THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES
TO use the famous expression applied by Dr. Johnson to his College at
Oxford, we had quite a nest of singing-birds at 32 Addison Mansions,
for, to mention only three of them, William Watson, John Davidson and
Richard le Gallienne were at the same time habitués of our at-homes, and
Bliss Carman, the Canadian, was constantly with us when he was over
here.
Sir Lewis Morris, who was considered likely to succeed Tennyson as
laureate at a time when those young poets were in the nursery, sometimes
walked down from the Reform Club to call on us, but he always came on
odd afternoons, a tall man, with a gaunt red face, who in those days was
inclined to put his poetical triumphs behind him, and be the Liberal
politician. Personally, I much preferred the poems of Lord de Tabley, a
delightfully dignified, gentle and affable personage. His poems have
never received full justice; for Graeco-Roman atmosphere he must be
classed with those who come just below Shelley, Keats and Matthew
Arnold—above Horne’s “Orion,” I think.
Edmund Gosse, who introduced me to Lord de Tabley, introduced me also to
the late H. O. Houghton, at that time head of the eminent publishing
firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the John Murrays of America, and to the
late Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the _Century Magazine_, two men at
whose houses I met all the most famous authors of Boston and New York
respectively. Gosse, who had for his brother-in-law the late Sir Alma
Tadema, lived in those days at Delamere Terrace, and at his house on
Sunday afternoons you always met authors of real distinction, men like
Lord de Tabley, Maarten Maartens, Austin Dobson, or Wolcott Balestier,
Kipling’s brother-in-law, the type of genius in a frail body. Edmund
Gosse, besides being one of those poets, rare nowadays, who preserve the
traditional grace of form, the distillation of thought which
characterises the poetical masters of the “Golden Treasury,” was
instrumental in giving England Ibsen and the other Scandinavian giants
of the generation.
Austin Dobson, a man who has the mild and magnificent eye of Browning’s
_Lost Leader_, the Horace of lighter English poetry, began life, like
Gosse, as a Civil Servant, and, like Gosse, is as felicitous in his
essays and his criticisms as in his poems. But, since he lived at Ealing
and had five sons and five daughters, he was very little to be seen at
literary gatherings in the days of which I speak.
It is natural to mention Andrew Lang with them. They were the three best
lighter poets of their generation, but Lang had the advantage over the
others of being one of the most brilliant scholars of his time—no man
since the mighty Conington displayed such a mass of classical erudition,
combined with a genius for popularising it, especially in the direction
of translation. Lang’s prose translations can be compared with
Conington’s rhymed versions of Virgil and Horace. He had also a passion
for the occult, and was one of the best scholars in comparative
occultology and mythology.
His tall, lean figure, mop of grey hair, and screwed-up scholar’s eyes,
were as familiar among golfers and anglers as at the Savile Club, and
other literary coteries, which he deigned to honour with his presence.
He reduced rudeness to a fine art, and never showed his heart to any one
old enough to understand it. But he was nearly a big man as well as a
big scholar.
One cannot think of Lang without thinking also of Frederic W. H. Myers,
whom I met far earlier. As a child he was remarkable; at thirteen, on
entering Cheltenham College (where I was educated long afterwards), so
precocious was his scholarship that he was placed with boys of seventeen
and eighteen. I doubt if there ever has lived another English boy who
learned the whole of Virgil by heart for his own pure delight, before he
passed the school age. He won the senior classical scholarship in his
first year at thirteen; besides gaining the first prize for Latin
lyrics, he sent in two English poems in different metres, and both were
the best and came out top!
At the university few men have won more honours. Myers was to Cambridge
as Lang was to Oxford—and more also. He was greater in pure scholarship,
and far greater as a poet, for he wrote “St. Paul,” almost the finest
quatrain poem in the English language. His later volume of poems,
entitled _The Renewal of Youth_, is perhaps less well known, but this
was the poem that he himself cared for most, and its compressed force
and intensity of feeling and wonderful beauty of expression have gained
it a steadily increasing public.
In his later years he became more absorbed in psychical research. The
success of his famous work, _Human Personality, and its Survival of
Bodily Death_, is well known. The epilogue, pp. 341-352, has become
almost a classic, and the book has now been translated into nearly all
European languages. This would have surprised Frederic Myers enormously.
