they betray of a
state of mind familiar and always slightly distressing to people who
take art seriously. She was a fair scholar Miss Sichel tells us;
certainly she studied under an excellent master--the author of "Ionica";
yet she could say of the "Bacchae": "The Hallelujah Lasses get drunk on
the wine of the spirit, not the wine of the grape"; and of the "Medea":

"Medea is thoroughly _fin de siecle_; says she would rather go into
battle three times than have a baby once, pitches into men like
anything. But there's too much Whitechapel about her. How are you
to be seriously interested in a woman who has murdered her mother
and boiled her father-in-law before the play begins?"

What is this but the shy jauntiness, the elaborate understatement, of
something small in the presence of something great? That uneasy titter,
caught from time to time as one turns Miss Coleridge's pages, we seem to
have heard before in the Arena chapel or at the end of a Bach fugue. It
is the comment of sophisticated refinement that can neither sit still
nor launch out into rapturous, but ill-bred, ecstasies, of the weakling
who takes refuge in slang or jocularity for fear of becoming natural and
being thought ridiculous. Miss Coleridge stood for Kensington and
Culture, so she smiled and shrugged her shoulders at Medea, and called
the Bacchae "Hallelujah Lasses." She and Kensington admired Greek
literature and art, of course, with enthusiasm tempered by taste; but
the "glory that was Greece," the merciless honesty and riotous passions,
the adventurous thought and feeling, were meat too strong for a society
whose happiness depended on gazing at one half of life with closed eyes
and swallowing the other in sugar-coated pills.

So we shall not turn again to "Gathered Leaves," though we shall
sometimes read the poems. Henceforth, they will conjure up a less
elusive figure. They will show us a pensive lady, rather well dressed in
the fashion of five-and-twenty years ago, who sits in a Morris
drawing-room, the white walls of which are spotted with Pre-Raphaelite
pictures, and muses on what her surroundings represent. She is
intelligent and graceful; witty in season, fantastic in measure. Her
mind is ruffled by the perplexities appropriate to her age and state;
she searches Canon Dixon's latest poem for light on Holman Hunt's last
picture. Her life is an exquisite preoccupation with the surface of
truth and the heart of u