PELHAM HOUSE,
HAMMERSMITH,
Dec. 28, 1904.
DEAR HERBERT,--Since I left Oxford, I have been staying in town. I
can't remember if you ever came across my old friend Hardy--Augustus
Hardy, the art critic--at all events you will know whom I mean. I have
been very much interested and a good deal distressed by my visit. Hardy
is an elderly man now, nearly sixty. He went through Oxford with a good
deal of distinction, and his sketches were much admired. It was
supposed that he had only to present himself at the doors of the
Academy, and that it would surrender at discretion. His family were
rich, and Hardy went up to town to practise art. He was a friend of my
father's, and he was very kind to me as a boy. He was well off, and
lived in a pleasant house of his own in Half Moon Street. He was a
great hero of mine in those days; he had given up all idea of doing
anything great as a painter, but turned his attention to art-criticism.
He wrote an easy, interesting style, and he used to contribute to
magazines on all kinds of aesthetic subjects; he belonged to several
clubs, dined out a great deal, and used to give elaborate little
dinners himself. He was fond of lecturing and speechifying generally;
and he liked the society of young people, young men of an intelligent
and progressive type. He was very free with his money--I suppose he had
nearly three thousand a year--and spent it in a princely kind of way;
when he travelled he travelled like a great gentleman, generally took a
young artist or two with him in whom he was interested, and whose
expenses he paid.
He was in those days an admirable talker, quick, suggestive, amusing,
and with an indefinable charm. He was then a tall, thin, active man,
with flashing eyes, a sanguine complexion, and a mobile face; he wore
his hair rather luxuriantly, and had a picturesque, pointed beard. I
shall never forget the delight of occasional visits to his house; he
was extraordinarily kind and really sympathetic, and he had with young
people a kind of caressing deference in his manner that used to give
one an agreeable sense of dignity. I remember that he had a very deft
way of giving one's halting remarks a kind of twist which used to make
it appear that one had said something profound and poetical.
Well, about twenty years ago, all this came to an end very suddenly.
Hardy lost the greater part of his money at one swoop; he had
inherited, I think, a certain share in his father's business; he had
one brother, older than himself, who carried the business on. Hardy
never looked into money matters, but simply spent whatever came in; the
business came to grief, and Hardy found himself pretty considerably in
debt, with a few hundreds a year of his own. He had, fortunately for
himself, never married; his friends came to his assistance, and
arranged matters as comfortably as possible. Hardy settled in an old
house in Hammersmith, and has lived there ever since. He belonged to
several clubs; but he resigned his membership of all but one, where he
now practically spends his day, and having been always accustomed to
have his own way, and dominate the societies in which he found himself,
took it for granted that he would be the chief person there. He was
always an egoist, but his position, his generosity, and his own charm
had rather tended to conceal the fact.
Well, he has found every one against him in his adversity, and has
suffered from all the petty intrigues of a small and rather
narrow-minded society. His suggestions have been scouted, he has been
pointedly excluded from all share in the management of the club, and
treated with scanty civility. I don't suppose that all this has given
him as much pain as one would imagine, because he has all the
impenetrability and want of perception of the real egoist. I am told
that he used to be treated at one time in the club with indifference,
hostility, and even brutality. But he is not a man to be suppressed--he
works hard, writes reviews, articles, and books, and pays elaborate
civilities to all new members. I have only seen him at long intervals
of late years; but he has stayed with me once or twice, and has often
pressed me to go and see him in town. I had some business to attend
there this Christmas, and I proposed myself. He wrote a letter of
cordial welcome, and I have now been his guest for four days.
I can't express to you the poignant distress which my visit has caused
me; not exactly a personal distress, for Hardy is not a man to be
directly pitied; but the pathos of the whole thing is very great. His
house has large and beautiful rooms, and I recognised many of the
little treasures--portraits, engravings, statuettes, busts, and
books--which used to adorn the house in Half Moon Street. But the man
himself! He has altered very little in personal appearance. He still
moves briskly, and, except that his hair is nearly white, I could
imagine him to be the same hero that I used to worship. But his egoism
has grown upon him to such an extent that his mind is hardly
recognisable. He still talks brilliantly and suggestively at times; and
I find myself every now and then amazed by some stroke of genius in his
talk, some familiar thing shown in a new and interesting light, some
ray of poetry or emotion thrown on to some dusty and well-known
subject. But he has become a man of grievances; he still has, at the
beginning of a talk, some of the fine charm of sympathy. He will begin
by saying that he wants to know what one thinks of a point, and he will
smile in the old affectionate kind of way, as one might smile at a
favourite child; but he will then plunge into a fiery monologue about
his ambitions and his work. He declaims away, with magnificent
gestures. He still interlards his talk with personal appeals for
approbation, for concurrence, for encouragement; but it is clear he
does not expect an answer, and his demands for sympathy have little
more personal value than the reiterated statement in the Litany that we
are miserable sinners has in the mouth of many respectable church-goers.
