OLD FAMILIAR FACES

 BY THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

 AUTHOR OF “AYLWIN”

 NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY MCMXVI

 THE ATHENÆUM PRESS, LONDON, ENGLAND. 

 [Picture: Mrs. William Morris. “She was the most lovely woman I have ever known, her beauty was incredible. ”—Theodore Watts-Dunton]

INTRODUCTION. 

For some years before his death it was the intention of TheodoreWatts-Dunton to publish in volume form under the title of ‘Old FamiliarFaces, ’ the recollections of his friends that he had from time to timecontributed to _The Athenæum_. Had his range of interests been less widehe might have found the time in which to further this and many otherliterary projects he had formed; but he was, unfortunately, very slow towrite, and slower still to publish. His long life produced in publishedworks a number of critical and biographical essays contributed toperiodicals and encyclopædias, a romance (‘Aylwin’), a sheaf of poems(‘The Coming of Love’), two of the most stimulating criticalpronouncements that his century produced (‘Poetry’ and ‘The Renascence ofWonder’), a handful of introductions to classics—and that is all. 

Only those who were frequent visitors at “The Pines” can form any idea ofhis keen interest in life and affairs, which seemed to grow rather thanto diminish with the passage of each year, even when 81 had passed himby. At his charmingly situated house at the foot of Putney Hill, helived a life of as little seclusion as he would have lived in FleetStreet. Here he received his friends and acquaintances, and there waslittle happening in the world outside with which he was unacquainted. 

He was a tremendous worker, and only a few months before his death hewrote of “the enormous pressure of work” that was upon him, telling hiscorrespondent that he had “no idea, no one can have any idea, what it is. I am an early riser and breakfast at seven, and from that hour untilseven in the evening, I am in full swing of my labours with the aid oftwo most intelligent secretaries. ”

To outlive his generation is, perhaps, the worst fate that can befall aman; but this cannot truly be said of Theodore Watts-Dunton, who seemedto be of no generation in particular. His interest in the life of thetwentieth century, a life so different from that of his own youth andearly manhood, was strangely keen and insistent. Sometimes in talking ofhis great contemporaries, Tennyson, Meredith, Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris, Matthew Arnold, Borrow, there would creep into his voice a noteof reminiscent sadness; but it always seemed poetic rather than personal. It may be said that he never really grew up, that his spirit never tired. His laugh was as youthful as the hearty “My dear fellow, ” with which hewould address his friends. 

His most remarkable quality was his youth. His body had aged, his voicehad shrunk; but once launched into the subject of literature, Greek versein particular (he regarded the Attic tongue as the peculiar vehicle forpoetic expression), he seemed immediately to become a young man. Whenquoting his favourite passage from Keats, his voice would falter withemotion. 

 Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 

These lines he regarded as the finest in English poetry. 

He possessed the great gift of conversation. Every subject seemed todevelope quite naturally out of that which had preceded it, and althoughin a single hour he would have passed from Æschylus and Sophocles totwentieth-century publishers, there was never any break or suspicion of achange of topic. Seated on the sofa in the middle of his study, withreminders of his friendship with Rossetti gazing down upon him from thewalls, he welcomed his friends with that almost boyish cordiality that soendeared him to their hearts. If they had been doing anything of whichthe world knew, he would be sure to have heard all about it. His mindwas as alert as his memory was remarkable; but above all he was possessedof a very real charm, a charm that did not vanish before the on-comingyears. It was this quality of interesting himself in the doings ofothers that retained for him the friendships that his personality andcordiality had created. 

Few men have been so richly endowed with great friendships as TheodoreWatts-Dunton: Swinburne, the Rossettis, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Borrow, Lowell, Latham, men of vastly dissimilar temperaments;yet he was on terms of intimacy with them all, and as they one by onepassed away, to him was left the sad duty of giving to the world by farthe most intimate picture of their various personalities. There wasobviously some subtle quality in Watts-Dunton’s nature that not onlyattracted to him great minds in the world of art and letters; but whichseemed to hold captive their affection for a lifetime. Even aninstinctive recluse such as Borrow, a man almost too sensitive forfriendship, found in Watts-Dunton one whose capacity for friendship wasso great as to override all other considerations. Watts-Dunton was “thefriend of friends” to Rossetti, who wished to make him his heir, and wasdissuaded only when he saw that to do so would pain his friend, whoregarded it as an act of injustice to Rossetti’s own family. During hislifetime Swinburne desired to make over to him his entire fortune. Theman to whom these tributes were paid was undoubtedly possessed of somerare and strange gift. 

 [Picture: Algernon Charles Swinburne]

The greatest among his many great friendships was with Swinburne. Forthirty years they lived together at “The Pines” in the closest unity andaccord. They would take their walks together, discuss the hundred andone things in which they were both interested, living, not as great mensometimes live, a frigid existence of intellectual loneliness; butshowing the keenest interest in the affairs of the everyday, as well asof the literary, world. When death at last severed the link that it hadtaken upwards of thirty years to forge, it is not strange that thereshould be no reminiscences written of the man who had been toWatts-Dunton more than a brother. 

It was not always easy to get Watts-Dunton to talk of those he had knownso intimately; but when he did so it was frankly and freely. Once whentelling of some characteristic act of generosity on the part of thatstrangely composite being, half genius, half schoolboy, William Morris, he remarked, “Yes, Morris was a very dear friend of mine; but he hadstrange limitations. Swinburne had the utmost contempt for thenarrowness of his outlook. It was incredible! Outside his own domain hewas unintelligent in his narrowness, and frequently bored and irritatedhis friends. ”

As artist, poet, and craftsman, however, Watts-Dunton spoke withenthusiasm of Morris; but intellectually he regarded him as inferior toMrs. Morris. On the day following the announcement of her death, thepresent writer happened to be taking tea at “The Pines, ” and theconversation not unnaturally turned upon the Morrises. Watts-Duntoncalled attention to the large number of magnificent Rossetti portraits ofher that hung from the walls of his study. “A remarkable woman, ” hesaid, “a most remarkable woman; superior to Morris intellectually, shereached a greater mental height than he was capable of, yet few knew it. ”Then he proceeded to tell how she had acquired French and Italian withthe greatest ease and facility. When Morris had met her she possessedvery few educational advantages; yet she very quickly made good hershortcomings. When reminded that Mr. H. Buxton Forman had recentlywritten that he had seen beautiful women in all quarters of the globe, “but never one so strangely lovely and majestic as Mrs. Morris, ”Watts-Dunton remarked, “She was the most lovely woman I have ever known, her beauty was incredible. ”

In answer to a question he went on to say that Rossetti painted her lipswith the utmost faithfulness. In spite of her beauty and her high mentalqualities, she was very shy and retiring, almost fearful, in her attitudetowards others. 

In literature and criticism Watts-Dunton stood for enthusiasm. Hisgospel as a critic was to seek for the good that is to be found in mostthings, literary or otherwise; and what is, perhaps, most remarkable inone who has known so many great men, he never seemed to draw invidiouscomparisons between the writers and artists of to-day and those of thegreat Victorian Era. 

Life at “The Pines” was as bright as naturally cheerful and bright peoplecould make it, people who were not only attracted to and interested ineach other; but found the world an exceedingly good place in which tolive. The home circle was composed of Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, his twosisters, Miss Watts and Mrs. Mason. To these must be added Mr. ThomasHake, for many years Watts-Dunton’s friend and secretary, who was indaily attendance. Later the circle was enlarged by the entry into it ofthe young and accomplished bride, the present Mrs. Watts-Dunton. 

“The Pines” would have seemed a strange place without “the Colonel, ” asWatts-Dunton always called Mr. Hake, adopting a family name given to himwhen a boy on account of his likeness to his cousin, General, thenColonel, Gordon. Nothing amused Watts-Dunton more than for some callerto start discussing army matters with the supposed ex-officer. He wouldwatch with a mischievous glee Mr. Hake’s endeavours to carry on aconversation in which he had no special interest. Watts-Dunton neverinformed callers of their mistake, and to this day there is one friend oftwenty-five years’ standing, a man keenly interested in National Defence, who regards Mr. Hake as an authority upon army matters. 

“No living man knew Borrow so well as Thomas Hake, ” Watts-Dunton onceremarked to a friend. To the young Hakes Lavengro was a great joy, andthey would often accompany him part of his way home from Coombe End. Onone occasion Borrow said to the youngest boy, “Do you know how to fight aman bigger than yourself?” The lad confessed that he did not. “Well, ”said Borrow, “You challenge him to fight, and when he is taking off hiscoat, you hit him in the stomach as hard as you can and run for yourlife. ”

Swinburne and Watts-Dunton had first met in 1872. In 1879 they went tolive together at “The Pines, ” and from that date were never parted untilSwinburne’s death thirty years’ later. In no literary friendship has thebond been closer. Watts-Dunton’s first act each morning was to visitSwinburne in his own room, where the poet breakfasted alone with themorning newspapers. During the morning the two would take their dailywalk together, a practice continued for many years. “There is no timelike the morning for a walk, ” Swinburne would say, “The sparkle, theexhilaration of it. I walk every morning of my life, no matter what theweather, pelting along all the time as fast as I can go. ” His perfecthealth he attributed entirely to this habit. 

In later years he would take his walks alone. It was during one of thesethat he met with an adventure that seemed to cause him some irritation. A young artist hearing that “the master” walked each day up Putney Hilllay in wait for him. After several unsuccessful ventures he at lengthsaw a figure approaching which he instantly recognized. Crossing theroad the youth went boldly up and said:—

“If you are Mr. Swinburne, may I shake hands with you?”

“Eh?” remarked the astonished poet. 

The young man repeated his request in a louder voice, rememberingSwinburne’s deafness, adding:—

“It is my ambition to shake hands with you, sir. ”

“Oh! very well, ” was the response, as Swinburne half-heartedly extendedhis hand, “I’m not accustomed to this sort of thing. ”

Meal times at “The Pines” were occasions when there was much talk andlaughter; for in both Swinburne and Watts-Dunton the mischievous spiritof boyhood had not been entirely disciplined by life, and in the othermembers of the household the same unconquerable spirit of youth wasmanifest. Sometimes there were great discussions and arguments. Watts-Dunton had more than a passing interest in science, whereas, toSwinburne it was anathema, although his father was strongly scientific inhis learning. The libraries of the two men clearly showed how differentwere their tastes; for that of Watts-Dunton was all-embracing, Swinburne’s was as exclusive as his circle of personal friends. The onewas the library of a critic, the other that of a poet. 

Swinburne enjoyed nothing better than a discussion, and he was a foe whowielded a stout blade. He fought, however, with scrupulous fairness, never interrupting an adversary; but listening to him with a deliberatepatience that was almost disconcerting. Then when his turn came he wouldoverwhelm his opponent and destroy his most weighty arguments in what afriend once described as “a lava torrent of burning words. ” He possessedmany of the qualities necessary to debate: concentration, the power ofpouncing upon the weak spot in his adversary’s argument, and above all awonderful memory. What he lacked was that calm and calculating frigidityso necessary to the successful debater. Instead of freezing his opponentto silence with deliberate logic, he would strive rather by thetempestuous quality of his rhetoric to hurl him into the next parish. 

There were times when he would work himself up into a passion ofdenunciation, when, trembling and quivering in every limb, he would in afine frenzy of scorn annihilate those whom he conceived to be hisenemies, and in scathing periods pour ridicule upon their works. But ifhe were merciless in his onslaughts upon his foes, he was correspondinglyloyal in the defence of his friends. He seemed as incapable of seeingthe weakness of a friend as of appreciating the strength of an enemy. 

The things and the people who did not interest him he had the fortunatecapacity of entirely forgetting. A friend {15} tells of how on oneoccasion he happened to mention in the course of conversation a book by acertain author whom he knew had been a visitor at “The Pines” on severaloccasions, and as such was personally known to Swinburne. 

“Oh! really, ” Swinburne remarked, “Yes, now that you mention it, Ibelieve someone of that name has been so good as to come and see us. Iseem to recall him, and I seem to remember hearing someone say that hehad written something, though I don’t remember exactly what. So he haspublished a book upon the subject of which we are talking. Really? Idid not know. ”

All this was said with perfect courtesy and without the least intentionof administering a snub or belittling the writer in question. Swinburnehad merely forgotten because there was nothing in that author’spersonality that had impressed itself upon him. On the other hand, hewould remember the minutest details of conversations in which he had beeninterested. 

In spite of his capacity for passionate outbursts and inspired invective, Swinburne was a most attentive listener, provided there were things beingsaid to which it was worth listening. At meal times when his attentionbecame engaged he would forget everything but the conversation. Indifferent as to what stage of the meal he was at, he would turn towhoever it might be that had introduced the subject, and would talk orlisten oblivious of the fact that food might be spoiling. Fortunately, he was a small eater. 

On one occasion when lunching at “The Pines” Mr. Coulson Kernahanhappened to remark that he had in his pocket a copy of ChristinaRossetti’s then unpublished poem, ‘The Death of a First-born, ’ written inmemory of the Duke of Clarence. Down went knife and fork as Swinburnehalf rose from his chair to reach across the table for the manuscript. “She is as a god to mortals when compared to most other living womenpoets, ” he exclaimed. Then, in his thin-high-pitched, but exquisitelymodulated voice he half read, half chanted, two stanzas of the poem. 

 One young life lost, two happy young lives blighted With earthward eyes we see: With eyes uplifted, keener, farther sighted We look, O Lord to thee. 

 Grief hears a funeral knell: hope hears the ringing Of birthday bells on high. Faith, Hope and Love make answer with soft singing, Half carol and half cry. 

He stopped abruptly refusing to read the third and last stanza because itwas unequal, and the poem was stronger and finer by its omission. Thenhe said in a hushed voice, “For the happy folk who are able to think asshe thinks, who believe as she believes, the poem is of its kindperfect. ”

With glowing eyes and with hand that marked time to the music, he readonce more the second verse, repeating the line, “half carol and half cry”three times, lowering his voice with each repetition until it becamelittle more than a whisper. Laying the manuscript reverently beside him, he sat perfectly still for a space with brooding eyes, then risingsilently left the room with short swift strides. {17}

Many of Swinburne’s friends have testified to his personal charm andcourtliness of bearing. “Unmistakably an aristocrat, and with all theease and polish which one associates with high breeding, there was, evenin the cordiality with which he would rise and come forward to welcome avisitor a suspicion of the shy nervousness of the introspective man andof the recluse on first facing a stranger. ” Mr. Coulson Kernahan hassaid, “I have seen him angry, I have heard him furiously dissent from, and even denounce the views put forward by others, but never once waswhat, for want of a better word, I must call his personal deference tothose others relaxed. 

“To no one would he defer quite so graciously and readily, to no one washe so scrupulously courtly in bearing as to those who constituted his ownhousehold. ”

If he felt that he had monopolized the conversation he would turn toWatts-Dunton and apologize, and for a time become transformed into anattentive listener. 

Lord Ronald Gower writes of Swinburne’s remarkable powers as a talker. Telling of a luncheon at “The Pines” in 1879, he writes:—“Swinburne’stalk after luncheon was wonderful . . . What, far beyond the wonderfulflow of words of the poet, struck me, was his real diffidence andmodesty; while fully aware of the divine gifts within him, he is assimple and unaffected as a child. ” {18}

 [Picture: Theodore Watts-Dunton]

But conversation at “The Pines” was not always of the serious things oflife. It very frequently partook of the playful, when the hearers wouldbe kept amused with a humour and whimsicality, cauterized now and thenwith some biting touch of satire which showed that neither Swinburne norWatts-Dunton had entirely grown up. 

Reading aloud was also a greatly favoured form of entertainment. Swinburne was a sympathetic reader, possessed of a voice of remarkablequality and power of expression, and he would read for the hour togetherfrom Dickens, Lamb, Charles Reade, and Thackeray. To Mrs. Mason’s littleboy he was a wizard who could open many magic casements. He would carryoff the lad to his own room, and there read to him the stories whichcaused the hour of bedtime to be dreaded. When the nurse arrived tofetch the child to bed he would imperiously wave her away, hoping thatSwinburne would not notice the action and so bring the evening’sentertainment to a close. On one occasion the child stole down toSwinburne’s room after he had been safely put to bed, where theinterrupted story was renewed. When eventually discovered both seemed toregard the incident as a huge joke, and Swinburne carried the child tothe nursery and tucked him up for the night. 

A great capacity for friendship involves an equally great meed of sorrow. At last the hour arrived when the friend who was nearer to him than abrother followed those who one by one he had mourned, and of the oldfamiliar faces there were left to him only the two sisters, whose loveand devotion had contributed so much to his domestic happiness, and hisfriend, Mr. Thomas Hake, who for seventeen years had acted asconfidential secretary. 

CONTENTS

 PAGE. 

 INTRODUCTION 5

I. GEORGE BORROW 25

II. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 69

III. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON 120

IV. CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI 177

V. DR. GORDON HAKE 207

VI. JOHN LEICESTER WARREN, LORD DE TABLEY 219

VII. WILLIAM MORRIS 240

VIII. FRANCIS HINDES GROOME 277

ILLUSTRATIONS

MRS. WILLIAM MORRIS _Frontispiece_

A. C. SWINBURNE to face page 8

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 18

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 70

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, ÆT 80, 120

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 178

MRS. ROSSETTI 182

DR. GORDON HAKE 208

WILLIAM MORRIS 240

FRANCIS HINDES GROOME 278

I. GEORGE BORROW. 1803–1881. 

I. 

I have been reading those charming reminiscences of George Borrow whichappeared in _The Athenæum_. {25} I have been reading them, I may add, under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-sameheather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quainttalk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life. So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read hispaper I seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian accent of thewell-remembered voice—I seemed to see the mighty figure, strengthened bythe years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whinbushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck thewild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as hecrushed them, now stopping to watch the water-wagtail by the ponds as hedescanted upon the powers of that enchanted bird—powers, like many humanendowments, more glorious than pleasant, if it is sober truth, as Borrowwould gravely tell, that the gipsy lad who knocks a water-wagtail on thehead with a stone gains for a bride a “ladye from a far countrie, ” anddazzles with his good luck all the other black-eyed young urchins of thedingle. 

Though my own intimacy with Borrow did not begin till he was considerablyadvanced in years, and ended on his finally quitting London for Oulton, there were circumstances in our intercourse—circumstances, I mean, connected partly with temperament and partly with mutual experience—whichmake me doubt whether any one understood him better than I did, or brokemore thoroughly through that exclusiveness of temper which isolated himfrom all but a few. However, be this as it may, no one at least realizedmore fully than I how lovable was his nature, with all hisangularities—how simple and courageous, how manly and noble. Hisshyness, his apparent coldness, his crotchety obstinacy, repelled people, and consequently those who at any time during his life really understoodhim must have been very few. How was it, then, that such a man wanderedabout over Europe and fraternized so completely with a race so suspiciousand intractable as the gipsies? A natural enough question, which I haveoften been asked, and this is my reply:—

Those who know the gipsies will understand me when I say that thissuspicious and wary race of wanderers—suspicious and wary from aninstinct transmitted through ages of dire persecutions from the Childrenof the Roof—will readily fraternize with a blunt, single-minded, and shyeccentric like Borrow, while perhaps the skilful man of the world mayfind all his tact and _savoir faire_ useless and, indeed, in the way. And the reason of this is not far to seek, perhaps. What a gipsy mostdislikes is the feeling that his “gorgio” interlocutor is thinking abouthim; for, alas! to be the object of “gorgio” thoughts—has it not been amost dangerous and mischievous honour to every gipsy since first hismysterious race was driven to accept the grudging hospitality of theWestern world? A gipsy hates to be watched, and knows at once when he isbeing watched; for in tremulous delicacy of apprehension his organizationis far beyond that of an Englishman, or, indeed, of any member of any ofthe thick-fingered races of Europe. One of the results of this excessivedelicacy is that a gipsy can always tell to a surety whether a “gorgio”companion is thinking about him, or whether the “gorgio’s” thoughts arereally and genuinely occupied with the fishing rod, the net, the gin, thegun, or whatsoever may be the common source of interest that has drawnthem together. 

Now, George Borrow, after the first one or two awkward interviews werewell over, would lapse into a kind of unconscious ruminating bluntness, apronounced and angular self-dependence, which might well disarm thesuspiciousness of the most wary gipsy, from the simple fact that it wasgenuine. Hence, as I say, among the few who understood Borrow his gipsyfriends very likely stood first—outside, of course, his family circle. And surely this is an honour to Borrow; for the gipsies, notwithstandingcertain undeniable obliquities in matters of morals and cusine, are theonly people left in the island who are still free from British vulgarity(perhaps because they are not British). It is no less an honour to them, for while he lived the island did not contain a nobler English gentlemanthan him they called the “Romany Rye. ”

Borrow’s descriptions of gipsy life are, no doubt, too deeply chargedwith the rich lights shed from his own personality entirely to satisfy amore matter-of-fact observer, and I am not going to say that he isanything like so photographic as F. H. Groome, for instance, or sotrustworthy. But then it should never be forgotten that Borrow was, before everything else, a poet. If this statement should be challengedby “the present time, ” let me tell the present time that by poet I do notmean merely a man who is skilled in writing lyrics and sonnets and thatkind of thing, but primarily a man who has the poetic gift of seeingthrough “the shows of things” and knowing where he is—the gift ofdrinking deeply of the waters of life and of feeling grateful to Naturefor so sweet a draught; a man who, while acutely feeling the ineffablepathos of human life, can also feel how sweet a thing it is to live, having so great and rich a queen as Nature for his mother, and forcompanions any number of such amusing creatures as men and women. Inthis sense I cannot but set Borrow, with his love of nature and his loveof adventure, very high among poets—as high, perhaps, as I place anotherdweller in tents, Sylvester Boswell himself, “the well-known andpopalated gipsy of Codling Gap, ” who, like Borrow, is famous for “hisgreat knowledge in grammaring one of the ancientist langeges on record, ”and whose touching preference of a gipsy tent to a roof, “on the accentof health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure ofNature’s life, ” is expressed with a poetical feeling such as Chaucermight have known had he not, as a court poet, been too genteel. “Enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life!” That is what Borrow did; andhow few there are that understand it. 

The self-consciousness which in the presence of man produces that kind ofshyness which was Borrow’s characteristic left him at once when he waswith Nature alone or in the company of an intimate friend. At her, noman’s gaze was more frank and childlike than his. Hence the charm of hisbooks. No man’s writing can take you into the country as Borrow’s can:it makes you feel the sunshine, see the meadows, smell the flowers, hearthe skylark sing and the grasshopper chirrup. Who else can do it? Iknow of none. And as to personal intercourse with him, if I were askedwhat was the chief delight of this, I should say that it was the delightof bracingness. A walking tour with a self-conscious lover of thepicturesque—an “interviewer” of Nature with a note-book—worrying you toadmire _him_ for admiring Nature so much, is one of those occasionalcalamities of life which a gentleman and a Christian must sometimesheroically bear, but the very thought of which will paralyze with fearthe sturdiest Nature-worshipper, whom no crevasse or avalanche ortreacherous mist can appal. But a walk and talk with Borrow as he strodethrough the bracken on an autumn morning had the exhilarating effect uponhis companion of a draught of the brightest mountain air. And this wasthe result not, assuredly, of any exuberance of animal spirits (Borrow, indeed, was subject to fits of serious depression), but rather of afeeling he induced that between himself and all nature, from the cloudsfloating lazily over head to the scented heather, crisp and purple, underfoot, there was an entire fitness and harmony—a sort of mutualunderstanding, indeed. There was, I say, something bracing in the verylook of this silvery-haired giant as he strode along with a kind of easysloping movement, like that of a St. Bernard dog (the most deceptive ofall movements as regards pace), his beardless face (quite matchless forsymmetrical beauty) beaded with the healthy perspiration drops of strongexercise, and glowing and rosy in the sun. 

As a vigorous old man Borrow never had an equal, I think. There has beenmuch talk of the vigour of Shelley’s friend, E. J. Trelawny. I knew thatsplendid old corsair, and admired his agility of limb and brain; but atseventy Borrow could have walked off with Trelawny under his arm. Atseventy years of age, after breakfasting at eight o’clock in HerefordSquare, he would walk to Putney, meet one or more of us at Roehampton, roam about Wimbledon and Richmond Park with us, bathe in the Fen Pondswith a north-east wind cutting across the icy water like a razor, runabout the grass afterwards like a boy to shake off some of thewater-drops, stride about the park for hours, and then, after fasting fortwelve hours, eat a dinner at Roehampton that would have done Sir WalterScott’s eyes good to see. Finally, he would walk back to HerefordSquare, getting home late at night. 

And if the physique of the man was bracing, his conversation, unless hehappened to be suffering from one of his occasional fits of depression, was still more so. Its freshness, raciness, and eccentric whim no pencould describe. There is a kind of humour the delight of which is thatwhile you smile at the pictures it draws, you smile quite as much or moreto think that there is a mind so whimsical, crotchety, and odd as to drawthem. This was the humour of Borrow. His command of facialexpression—though he seemed to exercise it almost involuntarily andunconsciously—had, no doubt, much to do with this charm. Once, when hewas talking to me about the men of Charles Lamb’s day—_The LondonMagazine_ set—I asked him what kind of a man was the notorious andinfamous Griffiths Wainewright. {32} In a moment Borrow’s face changed:his mouth broke into a Carker-like smile, his eyes became elongated to anexpression that was at once fawning and sinister, as he said, “Wainewright! He used to sit in an armchair close to the fire and_smile_ all the evening like _this_. ” He made me see Wainewright andhear his voice as plainly as though I had seen him and heard him in thepublishers’ parlour. 

His vocabulary, rich in picturesque words of the high road and dingle, his quaint countrified phrases, might also have added to the effect ofthis kind of eccentric humour. “A duncie book—of course it’s duncie—it’sonly duncie books that sell nowadays, ” he would shout when some new“immortal poem” or “greatest work of the age” was mentioned. Tennyson, Ifear, was the representative duncie poet of the time; but that wasbecause nothing could ever make Borrow realize the fact that Tennyson wasnot the latest juvenile representative of a “duncie” age; for although, according to Leland, {33} the author of ‘Sordello’ is (as is natural, perhaps) the only bard known in the gipsy tent, it is doubtful whethereven his name was more than a name to Borrow; indeed, I think that peoplewho had no knowledge of Romany, Welsh, and Armenian were all more or less“duncie. ” As a trap to catch the “foaming vipers, ” his critics, he in‘Lavengro’ purposely misspelt certain Armenian and Welsh words, just tohave the triumph of saying in another volume that they who had attackedhim on so many points had failed to discover that he had wrongly given“zhats” as the nominative of the Armenian noun for bread, while everybodyin England, especially every critic, ought to know that “zhats” is theaccusative form. 

I will try, however, to give the reader an idea of the whim of Borrow’sconversation, by giving it in something like a dramatic form. Let thereader suppose himself on a summer’s evening at that delightful oldroadside inn the Bald-Faced Stag, in the Roehampton Valley, near RichmondPark, where are sitting, over a “cup” (to use Borrow’s word) of foamingale, Lavengro himself, one of his oldest friends, and a new acquaintance, a certain student of things in general lately introduced to Borrow andnearly, but not quite, admitted behind the hedge of Borrow’s shyness, asmay be seen by the initiated from a certain rather constrained, half-resentful expression on his face. Jerry Abershaw’s {34} sword (thechief trophy of mine host) has been introduced, and Borrow’s old friendhas been craftily endeavouring to turn the conversation upon that everfresh and fruitful topic, but in vain. Suddenly the song of anightingale, perched on a tree not far off, rings pleasantly through theopen window and fills the room with a new atmosphere of poetry andromance. “That nightingale has as fine a voice, ” says Borrow, “as thoughhe were born and bred in the Eastern Counties. ” Borrow is proud of beingan East-Anglian, of which the student has already been made aware andwhich he now turns to good account in the important business he has sethimself, of melting Lavengro’s frost and being admitted a member of theOpen-Air Club. “Ah!” says the wily-student, “I know the EasternCounties; no nightingales like those, especially Norfolk nightingales. ”Borrow’s face begins to brighten slightly, but still he does not directhis attention to the stranger, who proceeds to remark that although thesouthern counties are so much warmer than Norfolk, some of them, such asCornwall and Devon, are without nightingales. Borrow’s face begins toget brighter still, and he looks out of the window with a smile, asthough he were being suddenly carried back to the green lanes of hisbeloved Norfolk. 

“From which well-known fact of ornithology, ” continues the student, “I amdriven to infer that in their choice of habitat nightingales are guidednot so much by considerations of latitude as of good taste. ” Borrow’sanger is evidently melting away. The talk runs still upon nightingales, and the student mentions the attempt to settle them in Scotland once madeby Sir John Sinclair, who introduced nightingales’ eggs from England intorobins’ nests in Scotland, in the hope that the young nightingales, afterenjoying a Scotch summer, would return to the place of their birth, afterthe custom of English nightingales. “And did they return?” says Borrow, with as much interest as if the honour of his country were involved inthe question. “Return to Scotland?” says the student quietly; “theentire animal kingdom are agreed, you know, in never returning toScotland. Besides, the nightingales’ eggs in question were laid inNorfolk. ” Conquered at last, Borrow extends the hand of brotherhood tothe impudent student (whose own private opinion, no doubt, is thatNorfolk is more successful in producing Nelsons than nightingales), andproceeds without more ado to tell how “poor Jerry Abershaw, ” on beingcaptured by the Bow Street runners, had left his good sword behind him asa memento of highway glories soon to be ended on the gallows tree. (By-the-bye, I wonder where that sword is now; it was bought by Mr. Adolphus Levy, of Alton Lodge, at the closing of the Bald-Faced Stag. )

From Jerry Abershaw Borrow gets upon other equally interesting topics, such as the decadence of beer and pugilism, and the nobility of the nowneglected British bruiser, as exampled especially in the case of thenoble Pearce, who lost his life through rushing up a staircase andrescuing a woman from a burning house after having on a previous occasionrescued another woman by blacking the eyes of six gamekeepers, who hadbeen set upon her by some noble lord or another. Then, while the alesparkles with a richer colour as the evening lights grow deeper, the talkgets naturally upon “lords” in general, gentility nonsense, and“hoity-toityism” as the canker at the heart of modern civilization. 

II. 

Borrow could look at Nature without thinking of himself—a rare gift, forNature, as I have said, has been disappointed in man. Her great desirefrom the first has been to grow an organism so conscious that it can turnround and look at her with intelligent eyes. She has done so at last, but the consciousness is so high as to be self-conscious, and man cannotfor egotism look at his mother after all. Borrow was a great exception. Thoreau’s self-consciousness showed itself in presence of Nature, Borrow’s in presence of man. The very basis of Borrow’s nature wasreverence. His unswerving belief in the beneficence of God was mostbeautiful, most touching. In his life Borrow had suffered much: atemperament such as his must needs suffer much—so shy it was, so proud, and yet yearning for a close sympathy such as no creature and onlysolitary communing with Nature can give. Under any circumstances, I say, Borrow would have known how sharp and cruel are the flints along theroad—how tender are a poet’s feet; but _his_ road at one time was roughindeed; not when he was with his gipsy friends (for a tent is freer thana roof, according to the grammarian of Codling Gap, and roast hedgehog isthe daintiest of viands), but when he was toiling in London, his finegifts unrecognized and useless—_that_ was when Borrow passed through thefire. Yet every sorrow and every disaster of his life he traced to thekindly hand of a benevolent and wise Father, who sometimes will use awhip of scorpions, but only to chastise into a right and happy course thechildren he loves. 

Apart from the instinctive rectitude of his nature, it was with Borrow adeep-rooted conviction that sin never goes, and never can go, unpunished. His doctrine, indeed, was something like the Buddhist doctrine ofKarma—it was based on an instinctive apprehension of the sacredness of“law” in the most universal acceptation of that word. SylvesterBoswell’s definition of a free man, in that fine, self-respectivecertificate of his, as one who is “free from all cares or fears of lawthat may come against him, ” is, indeed, the gospel of every truenature-worshipper. The moment Thoreau spurned the legal tax-gatherer thelaw locked the nature-worshipper in gaol. To enjoy nature the soul_must_ be free—free not only from tax-gatherers, but from sin; for everywrongful act awakes, out of the mysterious bosom of Nature herself, itsown peculiar serpent, having its own peculiar stare, but always hungryand bloody-fanged, which follows the delinquent’s feet whithersoever theygo, gliding through the dewy grass on the brightest morning, dodginground the trees on the calmest eve, wriggling across the brook where thewrongdoer would fain linger on the stepping-stones to soothe his soulwith the sight of the happy minnows shooting between thewater-weeds—following him everywhere, in short, till at last, in sheerdesperation, he must needs stop and turn, and bare his breast to thefangs; when, having yielded up to the thing its fill of atoning blood, Nature breaks into her old smile again, and he goes on his way in peace. 

All this Borrow understood better than any man I have ever met. Yet eveninto his doctrine of Providence Borrow imported such an element of whimthat it was impossible to listen to him sometimes without a smile. Forinstance, having arrived at the conclusion that a certain lieutenant hadbeen cruelly ill used by genteel magnates high in office, Borrowdiscovered that since that iniquity Providence had frowned on the Britisharms, and went on to trace the disastrous blunder of Balaklava to thiscause. Again, having decided that Sir Walter Scott’s worship ofgentility and Jacobitism had been the main cause of the revival offlunkeyism and Popery in England, Borrow saw in the dreadful monetarydisasters which overclouded Scott’s last days the hand of God, whose planwas to deprive him of the worldly position Scott worshipped at the verymoment when his literary fame (which he misprized) was dazzling theworld. 

And now as to the gipsy wanderings. As I have said, no man has been moreentirely misunderstood than Borrow. That a man who certainly did (as F. H. Groome says) look like a “colossal clergyman” should have joined thegipsies, that he should have wandered over England and Europe, contentoften to have the grass for his bed and the sky for his hostry-roof, hasastonished very much (and I believe scandalized very much) this age. Myexplanation of the matter is this: Among the myriads of children borninto a world of brick and mortar there appears now and then one who ismeant for better things—one who exhibits unmistakable signs that heinherits the blood of those remote children of the open air who, according to the old Sabæan notion, on the plains of Asia lived withNature, loved Nature and were loved by her, and from whom all men aredescended. George Borrow was one of those who show the olden strain. Now, for such a man, born in a country like England, where the modernfanaticism of house-worship has reached a condition which can only becalled maniacal, what is there left but to try for a time the gipsy’stent? On the Continent house-worship is strong enough in all conscience;but in France, in Spain, in Italy, even in Germany, people do think ofsomething beyond the house. But here, where there are no romanticcrimes, to get a genteel house, to keep (or “run”) a genteel house, or topretend to keep (or “run”) a genteel house, is the great first cause ofalmost every British delinquency, from envy and malignant slander up toforgery, robbery, and murder. And yet it is a fact, as Borrow discovered(when a mere lad in a solicitor’s office), that to men in health thehouse need not, and should not, be the all-absorbing consideration, butshould be quite secondary to considerations of honesty and sweet air, pure water, clean linen, good manners, freedom to migrate at will, and, above all, freedom from “all cares or fears of law” that may come againsta man in the shape of debts, duns, and tax-gatherers. 

Against this folly of softening our bodies by “snugness” and degradingour souls by “flunkeyism, ” Borrow’s early life was a protest. He sawthat if it were really unwholesome for man to be shone upon by the sun, blown upon by the winds, and rained upon by the rain, like all the otheranimals, man would never have existed at all, for sun and wind and rainhave produced him and everything that lives. He saw that for thecultivation of health, honesty, and good behaviour every man born in thetemperate zone ought, unless King Circumstance says “No, ” to spend in theopen air eight or nine hours at least out of the twenty-four, and oughtto court rather than to shun Nature’s sweet shower-bath the rain, unless, of course, his chest is weak. 

The evanescence of literary fame is strikingly illustrated by recallingat this moment my first sight of Borrow. I could not have been much morethan a boy, for I and a friend had gone down to Yarmouth in March toenjoy the luxury of bathing in a Yarmouth sea, and it is certainly a“good while”—to use Borrow’s phrase—since I considered _that_ a luxurysuitable to March. On the morning after our arrival, having walked somedistance out of Yarmouth, we threw down our clothes and towels upon thesand some few yards from another heap of clothes, which indicated, to oursurprise, that we were not, after all, the only people in Yarmouth whocould bathe in a biting wind; and soon we perceived, ducking in animmense billow that came curving and curling towards the shore, such apair of shoulders as I had not seen for a long time, crowned by a headwhite and glistening as burnished silver. (Borrow’s hair was white Ibelieve, when he was quite a young man. ) When the wave had broken uponthe sand, there was the bather wallowing on the top of the water like aPolar bear disporting in an Arctic sun. In swimming Borrow clawed thewater like a dog. I had plunged into the surf and got very close to theswimmer, whom I perceived to be a man of almost gigantic proportions, when suddenly an instinct told me that it was Lavengro himself, who livedthereabouts, and the feeling that it was he so entirely stopped theaction of my heart that I sank for a moment like a stone, soon to riseagain, however, in glow of pleasure and excitement: so august a presencewas Lavengro’s then!

I ought to say, however, that Borrow was at that time my hero. From mychildhood I had taken the deepest interest in proscribed races such asthe Cagots, but especially in the persecuted children of Roma. I hadread accounts of whole families being executed in past times for no othercrime than that of their being born gipsies, and tears, childish and yetbitter, had I shed over their woes. Now Borrow was the recognizedchampion of the gipsies—the friend companion, indeed, of the proscribedand persecuted races of the world. Nor was this all: I saw in him moreof the true Nature instinct than in any other writer—or so, at least, Iimagined. To walk out from a snug house at Rydal Mount for the purposeof making poetical sketches for publication seemed to me a very differentthing from having no home but a tent in a dingle, or rather from Borrow’sfashion of making all Nature your home. Although I would have givenworlds to go up and speak to him as he was tossing his clothes upon hisback, I could not do it. Morning after morning did I see him undress, wallow in the sea, come out again, give me a somewhat sour look, dress, and then stride away inland at a tremendous pace, but never could I speakto him; and many years passed before I saw him again. He was then halfforgotten. 

For an introduction to him at last I was indebted to Dr. Gordon Hake, thepoet, who had known Borrow for many years, and whose friendship Borrowcherished above most things—as was usual, indeed, with the friends of Dr. Hake. This was done with some difficulty, for, in calling at Roehamptonfor a walk through Richmond Park and about the Common, Borrow’s firstquestion was always, “Are you alone?” and no persuasion could induce himto stay unless it could be satisfactorily shown that he would not be“pestered by strangers. ” On a certain morning, however, he called, andsuddenly coming upon me, there was no retreating, and we were introduced. He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much annoyed. Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that drew my heartto him, for to me he was the Lavengro of my boyhood still. My ownshyness had been long before fingered off by the rough handling of theworld, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier itwas, yet I attacked it manfully. I knew that Borrow had read but littleexcept in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then unfortunately, likeall specialists, he considered that in these his own special directionslay all the knowledge that was of any value. Accordingly, what appearedto Borrow as the most striking characteristic of the present age was itsignorance. 

Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk of his ownpublished books or of gipsies appeared to him to be “prying, ” thoughthere I should have been quite at home. I knew, however, that in theobscure English pamphlet literature of the last century, recording thesayings and doings of eccentric people and strange adventurers, Borrowwas very learned, and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in thatdirection. I touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect. Borrow evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiarwith the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail. Then Itouched upon beer, the British bruiser, “gentility-nonsense, ” the“trumpery great”; then upon etymology, traced hoity-toityism to _toit_, aroof, —but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a witheringsmile. I tried other subjects in the same direction, but with smallsuccess, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett. There is a very scarce eighteenth-century pamphlet narrating the story ofAmbrose Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted formurdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at aseaside inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet irons, went tosea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war thevery man he had been hanged for murdering. The truth was that Gwinett’ssupposed victim, having been attacked on the night in question by aviolent bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a fewminutes’ walk in the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him andbore him off to sea, where he had been in service ever since. The storyis true, and the pamphlet, Borrow afterwards told me (I know not on whatauthority), was written by Goldsmith from Gwinett’s dictation for aplatter of cowheel. 

To the bewilderment of Dr. Hake, I introduced the subject of AmbroseGwinett in the same manner as I might have introduced the story of“Achilles’ wrath, ” and appealed to Dr. Hake (who, of course, had neverheard of the book or the man) as to whether a certain incident in thepamphlet had gained or lost by the dramatist who, at one of the minortheatres, had many years ago dramatized the story. Borrow was caught atlast. “What?” said he, “you know that pamphlet about Ambrose Gwinett?”“Know it?” said I, in a hurt tone, as though he had asked me if I knew‘Macbeth’; “of course I know Ambrose Gwinett, Mr. Borrow, don’t you?”“And you know the play?” said he. “Of course I do, Mr. Borrow?” I said, in a tone that was now a little angry at such an insinuation of crassignorance. “Why, ” said he, “it’s years and years since it was acted; Inever was much of a theatre man, but I did go to see _that_. ” “Well, Ishould rather think you _did_, Mr. Borrow, ” said I. “But, ” said he, staring hard at me, “_you_—you were not born!” “And I was not born, ”said I, “when the ‘Agamemnon’ was produced, and yet one reads the‘Agamemnon, ’ Mr. Borrow. I have read the drama of ‘Ambrose Gwinett. ’ Ihave it bound in morocco with some more of Douglas Jerrold’s earlytranspontine plays, and some Æschylean dramas by Mr. Fitzball. I willlend it to you, Mr. Borrow, if you like. ” He was completely conquered. “Hake!” he cried, in a loud voice, regardless of my presence. “Hake!your friend knows everything. ” Then he murmured to himself, “Wonderfulman! Knows Ambrose Gwinett!”

It is such delightful reminiscences as these that will cause me to haveas long as I live a very warm place in my heart for the memory of GeorgeBorrow. 

From that time I used to see Borrow often at Roehampton, sometimes atPutney, and sometimes, but not often, in London. I could have seen muchmore of him than I did had not the whirlpool of London, into which Iplunged for a time, borne me away from this most original of men; andthis is what I so greatly lament now: for of Borrow it may be said, as itwas said of a greater man still, that “after Nature made _him_ sheforthwith broke the mould. ” The last time I ever saw him was shortlybefore he left London to live in the country. It was, I remember well, on Waterloo Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singularand striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists werereeling and boiling over the West-End. Borrow came up and stood leaningover the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be. Like mostpeople born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets. Turnercould not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could notdescribe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun and hadlost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose above the roofs, steeples, and towers, it went curling round the sinking sun in a rosyvapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a golden rim, which gleamedas dazzlingly as in the thinnest and clearest air—a peculiar effect whichstruck Borrow deeply. I never saw such a sunset before or since, noteven on Waterloo Bridge; and from its association with “the last ofBorrow” I shall never forget it. 

III. 

Students of Borrow will be as much surprised as pleased to find what alarge collection of documents Dr. Knapp has been able to use in compilingthis long-expected biography. {50} Indeed, the collection might havebeen larger and richer still. For instance, in the original manuscriptof ‘Zincali’ (in the possession of the present writer) there are somevariations from the printed text; but, what is of very much moreimportance, the whole—or nearly the whole—of Borrow’s letters to theBible Society, which Dr. Knapp believed to be lost, have been discoveredin the crypt of the Bible House in which the records of the Society arestored. But even without these materials two massive volumes crammedwith documents throwing light upon the life and career of a man likeGeorge Borrow must needs be interesting to the student of Englishliterature. For among all the remarkable characters that during themiddle of the present century figured in the world of letters, the mosteccentric, the most whimsical, and in every way the most extraordinarywas surely the man whom Dr. Knapp calls, appropriately enough, his“hero. ”

It is no exaggeration to say that there was not a single point in whichBorrow resembled any other writing man of his time; indeed, we cannot, atthe moment, recall any really important writer of any period whoseeccentricity of character can be compared with his. At the basis of theartistic temperament is generally that “sweet reasonableness” the lack ofwhich we excuse in Borrow and in almost no one else. As to literarywhim, it must not be supposed that this quality is necessarily and alwaysthe outcome of temperament. There are some authors of whom it may besaid that the moment they take pen in hand they pass into their “literarymood, ” a mood that in their cases does not seem to be born oftemperament, but to spring from some fantastic movement of the intellect. Sterne, for instance, the greatest of all masters of whim (not excludingRabelais), passed when in the act of writing into a literary mood which, as “Yorick, ” he tried to live up to in his private life—tried in vain. With regard to Charles Lamb, his temperament, no doubt, was whimsicalenough, and yet how many rich and rare passages in his writings areinformed by a whim of a purely intellectual kind—a whim which could onlyhave sprung from that delicious literary mood of his, engendered by muchstudy of quaint old writers, into which he passed when at his desk! Butwhatsoever is whimsical, whatsoever is eccentric and angular, in Borrow’swritings is the natural, the inevitable growth of a nature morewhimsical, more eccentric, more angular still. 

That such a man should have had an extraordinary life-experience was tobe expected. And an extraordinary life-experience Borrow’s was, to besure! This alone would lend an especial interest to Borrow’sbiography—the fact, we mean, of his life having been extraordinary. Forin these days no lives, as a rule, are less adventurous, none, as a rule, less tinged with romance, than the lives of those who attain eminence inthe world of letters. No doubt they nowadays move about from place toplace a good deal; not a few of them may even be called travellers, or atleast globe-trotters; but, alas! in globe-trotting who shall hope to meetwith adventures of a more romantic kind than those connected with arailway collision or a storm at sea? And this was so in days thatpreceded ours. It was so with Scott, it was so with Dickens, it was sowith even Dumas, who, chained to his desk for months and months at astretch, could only be seen by his friends during the intervals of work. Nay, even with regard to the writing men of the far past, the more time aman gave to literary production the less time he had to drink the richwine of life, to see the world, to study nature and nature’s enigma man. 

Perhaps one reason why we have almost no record of what the greatest ofall writing men was doing in the world is that while his friends wereelbowing the tide of life in the streets of London, or fighting in theLow Countries, or carousing at the Mermaid Tavern, or at the ApolloSaloon, he was filling every moment with work—work which enabled him, before he reached his fifty-second year, to build up that literarymonument of his, that edifice which made the monuments of the others, hiscontemporaries, seem like the handiwork of pigmies. But as regardsBorrow, student though he was, it is not as an author that we think ofhim; it is as the adventurer, it is as the great Romany Rye, whodiscovered the most interesting people in Europe, and as a brothervagabond lived with them—lived with them “on the accont of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life, ” toquote the “testimonial” of the prose-poet Sylvester Boswell. 

Even by his personal appearance Borrow was marked off from hisfellow-men. As a gipsy girl once remarked, “Nobody as ever see’d thewhite-headed Romany Rye ever forgot him. ” Standing considerably abovesix feet in height, he was built as perfectly as a Greek statue, and hispractice of athletic exercises gave his every movement the easyelasticity of an athlete under training. As to his countenance, “noble”is the only word that can be used to describe it. The silvery whitenessof the thick crop of hair seemed to add in a remarkable way to the beautyof the hairless face, but also it gave a strangeness to it, and thisstrangeness was intensified by a certain incongruity between the features(perfect Roman-Greek in type) and the Scandinavian complexion, luminousand sometimes rosy as an English girl’s. An increased intensity was lentby the fair skin to the dark lustre of the eyes. What struck theobserver, therefore, was not the beauty but the strangeness of the man’sappearance. It was not this feature or that which struck the eye, it wasthe expression of the face as a whole. If it were possible to describethis expression in a word or two, it might, perhaps, be called a shyself-consciousness. 

How did it come about, then, that a man shy, self-conscious, andsensitive to the last degree, became the Ulysses of the writingfraternity, wandering among strangers all over Europe, and consorting onintimate terms with that race who, more than all others, are repelled byshy self-consciousness—the gipsies? This, perhaps, is how the puzzle maybe explained. When Borrow was talking to people in his own class of lifethere was always in his bearing a kind of shy, defiant egotism. WhatCarlyle calls the “armed neutrality” of social intercourse oppressed him. He felt himself to be in the enemy’s camp. In his eyes there was alwaysa kind of watchfulness, as if he were taking stock of his interlocutorand weighing him against himself. He seemed to be observing what effecthis words were having, and this attitude repelled people at first. Butthe moment he approached a gipsy on the heath, or a poor Jew inHoundsditch, or a homeless wanderer by the wayside, he became anotherman. He threw off the burden of restraint. The feeling of the “armedneutrality” was left behind, and he seemed to be at last enjoying theonly social intercourse that could give him pleasure. This it was thatenabled him to make friends so entirely with the gipsies. Notwithstanding what is called “Romany guile” (which is the growth ofages of oppression), the basis of the Romany character is a joyousfrankness. Once let the isolating wall which shuts off the Romany fromthe “Gorgio” be broken through, and the communicativeness of the Romanytemperament begins to show itself. The gipsies are extremely closeobservers; they were very quick to notice how different was Borrow’sbearing towards themselves from his bearing towards people of his ownrace, and Borrow used to say that “old Mrs. Herne and Leonora were theonly gipsies who suspected and disliked him. ”

Thus it came about that the gipsies and the wanderers generally werealmost the only people in any country who saw the winsome side of Borrow. A truly winsome side he had. Yes, notwithstanding all that has been saidabout him to the contrary, Borrow was a most interesting and charmingcompanion. We all have our angularities; we all have unpleasant facetsof character when occasion offers for showing them. But there are someunfortunate people whose angularities are for ever chafing and irritatingtheir friends. Borrow was one of these. It is very rarely indeed thatone meets a friend or an acquaintance of Borrow’s who speaks of him withthe kindness he deserved. When a friend or an acquaintance relates ananecdote of him the asperity with which he does so is really remarkableand quite painful. It was—it must have been—far from Dr. Gordon Hake’swish to speak unkindly of his old friend who remained to the last deeplyattached to him. And yet few things have done more to prejudice thepublic against Borrow than the Doctor’s tale of Lavengro’s outrage atRougham Rookery, the residence of the banker Bevan, one of the kindestand most benevolent men in Suffolk. 

This story, often told by Hake, appeared at last in print in his memoirs. Invited to dinner by Mr. Bevan, Borrow accepted the invitation and, according to the anecdote, thus behaved: During dinner Mrs. Bevan, thinking to please him, said, “Oh, Mr. Borrow, I have read your bookswith so much pleasure!” On which Borrow exclaimed, “Pray what books doyou mean, ma’am—do you mean my account books?” Then, rising from thetable, he walked up and down among the servants during the whole dinner, and afterwards wandered about the rooms and passages till the carriagecould be ordered for his return home. A monstrous proceeding truly, andnot to be condoned by any circumstances. Yet some part of its violencemay, perhaps, thus be explained. Borrow’s loyalty to a friend wasproverbial—until he and the friend quarrelled. A man who dared say anungenerous word against a friend of Borrow’s ran the risk of beingknocked down. Borrow on this occasion had been driven half mad withrage—unreasoning, ignorant rage—against the Bury banking-house, becauseit had “struck the docket” against a friend of Borrow’s, the heir to aconsiderable estate, who had got into difficulties. What Borrow yearnedto do was, as he told the present writer, to cane the banker. He had, asfar as his own reputation went, far better have done this and taken theconsequences than have insulted the banker’s wife—one of the most gentle, amiable, and unassuming ladies in Suffolk. Dr. Knapp speaks very sharplyof Miss Cobb’s remarks upon Borrow, and certainly these remarks are madewith a great deal too much acidity. But if the Borrovian is to losetemper with every one who girds at Borrow he will lead a not verycomfortable life. 

Dr. Knapp has no doubt whatever that ‘Lavengro’ is in the main anautobiography. We have none. The only question is how much _Dichtung_is mingled with the _Wahrheit_. Had it not been for the amazingly clumsypieces of fiction which he threw into the narrative—such incidents asthat of his meeting on the road the sailor son of the old apple-woman ofLondon Bridge, and the exaggerated description of the man sent to sleepby reading Wordsworth—few readers would have doubted the autobiographicalnature of ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye. ’ Such incidents as these shedan air of unreality over the whole. 

All writers upon Borrow fall into the mistake of considering him to havebeen an East Anglian. They might as well call Charlotte Brontë aYorkshirewoman as call Borrow an East Anglian. He was, of course, nomore an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman. He had at bottom no East Anglian characteristics. He inherited nothingfrom Norfolk save his accent and his love of “leg of mutton and turnips. ”Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the locality thathas given birth to a man influences him throughout his life. The fact ofBorrow’s having been born in East Anglia was the result of accident. Hisfather, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged, owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his native place and enlist as acommon soldier. Afterwards he became a recruiting officer, and movedabout from one part of Great Britain and Ireland to another. It sochanced that while staying at East Dereham, in Norfolk, he met and fellin love with a lady of French extraction. Not one drop of East Anglianblood was in the veins of Borrow’s father, and very little in the veinsof his mother. Borrow’s ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and onthe other mainly French. But such was the sublime egotism ofBorrow—perhaps we should have said such is the sublime egotism of humannature—that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him lookupon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe. 

There is, it must be confessed, something to us very agreeable in Dr. Knapp’s single-minded hero-worship. A scholar and a philologist himself, he seems to have devoted a large portion of his life to the study ofBorrow—following in Lavengro’s footsteps from one country to another withunflagging enthusiasm. Now and again, undoubtedly, this hero-worshipruns to excess: the faults of style and of method in Borrow’s writingsare condoned or are passed by unobserved by Dr. Knapp, while the mostunanswerable strictures upon them by others are resented. For instance, at the end of the following extract from the report of the gentleman whoread ‘Zincali’ for Mr. Murray, he appends a note of exclamation, asthough he considers the admirable advice given to be eccentric or bad:—

 “The Dialogues are amongst the best parts of the book; but in several of them the tone of the speakers, of those especially who are in humble life, is too correct and elevated, and therefore out of character. This takes away from their effect. I think it would be very advisable that Mr. Borrow should go over them with reference to this point, simplifying a few of the terms of expression and introducing a few contractions—_don’ts_, _can’ts_, &c. This would improve them greatly. ”

Now the truth is that Mr. Murray’s reader, whoever he was, {60} pointedout the one great blemish in _all_ Borrow’s dramatic pictures of gipsylife, wheresoever the scene may be laid. Take his pictures of Englishgipsies. The reader has only to compare the dialogue between gipsiesgiven in that photographic study of Romany life ‘In Gipsy Tents’ with thedialogues in ‘Lavengro’ to see how the illusion in Borrow’s narrative isdisturbed by the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers. After allallowance is made for the Romany’s love of high-sounding words, itconsiderably weakens our belief in Mr. And Mrs. Petulengro, Ursula, andthe rest, to find them using complex sentences and bookish words which, even among English people, are rarely heard in conversation. 

Dr. Knapp says emphatically that Borrow never created a character, andthat the originals are easily recognizable to one who thoroughly knowsthe times and Borrow’s writings. This is true, no doubt, as regardspeople with whom he was brought into contact at Norwich, and, indeed, generally before the period of his gipsy wanderings. It must not besupposed, however, that such characters as the man who “touched” to avertthe evil chance and the man who taught himself Chinese are in any senseportraits. They have so many of Borrow’s own peculiarities that theymight rather be called portraits of himself. There was nothing thatBorrow strove against with more energy than the curious impulse, which heseems to have shared with Dr. Johnson, to touch the objects along hispath in order to save himself from the evil chance. He never conqueredthe superstition. In walking through Richmond Park he would step out ofhis way constantly to touch a tree, and he was offended if the friend hewas with seemed to observe it. Many of the peculiarities of the man whotaught himself Chinese were also Borrow’s own. 

“But what about Isopel Berners?” the reader will ask. “How much of truthand how much of fiction went to the presentation of this most interestingcharacter?” Seeing that Dr. Knapp has at his command such an immenseamount of material in manuscript, the reader will feel somedisappointment at discovering that the book tells us nothing new abouther. The character he names Isopel Berners was just the sort of girl inevery way to attract Borrow, and if he had had the feeblest spark of thelove-passion in his constitution one could almost imagine his falling inlove with her. Yet even the portrait of Isopel is marred by Borrow’simpulse towards exaggeration. He must needs describe her as being tallerthan himself, and as he certainly stood six feet three Isopel would havebeen far better suited to sit by the side of Borrow’s friend the “Norfolkgiant, ” Hales, in the little London public-house where he latterlyresided, than to become famous as a fighting woman who could conquer theFlaming Tinman. Few indeed have been the women who could stand up forlong before a trained boxer, and these must needs be not too tall, andmoreover they must have their breasts padded after the manner of awell-known gipsy girl who excelled in this once fashionableaccomplishment. Even then a woman’s instinct impels her to guard herchest more carefully than she guards her face, and this leads todisaster. Altogether Borrow, by his wilful exaggeration, makes thereader a little sceptical about Isopel, who was really an East Anglianroad-girl of the finest type, known to the Boswells, and remembered notmany years ago. All that Dr. Knapp has derived from the documents in hispossession concerning her is the following extraordinary passage from theoriginal manuscript, which Borrow struck out of ‘Lavengro. ’ He says:—

 “As to the remarkable character introduced into ‘Lavengro’ and ‘Romany Rye’ under the name of Isopel Berners, I have no light from the MSS. Of George Borrow, save the following fragment, which perhaps I ought to have suppressed. I am sorry if it dispel any illusions:—

 “(_Loquitur Petulengro_) ‘My mind at present rather inclines towards two wives. I have heard that King Pharaoh had two, if not more. Now, I think myself as good a man as he; and if he had more wives than one, why should not I, whose name is Petulengro?’

 “‘But what would Mrs. Petulengro say?’

 “‘Why, to tell you the truth, brother, it was she who first put the thought into my mind. She has always, you know, had strange notions in her head, gorgiko notions, I suppose we may call them, about gentility and the like, and reading and writing. Now, though she can neither read nor write herself, she thinks that she is lost among our people and that they are no society for her. So says she to me one day, “Pharaoh, ” says she, “I wish you would take another wife, that I might have a little pleasant company. As for these here, I am their betters. ” “I have no objection, ” said I; “who shall it be? Shall it be a Cooper or a Stanley?” “A Cooper or a Stanley!” said she, with a toss of her head, “I might as well keep my present company as theirs; none of your rubbish; let it be a _gorgie_, one that I can speak an idea with”—that was her word, I think. Now I am thinking that this here Bess of yours would be just the kind of person both for my wife and myself. My wife wants something gorgiko, something genteel. Now Bess is of blood gorgious; if you doubt it, look in her face, all full of _pawno ratter_, white blood, brother; and as for gentility, nobody can make exceptions to Bess’s gentility, seeing she was born in the workhouse of Melford the Short, where she learned to read and write. She is no Irish woman, brother, but English pure, and her father was a farmer. 

 “‘So much as far as my wife is concerned. As for myself, I tell you what, brother, I want a strapper; one who can give and take. The Flying Tinker is abroad, vowing vengeance against us all. I know what the Flying Tinker is, so does Tawno. The Flying Tinker came to our camp. “Damn you all, ” says he, “I’ll fight the best of you for nothing. ”—“Done!” says Tawno, “I’ll be ready for you in a minute. ” So Tawno went into his tent and came out naked. “Here’s at you, ” says Tawno. Brother, Tawno fought for two hours with the Flying Tinker, for two whole hours, and it’s hard to say which had the best of it or the worst. I tell you what, brother, I think Tawno had the worst of it. Night came on. Tawno went into his tent to dress himself and the Flying Tinker went his way. 

 “‘Now suppose, brother, the Flying Tinker comes upon us when Tawno is away. Who is to fight the Flying Tinker when he says: “D---n you, I will fight the best of you”? Brother, I will fight the Flying Tinker for five pounds; but I couldn’t for less. The Flying Tinker is a big man, and though he hasn’t my science, he weighs five stone heavier. It wouldn’t do for me to fight a man like that for nothing. But there’s Bess, who can afford to fight the Flying Tinker at any time for what he’s got, and that’s three ha’pence. She can beat him, brother; I bet five pounds that Bess can beat the Flying Tinker. Now, if I marry Bess, I’m quite easy on his score. He comes to our camp and says his say. “I won’t dirty my hands with you, ” says I, “at least not under five pounds; but here’s Bess who’ll fight you for nothing. ” I tell you what, brother, when he knows that Bess is Mrs. Pharaoh, he’ll fight shy of our camp; he won’t come near it, brother. He knows Bess don’t like him, and what’s more, that she can lick him. He’ll let us alone; at least I think so. If he does come, I’ll smoke my pipe whilst Bess is beating the Flying Tinker. Brother, I’m dry, and will now take a cup of ale. ’”

Why did Borrow reject this passage? Was it owing to his dread ofrespectability’s frowns?—or was it not rather because he felt that herehis exaggeration, his departure from the true in quest of the striking, did not recommend itself to his cooler judgment? For those who knowanything of the gipsies would say at once that it would have beenimpossible for Mrs. Petulengro to make this suggestion; and that, even ifshe had made it, Mr. Petulengro would not have dared to broach it to anyEnglish road-girl, least of all to a girl like Isopel Berners. Thepassage, however, is the most interesting document that Dr. Knapp haspublished. 

What may be called the Isopel Berners chapter of Borrow’s life was soonto be followed by the “veiled period”—that is to say, the period betweenthe point where ends ‘The Romany Rye’ and the point where the BibleSociety engages Borrow. 

Dr. Knapp’s mind seems a good deal exercised concerning this period. Borrow having chosen to draw the veil over that period, no one has anyright to raise it—or, rather, perhaps no one would have had any right todo so had not Borrow himself thrown such a needless mystery around it. In considering any matter in connexion with Borrow it is always necessaryto take into account the secretiveness of his disposition, and also hispassion for posing. He had a child’s fondness for the wonderful. It isthrough his own love of mystification that students like Dr. Knapp mustneeds pry into these matters—must needs ask why Borrow drew the veil overseven years—must needs ask whether during the “veiled period” he led alife of squalid misery, compared with which his sojourn with IsopelBerners in Mumpers’ Dingle was luxury, or whether he was reallytravelling, as he pretended to have been, over the world. 

By yielding to his instinct as a born showman he excites a curiositywhich would otherwise be unjustifiable. Even if Dr. Knapp had been ableto approach Borrow’s stepdaughter—which he seems not to have been able todo—it is pretty certain that she could have told him nothing of thatmysterious seven years. For about this subject the people to whom Borrowseems to have been most reticent were his wife and her daughter. Indeed, it was not until after his wife’s death that he would allude to thisperiod even to his most intimate friends. One of the very few people towhom he did latterly talk with anything like frankness about this periodin his life—Dr. Gordon Hake—is dead; and perhaps there is not more thanabout one other person now living who had anything of his confidence. 

With regard to this veiled period, people who read the idyllic picturesin ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye’ of the life of a gipsy gentlemanworking as a hedge-smith in the dingle or by the roadside seem to forgetthat Borrow was then working not for amusement, but for bread, and theyforget how scant the bread must have been that could be bought for theodd sixpence or the few coppers that he was able to earn. To those, however, who do not forget this it needs no revelation from documents, and none from any surviving friend, to come to the conclusion that asBorrow was mainly living in England during these seven years (continuingfor a considerable time his life of a wanderer, and afterwards living asan obscure literary struggler in Norwich), his life was during thisperiod one of privation, disappointment, and gloom. It was for him todecide what he would give to the public and what he would withhold. 

The concluding chapter of Dr. Knapp’s book is not only pathetic—it ispainful. In the summer of 1874 Borrow left London, bade adieu to Mr. Murray and a few friends, and returned to Oulton—to die. On the 26th ofJuly, 1881, he was found dead in his home at Oulton, in his seventy-ninthyear. 

II. DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI, 1828–1882. 

I. 

At Birchington-on-Sea one of the most rarely gifted men of our time hasjust died [April 9th, 1882] after a lingering illness. During the timethat his ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ was passing through the press last autumnhis health began to give way, and he left London for Cumberland. A stayof a few weeks in the Vale of St. John, however, did nothing to improvehis health, and he returned much shattered. After a time a numbness inthe left arm excited fear of paralysis, and he became dangerously ill. It is probable, indeed, that nothing but the skill and unweariedattention of Mr. John Marshall saved his life then, as it had done uponseveral previous occasions. Such of his friends as were then inLondon—W. B. Scott, Burne Jones, Leyland, F. Shields, Mr. Dunn, andothers—feeling the greatest alarm, showed him every affectionateattention, and spared no effort to preserve a life so precious and sobeloved. Mr. Seddon having placed at his disposal West Cliff Bungalow, Birchington-on-Sea, he went thither, accompanied by his mother and sisterand Mr. Hall Caine, about nine weeks since, but received no benefit fromthe change, and, gradually sinking from a complication of disorders, hedied on Sunday last at 10 P. M. 

 [Picture: Dante Gabriel Rosette. From a crayon-drawing by himself reproduced by the kind permission of Mrs. W. M. Rossetti]

Were I even competent to enter upon the discussion of Rossetti’s gifts asa poet and as a painter, it would not be possible to do so here and atthis moment. That the quality of romantic imagination informs with morevitality his work than it can be said to inform the work of any of hiscontemporaries was recognized at first by the few, and is now (judgingfrom the great popularity of his last volume of poetry) being recognizedby the many. And the same, I think, may be said of his painting. Thosewho had the privilege of a personal acquaintance with him knew how “ofimagination all compact” he was. Imagination, indeed, was at once hisblessing and his bane. To see too vividly—to love too intensely—tosuffer and enjoy too acutely—is the doom, no doubt, of all those “lostwanderers from Arden” who, according to the Rosicrucian story, sing theworld’s songs; and to Rossetti this applies more, perhaps, than to mostpoets. And when we consider that the one quality in all poetry whichreally gives it an endurance outlasting the generation of its birth isneither music nor colour, nor even intellectual substance, but theclearness of the seeing; the living breath of imagination—the veryqualities, in short, for which such poems as ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘RoseMary’ are so conspicuous—we are driven to the conclusion that Rossetti’spoetry has a long and enduring future before it. 

A life more devoted to literature and art than his it is impossible toimagine. Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born at 38, CharlotteStreet, Portland Place, London, on the 12th of May, 1828. He was thefirst son and second child of Gabriele Rossetti, the patriotic poet, who, born at Vasto in the Abruzzi, settled in Naples, and took an active partin extorting from the Neapolitan king Ferdinand I. The constitutiongranted in 1820, which constitution being traitorously cancelled by theking in 1821, Rossetti had to escape for his life to Malta with variousother persecuted constitutionalists. From Malta Gabriele Rossetti wentto England about 1823, where he married in 1826 Frances Polidori, daughter of Alfieri’s secretary and sister of Byron’s Dr. Polidori. Hebecame Professor of Italian in King’s College, London, became alsoprominent as a commentator on Dante, and died in April, 1854. Hischildren, four in number—Maria Francesca, Dante Gabriel, William Michael, and Christina Georgina—all turned to literature or to art, or to both, and all became famous. There can, indeed, be no doubt that the Rossettifamily will hold a position quite unique in the literary and artisticannals of our time. 

Young Rossetti was first sent to the private school of the Rev. Mr. Paulin Foley Street, Portland Place, where he remained, however, for onlythree quarters of a year, from the autumn of 1835 to the summer of 1836. He next went to King’s College School in the autumn of 1836, where heremained till the summer of 1843, having reached the fourth class, thenconducted by the Rev. Mr. Framley. 

Having from early childhood shown a strong propensity for drawing andpainting, which had thus been always regarded as his future profession, he now left school for ever and received no more school learning. InLatin he was already fairly proficient for his age; French he knew well;he had spoken Italian from childhood, and had some German lessons about1844–5. On leaving school he went at once to the Art Academy of Cary(previously called Sass’s) near Bedford Square, and thence obtainedadmission to the Royal Academy Antique School in 1844 or 1845. To theRoyal Academy Life School he never went, and he was a somewhat negligentart student, but always regarded as one who had a future before him. 

In 1849 Rossetti exhibited ‘The Girlhood of the Virgin’ in the so-calledFree Exhibition or Portland Gallery. The artist who had perhaps thestrongest influence upon Rossetti’s early tastes was Ford Madox Brown, who, however, refused from the first to join the Pre-RaphaeliteBrotherhood on the ground that coteries had in modern art no properfunction. Rossetti was deeply impressed with the power and designingfaculty displayed by Madox Brown’s cartoons exhibited in WestminsterHall. When Rossetti began serious work as a painter he thought of MadoxBrown as the one man from whom he would willingly receive practicalguidance, and wrote to him at random. From this time Madox Brown becamehis intimate friend and artistic monitor. 

In painting, however, Rossetti was during this time exercising only halfhis genius. From his childhood it became evident that he was a poet. Atthe age of five he wrote a sort of play called ‘The Slave, ’ which, as maybe imagined, showed no noteworthy characteristic save precocity. Thiswas followed by the poem called ‘Sir Hugh Heron, ’ which was written about1844, and some translations of German poetry. ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and‘Sister Helen’ were produced in their original form so early as 1846 or1847. The latter of these has undergone more modifications than anyother first-class poem of our time. To take even the new edition of the‘Poems’ which appeared last year [1881], the stanzas introducing the wifeof the luckless hero appealing to the sorceress for mercy are soimportant in the glamour they shed back over the stanzas that have gonebefore, that their introduction may almost be characterized as arewriting of every previous line. 

The translations from the early Italian poets also began as far back as1845 or 1846, and may have been mainly completed by 1849. Rossetti’sgifts as a translator were, no doubt, of the highest. And this arosefrom his deep sympathy with literature as a medium of human expression:he could enter into the temperaments of other writers, and by sympathycriticize the literary form from the author’s own inner standpoint, supposing always that there was a certain racial kinship with the author. Many who write well themselves have less sympathy with the expressionalforms adopted by other writers than is displayed by men who have neitherthe impulse nor the power to write themselves. But this sympathybetrayed him sometimes into a free rendering of locutions such as atranslator should be chary of indulging in. Materials for a volumeaccumulated slowly, but all the important portions of the ‘Poems’published in 1870 had been in existence some years before that date. Theprose story of ‘Hand and Soul’ was also written as early as 1848 or 1849. 

In the spring of 1860 he married Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, who beingvery beautiful was constantly painted and drawn by him. She had onestill-born child in 1861, and died in February, 1862. He felt her deathvery acutely, and for a time ceased to write or to take any interest inhis own poetry. Like Prospero, indeed, he literally buried his wand, butfor a time only. From this time to his death he continued to producepictures, all of them showing, as far as technical skill goes, anunfaltering advance in his art. 

Yet wonderful as was Rossetti as an artist and poet, he was still morewonderful, I think, as a man. The chief characteristic of hisconversation was an incisiveness so perfect and clear as to have oftenthe pleasurable surprise of wit. It is so well known that Rossetti hasbeen for a long time the most retired man of genius of our day, and somany absurd causes for this retirement have been spoken of, that there isnothing indecorous in the true cause of it being made public by one whoof late years has known more of him, perhaps, than has any other person. About 1868 the curse of the artistic and poetictemperament—insomnia—attacked him, and one of the most distressingeffects of insomnia is a nervous shrinking from personal contact with anysave a few intimate friends. This peculiar kind of nervousness may beaggravated by the use of sleeping draughts, and in his case was thusaggravated. 

But, although Rossetti lived thus secluded, he did not lose theaffectionate regard of the illustrious men with whom he started in hisartistic life. Nor, assuredly, did he deserve to lose it, for no manever lived, I think, who was so generous as he in sympathizing with othermen’s work, save only when the cruel fumes of chloral turned him againsteverything. And his sympathy was as wide as generous. It was onlynecessary to mention the name of Leighton or Millais or Madox Brown orBurne Jones or G. F. Watts, or, indeed, of any contemporary painter, toget from him a glowing disquisition upon the merits of each—adisquisition full of the subtlest distinctions, and illuminated by thebrilliant lights of his matchless fancy. And it was the same in poetry. 

But those who loved Rossetti (that is to say, those who knew him) canrealize how difficult it is for me, a friend, to pursue just now suchreminiscences as these. 

II. 

In his preface Mr. W. M. Rossetti says:—

 “I have not attempted to write a biographical account of my brother, nor to estimate the range or value of his powers and performances in fine art and in literature. I agree with those who think that a brother is not the proper person to undertake a work of this sort. An outsider can do it dispassionately, though with imperfect knowledge of the facts; a friend can do it with mastery, and without much undue bias; but a brother, however equitably he may address himself to the task, cannot perform it so as to secure the prompt and cordial assent of his readers. ”

These words will serve as a good example of the dignified modesty whichis a characteristic of Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s, and is one of the bestfeatures of this volume. {77} In these days of empty pretence it isalways refreshing to come upon a page written in the spirit of scholarlyself-suppression which informs every line this patient and admirablecritic writes. And as to the interesting question glanced at in thepassage above quoted, though the contents of this volume will, no doubt, form valuable material for the future biography of Rossetti, we wonderwhether the time is even yet at hand when that biography, whether writtenby brother, by friend, or by outsider, is needed. That mysterious entity“the public, ” would, no doubt, like to get one; but we have always sharedRossetti’s own opinion that a man of genius is no more the property ofthe “public” than is any private gentleman; and we have always felt withhim that the prevalence in our time of the opposite opinion has fashionedso intolerable a yoke for the neck of any one who has had the misfortuneto pass from the sweet paradise of obscurity into the vulgar purgatory ofFame, that it almost behoves a man of genius to avoid, if he can, passinginto that purgatory at all. 

Can any biography, by whomsoever written, be other than inchoate andillusory—nay, can it fail to be fraught with danger to the memory of thedead, with danger to the peace of the living, until years have fullycalmed the air around the dead man’s grave? So long as the man to beportrayed cannot be separated from his surroundings, so long as hisportrait cannot be fully and honestly limned without peril to the peaceof those among whom he moved—in a word, so long as there remains anythrob of vitality in those delicate filaments of social life by which hewas enlinked to those with whom he played his part—that brother, or thatfriend, or that outsider who shall attempt the portraiture must feel whatheavy responsibilities are his—must not forget that with him to trip isto sin against the head. And how shall he decide when the time has atlast come for making the attempt? Before the incidents of a man’s lifecan be exploited without any risk of mischief, how much time shouldelapse? “A month, ” say the publishers, each one of whom runs his ownspecial “biographical series, ” and keeps his own special bevy ofrecording angels writing against time and against each other. “Thirtyyears, ” said one whose life-wisdom was so perfect as to be in a worldlike ours almost an adequate substitute for the morality helacked—Talleyrand. 

Of all forms of literary art biography demands from the artist not onlythe greatest courage, but also the happiest combination of the highestgifts. To succeed in painting the portrait of Achilles or of Priam, ofHamlet or of Othello, may be difficult, but is it as difficult as tosucceed in painting the portrait of Browning or Rossetti? Surely not. In the one case an intense dramatic imagination is needed, and nothingmore. If Homer’s Achaian and Trojan heroes were falsely limned, notthey, but Homer’s art, would suffer the injury. If for the purposes ofart the poet unduly exalted this one or unduly abased that—if he misreadone incident in the mythical life of Achilles, and another in themythical life of Hector—he did wrong to his art undoubtedly, but none tothe memory of a dead man, and none to the peace of a living one. Butwith him who would paint the portrait of Browning or Rossetti howdifferent is the case! Although he requires the poet’s vision before hecan paint a living picture of his subject, the task he has set himself todo is something more than artistic: before everything else it isfiduciary. 

A trustee whose trust fund is biographical truth, he has, aftercollecting and marshalling all the facts that come to his hand, to decidewhat is truth as indicated by those generalized facts. But having donethis, he has to decide what is the proper time for giving the world thetruth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—what is the propertime? In the biographer’s relation to the dead man on the one-hand andto the public on the other should he be so unhappy as to forget that timeis of the very “essence of the contract”—should he forget that so inwovenis human life that truth spoken at the wrong moment may be a greatermischief-worker than error—he may, if conscientious, have to rememberthat forgetfulness of his during the remainder of his days. He whothinks that truth may not be sometimes as mischievous as a pestilenceknows but little of this mysterious and wonderful net of human life. Butif this is so with regard to truth, how much more is it so with regard tomere matter of fact? Fact-worship, document-worship, is at once thecrowning folly and the crowning vice of our time. To mistake a fact fora truth, and to give the world that; to throw facts about and documentsabout heedless of the mischief they may work—wronging the dead andwronging the living—this is actually paraded as a virtue in these days. 

Here is a case in point. Down to the very last moment of his lifeRossetti’s feeling towards his great contemporary Tennyson was that ofthe deepest admiration, and yet what says the documentary evidence asgiven to the world by Rossetti’s brother? It shows that Rossetti used anextremely unpleasant phrase concerning a letter from Tennysonacknowledging the receipt of Rossetti’s first volume of poems in 1870. Those who have heard Tennyson speak of Rossetti know that to use thisphrase in relation to any letter of his dealing with Rossetti’s poetrywas to misunderstand it. Yet here are the unpleasant words of a hastymood, “rather shabby, ” in print. And why? Because the public has becomeso demoralized that its feast of facts, its feast of documents it musthave, come what will. But even supposing that the public had any rightswhatsoever in regard to a man of genius, which we deny, what are lettersas indications of a man’s character? Of all modes of expression is notthe epistolary mode that in which man’s instinct for using language “todisguise his thought” is most likely to exercise itself? There is likelyto be far more deep sincerity in a sonnet than in a letter. It is noexaggeration to say that the common courtesies of life demand a certainamount of what is called “blarney” in a letter—especially in an eminentman’s letter—which would ruin a sonnet. And this must be steadily bornein mind at a time like ours, when private letters are bought and soldlike any other article of merchandise, not only immediately after a man’sdeath, but during his lifetime. 

