LIBRARY 
 
 U*ivn!V >' California^ 
 
 IRVINE^ 
 
PORTRAITS AND 
 SKETCHES 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 Uniform with this Volume 
 
 SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES 
 GOSSIP IN A LIBRARY 
 FRENCH PROFILES 
 CRITICAL KIT-KATS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
PORTRAITS AND 
 SKETCHES 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. 
 
 AUTHOR OF "FATHER AND SON" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1914 
 
Printed in Englanj 
 
TO 
 
 H. OF C. 
 
 THIS VOLUME IS AFFECTIONATELY 
 DEDICATED 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THESE short studies of authors whom I have known 
 more or less intimately, and have observed with 
 curiosity and admiration, base whatever value they 
 may possess on their independence. They are 
 imperfect, perhaps erroneous, but they are not 
 second-hand. Whether they are the result of a 
 few flashing glimpses, or of the patient scrutiny of 
 many years, in either case they are my own. I hope 
 that some of them, at least, may be found to possess 
 the interest which attaches to even a rude pencil- 
 sketch of a famous person, drawn faithfully from 
 the life. 
 
 The persons dealt with are of widely differing 
 importance, and it is probable that posterity will 
 intensify the distinction between them. Some 
 names are here included which history may neglect 
 altogether ; here are others which we believe will 
 become more and more luminous with the passage 
 of years. But the men discussed in the following 
 pages had the common characteristic of devotion to 
 literature ; all were writers, and each had, in his own 
 time and way, a serious and even a passionate con- 
 ception of the responsibilities of the art of writing. 
 They were all, in their various capacities, engaged 
 
viii Preface 
 
 in keeping bright, and in passing on unquenched, 
 the torch of literary tradition. 
 
 In the case of such men of letters, there has 
 always seemed to me to be a singular interest in 
 observing how personal character acts upon the 
 work performed. It is less entertaining, for instance, 
 to dwell exclusively on the verses of a poet, or ex- 
 clusively on the incidents of his life, than to attempt 
 the more complicated study of these elements in 
 inter-relation to one another, as has been done, but 
 only too rarely, in the best critical biographies. 
 M. Paul Desjardins, in an amusing and illuminating 
 phrase, speaks of " la cinematographic d'une abeille 
 dans le mystere de la mellification." This, I confess, 
 is what I like best in a literary biography, and it is 
 what I have attempted to produce. To analyse the 
 honey is one thing, and to dissect the bee another ; 
 but I find a special pleasure in watching him, myself 
 unobserved, in the act of building up and filling the 
 cells. In what I have recorded, I have tried to 
 concentrate attention, not on vague anecdotes and 
 empty tricks of conduct, but on such traits of 
 character as throw light on the man's intellect and 
 imagination, and are calculated to help us in the 
 enjoyment of his work. And while I hope I have 
 never courted sensation by recounting anything 
 scandalous, I have not hesitated to tell what I 
 believe to be the truth, nor glossed over pecu- 
 liarities of temperament when they help us to 
 comprehend the published writings. 
 
 Of all the human beings whom I have known 
 
Preface 
 
 IX 
 
 I think that Algernon Swinburne was the most 
 extraordinary. It is therefore needless to excuse 
 the length of the essay with which this volume 
 opens. Hitherto little that is trustworthy has been 
 published about this amazing man, around whose 
 career a good deal of legend has at one time or 
 another crystallised. He was so much of a hermit 
 of late years that curiosity has been glad to satisfy 
 itself with tales which were picturesque although 
 they were unfounded. I hope to start the work, 
 which others will continue and make perfect, of 
 preserving the true features of Swinburne as a poet 
 and as a person. My recollections of his person 
 and character are limited and imperfect, and no one 
 is more conscious of their imperfection than I am ; 
 but so far as I can ensure fidelity to the truth, they 
 are true ; and I cannot help hoping that they will 
 be of service to those, perhaps still unborn, who 
 will elaborate the final portrait. Whatever vicis- 
 situdes of taste our literature may undergo, one 
 thing appears to me absolutely certain, that Swin- 
 burne will end by taking his place as one of the fev) 
 unchallenged Immortals, about whose personal and 
 intellectual habits no faithful record is unwelcome. 
 In"Festus" Bailey and "Orion" Home we have 
 typical products of the transitional period between 
 Shelley and Keats on the one hand and Tennyson 
 and Browning on the other. Those who had an 
 opportunity of conversing with these interesting 
 and pathetic figures in their old age are growing 
 rare, while no life of either of them has appeared. 
 
 b 
 
x Preface 
 
 My recollections of Mandell Creighton were written 
 down before the appearance of the " Life " of 
 him published by his accomplished widow. Mrs. 
 Creighton's view of her husband's character,although 
 so exhaustive and so largely illuminated by docu- 
 ments, was pre-eminently ecclesiastical ; I venture 
 to hope that there is therefore still an excuse for 
 preserving the reminiscences of a lay friend, as an 
 appendix to her excellent monument. This is still 
 more the case in respect to Shorthouse, where the 
 official biography, I am bound to confess, seems to 
 me to present not an imperfect so much as a false 
 impression of a very singular person. The great 
 danger of twentieth-century biography is its un- 
 willingness to accept any man's character save at 
 the valuation of his most cautious relatives, and in 
 consequence to reduce all figures to the same 
 smooth forms and the same mediocre proportions. 
 
 The last portrait in my little gallery is more 
 obviously unfinished than any of the rest. If the 
 presence of M. Andre" Gide among so many of those 
 who have passed away is objected to, I will say that 
 I like to feel that I take one living friend with me in 
 my round of respectful visits to the dead. His is 
 not a portrait ; it is hardly an outline ; but I wish 
 to delay no longer in recommending to the study 
 of English readers a fascinating writer, still young, 
 who is destined I believe to take a place in the very 
 first rank of European writers. 
 
 September 1912 EDMUND GOSSE 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PREFACE vii 
 
 SWINBURNE 
 
 PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 
 
 "ORION" HORNE 
 
 AUBREY DE VERE 
 
 A FIRST SIGHT OF TENNYSON 
 
 A VISIT TO WHITTIER 
 
 THE AUTHOR OF "JOHN INGLESANT" 
 
 MANDELL CREIGHTON 
 
 ANDREW LANG 
 
 WOLCOTT BALESTIER 
 
 CARL SNOILSKY 
 
 EUGENE MELCHIOR DE VOGUE 
 
 ANDRE GIDE 
 
 INDEX 
 
SWINBURNE 
 
 1837-1909 
 
SWINBURNE 
 
 MEN who to-day have not passed middle age can 
 scarcely form an impression of what the name and 
 fame of Algernon Charles Swinburne meant forty 
 years ago to those who were then young and enthu- 
 siastic candidates for apprenticeship in the fine arts. 
 Criticism now looks upon his work and possibly it 
 is right in so looking rather as closing than as 
 opening a great poetic era. The conception is of a 
 talent which collects all the detonating elements of 
 a previous illumination, and lets them off, once and 
 for all, in a prodigious culminating explosion, after 
 which darkness ensues. But such a conception of 
 Swinburne, as the floriated termination of the roman- 
 tic edifice, or, once more to change the image, as 
 one who brought up the rear of a long and" straggling 
 army, would have seemed to his adorers of 1869 not 
 merely paradoxical but preposterous. It was not 
 doubted by any of his admirers that here they held 
 an incomparable poet of a new order, " the fairest 
 first-born son of fire," who was to inaugurate a new 
 age of lyric gold. 
 
 This conception was shared alike by the few who 
 in those days knew him personally, and by the many 
 who did not. While the present writer was still in 
 
Portraits and Sketches 
 
 that outer class, he well remembers being told that 
 an audience of the elect, to whom Swinburne recited 
 the yet unpublished " Dolores," had been moved to 
 such incredible ecstasy by it that several of them 
 had sunk on their knees, then and there, and adored 
 him as a god. Those were blissful times, when 
 poets and painters, if they were attached to Keats' 
 "little clan," might hope for honours which were 
 private indeed, and strictly limited, but almost divine. 
 The extraordinary reputation of Swinburne in the 
 later sixties was constructed of several elements. 
 It was built up on the legend of his mysterious 
 and unprecedented physical appearance, of the 
 astonishing verbal beauty of his writings, but most 
 of all on his defiance of the intellectual and religious 
 prejudices of his age and generation. He was not 
 merely a poet, but a flag ; and not merely a flag, but 
 the Red Flag incarnate. There was an idea abroad, 
 and it was not ill-founded, that in matters of taste 
 the age in England had for some time been stationary, 
 if not stagnant. It was necessary to wake people 
 up ; as Victor Hugo had said : " II faut rudoyer 
 le genre humain," and in every gesture it was 
 believed that Swinburne set forth to " rudoyer " the 
 Philistines. 
 
 This was welcome to all young persons sitting in 
 bondage, who looked up to Swinburne as to the 
 deliverer. He also enjoyed, in popular belief, the 
 advantage of excessive youth. In point of fact, his 
 immaturity was not so dazzling as was reported by 
 the newspapers, or, alas 1 as he then himself reported. 
 
Swinburne 5 
 
 When " Poems and Ballads " appeared he was in 
 his thirtieth year, yet he was generally reported 
 to be only twenty-four. This is interesting merely 
 because there are five or six years of Swinburne's 
 early manhood which seem to be without any visible 
 history. What did he do with himself between 
 1860, when "The Queen-Mother" was stillborn, and 
 1865, when he flashed into universal prominence as 
 the author of " Atalanta in Calydon " ? On the large 
 scale, nothing ; on the small scale, the bibliographer 
 (aided by the indefatigable Mr. Thomas J. Wise) 
 detects the review of Baudelaire's " Fleurs du Mai " 
 in the Spectator (1862), and a dim sort of short 
 story in prose called "Dead Love" (1864). No 
 doubt this was a time of tremendous growth in 
 secret ; but, visibly, no flame or even smoke was 
 ejected from the crater of the young volcano. 
 Swinburne told me that he wrote the "Baudelaire" 
 in a Turkish bath in Paris. (There were stranger 
 groves of Academe than this.) No doubt the 
 
 O * 
 
 biographers of the future, intent on rubbing the 
 gold-dust off the butterflies' wings, will tell us every- 
 thing day by day. Meanwhile, these early years 
 continue to be delightfully mysterious, and he was 
 nearly thirty when he dawned in splendour on 
 London. 
 
 Swinburne's second period lasted from 1865 to 
 1871. This was the blossoming-time of the aloe, 
 when its acute perfume first filled the literary salons, 
 and then emptied them ; when for a very short time 
 the poet emerged from his life-long privacy and trod 
 
Portraits and Sketches 
 
 the social stage. The experiment culminated, 1 
 suppose, in his solitary public utterance. He might 
 be called " Single-speech Swinburne," since positively 
 his only performance on his legs was an after-dinner 
 oration, in May 1866, when he responded to the 
 toast of "The Imaginative Literature of England" 
 at Willis's Rooms. This second period was brilliant, 
 but stormy. Swinburne was constitutionally unfitted 
 to shine in mixed society. The events in his career 
 now came fast and thick. The " Atalanta," acclaimed 
 in 1865, had been followed later in the same year by 
 " Chastelard," which made old men begin to dream 
 dreams, and in 1866 by " Poems and Ballads," which 
 roused a scandal unparalleled since Byron left 
 England exactly half a century before. 
 
 Then, when the fury of the public was at its 
 height, there was a meeting between Jowett and 
 Mazzini, at the house of Mr. George Howard 
 (afterwards the ninth Earl of Carlisle), to discuss 
 " what can be done with and for Algernon." And 
 then there came the dedication to the Republic, 
 " the beacon-bright Republic far-off sighted," and 
 all the fervour and intellectual frenzies were success- 
 fully diverted from " such tendrils as the wild Loves 
 wear" to the luminous phantasms of liberty and 
 tyrannicide, to the stripping of the muffled souls 
 of kings, and to all the other glorious, generous 
 absurdities of the Mazzini-haunted "Songs before 
 Sunrise" (1871). This was the period when, after 
 an unlucky experience of London Society, the poet 
 fled to the solitudes again, and nearly lost his life 
 
Swinburne 7 
 
 swimming in the harbour of Etretat. Of this episode 
 I shall presently give a full account. The autumn 
 of 1870 saw him once again in London. It is at this 
 moment, when Swinburne was in his thirty-fourth 
 year, that the recollections which I venture to set 
 down before they be forgotten practically begin. 
 They represent the emotional observations of a boy 
 on whom this mysterious and almost symbolical 
 luminary turned those full beams which were then 
 and afterwards so thriftily withdrawn from the world 
 at large. 
 
 That I may escape as quickly as possible from the 
 necessity of speaking of myself, and yet may detail 
 the credentials of my reminiscences, let me say that 
 my earliest letter from Swinburne was dated Sep- 
 tember 14, 1867, when I was still in my eighteenth 
 year, and that I first saw him in 1868. I was not 
 presented to him, however, until the last week in 
 1870, when, in a note from the kind hostess who 
 brought us together, I find it stated: "Algernon 
 took to you at once, as is seldom the case with him." 
 In spite of this happy beginning, the acquaintance 
 remained superficial until 1873, when, I hardly 
 know how, it ripened suddenly into an intimate 
 friendship. From that time until he left London 
 for good in the autumn of 1879 I saw Swinburne 
 very frequently indeed, and for several years later 
 than that our intercourse continued to be close. 
 These relations were never interrupted, except by 
 his increasing deafness and general disinclination to 
 leave home. I would, then, say that the memories 
 
8 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 I venture to bring forward deal mainly with the 
 years from 1873 to 1880, but extend a little before 
 and after that date. 
 
 The physical conditions which accompany and 
 affect what we call genius are obscure, and have 
 hitherto attracted little but empirical notice. It is 
 impossible not to see that the absolutely normal man 
 or woman, as we describe normality, is very rarely 
 indeed an inventor, or a seer, or even a person of 
 remarkable mental energy. The bulk of what are 
 called entirely " healthy " people add nothing to the 
 sum of human achievement, and it is not the average 
 navvy who makes a Darwin, nor the typical daughter 
 of the plough who develops into an Elizabeth Barrett 
 Browning. There are probably few professional men 
 who offer a more insidious attack upon all that in 
 the past has made life variegated and interesting 
 than the school of robust and old - fashioned 
 physicians who theorise on eccentricity, on varia- 
 tions of the type, as necessarily evil and obviously 
 to be stamped out, if possible, by the State. The 
 more closely we study, with extremely slender 
 resources of evidence, the lives of great men of 
 imagination and action since the beginning of the 
 world, the more clearly we ought to recognise that 
 a reduction of all the types to one stolid uniformity 
 of what is called " health " would have the effect of 
 depriving humanity of precisely those individuals 
 
Swinburne 9 
 
 who have added most to the beauty and variety of 
 human existence. 
 
 This question is one which must in the near 
 future attract the close and sympathetic attention 
 of the medical specialist. At present there seems 
 to be an almost universal confusion between mor- 
 bid aberration and wholesome abnormality. The 
 presence of the latter amongst us is, indeed, scarcely 
 recognised, and an unusual individuality is almost 
 invariably treated as a subject either of disease or of 
 affected oddity. When the physical conditions of men 
 of the highest celebrity in the past are touched upon, 
 it is usual to pass them over with indifference, or 
 else to account for them as the results of disease. 
 The peculiarities of Pascal, or of Pope, or of 
 Michelangelo are either denied, or it is presumed 
 that they were the result of purely morbid factors 
 against which their genius, their rectitude, or their 
 common-sense more or less successfully contended. 
 It is admitted that Tasso had a hypersensitive con- 
 stitution, which cruelty tortured into melancholia, 
 but it is taken for granted that he would -have been a 
 greater poet if he had taken plenty of outdoor 
 exercise. Descartes was of a different opinion, for 
 though his body was regarded as feeble and some- 
 what abnormal, he considered it a machine well 
 suited to his own purposes, and was convinced that 
 the Cartesian philosophy would not have been im- 
 proved, though the philosopher's digestion might, 
 by his developing the thews of a ploughboy. 
 
 These reflections are natural in looking back upon 
 
io Portraits and Sketches 
 
 the constitution of Swinburne, which 1 believe to 
 have been one of the most extraordinary that have 
 been observed in our time. It would be a pity if its 
 characteristics should be obscured by caricature on 
 the one hand or by false sentiment on the other. In 
 the days j when I watched him closely I found 
 myself constantly startled by the physical problem : 
 What place has this singular being in the genus 
 homo f It would easily be settled by the vague 
 formula of " degeneration," but to a careful eye 
 there was nothing in Swinburne of what is known 
 as the debased or perverse type. The stigmata of 
 the degenerate, such as we have been taught to note 
 them, were entirely absent. Here were, to the out- 
 ward and untechnical perception at least, no radical 
 effects of disease, hereditary or acquired. He stood 
 on a different physical footing from other men ; he 
 formed, as Cowley said of Pindar, " a vast species 
 alone." If there had been a planet peopled by 
 Swinburnes, he would have passed as an active, 
 healthy, normal specimen of it. All that was extra- 
 ordinary in him was not, apparently, the result of 
 ill-health, but of individual and inborn peculiarity. 
 
 The world is familiar from portraits, and still 
 better from caricatures, with his unique appearance. 
 He was short, with sloping shoulders, from which 
 rose a long and slender neck, surmounted by a very 
 large head. The cranium seemed to be out of all 
 proportion to the rest of the structure. His spine 
 was rigid, and though he often bowed the heaviness 
 of his head, lasso papavera collo, he seemed never to 
 
Swinburne 1 1 
 
 bend his back. Except in consequence of a certain 
 physical weakness, ( which probably may, in more 
 philosophical days, come to be accounted for and 
 palliated except when suffering from this external 
 cause, he seemed immune from all the maladies 
 that pursue mankind. He did not know fatigue ; 
 his agility and brightness were almost mechanical. 
 I never heard him complain of a headache or of 
 a toothache. He required very little sleep, and 
 occasionally when I have parted from him in the 
 evening after saying " Good-night," he has simply 
 sat back in the deep sofa in ; his sitting-room, his 
 little feet close together, his arms against his side, 
 folded in his frock-coat like a grasshopper in its 
 wing-covers, and fallen asleep, apparently for the 
 night, before I could blow out the candles and 
 steal forth from the door. I am speaking, of course, 
 of early days ; it was thus about 1875 that I closely 
 observed him. 
 
 He was more a hypertrophied intelligence than 
 a man. His vast brain seemed to weigh down 
 and give solidity to a frame otherwise as light 
 as thistledown, a body almost as immaterial .as 
 that of a fairy. In the streets he had the move- 
 ments of a somnambulist, and often I have seen 
 him passing like a ghost across the traffic of 
 Holborn, or threading the pressure of carts east- 
 ward in Gray's Inn Road, without glancing to the 
 left or the right, like something blown before a 
 wind. At that time I held a humble post at the 
 British Museum, from which I was freed at four 
 
12 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 o'clock, and Swinburne liked to arrange to meet me 
 half-way between that monument and his own 
 lodgings. One of Swinburne's peculiarities was an 
 extreme punctuality, and we seldom failed to meet on 
 the deserted northern pavement of Great Coram 
 Street. But although the meeting was of his own 
 making, and the person to be met a friend seen every 
 day, if I stood a couple of yards before him silent, he 
 would endeavour to escape on one side and then on 
 the other, giving a great shout of satisfaction when at 
 length his eyes focused on my face. 
 
 He was very fond of talking about his feats of 
 swimming and riding as a boy, and no other poet 
 has written about the former exercise with so much 
 felicity and ardour : 
 
 As one that ere a June day rise 
 
 Makes seaward for the dawn, and tries 
 The water with delighted limbs, 
 That tastes the sweet dark sea, and swims 
 
 Right eastward under strengthening skies, 
 And sees the gradual rippling rims 
 
 Of waves whence day breaks blossom- wise 
 Takejire ere light peer well above, 
 And laughs from all his heart with love ; 
 
 And softlier swimming, with raised head, 
 Feels the full flower of morning shed, 
 
 And fluent sunrise round him rolled, 
 
 That laps and laves his body bold 
 With fluctuant heaven in water's stead, 
 
 And urgent through the growing gold 
 Strikes, and sees all the spray flash red. 
 
Swinburne 13 
 
 And his soul takes the sun, and yearns 
 
 For joy wherewith the sea's heart burns. . . . 
 
 There is nothing to approach it elsewhere in litera- 
 ture. It was founded on experience in the surf of 
 Northumberland, and Swinburne's courage and zest 
 as a bather were superb. But I was assured by 
 earlier companions that he made remarkably little 
 way by swimming, and that his feats were mainly of 
 floating, his little body tossing on the breakers like 
 a cork. His father, the admiral, had taught him to 
 plunge in the sea when he was a very little child, 
 taking him up in his arms and flinging him out 
 among the waves. His cousin, Lord Redesdale, 
 tells me that at Eton Algernon " could swim for 
 ever," but he was always muscularly feeble, making 
 up for this deficiency by his splendid courage and 
 confidence. 
 
 No physiologist who studied the corporeal condi- 
 tion of Swinburne could avoid observing the violent 
 elevation of spirits to which he was constantly 
 subject. The slightest emotional excitement, of 
 anger, or pleasure, or admiration, sent him into 
 a state which could scarcely be called anything but 
 convulsive. He was like that little geyser in 
 Iceland which is always simmering, but which, if it 
 is irritated by having pieces of turf thrown into it, 
 instantly boils over and flings its menacing column 
 at the sky. I was never able to persuade myself 
 whether the extraordinary spasmodic action of the 
 arms and legs which accompanied these paroxysms 
 
14 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 was the result of nature or habit. It was violent 
 and it was long-continued, but I never saw that it 
 produced fatigue. It gradually subsided into a 
 graceful and smiling calm, sometimes even into 
 somnolence, out of which, however, a provocative 
 remark would instantly call up again the surprising 
 spasm of the geyser. The poet's surviving sister, 
 Miss Isabel Swinburne, tells me that this trick of 
 stiffly drawing down his arms from the shoulders 
 and giving a rapid vibratory movement to his hands 
 was voluntary in childhood ; she considers that it 
 spoiled his shoulders and made them sloping. In 
 later years I am sure it had become instinctive and 
 unconscious. She describes to me also the extra- 
 ordinary ecstasy which shook his body and lighted 
 up his face when reading a book^ which delighted 
 him or when speaking of any intellectual pleasure. 
 Swinburne seemed to me to divide his hours 
 between violent cerebral excitement and sheer 
 immobility, mental and physical. He would sit for 
 a long time together without stirring a limb, his 
 eyes fixed in a sort of trance, and only his lips 
 shifting and shivering a little, without a sound. 
 
 The conception of Swinburne, indeed, as inces- 
 santly flamboyant and convulsive is so common 
 that it may be of value to note that he was, on 
 the contrary, sometimes pathetically plaintive and 
 distressed. The following impression, written 
 down next day (January 4, 1878), reveals a 
 Swinburne little imagined by the public, but 
 frequently enough to be observed in those days by 
 
Swinburne 1 5 
 
 intimate friends. It describes a slightly later condition 
 than that on which I have hitherto dwelt : 
 
 " Swinburne has become very much at home 
 with us, and, knowing our eating-times, he drops in 
 every fortnight or so to dinner, and stays through 
 the evening. All this winter he has been noticeably 
 worn and feeble, sometimes tottering like an old 
 man, and glad to accept a hand to help him up and 
 down stairs. I hear he is very violent between 
 whiles, but he generally visits us during the 
 exhaustion and depression which follow his fits of 
 excitement, when he is tired of his loneliness at 
 Great James Street, and seems to crave the comfort 
 of home-life and the petting that we lavish on him. 
 Last night he arrived about 5 P.M. ; he was waiting 
 for me when I came back from the office. The 
 maid had seen him into my study, brightened the 
 fire and raised the lamp, but although she left him 
 cosily seated under the light, I found him mourn- 
 fully wandering, like a lost thing, on the staircase. 
 We happened to be quite alone, and he stayed 
 on for six hours. He was extremely gentle, bright, 
 and sensible at dinner, full of gay talk about early 
 memories, his recollections of Dickens, and odd 
 anecdotes of older Oxford friends, Jowett, Stubbs, 
 and the present Bishop of Ely [James Russell 
 Woodford], Directly dinner was over he insisted 
 on seeing the baby, whom on these occasions he 
 always kisses, and worships on his knees, and is 
 very fantastic over. When he and I were alone, he 
 closed up to the fire, his great head bowed, his 
 
1 6 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 knees held tight together, and his finger-tips pressed 
 to his chest, in what I call his ' penitential ' attitude, 
 and he began a long tale, plaintive and rather 
 vague, about his loneliness, the sadness of his life, 
 the suffering he experiences from the slanders of 
 others. He said that George Eliot was hounding 
 on her myrmidons to his destruction. I made out 
 that this referred to some attack in a newspaper 
 which he supposes, very groundlessly I expect, 
 to be inspired by George Eliot. Swinburne said 
 that a little while ago he found his intellectual 
 energy succumbing under a morbid distress at his 
 isolation, and that he had been obliged steadily to 
 review before his conscience his imaginative life in 
 order to prevent himself from sinking into despair. 
 This is only a mood, to be sure ; but if there 
 be any people who think so ill of him, I only wish 
 they could see him as we see him at these recupera- 
 tive intervals. Whatever he may be elsewhere, in 
 our household not a kinder, simpler, or more 
 affectionate creature could be desired as a visitor. 
 The only fault we find with him is that his little 
 mournful ways and his fragility drag painfully upon 
 our sympathy." 
 
 This, it will be admitted, is not the Swinburne of 
 legend in the seventies, and that it is so different 
 may be judged, I hope, my excuse for recording it. 
 A very sensible further change came over him 
 when he was attacked by deafness, an infirmity to 
 which, I believe, most members of his family have 
 been liable. I do not think that I noticed any 
 
Swinburne 17 
 
 hardness of hearing until 1880, when the affliction 
 rapidly developed. He was, naturally, very much 
 concerned at it, and in the summer of that year he 
 wrote to a lady of my household, " If this gets worse 
 I shall become wholly unfit to mix in any society 
 where two or three are gathered together." It did 
 get worse ; it was constitutional and incurable, and 
 for the last quarter of a century of his life he 
 was almost impervious to outward sound. All the 
 more, therefore, was he dependent on the care 
 of the devoted friend who thenceforward guarded 
 him so tenderly. 
 
 II 
 
 The year 1868 was one of the most troubled in 
 Swinburne's existence. He had now reached his 
 thirty-second year, and there had succeeded a 
 reaction to his juvenile flow of animal spirits, to his 
 inexhaustible fecundity, and even to the violent 
 celebrity which had stimulated and incited him as 
 with the sting of a gad-fly. His first period of 
 creative energy had come to a close, and he had not 
 yet begun, or only now was beginning to launch 
 steadily upon, his second, namely, the celebration in 
 transcendental verse, and under the auspices of 
 Mazzini, of the ideal and indivisible Republic. He 
 was dejected in mind and ailing in body ; the 
 wonderful colours of youth were now first beginning 
 to fade out of his miraculous eyes and hair. In 
 
 B 
 
1 8 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 April, having written "The Hymn of Man," and 
 having sent his great prose monograph on " William 
 Blake " to the press, Swinburne paused and looked 
 round him with a melancholy which had never 
 afflicted him before. He complained, humorously 
 and angrily, of "illness hardly intermittent during 
 weeks and months of weather which would have 
 disgraced hell and raised a revolution among devils." 
 His principal pleasure was the encouragement given 
 him by Mazzini, "my beloved Chief, still with us, 
 very ill and indomitable, and sad and kind as ever." 
 "Siena" was finished in May, and " Tiresias " was 
 begun in June. Swinburne was doggedly and pain- 
 fully working at what he always called "His book," the 
 Chief's book, the volume of political lyrics which 
 Mazzini had commanded him to write for the glory 
 of Liberty and Italia. 
 
 It was in the evening of July 10, 1868, that I first 
 cast icyes on the poet who was at that time the 
 divinity, the object of feverish worship, to every 
 budding artist and faltering singer in England. The 
 occasion was accidental, the circumstances painful ; 
 it is enough to say that the idol was revealed to the 
 juvenile worshipper at a startling moment of physical 
 suffering and distress, and that the impression was 
 one of curious terror, never, even under happier 
 auspices, to be wholly removed. I shall not lose that 
 earliest, and entirely unanticipated, image of a lan- 
 guishing and pain-stricken Swinburne, like some odd 
 conception of Aubrey Beardsley, a Cupido crucifixus 
 on a chair of anguish. I recall it here because, 
 
Swinburne 19 
 
 although in truth he was not nearly so ill as he looked, 
 this apparition explains to me the imperative neces- 
 sity which his friends found in the summer of that 
 year to get him away from London, away from 
 England, and if so, whither, if not to his beloved 
 France ? 
 
 It was projected that, so soon as he was well 
 enough to move, he should go over to Boulogne^ 
 where a Welsh friend, Mr. Powell of Nant-E6s, was 
 to receive him. But this was not found immediately 
 possible ; the poet's journey was delayed, partly by 
 his own continued weakness, then by an illness of 
 his mother, so that it was not until September that 
 he joined Powell at Etretat. Of this, his preliminary 
 stay there, little record seems to remain. It was 
 already late for bathing, and the weather turned 
 bad. The party soon broke up. But Swinburne 
 stayed long enough to form a great liking for the 
 village, which was anything but the fashionable 
 watering-place which it has since grown to be. It 
 was a cluster of little old houses, with whitewashed 
 walls and turfed roofs, inhabited by a sturdy race of 
 Norman fishermen. Etretat had been " discovered " 
 about ten years before this time by certain artists, 
 particularly by Isabey and by the younger Clarkson 
 Stanfield, all of whom kept their " discovery " very 
 quiet. But Alphonse Karr, in his novels, had been 
 unable to preserve a like reticence, and Paris had 
 now waked up to the picturesque capacities of 
 Etretat. Villas were beginning to be built along the 
 edge of the two chalk cliffs and down the Grand Val. 
 
2O Portraits and Sketches 
 
 It was none of these little smart villas, it was a 
 dwelling of the local Norman type, which was to 
 be identified in such a curious way with the legend 
 of Swinburne. 
 
 Whether the purchase had already been made, or 
 whether it was concluded after Swinburne left, 
 or whether indeed the little place was not simply 
 rented, year after year at all events the beautified 
 cottage in question passed about this time into the 
 possession of Powell, who lived there for several 
 years and entertained Swinburne summer after 
 summer. He became an astonishing figure of 
 eccentricity in the eyes of the simple fishermen of 
 Etretat. It was he or Swinburne, or the precious 
 pair of farceurs together, who gave the little house 
 the sinister name of the Chaumiere de Dolmance, 
 which presupposed a considerable amount of out- 
 of-the-way reading in the passer-by who was to be 
 scandalised. It did not scandalise, but very much 
 " intrigued " a sturdy youth who often crossed its 
 painted legend in his holidays, and who had already 
 read enough " undesirable " literature to wonder 
 what this was all about, and what odd beings chose 
 to advertise that they inhabited the Chaumiere de 
 Dolmanc6. It is necessary to sweep away a good 
 many cobwebs of romance in dealing with the rela- 
 tions between Swinburne and Guy de Maupassant ; 
 for the sturdy youth was no other than he. In the 
 following pages I hope to clear up, in some measure, 
 the mystification which each of them wove around 
 the legend in later years. 
 
Swinburne 21 
 
 In the first place, it is needful to understand that 
 Maupassant was not the famous writer he after- 
 wards became. He was a youth of eighteen, and 
 six years were to elapse before his nostrils snuffed 
 up the odour of printers' ink. Etretat was his 
 mother's summer home. Very soon after his birth 
 Madame de Maupassant bought a small property in 
 the Norman village, and here the future novelist's 
 childhood was passed. The cure of Etretat prepared 
 him for school, first for the seminary of the neigh- 
 bouring town of Yvetot, that "citadel of Norman 
 wit," and afterwards for Rouen ; but all his holidays 
 were spent among the fishermen of Etretat, going 
 out with them in their boats by day and night, 
 wrestling and climbing with their boys, scaling the 
 slippery chalk cliffs to watch for their returning 
 sails. It was not, therefore, a scandal-mongering 
 journalist of Paris who pushed himself on the notice 
 of the two Englishmen, but an extremely vivid and 
 observant boy practically native to the soil, who 
 examined the strange visitors with a wholly legiti- 
 mate curiosity. The good faith of Guy de Maupas- 
 sant, which has been called in question, must be 
 defended. During these years, and till the war 
 broke out, Maupassant was a student at the Lycee 
 of Rouen, working under the benevolent eye of 
 Gustave Flaubert, rapidly advancing in solid physi- 
 cal vigour, but giving little indication of his future 
 line of action except in the painful writing of verses. 
 He was, however, preternaturally wide-awake ; and 
 sweeping the horizon of Etrelat, he became aware, 
 
22 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 summer after summer, of a remarkable pair of 
 exotics. 
 
 The incident which led to his forming Swin- 
 burne's acquaintance must now be told with some 
 minuteness, partly because, as an adventure, it was 
 the most important in the poet's career, and partly 
 because it has been made the subject of many vague 
 and contradictory rumours. Swinburne, as we have 
 already seen, was a daring bather, and one of the 
 main attractions of Etretat was the facility it gave for 
 exercise in the sea. On a certain Friday in the late 
 summer at about 10 A.M., the poet went down alone 
 to a solitary point on the eastern side of the plage, 
 the Porte d'Amont for there is no real harbour at 
 Etretat divested himself of his clothes, and plunged 
 in, as was his wont. The next thing that happened 
 was that a man called Coquerel, who was on the 
 outlook at the semaphore, being at the foot of the 
 cliffs on the eastern side of the bay, heard continued 
 cries for help and ^piercing screams. He climbed up 
 on a sort of rock of chalk, called Le Bane a Cuve, 
 and perceived that a swimmer, who had been caught 
 by the tide, which runs very heavily at that place, 
 was being hurried out to sea, in spite of the violent 
 efforts which he was making to struggle for his life. 
 As it was impossible for Coquerel to do anything 
 else to help the drowning man, he was starting to 
 race along the shore to Etretat, when he saw 
 coming round the point one of the fishing-smacks 
 of the village. Coquerel attracted the attention of 
 this boat, and directed the captain to the point out 
 
Swinburne 23 
 
 at sea where Swinburne's cries were growing fainter 
 and further. The captain of the smack very cleverly 
 seized the situation, and followed the poet, who 
 had now ceased to struggle, but who supported 
 himself by floating on the surface of the tide. 
 This was hurrying him along so swiftly that he 
 was not picked up until at a point a mile to the 
 east-north-east of the eastern point of Etretat. It 
 is a great pleasure to me, after more than forty 
 years, to be able to give the name of the man 
 who saved the life of one of the greatest poets of 
 England. I hope that Captain Theodule Vallin 
 may be remembered with gratitude by the lovers 
 of literature. 
 
 The story hitherto is from Etretat sources. I now 
 take it up as Swinburne told it to me, not very long 
 after the event. His account did not differ in any 
 essential degree from what has just been said. But 
 he told me that soon after having left the Porte 
 d'Amont he felt the under-current of the tide take 
 possession of him, and he was carried out to sea 
 through a rocky archway. Now, when it was too late, 
 he recollected that the fishermen had warned him 
 that he ought not to bathe without taking the tide 
 into consideration. He tried to turn, to get out of 
 the stream ; but it was absolutely impossible, he was 
 drawn on like a leaf. (What he did not say, of 
 course, was that although he was absolutely untiring 
 in the sea, and as familiar with it as a South Sea 
 islander, the weakness of his arms prevented his 
 being able to swim fast or far, so that he depended on, 
 
24 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 frequent interludes of floating.) At first he fought 
 to get out of the tide, and then, realising the hope- 
 lessness of this, he set himself to shout and yell, and 
 he told me that the sound of his own voice, in that 
 stillness of racing water, struck him as very strange 
 and dreadful. Then he ceased to scream, and 
 floated as limply as possible, carried along, and 
 then he was suddenly aware that in a few minutes he 
 would be dead, for the possibility of his being saved 
 did not occur to him. 
 
 I asked him what he thought about in that 
 dreadful contingency, and he replied that he had 
 no experience of what people often profess to 
 witness, the concentrated panorama of past life 
 hurrying across the memory. He did not reflect 
 on the past at all. He was filled with annoyance 
 that he had not finished his " Songs before Sunrise," 
 and then with satisfaction that so much of it was 
 ready for the press, and that Mazzini would be 
 pleased with him. And then he continued : " I 
 reflected with resignation that I was exactly the 
 same age as Shelley was when he was drowned." 
 (This, however, was not the case ; Swinburne had 
 reached that age in March 1867 ; but this was part of a 
 curious delusion of Swinburne's that he was younger 
 by two or three years than his real age.) Then, 
 when he began to be, I suppose, a little benumbed 
 by the water, his thoughts fixed on the clothes he 
 had left on the beach, and he worried his clouding 
 brain about some unfinished verses in the pocket of 
 his coat. I suppose that he then fainted, for he 
 
Swinburne 25 
 
 could not recollect being reached by the smack or 
 lifted on board. 
 
