A little child's wreath

Elizabeth Rachel Chapman, whose sonnets are now republished as a memorial volume, was born at Woodford, Essex, in February, 1850. She was descended through her father from a Yorkshire family associated, in many of its generations, with Whitby, and was connected through both father and mother with the Gurneys of Earlham. She was a great-grand-daughter of Elizabeth Fry, and was said to bear her a noticeable resemblance. That this likeness was also in her mind is attested by the “genius for benevolence” which she inherited from her ancestress, and by the tenderness of her affection and pity for all sufferers. In her Book of Sibyls Mrs. Ritchie (Miss Thackeray) describes the Gurneys of Earlham as ordained to “a sort of natural priesthood.” Elizabeth Chapman was of that company of devoted spirits. Her love for children was boundless; and the Wreath was consecrated to the memory of a little nephew, tenderly loved, in whose grave she now lies.

Miss Chapman’s writings were published between the years 1881 and 1897; at earlier date appeared her first work, Master of All, and at the later her last, Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction. Meanwhile she wrote what was perhaps her best-known work, A Companion to “In Memoriam,” which drew from Tennyson the letter published in the Life: “I am grateful to you,” he says, “for your book ... excellent in taste and judgment. I like, too, what you say about Comtism. I really could almost fancy that page 95 was written by myself. I have been saying the same thing for years in all but the same words.” The passage treats of her perfect belief in immortality, and her sense of the mockery of life without a future. Again, he said that her commentary on his poem was “the best ever done.” A Tourist Idyll and other Stories, The New Godiva and other Studies, and A Comtist Lover and other Studies had followed each other at intervals of a year or two, and in 1887 appeared a volume of verse, The New Purgatory and other Poems. A Little Child’s Wreath was published in 1894 and reprinted in the year following.

There is a sense in which the simplest things of literature are the most difficult. The primary and original griefs and felicities of the heart need to-day something more than the original emotion, if poetry is to re-tell them. We know too well the formula in literature, whereas in the heart there is no formula; and thus the simple and primitive passion inclines to be more silent now than at any earlier day. Women no longer cry out at a funeral, and they say little when a child dies. The outcry has ceased to reach the sensibility of the hearer, and the phrase of grief has grown relaxed and dull by custom. Therefore it is with some of the courage of unconsciousness, and of a grief secluded in its own completeness, that a writer takes up the old history of the loss of a beloved child. For this sorrow is so constantly with us—with mankind—as to have become the ready subject of another kind of literature. The sentimentalist has used it, and the sincere mourner, who had at hand only a sentimentalist’s diction, has vainly essayed to convey the true feeling in the strained and depreciated phrase. When Elizabeth Rachel Chapman undertook her Little Child’s Wreath, she must have been well aware that two kinds of insincerity—the insincerity of the sentimentalist, which is insincerity of character, and that other sort which is merely insincerity of literature, and may be the disabled utterance of a true heart—had made much, especially in the course of the nineteenth century, of the death of children. But she forgot or disregarded all this unworthiness, for it can always be put aside; and freshly and tenderly arranged her thoughts and rhymed her phrases, writing out of a heart doubly sincere.

Obviously her work must have been done in the after-time of grief. Her sorrow for the little boy, which no mother could have excelled, had grown, when she began to write, not gentler—for we can hardly imagine it anything but gentle even in the first speechless hours—but more able to endure. She had the literary sincerity which led her to this expression, and made the craftsmanship of verse a natural exercise in the leisure of her loss. There is no rhetoric, no mere borrowing of excessive language, no violence of feeling or of diction. The laws of poetry, spiritual as well as metrical, control, or rather direct, the writer’s statement of love and loss, and she has given the right of this discipline to a form of verse—the Shakespearian sonnet—long neglected, but better fitted than the Petrarchan to the quantity and quality of English rhyme. The poems do not profess despair or revolt; they have the dignity of another spirit, older, newer, and doubtless more perdurable. Miss Chapman’s studies of In Memoriam had instructed her in the responsibilities of a profound affliction.

Slightly, with the slightness of tenderness, she reveals the portrait of a wonderful child, one of whom the world was not worthy. His death at seven years old silenced the doubts, not whether he would be good, but whether he would be strong, whether he would have the force, the enterprise to face the strife, to grapple with the ill. The imminence of death was evidently visible in him as it has been in so many children who have died, as it is visible even in an infant who is not to survive infancy—a greater sweetness, a lovelier smile, not imagined by a mother’s memory after the child’s death, but noted during his life and during his health, and confessed then as the inevitable sign of near mortality. The portrait in A Little Child’s Wreath is an exquisite one of an exquisite subject; and unconsciously the author—now that she too has passed from this world we may say it—has shown her own beautiful and noble soul to have been marked for a too early, though a later, passage.