SOME VICTORIAN POETS
Among the great literary men of the time, Lord Tennyson was the first
with whom I came into personal contact. When I was about seventeen I
used to stay sometimes with Mrs. Cameron in her house at Freshwater, in
the Isle of Wight, where her son Henry and I occupied ourselves very
earnestly in private theatricals.
Farringford, where Lord Tennyson dwelt, was near by, and the first time
that I saw the poet was on the occasion of our performance of Tom
Taylor’s play, _Helping Hands_, in which I enacted the part of a Jew
dealer in musical instruments. As I came upon the little stage I felt
almost startled by the great white dome of Tennyson’s head as he sat in
the front row of the stalls.
I suppose there was no man of his time in any walk of life whose
personal appearance was so striking and impressive. Watts has imaged him
well, and Millais too. But there was something in the presence of the
man himself that Art could not render, a mingled impression of beauty
and dignity, of simplicity and power, which I cannot recall as being
combined in equal measure in any other face I have known.
It is a singular fact, not I think generally recognised while they were
both living, that there are many elements of resemblance in the features
of Tennyson and Charles Dickens. I saw Dickens only once at a reading
which he gave in St. James’s Hall, and I was then deeply impressed by
the power exhibited in the upper part of the head. But it was not until
I was looking one day at a beautiful pencil-drawing which Millais had
made of Dickens after death that I perceived the striking resemblance
between them--a resemblance that was recognised by Tennyson himself, for
while this very drawing, now the property of Mrs. Perugini, was still in
Millais’s studio, Tennyson, after he had gazed at it for some time,
suddenly exclaimed, “This is the most extraordinary drawing. It is
exactly like myself.”
During those early Isle of Wight days Mrs. Cameron would sometimes take
us in the evening to Farringford, where Tennyson, if he were in the
mood, would read some of his own poems. It was not reading in the
ordinary sense, but may more truly be likened to a deep organ chant, and
yet it was effective and impressive to an extraordinary degree.
I remember in particular, as he recited one of the songs from the
_Princess_, the splendid cadence of his deep echoing voice as it rose
and swelled and sank and fell in almost musical response to the changing
mood of the verse:
[Illustration: HEAD OF CHARLES DICKENS
(_Taken after death._)
From the pencil-drawing by Sir J. E. MILLAIS, Bart., P.R.A., in the
possession of Mrs. Perugini.
_To face page 194._
]
O love, they die in yon rich sky,
They faint on hill or field or river:
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow for ever and for ever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
It is impossible to recapture by mere description the added beauty which
he contrived to confer upon these lines as they came from his own lips,
or even to suggest the strength and tenderness of feeling he could
command as the tones of his great voice gradually sank and died at the
close.
Many years later I heard him read again in his Surrey home, whither I
had taken Mrs. Bernard Beere on the eve of the production of his play
called _The Promise of May_.
He read it through to us himself, and here he adopted a more direct and
dramatic style, giving admirable point to the humour of the rustic
scenes. As we stood up to take our leave he put his hand on Mrs. Beere’s
shoulder and said, “You are tall. I am tall too. Carlyle once said to me
I ought to have been a grenadier.”
_The Promise of May_ was not one of Tennyson’s successful essays in
dramatic writing, and it may, I think, he doubted whether he possessed
in any great degree the dramatic quality. And yet, on two occasions at
the Lyceum Theatre, under the guidance of Irving, a deep impression was
made upon the public. Both _The Cup_ and _Becket_ have scenes that make
a simple and dramatic appeal to the heart; and the latter, at any rate,
served to supply the actor with the material for one of his greatest
impersonations.
It was while Irving was rehearsing _Becket_ that he told me a story of
Tennyson that has both a pathetic and humorous significance. In the
earlier days, when _The Cup_ was in preparation, he had been to see
Tennyson in the Isle of Wight to discuss his ideas for its presentation.
After dinner, as he told me, the dessert and the wine were set out upon
a separate table, and when they were seated the poet asked Irving if he
would like a glass of port.
