JOURNALISM AND LETTERS
My husband has given some account of his days at the Bar in his own
_Reminiscences_. I shall, therefore, not touch on that part of his
career, as it was practically ended before I knew him--the necessity of
earning daily grist for the mill having carried him entirely into the
ranks of journalism.
I believe he got through a quite unusual amount of work in that
profession. Many an evening did I put back our little dinner while
he rushed off to Euston to give his copy of Art Criticism for the
_Manchester Guardian_ into the hands of the guard for early morning
delivery: he wrote on the same subject for the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and
the _Art Journal_, and what with criticism and social articles for the
_Saturday Review_ and _World_, he was never in bed till long after
midnight.
It must have been about this time that he took me with him to Paris for
a short so-called holiday while he wrote his criticism for the _Pall
Mall Gazette_ on the _Salon_ of the year.
A gladsome time it was in that most smiling of cities in spring. There
was a day on which a cry of dismay arose from our party--including his
fellow-worker and old friend, Adam Gielgud with his wife--when a letter
arrived from Edmund Yates refusing to let Joe off his weekly article in
the series of Skits on the London newspapers which were then attracting
attention in the _World_--I think the topic for that week was _The Old
Maid of Journalism_ (“The Spectator”) and perhaps that dignified lady
received a more caustic drubbing than she would otherwise have had
because of the distaste with which he set to his task.
Cheerful meals in the humblest of restaurants--whenever we could run
to it, in the excellent Café Gaillon--now the fashionable _Henry_, but
then of far simpler ambitions; merry meetings at the house of that good
comrade of Joe’s of whom he tells the tale of exchanged French
and English lessons at _Kettner’s_ restaurant in London, and
lastly a gorgeous feast in the suburban home of a fellow contributor
to _L’Art_, to both of which festivities my sister, Mrs.
Harrison--then Alma Strettell--was bidden as being of our party.
Both occasions were a pleasant peep into Parisian bourgeois life. Our
first host was eager to show that he could give us a _gigot_ of mutton
as well roasted as in London, and sorely crestfallen was the poor
man when the little joint came to table black as a cinder and blue
when cut. Joe quickly made capital out of the catastrophe, however,
by declaring that one didn’t come to Paris to eat home fare,
and that it served his friend right for putting his cook to such an
unworthy task.
Our second entertainment, though we did not meet such intellectual
company as the distinguished writers on the _Temps_ and the _Débats_,
who so courteously helped Joe to express brilliant ideas in daringly
lame French and paid such charming court to my sister and myself,
was more typical of its class; for, although the young couple of the
house were our entertainers, the old couple were our hosts, and it was
wondrous and delightful to see the respectful attitude of the son and
his wife to the parents and the undisputed supremacy which they held
from their two ends of the long table set out under the trees of the
flower-laden May.
A rushing week it was, into which my sister and I crammed much
enthralling shopping. I can see now Joe’s reproachful face at the door
of the café where we had kept him waiting half an hour for _déjeuner_
after his hot and tiring morning’s work at the _Salon_. I made a
shameless excuse to the effect that we had secured many “occasions”
(bargains). And as I gave him a toothbrush which he had asked me to
buy, he said: “Is this an ‘occasion’ too? I’d rather have a punctual
meal than an occasional toothbrush!”
Merry hours but very far from idle ones, and he reaped an additional
and unexpected reward for his labours when we got home.
We had been bidden to a cricket match at his old school the day after
our return, where, in virtue of his old rank of Captain of the Eleven,
he was to play as a visitor; and I seem to see the boyish blush of
satisfaction with which he told his beloved master--Dr. Birkbeck
Hill--that it was he and no leader-writer on the _Times_, as was
rumoured, who was writing those humorous articles on the newspapers for
the _World_.
My husband has told so much of the tale of his early journalistic days
in his _Eminent Victorians_ that I find little to add; but I remember
a curious incident in the fine old room at Great Russell Street when
George Hake--Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s secretary--came one day,
ostensibly “on his own,” to have a talk with him on the
series of papers on painters of the day, appearing above the signature
of “Ignotus,” but of which the authorship had leaked out.