He wrote to a friend in 1900, “I am occupied in writing a big book which
I don’t expect any one to read, but I do it for the satisfaction of my
own conscience.” He laboured in this field up to his death, with the
same ardour and strenuousness that he threw into all his work.
He was a wonderful personality—no one who ever saw his unforgettable
eyes, and beautiful majestic head, and heard his marvellously eloquent
voice, could ever forget him. Myers is buried just where he should be
buried—by the side of Shelley and John Addington Symonds in the new
Protestant cemetery at Rome, under the ancient cypresses which top the
city wall. Close by, this wall of Aurelian is pierced by the gate
through which St. Paul was led to his martyrdom. The people who stood on
the wall where the author of “St. Paul” lies buried, could have seen the
Saint pass out.
Myers and H. M. Stanley married two sisters. I always though it so
appropriate that Stanley’s brother-in-law, one of the greatest scholars
Cambridge ever nursed, should have been so great an explorer in the
Universe. A mutual friend told me that when Myers was on his deathbed,
Henry Sidgwick, the philosopher, quoted to Mrs. Myers some lines in “The
Renewal of Youth,” the poem which Myers himself, and many of his
Cambridge friends, thought the best of all his work—
“Ah, welcome then that hour which bids thee lie
In anguish of thy last infirmity!
Welcome the toss for ease, the gasp for air,
The visage drawn, and Hippocratic stare;
Welcome the darkening dream, the lost control,
The sleep, the swoon, the arousal of the soul!”
Sidgwick thought these lines, and indeed, the whole poem, wonderful, far
finer than “St. Paul.”
Of the younger generation of the poets, four of the most noted, William
Watson, W. B. Yeats, John Davidson and le Gallienne, were at one time
almost weekly at our flat. Watson, whose powerful clean-shaven face
always reminded me of Charles James Fox, before that inventor of
irresponsible Liberalism lost his looks by dissipation, I see still
sometimes. It was only last year that he and his beautiful young wife
asked me to visit them at their house in the country.
The sturdy Yorkshire stock of which he came is reflected in his poems.
He is accustomed to think and write upon large national and
international movements, and he has a splendid gift of sonorous and
epigrammatic diction. I did not share the views he expressed, but that
did not prevent me from admiring the way in which he expressed them. In
my mind, there was no question but that the laureateship lay between him
and Kipling. But at Oxford Bridges already had a reputation as a poet
while I was an undergraduate.
When Yeats first came to our house he was a shock-headed Irish boy of
twenty-six, without any regard for his personal appearance. He did not
care whether he had any studs in his shirt or not, and once he came in
evening dress without a tie. But we knew then that he was a genius, and
the world knows it now. He has a fairy-like muse, whose quill is dipped
in pathos. He had then only just given up the idea of being an artist,
like his father. He was an art student for three years. His poems and
plays will live.
Yeats was very naïve. I remember his complaining to me in the early days
of the Irish Literary Society that it suffered under a grave
disadvantage; its authors were unable to write as “nationalistically” as
they would have desired, because the Irish never bought books, and the
brutal Saxon would not buy them if they went too far in denouncing him.
Those were not his exact words, but they give the substance of them. One
might fancy that these young men and young women, falling between the
devil and the deep sea, took refuge in playwriting, because the
Englishman will go and see a play which is sufficiently pathetic or
sufficiently funny, no matter how disloyal to himself its sentiments may
be; but his purse-strings are tighter with regard to displeasing books.
Yeats was always highly appreciated. When he published _John Sherman_ it
was thought that he had a career as a novelist before him, but he did
not follow this up.
Another Irishman whom I may mention here is Dr. Todhunter, though he
already had some silver in his beard twenty years ago, and was the
_doyen_ of our poets, and at the beginning the most considerable in his
accomplishments. He had made his name with “The Black Cat” and the
“Sicilian Idyll,” and belonged to an older generation.
English literature is much the poorer by John Davidson having taken his
own life, in despair at the scantiness of the rewards which his genius
could earn. Davidson was a man I liked very much. His robust personality
was reflected in his brilliant eyes and colouring. His heartiness and
sincerity were transparent and he was a very vital poet. He came often.
