CHELSEA MEMORIES
Coming to close quarters with it, I am not sure that, after all, Chelsea
has not more to offer the literary pilgrim than even Hampstead has.
Addison, Locke, Smollett, Horace Walpole, are among the illustrious names
whose local habitations were once there but are no longer to be seen.
Charles and Henry Kingsley spent their boyhood at their father's rectory
in Sidney Street; Daniel Maclise lived for ten years at 4 Cheyne Walk,
where George Eliot died; and "Queen's House," No. 16 Cheyne Walk, is the
house that, in 1862, Rossetti, Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and
Meredith took as joint-tenants. Meredith soon paid a quarter's rent in
lieu of notice and withdrew from the arrangement, but Swinburne and
Rossetti lived on there together for some years, and did much of their
greatest work there. Swinburne was next to go, and he presently set up
house with Mr. Watts-Dunton at "The Pines," near the foot of Putney Hill,
where he lived till his death in 1909. In the early seventies Mr. W. M.
Rossetti married and removed elsewhere, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti stayed
on in the Chelsea house alone.
Later, in the gloomy days before he went away to Birchington to die,
Rossetti suffered terribly from insomnia, was ill and depressed, and a
prey to morbid imaginings, but in the earlier years of his tenancy of 16
Cheyne Walk he was absorbed in his art, his house was lively with many
visitors, and in his lazy, sociable fashion he seems to have been almost
as happy as a man of his sensitive temperament could be. "Here," writes
Mr. Joseph Knight, "were held those meetings, prolonged often until the
early hours of the morning, which to those privileged to be present were
veritable nights and feasts of gods. Here in the dimly-lighted studio,
around the blazing fire, used to assemble the men of distinction or
promise in literature and art whom the magnetism of Rossetti's
individuality collected around him. Here Rossetti himself used, though
rarely, to read aloud, with his voice of indescribable power and
clearness, and with a bell-like utterance that still dwells in the mind,
passages from the poems he admired; and here, more frequently, some young
poet, encouraged by his sympathy, which to all earnest effort in art was
overflowing and inexhaustible, would recite his latest sonnet." He crowded
his rooms with quaintly-carved oak furniture, and beautiful ornaments; he
had a wonderful collection of blue china that he sometimes put on the
table and recklessly used at his dinner-parties. In his garden he had "a
motley collection of animals, peacocks, armadilloes, the wombat,
woodchuck, or Canadian marmot, and other outlandish creatures, including
the famous zebu." This zebu was kept fastened to a tree, and Rossetti
loved to exhibit it and point out its beauties with his maulstick. Mr.
Knight goes on to repeat the story that was told concerning this animal by
Whistler, who was at that time living at what is now 101 Cheyne Walk, and
was then 7 Lindsey Row. According to Whistler, one day when he and
Rossetti were alone in the garden, "and Rossetti was contemplating once
more the admired possession, and pointing out with the objectionable stick
the points of special beauty, resentment blazed into indignation. By a
super-bovine exertion the zebu tore up the roots of the tree to which it
was attached, and chased its tormentor round the garden, which was
extensive enough to admit of an exciting chase round the trees." The zebu
was fortunately hampered by the uprooted tree, and Rossetti made good his
escape, but he would harbour the animal no longer, and as nobody would buy
it he gave it away.
[Illustration: QUEEN'S HOUSE. CHEYNE WALK.]
You get an illuminating glimpse of Rossetti's home life in these days from
that useful literary chronicle, Allingham's Diary (Monday, June 27, 1864):
"Got down to Chelsea by half-past eight to D. G. R.'s. Breakfasted in a
small, lofty room on first floor with window looking on the garden. Fanny
in white. Then we went into the garden, and lay on the grass, eating
strawberries and looking at the peacock. F. went to look at the
'chicking,' her plural of chicken. Then Swinburne came in and soon began
to recite--a parody on Browning was one thing; and after him Whistler, who
talked about his own pictures--Royal Academy--the Chinese painter girl,
Millais, &c."
Rossetti's wife had died shortly before he went to Cheyne Walk, and it was
during his residence here that her grave in Highgate Cemetery was opened,
that the manuscript volume of poems he had buried with her might be
recovered, and most of its contents included in his first published book
of original work.
One time and another Whistler occupied four different houses in Cheyne
Walk, and No. 101 was the first of these. He had been living in lodgings,
or with his brother-in-law, since he came over from America, but in 1863
he took the Cheyne Walk house, and his mother went to live there with him.
It is a three-storey house, and the back room on the first floor was his
studio; the river lies before it, just across the road, and he could see
from his front windows old Battersea Bridge, Battersea Church on the other
side of the Thames, and at night the twinkling lights of boats and barges
at anchor and the flare and many-coloured glitter of Cremorne Gardens in
the distance. At the end of Cheyne Walk lived the boatbuilder Greaves. "He
had worked in Chelsea for years," write Mr. and Mrs. Pennell, in their
_Life of Whistler_. "He had rowed Turner about on the river, and his two
sons were to row Whistler. One of the sons, Mr. Walter Greaves, has told
us that Mrs. Booth, a big, hard, coarse Scotchwoman, was always with
Turner when he came for a boat. Turner would ask Greaves what kind of a
day it was going to be, and if Greaves answered 'Fine,' he would get
Greaves to row them across to Battersea Church, or to the fields, now
Battersea Park. If Greaves was doubtful, Turner would say, 'Well, Mrs.
