Though it was my privilege to count among my friends several personal
friends of Swinburne--notably the late Theodore Watts-Dunton, Philip
Bourke Marston, and the dearest and closest of all my friends, Mrs.
Louise Chandler Moulton--it was not until the first weeks of 1892
that I met him personally.
I was invited to lunch at The Pines, and the first thing that struck
me as I entered the dining-room and took the extended hand, which
was soft and limp, and had no sturdiness in the grasp, was the
singular charm and even courtliness of his bearing. Unmistakably an
aristocrat, and with all the ease and polish which one associates
with high breeding, there was, even in the cordiality with which
he rose and came forward to welcome me, a suspicion of the shy
nervousness of the introspective man and of the recluse on first
facing a stranger. It had passed in a few minutes, and I saw no
trace of it at any of our subsequent meetings, but to the last
his courtliness remained. I have seen him angry, I have heard him
furiously dissent from and even denounce the views put forward by
others, but never once was what, for want of a better word, I must
call his personal deference to those others relaxed. With him the
proverbial familiarity which is said to breed contempt, bred only
more consistent and insistent courtesy. To no one would he defer
quite so graciously and readily, to no one was he so scrupulously
courtly in his bearing, as to those who constituted the household
in which he lived. On the occasion of this first meeting with him
he talked with extraordinary animation, sitting up erectly in his
chair and moving his body or limbs stiffly and jerkily. He had not
long returned from his forenoon walk, and, if I may be pardoned
so far-fetched a comparison, he was like a newly-opened bottle of
champagne, bubbling and brimming over with the buoyant, beady, joyous
and joy-giving wine of morning. Watts-Dunton, always generously
ready to interest himself, and to endeavour to interest others, in
the work of a young writer of ability, was anxious to talk about my
friend, Richard Le Gallienne. He might as well, by making a stopper
of his open hand, have tried permanently to prevent the overflow of
the champagne bottle which I have used for the purpose of a fanciful
comparison. The moment he withdrew his hand, the instant he ceased to
speak of Le Gallienne, Swinburne, as represented by the newly-opened
bottle, was bubbling over again about his walk. The wine of it was in
his veins and seemed to have intoxicated him.
“There is no time like the morning for a walk!” he declared, turning
to me with enthusiasm. “The sparkle, the exhilaration of it! I walk
every morning of my life, no matter what the weather, pelting along
all the time as fast as I can go; and it is entirely to my daily walk
that I attribute my perfect health.”
On hearing that I, too, was a great, as well as a fast walker,
Swinburne looked me up and down challengingly, and said with a smile
that was almost like a merry boy’s:
“Yes! but I think I could outwalk you, and get there first, for
all your six feet!” Then, turning to Watts-Dunton, he apologised
playfully for having monopolised the talk, and said, “Now tell me
about your young poet. His is certainly the most beautiful poet-face
since Shelley’s.”
Watts-Dunton replied by reading some extracts from a “Note on
Swinburne” which Le Gallienne had contributed to _Literary Opinion_,
Swinburne listening with downbent head meanwhile. When Watts-Dunton
had made an end of it, and Swinburne had expressed his appreciation,
the latter inquired how I first came to know Le Gallienne, and
learning that when I was acting as the Editor of the English edition
of _Lippincott’s Magazine_ I had, in that capacity or incapacity,
accepted one of Le Gallienne’s first published articles, _The Nature
Poems of George Meredith_, he asked if I knew Sir J. M. Barrie, who
he considered had been much influenced by the author of _The Ordeal
of Richard Feverel_.
“Only slightly,” I answered. “I suggested, in fact organised a
dinner to dear old F. W. Robinson, in whose magazine _Home Chimes_
much of the early work of Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, Zangwill, Eden
Phillpotts, G. B. Burgin, and many others, who have since come into
their own, appeared. Jerome took the chair and Barrie the vice-chair,
and the dinner was something of a record in the list of distinguished
men present, and was, I believe, one of the few functions of the sort
of which an account appeared in the _Athenæum_. It was there I first
met Barrie.”
“Robinson of _Grandmother’s Money_,” cried Swinburne in an ecstasy
of enthusiasm. “You have mentioned the name of one of the very salt
of the earth, and one of the dearest friends of both of us here.
We contributed to the first number of _Home Chimes_. Watts-Dunton
wrote a noble Sonnet of Greeting, and I printed my Sonnet _Near
Cromer_ there. His novels, I grant, though eminently readable, as
the reviewers say, are not great. Unlike Dr. Gilbert’s, they do not
dovetail. Finishing one chapter, you are not restless and uneasy till
you have read the next, and that is a fatal defect in a novelist.”
Speaking of Robinson and _Home Chimes_ reminded Swinburne of the fact
that it was in that unfortunately named and defunct magazine that he
had seen some of the best work of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind
poet, concerning whom I had contributed an article to the current
number of the _Fortnightly Review_. This article Swinburne had read
and wished to discuss, for, whereas my friendship with Philip Marston
was not of long standing, he had known the blind poet since the
latter was a lad of fourteen, and on the day after Philip’s death
had written a memorial sonnet which was subsequently printed in the
_Athenæum_.
Swinburne’s remarks upon the subject of my article--though I need
hardly say I have forgotten no word of what he said--I pass over,
but what I must not pass over is the witness these remarks bore to
his extraordinary memory and to his equally extraordinary method
of reading. Reading, in fact, is not the word. Had he parsed the
article, schoolboy wise, sentence by sentence, he could not more
effectually have mastered it; had he dissected it, part by part,
surgeon-like, he could not more completely have torn the heart out of
the matter.
Obviously Swinburne could only have read the thing once, yet had I,
the writer, been called upon, even while it was fresh in my memory,
to pass an examination on this very article, I doubt whether I
should have known half as much of it as he. Hearing him thus deliver
himself upon a casual contribution to a periodical, which, by reason
of his love and friendship for the blind poet with whom the article
dealt, had chanced to interest him, I could understand how his single
brain had been able to deal illuminatingly with so vast a volume of
literature as he had from time to time passed under review. His power
of concentration, and of pouncing, hawk-like, upon what seemed to him
to be memorable or salient, as well as his ability to recollect all
he had read, must have been extraordinary.
A more exhaustive summing up--not, I admit, of the evidence on both
sides, but of the evidence which appealed to his individual judgment,
his individual imagination, and his individual taste--I have never
heard. Prejudiced as he was, however, in favour of Marston, he would
not go so far as Rossetti, for his last word on the subject was:
“When Gabriel spoke of Philip’s poem, _The Rose and the Wind_, as
‘worthy of Shakespeare in his subtlest lyrical mood,’ he let his
personal affection run away with his critical judgment, and his
verdict must always be discounted by the fact that Philip was the
aptest pupil in the School of Poetry in which Rossetti was the
acknowledged master. Watts-Dunton is a much surer guide, and when
he said that ‘So perfect a lyric as _The Rose and the Wind_ should
entitle Marston to a place of his own, and that no inconsiderable
one,’ he said the true word, the deserved word, and the word which I
do not think anyone will have the hardihood to dispute.”