Davidson was inspired; there are lines of white fire in “The Ballad of
the Nun.” His cheery, courageous face and blithe smile did not in the
least suggest a man who would commit suicide; they were much more
suggestive of the bloods who lived in the piping times of King George
III. He was another Lane discovery, I think, and I suspect that Lane
brought him to our house, as he brought Beardsley and many another man
destined to be celebrated, W. J. Locke among them.
Le Gallienne I knew better than any of them. He and his brother-in-law,
James Welch, were conspicuous features at our parties, Welch because he
was irresistibly funny, and in the habit of exercising his wonderful
gift of mimicry at odd moments—we all believed in his future eminence.
Le Gallienne was even more conspicuous for his personal appearance and
frank posing. He had a face like Shelley, and the true hyacinthine
curls, if hyacinthine curls mean the rich, waving black hair which one
associates with the Greeks of mythology. He was really a rather vigorous
and athletic man, and he used to say in the most captivating way, “You
mustn’t mind me letting my hair grow, and living up to it—it is part of
my stock-in-trade. People wouldn’t come to hear me lecture without it.”
Undoubtedly his picturesque appearance made him one of the most striking
figures in any literary assemblage, but he also had splendid gifts as a
poet. I have always thought that his version of Omar Khayyam is one of
the most beautiful, and has never received justice in comparison with
other versions. Like Fitzgerald, he was unable to translate from the
original, but that did not signify, because hardly any one in England,
in or out of the Omar Khayyam Club, can understand the original, and the
most popular version of the Rubaiyat is valued, not for what Omar put
into it, but for what Fitzgerald put into it. Huntly McCarthy, who was
only in our house once or twice, did, of course, actually make a
translation of the Rubaiyat, but he is a literary marvel who has not yet
come into his own, author of exquisite poems, and of some of the most
brilliant and delightful historical novels by any living writer. His
father, the genial leader of the Home Rule Party, who loved Ireland
without hating England, and wrote history blindfolded to prejudice, that
grand old man, Justin McCarthy, was a much more frequent visitor. I can
see him now, with his long beard, and eloquent Irish eyes behind very
conspicuous glasses, leaning on his daughter Charlotte, and I can hear
his rich brogue. It was a great honour to be admitted to the intimate
friendship of Justin McCarthy, and when he grew more infirm, and went to
die at Westgate, where he lived on for a surprising time, he never
failed to remember me with a line at Christmas.
I ought to mention Oscar Wilde here, who had a wonderful gift of
poetical expression, and whom I met when we were both undergraduates at
Oxford, where he used to call himself O. O’F. Wills Wilde—Oscar
O’Flaherty Wills Wilde. He was always known as Wills Wilde.
But our parties were too crowded for him; he prefered to come to see me
on a chance afternoon, like Lewis Morris. He hated having people
introduced to him, until he had expressed the desire that they should
have the honour, and in meetings so Bohemian he could not have escaped
it. He took a scholarship at Oxford, and won the University prize for
the English poem, and I rather think he got a First Class, but one did
not think of him _dans cette galère_. He had, even in those days, a
desire to be conspicuous, and in those days æstheticism pranced through
the land. Garments of funny-coloured green baize, with a Greek absence
of any pretence at dressmaking, were the badge of the æsthetic female,
who to take first prize was required to have red hair and green eyes,
and a mouth like a magenta foxglove. And the idea was that men should
wear black velvet knickerbocker suits, with silk stockings and black
velvet caps like pancakes. I never saw them doing it, except in an
æsthetic pottery shop in the Queen’s Road, Bayswater, where they sold
Aspinall’s enamels, and on the stage, where Gilbert and Sullivan’s
_Patience_ took the place now occupied by works of genius like Bernard
Shaw’s _Chocolate Soldier_. Wilde never wore the dress at Oxford, but he
was quite courageous in adjuncts. At one time he banished all the
decorations from his rooms, except a single blue vase of the true
æsthetic type which contained a “Patience” lily. He was discovered by
the other undergraduates of Magdalen prostrated with grief before it
because he never could live up to it. They did what they could to revive
him by putting him under the college pump.
But they applauded his wit, at the coining of a famous example of which
I was privileged to be present. We were both in for a Divinity exam. at
the same time. There was no Honour school in Divinity; it was simply a
qualifying exam. to show that we had sufficient knowledge of the
rudiments of the religion of the Church of England to be graduates of a
religious university; we used to call the exam. “Rudiments” for short.