Booth, we won't go far'; and afterwards for the sons--boys at the
time--Turner in their memory was overshadowed by her." Whistler and the
Greaves boys were up and down the river at all hours of the day and night
and in all weathers, painting and sketching, they under his tuition, or
gathering impressions and studying effects of light and shadow. He was
frequently in at the Rossettis' house, and they and their friends were as
frequently visiting him.
In 1867 Whistler moved to what is now 96 Cheyne Walk, and had a
housewarming on the 5th of February at which the two Rossettis were
present. Describing the decoration of the walls here, Mr. and Mrs. Pennell
say its beauty was its simplicity. "Rossetti's house was a museum, an
antiquity shop, in comparison. The simplicity seemed the more bewildering
because it was the growth, not of weeks but of years. The drawing-room was
not painted till the day of Whistler's first dinner-party. In the morning
he sent for the brothers Greaves to help him. 'It will never be dry in
time,' they feared. 'What matter?' said Whistler; 'it will be
beautiful!'... and by evening the walls were flushed with flesh-colour,
pale yellow and white spread over doors and woodwork, and we have heard
that gowns and coats too were touched with flesh-colour and yellow before
the evening was at an end. One Sunday morning Whistler, after he had taken
his mother to Chelsea Church, as he always did, again sent for his pupils
and painted a great ship with spreading sails in each of the two panels at
the end of the hall; the ships are said to be still on the wall, covered
up. His mother was not so pleased when, on her return, she saw the blue
and white harmony, for she would have had him put away his brushes on
Sunday as once she put away his toys."
Solitude was irksome to him, and he welcomed the motley crowd of artists
and students who came in at all hours to chat with him whilst he worked.
The Pennells tell a capital story of a man named Barthe, of whom Whistler
had bought tapestries, and who, not being able to get his account settled,
called one evening for the money. He was told that Whistler was not in;
but there was a cab waiting at the door, and he could hear his debtor's
voice, so he pushed past the maid and, as he afterwards related, "Upstairs
I find him, before a little picture, painting, and behind him ze bruzzers
Greaves holding candles. And Vistlaire he say, 'You ze very man I vant:
hold a candle!' And I hold a candle. And Vistlaire he paint, and he paint,
and zen he take ze picture, and he go downstairs, and he get in ze cab,
and he drive off, and we hold ze candle, and I see him no more. Mon Dieu,
il est terrible, ce Vistlaire!"
His studio here was a back room on the second floor, and up to that
studio, on many days of 1873, Carlyle climbed to give sittings for the
portrait which ranks now with the greatest of Whistler's works. The
portrait of his mother had already been painted in that same small room,
and hung on the wall there whilst Carlyle was coming to life on the
canvas. Carlyle was not a patient sitter. Directly he sat down he urged
Whistler to "fire away," and was evidently anxious to get through with his
part of the business as quickly as possible. "One day," says Whistler, "he
told me of others who had painted his portrait. There was Mr. Watts, a mon
of note. And I went to his studio, and there was much meestification, and
screens were drawn, and I was not allowed to see anything. And then, at
last, the screens were put aside and there I was. And I looked. And Mr.
Watts, a great mon, he said to me, 'How do you like it?' And then I turned
to Mr. Watts, and I said, 'Mon, I would have ye know I am in the hobit of
wurin' clean lunen!'" There is a note in Allingham's Diary, dated July 29,
1873: "Carlyle tells me he is 'sitting' to Whistler. If C. makes signs
of changing his position W. screams out in an agonised tone, 'For God's
sake, don't move!' C. afterwards said that all W.'s anxiety seemed to be
to get the _coat_ painted to ideal perfection; the face went for little.
He had begun by asking two or three sittings, but managed to get a great
many. At last C. flatly rebelled. He used to define W. as the most absurd
creature on the face of the earth."
[Illustration: WHISTLER. 96 CHEYNE WALK.]
Whilst he was at 96 Cheyne Walk, Whistler brought his famous libel action
against Ruskin, won it, but was awarded only a farthing damages, and had
to pay his own costs. During the progress of the suit he was having the
White House built for him in Tite Street, Chelsea, but the payment of his
law costs so crippled him that he had to sell it before it was ready for
occupation, and to sell off also the furniture and effects of his Cheyne
Walk home.
None of these things seem, however, to have affected Whistler with worse
than a temporary irritation. He wrote jestingly over his door: "Except the
Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. E. W. Godwin,
F.S.A., built this one;" turned his back upon the scenes of his recent
disasters, and went to Venice. After rather more than a year of absence,
he returned to London in the winter of 1880, stayed with his brother in
Wimpole Street, put up at divers lodgings, had an exhibition in Bond
Street, and in May 1881 took a studio at 13 Tite Street, Chelsea, and
began to be the most talked-of man of the day. "He filled the papers with
letters," write Mr. and Mrs. Pennell. "London echoed with his laugh. His
white lock stood up defiantly above his curls; his cane lengthened; a
series of collars sprang from his long overcoat; his hat had a curlier
brim, a lower tilt over his eyes; he invented amazing costumes.... He was
known to pay calls with the long bamboo stick in his hand and pink bows on
his shoes. He allowed no break in the gossip. The carriages brought
crowds, but not sitters. Few would sit to him before the trial; after it
there were fewer. In the seventies it needed courage to be painted by
Whistler; now it was to risk notoriety and ridicule." When Mr. Pennell
first saw him at 13 Tite Street, in July 1884, "he was all in white, his
waistcoat had long sleeves, and every minute it seemed as if he must begin
to juggle with glasses. For, to be honest, my first impression was of a
bar-keeper strayed from a Philadelphia saloon into a Chelsea studio. Never
had I seen such thick, black, curling hair. But in the midst was the white
lock, and keen, brilliant eyes flashed at me from under the thick, bushy
eyebrows."
