a critic's measure to comic personages.

Voice and the Trivial

Meynell's critical voice is distinctive for its willingness to dwell on 'significant trivialities.' In the essay on Holmes, she defends this choice: 'It is often a question which of several significant trivialities a critic shall choose in his communication with a reader who does not insist that all the grave things shall be told him.' This self-awareness about the essayist's craft—the deliberate selection of small details—marks her style. She connects Holmes's humour to 'the New Humorist' and traces a lineage while absolving the earlier writer of 'any fault of theirs in the bastardy.' The tone is wry, precise, and unapologetically literary. Her own prose avoids the 'artificial violence' that 'throws life out of metre,' preferring instead a natural cadence that mirrors the periodicity she describes.

Fancy, Not Imagination

Meynell draws a careful distinction between fancy and imagination, attributing to Holmes 'fancy rather than imagination' but calling it 'more perfect, more definite, more fit.' She illustrates with Holmes's extended simile of a crow and king-bird, noting that 'the comparison goes on after this at needless length, with explanations.' This critique reveals Meynell's own preference for economy: she values the precise image over the elaborated one. Her essays themselves rarely overstay; they move from observation to reflection without padding. The closing essay on 'Penultimate Caricature' or 'The Lesson of Landscape' likely continues this pattern of concise, pointed commentary. The reader attuned to Meynell's own rhythms will find a writer who practices what she preaches—a prose that keeps time with its own internal metre.

Meynell's essays reward attention to her sentence rhythms and the way she builds an argument from a single, resonant phrase. The reader might note how often she returns to the language of measurement—'metrical,' 'periodicity,' 'temperate'—even when the subject shifts from literary criticism to nature or memory. These verbal recurrences are themselves a demonstration of the principle she names. For a full appreciation, read the essays aloud; the cadence is part of the meaning.

Meynell’s quiet insistence on recurrence—the tide returning, the syllable counted—reminded me of an old summer when I read her beside an open window, and the same unhurried rhythm surfaced again in In a Green Shade: A Country Commentary — Inside the Classic. That book felt like finding the same bench in a different garden, familiar but shaded differently.