I went to the exam., like a good young man, at the advertised hour, nine
o’clock; Wilde did not arrive till half-an-hour later, and when Spooner,
the Head of New College, who was one of our examiners, asked him what he
meant by being so late, he said, “You must excuse me; I have no
experience of these pass examinations.”
It was the morning of the _viva voce_ examinations, and his being late
did not really signify because W is one of the last letters in the
alphabet. But the examiners were so annoyed at his impertinence that
they gave him a Bible, and told him to copy out the long twenty-seventh
chapter of the Acts. He copied it out so industriously in his exquisite
handwriting that their hearts relented, and they told him that he need
not write out any more. Half-an-hour afterwards they noticed that he was
copying it out as hard as ever, and they called him up to say, “Didn’t
you hear us tell you, Mr. Wilde, that you needn’t copy out any more?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “I heard you, but I was so interested in what I was
copying, that I could not leave off. It was all about a man named Paul,
who went on a voyage, and was caught in a terrible storm, and I was
afraid that he would be drowned, but, do you know, Mr. Spooner, he was
saved, and when I found that he was saved, I thought of coming to tell
you.”
As Mr. Spooner was nephew of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the insult
was of a peculiarly aggravating nature, and he ploughed him then and
there. As my name also came low down in the alphabet, I was a witness of
the whole performance.
Herbert Trench, the poet, who, when he became a theatrical manager,
discovered the “Blue Bird,” often came, a very handsome Irishman of the
blue-eyed and black-haired type. I met him when he and I were fellow
members of the House Committee which discussed the poorness of the
dinners at the old Authors’ Club.
Frederick Langbridge, the charming poet, who was joint author of Martin
Harvey’s evergreen “Only Way,” only came once or twice, because, like
Dean Swift, he was exiled by an Irish preferment. He is Rector of
Limerick.
Wilde once brought a friend with him, whose name was Barlass. He wrote
poetry which Wilde admired, though it had no market, and claimed to be a
descendant of the Katherine Douglas who barred the door with her arm
when the bolt had been stolen, to save King James III of Scotland from
his murderers, and was nicknamed Katherine Barlass. I have a volume of
his poems still, but the thing I remember best about him was an episode
which happened when we were both at Wilde’s house in Tite Street one
day. Upstairs in the drawing-room he had asked Wilde, “What do you think
of George Meredith’s novels?”
Wilde, having nothing effective to say at the moment, appeared not to
hear him. But as he was going out of the front door, he said, “George
Meredith is a sort of prose Browning,” and when Barlass was halfway down
Tite Street, he called after him, “And Browning also is a sort of prose
Browning.”
Bliss Carman wrote some of the most delightful poetry of them all. Born
in Canada, where they have eternal sunshine in summer, and brought up in
those parts of the Maritime provinces where little mountains and little
lakes and little rivers and little forests combine with a bold coastline
to make Acadia an Arcady, it was only natural that he should be able to
transfigure in his poems the Old World Arcady, with Pan, Faun, Syrinx
and Adonis, and all the lovely rabble of mountain, sea and woodland
nymphs.
Carman could write from a typical Canadian inspiration also. He could
make you see Grandpré, and the lives of the men who won Canada from the
wilds and maintained a seignorial grace of life in the new France, which
was born in the days of the Roi Soleil, and lived under the white flag
till it went down in the glorious sunset on the heights of Abraham.
Carman’s poetry is rich in romance, and he was a romantic figure, for
with his great stature and fair hair, and blue eyes, he looked as if he
might have been one of the Norsemen led to the far north of the
continent by Leif, the son of Erik, a thousand years ago, whose
descendants were discovered roaming in the Arctic only the other day. As
a matter of fact, he was descended from one of the most famous men among
the United Empire loyalists, who left the United States when they could
no longer live there under the British flag, and gave Canada her
unconquerable backbone.