From Tite Street, Whistler presently removed to 454 Fulham Road; thence to
The Vale, Chelsea, a pleasant quarter which was a year or two ago wiped
off the face of the earth; and in 1890 he was back again in Cheyne Walk,
at No. 21. "I remember a striking remark of Whistler's at a garden-party
in his Chelsea house," says M. Gerard Harry, who was one of Whistler's
guests at No. 21. "As he caught me observing some incompletely furnished
rooms and questioning within myself whether he had occupied the house more
than a fortnight or so: 'You see,' he said, with his short laugh, 'I do
not care for definitely settling down anywhere. Where there is no more
space for improvement, or dreaming about improvement, where mystery is in
perfect shape, it is _finis_--the end--death. There is no hope nor outlook
left.' I do not vouch for the words, but that was certainly the sense of a
remark which struck me as offering a key to much of Whistler's philosophy,
and to one aspect of his original art."
By 1892, in spite of himself and his fantastic and silly posings and
posturings, the world had learned to take his art seriously instead of
taking him so, and when he went away that year to live in Paris his
greatness as a painter had become pretty generally recognised. In 1894 he
came back to London with his wife, who was dying of cancer, and after her
death in 1896 he lived with friends or in lodgings, and had no settled
home, until in 1902 he once again took a house in Cheyne Walk, this time
No. 74, a house which stands below the street level; its front windows
overlook the Thames, and it had a large studio at the back. Here Mrs. and
Miss Birnie Philip went to share house with him, for his health was
breaking, and he was in need of companionship and attention. But there
were good intervals, when he was able to work with all his old eagerness
and energy. "We knew on seeing him when he was not so well," say Mr. and
Mrs. Pennell, "for his costume of invalid remained original. He clung to a
fur-lined overcoat worn into shabbiness. In his younger years he had
objected to a dressing-gown as an unmanly concession; apparently he had
not outgrown the objection, and on his bad days this shabby, worn-out
overcoat was its substitute. Nor did the studio seem the most comfortable
place for a man so ill as he was. It was bare, with little furniture, as
his studios always were, and he had not used it enough to give it the air
of a workshop. The whole house showed that illness was reigning there."
Trays and odds and ends of the sickroom lay about the hall; papers, books,
and miscellaneous litter made the drawing-room and dining-room look
disorderly. "When we saw Whistler in his big, shabby overcoat shuffling
about the huge studio, he struck us as so old, so feeble and fragile, that
we could imagine no sadder or more tragic figure. It was the more tragic
because he had always been such a dandy, a word he would have been the
first to use in reference to himself.... No one would have suspected the
dandy in this forlorn little old man, wrapped in a worn overcoat, hardly
able to walk."
He lingered thus for about a year; then the end came suddenly. On the 14th
July 1903, Mrs. Pennell found him dressed and in his studio. "He seemed
better, though his face was sunken, and in his eyes was that terrible
vagueness. Now he talked, and a touch of gallantry was in his greeting, 'I
wish I felt as well as you look.' He asked about Henley, the news of whose
death had come a day or two before.... There was a return of vigour in his
voice when Miss Birnie Philip brought him a cup of chicken broth, and he
cried, 'Take the damned thing away,' and his old charm was in the apology
that followed, but, he said, if he ate every half-hour or so, as the
doctor wanted, how could he be expected to have an appetite for dinner? He
dozed a little, but woke up quickly with a show of interest in
everything." But on the evening of the 17th, he suddenly collapsed, and
was dead before the doctor could be fetched to him.
[Illustration: TURNER'S HOUSE. CHEYNE WALK.]
Turner's last days in this same Cheyne Walk were almost as sad, almost
as piteous as Whistler's, but there is a haze of mystery about them, as
there is about some of his paintings, and he had no butterfly past of
dandyism to contrast painfully with the squalor of his ending. Born over
the barber's shop kept by his father in Maiden Lane, Strand, he mounted to
the seats of the immortals without acquiring by the way any taste for
personal adornment, or for the elegancies or little prettinesses so
beloved by little artists in his home surroundings. His soul was like a
star, and could not make its heaven among the dainty chairs and tables and
nice wall and mantelpiece ornaments of the drawing-room. On Stothard's
advice (Stothard being one of the customers at the shaving shop) Turner's
father made him an artist; he studied under Sir Joshua Reynolds, and
later, Blake was one of his pupils. Growing in reputation, he lived by
turns in Harley Street, at Hammersmith, at Twickenham, and is described in
middle age as bluff and rough-mannered, and looking "the very moral of a
master carpenter, with lobster-red face, twinkling staring grey eyes,
white tie, blue coat with brass buttons, crab-shell turned-up boots, large
fluffy hat, and enormous umbrella." From about 1815 onwards, he had a
house that is no longer standing at 47 Queen Anne Street, Harley Street,
and here, in 1843, when Turner was sixty-eight, a Mr. Hammersley called on
him and has described (I quote from Mr. Lewis Hind's _Turner's Golden
Visions_) how he "heard the shambling, slippered footstep coming down the
stairs, the cold, cheerless room, the gallery, even less tidy and more
forlorn, all confusion, mouldiness, and wretched litter; most of the
pictures covered with uncleanly sheets, and the man! his loose dress, his
ragged hair, his indifferent quiet--all, indeed, that went to make his
physique and some of his mind; but above all I saw, felt (and feel still)
his penetrating grey eye."
