[Early in the year 1914 Mr. Edmund Gosse told me he was asking certain
of his friends to write for him a few words apiece in description of
Swinburne as they had known or seen him at one time or another; and
he was so good as to wish to include in this gathering a few words by
myself. I found it hard to be brief without seeming irreverent. I
failed in the attempt to make of my subject a snapshot that was not a
grotesque. So I took refuge in an ampler scope. I wrote a reminiscential
essay. From that essay I made an extract, which I gave to Mr. Gosse.
From that extract he made a quotation in his enchanting biography. The
words quoted by him reappear here in the midst of the whole essay as
I wrote it. I dare not hope they are unashamed of their humble
surroundings.--M. B.]
In my youth the suburbs were rather looked down on--I never quite knew
why. It was held anomalous, and a matter for merriment, that Swinburne
lived in one of them. For my part, had I known as a fact that Catullus
was still alive, I should have been as ready to imagine him living in
Putney as elsewhere. The marvel would have been merely that he lived.
And Swinburne’s survival struck as surely as could his have struck in me
the chord of wonder.
Not, of course, that he had achieved a feat of longevity. He was
far from the Psalmist’s limit. Nor was he one of those men whom one
associates with the era in which they happened to be young. Indeed, if
there was one man belonging less than any other to Mid-Victorian days,
Swinburne was that man. But by the calendar it was in those days that he
had blazed--blazed forth with so unexampled a suddenness of splendour;
and in the light of that conflagration all that he had since done, much
and magnificent though this was, paled. The essential Swinburne was
still the earliest. He was and would always be the flammiferous boy of
the dim past--a legendary creature, sole kin to the phoenix. It had been
impossible that he should ever surpass himself in the artistry that
was from the outset his; impossible that he should bring forth rhythms
lovelier and greater than those early rhythms, or exercise over them a
mastery more than--absolute. Also, it had been impossible that the first
wild ardour of spirit should abide unsinkingly in him. Youth goes. And
there was not in Swinburne that basis on which a man may in his maturity
so build as to make good, in some degree, the loss of what is gone.
He was not a thinker: his mind rose ever away from reason to rhapsody;
neither was he human. He was a king crowned but not throned. He was
a singing bird that could build no nest. He was a youth who could
not afford to age. Had he died young, literature would have lost many
glories; but none so great as the glories he had already given, nor any
such as we should fondly imagine ourselves bereft of by his early death.
A great part of Keats’ fame rests on our assumption of what he would
have done. But--even granting that Keats may have had in him more than
had Swinburne of stuff for development--I believe that had he lived on
we should think of him as author of the poems that in fact we know. Not
philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is
the primal thing in poetry. Ideas, and flesh and blood, are but reserves
to be brought up when the poet’s youth is going. When the bird can no
longer sing in flight, let the nest be ready. After the king has dazzled
us with his crown, let him have something to sit down on. But the
session on throne or in nest is not the divine period. Had Swinburne’s
genius been of the kind that solidifies, he would yet at the close of
the nineteenth century have been for us young men virtually--though not
so definitely as in fact he was--the writer of ‘Atalanta in Calydon’ and
of ‘Poems and Ballads.’
Tennyson’s death in ‘98 had not taken us at all by surprise. We had
been fully aware that he was alive. He had always been careful to keep
himself abreast of the times. Anything that came along--the Nebular
Hypothesis at one moment, the Imperial Institute at another--won mention
from his Muse. He had husbanded for his old age that which he had long
ago inherited: middle age. If in our mourning for him there really was
any tincture of surprise, this was due to merely the vague sense that
he had in the fullness of time died rather prematurely: his middle-age
might have been expected to go on flourishing for ever. But assuredly
Tennyson dead laid no such strain on our fancy as Swinburne living.
It is true that Swinburne did, from time to time, take public notice
of current affairs; but what notice he took did but seem to mark his
remoteness from them, from us. The Boers, I remember, were the theme of
a sonnet which embarrassed even their angriest enemies in our midst.
He likened them, if I remember rightly, to ‘hell-hounds foaming at the
jaws.’ This was by some people taken as a sign that he had fallen away
from that high generosity of spirit which had once been his. To me it
meant merely that he thought of poor little England writhing under the
heel of an alien despotism, just as, in the days when he really was
interested in such matters, poor little Italy had writhen. I suspect,
too, that the first impulse to write about the Boers came not from the
Muse within, but from Theodore Watts-Dunton without.... ‘Now, Algernon,
we’re at war, you know--at war with the Boers. I don’t want to bother
you at all, but I do think, my dear old friend, you oughtn’t to let slip
this opportunity of,’ etc., etc.