“Yes, I like a glass of port,” replied the actor.
Upon which Tennyson, taking him at his word, poured him out a glass of
port, and all unconsciously finished the remainder of the bottle
himself. At a later time, when _Becket_ was to be presented, Tennyson
was suffering from gout and was under a strict _régime_. But the same
graceful little ceremony was observed, and again his host inquired of
Irving whether he would like a glass of port, but on this occasion, as
Irving related to me, the positions were reversed, for poor Lord
Tennyson was only permitted a single glass, and Irving finished the
bottle.
Next morning the actor had to leave early, and had therefore taken leave
of his host overnight. But he had scarcely awakened when he saw Lord
Tennyson sitting at the foot of his bed.
“How are you this morning, Irving?” he inquired anxiously.
“Very well indeed,” was his guest’s reply.
“Are you?” came the response, with just a tinge of doubt in the tones of
the voice. “You drank a lot of port last night.”
I think Tennyson’s was essentially a simple nature. Certainly in his own
home he gave me that impression. His high qualities as a poet, and the
unerring refinement of taste that is stamped on almost every line of his
verse, seemed never to have disturbed or effaced a primitive strength of
character that had its roots deep in the soil. And yet he was quickly
sensitive to criticism, and would sometimes take no pains to hide his
wounds.
At our last meeting he openly expressed his vexation at an unfavourable
article that had then recently appeared. He questioned me closely as to
what I thought could have been the motive of the writer, who for the
rest was not of such a rank that his censure need have disturbed the
poet’s equanimity. “What harm have I ever done to him?” he exclaimed, in
tones that seemed to me at the time almost child-like in reproach. But
it is, as I have come to think, a sure hall-mark of genius that its
weakness is very often frankly avowed. It is a part of that inward
candour that makes for greatness, the petty price that we have to pay
for the larger and nobler revelation. Lesser spirits can often contrive
to hide their littleness, but in the greatest it is nearly always
carelessly confessed.
Tennyson’s simplicity would sometimes find vent in almost boyish frolic.
One evening at Farringford he was suddenly seized with the idea that he
would like to dress up one of Mrs. Cameron’s nieces in the garb of a
man. He got one of his own long coats from the hall, and with a burnt
cork himself disfigured her pretty face, daubing upon it a heavy black
moustache and imperial, and then retreating to the other side of the
room to gaze with manifest delight upon the result of his own handiwork.
The primitive side of Tennyson’s nature was aptly mirrored in the person
of his brother Horatio, who, by reason of certain well-considered
peculiarities of dress, was often mistaken by visitors to Freshwater for
the poet himself. The attention thus attracted to him he contrived to
endure with complacency; indeed, I think he was partly conscious that he
served in this way as a sort of buffer between his greater brother and
the prying curiosity of the crowd which the poet himself deeply
resented.
Horatio Tennyson would often accompany Harry Cameron and myself when we
wandered over the downs with a gun in search of sea-gulls, or scoured
the neighbouring farms for rabbits. His mind, I think, moved slowly, and
there was sometimes a strong bucolic flavour in the stories he loved to
relate.
Another constant companion on these rambling excursions was poor Lionel
Tennyson, the poet’s younger son, who afterwards married Frederick
Locker’s daughter. Locker himself I came to know later in the days of
the Grosvenor Gallery. I think few men have been endowed with a surer
and more delicate taste in all matters pertaining to Art. We met in
sympathy over the drawings by the old masters, of which he possessed a
few of the very choicest examples. It was, indeed, his unfailing
characteristic as a collector that all he had was of the best. And his
personality, very winning in its simplicity and refinement, responded
aptly enough to the qualities of his mind.
In conversation he would sometimes leap with quaint abruptness of
thought from the most abstract to the most concrete things, from the
appreciation of a drawing by Leonardo to the sudden consideration of the
price of coals. Du Maurier’s pen-and-ink drawing of him may be said to
rank as the most perfect of portraits--an exact image of the man himself
in form and feature.