 The fishermen, however, drew the poet success- 
 fully out of the water. Ivy should have grown up 
 the masts and the sound of flutes have been heard 
 in the forecastle, as when Dionysus boarded the 
 pirate-vessel off Naxos. Captain Vallin was not 
 much less astonished at his capture than the Icarians 
 were, for Swinburne immediately displayed his 
 usual vivacity. The Marie-Marthe for that was the 
 name of the boat proceeded on her voyage to 
 Yport. The weather was glorious ; the poet's body 
 was rubbed by the horny hands of his rescuers, and 
 then wrapped in a spare sail, over which his mane 
 of orange-ruddy hair was spread to dry, like a fan. 
 He proceeded to preach to the captain and his men, 
 who surrounded him, he told me, in rapturous 
 approval, the doctrines of the Republic, and then he 
 recited to them, " by the hour together," the poems 
 of Victor Hugo. He was given some food, and in 
 the course of the morning the Marie-Marthe, with 
 her singular lading, tacked into the harbour of 
 Yport. 
 
 Meanwhile, Swinburne's English friend and host, 
 who had been near him on the shore, but not him- 
 self bathing, had, with gathering anxiety, seen him 
 rapidly and unresistingly hurried out to sea through 
 the rocky archway until he passed entirely out of 
 sight. He immediately recollected what Swin- 
 burne had forgotten the treacherous under-currents 
 so prevalent and so much dreaded on that dangerous 
 
26 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 coast. After Mr. Powell had lost sight of the poet 
 for what seemed to him at least ten minutes, his 
 anxiety was turned into horror, for there were shouts 
 heard on the cliffs above him to the effect that lt a 
 man was drowning." He gathered up Swinburne's 
 clothes in his arms, and ran ankle-deep in the 
 loose shingle to where some boats were lying on the 
 beach. These immediately started to the rescue ; in 
 but a few minutes after their departure, however, a 
 boat arriving at Etretat from the east brought the 
 welcome news that no catastrophe had happened, 
 but that the Marie-Marthe had been seen to pick 
 the Englishman up out of the water, and to continue 
 her course towards Yport. Mr. Powell, therefore, 
 took a carriage and galloped off at fullest speed, 
 with Swinburne's clothes, and arrived at Yport just 
 in time to see the Marie-Marthe enter the harbour, 
 with Swinburne in excellent spirits and, wrapped in 
 a sail, gesticulating on the deck. 
 
 What greatly astonished the Normans was that, 
 after so alarming an adventure and so bitter an 
 experience of the treachery of the sea, Swinburne 
 was by no means willing to abandon it. The friends 
 dismissed their carriage, and lunched at the pleasant 
 little inn between the place and the sea ; and having 
 found that the Marie-Marthe was returning to Etretat 
 in the afternoon, they took a walk along the cliffs 
 until Captain Vallin had finished his business in 
 Yport, when they returned with him by sea. This 
 conduct was thought eccentric ; it would have been 
 natural to prefer a land journey at such a moment. 
 
Swinburne 27 
 
 But, as the captain approvingly said, " C'eut etc trop 
 peu anglais." Everybody who had helped in the 
 salvage was generously rewarded, and Swinburne 
 and his friend were, for at least twenty-four hours, 
 the most popular of the residents of Etretat. 
 
 It is not till now, at the twelfth hour, that Guy 
 de Maupassant comes into the story. It is only fair 
 to say that he never asserted, nor acquiesced in the 
 assertion made by others, that he himself, on his own 
 yacht, rescued Swinburne. A collegian of nineteen, 
 at home for the holidays, a yacht was the last thing 
 he was likely to possess. But he jumped on board 
 one of those fishing-smacks which Mr. Powell sent 
 out, and the boat he was on turned back only on 
 hearing that the Maric-Marthe had already saved the 
 drowning man. Who the latter was Maupassant 
 did not learn until the evening of the same day, when 
 he discovered that it was the English poet who had 
 arrived, not long before, to be the guest of a strange 
 Englishman, accomplished and extravagant, who 
 occasionally conversed with Maupassant, as he paced 
 the shingle-beach, and who had already excited his 
 curiosity. " Ce Monsieur Powell," says Maupassant, 
 " etonnait le pays par une vie extremement solitaire 
 et bizarre aux yeux de bourgeois et de matelots 
 peu accoutumes aux fantaisies et aux excentricites 
 anglaises." In later years Maupassant was in the 
 habit of describing, and doubtless of amplifying, for 
 the amusement of Parisian friends, these " English 
 eccentricities," and in particular he regaled Heredia 
 and the Goncourts with them. Edmond de 
 
28 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 Goncourt wrote a novel, once famous, which there 
 are now none to praise and very few to read, called 
 " La Faustin." This work is evidently founded on 
 the gossip of Guy de Maupassant ; but no one 
 needs to waste his time searching in it for a portrait 
 of Swinburne, for it is not there. 
 
 Maupassant's obliging zeal in hurrying to Swin- 
 burne's help was rewarded on the following day by 
 an invitation to lunch at the Chaumiere de Dol- 
 manc6. The two Englishmen were waiting for 
 him in a pretty garden, verdurous and shady. 
 Their visitor describes the house as " une toute basse 
 maison normande construite en silex et coiffee de 
 chaume," the very type of building in which the 
 tragedies and comedies of rustic life in the Seine- 
 Inferieure were to figure, years later, in the tales of 
 the juvenile visitor. The eyes of that visitor, by the 
 way, if youthful, were exceedingly sharp and bright ; 
 although he had not yet learned the artifice of prose 
 expression, the power of observing and noting 
 character was already highly developed in him. 
 His account of the meeting, accordingly, is a very 
 curious document, and one which a historian must 
 touch with care. As it advances, with the desire to 
 astonish and scandalise, it certainly borders on the 
 apocryphal, and justifies Swinburne's indignation 
 towards the end of his life. But the opening 
 paragraphs bear the impress of absolute truth, and 
 truth seen by the most clairvoyant of observers. 
 
 This, then, is how our poet struck the Norman 
 boy who had never read a line of his verses. " M. 
 
Swinburne 29 
 
 Swinburne was small and thin, amazingly thin at 
 first sight, a sort of fantastic apparition. When 
 I looked at him for the first time, I thought of 
 Edgar Poe. The forehead was very large under 
 long hair, and the face went narrowing down to a 
 tiny chin, shaded by a thin tuft of beard. A very 
 slight moustache slipped over lips which were 
 extraordinarily delicate and were pressed together, 
 while what seemed an endless neck joined this 
 head/which was alive only in its bright, penetrating, 
 and fixed eyes, to a body without shoulders, since 
 the upper part of Swinburne's chest seemed 
 scarcely broader than his forehead. The whole of 
 this almost supernatural personage was stirred by 
 nervous shudders. He was very cordial, very 
 easy of access ; and the extraordinary charm of his 
 intelligence bewitched me from the first moment." 
 There may be a touch of emphasis in this, a slight 
 effect of caricature ; but no one who knew 
 Swinburne in those days will dare to deny the 
 general fidelity of the portrait. 
 
 During the course of their life at Etretat the con- 
 versation of the friends continually turned on art, 
 on literature, even on music, about which Powell 
 was then greatly exercised. Swinburne did not 
 recognise the difference between one tune and 
 another, but he took a cerebral interest in music. 
 The friends were entranced by the fame of Wagner 
 and of Berlioz, who was much discussed in art 
 circles ; it is to be doubted whether either of them 
 had heard any of the compositions of these 
 
30 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 musicians performed in public or in private. It 
 was the attitude of Wagner which attracted and 
 delighted them, while Swinburne had a curious 
 conviction of sympathy with Berlioz, who died just 
 about this time, leaving a mysterious reputation 
 behind him. I have heard Swinburne express an 
 overwhelming desire to be present when " La 
 Damnation de Faust " was performed, and he was 
 prepared, or almost prepared, to take a journey 
 to Leipzig for that particular purpose. He had read 
 some of Berlioz' musical criticism, which used to 
 appear (I think) in Le Figaro, and he exulted in the 
 French musician's eulogies of Shakespeare. The 
 " Memoires " of Berlioz were published later, but I 
 think Swinburne had read " Les Grotesques de 
 la Musique." Rapturous appreciation of music 
 which he had never heard did not preclude, on 
 Mr. Powell's part, enjoyment of music which he 
 shared with all the world ; and Offenbach, then 
 laden with the laurels of " La Grande Duchesse 
 de Gerolstein," was an honoured guest at the 
 Chaumiere while Swinburne was there. 
 
 But it was literature and art on which the poet 
 discoursed with the greatest glow and abundance. 
 Maupassant was dazzled, as well he might be, by 
 the erudition, by the imagination, by the daring, by 
 what seemed to him the perversity of the incredible 
 English genius. It is impossible not to regret that 
 Maupassant neglected, on the successive occasions 
 when he spent some hours with Swinburne at 
 Etretat, to note down, as he could have done, even 
 
Swinburne 31 
 
 at that early age, with admirable fidelity, some of the 
 meteoric showers which crossed the vault of that 
 high conversation. It is true that some of them, as 
 the Frenchman merrily indicates, would demand, 
 or would have demanded in mid-Victorian times, 
 the gauze of Latinity to subdue their brilliance. 
 Maupassant was particularly struck and this is 
 very interesting as the criticism of a Frenchman 
 with the Latin character of Swinburne's mind. He 
 thought that the Roman imagination had no secrets 
 from him, and Swinburne showed him Latin verses 
 of his own, which Maupassant considered " admir- 
 ables comme si 1'ame de ce peuple [the Roman race] 
 etait reste en lui." Let us not ask whether the boy 
 of eighteen was highly competent to judge of the 
 Latinity of these verses ; he could at least perfectly 
 appreciate the poet's compliment. 
 
 As a Republican of the innermost sect of Mazzini 
 it was necessary^that Swinburne should proclaim, in 
 season and out of season, his political convictions. 
 He did not spare them to his young friend ; and he 
 did not conceal his loathing for "the Accursed," as 
 he called Napoleon III., then drawing much nearer 
 to his end than anybody guessed. Maupassant was 
 not scandalised by these opinions, but he noted the 
 oddity of their being held by one so essentially 
 an aristocrat, so much a noble to the tips of his 
 fingers, as Swinburne evidently was. The visitor 
 turned the subject to Victor Hugo, of whom 
 the English poet spoke, as he always did, with 
 unbridled enthusiasm. As Swinburne's flow of 
 
32 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 unaffected conversation became easier and fuller 
 the astonishment of Maupassant increased. He 
 thought his English acquaintance the most exasper- 
 atedly artistic human being whom he had ever met ; 
 and in later years, when he had become acquainted 
 with all Paris, he still thought so. He was not 
 altogether in sympathy with Swinburne, however. 
 He considered that in his way of looking at 
 literature and life there was something macabre ; 
 that, with all his splendour of thought, he suffered 
 from a malady of spiritual vision, and that a 
 perversity of temper mingled with the magic of his 
 fancy. It would be folly to deny that, in this also, 
 the young visitor showed a rare clairvoyance. 
 
 At the close of his visit to France in the summer 
 of 1869 Swinburne devoted a month of the time 
 otherwise spent at Etretat to an excursion of which 
 no account has hitherto, I think, been published. 
 It was in some ways so momentous, from the 
 associations connected with it, that it ought to be 
 recorded. Richard Burton, with whom Swinburne 
 had now for some years been intimate, was 
 appointed British consul in Damascus. As he had 
 just returned from Santos in rather poor health, he 
 was advised to take a course of the Vichy waters 
 before he proceeded to Syria. He proposed that 
 Swinburne should join him, which the poet, 
 although greatly enjoying the sea-bathing at 
 Etretat, instantly agreed to do. They met at 
 Boulogne and reached Vichy on July 24. Five 
 days later the poet wrote " Vichy suits me splen- 
 
Swinburne 33 
 
 didly," and indeed he was now entering upon one 
 of the most completely happy months of his life. 
 He delighted in the breezy company of Burton, 
 and at Vichy they found two other friends, 
 Frederick Leighton and Adelaide Kemble (Mrs. 
 Sartoris), whose " Week in a French Country- 
 house " had recently revealed the existence of a 
 new and exquisite humorist. This quartette of 
 brilliant compatriots met daily, and entertained one 
 another to the top of their bent. Many years after- 
 wards, when the other three were dead, Swinburne 
 celebrated this enchanting month at Vichy in a 
 poem, called " Reminiscence," which he after- 
 wards included in the " Channel Passage" volume 
 under the title of " An Evening at Vichy." In it 
 he describes 
 
 how bright the days [were] and how sweet their chime 
 Rang, shone and passed in music that matched the clime 
 Wherein we met rejoicing, 
 
 He analyses of what the charm and what the 
 radiance consisted, and he gives the first praise to 
 
 The loyal grace, the courtesy bright as day, 
 
 The strong sweet radiant spirit of fife and light 
 That shone and smiled and lightened on all men's sight, 
 
 The kindly life whose tune was the tune of May, 
 
 in Leighton's conversation. Mrs. Sartoris was 
 accustomed to sing for the three friends, with her 
 incredible grace of vocalisation, and Swinburne 
 describes how 
 
 c 
 
34 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 A woman's voice, divine as a bird's by dawn 
 Kindled and stirred to sunward, arose and held 
 
 Our souls that heard, from earth as from sleep withdrawn, 
 And filled with light as stars, and as stars compelled 
 To move by might of music. 
 
 Finally, Burton's turn comes, 
 
 warrior and wanderer, crowned 
 With fame that shone from eastern on western day, 
 More strong, more kind, than praise or than grief might say. 
 
 It is surprising that this very important bio- 
 graphical poem has hitherto attracted so little 
 attention from those who have written on the 
 friendships of Swinburne. It was written in 1890. 
 
 While he was thus enjoying himself at Vichy, full 
 of quiet happiness, he was lifted into the seventh 
 heaven " lit as a mountain lawn by morning," in 
 his own words through receiving a letter from 
 Victor Hugo inviting him to stay with him at 
 Hauteville House in Guernsey. Swinburne had 
 sent the Master an article' of his on the newly- 
 published novel " L'Homme qui Rit." Victor Hugo 
 wrote back " such a letter ! thanking me ex imo 
 corde, as he says (as if he to whom we all owe such 
 thanks could have anything to thank any one for !), 
 and ending up with ' Quand done me sera-t-il 
 donne de vous voir ? ' ' Swinburne immediately 
 and gratefully replied, " In a month's time, in 
 September " ; and on the same occasion he 
 planned to spend "not more than a week" in 
 Paris, on his way from Vichy to Guernsey. He 
 
Swinburne 35 
 
 made arrangements to meet in Paris Paul de Saint- 
 Victor, Theophile Gautier, "and perhaps Gustave 
 Flaubert." " Tu conviendras que cela veut bien la 
 peine de s'arreter ? " he writes at the close of July. 
 But of all this glittering anticipation, nothing, I 
 think, was realised. There was never a meeting with 
 Gautier and Flaubert, and none with Hugo till 
 it was too late for happiness. Why did the bright 
 scheme fall through ? I do not know ; but when 
 Sir Richard Burton went eastward to Damascus, 
 it seems certain that Swinburne came dully back 
 to Etretat, and he was in London in October. 
 He possessed that winter an unpublished poem, 
 " Les Enfants Pauvres," which Hugo had given him. 
 
 He wrote little during these summer holidays on 
 the Norman coast. But it may be of interest to 
 record that the magnificent " Epilogue" to "Songs 
 before Sunrise," with its description of swimming 
 at dawn, was composed at Etretat. The marvellous 
 stanzas recording the sensations of the swimmer 
 are a direct transcript of the ecstatic adventures in 
 early morning hours from the plage outside the 
 Porte d'Amont, or off the moorings of some 
 indulgent and astonished fisherman. The poet's 
 audacity in the waves was even sometimes alarming, 
 as it had been twelve years before, when, as Miss 
 Isabel Swinburne tells me, he insisted, in spite of the 
 warning of the natives, upon plunging into the cold 
 and dangerous waters of the Lac de Gaube, in the 
 Pyrenees. 
 
 There remains only to add that the episode which 
 
36 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 has been described on a previous page, in the 
 course of which Swinburne so nearly lost his life, 
 has left a direct mark on his poetry. It inspired 
 " Ex-Voto," a poem written at Etretat, but not 
 published until eight years later, when it was 
 included in "Poems and Ballads, Second Series." 
 I have the poet's own authority for stating this, and 
 in particular for drawing attention to the fact that 
 the following stanza (addressed, of course, to the 
 sea) directly refers to his being nearly drowned : 
 
 When thy salt lips well-nigh 
 Sucked in my mouth's last sigh, 
 Grudged I so much to die 
 
 This death as others ? 
 Was it no ease to think 
 The chalice from whose brink 
 Fate gave me death to drink 
 
 Was thine my Mother's ? 
 
 When the Franco-German War broke out, 
 Swinburne was lingering at Etretat. He almost 
 immediately returned to London, murmuring on the 
 journey the strophes of an ode which he was 
 already composing to the glory of a probable 
 French Republic. He never, I believe, visited 
 Etretat again. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The conversation of Swinburne, in the days of his 
 youth and power, was very splendid in quality. No 
 
Swinburne 37 
 
 part of a great man disappears so completely as his 
 table-talk, and of nothing is it more difficult after- 
 wards to reconstruct an impression. Swinburne's 
 conversation had, as was to be expected, some of 
 the characteristics of his poetry. It was rapid, and 
 yet not voluble ; it was measured, ornate, and pic- 
 turesque, and yet it was in a sense homely. It was 
 much less stilted and involved than his prose writing. 
 His extreme natural politeness was always apparent 
 in his talk, unless, of course, some unfortunate 
 contretemps should rouse a sudden ebullition, when 
 he could be neither just nor kind. But, as a rule, 
 his courtesy shone out of his blue-grey eyes and was 
 lighted up by the halo of his cloud of orange hair as 
 he waved it, gravely or waggishly, at the company. 
 The ease with which finished and polished sentences 
 flowed from him was a constant amazement to me 
 I noted (January 1875) that somebody having been so 
 unwise as to speak of the " laborious " versification 
 of Catullus, Swinburne burst forth with a trumpet- 
 note of scorn, and said, " Well, I can only tell you 
 I should have called him the least laborious, and the 
 most spontaneous, in his god-like and bird-like 
 melody, of all the lyrists known to me except Sappho 
 and Shelley ; I should as soon call a lark's note 
 'laboured' as Catullus'.'' This might have been 
 said of Swinburne's amazing talk ; it was a stream of 
 song, no more laboured than a lark's. 
 
 Immediately after leaving him I used sometimes, 
 as well as I could, to note down a few of his 
 sentences. It was not easy to retain much where 
 
Portraits and Sketches 
 
 all was so copious and rich, but a whole phrase or 
 even colloquy would linger long in the memory. I 
 think these brief reports may be trusted to give his 
 exact words : nothing could recall his accent and 
 the spontaneous crescendo effect of his enthusiasm. 
 I quote from my note-books almost at random. 
 This is in 1875, about some literary antagonist, but 
 I have neglected to note whom : 
 
 "He had better be careful. If I am obliged" 
 [very slowly] " to take the cudgel in my hand " [in 
 rapid exultation] "the rafters of the hovel in which 
 he skulks and sniggers shall ring with the loudest 
 whacks ever administered in discipline or chastise- 
 ment to a howling churl." All this poured forth, in 
 towering high spirits, without a moment's pause to 
 find a word. 
 
 Often Swinburne would put on the ironical stop, 
 and, with a killing air of mock modesty, would say, 
 "I don't know whether you can reasonably expect 
 me to be very much weaker than a tame rabbit " ; or 
 " Even milk would boil over twice to be treated in 
 that way." 
 
 He was certainly, during the years in which I 
 knew him well, at his best in 1875. Many of the 
 finest things which I tried to capture belonged 
 to that year. Here is an instance of his proud 
 humility : 
 
 " It is always a thorn in my flesh, and a check to 
 any satisfaction which I might feel in writing prose, 
 to reflect that probably I have never written, nor 
 shall ever write, one single page that Landor would 
 
Swinburne 39 
 
 have deigned to sign. Nothing of this sort, or indeed 
 of any sort whatever, troubles me for a moment when 
 writing verse, but this always does haunt me when 
 I am at work on prose." 
 
 Before 1875 he had become considerably severed 
 from Rossetti in sympathy, and he was prepared to 
 discuss without anger the possibility that his praise 
 had been over-luscious : 
 
 "Well, very likely I did say some extravagant 
 things about Rossetti's original sonnets and lyrics, 
 but I do deliberately stick to any word I said about 
 him as a translator. No doubt Shelley is to the full 
 as beautiful a workman in that line, but then he is 
 as inaccurate as Rossetti is accurate." 
 
 All through this year, 1875, his mind was full of 
 the idea of translating ^schylus, Aristophanes, 
 Villon, all his peculiar foreign favourites, and the 
 subject was frequently uppermost in his mouth. 
 He thought Mallarme's version of Poe "very 
 exquisite," although he could not make much 
 of Manet's amazing tolio illustrations.' Swinburne 
 was well disposed, however, to Manet, whose studio 
 in Paris he told me he had visited in 1863, in com- 
 pany with Whistler and Fantin. He was much 
 disappointed at the sudden death of Maggi, of Milan 
 who had undertaken to bring out a complete Italian 
 translation of his poems. Swinburne used to speak 
 of Italy as " my second mother-country " and " my 
 country by adoption," although I think his only 
 personal knowledge of it had been gained in 1863, 
 when he spent a long time in and near Florence, 
 
40 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 much of the time in the society of Walter Savage 
 Landor and that " dear, brilliant, ingenious creature," 
 Mrs. Gaskell. It was in a garden at Fiesole, he told 
 me, that he wrote " Itylus," with the whole air 
 vociferous with nightingales around him. 
 
 In the summer of 1875 I brought him a very 
 laudatory review of his writings which had just 
 appeared in Copenhagen, and urged him to gratify 
 the Danish critic by sending him a few written words 
 of acknowledgment. This he was very well pleased 
 to do, but he paused, with lifted pen, and looking 
 up sideways with that curious roguish smile which 
 was one of his charms, he asked, " But what in the 
 name of all the gods and little fishes of Scandinavia 
 am I to say ? t know 1 I must borrow some of the 
 divine daring which enables our Master to respond 
 so frankly to tributes of which he cannot read a 
 word ! I will write to your Danish friend exactly as 
 Victor Hugo replies to such tributes of English verse 
 and prose 1" 
 
 The first letter, he told me, which he received 
 from Victor Hugo, of whom he always spoke in 
 terms of idolatrous reverence, was dated in the early 
 part of 1862, in acknowledgment of some unsigned 
 articles on " Les Misrables." In replying, with the 
 greatest effusion, Swinburne asked leave to lay the 
 dedication of " Chastelard " at Hugo's feet. Although 
 the English poet always spoke of the French poet as 
 a daughter might speak of her mother, with tender 
 adoration, they did not meet until November 1882, 
 when Swinburne went over to Paris on purpose to 
 
Swinburne 41 
 
 attend the revival "the resurrection," he called it 
 of " Le Roi s'amuse." He had no familiarity with 
 Paris ; he stayed, like a true British tourist, in one 
 of the fashionable hotels in the Rue St. Honore. 
 On that occasion, and I think for the only time in 
 his life, he pressed the hand of Victor Hugo. He 
 wrote to me from Paris of the play, and of the fiftieth 
 anniversary of its appearance, "a thing as unique 
 and wonderful as the play itself," but said not a word 
 of his impressions of Hugo. 
 
 To some one who remarked that it was disagree- 
 able to be controverted, Swinburne replied gravely, 
 " No ! not at all ! It gives a zest to the expression 
 of sympathy to raise some points of amicable dis- 
 agreement." This was not the only case in which 
 I was struck by a certain unconscious resemblance 
 between his repartees and those of Dr. Johnson. 
 
 Early in life he started his theory of the division 
 of great writers into gods and giants. He worked 
 it out rather whimsically ; Shakespeare, of course, 
 was a god, and Ben Jonson was a 'giant, but I 
 think that Webster was a god. These conjectures 
 led him along the pleasant pathway of caprice. 
 He now started his serious study of Shakespeare, 
 of which, as about to become a book, I believe he 
 first spoke to me late in 1873. It was a time of con- 
 troversy so acrid that we can hardly realise the 
 bitterness of it in these calm days. But Swinburne 
 was more than ready for the fight. He rejoiced in 
 his power to make his assailants ridiculous. " I 
 need hardly tell you," he said to me, " that I shall 
 
42 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 begin, and clear my way, with a massacre of the 
 pedants worthy of one of Topsy's [William Morris's] 
 Icelandic sagas. It shall be ' a murder grim and 
 great,' I pledge myself to you ! " And indeed he 
 was very vivacious at the expense of the New Shak- 
 spere (or " Shack-spur," as he always pronounced it) 
 Society. 
 
 Great anger burnecj in his bosom because the 
 Athenaum described his " Erechtheus " as " a transla- 
 tion from Euripides." I never clearly understood 
 the reason of Swinburne's fanatical objection to 
 Euripides, which has even puzzled Dr. Verrall. He 
 must have adopted it, I think, from Jowett. On the 
 occasion of the appearance of the review quoted 
 above, I found Swinburne in a fine fit of the tantrums. 
 He poured out his indignation the moment I came 
 into the room. " Translation from Euripides, indeed ! 
 Why, a fourth-form boy could perceive that, as far as 
 " Erechtheus " can be said to be formed after any- 
 body it is modelled throughout on the earlier style of 
 ^schylus, the simple three-parts-epic style of ' The 
 Suppliants,' ' The Persians,' and the ' Seven against 
 Thebes/ the style most radically contrary to the 
 ' droppings/ grrh ! the droppings (as our divine and 
 dearest Mrs. Browning so aptly rather than delicately 
 puts it) of the scenic sophist that can be conceived. 
 I should very much like to see the play of Euripides 
 which contains five hundred consecutive lines that 
 could be set against as many of mine 1 " 
 
 Again, on a later occasion, " I always have main- 
 tained, and I always shall maintain, that it is infi- 
 
Swinburne 43 
 
 nitely easier to overtop Euripides by the head and 
 shoulders than to come up to the waist of Sophocles 
 or stretch up to touch the lance of ^Eschylus." 
 " Erechtheus" was written with unusual celerity, all 
 of it, if I remember right, in lodgings by the sea at 
 Wragford, near Southwold, in Suffolk, where Swin- 
 burne was staying in the autumn of 1875. When 
 we think of the learning, the weight of imagination, 
 and the unrivalled metrical daring of that splendid 
 drama (to my mind on the very highest level of 
 Swinburne's poetical achievement), this improvisa- 
 tion seems marvellous. 
 
 To one who praised in his presence the two great 
 naval odes of Campbell : " I like to hear you say 
 that. But I should speak still more passionately, 
 for the simple fact is that I know nothing like them 
 at all, simile aut secundum, in their own line, which 
 is one of the very highest lines in the highest range 
 of poetry. Very little national verse anywhere is 
 good either patriotically or poetically ; and what is 
 good patriotically is far inferior to Campbell 
 poetically. Look at Burns and Rouget de 1'Isle ! 
 What is virtually lacking is proof, in the face of the 
 Philistines, that poetry has real worth and weight in 
 national matters lacking everywhere else, only 
 not lacking in Campbell." 
 
 His feeling about literature was serious to the 
 verge of fanaticism. It absorbed him like a 
 religion, and it was this unflagging sense of the 
 superhuman power and value of poetry which made 
 his conversation so stimulating, especially to a very 
 
44 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 young man whom he honoured with the untram- 
 melled expression of his opinions. But he had 
 a charming delicacy of toleration for the feelings of 
 those whom he respected, even when he believed 
 them to be tainted with error. Of an elder writer 
 of some authority, to whom he was urged to reply 
 on a point of criticism, he said, "No ! If I wrote 
 about what he has said, I could not hold myself in. 
 
 I do not wish to be rude to . Now, I know 
 
 that I should begin by trying to behave like a good 
 boy, and before I knew what I was doing I should 
 
 be smiting hip and thigh, and making him 
 
 as the princes were who perished at Endor. I hope 
 you remember what they became ? Look it up, and 
 you will find what becomes of poeticules when they 
 decompose into criticasters ! So, you see, I had 
 better leave him alone." 
 
 Swinburne's pleasure in fighting was a very 
 marked and a very amusing trait in his conversa- 
 tion. He liked, at brief intervals, to have something 
 to worry between the teeth of his discourse. He 
 would allow himself to be drawn off the scent 
 by any red herring of criticism. This mock 
 irascibility, as of a miniature Boythorn, always 
 struck me as having been deliberately modelled on 
 the behaviour of Walter Savage Landor. This im- 
 pression was confirmed in rather a startling way by 
 a phrase of Swinburne's own. He had been 
 reading to me the MS. of his "George Chapman," 
 and after the reading was over, and we had passed 
 to other things, Swinburne said, " Did you notice 
 
Swinburne 45 
 
 just now some pages of rather Landorian character? 
 Don't you think I was rather like the old lion, when 
 he was using his teeth and claws, in my rending of 
 the stage licensers and our crazy English censorial 
 system ? " 
 
 IV 
 
 The intellectual temperament of Swinburne is 
 not to be apprehended unless we remember that he 
 was in grain an aristocrat. On the father's side he 
 was directly descended from a feudal Border 
 family, which, as long ago as the reign of 
 Edward II., had produced a man of mark in Sir 
 Adam de Swinburne. The poet never forgot the 
 ancestral castle of Swinburne, which had passed 
 from his forbears two centuries ago, never the 
 fierce feuds and rattling skirmishes under the hard 
 Northumbrian sky. He talked with freedom and 
 with manifest pleasure of these vague mediaeval 
 forefathers, of their bargaining and fighting with 
 the Umfrevilles and the Fenwicks ; - of the un- 
 speakable charm of their fastness at Capheaton, 
 where so much of his own childhood was passed. 
 But his interest in the Swinburnes seemed to be 
 largely romantic and antiquarian. His connections 
 on his mother's side were not less distinguished, nor 
 were they less ancient, although the Ashburnhams 
 were ennobled by William III., and their immediate 
 founder had been a loyal groom of the bedchamber 
 to Charles I. The poet's interest in their history, 
 however, began at the point where Lady Jane 
 
46 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 Ashburnham married Admiral Charles Swinburne 
 in 1836, Algernon being born next year as their 
 eldest son. He was not indisposed, however, in 
 unemphatic retrospect, to recall the great houses of 
 Ormonde, Anglesey, and Northumberland with 
 which the blood of his mother brought him into 
 direct connection. Probably a reminiscence of all 
 this may occasionally be found to throw light on 
 some otherwise cryptic lines in his poetry. 
 
 Of all his relatives, however, he spoke in those 
 days most of two : his incomparable mother, 
 invincible in tenderness and anxious care, and his 
 somewhat formidable uncle, the fourth Earl. This 
 nobleman was a book-collector of the fearless old 
 fashion, who had formed, at a reckless cost, one of 
 the noblest libraries in England. Lord Ashburn- 
 ham did not welcome visitors to his bookshelves, 
 but he made a special, perhaps a unique, exception 
 in favour of his nephew. Some of Swinburne's 
 happiest days were spent among the almost 
 fabulous treasures of the great house near Battle, 
 and he would return to London with dazzled eyes, 
 babbling of illuminated breviaries and old MS. 
 romances in Burgundian French. There can be no 
 doubt that Lord Ashburnham was one of the very 
 few persons, if he was not the only one, of whom 
 his nephew stood in awe. If the poet was fractious, 
 the peer could be tumultuous, and I have been told 
 that nowhere was Algernon so primly on his " p's 
 and q's " as at Ashburnham. But a real affec- 
 tionate appreciation existed between the old biblio- 
 
Swinburne 47 
 
 phile and the glowing young poet. When Lord Ash- 
 burnham died, over eighty, in 1 878, it was with sorrow 
 as well as respect that his nephew mourned him. 
 
 Outside poetry, and, in lesser measure, his family 
 life, Swinburne's interests were curiously limited. 
 He had no " small talk," and during the discussion 
 of the common topics of the day his attention at 
 once flagged and fell off, the glazed eye betraying 
 that the mind was far away. For science he had 
 no taste whatever, and his lack of musical ear 
 was a byword among his acquaintances. I once 
 witnessed a practical joke played upon him, which 
 made me indignant at the time, but which now seems 
 innocent enough, and not without interest. A lady, 
 having taken the rest of the company into her con- 
 fidence, told Swinburne that she would render on the 
 piano a very ancient Florentine ritornello which had 
 just been discovered. She then played " Three Blind 
 Mice," and Swinburne was enchanted. He found 
 that it reflected to perfection the cruel beauty of the 
 Medicis which perhaps it does. But this exemplifies 
 the fact that all impressions with him were intel- 
 lectual, and that an appeal to his imagination would 
 gild the most common object with romance. 
 
 In the days I speak of, Swinburne lived in large, 
 rather empty rooms on the first floor of an old 
 house in Great James Street, which used to remind 
 me of one of Dickens's London houses in "Great 
 Expectations" or "Little Dorrit." But until the 
 death of his father, who died at a great age in the early 
 autumn of 1877, Swinburne always had a country 
 
48 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 home in Holmwood, near Henley-on-Thames. At 
 Admiral Swinburne's death I think he stayed on 
 with his mother at Holmwood till the end of that 
 year. Such months on the banks of the Thames 
 were always beneficial to his health, and he wrote 
 there without interruption. I find a note (1875) : 
 " How exuberant S. always is when he comes 
 back ; it is partly pleasure at being in London 
 again, and partly refreshment from his country 
 captivity." Of his visits to the sea-coast of Norfolk 
 and Suffolk others must speak, for I never had the 
 pleasure of accompanying him. 
 
 When he came back from the country to town 
 he was always particularly anxious to recite or read 
 aloud his own poems. In doing this he often be- 
 came very much excited, and even, in his over- 
 whelming sense of the movement of the metre, 
 would jump about the room in a manner some- 
 what embarrassing to the listener. His method of 
 procedure was uniform. He would arrive at a 
 friend's house with a breast-pocket obviously bulg- 
 ing with manuscript, but buttoned across his chest. 
 After floating about the room and greeting his host 
 and hostess with many little becks of the head, and 
 affectionate smiles, and light wavings of the fingers, 
 he would settle at last upright on a chair, or, by 
 preference, on a sofa, and sit there in a state of 
 rigid immobility, the toe of one foot pressed against 
 the heel of the other. Then he would say, in an 
 airy, detached way, as though speaking of some 
 absent person, " I have brought with me my 
 
Swinburne 49 
 
 ' Thalassius ' or my ' Wasted Garden ' (or whatever 
 it might happen to be), which I have just finished." 
 Then he would be folded again in silence, looking 
 at nothing. We then were to say, " Oh, do please 
 read it to us ! Will you ?" Swinburne would 
 promptly reply, " I had no intention in the world 
 
 of boring you with it, but since you ask me " and 
 
 out would come the MS. I do not remember that 
 there was ever any variation in this little ceremony, 
 which sometimes preluded many hours of recitation 
 and reading. His delivery, especially of his own 
 poetry, was delightful as long as he sat quietly in his 
 seat. His voice, which was of extraordinary beauty, 
 " the pure Ashburnham voice," as his cousin explains 
 to me, rose and fell monotonously, but with a flute- 
 like note which was very agreeable, and the pulse of 
 the rhythm was strongly yet delicately felt. I shall 
 never forget the successive evenings on which he 
 read "Both well" aloud in his lodgings, in parti- 
 cular one on which Edward Burne-Jones, Arthur 
 O'Shaughnessy, P. B. Marston, and I sat with him 
 at his round marble-topped table lighted only by 
 candles in two giant candlesticks of serpentine he 
 had brought from the Lizard and heard him read 
 the magnificent second act of that tragedy. He 
 surpassed himself in vigour and melody of utter- 
 ance that night. But sometimes, in reading, he 
 lost control of his emotions, the sound became a 
 scream, and he would dance about the room, the 
 paper fluttering from his finger-tips like a pennon 
 in a gale of wind. 
 
