PREFACE WHATEVER verdict posterity-sternest, justest of juries-may pass on "Frank Danby's" literary achievements, there can be no two opinions about her genius for motherhood. For her children, from the first days she bore them in pain to the last nights when she parted from them in agony, no burden she could carry was ever too heavy, no sacrifice she could make ever too exacting. All she possessed, of heart, of intellect, of influence or of money, she poured out for us, unstinting, in one bright continuous stream. Of necessity, her career as an authoress paid penalty for this splendid giving; since to no woman is it granted that she achieve supreme success both as mother and as artist. Between these two dominating passions the soul wavers like a magnetic needle between two poles, vibrating now towards one, now towards the other-so that, in the case of the average woman-writer, neither destiny is fulfilled completely, and she dies as she has lived, a mediocre mother, a mediocre artist, to be as soon forgotten by the children she has neglected as by the readers she has failed to capture. "Frank Danby's" memory fears no such fate. Nobody reading Doctor Phillips, Pigs in Clover, Twilight, can fail to realise how very nearly she accomplished her mission as a novelist ; nobody who understands the love, the reverence for her, which lives in the hearts of us, her children, can fail to know how utterly she succeeded in her destiny as a mother. At the very outset of her public career, "Frank Danby's" keen brain faced these two primal issues; made the self-sacrificing, the irrevocable decision; robbed herself, robbed the world—that we might be the richer. With my mother's intellectual vision, her courage, her power over the medium in which she worked, there was no height either of" literary " or " popular" success (at long last, both are one) to which she might not have aspired. One attribute, and one only, of genius, she lacked-selfishness. And so (this is her judgment, not my own) none of her work was ever "finished." It came to her, seething from the inner consciousness, demanding expression; dashed itself to paper; and then . . . then the mother-heart intervened, crying: "Let be! go back to your children." And she, bound by that first irrevocable decision, gave her heart its desire, let it command" Enough" to the clamouring brain. Of the many sacrifices she made for us, surely this was the grandest. God knows, I am grateful; yet there come moments when I shudder at the thought of it, when I most bitterly regret this chain our helplessness bound on her willing hands. Pray God, that her soul, looking down from the Place of All Knowledge, harbour not the same regrets. To me, Mothers and Children-dic |