Some such hortation is easily imaginable by any one who saw the two
old friends together. The first time I had this honour, this sight for
lasting and affectionate memory, must have been in the Spring of ‘99. In
those days Theodore Watts (he had but recently taken on the Dunton) was
still something of a gad-about. I had met him here and there, he had
said in his stentorian tones pleasant things to me about my writing, I
sent him a new little book of mine, and in acknowledging this he asked
me to come down to Putney and ‘have luncheon and meet Swinburne.’ Meet
Catullus!
On the day appointed ‘I came as one whose feet half linger.’ It is but
a few steps from the railway-station in Putney High Street to No. 2.
The Pines. I had expected a greater distance to the sanctuary--a walk
in which to compose my mind and prepare myself for initiation. I laid
my hand irresolutely against the gate of the bleak trim front-garden, I
withdrew my hand, I went away. Out here were all the aspects of common
modern life. In there was Swinburne. A butcher-boy went by, whistling.
He was not going to see Swinburne. He could afford to whistle. I pursued
my dilatory course up the slope of Putney, but at length it occurred
to me that unpunctuality would after all be an imperfect expression of
reverence, and I retraced my footsteps.
No. 2--prosaic inscription! But as that front-door closed behind me I
had the instant sense of having slipped away from the harsh light of the
ordinary and contemporary into the dimness of an odd, august past. Here,
in this dark hall, the past was the present. Here loomed vivid and vital
on the walls those women of Rossetti whom I had known but as shades.
Familiar to me in small reproductions by photogravure, here they
themselves were, life-sized, ‘with curled-up lips and amorous hair’ done
in the original warm crayon, all of them intently looking down on me
while I took off my overcoat--all wondering who was this intruder
from posterity. That they hung in the hall, evidently no more than an
overflow, was an earnest of packed plenitude within. The room I was
ushered into was a back-room, a dining-room, looking on to a good
garden. It was, in form and ‘fixtures,’ an inalienably Mid-Victorian
room, and held its stolid own in the riot of Rossettis. Its proportions,
its window-sash bisecting the view of garden, its folding-doors (through
which I heard the voice of Watts-Dunton booming mysteriously in the
front room), its mantel-piece, its gas-brackets, all proclaimed that
nothing ever would seduce them from their allegiance to Martin Tupper.
‘Nor me from mine,’ said the sturdy cruet-stand on the long expanse
of table-cloth. The voice of Watts-Dunton ceased suddenly, and a few
moments later its owner appeared. He had been dictating, he explained.
‘A great deal of work on hand just now--a great deal of work.’... I
remember that on my subsequent visits he was always, at the moment of
my arrival, dictating, and always greeted me with that phrase, ‘A great
deal of work on hand just now.’ I used to wonder what work it was, for
he published little enough. But I never ventured to inquire, and indeed
rather cherished the mystery: it was a part of the dear little old
man; it went with the something gnome-like about his swarthiness and
chubbiness--went with the shaggy hair that fell over the collar of his
eternally crumpled frock-coat, the shaggy eyebrows that overhung his
bright little brown eyes, the shaggy moustache that hid his small round
chin. It was a mystery inherent in the richly-laden atmosphere of The
Pines....
While I stood talking to Watts-Dunton--talking as loudly as he, for he
was very deaf--I enjoyed the thrill of suspense in watching the door
through which would appear--Swinburne. I asked after Mr. Swinburne’s
health. Watts-Dunton said it was very good: ‘He always goes out for his
long walk in the morning--wonderfully active. Active in mind, too. But
I’m afraid you won’t be able to get into touch with him. He’s almost
stone-deaf, poor fellow--almost stone-deaf now.’ He changed the subject,
and I felt I must be careful not to seem interested in Swinburne
exclusively. I spoke of ‘Aylwin.’ The parlourmaid brought in the hot
dishes. The great moment was at hand.
Nor was I disappointed. Swinburne’s entry was for me a great moment.
Here, suddenly visible in the flesh, was the legendary being and divine
singer. Here he was, shutting the door behind him as might anybody else,
and advancing--a strange small figure in grey, having an air at once
noble and roguish, proud and skittish. My name was roared to him. In
shaking his hand, I bowed low, of course--a bow de coeur; and he, in the
old aristocratic manner, bowed equally low, but with such swiftness that
we narrowly escaped concussion. You do not usually associate a man of
genius, when you see one, with any social class; and, Swinburne being
of an aspect so unrelated as it was to any species of human kind, I
wondered the more that almost the first impression he made on me, or
would make on any one, was that of a very great gentleman indeed. Not of
an old gentleman, either. Sparse and straggling though the grey hair
was that fringed the immense pale dome of his head, and venerably
haloed though he was for me by his greatness, there was yet about him
something--boyish? girlish? childish, rather; something of a beautifully
well-bred child. But he had the eyes of a god, and the smile of an elf.