At the time when I first met Tennyson, I think Robert Browning had won
my larger admiration. I thought him then the greater poet of the two--I
no longer think so now; and the very qualities which so strongly
attracted me as a youth have since proved in themselves to be the source
of my altered judgment. It seems like a paradox, but I believe it to be
none the less true, that it is the intellectual quality in verse that
first most strongly attracts the younger student of poetry. So at least
it was in my case. The complexity of thought, even the obscurity of
expression which marks so much of Browning’s work, had for me then the
strongest fascination. That half-rebel note in his style, with its
defiant scorn of all accepted models of musical form and rhythmical
expression, was in itself an added allurement to the poet’s untiring
intellectual agility of which the rugged verse was but the chosen
garment. And although the spell he then exercised over my imagination
still in some degree survives, I find myself now asking of poetry less
and less for any ordered philosophy of life, and more and more for life
itself. The most nobly directed gospel that seeks an altered world
counts for little in a poet’s equipment beside the passionate vision of
the world as it is with its unchanging heritage of joy and pain. So at
least it seems to me now and, with my modified judgment as to what
rightly constitutes the substantive part of poetry, has come an
ever-growing delight in the formal beauty of its expression. The two
elements are indeed indissolubly bound together. There is no high music
in verse that is not linked with sense, no thought that is rightly a
poet’s thought that may not find its fitting melody. And it is because
Tennyson, despite his confessed limitations on the side of passion, more
constantly than his fellows held fast to the true office of the poet,
that he stands among them all as their undisputed master.
In every art the last word is simplicity. There is no phase of thought
or feeling rightly admissible into the domain of poetry that the might
of genius may not force to simple utterance. It is this which
constitutes the final triumph of all the greatest wizards of our tongue,
of Shakespeare as of Milton; of Wordsworth no less than of Keats. All of
them found a way to wed the subtlest music with the simplest speech,
striving with ever-increasing severity for that chastened perfection of
form which stands as the last and the surest test of the presence of
supreme poetic genius.
So much cannot be said of Browning. There is enough and to spare in the
great body of his work to leave his position as a poet unassailed, but
there is more to prove that, beside the purely poetic impulse, there
were other forces working in his nature, which, in so far as they
prevail, must tend to rob the result of that faultless music which
alone
[Illustration:
_Hollyer_
ROBERT BROWNING
From the painting by G. F. WATTS, R.A., in the National Portrait
Gallery.
_To face page 201._
]
can give to verse its final right of survival. This is doubtless true
also of Wordsworth, but in his case the good and the bad are easily
separable, and the good at its best is flawless. But with Browning the
conflicting elements of his genius are so closely locked together that
the task of selection is not so easy, and the triumph, even when it has
to be acknowledged, is not so secure.
And yet, for all who then came under his influence, the charm can never
quite be broken. He spoke to those of us who first learned to know him
in our youth with a quickened authority that nothing can quite destroy.
The faults which time now thrusts forward were hardly then matter for
pardon. For those who come after they may indeed serve to set his fame
in peril, but the message he had for us was so overwhelming in its
appeal that we forgot the crabbed hand in which it was transcribed.
In one respect, and in one respect only, Browning the poet found an echo
in Browning as he was known to his friends. That brave optimism of
spirit, with its constant nobility of outlook on the facts of life which
so finely distinguishes his writing, was also, I think, characteristic
of the man. It was always a spiritual refreshment to meet him. The fact
that he was a poet was, indeed, a secret he took some pains to conceal.
In this respect, except for rare lapses of noble enthusiasm, he
preferred to preserve a kind of austere incognito; but at the same time
he contrived to convey even in the simplest converse with the most
ordinary people a sense of personal detachment that nevertheless left
them free to feel at their ease. And yet, often as I have seen him
apparently content with associates who were manifestly his inferiors in
intellect, and even in spirit, I cannot recall a time when his own
personality ever seemed to suffer by the contact.