With regard to literary men, their letters in former times were simplyartistic compositions; hence as indications of character they must bejudged by the same canons as literary essays would be judged. In bothcases the writer had full space and full time to qualify his statementsof opinion; in both cases he was without excuse for throwing out anythingheedlessly. Not only in Walpole’s case and Gray’s, but also in CharlesLamb’s, we apply the same rules of criticism to the letters as we applyto the published utterances that appeared in the writer’s lifetime. Butnow, when letters are just the hurried expression of the moment, whenill-considered things—often rash things—are said which either in literarycompositions or in conversation would have been, if said at all, greatlyqualified—the greatest injustice that can be done to a writer is to printhis letters indiscriminately. Especially is this the case with Rossetti. All who knew him speak of him as being a superb critic, and a superbcritic he was. But his printed letters show nothing of the kind. Onliterary subjects they are often full of over-statement and of biasedjudgment. Here is the explanation: in conversation he had a way ofperpetrating a brilliant critical paradox for the very purpose ofqualifying it, turning it about, colouring it by the lights of hiswonderful fancy, until at last it became something quite different fromthe original paradox, and full of truth and wisdom. But when such aparadox went off in a letter, there it remained unqualified; and theywho, not having known him, scoff at his friends who claim for him thehonours of a great critic, seem to scoff with reason. 

No one was more conscious of the treachery of letters than was Rossettihimself. Comparatively late in his life he realized what all eminent menwould do well to realize, that owing to the degradation of public taste, which cries out for more personal gossip and still more every day, thetime has fully come when every man of mark must consider the rights ofhis friends—when it behoves every man who has had the misfortune to passinto fame to burn all letters; and he began the holocaust that duty tofriendship demanded of him. But the work of reading through such acorrespondence as his in order to see what letters must be preserved fromthe burning took more time and more patience than he had contemplated, and the destruction did not progress further than to include the lettersof the early sixties. Business letters it was, of course, necessary topreserve, and very properly it is from these that Mr. W. M. Rossetti hasmainly quoted. 

The volume is divided into two parts: first, documents relating to theproduction of certain of Rossetti’s pictures and poems; and second, aprose paraphrase of ‘The House of Life. ’

The documents consist of abstracts of and extracts from such portions ofRossetti’s correspondence as have fallen into his brother’s hands asexecutor. Dealing as they necessarily do with those complications ofprices and those involved commissions for which Rossetti’s artisticcareer was remarkable, there is a commercial air about the first portionof the book which some will think out of harmony with their conception ofthe painter, about whom there used to be such a mysterious interest untilmuch writing about him had brought him into the light of common day. Infuture years a summary so accurate and so judicious as this will seembetter worth making than it, perhaps, seems at the present moment; forMr. W. M. Rossetti’s love of facts is accompanied by an equally stronglove of making an honest statement of facts—a tabulated statement, ifpossible; and no one writing of Rossetti need hesitate about followinghis brother to the last letter and to the last figure. 

To be precise and perspicuous is, he hints in his preface, better than tobe graphic and entertaining; and we entirely agree with him, especiallywhen the subject discussed is Rossetti, about whom so many fancies thatare neither precise nor perspicuous are current. Still, to read aboutthis picture being offered to one buyer and that to another, and rejectedor accepted at a greatly reduced price after much chaffering, is not, wewill confess, exhilarating reading to those to whom Rossetti’s picturesare also poems. It does not conduce to the happiness of his admirers tothink of such works being produced under such prosaic conditions. Onebuyer—a most worthy man, to be sure, and a true friend of Rossetti’s, butfull of that British superstition about the saving grace of clothes whichis so wonderful a revelation to the pensive foreigner—had to be humouredin his craze against the nude. After having painted a beautifulpartly-draped Gretchen (which, we may remark in passing, had no relation, as Mr. W. M. Rossetti supposes, to the Marguerite alluded to in a letterto Mr. Graham in 1870) from a new model whose characteristics were asuperb bosom and arms, he, Rossetti, was obliged to consent to concealthe best portions of the picture under drapery. 

That this was a matter of great and peculiar vexation to him may besupposed when it is remembered that unequalled as had been his goodfortune in finding fine face-models (ladies of position and culture, andoften of extraordinary beauty), he had in the matter of figure-modelsbeen most unlucky. And this, added to his slight knowledge of anatomy, made all his nude pictures undesirable save those few painted from thebeautiful girl who stood for ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow’ and ‘ForcedMusic. ’ What his work from the nude suffered from this is incalculable, as may be seen in the crayon called ‘Ligeia Siren, ’ a naked siren playingon a kind of lute, which Rossetti described as “certainly one of his bestthings. ” The beauty and value of a crayon which for weirdpoetry—especially in the eyes—must be among Rossetti’s masterpieces areruined by the drawing of the breasts. 

The most interesting feature of the book, however, is not that whichdeals with the prices Rossetti got for his pictures, but that which tellsthe reader the place where and the conditions under which they werepainted; and no portion of the book is more interesting than that whichrelates to the work done at Kelmscott:—

 “At the beginning of this year 1874 Rossetti was again occupied with the picture which he had commenced in the preceding spring, entitled, ‘The Bower Maiden’—a girl in a room with a pot of marigolds and a black cat. It was painted from ‘little Annie’ (a cottage-girl and house assistant at Kelmscott), and it ‘goes on’ (to quote the words of one of his letters) ‘like a house on fire. This is the only kind of picture one ought to do—just copying the materials, and no more: all others are too much trouble. ’ It is not difficult to understand that the painter of a ‘Proserpine’ and a ‘Ghirlandata’ would occasionally feel the luxury of a mood intellectually lazy, and would be minded to give voice to it—as in this instance—in terms wilfully extreme; keeping his mental eye none the less steadily directed to a ‘Roman Widow’ or a ‘Blessed Damozel’ in the near future. As a matter of fact, my brother painted very few things, at any stage of his career, as mere representations of reality, unimbued by some inventive or ideal meaning: in the rare instances when he did so, he naturally felt an indolent comfort, and made no scruple of putting the feeling into words—highly suitable for being taken _cum grano salis_. Nothing was more alien from his nature or habit than ‘tall talk’ of any kind about his aims, aspirations, or performances. It was into his work—not into his utterances about his work—that he infused the higher and deeper elements of his spirit. ‘The Bower Maiden’ was finished early in February, and sold to Mr. Graham for 682_l. _, after it had been offered to Mr. Leyland at a rather higher figure, and declined. It has also passed under the names of ‘Fleurs de Marie, ’ ‘Marigolds, ’ and ‘The Gardener’s Daughter. ’ After ‘The Bower Maiden’ had been disposed of, other work was taken up—more especially ‘The Roman Widow, ’ bearing the alternative title of ‘Dîs Manibus, ’ which was in an advanced stage by the month of May, and was completed in June or July. It was finished with little or no glazing. The Roman widow is a lady still youthful, in a grey fawn-tinted drapery, with a musical instrument in each hand; she is in the sepulchral chamber of her husband, whose stone urn appears in the background. I possess the antique urn which my brother procured, and which he used for the painting. For graceful simplicity, and for depth of earnest but not strained sentiment, he never, I think, exceeded ‘The Roman Widow. ’ The two instruments seem to repeat the two mottoes on the urn, ‘Ave Domine—Vale Domine. ’ The head was painted from Miss Wilding, already mentioned; but it seems to me partly associated with the type of Mrs. Stillman’s face as well. There are many roses in this picture—both wild and garden roses; they kept the artist waiting a little after the work was otherwise finished. ‘I really think it looks well, ’ he wrote on one occasion; ‘its fair luminous colour seems to melt into the gold frame (which has only just come) like a part of it. ’ He feared that the picture might be ‘too severe and tragic’ for some tastes; but could add (not, perhaps, with undue confidence), ‘I don’t think Géricault or Régnault would have quite scorned it. ’”

The magnificent design here alluded to, ‘Dîs Manibus, ’ entirely suggestedby the urn, which had somewhat come into his possession (probably throughHowell), and also ‘The Bower Maiden, ’ suggested by his accidentallyseeing a pretty cottage-child lifting some marigolds to a shelf, formedpart of the superb work produced by Rossetti during his long retirementat Kelmscott Manor—that period never before recorded, which has at thisvery moment been brought into prominence by his friend Dr. Hake’ssonnet-sequence ‘The New Day, ’ just published. As far as literary andartistic work goes, it was, perhaps, the richest period of his life; andthat it was also one of the happiest is clear not only from his ownwords, but also from the following testimony of Dr. Hake, who saw much ofhim there:—

 O, happy days with him who once so loved us! We loved as brothers, with a single heart, The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us From nature to her blazoned shadow—Art. How often did we trace the nestling Thames From humblest waters on his course of might, Down where the weir the bursting current stems— There sat till evening grew to balmy night, Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the Strand Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea, That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned Triumphal labours of the day to be. 

It was at Kelmscott, in the famous tapestried room, that besides paintingthe ‘Proserpine, ’ ‘The Roman Widow, ’ &c. , he wrote many of his laterpoems, including ‘Rose Mary. ’

Considering how deep is Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s affection for his brother’smemory, and how great is his admiration for his brother’s work, it isremarkable how judicial is his mind when writing about him. This is whathe says about the much discussed ‘Venus Astarte’:—

 “Into the ‘Venus Astarte’ he had put his utmost intensity of thinking, feeling, and method—he had aimed to make it equally strong in abstract sentiment and in physical grandeur—an ideal of the mystery of beauty, offering a sort of combined quintessence of what he had endeavoured in earlier years to embody in the two several types of ‘Sibylla Palmifera’ and ‘Lilith, ’ or (as he ultimately named them in the respective sonnets) ‘Soul’s Beauty’ and ‘Body’s Beauty. ’ It may be well to remark that, by the time when he completed the ‘Venus Astarte, ’ or ‘Astarte Syriaca, ’ he had got into a more austere feeling than of old with regard to colour and chiaroscuro; and the charm of the picture has, I am aware, been less, to many critics and spectators of the work, than he would have deemed to be its due, as compared with some of his other performances of more obvious and ostensible attraction. ”

Though Mr. W. M. Rossetti is right in saying that it was not till thebeginning of 1877 that this remarkable picture was brought to aconclusion, the main portions were done during that long sojourn atBognor in 1876–7, which those who have written about Rossetti havehitherto left unrecorded. Having fallen into ill health after his returnto London from Kelmscott, he was advised to go to the seaside, and alarge house at Bognor was finally selected. No doubt one reason why thepreference was given to Bognor was the fact that Blake’s cottage atFelpham was close by, for businesslike and unbusiness-like qualities werestrangely mingled in Rossetti’s temperament, and it was generally somesentiment or unpractical fancy of this kind that brought about Rossetti’sfinal decision upon anything. Blake’s name was with him still a word tocharm with, and he was surprised to find, on the first pilgrimage ofhimself and his friends to the cottage, that scarcely a person in theneighbourhood knew what Blake it was that “the Londoners” were inquiringabout. 

To the secluded house at Bognor—a house so surrounded by trees and shrubsthat the murmur of the waves mingling with the whispers of the leavesseemed at one moment the sea’s voice, and at another the voice of theearth—Rossetti took not only the cartoon of the ‘Astarte Syriaca, ’ butalso the most peculiar of all his pictures, ‘The Blessed Damozel, ’ whichhad long lain in an incomplete state. But it was not much painting thathe did at Bognor. From a cause he tried in vain to understand, and triedin vain to conquer, his thoughts ran upon poetry, and refused to fixthemselves upon art. Partly this might have been owing to the fact thatnow, comparatively late in life, he to whom, as his brother well says, “such words as _sea_, _ship_, and _boat_ were generic terms admitting oflittle specific and still less of any individual and detaileddistinction, ” awoke to the fascination that the sea sooner or laterexercises upon all truly romantic souls. For deep as is the poetry ofthe inland woods, the Spirit of Romance, if there at all, is there inhiding. In order for that Spirit to come forth and take captive the soulsomething else is wanted; howsoever thick and green the trees—howsoeverbright and winding the streams—a magical glimmer of sea-light far or nearmust shine through the branches as they wave. 

That this should be a new experience to so fine a poet as Rossetti was nodoubt strange, but so it chanced to be. He whose talk at Kelmscott hadbeen of ‘Blessed Damozels’ and ‘Roman Widows’ and the like, talked now ofthe wanderings of Ulysses, of ‘The Ancient Mariner, ’ of ‘Sir PatrickSpens, ’ and even of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’ and ‘Allan Gordon. ’ And onhearing a friend recite some tentative verses on a great naval battle, helooked about for sea subjects too; and it was now, and not later, as isgenerally supposed, that he really thought of the subject of ‘The WhiteShip, ’ a subject apparently so alien from his genius. Every evening heused to take walks on the beach for miles and miles, delighted with abeauty that before had had no charms for him. Still, the ‘AstarteSyriaca’ did progress, though slowly, and became the masterpiece that Mr. W. M. Rossetti sets so high among his brother’s work. 

 “From Bognor my brother returned to his house in Cheyne Walk; and in the summer he paid a visit to two of his kindest and most considerate friends, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, at their seat of Broadlands in Hampshire. He executed there a portrait in chalks of Lady Mount-Temple. He went on also with the picture of ‘The Blessed Damozel. ’ For the head of an infant angel which appears in the front of this picture he made drawings from two children—one being the baby of the Rev. H. C. Hawtrey, and the other a workhouse infant. The former sketch was presented to the parents of the child and the latter to Lady Mount-Temple; and the head with its wings, was painted on to the canvas at Broadlands. ”

Mr. W. M. Rossetti omits to mention that the landscape which forms thepredella to ‘The Blessed Damozel, ’ a river winding in a peculiarlytortuous course through the cedars and other wide-spread trees of anEnglish park, was taken from the scenery of Broadlands—that fairyland ofsoft beauty which lived in his memory as it must needs live in the memoryof every one who has once known it. But the wonder is that such a massof solid material has been compressed into so small a space. 

Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s paraphrase of ‘The House of Life’—done with so muchadmiration of his brother’s genius and affection for his memory—touchesupon a question relating to poetic art which has been raisedbefore—raised in connexion with prose renderings of Homer, Sophocles, andDante: Are poetry and prose so closely related in method that one canever be adequately turned into the other? Schiller no doubt wrote hisdramas in prose and then turned them into rhetorical verse; but thenthere are those who affirm that Schiller’s rhetorical verse is scarcelypoetry. The importance of the question will be seen when we call to mindthat if such a transmutation of form were possible, translations ofpoetry would be possible; for though, owing to the tyrannous demands ofform, the verse of one language can never be translated into the verse ofanother, it can always be rendered in the prose of another, only it thenceases to be poetry. 

That the intellectual, and even to some extent the emotional, substanceof a poem can be seized and covered by a prose translation is seen inProf. Jebb’s rendering of the ‘Œdipus Rex’; but, as we have beforeremarked, the fundamental difference between imaginative prose and poetryis that, while the one must be informed with intellectual life andemotional life, the other has to be informed with both these kinds oflife, and with another life beyond these—rhythmic life. Now, if wewished to show that rhythmic life is in poetry the most important of all, our example would, we think, be Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s prose paraphrase ofhis brother’s sonnets. The obstacles against the adequate turning ofpoetry into prose can be best understood by considering the obstaclesagainst the adequate turning of prose into poetry. Prose notes tracingout the course of the future poem may, no doubt, be made, and usefullymade, by the poet (as Wordsworth said in an admirable letter to Gillies), unless, indeed, the notes form too elaborate an attempt at a full proseexpression of the subject-matter, in which case, so soon as the poettries to rise on his winged words, his wingless words are likely to actas a dead weight. For this reason, when Wordsworth said that the prosenotes should be brief, he might almost as well have gone on to say thatin expression they should be slovenly. This at least may be said, thatthe moment the language of the prose note is so “adequate” and rich thatit seems to be what Wordsworth would call the natural “incarnation of thethought, ” the poet’s imagination, if it escapes at all from the chains ofthe prose expression, escapes with great difficulty. An instance of thisoccurred in Rossetti’s own experience. 

During one of those seaside rambles alluded to above, while he waswatching with some friends the billows tumbling in beneath the wintrymoon, some one, perhaps Rossetti himself, directed attention to thepeculiar effect of the moon’s disc reflected in the white surf, andcompared it to fire in snow. Rossetti, struck with the picturesquenessof the comparison, made there and then an elaborate prose note of it inone of the diminutive pocket-books that he was in the habit of carryingin the capacious pocket of his waistcoat. Years afterwards—shortlybefore his death, in fact—when he came to write ‘The King’s Tragedy, ’remembering this note, he thought he could find an excellent place for itin the scene where the king meets the Spae wife on the seashore andlistens to her prophecies of doom. But he was at once confronted by thisobstacle: so elaborately had the image of the moon reflected in the surfbeen rendered in the prose note—so entirely did the prose matter seem tobe the inevitable and the final incarnation of the thought—that itappeared impossible to escape from it into the movement and the dictionproper to poetry. It was only after much labour—a labour greater than hehad given to all the previous stanzas combined—that he succeeded infreeing himself from the fetters of the prose, and in painting thepicture in these words:—

 That eve was clenched for a boding storm ’Neath a toilsome moon half seen; The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high; And where there was a line of sky, Wild wings loomed dark between. 

 * * * *

 ’Twas then the moon sailed clear of the rack On high on her hollow dome; And still as aloft with hoary crest Each clamorous wave rang home, Like fire in snow the moonlight blazed Amid the champing foam. 

And the remark was then made to him with regard to Coleridge’s‘Wanderings of Cain, ’ that it is not unlikely the matchless fragmentgiven in Coleridge’s poems might have passed nearer towards completion, or at least towards the completion of the first part, had it not been forthose elaborate and beautiful prose notes which he has left behind. 

And if the attempt to turn prose into poetry is hopeless, the attempt toturn poetry into prose is no less so, and for a like reason—that of theimmense difficulty of passing from the movement natural to one mood intothe movement natural to another. And this criticism applies especiallyto the poetry of Rossetti, which produces so many of its best effects bymeans not of logical statement, but of the music and suggestive richnessof rhythmical language. That Rossetti did on some occasions, when toldthat his sonnets were unintelligible, talk about making such a paraphrasehimself is indisputable, because Mr. Fairfax Murray say that he heard himsay so. But indisputable also is many another saying of Rossetti’s, equally ill-considered and equally impracticable. That he ever seriouslythought of doing so is most unlikely. 

III. 

In his memoir of his brother, Mr. William Michael Rossetti thus makesmention of a ballad left by the poet which still remains unpublished:—

 “It [the ballad] is most fully worthy of publication, but has not been included in Rossetti’s ‘Collected Works, ’ because he gave the MS. To his devoted friend Mr. Theodore Watts, with whom alone now rests the decision of presenting it or not to the public. ”

And he afterwards mentions certain sonnets on the Sphinx, also in mypossession. 

With the most generous intentions my dear and loyal friend WilliamRossetti has here brought me into trouble. 

Naturally such an announcement as the above has excited great curiosityamong admirers of Rossetti, and I am frequently receiving letters—some ofthem cordial enough, but others far from cordial—asking, or ratherdemanding, to know the reason why important poems of Rossetti’s have forso long a period been withheld from the public. In order to explain thedelay I must first give two extracts from Mr. Hall Caine’s picturesque‘Recollections of Rossetti, ’ published in 1882:—

 “The end was drawing near, and we all knew the fact. Rossetti had actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a facetious ballad (conceived years before), of the length of ‘The White Ship, ’ called ‘Jan Van Hunks, ’ embodying an eccentric story of a Dutchman’s wager to smoke against the devil. This was to appear in a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Theodore Watts, a project which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and in which he now, in his last moments, took a revived interest, strange and strong. ”

 “On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he had for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two sonnets which he had composed on a design of his called ‘The Sphinx, ’ and which he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad before described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just mentioned. On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and his speech from that cause hardly intelligible. ”

As the facts in connexion with this project exhibit, with a force thatnot all the words of all his detractors can withstand, the splendidgenerosity of the poet’s nature, I only wish that I had made them publicyears ago, Rossetti (whose power of taking interest in a friend’s workMr. Joseph Knight has commented upon) had for years been urging me topublish certain writings of mine with which he was familiar, and foryears I had declined to do so—declined for two simple reasons: first, though I liked writing for its own sake—indulged in it, indeed, as adelightful luxury—to enter formally the literary arena, and to go throughthat struggle which, as he himself used to say, “had never yet broughtcomfort to any poet, but only sorrow, ” had never been an ambition ofmine; and, secondly, I was only too conscious how biased must thejudgment be of a man whose affections were so strong as his when broughtto bear upon the work of a friend. 

In order at last to achieve an end upon which he had set his heart, heproposed that he and I should jointly produce the volume to which Mr. Hall Caine refers, and that he should enrich it with reproductions ofcertain drawings of his, including the ‘Sphinx’ (now or lately in thepossession of Mr. William Rossetti) and crayons and pencil drawings in myown possession illustrating poems of mine—those drawings, I mean, fromthat new model chosen by me whose head Leighton said must be theloveliest ever drawn, who sat for ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow, ’ and thatother design which William Sharp christened ‘Forced Music. ’

In order to conquer my most natural reluctance to see a name so unknownas mine upon a title-page side by side with a name so illustrious as his, he (or else it was his generous sister Christina, I forget which)italianized the words Walter Theodore Watts into “Gualtiero TeodoroGualtieri”—a name, I may add in passing, which appears as an inscriptionon one at least of the valuable Christmas presents he made me, a rare oldVenetian Boccaccio. My portion of the book was already in existence, butthat which was to have been the main feature of the volume, a ballad ofRossetti’s to be called ‘Michael Scott’s Wooing’ (which had no relationto early designs of his bearing that name), hung fire for this reason:the story upon which the ballad was to have been based was discovered tobe not an old legend adapted and varied by the Romanies, as I hadsupposed when I gave it to him, but simply the Ettrick Shepherd’snovelette ‘Mary Burnet’; and the project then rested in abeyance untilthat last illness at Birchington painted so graphically and patheticallyby Mr. Hall Caine. 

For some reason quite inscrutable to the late John Marshall, who attendedhim, and to all of us, this old idea seized upon his brain; so much so, indeed, that Marshall hailed it as a good omen, and advised us to fosterit, which we did with excellent results, as will be seen by referring tothe very last entry in his mother’s touching diary as lately printed byMr. W. M. Rossetti: “March 28, Tuesday. Mr. Watts came down. Gabrielrallied marvellously. ”

Though the ballad, in Rossetti’s own writing, has ever since remained inmy possession, as have also the two sonnets in the MS. Of another friendwho has since, I am delighted to know, achieved fame for himself, no onewho enjoyed the intimate friendship of Rossetti need be told that hisdeath took from me all heart to publish. 

Time, however, is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrowhimself, bows at last. The rights of Rossetti’s admirers can no longerbe set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within thepresent year ‘Jan Van Hunks’ and the ‘Sphinx Sonnets, ’ the former ofwhich will show a new and, I think, unexpected side of Rossetti’s genius. 

IV. 

It is a sweet and comforting thought for every poet that, whether or notthe public cares during his life to read his verses, it will after hisdeath care very much to read his letters to his mistress, to his wife, tohis relatives, to his friends, to his butcher, and to his baker. Andsome letters are by that same public held to be more precious thanothers. If, for instance, it has chanced that during the poet’s life he, like Rossetti, had to borrow thirty shillings from a friend, that is acircumstance of especial piquancy. The public likes—or rather itdemands—to know all about that borrowed cash. Hence it behoves theproperly equipped editor who understands his duty to see that not oneallusion to it in the poet’s correspondence is omitted. If he can alsoshow what caused the poet to borrow those thirty shillings—if he can bylearned annotations show whether the friend in question lent the sumwillingly or unwillingly, conveniently or inconveniently—if he can showwhether the loan was ever repaid, and if repaid when—he will be a happyeditor indeed. Then he will find a large and a grateful public to whomthe mood in which the poet sat down to write ‘The Blessed Damosel’ is offar less interest than the mood in which he borrowed thirty shillings. 

We do not charge the editor of this volume {104} with exhibiting unusualwant of taste. On the whole, he is less irritating to the poeticalstudent than those who have laboured in kindred “fields of literature. ”Indeed, we do not so much blame the editors of such books as we blame thepublic, whose coarse and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum. The writer of this review possesses an old circulating-library copy of abook containing some letters of Coleridge. One page, and one only, isgreatly disfigured by thumb marks. It is the page on which appears, notsome precious hint as to the conclusion of ‘Christabel, ’ but a domesticmissive of Coleridge’s ordering broad beans for dinner. 

If, then, the name of those readers who take an interest in broad beansis legion compared with the name of those who take an interest in ‘KublaKhan, ’ is not the wise editor he who gives all due attention to thepoet’s favourite vegetable? Those who will read with avidity Rossetti’sallusion to his wife’s confinement in the letter in which he tellsAllingham that “the child had been dead for two or three weeks” willlaugh to scorn the above remarks, and as they are in the majority thelaugh is with them. 

The editor of this volume laments that Allingham’s letters to Rossettiare beyond all editorial reach. But who has any right to ask forAllingham’s private letters? Rossetti, who was strongly against theprinting of private letters, had the wholesome practice of burning allhis correspondence. This he did at periodical holocausts—memorableoccasions when the coruscations of the poet’s wit made the sparks fromthe burning paper seem pale and dull. He died away from home, or not ascrap of correspondence would have been left for the publishers. Although the “public” acknowledges no duties towards the man of literaryor artistic genius, but would shrug up its shoulders or look with dismayat being asked to give five pounds in order to keep a poet from theworkhouse, the moment a man of genius becomes famous the public becomesaware of certain rights in relation to him. Strangely enough, theserights are recognized more fully in the literary arena than anywhereelse, and among them the chief appears to be that of reading an author’sprivate letters. One advantage—and surely it is a very great one—thatthe “writing man” has over the man of action is this: that, while theportrait of the man of action has to be painted, if painted at all, bythe biographer, the writing man paints his own portrait for himself. 

And as, in a deep sense, every biographer is an inventor like thenovelist—as from the few facts that he is able to collect he infers acharacter—the man of action, after he is dead, is at the mercy of everyman who writes his life. Is not Alexander the Great no less a figment ofanother man’s brain than Achilles, or Macbeth, or Mr. Pickwick? But apoet, howsoever artistic, howsoever dramatic, the form of his work maybe, is occupied during his entire life in painting his own portrait. Andif it were not for the intervention of the biographer, the reminiscencewriter, or the collector of letters for publication, our conception ofevery poet would be true and vital according to the intelligence withwhich we read his work. 

This is why, of all English poets, Shakespeare is the only one whom we dothoroughly know—unless perhaps we should except his two greatcontemporaries Webster and Marlowe. Steevens did not exaggerate when hesaid that all we know of Shakespeare’s outer life is that he was born atStratford-on-Avon, married, went to London, wrote plays, returned toStratford, and died. Owing to this circumstance (and a blessed one itis) we can commune with the greatest of our poets undisturbed. We knowhow Shakespeare confronted every circumstance of this mysterious life—weknow how he confronted the universe, seen and unseen—we know to whatdegree and in what way he felt every human passion. There is no carelessletter of his, thank God! to give us a wrong impression of him. There isno record of his talk at the Mermaid, the Falcon, or the Apollo saloon tomake readers doubtful whether his printed utterances truly represent him. Would that the will had been destroyed! then there would have been notalk about the “second-best bed” and the like insane gabble. Suppose, byill chance, a batch of his letters to Anna Hathaway had been preserved. Is it not a moral certainty that they would have been as uninteresting asthe letters of Coleridge, of Scott, of Dickens, of Rossetti, and ofRossetti’s sister?

Why are the letters of literary men apt to be so much less interestingthan those of other people? Is it not because, the desire to expressoneself in written language being universal, this desire with peopleoutside the literary class has to be of necessity exercised inletter-writing? Is it not because, where there is no other means ofwritten expression than that of letter-writing, the best efforts of theletter-writer are put into the composition, as the best writing of theessayist is put into his essays? However this might have been inShakespeare’s time, the half-conscious, graphic power of the non-literaryletter-writer of to-day is often so great that if all the letters writtenin English by non-literary people, especially letters written from abroadto friends at home in the year 1897, {108} were collected, and the creamof them extracted and printed, the book would be the most preciousliterary production that the year has to show. If, on the other hand, the letters of contemporary English authors were collected in the sameway, the poverty of the book would be amazing as compared with thepublished writings of the authors. With regard to Dickens’s letters, indeed, the contrast between their commonplace, colourless style and thepregnancy of his printed utterances makes the writing in his books seemforced, artificial, unnatural. 

The same may in some degree be said of such letters of Rossetti as havehitherto been published. The charming family letters printed by hisbrother come, of course, under a different category. With the exceptionof these, perhaps the letters in the volume before us are the mostinteresting Rossetti letters that have been printed. Yet it isastonishing how feeble they are in giving the reader an idea of Rossettihimself. And this gives birth to the question: Do we not live at a timewhen the unfairness of printing an author’s letters is greater than itever was before? To go no further back than the early years of thepresent century, the facilities of locomotion were then few, friends werenecessarily separated from each other by long intervals of time, andletters were a very important part of intercommunication, consequently itmight be expected that even among authors a good deal of a man’sindividuality would be expressed in his letters. But even at that periodit was only a quite exceptional nature like that of Charles Lamb whichadequately expressed itself in epistolary form. Keats’s letters, nodoubt, are full of good sense and good criticism, but taking them as abody, including the letters to Fanny Brawne, we think it were better ifthey had been totally destroyed. As to Byron’s letters, they, of course, are admirable in style and full of literary life, but their veryexcellence shows that his natural mode of expression was brilliant, slashing prose. But if it was unfair to publish the letters of Coleridgeand Keats, what shall we say of the publication of letters written by theauthors of our own day, when, owing to an entire change in the conditionsof life, no one dreams of putting into his letters anything of literaryinterest?

When Rossetti died he was, as regards the public, owing to hisexclusiveness, much in the same position as Shakespeare has always been. The picture of Rossetti that lived in the public mind was that of a poetand painter of extraordinary imaginative intensity and magic, whosepersonality, as romantic as his work, influenced all who came in contactwith him. He was, indeed, the only romantic figure in the imagination ofthe literary and art world of his time. It seemed as if in his very namethere was an unaccountable music. The present writer well remembersbeing at a dinner-party many years ago when the late Lord Leighton wastalking in his usual delightful way. His conversation was speciallyattended to only by his interlocutor, until the name of Rossetti fellfrom his lips. Then the general murmur of tongues ceased. Everybodywanted to hear what was being said about the mysterious poet-painter. Thus matters stood when Rossetti died. Within forty-eight hours of hisdeath the many-headed beast clamoured for its rights. Within forty-eighthours of his death there was a leading article in an important newspaperon the subject of his suspiciousness as the result of chloral-drinking. And from that moment the romance has been rubbed off the picture aseffectually by many of those who have written about him as the bloom isfingered off of a clumsily gathered peach. 

But the reader will say, “Truth is great, and must prevail. The pictureof Rossetti that now exists in the public mind is the true one. Theformer picture was a lie. ” But here the reader will be much mistaken. The romantic picture which existed in the public mind during Rossetti’slife was the true one; the picture that now exists of him is false. 

Does any one want to know what kind of a man was the painter of ‘Dante’sDream’ and the poet of ‘The Blessed Damosel, ’ let him wipe out of hismind most of what has been written about him, let him forget if he canmost of the Rossetti letters that have been published, and let him readthe poet’s poems and study the painter’s pictures, and he will knowRossetti—not, indeed, so thoroughly as we know Shakespeare and Æschylusand Sophocles, but as intimately as it is possible to know any man whosebiography is written only in his works. 

It must be admitted, however, that for those who had a personal knowledgeof Rossetti some of the letters in this volume will have an interest, owing to the evidence they afford of that authorial generosity which wasone of his most beautiful characteristics. His disinterestedappreciation of the work of his contemporaries sets him apart from allthe other poets of his time and perhaps of any other time. To waxeloquent in praise of this and that illustrious name, and thus to claim akind of kinship with it, is a very different thing from Rossetti’s noblechampionship of a name, whether that of a friend or otherwise, which hasnever emerged from obscurity. It is perhaps inevitable and in the natureof things that most poets are too much absorbed in their own work to havetime to interest themselves in the doings of their fellow-workers. 

But, with regard to Rossetti, he could feel, and often did feel, as deepan interest in the work of another man as in his own. There was notrouble he would not take to aid a friend in gaining recognition. Thisit was more than anything else which endeared him to all his friends, andmade them condone those faults of his which ever since his death havebeen so freely discussed. The editor of this volume quotes this sentencefrom Skelton’s ‘Table-Talk of Shirley’:—

 “I have preserved a number of Rossetti’s letters, and there is barely one, I think, which is not mainly devoted to warm commendation of obscure poets and painters—obscure at the time of writing, but of whom more than one has since become famous. ”

Nor was his interest in other men’s work confined to that of his personalfriends. His discovery of Browning’s ‘Pauline, ’ of Charles Wells, and ofthe poems of Ebenezer Jones may be cited as instances of this. Moreover, he was always looking out in magazines—some of them of the most obscurekind—for good work. And if he was rewarded, as he sometimes was, bycoming upon precious things that might otherwise have been lost, hisheart was rejoiced. 

One day, having turned into a coffee-house in Chancery Lane to get a cupof coffee, he came upon a number of _Reynolds’s Miscellany_, and findingthere a poem called ‘A Lover’s Pastime, ’ he saw at once its extraordinarybeauty, and enclosed it in a letter to Allingham. In this case, however, he unfortunately did not make his usual efforts to discover theauthorship of a poem that pleased him; and a pity it is, for the poem isone of the loveliest lyrics that have been written in modern times. Wehope it will find a place in the next anthology of lyrical poetry. 

Though his criticisms were not always sure and impeccable, he was of allcritics the most independent of authority. Had he chanced to find in thepoets’ corner of _The Eatanswill Gazette_ a lyric equal to the best ofShelley’s, he would have recognized its merits at once and proclaimedthem; and had he come across a lyric of Shelley’s that had receivedunmerited applause, he would have recognized its demerits for himself, and proclaimed them with equal candour and fearlessness. 

Again, certain passages in these letters will surprise the reader bythrowing light upon a side of Rossetti’s life and character which wasonly known to his intimate friends. Recluse as Rossetti came to be, heknew more of “London life” in the true sense of the word than did many ofthose who were supposed to know it well—diners-out like Browning, forinstance, and Richard Doyle. That the author of ‘The House of Life’ knewLondon on the side that Dickens knew it better than any other poet of histime will no doubt surprise many a reader. His visits to Jamrach’s martfor wild animals led him to explore the wonderful world, that so fewpeople ever dream of, which lies around Ratcliffe Highway. He observedwith the greatest zest the movements of the East-End swarm. Moreover, his passion for picking up “curios” and antique furniture made himfamiliar with quarters of London that he would otherwise have neverknown. And not Dickens himself had more of what may be called the“Haroun al Raschid passion” for wandering through a city’s streets atnight. It was this that kept him in touch on one side with men so unlikehim as Brough and Sala. 

In this volume there is a charming anecdote of his generosity to Brough’sfamily, and Sala always spoke of him as “dear Dante Rossetti. ” Thetranspontine theatre, even the penny gaff of the New Cut, was not quiteunfamiliar with the face of the poet-painter. Hence no man was a betterjudge than he of the low-life pictures of a writer like F. W. Robinson, whose descriptions of the street arab in ‘Owen, a Waif, ’ &c. , he wouldread aloud with a dramatic power astonishing to those who associated himexclusively with Dante, Beatrice, and mystical passion. 

Frequently in these letters an allusion will puzzle the reader who doesnot know of Rossetti’s love of nocturnal rambling, an allusion, however, which those who knew him will fully understand. Here is a sentence ofthe kind:—

 “As I haven’t been outside my door for months in the daytime, I should not have had much opportunity of enjoying pastime and pleasaunces. ”

The editor quotes some graphic and interesting words from Mr. W. M. Rossetti which explain this passage. 

In summer, as in winter, he rose very late in the day and made abreakfast, as he used to say, which was to keep him in fuel for somethingunder twelve hours. He would then begin to paint, and scarcely leave hiswork till the daylight waned. Then he would dine, and afterwards startoff for a walk through the London streets, which to him, as he used tosay, put on a magical robe with the lighting of the gas lamps. Afterwalking for miles through the streets, either with a friend or alone, loitering at the windows of such shops as still were open, he would turninto an oyster shop or late restaurant for supper. Here his frankness ofbearing was quite irresistible with strangers whenever it pleased him toapproach them, as he sometimes did. The most singular and bizarreincidents of his life occurred to him on these occasions—incidents whichhe would relate with a dramatic power that set him at the head of the_raconteurs_ of his time. One of these _rencontres_ in the Haymarket wasof a quite extraordinary character. 

In the latter years of his life, when he lived at Cheyne Walk, he wouldoften not begin his perambulations until an hour before midnight. Itwill be a pity if some one who accompanied him in his nocturnalrambles—the most remarkable man of our time—does not furnish the worldwith reminiscences of them. 

Another point of interest upon which these letters will throw light isthat connected with his method of work. He himself, like Tennyson, usedto say that those who are the most curious as to the way in which a poemwas written are precisely those who have the least appreciation of thebeauties of the poem itself. If this is true, the time in which we liveis not remarkable, perhaps, for its appreciation of poetry. Theseletters, at any rate, will be appreciated, for the light that some ofthem throw upon Rossetti at work is remarkable. When a subject for apoem struck him, it was his way to make a prose note of it, then tocartoon it, then to leave it for a time, then to take it up again andread it to his friends, and then to finish it. In a letter to Allingham, dated July 18th, 1854, enclosing the first form of the sonnet called‘Lost on Both Sides’—which sonnet did not appear in print till1881—Rossetti says: “My sonnets are not generally finished till I seethem again after forgetting them; and this is only two days old. Whenbetween the first form of a sonnet and the second an interval oftwenty-seven years elapses, no student of poetry can fail to compare oneform with the other. 

And so with regard to that poem which is, on the whole, Rossetti’smasterpiece—‘Sister Helen’—sent as early as 1854 to Mrs. Howitt for theGerman publication the _Düsseldorf Annual_; the changes in it areextremely interesting. Never did it appear in print without sufferingsome important variation. Sometimes, indeed, the change of a word or twoin a line would entirely transfigure the stanza. As to the new stanzasadded to the ballad just before Rossetti’s death, these turned the balladfrom a fine poem into a great one. 