In figure, at first glance, he seemed almost fat; but this was merely
because of the way he carried himself, with his long neck strained
so tightly back that he all receded from the waist upwards. I noticed
afterwards that this deportment made the back of his jacket hang quite
far away from his legs; and so small and sloping were his shoulders that
the jacket seemed ever so likely to slip right off. I became aware, too,
that when he bowed he did not unbend his back, but only his neck--the
length of the neck accounting for the depth of the bow. His hands were
tiny, even for his size, and they fluttered helplessly, touchingly,
unceasingly.
Directly after my introduction, we sat down to the meal. Of course I had
never hoped to ‘get into touch with him’ reciprocally. Quite apart from
his deafness, I was too modest to suppose he could be interested in
anything I might say. But--for I knew he had once been as high and
copious a singer in talk as in verse--I had hoped to hear utterances
from him. And it did not seem that my hope was to be fulfilled.
Watts-Dunton sat at the head of the table, with a huge and very
Tupperesque joint of roast mutton in front of him, Swinburne and myself
close up to him on either side. He talked only to me. This was the more
tantalising because Swinburne seemed as though he were bubbling over
with all sorts of notions. Not that he looked at either of us. He smiled
only to himself, and to his plateful of meat, and to the small bottle of
Bass’s pale ale that stood before him--ultimate allowance of one who had
erst clashed cymbals in Naxos. This small bottle he eyed often and with
enthusiasm, seeming to waver between the rapture of broaching it now and
the grandeur of having it to look forward to. It made me unhappy to see
what trouble he had in managing his knife and fork. Watts-Dunton told
me on another occasion that this infirmity of the hands had been
lifelong--had begun before Eton days. The Swinburne family had been
alarmed by it and had consulted a specialist, who said that it resulted
from ‘an excess of electric vitality,’ and that any attempt to stop it
would be harmful. So they had let it be. I have known no man of genius
who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or
spiritual, for what the gods had given him. Here, in this fluttering of
his tiny hands, was a part of the price that Swinburne had to pay. No
doubt he had grown accustomed to it many lustres before I met him, and
I need not have felt at all unhappy at what I tried not to see. He,
evidently, was quite gay, in his silence--and in the world that was for
him silent. I had, however, the maddening suspicion that he would have
liked to talk. Why wouldn’t Watts-Dunton roar him an opportunity? I felt
I had been right perhaps in feeling that the lesser man was--no, not
jealous of the greater whom he had guarded so long and with such love,
but anxious that he himself should be as fully impressive to visitors as
his fine gifts warranted. Not, indeed, that he monopolised the talk.
He seemed to regard me as a source of information about all the
latest ‘movements,’ and I had to shout banalities while he munched his
mutton--banalities whose one saving grace for me was that they were
inaudible to Swinburne. Had I met Swinburne’s gaze, I should have
faltered. Now and again his shining light-grey eyes roved from the
table, darting this way and that--across the room, up at the ceiling,
out of the window; only never at us. Somehow this aloofness gave no hint
of indifference. It seemed to be, rather, a point in good manners--the
good manners of a child ‘sitting up to table,’ not ‘staring,’ not
‘asking questions,’ and reflecting great credit on its invaluable old
nurse. The child sat happy in the wealth of its inner life; the child
was content not to speak until it were spoken to; but, but, I felt it
did want to be spoken to. And, at length, it was.
So soon as the mutton had been replaced by the apple-pie, Watts-Dunton
leaned forward and ‘Well, Algernon,’ he roared, ‘how was it on the Heath
to-day?’ Swinburne, who had meekly inclined his ear to the question,
now threw back his head, uttering a sound that was like the cooing of a
dove, and forthwith, rapidly, ever so musically, he spoke to us of his
walk; spoke not in the strain of a man who had been taking his daily
exercise on Putney Heath, but rather in that of a Peri who had at long
last been suffered to pass through Paradise. And rather than that he
spoke would I say that he cooingly and flutingly sang of his experience.