Joe has told, in _Coasting Bohemia_, of the rift in his friendship with
Rossetti over these articles, and a sad tale it is. Mr. Hake fancied
that Rossetti would like to see his friend’s bride, but, alas!
he was taking too much on himself, for the visit never came off. But
Rossetti was at that time already an invalid and was not to be counted
upon.
It must have been some time after this that the French proprietors of
that luxurious publication, _L’Art_, invited Joe to run a London
office for its sale, in connection with which he afterwards started
an English version--_Art and Letters_--edited and largely written by
himself.
Many funny incidents group themselves around the person of the French
proprietor, whose English, though insistently fluent, was of the
lamest, and I think Joe sometimes led him on in the expectation of some
pleasant malapropism.
“How are you now?” he would ask, when the poor gentleman had “suffered
the sea.”
“Only ’alf and ’alf, my friend,” the Frenchman would reply. “But I
must back tonight. I make my trunk at four.” And his apt _mots_ on the
super-sensitive lady-assistant who “always begin to tear for nothing”
and “forgive never man that he ’ave not married her” afforded Joe
continual delight.
But a courtlier host than that Frenchman never existed. He would
entertain us royally at the old _Maison Dorée_ when we went to Paris
though he ate but little himself and always preferred the humbler Café
Duval; so little, in fact, was he in accord with most men of his nation
upon the food question that, when Joe gave him the usual fish dinner at
Greenwich, he was naturally dismayed at the explanation, after several
courses had been passed by, of “_Mon ami, je ne mange jamais du
poisson_.”
_Art and Letters_, though an artistic was not a financial success,
but it may have led to the one of his many adventures of which he
was perhaps the most proud: the planning and editing, at the request
of Messrs. Macmillan, of their beautiful magazine, the _English
Illustrated_.
He has spoken so well himself of his pleasant intercourse with the men
who worked for him--struggling men in those days but known to fame
since--that there is little left for me to record, save to note that
among the many tributes from his many friends I prize not least those
of his collaborators of that time, with the oft-repeated testimony to
his having helped them to the first-rung on the ladder of success.
Mr. Stanley Weyman, whose first book, _The House of the Wolf_, was
published in those pages, comes first to my mind, and those who
have read my husband’s _Eminent Victorians_ will recollect
the striking proof of the accuracy of his critical faculty in the
incident of Mr. Weyman’s bringing him two letters--written
with an interval of many years--in which he criticized a play of
that brilliant novelist’s in almost identical words, although
the first letter was written openly to the author and the second--in
forgetfulness of the fact--to a theatrical agent who had not divulged
the playwright’s name.
Robert Louis Stevenson was one of his cherished contributors, and I
recall an angry rebuke from that great man to the Editor, who had
dared to strike out a word in the title of one of his articles at the
moment of going to press; it is pleasant to add that a placated and
highly amused reply followed on Joe’s deft and short method of
extricating himself from the position: “My dear Stevenson--You
see, I knew that the extra word was a slip of the pen,” he wrote,
“for I should as soon have expected you to talk of female bitches
as of male dogs. Yours etc.”
Sir James Barrie wrote one of his early essays for the _English
Illustrated Magazine_, and in a kindred branch of the adventure--that
of illustration--Mr. Hugh Thomson was discovered by Joe--a poor Irish
lad living on the scanty pay of advertisements for a business firm,
and devoting all his leisure to flights of fancy in the most delicate
realms of the humorous eighteenth century subjects in which he has
always excelled. Joe confessed to me on the day when the boy sought an
interview, with his portfolio under his arm, that he did not at first
believe he had done the drawings himself. But he gave him a subject,
and when he returned with it after a day or two his doubts were set
at rest, and he offered him the post which he held for so long with
distinction.
The relations between editor and artist were always affectionate and I
have two letters from the latter--one to Joe and one to myself--full
of a touching gratitude such as perhaps only an Irishman could have
expressed. The one quoted below is of later date.