Equally striking are the changes in ‘The Blessed Damosel. ’ But the mostnotable example of the surety of his hand in revising is seen in regardto a poem several times mentioned in this volume, called originally‘Bride’s Chamber Talk. ’ It was begun as early as ‘Jenny, ’ read byAllingham in 1860, but not printed till more than a quarter of a centurylater. The earliest form is still in existence in MS. , and although someof the lines struck out are as poetry most lovely, the poem on the wholeis better without them. It was a theory of Rossetti’s, indeed, that thevery riches of the English language made it necessary for the poet whowould achieve excellence to revise and manipulate his lines. And insupport of this he would contrast the amazing passion for revisiondisclosed by Dr. Garnett’s ‘Relics of Shelley, ’ in which sometimesscarcely half a dozen of the original words are left on a page, withScott’s metrical narratives, which were sent to the printer in cantos asthey were written, like one of the contemporary novels thrown off for theserials. The fact seems to be, however, that the poet’s power ofreaching, as Scott reached, his own ideal expression _per saltum_, orreaching it slowly and tentatively, is simply a matter of temperament. For whose verses are more loose-jointed than Byron’s? whose diction ismore commonplace than his? And yet this is what the greatest of Byronspecialists, Mr John Murray, says in his extremely interesting remarksupon Byron’s autograph:—

 “If we except Byron’s dramatic pieces and ‘Don Juan, ’ the first draft of Byron’s longer poems formed but a nucleus of the work as it was printed. For example, ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ grew out of the ‘British Bards, ’ while ‘The Giaour, ’ by constant additions to the manuscript, the proofs, and even to the work after publication, was expanded to nearly twice its original size. . . . When the inspiration was on him, the printer had to be kept at work the greater part of the night, and fresh ‘copy’ and fresh revises were crossing one another hour by hour. ”

The conclusion is that poets cannot be classified according to theirmethods of work, but only in relation to the result of those methods, andthat our two great elaborators, Byron and Rossetti, may still be moreunlike each other in essentials than are any other two nineteenth-centurypoets. 

On the whole, we cannot help closing this book with kindly feelingstowards the editor, inasmuch as it aids in the good work of restoring thetrue portrait of the man who has suffered more than any other from themischievous malignity of foes and the more mischievous indiscretion ofcertain of his friends. 

III. ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON. 1809–1892. 

I. 

Charles Lamb was so paralyzed, it is said, by Coleridge’s death, that forweeks after that event, he was heard murmuring often to himself, “Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead. ” In such a mental condition atthis moment is an entire country, I think. “Tennyson is dead! Tennysonis dead!” It will be some time before England’s loss can really beexpressed by any words so powerful in pathos and in sorrow as these. Andif this is so with regard to English people generally, what of those fewwho knew the man, and knowing him, must needs love him—must needs lovehim above all others?—those, I mean, who, when speaking of him, used totalk not so much about the poetry as about the man who wrote it—those whonow are saying, with a tremor of the voice, and a moistening of the eye:—

 There was none like him—none. 

 [Picture: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, æt. 80. From a photography reproduced by the kind permission of Lord Tennyson]

To say wherein lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives ismostly difficult. Especially is it so with regard to a man of poeticgenius. All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed animmense charm. So he did, indeed. But who has been able to define thatcharm? I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well. Sometimes, indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside hisown most affectionate and noble-tempered family, including that oldfriend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti sodeeply and so lastingly as I did; unless, perhaps, it was the poor blindpoet, Philip Marston, who, being so deeply stricken, needed to love andto be loved more sorely than I, to whom Fate has been kind. And yet Ishould find it difficult to say wherein lay the charm of Rossetti’schameleon-like personality. So with other men and women I could name. This is not so in regard to the great man now lying dead at Aldworth. Nothing is easier than to define the charm of Tennyson. 

It lay in a great veracity of soul—in a simple-mindedness so childlikethat, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of hisexquisitely artistic poems, you would have supposed that even thesubtleties of poetic art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of allsubtlety as his. “Homer, ” you would have said, “might have been such aman as this, for Homer worked in a language which is Poetry’s very voice. But Tennyson works in a language which has to be moulded into harmony bya myriad subtleties of art. How can this great inspired child, who yethas the simple wisdom of Bragi, the poetry-smith of the Northern Olympus, be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The Princess, ’ ‘The Palace of Art, ’‘The Day-Dream, ’ and ‘The Dream of Fair Women’?”

As deeply as some men feel that language was given to men to disguisetheir thoughts did Tennyson feel that language was given to _him_ todeclare his thoughts without disguise. He knew of but one justificationfor the thing he said, viz. , that it was the thing he thought. _Arrièrepensée_ was with him impossible. But, it may be asked, when a mancarries out-speaking to such a pass as this, is he not apt to become asomewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modernsociety? No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so. Butthe honest ring in the voice—which, by-the-by, was strengthened anddeepened by the old-fashioned Lincolnshire accent—softened and, to agreat degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness. Moreover, behindthis uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendidcourtesy; for, above all things, Tennyson was a great and forthrightEnglish gentleman. As he stood at the porch at Aldworth, meeting a guestor bidding him good-bye—as he stood there, tall, far beyond the height ofaverage men, his naturally fair skin showing dark and tanned by the sunand wind—as he stood there no one could mistake him for anything but agreat gentleman, who was also much more. Up to the last a man ofextraordinary presence, he showed, I think, the beauty of old age to adegree rarely seen. 

A friend of his who, visiting him on his birthday, discovered him thusstanding at the door to welcome him, has described his unique appearancein words which are literally accurate at least:—

 A poet should be limned in youth, they say, Or else in prime, with eyes and forehead beaming Of manhood’s noon—the very body seeming To lend the spirit wings to win the bay; But here stands he whose noontide blooms for aye, Whose eyes, where past and future both are gleaming With lore beyond all youthful poets’ dreaming, Seem lit from shores of some far-glittering day. 

 Our master’s prime is now—is ever now; Our star that wastes not in the wastes of night Holds Nature’s dower undimmed in Time’s despite; Those eyes seem Wisdom’s own beneath that brow, Where every furrow Time hath dared to plough Shines a new bar of still diviner light. 

This, then, was the secret of Tennyson’s personal charm. And if thereader is sceptical as to its magnetic effect upon his friends, let meremind him of the amazing rarity of these great and guileless natures;let me remind him also that this world is comprised of two classes ofpeople—the bores, whose name is legion, and the interesting people, whosename is _not_ legion—the former being those whose natural instinct ofself-protective mimicry impels them to move about among their fellowshiding their features behind a mask of convention, the latter being thosewho move about with uncovered faces just as Nature fashioned them. Ifguilelessness lends interest to a dullard, it is still more so with thereally luminous souls. So infinite is the creative power of nature thatshe makes no two individuals alike. If we only had the power ofinquiring into the matter, we should find not only that each individualcreature that once inhabited one of the minute shells that go to thebuilding of England’s fortress walls of chalk was absolutely unlike allthe others, but that even the poor microbe himself, who in these days isso maligned, is also very intensely an individual. 

Some time ago the old discussion was revived in _The Athenæum_ as towhether the nightingale’s song was joyful or melancholy. And, perhaps, if the poems of the late James Thomson and the poems of Mr. Austin Dobsonwere recited by their authors to a congregation of nightingales, thequestion would at once be debated amongst them, “Is the note of the humansongster joyful or melancholy?” The truth is that the humidity or thedryness of the atmosphere in the various habitats of the nightingalemodifies so greatly the _timbre_ of the voice that, while a nightingalechorus at Fiesole may seem joyous, a nightingale chorus in the moistthickets along the banks of the Ouse may seem melancholy. Nay, more, asI once told Tennyson at Aldworth, I, when a truant boy wandering alongthe banks of the Ouse (where six nightingales’ nests have been found inthe hedge of a single meadow), got so used to these matters that I had myown favourite individuals, and could easily distinguish one from another. That rich climacteric swell which is reached just before the “jug, jug, jug, ” varies amazingly, if the listener will only give the matterattention. And if this infinite variety of individualism is thus seen inthe lower animals, what must it be in man?

There is, however, in the entire human race, a fatal instinct for marringitself. To break down the exterior signs of this variety ofindividualism in the race by mutual imitation, by all sorts ofaffectations, is the object not only of the civilization of the Westernworld, but of the very negroes on the Gaboon River. No wonder, then, that whensoever we meet, as at rarest interval we do meet, an individualwho is able to preserve his personality as Nature meant it to live, wefeel an attraction towards him such as is irresistible. Now I wouldchallenge those who knew him to say whether they ever knew any other manso free from this great human infirmity as Tennyson. The way in whichhis simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances, most remarkable. Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism ofthe artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemedimpossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took amongcontemporary writers all over the world. “Poets, ” he once said to me, “have not had the advantage of being _born_ to the purple. ” Up to thelast he felt himself to be a poet at struggle more or less with theWilsons and the Crokers who, in his youth, assailed him. I, and a verydear friend of his, a family connexion, tried in vain to make him seethat when a poet had reached a position such as he had won, no criticismcould injure him or benefit him one jot. 

What has been called his exclusiveness is entirely mythical. He was themost hospitable of men. It was very rare, indeed, for him to part from afriend at his hall door, or at the railway station without urging him toreturn as soon as possible, and generally with the words, “Come wheneveryou like. ” The fact is, however, that for many years the strangestnotions seem to have got abroad as to the claims of the public upon menof genius. There seems now to be scarcely any one who does not look uponevery man who has passed into the purgatory of fame as his or her commonproperty. The unlucky victim is to be pestered by letters upon everysort of foolish subject, and to be hunted down in his walks and insultedby senseless adulation. Tennyson resented this, and so did Rossetti, andso ought every man who has reached eminence and respects his own genius. Neither fame nor life itself is worth having on such terms as these. 

One day, Tennyson when walking round his garden at Farringford, sawperched up in the trees that surrounded it, two men who had been refusedadmittance at the gate—two men dressed like gentlemen. He very wiselygave the public to understand that his fame was not to be taken as anabrogation of his rights as a private English gentleman. For my part, whenever I hear any one railing against a man of eminence with whom hecannot possibly have been brought into contact, I know at once what itmeans: the railer has been writing an idle letter to the eminent one andreceived no reply. 

Tennyson’s knowledge of nature—nature in every aspect—was very great. His passion for “star-gazing” has often been commented upon by readers ofhis poetry. Since Dante no poet in any land has so loved the stars. Hehad an equal delight in watching the lightning; and I remember being atAldworth once during a thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temeritywith which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at theblinding lightning. For moonlight effects he had a passion equallystrong, and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to rememberthat he passed away in the light he so loved—in a room where there was noartificial light—nothing to quicken the darkness but the light of thefull moon (which somehow seems to shine more brightly at Aldworth thananywhere else in England); and that on the face of the poet, as he passedaway, fell that radiance in which he so loved to bathe it when alive. 

If it is as easy to describe the personal attraction of Tennyson as it isdifficult to describe that of any one of his great contemporaries, we donot find the same relations existing between him and them as regards hisplace in the firmament of English poetry. In a country with a compositelanguage such as ours, it may be affirmed with special emphasis, thatthere are two kinds of poetry; one appealing to the uncultivated masses, whose vocabulary is of the narrowest; the other appealing to the few who, partly by temperament, and partly by education, are sensitive to the truebeauties of poetic art. While in the one case the appeal is made througha free and popular use of words, partly commonplace and partly steeped inthat literary sentimentalism which in certain stages of an artificialsociety takes the place of the simple utterances of simple passion ofearlier and simpler times; in the other case the appeal is made verylargely through what Dante calls the “use of the sieve for noble words. ”

Of the one perhaps Byron is the type, the exemplars being such poets asthose of the Mrs. Hemans school in England, and of the Longfellow schoolin America. Of the other class of poets, the class typified by Milton, the most notable exemplars are Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Wordsworthpartakes of the qualities of both classes. The methods of the first ofthese two groups are so cheap—they are so based on the wide severancebetween the popular taste and the poetic temper (which, though in earliertimes it inspired the people, is now confined to the few)—that one maysay of the first group that their success in finding and holding anaudience is almost damnatory to them as poets. As compared with thepoets of Greece, however, both groups may be said to have secured only apartial success in poetry; for not only Æschylus and Sophocles, but Homertoo, are as satisfying in the matter of noble words as though they hadnever tried to win that popular success which was their goal. In thisrespect—as being, I mean, the compeer of the great poets ofGreece—Shakespeare takes his peculiar place in English poetry. Of allpoets he is the most popular, and yet in his use of the “sieve for noblewords” his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, andKeats. His felicities of diction in the great passages seem little shortof miraculous, and they are so many that it is easy to understand why heis so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore. That hewas _not_ an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take thetrouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with thereceived text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ with theplay as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603 with the ‘Hamlet’ of1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given byHeminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623. If we take into account, moreover, that it is only by the lucky chapter of accidents that we nowpossess the earlier forms of the three plays mentioned above, and thatmost likely the other plays were once in a like condition, we shall cometo the conclusion that there was no more vigilant worker with Dante’ssieve than Shakespeare. Next to Shakespeare in this great power ofcombining the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealingboth to the commonplace sense of a commonplace public and to the artisticsense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s timeno one has met with anything like Tennyson’s success in effecting areconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry inEngland. 

The biography of such a poet, one who has had such an immense influenceupon the literary history of the entire Victorian epoch—indeed, upon thenineteenth century, for his work covers two-thirds of the century—will bea work of incalculable importance. There is but one man who is fullyequipped for such an undertaking, and fortunately that is his own son—aman of great ability, of admirable critical acumen, and of quiteexceptional accomplishments. His son’s filial affection was so preciousto Tennyson that, although the poet’s powers remained undimmed to thelast day of his life, I do not believe that we should have had all thesplendid work of the last ten years without his affectionate andunwearied aid. 

II. 

All emotion—that of communities as well as that of individuals—is largelygoverned by the laws of ebb and flow. It is immediately after a nationalmourning for the loss of a great man that a wave of reaction generallysets in. But the eagerness with which these volumes {132} have beenawaited shows that Tennyson’s hold upon the British public is as strongat this moment as it was on the day of his death. This very popularityof his, however, has sometimes been spoken of by critics as though itwere an impeachment of him as a poet. “The English public iscommonplace, ” they say, “and hence the commonplace in poetry suits it. ”And no doubt this is true as a general saying, otherwise what wouldbecome of certain English poetasters who are such a joy to the many andsuch a source of laughter to the few? But a hardy critic would he be whoshould characterize Tennyson’s poetry as commonplace—that very poetrywhich, before it became popular, was decried because it was merely“poetry for poets. ” Still that poetry so rich and so rare as his shouldfind its way to the heart of a people like the English, who have “notsufficient poetic instinct in them to give birth to vernacular poetry, ”is undoubtedly a striking fact. With regard to the mass of his work, hebelonged to those poets whose appeal is as much through their masteryover the more subtle beauties of poetic art as through the heat of thepoetic fire; and such as these must expect to share the fate ofColeridge, Keats, and Shelley. Every true poet must have an individualaccent of his own—an accent which is, however, recognizable as anothervariation of that large utterance of the early gods common to all truepoets in all tongues. Is it not, then, in the nature of things that, inEngland at least, “the fit though few” comprise the audience of such apoet until the voice of recognized Authority proclaims him? ButAuthority moves slowly in these matters; years have to pass before themusic of the new voice can wind its way through the convolutions of thegeneral ear—so many years, indeed, that unless the poet is blessed withthe sublime self-esteem of Wordsworth he generally has to die in thebelief that his is another name “written in water. ” And was it alwaysso? Yes, always. 

England having, as we have said, no vernacular song, her poetry isentirely artistic, even such poetry as ‘The May Queen, ’ ‘The NorthernFarmer, ’ and the idyls of William Barnes. And it would be strange indeedif, until Authority spoke out, the beauties of artistic poetry were everapparent to the many. Is it supposable, for instance, that even thevoice of Chaucer—is it supposable that even the voice of Shakspeare—wouldhave succeeded in winning the contemporary ear had it not been for thatgreat mass of legendary and romantic material which each of these foundready to his hand, waiting to be moulded into poetic form? The fate, however, of Moore’s poetical narratives (perhaps we might say of Byron’stoo) shows that if any poetry is to last beyond the generation thatproduced it, there is needed not only the romantic material, but also theaccent, new and true, of the old poetic voice. And these volumes showwhy in these late days, when the poet’s inheritance of romantic materialseemed to have been exhausted, there appeared one poet to whom theEnglish public gave an acceptance as wide almost as if he had written inthe vernacular like Burns or Béranger. 

It is long since any book has been so eagerly looked forward to as this. The main facts of Tennyson’s life have been matter of familiar knowledgefor so many years that we do not propose to run over them here once more. Nor shall we fill the space at our command with the biographer’sinteresting personal anecdotes. So fierce a light had been beating uponAldworth and Farringford that the relations of the present Lord Tennysonto his father were pretty generally known. In the story of Englishpoetry these relations held a place that was quite unique. What thebiographer says about the poet’s sagacity, judgment, and goodsense—especially what he says about his insight into the characters ofthose with whom he was brought into contact—will be challenged by no onewho knew him. Still, the fact remains that Tennyson’s temperament waspoetic entirely. And the more attention the poet pays to his art, themore unfitted does he become to pay attention to anything else. For inthese days the mechanism of social life moves on grating wheels that needno little oiling if the poet is to bring out the very best that is withinhim. Not that all poets are equally vexed by the special infirmity ofthe poetic temperament. Poets like Wordsworth, for instance, aresupported against the world by love of Nature and by that “divinearrogance” which is sometimes a characteristic of genius. Tennyson’scase shows that not even love of Nature and intimate communings with herare of use in giving a man peace when he has not Wordsworth’stemperament. No adverse criticism could disturb Wordsworth’s sublimeself-complacency. 

“Your father, ” writes Jowett, with his usual wisdom, to Lord Tennyson, “was very sensitive, and had an honest hatred of being gossiped about. He called the malignant critics and chatterers ‘mosquitos. ’ He neverfelt any pleasure at praise (except from his friends), but he felt agreat pain at the injustice of censure. It never occurred to him that anew poet in the days of his youth was sure to provoke dangeroushostilities in the ‘genus irritabile vatum’ and in the old-fashionedpublic. ”

It might almost be said, indeed, that had it not been for theministrations, first of his beloved wife, and then of his sons, Tennyson’s life would have been one long warfare between the attitude ofhis splendid intellect towards the universe and the response of hisnervous system to human criticism. From his very childhood he seems tohave had that instinct for confronting the universe as a whole which, except in the case of Shakespeare, is not often seen among poets. Star-gazing and speculation as to the meaning of the stars and what wasgoing on in them seem to have begun in his childhood. In his firstCambridge letter to his aunt, Mrs. Russell, written from No. 12, RoseCrescent, he says, “I am sitting owl-like and solitary in my room, nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles. ” And his sontells us of a story current in the family that Frederick, when an Etonschoolboy, was shy of going to a neighbouring dinner-party to which hehad been invited. “Fred, ” said his younger brother, “think of Herschel’sgreat star-patches, and you will soon get over all that. ” He hadWordsworth’s passion, too, for communing with Nature alone. He was oneof Nature’s elect who knew that even the company of a dear and intimatefriend, howsoever close, is a disturbance of the delight that intercoursewith her can afford to the true devotee. In a letter to his future wife, written from Mablethorpe in 1839, he says:—

 “I am not so able as in old years to commune _alone_ with Nature . . . Dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching far back into childhood, a known landskip is to me an old friend, that continually talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things, and indeed does more for me than many an old friend that I know. An old park is my delight, and I could tumble about it for ever. ”

Moreover, he was always speculating upon the mystery and the wonder ofthe human story. “The far future, ” he says in a letter to Miss Sellwood, written from High Beech in Epping Forest, “has been my world always. ”And yet so powerless is reason in that dire wrestle with temperamentwhich most poets know, that with all these causes for despising criticismof his work, Tennyson was as sensitive to critical strictures asWordsworth was indifferent. “He fancied, ” says his biographer, “thatEngland was an unsympathetic atmosphere, and half resolved to live abroadin Jersey, in the South of France, or in Italy. He was so far persuadedthat the English people would never care for his poetry, that, had it notbeen for the intervention of his friends, he declared it not unlikelythat after the death of Hallam he would not have continued to write. ”And again, in reference to the completion of ‘The Sleeping Beauty, ’ hisson says, “He warmed to his work because there had been a favourablereview of him lately published in far-off Calcutta. ”

We dwell upon this weakness of Tennyson’s—a weakness which, in view ofhis immense powers, was certainly a source of wonder to his friends—inorder to show, once for all, that without the tender care of his son hecould never in his later years have done the work he did. This it waswhich caused the relations between Tennyson and the writer of thisadmirable memoir to be those of brother with brother rather than offather with son. And those who have been eagerly looking forward tothese volumes will not be disappointed. In writing the life of any manthere are scores and scores of facts and documents, great and small, which only some person closely acquainted with him, either as relative oras friend, can bring into their true light; and this it is which makesdocuments so deceptive. Here is an instance of what we mean. In writingto Thompson, Spedding says of Tennyson on a certain occasion: “I couldnot get Alfred to Rydal Mount. He would and would not (sulky one!), although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him. ” This remarkwould inevitably have been construed into another instance of thatchurlishness which is so often said (though quite erroneously) to havebeen one of Tennyson’s infirmities. But when we read the followingfoot-note by the biographer, “He said he did not wish to intrude himselfon the great man at Rydal, ” we accept the incident as another proof ofthat “humility” which the son alludes to in his preface as being one ofhis father’s characteristics. And of such evidence that had not thepoet’s son written his biography the loss to literature would have beenincalculable the book is full. Evidence of a fine intellect, a fineculture, and a sure judgment is afforded by every page—afforded as muchby what is left unsaid as by what is said. 

The biographer has invited a few of the poet’s friends to furnish theirimpressions of him. These could not fail to be interesting; it ispleasant to know what impression Tennyson made upon men of such diversecharacters as the Duke of Argyll, Jowett, Tyndall, Froude, and others. But so far as a vital portrait of the man is concerned they were notneeded, so vigorously does the man live in the portrait painted by himwho knew the poet best of all. 

“For my own part, ” says the biographer, “I feel strongly that nobiographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works;but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him inevery word which he has written; and it is difficult for me so far todetach myself from the home circle as to pourtray him for others. Thereis also the impossibility of fathoming a great man’s mind; his deeperthoughts are hardly ever revealed. He himself disliked the notion of along, formal biography, for

 None can truly write his single day, And none can write it for him upon earth. 

“However, he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of hislife should be given as shortly as might be without comment, but that mynotes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of furtherand unauthentic biographies. 

“For those who cared to know about his literary history he wrote ‘Merlinand the Gleam. ’ From his boyhood he had felt the magic of Merlin—thatspirit of poetry—which bade him know his power and follow throughout hiswork a pure and high ideal, with a simple and single devotedness and adesire to ennoble the life of the world, and which helped him throughdoubts and difficulties to ‘endure as seeing Him who is invisible. ’

 Great the Master, And sweet the Magic, When over the valley, In early summers, Over the mountain, On human faces, And all around me, Moving to melody, Floated the Gleam. 

“In his youth he sang of the brook flowing through his upland valley, ofthe ‘ridged wolds’ that rose above his home, of the mountain-glen andsnowy summits of his early dreams, and of the beings, heroes and fairies, with which his imaginary world was peopled. Then was heard the ‘croak ofthe raven, ’ the harsh voice of those who were unsympathetic—

 The light retreated, The Landskip darken’d, The melody deaden’d, The Master whisper’d, ‘Follow the Gleam. ’

“Still the inward voice told him not to be faint-hearted but to followhis ideal. And by the delight in his own romantic fancy, and by theharmonies of nature, ‘the warble of water, ’ and ‘cataract music offalling torrents, ’ the inspiration of the poet was renewed. His Ecloguesand English Idyls followed, when he sang the songs of country life andthe joys and griefs of country folk, which he knew through and through, Innocent maidens, Garrulous children, Homestead and harvest, Reaper and gleaner, And rough-ruddy faces Of lowly labour. 

“By degrees, having learnt somewhat of the real philosophy of life and ofhumanity from his own experience, he rose to a melody ‘stronger andstatelier. ’ He celebrated the glory of ‘human love and of human heroism’and of human thought, and began what he had already devised, his epic ofKing Arthur, ‘typifying above all things the life of man, ’ wherein he hadintended to represent some of the great religions of the world. He hadpurposed that this was to be the chief work of his manhood. Yet thedeath of his friend, Arthur Hallam, and the consequent darkening of thewhole world for him made him almost fail in this purpose; nor any longerfor a while did he rejoice in the splendour of his spiritual visions, norin the Gleam that had ‘waned to a wintry glimmer. ’

 Clouds and darkness Closed upon Camelot; Arthur had vanish’d I knew not whither, The King who loved me, And cannot die. 

“Here my father united the two Arthurs, the Arthur of the Idylls and theArthur ‘the man he held as half divine. ’ He himself had fought withdeath, and had come out victorious to find ‘a stronger faith his own, ’and a hope for himself, for all those in sorrow and for universal humankind, that never forsook him through the future years. 

 And broader and brighter The Gleam flying onward, Wed to the melody, Sang thro’ the world. 

 * * *

 I saw, wherever In passing it glanced upon Hamlet or city, That under the Crosses The dead man’s garden, The mortal hillock, Would break into blossom; And so to the land’s Last limit I came. 

“Up to the end he faced death with the same earnest and unfailing couragethat he had always shown, but with an added sense of the awe and themystery of the Infinite. 

 I can no longer, But die rejoicing, For thro’ the Magic Of Him the Mighty, Who taught me in childhood, There on the border Of boundless Ocean, And all but in Heaven Hovers the Gleam. 

“That is the reading of the poet’s riddle as he gave it to me. Hethought that ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ would probably be enough of biographyfor those friends who urged him to write about himself. However, thishas not been their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that Imight do. ”

There are many specialists in Tennysonian bibliography who take a pride(and a worthy pride) in their knowledge of the master’s poems. But theknowledge of all of these specialists put together is not equal to thatof him who writes this book. Not only is every line at his fingers’ends, but he knows, either from his own memory or from what his fatherhas told him, where and when and why every line was written. He, however, shares, it is evident that dislike—rather let us say thatpassionate hatred—which his father, like so many other poets, had of thatwell-intentioned but vexing being whom Rossetti anathematized as the“literary resurrection man. ” Rossetti used to say that “of all signsthat a man was devoid of poetic instinct and poetic feeling the impulseof the literary resurrectionist was the surest. ” Without going so far asthis we may at least affirm that all poets writing in a languagerequiring, as English does, much manipulation before it can be mouldedinto perfect form must needs revise in the brain before the line is setdown, or in manuscript, as Shelley did, or partly in manuscript andpartly in type, as Coleridge did. But the rakers-up of the “chips of theworkshop, ” to use Tennyson’s own phrase, seem to have been speciallyirritating to him, because he belonged to those poets who cannot reallyrevise and complete their work till they see it in type. “Poetry, ” hesaid, “looks better, more convincing in print. ”

“From the volume of 1832, ” says his son, “he omitted several stanzas of‘The Palace of Art’ because he thought that the poem was too full. ‘Theartist is known by his self-limitation’ was a favourite adage of his. Heallowed me, however, to print some of them in my notes, otherwise Ishould have hesitated to quote without his leave lines that he hadexcised. He ‘gave the people of his best, ’ and he usually wished thathis best should remain without variorum readings, ‘the chips of theworkshop, ’ as he called them. The love of bibliomaniacs for firsteditions filled him with horror, for the first editions are obviously inmany cases the worst editions, and once he said to me: ‘Why do theytreasure the rubbish I shot from my full-finish’d cantos?’

 νήπιοι ουδε ισασιν οσω πλέον ημισυ παντός. 

For himself many passages in Wordsworth and other poets have beenentirely spoilt by the modern habit of giving every various reading alongwith the text. Besides, in his case, very often what is published as thelatest edition has been the original version in his first manuscript, sothat there is no possibility of really tracing the history of what mayseem to be a new word or a new passage. ‘For instance, ’ he said, ‘in“Maud” a line in the first edition was ‘I will bury myself in _my books_, and the Devil may pipe to his own, ’ which was afterwards altered to ‘Iwill bury myself _in myself_, &c. ’: this was highly commended by thecritics as an improvement on the _original_ reading—but it was actuallyin the first MS. Draft of the poem. ”

Again, it is important to get a statement by one entitled to speak withauthority as to what Tennyson did and what he did not believe uponreligious matters. He had in ‘In Memoriam’ and other poems touched witha hand so strong and sometimes so daring upon the teaching of modernscience, and yet he had spoken always so reverently of what moderncivilization reverences, that the most opposite lessons were read fromhis utterances. To one thinker it would seem that Tennyson had thrownhimself boldly upon the very foremost wave of scientific thought. Toanother it would seem that Wordsworth (although, living and writing whenhe did, before the birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to bestill in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch withthe new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardentlythan any poet since Lucretius. While Wordsworth, notwithstanding aconventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature withoutthe ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so“God-intoxicated” a man as Tennyson. His son sets the question at restin the following pregnant words:—

“Assuredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him. He consistentlyemphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths; in anOmnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-loving God, Who has revealed Himselfthrough the human attribute of the highest self-sacrificing love; in thefreedom of the human will; and in the immortality of the soul. But heasserted that ‘Nothing worthy proving can be proven, ’ and that even as tothe great laws which are the basis of Science, ‘We have but faith, wecannot know. ’ He dreaded the dogmatism of sects and rash definitions ofGod. ‘I dare hardly name His Name, ’ he would say, and accordingly henamed Him in ‘The Ancient Sage’ the ‘Nameless. ’ ‘But take away belief inthe self-conscious personality of God, ’ he said, ‘and you take away thebackbone of the world. ’ ‘On God and God-like men we build our trust. ’ Aweek before his death I was sitting by him, and he talked long of thePersonality and of the Love of God, ‘That God, Whose eyes consider thepoor, ’ ‘Who catereth, even for the sparrow. ’ ‘I should, ’ he said, ‘infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face ofthe earth with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone. ’He would allow that God is unknowable in ‘his whole world-self, andall-in-all, ’ and that, therefore, there was some force in the objectionmade by some people to the word ‘Personality’ as being ‘anthropomorphic, ’and that, perhaps ‘Self-consciousness’ or ‘Mind’ might be clearer tothem: but at the same time he insisted that, although ‘man is like athing of nought’ in ‘the boundless plan, ’ our highest view of God must bemore or less anthropomorphic: and that ‘Personality, ’ as far as ourintelligence goes, is the widest definition and includes ‘Mind, ’‘Self-consciousness, ’ ‘Will, ’ ‘Love, ’ and other attributes of the Real, the Supreme, ‘the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, Whose nameis Holy. ’”

And then Lord Tennyson quotes a manuscript note of Jowett’s in which hesays:—

“Alfred Tennyson thinks it ridiculous to believe in a God and deny hisconsciousness, and was amused at some one who said of him that he hadversified Hegelianism. ”

He notes also an anecdote of Edward Fitzgerald’s which speaks of a weekwith Tennyson, when the poet, picking up a daisy, and looking closely atits crimson-tipped leaves, said, “Does not this look like a thinkingArtificer, one who wishes to ornament?”

Here is a paragraph which will be read with the deepest interest, notonly by every lover of poetry, but by every man whose heart has been rungby the most terrible of all bereavements—the loss of a beloved friend. Close as the tie of blood relationship undoubtedly is, it is based uponconvention as much as upon nature. It may exist and flourish vigorouslywhen there is little or no community of taste or of thought:—

“It may be as well to say here that all the letters from my father toArthur Hallam were destroyed by his father after Arthur’s death: a greatloss, as these particular letters probably revealed his inner self moretruly than anything outside his poems. ”

We confess to belonging to those who always read with a twinge of remorsethe private letters of a man in print. But if there is a case where onemust needs long to see the letters between two intimate friends, it isthat of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam. They would have been only second ininterest to Shakespeare’s letters to that mysterious “Mr. W. H. ” whoseidentity now can never be traced. For, notwithstanding all that hasrecently been said, and ably said, to the contrary, the man to whom manyof the sonnets were addressed was he whom “T. T. ” addresses as “Mr. W. H. ”

But for an intimacy to be so strong as that which existed betweenTennyson and Arthur H. Hallam there must be a kinship of soul so closeand so rare that the tie of blood relationship seems weak beside it. Itis then that friendship may sometimes pass from a sentiment into apassion. It did so in the case of Shakespeare and his mysterious friend, as the sonnets in question make manifest; but we are not aware that thereis in English literature any other instance of friendship as a passionuntil we get to ‘In Memoriam. ’ So profound was the effect of Hallam’sdeath upon Tennyson that it was the origin, his son tells us, of ‘The TwoVoices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide. ’ What was the secret of Hallam’sinfluence over Tennyson can never be guessed from anything that he hasleft behind either in prose or verse. But besides the creative genius ofthe artist there is that genius of personality which is irresistible. With a very large gift of this kind of genius Arthur Hallam seems to havebeen endowed. 

“In the letters from Arthur Hallam’s friends, ” says Lord Tennyson, “therewas a rare unanimity of opinion about his worth. Milnes, writing to hisfather, says that he had a ‘very deep respect’ for Hallam, and thatThirlwall, in after years the great bishop, for whom Hallam and my fatherhad a profound affection, was ‘actually captivated by him. ’ When atCambridge with Hallam he had written: ‘He is the only man here of my ownstanding before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything. ’Alford writes: ‘Hallam was a man of wonderful mind and knowledge on allsubjects, hardly credible at his age. . . . I long ago set him down forthe most wonderful person I ever knew. He was of the most tender, affectionate disposition. ’”

Lord Tennyson’s remarks upon the ‘Idylls of the King, ’ and upon theenormous success of the book have a special interest, and serve toillustrate our opening remarks upon the popularity of his father’s works. Popular as Tennyson had become through ‘The Gardener’s Daughter, ’ ‘TheMiller’s Daughter, ’ ‘The May Queen, ’ ‘The Lord of Burleigh, ’ and scoresof other poems—endeared to every sorrowing heart as he had become through‘In Memoriam’—it was the ‘Idylls of the King’ that secured for him hisunique place. Many explanations of the phenomenon of a true poetsecuring the popular suffrages have been offered, one of them being hisacceptance of the Laureateship. But Wordsworth, a great poet, alsoaccepted it; and he never was and never will be popular. The wisdom ofwhat Goethe says about the enormous importance of “subject” in poetic artis illustrated by the story of Tennyson and the ‘Idylls of the King. ’

For what was there in the ‘Idylls of the King’ that brought all Englandto Tennyson’s feet—made English people re-read with a new seeing in theireyes the poems which they once thought merely beautiful, but now thoughthalf divine? Beautiful these ‘Idylls’ are indeed, but they are not morebeautiful than work of his that went before. The rich Klondyke of Maloryand Geoffrey of Monmouth had not escaped the eyes of previousprospectors. All his life Milton had dreamed of the mines lyingconcealed in the “misty mid-region” of King Arthur and the Round Table, but, luckily for Tennyson, was led away from it into other paths. WithMilton’s immense power of sensuous expression—a power that impelled him, even when dealing with the spirit world, to flash upon our sensespictures of the very limbs of angels and fiends at fight—we may imaginewhat an epic of King Arthur he would have produced. Dryden alsocontemplated working in this mine, but never did; and until Scott camewith his Lyulph’s Tale in ‘The Bridal of Triermain, ’ no one had taken upthe subject but writers like Blackmore. Then came Bulwer’s burlesque. Now no prospector on the banks of the Yukon has a keener eye for nuggetsthan Tennyson had for poetic ore, and besides ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and‘Launcelot and Guinevere, ’ he had already printed the grandest of all hispoems—the ‘Morte d’Arthur. ’ It needed only the ‘Idylls of the King, ’where episode after episode of the Arthurian cycle was rendered in poemswhich could be understood by all—it needed only this for all England tobe set reading and re-reading all his poems, some of them more preciousthan any of these ‘Idylls’—poems whose familiar beauties shone out nowwith a new light. 

Ever since then Tennyson’s hold upon the British public seemed to growstronger and stronger up to the day of his death, when Great Britain, and, indeed, the entire English-speaking race, went into mourning forhim; nor, as we have said, has any weakening of that hold beenperceptible during the five years that have elapsed since. 

The volumes are so crammed with interesting and important matter that todiscuss them in one article is impossible. But before concluding theseremarks we must say that the good fortune which attended Tennyson duringhis life did not end with his death. Fortunate, indeed, is the famousman who escapes the catchpenny biographer. No man so illustrious asTennyson ever before passed away without his death giving rise to a floodof books professing to tell the story of his life. Yet it chanced thatfor a long time before his death a monograph on Tennyson by Mr. ArthurWaugh—which, though of course it is sometimes at fault, was carefullyprepared and well considered—had been in preparation, as had also asecond edition of another sketch of the poet’s life by Mr. HenryJennings, written with equal reticence and judgment. These two books, coming out, as far as we remember, in the very week of Tennyson’sfuneral, did the good service of filling up the gap of five years untilthe appearance of this authorized biography by his son. Otherwise thereis no knowing what pseudo-biographies stuffed with what errors andnonsense might have flooded the market and vexed the souls of Tennysonianstudents. For the future such pseudo-biographies will be impossible. 

III. 

Notwithstanding the apparently fortunate circumstances by which Tennysonwas surrounded, the record of his early life produces in the reader’smind a sense of unhappiness. Happiness is an affair of temperament, notof outward circumstances. Happy, in the sense of enjoying the present asWordsworth enjoyed it, Tennyson could never be. Once, no doubt, Nature’ssweetest gift to all living things—the power of enjoying the present—wasman’s inheritance too. Some of the human family have not lost it evenyet; but poets are rarely of these. Give Wordsworth any pittance, enoughto satisfy the simplest physical wants—enough to procure him plain livingand leisure for “high thinking”—and he would be happier than Tennysonwould have been, cracking the finest “walnuts” and sipping the richest“wine” amidst a circle of admiring and powerful friends. As to opinion, as to criticism of his work—what was that to Wordsworth? Had he not fromthe first the good opinion of her of whom he was the high priest elect. Natura Benigna herself? Nay, had he not from the first the good opinionsof Wordsworth himself and Dorothy? Without this faculty of enjoying thepresent, how can a bard be happy? For the present alone exists. Thepast is a dream; the future is a dream; the present is the narrow plankthrown for an instant from the dream of the past to the dream of thefuture. And yet it is the poet (who of all men should enjoy the rareeshow hurrying and scrambling along the plank)—it is he who refuses toenjoy himself on his own trembling little plank in order to “stare round”from side to side. 

Spedding, speaking in a letter to Thompson in 1835 of Tennyson’s visit tothe Lake country, lets fall a few words that describe the poet in theperiod before his marriage more fully than could have been done by avolume of subtle analysis:—

“I think he took in more pleasure and inspiration than any one would havesupposed who did not know his own almost personal dislike of the present, whatever it might be. ”

This is what makes us say that by far the most important thing inTennyson’s life was his marriage. He began to enjoy the present: “Thepeace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her. ” Nomore beautiful words than these were ever uttered by any man concerningany woman. And to say that the words were Tennyson’s is to say that theyexpressed the simple truth, for his definition of human speech as Godmeant it to be would have been “the breath that utters truth. ” It wouldhave been wonderful, indeed, if he, whose capacity of loving a friend wasso great had been without an equal capacity of loving a woman. 