I should have mentioned ere this two dear friends of ours who are both
dead—William Sharp and Gleeson White. White was one of my oldest
literary friends. We knew him when we were living at Richmond before we
went to America, and saw a lot of him during the three years we were
there. We came home, I think, just before him. William Sharp introduced
him to us. Sharp, who was the friend of nearly every well-known author
of his time, began life as poet and critic. As general editor of the
“Canterbury Poets,” his name is a household word. There was no
wider-minded critic, none who had a wider knowledge of the poetry and
other verses of his day. But his chief contribution to literature
consisted of the works of “Fiona Macleod,” which were never acknowledged
as his during his lifetime, though he never denied their authorship to
me. We saw him frequently, not only at Addison Mansions, but abroad,
for, like ourselves, he was an insatiable wanderer over Italy and
Sicily.
Gleeson White did not write much verse himself, but he edited a volume
of society verses under the title of _Ballades and Rondeaux_, in the
“Canterbury Poets,” which had a really public effect. It collected the
best examples of the ballades and rondeaux, and verse in other old
French forms, written by Gosse and Dobson, and Lang, and other
well-known writers, in such a convenient form, and gave the rules for
writing them so clearly, that everybody who had any skill in versifying
set to work to write ballades and rondeaux, and bombard the magazines
and newspapers with them. There was a rage of ballade-writing which can
only be compared to the limerick competitions of _Pearson’s Weekly_. Of
Gleeson White’s accomplishments as an art critic I have spoken
elsewhere.
Edgar Fawcett, the New Yorker who was so often at our parties on both
sides of the Atlantic, was one of the best American writers of ballades,
though thousands of American writers, according to the sardonic Miss
Gilder, turned them out by machinery.
Sharp himself was more inclined to the sonnet, as was our mutual friend,
Theodore Watts (now Watts-Dunton), who lived with Swinburne at the
Pines, Putney, and will always be remembered as Swinburne’s greatest
friend. Watts’s sonnets in the _Athenæum_ became as well known to
literary people as Dr. Watts’s hymns. They were among the best sonnets
of the day. Watts was Swinburne’s companion on his famous swimming
excursions. Like the matchless poet who refused the laureateship, he was
a magnificent swimmer.
Hall Caine was at that time the chief authority upon the sonnet, as he
was one of the chief literary critics of the _Athenæum_ and the
_Academy_. He gave me about that time his _Sonnets of Three Centuries_,
which I still keep.
Two other followers of the Muse who came to our parties were Mackenzie
Bell and Norman Gale.
Adrian Ross—Arthur Reed Ropes—who so long carried on a dual literary
life—a Fellow of King’s, an Examiner to the University, and writer of
text-books at Cambridge, while he wrote the songs for George Edwardes’s
musical comedies in London, was a friend of ours before he came to live
in Addison Mansions, partly, I believe, because we lived there. He is an
amazingly clever man; his general knowledge is extraordinary. He took
various ’varsity scholarships and prizes at Cambridge and was the ablest
of the clever journalists with whom Clement Shorter surrounded himself
for his great move. He may also fairly claim to be W. S. Gilbert’s
successor as a writer of really witty and scholarly songs (which have
also been amazingly popular) for the principal musical comedies from _A
Greek Slave_ till the present day. Adrian Ross, who is a Russian by
birth, looks like a Russian with his big, burly form, and fair beard and
glasses, when you see him taking the chair at some feast of reason like
the Omar Khayyam Club. He is one of the chief Omarians, and might, if he
devoted himself to it, write just such a poem as Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat”
himself, for he has the gift of form, the wit, and the width of
knowledge, to draw upon. In the same way, if he had been born early
enough, he would have written some of our best ballades and rondeaux.
There, in addition to his extraordinary facility, he had the advantage
of being one of the best-read men in England on French literature, and
one of the chief authorities upon it. He married Ethel Wood, an actress
as clever as she is pretty, who, if she acted more, would be one of our
most successful character-actresses.
Rowland Thirlmere was another dual personality. When he came to see us
at Addison Mansions he was Rowland Thirlmere the poet, literary to his
finger-tips; when he was at home at Bury he was John Walker, a
Lancashire cotton-mill manager, an ardent Conservative politician, a
“Wake up, England!” man. Did he not write _The Clash of Empires_, a
classic on the German peril?
Douglas Ainslie, the poet of the Stuarts, who has now established for
himself a solid reputation in Philosophy, was still a diplomat when he
first used to come to see us.