The wonders of this morning’s wind and sun and clouds were expressed in
a flow of words so right and sentences so perfectly balanced that they
would have seemed pedantic had they not been clearly as spontaneous as
the wordless notes of a bird in song. The frail, sweet voice rose and
fell, lingered, quickened, in all manner of trills and roulades. That he
himself could not hear it, seemed to me the greatest loss his deafness
inflicted on him. One would have expected this disability to mar the
music; but it didn’t; save that now and again a note would come out
metallic and over-shrill, the tones were under good control. The whole
manner and method had certainly a strong element of oddness; but no one
incapable of condemning as unmanly the song of a lark would have called
it affected. I had met young men of whose enunciation Swinburne’s now
reminded me. In them the thing had always irritated me very much; and I
now became sure that it had been derived from people who had derived it
in old Balliol days from Swinburne himself. One of the points familiar
to me in such enunciation was the habit of stressing extremely, and
lackadaisically dwelling on, some particular syllable. In Swinburne
this trick was delightful--because it wasn’t a trick, but a need of his
heart. Well do I remember his ecstasy of emphasis and immensity of pause
when he described how he had seen in a perambulator on the Heath to-day
‘the most BEAUT--iful babbie ever beheld by mortal eyes.’ For babies,
as some of his later volumes testify, he had a sort of idolatry. After
Mazzini had followed Landor to Elysium, and Victor Hugo had followed
Mazzini, babies were what among live creatures most evoked Swinburne’s
genius for self-abasement. His rapture about this especial ‘babbie’ was
such as to shake within me my hitherto firm conviction that, whereas
the young of the brute creation are already beautiful at the age of five
minutes, the human young never begin to be so before the age of three
years. I suspect Watts-Dunton of having shared my lack of innate
enthusiasm. But it was one of Swinburne’s charms, as I was to find, that
he took for granted every one’s delight in what he himself so fervidly
delighted in. He could as soon have imagined a man not loving the very
sea as not doting on the aspect of babies and not reading at least one
play by an Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatist every day.
I forget whether it was at this my first meal or at another that he
described a storm in which, one night years ago, with Watts-Dunton,
he had crossed the Channel. The rhythm of his great phrases was as the
rhythm of those waves, and his head swayed in accordance to it like the
wave-rocked boat itself. He hymned in memory the surge and darkness,
the thunder and foam and phosphorescence--‘You remember, Theodore? You
remember the PHOS--phorescence?’--all so beautifully and vividly that I
almost felt stormbound and in peril of my life. To disentangle one from
another of the several occasions on which I heard him talk is difficult
because the procedure was so invariable: Watts-Dunton always dictating
when I arrived, Swinburne always appearing at the moment of the meal,
always the same simple and substantial fare, Swinburne never allowed
to talk before the meal was half over. As to this last point, I soon
realised that I had been quite unjust in suspecting Watts-Dunton of
selfishness. It was simply a sign of the care with which he watched over
his friend’s welfare. Had Swinburne been admitted earlier to the talk,
he would not have taken his proper quantity of roast mutton. So soon,
always, as he had taken that, the embargo was removed, the chance was
given him. And, swiftly though he embraced the chance, and much though
he made of it in the courses of apple-pie and of cheese, he seemed
touchingly ashamed of ‘holding forth.’ Often, before he had said
his really full say on the theme suggested by Watts-Dunton’s loud
interrogation, he would curb his speech and try to eliminate himself,
bowing his head over his plate; and then, when he had promptly been
brought in again, he would always try to atone for his inhibiting
deafness by much reference and deference to all that we might otherwise
have to say. ‘I hope,’ he would coo to me, ‘my friend Watts-Dunton,
who’--and here he would turn and make a little bow to Watts-Dunton--‘is
himself a scholar, will bear me out when I say’--or ‘I hardly know,’
he would flute to his old friend, ‘whether Mr. Beerbohm’--here a bow to
me--‘will agree with me in my opinion of’ some delicate point in Greek
prosody or some incident in an old French romance I had never heard of.
On one occasion, just before the removal of the mutton, Watts-Dunton
had been asking me about an English translation that had been made of M.
Rostand’s ‘Cyrano de Bergerac.’ He then took my information as the match
to ignite the Swinburnian tinder. ‘Well, Algernon, it seems that “Cyrano
de Bergerac”’--but this first spark was enough: instantly Swinburne
was praising the works of Cyrano de Bergerac. Of M. Rostand he may
have heard, but him he forgot. Indeed I never heard Swinburne mention a
single contemporary writer. His mind ranged and revelled always in the
illustrious or obscure past. To him the writings of Cyrano de Bergerac
were as fresh as paint--as fresh as to me, alas, was the news of their
survival. Of course, of course, you have read “L’Histoire Comique des
états et des Empires de la Lune”?’ I admitted, by gesture and facial
expression, that I had not. Whereupon he reeled out curious extracts
from that allegory--‘almost as good as “Gulliver”’--with a memorable
instance of the way in which the traveller to the moon was shocked by
the conversation of the natives, and the natives’ sense of propriety was
outraged by the conversation of the traveller.