“Although as a son, ” says the biographer, “I cannot allow myself fullutterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and ‘very woman ofvery woman’—‘such a wife’ and true helpmate she proved herself. It wasshe who became my father’s adviser in literary matters; ‘I am proud ofher intellect, ’ he wrote. With her he always discussed what he wasworking at; she transcribed his poems: to her and to no one else hereferred for a final criticism before publishing. She, with her ‘tender, spiritual nature, ’ {156} and instinctive nobility of thought, was alwaysby his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympatheticcounsellor. It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from theannoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerableletters addressed to him from all parts of the world. By her quiet senseof humour, by her selfless devotion, by ‘her faith as clear as theheights of the June-blue heaven, ’ she helped him also to the utmost inthe hours of his depression and of his sorrow. ”

There are some few people whose natures are so noble or so sweet that howrich soever may be their endowment of intellect, or even of genius, weseem to remember them mainly by what St. Gregory Nazianzen calls “therhetoric of their lives. ” And surely the knowledge that this is so isencouraging to him who would fain believe in the high destiny ofman—surely it is encouraging to know that, in spite of “the inhumandearth of noble natures, ” mankind can still so dearly love moral beautyas to hold it more precious than any other human force. And certainlyone of those whose intellectual endowments are outdazzled by the beautyof their qualities of heart and soul was the sweet lady whose death I amrecording. 

Among those who had the privilege of knowing Lady Tennyson (and they weremany, and these many were of the best), some are at this moment eloquentin talk about the perfect helpmate she was to the great poet, and theperfect mother she was to his children, and they quote those lovely linesof Tennyson which every one knows by heart:—

 Dear, near and true—no truer Time himself Can prove you, tho’ he make you evermore Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life Shoots to the fall—take this and pray that he Who wrote it, honouring your sweet faith to him, May trust himself;—and after praise and scorn, As one who feels the immeasurable world, Attain the wise indifference of the wise; And after autumn past—if left to pass His autumn into seeming leafless days— Draw toward the long frost and longest night, Wearing his wisdom lightly, like the fruit Which in our winter woodland looks a flower. 

Others dwell on the unique way in which those wistful blue eyes of hersand that beautiful face expressed the “tender spiritual nature” describedby the poet—expressed it, indeed, more and more eloquently with thepassage of years, and the bereavements the years had brought. Thepresent writer saw her within a few days of her death. She did not seemto him then more fragile than ordinary. For many years she whose fragileframe seemed to be kept alive by the love and sweet movements of the soulwithin had seemed as she lay upon her couch the same as she seemed whendeath was so near—intensely pale, save when a flush as slight as the pinkon a wild rose told her watchful son that the subject of conversation wasinteresting her more than was well for her. As a matter of fact, however, Lady Tennyson was no less remarkable as an intelligence than asthe central heart of love and light that illumined one of the mostbeautiful households of our time. 

Though her special gift was no doubt music, she had, as Tennyson wouldsay with affectionate pride, a “real insight into poetical effects”; andthose who knew her best shared his opinion in this matter. Whether, hadher life not been devoted so entirely to others, she would have been anoticeable artistic producer it is hard to guess. But there is no doubtthat she was born to hold a high place as a conversationalist, brilliantand stimulating. Notwithstanding the jealous watchfulness of her familylest the dinner talk should draw too heavily upon her small stock ofphysical power, the fascination of her conversation, both as tosubject-matter and manner, was so irresistible that her friends were aptto forget how fragile she really was until warned by a sign from her sonor, daughter-in-law, who adored her, that the conversation should bebrought to a close. 

Her diary, upon which her son has drawn for certain biographical portionsof his book shows how keen and how persistent was her interest in thepoetry of her husband; it also shows how thorough was her insight intoits principles. As a rule, diaries, professing as they do to giveportraitures of eminent men, are mostly very much worse than worthless. The points seized upon by the diarist are almost never physiognomic, andeven if the diarist does give some glimpse of the character he professesto limn, the picture can only be partially true, inasmuch as it can neverbe toned down by other aspects of the character unseen by the diarist andunknown to him. 

Very different, however, is the record kept by Lady Tennyson. As aninstance of her power of selecting really luminous points forpreservation in her diary, let me instance this. Many a student of the‘Idylls of the King’ has been struck by a certain difference in the stylebetween ‘The Coming of Arthur’ and ‘The Passing of Arthur’ and the otheridylls. Indeed, more than once this difference has been cited as showingTennyson’s inability to fuse the different portions of a long poem. Thisfact had not escaped the eye of the loving wife and critic, and two daysbefore her death she said to her son, “He said ‘The Coming of Arthur’ and‘The Passing of Arthur’ are purposely simpler in style than the otheridylls as dealing with the awfulness of birth and death, ” and wished thisremark of the poet’s to be put on record in the book. 

It is needless to comment on the value of these few words and the lightthey shed upon Tennyson’s method. 

Those who saw Lady Tennyson in middle life and in advanced age, and werestruck by that spiritual beauty of hers which no painter could everrender, will not find it difficult to imagine what she was at seventeen, when Tennyson suddenly came upon her in the “Fairy Wood, ” and exclaimed, “Are you an Oread or a Dryad wandering here?” And yet her beauty wasonly a small part of a charm that was indescribable. An important eventfor English literature was that meeting in the “Fairy Wood. ” For, fromthe moment of his engagement, “the current of his mind was no longer andconstantly in the channel of mournful memories and melancholyforebodings, ” says his son. And speaking of the year, 1838, the sontells us that, on the whole, he was happy in his life. “When I wrote‘The Two Voices, ’” he used to say, “I was so utterly miserable, a burdento myself and my family, that I said, ‘Is life worth anything?’ and nowthat I am old, I fear that I shall only live a year or two, for I havework still to do. ”

The hostile manner in which ‘Maud’ was received vexed him, and would, before his marriage, have deeply disturbed him. A right view of thisfine poem seems to have been taken by George Brimley, an admirablecritic, who in the ‘Cambridge Essays, ’ had already pointed out with greatacumen many of the more subtle beauties of Tennyson. 

There are few more pleasant pages in this book than those which recordTennyson’s relations with another poet who was blessed in hiswife—Browning. Although the two poets had previously met (notably inParis in 1851), the intimacy between them would seem to have beencemented, if not begun, during one of Tennyson’s visits to his andBrowning’s friends, Mr. And Mrs. Knowles at the Hollies, Clapham Common. Here Tennyson read to Browning the ‘Grail’ (which the latter pronouncedto be Tennyson’s “best and highest”); and here Browning came and read hisown new poem ‘The Ring and the Book, ’ when Tennyson’s verdict on it was, “Full of strange vigour and remarkable in many ways, doubtful if it willever be popular. ”

The record of his long intimacy with Coventry Patmore and Aubrey de Veretakes an important place in the biography, and the reminiscences ofTennyson by the latter poet form an interesting feature of the volumes. In George Meredith’s first little book Tennyson was delighted by the‘Love in a Valley, ’ and he had a full appreciation of the great novelistall round. With the three leading poets of a younger generation, Rossetti, William Morris, and Swinburne, he had slight acquaintance. Here, however, is an interesting memorandum by Tennyson recording hisfirst meeting with Swinburne:

“I may tell you, however, that young Swinburne called here the other daywith a college friend of his, and we asked him to dinner, and I thoughthim a very modest and intelligent young fellow. Moreover I read him whatyou vindicated [‘Maud’], but what I particularly admired in him was thathe did not press upon me any verses of his own. ”

Of contemporary novels he seems to have been a voracious andindiscriminate reader. In the long list here given of novelists whosebooks he read—good, bad, and indifferent—it is curious not to find thename of Mrs. Humphry Ward. With Thackeray he was intimate; and he was incordial relations with Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, and George Eliot. Amongthe poets, besides Edward Fitzgerald and Coventry Patmore, he saw much ofWilliam Allingham. Though he admired parts of ‘_Festus_’ greatly, we donot gather from these volumes that he met the author. Dobell he saw muchof at Malvern in 1846. The letter-diary from Tennyson during his stay inCornwall with Holman Hunt, Val. Prinsep, Woolner, and Palgrave, shows howexhilarated he could be by wind and sea. The death of Lionel was a sadblow to him. ‘Demeter, and other Poems, ’ was dedicated to Lord Dufferin, “as a tribute, ” says his son, “of affection and of gratitude; for wordswould fail me to tell the unremitting kindness shown by himself and LadyDufferin to my brother Lionel during his fatal illness. ”

Tennyson’s critical insight could not fail to be good when exercised uponpoetry. Here are one or two of his sayings about Burns, which show inwhat spirit he would have read Henley’s recent utterances about thatpoet:—

“Burns did for the old songs of Scotland almost what Shakespeare had donefor the English drama that preceded him. ”

“Read the exquisite songs of Burns. In shape each of them has theperfection of the berry, in light the radiance of the dew-drop: youforget for its sake those stupid things his serious poems. ”

Among the reminiscences and impressions of the poet which Lord Tennysonhas appended to his second volume, it is only fair to specialize theadmirable paper by F. T. Palgrave, which, long as it is, is not by oneword too long. That Jowett would write wisely and well was in the natureof things. The only contribution, however, we can quote here isFroude’s, for it is as brief as it is emphatic:—

 “I owe to your father the first serious reflexions upon life and the nature of it which have followed me for more than fifty years. The same voice speaks to me now as I come near my own end, from beyond the bar. Of the early poems, ‘Love and Death’ had the deepest effect upon me. The same thought is in the last lines of the last poems which we shall ever have from him. 

 “Your father in my estimate, stands, and will stand far away by the side of Shakespeare above all other English Poets, with this relative superiority even to Shakespeare, that he speaks the thoughts and speaks _to_ the perplexities and misgivings of his own age. 

 “He was born at the fit time, before the world had grown inflated with the vanity of Progress, and there was still an atmosphere in which such a soul could grow. There will be no such others for many a long age. ”

 “Yours gratefully, “J. A. FROUDE. ”

This letter is striking evidence of the influence Tennyson had upon hiscontemporaries. Comparisons, however, between Shakespeare and otherpoets can hardly be satisfactory. A kinship between him and any otherpoet can only be discovered in relation to one of the many sides of the“myriad-minded” man. Where lies Tennyson’s kinship? Is it on thedramatic side? In a certain sense Tennyson possessed dramatic powerundoubtedly; for he had a fine imagination of extraordinary vividness, and could, as in ‘Rizpah, ’ make a character live in an imaginedsituation. But to write a vital play requires more than this: itrequires a knowledge—partly instinctive and partly acquired—of men aswell as of man, and especially of the way in which one individual actsand reacts upon another in the complex web of human life. To depict theworkings of the soul of man in a given situation is one thing—to depictthe impact of ego upon ego is another. When we consider that the morepoetical a poet is the more oblivious we expect him to be of themachinery of social life, it is no wonder that poetical dramatists are sorare. In drama, even poetic drama, the poet must leave the “goldenclime” in which he was born, must leave those “golden stars above” inorder to learn this machinery, and not only learn it, but take a pleasurein learning it. 

In honest admiration of Tennyson’s dramatic work, where it is admirable, we yield to none, at the time when ‘The Foresters’ was somewhat coldlyaccepted by the press on account of its “lack of virility, ” we consideredthat in the class to which it belonged, the scenic pastoral plays, itheld a very worthy place. That Tennyson’s admiration for Shakespeare wasunbounded is evident enough. 

“There was no one, ” says Jowett in his recollections of Tennyson, “towhom he was so absolutely devoted, no poet of whom he had a more intimateknowledge than Shakespeare. He said to me, and probably to many others, that there was one intellectual process in the world of which he couldnot even entertain an apprehension—that was the plays of Shakespeare. Hethought that he could instinctively distinguish between the genuine andthe spurious in them, _e. G. _, between those parts of ‘King Henry VIII. , ’which are generally admitted to be spurious, and those that are genuine. The same thought was partly working in his mind on another occasion, whenhe spoke of two things, which he conceived to be beyond the intelligenceof man, and it was certainly not repeated by him from any irreverence;the one, the intellectual genius of Shakespeare—the other, the religiousgenius of Jesus Christ. ”

And in the pathetic account of Tennyson’s last moments we find itrecorded that on the Tuesday before the Wednesday on which he died, hecalled out, “Where is my Shakespeare? I must have my Shakespeare”; andagain on the day of his death, when the breath was passing out of hisbody, he asked for his Shakespeare. All this, however, makes it the moreremarkable that of poets Shakespeare had the least influence uponTennyson’s art. There was a fundamental unlikeness between the genius ofthe two men. The only point in common between them is that each in hisown way captivated the suffrages both of the many and of the fit thoughfew, notwithstanding the fact that their methods of dramatic approach intheir plays are absolutely and fundamentally different. Even their verymethods of writing verse are entirely different. Tennyson’s blank verseseems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and theWordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as aShakespearean line. Now and then such a line as

 Authority forgets a dying king

turns up, but very rarely. We agree with all Professor Jebb says inpraise of Tennyson’s blank verse. 

“He has known, ” says he, “how to modulate it to every theme, and toelicit a music appropriate to each; attuning it in turn to a tender andhomely grace, as in ‘The Gardener’s Daughter ‘; to the severe and idealmajesty of the antique, as in ‘Tithonus’; to meditative thought, as in‘The Ancient Sage, ’ or ‘Akbar’s Dream’; to pathetic or tragic tales ofcontemporary life, as in ‘Aylmer’s Field, ’ or ‘Enoch Arden’; or tosustained romance narrative, as in the ‘Idylls. ’ No English poet hasused blank verse with such flexible variety, or drawn from it so large acompass of tones; nor has any maintained it so equably on a high level ofexcellence. ”

But we fail to see where he touched Shakespeare on the dramatic side ofShakespeare’s immense genius. 

Tennyson had the yearning common to all English poets to writeShakespearean plays, and the filial piety with which his son tries touphold his father’s claims as a dramatist is beautiful; indeed, it ispathetic. But the greatest injustice that can be done to a great poet isto claim for him honours that do not belong to him. In his own lineTennyson is supreme, and this book makes it necessary to ask once morewhat that line is. Shakespeare’s stupendous fame has for centuries beenthe candle into which all the various coloured wings of later days haveflown with more or less of disaster. Though much was said in praise of‘Harold’ by one of the most accomplished critics and scholars of ourtime, Dr. Jebb, {168} the play could not keep the stage, nor does it liveas a drama as any one of Tennyson’s lyrics can be said to live. ‘Becket, ’ to be sure, was a success on the stage. A letter to Tennysonin 1884 from so competent a student of Shakespeare as Sir Henry Irvingdeclares that ‘Becket’ is a finer play than ‘King John. ’ Still, the‘Morte d’Arthur, ’ ‘The Lotos-Eaters, ’ ‘The Gardener’s Daughter, ’ outweighthe five-act tragedy in the world of literary art. Of acted dramaTennyson knew nothing at all. To him, evidently, the word _act_ in aprinted play meant _chapter_; the word _scene_ meant _section_. In hisearly days he had gone occasionally to see a play, and in 1875 he went tosee Irving in Hamlet and liked him better than Macready, whom he had seenin the part. Still later he went to see Lady Archibald Campbell act when‘Becket’ was given “among the glades of oak and fern in the CanizzaroWood at Wimbledon. ” But handicapped as he was by ignorance of drama as astage product how could he write Shakespearean plays?

But let us for a moment consider the difference between the two men aspoets. It is hard to imagine the master-dramatist of the world—it ishard to imagine the poet who, by setting his foot upon allegory, savedour poetry from drying up after the invasion of gongorism, euphuism, andallegory—it is, we say, hard to imagine Shakespeare, if he had conceivedand written such lovely episodes as those of the ‘Idylls of the King, ’ sofull of concrete pictures, setting about to turn his flesh-and-bloodcharacters into symbolic abstractions. There is in these volumes acurious document, a memorandum of Tennyson’s presented to Mr. Knowles atAldworth in 1869, in which an elaborate scheme for turning into abstractideas the characters of the Arthurian story is sketched:—

 K. A. Religious Faith. 

 King Arthur’s three Guineveres. 

 The Lady of the Lake. 

 Two Guineveres, ye first prim Christianity. 2d Roman Catholicism: ye first is put away and dwells apart, 2d Guinevere flies. Arthur takes to the first again, but finds her changed by lapse of Time. 

 Modred, the sceptical understanding. He pulls Guinevere, Arthur’s latest wife, from the throne. 

 Merlin Emrys, the Enchanter. Science. Marries his daughter to Modred. 

 Excalibur, War. 

 The Sea, the people / The Saxons, the people } the S. Are a sea-people and it is theirs and a type of them. 

 The Round Table: liberal institutions. 

 Battle of Camlan. 

 2d Guinevere with the enchanted book and cup. 

And Mr. Knowles in a letter to the biographer says:—

“He encouraged me to write a short paper, in the form of a letter to _TheSpectator_, on the inner meaning of the whole poem, which I did, simplyupon the lines he himself indicated. He often said, however, that anallegory should never be pressed too far. ” Are all the lovely passagesof human passion and human pathos in these ‘Idylls’ allegorical—that isto say—make-believe? The reason why allegorical poetry is alwayssecond-rate, even at its best, is that it flatters the reader’s intellectat the expense of his heart. Fancy “the allegorical intent” behind theparting of Hector and Andromache, and behind the death of Desdemona!Thank Heaven, however, Tennyson’s allegorical intent was a destructiveafterthought. For, says the biographer, “the allegorical drift heremarked out was fundamentally changed in the later schemes in the‘Idylls. ’” According to that delicate critic, Canon Ainger, there is asymbolical intent underlying ‘The Lady of Shalott’:—

“The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world fromwhom she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region ofshadows into that of realities. ”

But what concerns us here is the fact that when Shakespeare wrote, although he yielded too much now and then to the passion for gongorismand euphuism which had spread all over Europe, it was against the natureof his genius to be influenced by the contemporary passion for allegory. That he had a natural dislike of allegorical treatment of a subject isevident, not only in his plays, but in his sonnets. At a time when thesonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeare’ssonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate andpersonal kind—a fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about theBaconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, for what Bacon had was fancy, not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is themother of Drama. The moment that Bacon essayed imaginative work, hepassed into allegory, as we see in the ‘New Atlantis. ’

It might, perhaps, be said that there are three kinds of poeticaltemperament which have never yet been found equally combined in any onepoet—not even in Shakespeare himself. There is the lyric temperament, asexemplified in writers like Sappho, Shelley, and others; there is themeditative temperament—sometimes speculative, but not always accompaniedby metaphysical dreaming—as exemplified in Lucretius, Wordsworth, andothers; and there is the dramatic temperament, as exemplified in Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. In a certain sense the Iliad isthe most dramatic poem in the world, for the dramatic picture livesundisturbed by lyrism or meditation. In Æschylus and Sophocles we find, besides the dramatic temperament, a large amount of the lyricaltemperament, and a large amount of the meditative, but unaccompanied bymetaphysical speculation. In Shakespeare we find, besides the dramatictemperament, a large amount of the meditative accompanied by anirresistible impulse towards metaphysical speculation, but, on the whole, a moderate endowment of the lyrical temperament, judging by the fewoccasions on which he exercised it. For fine as are such lyrics as“Hark, hark, the lark, ” “Where the bee sucks, ” &c. , other poets havewritten lyrics as fine. 

In a certain sense no man can be a pure and perfect dramatist. Every egois a central sun found which the universe revolves, and it must needsassert itself. This is why on a previous occasion, when speaking of theway in which thoughts are interjected into drama by the Greek dramatists, we said that really and truly no man can paint another, but only himself, and what we call character-painting is at the best but a poor mixing ofpainter and painted—a third something between these two, just as what wecall colour and sound are born of the play of undulation upon organism. Very likely this is putting the case too strongly. But be this as itmay, it is impossible to open a play of Shakespeare’s without beingstruck with the way in which the meditative side of Shakespeare’s mindstrove with and sometimes nearly strangled the dramatic. If this wereconfined to ‘Hamlet, ’ where the play seems meant to revolve on aphilosophical pivot, it would not be so remarkable. But so hindered withthoughts, reflections, meditations, and metaphysical speculations wasShakespeare that he tossed them indiscriminately into other plays, tragedies, comedies, and histories, regardless sometimes of the characterwho uttered them. With regard to metaphysical speculation, indeed, evenwhen he was at work on the busiest scenes of his dramas, it would seem—aswas said on the occasion before alluded to—that Shakespeare’s instinctfor actualizing and embodying in concrete form the dreams of themetaphysician often arose and baffled him. It would seem that whenwriting a comedy he could not help putting into the mouth of a man likeClaudio those words which seem as if they ought to have been spoken by ametaphysician of the Hamlet type, beginning, Ay, but to die and go we know not where. 

It would seem that he could not help putting into the mouth of Macbeththose words which also seem as if they ought to have been spoken on theplatform at Elsinore, beginning, To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow. 

And if it be said that Macbeth was a philosopher as well as a murderer, and might have thought these thoughts in the terrible strait in which hethen was, surely nothing but this marvellous peculiarity of Shakespeare’stemperament will explain his making Macbeth stop at Duncan’s bedroomdoor, dagger in hand, to say, Now o’er the one half world Nature seems dead, &c. 

And again, though Prospero was very likely a philosopher too, even hesteals from Hamlet’s mouth such words of the metaphysician as these:—

 We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. 

That this is one of Shakespeare’s most striking characteristics will notbe denied by any competent student of his works. Nor will any suchstudent deny that, exquisite as his lyrics are, they are too few and toounimportant in subject-matter to set beside his supreme wealth ofdramatic picture, and his wide vision as a thinker and a metaphysicaldreamer. 

Now on which of these sides of Shakespeare does Tennyson touch? Is it onthe lyrical side? Shakespeare’s fine lyrics are so few that they wouldbe lost if set beside the marvellous wealth of Tennyson’s lyrical work. On one side only of Shakespeare’s genius Tennyson touches, perhaps, moreclosely than any subsequent poet. As a metaphysician none comes so nearShakespeare as he who wrote these lines:—

 And more, my son! for more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the Self was loosed, And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touch’d my limbs, the limbs Were strange not mine—and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self. The gain of such large life as match’d with ours Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world. 

Here, then, seems to be the truth of the matter: while Shakespeare hadimmense dramatic power, and immense meditative power with moderate lyricpower, Tennyson had the lyric gift and the meditative gift without thedramatic. His poems are more full of reflections, meditations, andgeneralizations upon human life than any poet’s since Shakespeare. Butthen the moment that Shakespeare descended from those heights whether hismetaphysical imagination had borne him, he became, not a lyrist, asTennyson became, but a dramatist. And this divides Shakespeare as farfrom Tennyson as it divides him from any other first-class writer. Weadmirers of Tennyson must content ourselves with this thought, that, wonderful as it is for Shakespeare to have combined great metaphysicalpower with supreme power as a dramatist, it is scarcely less wonderfulfor Tennyson to have combined great metaphysical power with the power ofa supreme lyrist. Nay, is it not in a certain sense more wonderful for alyrical impulse such as Tennyson’s to be found combined with a power ofphilosophical and metaphysical abstraction such as he shows in some ofhis poems?

IV. CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI. 1830–1894. 

I. 

Although the noble poet and high-souled woman we have just lost had beenill and suffering from grievous pain for a long time, Death came at lastwith a soft hand which could but make him welcome. Since early inAugust, when she took to her bed, she was so extremely weak and otherwiseill that one scarcely expected her (at any time) to live more than amonth or so, and for the last six weeks or thereabouts—say from the 15thof November—one expected her to die almost from day to day. My dearfriend William Rossetti, who used to go to Torrington Square everyafternoon, saw her on the afternoon of December 28th [1894]. He did not, he told me, much expect to find her alive in the afternoon of the 29th, and intended, therefore, to make his next call earlier. She died athalf-past seven in the morning of the 29th, in the presence only of herfaithful nurse Mrs. Read. It was through her sudden collapse that shemissed at her side, when she passed away, that brother whose whole lifehas been one of devotion to his family, and whose tireless affection forthe last of them was one of the few links that bound Christina’s sympathyto the earth. 

 [Picture: Christina Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]

Her illness was of a most complicated kind: two years and a half ago shewas operated on for cancer: functional malady of the heart, accompaniedby dropsy in the left arm and hand, followed. Although on Friday theserious symptoms of her case became, as I have said, accentuated, she wasthroughout the day and night entirely conscious; and so peaceful andapparently so free from pain was she that neither the medical man nor thenurse supposed the end to be quite so near as it was. During all thistime, up to the moment of actual dissolution, her lips seemed to bemoving in prayer, but, of course, this with her was no uncommon sign:duty and prayer ordered her life. Her sufferings, I say, had been great, but they had been encountered by a fortitude that was greater still. Throughout all her life, indeed, she was the most notable example thatour time has produced of the masterful power of man’s spiritual naturewhen at its highest to conquer in its warfare with earthly conditions, asher brother Gabriel’s life was the most notable example of the struggleof the spiritual nature with the bodily when the two are equallyequipped. It is the conviction of one whose high privilege it was toknow her in many a passage of sorrow and trial that of all the poets whohave lived and died within our time, Christina Rossetti must have had thenoblest soul. 

A certain irritability of temper, which was, perhaps, natural to her, had, when I first became acquainted with her family (about 1872), beenovercome, or at least greatly chastened, by religion (which with her wasa passion) and by a large acquaintance with grief, resulting in a longmeditation over the mystery of pain. In wordly matters her generositymay be described as boundless; but perhaps it is not difficult for a poetto be generous in a worldly sense—to be free in parting with that whichcan be precious only to commonplace souls. What, however, is not so easyis for one holding such strong religious convictions as ChristinaRossetti held to cherish such generous thoughts and feelings as were hersabout those to whom her shibboleths meant nothing. This was what madeher life so beautiful and such a blessing to all. The indurating effectsof a selfish religiosity never withered her soul nor narrowed it. Withher, indeed, religion was very love—

 A largess universal like the sun. 

It is always futile to make guesses as to what might have been thedevelopment of a poet’s genius and character had the education ofcircumstances been different from what it was, and perhaps it isspecially futile to guess what would have been the development underother circumstances of her, the poet of whom her friends used to speakwith affection and reverence as “Christina. ”

On the death of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (or as his friendsused to call him Gabriel) in 1882, I gave that sketch of the family storywhich has formed the basis of most of the biographical notices of him andhis family; it would, therefore, be superfluous to reiterate what I saidand what is now matter of familiar knowledge. It may, however, be aswell to remind the reader that, owing to the peculiar position in Londonof the father Gabriele Rossetti, the family were during childhood andpartly during youth as much isolated from the outer English world as werethe family between whom and themselves there were many points ofresemblance—the Brontës. The two among them who were not in youth of aretiring disposition were he who afterwards became the most retiring ofall, Gabriel, and Maria, the latter of whom was in one sense retiring, and in another expansive. In her dark brown, or, as some called them, black eyes, there would suddenly come up and shine an enthusiasm, acapacity of poetic and romantic fire, to the quelling of which there musthave gone an immensity of religious force. As to Gabriel, during a largeportion of his splendid youth he exhibited a genial breadth of front thataffined him to Shakespeare and Walter Scott. The English strain in thefamily found expression in him, and in him alone. There was a somethingin the hearty ring of his voice that drew Englishmen to him as by amagnet. 

While it was but little that the others drew from the rich soil of merryEngland, he drew from it half at least of his radiant personality—half atleast of his incomparable genius. Though he was in every way part andparcel of that marvellous little family circle of children of genius inCharlotte Street, he had also the power of looking at it from theoutside. It would be strange, indeed, if this or any other power shouldbe found lacking in him. I have often heard Rossetti—by the red flickerof the studio fire, when the gas was turned down to save hiseyesight—give the most graphic and fascinating descriptions of the littlegroup and the way in which they grew up to be what they were under thetuition of a father whose career can only be called romantic, and amother whose intellectual gifts were so remarkable that, had they notbeen in some great degree stifled by the exercise of an entireself-abnegation on behalf of her family, she, too, must have become animportant figure in literature. 

 [Picture: Mrs. Rossetti. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]

The father died in 1854, many years before I knew the family; butGabriel’s description of him; his conversations with his brother-refugeesand others who visited the house—conversations in which the dreamy andthe matter-of-fact were oddly blent; his striking skill as animprovisatore of Italian poetry, and also as a master of pen-and-inkdrawing; his great musical gift—a gift which none of his family seemed tohave inherited; his fine tenor voice; his unflinching courage andindependence of character (qualities which made him refuse, in aProtestant country, to make open abjuration of the creed in which theRossettis had been reared, though he detested the Pope and all his works, and was, if not an actual freethinker, thoroughlylatitudinarian)—Gabriel’s pictures of this poet and father of poets wereso vivid—so amazingly and incredibly vivid—that I find it difficult tothink I never met the father in the flesh: not unfrequently I find myselftalking of him as if I had known him. What higher tribute than this canbe made to a narrator’s dramatic power? Those who have seen the elderRossetti’s pen-and-ink drawings (the work of a child) will agree with methat Gabriel did not over-estimate them in the least degree. All theRossettis inherited from their father voices so musical that they couldbe recognized among other voices in any gathering, and no doubt thatclear-cut method of syllabification which was so marked a characteristicof Christina’s conversation, but which gave it a sort of foreign tone, was inherited from the father. Her affinity to the other two members ofthe family was seen in that intense sense of duty of which Gabriel, withall his generosity, had but little. There was no martyrdom she would nothave undertaken if she thought that duty called upon her to undertake it, and this may be said of the other two. 

In most things, however, Christina Rossetti seemed to stand midwaybetween Gabriel and the other two members of her family, and it was thesame in physical matters. She had Gabriel’s eyes, in which hazel andblue-grey were marvellously blent, one hue shifting into the other, answering to the movements of the thoughts—eyes like the mother’s. Andher brown hair, though less warm in colour than his during his boyhood, was still like it. When a young girl, at the time that she sat for theVirgin in the picture now in the National Gallery, she was, as both hermother and Gabriel have told me, really lovely, with an extraordinaryexpression of pensive sweetness. She used to have in the little backparlour a portrait of herself at eighteen by Gabriel, which gives allthese qualities. Even then, however, the fullness in the eyes wassomewhat excessive. Afterwards her ill health took a peculiar form, theeffect of which was that the eyes were, in a manner of speaking, pushedforward, and although this protuberance was never disagreeable, itcertainly took a good deal of beauty from her face. 

Dominant, however, as was the father’s personality among his friends, themother’s influence upon the children was stronger than his; and nowonder, for I think there was no beautiful charm of woman that Mrs. Rossetti lacked. She did not seem at all aware that she was a woman ofexceptional gifts, yet her intellectual penetration and the curiousexactitude of her knowledge were so remarkable that Gabriel accepted herdicta as oracles not to be challenged. One of her specialities was thepronunciation of English words, in which she was an authority. I cannotresist giving one little instance, as it illustrates a sweet feature ofGabriel’s character. It occurred on a lovely summer’s day in the oldKelmscott manor house in 1873, when Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, and myselfwere watching Gabriel at work upon ‘Proserpine. ’ I had pronounced theword _aspirant_ with the accent upon the middle syllable. “Pardon me, mydear fellow, ” said he, without looking from his work, “that word shouldbe pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, as a purist like youought to know. ” On my challenging this, he said, in a tone which wasmeant to show that he was saying the last word upon the subject, “Mymother always says _áspirant_, and she is always right upon matters ofpronunciation. ” “Then I shall always say _áspirant_, ” I replied. And Imay add that I now do say _áspirant_, and, right or wrong, intend to say_áspirant_ so long as this breath of mine enables me to say _áspirant_ atall. Afterwards Christina, as we were strolling by the weir, watchingGabriel and George Hake pounding across the meadows at the rate of fivemiles an hour, said to me, “I think you were right about _aspírant_. ”“No, ” I said, “it is a dear, old-fashioned way. Your mother says_áspirant_; I now remember that my own mother said _áspirant_. I shallstick to _áspirant_ till the end of the chapter. ” And Christina said, “Then so will I. ”

Among Mrs. Rossetti’s accomplishments was reading aloud, mainly fromimaginative writers, and I cannot recall without a thrill of mingledemotions a delightful stay of mine at Kelmscott in the summer of ’73, when she, whose age then was seventy-three, used to read out to us allsorts of things. And writing these words makes me hear those readingsagain—makes me hear, through the open casement of the quaint old house, the blackbirds from the home field trying in vain to rival the music ofthat half-Italian, half-English voice. To have been admitted into such acharmed circle I look upon as one of the greatest privileges of my life. It is something for a man to have lived within touch of ChristinaRossetti and her mother. From her father, however, Christina took, either by the operation of some law of heredity or from early associationwith the author of ‘Il Mistero dell’ Amor Platonico del Medio Evo’ and‘La Beatrice di Dante, ’ that passion for symbolism which is one of thechief features of her poetry. There is, perhaps, no more strikinginstance of the inscrutable lines in which ancestral characteristicsdescend than the way in which the passion for symbolism was inherited byChristina and Gabriel Rossetti from their father. 

While Christina’s poetical work may be described as being all symbolical, she was not much given, like her brother, to read symbols into theevery-day incidents of life. Gabriel, on the contrary, though usingsymbolism in his poetry in only a moderate degree, allowed his instinctfor symbolizing his own life to pass into positive superstition. When aparty of us—including Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, the two aunts, Dr. Hake, with four of his sons, and myself—were staying for Christmas with Gabrielnear Bognor, a tree fell in the garden during a storm. While Gabrielseemed inclined to take it as a sign of future disaster, Christina, whosepoetry is so full of symbolism, would smile at such a notion. YetGabriel could speak of his father’s symbolizing (as in ‘La Beatrice diDante’) as being absolutely and hopelessly eccentric and worthless. Thisis remarkable, for one would have thought that it was impossible to readthose extraordinary works of the elder Rossetti’s without being impressedby the rare intellectual subtlety of the Italian scholar. 

Of course the opportunities of brother and sister of studying Nature wereidentical. Both were born in London, and during childhood saw Natureonly as a holiday scene. Christina would talk with delight of hergrandfather’s cottage retreat about thirty miles from London, to whichshe used to go for a holiday in a stage coach, and of the beauty of thecountry around. But these expeditions were not numerous, and came to anend when she was a child of seven or eight, and it was very little thatshe saw outside London before girlhood was past. I have myself heard herspeak of what she has somewhere written about—the rapture of the sight ofsome primroses growing in a railway cutting. It is, of course, a greatdisadvantage to any poet not to have been born in the country; learned inNature the city-born poet can never be, as we see in the case of Milton, who loved Nature without knowing her. It is here that Jean Ingelow hassuch an advantage over Christina Rossetti. Her love of flowers, andbirds, and trees, and all that makes the earth so beautiful, is not onewhit stronger than Christina’s own, but it is a love born of anexhaustive detailed knowledge of Nature’s life. 

On a certain occasion when walking with a friend at Hunter’s Forestall, near Herne Bay, where she and her mother were nursing Gabriel through oneof his illnesses, the talk ran upon Shelley’s ‘Skylark, ’ a poem which sheadored. She was literally bewildered because the friend showed that hewas able to tell, from a certain change of sound in the note of a skylarkthat had risen over the lane, the moment when the bird had made up itsmind to cease singing and return to the earth. It seemed to her analmost supernatural gift, and yet an ignorant ploughman will often beable to do the same thing. This kind of intimacy with Nature shecoveted. With the lower animals, nevertheless, she had a strange kind ofsympathy of her own. Young creatures especially understood the playfulhumour of her approach. A delightful fantastic whim was the bond betweenher and puppies and kittens and birds. Her intimacy with Nature—of adifferent kind altogether from that of Wordsworth and Tennyson—was of thekind that I have described on a previous occasion as Sufeyistic: sheloved the beauty of this world, but not entirely for itself; she loved iton account of its symbols of another world beyond. And yet she was noslave to the ascetic side of Christianity. No doubt there was mixed withher spiritualism, or perhaps underlying it, a rich sensuousness thatunder other circumstances of life would have made itself manifest, andalso a rare potentiality of deep passion. It is this, indeed, whichmakes the study of her great and noble nature so absorbing. 

Perhaps for strength both of subject and of treatment, ChristinaRossetti’s masterpiece is ‘Amor Mundi. ’ Here we get a lesson of humanlife expressed, not didactically, but in a concrete form of unsurpassablestrength, harmony, and concision. Indeed, it may be said of her workgenerally that her strength as an artist is seen not so much in masteryover the rhythm, or even over the verbal texture of poetry, as in theskill with which she expresses an allegorical intent by subtle suggestioninstead of direct preachment. Herein ‘An Apple Gathering’ is quiteperfect. It is, however, if I may venture to say so, a mistake to speakof Christina Rossetti as being a great poetic artist. Exquisite as herbest things are, no one had a more uncertain hand than she when at work. Here, as in so many things, she was like Blake, whose influence upon herwas very great. 

Of self-criticism she had almost nothing. On one occasion, many yearsago now, she expressed a wish to have some of her verses printed in _TheAthenæum_, and I suggested her sending them to 16, Cheyne Walk, herbrother’s house, where I then used to spend much time in a study that Ioccupied there. I said that her brother and I would read them togetherand submit them to the editor. She sent several poems (I think aboutsix), not one of which was in the least degree worthy of her. Thisnaturally embarrassed me, but Gabriel, who entirely shared my opinion ofthe poems, wrote at once to her and told her that the verses sent were, both in his own judgment and mine, unworthy of her, and that she “hadbetter buckle to at once and write another poem. ” She did so, and theresult was an exquisite lyric which appeared in _The Athenæum_. Here iswhere she was wonderfully unlike Gabriel, whose power of self-criticismin poetry was almost as great as Tennyson’s own. But in the matter ofinspiration she was, I must think, above Gabriel—above almost everybody. 

If English rhymed metres had been as easy to work in as Italian rhymedmetres, her imagination was so vivid, her poetic impulse was so strong, and, indeed, her poetic wealth so inexhaustible, that she would havestood in the front rank of English poets. But the writer of Englishrhymed measures is in a very different position as regardsimprovisatorial efforts from the Italian who writes in rhymed measures. He has to grapple with the metrical structure—to seize the form by thethroat, as it were, and force it to take in the enormous wealth at theEnglish poet’s command. Fine as is the ‘Prince’s Progress, ’ for instance(and it would be hard to find its superior in regard to poetic materialin the whole compass of Victorian poetry), the number of rugged lines thereader has to encounter weighs upon and distresses him until, indeed, theconclusion is reached: then the passion and the pathos of the subjectcause the poem to rise upon billows of true rhythm. On the other hand, however, it may be said that a special quality of her verse is a _curiosafelicitas_ which makes a metrical blemish tell as a kind of suggestivegrace. But I must stop; I must bear in mind that he who has walked andtalked with Christina Rossetti, burdened with a wealth of rememberedbeauty from earth and heaven, runs the risk of becoming garrulous. 

II. 

In regard to unpublished manuscripts which a writer has left behind him, the responsibilities of his legal representatives are far more grave thanseems to be generally supposed. In deciding what posthumous writings anexecutor is justified in giving to the public it is important, of course, to take into account the character, the idiosyncrasy of the writer inregard to all his relations towards what may be called the mechanism ofevery-day life. Some poets are so methodical that the mere fact ofanything having been left by them in manuscript unaccompanied bydirections as to its disposal is _primâ facie_ evidence that it wasintended to be withheld from the public, either temporarily for revisionor finally and absolutely. And, of course, the representative, especially if he is also a relative or a friend, has to considerprimarily the intentions of the dead. If loyalty to living friends is aduty, what shall be said of loyalty to friends who are dead? This, indeed, has a sanction of the deepest religious kind. 