I suppose no man of his generation responded so readily to the call of
hospitality. He was to be met everywhere, and so keen was his zest in
the ordinary traffic of social life that he seemed at times to be
indifferent to his choice of associates. There was something in his own
power of drawing entertainment from an evening passed in the society of
friends that no measure of dulness in his surroundings seemed capable of
abating.
He preserved in all companies a constant alertness of spirit, an
undiminished sense of self-reliant enjoyment, that was surprising to the
onlooker. And yet, despite his unfailing courtesy even to those whom in
his secret heart he must often have set in the category of bores, he
never left the slightest impression of insincerity. By means, hardly
definable, he contrived to keep his converse, even with the most
commonplace of his acquaintance, on a certain high spiritual level, and
when he took his leave of any party it was impossible not to feel that a
considerable personage had quitted the room.
And yet the personal impression made by Browning was not commanding.
Vigorous and strenuous he always seemed, and those characteristics
stamped him on the first encounter. But they might have belonged equally
to a leader in any other walk of life--to a successful man of affairs,
or to a politician in the fulness of his fame.
To those who knew him well there were, however, many little sidelights
that showed the poet. Something deeper and more passionate, something
more chivalrous and more tender, lurked beneath the social armour that
he chose to wear; and it was easy to perceive that even in his ripe age
there were smouldering fires of a more passionate experience that a word
might waken into flame.
He came often to our house in the years between 1880 and 1885. In our
smaller circle we saw him as an intimate friend, and he was a kind and a
true friend. I think he was not indifferent to good living, but he was
always content with our simple fare--more than content, certainly, if he
was allowed his bottle of port wine, not to be sipped at dessert as
others use it, but to be quaffed through dinner as an accompaniment to
every course. His appreciation of wine, never immoderately indulged,
must, I suppose, have been inherited, for he used to tell me a story of
his father’s indignation on the occasion of his once asking for a glass
of water.
“Water, Robert!” exclaimed the elder Browning in dismay. “For washing
purposes it is, I believe, often employed, and for navigable canals I
admit it to be indispensable, but for drinking, Robert, God never
intended it.”
Browning’s unfailing courtesy towards women could sometimes display
itself in a partly humorous fashion. One day when he was calling upon my
wife, an authoress whose high estimate of her own work was never quite
confirmed by the public, was suddenly announced. The visit was somewhat
embarrassing, for the lady had sent my wife one of her novels, with a
request that, when she had read it, it might be submitted to me with a
view to its being adapted for the stage. The book had not been read, had
in fact been mislaid, but as this was the second occasion upon which the
lady had applied for my verdict, my wife basely resorted to
prevarication, and embarked upon general phrases of eulogy in regard to
the high merit of the work in question. This subterfuge, however, only
resulted in deeper disaster, for the flattered authoress at once plunged
into baffling details that lay beyond the reach of my wife’s improvised
mendacity. It happened, however, that Browning had read the book, and,
realising the situation, at once came to the rescue, and finally
succeeded in persuading the unhappy authoress that the very merits of
the novel were in themselves an insuperable obstacle to its production
on the stage.
One thing remains vividly in my recollection of Browning, and that was
his constant expression of loyal admiration for the genius of Tennyson.
I have heard him bear witness to it again and again, and always with
entire sincerity.
There was about him in his outlook on life, in his high courtesy and in
his unflagging faith in the beauty of the world, a quality that I
sometimes find lacking in gifted men of a younger generation. I can only
express what I feel in this sense by reference to a splendid survivor of
the great race--George Meredith. To those who do not instinctively feel
it, my reference may mean nothing, but to me, to whom the whole
achievement of the Victorian Era, in art as in literature, stands high,
it means everything. It is not my purpose in these pages of personal
recollections to dwell upon my intimate association with men who are
still living, but in Mr. Meredith I feel I may make an exception. And
Browning has reminded me of him because there is in both a kindred
quality--the quality of a superb reverence for life, an undying faith in
its ultimate beauty. As literature has fallen since under the conduct of
later hands, I find that it seems in some sense shattered in
subdivision. There are, on the one hand, writers who seek to be artists
and no more, men who pet and polish their rhythmic phrases till they may
be said to have reached perfection, and on the other hand there are
pamphleteers, eager and sincere, but still pamphleteers, who are content
if they can coerce their readers into the belief that their chosen
gospel for the regeneration of humanity is a fair equivalent for the
larger vision of life itself. No man who is richly human can escape that
yearning towards a brighter social ideal. Browning and Tennyson,
Thackeray and Dickens, all had their hopes for the bettering of the
world as they found it; but with them all, whatever their original
impulse, the beauty of the world, as it has been and as it is, outlived
their humanitarian ambition, and left them at the last with an
increasing sense of its enduring beauty and glory. And that is where
George Meredith, still living, stands as a monument of strength, for
worship as for example, to those who have still to come after him.