Somewhere between 1847 and 1848 Turner strangely disappeared from his
customary haunts; his Queen Anne Street house was closed, the door kept
locked, and his old housekeeper, Hannah Danby, could only assure anybody
who came that he was not there, and that she simply did not know where he
had gone. For the next four years or so, until he was dying, no one
succeeded in discovering his hiding-place. Now and then, in the meantime,
he would appear in a friend's studio, or would be met with at one of the
Galleries, but he offered no explanation of his curious behaviour, and
allowed no one to obtain any clue to his whereabouts. He went in 1850 to a
dinner given by David Roberts, and was in good spirits, and bubbling over
with laborious jokes. "Turner afterwards, in Roberts's absence, took the
chair, and, at Stanfield's request, proposed Roberts's health, which he
did, speaking hurriedly, but soon ran short of words and breath, and
dropped down on his chair with a hearty laugh, starting up again and
finishing with a 'Hip, hip, hurrah!'... Turner was the last who left, and
Roberts accompanied him along the street to hail a cab. When the cab drove
up, he assisted Turner to his seat, shut the door, and asked where he
should tell cabby to take him; but Turner was not to be caught, and, with
a knowing wink, replied, 'Tell him to drive to Oxford Street, and then
I'll direct him where to go.'"
The fact is he was living at Cremorne Cottage, 119 Cheyne Walk. He was
living there anonymously; a Mrs. Booth, whom he had known many years
before when he stayed at her Margate boarding-house, was keeping house for
him, and he was known in the neighbourhood as Admiral Booth, a rumour
having got about that he was a retired naval officer fallen on evil days.
This was the time of which the father of the Greaves boys had spoken to
Whistler--the days when Mrs. Booth used to come with Turner to the
waterside and he would row them over to Battersea. Though all his greatest
work was finished, Turner painted several pictures here; he frequently
rose at daybreak, and, wrapped in a blanket or a dressing-gown, stood out
on the roof, leaning over the railing to watch the sunrise and the play of
light on the river opposite. He used the room on the second floor as his
studio, and in that room, on the 19th December 1851, he died. Some months
before his death, he was seen at the Royal Academy's private view; then,
tardily responding to a letter of friendly reproach that David Roberts had
addressed to him at Queen Anne Street, he came to Roberts's studio in
Fitzroy Square. He was "broken and ailing," and had been touched by
Roberts's appeal, but as for disclosing his residence--"You must not ask
me," he said; "but whenever I come to town I will always come to see you."
When Roberts tried to cheer him, he laid his hand on his heart and
murmured, "No, no! There is something here that is all wrong."
His illness increasing on him, he wrote to Margate for Dr. Price, an old
acquaintance of his and Mrs. Booth's, and Price, coming up, examined him
and told him there was no hope of his recovery. "Go downstairs," he urged
the doctor, "take a glass of sherry, and then look at me again." But a
second examination only confirmed Dr. Price in his opinion.
It must have been at this juncture that Turner's hiding-place was
discovered. His Queen Anne Street housekeeper, Hannah Danby, found a
letter left in the pocket of one of his old coats, and this gave the
Chelsea address. She went with another woman and made inquiries round
about Cheyne Walk till it was clear enough to her that the Mr. Booth to
whom that letter was directed was none other than Turner, and acting on
her information Mr. Harpur, Turner's executor, journeyed at once to
Chelsea, and arrived at 119 Cheyne Walk to find Turner sinking fast.
Towards sunset, on that wintry day of his dying, he asked Mrs. Booth to
wheel him to the window, and so gazing out on the wonder of the darkening
sky he passed quietly away with his head on her shoulder.
A certain John Pye, a Chelsea engraver, afterwards interviewed the owner
of No. 119, and learned from him that Turner and Mrs. Booth had, some four
or five years before, called and taken the house of him, paying their rent
in advance because they objected to giving any names or references. Pye
also saw Mrs. Booth, and says she was a woman of fifty, illiterate, but
"good-looking and kindly-mannered." Turner had used to call her "old 'un,"
she said, and she called him "dear"; and she explained that she had first
got acquainted with him when, more than twenty years ago, "he became her
lodger near the Custom House at Margate." So small was the shabby little
house in Cheyne Walk that the undertakers were unable to carry the coffin
up the narrow staircase, and had to carry the body down to it. Nowadays,
the house has been enlarged; it and the house next door have been thrown
into one, otherwise it has undergone little change since Turner knew it.