We had not so many poetesses. The chief of them was Lady Lindsay, whose
_In a Venetian Gondola_ went through many editions, a poetess of the
same order and rank as the Hon. Mrs. Norton a generation before. Her
poetry was strengthened by sincere piety and morality. They gave it the
mysterious quality which attracts us in the old Sienese pictures.
Among the younger poetesses who came to us, two stood out—Ethel
Clifford, Mrs. W. K. Clifford’s daughter, who married Fisher Dilke, and
Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall.
The charm of Mrs. Dilke’s poetry is universally admitted, but Miss
Hall’s has not yet received anything like the recognition which it
deserves.
She is a step-daughter of the famous musician, Albert Visetti, and much
younger than any of the others. To see her, even to speak with her, one
would think that she thought more of her hunting-box and her horses than
of abstractions like poetry. At the time when I first met her, her
winters were equally divided between travelling and hunting, and she
appears to have gathered inspiration from both of these sources. Her
outdoor life in one of our most beautiful counties has given her a deep
love and appreciation of the country pleasures only to be found in
England. There is no one I know who writes more from inspiration. I
reviewed her first book, _’Twixt Earth and Stars_, with real enthusiasm.
Since then she has published _A Sheaf of Verses_, _Poems of the Past and
Present_, and _Songs of Three Counties and Other Poems_. Of these three
volumes, _Poems of the Past and Present_ shows her at her best.
Visetti was born a Dalmatian, but he has for thirty years been a British
subject—and a very patriotic British subject. He had the celebrated
composer, Arrigo Boito, for a fellow-student at the Conservatoire at
Milan. An even greater composer, Auber, introduced him to the splendid
court of the third Napoleon. Dumas père wrote a libretto for him. He was
Adelina Patti’s musical adviser for five years, and wrote “La Diva” for
her. He was admitted to the personal friendship of both the late King
Edward and the late Duke of Edinburgh. He was the first professor
appointed to the staff of the Royal College of Music. He has written
lives of Palestrina and Verdi.
“Dolly Radford,” a writer of delicate and sympathetic verse, and her
husband, Ernest Radford, used to come to us in those days. So, very
occasionally, did two Irish poetesses, Mrs. Shorter and Katherine Tynan.
The former, wife of the editor of the _Sphere_, has won herself an
assured position by Celtic ballads of a highly imaginative order. She is
Yeats’s closest rival.
I first met Mrs. Clement Shorter when she was staying with Miss
Katherine Tynan (Mrs. Hinkson) at Ealing, where Shorter first met her.
Mrs. Hinkson thus recalls Miss Dora Sigerson, as she was then, in her
_Reminiscences_—
“I was the means of introducing Dora some years later to Mr. Clement
Shorter, whom she married.
“We were all possessed with the common impulse towards literature. We
were all making our poems and stories. Dora Sigerson, who was then a
strikingly handsome girl, was painting as well, making statuettes and
busts, doing all sorts of things, and looking like a young Muse. Dr.
Sigerson was, as he is happily doing to-day, dispensing the most
delightful hospitality. His Sunday-night dinners were, and are, a
feature of literary life in Dublin, chiefly of the literary life which
has the colour of the green. At the time there was no Irish Literary
Society, as there is now, with Dr. Sigerson for its President. The best
of the young intellect of Dublin was to be found at Dr. Sigerson’s
board.”
Mrs. Shorter has written several volumes of poetry, one with an
introduction by George Meredith, novels and short stories. She also
still paints in oils, and models; her country garden at Great Missenden
has many examples of her talent in this direction.
Mrs. Shorter’s poetry has an ample range. Some of her ballads are
pitiful tragedies, told with a delicate sense of ballad simplicity, and
an exquisite ear for the broken music which is so essential to ballads;
and, at the other end of the gamut, she can also write songs in a
lighter vein that deserve a composer like Bishop to set them to
music—such songs as the poem called “The Spies” in her _Madge Linsey_
volume.
Katherine Tynan, who had married H. A. Hinkson before we ever met
personally, though years earlier she had given me introductions to
Louise Imogen Guiney, the American poetess, and other valued friends
among the writers in America, is the author of short lyrics, human and
graceful, which ought to find a permanent place in our anthologies, as
well as a popular novelist, and has lately written a charming volume of
her _Reminiscences_.
