which true poets, great or small, know—that fine despair which, while it
will sometimes stop the breath of one of the true sons of Apollo, as it
actually did strike mute Charles Wells, and as at one time it threatened
to stop the breath of Rossetti, will lead others to write, and write, and
write. It is, however, life’s illusions that in most cases make life
tolerable. When in old age calamity came upon Hake, and he was shut out
from life as by a prison wall, his one solace, the one thing that really
bound him to life, was this ambitious dream which came upon the Bluecoat
boy of eleven.
His mother was in easy circumstances, and when a youth Hake travelled a
good deal on the Continent, where his success in the “great world” of
that time was swift and complete. If this success was owing as much to
his exceptionally striking personal appearance and natural endowment of
style as to his intellectual equipments—high as these were—that is not
surprising to those who knew him. Of course he was well advanced in
years before I was old enough to call him my friend; but even then he was
so extremely handsome a man that I can well believe the stories I have
got from his family connexions (such as his wife’s sisters) of his
appearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the
most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put to
the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period
of 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 is
passed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what used
to be called “the great world.” To be, or to seem to be, unconscious of
one’s own bearing towards the world, and unconscious of the world’s
bearing towards oneself, is, I fancy, impossible to a man—even though he
have the genius and intellectual endowment of a Browning—who is for the
first time brought into touch with society after the plastic period is
passed.
I have told elsewhere the whimsical story of Hake and Rossetti, of
Rossetti’s delightful account of his reading as a boy, in a coffee-house
in Chancery Lane, Hake’s remarkable romance ‘Vates,’ afterwards called
‘Valdarno,’ in a magazine; his writing a letter about it to the unknown
author, and getting no reply until many years had passed. Hake’s
relations towards Rossetti were of the deepest and most sacred kind.
Rossetti had the highest opinion of Hake’s poetical genius, and also felt
towards him the greatest love and gratitude for services of an
inestimable kind rendered to him in the direst crisis of his life. To
enter upon these matters, however, is obviously impossible in a brief and
hurried obituary notice; and equally impossible is it for me to enter
into the poetic principles of a writer whose very originality has been a
barrier to his winning a wide recognition.
Hake’s best work is that, I think, contained in the volume called ‘New
Symbols,’ in which there is disclosed an extraordinary variety of poetic
power. In execution, too, he is at his best in that volume. Christina
Rossetti has often told me that ‘Ecce Homo’ impressed her more profoundly
than did any other poem of her own time. Also its daring startled her.
It was, however, the previous volume, ‘Madeline, and other Poems,’ which
brought him into contact with Rossetti—the great event of his literary
life.
If the man ever lived who could take as much interest in another man’s
work as his own, Dr. Hake in finding Rossetti found that man. Although
at that time Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and
Swinburne were running abreast of each other, there was no poet in
England who would not have felt honoured by having his work reviewed by
Rossetti. But Dr. Hake, whose name was absolutely unknown, had made his
way into Rossetti’s affections—as, indeed, he made his way into the
affections of all who knew him—and this was quite enough to induce
Rossetti to ask Dr. Appleton for leave to review ‘Madeline’ in ’71 in
_The Academy_—a request which Appleton, of course, was delighted to
grant. And again, when in 1873 ‘Parables and Tales’ appeared, Mr. John
Morley, we may be sure, was something more than willing to let Rossetti
review the book in _The Fortnightly Review_; and, again, when ‘New
Symbols’ appeared, there was some talk about Rossetti’s reviewing it in
_The Fortnightly Review_; but this, for certain reasons which Rossetti
explained to me—reasons which have been misunderstood, but which were
entirely adequate—was abandoned. Down to the period when Dr. Hake went
to live in Germany he and his son Mr. Gordon Hake were among the most
intimate friends of the great poet-painter. Mr. Gordon Hake, indeed, a
man of admirable culture and abilities, lived with Rossetti, who
certainly benefited much by contact with his bright and lively companion.
The portrait of Dr. Hake prefixed to Mrs. Meynell’s selections from his
works is one of Rossetti’s finest crayons. It is, however, too heavy in
expression for Hake.