In life, as in (that for him more truly actual thing) literature, it
was always the preterit that enthralled him. Of any passing events,
of anything the newspapers were full of, never a word from him; and I
should have been sorry if there had been. But I did, through the medium
of Watts-Dunton, sometimes start him on topics that might have led him
to talk of Rossetti and other old comrades. For me the names of those
men breathed the magic of the past, just as it was breathed for me by
Swinburne’s presence. For him, I suppose, they were but a bit of the
present, and the mere fact that they had dropped out of it was not
enough to hallow them. He never mentioned them. But I was glad to see
that he revelled as wistfully in the days just before his own as I in
the days just before mine. He recounted to us things he had been told
in his boyhood by an aged aunt, or great-aunt--‘one of the Ashburnhams’;
how, for example, she had been taken by her mother to a county ball,
a distance of many miles, and, on the way home through the frosty and
snowy night, the family-coach had suddenly stopped: there was a crowd of
dark figures in the way...at which point Swinburne stopped too, before
saying, with an ineffable smile and in a voice faint with appreciation,
‘They were burying a suicide at the crossroads.’
Vivid as this Hogarthian night-scene was to me, I saw beside it another
scene: a great panelled room, a grim old woman in a high-backed chair,
and, restless on a stool at her feet an extraordinary little nephew with
masses of auburn hair and with tiny hands clasped in supplication--‘Tell
me more, Aunt Ashburnham, tell me more!’
And now, clearlier still, as I write in these after-years, do I see that
dining-room of The Pines; the long white stretch of table-cloth,
with Swinburne and Watts-Dunton and another at the extreme end of it;
Watts-Dunton between us, very low down over his plate, very cosy and
hirsute, and rather like the dormouse at that long tea-table which Alice
found in Wonderland. I see myself sitting there wide-eyed, as Alice sat.
And, had the hare been a great poet, and the hatter a great gentleman,
and neither of them mad but each only very odd and vivacious, I might
see Swinburne as a glorified blend of those two.
When the meal ended--for, alas! it was not, like that meal in
Wonderland, unending--Swinburne would dart round the table, proffer his
hand to me, bow deeply, bow to Watts-Dunton also, and disappear. ‘He
always walks in the morning, writes in the afternoon, and reads in the
evening,’ Watts-Dunton would say with a touch of tutorial pride in this
regimen.
That parting bow of Swinburne to his old friend was characteristic of
his whole relation to him. Cronies though they were, these two, knit
together with bonds innumerable, the greater man was always aux petits
soins for the lesser, treating him as a newly-arrived young guest might
treat an elderly host. Some twenty years had passed since that night
when, ailing and broken--thought to be nearly dying, Watts-Dunton
told me--Swinburne was brought in a four-wheeler to The Pines. Regular
private nursing-homes either did not exist in those days or were less
in vogue than they are now. The Pines was to be a sort of private
nursing-home for Swinburne. It was a good one. He recovered. He was most
grateful to his friend and saviour. He made as though to depart, was
persuaded to stay a little longer, and then a little longer than that.
But I rather fancy that, to the last, he never did, in the fullness of
his modesty and good manners, consent to regard his presence as a matter
of course, or as anything but a terminable intrusion and obligation. His
bow seemed always to convey that.
Swinburne having gone from the room, in would come the parlourmaid. The
table was cleared, the fire was stirred, two leather arm-chairs were
pushed up to the hearth. Watts-Dunton wanted gossip of the present. I
wanted gossip of the great past. We settled down for a long, comfortable
afternoon together.
Only once was the ritual varied. Swinburne (I was told before luncheon)
had expressed a wish to show me his library. So after the meal he did
not bid us his usual adieu, but with much courtesy invited us and led
the way. Up the staircase he then literally bounded--three, literally
three, stairs at a time. I began to follow at the same rate, but
immediately slackened speed for fear that Watts-Dunton behind us might
be embittered at sight of so much youth and legerity. Swinburne waited
on the threshold to receive us, as it were, and pass us in. Watts-Dunton
went and ensconced himself snugly in a corner. The sun had appeared
after a grey morning, and it pleasantly flooded this big living-room
whose walls were entirely lined with the mellow backs of books. Here, as
host, among his treasures, Swinburne was more than ever attractive.
He was as happy as was any mote in the sunshine about him; and the
fluttering of his little hands, and feet too, was but as a token of so
much felicity. He looked older, it is true, in the strong light. But
these added years made only more notable his youngness of heart. An
illustrious bibliophile among his books? A birthday child, rather, among
his toys.
Proudly he explained to me the general system under which the volumes
were ranged in this or that division of shelves. Then he conducted me to
a chair near the window, left me there, flew away, flew up the rungs of
a mahogany ladder, plucked a small volume, and in a twinkling was at
my side: ‘This, I think, will please you! ‘It did. It had a beautifully
engraved title-page and a pleasing scent of old, old leather. It was
editio princeps of a play by some lesser Elizabethan or Jacobean. ‘Of
course you know it?’ my host fluted.
