[Footnote A: Preface to the first edition.]
As I sit, this hot July day, by my window on the Walk, while the two
streams, of traffic and of Thames, drift past me, I think of the man
who was my friend, the man who loved this scene so well.
And he is dead. In my hand, as I write, lie his last written words, a
hasty scribble ere the steamer left port on her voyage across the
Atlantic. He is busy, as is evident by the greasy thumb-mark on the
corner. He sat down in the midst of his work to send a last line to
his friend. There is the inevitable joke at the expense of "his friend
the Mate," that individual being in a towering passion with a certain
pig which had escaped from his enclosure. This same pig, he declares,
is some previous First Officer, who had been smitten by Circe for
incontinence, and now wanders even from his sty! But I cannot go on in
this way, for he is dead, poor lad, and I shall not see him again.
To those men who have wedded early I can never hope to explain the
deep-rootedness of such a friendship as ours. It was, to me, as though
my own youth were renewed in more perfect design. Never again shall I
experience that exquisite delight with which one sees a youth reach
post after post along the ways of life and thought, reach out eagerly
to field on field of knowledge, through which one has tramped or
scampered so many years before. With something of wonder, too, was I
inspired to see so young a man lead a life so perfectly balanced, so
exquisitely sensitive to every fine masculine influence. Possessing to
an unusual degree that rare temperament which we call culture, he
entered joyously into all that life offered to him, impatient only of
hypocrisy and what he called "the copiously pious." Many misunderstood
this phase of his character, mistaking for coarseness what was really
a very fine love of honesty in thinking.
Of his antecedents I have often wished to know something, but it was
his whim to treat personal details in a very general way. He would
maintain obstinately that he himself was the most interesting person
he had ever met, because, he would add, he knew so little about
himself! When pressed, he would say, "My forefathers plowed the soil,
my father plowed the ocean, I myself am the full corn in the ear." As
to his childhood, he rarely mentioned it save in a cynical manner,
indicating indisputably enough that all had not gone well.
"In the beginning," I heard him tell a religious person, "In the
beginning my mother bore me. When I was a child I was wont to bore my
mother. Now we bore each other." That this was primarily intended to
shock our friend's devotional sensibilities I do not doubt, but I
imagine it contained some small truth all the same. I think he
rather shrank from personalities, resolutely refusing even to be
photographed, hating that process with an unexampled vehemence strange
in one so modern and so versed in mechanical and chemical science.
"I!" he would rage. "What have _I_ done to merit portraiture? Have I
builded a city, or painted a masterpiece, or served my country, or
composed an iliad?" Again, "Better a single faulty _human_ effort than
the most perfect photograph ever developed."
Scanty indeed, therefore, did I find the materials with which to
fashion an introduction to this book. With the exception of one or two
pertinent fragments among his manuscripts, fragments more valuable to
a critic than a biographer, I was unrewarded. One thing, however, was
impressed upon me by my search. Here, at any rate, was a man developed
to the full. Here was a man whose culture was deep and broad, whose
body was inured to toil, whose hands and brains were employed in doing
the world's work. I have read in books vehement denials of such a
one's existence. He himself, in citing Ruskin, seemed to be sceptical
of any one man becoming a passionate thinker and a manual worker. But
I have often heard him in close converse with some old shopmate,
passing hour after hour in technical reminiscences and descriptions;
then, upon the entrance of some artist or _litterateur_, plunge into
the history of Letters or of Arts, never at a loss for authorities or
original ideas, often even illuminating intellectual problems by some
happy analogy with the problems of his trade, and rarely grounding on
either the Scylla of overbearing conceit or the Charybdis of foolish
humility.
I must insist on this fact at all events: he was not merely a clever
young man of modern ideas. "London is paved and bastioned with clever
young men," he would snarl. His aversion to the impossible type of
cultured nonentities was almost too marked. His passion for thinking
as an integral part of life placed him beyond these, among a rarer,
different class of men, the lovers of solitude. It came to view in
various ways, this fine quality of intellectual fibre. And, indeed,
he--who had in him so much that drove him towards the fine Arts, yet
could go out to earn his bread upon the waters, dwelling among those
who had no glimmering of the things he cared for--was no slippered
mouther of Pater and Sainte-Beuve but a strong spirit, confident in
his own breadth of pinion, courageous to let Fate order his destiny.