Whilst Turner was thus passing out of life in Cheyne Walk, Carlyle was
dwelling near by at No. 24 (then No. 5) Cheyne Row, and had been resident
there for seventeen years. On first coming to London in 1830, he and his
wife lodged at 33 Ampton Street, Gray's Inn Road. They spent, he says, "an
interesting, cheery, and, in spite of poor arrangements, really pleasant
winter" there; they had a "clean and decent pair of rooms," and their
landlord's family consisted of "quiet, decent people." He wrote his essay
on Dr. Johnson whilst he was here, and was making a fruitless search for a
publisher who would accept _Sartor Resartus_, which he had recently
completed. Jeffrey called there several times to pass an afternoon with
him, and John Stuart Mill was one other of the many visitors who found
their way to the drab, unlovely, rather shabby street to chat with the
dour, middle-aged Scotch philosopher, who was only just beginning to be
heard of.
He fixed on the Cheyne Row house in 1834, and, except for occasional
holidays, never left it until his death forty-seven years afterwards. As
soon as he was settled here Carlyle wrote to Sir William Hamilton, giving
him his new address: "Our upholsterers, with all their rubbish and
clippings, are at length swept handsomely out of doors. I have got my
little book-press set up, my table fixed firm in its place, and sit here
awaiting what Time and I, in our questionable wrestle, shall make out
between us." In another letter of about the same date he writes of it:
"The street is flag-paved, sunk-storied, iron-railed, all old-fashioned
and tightly done up, looks out on a rank of sturdy old pollarded (that is,
beheaded) lime trees standing there like giants in tawtie wigs (for the
new boughs are still young); beyond this a high brick wall; backwards a
garden, the size of our back one at Comely Bank, with trees, &c., in bad
culture; beyond this green hayfields and tree avenues, once a bishop's
pleasure grounds, an unpicturesque but rather cheerful outlook. The house
itself is eminent, antique, wainscoted to the very ceiling, and has been
all new painted and repaired; broadish stair, with massive balustrade (in
the old style), corniced and as thick as one's thigh; floors thick as
rock, wood of them here and there worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanliness,
and still with thrice the strength of a modern floor. Chelsea is a
singular heterogeneous kind of spot, very dirty and confused in some
places, quite beautiful in others, abounding in antiquities and the traces
of great men--Sir Thomas More, Steele, Smollett, &c. Our Row, which for
the last three doors or so is a street and none of the noblest, runs out
upon a Parade (perhaps they call it) running along the shore of the river,
a broad highway with huge shady trees, boats lying moored, and a smell of
shipping and tar."
A note in Allingham's Diary (1860) offers you a very clear little picture
of Carlyle's garden here, as he saw it: "In Carlyle's garden, some twenty
yards by six; ivy at the end. Three or four lilac bushes; an ash stands on
your left; a little copper beech on your right gives just an umbrella to
sit under when the sun is hot; a vine or two on one wall, neighboured
by a jasmine--one pear tree."
[Illustration: CARLYLE. AMPTON STREET.]
In this Cheyne Row house Carlyle wrote all his books, except _Sartor_ and
some of the miscellaneous essays; here he entertained, not always very
willingly or very graciously, most of the great men of his day; quarrelled
with his neighbours furiously over the crowing of their cocks; was
pestered by uninvited, admiring callers from all over the world; and had
his room on the top floor furnished with double-windows that were supposed
to render it sound-proof, but did not. Charles Boner, visiting 24 Cheyne
Row in 1862, disturbed Carlyle as he sat in his dressing-gown and slippers
correcting the proofs of his _Frederick the Great_, whilst Mrs. Carlyle
remained in attendance, seated on a sofa by the fire.
In 1866 Mrs. Carlyle died suddenly of heart failure, and left him burdened
with remorse that he had not been kinder to her and made her life happier;
and after two years of lonely living without her, he writes: "I am very
idle here, very solitary, which I find to be oftenest less miserable to me
than the common society that offers. Except Froude almost alone, whom I
see once a week, there is hardly anybody whose talk, always polite, clear,
sharp, and sincere, does me any considerable good.... I am too weak, too
languid, too sad of heart, too unfit for any work, in fact, to care
sufficiently for any object left me in the world to think of grappling
round it and coercing it by work. A most sorry dog-kennel it oftenest all
seems to me, and wise words, if one ever had them, to be only thrown away
on it. Basta-basta, I for most part say of it, and look with longings
towards the still country where at last we and our loved ones shall be
together again."
You will get no better or more intimate glimpses into Carlyle's home life
than Allingham gives in his Diary. Sometimes they are merely casual and
scrappy notes, at others fairly full records of his walks and talks with
him, such as this: "_1873, April 28._--At Carlyle's house about three. He
spent about fifteen minutes in trying to clear the stem of a long clay
pipe with a brass wire, and in the end did not succeed. The pipe was new,
but somehow obstructed. At last he sent for another one and smoked, and we
got out at last. (I never saw him smoke in public.) He said Emerson had
called on him on Sunday, and he meant to visit E. to-day at his lodging in
Down Street. We walked to Hyde Park by Queen's Gate, and westward along
the broad walk, next to the ride, with the Serpentine a field distant on
the left hand. This was a favourite route of his. I was well content to
have the expectation of seeing Emerson again, and, moreover, Emerson and
Carlyle together. We spoke of Masson's _Life of Milton_, a volume of which
was on C.'s table. He said Masson's praise of Milton was exaggerated.