How I wished I could say that I knew it and loved it well! I revealed to
him (for by speaking very loudly towards his inclined head I was able
to make him hear) that I had not read it. He envied any one who had
such pleasure in store. He darted to the ladder, and came back thrusting
gently into my hands another volume of like date: ‘Of course you know
this?’
Again I had to confess that I did not, and to shout my appreciation of
the fount of type, the margins, the binding. He beamed agreement, and
fetched another volume. Archly he indicated the title, cooing, ‘You are
a lover of this, I hope?’ And again I was shamed by my inexperience.
I did not pretend to know this particular play, but my tone implied that
I had always been meaning to read it and had always by some mischance
been prevented. For his sake as well as my own I did want to acquit
myself passably. I wanted for him the pleasure of seeing his joys shared
by a representative, however humble, of the common world. I turned the
leaves caressingly, looking from them to him, while he dilated on the
beauty of this and that scene in the play. Anon he fetched another
volume, and another, always with the same faith that this was a
favourite of mine. I quibbled, I evaded, I was very enthusiastic and
uncomfortable. It was with intense relief that I beheld the title-page
of yet another volume which (silently, this time) he laid before me--The
Country Wench. ‘This of course I have read,’ I heartily shouted.
Swinburne stepped back. ‘You have? You have read it? Where?’ he cried,
in evident dismay.
Something was wrong. Had I not, I quickly wondered, read this play? ‘Oh
yes,’ I shouted, ‘I have read it.’
‘But when? Where?’ entreated Swinburne, adding that he had supposed it
to be the sole copy extant.
I floundered. I wildly said I thought I must have read it years ago in
the Bodleian. ‘Theodore! Do you hear this? It seems that they have now
a copy of “The Country Wench” in the Bodleian! Mr. Beerbohm found one
there--oh when? in what year?’ he appealed to me.
I said it might have been six, seven, eight years ago. Swinburne knew
for certain that no copy had been there twelve years ago, and was
surprised that he had not heard of the acquisition. ‘They might have
told me,’ he wailed.
I sacrificed myself on the altar of sympathy. I admitted that I might
have been mistaken--must have been--must have confused this play with
some other. I dipped into the pages and ‘No,’ I shouted, ‘this I have
never read.’
His equanimity was restored. He was up the ladder and down again,
showing me further treasures with all pride and ardour. At length,
Watts-Dunton, afraid that his old friend would tire himself, arose from
his corner, and presently he and I went downstairs to the dining-room.
It was in the course of our session together that there suddenly flashed
across my mind the existence of a play called ‘The Country Wife,’
by--wasn’t it Wycherley? I had once read it--or read something about
it.... But this matter I kept to myself. I thought I had appeared fool
enough already.
I loved those sessions in that Tupperossettine dining-room, lair of
solid old comfort and fervid old romanticism. Its odd duality befitted
well its owner. The distinguished critic and poet, Rossetti’s closest
friend and Swinburne’s, had been, for a while, in the dark ages, a
solicitor; and one felt he had been a good one. His frock-coat, though
the Muses had crumpled it, inspired confidence in his judgment of other
things than verse. But let there be no mistake. He was no mere bourgeois
parnassien, as his enemies insinuated. No doubt he had been very useful
to men of genius, in virtue of qualities they lacked, but the secret of
his hold on them was in his own rich nature. He was not only a born man
of letters, he was a deeply emotional human being whose appeal was
as much to the heart as to the head. The romantic Celtic mysticism of
‘Aylwin,’ with its lack of fashionable Celtic nebulosity, lends itself,
if you will, to laughter, though personally I saw nothing funny in
it: it seemed to me, before I was in touch with the author, a work of
genuine expression from within; and that it truly was so I presently
knew. The mysticism of Watts-Dunton (who, once comfortably settled at
the fireside, knew no reserve) was in contrast with the frock-coat and
the practical abilities; but it was essential, and they were of the
surface. For humorous Rossetti, I daresay, the very contrast made
Theodore’s company the more precious. He himself had assuredly been,
and the memory of him still was, the master-fact in Watts-Dunton’s
life. ‘Algernon’ was as an adopted child, ‘Gabriel’ as a long-lost
only brother. As he was to the outer world of his own day, so too to
posterity Rossetti, the man, is conjectural and mysterious. We know that
he was in his prime the most inspiring and splendid of companions. But
we know this only by faith. The evidence is as vague as it is emphatic.
Of the style and substance of not a few great talkers in the past we can
piece together some more or less vivid and probably erroneous notion.