27, PERHAM ROAD,
WEST KENSINGTON,
_February 5th, 1909_.
DEAR MR. COMYNS CARR,
It is only now that we have contrived to get a reading of your
delightful book “Some Eminent Victorians,” and it has
literally staggered me (with delight) to find myself in such company.
I so rarely see a soul that I was entirely ignorant, and never dreamt
of it. We had of course read such reviews of the book as came our way
and had rejoiced in the whole-hearted pleasure with which the notices
were charged but we never suspected that in a corner of the book you
had propped me up. My wife is more than ever confirmed in her opinion
that you are the most delightful author that ever lived, and she is
already looking forward, frugally, to the time when the libraries will
be selling off their soiled copies of books when she hopes to secure
Some Eminent Victorians and ME for her very own. Possibly you might
think it forward in me if I told you what a genuine delight it is to
read the book for the way it is written. Your pages on Bright and the
orators are as eloquent as they. But it is all the most entertaining
book we have read for ages. Below is a memory of the famous interview
you had with the suspicious character from Ireland. I think I have
caught the bannisters well, as also Lacour waiting outside.
Your delighted
HUGH THOMSON.
So much for the affectionate reverence in which one held him who was
starting life’s race when that “famous interview” took place. Joe was
comparatively young himself then, but as the years went on there were
many of greater disparity in age, who did not fail to pay him the same
tribute; indeed, I don’t think there was ever any sense of difference
in this respect between him and the many good comrades in many classes
of society who rejoiced to _work_ with him because he always lightened
labour with kindness and good humour--who rejoiced to _play_ with him
because he was never afraid of, or at a loss for, the right word at
the right moment, were it grave or gay, appreciative or pungent as the
occasion required.
He was always the encourager, never the discourager, of sincere and
patient effort: bombast and a pandering to mere popularity, he could
censure with words of biting wit, but he never laughed at those who
sent their arrows at the moon though he knew well enough that such
might not achieve financial prosperity. His unfaltering advice was
always that everyone should stick to what he best loved to do.
“My dear,” I remember his saying to me one day, when I had
tried and signally failed to write a popular farce, “it takes a
more competent fool than you to know just what kind of foolishness the
public wants. Don’t you be put off what you _can_ do because you
fancy it is not what they want.”
And in a letter written perhaps in a more serious spirit to one often
oppressed by a sense of failure I find the words: “There is no
such thing as failure--excepting the failure to see and love the beauty
of life.”
These are among the graver memories of him: his generation will
remember him most readily for what Sir James Barrie, writing to me
of him as “a man for whom I had a mighty admiration,” appreciatively
describes as “his positive genius for conversation.” The latter word is
so apt because it perceives that the Celtic gift of repartee was the
most finely pointed of his arrows: he was generally at his best when
some might have fancied that he was going to be non-plussed.
One day he told me of a dinner at which King Edward VII., then Prince
of Wales, was the honoured guest. Someone had whispered to the Prince
that my husband was a Radical, and he, turning to him, asked if such a
thing could be true.
“I _am_ a Radical, Sir,” replied Joe, and after a
little pause added: “but I never mention it in respectable
society.”
The table was silent for an instant, but the Prince led the way with a
laugh and all was well.
A funny little incident, told me in the small hours when Joe came home,
described the dire discomfiture of one of his greatest admirers when,
having invited him to supper that he might silence “a conceited young
ass” by his superior wit, the “conceited young ass” so fancied himself
as to monopolize the whole conversation: this fiasco, though not to
his own glorification, caused Joe infinite delight; but the disgusted
host was only consoled after he had arranged a duel for my husband with
Robert Marshall, the playwright, a recognised wit--the condition being
that neither should think before speaking: I consider that here an
unfair advantage was taken--any one who was a friend of Joe’s knowing
full well that this was just the whip of which he loved the lash. Be it
added that this tilt between the two knights cemented their friendship.