'Milton had a gift in poetry--of a particular kind. _Paradise Lost_ is
absurd; I never could take to it all--though now and again clouds of
splendour rolled in upon the scene.'... At Hyde Park Corner, C. stopped
and looked at the clock. 'You are going to Down Street, sir?' 'No, it's
too late.' 'The place is close at hand.' 'No, no, it's half-past five.' So
he headed for Knightsbridge, and soon after I helped him into a Chelsea
omnibus, banning internally the clay pipe (value a halfpenny farthing)
through which this chance (perhaps the last, for Emerson is going away
soon) was lost."
[Illustration: THOMAS CARLYLE]
There are numerous entries in the Diary of visits and conversations of
this sort. On October 18, 1879, Allingham called at Cheyne Row with his
little son, and they met Carlyle coming out of the door to his carriage.
On December 4, of the same year: "Helen and I to Cheyne Row. Carlyle's
eighty-fourth birthday. Mrs. Lecky there. Browning and Ruskin are gone. C.
on his sofa by the window, warm and quiet, wearing a new purple and gold
cap. Gifts of flowers on the table...." Some of the swift little
word-sketches of Carlyle at this date, when he was very old, very feeble,
and apt to be oppressed with gloom, are piteous and pathetic enough. On
his eighty-fifth birthday (December 4, 1880) Allingham found him easier
and more himself; but on Friday, December 24, you read: "To Carlyle's at
two. He was lying on the sofa in the drawing-room. When I spoke to him he
held out his hand and shook hands with me, but said nothing. I was not
sure that he knew me. A stout Scotch servant girl and I lifted him to his
feet to go to the carriage. In the hall his heavy sealskin coat was put on
with difficulty, and he was got into the carriage. Alick and I with him.
We drove twice round Hyde Park. The old man dozed much."
Earlier that year, the two sons of Alexander Munro called at Cheyne Row,
and in a letter home the elder of them gave a wonderfully poignant and
living account of their visit. Munro, who was dead, had been one of
Carlyle's old friends, and the two boys were now at school at the
Charterhouse. They were conducted upstairs, says the letter, to a
well-lighted, cheerful apartment, and here "the maid went forward and said
something to Carlyle, and left the room. He was sitting before a fire in
an arm-chair, propped up with pillows, with his feet on a stool, and
looked much older than I had expected. The lower part of his face was
covered with a rather shaggy beard, almost quite white. His eyes were
bright blue, but looked filmy from age. He had on a sort of coloured
nightcap, and a long gown reaching to his ankles, and slippers on his
feet. A rest attached to the arm of his chair supported a book before him.
I could not quite see the name, but I think it was Channing's works.
Leaning against the fireplace was a long clay pipe, and there was a slight
smell of tobacco in the room. We advanced and shook hands, and he invited
us to sit down, and began, I think, by asking where we were living. He
talked of our father affectionately, speaking in a low tone as if to
himself, and stopping now and then for a moment and sighing.... He went
on, 'I am near the end of my course, and the sooner the better is my own
feeling.' He said he still reads a little, but has not many books he cares
to read now, and is 'continually disturbed by foolish interruptions from
people who do not know the value of an old man's leisure.' His hands were
very thin and wasted; he showed us how they shook and trembled unless he
rested them on something, and said they were failing him from weakness."
And, at length, closing the interview, "'Well, I'll just bid you
good-bye.' We shook hands. He asked our names. He could not quite hear
Henry's at first. 'I am a little deaf, but I can hear well enough
talking,' or words to that effect. 'I wish you God's blessing;
good-bye.' We shook hands once more and went away. I was not at all shy.
He seemed such a venerable old man, and so worn and old-looking, that I
was very much affected. Our visit was on Tuesday, May 18, 1880, at about 2
P.M."
[Illustration: CARLYLE'S HOUSE. CHEYNE ROW.]
He died in the following February; after lying motionless and seemingly
unconscious for hours, he passed quietly soon after eight on the morning
of February 5, 1881. His bed, says Allingham, had been brought down to the
drawing-room (the front room on the first floor), and he rarely spoke in
the last two or three weeks, not so much because he could not as because
he did not seem to wish to say anything. Newspaper reporters were so
continually ringing at the door, day and night, that bulletins had to be
posted outside to prevent this. Now and then he appeared to wander in his
mind, and when the Scotch maid, Mary, was attending upon him he would
sometimes murmur, "Poor little woman," as if he mistook her for his
long-dead Jenny; and once, says Allingham, "he supposed the female hands
that tended him, lifting his head, perhaps, to be those of his good old
mother--'Ah, mother, is it you?' he murmured, or some such words. I think
it was on the day before the last day that Mary heard him saying to
himself, 'So this is Death: well----'"
But the Cheyne Row house has many happy memories too, and I always think
one of the happiest is that of how Leigh Hunt called once after a long
absence, and brought with him word of some unexpected good news that so
delighted Mrs. Carlyle that she impulsively ran to him and kissed him,
and he went away to write that charming little rondeau that bids fair to
outlive all his more ambitious poetry:
"Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I'm growing old--but add,
Jenny kissed me."
