Michael Fairless by William Scott Palmer

I: Michael Fairless was an artist, with the artist's longing for creative expression. But while she was able to move about among her fellows her imaginative force, together with such strength of body as she had and her fine intellectual endowment, was spent on their behalf. She gave herself without stint and, it appeared, without regret for much that must consequently stand aside. Men and their miseries, their poverty, pleasures, joys and pain, seemed to take the place for her of the artist's material in language or clay or colour. The material she chose was life, life in all its crudity or evasiveness, its stubborn resistance, forbidding weakness, its failures and faults; and with the far-reaching promise upon which only faith as strong as hers can keep a constant hold. In each man she saw, through disfigurement and disguise, his proper reflexion of the divine image, as a sculptor sees in the block of marble the one beauty that he is to set free.

There were times when I thought this passion of hers would always be enough. I thought the fountain of charity in her heart would never allow her artistic longings to be carried into any field but that of life. When the claims of human needs and suffering for the moment slackened, I saw that there was always the attraction of a perennial love and carefulness for every creature of the earth, even the very lowest. From the blade of grass and the clod on which it grew, to every beast and bird, all things entered her soul to become her own, to become centres of the active, self-devoted interest that one gives only to one's own. I might well think that she would live and die without any disturbing recognition of another longing unfulfilled. Moreover, her enjoyment of the creative work of others was never tainted by self-pity, or by that base alloy of envy which kills delight in many of us, whose gifts and executive powers are far inferior to hers. It seemed reasonable to think that her love of beauty would be satisfied with what her indomitable eagerness and energy enabled her to absorb from literature, painting and sculpture, from music and, above all, from the symbolism of religion in its poetry of psalm and stately hymn, and in those lovely myths with which the childlike heart of man has clothed his intuitions of divine things. But I was wrong. The impulse to create, though often overborne, was very masterful.