 D 
 
50 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 He was not, in my recollection, very ready to 
 recite old published poems of his own, though 
 always glad, and even imperiously anxious, to read 
 new ones. Almost the only exception which I re- 
 member was in favour of " The Triumph of Time," 
 a poem which Swinburne deliberately impressed 
 upon me, and doubtless upon other friends as well, 
 as being, in a very peculiar sense, a record of per- 
 sonal experience. It was always difficult to know 
 where the frontier ran between hard fact and Swin- 
 burne's mind illuminated by a sweeping limelight 
 of imagination. He had a real love of truth, but 
 no certain recognition of fact. Unless, however, 
 he curiously deceived himself, a set of very definite 
 emotions and events is embalmed in " The Triumph 
 of Time," of which I have more than once heard 
 him chant fragments with extraordinary poignancy. 
 On these occasions his voice took on strange and 
 fife-like notes, extremely moving and disconcerting, 
 since he was visibly moved himself. The sound of 
 Swinburne wailing forth in his thrilling semitones 
 such stanzas as that addressed to the Sea : 
 
 / shall sleep, and move with the moving ships, 
 Change as the winds change, veer in the tide ; 
 
 My lips will feast on the foam of thy lips, 
 
 I shall rise with thy rising, with thee subside ; 
 
 Sleep, and not know if she be, if she were, 
 
 Filled full with life to the eyes and hair, 
 
 At a rose is fulfilled to the rose leaf tips 
 
 With splendid summer and perfume and pride, 
 
Swinburne 51 
 
 is something which will not fade out of memory a 
 long as life lasts ; and, perhaps, most of all, in the 
 recitation of the last four of the following very 
 wonderful verses: 
 
 / shall go my ways, tread out my measure, 
 
 Fill the days of my daily breath 
 With fugitive things not good to treasure, 
 
 Do as the world doth, say as it saith ; 
 But if we had loved each other O sweet, 
 Had you felt, lying under the palms of your feet, 
 The heart of my heart, beating harder with pleasure 
 
 To feel you tread it to dust and death, 
 
 Swinburne seemed to achieve, or to go far towards 
 achieving, an entirely novel and original form of 
 expression. His whole body shook with passion, 
 his head hung on one side with the eyes uplifted, 
 his tongue seemed burdened by the weight of the 
 syllables, and in the concentrated emphasis of his 
 slow utterance he achieved something like the real 
 Delphic ecstasy, the transfiguration of .the Pythia 
 quivering on her tripod. It was surpassingly strange, 
 but it was without a touch of conscious oddity or 
 affectation. It was a case of poetic " possession," 
 pure and simple. 
 
 V 
 
 Swinburne was a prodigious worker, and the bulk of 
 his productions in prose and verse is the more surpris- 
 ing since the act of writing was extremely disagreeable 
 to him, as, we may remember, it was to Wordsworth. 
 
52 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 He should have been born an improvisatore. I 
 brought him once a picture of the Swedish poet Bell- 
 mann, whose genius (a hundred years earlier) had a 
 certain resemblance to his own. Bellmann was repre- 
 sented with a lute, improvising his verses in the open 
 air. u Ah ! " said Swinburne, " that is what I should 
 like to do ! I should like to stand on a promontory 
 in Sark, in the full blaze of the sun, and shout my 
 verses till all the gulls come fawning to my feet. 
 That would be better than scraping and spluttering 
 over a filthy pen." In spite of a real physical 
 difficulty in writing, however, Swinburne got through 
 an astonishing amount. In the autumn of 1874, for 
 instance, I find he was finishing " Bothwell " ; he 
 was preparing a volume of essays for the press ; he 
 was composing lyrics for a volume to be called 
 " Songs in Time of Change," and then " Poems of 
 Revolution " (ultimately, I suppose, " Songs of Two 
 Nations"); he was writing criticism of Poe and 
 Blake (which did not, I think, please him enough to 
 be printed) ; he was busy with a book about 
 Chapman ; and he was engaged on a revival of 
 Wells's " Joseph and His Brethren." In connection 
 with the last-mentioned, I remember his showing me 
 the recast he was making of an essay on Wells he 
 had written in 1861, and he said, "At all events, I 
 can write better prose now than I could then." 
 
 The habit of centenaries had not seized the 
 British public forty years ago. The anniversary of 
 Lander's birth passed quite unobserved, and even 
 Swinburne did not recollect the date till the day 
 
Swinburne 53 
 
 itself, when he was at Holmwood, and could do 
 nothing. He was extremely vexed ; oddly enough, 
 he had always believed Landor to be two or three 
 years older than he was, and he had taken for 
 granted that the centenary had passed. However, 
 it providentially transpired that Charles Lamb was 
 born only eleven days later than Landor, so on 
 February i, 1875, Swinburne came up to town, 
 with delightful fussiness, on purpose to organise a 
 Lamb dinner. So far as I know, it was the only time in 
 his life that he ever " organised " anything. He was 
 magnificent ; very grave and important ; and he 
 smoothed over the awkward circumstance of his 
 having forgotten (for the moment) his own beloved 
 Landor by saying that the same libations might fitly 
 and gracefully be mingled in an affectionate remem- 
 brance of the two great men. 
 
 Landor, however, was ultimately merged in Lamb, 
 in whose honour a very small group ate a mediocre 
 dinner in a Soho tavern on February 10. We 
 were only five, if I recollect rightly, the others 
 being Mr. Theodore Watts, our ardent and sanguine 
 William Minto (whose bright life burned out untimely 
 some nineteen years ago), and a curious friend of 
 Swinburne's, Thomas Purnell, always to me rather a 
 disturbing element. Swinburne was in the chair, and 
 I never saw him in better " form." He took upon 
 himself an air of dignity which presupposed the 
 idea that our little banquet was, symbolically, a 
 large public affair ; and when Purnell " went too 
 far," as people say, it was wonderful to hear 
 
54 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 Swinburne recall him to a more decorous choice of 
 language. I feel as if there had been " speeches " ; 
 but that is merely caused by a recollection of the 
 very high grade along which the conversation moved 
 until the waiters turned us out into the street. 
 
 Of the relations between Swinburne and Brown- 
 ing something should, I believe, be put on record. 
 In the earliest times the former had shared the 
 Pre-Raphaelite enthusiasm for what Browning had 
 published up to " Men and Women." But the two 
 poets came into no close contact, and I think that 
 Swinburne's natural instinct was not attracted to 
 Browning's personality. When, in 1874, I began 
 eagerly to talk of the elder to the younger poet, my 
 zeal was checked by Swinburne's courteous indiffer- 
 ence. He found no pleasure whatever in Browning's 
 plays, nor much, which astonished me, in his lyrics. 
 Yet there was no aversion, and when we came to 
 " The Ring and the Book " Swinburne's praise was 
 unaffected. Moreover, he more and more warmly 
 admired the series of psychological studies beginning 
 with " Fifine at the Fair." " This," he said, " is far 
 better than anything Browning has yet written. 
 Here is his true province." The result of this deve- 
 lopment of taste was the page of almost extravagant 
 laudation in the " George Chapman " of 1875, which 
 amazed some of Swinburne's friends, and bewildered 
 Browning himself as much as it gratified him. But, 
 unfortunately, in 1877, at the height of Swin- 
 burne's violent controversy with the New Shakspere 
 Society, Browning accepted the presidency of that 
 
Swinburne 55 
 
 body. This gave Swinburne not merely deep 
 offence, but great and lasting pain, and no invectives 
 became too sharp for him in speaking of Browning. 
 It distressed me beyond measure that such a mis- 
 understanding should exist between men whom I 
 loved and venerated, and I ventured to tell Brown- 
 ing how much Swinburne was hurt. He was, of 
 course, entirely innocent of all intentional offence, 
 expressed himself shocked, and begged me to explain 
 to Swinburne how little any intention of slighting 
 him had crossed his mind. At the same time, for my 
 private ear, Browning suggested that one's conduct 
 really could not be regulated by the dread lest some 
 eminent person one scarcely knew might disapprove 
 of it. I did what I could, not without some success, 
 to moderate Swinburne's anger, but the damage was 
 done. There was a native incompatibility between 
 the two poets which prevented either of them from 
 according complete justice to the other. The 
 character of Browning had the breadth of a lake, 
 which is sometimes swept by storms ; that of Swin- 
 burne, the unceasing impetuosity of a mountain 
 torrent. 
 
 Before his fortieth year there had set in a curious 
 ossification of Swinburne's intellect. He ceased to 
 form new impressions, while reverting with all his 
 former exuberance to the old. This was extraordi- 
 nary in one who had waved the banner of rebellion 
 and had led youthful enthusiasm so heroically when 
 it affected writers just earlier than himself. Whether 
 he changed his tone in familiar talk later on I do not 
 
56 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 know, but certainly between i874and i884heshowed 
 no intelligent comprehension whatever of the new 
 elements in literature. He was absolutely indifferent 
 to Stevenson, to Ibsen, to Dostoieffsky, each of 
 whom was pressed upon his notice, and his hostility 
 to Zola was grotesque. In 1877 " L'Assommoir " 
 was published periodically in a Paris review called, 
 I think, La Republique des Lettres, a journal which 
 had languished from the first, and now expired in its 
 third volume. Swinburne attributed, of course 
 jocosely, the fact of its failure to the effect of a most 
 dignified protest against Zola which he had printed 
 somewhere. I remember his ecstasy, and his ex- 
 pression of a belief (which proved quite unfounded) 
 that Zola would never dare to publish another page. 
 This attitude to the French Naturalists was 
 unusual. Swinburne's native temper was generous, 
 and the idea of attacking a genuine talent of any 
 species would have been dreadful to him. But he 
 did not think that Stevenson to take a particularly 
 distressing instance had any talent, and he was 
 therefore silent about what he wrote. It was curious, 
 however, to note that Swinburne was always capable 
 of being affected along straight lines of reminiscence. 
 At the very moment when he was hewing at the 
 French realists, root and branch, he spoke to me with 
 generous approval of one of the least gifted and most 
 extreme of their precursors, L6on Cladel. I was 
 greatly astonished, but the mystery was soon ex- 
 plained. Cladel had attacked Napoleon III. with 
 peculiar virulence, and he was an open worshipper at 
 
Swinburne 57 
 
 the altar of Victor Hugo. No matter how Zolaesque 
 his stories might be, he had these two unquestionable 
 claims on Swinburne's approbation. 
 
 There is no doubt that a wonderful aura of charm 
 hung about the person of this astonishing man of 
 genius. Swinburne might be absurd ; he could 
 not fail to be distinguished. He might be quixotic ; 
 he was never mean or timid or dull. He repre- 
 sented, in its most flamboyant shape, revolt against 
 the concessions and the hypocrisies of the mid- 
 Victorian era, " this ghastly, thin-faced time of ours." 
 An extraordinary exhilaration accompanied his pres- 
 ence, something uplifted, extravagant, and yet un- 
 selfish. No one has ever lived who loved poetry 
 more passionately, found in it more inexhaustible 
 sources of pleasure, cultivated it more thoroughly 
 for itself, more sincerely for nothing which it 
 might be persuaded to offer as a side issue. 
 Half Swinburne's literary influence depended 
 upon little, unregarded matters, such as his 
 unflinching attitude of worship towards the great 
 masters, his devotion to unpopular causes, his 
 uncompromising arrogance in the face of conven- 
 tionality. It is becoming difficult to recapture even 
 the thrill he caused by his magic use of " unpoetic " 
 monosyllables, such as "bloat," "pinch," "rind," 
 "fang," "wince," embedded in the very heart of 
 his ornate melody. But his meteoric flight across 
 the literary heavens, followed by the slow and 
 dignified descent of the glimmering shower of 
 sparks, will long excite curiosity, even when the 
 
58 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 sensation it caused has ceased to be quite intelligible. 
 Yet those who stood under the apparition, and stared 
 in amazement at its magnificent audacity, must not 
 be over-much surprised if a generation is arising 
 that fails to comprehend what the phenomenon 
 meant to the original spectators. 
 
 1909-12. 
 
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 
 
 1816-1902 
 
PHILIP JAMES BAILEY 
 
 AT the opening of the year 1902 there were still 
 alive amongst us two men who survived as repre- 
 sentatives of what poetry was in these islands before 
 the commencement of the Victorian era. Mr. 
 Aubrey de Vere, having reached his eighty-ninth 
 year, passed away on January 20 ; Mr. Philip James 
 Bailey, in his eighty-seventh, on September 7. So, 
 as we sit quietly and watch, we see history un- 
 rolling, since, in the chronicle of our literature, 
 the closure of a great and complicated system of 
 poetic activity was, in a sense, defined by the deaths 
 of these venerable men. Moreover and this is 
 curious in each of these survivors we had, living 
 before us, types not quite of the first order, indeed, 
 but yet vivid types of the two main divisions of 
 the English poetry of the first half of the nineteenth 
 century : that, namely, which was devoted to a 
 reasonable grace, and that which was uplifted on 
 a mystical enthusiasm. So that a sermon on the 
 verse of that time might well take as its text the 
 opposed and yet related names of De Vere and 
 Bailey. 
 
 Nothing so extensive is to be attempted here. 
 But before endeavouring to define the character of 
 
62 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 the talent of the younger of these veterans, and 
 to note the place of " Festus " in the history of 
 letters, we may linger a moment on what re- 
 semblance there was between the two aged men, 
 so intensely opposed in their general disposition 
 of mind and their walk in the world. They had 
 in common an exquisite personal dignity, Mr. de 
 Vere moving in the genial companionship of like- 
 minded friends, both in Ireland and in London ; 
 Mr. Bailey immobile in his hermitage at Notting- 
 ham. They had in common the happy fate which 
 preserved to each in extreme old age all the 
 faculties of the mind, the sweetest cheerfulness, 
 the most ardent hopefulness, an optimism that 
 nothing could assail and that disease itself avoided. 
 Each, above all, to a very remarkable degree, pre- 
 served to the last his religious devotion to that art 
 to which his life had been dedicated ; each to the 
 very end was full of a passionate love of verse. 
 Song-intoxicated men they were, both of them ; 
 preserving their delight in poetry far beyond the 
 common limits of an exhilaration in any mental 
 matter. 
 
 When this has been said, it is the difference far 
 more than the resemblance between them which 
 must strike the memory. Of the imaginative op- 
 position which the author of " Festus " offered 
 to the entire school of which Mr. de Vere was 
 a secondary ornament more will be said later. 
 But the physical opposition was immense between 
 the slightness of figure and flexible elegance of the 
 
Philip James Bailey 63 
 
 Irish poet, with his mundane mobility, and the 
 stateliness of Mr. Bailey. Mr. de Vere never 
 seemed to be an old man, but a young man dried 
 up ; Mr. Bailey, of whose appearance my recollec- 
 tions go back at least thirty years, always during 
 that time looked robustly aged, a sort of prophet 
 or bard, with a cloud of voluminous white hair 
 and curled silver beard. As the years went by 
 his head seemed merely to grow more handsome, 
 almost absurdly, almost irritatingly so, like a picture 
 of Connal, "first of mortal men," in some illustrated 
 edition of Ossian. The extraordinary suspension 
 of his gaze, his gentle, dazzling aspect of uninter- 
 rupted meditation, combined with a curious down- 
 ward arching of the lips, seen through the white 
 rivers of his beard, to give a distinctly vatic 
 impression. He had an attitude of arrested in- 
 spiration, as if waiting for the heavenly spark to 
 fall again, as it had descended from 1836 to 1839, 
 and as it seemed never inclined to descend again. 
 But the beauty of Mr. Bailey's presence, which 
 was so marked as to be an element that cannot be 
 overlooked in a survey of what he was, had an 
 imperfection in its very perfectness. It lacked fire. 
 What the faces of Milton and Keats possessed, 
 what we remember in the extraordinary features of 
 Tennyson, just this was missing in Mr. Bailey, who, 
 nevertheless, might have sat to any scene-painter 
 in Christendom as the type of a Poet. 
 
64 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 I 
 
 English literature in the reign of William IV. 
 is a subject which has hitherto failed to attract a 
 historian. It forms a small belt or streak of the 
 most colourless, drawn across our variegated in- 
 tellectual chronicle. The romantic movement of 
 the end of the preceding century had gradually 
 faded into emotional apathy by 1830, and the years 
 which England spent under the most undignified 
 and inefficient of her monarchs were few indeed, 
 but highly prosaic. Most of the mental energy 
 of the time went out in a constitutional struggle 
 which was necessary, but was not splendid. A 
 man is hardly at his best when his own street-door 
 has been slammed in his face, and he stands outside 
 stamping his feet and pulling the bell. The decade 
 which preceded the accession of Victoria was, in 
 literature, a period of cold reason : the best that 
 could be said of the popular authors was that 
 they were sensible. A curious complacency marked 
 the age, a self-sufficiency which expressed itself in 
 extraordinarily unemotional writing. To appreciate 
 the heavy and verbose deadness of average English 
 prose in the thirties we must dip into the books then 
 popular. No volume of the essay class was so 
 much in vogue as the " Lacon " of the Rev. Mr. 
 Colton, a work the aridity of which can only be 
 comprehended by those who at this date have the 
 courage to attack it. Mr. Colton, although he 
 preached the loftiest morality, was a gambling 
 
Philip James Bailey 65 
 
 parson, and shot himself, in 1832, in the Forest 
 of Fontainebleau. But that did not affect the 
 popularity of his chain of dusty apophthegms. 
 
 The starvation of the higher faculties of the mind 
 in the William IV. period was something which we 
 fail to-day to realise. No wonder Carlyle thought, 
 in 1835, that "Providence warns me to have done 
 with literature," and in 1837 saw nothing for it but 
 to " buy a rifle and a spade, and withdraw to the 
 Transatlantic wilderness." In the letters of Tennyson 
 we may easily read what it was that, after the 
 failure of his enchanting volumes of 1830 and 1833, 
 kept him silent in despair for ten of his best years. 
 This was the dead lull during which the moral 
 storms of 1840-1850 were preparing to gather. It 
 was the time when the Puseyite controversy was 
 beginning, when " Tracts for the Times," under an 
 oppressive obloquy and miscomprehension, were 
 making a struggle for religious warmth and air. A 
 chilly light of reason applied to morals, that was 
 what the subjects of William IV. desired to 
 contemplate, and poetry itself was called upon to 
 make a definite concession to the gospel of utility. 
 Romance was at its lowest ebb, and even 
 
 the ghost ofMiltiades rose by night 
 And stood by the bed of the Benthamite. 
 
 Among poets who possessed the public ear at that 
 time, the aged Wordsworth stood first, but the 
 prestige of the laureate, Southey, who had been one 
 of the most active and authoritative of reviewers, 
 
 
 
66 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 was, in many circles, paramount. Now Southey 
 as his most prominent disciple, Sir Henry Taylor, 
 has proudly told us " took no pleasure in poetic 
 passion." By the time of which we are speaking, 
 however, Southey and even Wordsworth had passed 
 into the background of active life, but there had 
 been no reaction against the quietism of their later 
 days. That quietism had taken possession of the 
 taste of the country, and had gradually ousted the 
 only serious rival it had seemed to possess, the 
 violence of Byron. It was at this time, in the full 
 tide of Benthamism, that Henry Taylor attempted a 
 poetical coup d'etat which demands close attention 
 from the student of our literary history. 
 
 In publishing his enormous drama of " Philip van 
 Artevelde," in 1834, Henry Taylor took occasion to 
 issue a preface which is now far more interesting to 
 read than his graceful verse. He thought the time 
 had come to stamp out what he called "the mere 
 luxuries of poetry." He was greatly encouraged by 
 the general taste of the public, which obviously 
 was finding highly-coloured literature inacceptable, 
 and in a preface of singular boldness, not unadroit 
 in its logic, Taylor presumed to dictate terms to the 
 poets. He begged them, for the future, to walk the 
 common earth and breathe the common air. He 
 entreated them to believe that forcible expression, 
 fervid feeling, and beautiful imagery are useless if 
 employed in connection with thoughts that are 
 not "sound." There was to be no health for us 
 unless reason had full supremacy over imagination. 
 
Philip James Bailey 67 
 
 Reflection must take the place of mere " feeling," 
 thought the place of imagery. Passion, so this 
 faithful disciple of Southey thought, was to be 
 regarded as a direct danger and disadvantage. 
 
 Nor did the preface of 1834 confine itself to the 
 encouragement of what was tame and good ; it 
 descended into the dust, and wrestled with lions 
 that were wild and bad. It fought with Byron, as 
 Christian fought with Apollyon, conscious of the 
 awful strength of its supernatural opponent. It 
 fought less strenuously, and with a touch of contempt, 
 with " the brilliant Mr. Shelley," to whom it could 
 afford to be condescending. It glanced round the 
 arena without being able so much as to observe an 
 antagonist who, to our eyes, fills the picture, and is 
 alone sufficient to condemn all the " Philip van 
 Artevelde " arguments and theories. This is Keats, 
 of whom, so far as we can discover from this 
 preface, Taylor had, in 1834, never even heard, or 
 else despised so entirely that it did not occur to him 
 to mention his name. 
 
 The Preface to " Philip van Artevelde" enjoyed a 
 great success. Its assumptions were accepted by 
 the reviewers as poetic canon law. It was admitted 
 without reserve that the function of poetry was " to 
 infer and to instruct." The poets were warned 
 to occupy themselves in future mainly with what 
 was rational and plain. Henry Taylor had made 
 the sweeping charge that the more enthusiastic 
 species of verse was apt to encourage attention by 
 fixing it on what is "puerile, pusillanimous, or 
 
68 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 wicked." There was a great searching of heart in 
 families ; the newspapers were immense. A large 
 number of copies of "Childe Harold" and of 
 " Manfred " were confiscated, and examples of 
 Pollok's " Course of Time " (by many persons 
 preferred to " Paradise Lost," as of a purer 
 orthodoxy) were substituted for them. Even the 
 young Macaulay, who had suddenly become a 
 power, joined the enemy, and declared that " perhaps 
 no person can be a poet, or can ever enjoy poetry, 
 without a certain unsoundness of mind." Ah, but, 
 cries in effect the excellent Henry Taylor, we will so 
 coerce and browbeat and depress the poets that 
 they shall not think a thought or write a line that is 
 not " sound," and the Benthamite himself (the 
 stupendous original Jeremy had died, of course, in 
 1832) shall pluck, unhandily enough, at the lyre 
 now consecrated to utility and decorum. 
 
 It was the old balance between "stasy" and 
 "ec-stasy," and Henry Taylor was, to a certain 
 extent, justified by the character of such contempo- 
 rary works as might be held to belong to the ecstatic 
 species. It did not seem a moment at which great 
 subjects and a great style were prepared to commend 
 themselves. The most prominent indulgers in 
 "the mere luxury of poetry" were Heraud and 
 Reade, whose efforts were calculated to bring instant 
 ridicule upon imaginative writing by their hollow 
 grandiloquence. There were the Byronisms of 
 Croly, the once-famous author of that gorgeous 
 romance, " Salathiel," and there was the never- 
 
Philip James Bailey 69 
 
 to-be-forgotten Robert Montgomery. All these 
 poetasters merely emphasised and justified Henry 
 Taylor's protest. In genuine poetry of a highly 
 imaginative cast there appeared, almost wholly 
 unregarded, " Pauline " and " Paracelsus," and in 
 1838 Miss Barrett produced, in defiance of the 
 taste of the age, her irregular and impassioned 
 " Seraphim." None of these publications, however, 
 disturbed in the least degree the supremacy of the 
 school of good sense, or threatened that " equipoise 
 of reason " which the disciples of Southey thought 
 that they had fixed for ever. Poetry was to preserve 
 its logical judgment ; it was never to " let itself go." 
 The cardinal importance of Bailey's " Festus " is 
 that it was the earliest direct counterblast to this 
 scheme of imaginative discipline, and that when it 
 appeared in 1839 the walls built up by Henry 
 Taylor's arrogant preface immediately began to 
 crumble down. 
 
 II 
 
 The extraordinary poem which thus recalled 
 English literature to the ecstatic after a period of 
 bondage to the static, and attracted the astonishment 
 of the public by leading a successful revolt against 
 baldness, against what a critic of the time called 
 " the pride of natural barrenness," was the work of 
 an extremely young man. Philip James Bailey 
 was born in Nottingham on April 22, 1816. He was 
 the son of a journalist of an excellent provincial 
 
jo Portraits and Sketches 
 
 type, a sturdy local politician, antiquary, and 
 philanthropist, himself an amateur in verse, "an 
 inveterate rhymer," we are told, and full of 
 enthusiasm for new ideas as they revealed them- 
 selves to active-thinking persons in those repressed 
 and stunted thirties. The father of Philip James 
 Bailey promptly acquiesced, like the father of 
 Robert Browning, in the decision of his son to 
 adopt "the vocation of a poet," and the boy 
 seems to have been educated to that end, as 
 others to become chartered accountants or 
 solicitors. Nominally, indeed, the latter profession 
 was selected for young Bailey, who, nevertheless, as 
 early as 1835, is understood to have begun to plan 
 his great poem. It is further related that in 1836 
 the young man was in his twentieth year he began 
 to write " Festus," and in 1838 had finished the 
 first draft of it. 
 
 So far as it appears, there was nothing but 
 irresistible vocation and a selective use of the most 
 sympathetic models which led Bailey back to what 
 had so long and so completely been neglected in 
 English poetry, the record of the subtler action of 
 the mind. In the midst of a fashion for scrupulous 
 common sense and " the equipoise of reason," here 
 was a young man of twenty who, without any sort 
 of impetus from without, and in defiance of current 
 criticism, devoted himself to the employment of 
 clothing philosophic speculation with almost reck- 
 less imagery. Henry Taylor had entreated the 
 poets not to attempt to describe anything which 
 
Philip James Bailey 71 
 
 cannot " be seen through the mere medium of our 
 eyesight." But from the very outset the new bard 
 was to deal wholly with impassioned spiritual life, 
 exalted into a sphere unoccupied except by rapture 
 and vision. You are to build, practically dictated 
 the Preface of " Philip van Artevelde," nothing but 
 comfortable two-storied villas, with all the modern 
 appliances. The architect of "Festus" comes, 
 raising none but pinnacled archangelic mansions 
 high in the unapparent. This was the note of the 
 amazement with which " Festus " was received in 
 1839. It bore a message of good tidings to spiritual 
 souls starving in a utilitarian desert. It lifted a 
 palm-tree, it unsealed a well in the arid flats of 
 common sense. We cannot, in the light of all that 
 has been written since, appreciate in the least 
 degree what " Festus " was to its earliest readers, 
 unless we bear this in mind. All the yearnings 
 for the unlimited, all the suppressed visions of 
 infinity, all who groped in darkness after the exces- 
 sive, and the impassioned, and the inconceivable, 
 gathered in tumult and joy to welcome this new 
 voice. James Montgomery wrote that, after reading 
 " Festus," he felt as though he had been eating of 
 the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. 
 
 To realise what it was which hungry visionaries 
 found in the new poem, it is necessary to turn back to 
 what it was which was presented to them in 1839. 
 The first edition of "Festus" is a work of remark- 
 able interest. It is now very rare, and it may safely 
 be said that there is no volume which justifies more 
 
72 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 completely the passion or mania of the book- 
 collector. For sixty-three years " Festus " has not 
 lacked readers, and edition after edition has steadily 
 supplied a demand. But the "Festus" of 1901 is 
 a very different affair from the volume of the same 
 name of 1839. In the first place, it is very unlike 
 it in size, since it contains about 40,000 verses, while 
 the original edition has something less than 10,000. 
 We shall presently have to describe the extra- 
 ordinary manner in which Mr. Bailey, during sixty 
 years, steadily added to the bulk of his poem. But 
 the point to dwell on here is that the effect made 
 upon his own generation was not made by the huge 
 and very unwieldy book which one now buys as 
 " Festus " in the shops, but by a poem which was 
 already lengthy, yet perfectly within the bounds of 
 easy reading. It seems essential, if we are to gauge 
 that effect, to turn back to the first edition. This 
 was a large octavo, with no name on the title-page, 
 but with a symbolic back presenting a malignant 
 snake flung downwards through the inane by the 
 rays that dart from a triangle of light, a very proper 
 preparation for the redundant and arcane invocations 
 of the text within the covers. 
 
 The attack of the utilitarians had been chiefly 
 directed against the disciples of Byron, and the new 
 poet evaded the censure of such critics by ignoring 
 in the main the influence of that daemonic enchanter. 
 It is specious to see the effect of " Manfred " upon 
 " Festus," but in point of fact the resemblance seems 
 to result from a common study of " Faust." Nor 
 
Philip James Bailey 73 
 
 has the " Dr. Faustus " of Marlowe although, since 
 the publication of Lamb's " Specimens " in 1808, 
 that majestic poem had been within every one's 
 reach anything very definite to do with Bailey's 
 conception. This was founded, almost too closely, 
 on that of Goethe's "Faust." The result of the 
 manipulation of later editions has been more and 
 more to disguise the resemblance of the original 
 draft of " Festus " to its great German forerunner, 
 and to this, therefore, with the edition of 1839 
 before us, we must give a moment's attention. 
 
 Bailey's poem began, not as it does now, but with 
 an abrupt introduction of the reader to Heaven, 
 exactly as in " Faust," with a " Prolog im Himmel." 
 In each case God himself speaks, and in a triplet of 
 verses. There is a "Chor der Engel," called by 
 Bailey "Seraphim" and "Cherubim," and these 
 combine in a great burst of melodious adoration, 
 like "die himmelischen Heerschaaren " in "Faust." 
 Lucifer demands the soul of Festus to sport with, 
 exactly as Mephistopheles asks for Faust. When 
 the tempter abruptly appears to his meditating 
 mortal victim, the startled " Who art thou, pray ? " 
 of Festus is precisely the " Wie nennst du dich ? " 
 of Faust. Later on, Lucifer and Festus ride Ruin 
 and Darkness, the black colts of the Evil One, 
 exactly as Faust and Mephistopheles do their black 
 steeds after the Walpurgisnacht. In the 1839 edition 
 of " Festus" the lyrical element is very much more 
 prominent than in the later editions, where it has 
 been steadily superseded by blank verse. These 
 
74 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 odes and choruses in the original text are plainly 
 modelled upon the lyrics in the German poem, and, 
 what is curious, it seems to be rather the second 
 than the first part of " Faust " which has attracted 
 the English rhapsodist, whose cantatas occasionally 
 recall, in their form, those of the "Chor seliger 
 Knaben " and the rest. 
 
 It would be interesting to trace the mode in which 
 Goethe influenced the mind of the young Notting- 
 ham poet, whose masterpiece was to be the most 
 important contribution to English literature in which 
 rivalry with " Faust " is predominant. Bailey, as 
 I am informed, never resided in Germany, and had 
 but a scanty knowledge of the German language. 
 The only direct reference to Goethe which I have 
 found in his writings occurs in " The Age," where he 
 remarks that 
 
 Wolfgangs " Faust" jlames forth the fire divine 
 In many a so/id thought and glowing line 
 
 a couplet of not particularly luminous criticism. 
 I suppose that Bailey was not constrained to 
 spell out the original, since, by 1836, Goethe was 
 not without interpreters in this country. The 
 acquaintance of Englishmen with Goethe as a force 
 hardly existed earlier than 1827, when Carlyle's two 
 great essays made their mark. In 1831 Abraham 
 Hay ward led the army of translators with a privately 
 printed " Faust," and in 1832 a certain sensation was 
 caused in English intellectual circles by the death 
 of Goethe, a reverberating event. Then followed 
 
Philip James Bailey 75 
 
 version upon version, comment upon comment ; 
 the publication to the outer world of Hayward in 
 1833, in 1835 tne "Faust" of Dr. Anster, eagerly 
 commended by the Edinburgh Review these, we 
 may shrewdly conjecture, were the main media of 
 inspiration to the youthful Bailey, although he prob- 
 ably glanced at the original. Moreover, there 
 existed a widely circulated portfolio of designs for 
 " Faust " by Ritzsch, with some text in English ; 
 these drawings were in the hands of the infant 
 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it appears, by 1836, and may 
 very well have stimulated the imagination of the 
 adolescent author of " Festus." There can be, at 
 all events, no awkwardness in comprehending that 
 the latter, without any deep knowledge of the Ger- 
 man language, but by a mere happy inevitable 
 instinct, could grasp the essential character of the 
 sublime poem of Goethe, and bend its design to his 
 own ends. The difficulty, I confess, to me is that, 
 as I have said, " Festus " seems to presuppose fami- 
 liarity with some scenes, at least, of the second 
 part of "Faust," which had not been published 
 anywhere until 1831, and was but slowly and 
 confusedly recognised in England. 
 
 In the evolution of a plot the English drama was 
 far less successful than its German exemplar. The 
 great disadvantage of " Festus " was immediately 
 perceived to be its lack of coherent outline. Eliza- 
 beth Barrett remarked that " the fine things were 
 worth looking for, in the design manque.'' Home, 
 one of the earliest and most judicious of admirers, 
 
Portraits and Sketches 
 
 lamented that the framework of the poem was 
 unworthy of its eminent beauties of detail. The 
 plot of " Festus " is, in fact, too slight to bear the 
 heavy robes of brocade which are hung about its 
 insufficiency. To make such a work durably weighty 
 it should have an actual story, complicated and 
 animated enough to arrest attention. This was 
 perfectly comprehended by Goethe in both parts 
 of " Faust." But the narrative element in " Festus" 
 is thin and vague to excess. The. hero is a human 
 soul, of the highest gifts and attainments, doomed 
 to despair and melancholy, and unwillingly enslaved 
 to sin. The mode in which he becomes the play- 
 thing of the arch-spirit of evil is impressive, but 
 scarcely intelligible ; nor are the relations of the 
 tempter to his victim ever realised in a vividly 
 dramatic or narrative way. It would be an almost 
 impossible feat to separate the " story " or plot of 
 "Festus" from its lyrical and rhetorical ornament. 
 One has to face the fact that the poem exists in and 
 for these purple robes, and that it is essentially a 
 series of transcendent visions, each clothed upon by 
 a fresh set of more or less sumptuous and redundant 
 imagery. 
 
 The keynote of " Festus " is a spiritual optimism. 
 The lesson of the poem was easily perceived to be 
 insistence upon the ministry of evil as a purifier. 
 Man was to pass through sin as through a fire, and 
 to come out purged from the dross of humanity. 
 At the opening of the poem the note of hope is 
 struck. In spite of Lucifer, and of all his ingenious 
 
Philip James Bailey 77 
 
 activity, Earth and Man are improving. But God 
 (the youthful Bailey was extraordinarily familiar 
 with the mind of the Creator), in a speech of 
 disconcerting petulance, dooms Earth to end : 
 " Earth to death is given," and the pitying angels 
 cover their faces. It is by playing upon the depres- 
 sion of one who inhabits an orb which is about to 
 be annihilated that Lucifer obtains his ascendancy 
 over the spirit of Festus ; he approaches him in the 
 guise of a giant force, placable and sane, that will 
 give the longed-for happiness. But Festus rejects 
 all the vulgar forms of joy : 
 
 Spirit, 
 
 It ii not bliss I seek ; I care not for it. 
 
 I am above the low delights of life. 
 
 The life 1 live is in a dark cold cavern, 
 
 Where I wander up and down, feeling for something 
 
 Which is to be ; and must be ; what, I know not ; 
 
 But the incarnation of my destiny 
 
 Is nigh . . . 
 
 The worm of the world hath eaten out my heart. 
 
 Lucifer is equal to the opportunity ; he promises to 
 renew the heart of Festus within him, and to endow 
 it with immortality in spite of God. Festus wavers, 
 but he is now launched upon a career of super- 
 natural adventures, presented to us in a succession 
 of scenes and visions. These are pleasing in pro- 
 portion with their seriousness, for Bailey had none 
 of Goethe's gift of laughter, and his " comic relief " 
 is invariably deplorable. It is in his communion 
 
78 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 with infinity, in his pictures of impassioned spiritual 
 life, that he is successful, and his flights are most 
 fully to be trusted when they carry him farthest 
 up into the empyrean. 
 
 If we analyse the narrative of " Festus," we are 
 led to strange and awkward conclusions. The 
 Spirit of Evil, embodied in Lucifer, rarely coincides 
 with the ethical action of guilt, and is often actually 
 in collision with it. One does not see what Lucifer 
 has to gain from his ascendancy over Festus, since 
 that personage continues melancholy, active in 
 aspiration, in will passionately virtuous. The great 
 evidence of his spiritual peril is the yielding of his 
 intellect to the Devil, but Bailey is too delicate 
 to carry out this submission to any practical issue. 
 If Lucifer is very audacious, Festus does not em- 
 brace the wicked suggestion, but turns and rates 
 the tempter, in tones dignified and courteous, like 
 those of Dr. Primrose reproving sin in Mr. Thorn - 
 hill. On their Walpurgisnacht-ride over the world 
 Festus and Lucifer overhear an island-people, on 
 their knees before a maiden fair, singing " Hail, 
 Victoria ! Princess, hail !" (A.D. 1837), an< ^ quaintly 
 enough it seems to be gratitude to Lucifer for 
 having shown him this patriotic scene which finally 
 conquers the scruples of Festus and binds him to 
 the tempter. 
 
 The central incidents of the poem are sometimes 
 difficult to follow. Lucifer takes Festus up into 
 the planet Venus, where they have an interview 
 with the Muse, and where Angela, the dead love of 
 
Philip James Bailey 79 
 
 Festus, appears to him. The scene changes to 
 earth, and Festus is discovered with one "my 
 Helen " at what the stage-direction calls " a large 
 party and entertainment." This episode, or lyrical 
 intermezzo, is long, and breaks the poem into two 
 parts ; it was considered very sprightly in the 
 forties. Festus sings the following song at supper : 
 
 Thy nature is so pure andjine, 
 
 'Tis most like wine; 
 Thy bloody which blushes thro 1 each vein, 
 
 Rosy champagne; 
 And the fair skin which o'er it grows, 
 
 Bright as its snows. 
 Thy wit, which thou dost work so well, 
 
 Is like cool moselle; 
 Like madeira, bright and warm. 
 