Leigh Hunt was turned fifty then, and was Carlyle's neighbour, living at
No. 10 (then No. 4) Upper Cheyne Row. I have seen it said that Leigh Hunt
went there in order to be near Carlyle, but his occupancy of that house
dates from 1833--the year before Carlyle established himself in
Chelsea--and he remained there until 1840, seven years of poverty and
worry, when it was literal truth that he was weary and sad, in indifferent
health, harassed for want of money, and growing old, yet you find him
never losing hope, and always ready on the smallest excuse to rejoice and
make light of his troubles. I am afraid Dickens's caricature of Hunt as
Harold Skimpole, and Byron's contemptuous references to his vanity and
vulgarity and the squalor of his easy-going home life (his children, said
Byron, "are dirtier and more mischievous than Yahoos," and writing of
their arrival in Italy as Shelley's guests he observes, "Poor Hunt, with
his six little blackguards, are coming slowly up; as usual he turned back
once--was there ever such a kraal out of the Hottentot country?")--I am
rather afraid these things have tended to wrong Hunt in our imagination of
him, for you learn on other evidence that there is just enough truth in
those representations of him to make them seem quite true, and they linger
in your mind, and affect your regard and admiration of the man in spite of
yourself. But Dickens, with his keen sense of the absurd, had a habit of
exaggeration; there was no ill-nature in his laughter--he merely seized on
certain of Hunt's weaknesses and gave them to a character who has none of
Hunt's finer qualities, and it is ridiculous in us and unfair to both men
to take that caricature as a portrait. As for Byron--he could not justly
appraise Hunt, for he had no means of understanding him. His own way of
life was made too easy for him from the first; he was not born to Hunt's
difficulties and disadvantages; his experiences of the world, and
therefore his sympathies, were too limited. There is no merit in living
elegantly and playing the gentleman when you simply inherit, as the fruits
of an ancestor's abilities, all the conveniences and the money that enable
you to do so. On the whole, if you compare their lives, you will realise
that Leigh Hunt was by far the greater man of the two, even if Byron was
the greater poet, and I am more than a little inclined to agree with
Charles Lamb that even as a poet Byron was "great in so little a way. To
be a poet is to be the man, not a petty portion of occasional low passion
worked up in a permanent form of humanity. Shakespeare has thrust such
rubbishy feelings into a corner--the dark, dusty heart of Don John, in the
_Much Ado about Nothing_."
Shelley never speaks of Leigh Hunt but in the kindliest terms. He was
"gentle, honourable, innocent, and brave," writes Shelley; "one of more
exalted toleration for all who do and think evil, and yet himself more
free from evil; one of simpler and, in the highest sense of the word,
purer life and manners, I never knew." He is, he says in the _Letter to
Maria Gisborne_:
"One of those happy souls
Which are the salt of the earth, and without whom
This earth would smell like what it is--a tomb."
Hunt tells in his _Autobiography_ how he came to Chelsea, and gives a
glowing description of his house there. He left St. John's Wood, and then
his home in the New Road (now Marylebone Road), because he found the clay
soil of the one and the lack of quiet around the other affected his
health, or "perhaps it was only the melancholy state of our fortune" that
was answerable for that result; anyhow, from the noise and dust of the New
Road he removed to Upper Cheyne Row--"to a corner in Chelsea," as he says,
"where the air of the neighbouring river was so refreshing and the quiet
of the 'no-thoroughfare' so full of repose, that although our fortunes
were at their worst, and my health almost at a piece with them, I felt for
some weeks as if I could sit still for ever, embalmed in silence. I got to
like the very cries in the street, for making me the more aware of it by
the contrast. I fancied they were unlike the cries in other quarters of
the suburbs, and that they retained something of the old quaintness and
melodiousness which procured them the reputation of having been composed
by Purcell and others.... There was an old seller of fish, in particular,
whose cry of 'Shrimps as large as prawns' was such a regular, long-drawn,
and truly pleasing melody that, in spite of his hoarse and, I am
afraid, drunken voice, I used to wish for it of an evening, and hail it
when it came....
[Illustration: LEIGH HUNT'S HOUSE. CHELSEA.]
"I know not whether the corner I speak of remains as quiet as it was. I am
afraid not; for steamboats have carried vicissitude into Chelsea, and
Belgravia threatens it with her mighty advent. But to complete my sense of
repose and distance, the house was of that old-fashioned sort which I have
always loved best, familiar to the eyes of my parents, and associated with
childhood. It had seats in the windows, a small third room on the first
floor, of which I made a sanctum, into which no perturbation was to enter,
except to calm itself with religious and cheerful thoughts; and there were
a few limes in front which, in their due season, diffused a fragrance. In
this house we remained seven years; in the course of which, besides
contributing some articles to the _Edinburgh_ and _Westminster Reviews_,
and producing a good deal of the book since called _The Town_, I set up
(in 1834) the _London Journal_, endeavoured to continue the _Monthly
Repository_, and wrote the poem entitled _Captain Sword and Captain Pen_,
the _Legend of Florence_, and three other plays. Here also I became
acquainted with Thomas Carlyle, one of the kindest and best, as well as
most eloquent of men.... I believe that what Mr. Carlyle loves better than
his fault-finding, with all its eloquence, is the face of any human
creature that looks suffering, and loving, and sincere; and I believe
further that if the fellow-creature were suffering only, and neither
loving nor sincere, but had come to a pass of agony in this life which put
him at the mercies of some good man for some last help and consolation
towards his grave, even at the risk of loss to repute and a sure amount
of pain and vexation, that man, if the groan reached him in its
forlornness, would be Thomas Carlyle."