The result is that I find myself greatly fatigued by my visit. I have
spent several hours of every day in his society, and I do not suppose
that I have uttered a dozen consecutive words; yet many of his
statements would be well worth discussing, if he were capable of
discussion.
The burden of his song is the lack of that due recognition which he
ought to receive; and this, paradoxical as it may appear, is combined
with an intense and childish complacency in his own greatness, his
position, his influence, his literary and artistic achievements.
He seems to live a very lonely life, though a full one; every hour of
his day is methodically mapped out. He has a large correspondence, he
reads the papers diligently, he talks, he writes; but he seems to have
no friends and no associates. His criticisms upon art, which are
suggestive enough, are regarded with undisguised contempt by
professional critics; and I find that they are held to be vitiated by a
certain want of balance and proportion, and a whimsical eclecticism of
taste.
But the pathos of the situation is not the opinion which is held of
him, for he is wholly unconscious of it, and he makes up for any lack
of expressed approbation by the earnest and admiring approval of all he
does, which he himself liberally supplies. It is rather a gnawing
hunger of the soul from which he seems to suffer; he has a simply
boundless appetite for the poor thing which he calls recognition--I
shudder to think how often I have heard the word on his lips--and his
own self-approbation is like a drug which he administers to still some
fretting pain.
He has been telling me to-night a long story of machinations against
him in the club; the perspicacity with which he detected them, the
odious repartees he made, the effective counter-checks he applied. "I
was always a combatant," he says, with a leering gaiety. Then the next
moment he is girding at the whole crew for their stupidity, their
ingratitude, their malignity; and it never seems to cross his mind that
he can be, or has been in the smallest degree, to blame. It distressed
me profoundly, and my mind and heart seemed to weep silent tears.
If he had shown tact, prudence, diligence, if he could have held his
tongue when he first took a different place, he would have had a circle
of many friends by now. Instead of this, I find him barely tolerated.
He talks--he has plenty of courage, and no idea of being put down--but
he is listened to with ill-concealed weariness, and, at best, with
polite indifference. Yet every now and then the old spell falls on me,
and I realise what a noble mind is overthrown. He ought to be at this
time the centre of a set of attached friends, a man spoken of with
reverence, believed in, revisited by grateful admirers--a man whom it
would be an honour and a delight to a young man to know; and the
setting in which he lives is precisely adapted to this role. Instead of
which it may safely be said that, if he were to announce his departure
from town, it would be received with general and cordial satisfaction
by his fellow-clubmen.
Even if he had not his circle, he might live a quiet, tranquil, and
laborious life in surroundings which are simple and yet dignified.
But the poison is in his system, and it afflicts me to think in how
many systems the same poison is at work nowadays. One sees the frankest
form of it in the desire of third-rate people to amass letters after
their names; but, putting aside all mere vulgar manifestations of it,
how many of us are content to do good, solid, beautiful work unpraised,
unsung, unheeded? I will take my own case, and frankly confess that
what is called recognition is a pleasure to me. I like to have work,
which I have done with energy, enjoyment, and diligence, praised--I
hope because it confirms the verdict of my own mind that it has been
faithfully done. But I can also sincerely say that, as far as literary
work goes, the chief pleasure lies in the doing of it; and I could
write with unabated zest even if there were no question of publication
in view--at least, I think so, but one does not know oneself.
In any event, the contemplation of poor Hardy's case is a terrible
lesson to one not to let the desire for praise get too strong a hold,
or, at all events, to be deliberately on one's guard against it.
But the pathos and sadness, after all, remain. "Healing is well," says
the poet, "but wherefore wounds to heal?" and I find myself lost in a
miserable wonder under what law it is that the Creator can mould so
fine a spirit, endow it with such splendid qualities, and then allow
some creeping fault to obscure it gradually, as the shadow creeps over
the moon, and to plunge it into disastrous and dishonourable eclipse.
But I grow tedious; I am inoculated by Hardy's fault. I hastily close
this letter, with all friendly greetings. "Pray accept a blessing!" as
little Miss Flite said. I am going down to my sister's to-morrow.--Ever
yours,