 Is thy smile's charm ; 
 Clarets glory hath thine eye, 
 
 Or mine must lie; 
 But nought can like thy lip possess 
 
 Dehciousness ! 
 
 And now that thou art divinely merry, 
 VII kiss and call thee, sparkling sherry. 
 
 When Bailey is " divinely merry " he puts the 
 Muses out of countenance ; yet this amazing ana- 
 creontic has survived through all the editions of 
 " Festus." The social occasion which opens with 
 this gaiety proves a very lengthy and animated 
 affair ; there are rompings and singing of arch songs, 
 and the discomfortable practice of wearing, beneath 
 
8o Portraits and Sketches 
 
 the lamp, wreaths of flowers which have been 
 dipped in the wine-cup, much prevails. An extra- 
 ordinary number of kisses, and vows, and amorous 
 forfeits are exchanged, and Lucifer takes a modest 
 and agreeable part in the entertainment. But at 
 Nottingham, in the reign of William IV., the most 
 successful evening parties came to an end before 
 midnight, and one George having gone so far as to 
 propose that a certain Fanny should " fold him bee- 
 like on her bosom's gentle tide," both Festus and 
 Lucifer feel that it is time to separate, and the 
 latter proposes that George should "shake hands, 
 man, with eternity," or, in other words, should go 
 home to bed. The stage-direction is, "They 
 break up." 
 
 From these faded pleasantries it is strange to 
 turn to the serious portions of the poem, which 
 have preserved to a remarkable degree their fresh- 
 ness and sonority. Almost immediately after this 
 " party," so unhappy in its provinciality, we come 
 upon a scene admirably dramatic in tone, and in its 
 excellent ironic note of mockery not unworthy of 
 Goethe or of Ibsen, in which Lucifer, in the 
 guise of a ranter at the door of a church, preaches 
 to the crowd a sermon on predestination, fooling 
 his audience savagely, till, at last, they perceive 
 his intention and turn to kill him. There is 
 nothing of its kind finer in the poetry of that age 
 than this magnificent sermon where it turns from 
 persiflage to contemptuous invective. " Tremble ! " 
 cries Lucifer to his conventional congregation 
 
Philip James Bailey 81 
 
 Tremble ! ye dare not believe. 
 No, cowards ! sooner than believe ye would die. 
 Die with the black lie flapping on your lips 
 Like the soot-flake upon a burning bar. 
 Be merry, happy if ye can : think never 
 Of him who slays your souls, nor Him who saves, 
 There's time enough for that when you're a-dying! 
 
 Men are not to resist such is the gospel of 
 Lucifer ; let yourselves go, he preaches, be swept on. 
 Resistance is the beginning of spiritual life, it gives 
 God his chance for leverage. " Prance merrily 
 off, skim like bubbles on the river, for then you 
 are sure to come to me." This is very Goethesque : 
 "stiirzt euch in Peneios',Fluth !" one remembers. 
 
 Although the subject is so audacious and apoca- 
 lyptical, the text of the first edition of " Festus " is 
 remarkable for simplicity of diction. There is a 
 general absence of pomposity ; the author is in- 
 spired, with evident earnestness, by a genuine 
 ecstasy of spiritual life. He submits to " visions of 
 sublime convocation," but he avoids the error of 
 translating these into swollen and preposterous 
 language. It is the more needful to insist on this 
 because in later editions Bailey contrived to spoil 
 his poem in this respect. He lost a great deal of his 
 directness of speech, and he substituted for it, as we 
 shall presently see, a bombastic splendour which 
 did him grievous wrong. But the blank verse of 
 the original " Festus," which has something of the 
 best parts of Young's "Night Thoughts" (that 
 very stately piece of elaborate rhetoric, nowadays 
 
 F 
 
82 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 so unjustly decried), is plain, full, and direct, with 
 curious touches of realism. Its lyrics are less 
 happy. Sometimes, as in the ballad of " The Gipsy 
 Maid," we have such a vivid improvisation as we 
 could imagine a bard composing by a watch-fire 
 in a mountain-pass, with no art, no care, yet 
 with a long breath of melancholy music. But, in 
 the main, it is the non-lyrical parts of " Festus " 
 which fascinate its readers now, as they did those of 
 sixty years ago, by their unsatisfied yearnings after 
 infinity, their enfranchised metaphysical specula- 
 tion, and their uplifted clarion-cries of melody and 
 vision. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Reviewers of the prevailing school, who held 
 that poetry should be rational, broad, and calm, 
 received "Festus" in 1839 with bewilderment. 
 To some of them it seemed less an achievement 
 in art than an exercise in theological mysticism run 
 mad. But the general verdict of the best judges 
 was highly favourable, and when it became known 
 that it was the production of a youth of two-and- 
 twenty, it was looked upon as a kind of portent. 
 
 There seemed nothing preposterous in comparing 
 such a work with the famous monuments of 
 literary precocity, with the "Ode on Christ's 
 Nativity," with the " Essay on Criticism," with 
 " Endymion." What might not the author attain 
 to ? It could not be questioned that " Festus " was 
 a better poem than "Queen Mab" ; why should 
 
Philip James Bailey 83 
 
 young Bailey not grow up to be as great a poet as 
 Shelley ? Already he possessed sustained powers 
 of a very high order. He had actually achieved, 
 at these his tender years, a body of philosophical 
 verse strenuous, fervent, and elevated. He had 
 already, as Swift might have said, his wings and his 
 music. What he lacked was what youth never 
 possesses, a sense of proportion, a delicacy of 
 workmanship, a full command over his materials. 
 These would naturally follow with the ripening 
 years, " which mellow what we write to the dull 
 sweets of rhyme." 
 
 By what inscrutable fate was it ordained that 
 in this case the gifts never ripened at all ? At 
 twenty-three Bailey was perhaps the most " promis- 
 ing " of living English poets, and at eighty-six that 
 promise was still to be fulfilled. In 1902, as in 
 1839, Philip James Bailey was the author of 
 " Festus," neither more nor less. Had he died in 
 the last-mentioned year he would have retained a 
 foremost place among our " inheritors of unfulfilled 
 renown " ; he would be habitually mentioned with 
 Chatterton. But, by the oddest irony, he survived, 
 actively endeavouring to improve his position, until 
 extreme old age, and yet was never able to recapture 
 his earliest melody and fervour. Meanwhile his 
 arrested development and successive mishaps did 
 not affect to any appreciable degree the fate of his 
 solitary production, which continued and continues 
 still to have a wide circle of readers. The case is odd 
 in itself and singular in the history of our literature. 
 
84 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 The earliest reception of "Festus" was mainly 
 by those most intimately interested in the art of 
 poetry. Tennyson, Bulvver Lytton, Thackeray, 
 the Brownings, and Home were among its few 
 original admirers and advocates. But as time went 
 on, the ring of readers spread further outwards 
 and became steadily less esoteric. The edition of 
 1846, which bore the author's name on the title- 
 page, greatly added to the quantity of his readers, but 
 took something from their quality. Tennyson, who 
 had been rapturous, while advising FitzGerald to 
 read " Festus " " There are really very grand things 
 in it" confessed that his correspondent would 
 "most likely find it a great bore." (Any human 
 being, by the way, less likely to appreciate 
 " Festus " than FitzGerald it would be difficult to 
 imagine.) The Brownings, even, now saw spots in 
 the sun. But with this slackening of technical or 
 professional interest in Bailey there grew up a 
 public sympathy founded on the matter of his poem, 
 its theological positions, its doctrine of ultimate 
 salvation, its bewitching theory of remedial chas- 
 tisement, its universalism. This process of divorce 
 from the purely literary current of the time has 
 continued ever since, and is the cause of several of 
 the anomalies of Bailey's celebrity. 
 
 Borne on a tide of imaginative earnestness, the 
 young author had declared that whatever he had 
 received, in a rush of improvisation, was made 
 independent of the workmanlike attributes of the 
 art by the fullness of his message and the abundance 
 
Philip James Bailey 85 
 
 of his imagery. With incomparable boldness this 
 lad of twenty-three had written as the colophon of 
 his poem : 
 
 Read Ms, world.' He who writes is dead to thee, 
 But still lives in these leaves. He spake inspired: 
 Night and day, thought came unhelped, undesired, 
 
 Like blood to his heart. 
 
 This is an impressive attitude, so long as the 
 inspiration lasts ; but suppose it to be withdrawn ? 
 It is then that the rhapsodist feels the lack of that 
 craft and discipline of art which he scorned in the 
 hour of his prophetic afflatus. There was never 
 a greater disappointment than attended the publi- 
 cation of Bailey's second volume, " The Angel 
 World," in 1850. The opportunity was matchless, 
 since a generation had now grown up emancipated 
 from all the sedative legislation of Southey and 
 Taylor. Highly coloured poetry was at present in 
 fashion ; imagination had reasserted its supremacy 
 over reason. There was no fear that Bailey's verse 
 would be reproved because of its excess of force and 
 fervour. But " The Angel World," to use Jeffrey's 
 phrase, "wouldn't do." It was a kind of celestial 
 romance in blankverse,faintlyreminiscent of " Eloa" 
 and still more faintly of " The Loves of the Angels." 
 It repeated, in less seductive accents, the universalist 
 dogma of " Festus " good and bad alike were finally 
 to be lapped in the mantle of the Eternal rest : 
 
 They who had erred and they who taught to err, 
 A 'long with those who, wise and pure, withstood. 
 
86 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 But it was, either as a tale or as a sermon, extra- 
 ordinarily unexhilarating. However, although the 
 little volume has never been re-issued, the reader 
 may in this matter indolently form his own opinion, 
 since Bailey, finding that people would not accept 
 "The Angel World," formed an ingenious and un- 
 fortunate project, which he continued to carry out 
 for the rest of his life. If a poem was received by 
 the critics and the public with marked disfavour, he 
 would be even with them by putting it bodily into 
 the next edition of " Festus." The argument in his 
 mind seems to have been something like this : " You 
 won't read my new piece, and you say you prefer 
 'Festus'? Very well, then it shall form part of 
 'Festus/ and so you will be obliged to read it." 
 Accordingly, as research will prove, " The Angel 
 World " was broken into two parts, and was silently 
 implanted in the middle of the next edition of 
 "Festus," with such verbal adaptations as were 
 necessary, but otherwise without change. 
 
 Internal evidence tends to show that the crushing 
 failure of " The Angel World " convinced the poet 
 of his error in depending wholly on improvisation 
 or "inspiration." In 1855 he published "The 
 Mystic," a volume which displays a close preoccupa- 
 tion with form. It consists of three unrelated poems, 
 of which the first is modelled on Shelley's " Alastor," 
 while the second, called " A Spiritual Legend," is a 
 strenuous and almost violent pastiche of Miltonic 
 blank verse, the stresses and inversions and elisions 
 of the rhythm of " Paradise Lost " being reproduced 
 
Philip fames Bailey 87 
 
 as though for a wager. In particular, the Miltonic 
 use of proper names is introduced without restraint, 
 so as to produce at length an almost ludicrous effect, 
 although often in itself beautiful in its full echo of 
 Milton : 
 
 By great SJiedaa, city occult, whose walls 
 Towered in alternate tiers of silver and gold ; 
 Where bright Herat, city oj roses, lights 
 With dome and minaret the land skip green ; 
 Damasek old, old Byblos, or Babel, 
 Or Tchelminar, or Baalbek, or where Balkh, 
 Mother of cities, murally encrowned, 
 Mourns. 
 
 There are magnificent lines in both these poems, 
 but especially in " A Spiritual Legend." The fault 
 of them is their obscurity, their vagueness ; it is, 
 frankly, impossible to know what "The Mystic" 
 is all about. It must be considered mainly as an 
 exercise in versification, undertaken, oddly and 
 perhaps pathetically, by a poet who felt that some- 
 thing divine, a gift of youth, was slipping from him, 
 and who determined to recapture it by a tardy and 
 vain preoccupation with the form and structure of 
 verse. 
 
 Certain fragments of the volume of 1855 were 
 shredded, in the extraordinary fashion already men- 
 tioned, into the ever-swelling " Festus," although 
 most of " The Mystic " was rebellious to this kind of 
 adaptation. But Bailey had formed the idea, long 
 before this, lhat the original outline of "Festus" 
 was sufficiently elastic to be stretched indefinitely : 
 
Portraits and Sketches 
 
 " more or less " ambiguous phrase ! he had per- 
 ceived this from the beginning, he wrote in 1889. 
 He worked everything into the design of his drama ; 
 he accounted for all his later fancies and rhapsodies 
 by thinking "This will do for ' Festus.'" He 
 thought that there had been revealed to him a new 
 and more rational idea of Hell, and he now scarcely 
 wrote anything in which his ideas of the limitation 
 of punishment and the eternity of universal bliss 
 did not find place. A curious example of this 
 persistency may be given. The last of the three 
 pieces which form the volume of 1855 ^ s a ballad 
 called "A Fairy Tale" ; it is one of Bailey's least 
 fortunate productions, a languid and insipid story 
 of how a little girl was disporting at eve in a verdant 
 ring, when she was pounced down upon by the 
 fairies, and persuaded to live with them. The 
 hasty reader might easily see in this nothing but 
 a piece of unusually guileless and puerile early 
 Victorian mock-romance, but if he pushes on he 
 will find his Bailey. The little girl casually dis- 
 covers that the fairies are greatly dejected by their 
 lack of a soul, so she sits up at the flower-embroidered 
 banquet and eloquently propounds to Sir Oberon 
 and to " divine Titania, night's incomparable queen," 
 the glad theory of universal salvation. It really 
 became with Bailey a King Charles's head. 
 
 Of the later publications of Bailey it is kinder 
 not to speak in detail. "The Age," of 1858, was a 
 satire on the manners and morals of the day, in 
 heroic couplets; "Universal Hymn," in Thomsonian 
 
Philip James Bailey 89 
 
 blank verse, of 1867, was cut up in the usual way, 
 to feed that poetical Oliver Twist, the insatiable 
 "Festus"; "Nottingham Castle," of 1878, was an 
 attempt at an historical ode in the grand style. No 
 poet ever did more in his later years to destroy the 
 favourable impression created by the writings of his 
 youth. For the last quarter of a century Mr. Bailey 
 gave up the vain attempt to attract readers to his 
 miscellaneous writings. He frankly abandoned them, 
 and we deed not dwell upon them. He could 
 afford to throw these punier children of his brain 
 to the wolves, because of the really formidable 
 proportions which his first-born had gradually 
 attained. To a recent visitor he said, plainly, that 
 he was the author of one book, and that is what he 
 will remain in the chronicle of literature. His 
 obstinate determination to present his string of 
 scenes as a whole, in spite of the hopelessly in- 
 vertebrate character of the design, has in the end 
 led to a sort of acceptation of " Festus " as a 
 definite achievement. 
 
 IV 
 
 Of attempts to "place" the author of "Festus" 
 in relation to other authors, the earliest, so far as I 
 am able to discover, was that made by Robert 
 Chambers in 1858. This careful critic, surveying 
 the literature of his day, observed "a group of 
 philosophical poets men of undoubted talent, 
 learning, and poetic imagination, but too often 
 
90 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 obscure, mystical, and extravagant." This group, 
 he explained, consisted of P. J. Bailey, Robert 
 Browning, and Richard Hengist Home. To-day 
 the differences between t( Festus," " Paracelsus," 
 and " Orion " are more striking than the similarities, 
 but Bailey had a pronounced admiration for both 
 the latter poems. For the Brownings Mr. Bailey 
 preserved an enthusiastic regard, but there is no 
 trace of their style upon his. 1 In fact, we look in 
 vain for contemporary influences in "Festus"; 
 Goethe for matter, Milton, Thomson, and Shelley 
 for manner, were Bailey's masters, and occasionally 
 he was faintly touched by Byron. It will be found 
 that what was ultimately discarded from " Festus " 
 as immature is in the main Byronic. The prevailing 
 Byronism was a weed which he uprooted from his 
 poetic garden, as Tennyson and Browning are said 
 to have done from theirs. 
 
 Mr. Bailey's interest in the successive generations 
 which he saw rise up and pass away was kindly but 
 fluctuating. He liked a gorgeous texture in poetry, 
 and was therefore attracted to D. G. Rossetti and 
 much later to Lord de Tabley. About 1870-75 
 he indulged, anonymously, in a certain amount of 
 reviewing, and said very kind and delicate things 
 about some of the poets that were at that time 
 
 1 Miss F. C. Carey, the niece and constant companion of 
 Mr. Bailey, tells me that her uncle became acquainted with 
 " Paracelsus " soon after the publication of " Festus," prob- 
 ably in 1840, as the gift of Westland Marston. This disposes 
 of any idea of the influence of the earlier on the later poem. 
 
Philip James Bailey 91 
 
 making their first bow to the public. But more 
 interesting is the fact that in the fifties he was taken 
 as a model by a group of writers who made a great 
 stir for a moment, and are now too readily forgotten. 
 These were the Spasmodists, as they were called, 
 who accepted the rather formless "Festus" as 
 the pattern for huge semi-dramatic pieces more 
 amorphous still ; Alexander Smith, in " A Life 
 Drama" (1853), Sydney Dobell, in "Balder" (1854), 
 and John Stanyan Bigg, in " Night and the Soul " 
 (1854), displayed themselves as the docile and 
 reverent offspring of Bailey. Why the influence 
 of " Festus " suddenly, after so many years, made 
 its appearance thus sown broadcast is curious, and 
 curious too the extravagance of these imitations. 
 Perhaps no one ever soared and sank so violently 
 as did the author of "Night and the Soul." Yet 
 even the Spasmodists had merits, which might 
 detain a critic, but here they are interesting to us 
 only as a cluster of satellites oddly circling round 
 the planet of " Festus " in its mid-career. 
 
 The Spasmodists imitated Mr. Bailey's ecstasy, 
 but not his moral earnestness and not his original 
 strain of religious philosophy. His was a mind of 
 greater weight and fuller body than theirs. He was 
 often redundant and sometimes nebulous, but there 
 was always something definite behind the coloured 
 cloud. His occasional excursions into prose were 
 not fortunate, for his style was awkward and heavy, 
 and he liked to coin impossible words : he says 
 " evilhood," for instance, although even he seems 
 
92 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 to have blenched before the use of " goodhood." 
 His prose was unattractive, therefore, but it is worth 
 examining, because it reveals the intense convictions 
 which led the writer onward. In natural tempera- 
 ment, I think, Mr. Bailey was timid, but in his 
 determination to thrust his message on the world 
 he showed an absolute courage which neither 
 ridicule, nor argument, nor neglect could shake in 
 the slightest degree. And this may bring us to a 
 reflection to which the study of " Festus " must 
 inevitably lead, namely, that in this his single-minded 
 earnestness lay the secret of Mr. Bailey's reward. 
 A word to indicate in what way this operated must 
 close this brief study of his work and character. 
 
 With a curious misuse of a phrase which has 
 become almost a journalistic cliche, Bailey has been 
 recently called a "poet's poet." If this term has 
 a meaning at all, it refers to the quality which 
 makes certain writers, whose nature leads them to 
 peculiar delicacy of workmanship, favourites with 
 their fellow-craftsmen, although little comprehended 
 by the vulgar. Mr. Bailey was the exact opposite 
 of these poets. There was nothing in his work to 
 attract students of what is exquisitely put, and, as a 
 rule, he has been little appreciated by these rarer 
 spirits. His form is so plain as to be negligible ; it is 
 in his matter, in his ethical attitude, that he is found 
 attractive by those and they are numerous who 
 in several generations have come under his spell. 
 " Festus " appeals to the non-literary temperament, 
 which is something very different indeed from 
 
Philip James Bailey 93 
 
 saying that it appeals to the anti-literary. Those 
 who love it appreciate its imagery, its large music, 
 its spacious landscape, but they value it mainly for 
 its teaching. No purely esthetic estimate of the 
 poem will satisfy those who reply, " Yes, what you 
 say is technically true, no doubt ; but it has helped 
 and comforted me, and it helps me still." In many 
 a distant home, in America even oftener than in 
 Great Britain, a visit to some invalid's room would 
 reveal the presence of two volumes on the bed 
 the one a Bible, the other " Festus." This is an 
 element in the popularity of Philip James Bailey 
 which criticism is powerless to analyse. But no 
 consideration of his remarkable career is complete 
 if a record of it is neglected. 
 
 1902 
 
"ORION 5 HORNE 
 
 1802-1884 
 
"ORION' HORNE 
 
 THE publication of the love letters which passed, 
 in 1845 an d 1846, between Robert Browning and 
 Elizabeth Barrett blew a little of the dust off 
 several names which were brightly before the 
 public then and have become sadly obscured since. 
 The two learned lovers speak of Mr. Serjeant 
 Talfourd and of his incomparable tragedy of 
 " Ion," of Sir John Hanmer and his sonnets, of 
 the terrible criticisms of Chorley, of the writings 
 of Abraham Heraud and Silk Buckingham and 
 Cornelius Mathews. These are faded notorieties 
 with a vengeance. But amongst these names, 
 faintly echoing from the earliest Victorian period, 
 we meet with one more than the rest- deserving 
 of perpetuation, with at all events a greater mass 
 of actually accomplished work attached to it, the 
 name of Mr. Home, the author of " Cosmo de 
 Medici," of "Gregory VII.," and, above all, of 
 " the farthing epic," the once extremely celebrated 
 "Orion." And with this there comes vividly back 
 to me a vision of an extraordinary personage, of 
 whom I saw a great deal in my youth, and of 
 whom I feel disposed to garner some of my 
 impressions before I lose them. 
 
 G 
 
Portraits and Sketches 
 
 He had been baptized Richard Henry Home, 
 but in late middle life he had changed the second 
 of these names to Hengist. It was in 1874 that 
 I set eyes on him first, in circumstances which 
 were somewhat remarkable. The occasion was 
 the marriage of the poet, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 
 to the eldest daughter of Westland Marston, the 
 playwright. There was a large and distinguished 
 company present, and most of the prominent 
 " Pre-Raphaelites," as they were still occasionally 
 called. In the midst of the subsequent festivities, 
 and when the bride was surrounded by her friends, 
 a tiny old gentleman cleared a space around him, 
 and, all uninvited, began to sit upon the floor and 
 sing, in a funny little cracked voice, Spanish songs 
 to his own accompaniment on the guitar. He was 
 very unusual in appearance. Although he was 
 quite bald at the top of his head, his milk-white hair 
 was luxuriant at the sides, and hung in clusters of 
 ringlets. His moustache was so long that it 
 became whisker, and in that condition drooped, 
 also in creamy ringlets, below his chin. The elder 
 guests were inclined to be impatient, the younger 
 to ridicule this rather tactless interruption. Just 
 as it seemed possible something awkward would 
 happen, Robert Browning stepped up and said, in 
 his loud, cheerful voice : " That was charming, 
 Home 1 It quite took us to ' the warm South ' 
 again," and cleverly leading the old gentleman's 
 thoughts to a different topic, he put an end to the 
 incident. 
 
" Orion " Home 99 
 
 This scene was very characteristic of Home, who 
 was gay, tactless, and vain to a remarkable degree. 
 He had lately come back from Australia, where 
 nothing had gone well with him for long together, 
 and he did not understand the ways of the younger 
 generation in London. But to those who could be 
 patient with his peculiarities he offered a very 
 amusing study. He had delightful stories, many of 
 which are still inedited, of the great men of his 
 youth Wordsworth, Hunt, Hazlitt, in particular. 
 But he himself, with his incredible mixture of affec- 
 tation and fierceness, humour and absurdity, 
 enthusiasm and ignorance, with his incoherency of 
 appearance, at once so effeminate and so muscular, 
 was better than all his tales. He was a com- 
 bination of the troubadour and the prize-fighter, on 
 a miniature scale. It was impossible not to think 
 of a curly white poodle when one looked at him, 
 especially when he would throw his fat little person 
 on a sofa and roll about, with gestures less dignified 
 than were, perhaps, ever before seen in a poet of 
 between seventy and eighty years of age. And yet 
 he had a fine, buoyant spirit, and a generous 
 imagination with it all. But the oddity of it, alas ! 
 is what lingers in the memory those milky ringlets, 
 that extraordinary turn of the head, that embrace 
 of the beribboned guitar ! 
 
 In a pathetic little letter which Home wrote to 
 me in his eightieth year, he said, quite placidly, that 
 though he was now forgotten, no poet had ever had 
 more pleasant things said of him by people dead 
 
ioo Portraits and Sketches 
 
 and gone. It was perfectly true. Wordsworth and 
 Tennyson, Leigh Hunt and Walter Savage Landor, 
 had all praised his poetry ; Carlyle had declared 
 that "the fire of the stars was in him," and 
 G. H. Lewes that he was "a man of the most 
 unquestionable genius." How highly Robert and 
 Elizabeth Browning regarded him may be seen 
 over and over again in the course of their corre- 
 spondence. But his talent was of a very fugitive 
 kind. He was a remarkable poet for seven or eight 
 years, and a tiresome and uninspired scribbler for 
 the rest of his life. His period of good work began 
 in 1837, when he published " Cosmo de Medici " 
 and " The Death of Marlowe " ; it closed in 1843, 
 with the publication of "Orion," and the composi- 
 tion of all that was best in the " Ballad Romances." 
 If any one wished to do honour to the manes of 
 poor old Home and in these days far less distin- 
 guished poets than he receive the honours of 
 rediscovery the way to do it would be to publish 
 in one volume the very best of his writings, and 
 nothing more. The badness of the bulk of his 
 later verse is outside all calculation. How a man 
 who had once written so well as he, could ever 
 come to write, for instance, " Bible Tragedies " 
 (1881) is beyond all skill of the literary historian to 
 comprehend. 
 
 But, although Home was, for a short time, a 
 good poet, he was always more interesting as a 
 human being. His whole life was an adventure ; it 
 was like a "book for boys." He was pleased to 
 
"Orion" Home 101 
 
 relate that even his birth was not ordinary, for he 
 came into the world so exactly at the stroke of 
 midnight on the last day of the year that it could 
 never be decided whether he was born in 1802 or 
 1803. I do not know who his parents were or 
 what his family. In the days when I saw so much 
 of him he appeared to be quite solitary ; he never 
 spoke of possessing a relative. He was trained for 
 the army, and lost his chance through some foolish 
 escapade. But before this he had been at school 
 at Enfield, where Tom Keats, the poet's brother, 
 and Charles Wells, who wrote " Joseph and his 
 Brethren," had been his school-fellows. He used 
 to tell us in his old age that he was once scamper- 
 ing out of school, when he saw the chaise of 
 Mr. Hammond, the surgeon, standing at the door. 
 John Keats, who was Hammond's apprentice, was 
 holding the horse, his head sunken forward in a 
 brown study ; the boys, who knew how pugnacious 
 Keats was, dared Home to throw a snowball at 
 him, which Home did, hitting Keats in 'the back of 
 the head, and then escaping round the corner at a 
 headlong pace. It used to be very thrilling, in the 
 eighties, to hear the old gentleman tell how he had 
 actually snowballed Keats ; almost as though one 
 should arise and say that he had sold Shakespeare 
 a cheese-cake. 
 
 Just before he should have entered Sandhurst the 
 young Home was lured away to America, and 
 offered himself as a volunteer in the War of 
 Mexican Independence. He entered the new Mexi- 
 
IO2 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 can navy as a midshipman, and dashed about under 
 irregular fire at the bombardment of Vera Cruz and 
 at the siege of San Juan Ulloa. He used to tell us 
 that he never would miss his swim in the sea in 
 the morning, nor return to the ship until he had 
 been well within range of the guns of Vera Cruz. 
 The Spaniards could never hit him, he said ; 
 but one day when he was making a long nose 
 at the gunners, he was as nearly as possible 
 swallowed from behind by a shark. I forget 
 how he accounted for his escape, but there was 
 always a good deal of Baron Munchausen about 
 Mr. Home. 
 
 When the Mexican War was over, he strolled 
 across the United States, with a belt full of doubloons 
 girded about his person, and visited the Mohawks, 
 the Oneidas, and the Hurons. He had a fight with 
 a Red Indian brave and beat him, and carried away 
 a bunch of eagle-feathers from his body. After 
 many strange adventures, he must needs bathe in 
 public under the cataract of Niagara. Two of his 
 ribs were found to be broken when he was fished 
 cut again, insensible. He then took a steerage 
 passage in a steamer that was wrecked in the St. 
 Lawrence. He walked in moccasins over to Hali- 
 fax, Nova Scotia, and started again in a timber 
 ship, whose crew rose in mutiny and set fire to her 
 in mid-Atlantic ; Mr. Home quelled the mutiny and 
 put out the fire, to the eternal gratitude of the 
 captain, who fell upon his knees upon the deck and 
 kissed his hands. I delighted in Mr. Home's stories 
 
"Orion" Home 103 
 
 of his past life, but sometimes I used to fear that he 
 exaggerated. 
 
 It was not until he was thirty years of age that 
 Home began to take up literature, and he was 
 thirty-five when he enjoyed his first success with 
 "Cosmo de Medici," an historical tragedy in blank 
 verse, which has some very fine passages, and was 
 greatly admired in the London coteries. Then came 
 the period of seven years, of which I have spoken, 
 in which Home really took his place, with Brown- 
 ing and Tennyson, as one of the promising poets of 
 the age. If he had died in 1844, he would probably 
 hold a high place still, as an " inheritor of unful- 
 filled renown," but unfortunately he lived for forty 
 more years, and never discovered that his talent 
 had abandoned him. His "Orion," which was 
 published in 1843, was brought out at the price of 
 one farthing. Elizabeth Barrett sent out to the 
 nearest bookshop for a shilling's worth, but was 
 refused her four dozen copies. Purchasers had to 
 produce their brass farthing for each " Orion," and 
 no change was given. This was done "to mark 
 the public contempt into which epic poetry has 
 fallen," but it was also a very good advertisement. 
 Everybody talked about Mr. Home's "farthing" 
 poem, and after some editions had run out the 
 price was cautiously raised. But when the tenth 
 edition appeared, at a cost of seven shillings, the 
 public perceived that its leg was being pulled, and 
 it purchased " Orion " no more. In spite of all 
 this, " Orion " is far indeed from being a humorous 
 
104 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 composition ; it is a dignified and melodious 
 romance of Greek symbolism, with some remote 
 relation to the " Hyperion " of Keats, and contains 
 some admirable passages. 
 
 The poets of the opening years of Queen Victoria's 
 reign were almost all of them tempted to write 
 philosophical poetry. Robert Browning had led the 
 way with " Pauline " and " Paracelsus." Bailey 
 had produced " Festus " ; Ragg, the lace-worker 
 (now forgotten), had made a temporary mark with 
 " The Deity," a formidable essay ; Miss Barrett 
 wrote " The Drama of Exile " ; there were the lucu- 
 brations of John Edmund Reade. None of these 
 laborious poems could be styled successful, but they 
 all were interesting in their curious contemporary 
 effort to reconcile ideas with sensations, on a grand 
 scale. These writers believed that unless a poem 
 contained a philosophy it was, on the whole, a poor 
 affair. Home joined the band of the philosophers 
 when he wrote " Orion," which is perhaps, as a 
 poem, the best of the group. His mind was not 
 disciplined, but he always had a curiosity about the 
 literature of thought. He made the acquaintance, 
 about 1841, of a doctor of philosophy, Dr. Leonard 
 Schmitz, who came over from Bonn to introduce 
 German literature to English readers. Conversation 
 with Schmitz set Home's thoughts running in the 
 direction of a poem which should re-establish the 
 union which had existed in ancient times between 
 philosophy and poetry, before analysis stepped in 
 and divorced them. The effort was one quite 
 
"Orion" Home 105 
 
 beyond Home's power to carry out successfully, 
 but he wrote what is by no means the worst of 
 modern machines. 
 
 This is the poet's explanation of his " spiritual 
 epic," as Elizabeth Barrett called it, as it appeared 
 to him thirty years afterwards : 
 
 " Orion, the hero of my fable, is meant to present 
 a type of the struggle of man with himself that is to 
 say, the contest between the intellect and the senses, 
 when powerful energies are equally balanced. 
 Orion is man standing naked before Heaven and 
 Destiny, resolved to work as a really free agent to 
 the utmost pitch of his powers for the good of his 
 race. He is a truly practical believer in his gods 
 and in his own conscience; a man with the 
 strength of a giant; innocently wise; with a heart 
 expanding towards the largeness and warmth of 
 Nature, and a spirit unconsciously aspiring to the 
 stars. He is a dreamer of noble dreams and 
 a hunter of grand shadows (in accordance with 
 the ancient symbolic myth), all tending to healthy 
 thought or to practical action and structure. He is 
 the type of a Worker and a Builder for his fellow- 
 men." 
 
 There is in this commentary a touch of the teach- 
 ing of Carlyle, who in his turn perused " Orion " 
 with marked affability. The sage of Chelsea had 
 recently published " Heroes and Hero-worship," 
 which had no warmer admirer than Home. " Orion," 
 then, the "farthing epic," appeared with every 
 circumstance in its favour and enjoyed a very 
 
io6 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 considerable success. Why it is no longer read it 
 would be difficult to say. Its lustrous descriptions 
 of primeval giants are solemn and beautiful, but 
 unfortunately the memory goes back to " Hyperion." 
 Yet this is unjust, and it would be puzzling to define 
 what it is that makes so very careful and accom- 
 plished a work not any longer easy to read, in spite 
 of its excellent proportions, moderate length, and 
 indisputable dignity. The "deliberate opinion " of 
 Edgar Allan Poe was that " in all that regards the 
 loftiest and holiest attributes of true poetry ' Orion ' 
 has never been excelled." It is certainly very good ; 
 listen : 
 
 Ye rocky heights of Chios, where the snow, 
 
 Lit by the far-off and receding moon, 
 
 Now feels the soft dawn 1 s purpling twilight creep 
 
 Over your ridges, while the mystic dews 
 
 Swarm down and wait to be instinct with gold 
 
 And solar fire ! ye mountains waving brown 
 
 With thick-winged woods, and blotted with deep caves 
 
 In secret places ; and ye paths that stray 
 
 E'en as ye list ; what odours and what sighs 
 
 Tend your sweet silence through the star-showered night, 
 
 Like memories breathing of the Goddess-forms 
 
 That left your haunts, yet with the day return. 
 
 Excellent, until we come to the last two lines, which 
 are invaded by that curious flatness characteristic of 
 English poetry in the unfortunate reign of King 
 William IV. When Douglas Jerrold said that 
 Home had "presented an undying gift to the 
 
"Orion" Home 107 
 
 world" in "Orion," he forgot to estimate the 
 element of decomposition involved in the language 
 of all metrical writers between Keats and Tennyson. 
 Darley, Wade, Wells, Bailey, Heraud, and Beddoes 
 they all had the unfortunate crack in the voice 
 which made them, with their wealth of enthusiasm 
 for the grand style, incapable of carrying it out 
 without incessant lapses into mediocrity of expres- 
 sion. And Home, to use a vulgar expression, is 
 tarred with the same William IV. brush. Yet there 
 are very good things in " Orion," lines such as : 
 
 'Tis always morning somewhere in the world, 
 
 and passages of Greek landscape, of which this is by 
 no means an isolated example : 
 
 since the breath of spring had stirred the woods, 
 Through which the joyous tidings busily ran, 
 And oval buds of delicate pink and green 
 Broke, infant-like, through bark of sapling boughs, 
 The vapours from the ocean had ascended, 
 Fume after fume, wreath after wreath, and floor 
 Onjloor, till a grey curtain upward spread 
 From sea to sky, and both as one appeared. 
 Now came the snorting and intolerant steeds 
 Of the Sun's chariot towards the summer signs ; 
 At first obscurely, then with dazzling beams, 
 
 and so on. And, as some one has said of Lamartine's 
 efforts in the same kind, there is throughout 
 " Orion," if not a philosophy, at all events a credit- 
 able movement of philosophical reflection. 
 
 It is known to Apollo only what varied employ- 
 
io8 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 ments Home took up when the Muses began to 
 abandon him. He was sub-editor of Household 
 Words under Dickens, and special commissioner 
 of the Daily News to Ireland when the great 
 famine broke out. Suddenly, and desperately deter- 
 mined to marry, he went down to stay with Miss 
 Mitford in Berkshire, and proposed to all the neigh- 
 bouring heiresses one after another, to the intense 
 indignation of that lady, who declared that he had 
 used her hospitable dining-room, on the same day, 
 to propose to a lady (with 50,000 a year) at lunch, 
 and to another (with 40,000 a year) at tea. None 
 of these efforts was crowned with success ; perhaps 
 he had the presumption to be in love with Elizabeth 
 Barrett, whom he had at that time never seen, 
 although oceans of correspondence had passed 
 between them. At all events, directly Robert Brown- 
 ing had carried off his eminent bride, Home 
 appeared with a little Miss Foggs upon his arm, 
 whom he presently married. They did not get on 
 together ; why should history conceal the fact, when 
 Home himself was wont to dilate upon it so freely 
 to his friends ? Mrs. Home, in tears, threw herself 
 upon the paternal sympathy of Charles Dickens, and 
 Home indignantly sought a southern hemisphere. 
 
