It was my privilege, many years ago, to make the acquaintance of the
obscure literary hermit, whose talk I have tried to reproduce in the
pages that follow. Our first meeting was one of those chance affairs
that now and then mitigate the loneliness of the London streets, and a
second hazard led to the discovery that we had many interests in common.
I think that the Hermit (as I shall call him) had begun to find the
perpetual solitude of his years a growing terror, and he was not sorry
to have a listener; at first, indeed, he talked almost with the joy of a
child, or rather of a prisoner who has escaped from the house of
silence, but as he chose subjects which have always interested me
intensely, he gave as much pleasure as he received, and I became an
assiduous visitor of his cell.
He had found an odd retreat. He avoided personalities, and had a happy
knack of forgetting any that I vouchsafed on my side, (he forgot my name
three times on the first evening that we spent together, and succeeded
in repeating this feat over and over again since then), and I never
gathered much of his past history. But I believe that "something had
happened" many years before, in the prehistoric age of the 'seventies.
There had been a break of some sort in the man's life when he was quite
young; and so he had left the world and gone to Barnsbury, an almost
mythical region lying between Pentonville and the Caledonian Road. Here,
in the most retired street of that retired quarter, he occupied two
rooms on the ground floor of a big, mouldy house, standing apart from
the street and sheltered by gaunt grown trees and ancient shrubs; and
just beside the dim and dusty window of the sitting-room a laburnum had
cast a green stain on the decaying wall. The laburnum had grown wild,
like all the trees and shrubs, and some of its black, straggling boughs
brushed the pane, and of dark, windy nights while we sat together and
talked of art and life we would be startled by the sudden violence with
which those branches beat angrily upon the glass.
The room seemed always dark. I suppose that the house had been built in
the early eighteenth century, and had been altered and added to at
various periods, with a final "doing up" for the comparative luxury of
someone in the 'tens or 'twenties; there were, I think, twenty rooms in
it, and my friend used to declare that when a new servant came she spent
many months in finding her way in the complicated maze of stairs and
passages, and that the landlady even was now and then at fault. But the
room in which we sat was hung with flock paper, of a deep and heavy
crimson colour, and even on bright summer evenings the crimson looked
almost black, and seemed to cast a shadow into the room. Often we sat
there till the veritable darkness came, and each could scarcely see the
white of the other's face, and then my friend would light two lonely
candles on the mantelpiece, or if he wished to read he set one on a
table beside him; and when the candles were lighted I thought that the
gloom grew more intense, and looking through the uncurtained window one
could not see even the friendly twinkle of the gas-lamp in the street,
but only the vague growth of the laburnum, and the tangle of boughs
beyond.
It was a large room and gave me always a sense of empty space. Against
one wall stood a heavy bookcase, with glass doors, solid and of dark
mahogany, but made in the intermediate period that came between
Chippendale and the modern school of machine-turned rubbish. In the
duskiest corner of the room there was a secretaire of better
workmanship, and two small tables and three gaunt chairs made up the
furnishing. The Hermit would sometimes pace up and down in the void
centre of the room as he talked, and if I chanced to be sitting by the
window, his shape would almost disappear as he neared the secretaire on
his march, and I heard the voice, and used to wonder for a moment
whether the man had not vanished for ever, having been resolved into the
shadows about him.
I have spent many evenings in that old mouldering room, where, when we
were silent for an instant, the inanimate matter about us found a voice,
and the decaying beams murmured together, and a vague sound might come
from the cellars underneath. And it always seemed to me as if the
crypt-like odour of the cellar rose also into the room, mingling with a
faint suggestion of incense, though I am sure that my friend never
burned it. Here then, with such surroundings as I have indicated, we
held our sessions and talked freely and with enjoyment of many curious
things, which, as the Hermit would say, had the huge merit of
interesting no one but ourselves.
He would sometimes, whimsically, compare himself to Coleridge, and I
think that he often deliberately talked in S. T. C.'s manner with
delight in the joke. For, I need hardly say that the comparison was not
in any way a serious one; he had a veneration for Coleridge's
achievement, with a still greater veneration for that which Coleridge
might have achieved, which would have caused him to regard any such
comparison, seriously entertained, as unspeakably ludicrous. Still, he
liked to regard himself as a very humble disciple in Coleridge's school,
he was fond, as I have said, of imitating his master's manner as well as
he could, and I think that he cherished, in the fashion of S. T. C., the
notion that he had a "system," an esoteric philosophy of things; he
sought for a key that would open, and a lamp that would enlighten all
the dark treasure-houses of the Universe, and sometimes he believed that
he held both the Key and the Lamp in his hands.
It is a confession of mysticism, but I incline to think that he was
right in this belief. I recall the presence of that hollow, echoing
room, the atmosphere with its subtle suggestion of incense sweetening
the dank odours of the cellar, and the tone of the voice speaking to me,
and I believe that once or twice we both saw visions, and some glimpse
at least of certain eternal, ineffable Shapes. But these matters, the
more esoteric doctrines of "the system" have entered hardly or not at
all into the very imperfect and fragmentary notes that I have made of
his conversations on literature.
I should scarcely be justified in calling him a literary monomaniac. But
it is true that Art in general, and the art of literature in particular
had for him a very high significance and interest; and he was always
ready to defend the thesis that, all the arts being glorious, the
literary art was the most glorious and wonderful of all. He reverenced
music, but he was firm in maintaining that in perfect lyrical poetry
there is the subtlest and most beautiful melody in the world.
I can scarcely say whether he wrote much himself. He would speak of
stories on which he was engaged, but I have never seen his name on
publishers' lists, and I do not think that he had adopted a pseudonym.
One evening, I remember, I came in a little before my accustomed time,
and in the shadowy corner of the room, a drawer in the secretaire was
open, and I thought that it looked full of neat manuscripts. But I never
spoke to him about his literary work; and I noticed that he did not much
care to talk of literature from the commercial standpoint.
It is perhaps needless to say that I consulted my friend before
publishing these notes of his conversations. I had been forced to leave
London for some months, and I wrote to him from the country, requesting
his permission to give to the world (if the world would have them) those
judgments on books which I had listened to in Barnsbury. His reply
allowed me to take my own way, "with all my heart, so long as you make
me sufficiently apocryphal. I am not going to compete with 'real'
critics whose names are printed in the papers; but if you can maintain
the _incognito_ and allow your readers (supposing their existence) to
believe that I am a mere figment of your brain, you can print my _obiter
dicta_ 'with ease of body and rest of reins.' Here is a suggestion for a
title: what do you say to 'Boswell in Barnsbury'? But I really had no
notion that you were taking notes all the time. Remember: keep the
secret, _and the secrets_."
I regarded this as a very liberal license, and I have tried to set in
the best order I could compass the "system" so far as it relates to
letters. I do not pretend that I am a _verbatim_ reporter, for I had to
trust to my memory, and though I tried to arrange my notes at the time,
I fear I have fallen here and there into confusion. Still, I think that
the six chapters which follow will seem fairly consecutive in their
argument and arrangement, and the "Appendix"--a confession of
failure--is, in reality, the result of the "cyclical mode of
discoursing," in which the Hermit jocularly professed to follow
Coleridge.
Perhaps indeed Coleridge was deceived, and my dear friend with him, in
the hope of real essential knowledge; but even so, these fragments which
I propose are evidence that the latter earnestly desired the truth and
sought it.