No doubt, in the philosophical sense, the aspiration of the dead artistfor perfect work and the honour it brings is a delusion, a sweet mockeryof the fancy. But then so is every other aspiration which soars abovethe warm circle of the human affections, and if this delusion of the deadartist was held worthy of respect during the artist’s life, it is worthyof respect—nay, it is worthy of reverence—after he is dead. Now everytrue artist when at work has before him an ideal which he would fainreach, or at least approach, and if he does not himself know whether inany given exercise he has reached that ideal or neared it, we may bepretty sure that no one else does. Hence, whenever there is apparent inthe circumstances under which the MS. Has been found the slightestindication that the writer did not wish it to be given to the public, therepresentative who ignores this indication sins against that reverencefor the dead which in all forms of civilization declares itself to be oneof the deepest instincts of man. 

That the instinct we are speaking of is really one of the primalinstincts is the very first fact that archæology vouches for. Of manylost races, such as the Aztecs and Toltecs, for instance, we have nohistorical traces save those which are furnished by testimonials of theirreverence for the dead. But that this fine instinct is now dying out inthe Western world—that it will soon be eliminated from the humanconstitution of races that are generally considered to be the mostadvanced—is made manifest by the present attitude of England and Americatowards their illustrious dead. In the literary arena of both countries, indeed, so entire is the abrogation of this most beautiful of allfeelings—so recklessly and so shamefully are not only raw manuscripts, but private letters, put up to auction for publication—that at last thegreat writers of our time, confronted by this new terror, are wiselybeginning to take care of themselves and their friends by a holocaust ofevery scrap of paper lying in their desks. 

So demoralized has the literary world become by the present craze fornotoriety and for personal details of prominent men that an executor whoin regard to the disposal of his testator’s money would act with the mostrigid scrupulousness will, in regard to the MSS. He finds in histestator’s desk, commit, “for the benefit of the public, ” an outrage thatwould have made the men of a less vulgar period shudder. The “benefit ofthe public, ” indeed! Who is this “public, ” and what are its rights asagainst the rights of the dead poet, whose heartstrings are woven into“copy” by the disloyal friend he trusted? The inherent callousness ofman’s nature is never so painfully seen as in the relation of this ogre, “the public, ” to dead genius. Without the smallest real reverence forgenius—without the smallest capacity of distinguishing the poetaster italways adores from the true poet it always ignores—the public can stillfall down before the pedestal upon which genius has been placed by theselect few—fall down with its long ears wide open for gossip aboutgenius, or anything else that is talked about. 

It was with such thoughts as these that we opened the present somewhatbulky volume {195}—not, however, with many misgivings; for ChristinaRossetti, before she made her brother executor, knew what were his viewsas to the rights of the public as against the rights of genius. And ifhe has printed here every poem he could lay hands upon, he may fairly beassumed to have done so with the consent of a sister whom he loved sodearly and by whom he was so dearly loved. Fortunately there are notmany of these relics that are devoid of a deep interest, some from thebiographical point of view, some from the poetical. 

Again, what is to be said about such part of a dead author’s writing as, having appeared in print, has afterwards passed through the author’scrucible of artistic revision? What about the executor’s duty here, where the case between the author and the public stands on a differentfooting? At the present time, when newspapers and novels alone are read, it is not the poet’s verses which most people read, but paragraphs aboutwhat the author and his wife and children “eat and drink and avoid”: atime when, if the poet’s verses are read at all, it is the accidentsrather than the essentials of the work that seem primarily to concern thepublic. At such a time an editor is not entirely master of his actions. Doubtless, there is much reason in the wrath of Tennyson and other greatpoets against the “literary resurrection man, ” who, though incapable ofunderstanding the beauties of a beautiful work, can take a very greatinterest in poring over the various stages through which that work haspassed on its way to perfection. These poets, however, are apt to forgetthat, after a poem or line has once passed into print, its finalsuppression is impossible. And perhaps there are other reasons why, inthis matter, an editor should be allowed some indulgence. 

Here, for instance, is a puzzling case to be tried _in foro conscientiæ_. In the first edition of ‘Goblin Market, ’ published in 1862, appearedthree poems of more breadth of treatment than any of the others: ‘CousinKate, ’ a ballad, ‘Sister Maude, ’ a ballad, and ‘A Triad, ’ a sonnet. Insubsequent issues of the book these were all omitted. Mr. W. M. Rossetti, speaking of ‘Sister Maude, ’ says: “I presume that my sister, with overstrained scrupulosity, considered its moral tone to be somewhatopen to exception. In such a view I by no means agree, and I thereforereproduce it. ” If Christina’s objection was valid when she raised it, itis, of course, valid now, when the beloved poet is in the “country beyondOrion, ” and knows what sanctions are of man’s imagining, and whatsanctions are more eternal than the movements of the stars. 

The question here is, What were Christina Rossetti’s wishes? not whetherher brother “agrees” with them. Hence, if it were not certain that someone would soon have restored them, would Mr. W. M. Rossetti havehesitated before doing so? For they are among the most powerful thingsChristina Rossetti ever wrote, and it was a subject of deep regret to herfriends that she suppressed them. Yet she withdrew them fromconscientious motives. In ‘Sister Maude’ she showed how great was herpower in the most difficult of all forms of poetic art—the romanticballad. Splendid as are Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘RoseMary, ’ the literary _aura_ surrounding them prevents them from seeming—asthe best of the Border ballads seem—Nature’s very voice muttering in herdreams of the pathos and the mystery of the human story. It was not, perhaps, given even to Rossetti to get very near to that supreme old poet(not forgotten, because never known) who wrote “May Margaret’s” appeal tothe ghost of her lover Clerk Saunders:—

 Is there ony room at your head, Saunders? Is there ony room at your feet? Is there ony room at your side, Saunders, Where fain, fain I wad sleep?

where the very imperfections of the rhymes seem somehow to add to thepathos and the mystery of the chant. But if, indeed, it has been givento any modern poet to get into this atmosphere, it has been given toChristina Rossetti. And so with the ballad of simple human passion nomodern writer has quite done what Christina Rossetti has done in one ofthe poems here restored:—

SISTER MAUDE. 

 Who told my mother of my shame, Who told my father of my dear? Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude, Who lurked to spy and peer. 

 Cold he lies, as cold as stone, With his clotted curls about his face: The comeliest corpse in all the world, And worthy of a queen’s embrace. 

 You might have spared his soul, sister, Have spared my soul, your own soul too: Though I had not been born at all, He’d never have looked at you. 

 My father may sleep in Paradise, My mother at Heaven-gate: But sister Maude shall get no sleep Either early or late. 

 My father may wear a golden gown, My mother a crown may win; If my dear and I knocked at Heaven-gate Perhaps they’d let us in: But sister Maude, O sister Maude, Bide _you_ with death and sin. 

But it is for the personal poems that this volume will be prized mostdearly by certain readers. 

Mr. W. M. Rossetti speaks of “the very wide and exceedingly strongoutburst of eulogy” of his sister which appeared in the public pressafter her death. Yet that outburst was far from giving adequateexpression to what was felt by some of her readers—those between whom andherself there was a bond of sympathy so sacred and so deep as to besomething like a religion. It is not merely that she was theacknowledged queen in that world (outside the arena called “the literaryworld”) where poetry is “its own exceeding great reward, ” but to otherreaders of a different kind altogether—readers who, drawing the deepestdelight from such poetry as specially appeals to them, never read anyother, and have but small knowledge of poetry as a fine art—her versewas, perhaps, more precious still. They feel that at every page of herwriting the beautiful poetry is only the outcome of a life whose almostunexampled beauty fascinates them. 

Although Christina Rossetti had more of what is called theunconsciousness of poetic inspiration than any other poet of her time, the writing of poetry was not by any means the chief business of herlife. She was too thorough a poet for that. No one felt so deeply asshe that poetic art is only at the best the imperfect body in whichdwells the poetic soul. No one felt so deeply as she that as the notesof the nightingale are but the involuntary expression of the bird’semotion, and, again, as the perfume of the violet is but the flower’snatural breath, so it is and must be with the song of the very poet, andthat, therefore, to write beautifully is in a deep and true sense to livebeautifully. In the volume before us, as in all her previously publishedwritings, we see at its best what Christianity is as the motive power ofpoetry. The Christian idea is essentially feminine, and of this femininequality Christina Rossetti’s poetry is full. 

In motive power the difference between classic and Christian poetry mustneeds be very great. But whatever may be said in favour of one asagainst the other, this at least cannot be controverted, that the historyof literature shows no human development so beautiful as the idealChristian woman of our own day. She is unique, indeed. Men of sciencetell us that among all the fossilized plants we find none of the lovelyfamily of the rose, and in the same way we should search in vain throughthe entire human record for anything so beautiful as that kind ofChristian lady to whom self-abnegation is not only the first of duties, but the first of joys. Yet, no doubt, the Christian idea must needs bemore or less flavoured by each personality through which it is expressed. With regard to Christina Rossetti, while upon herself Christian dogmaimposed infinite obligations—obligations which could never be evaded byher without the risk of all the penalties fulminated by allbelievers—there was in the order of things a sort of ether of universalcharity for all others. She would lament, of course, the lapses of everysoul, but for these there was a forgiveness which her own lapses couldnever claim. There was, to be sure, a sweet egotism in this. It wasvery fascinating, however. This feeling explains what seems somewhat topuzzle the editor, especially in the poem called ‘The End of the FirstPart, ’ written April 18th, 1849, of which he says, “‘Tears for guilt’ isin reference to Christina a very exaggerated phrase”:—

THE END OF THE FIRST PART. 

 My happy dream is finished with, My dream in which alone I lived so long. My heart slept—woe is me, it wakeneth; Was weak—I thought it strong. 

 Oh, weary wakening from a life-true dream! Oh pleasant dream from which I wake in pain! I rested all my trust on things that seem, And all my trust is vain. 

 I must pull down my palace that I built, Dig up the pleasure-gardens of my soul; Must change my laughter to sad tears for guilt, My freedom to control. 

 Now all the cherished secrets of my heart, Now all my hidden hopes, are turned to sin. Part of my life is dead, part sick, and part Is all on fire within. 

 The fruitless thought of what I might have been, Haunting me ever, will not let me rest. A cold North wind has withered all my green, My sun is in the West. 

 But, where my palace stood, with the same stone I will uprear a shady hermitage; And there my spirit shall keep house alone, Accomplishing its age. 

 There other garden beds shall lie around, Full of sweet-briar and incense-bearing thyme: There I will sit, and listen for the sound Of the last lingering chime. 

It was the beauty of her life that made her personal influence so great, and upon no one was that influence exercised with more strength than uponher illustrious brother Gabriel, who in many ways was so much unlike her. In spite of his deep religious instinct and his intense sympathy withmysticism, Gabriel remained what is called a free thinker in the truemeaning of that much-abused phrase. In religion as in politics hethought for himself, and yet when Mr. W. M. Rossetti affirms that thepoet was never drawn towards free thinking women, he says what isperfectly true. And this arose from the extraordinary influence, scarcely recognized by himself, that the beauty of Christina’s life andher religious system had upon him. 

This, of course, is not the place in which to say much about him; norneed much at any time and in any place be said, for has he not writtenhis own biography—depicted himself more faithfully than Lockhart coulddepict Walter Scott, more faithfully than Boswell could depict Dr. Johnson? Has he not done this in the immortal sonnet-sequence called‘The House of Life’? What poet of the nineteenth century do we know sointimately as we know the author of ‘The House of Life’?

Christina Rossetti’s peculiar form of the Christian sentiment sheinherited from her mother, the sweetness of whose nature was neverdisturbed by that exercise of the egoism of the artist in which Christinaindulged and without whose influence it is difficult to imagine what theRossetti family would have been. The father was a poet and a mystic ofthe cryptographic kind, and it is by no means unlikely that had hestudied Shakespeare as he studied Dante he would in these days have beena disciple of the Baconians, and, of course, his influence on the familyin the matter of literary activity and of mysticism must have been verygreat. And yet all that is noblest in Christina’s poetry, anever-present sense of the beauty and power of goodness, must surely havecome from the mother, from whom also came that other charm ofChristina’s, to which Gabriel was peculiarly sensitive, her youthfulnessof temperament. 

Among the many differences which exist between the sexes this might, perhaps, be mentioned, that while it is beautiful for a man to growold—grow old with the passage of years—a woman to retain her charm mustalways remain young. In a deep sense woman may be said to have but oneparamount charm, youth, and when this is gone all is gone. Theyouthfulness of the body, of course, soon vanishes, but with any womanwho can really win and retain the love of man this is not nearly soimportant as at first it seems. It is the youthfulness of the soul that, in the truly adorable woman, is invulnerable. It is one of the deepmisfortunes of the very poor of cities that as a rule the terriblestruggle with the wolf at the door is apt to sour the nature of women andturn them into crones at the age when in the more fortunate classes thetrue beauty of woman often begins; and even where the environment is notthat of poverty, but of straitened means, it is as a rule impossible fora woman to retain this youthfulness. 

In the case of the Rossettis, in the early period they were in a positionof straitened means. Nor was this all: the children, Gabriel aloneexcepted, felt themselves to be by nationality aliens. Christina, thoughshe made only one visit to Italy, felt herself to be an Italian, andwould smile when any one talked to her of the John Bullism of her brotherGabriel, and yet, with these powerful causes working against theirnatural elasticity of temperament, both mother and daughter retained thatjuvenility which Gabriel Rossetti felt to be so refreshing. So strongwas it in the mother that it had a strange effect upon the mere physique, and at eighty the expression in the eyes, and, indeed, on the facethroughout, retained so much of the winsomeness of youth that she wasmore beautiful than most young women:—

1882. 

 My blessed mother dozing in her chair On Christmas Day seemed an embodied Love, A comfortable Love with soft brown hair Softened and silvered to a tint of dove; A better sort of Venus with an air Angelical from thoughts that dwell above; A wiser Pallas in whose body fair Enshrined a blessed soul looks out thereof. Winter brought holly then, now Spring has brought Paler and frailer snowdrops shivering; And I have brought a simple humble thought— I her devoted duteous Valentine— A lifelong thought which thrills this song I sing, A lifelong love to this dear saint of mine. 

Although this was not so with Christina, upon whose face ill-healthworked its ravages, her temperament, as we say, remained as young asever. The lovely relations—sometimes staid and sometimes playful—betweenmother and daughter, are seen throughout the book before us. Butespecially are they seen in one little group of poems—“The Valentines toher Mother”—in regard to which Christina left the following pencillednote:—

“These Valentines had their origin from my dearest mother’s remarkingthat she had never received one. I, her C. G. R. , ever after suppliedone on the day; and (so far as I recollect) it was a surprise every time, she having forgotten all about it in the interim. ”

Mrs. Rossetti’s first valentine was received when she was nearlyseventy-six years of age, and she continued every year to receive avalentine until 1886, when she died. Surely there is not in the historyof English poetry anything more fascinating than these valentines. 

It is pleasing to see the book open with the following dedication by Mr. W. M. Rossetti:—

“To Algernon Charles Swinburne, a generous eulogist of ChristinaRossetti, who hailed his genius and prized himself the greatest of livingBritish poets, my old and constant friend, I dedicate this book. ”

V. DR. GORDON HAKE. 1809–1895. 

I little thought when I recently quoted from Dr. Hake’s account of thatChristmas gathering of the Rossettis at Bognor in 1875—a gathering whichhe has made historic—that to-day I should be writing an obituary noticeof the “parable-poet” himself. It is true that, having fractured a legin a lamentable accident which befell him, he had for the last few yearsbeen imprisoned in one room and compelled during most of the time to liein a horizontal position. But notwithstanding this, and notwithstandinghis great age, his mental faculties remained so unimpaired that it washard to believe his death could be so near. 

 [Picture: Dr. Gordon Hake. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. Thomas Hake]

Although, owing to his intimacy with George Borrow, Hake was associatedin the public mind with the Eastern Counties, he was not an East Anglian. It was at Leeds (in 1809) that he first saw the light. His mother was aGordon of the Huntly stock, and came of “the Park branch” of that house. The famous General Gordon was his first cousin, and it was owing to thisfact that Hake’s son, Mr. Egmont Hake, was entrusted with the materialfor writing his authoritative books upon the heroic Christian soldier. Between Hake’s eldest son, Mr. T. St. E. Hake, a rising novelist, and theGeneral the likeness was curiously strong. Nominated by one of hisuncles to Christ’s Hospital, Hake entered that famous school. He givesin his ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ a very vivid picture of it and also areally vital portrait of himself. From his very childhood he was hauntedby a literary ambition which can only be called an insatiable passion. It lasted till the very hour of his death. When eleven years of age hebecame acquainted with that one poet whose immensity of fame has for morethan three centuries been the flame into which the myriad Shakespearemoths of English literature have been flying. The Shakespearean ofeleven summers did not, like so many Shakespeare enthusiasts fromDavenant down to those latest Shakespeares, Homers, and Miltons of ourcontemporary paragraphists, get himself up to look like the Stratfordbust. The only man who ever really looked like that bust was the lateDion Boucicault, who did so without trying. But Shakespeare’s wonderfulwork acted on the imagination of the child of eleven in an equallyhumorous way. “Shakespeare’s perfection, ” he says in his memoirs, “notonly made me envious of the greatest of writers, but it depressed me inturn with the feeling that I could never equal it howsoever long I mightlive. ”

Yet although this passion never passed away, but waxed with his years, itmust not be supposed that Hake suffered from what in the “new criticism”is sweetly and appropriately called “modernity”—in other words, thatvulgar greed for notoriety that in these days, when literature to belistened to must be puffed like quack medicine and patent soap, has madethe atmosphere of the literary arena somewhat stifling in the nostrils ofthose who turn from “modernity” to poetic art. Nor was Hake’s feelingakin to that fine despair

 Before the foreheads of the gods of song

which true poets, great or small, know—that fine despair which, while itwill sometimes stop the breath of one of the true sons of Apollo, as itactually did strike mute Charles Wells, and as at one time it threatenedto stop the breath of Rossetti, will lead others to write, and write, andwrite. It is, however, life’s illusions that in most cases make lifetolerable. When in old age calamity came upon Hake, and he was shut outfrom life as by a prison wall, his one solace, the one thing that reallybound him to life, was this ambitious dream which came upon the Bluecoatboy of eleven. 

His mother was in easy circumstances, and when a youth Hake travelled agood deal on the Continent, where his success in the “great world” ofthat time was swift and complete. If this success was owing as much tohis exceptionally striking personal appearance and natural endowment ofstyle as to his intellectual equipments—high as these were—that is notsurprising to those who knew him. Of course he was well advanced inyears before I was old enough to call him my friend; but even then he wasso extremely handsome a man that I can well believe the stories I havegot from his family connexions (such as his wife’s sisters) of hisappearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was themost poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put tothe best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic periodof his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England. I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a man’s life ispassed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what usedto be called “the great world. ” To be, or to seem to be, unconscious ofone’s own bearing towards the world, and unconscious of the world’sbearing towards oneself, is, I fancy, impossible to a man—even though hehave the genius and intellectual endowment of a Browning—who is for thefirst time brought into touch with society after the plastic period ispassed. 

I have told elsewhere the whimsical story of Hake and Rossetti, ofRossetti’s delightful account of his reading as a boy, in a coffee-housein Chancery Lane, Hake’s remarkable romance ‘Vates, ’ afterwards called‘Valdarno, ’ in a magazine; his writing a letter about it to the unknownauthor, and getting no reply until many years had passed. Hake’srelations towards Rossetti were of the deepest and most sacred kind. Rossetti had the highest opinion of Hake’s poetical genius, and also felttowards him the greatest love and gratitude for services of aninestimable kind rendered to him in the direst crisis of his life. Toenter upon these matters, however, is obviously impossible in a brief andhurried obituary notice; and equally impossible is it for me to enterinto the poetic principles of a writer whose very originality has been abarrier to his winning a wide recognition. 

Hake’s best work is that, I think, contained in the volume called ‘NewSymbols, ’ in which there is disclosed an extraordinary variety of poeticpower. In execution, too, he is at his best in that volume. ChristinaRossetti has often told me that ‘Ecce Homo’ impressed her more profoundlythan did any other poem of her own time. Also its daring startled her. It was, however, the previous volume, ‘Madeline, and other Poems, ’ whichbrought him into contact with Rossetti—the great event of his literarylife. 

If the man ever lived who could take as much interest in another man’swork as his own, Dr. Hake in finding Rossetti found that man. Althoughat that time Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, andSwinburne were running abreast of each other, there was no poet inEngland who would not have felt honoured by having his work reviewed byRossetti. But Dr. Hake, whose name was absolutely unknown, had made hisway into Rossetti’s affections—as, indeed, he made his way into theaffections of all who knew him—and this was quite enough to induceRossetti to ask Dr. Appleton for leave to review ‘Madeline’ in ’71 in_The Academy_—a request which Appleton, of course, was delighted togrant. And again, when in 1873 ‘Parables and Tales’ appeared, Mr. JohnMorley, we may be sure, was something more than willing to let Rossettireview the book in _The Fortnightly Review_; and, again, when ‘NewSymbols’ appeared, there was some talk about Rossetti’s reviewing it in_The Fortnightly Review_; but this, for certain reasons which Rossettiexplained to me—reasons which have been misunderstood, but which wereentirely adequate—was abandoned. Down to the period when Dr. Hake wentto live in Germany he and his son Mr. Gordon Hake were among the mostintimate friends of the great poet-painter. Mr. Gordon Hake, indeed, aman of admirable culture and abilities, lived with Rossetti, whocertainly benefited much by contact with his bright and lively companion. The portrait of Dr. Hake prefixed to Mrs. Meynell’s selections from hisworks is one of Rossetti’s finest crayons. It is, however, too heavy inexpression for Hake. 

Full of fine qualities as is his best poetry, full of intellectualsubtlety, imagination, and a rare combination of subjective withobjective power, there is apparently in it a certain _je ne sais quoi_which has prevented him at present from winning his true meed of fame. His hand, no doubt, is uncertain; but so is the hand of many a successfulpoet—that of Christina Rossetti, for instance. For sheer originality ofconception and of treatment what recent poems surpass or even equal ‘OldSouls’ and the ‘Serpent Charmer’? Then take the remarkable mastery overcolour exhibited by ‘Ortrud’s Vision. ’ His volume of pantheistic sonnetsin the Shakespearean form, ‘The New Day, ’ written in his eighty-firstyear, is on the whole, however, his most remarkable work. The kind ofSufeyistic nature ecstasy displayed therein by a man of so advanced anage is nothing less than wonderful. And as to knowledge of nature, noteven Wordsworth or Tennyson knew nature so completely as did Hake, for hehad a thorough training as a naturalist. In looking at a flower he couldenjoy not only its beauty, but also the delight of picturing to himselfthe flower’s inherited beauty and the ancestors from which the flower gotits inheritance. And as regards the lyrical flow imported into somonumental a form as the sonnet, every student of this form must needsstudy the book with the greatest interest. His very latest work, however, is in prose. I find it extremely difficult to write about‘Memoirs of Eighty Years. ’ It is full of remarkable qualities: wit, humour, an ebullience of animal spirits that is Rabelaisian. What itlacks (and in some portions of it greatly lacks) is delicacy, refinementof tone. And surely this is remarkable when we realize the kind of manhe was who wrote it. 

It has been my privilege to go about with him not only in London, butalso in Rome, in Paris, in Venice, in Florence, Pisa, &c. ; and no matterwhat might be the quality of the society with which he was brought intocontact, it always seemed to me that he was distinguished by his verylack of that accentuated movement which the _littérateur_ generallydisplays. I merely dwell upon this to show how inscrutable are themental processes in the crowning puzzle of the great humourist Nature, the writing man. Just as the most angular and _gauche_ man in a literarygathering may possibly turn out to be the poet whose lyrics have beencompared to Shelley, or the prose writer whose mellifluous periods havebeen compared to those of Plato, so the most dignified man in the roommay turn out to be the writer of a book whose defect is a noticeable lackof dignified style. It was hard, indeed, for those who knew Hake in theflesh to believe that the ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ was written by him. I suppose I shall be expected to say a word about the famous intimacybetween Hake and Borrow. After Hake went to live in Germany, Borrow toldme a good deal about this intimacy and also about his own early life; forreticent as he naturally was, he and I got to be confidential andintimate. His friendship with Hake began when Hake was practising as aphysician in Norfolk. It lasted during the greater part of Borrow’slater life. When Borrow was living in London, his great delight was towalk over on Sundays from Hereford Square to Coombe End, call upon Hake, and take a stroll with him over Richmond Park. They both had a passionfor herons and for deer. At that time Hake was a very intimate friend ofmy own, and having had the good fortune to be introduced by him toBorrow, I used to join the two in their walks. Afterwards, when Hakewent to live in Germany, I used to take these walks with Borrow alone. Two more interesting men it would be impossible to meet. The remarkablething was that there was between them no sort of intellectual sympathy. In style, in education, in experience, whatever Hake was Borrow was not. Borrow knew almost nothing of Hake’s writings, either in prose or inverse. His ideal poet was Pope, and when he read, or rather looked into, Hake’s ‘World’s Epitaph, ’ he thought he did Hake the greatest honour bysaying, “There are lines here and there that are nigh as good as Pope’s. ”On the other hand, Hake’s acquaintance with Borrow’s works was far behindthat of some Borrovians who did not know Lavengro in the flesh, such asMr. Saintsbury and Mr. Birrell. 

Borrow was shy, eccentric, angular, rustic in accent and in locution, butwith a charm for me, at least, that was irresistible. Hake was polished, easy, and urbane in everything, and, although not without prejudice andbias, ready to shine gracefully in any society. As far as Hake wasconcerned, the sole link between them was that of reminiscence of earlierdays and adventures in Borrow’s beloved East Anglia. Among many proofsthat I could adduce of this, I will give one. I am the possessor of themanuscript of Borrow’s ‘Gypsies in Spain, ’ written partly in a Spanishnote-book as he moved about Spain in his colporteur days. It was my wishthat Hake would leave behind him some memorial of Borrow more worthy ofhimself and his friend than those brief reminiscences contained in‘Memoirs of Eighty Years. ’ I took to Hake this precious relic of one ofthe most wonderful men of the nineteenth century in order to discuss withhim differences between the MS. And the printed text. Hake was sittingin his invalid chair, writing verses. “What does it all matter?” hesaid. “I do not think you understand Lavengro, ” said I. Hake replied, “And yet Lavengro had an advantage over me, for _he_ understood _nobody_. Every individuality with which he was brought into contact had, as no oneknows better than you, to be tinged with colours of his own before hecould see it at all. ”

This, of course, was true enough; and Hake’s asperities when speaking ofBorrow in ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’—asperities which have vexed a goodmany Borrovians—simply arose from the fact that it was impossible for twosuch men to understand each other. When I told him of Andrew Lang’sangry onslaught upon Borrow, in his notes to the “Waverley Novels, ” onaccount of his attacks upon Scott, he said, “Well, and does he notdeserve it?” When I told him of Miss Cobbe’s description of Borrow as a_poseur_, he said to me, “I told you the same scores of times. But I sawthat Borrow had bewitched you during that first walk under the rainbow inRichmond Park. It was that rainbow, I think, that befooled you. ”Borrow’s affection for Hake, however, was both strong and deep, as I sawafter Hake had gone to Germany and in a way dropped out of Borrow’s ken. Yet Hake was as good a man as ever Borrow was, and for certain otherswith whom he was brought in contact as full of a genuine affection asBorrow was himself. 

JOHN LEICESTER WARREN, LORD DE TABLEY. 1835–1895. 

I. 

In the death of Lord de Tabley, the English world of letters has lost atrue poet and a scholar of very varied accomplishments. His friends havelost much more. Since his last attack of influenza, those who knew himand loved him had been much concerned about him. The pallor of hiscomplexion had greatly increased; so had his feebleness. As long ago asMay last, when I called upon him at the Athenæum Club in order to joinhim at a luncheon he was giving at the Café Royal, I found that he hadengaged a four-wheeled cab to take us over those few yards. Theexpression in his kind and wistful blue-grey eyes showed that he hadnoted the start of surprise I gave on seeing the cab waiting for us. “You know my love of a growler, ” he said; “this is just to save us thebother of getting across the Piccadilly cataracts. ” I thought to myself, “I wish it were only the bother of crossing the cataracts which accountsfor the growler. ”

Another sign that the physical part of him was in the grip of the demonof decay was that, instead of coming to the Pines to luncheon, as hadbeen his wont, he preferred of late to come to afternoon tea, and returnto Elm Park before dinner. And on the occasion when he last came in thisway it seemed to us here that he had aged still more; yet hisintellectual forces had lost nothing of their power. And as a companionhe was as winsome as ever. That fine quality with which he was so richlyendowed, the quality which used to be called “urbanity, ” was as freshwhen I saw him last as when I first knew him. That sweet sagacity, mellowed and softened by a peculiarly quiet humour, shone from his faceat intervals as he talked of the pleasant old days when he was mycolleague on _The Athenæum_, and when I used to call upon him sofrequently on my way to Rossetti in Cheyne Walk to chat over “the walnutsand the wine” about poetry. 

My own friendship with him began at my first meeting him, and this waslong ago. Being at that time a less-known man of letters than I am now, supposing that to be possible, I was astonished one day when my friendEdmund Gosse told me that his friend Leicester Warren had expressed awish to meet me on account of certain things of mine which he had read in_The Examiner_ and _The Athenæum_. I accepted with alacrity Mr. Gosse’sinvitation to one of those charming _salons_ of his on the banks ofWestbournia’s Grand Canal which have become historic. I was surprised tofind Warren, who was then scarcely above forty, looking so old, not tosay so old-fashioned. At that time he did not wear the moustache andbeard which afterwards lent a picturesqueness to his face. There was akind of rural appearance about him which had for me a charm of its own;it suited so well with his gentle ways, I thought. This being theimpression he made upon me, it may be imagined how delighted I wasshortly afterwards to see him come to the door of Ivy Lodge, Putney, where I was then living alone. Nor was I less surprised than delightedto see him. On realizing at Gosse’s _salon_ that my new acquaintance wasa botanist, I had fraternized with him on this point, and had describedto him an extremely rare and lovely little tree growing in the centre ofmy garden, which some unknown lover of trees had imported. I had givenWarren a kind of general invitation to come some day and see it. Soearly a call as this I had not hoped to get. Perhaps I thought soreclusive a man as he even then appeared would never come at all. 

After having duly admired the tree he turned to the Rossetti crayons onthe walls of the rooms; but although he talked much about ‘The Spirit ofthe Rainbow’ and the design from the same beautiful model which WilliamSharp has christened ‘Forced Music, ’ the loveliness of which attractedhim not a little, I perceived that he had something else that he wantedto talk about, and allowed him to lead the conversation up to it. To mysurprise I found that, so far from having perceived how much he hadinterested me, he had imagined that my attitude towards him wasconstrained, and had explained it to his own discomfort after thefollowing fashion: “Watts has an intimate friend of whose poetry I am adeep admirer—so deep indeed that some people, and not without reason, have said that my own poetry is unduly influenced by it. But an articleby me in _The Fortnightly_ goes out of its way to dub as a ‘minor poet’the very writer to whose influence I have succumbed. It is theincongruity between my dubbing my idol a ‘minor poet’ and my real andmost obvious admiration of his work that makes Watts, in spite of anexternal civility, feel unfriendly towards me. Yet there is no realincongruity, for it was the editor, G. H. Lewes, who, after my proof hadbeen returned for press, interpolated the objectionable words about theminor poet. ”

This was how he had been reasoning. When I laughed and told him torecast his syllogism—told him that I had never seen the article inquestion, and doubted whether my friend had—matters became very brightbetween us. He stayed to luncheon; we walked on the Common; I showed himour Wimbledon sun-dews; in a word, I felt that I had discovered a richergold mine than the richest in the world, a new friend. Had I then knownhim as well as I afterwards did, I should have been aware that he had astrong dash of the sensitive, not to say the morbid, in his nature. Hehad a habit of submitting almost every incident of his life to such ananalysis as that I have been describing. 

On another occasion, when years later he had a difference with a friend, I reminded him of the incident recorded above, and made him laugh bysaying, “My dear Warren, you are so afraid of treading on people’s cornsthat you tread upon them. ”

On first visiting him, as on many a subsequent occasion, I was struck bythe variety of his intellectual interests, and the thoroughness withwhich he pursued them all. I have lately said in print what I fullybelieve—that he was the most learned of English poets, if learning meanssomething more than mere scholarship. He was a skilled numismatist, andin 1862 published, through the Numismatic Society, ‘An Essay on GreekFederal Coinage, ’ and an essay ‘On Some Coins of Lycia under RhodianDomination and of the Lycian League. ’ He even took an interest inbook-plates, and actually, in 1880, published ‘A Guide to the Study ofBook-Plates. ’ I should not have been at all surprised to learn that hewas also writing a guide for the collectors of postage stamps. 

At this time he had published a good deal of verse; for instance, ‘Eclogues and Monodramas’ in 1865; ‘Studies in Verse’ in 1866; ‘Orestes’in 1867; a collection of poems called ‘Rehearsals’ in 1873; anothercollection, called ‘The Searching Net, ’ in 1876. From this time, duringmany years, I saw him frequently, although, for a reason which it is notnecessary to discuss here, he became seized with a deep dislike of theliterary world and its doings, and I am not aware that he saw anyliterary man save myself and the late W. B. Scott, the bond between whomand himself was “book-plates”! Then he took to residing in the country. As a poet he seemed to be quite forgotten, save by students of poetry, until his name was revived by means of Mr. Miles’s colossal anthology‘The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, ’ Mr. Miles, itseems, was a great admirer of Lord de Tabley’s poetry, and managed toreach the hermit in his cell. In the sixth volume of his work Mr. Milesgave a judicious selection from Lord de Tabley’s poems and an admirableessay upon them. The selection attracted a good deal of attention. 

On finding that the public would listen to him, I urged him to bring outa volume of selected pieces from all his works, an idea which for sometime he contested with his usual pessimistic vigour. Having, however, set my heart upon it, I spoke upon the subject to Mr. John Lane, who atonce saw his way to bring out such a volume at his own risk. To thepoet’s astonishment the book was a success, and it at once passed into asecond edition. In the spring of this year he was emboldened to bringout another volume of new poems, and his name became firmlyre-established as a poet. It was after the success of the first bookthat he consulted me upon a question which was then upon his mind: Shouldhe devote his future energies to literature or to making himself aposition as a speaker in the Lords? He had lately had occasion to speakboth in the country and in the Lords upon some local matter ofimportance, and his success had in some slight degree revived an oldaspiration to plunge into the world of politics. He was a Liberal, andin 1868 he had contested—but unsuccessfully—Mid-Cheshire. This was onthe first election for that division after the Reform Act of 1867. Hissupport in a county so Conservative as Cheshire had really been verystrong, but he never made another effort to get into Parliament. “Youknow my way, ” he used to say. “I can make one spring—perhaps a prettygood spring—but not more than one. ”

On the whole, he leaned towards the idea of going into politics. The wayin which he put the case to me was thoroughly characteristic of him:“Even if my verse were strong and vital, which I fear it is not, there isalmost no chance for men of my generation receiving more than a slightattention at the present day. Things have altogether changed since thesixties and seventies, when I published my most important work—at a timewhen the prominent names were Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. The old critical oracles are now dumb;the reviewers are all young men whose knowledge of poetry does not goback so far as the sixties. Those who reviewed the selection from mywork in Miles’s book showed themselves to be entirely unconscious of thename of Leicester Warren, and treated the poems there selected as beingthe work of a new writer; and even when the poems published by Lane cameout, no one seemed to be aware that they were by a writer who was verymuch to the fore a quarter of a century ago. That book has had a flutterof success, but in how large a degree was the success owing to thecuriosity excited by the book of a man of my generation being brought outnow, and by the publisher of the men of this? With all my sympathy withthe work of the younger men and my admiration of some of it, things, Isay, have changed since those days. ”

I did not share these pessimistic views. Moreover, knowing as I did howextremely sensitive he was, I knew that his figuring in Parliament wouldresult in the greatest pain to him, and if I gave a somewhat exaggeratedexpression with regard to my hopes of him in the literary world, it was akindly feeling towards himself that impelled me to do so. He took myadvice and proceeded to gather material for another volume. 

To define clearly the impression left upon one by intercourse with anyman is difficult. In De Tabley’s case it is almost impossible. Hisremarkable modesty, or rather diffidence, was what, perhaps, struck memost. It was a genuine lack of faith in his own powers; it had nothingwhatever to do with “mock-modesty. ” I had a singular instance of thisdiffidence in the autumn of last year. Lord de Tabley, who was stayingat Ryde, having learnt that I was staying with a friend near Niton Bay, wrote to me there saying that he somewhat specially wanted to see me, andproposed our lunching together at an hotel at Ventnor. I was delightedto accede to this, for, like all who fully knew Lord de Tabley, I wasthoroughly and deeply attached to him. He was so genuine and so modestand so genial—unsoured by the great and various sorrows of which he usedsometimes to talk to me by the cosy study fire—nay, sweetened by them, asI often thought—so grateful for the smallest service rendered in an arenawhere ingratitude sometimes seems to be the _vis motrix_ of life—a trulylovable man, if ever there was one. 

I drove over to Ventnor. As I chanced to reach the hotel somewhat beforethe appointed time, and he had not arrived, I drove on to Bonchurch alongthe Shanklin road. On my way back, I passed a four-wheel cab; but notdreaming that his love of the “growler” reached beyond London, I neverthought of him in connexion with it until I saw the well-known face withits sweet thoughtful expression looking through the cab window. On thisoccasion it looked so specially thoughtful that I imagined somethingserious had occurred. At the hotel I found that he had secured a snugroom and a luxurious luncheon. An ominous packet of writing-paperpeering from his overcoat pocket convinced me that it was a manuscriptbrought for me to read, and feeling that I should prefer to get it overbefore luncheon, I asked him to show it to me. He then told me itshistory. Having sent by special invitation a poem to _The NineteenthCentury_, the editor had returned it—returned it with certain stricturesupon portions of it. This incident he had at once subjected to the usualanalysis, and had come to the conclusion that certain outside influencesof an invidious kind had been brought to play upon the editor. 