 In Australia he was commander of the Gold 
 Escort, and it was delightful, years afterwards, to 
 hear him tell how he convoyed several tons of 
 bullion from Ballarat to Melbourne amid every 
 circumstance of peril. Then he became Gold 
 Commissioner to the Government, but here his 
 
"Orion" Home 109 
 
 flow of high spirits carried him away. He 
 then flung himself into the cultivation of the 
 cochineal insect, edited a Victorian newspaper, 
 became Commissioner of Waterworks, gave lessons 
 in gymnastics, professed the art of natation, and 
 was one of the starters of Australian wine-growing. 
 Long afterwards, when the first Australian cricketers 
 came over to England, Home wrote to me : " I 
 learn that the cricketers have made each 1000 over 
 here ! Why, oh ! why did not I become an 
 Australian cricketer, instead of an unprofitable 
 swimmer ? When years no longer smiled upon 
 my balls and runs, I might have retired upon my 
 laurelled bat, and have published tragedies at my 
 own expense. Is there any redress for these things 
 in another world ? I don't think so ; I shall be 
 told I had my choice." He certainly paid his 
 money. No one, I suppose, ever failed in so many 
 brilliant, unusual enterprises, every one of which 
 was sure to succeed when he adopted it. 
 
 When he came back from Australia, I think about 
 1869, he was in very low water. He had managed 
 very deeply to offend Charles Dickens, who had 
 taken up the cause of Home's neglected wife. 
 What happened to Home in the early years after 
 his return I never heard ; I fancy that he went 
 abroad again for some part of the time. A little 
 later Robert Browning, who had always felt a 
 sincere regard for Home, was able to be of practical 
 service to him. He was encouraged to republish 
 his poems, and to appeal by means of them to the 
 
iio Portraits and Sketches 
 
 new age. In these days one used to meet him at 
 afternoon parties, carrying with great care, under 
 his arm, the precious guitar, which he called "my 
 daughter," and was used ceremoniously to introduce 
 as lt Miss Home." A little later in the evening 
 Home would be discovered on a low stool, warbling 
 Mexican romances, or murmuring with exaggerated 
 gallantry to the prettiest girl in the room. All this 
 time he was thirsting for publicity if he could only 
 be engaged to sing in public, to box in public, to 
 swim in public, how happy he would be ! It used 
 to be said that when he was nearly seventy Home 
 persuaded the captain of a ship to tie his legs 
 together and fling him into the sea, and that he 
 swam with ease to the boat. A wonderful little 
 ringleted athlete, no doubt ! 
 
 A great deal of Home's work in verse, and even 
 in prose, remains unpublished, and is not very 
 likely, I should think, to be ever printed. As I 
 have said, his faculty, which had been so graceful, 
 faded away from him about forty years before he 
 died. When he was in Australia he wrote a 
 good deal, among other things a choral drama, 
 " Prometheus, the Fire-Bringer," which was actually 
 composed out in the bush, and lost, and written all 
 over again, still in the bush. The first edition of 
 this poem is styled "by Richard Henry Home," 
 and the second, which followed soon after, " by 
 Richard Hengist Home," showing the period at 
 which he adopted the more barbaric name. I have 
 glanced through a mass of Home's manuscript, 
 
" Orion " Home 1 1 1 
 
 which I possess (I believe that Mr. Buxton Forman 
 possesses a great deal more), to see whether I can 
 find anything unpublished which is good enough 
 to offer to the readers of this volume. The fol- 
 lowing impromptu is at least brief ; it was composed 
 when the poet was in his seventy-eighth year : 
 
 THE SPRING-TIDE OF THE BARDS 
 
 Ah, where \s the Spring-tide of Poets of old, 
 
 When Chaucer lov'd April and all her sweet showers, 
 
 When Spenser's knights felt not their armour strike cold, 
 Tho' lost in wet forests or dreaming in bowers ? 
 
 'Tis afar other planet to us in this season, 
 
 And Nature must own we complain with some reason ! 
 
 For north winds, and east winds, and yellow-fac'dfogs, 
 And thunders and lightnings that scare buds and shoots, 
 
 May cheer the hoarse chorus of cold-blooded frogs, 
 But Man craves life 's future , and fears for its fruits. 
 
 Then come again, Spring, like the dear songs of old, 
 
 Where the crocus smiled daily in sunlight and gold. 
 
 Home's cheerfulness was a very pleasant feature 
 in his character. Life had treated him scurvily, 
 love had missed him, fame had come down and 
 crowned him, and then had rudely snatched the 
 laurel away. If ever a man might have been 
 excused for sourness, it was Home. But he was 
 a gallant little old man, and if it was impossible 
 not to smile at him, it was still less possible not 
 to recognise his courage and his spirit. Curiously 
 enough, Elizabeth Barrett, who carried on so close 
 
112 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 a correspondence with Home in her unmarried 
 days, but who, warned by Miss Mitford, never 
 would allow him to call upon her in person, had 
 an accurate instinct of his merits and his weak- 
 nesses, and all the casual remarks about Home 
 which she makes in the course of her letters to 
 Robert Browning strike one who knew Home well 
 in later years as singularly exact and perspicacious. 
 His edition of her letters to him, published about 
 twenty years ago in two volumes, is becoming a 
 rare book, and contains many things of remarkable 
 interest and importance. 
 
 It was from 1876 to 1879 that we saw him most 
 frequently. He was living at this time in two 
 rooms in Northumberland Street, Regent's Park, 
 in very great poverty, which he bore with the 
 gayest and most gallant insouciance. An attempt 
 was made indeed, several attempts were made 
 to secure for him a little pension from the Civil 
 List, and these were supported by Carlyle and 
 Browning, Tennyson and Swinburne, to name no 
 smaller fry. But all in vain ; for some reason, 
 absolutely inscrutable to me, these efforts were 
 of no avail. It was darkly said that there were 
 reasons why Mr. Gladstone would never, never 
 yield ; and he never did. When Lord Beaconsfield 
 came into office, he granted the poor little old man 
 50 a year, but even then he had not too much 
 food to eat nor clothes to keep him warm. Still he 
 went bravely on, shaking his white ringlets and 
 consoling himself with his guitar. He was fond 
 
"Orion" Home 113 
 
 of mystery, which is a great consoler. For 
 economy's sake, he used to write on post-cards, 
 but always with a great deal of care, so that the 
 postman should be none the wiser. I have such a 
 post-card before me now ; it is an answer to 
 a proposal of mine that he should come in and 
 take dinner with us : 
 
 "Nov. 29, 1877. 
 
 " The Sharpshooter's friendly shot just received. 
 By adroitly porting my helm, and hauling out my 
 flying jib, I shall, by 7 o'clock this evening, be able 
 to get the weather-gauge of the Cape I was bound 
 for, and run into your Terrace. Thine. 
 
 " REEFER." 
 
 Nothing, surely, could be more discreet than that. 
 
 To the very last he was anxious to regain his old 
 place as a man of letters, and his persistency was 
 really quite pathetic. One did not know what to do 
 with his suggestions. I appeal to any one acquainted 
 with the business of literature whether anything 
 can be more trying than to receive this sort of 
 communication : 
 
 " Don't you think curiosity might be aroused if 
 
 you could induce the editor of the to print 
 
 something of this kind : 'We understand that a 
 leading periodical will shortly contain a Dramatic 
 Scene by the Author of " Orion," entitled "The Circle 
 of the Regicides," in which such interlocutors as 
 Dr. Kobold, Prof. Franz Tollkopf, Hans Arbeits- 
 dulder, and Baron Dumm von Ehrsucht will repre- 
 
 H 
 
114 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 sent certain well-known characters. There will also 
 be brought upon the scene the Apparitions of Brutus, 
 Cromwell, the patriot Mazzini, and the philan- 
 thropist Robert Owen ; together with a chorus of 
 French and Russian revolutionists, with a trio and 
 chorus of female Regicides.' On second thoughts, 
 perhaps, better stop after 'Owen.' ' 
 
 It was difficult to bring such suggestions as these 
 within the range of practical literature. 
 
 Home's physical strength was very extraordinary 
 in old age. It was strangely incompatible with the 
 appearance of the little man, with his ringleted locks 
 and mincing ways. But he was past seventy before 
 he ceased to challenge powerful young swimmers to 
 feats of natation, and he very often beat them, carrying 
 off from them cups and medals, to their deep disgust. 
 He was nearly eighty when he filled us, one evening, 
 with alarm by bending our drawing-room poker to 
 an angle in striking it upon the strained muscles of his 
 fore-arm. He was very vain of his physical accom- 
 plishments, and he used to declare that he was in 
 training to be a centenarian. These are things that 
 should never be said, they tempt the fates ; so one 
 day, just after poor Mr. Home had been boasting, he 
 was knocked down by a van in Lisson Grove, and, 
 although he rallied in a wonderful way, he was 
 never the same man again. Presently, on March 13, 
 1884, he died at Margate, whither he had been 
 removed to take the benefit of the sea-air. He was 
 in his eighty-second year. It would be a great pity 
 that a man so unique and so picturesque should be 
 
" Orion " Home 1 1 5 
 
 forgotten. As long as the world is interested in 
 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Home can never be 
 entirely forgotten, but he deserves to be remembered 
 for his own sake. 
 
AUBREY DE VERE 
 1814-1902 
 
AUBREY DE VERE 
 
 ON January 19, 1902, there passed away in his sleep 
 the most venerable of the then-living poets of the 
 Anglo-Saxon world. There is an old house in County 
 Limerick, with a deer park round it and a lawn that 
 slopes to a lake, all combining to form one of the 
 most exquisite estates in the south of Ireland. 
 There Mr. Aubrey de Vere was born at the beginning 
 of 1814, and there, having reached his eighty-ninth 
 year, he died. It would be impossible to conceive 
 a more gentle, innocent, or delicate life than his was 
 or a more happy one. He did not marry ; he con- 
 secrated all his activities to the service of literature, 
 and of religion, and of his friends. It was his 
 singular good fortune to be protected from every 
 species of care or anxiety. He was not rich, yet 
 he had the ease and dignity of circumstance 
 which make it possible to concentrate the mind 
 on higher thoughts than surround our daily bread. 
 He was not poor, and yet he was screened by 
 conditions from all that makes the possession of 
 wealth disturbing and hardening. Mr. Aubrey de 
 Vere was more fortunate than the farm-folk in 
 Virgil, for he knew that he was happy. In the 
 
I2O Portraits and Sketches 
 
 moderation of his desires, in the resigning of all 
 vain ambitions, he was as wise as he was pure and 
 good. 
 
 Among my treasures I possess a copy of the 
 " Sonnets " of his father, Sir Aubrey de Vere, pre- 
 sented to me by the son, as a kind inscription sets 
 forth, in the year 1869. For the guidance of posterity, 
 however, I have to say that I was not acquainted 
 with Mr. de Vere at so tender an age as this would 
 seem to imply. By one of those slips of the pen 
 which we all make, but which in old age we forget 
 to amend, Mr. de Vere wrote 1869 when he meant 
 1896. It was, in fact, not until the latter year that I 
 had the privilege of forming an acquaintance which 
 he allowed to ripen into something like a friendship. 
 I met him early in 1896, by special arrangement and 
 in conditions singularly delightful, at the house of 
 an Irish lady who is devoted to literature. The poet 
 was already in his eighty-third year, and my recollec- 
 tions, therefore, are of a very old man. But they 
 are by no means of an infirm or senile man. The 
 mental freshness and buoyancy of his mind con- 
 tinued, I suppose for I did not see him for several 
 months before his death almost, if not quite, to the 
 end. They certainly survived, with no symptom of 
 decay, until long after 1896. His letters, which 
 were filled with the enthusiastic love of poetry, con- 
 tinued to breathe the loftiest intellectual ardour 
 even when the implacable years had so shaken the 
 hand that it became difficult to read what was 
 written. This beautiful elasticity of spirit was 
 
Aubrey de Vere 121 
 
 perhaps the most surprising feature in the wonderful 
 old age of Mr. Aubrey de Vere. 
 
 His appearance at about the age of eighty-three is 
 very vivid in my recollection. He entered the room 
 swiftly and gracefully, the front of his body thrown 
 a little forward, as is frequently the case with tall and 
 active old men. His countenance bore a singular 
 resemblance to the portraits of Wordsworth, although 
 the type was softer and less vigorous. His forehead, 
 which sloped a little and was very high and domed, 
 was much observed in the open air from a trick he 
 had of tilting his tall hat back. I used to think, 
 very profanely, that in profile, on these occasions, 
 he bore a quite absurdly close resemblance to the 
 Hatter in " Alice's Adventures," especially when, as 
 was frequently the case, he recited poetry. I am 
 sure that any open-minded person who recollects 
 Mr. de Vere will admit that Sir John Tenniel's im- 
 mortal drawing of the Hatter repeating " Twinkle, 
 twinkle, little bat !" is irresistibly reminiscent of our 
 revered friend. In spite of this there was something 
 extraordinarily delicate and elevated in his address. 
 He was, in fact, conversation made visible. I never 
 knew a more persistent speaker. If he broke bread 
 with one, the progress of the meal would be inter- 
 rupted and delayed from the very first by his talk, 
 which was softly, gently unbroken, like a fountain 
 falling upon mosses. On one occasion, when we sat 
 together in a garden in the summer, Mr. de Vere 
 talked, with no other interruption than brief pauses 
 for reflection, for three hours, in itself a prodigious 
 
122 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 feat for an old man' of eighty-five, and without the 
 smallest sign of fatigue. 
 
 In spite of the fact that he occasionally used what 
 are called " strong expressions " with a little playful 
 affectation, I used to think, of the man of the world 
 Mr. Aubrey de Vere had an ecclesiastical air, 
 like that of some highly cultivated, imaginative old 
 abbe. He possessed a sort of distinguished inno- 
 cence, a maidenly vivacious brightness, very charm- 
 ing and surprising. He once remarked to me that 
 the feminine characteristics of Newman were always 
 recurring to his memory, that as he looked back 
 upon the early Oxford days he continually had the 
 impression in Newman of " a kind of virginal 
 remoteness mingled with extremely tender grace." 
 When he said this I could not help feeling that 
 although there was no " remoteness " about Mr. de 
 Vere, there was something of the same feminine 
 grace. 
 
 The principal, indeed perhaps the only, sign of 
 advanced old age which the poet presented until 
 near his end was the weakness of his voice. This 
 must have once been, I think, very melodious, but 
 already when I knew him first it had become so 
 faint as to be sometimes scarcely audible, particularly 
 in company. It was therefore most pleasant to be 
 alone with him, especially in the open air, where he 
 seemed to speak with particular freedom and ease. 
 The astonishing fullness of his memory made his 
 conversation marvellous and delightful. He not 
 merely passed, with complete comprehension of the 
 
Aubrey de Vere 123 
 
 relative distance, from events of 1820 to events of to- 
 day, but his verbal memory was astounding. He 
 garnished his recollections of Wordsworth, Rogers, 
 Landor, or Sir Henry Taylor with copious and 
 repeated quotations from their poetry. Indeed, he 
 once assured me that of certain favourite poets in 
 particular Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats he still 
 retained, at the age of eighty-four, " substantially 
 the bulk of their writings." He said that his principal 
 occupation had been and still was, in his solitary 
 walks or by the fire, to repeat, silently or aloud, 
 pages after pages of poetry. His memory of the 
 great writers was, he believed, so exact that in these 
 exercises he had the illusion that he was reading from 
 the printed book. 
 
 The friends of Mr. Aubrey de Vere were so well 
 versed in the stores of his memory that they antici- 
 pated an immense pleasure from his " Recollections," 
 which he published in 1897. This was a charming 
 book in many ways, but it was in some degree a dis- 
 appointment. It was in no sense what we had 
 hoped it would be, an autobiography ; it recalled a 
 variety of incidents and places which had interested 
 the writer, yet it told but little of what had moved 
 him most. The inherent delicacy and shyness of the 
 author spoiled the effect. " Self," he said, " is a 
 dangerous personage to let into one's book," but 
 unfortunately, without it an autobiography is 
 " Hamlet " with the part of the Prince of Denmark 
 omitted. There is much in Aubrey de Vere's 
 "Recollections" which is delightful, but those who 
 
124 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 enjoyed his conversation miss in the published book 
 a great deal that they recall as particularly original 
 and delightful. For instance, I once asked Mr. de 
 Vere who, among all the great souls he had known, 
 had impressed him the most. He said instantly, 
 " Wordsworth and Newman ; they are the two for 
 whom my love has been most like idolatry." There 
 were precious pages about Newman in the "Recollec- 
 tions," but the great disappointment of that book 
 was the comparative absence of any salient notes 
 about Wordsworth. I think Mr. de Vere felt the 
 subject too sacred for public annotation, and yet in 
 personal talk he was always ready to return to it. 
 His loyalty to Wordsworth was a passion. In the 
 very latest letter which I received from him, in a 
 hand so flickering that it is hard to decipher, he says : 
 " Old Christopher North was the first, except Leigh 
 Hunt, who plucked up heart of grace, 'wrote all like 
 a man/ and so forced the public at last to read 
 Wordsworth. He said so often and so loudly 
 what St. Augustine had said to the pagan world 
 ' So read these things that you may deserve to under- 
 stand them,' that at last a large part of that world 
 did come to understand that the greatest of the 
 philosophic poets was even then living in their 
 midst." Is it not an enviable gift still to be able to 
 care so much about poetry and philosophy as the 
 ninetieth year approaches ? 
 
 Many notes which his friends had taken of Mr. 
 de Vere's conversations were rendered nugatory by 
 the publication of his book ; some, however, have 
 
Aubrey de Vere 125 
 
 still their value. He toned down in publication, for 
 instance, the impression of his seeing Newman for 
 the first time in 1838, and his spoken words, which 
 I noted in 1896, were much more vivid. I had asked 
 him to tell me how the future cardinal struck him. 
 He was silent for a moment and then replied, with 
 a light in his blue eyes, " The emotion of seeing him 
 for the first time was one of the greatest in my life. 
 I shall never forget his appearance. I had been 
 waiting some time and then the door opened and 
 Newman, in cap and gown, entered very swiftly and 
 quietly, with a kind of balance of the figure like a 
 very great lady sweeping into the room. That was 
 my first impression ; the second was of a high-bred 
 young monk of the Middle Ages whose asceticism 
 cannot quite conceal his distinguished elegance." 
 Another unpublished impression of Oxford deserves 
 to be recorded. Mr. de Vere went to hear Newman 
 preach his famous sermon on Vain Works. He was 
 a little late, and as he took a remote seat he thought 
 with annoyance that he should not hear anything. 
 But he heard every syllable ; Newman's voice was 
 musical, but very low, yet every word told. Mr. de 
 Vere observed to himself on this occasion that it 
 seemed as though Newman's thought was so clear 
 that it was impossible not to perceive the impression 
 of it. You seemed less to be hearing him speak 
 than think. Innumerable links, such as these, with 
 the past were broken by the death of this beloved 
 and venerated man. 
 
A FIRST SIGHT OF 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
A FIRST SIGHT OF 
 
 TENNYSON 
 
 THERE is a reaction in the popular feeling about 
 Tennyson, and I am told that upon the young he 
 has lost his hold, which was like that of an octopus 
 upon us in my salad days. These revolutions in 
 taste do not trouble me much ; they are inevitable 
 and they are not final. But those who " cannot 
 read " " Maud " and " In Memoriam " to-day must 
 take it on the word of a veteran that forty years ago 
 we, equally, could not help reading them. There 
 was a revolt against the tyranny now and then ; in 
 particular, after " The Loves of the Wrens " and 
 ' Enoch Arden " a rather serious mutiny broke 
 out among Tennyson's admirers, but " Lucretius " 
 appeared and they were enslaved again. 
 
 It is strange to look back upon the unrestrained 
 panegyric which took the place of the higher criticism 
 of Tennyson in the closing years of the nineteenth 
 century. When a very clever man like the late Duke 
 of Argyll, a man of sober years, could say, without 
 being reproached, that Tennyson's blank verse in the 
 " Idylls " was sweeter and stronger than " the stately 
 march of Elizabethan English in its golden prime" ; 
 
 J 
 
130 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 when Mr. Gladstone could declare of Arthur in 
 the same " Idylls " that he " knew not where to look 
 in history or letters for a nobler or more over- 
 powering conception of man as he might be," then 
 a reaction, however tenderly delayed, was inevit- 
 able. The uncritical note of praise is almost more 
 surely hurtful to a reputation than the uncritical 
 note of blame, for it makes a wound that it is much 
 harder to heal. Tennyson is now suffering from 
 the extravagant obsequiousness of his late Victorian 
 admirers. At the moment of which I am about to 
 speak, Tennyson had published nothing since " The 
 Holy Grail," and it was understood that he was 
 slightly startled by the arrival of Swinburne, Morris, 
 and the Rossettis on a stage which he, with Robert 
 Browning still very much in the background, had 
 hitherto sufficiently filled. But the vogue of these 
 new-comers was confined to the elect. In the world 
 at large Tennyson was the English living poet par 
 excellence, great by land and great by sea, the one 
 survivor of the heroic chain of masters. 
 
 It was the early summer of 1871, and I was 
 palely baking, like a crumpet, in a singularly 
 horrible underground cage, made of steel bars, 
 called the Den. This was a place such as no 
 responsible being is allowed to live in nowadays, 
 where the transcribers on the British Museum staff 
 were immured in a half-light. This cellar was 
 prominently brought forward a year or two later in 
 the course of a Royal Commission on the British 
 Museum, being "lifted into notice" only to be 
 
A First Sight of Tennyson 131 
 
 absolutely condemned by the indignation of the 
 medical faculty. I was dolefully engaged here, 
 being then one of the humblest of mankind, a 
 Junior Assistant in the Printed Books Department 
 of the British Museum, on some squalid task, in 
 what was afterwards described by a witness as an 
 atmosphere "scented with rotten morocco, and an 
 indescribable odour familiar in foreign barracks," 
 when a Senior Assistant, one of the rare just spirits 
 in that academical Dotheboys Hall, W. R. S. 
 Ralston, came dashing down the flights of curling 
 steel staircase, to the danger of his six feet six of 
 height, and of the beard that waved down to his 
 waist. Over me he bent, and in a whisper (we were 
 forbidden to speak out loud in the Den) he said, 
 " Come up stairs at once and be presented to 
 Mr. Tennyson ! " 
 
 Proud young spirits of the present day, for whom 
 life opens in adulation, will find it scarcely possible 
 to realise what such a summons meant to me. As 
 we climbed those steep and spiral staircases towards 
 light and day, my heart pounded in my chest with 
 agitation. The feeling of excitement was almost 
 overwhelming : it was not peculiar to myself ; such 
 ardours were common in those years. Some day a 
 philosopher must analyse it that enthusiasm of the 
 seventies, that intoxicating belief in "the might of 
 poesy." Tennyson was scarcely a human being to 
 us, he was the God of the Golden Bow ; I 
 approached him now like a blank idiot about to be 
 slain, " or was I a worm, too low-crawling for death, 
 
132 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 O Delphic Apollo ? " It is not merely that no 
 person living now calls forth that kind of devotion, 
 but the sentiment of mystery has disappeared. 
 Not genius itself could survive the kodak snapshots 
 and the halfpenny newspapers. 
 
 It must, I suppose, have been one of those days 
 on which the public was then excluded, since we 
 found Tennyson, with a single companion, alone 
 in what was then the long First Sculpture Gallery. 
 His friend was James Spedding, at whom in other 
 conditions I should have gazed with interest, but in 
 the Delphic presence he was not visible to my 
 dazzled eyes. Mr. Thornycroft's statue of the poet, 
 now placed in Trinity College, gives an admirable 
 impression of him at a slightly later date than 1871, 
 if (that is) it is translated out of terms of white 
 into terms of black. Tennyson, at that time, was 
 still one of the darkest of men, as he is familiarly 
 seen in all his earlier portraits. But those portraits 
 do not give, although Mr. Thornycroft has suggested, 
 the singular majesty of his figure, standing in repose. 
 Ralston, for all his six feet six, seemed to dwindle 
 before this magnificent presence, while Tennyson 
 stood, bare-headed among the Roman Emperors, 
 every inch as imperial-looking as the best of them. 
 He stood there as we approached him, very still, 
 with slightly drooping eyelids, and made no move- 
 ment, no gesture of approach. When I had been 
 presented, and had shaken his hand, he continued 
 tc consider me in a silence which would have 
 been deeply disconcerting if it had not, somehow, 
 
A First Sight of Tennyson 133 
 
 seemed kindly, and even, absurd as it sounds, 
 rather shy. 
 
 The stillness was broken by Ralston's irrelevantly 
 mentioning that I was presently to start for Norway. 
 The bard then began to talk about that country, 
 which I was surprised to find he had visited some 
 dozen years before. Ralston kindly engaged 
 Spedding in conversation, so that Tennyson might 
 now apply himself to me ; with infinite goodness he 
 did so, even " making conversation," for I was hope- 
 lessly tongue-tied, and must, in fact, have cut a very 
 poor figure. Tennyson, it miraculously appeared, 
 had read some of my stammering verses, and was 
 vaguely gracious about them. He seemed to accept 
 me as a sheep in the fold of which he was, so 
 magnificently, the shepherd. This completed my 
 undoing, but he did not demand from me speech. 
 He returned to the subject of Norway, and said it 
 was not the country for him to travel in, since you 
 could only travel in it in funny little round carts, 
 called karjols, which you must drive yourself, and 
 that he was far too near-sighted for that. (I had 
 instantly wondered at his double glasses, of a kind 
 I had never seen before.) 
 
 Then somebody suggested that we should examine 
 the works of art, which, in that solitude, we could 
 delightfully do. Tennyson led us, and we stopped 
 at any sculpture which attracted his notice. But 
 the only remark which my memory has retained 
 was made before the famous black bust of Antinous. 
 Tennyson bent forward a little, and said, in his deep, 
 
134 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 slow voice, "Ah ! this is the inscrutable Bithynian ! " 
 There was a pause, and then he added, gazing into 
 the eyes of the bust : " If we knew what he knew, 
 we should understand the ancient world." If I live 
 to be a hundred years old, I shall still hear his rich 
 tones as he said this, without emphasis, without 
 affectation, as though he were speaking to himself. 
 And soon after, the gates of heaven were closed, 
 and I went down three flights of stairs to my hell of 
 rotten morocco. 
 
A VISIT TO WHITTIER 
 
A VISIT TO WHITTIER 
 
 WHEN I was in Boston in 1884, my brilliant and 
 hospitable friend Mr. W. D. Howells received a 
 letter from the poet Whittier, expressing a most 
 kind wish that I should visit him. It would have 
 been a great satisfaction to me to have seen him in 
 summer, and in his own beautiful home at Amesbury, 
 where he settled in 1836, and where he resided until 
 his death in 1892, although at the moment of his 
 demise he happened to be visiting a friend at Horton 
 Falls. It would have been delightful to carry away 
 an impression of that noble, calm figure in the midst 
 of its household gods. But, if I remember rightly, 
 the mansion at Amesbury was at that -time being 
 altered in some way ; at all events, Mr. Whittier was 
 staying with female relations at a house, called Oak 
 Knoll, near the town of Danvers. It was, moreover, 
 in the depth of the hard New England winter ; all the 
 landscape was choked with snow. Certainly, the 
 visitor's attention would be the more exclusively 
 concentrated on the appearance and conversation 
 of his celebrated host. Accordingly, an appoint- 
 ment was made, and on December 6 I set forth on 
 quite an arctic expedition to discover the author of 
 "Snow Bound." 
 
138 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 I have a superstition that all very agreeable 
 adventures begin with a slight mishap. I was not 
 prepared to believe Mr. Whittier so difficult to 
 reach as I found him. We arrived early at the 
 dismal railway station of Danvers, and a hack was 
 persuaded to drive us to the entrance of Oak 
 Knoll. All this Massachusetts landscape, doubtless 
 enchanting at other times of the year, is of a most 
 forbidding bleakness in midwinter. The carriage 
 deposited us and drove off, leaving us to struggle 
 up to the homestead, and we arrived with relief 
 under the great pillars of an ample piazza. Perhaps, 
 in leafy seasons, Oak Knoll may have its charms, 
 but it was distinctly sinister that December morning. 
 
 We rang, and after a long pause the front door 
 opened slightly, and a very unprepossessing dog 
 emerged, and shut the door (if I may say so) behind 
 him. We were face to face with this animal, which 
 presented none of the features identified in one's 
 mind with the idea of Mr. Whittier. It sniffed un- 
 pleasantly, but we spoke to it most blandly, and it 
 became assured that we were not tramps. The dog 
 sat down and looked at us ; we had nowhere to sit 
 down, but we looked at the dog. Then, after many 
 blandishments, but feeling very uncomfortable, I 
 ventured to hold the dog in conversation, while I 
 rang again. After another pause, the door was very 
 slightly opened, and a voice of no agreeable timbre 
 asked what we wanted. We explained, across the 
 dog, that we had come by appointment to see Mr. 
 Whittier. The door was closed a second time, and, 
 
A Visit to Whittier 139 
 
 if our carriage had still been waiting, we should 
 certainly have driven back to Danvers. But at 
 length a hard-featured woman grudgingly admitted 
 us, and showed us, growling as she did it, into a 
 parlour. 
 
 Our troubles were then over, for Mr. Whittier 
 himself appeared, with all that report had ever told 
 of gentle sweetness and dignified, cordial courtesy. 
 He was then seventy-seven years old, and, although 
 he spoke of age and feebleness, he showed few signs 
 of either ; he was, in fact, to live eight years more. 
 Perhaps because the room was low, he seemed 
 surprisingly tall ; he must, in fact, have been a 
 little less than six feet high. The peculiarity of his 
 face rested in the extraordinarily large and luminous 
 black eyes, set in black eyebrows, and fringed with 
 thick black eyelashes curiously curved inwards. 
 This bar of vivid black across the countenance was 
 startlingly contrasted with the bushy snow-white 
 beard and hair, offering a sort of contradiction 
 which was surprising and presently pleasing. He 
 was careful to keep on my right side, I noticed, 
 being presumably deaf in the right ear ; even if this 
 were the case, which he concealed, his hearing 
 continued to be markedly quick in a man of his 
 years. 
 
 His generosity to those much younger and less 
 gifted than himself is well known, and I shall not 
 dwell on the good-natured things which he 
 proceeded to say to his English visitor. He made 
 no profession at any time of being a critic, and his 
 
140 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 formula was that such and such verse or prose had 
 given him pleasure " I am grateful to thee for 
 all that enjoyment," was his charming way of being 
 kind. But I will mention what he said about one 
 book, the " Life of Gray," because I do not remem- 
 ber that Gray is mentioned in any of the published 
 works of Whittier. He said that he had delighted in 
 that narrative of a life so quiet and so sequestered 
 that, as he put it, it was almost more " Quakerly " 
 than that of any famous member of the Society ; 
 and he added that he had been greatly moved 
 by the fullness and the significance of a career 
 which to the outside world might have seemed 
 absolutely without movement. " Thee were very 
 fortunate," he went on, " to have that beautiful, 
 restful story left to tell after almost all the histories 
 of great men had been made so fully known to 
 readers." 
 
 He asked me what and whom I had seen. Had 
 I yet visited Concord ? I responded that I was 
 immediately about to do so, and then he said 
 quickly, "Ah! thee should have come a little 
 sooner, when we were still united. There were 
 four of us a little while ago, but two are gone, and 
 what is Concord without Emerson?" He spoke 
 with great emotion of Emerson "the noblest 
 human being I have known " and of Longfellow 
 "perhaps the sweetest. But you will see Holmes," 
 he added. I replied it was my great privilege to be 
 seeing Dr. Holmes every day, and that the night 
 before he had sent all sorts of affectionate messages 
 
A Visit to Whittier 141 
 
 by me to Mr. Whittier. The latter expressed great 
 curiosity to see Holmes's short " Life of Emerson," 
 which, in fact, was published five or six days later. 
 With reminiscences of the past, and especially of 
 the great group of the poets his contemporaries, my 
 venerable host kept me long entertained. 
 
 He presently said that he would leave me that he 
 might search for a portrait of himself, which he was 
 so kind as to offer to me as a memorial of my visit. 
 I proposed to take my leave, but he insisted that 
 I must not go ; he was absent about twenty minutes, 
 resting, as I gathered, from the exertion of 
 speaking, which had caused a noticeable hoarseness. 
 He returned, entirely refreshed, and was once more 
 delightfully communicative. I know not how he 
 was induced to go back to the early anti-slavery 
 days, but this subject having been started, he 
 pursued it with the greatest vivacity. I was left 
 with the impression that on his sedentary and noise- 
 less existence the troubles of 1835 had left an 
 indelible impression that these formed, indeed, the 
 most exciting pivot for his reminiscences. He told 
 the story of the Concord riots eagerly and merrily, 
 no doubt in almost the same words as he had often 
 told it before. His eyes flashed, he slapped his 
 knees, he may almost be said to have gesticulated, 
 and there was something less than Quakerly quiet- 
 ism in his gusto at the exciting incidents of the 
 narrative. He told how he was met in the street 
 of Concord by the rioters, who were looking for 
 George Thompson, the abolitionist lecturer. 
 
142 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 Thompson was a man of about his own age, and 
 the mob, supposing Whittier to be he, pelted the 
 poet with rotten eggs and, worse than that, with 
 stones. Their aim was bad, for they scarcely 
 touched Whittier with the more serious missiles, 
 which rattled instead on the wooden fence behind 
 him. He said it made him feel like the Apostle 
 Paul. Another abolitionist, a Mr. Kent, at this 
 moment providentially opened his street-door, and 
 Whittier was pulled in out of the angry crowd. I 
 forget exactly what happened next, but there was 
 a great deal of shouting and firing, and in the 
 process of time George Thompson seems to have 
 joined the other anti-slavery men in their refuge. 
 At all events, Mr. Whittier described, with immense 
 animation and spirit, how it became necessary at 
 length to make a dash, and how Thompson and he 
 were brought in a carriage to a side-door, and the 
 horse suddenly whipped through the unexpectant 
 crowds out of the town and far away before 
 any one thought of pursuing them. At this final 
 recital the old gentleman could remain seated no 
 longer, but started from his chair and fought 
 his battle o'er again. No doubt it was all recorded 
 history, and could be reconstructed with closer 
 accuracy from the books, but it was a delightful 
 and quite sufficing experience to hear it thus told 
 by the most distinguished person engaged, after an 
 interim of nearly fifty years. 
 
 If it is not too trifling, I must mention, in connec- 
 tion with his magnificent, lustrous eyes, that, the 
 
A Visit to Whittier 143 
 
 conversation turning upon the hues of things, Mr. 
 Whittier greatly surprised me by confessing that he 
 was quite colour-blind. He exemplified his condition 
 by saying that if I came to Amesbury I should be 
 scandalised by one of his carpets. It appeared that 
 he was never permitted by the guardian goddesses of 
 his hearth to go " shopping " for himself, but that 
 once, being in Boston, and remembering that he 
 needed a carpet, he had ventured to go to a store and 
 buy what he thought to be a very nice, quiet article, 
 precisely suited to adorn a Quaker home. When it 
 arrived at Amesbury there was a universal shout of 
 horror, for what had struck Mr. Whittier as a 
 particularly soft combination of browns and greys 
 proved to normal eyes to be a loud pattern of bright 
 red roses on a field of the crudest cabbage-green. 
 When he had told me this, it was then easy to 
 observe that the fullness and brilliancy of his 
 wonderful eyes had something which was not 
 enhrely normal about them. 
 
 He struck me as very gay and cheerful, in spite of 
 his occasional references to the passage of time and 
 the vanishing of beloved faces. He even laughed, 
 frequently and with a childlike suddenness, but 
 without a sound. His face had none of the im- 
 mobility so frequent with very aged persons ; on 
 the contrary, waves of mood were always sparkling 
 across his features and leaving nothing stationary 
 there except the narrow, high, and strangely receding 
 forehead. His language, very fluid and easy, had 
 an agreeable touch of the soil, an occasional rustic 
 
144 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 note in its elegant colloquialism, that seemed very 
 pleasant and appropriate, as if it linked him naturally 
 with the long line of sturdy ancestors of whom he 
 was the final blossoming. In connection with his 
 poetry, I think it would be difficult to form in the 
 imagination a figure more appropriate to Whittier's 
 writings than Whittier himself proved to be in the 
 flesh. 
 