But about Rossetti nothing has been recorded in such a way as to make
him even faintly emerge. I suppose he had in him what reviewers seem
to find so often in books a quality that defies analysis. Listening to
Watts-Dunton, I was always in hope that when next the long-lost turned
up--for he was continually doing so--in the talk, I should see him, hear
him, and share the rapture. But the revelation was not to be. You might
think that to hear him called ‘Gabriel’ would have given me a sense of
propinquity. But I felt no nearer to him than you feel to the Archangel
who bears that name and no surname.
It was always when Watts-Dunton spoke carelessly, casually, of some to
me illustrious figure in the past, that I had the sense of being wafted
right into that past and plumped down in the very midst of it. When he
spoke with reverence of this and that great man whom he had known, he
did not thus waft and plump me; for I, too, revered those names. But I
had the magical transition whenever one of the immortals was mentioned
in the tone of those who knew him before he had put on immortality.
Browning, for example, was a name deeply honoured by me. ‘Browning,
yes,’ said Watts-Dunton, in the course of an afternoon, ‘Browning,’ and
he took a sip of the steaming whisky-toddy that was a point in our day’s
ritual. ‘I was a great diner-out in the old times. I used to dine out
every night in the week. Browning was a great diner-out, too. We were
always meeting. What a pity he went on writing all those plays! He
hadn’t any gift for drama--none. I never could understand why he took to
play-writing.’ He wagged his head, gazing regretfully into the fire, and
added, ‘Such a clever fellow, too!’
Whistler, though alive and about, was already looked to as a hierarch by
the young. Not so had he been looked to by Rossetti. The thrill of the
past was always strong in me when Watts-Dunton mentioned--seldom without
a guffaw did he mention--‘Jimmy Whistler.’ I think he put in the surname
because ‘that fellow’ had not behaved well to Swinburne. But he could
not omit the nickname, because it was impossible for him to feel the
right measure of resentment against ‘such a funny fellow.’ As heart-full
of old hates as of old loves was Watts-Dunton, and I take it as high
testimony to the charm of Whistler’s quaintness that Watts-Dunton did
not hate him. You may be aware that Swinburne, in ‘88, wrote for one of
the monthly reviews a criticism of the ‘Ten O’Clock’ lecture. He paid
courtly compliments to Whistler as a painter, but joined issue with his
theories. Straightway there appeared in the World a little letter from
Whistler, deriding ‘one Algernon Swinburne--outsider--Putney.’ It was
not in itself a very pretty or amusing letter; and still less so did it
seem in the light of the facts which Watts-Dunton told me in some such
words as these: After he’d published that lecture of his, Jimmy Whistler
had me to dine with him at Kettner’s or somewhere. He said “Now,
Theodore, I want you to do me a favour.” He wanted to get me to get
Swinburne to write an article about his lecture. I said “No, Jimmy
Whistler, I can’t ask Algernon to do that. He’s got a great deal of work
on hand just now--a great deal of work. And besides, this sort of thing
wouldn’t be at all in his line.” But Jimmy Whistler went on appealing to
me. He said it would do him no end of good if Swinburne wrote about him.
And--well, I half gave in: I said perhaps I would mention the matter to
Algernon. And next day I did. I could see Algernon didn’t want to do it
at all. But--well, there, he said he’d do it to please me. And he
did it. And then Jimmy Whistler published that letter. A very shabby
trick--very shabby indeed.’ Of course I do not vouch for the exact words
in which Watts-Dunton told me this tale; but this was exactly the tale
he told me. I expressed my astonishment. He added that of course he
‘never wanted to see the fellow again after that, and never did.’ But
presently, after a long gaze into the coals, he emitted a chuckle, as
for earlier memories of ‘such a funny fellow.’ One quite recent memory
he had, too. ‘When I took on the name of Dunton, I had a note from him.
Just this, with his butterfly signature: Theodore! What’s Dunton? That
was very good--very good.... But, of course,’ he added gravely, ‘I took
no notice.’ And no doubt, quite apart from the difficulty of finding
an answer in the same vein, he did well in not replying. Loyalty to
Swinburne forbade. But I see a certain pathos in the unanswered message.
It was a message from the hand of an old jester, but also, I think,
from the heart of an old man--a signal waved jauntily, but in truth
wistfully, across the gulf of years and estrangement; and one could wish
it had not been ignored.
Some time after Whistler died I wrote for one of the magazines an
appreciation of his curious skill in the art of writing. Watts-Dunton
told me he had heard of this from Swinburne. ‘I myself,’ he said, ‘very
seldom read the magazines. But Algernon always has a look at them.’