The hours that I have spent with George Meredith in and around his
simple home at Box Hill count among the most delightful of my life. I
met him first at the house of a dear friend of both, Frederick Jameson,
in the year 1876, and it was, I think, about that time that I had
published in the _Saturday Review_ a criticism of his novel,
_Beauchamp’s Career_, which I think must have pleased him, for I find a
phrase of his in a letter written to me at that date in which he says,
“Praise of yours comes from the right quarter.”
It was not long after that that we became intimate friends, and it was
his hospitable custom to invite me to breakfast with him on the little
lawn in front of his cottage, and then, after the repast, light and
dainty after the fashion of the French _dejeuner_, we would start for a
long ramble over Box Hill, returning often but just in time for dinner,
to continue or to renew the talk that had made the afternoon memorable.
Meredith could talk and walk after a fashion that I have known in no one
else. Sometimes he would occupy the whole of our ramble in a purely
invented biography of some one of our common friends, passing in rather
burlesque rhapsody from incident to incident of a purely hypothetical
career, but always preserving, even in the most extravagant of his
fancies, a proper relevancy to the character he was seeking to exhibit.
On one occasion I remember he traced with inimitable humour, and with
inexhaustible invention, a supposed disaster in love encountered by an
amiable gentleman we both knew well; and as he rambled on with an
eloquence that never halted, he became so in love with his theme that I
think he himself was hardly conscious where the record of sober fact had
ended and where the innocent mendacity of the novelist had begun. And
then, at the immediate summons of some beauty in the landscape around us
that arrested his imagination, he would pause in the wild riot of the
imagined portrait and pass, in a moment, to discourse, as eloquent but
more serious, on some deeper problem of Life or Art. Not that he ever
sought, either in the lighter or the deeper vein, to talk so as to
absorb the conversation. In single companionship there was no better
talker, as, indeed, there was no better listener; and in either mood he
was singularly stirring and inspiring.
One evening I remember that, after such a ramble and when dinner was
over, we ascended the slope of his garden to the little chalet on its
height, and there he read me till far into the night hours the whole of
that wonderful series of sonnets on Modern Love.
This is not the place or the time to assert his claims either as a poet
or as a writer of fiction. I have cited his name here and now, because
both as an author and as a man he seems to me to possess in the highest
degree that superb optimism of spirit which also characterised Browning:
an optimism born of no shallow or sentimental survey of life, and yet of
strength sufficient to survive all shocks of experience in virtue of its
deeper hold upon those secrets of beauty that no personal disaster
could efface or destroy.
Once when we were discussing the dramas of Ibsen he made, not in
criticism but in comment, a remark that has always seemed to me
memorable.
“There is no picture,” he said, “however overcast its subject, in which
the painter, rightly endowed, cannot suggest that beyond the enclosing
clouds there is room for a space of blue sky.”
He left the comment there without special application to this work or
that of the author under discussion, but it dwells in my memory as
highly and nobly characteristic of George Meredith the author and of
George Meredith the man.
The later advent of Mr. Swinburne caused many of us in those days to
reconsider the claims of Tennyson and Browning. It is difficult now to
realise the sense almost of intoxication with which the new music of his
verse was entertained. For a while it seemed to efface the simpler
triumphs of Tennyson no less than Browning’s more impetuous but less
ordered strains. Its overpowering wealth of rhythmic cadence struck a
new note that it was impossible for the younger generation to resist.