 Two days later I received from Mr. Whittier a 
 very kind letter and the gift of his latest volume of 
 poems, " The Bay of Seven Islands." It was far 
 from being his last, for it was to be followed by 
 two more in his lifetime and by a gleaning of post- 
 humous verses. But it was the book of an old man, 
 and in reading it one was reminded that fifty-three 
 years had passed since " Legends of New England " 
 had first given the name of Whittier to the lovers of 
 poetry. In saying that " The Bay of Seven Islands " 
 is an old man's book, however, I do not mean that 
 it shows marks of senile failure, but only that 
 the eye of the writer is constantly on the past, 
 counting the sheaves, watching the red colour 
 in the western sky. In verses not less sincere 
 because they are a little rough, he offers his own 
 apologia. He desires, he says, that it shall be said 
 of him when he is gone : 
 
 Hater of din and riot 
 He lived in days unquiet ; 
 And, lover of all beauty. 
 Trod the hard ways of duty. 
 
A Visit to Whittier 145 
 
 To all who dumbly suffered, 
 His tongue and pen he offered ; 
 His life was not his own, 
 Nor lived Jor self alone, 
 
 This we can clearly assert must always be said of 
 Whittier. But what will impartial criticism, which 
 is deaf to all the virtues if their expression be not en- 
 shrined and kept fresh in really fine literature, decide 
 about the poetry of this good and graceful man ? 
 
 Mr. Whittier was composing verses all his life, 
 and the difference of quality between those he wrote 
 at twenty and at eighty is remarkably small. He 
 was a poet in the lifetime of Gifford and Crabbe, 
 and he was still a poet when Mr. Rudyard Kipling 
 was already famous. During this vast period of 
 time his style changed very little ; it had its ups and 
 downs, its laxities and then its felicities, but it bore 
 very little relation to passing conditions. There rose 
 up beside it Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and 
 Swinburne, but none of these affected Whittier. His 
 genius, or talent, or knack whichever we choose to 
 call it was an absolutely local and native thing. It 
 was like the Indian waters of strange name of which 
 it sang, Winnepesaukee and Merrimac and Katahdin ; 
 it streamed forth, untouched by Europe, from 
 among the butternuts and maples of the hard New 
 England landscape. The art in Whittier's verse was 
 primitive. Those who love his poetry most will wish 
 that he had possessed a better ear, that he could have 
 felt that "mateless" does not rhyme with "greatness." 
 In all his books there is a tendency to excess, to 
 
 K. 
 
146 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 redundancy ; he babbles on, even when he has 
 nothing very inspired to say. 
 
 But when all this is acknowledged, none but a 
 very hasty reader will fail to recognise Whittier's 
 lasting place in the history of literature. He is not 
 rich, nor sonorous, nor a splendid artist ; he is even 
 rather rarely exquisite, but he has an individuality 
 of his own that is of durable importance. He is 
 filled with moral enthusiasm, as a trumpet is filled 
 with the breath of him who blows it. His Quaker 
 quietism concentrates itself till it breaks in a real 
 passion-storm of humanity, and when Whittier is 
 roused he sings with the thrilling sweetness of a 
 wood-thrush. By dint of simplicity and earnestness, 
 he frequently hits upon the most charming phrases, 
 instinct with life and truth ; so that the English poet 
 with whom it seems most natural to compare him in 
 the lyrical order is the epic and didactic Crabbe. 
 If the author of "The Borough" had been 
 dowered with the gift of writing in octosyllabics and 
 short stanzaic measures, and had been born of stern 
 Puritan stock in Massachusetts, and had been roused 
 by the sight of a public iniquity, such as slavery, 
 recognised and applauded in society, he might have 
 presented to the world a talent very much resembling 
 that of Whittier. But, as it is, we look around in 
 vain for an English or American poet of anything 
 like the same merit who shares the place of Whittier. 
 
 The grave of the admirable Quaker poet at Ames- 
 bury is hemmed in by a hedge of vigorous arbor 
 vitae. His memory, in like manner, depends for its 
 
A Visit to Whittier 147 
 
 protection, not on the praise of exotic communities 
 which can never, though they admire, rightly com- 
 prehend it, but on the conscience of New England, 
 shy, tenacious, intrepid, to which, more than any 
 other poet has done, Whittier made a direct and 
 constant appeal. 
 
THE AUTHOR OF "JOHN 
 
 INGLESANT " 
 
 1834-1903 
 
THE AUTHOR OF "JOHN 
 INGLESANT" 
 
 THE two volumes of her husband's ''Letters 
 and Literary Remains," which Mrs. Shorthouse 
 published in 1905, must have familiarised a great 
 number of readers with a favourite author who, 
 during his lifetime, was something of a mystery to 
 most of them. In order to see Joseph Henry 
 Shorthouse in the flesh it was necessary to make a 
 pilgrimage to Birmingham, where he shone for 
 twenty years as the principal literary light. Over 
 this light, even in its provincial sphere, for a 
 long time there descended more and more closely 
 the extinguisher of an ill-health which gradually 
 obscured it completely. One cannot be certain 
 that even these volumes, so devotedly and so 
 punctiliously prepared by his widow, will repeat 
 for the many the impression which his very curious 
 person made upon the few who knew him. Upon 
 myself, who saw him first nearly thirty years ago, 
 when his energies were at their height, the effect he 
 then made was startling. I had vaguely anticipated 
 something Quakerish or clerical, something faintly 
 
152 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 recalling the seventeenth-century Puritan clergy- 
 man, with perhaps a touch of Little Gidding. Very 
 elegant and colourless, one fancied him ; a grave 
 man, pale with meditation and dyed in the drab 
 tincture of provinciality. 
 
 The exact opposite was the fact. J. H. Shorthouse 
 was one of the most eighteenth-century-looking 
 people who have been seen in our day. But it was 
 not the eighteenth century of Gainsborough and 
 Romney which he represented ; it was Italian. To 
 tell the truth, the instant and irresistible impression 
 which he gave was that of a mask of 1750 suddenly 
 revived out of some serious and romantic pastoral. 
 He did not seem a part of actual existence ; he 
 made his entry facendo il bergamasco, and one 
 almost expected him to take off his large artificial 
 face, so much too big for his body, and reveal a 
 living Shorthouse below. With this curious illusion 
 of wearing a mask were connected his love of a 
 discreet but unusual gaiety of colour in dress, and 
 the movements of his soft, slightly prelatical hands. 
 His extreme courtesy and his few and stereotyped 
 but unusual gestures made it easy to think of a 
 Shorthouse, scarcely changed at all, moving in 
 the kaleidoscopic procession of figures in some 
 Neapolitan festival. Mrs. Shorthouse, with laudable 
 courage, does not attempt to disguise from her 
 readers what was the great physical misfortune of 
 her husband's life, his incurable stammer. When 
 I knew him first, this was not yet incessant and was 
 still under some control. But it added to that strange 
 
"John Inglesant " 153 
 
 resemblance with Italian types of the eighteenth 
 century, since the recollection of the stutter of 
 Tartaglia (if I may be pardoned for saying so) was 
 made irresistible by it. 
 
 It is perhaps not fantastic to say that, in his 
 intellectual character also, Shorthouse loved to 
 wear a domino and fling a purple cloak across his 
 shoulders. His mind went through life playing a 
 grave and graceful part, and his whole scheme of 
 culture was a delicate sport or elaborate system of 
 make-believe. He had never been in Italy, or, 
 indeed, across the English Channel, yet he loved 
 to fancy that he had travelled extensively and 
 confidentially in romantic Catholic countries. It 
 is the custom nowadays to speak of his pictures of 
 Italy as artless and "clumsy" the word (which 
 would have cut Shorthouse to the quick) was 
 actually used to describe them the other day. It 
 does not seem to me that they deserve this censure, 
 which is based upon a supposition that every author 
 is bound to paint topographically, with his eye on 
 the object, like Ruskin or Mr. Maurice Hewlett. 
 Some people think they have swept Shorthouse 
 away if they can prove that a palace which he 
 supposed to be of white marble is really built of 
 red brick. The staircase of the house in Edgbaston 
 was lined with fine impressions of the engravings of 
 Piranesi, and Shorthouse, seeing my eye rest on 
 these one day, said, " I got all my Italian local 
 colour out of those prints." Now, it is not to be 
 captious precisely " colour " that one does not get 
 
154 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 out of the stately convention of Piranesi. Con- 
 sequently, the author of "John Inglesant" had, 
 unconsciously, to supply a great deal out of his 
 brooding imagination. The whole thing was false, 
 in a sense, if you like to put it so ; he was not 
 describing, he was hardly creating, he was simply 
 facendo il bergamasco. 
 
 The author who " does his bergamask " runs the 
 greatest risk of being misconceived by criticism. 
 All the righteous commonplaces are trotted out 
 against him. He is told that what he writes is 
 laboured and unreal, he is called self-conscious and 
 academic, he is advised to put off his domino and 
 his cloak and to behave like other people. He is 
 reproved because life does not affect him directly 
 and because he has no objective sympathy with 
 mankind. This is the note of clever criticism 
 to-day with regard to " John Inglesant," a book 
 which seems to have passed, perhaps only for the 
 moment, out of fashion. The way to meet these 
 attacks, it seems to me, is to admit their premises, 
 and then to inquire what it all matters. If we are 
 to accept only one kind of fiction, strong in humour, 
 vivid and strenuous in relation to life, standing 
 sturdily on two sound legs of common-sense, then 
 we must confine ourselves to a very few books, of 
 which "Tom Jones" is unquestionably the best. 
 But without withdrawing a single epithet of eulogy 
 from Fielding and the great realists, we must 
 consent to widen our borders sufficiently to embrace 
 the fantastic, the unreal, the capricious types of 
 
"John Inglesant " 155 
 
 fiction. The terms which are used nowadays to 
 exclude "John Inglesant" from commendation would 
 forbid us to admire " La Princesse de Cleves " on 
 the one hand and " The Shaving of Shagpat " 
 on the other. This is a tendency which must be 
 resisted. There is a legitimate pleasure to be found 
 in the cultivation of a moral spectacle. It was this, 
 a sort of commedia erudita, which it was Shorthouse's 
 aim to produce. He did so in " John Inglesant," 
 and more exquisitely still, it seems to me, in a book 
 which has never been properly appreciated, " The 
 Little Schoolmaster Mark." 
 
 There are certain points of view from which these 
 romances must always retain their importance for 
 the social student of the mid-Victorian period. They 
 are the typical novels of the great awakening of 
 middle-class culture in the sixties. In those days 
 Oxford might possess its Matthew Arnold, and 
 Chelsea its Whistler, and Fairyland its Rossetti and 
 its Morris, but it was inconceivable that Birmingham 
 could exhibit a school of beauty or a cult of romance. 
 The extraordinary success of " John Inglesant" re- 
 sulted from its answer to the appeal for new light 
 from the Midlands, to the cry from local centres 
 which still lay in aesthetic darkness, but had heard 
 that the dayspring of art was at hand. Shorthouse, 
 who liked to talk about his books with his intimate 
 friends, often spoke to me about the inception of 
 " John Inglesant." He regarded it, I think, as a 
 little mysterious, almost supernatural. He did not 
 fatuously exaggerate the importance of it, but it was 
 
156 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 impossible for him to ignore the tremendous re- 
 sponse which came back to him from its readers. He 
 was a little alarmed, immensely pleased, and most of 
 all surprised. As he talked of the career of the novel, 
 his large solemn face, with its incredible whiskers, 
 would take an air of almost pathetic astonishment. 
 
 His attitude was, so far as sobriety would allow 
 him to suggest it, that " John Inglesant " was the 
 result of a kind of vocation. He was without pride, 
 but he really believed that the subject was "given " 
 to him, and he was wont to quote of himself, as a 
 writer, 4< Blessed is the man whom Thou choosest, 
 and causest to approach unto Thee, that he may 
 dwell in Thy courts." In 1866 he began to feel that 
 he must write a book he, a shy, Quakerish manu- 
 facturer, without literary training, subdued by per- 
 sistent ill-health. Nobody suggested or encouraged 
 this idea, but it grew ; " if it were only quite a little 
 book which nobody read, I should like to write one." 
 Then, as he brooded vaguely, he read a paragraph 
 somewhere about a knight who forgave the murderer 
 of his brother. This was the grain of mustard-seed, 
 and it took ten years for it to bourgeon into the great 
 Christian romance we all know. Meantime, the 
 simplicity of Shorthouse's intellectual life must have 
 been something extraordinary. He became ac- 
 quainted this alone shows the vacancy of the world 
 in which he had lived about the age of thirty-two, 
 he became acquainted with " The Christian Year " 
 and the poems of Wordsworth. The visit of a " vene- 
 rable and beloved" bishop to Birmingham filled 
 
"John Inglesant" 157 
 
 him with enthusiasm ; his lordship came to tea, con- 
 sented to read some passages of Wordsworth aloud in 
 the Shorthouses' drawing-room, and was let into the 
 secret that his host had " written a book." The bishop 
 read it, and said that it " contains a great deal of 
 very unusual information." Another bishop, equally 
 affable, went further, and said that he did not know 
 whether he had " ever read a book of the kind which 
 had struck or interested him more." We seem walk- 
 ing among shadows in these faint emotions, and in 
 the centre is a half-bewildered Shorthouse, with 
 rapturous face upturned, aghast at the prescience of 
 these prelates. But when had a famous book a 
 stranger birth ? 
 
 " John Inglesant " was privately printed for no 
 publisher would take the risk of it in 1880. Short- 
 house was in his forty-seventh year, and expected 
 nothing more of life, save perhaps richer vestmented 
 services at church on Sundays, a fresh talk over the 
 tea-table with some visiting bishop, and a shy com- 
 munication by letter, now and then, with some 
 author unknown to him whose works had delighted 
 him. But all through these years, in reality, he had 
 been insensibly growing into his own type ; he had 
 fixed his eyes on a moderate antiquity until he had 
 begun to be moderately antique himself. He began 
 to inhabit Edgbaston, that serene and highly cultured 
 apanage to Birmingham, breathlessly, as if it were 
 the gate of Heaven. At length he was actually sum- 
 moned to London to breakfast with Mr. Gladstone 
 (May 4, 1882), and he went, dreadfully alarmed, but 
 
158 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 believing it to be his aesthetic privilege and duty to 
 obey, much as St. Francis might have left Assisi for 
 Rome. And this was the occasion, I think, on which 
 he finally adopted his bergamask. He was no longer 
 Mr. Joseph Henry Shorthouse, the vitriol manu- 
 facturer of Birmingham ; he was the author of 
 "John Inglesant," into whose earthen vessel had 
 been divinely poured waters for the healing of the 
 nations. 
 
 Lest I be misunderstood to speak slightingly, in 
 trying to speak carefully, of this excellent man, whom 
 I admired and loved, I would immediately proceed 
 to say what in his own idea justified the slightly 
 solemn way in which he regarded his mission. He 
 believed that he had been raised up to persuade 
 people that God prefers culture to fanaticism. He 
 asserted this again and again ; the formula is his 
 own. He disliked excess of every kind tumultuous 
 benevolence, exaggerated faith, fanatical action. 
 He was of opinion that our English life, public 
 and private, as it was worked out to a practical 
 issue forty years ago, was a mistake. He was 
 an epicurean quietist, who believed that the 
 main object of every man's life should be to 
 conquer and secure for. himself peace of mind and 
 a solution of the intellectual difficulties which have 
 perplexed him. He held that so far as philanthropy, 
 or active energy of any sort, was incompatible with 
 perfect culture, it was wrong, it was unwholesome 
 and immoral. In his attitude towards altruism and 
 public pity, the author of "John Inglesant," arriving 
 
"John Inglesant " 159 
 
 from the opposite point of the compass, was oddly 
 in harmony with Nietzsche, of whom he had never 
 heard, and whom he would have looked upon as 
 a ruffian. Shorthouse grew, gentle as he was, quite 
 courageous when the ideas in "John Inglesant" 
 were attacked. Lord Acton found fault with the 
 character of the Jesuit ; Shorthouse replied, " I 
 never reason with Roman Catholics : they live in a 
 fairyland of their own " a delightful rejoinder. 
 
 The success of '* John Inglesant " occurred thirty 
 years ago, and the world has a short memory. But 
 some of us, alas ! can very clearly recall the 
 momentous circumstances of it. Mr. Gladstone, 
 swept away by the tide of enthusiasm, yet ambitious 
 to guide it, was photographed with the second volume 
 of " John Inglesant" open on his knee, "the title of 
 the book quite plain " even to those outside the 
 shop-windows of the vendors. Not provincial 
 prelates any longer, but archbishops, cardinals, 
 professors, ladies of the first quality bombarded 
 Edgbaston with their correspondence. For the 
 next five years, at least, Shorthouse was an accepted 
 celebrity, the champion of good taste, the unfailing 
 source of rather vague but always stimulating 
 " thoughts about beauty," the introducer into middle- 
 class life and conduct of an extreme refinement. 
 It was much to his advantage, and, perhaps, a 
 proof of his wisdom, that he resisted all incitements 
 to break up his provincial habits and be translated 
 to residence in London. It was in Birmingham, 
 and only in Birmingham, as an unconscious senti- 
 
160 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 ment taught him, that he could carry on his 
 graceful, intellectual parade without disturbance. 
 It depended extremely on exterior symbols and 
 superficial attitudes. 
 
 It behoves us to speak with no less respect than 
 sympathy of another phase of Shorthouse's character 
 into the cultivation of which he threw particular care. 
 But in the religious aspect of his genius, too, I find 
 the same remarkable cultivation of external charac- 
 teristics. Shall we say that when he went to church, 
 as he so -consistently loved to do, he still wore the 
 domino ? I think we must say so, and certainly he 
 was never more sincere nor more individual than 
 when he dwelt upon the importance of cultivating 
 the religious symbol. In literature, in art, in piety, 
 it was the becoming attitude which Shorthouse 
 valued, not merely for its own sake, but because he 
 believed that it naturally led to sympathy and 
 delicacy, and perhaps but this was less essential 
 to faith itself. In the course of my own long talks 
 with him, this preference for ceremony over dogma, 
 this instinct for the beautiful parade and refined 
 self-surrender of religion, grew to seem the central 
 feature of Shorthouse's intellectual character, ex- 
 plaining everything in his books, in his letters, in 
 his personal conduct. He wished, as we know, 
 that the agnostic should be persuaded to come to 
 the Sacrament, not that he might testify to a creed 
 which he did not share, but that " some effect of 
 sympathy, some magic chord and thrill of sweetness 
 should mollify and refresh his heart." 
 
"John Inglesant " 161 
 
 There are, of course, a great many sensible and 
 strong-minded people who object to this whole 
 attitude, who insist that we should be our own plain 
 selves, and wear no mask in literature or in religion. 
 These people would have had Shorthouse remember 
 that he was a manufacturer of vitriol (a quaint fact 
 which, I think, Mrs. Shorthouse never happens to 
 mention), " behaving as such " quite prosaically 
 wherever the wealth of Birmingham was gathered 
 together. But, as the poet pathetically puts it, " the 
 world is full of a number of things," and oceans of 
 sulphuric acid will be poured out before we have 
 another visionary dreamer like the author of " John 
 Inglesant." His sequestered existence, which would 
 have made him earth-bound if he had not lifted 
 himself on the wings of fancy, concentrated his 
 peculiarities and intensified a sort of exquisite pro- 
 vinciality. Shorthouse was very modest, with a due 
 self-consciousness of merit ; he was very simple, 
 with a certain love of pomp and artifice ; he clung to 
 a sense of the importance of beauty as a safeguard 
 against what was small and tiresome in daily life* 
 It would be an exaggeration to put Shorthouse in 
 the forefront of the authors of the nineteenth century. 
 His work is not copious enough and not spontaneous 
 enough for that. But he had a real talent for care- 
 fully studied and delicately harmonious prose, and 
 for that kind of painstaking literary harlequinade 
 which we call pastiche. 
 
 It is customary to say that the present generation 
 has forgotten Shorthouse. If that is true, let it be 
 
1 62 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 reminded of his admirable characteristics by the 
 pious labours of his widow. But I think we are apt 
 to judge too hastily of what " the younger genera- 
 tion " is supposed to remember or to forget. The 
 impress of Shorthouse's genius seems to me, on the 
 contrary, to be patent on many sides of us. We see 
 it, surely, in recent books so dissimilar and yet so 
 admirable as '' Ariadne in Mantua " and " Zuleika 
 Dobson." The bergamot perfume persists ; it would 
 be absurd to wish that it should pervade every 
 bouquet. But we must hope that " the younger 
 generation," that mysterious band of invaders, will 
 deign to read the volumes of essays and letters which 
 Mrs. Shorthouse presented to them. They will find, 
 I admit, a certain faintness, a certain weakness and 
 ineffectuality, but it will be astonishing if they do 
 not also admit that "an inexpressibly sweet and 
 delicate melody has penetrated their senses." 
 
MANDELL CREIGHTON 
 
 1843-1901 
 
MANDELL CREIGHTON 
 
 IN heroic times, when a monarch was about to 
 make a solemn adventure into strange dominions, 
 he chose one of the wisest and noblest of his 
 subjects, and sent him forward as a herald. Those 
 who indulge such fancies may have seen a mys- 
 terious revival of this custom in the fate which 
 removed the admirable Bishop of London exactly 
 eight days before his Queen was called upon to 
 take the same dread journey. If ceremonial had 
 demanded, at the approach of such an event, a 
 sacrifice of the most honoured, the most valued, the 
 most indispensable, many alternatives would have 
 occurred to those on whom the wretched duty of 
 choice would have fallen ; but it is probable that 
 among the first half-dozen of such precious names 
 would have been found that of a Churchman, 
 Mandell Creighton. His wholesome virtues, his 
 indefatigable vigour, the breadth of his sympathy, 
 the strenuous activity of his intellect, pointed him 
 out as the man who more than any other seemed 
 destined to justify the ways of the national Church 
 in the eyes of modern thought, the ecclesiastic who 
 more than any other would continue to conciliate 
 the best and keenest secular opinion. 
 
1 66 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 In Creighton, in short, a real prince of the 
 Church seemed to be approaching the ripeness of 
 his strength. He seemed preparing to spend the 
 next quarter of a century in leading a huge and 
 motley flock more or less safely into tolerably green 
 pastures. Here, then, we thought we had found, 
 what we so rarely see in England, a political prelate 
 of the first rank. With all this were combined 
 gifts of a literary and philosophical order, a 
 lambent wit, a nature than which few have been 
 known more generous or affectionate, and a con- 
 stitution which promised to defy the years. No 
 wonder, then, if Creighton had begun to take his 
 place as one of the most secure and precious of 
 contemporary institutions. In the fullness of his 
 force, at the height of his intellectual meridian, he 
 suddenly dropped out of the sky. And with all 
 the sorrow that we felt was mingled the homely 
 poignancy of a keen disappointment. 
 
 I 
 
 Mandell Creighton was the son of Robert 
 Creighton, timber merchant of Carlisle, and of 
 Sarah Mandell, his wife. On both sides he came 
 of sound Cumberland stock. He was born at 
 Carlisle, on July 5, 1843. He went to school at 
 Durham, and in 1862 he was elected " postmaster " 
 of Merton College, Oxford ; that is to say, a scholar 
 supported on the foundation. He spent the next 
 thirteen years at the university ; and this period 
 
Mandell Creighton 167 
 
 forms one of the most important of the sharply 
 marked stages into which Creighton's life was 
 divided. Oxford, Embleton, Cambridge, Peter- 
 borough, London it is very seldom that the 
 career of a modern man is subdivided by such 
 clean sword-cuts through the texture of his personal 
 habits. But it was the earliest of these stages which 
 really decided the order and character of the others. 
 It is easy to think of a Creighton who was never 
 Bishop of Peterborough ; it is already becoming 
 difficult to recollect at all clearly the one who was 
 Dixie Professor at Cambridge. But to think of 
 Creighton and not think of Oxford is impossible. 
 From the beginning of his career to the close of 
 it he exhaled the spirit of that university. 
 
 Those who knew Creighton as Bishop of London 
 may feel that they knew him as a young tutor at 
 Oxford. Those whose friendship with him goes 
 back further than mine tell me that as quite a 
 young undergraduate he had exactly the same 
 manner which we became accustomed to later. He 
 never changed in the least essential matter ; he 
 grew in knowledge and experience, indeed, but the 
 character was strongly sketched in him from the 
 very first. Boys are quick in their instinctive 
 observation, and almost as a freshman Creighton 
 was dubbed " the Professor." At Merton they were 
 fond of nicknames, and they liked them short ; it 
 followed that the future Bishop of London, during 
 his undergraduate days, was known among his 
 intimates as " the P." He wore glasses, and they 
 
1 68 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 gleamed already with something of the flash that 
 was to become so famous. In those earliest days, 
 when other boys were largely playing the fool, 
 Creighton was instinctively practising to play the 
 teacher. Already, indeed, he was scholastic in the 
 habit of his mind, although never, I think, what 
 could, with even an undergraduate's exaggeration, 
 be styled " priggish." I have heard of the zeal with 
 which, at a very early age, quite secretly and un- 
 obtrusively, he would help lame (and presumably 
 idle) dogs over educational stiles. He was not a 
 cricketer, but he took plenty of strenuous exercise 
 in the form of walking and rowing. He sought 
 glory in the Merton boat, and it is still remembered 
 that he was an ornament to a certain nautical club, 
 composed of graduates, and called the Ancient 
 Mariners. But the maniacal lovers of athletic exer- 
 cise can never quote Creighton as one of their 
 examples. 
 
 When he became a don fellow and tutor of his 
 college the real life of Creighton began. The 
 chrysalis broke, and the academic butterfly ap- 
 peared. With a certain small class of men at 
 Merton he was, I believe, for a very short time, 
 unpopular. It was a college illustrious for the self- 
 abandonment of high spirits, and Creighton had a 
 genius for discipline. But he was very soon re- 
 spected, and his influence over each of his particular 
 pupils was tremendous. It is interesting to note 
 that while everybody speaks of Creighton's "in- 
 fluence " over himself or others, no one ever seems 
 
Mandell Creighton 169 
 
 to recall any " influence " from without acting upon 
 Creighton. As to the undergraduates brought under 
 his care from 1866 onwards, there is probably not 
 one surviving who does not recollect the young 
 tutor with respect, and few who do not look back 
 upon him with affection. As a disciplinarian he 
 was quick and firm ; he was no martinet, but the 
 men under his charge soon understood that they 
 must work hard and behave themselves. From 
 each he would see that he got the best there was 
 to give. 
 
 He had great courage ; it was always one of his 
 qualities. One of the most remarkable exhibitions 
 of it, I think, was his custom while he was a fellow 
 at Merton, and afterwards when he was professor at 
 Cambridge of holding informal meetings in his 
 rooms, at which he allowed any species of historical 
 conundrum to be put to him, and enforced himself 
 to give a reasonable answer to it. The boys would 
 try to pose him, of course ; would grub up out-of- 
 the-way bits of historical erudition. Creighton was 
 always willing " to face the music," and I have never 
 heard of his being drawn into any absurd position. 
 Few pundits of a science would be ready to undergo 
 such a searching test of combined learning and 
 common-sense. 
 
 Of Creighton's particular pupils, in those early 
 days, two at least were destined to hold positions of 
 great prominence. In none of the obituary notices 
 of the Bishop of London, so far as I saw, were his 
 interesting relations with Lord Randolph Churchill 
 
1 70 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 so much as mentioned. A few months after 
 Creighton was placed on the governing body of 
 Merton, Lord Randolph made his appearance there 
 as an undergraduate. He was conspicuous, in those 
 days, as an unpromising type of the rowdy noble- 
 man. Nobody, not even his own family, believed 
 in a respectable future for him ; but Creighton, 
 with that singular perspicacity which was one of his 
 more remarkable characteristics, divined better 
 things in Lord Randolph at once. A friend 
 was once walking with the tutor of Merton, when 
 down the street came swaggering and strutting, with 
 a big nosegay at his buttonhole and a moustache 
 curled skywards, Lord Randolph Churchill, dressed, 
 as they say, " to kill." The friend could not resist 
 a gesture of disdain, but Creighton said : " You are 
 like everybody else : you think he is an awful ass ! 
 You are wrong : he isn't. You will see that he will 
 have a brilliant future, and what's more definite, a 
 brilliant political future. See whether my prophecy 
 doesn't turn out true." All through the period of 
 Lord Randolph Churchill's amazing harvest of wild 
 oats Creighton continued to believe in him. I 
 recollect challenging his faith in 1880, when Lord 
 Randolph was covering himself, after his second 
 election for Woodstock, with ridicule. He replied : 
 " You think all this preposterous conduct is mere 
 folly ? You are wrong : it is only the fermentation 
 of a very remarkable talent." Of course he was 
 right ; and as he lived to rejoice in the rush of his 
 meteor heavenwards, he lived to lament the earth- 
 
Mandell Creighton 171 
 
 ward tumble of all the sparks and sticks. Another 
 undergraduate of eminence, to whose care Creighton 
 was specially appointed, was the Queen's youngest 
 son, Leopold, Duke of Albany, to whom he gave 
 private lessons in history and literature, and over 
 whose mind he exercised a highly beneficial influ- 
 ence. It was Prince Leopold who first introduced 
 Creighton's name to the Queen, and started her 
 interest in his ecclesiastical career. 
 
 It was not until he became a don at Merton, in 
 1866, that Creighton formed a group of really 
 intimate friends. Then, immediately, his talents 
 and his conversation opened to him the whole circle 
 of the best minds of Oxford. No one could be 
 more attractive in such a society. His affectionate 
 nature and his very iresh and vigorous intellect 
 made him the most delightful of companions, and 
 he was preserved by a certain inherent magnanimity 
 from the pettiness which sometimes afflicts university 
 coteries. From the very first it was understood that 
 he would be an historian (although, by the irony of 
 examinations, he had gained only a " second class " 
 in modern history), but it was not clearly seen how 
 this obvious native bent would be made to serve a 
 profession. Suddenly, to everybody's great surprise, 
 in 1870 he was ordained deacon, and priest in 1873. 
 The reasons which led him to take so unexpected a 
 step have been frequently the subject of conjecture. 
 I shall presently, in endeavouring to form a portrait 
 of his character, return to a consideration of this 
 most interesting and important question. 
 
172 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 He was now, at the age of thirty, one of the most 
 individual types which Oxford, then abounding in 
 men of character, could offer to the observation of 
 a visitor. He was already one of the features of 
 the society : he was, perhaps, more frequently and 
 freely discussed than any other Oxonian of his 
 years. He was too strong a man to be universally 
 approved of : the dull thought him paradoxical, the 
 solemn thought him flippant ; already there was the 
 whisper abroad that he was "not a spiritually- 
 minded man." But the wise and the good, if they 
 sometimes may have doubted his gravity, never 
 doubted his sincerity ; nor would there be many 
 ready to denounce their own appreciation of good 
 company by declaring his conversation anything 
 but most attractive. 
 
 It was soon after he became a priest it was in 
 the early summer of 1874 that I first met Creighton. 
 I was on a visit to Walter Pater and his sisters, who 
 were then residing in the suburbs of Oxford, in 
 Bradmore Road. To luncheon on Sunday came a 
 little party of distinguished guests Henry Smith 
 and his sister, Max Miiller, Bonamy Price (I think), 
 and lastly Mr. and Mrs. Creighton ; for he had 
 married two years before this. Much the youngest 
 person present, I kept an interested silence ; most 
 of the talk, indeed, being fitted for local con- 
 sumption, and, to one who knew little of Oxford, 
 scarcely intelligible. During the course of the 
 meal, at which Creighton scintillated with easy 
 mastery, I caught his hawk's eye fall upon me once 
 
Mandell Creighton 173 
 
 or twice ; and when it was over, and the ladies had 
 left us, he quitted his own friends, and coming over 
 to me proposed a walk in the garden. I cannot say 
 that this brilliant clergyman, of doubtful age and 
 intimidating reputation, was quite the companion I 
 should have ventured to choose. But we descended 
 on to the greensward ; and as, through that long 
 golden afternoon, we walked up and down the 
 oblong garden, I gave myself more and more 
 unreservedly to the charm of my magnetic com- 
 panion, to his serious wit and whimsical wisdom, to 
 the directness of his sympathy, and to the firmness 
 of his grasp of the cord of life. I was conscious 
 of an irresistible intuition that this was one of the 
 best as well as one of the most remarkable men 
 whom I was ever likely to meet ; and our friendship 
 began in that hour. 
 
 II 
 
 From the first it seemed inevitable to count 
 Creighton among men of letters, and yet the 
 outward evidence of his literary life was very scanty 
 to the close of his Oxford period. In all his spare 
 time he was preparing for his future work, and 
 perhaps he was already publishing anonymously 
 some of his papers ; but the fact remains that his 
 name did not appear on a title-page until he was 
 leaving Oxford, in 1875. I fancy that the difficulty 
 he found in concentrating his attention on literature 
 was one of several reasons which so suddenly took 
 
174 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 him to Northumberland in that year. He had 
 already begun to plan his u agnum opus, "The 
 History of the Papacy," but he was struck with the 
 impossibility of combining the proper composition 
 of such a work with the incessant duties of a 
 college tutor. Hence, to most people's intense 
 surprise, it was one day abruptly announced that 
 Creighton had accepted the remote vicarage of 
 Embleton. He had given no one an opportunity of 
 advising him against the step, but it was known 
 that he had strengthened his determination by 
 taking counsel with Henry Smith. That wisest of 
 men had urged upon him the necessity, if he was 
 to enlarge his sphere of activity, and to rise to a 
 really commanding position in the Church, of his 
 seeing the other side of clerical life, the parochial. 
 With the academic side Creighton was sufficiently 
 familiar ; what he needed now was the practically 
 pastoral. Those who lamented that he should be 
 snatched from the gardens and classrooms of 
 Oxford, and from their peripatetic ingenuities, had 
 to realise that their charming friend was a very 
 strong man, predestined to do big things, and that 
 the time had come when solitude and fixity were 
 needful for his spiritual development. 
 
 So Creighton went off to Embleton ; and one 
 remembers the impression among his friends that it 
 was something worse for them, in the way of exile, 
 than Tomi could have been for the companions of 
 Ovid. But there was a great deal to mitigate the 
 horrors of exile. In the first place, Embleton was 
 
Mandell Creighton 175 
 
 the best of all the livings in the gift of Merton 
 College, and in many respects delightful, socially as 
 well as physically. The vicarage was a very 
 pleasant house, nested in tall trees, which were all 
 the more precious because of the general bareness 
 and bleakness of the grey Northumbrian landscape. 
 A mile away to the east, broadly ribboned by 
 rolling lion-coloured sands, is the sea the troubled 
 Euxine of those parts with a splendid ruin, the 
 keep of Dunstanborough Castle, crouching on a 
 green crag. To the west, dreary flat lands are 
 bounded, towards evening and on clear mornings, 
 by the far-away jags of the Cheviot Hills. On the 
 whole, it is a bright, hard, tonical country, lacking 
 the voluptuous beauties of the south, but full of 
 attraction to a strong and rapid man. It is a land 
 but little praised, although it has had one ardent 
 lover in Mr. Swinburne, that " flower of bright 
 Northumberland," that " sea-bird of the loud sea 
 strand," who sings the strenuous Tale of Balen. 
 It always seemed to me that this landscape, this 
 bleak and austere Northumbrian vigour, exactly 
 suited the genius of Creighton. It made a back- 
 ground to him, at all events ; and if I paint his full- 
 length portrait in my mind's eye, it is always with 
 the tawny sands and dark grey waters of Embleton 
 Bay against that falcon's head of his. 
 
 The social attractions of the Northumbrian parish 
 were singularly many. Creighton found himself in 
 the centre of a bouquet of county families, not a 
 few of which preserved in the present the fine 
 
176 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 traditions of a long hospitable past. The county 
 called, of course, on the new vicar, and was not 
 slow to discover that he was a man of power and 
 charm. But there were two of the acquaintances 
 so formed which ripened rapidly into friendships 
 of great importance to the Oxford historian. Some 
 five miles south of Embleton vicarage lay Howick, 
 the home of that veteran Whig statesman, the third 
 Earl Grey, who survived until long after Creighton 
 left Northumberland, and who died, at the age of 
 ninety-two, in 1894. Much nearer, and within his 
 own parish, he had as neighbour Sir George Grey 
 of Falloden, Lord John Russell's Home Secretary, 
 and father of the present Sir Edward Grey ; he died 
 in 1882. With these two aged politicians, of high 
 character and long experience, Creighton contrived 
 to form relations which in the case of the Falloden 
 family became positively intimate. The old Lord 
 Grey, although he welcomed the vicar and 
 delighted in his conversation, lived somewhat 
 above the scope of practical mortal friendship ; but 
 his nephew, the present earl then the hope of 
 politicians, and known as Mr. Albert Grey was 
 one of the most frequent visitors at the vicarage. 
 