A host of these incidents took place in his well-loved Garrick Club, of
which--by the testimony of many friends--he was the heart and soul and
some add the good genius. I believe there were quarrels not a few that
he averted or headed by his tact and kindly humour--quarrels that might
sometimes have led to sorrowful decisions by the Club Committee to
which he belonged. He told me one day of a humorous end to an earnest
expostulation he had held with poor Harry Kemble--greatly beloved in
spite of his known weakness: “Every word you say is true, my
dear Joe,” the actor had replied with the tears streaming down
his great cheeks--“but what if I like it?”
It is good to remember that that colossal figure--of which our
daughter, seeing it on the stage when she was a child, asked
tremulously, “Is it a human being?”--remained to the end an
honoured institution of the Club.
Of Joe’s tactful capacity as a peacemaker I was a witness at the
home of my mother’s family--the beautiful Gothic Abbey of Bisham
near Marlow. We were staying with my cousin, George Vansittart, who
was then the owner. He was the kindest of men, but had a peppery and
ill-controlled temper, and nothing so inflamed it as the growing habit
with trippers on the Thames of landing upon his grounds. His gardeners
and keepers were sternly bidden to warn off these rash people, and he
himself, if walking or shooting in Bisham woods--quite a mile from the
Abbey--would angrily bid them begone.
One day he and Joe were sitting in his ground-floor library facing the
river, when he espied a boat containing a lady and a man making across
stream towards the big trees shading his lawns. He jumped up--his face
flushed, and watched the man rise, a powerful figure, ship his sculls
and push into shore. “By----, the insolent brute! Under my very
nose!” shrieked the incensed squire. And, seizing a heavy stick
he strode out of the French window--Joe following somewhat alarmed.
My cousin took no pains to soften the language with which he addressed
“the insolent brute” before he was half-way across the lawn, and Joe
hastened as he saw the big man step defiantly out of the boat while
the woman wept and implored him unavailingly to return. Joe caught my
cousin by the arm--he was getting on in years--for as he drew near he
saw that the intruder was an actor--of no great refinement--known in
the profession for a swaggering bully.
“There’s a lady in the boat, Mr. Vansittart,” said
my husband. Instantly my cousin stopped, and the man, recognising
Joe, greeted him surlily and presently turned back to his companion
now fainting on the bank. Joe followed him, and George Vansittart,
returning to the house, called out to his butler, who was hastening
to the scene: “Take out some brandy and water for the lady and
see she needs nothing.” Joe brought back a message of thanks
from the poor thing, and was far too anxious lest the outbreak should
affect my cousin’s health to mind his remark that he was to be
congratulated upon his acquaintance.
Recurring to that appreciation of him by the young in his last years,
which is one of the sweetest tributes to Joe’s memory, many
alert and boyish faces rise up before me; eager over some animated
discussion in which the give-and-take was always even between the older
man and the younger, or alight with laughter at his quaint wit and
merry censure of some foible of the day; for though he could laugh at
its foibles he was never out of heart with the world, which was always
to him a good world, even when he prophesied that, through _some_
crucible, the crazes of the last twenty years would have to pass
for elimination. “They have got to have this epidemic,”
he would say of Cubist painter and eccentric poet, “but
they’ll get over it, and meanwhile the good old world will go
on quietly as usual and young folk will fall in love and want poets
to sing for them and so the best things must come to the top in the
end.”
Apart from this sort of, as he called it, “half-baked”
thought, he was always ready to weigh and consider every new aspect of
life; and if no passing mode could deceive him or put him out of heart,
either with his life-long heroes or with his own methods of expression;
yet to the last hour he was always keen--not only for fresh work
himself, but to see the work of the world develop. In the words of Mr.
Stopford Brooke, quoted in the _Life_ by Prof. L. P. Jacks, he would
have said: “Whether in this world or another we will pursue, we
will overtake, we will divide the spoil.”
And so, whether he were hanging over the garden gate of our holiday
home gathering information from the labourers who passed along the
road, or discussing ethical problems with his sons and their friends,
he was always “pursuing”--and the young were always at home
with him, for he never wanted to lead only to express his opinion and
listen to their reply.