But it was not Mr. Swinburne who first awakened in me a spirit of
reaction against the elder masters of our generation. Before I read
_Atalanta in Calydon_ my imagination had been deeply stirred by that
first volume of Mr. William Morris’s verse, entitled _The Defence of
Guinevere_. I had found there, though in a form perhaps deliberately
archaic, that deeper note of passion which Tennyson’s poetry, even at
its best, confessedly lacks; and its appeal
[Illustration: WILLIAM MORRIS
From the painting by G. F. WATTS, R.A., in the National Portrait
Gallery.
_Hollyer_
_To face page 209._
]
was the more urgent because Morris too was attracted by the charm of
mediæval romance--romance which in Tennyson’s hands had lost something
of its primitive dramatic quality, and became, as he developed the
Arthurian story, more and more material for setting forth a systematised
body of ethical teaching.
Morris at a single stroke seemed to restore the legend to its historical
place, and to recapture a part of its passionate significance. I confess
that no later work of his has ever affected me to the same degree,
though there runs in them all that exquisite and ineffable charm of the
born story-teller. In poetry as in fiction there are, and have always
been, two competing schools of thought, the one moved by the love of the
story to be told, and the other primarily attracted to the story by the
opportunities it may offer for the presentment of an ethical idea, or
the interpretation of individual character.
They may both reach the same goal, but there remains that contrast in
the quality of the workmanship which is born of its different origin.
I remember Morris saying to me once that he did not much care for a
story unless it was long, and although the statement perhaps was not
intended to be taken literally, it bore witness to that element in his
genius which led him to bury himself with unwearied delight in every
smallest detail of the tale he had chosen to tell. Morris, I think, was
not easy to know well. There was a certain rough shyness in his manner
that kept him aloof from the initial advances of ordinary acquaintance,
and it was only as an acquaintance that I knew him. But he must have
had deeply lovable qualities to have become so endeared, as he was, to
Burne-Jones. It was their custom for years to spend every Sunday morning
together in Burne-Jones’s studio; and on the many occasions when
Burne-Jones has spoken to me of him, I can recall no word of abatement
from the deep and lasting affection in which he held his life-long
friend.
The influence wielded by Mr. Swinburne over the younger men of his
generation was of a widely different kind. That new music of which I
have spoken, already announced in the _Atalanta_, and presented with
even greater variety and exuberance of expression in the Poems and
Ballads, set us all thinking. It seemed at the first as though music in
its fullest sense had never before entered into the arena of poetry, and
his inexhaustible invention of new metre and rhythmic phrasing set the
mind in wonder for a while as to whether all that had gone before was
not the mere preface to this final achievement. The immediate effect of
the fluent melodies he could command was for the time, at least, to put
earlier masters upon their trial, and it was not until the overpowering
glamour of these earlier poems had passed that it was possible to reckon
at their true worth his lasting claims as a poet.
I have always thought that Mr. Swinburne’s handling of language as a
musical instrument raises an interesting question in regard to the
relation of the arts. Of them all, music alone claims an absolute and
independent position. Its appeal does not rely upon association, and
demands no definable intellectual foundation. It stands in this way,
even in its most primitive forms, as an example to all other arts,
serving to remind them of what there is in each of the essential
artistic quality; to remind them yet again of the inevitable danger that
must be encountered when the artist adds to his natural burden the task
of interpreting the changing ideals of life.
Of all the other arts literature, by reason of the intellectual material
out of which it is moulded, stands at the farthest pole from music.