Time was when I should have shrunk with terror from so thankless a taskas that of reading a manuscript with such a frightful history, but it isastonishing what a long experience in the literary world will do for aman in perplexities of this kind. I read the manuscript and the editor’scourteous but sagacious comments, and I found that the poet hadundertaken a subject which was utterly and almost inconceivably alien tohis genius. As I read I felt the wistful gaze fixed upon me while thewaiter was moving in and out of the room, preparing the luncheon table. “Well, ” said he, as I laid the manuscript down, “what do you think? doyou agree with the editor?” “Not entirely, ” I said. “Not entirely!” heexclaimed; then turning to the waiter, he said, “You can leave the soup, and I will ring when we are ready. ” “Not entirely, ” I repeated. “Withall the editor’s strictures I entirely agree, but he says that by workingupon it you may make it into a worthy poem: there I disagree with him. Iconsider it absolutely hopeless. I regret now that we did not leave thematter until after luncheon, but we will not let it spoil our appetites. ”

I am afraid it did spoil our appetites nevertheless, for I felt that Ihad been compelled, for his own sake, to give him pain. He was muchdepressed, declared that the success of his late book was entirelyfactitious, and vowed that nothing should ever persuade him to writeanother line of verse, and that he would now devote his attention to apeer’s duties in the House of Lords. I was so disturbed myself at thuspaining so lovable a friend that next day I wrote to him, trying tosoften what I had said, and urged him to do as the editor of _TheNineteenth Century_ had suggested, write another poem—a poem upon someclassical subject, which he would deal with so admirably. The result ofit all was that he found the editor’s strictures on the unlucky poem tobe absolutely well grounded, and wrote for _The Nineteenth Century_‘Orpheus, ’ one of the finest of his later poems. 

I think these anecdotes of Lord de Tabley will show why we who knew himwere so attached to him. 

II. 

Can it be claimed for Lord de Tabley that in the poetical firmament whichhung over the days of his youth—when the heavens were bright with suchluminaries as Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morris—he had a place of his own? We think it can. And in sayingthis we are fully conscious of the kind of praise we are awarding him. Whatever may be said for or against the artistic temper of the presenthour, it must certainly be said of the time we are alluding to that itwas great as regards its wealth of poetic genius, and as regards itsartistic temper greater still. It was a time when “the beauteous damselPoesy, honourable and retired, ” whom Cervantes described, dared stillroam the English Parnassus, “a friend of solitude, ” disturbed by no clashof Notoriety’s brazen cymbals, “where fountains entertained her, woodsfreed her from _ennui_, and flowers delighted her”—delighted her fortheir own sakes. In order to write such verses as the following from theconcluding poem of the volume before us {231} a man must really havepassed into that true mood of the poet described by the great Spanishhumourist:—

 How idle for a spurious fame To roll in thorn-beds of unrest; What matter whom the mob acclaim, If thou art master of thy breast?

 If sick thy soul with fear and doubt, And weary with the rabble din, — If thou wouldst scorn the herd without, First make the discord calm within. 

 If we are lords in our disdain, And rule our kingdoms of despair, As fools we shall not plough the main For halters made of syren’s hair. 

 We need not traverse foreign earth To seek an alien Sorrow’s face. She sits within thy central hearth, And at thy table has her place. 

 So with this hour of push and pelf, Where nought unsordid seems to last, Vex not thy miserable self, But search the fallows of the past. 

 In Time’s rich track behind us lies A soil replete with root and seed; There harvest wheat repays the wise, While idiots find but charlock weed. 

Between the writer of the above lines and those great poets who in hisyouth were his contemporaries there is this point of affinity: like themhis actual achievements do not strike the reader so forcibly as thepotentialities which those achievements reveal. In the same way thatAchilles was suggested by his “spear” in the picture in the chamber ofLucrece, the poet who writes not for fame, but writes to please himself, suggests unconsciously his own portrait by every touch:—

 For much imaginary work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles’ image stood his spear Grip’d in an armèd hand; himself behind Was left unseen save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, Stood for the whole to be imaginèd. 

Poets, indeed, have always been divisible into those whose poetry givesthe reader an impression that they are greater than their work, and thosewhose poetry gives the reader a contrary impression. There have alwaysbeen poets who may say of themselves, like the “Poet” in ‘Timon ofAthens, ’

 Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes From whence ’tis nourished: the fire i’ the flint Shows not till it be struck. 

And there have always been poets whose verse, howsoever good it may be, shows that, although they have been able to mould into poetic forms theriches of the life around them, and also of the literature which has cometo them as an inheritance, they are simply working for fame, or ratherfor notoriety, in the markets of the outer world. The former can give usan impression of personal greatness such as the latter cannot. 

With regard to the originality of Lord de Tabley’s work, it is obviousthat every poet must in some measure be influenced by the leadingluminaries of his own period. But at no time would it have been fair tocall Lord de Tabley an imitator; and in the new poems in this volume theaccent is, perhaps, more individual than was the accent of any of hisprevious poetry. The general reader’s comparatively slight acquaintancewith Greek poetry may become unfortunate for modern poets. Often andoften it occurs that a poet is charged with imitating another poet of amore prominent position than his own when, as a matter of fact, bothpoets have been yielding to the magic influence of some poet of Greece. Such a yielding has been held to be legitimate in every literature of themodern world. Indeed, to be coloured by the great classics of Greek andRoman literature is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of allthe best poetry of the modern world, as it is the inevitable destiny andthe special glory of the far-off waters of the Nile to be enriched andtoned by the far-off wealth of Ruwenzori and the great fertilizing lakesfrom which they have sprung. But in drawing from the eternal fountainsof beauty Lord de Tabley’s processes were not those of his greatcontemporaries; they were very specially his own, as far removed from thesevere method of Matthew Arnold on the one hand as from Tennyson’s methodon the other. 

His way of work was always to illustrate a story of Hellenic myth bysymbols and analogies drawn not from the more complex economies of alater world, as was Tennyson’s way, but from that wide knowledge of thephenomena of nature which can be attained only by a poet whose knowledgeis that of the naturalist. His devotion to certain departments ofnatural science has been running parallel with his devotion to poetry, and if learning is something wider than scholarship, he is the mostlearned poet of his time. While Tennyson’s knowledge of natural science, though wide, was gathered from books, Lord de Tabley’s knowledge, especially in the department of botany, is derived largely from originalobservation and inquiry. And this knowledge enables him to make hispoetry alive with organic detail such as satisfies the naturalist asfully as the other qualities in his works satisfy the lover of poetry. The leading poem of the present volume, ‘Orpheus in Hades, ’ is full of aknowledge of the ways of nature beyond the reach of most poets, and yetthis knowledge is kept well in governance by his artistic sense; it isnever obtruded—never more than hinted at, indeed:—

 Soon, soon I saw the spectral vanguard come, Coasting along, as swallows, beating low Before a hint of rain. In buoyant air, Circling thy poise, and hardly move the wing, And rather float than fly. Then other spirits, Shrill and more fierce, came wailing down the gale; As plaintive plovers came with swoop and scream To lure our footsteps from their furrowy nest, So these, as lapwing guardians, sailed and swung To save the secrets of their gloomy lair. 

 * * * * *

 I hate to watch the flower set up its face. I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea, Its heaving roods of intertangled weed And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit; The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn, The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones, The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves, Rotting the floors of Autumn. 

‘The Death of Phaëthon’ is another poem in which Lord de Tabley succeedsin mingling a true poetic energy with that subtle dignity of utterancewhich can never really be divorced from true poetry, whether the poet’ssubject be lofty or homely. 

The line

 With sudden ray and music across the sea

and the opening line of the poem, Before him the immeasurable heaven, cause us to think that Lord de Tabley has paid but little attention tothe question of elision in English poetry. In the second of the linesabove quoted elision is impossible, in the first elision is demanded. The reason why elision is sometimes demanded is that in certain lines, asin the one which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades, ’ the hiatus which occurs when aword ending with a vowel is followed by a vowel beginning the next wordmay be so great as to become intolerable. The reason why elision issometimes a merely allowable beauty is that when a word ends with _w_, _r_, or _l_, to elide the liquids is to secure a kind of billowy music ofa peculiarly delightful kind. Now elision is very specially demanded ina line like that which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades, ’ where the pause of theline fall upon _the_. To make the main pause of the line fall upon _the_is extremely and painfully bad, even when the next word begins with aconsonant; but when the word following _the_ begins with a vowel, theline is absolutely immetrical; it has, indeed, no more to do with Englishprosody than with that prosody of Japan upon which Mr. Basil Chamberlaindiscourses so pleasantly. On the other hand, the elision of the secondsyllable of the word _music_ in the other line quoted above is equallyfaulty in another direction. But as we said when reviewing Mr. Bridges’streatise on Milton’s prosody, nothing is more striking than thehelplessness of most recent poets when confronted with the simplequestion of elision. 

In an ‘Ode to a Star’ there is great beauty and breadth of thought andexpression. Its only structural blemish, that of an opening stanza whoseform is not distinctly followed, can be so easily put right that it needonly be mentioned here in order to emphasize the canon that it is only inirregular odes that variation of stanza is permissible. Keats, no doubt, in one at least of his unequalled odes, does depart from the scheme ofstructure indicated by the opening stanza, and without any apparentmetrical need for so doing. But the poem does not gain by the departure. Besides, Keats is now a classic, and has a freedom in regard toirregularities of metre which Lord de Tabley would be the last to claimfor himself. Another blemish of a minor kind in the ‘Ode to a Star’ isthat of rhyming “meteor” with “wheatear. ”

If the poetry in Lord de Tabley’s volume answers as little to Milton’sfamous list of the poetic requirements, “simple, sensuous, andpassionate, ” as does Milton’s own poetry, which answers to only thesecond of these demands, very high poetry might be cited which is neithersensuous nor passionate. The so-called coldness displayed by ‘Lycidas’arises not, it may well be supposed, from any lack on Milton’s part ofsorrow for his friend, but from his determination that simple he wouldnot be, and yet his method is justified of its own beauty and glory. Ofcourse poetry may be too ornate, but in demanding a simplicity ofutterance from the poet it is easy for the critic to forget how wide andhow various are poetry’s domains. For if in one mood poetry is thesimple and unadorned expression of nature, in another it is the woof ofart, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings. 

In the matter of poetic ornament, all that the reader has any right todemand is that the decoration should be poetical and not rhetorical. Now, as a matter of fact, there is no surer sign of the amount of thepoetical endowment of any poet than the insight he shows into the natureof poetry as distinguished from rhetoric when working on ornate poetry. It is a serious impeachment of latter-day criticism that in very manycases, perhaps in most cases, the plaudits given to the last new “leadingpoet” of the hour are awarded to “felicitous lines, ” every felicity ofwhich is rhetorical and not poetical. 

VII. WILLIAM MORRIS. 1834–1896. 

I. 

The news of the grave turn suddenly taken by William Morris’s illnessprepared the public for the still worse news that was to follow. 

The certificate of the immediate cause of death affirms it to have beenphthisis, but one would suppose that almost every vital organ had becomeexhausted. Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to myinquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thoughtthis is to us all—that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we mayeasily be reconciled—nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s finalbeneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he sooften employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The thought thatMorris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain—the thought that he towhom work was sport and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil—would havebeen intolerable almost. For among the thousand and one charms of theman, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with anenormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circumstance, conspiring withNature, said to him, “Enjoy. ”

 [Picture: William Morris]

Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble ofwealth—cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and twodaughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as tounderstand a genius such as his—surrounded by friends, some of whom wereamong the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very saltof the earth—it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she touched him atall, never struck home. If it is true, as Mérimée affirms, that men arehastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature? Whowanted him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remainedtill the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his brow, butleft his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first opened on the world?Enough for us to think that the man must, indeed, be specially beloved bythe gods who in his sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris couldnot have borne with patience. Pain would not have developed him into ahero. This beloved man, who must have died some day, died when hismarvellous powers were at their best—and died without pain. The schemeof life and death does not seem so much awry, after all. 

At the last interview but one that ever I had with him—it was in thelittle carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turnedout—he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject herarely chose to talk about—the mystery of life and death. Theconversation ended with these words of his: “I have enjoyed my life—fewmen more so—and death in any case is sure. ”

It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death wasexcessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginativefaculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such alife of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. “Look at Gladstone, ” hewould say; “look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges. Don’t they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, notwork. ” No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual effortssuch as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the“dry light of intelligence, ” a prodigious amount of work may be achievedwithout any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where thatfusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? Idoubt it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quinceypointed out many years ago, a movement not of “the thinking machine”only, but of the whole man—the whole “genial” nature of the worker—hisimagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocityfrom the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence when, as in the case ofWalter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, theemotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is thetrue _vis vitæ_. 

We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced and its amountto realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such astrain. Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is his finestpoem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning till four in theafternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines!Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd. ’ Think ofthe mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of animaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of thecollaborating of the ‘Völsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied, ’ thechoosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from thelater poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heatinto the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not workenough here for a considerable portion of a poet’s life? And yet sogreat is the entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positivelyoverlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appearedsince his death in the press, while in the others it is alluded to inthree words, and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealtwith fills up all the available space of a newspaper. 

Then, again, take his translation of the Odyssey. Some competent criticsare dissatisfied with this; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. Thetwo specially Homeric qualities—those, indeed, which set Homer apart fromall other poets—are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fullycombined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexametersand by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignityhis magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows. Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can be caught. Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity ofthe Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completelyas Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal asBuckley’s prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote. 

This, with his much less satisfactory translation of Virgil, where hegives us an almost word-for-word translation, and yet throws over thepoem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of themodern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. Butthese two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere, ’ ‘Jason, ’ ‘The Earthly Paradise, ’‘Love is Enough, ’ ‘Poems by the Way, ’ &c. And then come his translationsfrom the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but notsuch translation as that in the “Saga Library. ” Allowing for all the aidhe got from Mr. Magnússon, what a work this is! Think of the imaginativeexercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a dictionso picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem, forpoem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginativesubstance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem. 

And this brings me to those poems without metre which he invented forhimself in the latter portion of his career. There is in thesedelightful stories, leaving out of consideration the exquisite lyricsinterspersed, enough poetic wealth adequately to endow a dozen poets. The last of all of them—the one of which the last two chapters, when hecould no longer hold a pen, he dictated to his friend Mr. Cockerell, inthe determination, as he said to me, that he would finish it before hedied—will be found to be finer than any hitherto published. It is called‘The Sundering Flood, ’ and was written after the story ‘The Water of theWondrous Isles. ’ It (‘The Sundering Flood’) is as long as ‘The Woodbeyond the World, ’ but has lyrics interspersed. 

But evidently it is as an inventor in the fine arts that he is chieflyknown to the general public. “Had he written no poetry at all, he wouldhave been as famous, ” we are told, “as he is now. ” Anyhow, there is nohousehold of any culture among the English-speaking races in which thename of William Morris does not at once call up that great revival indecorative art for which the latter part of the nineteenth century willbe famous. In his designs for tapestry and other textures, in hisdesigns for wall-papers and furniture, there is an expenditure ofimaginative force which alone might make the fame of an artist. Then hisartistic printing, in which he invented his own decorations, his owntype, and his own paper—think of the energy he put into all that! Themoment that this new interest seized him he made a more thorough study ofthe various specimens of black-letter printing than had ever been madebefore save by specialists. But even this could not “fatigue anappetite” for the joy of work “which was insatiable. ” He started as anapostle of Socialism. He edited _The Commonweal_, and wrote largely init, sank money in it week by week with the greatest glee, stumped thecountry as a Socialist orator, and into that cause alone put the energyof three men. Is it any wonder, then, that those who loved him wereappalled at this prodigious output? Often and often have I tried tobring this matter before him. It was all of no use. “For me to restfrom work, ” he would say, “means to die. ”

When not absorbed in some occupation that he loved—and in no other wouldhe move—his restlessness was that of a young animal. In conversation hecould rarely sit still for ten consecutive minutes, but must needs springfrom his seat and walk round the room, as if every limb were eager totake part in the talk. His boisterous restlessness was the first thingthat struck strangers. During the period when the famous partnership ofMorris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Was being dissolved I saw him veryfrequently at Queen’s Square, for I took a very active part in thearrangement of that matter, and after our interviews at Queen Square heand I used often to lunch together at the “Cock” in Fleet Street. Heliked a sanded floor and quaint old-fashioned settles. Moreover, thechops were the finest to be had in London. 

On the day following our first forgathering at the “Cock, ” I was lunchingthere with another poet—a friend of his—when the waiter, who knew mewell, said, “That was a loudish gent a-lunching with you yesterday, sir. I thought once you was a-coming to blows. ” Morris had merely beendeclaiming against the Elizabethan dramatists, especially Cyril Tourneur. He shouted out, “You ought to know better than to claim any merit forsuch work as ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’”; and wound up with thegeneralization that “the use of blank verse as a poetic medium ought tobe stopped by Act of Parliament for at least two generations. ” Onanother occasion, when Middleton (another fine spirit, who “should havedied hereafter”) and I were staying with him at Kelmscott Manor, thepassionate emphasis with which he declared that the curse of mankind wascivilization, and that Australia ought to have been left to the blacks, New Zealand to the Maoris, and South Africa to the Kaffirs, startled evenMiddleton, who knew him so well. 

It was this boisterous energy and infinite enjoyment of life which madeit so difficult for people on meeting him for the first time to associatehim with the sweet sadness of ‘The Earthly Paradise. ’ How could a man ofsuch exuberant animal spirits as Morris—so hearty, so noisy often, andoften so humorous—have written those lovely poems, whose only fault wasan occasional languor and a lack of humour often commented on when thecritic compares him with Chaucer? This subject of Chaucer’s humour andMorris’s lack of it demands, however, a special word even in so brief anotice as this. No man of our time—not even Rossetti—had a finerappreciation of humour than Morris, as is well known to those who heardhim read aloud the famous “Rainbow Scene” in ‘Silas Marner’ and certainpassages in Charles Dickens’s novels. These readings were as fine asRossetti’s recitations of ‘Jim Bludso’ and other specimens of Yankeehumour. And yet it is a common remark, and one that cannot be gainsaid, that there is no spark of humour in the published poems of either ofthese two friends. Did it never occur to any critic to ask whether theanomaly was not explicable by some theory of poetic art that they held incommon? It is no disparagement to say of Morris that when he began towrite poetry the influence of Rossetti’s canons of criticism upon him wasenormous, notwithstanding the influence upon him of Browning’s dramaticmethods. But while Rossetti’s admiration of Browning was very strong, itwas a canon of his criticism that humour was, if not out of place inpoetry, a disturbing element of it. 

What makes me think that Morris was greatly influenced by this canon isthe fact that Morris could and did write humorous poetry, and thenwithheld it from publication. For the splendid poem of ‘Sir PeterHarpdon’s End, ’ printed in his first volume, Morris wrote a humorousscene of the highest order, in which the hero said to his faithful fellowcaptive and follower John Curzon that as their deaths were so near hefelt a sudden interest in what had never interested him before—the storyof John’s life before they had been brought so close to each other. Theheroic but dull-witted soldier acceded to his master’s request, and theincoherent, muddle-headed way in which he gave his autobiography was fullof a dramatic and subtle humour—was almost worthy of him who in three orfour words created the foolish fat scullion in ‘Tristram Shandy. ’ Thishe refused to print, in deference, I suspect, to a theory of poetic art. 

In criticizing Morris, however, the critic is apt to forget that amongpoets there are those who, treating poetry simply as an art, do not pressinto their work any more of their own individual forces than the workartistically demands, while another class of poets are impelled to givefull expression to themselves in every poem they write. It is to theformer class of poets that Morris belongs. 

Whatever chanced to be Morris’s goal of the moment was pursued by himwith as much intensity as though the universe contained no other possiblegoal, and then, when the moment was passed, another goal received all hisattention. I was never more struck with this than on the memorable daywhen I first met him, and was blessed with a friendship that lastedwithout interruption for nearly a quarter of a century. It was shortlyafter he and Rossetti entered upon the joint occupancy of Kelmscott Manoron the Thames, where I was staying as Rossetti’s guest. On a certainmorning when we were walking in the fields Rossetti told me that Morriswas coming down for a day’s fishing with George Hake, and that “Mouse, ”the Icelandic pony, was to be sent to the Lechlade railway station tomeet them. “You are now going to be introduced to my fellow partner, ”Rossetti said. At that time I only knew of the famous firm by name, andI asked Rossetti for an explanation, which he gave in his usual incisiveway. 

“Well, ” said he, “one evening a lot of us were together, and we gottalking about the way in which artists did all kinds of things in oldentimes, designed every kind of decoration and most kinds of furniture, andsome one suggested—as a joke more than anything else—that we should eachput down five pounds and form a company. Fivers were blossoms of a raregrowth among us in those days, and I won’t swear that the table bristledwith fivers. Anyhow, the firm was formed, but of course there was nodeed, or anything of that kind. In fact, it was a mere playing atbusiness, and Morris was elected manager, not because we ever dreamed hewould turn out a man of business, but because he was the only one amongus who had both time and money to spare. We had no idea whatever ofcommercial success, but it succeeded almost in our own despite. Herecomes the manager. You must mind your _p’s_ and _q’s_ with him; he is awonderfully stand-off chap, and generally manages to take againstpeople. ”

“What is he like?” I said. 

“You know the portraits of Francis I. Well, take that portrait as thebasis of what you would call in your metaphysical jargon your ‘mentalimage’ of the manager’s face, soften down the nose a bit, and give himthe rose-bloom colour of an English farmer, and there you have him. ”

“What about Francis’s eyes?” I said. 

“Well, they are not quite so small, but not big—blue-grey, but full ofgenius. ”

And then I saw, coming towards us on a rough pony so diminutive that hewell deserved the name of “Mouse, ” the figure of a man in a wideawake—afigure so broad and square that the breeze at his back, soft and balmy asit was, seemed to be using him as a sail, and blowing both him and thepony towards us. 

When Rossetti introduced me, the manager greeted him with a “H’m! Ithought you were alone. ” This did not seem promising. Morris at thattime was as proverbial for his exclusiveness as he afterwards became forhis expansiveness. 

Rossetti, however, was irresistible to everybody, and especially toMorris, who saw that he was expected to be agreeable to me, and mostagreeable he was, though for at least an hour I could still see the shylook in the corner of his eyes. He invited me to join the fishing, whichI did. Finding every faculty of Morris’s mind and every nerve in hisbody occupied with one subject, fishing, I (coached by Rossetti, whowarned me not to talk about ‘The Defence of Guenevere’) talked aboutnothing but the bream, roach, dace, and gudgeon I used to catch as a boyin the Ouse, and the baits that used to tempt the victims to their doom. Not one word passed Morris’s lips, as far as I remember at this distanceof time, which had not some relation to fish and baits. He had come fromLondon for a few hours’ fishing, and all the other interests which assoon as he got back to Queen’s Square would be absorbing him wereforgotten. Instead of watching my float, I could not help watching hisface with an amused interest at its absorbed expression, which after awhile he began to notice, and the following little dialogue ensued, whichI remember as though it took place yesterday:—

“How old were you when you used to fish in the Ouse?”

“Oh, all sorts of ages; it was at all sorts of times, you know. ”

“Well, how young then?”

“Say ten or twelve. ”

“When you got a bite at ten or twelve, did you get as interested, asexcited, as I get when I see my float bob?”

“No. ”

The way in which he said, “I thought not, ” conveyed a world ofdisparagement of me as a man who could care to gaze upon a brother anglerinstead of upon his own float. 

II. 

In whatsoever William Morris does or says the hand or the voice of thepoet is seen or heard: in his house decorations no less than in hisepics, in his illuminated manuscripts no less than in his tapestries, inhis philippics against “restoration” no less than in his sage-greens, inhis socialism no less than in his samplers. And first a word as to hispoetry. Any critic who, having for contemporaries such writers asTennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and William Morris, fails to see that helives in a period of great poets may rest assured that he is a criticborn—may rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethanshe would have joined the author of ‘The Returne from Parnassus’ indespising the unacademic author of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear. ’ Among this bandof great contemporary poets what is the special position held by him who, having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to theepic, has now, by way of recreation, or rather by way of opening anecessary safety-valve to ease his restless energies, invented a systemof poetic socialism and expounded it in a brand-new kind of prosefiction?

A special and peculiar position Morris holds among his peers—on that weare all agreed; but what is that position? We must not talk toofamiliarly about the Olympian gods; but is it that, without being thegreatest where all are great, Morris is the one who on all occasionsproduces pure poetry and nothing else? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time show moreintellectual strength than he, are they, perchance, given sometimes toadulterating their poetry with ratiocination and didactic preachmentssuch as were better left to the proseman? Without affirming that it isso, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time canreach a finer frenzy than he and give it voice with a more melodiousthroat, are they, perchance, apt to forget that “eloquence is heard whilepoetry is overheard”? Without affirming that it is so, we may at leastask the question. If others, again, are more picturesque than he (thoughthese it might be difficult to find), are they, perchance, a little tooself-conscious in their word-pictures, and are they, perchance, apt topass into those flowery but uncertain ways that were first discovered byEuphues? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask thequestion. 

But supposing that we really had to affirm all these things about theother Olympians, where then would be the position of him about whose worksuch questions could not even be asked? Where would then be the place ofhim who never passes into ratiocination or rhetoric, never passes intoexcessive word-painting or into euphuism, never speaks so loud as to beheard rather than overheard, but, on the contrary, gives us always clearand simple pictures, and always in musical language? Where would then bethe place of him who is the very ideal, if not of the poet as _vates_, yet of the poet as “maker”—the poet who always looks out upon lifethrough a poetic atmosphere which, if sometimes more attenuated thansuits some readers, is as simple and as clear as the air of a Maymorning? A question which would be variously answered according to thevarious temperaments of those who answer—of those who define poetry to be“making, ” or those who define it to be “prophesying, ” or those who defineit to be “singing. ”

Exception has, no doubt, been taken to certain archaisms in which Morrisindulges not only in the epic of ‘Sigurd, ’ but also, and in a greaterdegree, in his translations, especially in that rendering of the Odyssey. It is not our business here to examine into the merits and demerits ofMorris as a translator; but if it were, this is what we should say on hisbehalf. While admitting that now and again his diction is a little tooScandinavian to be in colour, we should point to Matthew Arnold’s dictumthat in a versified translation a poet is no longer recognizable, andthen we should ask whether it is given to any man in any kind of dictionto translate Homer. One Homeric quality only can any one translatorsecure, it seems; and if he can secure one, is not his partial failurebetter than success in less ambitious efforts? To Chapman it was givento secure in the Iliad a measure of the Homeric eagerness—but what else?To Tennyson (in one wonderful fragment) it was given to secure a measureof the Homeric dignity and also a measure of the Homeric picture—but whatelse? There was still left one of the three supreme Homericqualities—the very quality which no one ever supposed could be securedfor our literature, or, indeed, for any other—Homer’s quality of _naïf_wonder. There is no witchery of Homer so fascinating as this; and didany one suppose that it could ever be caught by any translator? Andcould it ever have been caught had not Nature in one of her happiestmoods bethought herself of evolving, in a late and empty day, theindustrious tapestry weaver of Merton and idle singer of ‘Sigurd, ’ ‘TheEarthly Paradise, ’ ‘Love is Enough, ’ and ten thousand delightful versesbesides?

But can a writer be called _naïf_ who works in a diction belonging ratherto a past age than to his own? Morris has proved that he could. Imagination is the basis upon which all other human faculties rest. Inthe deep sense, indeed, one possession only have we “fools of nature, ”our imagination. What we fondly take for substance is the very shadow;what we fondly take for shadow is the very substance. And day by day isScience herself endorsing more emphatically than ever Hamlet’s dictum, that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. ” Bythe aid of imagination our souls confront the present, and, as a rule, the present only. But Morris is an instance, and not a solitary one, ofa modern writer’s inhaling so naturally the atmosphere of the particularpast period his imagination delights in as to belong spiritually to thatperiod rather than his own. To deny sincerity of accent to Morrisbecause of his love of the simple old Scandinavian note—the note which tohim represents every other kind of primitive simplicity—would be asuncritical as to deny sincerity of accent to Charles Lamb because of hissympathy with Elizabethan and Jacobean times, or to Dante Rossettibecause of his sympathy with the period of his great Italian namesake. 

So much for the poetry of our many-handed poet. As to his housedecorations, his illuminated manuscripts, his “anti-scrape” philippics, his sage-greens, his tapestries, his socialism, and his samplers: to dealwith the infinite is far beyond the scope of an article so very finite asthis, or we could easily show that in them all there is seen the same_naïf_ genius of the poet, the same rare instinct for beautifulexpression, the same originality as in the epics and the translations. Let him who is rash enough to suppose that even the socialism of a greatpoet is like the socialism of common folk read ‘John Ball. ’ Let himobserve how like Titania floating and dancing and playing among theAthenian clowns seems the Morrisian genius floating and dancing andplaying among the surroundings in which at present it pleases him todisport. What makes the ordinary socialistic literature to many peopleunreadable is its sourness. What the Socialists say may be true, buttheir way of saying it sets one’s teeth on edge. They contrive to statetheir case with so much bitterness, with so much unfairness—so much lackof logic—that the listener says at once, “For me, _any_ galley but this!Things _are_ bad; but, for Heaven’s sake, let us go on as we are!”

By the clever competition of organisms did Nature, long before socialismwas thought of, contrive to build up a world—this makeshift world. Bythe teeth of her very cats did she evolve her succulent clover. Butwhether the Socialists are therefore wrong in their views of society andits ultimate goal is not a question we need discuss. What they want ismore knowledge and less zeal. It is possible to see, and see clearly, that the social organism is far from being what it ought to be, and atthe same time to remember that man is a creature of slow growth, and thateven in reaching his present modest stage of development the time herequired was long—long indeed unless we consider his history in relationto the history of the earth, and then he appears to have been verycommendably expeditious. If there is any truth in what the geologiststell us of the vast age of the earth, it seems only a few years ago thatman succeeded, after much heroic sitting down, in wearing off anappendage which had done him good service in his early tree-climbingdays, but which, with new environments and with trousers in prospect, hadceased to be useful or ornamental. An anthropoid Socialist would haveadvised him to “cut it off, ” and had he done so he would have bled todeath. 

That among all her children Man is really Nature’s prime favourite seemspretty evident, though no one can say why. It is to him that the GreatMother is ever pointing and saying, “A poor creature, but mine own. Ishall do something with him some day, but I must not try to force him. ”Here, indeed, is the mistake of the Socialists. They think they canforce the very creature who above all others cannot be forced. Theythink they can turn him into something rich and strange—turn him in asingle generation—even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned whatNature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with newrudder-tail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feedinghim with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions. Competition, that evolved Shakespeare from an ascidian, may be a mistakeof Nature’s—M. Arsène Houssaye declares that she never was so wise andartistically perfect as we take her to be—but her mistakes are too old tobe rectified in a single generation. A little more knowledge, we say, and a little less zeal would save the Socialist from being considered bythe advanced thinker—who, studying the present by the light of the past, sees that all civilization is provisional—as the most serious obstructivewhom he has to encounter. 

As to Morris, we have always felt that, take him all round, he is therichest and most varied in artistic endowments of any man of our time. On whichsoever of the fine arts he had chanced to concentrate his giftsand energies the result would have been the same as in poetry. In thefront rank he would always have been. But it is not until we come todeal with his socialism that we see how entirely aestheticism is theprimal source from which all his energies spring. That he has a greatand generous heart—a heart that must needs sympathize with every form ofdistress—no one can doubt who reads these two books, {263} and yet hissocialism comes from an entirely æsthetic impulse. It is the vulgaritiesof civilization, it is the ugliness of contemporary life—so unlike thatEarthly Paradise of the poetic dream—that have driven him from hisnatural and proper work. He cannot take offence at our saying this, forhe has said it himself in ‘Signs of Change’:—

 “As I strove to stir up people to this reform, I found that the causes of the vulgarities of civilization lay deeper than I had thought, and little by little I was driven to the conclusion that all these uglinesses are but the outward expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society, and that it is futile to attempt to deal with them from the outside. Whatever I have written, or spoken on the platform, on these social subjects is the result of the truths of socialism meeting my earlier impulse, and giving it a definite and much more serious aim; and I can only hope, in conclusion, that any of my readers who have found themselves hard-pressed by the sordidness of civilization, and have not known where to turn to for encouragement, may receive the same enlightenment as I have, and that even the rough pieces in this book may help them to that end. ”

With these eloquent words no one can more fully agree than we do, so faras they relate to the unloveliness of Philistine rule. But though thebad features of the present time {264} are peculiar to itself, when werethose paradisal days of which Morris dreams? when did that merry Englandexist in which the general sum of human happiness and human misery wasmore equally distributed than now?

Those “dark ages” beloved of the author of ‘John Ball’ may not have beenquite so dark as Swinburne declares them to have been; but in this matterof the equalization of human happiness were they so very far in advanceof the present time? Those who have watched the progress of Morris’ssocialism know that, so far from being out of keeping with the“anti-scrape” philippics and the tapestry weaving, it is in entireharmony with them. Out of a noble anger against the “jerry builder” andhis detestable doings sprang this the last of the Morrisian epics, as outof the wrath of Achilles sprang the Iliad. That the picturesqueness ofthe John Ball period should lead captive the imagination of Morris was, of course, inevitable. Society is at least picturesque wheresoever theclasses are so sharply demarcated as they were in the dark ages, when thedifference as to quality of flesh and blood between the lord and thethrall was greater than the difference between the thrall and the swinehe tended. But what about the condition of this same picturesque thrallwho (as the law books have it) “clothed the soil”—whose every chance ofhappiness, whose every chance of comfort, depended upon the arbitrarywill of some more or less brutal lord? What was the condition of theEnglish lower orders—the orders for whom many bitter social tears are nowbeing shed? What about the condition of the thralls in dark ages so darkthat even an apostle of Wyclif’s (this same John Ball, Morris’s hero)preached the doctrine—unless he has been belied—that no child had a soulthat could be saved who had been born out of wedlock? The Persianaphorism that warns us to beware of poets, princes, and women must havehad a satirical reference to the fact that their governance of the worldis by means of picturesqueness. Always it has been the picturesquenessof tyranny that has kept it up. It was the picturesqueness of the _autode fe_ that kept up the Spanish Inquisition, but we may rest assured thatthe most picturesque actors in that striking tableau would have preferreda colourless time of jerry builders to a picturesqueness like that. Tofind a fourteenth-century pothouse parlour painted by a modern Socialistwith a hand more loving than Walter Scott’s own is indeed touching:—

 “I entered the door and started at first with my old astonishment, with which I had woke up, so strange and beautiful did this interior seem to me, though it was but a pothouse parlour. A quaintly carved sideboard held an array of bright pewter pots and dishes and wooden and earthen bowls; a stout oak table went up and down the room, and a carved oak chair stood by the chimney-corner, now filled by a very old man dim-eyed and white-bearded. That, except the rough stools and benches on which the company sat, was all the furniture. The walls were panelled roughly enough with oak boards to about six feet from the floor, and about three feet of plaster above that was wrought in a pattern of a rose stem running all round the room, freely and roughly done, but with (as it seemed to my unused eyes) wonderful skill and spirit. On the hood of the great chimney a huge rose was wrought in the plaster and brightly painted in its proper colours. There were a dozen or more of the men I had seen coming along the street sitting there, some eating and all drinking; their cased bows leaned against the wall, their quivers hung on pegs in the panelling, and in a corner of the room I saw half a dozen bill-hooks that looked made more for war than for hedge-shearing, with ashen handles some seven foot long. Three or four children were running about among the legs of the men, heeding them mighty little in their bold play, and the men seemed little troubled by it, although they were talking earnestly and seriously too. A well-made comely girl leaned up against the chimney close to the gaffer’s chair, and seemed to be in waiting on the company: she was clad in a close-fitting gown of bright blue cloth, with a broad silver girdle, daintily wrought, round her loins, a rose wreath was on her head, and her hair hung down unbound; the gaffer grumbled a few words to her from time to time, so that I judged he was her grandfather. ”

“Morris’s ‘Earthly Paradise’!” the reader will exclaim. Yes; and here wecome upon that feature of originality which, as has been before said, distinguishes Morris’s socialism from the socialism of the prosaicreformer. 

Political opinions almost always spring from temperament. Theconservative temper of such a poet as Sir Walter Scott leads him toidealize the past, and to concern himself but little about the future. The rebellious temperament of such a poet as Shelley leads him toidealize the future, and concern himself but little about the past. Butby contriving to idealize both the past and the future, and mixing thetwo idealizations into one delicious amalgam, the poet of the ‘EarthlyParadise’ gives us the Morrisian socialism, the most charming, and inmany respects the most marvellous product of “the poet’s mind” that hasever yet been presented to an admiring world. 

The plan of ‘John Ball’ is simplicity itself. The poet in a dreambecomes a spectator of the insurrection of the Kentish men at the timewhen Wat Tyler rebelled against the powers that were; and the hero, JohnBall, who is mainly famous as having preached a sermon from the text

 Wan Adam dalf and Eve span Wo was thanne a gentilman?

is made to listen to the poet-dreamer’s prophecy of the days of_bourgeois_ rule and the jerry builder. 

If we take into account the perfect truth and beauty of the literary formin which the story is presented, we do not believe that anything tosurpass it could be found in historic fiction; indeed, we do not knowthat anything could be found to equal it. The difficulty of theimaginative writer who attempts, whether in prose or verse, to vivify thepast seems to be increasing, as we have before said, every day with thegrowth of the scientific temper and the reverence of the sacredness ofmere documents. The old-fashioned theory—the theory which obtained fromShakespeare’s time down to Scott’s and even down to Kingsley’s—that thefacts of history could be manipulated for artistic purposes with the samefreedom that the artist’s own inventions can be handled, gave the artistpower to produce vital and flexible work at the expense of the historicconscience—a power which is being curtailed day by day. The instinct forvivifying by imaginative treatment the records of the past is toouniversal and too deeply inwoven in the very texture of the human mind tobe other than a true and healthy instinct. But so oppressive has becomethe tyranny of documents, so fettered by what a humourist has called“factology” have become the wings of the romancer’s imagination, that onewonders at his courage in dealing with historic subjects at all. 

A bold writer would he be who in the present day should make Shakespearefigure among the Kenilworth festivities as a famous player (after themanner of Scott), or who should (after the manner of Kingsley) giveElizabeth credit for Winter’s device of using the fire-ships beforeCalais. Even the poet—he who, dealing as he does with essential andelemental qualities only, is not so hampered as the proseman in thesematters—is beginning also to feel the tyranny of documents, as we seenotably in Swinburne’s ‘Bothwell, ’ which consists very largely ofdocuments transfigured into splendid verse. But more than even this: themere literary form has now to be as true to the time depicted ascircumstances will allow. If Scott’s romances have a fault it is that, as he had no command over, and perhaps but little sympathy with, thebeautiful old English of which Morris is such a master, his stories lackone important element of dramatic illusion. But it is in the literaryform of his story that Morris is especially successful. Where time hasdealt most cruelly with our beloved language is in robbing it of thatbeautiful cadence which fell from our forefathers’ lips as sweetly and asunconsciously as melody falls from the throat of the mavis. One of themany advantages that Morris has reaped from his peculiar line of study isthat he can write like this—he, and he alone among living men:—

 “‘Surely thou goest to thy death. ’ He smiled very sweetly, yet proudly, as he said: ‘Yea, the road is long, but the end cometh at last. Friend, many a day have I been dying; for my sister, with whom I have played and been merry in the autumntide about the edges of the stubble-fields; and we gathered the nuts and bramble-berries there, and started thence the missel-thrush, and wondered at his voice and thought him big; and the sparrow-hawk wheeled and turned over the hedges, and the weasel ran across the path, and the sound of the sheep-bells came to us from the downs as we sat happy on the grass; and she is dead and gone from the earth, for she pined from famine after the years of the great sickness; and my brother was slain in the French wars, and none thanked him for dying save he that stripped him of his gear; and my unwedded wife with whom I dwelt in love after I had taken the tonsure, and all men said she was good and fair, and true she was and lovely; she also is dead and gone from the earth; and why should I abide save for the deeds of the flesh which must be done? Truly, friend, this is but an old tale that men must die; and I will tell thee another, to wit, that they live: and I live now and shall live. Tell me then what shall befall. ”

Note the music of the cadence here—a music that plays about the heartmore sweetly than any verse, save the very highest. And here we touchupon an extremely interesting subject. 