One of these younger men--Mr. Hammond, by no means an
“obscure” one--writes: “There have been few men
whose companionship was so delightful to all who had the privilege
of knowing him.... I always remember with gratitude that he allowed
even young and obscure people to enjoy the pleasure of his best
conversation--one of the rarest intellectual pleasures that I have ever
known.”
And Mr. Hugh Sidgwick--killed in the prime of his own rare intellectual
career--follows with what might be called an echo: “I can’t
say how much I owe to him and to you for the many happy hours I spent
at your house. He never let the barrier of the generations stand
between him and us young men and we all of us looked on him as a real
friend and the most delightful of companions. There are memories of
many good talks and jovial discussions--with Mr. Carr always leading
and contributing more than his share of life and vivacity to them. And
it was inspiring to us--more perhaps than appeared--to meet one who was
so young in heart, so full of life and so sensitive to all the beauties
of all the arts.”
The words of W. A. Moore--blessed with his own Celtic temperament and
eager fighting quality--sound the same note:
“It was a great thing to have known him,” he writes
from Salonica, “I can never forget him for he was a most
radiant personality.” It is a curious thing that a kindred
epithet--“joyous personality”--was a favourite one of his
own, and he would maintain that you could see two men in the Seven
Dials--one lean, soured and scowling, his companion stout, merry,
humorous and full of vitality, though both dwelt on the same gutter and
wore the same threadbare garments.
It is, of course, quite impossible to give on paper any idea whatever
of the charm and brilliancy which these and many more testimonies
prove; to quote some words spoken by our friend Sir Arthur Pinero,
“It is rather like trying to remember the summers of years
ago!” and he left so few letters, possibly because he possessed
that “genius of conversation,” that he has few words to say
for himself; but it may not be inappropriate here to quote two which he
wrote to an old friend who had affectionately watched his whole career
and highly appraised his powers and judgment.
The first is in answer to an appeal as to whether it showed
“symptoms of senile decay” not to be able to admire _The
Hound of Heaven_ by Francis Thompson, which had been hailed with a
shout of praise from a section of the public. I quote it as showing
Joe’s own confession of faith in regard to the poetry that
endures.
“My dear--The Hound is a Mongrel. I know him of old and
have more than once driven him from my door. Several friends have
endeavoured to persuade me that he was of the true breed but I would
have none of him and will not now. Upon the provocation of your letter
I read the thing again and most gladly and willingly share your
symptoms of senile decay. The fabric of it I take to be pure fustian.
And there is not a line in it that does not debauch the language it
employs; not a phrase in it that does not seem to me to vulgarize by
its expression whatever innocent thought may underlie it.
The more I ponder over the great verse which time has left
impregnable, the more I am impressed by the true poet’s
unfailing reverence for the sanctity of words in their relation to
sense and by his stern rejection of all melody that is not rooted
there: the tinkling cadence of an obvious tune is not for him. His
purpose might be taken to be no other than to express in final
simplicity the thought that is in him. Why it is, or how it is,
that in this process he achieves a result, in which the sense of
beauty banishes all remembrance of intellectual origin--that is the
poet’s secret: the mystery and the mastery of his craft.
But I am getting into depths that cannot be plumbed on this tiny sheet
of paper. It is the old subject of many a long night’s talk with
you and concerns matters in which I think you and I are of accord....
As to Electra (Richard Strauss’ opera) of course I have no right
to plead before that tribunal; but the terms in which it is praised
make me suspect it is not praiseworthy.
Yours ever,
J. W. COMYNS CARR.”
In relation to the above I cannot refrain from quoting an appreciation
of my husband written some little while later by the late Theodore
Watts Dunton. He had asked for news of his old friend after his first
serious illness, and the following passage occurs in his acknowledgment
of the reply:
“Although he belongs to a later generation than mine, he and I
are as intimate as brothers and I deeply prize the intimacy. There is
no man on this earth whom I love more. Moreover I have always asserted
that he is a man of genius--a true poet, with wings clipped, for the
present, by the conditions of life.”