Full of fine qualities as is his best poetry, full of intellectual
subtlety, imagination, and a rare combination of subjective with
objective 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 successful
poet—that of Christina Rossetti, for instance. For sheer originality of
conception and of treatment what recent poems surpass or even equal ‘Old
Souls’ and the ‘Serpent Charmer’? Then take the remarkable mastery over
colour exhibited by ‘Ortrud’s Vision.’ His volume of pantheistic sonnets
in the Shakespearean form, ‘The New Day,’ written in his eighty-first
year, is on the whole, however, his most remarkable work. The kind of
Sufeyistic nature ecstasy displayed therein by a man of so advanced an
age is nothing less than wonderful. And as to knowledge of nature, not
even Wordsworth or Tennyson knew nature so completely as did Hake, for he
had a thorough training as a naturalist. In looking at a flower he could
enjoy not only its beauty, but also the delight of picturing to himself
the flower’s inherited beauty and the ancestors from which the flower got
its inheritance. And as regards the lyrical flow imported into so
monumental a form as the sonnet, every student of this form must needs
study 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 it
lacks (and in some portions of it greatly lacks) is delicacy, refinement
of tone. And surely this is remarkable when we realize the kind of man
he was who wrote it.
It has been my privilege to go about with him not only in London, but
also in Rome, in Paris, in Venice, in Florence, Pisa, &c.; and no matter
what might be the quality of the society with which he was brought into
contact, it always seemed to me that he was distinguished by his very
lack of that accentuated movement which the _littérateur_ generally
displays. I merely dwell upon this to show how inscrutable are the
mental processes in the crowning puzzle of the great humourist Nature,
the writing man. Just as the most angular and _gauche_ man in a literary
gathering may possibly turn out to be the poet whose lyrics have been
compared to Shelley, or the prose writer whose mellifluous periods have
been compared to those of Plato, so the most dignified man in the room
may turn out to be the writer of a book whose defect is a noticeable lack
of dignified style. It was hard, indeed, for those who knew Hake in the
flesh 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 intimacy
between Hake and Borrow. After Hake went to live in Germany, Borrow told
me a good deal about this intimacy and also about his own early life; for
reticent as he naturally was, he and I got to be confidential and
intimate. His friendship with Hake began when Hake was practising as a
physician in Norfolk. It lasted during the greater part of Borrow’s
later life. When Borrow was living in London, his great delight was to
walk 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 passion
for herons and for deer. At that time Hake was a very intimate friend of
my own, and having had the good fortune to be introduced by him to
Borrow, I used to join the two in their walks. Afterwards, when Hake
went to live in Germany, I used to take these walks with Borrow alone.
Two more interesting men it would be impossible to meet. The remarkable
thing 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 in
verse. 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 by
saying, “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 behind
that of some Borrovians who did not know Lavengro in the flesh, such as
Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Birrell.
Borrow was shy, eccentric, angular, rustic in accent and in locution, but
with a charm for me, at least, that was irresistible. Hake was polished,
easy, and urbane in everything, and, although not without prejudice and
bias, ready to shine gracefully in any society. As far as Hake was
concerned, the sole link between them was that of reminiscence of earlier
days and adventures in Borrow’s beloved East Anglia. Among many proofs
that I could adduce of this, I will give one. I am the possessor of the
manuscript of Borrow’s ‘Gypsies in Spain,’ written partly in a Spanish
note-book as he moved about Spain in his colporteur days. It was my wish
that Hake would leave behind him some memorial of Borrow more worthy of
himself and his friend than those brief reminiscences contained in
‘Memoirs of Eighty Years.’ I took to Hake this precious relic of one of
the most wonderful men of the nineteenth century in order to discuss with
him differences between the MS. and the printed text. Hake was sitting
in his invalid chair, writing verses. “What does it all matter?” he
said. “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 one
knows better than you, to be tinged with colours of his own before he
could see it at all.”
This, of course, was true enough; and Hake’s asperities when speaking of
Borrow in ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’—asperities which have vexed a good
many Borrovians—simply arose from the fact that it was impossible for two
such men to understand each other. When I told him of Andrew Lang’s
angry onslaught upon Borrow, in his notes to the “Waverley Novels,” on
account of his attacks upon Scott, he said, “Well, and does he not
deserve 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 saw
that Borrow had bewitched you during that first walk under the rainbow in
Richmond Park. It was that rainbow, I think, that befooled you.”
Borrow’s affection for Hake, however, was both strong and deep, as I saw
after 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 others
with whom he was brought in contact as full of a genuine affection as
Borrow was himself.
JOHN LEICESTER WARREN, LORD DE TABLEY.
1835–1895.