There was something to me very droll, and cheery too, in this picture of
the illustrious recluse snatching at the current issues of our twaddle.
And I was immensely pleased at hearing that my article had ‘interested
him very much.’ I inwardly promised myself that as soon as I reached
home I would read the article, to see just how it might have struck
Swinburne. When in due course I did this, I regretted the tone of the
opening sentences, in which I declared myself ‘no book-lover’ and avowed
a preference for ‘an uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures.’ I felt
that had I known my article would meet the eye of Swinburne I should
have cut out that overture. I dimly remembered a fine passage in one of
his books of criticism--something (I preferred not to verify it) about
‘the dotage of duncedom which cannot perceive, or the impudence of
insignificance so presumptuous as to doubt, that the elements of life
and literature are indivisibly mingled one in another, and that he to
whom books are less real than life will assuredly find in men and women
as little reality as in his accursed crassness he deserves to discover.’
I quailed, I quailed. But mine is a resilient nature, and I promptly
reminded myself that Swinburne’s was a very impersonal one: he would not
think the less highly of me, for he never had thought about me in any
way whatsoever. All was well. I knew I could revisit The Pines, when
next Watts-Dunton should invite me, without misgiving. And to this day
I am rather proud of having been mentioned, though not by name, and not
consciously, and unfavourably, by Swinburne.
I wonder that I cannot recall more than I do recall of those hours at
The Pines. It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how
few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and
how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured... I am
middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one third
of these, for one mustn’t count sleep as life. The residual number is
still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was unimportant to me
in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course; but even boredom is a
positive state: one chafes at it and hates it; strange that one
should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that of one’s actual
happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a remnant clings
about one! Of those hours at The Pines, of that past within a past,
there was not a minute nor a second that I did not spend with pleasure.
Memory is a great artist, we are told; she selects and rejects and
shapes and so on. No doubt. Elderly persons would be utterly intolerable
if they remembered everything. Everything, nevertheless, is just what
they themselves would like to remember, and just what they would like
to tell to everybody. Be sure that the Ancient Mariner, though he
remembered quite as much as his audience wanted to hear, and rather
more, about the albatross and the ghastly crew, was inwardly raging at
the sketchiness of his own mind; and believe me that his stopping only
one of three was the merest oversight. I should like to impose on the
world many tomes about The Pines.
But, scant though my memories are of the moments there, very full and
warm in me is the whole fused memory of the two dear old men that lived
there. I wish I had Watts-Dunton’s sure faith in meetings beyond the
grave. I am glad I do not disbelieve that people may so meet. I like to
think that some day in Elysium I shall--not without diffidence--approach
those two and reintroduce myself. I can see just how courteously
Swinburne will bow over my hand, not at all remembering who I am.
Watts-Dunton will remember me after a moment: ‘Oh, to be sure, yes
indeed! I’ve a great deal of work on hand just now--a great deal of
work, but’ we shall sit down together on the asphodel, and I cannot but
think we shall have whisky-toddy even there. He will not have changed.
He will still be shaggy and old and chubby, and will wear the same
frock-coat, with the same creases in it. Swinburne, on the other hand,
will be quite, quite young, with a full mane of flaming auburn locks,
and no clothes to hinder him from plunging back at any moment into the
shining Elysian waters from which he will have just emerged. I see him
skim lightly away into that element. On the strand is sitting a man of
noble and furrowed brow. It is Mazzini, still thinking of Liberty. And
anon the tiny young English amphibian comes ashore to fling himself
dripping at the feet of the patriot and to carol the Republican ode he
has composed in the course of his swim. ‘He’s wonderfully active--active
in mind and body,’ Watts-Dunton says to me. ‘I come to the shore now
and then, just to see how he’s getting on. But I spend most of my time
inland. I find I’ve so much to talk over with Gabriel. Not that he’s
quite the fellow he was. He always had rather a cult for Dante, you
know, and now he’s more than ever under the Florentine influence. He
lives in a sort of monastery that Dante has here; and there he sits
painting imaginary portraits of Beatrice, and giving them all to Dante.
But he still has his great moments, and there’s no one quite like
him--no one. Algernon won’t ever come and see him, because that fellow
Mazzini’s as Anti-Clerical as ever and makes a principle of having
nothing to do with Dante. Look!--there’s Algernon going into the water
again! He’ll tire himself out, he’ll catch cold, he’ll--’ and here the
old man rises and hurries down to the sea’s edge. ‘Now, Algernon,’ he
roars, ‘I don’t want to interfere with you, but I do think, my dear old
friend,’--and then, with a guffaw, he breaks off, remembering that his
friend is not deaf now nor old, and that here in Elysium, where no ills
are, good advice is not needed.