As his intimates know, Charles Dickens was one of the brightest stars
in my husband’s firmament. During all the years of our marriage, I
never remember him without a volume of Dickens and one of Boswell’s
_Life of Johnson_ beside his bed. Many a “night’s talk” with the
life-long friend to whom he wrote as above had been devoted to
ineffectual attempts to converting him to a real appreciation of
Dickens--attempts which, as the following letters show, were finally
successful.
“MY DEAR,----
I am very much interested in your letter about Dickens.... [This was
in the early stage of conversion.] Curiously enough I have lately
been reading the whole of Macready’s Diary and was immensely
interested in it. His conceit of course is colossal, but the diary
struck me as affording a revelation of a real and virile creature of
great independence of character, gifted on occasion with striking
insight and vision. I was noticing as I read that Dickens was the only
one of all his friends of long date with whom he never quarrelled,
and it struck me that there must have been something innately fine
and magnanimous in Dickens’ nature to command this constancy of
friendship from a man so vain and irascible as Macready.
But Macready sometimes sees far and I think his understanding of
Browning and his appreciation of the poet’s inherent limitations
in the field of drama are very illuminating. Evidently the drama was
the goal of Browning’s ambition and yet it has always seemed to
me--as it appeared to Macready--that he was not in essence a dramatist
at all.
When you next come to London you should look in at the Grafton
Gallery and take a glance at the Post Impressionists. I saw most
of them in Paris, with something added of further extravagance and
crude indecency; but the Parisian critics, with few exceptions, took
small account of the matter. Here, on the contrary, nearly all the
younger critics are at their feet. It seems to me to indicate a wave
of disease, even of absolute madness; for the whole product seems to
breathe not ineptitude merely but corruption--especially marked in
a sort of combined endeavour to degrade and discredit all forms of
feminine beauty.
Yours ever,
JOE.”
Later this was his great indictment of the Cubists also, well known to
his friends in the Club.
The following letter is to the same correspondent written during the
last year of his life and in much more satisfied mood on the subject of
his hero.
HASTINGS, 1915.
“MY DEAR,----
It gave me delight to get your letter--the greater in that you talk to
me of Dickens. I never tire of him nor of talking of him. But I was
not unprepared for your enthusiasm. I remember only the last time we
touched on the topic it was already brewing. I am struck above all by
what you feel about the composer’s gift in him, that unconscious
power of massing and moulding his material, the instructive adjustment
of varying currents in the narrative, so that--as he traces the
courses in which they run, we recognise in wonderment that they are
confluent streams though often seeming for the time to flow so far
asunder. Even the most modest of us are, I think, sometimes aware
that there is a force outside ourselves which holds the reins of our
fancy and that we must needs obey; but the exercise of that faculty in
Dickens approaches the miraculous. At times it would almost seem as if
he threw down the gauntlet to himself, directly challenging his own
powers of artistic control by flinging at his own feet the unsifted
harvest of the most prodigal invention with which man was ever endowed
and defying the artist in him to reduce it to order and harmony.
And yet the artist invariably wins and by a victory so complete as
to cheat us into the belief that every obstacle he subdues was an
integral feature of the original design. Inexhaustible invention and
unfailing control, these are the things that always seem to me to set
Dickens on an eminence which he shares with no one in his own time and
with only a few in our creative literature of any time. Shakespeare
stands there--as he stands everywhere, no matter what the quality to
be appraised or what the arena in which it finds exercise, above all
rivalry; and Walter Scott most surely and securely too; and ... well,
I don’t feel able to be certain about any others!...
I am not disposed to quarrel about _Bleak House_, I do not like it;
but that story and _Little Dorrit_ have always been my stumbling
blocks.
On the other hand I heartily agree about _Our Mutual Friend_; I think
it illustrates a giant’s way with Nature which becomes a fawning
slave before the tyranny of genius.
Yours ever,
JOE.”