Painting and sculpture have their own manifest laws and limitations,
which may serve to remind their exponents of the peril which awaits
their transgression, but literature, even in the supreme form of verse,
must of necessity be exposed to dangers from which only the intuitive
instinct of the artist can preserve it. Borrowing as by right from all
the arts, and pressing into its service all that has been won in the
region of form and colour to enforce its own message of the spirit, it
is nevertheless inevitable that to music it must remain the heaviest
debtor, for its chosen vehicle of rhythmic language approaches most
nearly to the abstract instrument of the musician. And yet, I think,
even in Mr. Swinburne’s highest triumphs in metrical expression, it is
made manifest that the attempt directly to capture the kind of melody
that in the last resort belongs to music alone, there lurks a peril that
no artist, however gifted, can hope to escape.
It is not in any spirit of depreciation of Mr. Swinburne’s unchallenged
gift, a gift which, in its kind, has perhaps never been surpassed in
literature, that I have set down these stray thoughts upon the possible
limits of music in verse. What I have said is rather intended to record
an experience of changing taste in myself in the interval that has
elapsed since the time when his earlier poems first captured my
imagination. It has grown clearer to me as the years have passed that,
even in poetry, only that music is enduring where the melody is subtly
interwoven with passionate truth, and that the highest triumph of mere
music, in so far as its effects are applicable to literature, must be
won by constant cultivation of the simplest means of expression.
To the serious student of poetry such a conclusion may deservedly rank
in the region of the accepted commonplace, but some of the utterances of
our later-day critics yield at least an excuse for its recall. Not long
ago I encountered in a seriously written review the astounding
announcement that Oscar Wilde was the author of some of the most
remarkable verse of the nineteenth century, and this is hardly an
isolated instance of an endeavour that seems at the moment widely spread
to make the pitiable disaster of poor Wilde’s career the occasion of the
most deplorably exaggerated appreciation of his gifts as a writer.
I met Wilde very often in those earlier days, before he had begun to
seek to win by personal eccentricity the attention which his literary
talent had not secured, and I am bound to confess that, in the light of
my later knowledge of the man and of his work, any attempt to set him in
the front rank as a literary personality or a great literary influence
seems to me in the highest degree ludicrous and grotesque.
In view of the terrible fate that overtook him, no one could desire to
deal harshly at this time with his qualities as a man. That he had a
certain charm of manner is undoubted, and that he possessed a measure of
wit, as often imitative as original, need not be denied. But there is
always a tendency in certain literary circles that lean towards
decadence, to exaggerate the genius of those who are morally condemned.
A tragic fate such as his, even in one less gifted, naturally tends in
such minds to exalt his claims to artistic consideration. It is, at
least to my thinking, only on such an assumption that any serious
student of poetry, having read the “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” could ever
be induced to rank Wilde as a poetic genius, or to consider the body of
his work as a man of letters, with whatever luxuries of habiliment it
may be offered to the world, as constituting an enduring claim to rank
him among the higher influences of his time.
Wilde’s best work was unquestionably, I think, done for the stage, and
here it may be conceded he struck out a path of his own. He had the
sense of the theatre, a genuine instinct for those moments in the
conflict of character to which the proper resources of the theatre can
grant both added force and added refinement. It is not an uncommon
assumption, especially among writers of fiction, that the drama by
comparison is an art of coarse fibre, incapable, by reason of its
limitations, of presenting the more intimate realities of character, or
the more delicate shades of feeling. The truth is that each art has its
own force, its own refinement, and cannot borrow them of another. What
is perfectly achieved in one form remains incomparable, and for that
very reason cannot in its completed form be appropriated by an art that
has other triumphs and is subject to other laws and conditions. And it
is here that the novelist so often breaks down in attempting to employ
his own special methods in the service of the stage. Wilde made no such
blunder. By constant study as well as by natural gift he knew well the
arena in which he was working when he chose the vehicle of the drama.
His wit has perhaps been over-praised; his epigrams so loudly acclaimed
at the time bear the taint of modishness that seems to render them
already old-fashioned. But his grip of the more serious situations in
life, and his ability to exhibit and interpret them by means genuinely
inherent in the resources at the disposal of the dramatist, are left
beyond dispute.
[Illustration:
_Emery Walker_
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
From the painting by Sir WILLIAM RICHMOND, K.C.B., R.A., in the National
Portrait Gallery.
_To face page 215._
]