 At Oxford Creighton had found it impossible to 
 devote himself to sustained literary work. The life 
 of the tutor of a college is so incessantly disturbed, 
 so minutely subdivided, that it is difficult indeed for 
 him to produce the least example of a work of 
 " long breath." In Northumberland it was not 
 that time was unoccupied wherever Creighton 
 
Mandell Creighton 177 
 
 was, there occupation instantly abounded but it 
 was at least not frittered and crumbled away with 
 hourly change of duty. Hence, directly we find 
 him at Embleton his literary work begins ; and it is 
 during those nine Northumbrian years that he 
 appeals to us pre-eminently as a man of letters. He 
 began with several little books, of the kind then 
 much advocated by the historians with whom he 
 had thrown in his lot, such as Freeman and Green. 
 It was, in fact, for a series edited by Green that 
 Creighton wrote his earliest published work, a little 
 History of Rome, in 1875. The next year saw the 
 publication of no fewer than three of his produc- 
 tions, two at least of which, " The Age of Elizabeth " 
 and " The Life of Simon de Montfort," remain 
 highly characteristic specimens of his manner. 
 Meanwhile he was writing anonymously, but 
 largely, in various periodicals, such as the Saturday 
 Review and the Athenaeum, to the last of which 
 he was for twelve years a steady contributor. In a 
 variety of ways he was labouring to secure the 
 recognition of the new science of history as he had 
 accepted it from the hands of Stubbs and Freeman. 
 His own magnum opus was all the time making 
 steady progress, and in 1882 were published the 
 first two volumes of "The History of the Papacy 
 during the Period of the Reformation." Of this book 
 the fifth and last volume was sent from Peter- 
 borough in 1894. It is a massive monument of 
 learning ; it is the work by which Creighton, as 
 a pure man of letters, will longest be remembered ; 
 
 M 
 
178 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 it is such a solid contribution to literature as few 
 scholars are fortunate enough to find time and 
 strength to make. The scope of the book was laid 
 down by himself : it was " to bring together 
 materials for a judgment of the change which came 
 over Europe in the sixteenth century, to which the 
 name of 'the Reformation' is loosely given." He 
 passed, in his five volumes, from the great schism 
 in the Papacy to the dissolution of the Council of 
 Trent. It cannot be said that Creighton's " History 
 of the Papacy" is a very amusing work. It was 
 not intended to entertain. It seems to leave out, of 
 set purpose, whatever would be interesting, and it 
 tells at length whatever is dull. It was Creighton's 
 theory, especially at this early period, that history 
 should be crude and unadorned ; not in any sense 
 a product of literary art, but a sober presentation of 
 the naked truth. Yet even the naked truth about 
 what happened (let us say) under Pope John XXII. 
 should, one would have supposed, have been amus- 
 ing. But Creighton was determined not to stoop 
 to the blandishments of anecdote or the siren lure 
 of style. 
 
 Busy as he was with literature all through these 
 years, he found, or made, at Embleton as much to 
 do as would have satisfied most country parsons. 
 The temporal wants of his parishioners immediately 
 attracted his attentiqn. Embleton has a fishing 
 suburb on the sea, called Craster. This was a 
 fever-ridden village, sunken in dirt and negligence. 
 Creighton, disregarding the growls of the indignant 
 
Mandell Creighton 179 
 
 and suspicious fishermen, took it vigorously in 
 hand, drained it, cleaned it, held services there, 
 founded what had never been dreamed of a 
 village school. We used to tell him that Craster 
 was his spoilt child. He seemed to hover about it, 
 washing its unwilling face, and combing its wilful 
 tangles. One watched him pounce down to see 
 what Craster was doing, and sweep along the street 
 of it like a winged person, ready to castigate or 
 caress. It was in the school at Craster that an 
 incident occurred which illustrates the difficulties of 
 rural education. Creighton, who had been holding 
 forth on the errors of ordinary teaching, took a 
 London friend into the school at Craster to show 
 how sensible and practical the mode was there. A 
 mixed and straggling class came up, and the vicar 
 asked the top pupil what is " the female of gander." 
 One blank face was followed by another, until far 
 down the class a dear little girl put forth a hand with 
 " Please, sir, gandress ! " Even Creighton, with all 
 his humour, was not at first amused, but he con- 
 soled himself by thinking that it was " so like Craster." 
 But his duties and activities were not confined to 
 the hamlets of his own large parish. He seemed at 
 last to have the whole neighbourhood in his hands. 
 He became the universal referee, the guide, 
 philosopher, and friend of the whole of northern 
 Northumberland. The county was in process of 
 ecclesiastical reconstruction, and Creighton was 
 made Rural Dean of Alnwick to help carry it out. 
 It was presently formed into a diocese, carved out of 
 
180 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 the Palatine of Durham, and Creighton was the 
 first Honorary Canon of the new Cathedral of 
 Newcastle. These titles were straws that marked 
 the current of his useful zeal. By and by the 
 duke consulted him in everything ; the bishop did 
 not stir without him. It almost seemed as though 
 his ambition would be satisfied with this sense of 
 local beneficence. At the age of forty he was 
 content to be simply the most indispensable man- 
 of-all-work in a province of Northern England. 
 But he was not born to live and die a useful rural 
 dean. 
 
 At no time of his life were the mental and moral 
 faculties of Creighton more wholesomely exercised 
 than during the latter part of his residence in 
 Embleton. In after years he pressed too much 
 into his life : he was always " on the go " at 
 Cambridge, always rushing about at Peterborough, 
 while in London he simply lost control of the brake 
 altogether and leaped headlong towards the inevit- 
 able smash. At Embleton, with his parish and his 
 extra-parochial work, his private pupils and his 
 books, his Oxford connection as public examiner 
 and select preacher, and all the rest of his intense 
 and concentrated activity, the machine, though 
 already going at a perilous rate, had not begun 
 to threaten to get beyond the power of the strong 
 and spirited rider to stop at will. I was lucky 
 enough, at this very moment of his career, to have 
 an opportunity of studying closely the character 
 and habits of my friend. In 1882 one of my 
 
Mandell Creighton 181 
 
 children was ordered to a bracing climate, and 
 Creighton suggested that nothing could possibly 
 brace more tightly than the bright Northumbrian 
 shore. He found us lodgings in the village of 
 Embleton, and we sojourned at the door of his 
 vicarage through the closing summer and the 
 autumn of that year. Thus, without presenting the 
 embarrassment of guests, who have to be "con- 
 sidered," we saw something of our fierce, rapid, 
 alert, and affectionate vicar every day, and could 
 study his character and mind at ease. We could 
 share his rounds, romp with his children and our 
 own, and engage at nights in the formidable 
 discipline of whist. 
 
 Of all my memories of those days bright, hard, 
 hot autumn days, with Creighton in the centre of 
 the visual foreground the clearest are those which 
 gather about tremendous walks. He was in his 
 element when he could tear himself away from his 
 complicated parochial duties, and start off, with his 
 mile-devouring stride, full of high cheerfulness, and 
 primed for endless discussion of religion and poetry 
 and our friends. He was a really pitiless pedestrian, 
 quite without mercy. I remember one breathless 
 afternoon, after hours upon the march, throwing 
 myself on the heather on the edge of Alnwick Moor, 
 and gasping for a respite. Silhouetted high up 
 against the sky, Creighton shouted : " Come on ! 
 Come on 1 " And it was then that anguish wrung 
 from me a gibe which was always thereafter a joke 
 between us. " You ought to be a caryatid/' I cried, 
 
1 82 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 "and support some public building ! It's the only 
 thing you're fit for ! " 
 
 He was particularly fond of driving or taking the 
 railway to a remote point, and sweeping a vast round 
 on foot, preferably along some river bed. Thus 
 have we ascended the Aln, and thus descended the 
 more distant Blackadder in Berwickshire, and thus 
 have we skirted the infinite serpentings of the Till 
 from Chillingham to Fowberry Towers. But of all 
 the wild and wine-coloured Northumbrian streams, 
 it was the enchanting Coquet which Creighton loved 
 the best. Mr. Hamo Thornycroft reminds me of 
 an occasion when he was staying with me at 
 Embleton, and Creighton took us for a long day's 
 tramp up the Coquet to Brinkburn Priory. The 
 river rolls and coils itself as it approaches the sea, 
 and to shorten our course, the future bishop com- 
 manded us to take off our shoes and stockings, and 
 ford the waters. There was a ridge of sharp stones 
 from bank to bank, with depth of slightly flooded 
 river on either side. He strode ahead like a St. 
 Christopher, with strong legs naked from the knee, 
 but he did not offer to take us on his back. On 
 strained and wounded feet we arrived at last at the 
 opposite shore, only to be peremptorily told that 
 we need not trouble to put on our shoes and stock- 
 ings, since we should have to ford the river again, 
 after just a mile of stubble. Gentle reader, have 
 you ever walked a mile barefoot in stubble ? When 
 we reached the foaming Coquet again, the ridged 
 stones of the ford seemed paradise in comparison. 
 
Mandell Creighton 183 
 
 Truly the caryatid of Embleton was forged in 
 iron. 
 
 Ill 
 
 The call to leave the moors and sandhills of 
 Northumberland came abruptly and in an un- 
 expected form. A remote benefactor of the Uni- 
 versity of Cambridge, and of Emmanuel College in 
 particular, Sir Wolstan Dixie, of Christ's Hospital, 
 had left a considerable sum of money, which it was 
 now determined to use by founding a chair of 
 ecclesiastical history. In 1884 this chair was finally 
 established, and all that remained was to discover 
 the best possible first professor. A board of electors, 
 which contained Lightfoot, Seeley, S. R. Gardiner, 
 and Mr. Bryce, very carefully considered the claims 
 of all the pretendants, and at last determined to do 
 an unusual thing, namely, to go outside the uni- 
 versity itself, and elect the man who at that moment 
 seemed to be, beyond question, the most eminent 
 church historian in England. That this should be 
 Creighton offers interesting evidence of the steady 
 way in which his literary and scholastic gifts had 
 been making themselves felt. He was not the 
 Cambridge candidate, but Cambridge accepted him 
 with a very good grace. Accordingly he returned 
 to academic life, and at the same time enjoyed the 
 advantage of becoming familiar with the routine of 
 a university other than that in which he was brought 
 up. But, while he was a professor at Cambridge 
 
184 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 for seven years, and was all that time entirely loyal 
 to his surroundings, Creighton was too deeply im- 
 pressed by an earlier stamp ever to be other than 
 an Oxford man translated to the banks of the Cam. 
 
 At the very same time that Creighton became 
 Dixie Professor, the present writer was elected to a 
 post at Cambridge, and for five years we were 
 colleagues in the university. Creighton's position 
 included the advantages of a senior fellow at 
 Emmanuel College, and he had rooms there, which, 
 however, he very rarely occupied. He took a house 
 for his family about a mile out of Cambridge, in the 
 Trumpington direction, and he did his best, by 
 multiplying occasions of walking out and in, to 
 keep up his habits of exercise. But he certainly 
 missed the great pedestrian activities of Embleton. 
 His lectures were delivered in the hall of Emmanuel 
 College, and I believe that they were fairly well 
 attended, as lectures go at Cambridge, by young 
 persons of both sexes who were struggling with 
 those cruel monsters, the History Tripos and the 
 Theology Tripos. But this formed, I must not say 
 an unimportant, but I will say an inconspicuous 
 part of Creighton's daily life, which in a few months 
 became complicated with all sorts of duties. The 
 year after he came to Cambridge he rose a step on 
 the ladder of clerical promotion by receiving from 
 the Queen a canonry at Worcester Cathedral. 
 After this, like the villains in melodrama, he lived 
 " a double life," half in Cambridge, half in Worcester. 
 
 The year 1886 was one of marked expansion in 
 
Mandell Creighton 185 
 
 the fame and force of Creighton. In the first place, 
 Emmanuel College nominated him to represent her 
 at the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth 
 anniversary of Harvard College, and on this occasion 
 he paid his first visit to America. This was an event 
 of prime importance to so shrewd and sympathetic 
 an observer. I remember that he expressed but one 
 disappointment, when he returned, namely, that he 
 had not been able to go out West. He was charmed 
 with the hospitality and the culture of the East, but, 
 as an historian and a student of men, he wanted to 
 see the bed-rock of the country. One rather super- 
 fine ornament of Massachusetts society lamented 
 to him that he must find America "so crude." 
 " My dear sir," said Creighton, in his uncom- 
 promising way, "not half so crude as I want to 
 find it. We don't travel over the Atlantic for the 
 mere fun of seeing a washed-out copy of Europe." 
 I recollect observing with interest that what 
 Creighton talked of, in connection with America, 
 when he returned, were almost entirely social and 
 industrial peculiarities, neither blaming nor approv- 
 ing, but noting them in his extremely penetrating 
 way. 
 
 It was in 1886, too, that he began the work by 
 which he became best known to the ordinary 
 cultivated reader, namely, the foundation and 
 editorship of the English Historical Review, which 
 he carried on for five years with marked success. 
 Perhaps no single book has done so much as this 
 periodical did, in Creighton's capable hands, to 
 
1 86 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 familiarise the public with the principles of our 
 newer school of scientific historians. At the same 
 time he was writing incessantly in other quarters. 
 To the Cambridge period belonged the third and 
 fourth volumes of "The History of the Papacy" 
 (1887), as well as the " Cardinal Wolsey " (1888), 
 and several volumes of a more ephemeral char- 
 acter. Already, in the last preface to the " Papacy," 
 there comes an ominous note : " The final revision 
 of the sheets has been unfortunately hurried, owing 
 to unexpected engagements." Of the rush of " un- 
 expected engagements " his friends were now be- 
 ginning to be rather seriously conscious. What- 
 ever was to be done, '"as of old Creighton seemed 
 to be man-of-all-work to do it. One finds among 
 his letters of this period the constant cry of in- 
 terruption. He has been on the point of finishing 
 this or that piece of work, and it is not done. " I 
 had a bad day again yesterday," he writes me from 
 Worcester, " as I was chartered to lionise the British 
 Association over the cathedral. Why do all ' asso- 
 ciations ' resolve themselves mainly into ugly women 
 with spectacles ? " i see that some of his friends 
 think that the Cambridge-Worcester period was a 
 restful one ; I cannot say that this is how it struck 
 me at the time. 
 
 It closed, at all events, in 1891. Magee, the 
 famous Bishop of Peterborough, was made Arch- 
 bishop of York in January, and about the same time 
 Creighton received from the Queen a canonry at 
 Windsor. He left Worcester in consequence, but 
 
Mandell Creighton 187 
 
 he never resided at Windsor, since, before he could 
 settle in there, he was called to fill the vacant see of 
 Peterborough. Here, then, at last, he had started 
 upon the episcopal career which was to carry his 
 fame so far. He did not accept the great change in 
 haste, although he must long have been prepared 
 for it. We have been told, on hysterical authority, 
 that Creighton spent a day " in great grief, trying 
 hard to find reasons which would justify him in 
 refusing Peterborough." This, of course, is sheer 
 nonsense ; this is the sort of conventional sentiment 
 which was particularly loathsome to Creighton. 
 There was no question of "grief" with him, no 
 ultimate doubt that he must one day be a bishop ; 
 but there was cause for very careful consideration 
 whether this was the particular time, and Peter- 
 borough the particular place, or not. As a matter 
 of fact, the appointment rather awkwardly coin- 
 cided with the earliest intimation he had had that 
 his iron constitution was not absolutely impermeable 
 to exhaustion and decay. It was in April 1891 that 
 he was first known to declare that he was " rather 
 feeble from overwork," and before he entered upon 
 his new duties he spent some time of absolute rest and 
 seclusion at Lo wer Gray swood, the Haslemere home 
 of his lifelong friend, Mrs. Humphry Ward. 
 
 He entered upon his episcopal duties, in fact, in 
 no very high spirits. He took a dark view of this, 
 as he supposed, the turning-point in, or rather the 
 sword-cut which should end, his literary career. 
 The first time that I saw him after his settling in to 
 
Portraits and Sketches 
 
 his new work it was in the dim, straggling garden 
 of his palace, late one autumn afternoon almost 
 the first thing I said to him was, " And how about 
 1 The History of the Papacy ' ? " " There's a volume 
 nearly ready for press," he replied, " but how am I 
 to finish it ? Do you happen to know a respectable 
 German drudge who would buy the lease of it for 
 a trifle ? " " But surely you will, you must bring 
 this book of yours to a close, after so many years ! 
 
 Your holidays, your odds and ends of time " " I 
 
 have no odds and ends I ought to be at this minute 
 arranging something with somebody ; and as to my 
 holidays, I shall want every hour of them to do 
 nothing at all in. Do you know," he said, gripping 
 my arm, and glancing round with that glittering 
 aquiline gleam of his, " do you know that it is very 
 easy not to be a bishop, but that, if you are one, you 
 can't be anything else ? Sometimes I ask myself 
 whether it would not have been wiser to stay where 
 I was ; but I think, on the whole, it was right to 
 come here. One is swept on by one's fate, in a 
 way ; but one thing I do clearly see that is an end 
 of me as a human being. I have cut myself off. 
 My friends must go on writing to me, but I shan't 
 answer their letters. I shall get their books, but I 
 shan't read 'em. I shall talk about writing books 
 myself, but I shan't write 'em. It is my friends I 
 miss ; in future my whole life will be spent on 
 railway platforms, and the only chance I shall have 
 of talking to you will be between the arrival of a 
 train and its departure." 
 
Mandell Creighton 
 
 These words proved to be only in part applicable 
 to Peterborough. For the first year his time seemed 
 to be indeed squandered in incessant journeyings 
 through the three counties of his diocese. But 
 after the summer of 1892 he became less migratory, 
 and indeed for long periods stationary in his palace. 
 He had resigned the editorship of the English 
 Historical Review into the hands of Samuel Rawson 
 Gardiner as soon as he was made bishop ; and for 
 some years it seemed as though all literary work had 
 come to a stop. But by degrees he grew used to the 
 routine of his episcopal duties, and his thoughts 
 came back to printer's ink. The fifth volume of the 
 " Papacy " got itself published without the help of 
 any "German drudge " ; in 1894 appeared the Hul- 
 sean lectures on Persecution and Toleration ; and in 
 1896 he published the most popular and the most 
 pleasingly written of all his books, his charming 
 monograph on Queen Elizabeth. Then came 
 London, and swallowed up the historian in the 
 active, practical prelate. 
 
 So far as the general public is concerned, the 
 celebrity of Creighton began with his translation 
 to the see of London, on the promotion of Dr. 
 Temple to the Primacy in January 1897. It was in 
 the subsequent four years that he contrived to set 
 the stamp of his personality on the greatest city 
 of the world, and to impress a whole nation with 
 his force of character. The obituary notices which 
 filled every journal at the time of his death 
 abounded in tributes to his ability as Bishop of 
 
190 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 London, and in anecdotes of his conversation and 
 his methods in that capacity. He arrived in his 
 monstrous diocese at a time of disturbance and 
 revolt ; he followed a prelate who had not troubled 
 himself much about ritual. Creighton set two aims 
 before him, in attempting to regulate his tempest- 
 uous clergy : he wished to secure " a recognisable 
 type of the Anglican services," and " a clear under- 
 standing about the limits of permissible variation." 
 How he carried out these purposes, and how far 
 he proceeded in the realisation of his very definite 
 dreams, are matters which a thousand pens can 
 speak of with more authority than mine. 
 
 But he attempted the physically impossible, and 
 he flung his life away in a vain effort to be every- 
 where, to do everything, and to act for every one. No 
 wonder that Lord Salisbury described Creighton as 
 " the hardest-worked man in England." His energy 
 knew no respite. There should have been some one 
 sent to tell him, as the Bishop of Ostia told St. 
 Francis of Assisi, that his duty to God was to show 
 some compassion to his own body. An iron con- 
 stitution is a dangerous gift, and the Bishop of 
 London thought his could never fail him. But all 
 through 1899, in his ceaseless public appearances, at 
 services, meetings, dinners, installations, and the 
 like, one noticed a more and more hungry look 
 coming in the hollow cheeks and glowing eyes. In 
 the summer of 1900 he collapsed, a complete wreck 
 in health, and w after a very painful illness he died 
 on January 14, 1901. The sorrow with which the 
 
Mandell Creighton 191 
 
 news of his decease was received was national, and 
 the most illustrious of the thousands who sent 
 messages of sympathy was Queen Victoria, who, 
 only eight days later, was to follow the great bishop 
 whose career she had watched with so deep an 
 interest. 
 
 IV 
 
 The character and temperament of Dr. Creighton 
 were remarkable in many respects, and were often 
 the subject of discussion among those who knew 
 him little or knew him ill. There is a danger that, 
 in the magnificence of the closing scenes of his life, 
 something of his real nature may be obscured ; 
 that he may be presented to us as such a model of 
 sanctity and holy pomp as to lose the sympathy 
 which human qualities provoke. There is another 
 danger : that, in reaction against this conventionally 
 clerical aspect, the real excellence of' his heart 
 may be done less than justice to. I would, there- 
 fore, so far as it lies in my power, draw the man 
 as I saw him during a friendship of six-and-twenty 
 years, without permitting myself to be dazzled or 
 repelled by the dignity which the crosier confers. 
 To do this, I must go back to the original crux 
 in the career of Creighton his taking of orders as 
 a young man at Oxford. 
 
 To comprehend the position, one must first of 
 all recollect how very " churchy " Oxford was 
 between 1860 and 1870. At that time, it will be 
 
192 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 remembered, there was scarcely any scope for the 
 energies of a resident don unless he was a 
 clergyman. It must be admitted, I think, that 
 Creighton's nature was not so " serious " at that 
 time as it steadily became as years went on. I am 
 prepared to believe that he took orders to a great 
 extent for college reasons. He had an instinctive 
 love of training and teaching, and these were things 
 for which a priest had more scope than a layman 
 at Oxford. There is no use in minimising the fact 
 that his going into the Church caused the greatest 
 surprise among his friends, nor in pretending that 
 at that time he seemed to have any particular 
 vocation for the holy life. He was just a liberal 
 one would have said almost anti-clerical don, of 
 the type which had developed at Oxford towards the 
 close of the sixties as a protest against academic 
 conservatism. I remember that Pater, discussing 
 Creighton about 1875, said to me, " I still think, no 
 doubt, that he would have made a better lawyer, or 
 even soldier, than priest." 
 
 Those who judged him thus overlooked certain 
 features in his character which, even at this early 
 period, should have emphasised Creighton's calling 
 for the sacerdotal life. His intense interest in 
 mankind, his patient and scrupulous observation 
 of others, not out of curiosity so much as out of 
 a desire to understand their fate, and then to 
 ameliorate it this pointed him out as a doctor of 
 souls. And his extreme unselfishness and affec- 
 tionateness no sketch of his character can be 
 
Mandell Creighton 193 
 
 worth a rush which does not insist upon these. 
 He was always hurrying to be kind to some one, 
 combining the bonitas with celeritas. Love for 
 others, and a lively, healthy, humorous interest 
 in their affairs, were really, I should say, the main- 
 spring of Creighton's actions. Voltaire somewhere 
 exclaims, " II faut aimer, c'est ce qui nous soutient, 
 car sans aimer il est triste d'etre homme " ; and 
 Creighton, who combined something of Voltaire 
 with something of St. John the Evangelist, would 
 have said the same. It was on the love of his 
 fellow-men that he built up the unique fabric of his 
 ecclesiastical life. 
 
 And this brings us to the everlasting question, 
 which never failed on the lips of critics of 
 Creighton Was he, as they say, " a spiritually- 
 minded man " ? This, too, I think we may afford 
 to face with courage. In the presence of his 
 lambent wit, his keenness of repartee, a certain 
 undeniable flightiness in his attitude to many sub- 
 jects which are conventionally treated with solem- 
 nity, a general jauntiness and gusto in relation to 
 mundane things, it must be conceded that the 
 epithet which suited him was hardly this. He 
 lacked unction ; he was not in any sense a mystic ; 
 we cannot imagine him snatched up in an ecstasy 
 of saintly vision. Creighton's feet were always 
 planted firmly on the earth. But if I resign the 
 epithet "spiritually-minded," it is only that I may insist 
 upon saying that he was " spiritually-souled." He 
 set conduct above doctrine : there is no doubt of 
 
 N 
 
1 94 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 that. The external parts of the religious life inter- 
 ested him very much. He had an inborn delicacy 
 which made it painful to him to seem to check 
 the individuality of others, and this often kept him 
 from intruding his innermost convictions upon 
 others. But no one can have known him well who 
 did not perceive, underlying all his external quali- 
 ties his energy, his eagerness, his practical wisdom, 
 his very "flippancy," if you will a strenuous 
 enthusiasm and purity of soul. 
 
 As a preacher Creighton improved after he 
 became a bishop. In earlier days he had been dull 
 and dry in the pulpit ; of all exercises of his talent, 
 I used to think preaching the one in which he shone 
 the least. But he was an interesting lecturer, an 
 uncertain although occasionally felicitous orator, 
 and an unrivalled after-dinner speaker. To the 
 end his talent in the last-mentioned capacity was 
 advancing, and on the very latest occasion upon 
 which he spoke in public at the banquet given 
 by the Lord Mayor on the occasion of the comple- 
 tion of the " Dictionary of National Biography " 
 although his face looked drawn and wasted, he was 
 as fascinating as ever. His voice had a peculiar 
 sharpness of tone, very agreeable to the ear, and 
 remarkably useful in punctuating the speaker's wit. 
 On all ceremonial and processional occasions 
 Creighton rose to the event. He could so hold 
 himself as to be the most dignified figure in 
 England ; and this was so generally recognised that 
 when, in 1896, the archbishops had to select a 
 
Mandell Creighton 195 
 
 representative of the English Church to attend the 
 coronation of the Czar, their choice instantly fell 
 upon the Bishop of Peterborough. Accordingly 
 he proceeded, in great splendour, to Moscow, and 
 he did honour to the Church of England by being 
 a principal feature of the show. He was not 
 merely one of the most learned as well as perhaps 
 the most striking of the foreign bishops present, 
 but he was unquestionably the most appreciative. 
 He made great friends with the popes and prelates, 
 and he was treated with exceptional favour. The 
 actual chapel where the coronation took place was 
 very exiguous, and the topmost potentates alone 
 could find room in it. It was not characteristic of 
 Creighton, however, to be left out of anything, and 
 the other foreign representatives, to their expressed 
 chagrin, saw the Bishop of Peterborough march 
 into the holy of holies without them, between two 
 of the officiating archimandrites. 
 
 To those who never saw Dr. Creighton some 
 picture of his outward appearance may not be 
 unwelcome. He was noticeably tall, lean, square- 
 shouldered. All through his youth and early 
 middle-age his frame was sinewy, like that of a 
 man accustomed to athletic exercises, although he 
 played no games. His head was held erect, the 
 cold blue-grey eyes ever on the alert. His hair 
 was red, and he wore a bushy beard, which was 
 lately beginning to turn grizzled. The clearness 
 of his pink complexion and the fineness and 
 smoothness of his skin were noticeable quite late on 
 
196 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 in his life. The most remarkable feature of his 
 face, without doubt, was his curious mouth, sensi- 
 tive and mobile, yet constantly closing with a 
 snap in the act of will. Nothing was more notable 
 and pleasing than the way in which his severe, keen 
 face, braced by the aquiline nose to a disciplinarian 
 austerity, lightened up and softened with this 
 incessantly recurrent smile. Such, in outward 
 guise, was one of the strangest, and the most original, 
 and the most poignantly regrettable men whom 
 England possessed and lost in the last years of the 
 nineteenth century. 
 
 1901. 
 
ANDREW LANG 
 
 1844-1912 
 
ANDREW LANG 
 
 INVITED to note down some of my recollections of 
 Andrew Lang, I find myself suspended between 
 the sudden blow of his death and the slow develop- 
 ment of memory, now extending in unbroken 
 friendship over thirty-five years. The magnitude 
 and multitude of Lang's performances, public and 
 private, during that considerable length of time 
 almost paralyse expression ; it is difficult to know 
 where to begin or where to stop. Just as his written 
 works are so extremely numerous as to make a path- 
 way through them a formidable task in bibliography, 
 no one book standing out predominant, so his char- 
 acter, intellectual and moral, was full -of so many 
 apparent inconsistencies, so many pitfalls for rash 
 assertion, so many queer caprices of impulse, that in 
 a whole volume of analysis, which would be tedious, 
 one could scarcely do justice to them all. I will 
 venture to put down, almost at haphazard, what I re- 
 member that seems to me to have been overlooked, or 
 inexactly stated, by those who wrote, often very sym- 
 pathetically, at the moment of his death, always 
 premising that I speak rather of a Lang of from 1877 
 to 1890, when I saw him very frequently, than of a 
 Lang whom younger people met chiefly in Scotland. 
 
2OO Portraits and Sketches 
 
 When he died, all the newspapers were loud in 
 proclaiming his "versatility." But I am not sure 
 that he was not the very opposite of versatile. I 
 take " versatile " to mean changeable, fickle, con- 
 stantly ready to alter direction with the weather-cock. 
 The great instance of versatility in literature is 
 Ruskin, who adopted diametrically different views 
 of the same subject at different times of his life, and 
 defended them with equal ardour. To be versatile 
 seems to be unsteady, variable. But Lang was 
 through his long career singularly unaltered ; he 
 never changed his point of view ; what he liked 
 and admired as a youth he liked and admired as an 
 elderly man. It is true that his interests and know- 
 ledge were vividly drawn along a surprisingly large 
 number of channels, but while there was abundance 
 there does not seem to me to have been versatility. 
 If a huge body of water boils up from a crater, it 
 may pour down a dozen paths, but these will always 
 be the same ; unless there is an earthquake, new 
 cascades will not form nor old rivulets run dry. In 
 some authors earthquakes do take place as in 
 Tolstoy, for instance, and in S. T. Coleridge but 
 nothing of this kind was ever manifest in Lang, who 
 was extraordinarily multiform, yet in his varieties 
 strictly consistent from Oxford to the grave. As this 
 is not generally perceived, I will take the liberty of 
 expanding my view of his intellectual development. 
 
 To a superficial observer in late life the genius of 
 Andrew Lang had the characteristics which we are 
 in the habit of identifying with precocity. Yet he 
 
Andrew Lang 20 1 
 
 had not been, as a writer, precocious in his youth. 
 One slender volume of verses represents all that he 
 published in book-form before his thirty-fifth year. 
 No doubt we shall learn in good time what he was 
 doing before he flashed upon the world of journalism 
 in all his panoply of graces, in 1876, at the close of 
 his Merton fellowship. He was then, at all events, 
 the finest finished product of his age, with the bright 
 armour of Oxford burnished on his body to such a 
 brilliance that humdrum eyes could hardly bear the 
 radiance of it. Of the terms behind, of the fifteen 
 years then dividing him from St. Andrews, we know 
 as yet but little ; they were years of insatiable acquire- 
 ment, incessant reading, and talking, and observing 
 gay preparation for a life to be devoted, as no 
 other life in our time has been, to the stimulation of 
 other people's observation and talk and reading. 
 There was no cloistered virtue about the bright and 
 petulant Merton don. He was already flouting 
 and jesting, laughing with Ariosto in the sunshine, 
 performing with a snap of his fingers tasks which 
 might break the back of a pedant, and concealing 
 under an affectation of carelessness a literary am- 
 bition which knew no definite bounds. 
 
 In those days, and when he appeared for the first 
 time in London, the poet was paramount in him. 
 Jowett is said to have predicted that he would be 
 greatly famous in this line, but I know not what 
 evidence Jowett had before him. Unless I am 
 much mistaken, it was not until Lang left Balliol 
 that his peculiar bent became obvious. Up to that 
 
2O2 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 time he had been a promiscuous browser upon 
 books, much occupied, moreover, in the struggle 
 with ancient Greek, and immersed in Aristotle and 
 Homer. But in the early days of his settlement at 
 Merton he began to concentrate his powers, and 
 I think there were certain influences which were 
 instant and far-reaching. Among them one was 
 pre-eminent. When Andrew Lang came up from 
 St. Andrews he had found Matthew Arnold occupying 
 the ancient chair of poetry at Oxford. He was a 
 listener at some at least of the famous lectures which, 
 in 1865, were collected as " Essays in Criticism " ; 
 while one of his latest experiences as a Balliol under- 
 graduate was hearing Matthew Arnold lecture on 
 the study of Celtic literature. His conscience was 
 profoundly stirred by "Culture and Anarchy" (1869) ; 
 his sense of prose-form largely determined by 
 "Friendship's Garland" (1871). I have no hesita- 
 tion in saying that the teaching and example of 
 Matthew Arnold prevailed over all other Oxford 
 influences upon the intellectual nature of Lang, 
 while, although I think that his personal acquaintance 
 with Arnold was very slight, yet in his social manner 
 there was, in early days, not a little imitation of 
 Arnold's aloofness and superfine delicacy of address. 
 It was unconscious, of course, and nothing would 
 have enraged Lang more than to have been accused 
 of "imitating Uncle Matt" 
 
 The structure which his own individuality now 
 began to build on the basis supplied by the learning 
 of Oxford, and in particular by the study of the 
 
Andrew Lang 203 
 
 Greeks, and "dressed" by courses of Matthew Arnold, 
 was from the first eclectic. Lang eschewed as com- 
 pletely what was not sympathetic to him as he 
 assimilated what was attractive to him. Those who 
 speak of his "versatility" should recollect what 
 large tracts of the literature of the world, and even 
 of England, existed outside the dimmest apprehen- 
 sion of Andrew Lang. It is, however, more useful 
 to consider what he did apprehend ; and there were 
 two English books, published in his Oxford days, 
 which permanently impressed him : one of these 
 was "The Earthly Paradise," the other D. G. 
 Rossetti's " Poems." In after years he tried to 
 divest himself of the traces of these volumes, but he 
 had fed upon their honey-dew and it had permeated 
 his veins. 
 
 Not less important an element in the garnishing of 
 a mind already prepared for it by academic and 
 aesthetic studies was the absorption of the romantic 
 part of French literature. Andrew Lang in this, as 
 in everything else, was selective. He dipped into the 
 wonderful lucky-bag of France wherever he saw the 
 glitter of romance. Hence his approach, in the early 
 seventies, was threefold : towards the mediaeval lais 
 and chansons, towards the sixteenth-century Pleiade, 
 and towards the school of which Victor Hugo was 
 the leader in the nineteenth century. For a long time 
 Ronsard was Lang's poet of intensest predilection ; 
 and I think that his definite ambition was to be the 
 Ronsard of modern England, introducing a new 
 poetical dexterity founded on a revival of pure 
 
204 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 humanism. He had in those days what he lost, or at 
 least dispersed, in the weariness and growing melan- 
 cholia of later years a splendid belief in poetry as a 
 part of the renown of England, as a heritage to be re- 
 ceived in reverence from our fathers, and to be passed 
 on, if possible, in a brighter flame. This honest and 
 beautiful ambition to shine as one of the permanent 
 benefactors to national verse, in the attitude so nobly 
 sustained four hundred years ago by Du Bellay and 
 Ronsard, was unquestionably felt by Andrew Lang 
 through his bright intellectual April, and supported 
 him from Oxford times until 1882, when he pub- 
 lished " Helen of Troy." The cool reception of that 
 epic by the principal judges of poetry caused him 
 acute disappointment, and from that time forth he 
 became less eager and less serious as a poet, more and 
 more petulantly expending his wonderful technical 
 gift on fugitive subjects. And here again, when one 
 comes to think of it, the whole history repeated itself, 
 since in " Helen of Troy " Lang simply suffered as 
 Ronsard had done in the " Franciade." But the 
 fact that 1882 was his year of crisis, and the tomb of 
 his brightest ambition, must be recognised by every 
 one who closely followed his fortunes at that time. 
 Lang's habit of picking out of literature and of life 
 the plums of romance, and these alone, comes to be, 
 to the dazzled observer of his extraordinarily vivid 
 intellectual career, the principal guiding line. This 
 determination to dwell, to the exclusion of all other 
 sides of any question, on its romantic side is alone 
 enough to rebut the charge of versatility. Lang was 
 
Andrew Lang 205 
 
 in a sense encyclopaedic ; but the vast dictionary of 
 his knowledge had blank pages, or pages pasted 
 down, on which he would not, or could not, read 
 what experience had printed. Absurd as it sounds, 
 there was always something maidenly about his mind, 
 and he glossed over ugly matters, sordid and dull 
 conditions, so that they made no impression what- 
 ever upon him. He had a trick, which often exas- 
 perated his acquaintances, of declaring that he had 
 " never heard " of things that everybody else was very 
 well aware of. He had " never heard the name " of 
 people he disliked, of books that he thought tire- 
 some, of events that bored him ; but, more than this, 
 he used the formula for things and persons whom he 
 did not wish to discuss. I remember meeting in the 
 street a famous professor, who advanced with up- 
 lifted hands, and greeted me with " What do you 
 think Lang says now ? That he has never heard of 
 Pascal ! " This merely signified that Lang, not 
 interested (at all events for the momen't) in Pascal 
 nor in the professor, thus closed at once all 
 possibility of discussion. 
 