He wrote that from his personal experience of Carlyle, for whilst they
were neighbours at Chelsea they frequently visited each other; and
Carlyle, on his part, saw the worst as well as the best of him, from the
inside, and was too large-minded and too big a man to judge him by his
faults and follies only. He saw how Hunt worked, all the while haunted by
pecuniary distresses; unpaid tradesmen knocking at his door and worrying
for their debts; once an execution in the house; now and then faced with
the humiliation of having to ask for loans of a few shillings to buy the
family dinner; his children almost in rags, and himself, as he said
bitterly, slighted and neglected by editors and the public, and
"carelessly, over-familiarly, or even superciliously treated, pitied or
patronised by his inferiors." Carlyle had known poverty and neglect
himself; he was fitted to judge Hunt understandingly, and he judged him
justly. "Leigh Hunt was a fine kind of man," he told Allingham in 1868.
"Some used to talk of him as a frivolous fellow, but when I saw him I
found he had a face as serious as death." In his Diary he noted, "Hunt is
always ready to go and walk with me, or sit and talk with me to all
lengths if I want him. He comes in once a week (when invited, for he is
very modest), takes a cup of tea, and sits discoursing in his brisk,
fanciful way till supper time, and then cheerfully eats a cup of porridge
(to sugar only), which he praises to the skies, and vows he will make his
supper of it at home."
It was Mrs. Carlyle who was severe about the Hunts' untidy and uncleanly
household, and complained of the domestic utensils they borrowed and
failed to return, but Carlyle took the position in a more genial spirit,
and saw the pity of it and the humour of it also. "Hunt's house," he wrote
after one of his visits to No. 10 Upper Cheyne Row, "excels all you have
ever read of--a poetical Tinkerdom without parallel even in literature. In
his family room, where are a sickly, large wife and a whole school of
well-conditioned wild children, you will find half-a-dozen old rickety
chairs gathered from half-a-dozen different hucksters, and all seemingly
engaged, and just pausing, in a violent hornpipe. On these and around them
and over the dusty table and ragged carpet lie all kinds of litter--books,
papers, egg-shells, scissors, and last night when I was there the torn
heart of a quartern loaf. His own room above stairs, into which alone I
strive to enter, he keeps cleaner. It has only two chairs, a bookcase, and
a writing-table; yet the noble Hunt receives you in his Tinkerdom in the
spirit of a king, apologises for nothing, places you in the best seat,
takes a window-sill himself if there is no other, and then folding closer
his loose-flowing 'muslin cloud' of a printed nightgown in which he always
writes, commences the liveliest dialogue on philosophy and the prospects
of man (who is to be beyond measure 'happy' yet); which again he will
courteously terminate the moment you are bound to go. A most interesting,
pitiable, lovable man, to be used kindly, but with discretion."
Hunt departed from Chelsea, with all his anxieties, in 1840, and took up
residence at 32 Edwardes Square, Kensington, where he got through with a
great deal of work, and one way and another was secured at last above his
financial embarrassments. Dickens, Jerrold, Forster and some other friends
raised £900 for him by a benefit performance of _Every Man in his Humour_;
the Government granted him two sums of £200, and then a Civil List Pension
of £200 a year, to the obtaining of which Carlyle readily lent all his
influence. Moreover, the Shelley family settled an annuity of £120 upon
him. But, with all these material advantages, came the death of his wife
and one of his sons. "She was as uncomplaining during the worst storms of
our adversity," Hunt wrote of his wife, reminiscently, "as she was during
those at sea in our Italian voyage."
He was an old and rather solitary man when he moved from Kensington in
1853 and went to 7 Cornwall Road, now known as 16 Rowan Road, Hammersmith
Road, but he had an ample and sure income, and was no longer haunted by
duns, if he could not indulge in much in the way of luxury. When Nathaniel
Hawthorne was in England he went to see him at Hammersmith, and found the
house in Rowan Road plain, small, shabby, Hunt's little study cheaply
papered, sparely carpeted, and furnished meanly, and Hunt himself "a
beautiful and venerable old man, buttoned to the chin in a black dress
coat, tall and slender, with a countenance quietly alive all over, and the
gentlest and most naturally courteous manner." At Rowan Road he wrote most
of his _Old Court Suburb_, in the preface to a recent edition of which Mr.
Austin Dobson says of the Leigh Hunt of those closing days, "He was still
the old sensitive, luminous-eyed Leigh Hunt of the wide collar and
floating printed nightgown, delighted with a flower or a bird or a
butterfly; but Time had snowed upon his pericranium, and to his breezy
_robe de chambre_ he had added, or was about to add, a protective cape,
more or less ample, of faded black silk, which gave him the air (says John
Forster) of an old French Abbé." He died away from home in 1859, whilst he
was on a short visit to a relative at Putney.
[Illustration: LEIGH HUNT. 16 ROWAN ROAD. HAMMERSMITH.]