Always in reading a prose story by a writer whose energies have beenexercised in other departments of letters there is for the critic aspecial interest. If this exercise has been in fields outsideimaginative literature—in those fields of philosophical speculation wherea logical method and a scientific modulation of sentences arerequired—the novelist, instead of presenting us with those concretepictures of human life demanded in all imaginative art, is apt to give usdisquisitions “about and about” human life. Forgetting that it is notthe function of any art to prove, he is apt to concern himself deeply inshowing why his actors did and said this or that—apt to busy himselfabout proving his story either by subtle analyses or else by purelyscientific generalizations, instead of attending to the true method ofconvincement that belongs to his art—the convincement that is effected byactual pictorial and dramatic illustration of how his actors really didthe things and said the things vouched for by his own imagination. Thatthe quest of a scientific, or supposed scientific, basis for a novelist’simaginative structure is fatal to true art is seen not only in GeorgeEliot and the accomplished author of ‘Elsie Venner, ’ but also in writersof another kind—writers whose hands cannot possibly have been stiffenedby their knowledge of science. 

Among the many instances that occur to us we need point to only one, thatof a story recently published by one of our most successful livingnovelists, in which the writer endeavours to prove that animal magnetismis the acting cause of spiritualistic manifestations so called. Settingout to show that a medium is nothing more than a powerful mesmerist, towhose manipulations all but two in a certain household are unconsciouslysuccumbing, he soon ignores for plot purposes the nature of the dramaticsituation by making those very two sceptics at a séance hear the samemusic, see the same spiritually conveyed newspaper, as the others hearand see. That the writer should mistake, as he seems to do, the merelydirective force of magnetism for a motive force does not concern theliterary critic. But when two sceptics, who are to expose a charlatan’stricks by watching how the believers are succumbing to mesmerichallucinations, are found succumbing to the same hallucinationsthemselves—succumbing because the story-teller needs them as witnesses ofthe phenomena—then the literary critic grows pensive, for he sees whathavoc the scientific method will work in the flower-garden of art. 

On the other hand, should the story-teller be a poet—one who, like thewriter of ‘John Ball, ’ has been accustomed to write under the conditionsof a form of literary art where the diction is always and necessarilyconcrete, figurative, and quintessential, and where the movement ismetrical—his danger lies in a very different direction. The critic’sinterest then lies in watching how the poet will comport himself inanother field of imaginative literature—a field where no such conditionsas these exist—a field where quintessential and concrete diction, thoughmeritorious, may yet be carried too far, and where those regular andexpected bars of the metricist which are the first requisites of verseare not only without function, but are in the way—are fatal, indeed, tothat kind of convincement which, and which alone, is the proper quest ofprose art. No doubt it is true, as we have before said, that literaturebeing nothing but the reflex of the life of man, or else of the life ofnature, the final quest of every form of literature is that special kindof convincement which is inherently suitable to the special form. Forthe analogy between nature and true art is not a fanciful one, and therelation of function to organism is the same in both. But what is thedifference between the convincement achieved by poetic and theconvincement achieved by prose art? Is it that the convincement of himwho works in poetic forms is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectlyachieved by a faithful record of the emotion aroused in his own soul bythe impact upon his senses of the external world, while the convincementof the proseman is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achievedby a faithful record and picture of the external world itself?

All such generalizations as this are, no doubt, to be taken with many andgreat qualifications; but, roughly speaking, would not this seem to bethe fundamental difference between that kind of imaginative literaturewhich expresses itself in metrical forms and that kind of imaginativeliterature in which metrical form is replaced by other qualities andother functions? Not but that these two methods may meet in the samework, not but that they may meet and strengthen each other, as we havebefore said when glancing at the interesting question, How much, or howlittle, of realism can poetry capture from the world of prose and weaveinto her magic woof, and how much of music can prose steal from poetry?But in order to do all that can be done in the way of enriching poetrywith prose material without missing the convincement of poetic art, thepoet must be Homer himself; in order to do all that can be done in theway of vivifying prose fiction with poetic fire without missing theconvincement of prose art, the story-teller must be Charlotte Brontë orEmily, her sister, in whose work we find for once the quintessentialstrength and the concrete and figurative diction of the poet—indeed, allthe poetical requisites save metre alone. Had ‘Jane Eyre, ’ ‘Villette, ’and ‘Wuthering Heights’ existed in Coleridge’s time he would, we may besure, have taken these three prose poems as illustrations of the truth ofhis axiom that the true antithesis of poetry is not prose, but science. 

What the prose poet has to avoid is metrical movement on the one side andscientific modulation of sentences on the other. And perhaps in no casecan it be achieved save in the autobiographic form of fiction, where andwhere alone the work is so subjective that it may bear even the poeticglow of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette. ’ What makes us think this to be so isthe fact that in ‘Shirley’—a story written in the epic method—the onlypassages of the poetic kind which really convince are those uttered bythe characters in their own persons. And as to ‘Wuthering Heights, ’ astory which could not, of course, be told in one autobiography, themethod of telling it by means of a group of autobiographies, thoughclumsy enough from the constructor’s point, was yet just as effective asa more artistic method. And it was true instinct of genius that ledEmily Brontë to adopt the autobiographic method even under these heavyconditions. 

Still the general truth remains that the primary function of the poet isto tell his story steeped in his own emotion, while the primary functionof the prose fictionist is to tell his story in an objective way. Henceit is that in a general way the difficulty of the poet who turns to prosefiction lies, like that of philosophical or scientific writers, insuppressing certain intellectual functions which he has been in the habitof exercising. And the case of Scott, which at first sight might seem toshow against this theory, may be adduced in support of it. For Scott’sversified diction, though concrete, is never more quintessential thanthat of prose; and his method being always objective rather thansubjective, when he turned to prose fiction he seemed at once to bewriting with his right hand where formerly he had been writing with hisleft. 

VIII. FRANCIS HINDES GROOME. (THE TARNO RYE. )1851–1902. 

I. 

I have been invited to write about my late friend and colleague FrancisHindes Groome, who died on the 24th ult. , and was buried among hisforefathers at Monk Soham in Suffolk. I find the task extremelydifficult. Though he died at fifty, he, with the single exception ofBorrow, had lived more than any other friend of mine, and perhapssuffered more. Indeed, his was one of the most remarkable and romanticliterary lives that, since Borrow’s, have been lived in my time. 

The son of an Archdeacon of Suffolk, he was born in 1851 at Monk SohamRectory, where, I believe, his father and his grandfather were born, andwhere they certainly lived; for—as has been recorded in one of theinvaluable registry books of my friend Mr. F. A. Crisp—he belonged to oneof the oldest and most distinguished families in Suffolk. He was sentearly to Ipswich School, where he was a very popular boy, but neverstrong and never fond of athletic exercises. His early taste forliterature is shown by the fact that with his boy friend Henry ElliotMaiden he originated a school magazine called the _Elizabethan_. Likemany an organ originated in the outer world, the _Elizabethan_ failedbecause it would not, or could not, bring itself into harmony with thepublic taste. The boys wanted news of cricket and other games: Groomeand his assistant editor gave them literature as far as it was in theirpower to do so. 

 [Picture: Francis Hindes Groome]

The Ipswich School was a very good one for those who got into the sixth, as Groome did. The head master, Dr. Holden, was a very fine scholar; andit is no wonder that Groome throughout his life showed a considerableknowledge of and interest in classical literature. That he had a realinsight into the structure of Latin verse is seen by a rendering ofTennyson’s ‘Tithonus, ’ which Mr. Maiden has been so very good as to showme—a rendering for which he got a prize. In 1869 he got prizes forclassical literature, Latin prose, Latin elegiacs, and Latin hexameters. But if Dr. Holden exercised much influence over Groome’s taste, theassistant master, Mr. Sanderson, certainly exercised more, for Mr. Sanderson was an enthusiastic student of Romany. The influence of theassistant master was soon seen after Groome went up to Oxford. He wasploughed for his “Smalls, ” and, remaining up for part of the “Long, ” hewent one night to a fair at Oxford at which many gipsies were present—anincident which forms an important part of his gipsy story ‘Kriegspiel. ’Groome at once struck up an acquaintance with the gipsies at the fair. It occurred also that Mr. Sanderson, after Groome had left IpswichSchool, used to go and stay at Monk Soham Rectory every summer forfishing; and this tended to focus Groome’s interest in Romany matters. At Göttingen, where he afterwards went, he found himself in a kind ofRomany atmosphere, for, owing perhaps to Benfey’s having been a Göttingenman, Romany matters were still somewhat rife there in certain sets. 

The period from his leaving Göttingen to his appearance in Edinburgh in1876 as a working literary man of amazing activity, intelligence, andknowledge is the period that he spent among the gipsies. And it is thisvery period of wild adventure and romance that it is impossible for me todwell upon here. But on some future occasion I hope to write somethingabout his adventures as a Romany Rye. His first work was on the ‘GlobeEncyclopædia, ’ edited by Dr. John Ross. Even at that time he was verydelicate and subject to long wearisome periods of illness. During hiswork on the ‘Globe’ he fell seriously ill in the middle of the letter_S_. Things were going very badly with him; but they would have gonemuch worse had it not been for the affection and generosity of his friendand colleague Prof. H. A. Webster, who, in order to get the work out intime, sat up night after night in Groome’s room, writing articles onSterne, Voltaire, and other subjects. 

Webster’s kindness, and afterwards the kindness of Dr. Patrick, endearedEdinburgh and Scotland to the “Tarno Rye. ” As Webster was at that timeon the staff of ‘The Encyclopædia Britannica, ’ I think, but I do notknow, that it was through him that Groome got the commission to write hisarticle ‘Gypsies’ in that stupendous work. I do not know whether it isthe most important, but I do know that it is one of the most thorough andconscientious articles in the entire encyclopædia. This was followed byhis being engaged by Messrs. Jack to edit the ‘Ordnance Gazetteer ofScotland, ’ a splendid work, which on its completion was made the subjectof a long and elaborate article in _The Athenæum_—an article which was agreat means of directing attention to him, as he always declared. Anyhow, people now began to inquire about Groome. In 1880 he brought out‘In Gypsy Tents, ’ which I shall describe further on. In 1885 he waschosen to join the staff of Messrs. W. & R. Chambers. It is curious tothink of the “Tarno Rye, ” perhaps the most variously equipped literaryman in Europe, after such adventures as his, sitting from 10 to 4 everyday on the sub-editorial stool. He was perfectly content on that stool, however, owing to the genial kindness of his colleague. As sub-editorunder Dr. Patrick, and also as a very copious contributor, he took partin the preparation of the new edition of ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia. ’ Hetook a large part also in preparing ‘Chambers’s Gazetteer’ and‘Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary. ’ Meanwhile he was writing articlesin the ‘Dictionary of National Biography, ’ articles in _Blackwood’sMagazine_ and _The Bookman_, and also reviews upon special subjects in_The Athenæum_. 

This was followed in 1887 by a short Border history, crammed withknowledge. In 1895 his name became really familiar to the general readerby his delightful little volume ‘Two Suffolk Friends’—sketches of hisfather and his father’s friend Edward FitzGerald—full of humour andadmirable character-drawing. 

In 1896 he published his Romany novel ‘Kriegspiel, ’ which did not meetwith anything like the success it deserved, although I must say he washimself in some degree answerable for its comparative failure. Theorigin of the story was this. Shortly after our intimacy I told him thatI had written a gipsy story dealing with the East Anglian gipsies and theWelsh gipsies, but that it had been so dinned into me by Borrow that inEngland there was no interest in the gipsies that I had never found heartto publish it. Groome urged me to let him read it, and he did read it, as far as it was then complete, and took an extremely kind view of it, and urged me to bring it out. But now came another and a new cause fordelay in my bringing out ‘Aylwin’: Groome himself, who at that time knewmore about Romany matters than all other Romany students of myacquaintance put together, showed a remarkable gift as a _raconteur_, andI felt quite sure that he could, if he set to work, write a Romanystory—_the_ Romany story of the English language. He strongly resistedthe idea for a long time—for two or three years at least—and he was onlypersuaded to undertake the task at last by my telling him that I wouldnever bring out my story until he brought out one himself. At last heyielded, told me of a plot, a capital one, and set to work upon it. Whenit was finished he sent the manuscript to me, and I read it through withthe greatest interest, and also the greatest care. I found, as Iexpected to find, that the gipsy chapters were simply perfect, and thatit was altogether an extremely clever romance; but I felt also thatGroome had given no attention whatever to the structure of a story. Incidents of the most striking and original kind were introduced at thewrong places, and this made them interesting no longer. So persuaded wasI that the story only needed recasting to prove a real success that Idevoted days, and even weeks, to going through the novel, and indicatingwhere the transpositions should take place. Groome, however, had got soentirely sick of his novel before he had completed it that he refusedabsolutely to put another hour’s work into it; for, as he said, “thewriting of it had already been a loss to the pantry. ”

He sent it, as it was, to an eminent firm of publishers, who, knowingGroome and his abilities, would have willingly taken it if they had seentheir way to do so. But they could not, for the very reasons that hadinduced me to recast it, and they declined it. The book was then sentround to publisher after publisher with the same result; and yet therewas more fine substance in this novel than in five ordinary stories. Itwas at last through the good offices of Mr. Coulson Kernahan that it waseventually taken by Messrs. Ward & Lock; and, although it won warmeulogies from such great writers as George Meredith, it never made itsway. Its failure distressed me far more than it distressed Groome, for Iloved the man, and knew what its success would have been to him. Amiableand charming as Groome was, there was in him a singular vein of doggedobstinacy after he had formed an opinion; and he not only refused torecast his story, but refused to abandon the absurd name of ‘Kriegspiel’for a volume of romantic gipsy adventure. I suspect that a largeproportion of people who asked for ‘Kriegspiel’ at Mudie’s and Smith’sconsisted of officers who thought that it was a book on the German wargame. 

I tried to persuade him to begin another gipsy novel, but found it quiteimpossible to do so. But even then I waited before bringing out my ownprose story. I published instead my poem in which was told the story ofRhona Boswell, which, to my own surprise and Groome’s, had a success, notwithstanding its gipsy subject. Then I brought out my gipsy story, and accepted its success rather ungratefully, remembering how thegreatest gipsy scholar in the world had failed in this line. In 1899 hepublished ‘Gypsy Folk-Tales, ’ in which he got the aid of the first Romanyscholar now living, Mr. John Sampson. And this was followed in 1901 byhis edition of ‘Lavengro, ’ which, notwithstanding certain unnecessarycarpings at Borrow—such, for instance, as the assertion that the word“dook” is never used in Anglo-Romany for “ghost”—is beyond any doubt thebest edition of the book ever published. The introduction gives sketchesof all the Romany Ryes and students of Romany, from Andrew Boorde (_c. _1490–1549) down to Mr. G. R. Sims and Mr. David MacRitchie. During thistime it was becoming painfully perceptible to me that his physical powerswere waning, although for two years that decadence seemed to have noeffect upon his mental powers. But at last, while he was working on abook in which he took the deepest interest—the new edition of ‘Chambers’sCyclopædia of English Literature’—it became manifest that the generalphysical depression was sapping the forces of the brain. 

But it is personal reminiscences of Groome that I have been invited towrite, and I have not yet even begun upon these. Our close friendshipdated no further back than 1881—the year in which died the great RomanyRye. Indeed, it was owing to Borrow’s death, coupled with Groome’sinterest in that same Romany girl Sinfi Lovell, whom the eloquent Romanypreacher “Gipsy Smith” has lately been expiating upon to immenseaudiences, that I first became acquainted with Groome. Although he hashimself in some magazine told the story, it seems necessary for me toretell it here, for I know of no better way of giving the readers of _TheAthenæum_ a picture of Frank Groome as he lives in my mind. 

It was in 1881 that Borrow, who some seven years before went down toOulton, as he told me, “to die, ” achieved death. And it devolved upon meas the chief friend of his latest years to write an obituary notice ofhim in _The Athenæum_. Among the many interesting letters that itbrought me from strangers was one from Groome, whose name was familiar tome as the author of the article ‘Gypsies’ in the ‘EncyclopædiaBritannica. ’ But besides this I had read ‘In Gypsy Tents, ’ a picture ofthe very kind of gipsies I knew myself, those of East Anglia—a picturewhose photographic truth had quite startled me. Howsoever much of matterof fact may be worked into ‘Lavengro’ (and to no one did Borrow talk withso little reticence upon this delicate subject as to me during many astroll about Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park), I am certain that hisfirst-hand knowledge of gipsy life was quite superficial compared withGroome’s during the nine years or so that he was brought into contactwith them in Great Britain and on the Continent. Hence a book like ‘InGypsy Tents’ has for a student of Romany subjects an interest altogetherdifferent from that which Borrow’s books command; for while Borrow, theman of genius, throws by the very necessities of his temperament thecolours of romance around his gipsies, the characters of ‘In GypsyTents, ’ depicted by a man of remarkable talent merely, are as realisticas though painted by Zola, while the wealth of gipsy lore at his commandis simply overwhelming. 

At that time—with the exception of Borrow and the late Sir RichardBurton—the only man of letters with whom I had been brought into contactwho knew anything about the gipsies was Tom Taylor, whose picture ofRomany life in an anonymous story called ‘Gypsy Experiences, ’ whichappeared in _The Illustrated London News_ in 1851, and in his play ‘SirRoger de Coverley, ’ is not only fascinating, but on the whole true. By-the-by, this charming play might be revived now that there is arevived interest in Romany matters. George Meredith’s wonderful ‘Kiomi’was a picture, I think, of the only Romany chi he knew; but genius suchas his needs little straw for the making of bricks. The letter Ireceived from Groome enclosed a ragged and well-worn cutting from aforgotten anonymous _Athenæum_ article of mine, written as far back as1877, in which I showed acquaintance with gipsydom and described theascent of Snowdon in the company of Sinfi Lovell, which was afterwardsremoved bodily to ‘Aylwin. ’ Here is the cutting:—

 “We had a striking instance of this some years ago, when crossing Snowdon from Capel Curig, one morning, with a friend. She was not what is technically called a lady, yet she was both tall and, in her way, handsome, and was far more clever than many of those who might look down upon her; for her speculative and her practical abilities were equally remarkable: besides being the first palmist of her time, she had the reputation of being able to make more clothes-pegs in an hour, and sell more, than any other woman in England. The splendour of that ‘Snowdon sunrise’ was such as we can say, from much experience, can only be seen about once in a lifetime, and could never be given by any pen or pencil. ‘You don’t seem to enjoy it a bit, ’ was the irritated remark we could not help making to our friend, who stood quite silent and apparently deaf to the rhapsodies in which we had been indulging, as we both stood looking at the peaks, or rather at the vast masses of billowy vapours enveloping them, as they sometimes boiled and sometimes blazed, shaking, whenever the sun struck one and then another, from amethyst to vermilion, ‘shot’ now and then with gold. ‘Don’t injiy it, don’t I?’ said she, removing her pipe. ‘_You_ injiy talking about it, _I_ injiy lettin’ it soak in. ’”

Groome asked whether the gipsy mentioned in the cutting was not a certainRomany chi whom he named, and said that he had always wondered who thewriter of that article was, and that now he wondered no longer, for heknew him to be the writer of the obituary notice of George Borrow. Interested as I was in his letter, it came at a moment when the illnessof a very dear friend of mine threw most other things out of my mind, andit was a good while before I answered it, and told him what I had to tellabout my Welsh gipsy experiences and the adventure on Snowdon. I gotanother letter from him, and this was the beginning of a charmingcorrespondence. After a while I discovered that there were, besidesRomany matters, other points of attraction between us. Groome was theson of Edward FitzGerald’s intimate friend Robert Hindes Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk. Now long before the great vogue of Omar Khayyam, and, of course, long before the institution of the Omar Khayyam Club, there was a little group of Omarians of which I was a member. I need notsay here who were the others of that group, but it was to them I alludedin the ‘Toast to Omar Khayyam, ’ which years afterwards I printed in _TheAthenæum_, and have since reprinted in a volume of mine. 

After a while it was arranged that he was to come and visit us for a fewdays at The Pines. When it got wind in the little household here thatanother Romany Rye, a successor to George Borrow, was to visit us, andwhen it further became known that he had travelled with Hungariangipsies, Roumanian gipsies, Roumelian gipsies, &c. , I don’t know whatkind of wild and dishevelled visitor was not expected. Instead of such aguest there appeared one of the neatest and most quiet young gentlemenwho had ever presented themselves at the door. No one could possiblyhave dared to associate Bohemia with him. As a friend remarked who wasafterwards invited to meet him at luncheon, “Clergyman’s son—suckling forthe Church, was stamped upon him from head to foot. ” I will not denythat so respectable a looking Romany Rye rather disappointed The Pines atfirst. At that time he was a little over thirty, but owing to hisslender, graceful figure, and especially owing to his lithe movements andelastic walk, he seemed to be several years younger. 

The subject of Welsh gipsies, and especially of the Romany chi ofSwindon, made us intimate friends in half an hour, and then there wereEast Anglia, Omar Khayyàm, and Edward FitzGerald to talk about!—adelightful new friend for a man who had so lately lost the only otherRomany Rye in the world. Owing to his youthful appearance, I christenedhim there and then the “Tarno Rye, ” in remembrance of that other “TarnoRye” whom Rhona Boswell loved. I soon found that, great as was thephysical contrast between the Tarno Rye and the original Romany Rye, themental contrast was greater still. Both were shy—very shy; but whileBorrow’s shyness seemed to be born of wariness, the wariness of a man whofelt that he was famous and had a part to play before an inquisitiveworld, Groome’s shyness arose from a modesty that was unique. 

As a philologist merely, to speak of nothing else, his equipment was tentimes that of Borrow, whose temperament may be called anti-academic, andwho really knew nothing thoroughly. But while Borrow was for everdisplaying his philology, and seemed always far prouder of it than of hisfascinating powers as a writer of romantic adventures, Groome’sphilological stores, like all his other intellectual riches, had to bedrawn from him by his interlocutor if they were to be recognized at all. Whenever Borrow enunciated anything showing, as he thought, exceptionalphilological knowledge or exceptional acquaintance with matters Romany, it was his way always to bring it out with a sort of rustic twinkle ofconscious superiority, which in its way, however, was very engaging. From Groome, on the contrary, philological lore would drop, when it didcome, as unconsciously as drops of rain that fall. It was the same withhis knowledge of Romany matters, which was so vast. Not once in all myclose intercourse with him did he display his knowledge of this subjectsave in answer to some inquiry. The same thing is to be noticed in‘Kriegspiel. ’ Romany students alone are able by reading between thelines to discover how deep is the hidden knowledge of Romany matters, sofull is the story of allusions which are lost upon the generalreader—lost, indeed, upon all readers except the very few. For instance, the gipsy villain of the story, Perun, when telling the tale of his crimeagainst the father of the hero who married the Romany chi whom Perun hadhoped to marry, makes allusion thus to the dead woman: “And then abouther as I have named too often to-day. ” Had Borrow been alluding to theRomany taboo of the names of the dead, how differently would he have goneto work! how eager would he have been to display and explain hisknowledge of this remarkable Romany superstition! The same remark may bemade upon the gipsy heroine’s sly allusion in ‘Kriegspiel’ to “SquireLucas, ” the Romany equivalent of Baron Munchausen, an allusion which nonebut a Romany student would understand. 

Before luncheon Groome and I took a walk over the common, and along thePortsmouth Road, through the Robin Hood Gate and across Richmond Park, where Borrow and I and Dr. Hake had so often strolled. I wondered whatthe Gryengroes whom Borrow used to foregather with would have thought ofmy new friend. In personal appearance the two Romany Ryes were as unlikeas in every point of character they were unlike. Borrow’s giant framemade him stand conspicuous wherever he went, Groome’s slender, slightbody gave an impression of great agility; and the walk of the two greatpedestrians was equally contrasted. Borrow’s slope over the ground withthe loose, long step of a hound I have, on a previous occasion, described; Groome’s walk was springy as a gipsy lad’s, and as noiselessas a cat’s. 

Of course, the talk during that walk ran very much upon Borrow, whomGroome had seen once or twice, but whom he did not in the leastunderstand. The two men were antipathetic to each other. It was thenthat he told me how he had first been thrown across the gipsies, and itwas then that he began to open up to me his wonderful record ofexperiences among them. The talk during that first out of many mostdelightful strolls ran upon Benfey, and afterwards upon all kinds ofRomany matters. I remember how warm he waxed upon his pet aversion, “Smith of Coalville, ” as he called him, who, he said, for the purposes ofa professional philanthropist, had done infinite mischief to the gipsiesby confounding them with all the wandering cockney raff from the slums ofLondon. On my repeating to him what, among other things, the Romany chibefore mentioned said to me during the ascent of Snowdon from CapelCurig, that “to make _kairengroes_ (house-dwellers) of full-bloodedRomanies was impossible, because they were the cuckoos of the human race, who had no desire to build nests, and were pricked on to move about fromone place to another over the earth, ” Groome’s tongue became loosened, and he launched out into a monologue on this subject full of learning andfull, as it seemed to me, of original views upon the Romanies. 

As an instance of the cuckoo instincts of the true Romany, he told methat in North America—for which land, alas! so many of our best Romanieseven in Borrow’s time were leaving Gypsey Dell and the grassy lanes ofold England—the gipsies have contracted a habit, which is growing ratherthan waning, of migrating southward in autumn and northward again inspring. He then launched out upon the subject of the wide dispersion ofthe Romanies not only in Europe—where they are found from almost theextreme north to the extreme south, and from the shores of the Bosphorusto the shores of the Atlantic Ocean—but also from north to south and fromeast to west in Asia, in Africa, from Egypt to the very south of theSoudan, and in America from Canada to the River Amazon. And he then wenton to show how intensely migratory they were over all these vast areas. 

So absorbing had been the gipsy talk that I am afraid the waitingluncheon was spoilt. The little luncheon party was composed of ferventadmirers of Sir Walter Scott—bigoted admirers, I fear, some of ourpresent-day critics would have dubbed us; and it chanced that we allagreed in pronouncing ‘Guy Mannering’ to be the most fascinating of allthe Wizard’s work. Of course Meg Merrilies became at once the centre ofthe talk. One contended that, great as Meg was as a woman, she was as agipsy a failure; in short, that Scott’s idea of the Scottish gipsy womanwas conventional—a fancy portrait in which are depicted some of theloftiest characteristics of the Highland woman rather than of theScottish gipsy. The true romany chi can be quite as noble as MegMerrilies, said one, but great in a different way. From Meg Merriliesthe talk naturally turned upon Jane Gordon of Kirk Yetholm, Meg’sprototype, who, when an old woman, was ducked to death in the River Edenat Carlisle. Then came the subject of Kirk Yetholm itself, the famousheadquarters of the Scotch Romanies; and after this it naturally turnedto Kirk Yetholm’s most famous inhabitant, old Will Faas, the gipsy king, whose corpse was escorted to Yetholm by three hundred and more donkeys. And upon all these subjects Groome’s knowledge was like an inexhaustiblefountain; or rather it was like a tap, ready to supply any amount of lorewhen called upon to do so. 

But it was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points ofsympathy at The Pines during that first luncheon; there was that othersubject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyàm. We, ahandful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps all the moreintense in our cult because we believed it to be esoteric. And here wasa guest who had been brought into actual personal contact with thewonderful old Fitz. As a child of eight he had seen him—talked withhim—been patted on the head by him. Groome’s father, the Archdeacon ofSuffolk, was one of FitzGerald’s most intimate friends. This was at oncea delightful and a powerful link between Frank Groome and those at theluncheon table; and when he heard, as he soon did, the toast to “OmarKhayyàm, ” none drank that toast with more gusto than he. The fact is, asthe Romanies say, that true friendship, like true love, is apt to beginat first sight. But I must stop. Frequently when the “Tarno Rye” cameto England his headquarters were at The Pines. Many and delightful werethe strolls he and I had together. One day we went to hear a gipsy bandsupposed to be composed of Roumelian gipsies. After we had listened toseveral well-executed things Groome sauntered up to one of the performersand spoke to him in Roumelian Romany. The man, although he did notunderstand Groome, knew that he was speaking Romany of some kind, andbegan speaking in Hungarian Romany, and was at once responded to byGroome in that variety of the Romany tongue. Groome then turned toanother of the performers, and was answered in English Romany. At lasthe found one, and one only, in the band who was a Roumelian gipsy, and aconversation between them at once began. 

This incident affords an illustration of the width as well as thethoroughness of Groome’s knowledge of Romany matters. I have affirmed in‘Aylwin’ that Sinfi Lovell—a born linguist who could neither read norwrite—was the only gipsy who knew both English and Welsh Romany. Groomewas one of the few Englishmen who knew the most interesting of allvarieties of the Romany tongue. But latterly he talked a great deal ofthe vast knowledge of the Welsh gipsies, both as to language andfolklore, possessed by Mr. John Sampson, University Librarian atLiverpool, the scholar who did so much to aid Groome in his last volumeon Romany subjects, called ‘Gypsy Folk-Tales. ’ It therefore gives me thegreatest pleasure to end these very inadequate words of mine with abeautiful little poem in Welsh Romany by Mr. Sampson upon the death ofthe “Tarno Rye. ” In a very few years Welsh Romany will become absolutelyextinct, and then this little gem, so full of the Romany feeling, will begreatly prized. I wish I could have written the poem myself, but no mancould have written it save Mr. Sampson:—

STANYAKERÉSKI. 

 Romano ráia, prala, jinimángro, Konyo chumeráva to chīkát, Shukar java mangi, ta mukáva Tut te ’jâ kamdóm me—kushki rat!

 Kamli, savimáski, sas i sarla, Baro zī sas tut, sar, tarno rom, Lhatián i jivimáski patrin, Ta līán o purikeno drom. 

 Boshadé i chiriklé veshténdi; Sanilé ’pre tuti chal ta chai; Mūri, pūv ta pāni tu kamésas Dudyerás o sonakó lilaí. 

 Palla ’vena brishin, shil, la baval: Sa’o divés tu murshkinés pīrdán: Ako kino ’vesa, rat avéla, Chēros sī te kesa tiro tan. 

 Parl o tamlo merimásko pāni Dava tuki miro vast, ta so Tu kamésas tire kokoréski Mai kamáva—“Te sovés mīstō!”

 _Translation_. 

 TO FRANCIS HINDES GROOME. 

 Scholar, Gypsy, Brother, Student, Peacefully I kiss thy forehead, Quietly I depart and leave Thee whom I loved—“Good night. ”

 Sunny, smiling was the morning; A light heart was thine, as, a youth, Thou dids’t strike life’s trail And take the ancient road. 

 The birds sang in the woods, Man and maid laughed on thee, The hills, field, and water thou didst love The golden summer illuminated. 

 Then come the rain, cold, and wind, All the day thou hast tramped bravely. Now thou growest weary, night comes on. It is time to make thy tent. 

 Across death’s dark stream I give thee my hand; and what Thou wouldst have desired for thyself I wish thee—mayst thou sleep well. 

II. 

Although novelists, dramatists, and poets are particularly fond of tryingto paint the gipsies, it cannot be said that many of them have beensuccessful in their delineations. And this is because the inner and theouter life of a proscribed race must necessarily be unlike each other. Meg Merrilies is no more a gipsy than is Borrow’s delightful IsopelBerners. Among the characteristic traits of the Romany woman, Meg doesno doubt exhibit two: a wild poetic imagination and a fearlessness suchas women rarely display. But no one who had been brought into personalcontact with gipsy women could ever have presented Meg Merrilies as oneof them. In the true Romany chi poetic imagination is combined with ahomeliness and a positive love of respectability which are very curious. Not that Meg, noble as she is, is superior to the kind of heroic womanthat the Romany race is capable of producing. Indeed, the greatspeciality of the Romanies is the superiority of the women to the men—asuperiority which extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except thatgift of music for which the gipsies are noticeable. Even in EasternEurope—Russia alone excepted—where gipsy music is so universal that, according to some writers, every Hungarian musician is of Romanyextraction, it is the men and not, in general, the women who excel. This, however, may simply be the result of opportunity and training. 

It is not merely in intelligence, in imagination, in command overlanguage, in breadth of view regarding the “Gorgio” world around them, that the Romany women, in Great Britain at least, leave the men farbehind. In character this superiority is equally noticeable. To imaginea gipsy hero is not easy. The male gipsy is not without a certain amountof courage, but it soon gives way, and in a physical conflict between agipsy and an Englishman it always seems as though ages of oppression havedamped its virility. Although some of our most notable prizefightershave been gipsies, it used to be well known in times when the ring wasfashionable that a gipsy could not be relied upon “to take punishment”with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly, perhaps, because his more highly strung nervous system makes him moresensitive to pain. The courage of a gipsy woman, on the other hand, haspassed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt her, and yet she will allowher husband, a cowardly ruffian himself, perhaps, to strike her withoutreturning the blow. Wife-beating, however, is not common among thegipsies. It may possibly be the case that some of the fine qualities ofthe gipsy woman are the result of that very barrenness of fine qualitiesamong the men of which we have been speaking. The lack of masculinechivalry among the men may in some measure account for the irresistibleimpulse among the women for taking their own part without appealing tothe men for aid. Also this may account for the strong way in which agipsy woman is often drawn to the “Tarno Rye, ” the young Englishgentleman of whom Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote the‘Scholar-Gipsy, ’ and her fidelity to whom is so striking. It is often insuch relations as these with the Tarno Rye that the instinct of monogamyin the Romany woman is seen. The unconquerable virtue of the Romany chiwas often commented upon by Borrow; and, indeed, every observer of gipsylife is struck by it. 

Seeing that the moment the Romanies are brought into contact with theGorgio world they adopt a method of approach entirely different from thenatural method—natural to them in intercourse with each other—it isperhaps no wonder that the popular notion of the gipsy girl, taken mainlyfrom the tradition of the stage, is so fantastically wrong. With regardto the stage, no characters in the least like gipsies ever appeared onthe boards, save the characters in Tom Taylor’s ‘Sir Roger de Coverley. ’In the eyes of the novelist, as well as in the eyes of the playwright, devilry seems to be the chief characteristic of the gipsy woman. Thefact is, however, that in the average gipsy woman as she really existsthere is but little devilry. “Romany guile, ” which is well defined inthe gipsy phrase as “the lie for the Gorgios, ” does not prevent gipsywomen from retaining some of the most marked characteristics of childhoodthroughout their lives. This, indeed, is one of their special charms. In his desire to depict the supposed devilry of the Romany woman, ProsperMérimée has perpetrated in ‘Carmen’ the greatest of all caricatures ofthe gipsy girl. A mere incarnation of lust and bloodthirstiness is morelikely to exist in any other race than in the Romanies, who have a greatdeal of love as a sentiment and comparatively very little of love as amovement of animal desire. 

In G. P. R. James’s ‘Gipsy’ (1835) there are touches which certainly showsome original knowledge of Romany life and character. The same may, perhaps, be said of Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Bird of Passage, ’ but thepictures of gipsy life in these and in all other novels are the merestdaubs compared with the Kiomi of George Meredith’s story ‘HarryRichmond. ’ Not even Borrow and Groome, with all their intimate knowledgeof gipsy life, ever painted a more vigorous picture of the Romany chithan this. The original was well known in the art circles of London atone time, and was probably known to Meredith, but this does not in anyway derogate from the splendour of the imaginative achievement ofpainting in a few touches a Romany girl who must, one would think, livefor ever. 

Between some Englishmen and gipsy women there is an extraordinaryattraction—an attraction, we may say in passing, which did not existbetween Borrow and the gipsy women with whom he was brought into contact. Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn to any woman, she wouldhave been of the Scandinavian type; she would have been what he used tocall a Brynhild. It was tall blondes he really admired. Hence, notwithstanding his love of the economies of gipsy life, his gipsy womenare all mere “scenic characters”—they clothe and beautify the scene; theyare not dramatic characters. When he comes to delineate a heroine, Isopel Berners, she is physically the very opposite of the Romany chi—aScandinavian Brynhild, in short. 

 THE END

Footnotes:

{15} Mr. Coulson Kernahan. 

{17} The writer is much indebted to Mr. Coulson Kernahan for this storyand much other information of life at “The Pines. ”

{18} ‘My Reminiscences, ’ by Lord Ronald Gower. 

{25} Of August 13, 1881. By Mr. A. Egmont Hake. 

{32} Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, art-critic, who poisoned a number ofhis relatives for their money, a contributor to _The London Magazine_ andexhibitor at the Royal Academy. He died a convict in Tasmania in 1852. 

{33} C. G. Leland (“Hans Breitmann”), on whom Borrow’s books had “anincredible influence, ” and caused him to take up the study of thingsRomany. 

{34} Louis Jeremiah Abershaw, better known as Jerry Abershaw, 1773?-1795, a notorious highwayman, who was the terror of the roads fromLondon to Wimbledon and Kingston. Borrow with characteristic perversitypersisted in regarding the redoubtable Jerry as a hero, in spite of thefact that he justly met his death on the gallows. 

{50} ‘Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow. ’ Derivedfrom Official and other Authentic Sources. By William I. Knapp, Ph. D. With Portrait and Illustrations. 2 vols. (Murray. )

{60} The “reader” was Richard Ford, author of the ‘Handbook forTravellers in Spain, ’ &c. He subsequently became Burrow’s warm admirerand friend. 

{77} ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as Designer and Writer. ’ Notes by WilliamMichael Rossetti. (Cassell and Co. )

{104} ‘Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham, 1854–1870. ’ By George Birkbeck Hill. (Fisher Unwin. )

{108} The year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. 

{132} ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson: a Memoir. ’ By his Son. 2 vols. (Macmillan). 

{156} “My father’s words. ”

{168} _The Times_, October 18, 1876. 

{195} ‘New Poems. ’ By Christina Rossetti. Edited by William MichaelRossetti. (Macmillan & Co. )

{231} ‘Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical. ’ By Lord de Tabley. Second Series. (Lane. )

{263} ‘A Dream of John Ball and a King’s Lesson. ’ ‘Signs of Change. ’

{264} Written in 1888.