I have left Sir Edwin Arnold, Thomas Hardy and W. E. Henley to the end
of this chapter. Arnold, whom I used to see daily when we were both
living in Tokyo, was too infirm to come to us much in Addison Mansions
in his last days.
While he was in Japan, he lived in a native house in Azabu outside
Treaty limits, receiving permission to do so under the legal fiction
that he was tutor to the daughters of the wealthy Japanese who lent him
the house under a similar fiction. It was just outside the Azabu Temple,
a favourite resort for holiday-makers, and had delightful bamboo-brakes,
which rustled rhythm to Arnold in his garden. The house had its proper
paraphernalia of shifting wooden and paper shutters, thick padded mats
of primrose straw, flat cushions to kneel on, flat quilts to sleep on,
tobacco-stoves, finger-stoves and kakemonos. It was so native that you
always had to take off your boots when you went to see him. Here he
wrote the _Light of the World_, and he used to read it to me batch by
batch as he finished it. His manuscript was most edifying; he wrote a
beautiful scholarly hand, full of character, rather like the hand of
Lanfranc, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of William the
Conqueror. He did very little sight-seeing or bargaining. His time was
taken up with receiving Buddhist abbots and the sages who, by
extraordinary abstinence and striking concentrations of mind and will,
had acquired supernatural powers, just as Hall Caine used to see the
leading Mohammedan _ulema_ in Egypt. They had a profound respect for
him. I always fancy that Arnold had in his mind some _magnum opus_ on
those Eastern superhumans, which he never gave to the world. He wrote a
good deal of poetry in those days besides the _Light of the World_,
chiefly translations, adaptations and imitations of the Hokku and other
Japanese forms of verse, in which he excelled. He not only had the
natural charm, he could put his mind on an Eastern plane of thought. He
looked quite Oriental when he was in Japanese dress; his dark skin, his
Oriental type, the deep reserve which lay behind his affability, all
suggested the child of the East.
Thomas Hardy (who honoured us with his presence very rarely) I must
mention in this context as a poet and not as a novelist, though he is
the head of the novelists’ craft to-day, undoubtedly. I am not certain
that he is not also our truest living poet, except Kipling. He has
certainly come nearer to finding a new poetical form than any modern
poet except Yone Noguchi, the marvellous Japanese, who has written some
of the finest contemporary poetry in our language, for Walt Whitman’s
psalm forms are not suited for any country but America, or for any
writer who is not one of the people working with his hands. His
crudities would not be tolerable in an educated man. But Hardy struck
out entirely fresh forms. Hardy shook off the ancient trammels of rhyme
and metre, while preserving a rich rhythm and a scholarly elegance, in
poems inspired with a broad humanity.
Henley, who, like Gray, wrote a few gems, which will find their place in
every anthology, was never in our flat at Addison Mansions, though he
was a friend of mine; he could not have climbed so many stairs if he had
tried.
I remember two sayings of his specially. In those days I wrote verses;
and he was good enough to read my books of verse and advise me on them.
He said there was some hope for me because I wrote short pieces, and, in
his opinion, the perfect poem should never contain more than three
stanzas. But I have long since abandoned verse writing.
The other was a thing which he said to me when he was giving me some
introductions, on the eve of my departure for America. I thought it was
a joke then, but subsequent events threw a light on it. He was urging me
after I left America to go on and see Stevenson at Samoa. He said that
Stevenson would be my inspiration, and as he was handing me the
introduction he said to me, with what I considered unnecessary emphasis,
“And when you see him, tell the beggar that I hate him for being so
beastly successful.”
Years afterwards Henley wrote of Stevenson with an acidity which his
friends regretted very much, and which proved to me that what he had
said to me as we were parting was one of those outbursts of candour for
which Henley was famous.
It required a big man like Henley to confess that he was envious, and
perhaps there was good reason why he should be, for considering the way
their careers began, and Henley’s magnificent intellect and gift of
expression, one would not have prophesied in the beginning that Henley
would only be appreciated by the critical few, and Stevenson by all the
world, gentle and simple.
I never did see Stevenson. We meant to have taken Samoa on our way back
from Japan to San Francisco, but the Japanese boat which should have
taken us there broke down, and we could not wait for the next.
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