One of the subjects of these studies said in my hearing, that
“Recollections” are generally written by people who have either
entirely lost their memory, or have never, themselves, done anything
in life worth remembering.
To the second indictment I plead guilty, but my best excuse for the
publication of this volume is that I write while the first indictment
fails. My memory is still good, and the one thing which seems most
worth remembering in my life is my undeservedly fortunate friendships.
In writing of my friends and of those with whom I was associated,
I am, therefore, I believe, giving of my best. I ought to add that
these papers were penned for inclusion in a volume of frankly
personal and intimate “Recollections.” A work of that sort is the
one book of his life in which an author is allowed some freedom from
convention. That is why I hope to be pardoned should any passage,
letter, or incident in these pages seem too intimate or too personal.
The reason why the studies are printed separately is that the ship in
which I hope to carry the bulk of my threatened “Recollections” (if
ever that ship come to port) will be so heavily weighted a vessel,
that I am lightening it by unloading a portion of the cargo at the
friendly harbour of The Bodley Head.
To drop figurative language and to speak plainly, I may add that,
though there is some attempt at a more or less finished portrait in
some of my pen-pictures, that of Lord Roberts is no portrait, but
merely a chronicle. His personality, at least, is too well known and
loved to need either analysis or description.
The paper _When Stephen Phillips Read_, mere snapshot as it is of one
aspect of his personality, was not written for the present volume,
with which, indeed, it is hardly in keeping. I include it by the wish
of Mr. John Lane who, years hence, will be remembered as the faithful
friend, as well as the generous and discriminating admirer, of the
distinguished poet, of whose work it is his pride also to be the
publisher.
Mr. Lane was anxious--knowing that my friendship with the poet was
long and close--that I should write of Stephen Phillips as fully as
I have here written of some others; but it is only under impulse
that I seek to picture the inner self and personality of my friends,
and I cannot do so while the sense of loss is comparatively new. In
the case of two of whom I have thus written, many years had elapsed
before I put pen to paper.
At his best--as the three friends who made such unexampled and such
self-sacrificing efforts on his behalf, Sir Sidney and Lady Colvin
and Mr. Stephen Gwynn, will, I think, agree--there was something
approaching the godlike in Stephen Phillips. Of what was weak, and
worse, in him I need not here speak, since, because he so loathed
hypocrisy, he hid it from none.
One day I hope to show Stephen Phillips as he really was, and as
not many knew him. I have heard him described as a man of brooding
and morbid aloofness. There is truth in the description, but it
is equally true to say that, at times, he could be as healthily
jovial and unconstrained, as high-spirited as a happy schoolboy. His
exquisite and extraordinary sense of humour was--I had almost written
his “salvation,” and that not only under success which, coming early
in life, might well have turned the head of a smaller man, but also
in adversity which, when it came, was as crushing as his success had
been complete. When this adversity, when tragic unhappiness, overtook
him, he bore them with courage, and reproached no one except himself.
If as a poet he was at first overpraised, it is equally true that,
towards the end, and since his death, the splendour, beauty and
power of his poetry have often been underestimated. Time will set
that right, and will rank him, I believe, as a true and, within his
limits, a great poet.
That Stephen Phillips, the man, gave no cause for sorrow and
concern to those of us who loved him, I do not maintain, nor would
he wish me to do so, for no one was more ready to acknowledge his
weaknesses--deeply and almost despairingly as he deplored them--and
none suffered intenser agony of remorse for ill-doing than he.
Knowing him as I did, I unhesitatingly aver that his ideals and his
longings were noble, and that the soul of the man was good. That all
is well with him, and that he is at rest, I have no doubt. Never have
I seen such fulness of peace and such beauty on the face of the newly
dead, as when I knelt--to commend his passing soul to his Maker--by
the bed on which lay what was mortal of Stephen Phillips. All that
was weak and unworthy seemed to have fallen away as something which
never was, which never could be, a part of his true self. In death,
even his youth returned to him. As he lay there, white-robed, and
with his hair tossed boyishly over his forehead, he looked so
young that one might have thought him to be a happy and sleeping
boy-chorister, dreaming of the poet-mother whom he so loved, and to
join whom in Paradise may not his soul even then have been hastening?