Another outcome of my search for light was a conviction of the
importance of his theory of art. I might almost say his religion
of art, inasmuch as he had no traffic with anything that was not
spontaneous, effervescing. To him a hammer and a chisel were actual
and very real, and the plastic art appealed especially to him in its
character of _smiting_. To smite from the stone, to finish with all a
craftsman's cunning care--there seemed to him real joy in this; and so
I think he felt the influence of art dynamically, maintaining always
that the life-force is also the art-force, and remains constant
throughout the ages. So, I imagine, he reasoned when he wrote the
following verses, only to fling them aside to be forgotten:
_An Author, Sitting to a Sculptor, Speaks His Mind._
And yet you call yourself a sculptor, sir?
You with your tape a-trailing to and fro,
Jotting down figures, frowning when I stir,
Measuring me across the shoulders, so!
And yet you are an artist, they aver,
Heir to the crown of Michelangelo?
I cannot think--eh, what? I ought to think?
How will you have me? Shall I sit at ease,
Staring at nothing thro' the eyelids' chink,
Coining new words for old philosophies?
Aye, so I sit until the pale stars wink
And vanish ere the early morning breeze.
Sculpture is dead, I say! We have no men
To match the mighty masters of the past:
I've read, I've seen their works; the acumen
Of Learning on their triumph I have cast.
Divine! Colossal! Tongue nor pen
Can tell their beauty, O Iconoclast!
Ah, now you're modelling--in the soft clay!
In that prosaic task where is the glow
Of genius, as in great Lorenzo's day,
When, solitary in his studio,
Buonarotti, in his "terrible way,"
Smote swift and hard the marble, blow on blow?
One moment while I ask you, earnestly,
Where is the splendour of the Dorian gone,
The genius of him whose mastery
Outshines the classic grace of Sicyon,
Whose art can show Death lock'd with Life, the cry,
The shuddering moan of poor Laocoon?
_The Sculptor continues to model swiftly while the sitter remains
motionless, watching him._
That's good, sir, good! I'll wait till you have done:
We men of letters are a crabbed race;
Often we're blind with staring at the sun;
And when the evening stars begin their race,
We miss their beauty, we, who creep and run
Like beetles o'er a buried Greek god's face.
I am reluctant to explain one of the main _motifs_ of this young man's
life as "an unfortunate love affair." Indeed, apart from his frank
avowal of the wandering fever in his blood, I am grown to believe that
it was the very reverse of unfortunate for him. It brought him, as
such things do, face to face with Realities, and showed him, sharply
enough, that at a certain point in a man's life there is a Gate,
guarded by the Fates, whose questions he must answer truthfully, or
turn sadly aside into the vague thickets of an aimless existence. And
never did there live a youth more sincere in his thought. I know
nothing more typical of him than his resolute refusal to sit for his
portrait until he had _done_ something memorable. "What!" he would
cry. "Why, the milk-man, who, I heard, has just had twins, is more
worthy of that high honour than I. He has _done_ something in the
world!"
And now he is dead, and doing and not doing are beyond his power. That
the sea whereon he was born should bring him his death was fitting.
Often he would urge his horror, not of death, but of Christian burial.
To be boxed up in the midst of mummeries and lies--he would start up
and pace the floor, the sweat standing on his face. Grimly enough,
Fate took him at his word, flung him suddenly into eternity, the
rushing of the wind his only requiem, the coastwise lights and the
morning star the only watchers of his end.
To the orthodox sentiment sudden death may seem a very horrible sort
of end to a promising life. But, as I sit by my window on the Walk,
while the tides of Thames and traffic flow swiftly by, and the blue
evening mist comes down over the river, transforming dingy wharf and
factory into fairy palace and phantom battlement, it seems to me that
my friend died fitly and well, in the midst of Realities, recking
little that the love he thought secure had passed irrevocably from
him, but never swerving in fidelity to his mistress or devotion to his
friend.
The air grows chilly, and night has fallen over the river.
_Chelsea._