 It must not be forgotten that we have lived to see 
 him, always wonderful indeed, and always passion- 
 ately devoted to perfection and purity, but worn, 
 tired, harassed by the unceasing struggle, the life- 
 long slinging of sentences from that inexhaustible 
 ink-pot. In one of the most perfect of his poems, 
 " Natural Theology," Lang speaks of Cagn, the great 
 hunter, who once was kind and good, but who was 
 spoiled by fighting many things. Lang was never 
 
206 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 " spoiled," but he was injured ; the surface of the 
 radiant coin was rubbed by the vast and intermin- 
 able handling of journalism. He was jaded by the 
 toil of writing many things. Hence it is not possible 
 but that those who knew him intimately in his later 
 youth and early middle-age should prefer to look 
 back at those years when he was the freshest, the 
 most exhilarating figure in living literature, when a 
 star seemed to dance upon the crest of his already 
 silvering hair. Baudelaire exclaimed of Theophile 
 Gautier : " Homme heureux ! homme digne d'envie ! 
 il n'a jamais aime que le Beau!" and of Andrew 
 Lang in those brilliant days the same might have 
 been said. As long as he had confidence in beauty 
 he was safe and strong ; and much that, with all 
 affection and all respect, we must admit was rasping 
 and disappointing in his attitude to literature in 
 his later years, seems to have been due to a decreas- 
 ing sense of confidence in the intellectual sources 
 of beauty. It is dangerous, in the end it must be 
 fatal, to sustain the entire structure of life and thought 
 on the illusions of romance. But that was what 
 Lang did he built his house upon the rainbow. 
 
 The charm of Andrew Lang's person and company 
 was founded upon a certain lightness, an essential 
 gentleness and elegance which were relieved by a 
 sharp touch ; just as a very dainty fruit may be pre- 
 served from mawkishness by something delicately 
 acid in the rind of it. His nature was slightly in- 
 human ; it was unwise to count upon its sympathy 
 beyond a point which was very easily reached in 
 
Andrew Lang 207 
 
 social intercourse. If any simple soul showed an 
 inclination, in eighteenth-century phrase, to " repose 
 on the bosom " of Lang, that support was imme- 
 diately withdrawn, and the confiding one fell among 
 thorns. Lang was like an Angora cat, whose gentle- 
 ness and soft fur, and general aspect of pure 
 amenity, invite to caresses, which are suddenly met 
 by the outspread paw with claws awake. This un- 
 certain and freakish humour was the embarrassment 
 of his friends, who, however, were preserved from 
 despair by the fact that no malice was meant, and 
 that the weapons were instantly sheathed again in 
 velvet. Only, the instinct to give a sudden slap, half 
 in play, half in fretful caprice, was incorrigible. No 
 one among Lang's intimate friends but had suffered 
 from this feline impulse, which did not spare even 
 the serenity of Robert Louis Stevenson. But, tire- 
 some as it sometimes was, this irritable humour 
 seldom cost Lang a friend who was worth preserving. 
 Those who really knew him recognised that he was 
 always shy and usually tired. 
 
 His own swift spirit never brooded upon an 
 offence, and could not conceive that any one else 
 should mind what he himself minded so little and 
 forgot so soon. Impressions swept over him very 
 rapidly, and injuries passed completely out of his 
 memory. Indeed, all his emotions were too fleeting, 
 and in this there was something fairy -like ; quick 
 and keen and blithe as he was, he did not seem 
 altogether like an ordinary mortal, nor could the 
 appeal to gross human experience be made to him 
 
2o8 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 with much chance of success. This, doubtless, is 
 why almost all imaginative literature which is 
 founded upon the darker parts of life, all squalid 
 and painful tragedy, all stories that " don't end well/' 
 all religious experiences, all that is not superficial 
 and romantic, was irksome to him. He tried some- 
 times to reconcile his mind to the consideration of 
 real life ; he concentrated his matchless powers on 
 it; but he always disliked it. He could persuade 
 himself to be partly just to Ibsen or Hardy or 
 Dostoieffsky, but what he really enjoyed was Dumas 
 pere, because that fertile romance- writer rose serene 
 above the phenomena of actual human experience. 
 We have seen more of this type in English literature 
 than the Continental nations have in theirs, but even 
 we have seen no instance of its strength and weak- 
 ness so eminent as Andrew Lang. He was the fairy 
 in our midst, the wonder-working, incorporeal, and 
 tricksy fay of letters, who paid for all his wonderful 
 gifts and charms by being not quite a man of like 
 passions with the rest of us. In some verses which 
 he scribbled to R.L.S. and threw away, twenty years 
 ago, he acknowledged this unearthly character, 
 and, speaking of the depredations of his kin, he 
 said: 
 
 Ffttt, dry might steml me, w? ma 
 
 And, hafdl mj F*rj hUL, 
 
 Pd Uj me <nm* then, and amd still, 
 
 Their land torn* i 
 Fr, mam, Fve maist/y h*d my fill 
 
 O' this mtrlfi dim. 
 
Andrew Lang 209 
 
 His wit had something disconcerting in its impish- 
 ness. Its rapidity and sparkle were dazzling, but it 
 was not quite human ; that is to say, it conceded 
 too little to the exigencies of flesh and blood. If 
 we can conceive a seraph being fanny, it would be 
 in the manner of Andrew Lang. Moreover, his wit 
 usually danced over the surface of things, and rarely 
 penetrated them. In verbal parry, in ironic mis- 
 understanding, in breathless agility of topsy-turvy 
 movement, Lang was like one of Milton's " yellow- 
 skirted fays," sporting with the helpless, moon- 
 bewildered traveller. His wit often had a depress- 
 ing, a humiliating effect, against which one's mind 
 presently revolted. I recollect an instance which 
 may be thought to be apposite : I was passing 
 through a phase of enthusiasm for Emerson, whom 
 Lang very characteristically detested, and I was so 
 ill-advised as to show him the famous epigram 
 called " Brahma." Lang read it with a snort of 
 derision (it appeared to be new to him), and im- 
 mediately he improvised this parody : 
 
 IfthemUhatlerttinkshekiffb, 
 Or If the batsmtm tKmts iSt imleJ, 
 
 They bum wit, fttr misgmUed *Zr, 
 Thfj t toe, shtllferish wumutlti. 
 
 I am tie bttsrn** ndthe fat, 
 \mmthelta1cmdthe1fatt, 
 
 Ike umpire, tie favifism fat, 
 
 Tie rtOer, pitch, amJ stumps, tmJ til. 
 
 This would make a pavilion cat laugh, and I felt 
 that Emerson was done for. But when Lang had left 
 
 O 
 
2io Portraits and Sketches 
 
 me, and I was once more master of my mind, I 
 reflected that the parody was but a parody, wonderful 
 for its neatness and quickness, and for its seizure of 
 what was awkward in the roll of Emerson's diction, 
 but essentially superficial. However, what would 
 wit be if it were profound ? I must leave it 
 there, feeling that I have not explained why Lang's 
 extraordinary drollery in conversation so often left 
 on the memory a certain sensation of distress. 
 
 But this was not the characteristic of his humour 
 at its best, as it was displayed throughout the 
 happiest period of his work. If, as seems possible, 
 it is as an essayist that he will ultimately take his 
 place in English literature, this element will continue 
 to delight fresh generations of enchanted readers. 
 I cannot imagine that the preface to his translation 
 of " Theocritus," "Letters to Dead Authors," "In 
 the Wrong Paradise," " Old Friends," and " Essays 
 in Little " will ever lose their charm ; but future 
 admirers will have to pick their way to them through 
 a tangle of history and anthropology and mythology, 
 where there may be left no perfume and no sweet- 
 ness. I am impatient to see this vast mass of writing 
 reduced to the limits of its author's delicate, true, 
 but somewhat evasive and ephemeral. genius. How- 
 ever, as far as the circumstances of his temperament 
 permitted, Andrew Lang has left with us the memory 
 of one of our most surprising contemporaries, a 
 man of letters who laboured without cessation from 
 boyhood to the grave, who pursued his ideal with 
 indomitable activity and perseverance, and who was 
 
Andrew Lang 211 
 
 never betrayed except by the loftiness of his own 
 endeavour. Lang's only misfortune was not to be 
 completely in contact with life, and his work will 
 survive exactly where he was most faithful to his 
 innermost illusions. 
 
 1912. 
 
WOLCOTT BALESTIER 
 
 1861-1891 
 
WOLCOTT BALESTIER 
 
 IT was early in 1889 that, on an evening which 
 must always remain memorable to some of us, two 
 or three English writers met, at the house of Mrs. 
 Humphry Ward, a young American man of business 
 who had just made her acquaintance. Among 
 those who then saw Wolcott Balestier for the 
 first time were Mr. Henry James (soon to become 
 his closest and most valued friend in England) and 
 the writer of these pages. As I look back upon that 
 evening, and ask myself what it was in the eager 
 face I watched across the table-cloth which could 
 create so instant a thrill of attraction, so unresisted 
 a prescience of an intimate friendship ready to 
 invade me, I can hardly find an answer. The type 
 was not of that warm and sympathetic class so 
 familiar in our race ; neither in colour, form, nor 
 character was it English. In later moments one 
 analysed that type a mixture of the suave colonial 
 French and the strained, nervous New England 
 blood. But, at first sight, a newly presented 
 acquaintance gained an impression of Wolcott 
 Balestier as a carefully dressed young-old man or 
 elderly youth, clean-shaven, with smooth dark hair, 
 thin nose, large sensitive ears, and whimsically 
 
2i6 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 mobile mouth. The singular points in this general 
 appearance, however, were given by the extreme 
 pallor of the complexion and by the fire in the 
 deeply-set dark blue eyes ; for the rest, a spare 
 and stooping figure, atonic, ungraceful, a general 
 physique ill-matched with the vigour of will, the 
 extreme rapidity of graceful mental motion, the 
 protean variety and charm of intellectual vitality, 
 that inhabited this frail bodily dwelling. To the very 
 last, after seeing him almost daily for nearly three 
 years, I never could entirely lose the sense of the ca- 
 pricious contrast between this wonderful intelligence 
 and the unhelpful frame that did it so much wrong. 
 Charles Wolcott Balestier had just entered his 
 twenty-eighth year when first I knew him. He was 
 born at Rochester, New York, on December 13, 
 1861. His paternal great-grandfather had been a 
 French planter in the island of Martinique ; his 
 maternal grandfather, whom he is said to have 
 physically resembled, was a jurist who completed 
 commercial negotiations between the United States 
 and Japan. Of his early life I know but little. 
 Wolcott Balestier was at school in his native city, 
 and at college for a short time at Cornell Uni- 
 versity, but his education was, I suppose, mainly 
 that of life itself. After his boyhood he spent a 
 few years on the outskirts of literature. I learn 
 from Mr. W. D. Howells that at the age of seventeen 
 he began to send little tales and essays to the office 
 of the Atlantic Monthly. He edited a newspaper, 
 later on, in Rochester ; he published in succession 
 
Wolcott Balestier 217 
 
 three short novels ; and he was employed in the 
 Astor Library in New York. 
 
 All these incidents, however, have little sig- 
 nificance. But in the winter of 1882 he made an 
 excursion to Leadville, which profoundly impressed 
 his imagination. The Colorado air was more than 
 his weak chest could endure, and he soon came 
 back ; but two years later he made a second trip to 
 the West, in company with his elder sister, and this 
 lasted for many months. He returned, at length, 
 through Mexico and the Southern States. The 
 glimpses that he gained in 1885 of the fantastic life 
 of the West remained to the end of his career the 
 most vivid and exciting which his memory retained. 
 The desire to write earnestly seized him, aryi it was 
 in Colorado that the first crude sketch of the book 
 afterwards re-written as " Benefits Forgot " was 
 composed. Soon after his return to New York he 
 became known to and highly appreciated by men in 
 business, and in the winter of 1888 he came over to 
 England to represent a New York publisher and 
 to open an office in London. 
 
 Of his three full years in the latter city I can 
 speak with some authority, for I was in close relation 
 with him during the greater part of that time. He 
 arrived in England without possessing the acquaint- 
 ance of a single Englishman, and he died leaving 
 behind him a wider circle of literary friends than, 
 probably, any other living American possessed. 
 He had an ardent desire to form personal con- 
 nections with those whose writings in any way 
 
218 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 interested him to have his finger, as he used to 
 say, on the pulse of literature and the peculiarity 
 of his position in London, as the representative 
 of an American publishing-house, not merely 
 facilitated the carrying out of this ambition, but 
 turned that pleasure into a duty. He possessed a 
 singularly winning mode of address with strangers 
 whose attention he wished to gain. It might be 
 described as combining the extreme of sympathetic 
 resignation with the self-respect needful to make 
 that resignation valuable. It was in the nature of 
 the business in which Balestier was occupied during 
 his stay in England that novels (prose fiction in all 
 its forms) should take up most of his thoughts. 
 I believe that there was not one English novelist, 
 from George Meredith and Mr. Thomas Hardy 
 down to the most obscure and " subterranean " 
 writer of popular tales, with whom he did not 
 come into relations of one sort or another, but 
 sympathetic and courteous in every case. He was 
 able to preserve in a very remarkable degree his 
 fine native taste in literature, while conscientiously 
 and eagerly " trading" for his friends in New York 
 in literary goods which were not literature at all. 
 This balance of his mind constantly amazed me. 
 His lofty standard of literary merit was never 
 lowered ; it grew, if anything, more exacting ; 
 yet no touch of priggishness, of disdain, coloured 
 his intercourse with those who produce what the 
 public buys in defiance of taste, the honest pur- 
 veyors of deciduous fiction. 
 
Wolcott Balestier 219 
 
 Balestier's ambition on landing, an obscure youth, 
 in an England which had never heard of him was 
 no less than to conquer a place of influence in the 
 centre of English literary society. Within three 
 years he had positively succeeded in gaining such 
 a position, and was daily strengthening it. There 
 has been no such recent invasion of London ; he 
 was not merely, as we used to tell him, "one 
 of our conquerors," but the most successful of 
 them all. 
 
 What was so novel and so delightful in his 
 relations with authors was the exquisite adroitness 
 with which he made his approaches. He never 
 lost a shy conquest through awkwardness or rough- 
 ness. If an anthology of appreciations of Wolcott 
 Balestier could be formed, it would show that to 
 each literary man and woman whom he visited he 
 displayed a tincture of his or her own native colour. 
 Soon after his death I received a letter from the 
 author of "John Inglesant," to whom in the winter 
 of 1890 I had given Balestier a letter of intro- 
 duction. " The impression he left upon me," says 
 Mr. Shorthouse, " was so refined and delicate in 
 its charm that I looked back to it all through that 
 terrible winter with a bright recollection of what is 
 to me the most delightful of experiences, a quiet 
 dinner with a sympathetic and intelligent man." 
 
 Our notices of the dead tend to grow stereotyped 
 and featureless. We attribute to them all the virtues, 
 all the talents, but shrink from the task of dis- 
 crimination. But the sketch which should dwell on 
 
22O Portraits and Sketches 
 
 Wolcott Balestier mainly as on an amiable young 
 novelist cut off in the flower of his literary youth 
 would fail more notably than usual in giving an 
 impression of the man. Of his literary work I 
 shall presently speak : to praise it with exaggeration 
 would, as I shall try to show, be unwise. But all 
 men are not mere machines for writing books, and 
 Balestier, pre-eminently, was not. The character 
 was far more unique, more curious, than the mere 
 talent for composition, and what the character was 
 I must now try to describe. He had, in the first 
 place, a business capacity which in its degree may 
 not be very rare, if we regard the whole industrial 
 field, but which as directed to the profession of 
 publication was, I am not afraid to say, unique. 
 He glanced over the field of the publishing-houses, 
 and saw them all divided in interests, pulling 
 various ways, impeding one another, sacrificing 
 the author to their traditions and their lack of 
 enterprise. 
 
 Balestier dreamed great dreams of consolidation, 
 at which those who are incapable of the effort of 
 dreaming may now smile, if they will. But no one 
 who is acquainted with details to which I must 
 not do more than allude here will deny that he 
 possessed many of the characteristics needed to 
 turn his dreams into facts. He held in his grasp the 
 details of the trade, yet combined with them an 
 astonishing power of generalisation. I have never 
 known any one connected with the art or trade of 
 literature who had anything like his power of 
 
Wolcott Balestier 221 
 
 marshalling before his memory, in due order, all the 
 militant English writers of the moment, small as 
 well as great. There they stood in seemly rows, the 
 names that every Englishman honours and never 
 buys, the names that every Englishman buys and 
 never honours. Balestier knew them all, knew their 
 current value, appraised them for future quotation, 
 keeping his own critical judgment, all the while, 
 unbent, but steadily suspended. 
 
 To reach this condition of experience time, of 
 course, had been required, but really very little. 
 Within twelve months he knew the English book- 
 market as, probably, no Englishman knew it. Into 
 this business of his he threw an indomitable will, 
 infinite patience, a curious hunting or sporting zest, 
 and what may be called the industrial imagination. 
 His mind moved with extreme rapidity ; he never 
 seemed to require to be told a fact or given a hint 
 twice. When you saw him a few days later the fact 
 had gathered to itself a cluster of associate supports, 
 the hint had already ripened to action. I may quote 
 an instance which has a pathetic interest now. In 
 the autumn of 1889, fresh from reading "Soldiers 
 Three," I told him that he ought to keep his eye on 
 a new Indian writer, Rudyard Kipling. "Rudyard 
 Kipling ? " he answered impatiently ; " is it a man 
 or a woman ? What's its real name ? " A little 
 nettled, I said, "You will find that you won't be 
 allowed to go on asking questions like those. He is 
 going to be one of the greatest writers of the day." 
 
 Pooh, pooh ! " Balestier replied, " now you are 
 
222 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 shouting ! " And no further reference was made to 
 the subject. But three days later I found a pile of 
 the blue Indian pamphlets on his desk, and within a 
 week he had added the future collaborator in "The 
 Naulahka" to the troop of what he used to call 
 his " personal conquests." 
 
 No striking qualities, as we know, are without 
 their defects. The most trying peculiarity of 
 Wolcott Balestier was the result of his rapidity in 
 decisive manoeuvring. He had cultivated such a 
 perfect gift for being all things to all men, discretion 
 and tact were so requisite in his calling, that he fell, 
 and that increasingly, into the error of excessive 
 reticence. This mysterious secrecy, which grew on 
 him towards the last, his profound caution and 
 subtlety, would doubtless have become modified ; 
 this feature of his character needed but to become 
 a little exaggerated, and he would himself have 
 perceived and corrected it. There was perhaps a 
 little temptation to vanity in the case of a young 
 man possessed of so many secrets, and convinced of 
 his worth as a confidential adviser. He "had the 
 unfortunate habit of staring very hard at his own 
 actions, and when he found his relations to others 
 refining themselves under a calcium light, he en- 
 deavoured to put up the screen." These words from 
 a story of his own may be twisted into an applica- 
 tion that he never intended. In the light of his 
 absolute and unshaken discretion, of his ardent 
 loyalty to his particular friends, of his zeal for the 
 welfare of others, this little tortuous foible for 
 
Wolcott Balestier 223 
 
 mystery dwindles into something almost too small 
 to be recorded. 
 
 For the ordinary relaxations of mankind, es- 
 pecially for the barbarous entertainments of us 
 red-blooded islanders, he had an amused and 
 tolerant disdain. He rode a little, but he had no 
 care for any other sort of exercise. He played 
 no games, he followed no species of sport. His 
 whole soul burned in his enterprises, in his vast 
 industrial dreams. If he tried golf, it was because 
 he was fond of Mr. Norris ; if he discussed agri- 
 culture and Wessex, it was because that was the 
 way to the heart of Mr. Thomas Hardy. Nothing 
 came amiss to him in conversation, and he was so 
 apt a learner that he would talk charmingly of 
 politics, of wine, of history, even of the fine arts. 
 But only three things really occupied his mind 
 the picturesque procession of the democratic life 
 of to-day, the features and fortunes of his friends, 
 and those commercial adventures for the conduct 
 of which he had so extraordinary a genius. 
 
 It is by design that I have not spoken hitherto 
 of his own literary productions. It would be easier, 
 I think, to exaggerate their positive value than to 
 overrate the value of the man who wrote them. 
 The three novels which he published in America 
 (" A Patent Philtre," 1884 ; " A Fair Device," 1884 ; 
 " A Victorious Defeat," 1886) were the outcome of 
 an admiration for the later novels of Mr. W. D. 
 H owells, but they had not the merit even of being 
 good imitations. Balestier was conscious of their 
 
224 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 weakness, and he deliberately set himself to forget 
 them. Meanwhile the large issues of life in the West 
 and its social peculiarities fascinated him. The result 
 of his study of the Leadville of 1885 will be found in 
 a novel called " Benefits Forgot," which was finished 
 in 1890, and published in 1892. During the last 
 year of his life Wolcott Balestier took to com- 
 position again with much fervour and assiduity. 
 There is no question that his intimate friendship 
 with so eager and brilliant a writer of tales as Mr. 
 Rudyard Kipling, who, as is known, became his 
 brother-in-law, was of vast service to him. The 
 short stories of his last year showed a remark- 
 able advance. There remains the part of "The 
 Naulahka" which he contributed, but on this it 
 is impossible here to dwell. What he might have 
 done, if he had lived ten years longer, none of us 
 can conjecture. 
 
 The melancholy task remains to me of telling 
 how so much of light and fire was extinguished. 
 He habitually overworked himself to such a degree, 
 the visible mental strain was so obvious, that his 
 health had long given us the deepest anxiety. I, 
 for one, for a year had almost ceased to hope that 
 he could survive. Yet it now appears, both from 
 the record of his family and from the opinion of 
 the German doctors, that there was no organic 
 mischief, and that he might, in spite of his weak- 
 ness, have lived to old age. He was overworked, 
 but he never worried ; he was exhausted, but he 
 did not experience the curse of sleeplessness. In 
 
Wolcott Balestier 225 
 
 November, however, after some days of indis- 
 position, looking all the while extremely ill, he 
 left London for business reasons, and went to 
 Berlin. We heard of him a few days later as laid 
 up in Dresden. His mother and sisters imme- 
 diately went to him from Paris. The disease proved 
 to be typhoid fever in a most malignant form, and 
 on the twenty-first day, Sunday, December 6, 1891, 
 he died, having not quite completed his thirtieth 
 year. He lies buried in the American cemetery at 
 Dresden, and our anticipations lie with him : 
 
 For what was he ? Some novel power 
 Sprang up for ever at a touch, 
 And hope could never hope too much 
 
 In watching him from hour to hour. 
 
 1892. 
 
CARL SNOILSKY 
 
 1841-1903 
 
CARL SNOILSKY 
 
 AND SOME RECENT SWEDISH POETS 
 
 SWEDEN has followed the general tradition of the 
 northern countries of Europe in the history of its 
 poetry. Its earliest writers of the seventeenth 
 century cultivated the didactic verse then generally 
 prevalent, and were mainly occupied in redeeming 
 the Swedish language from roughness and barbarism. 
 Such poets as Stjernhjelm and Samuel Columbus, 
 contemporaries of Dryden, Malherbe, and Logau, 
 offered to their readers little lyrical faculty and less 
 imaginative passion ; they tended to the diffuse, the 
 verbose, the rhetorical, but they polished and 
 sharpened the instrument, they made the language 
 of their country one peculiarly well prepared for 
 the variety and harmony of the poetic art. Later 
 poets looked to France for inspiration ; there was a 
 Ronsardist period and an Augustan period. Under 
 Queen Ulrika Eleonora, Pope and Addison became 
 the arbiters of poetic elegance. The close of the 
 eighteenth century saw the arrival of Bellmann, the 
 improvisatore of dithyrambs, a lyrical writer of the 
 highest originality. Then, like her neighbours, 
 Sweden experienced a change of heart ; she passed 
 
230 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 through the throes of conviction of classic sin, and 
 conversion to romantic righteousness. And all this 
 time her language was becoming more mellifluous, 
 more exquisitely balanced and burnished, more 
 dangerously perfect in its technical softness and 
 smoothness. 
 
 For fifty years of the early nineteenth century the 
 Swedes distinguished themselves in several of the 
 highest branches of poetical literature. But by 
 1850 TegneY, Geijer, and Franzen were dead, and 
 the lesser men around them were growing old. 
 Poets continued to appear, but they made less and 
 less impression. Between 1860 and 1870 the 
 decadence of Swedish verse was conspicuous, and 
 many observers believed that it was fatal. The 
 language seemed to have worn itself out, and its 
 facile sweetness to have become mawkish. Of the 
 writers of that time, few are now read or much 
 remembered. Their poetry was orthodox in style 
 and tone, optimistic, commonplace. The best of it 
 was remarkable for beauty of form, and certain 
 pieces have been kept alive, and will probably 
 always exist, by virtue of their delicate workmanship. 
 But these young bards lacked enthusiasm and 
 energy ; their pathetic and graceful verses had no 
 force ; they cultivated, often in compositions of 
 very trifling- melody, what they called " idealism," a 
 pretty wilful ignorance of all the facts of life. 
 
 A natural consequence was that the ordinary 
 sensual man lost interest in verset, and a conscious- 
 ness of a lack of hold upon the public increased 
 
Carl Snoilsky 231 
 
 the mediocrity of the poets. An extraordinary 
 prudishness, tameness, and sentimentality spread 
 over all departments of Swedish literature, and it 
 seemed very likely, in 1870, that poetry might cease 
 to be read and then to be written. Those pale 
 and pure verses, without evidence of passion or 
 experience, which alone were in fashion, were felt 
 to be absurd. In the midst of this decadence, as 
 though to arrest its ravages, and to make a bridge 
 over from one vivid age to another, there made his 
 appearance a lyrical poet of unquestionable force 
 and fire. This was Count Carl Snoilsky, of whom 
 it is hard to decide whether he was the last of an 
 earlier age or the precursor of a coming generation. 
 He was, at all events, genuinely inspired. Up to 
 that time the best colour in Swedish poetry had 
 been but chilly, an arrangement of the hues of the 
 arctic aurora. But Snoilsky the young Snoilsky 
 was intoxicated with life and joy, clad with the vine 
 and stained with the grape, a figure like one of the 
 followers of Bacchus, " crown'd with green leaves 
 and faces all on flame," in Keats' glorious ode. 
 This is how Snoilsky appeared, about 1870, to those 
 who watched the signs of the times in Swedish 
 poetry. 
 
 This remarkable man was a Swede of Slav 
 extraction, whose ancestors, Znojilsek by name, had 
 emigrated from Carinthia in the early part of the 
 seventeenth century. The family was presently 
 ennobled, and became distinguished in Swedish 
 diplomacy. The father of the poet was one of the 
 
232 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 most conservative of the peers in King Oscar I.'s 
 Upper House. It was in an atmosphere of Toryism, 
 of aristocratic etiquette, that Carl Johan Gustaf 
 Snoilsky was born, in the parish of Klara in 
 Stockholm, on Septembers, 1841. * We note him, 
 in passing, to have been the immediate contempo- 
 rary of Thomas Hardy and of Austin Dobson in 
 England, of Sully Prudhomme and of Heredia in 
 France. The early life of Count Snoilsky was not 
 distinguished from those of most young noblemen 
 of fortune who are destined from childhood for 
 the service of the State. He began, however, quite 
 soon to rhyme, and at the age of twenty produced 
 a volume of " Short Poems," under the pseudonym 
 which he long preserved, of Sven Trost. This 
 collection is sentimental and melancholy ; we see 
 in it the influence of current Swedish verse and 
 some imitation of Heine. 
 
 When, however, Sven Trost had recovered from 
 the infantile malady of sentiment which the publica- 
 tion of his first volume brought to a crisis, he rapidly 
 developed in an independent direction. The lyrical 
 work of that period in Sweden was concentrated in a 
 company of friends, lovers of romantic false names, 
 who were known as the Signatures. Among them 
 Sven Trost had taken his place, and he continued to 
 contribute to their annuals and anthologies, without 
 
 1 Karl Warburg, perhaps the first of contemporary Swedish 
 critics, has published an admirable biography, " Carl Snoilsky, 
 hans lefnad och skaldskap." (Hugo Gebers Forlag, 
 Stockholm.) 
 
Carl Snoilsky 233 
 
 recognising how completely he was breaking away 
 from them in spirit. In 1862 he seems to have per- 
 ceived, by the light of nature, the insipidity and 
 flatness of the " idealism " then prevalent in Swedish 
 literature, and to have determined to practise, if he 
 did not preach, what he called "a healthy artistic 
 realism." His second book, "Orchids," was a collec- 
 tion of fifty poems instinct with sunlight and joy, 
 flushed with the beauty of youthful exuberance. 
 Denmark was at this time far more richly endowed 
 with lyrical writers than Sweden, and it was 
 Snoilsky's good fortune to come under the influence 
 of those enchanting Danish song- writers of an earlier 
 school, Christian Winther and Bodtcher. This 
 little book showed great advance. 
 
 In 1864 Snoilsky went to Italy for a residence of 
 many months, and so completed his poetical educa- 
 tion. He enjoyed a delicate robustness of health, a 
 conscious glow of youth, and he seems to have 
 cultivated at this time, with remarkable 'success, the 
 cordial epicureanism which so peculiarly suits the 
 Swedish nation. It took in him that pleasing tone 
 of seriousness, of tender sobriety, which robs the 
 pursuit of pleasure of all its coarseness. At this, the 
 moment of his highest emotional and imaginative 
 development, we see Carl Snoilsky a sensitive creature 
 of quite irresistible charm, aglow in Nero's Golden 
 House at Rome, brooding in an elegant melancholy 
 under the cypresses at Fiesole, leading the revels at 
 Nemi with cups of Alban wine, or bewitching the 
 rugged Ibsen in his little smoky ostcria of the Via 
 
234 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 Tritone. All this time Snoilsky was living and 
 writing poems, such poems as had not been sung 
 before, at least in recent times, under the pallid 
 aurora of a Swedish sky. No translation can do 
 justice to the qualities of the verse which Snoilsky 
 composed during this ineffable pilgrimage of youth. 
 
 If there be a touch of weakness in the volume of 
 " Poems," of 1869, by which Snoilsky first became 
 widely revealed to the public, it consists in a perhaps 
 too dainty or comely conception of art, an unwilling- 
 ness, even while coming closely into touch with the 
 reality of nature, to accept anything which is sordid 
 or ugly. Throughout Europe in that generation the 
 best of the poets were infatuated devotees of beauty, 
 and they prepared the way for an inevitable reaction 
 in favour of ugliness. But the note of joy, of physical 
 ecstasy, in the dancing verse of Snoilsky was like 
 witchcraft. It intoxicated his readers, accustomed 
 to the staid melancholy and affected undertone of 
 his fellow-singers. He stood out in the colourless 
 current literature of his country like a piece of scarlet. 
 The opening stanzas of the book of 1869 struck the 
 note which never wavered : 
 
 " I bring grapes, I bring roses, I pour out beakers 
 of my young wine. Up every pathway, at every 
 cross-road, I smite my resonant tambourine. 
 
 " I do not weary you out of all your patience with 
 insipid visions from the house of dreams. I sing 
 exclusively of what I have seen and felt by the aid of 
 my own five wholesome senses." 
 
 And all this in a metre that swings and dances, 
 
Carl Snoilsky 235 
 
 with its ripple of rhymes, like a breeze in the top of 
 a pine-tree. 
 
 Snoilsky returned to Sweden, to be sent away 
 again as charge d'affaires to Copenhagen, where 
 he formed a close friendship with the first 
 of recent critics, Georg Brandes. The present 
 writer, who was in Denmark soon after this 
 date, recalls how enthusiastically Brandes spoke 
 of Snoilsky, and how ardent were his hopes for a 
 complete rejuvenescence of the poetic literature of 
 the North in the person of the brilliant young 
 diplomat. However, a series of unlucky personal 
 relationships seems about this time to have interfered 
 with the free development of Snoilsky's genius. He 
 had married in 1867, but not happily, and his family 
 vexed him with a persistent complaint that he ought 
 not to publish verses, as this was an act " unbe- 
 coming in a nobleman." Such a pretension can 
 excite nothing but laughter, yet was an indica- 
 tion of the absolute absence of sympathy which 
 gradually drained the happiness out of a life made 
 for amenity and joy. His early career as a poet 
 closed with a volume of " Sonnets " in 1871, after 
 which it was understood that he consented to bow to 
 the anti-poetical prejudices of his family. These 
 sonnets are acknowledged to be the finest hitherto 
 published in Swedish. 
 
 Snoilsky's withdrawal from the poetic art was, 
 however, even now, rather relative than positive. He 
 was engaged on a translation of the Shorter Poems 
 of Goethe ; and original compositions of his own 
 
236 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 appeared, although rarely, and with manifest signs of 
 a cessation of the old fire and enthusiasm. He was 
 unhappy, dissatisfied, and life no longer offered him 
 its grapes and its roses. In the spring of 1879 
 Sweden was thrilled by the news that Count Carl 
 Snoilsky had left Stockholm, throwing up all his 
 appointments and engagements, and that he was 
 accompanied in his flight to Italy by one of the 
 leaders of aristocratic Swedish society, the Countess 
 Ebba Piper. For a long time they were lost to the 
 circle of their friends " more than if they had been 
 dead." But in 1880, the way having been made 
 clear for them, the intrepid lovers were married at 
 Marseilles, and the oppression of the last ten years 
 seemed to be removed from the poet's inspiration. 
 Snoilsky entered on his second poetic period. His 
 wife and he went over to Africa, and spent many 
 months in a slow pilgrimage through Algeria and 
 Tunis, returning to Italy and ultimately settling in 
 Florence. In 1881 his " New Poems " revealed to 
 Swedish readers what may almost be called a new 
 poet, no longer a fiery, spontaneous, and dionysiac 
 improvisatore, perhaps, but a bard completely master 
 of a grave, sonorous instrument. Snoilsky wrote in 
 a private letter at this time : " The art of poetry 
 has hitherto been a game to me. Now I am 
 more and more penetrated by a sense of its deep 
 seriousness and significance, and by a conviction 
 that it is the real business of my life." 
 
 Engaged in literary work, Snoilsky remained 
 abroad, chiefly in Dresden, until 1885, when, after 
 
Carl Snoilsky 237 
 
 a visit to Finland, he was persuaded to return for a 
 few weeks' visit to Stockholm. The warmth of the 
 reception which he received startled and touched 
 him. The students arranged a festival in his 
 honour; the King Oscar II., himself a poet of 
 renown was graciousness incarnate. But Snoilsky 
 could not be prevailed upon to stay ; Dresden, he 
 declared, had become his home. However, the 
 fascination of the Fatherland became more and 
 more overpowering, and few years now passed in 
 the course of which the Snoilskys did not visit 
 Sweden. In the autumn of 1890 his Byronic exile 
 of nearly twelve years came formally to an end, 
 when the poet accepted the post of Chief Librarian 
 in the Royal Library of Stockholm. He wrote but 
 little, and but little of that in verse, after his return 
 to settle in his native land. The remainder of his 
 life, spent in the serene and regular performance 
 of his duties, and surrounded by the affection of his 
 friends, was uneventful. His health gave way, and 
 he was removed to a nursing home, where he died 
 on May 19, 1903. 
 
 Although Snoilsky lived far into the revival of 
 Swedish literature, it cannot be said that he showed 
 much comprehension of its aims or sympathy with 
 its movement. That, perhaps, was more than could 
 be expected from a man of his character and ante- 
 cedents. His own style had been definitely formed 
 in the sixties, and there was much in the intel- 
 lectual revolution of the eighties which could not 
 but be distasteful to him. With all the beautiful 
 
238 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 qualities of his art, Snoilsky was deeply impregnated 
 with the epicureanism which was typical of culti- 
 vated thought in Sweden during his youth, and he 
 was not inclined to embrace the violent and sinister 
 innovations of Strindberg and his followers. About 
 1880, outside his own practice, the vogue of verse 
 in Sweden rapidly declined ; the darkest hour lasted 
 from 1885 to 1890, when Swedish poetry was 
 nearer total extinction than it had been for a couple 
 of centuries. The new poetry, which came into being 
 about the year 1891, was manifested, almost simul- 
 taneously, in the works of three very great lyrical 
 artists, in whose hands Swedish verse once more 
 rose to its proper eminence. These three poets 
 were Eroding, Levertin, and Heidenstam. It is 
 worthy of notice that the exhibition of this new 
 energy in Swedish poetry was almost exactly 
 coincident with the return of Snoilsky from exile to 
 take up his official duties at Stockholm. 
 
 Few writers defy translation into a foreign 
 language more completely than Gustaf Eroding 
 who combines with a conscious study of the 
 methods of the Northern folk-song a spontaneous 
 lyrical elaboration of language and a buoyancy of 
 metre which make his poems as difficult as they are 
 fascinating. Froding, who was born in 1860, died 
 on February 8, 1911 ; for ten years he was in the 
 retirement of a hospital at Upsala. His brilliant 
 and meteoric career was practically confined within 
 the brief years from 1890 to 1898. "Guitar and 
 Harmonica," " Flashes and Patches," and equally 
 
Carl Snoilsky 239 
 
 eccentric titles to Froding's successive volumes of 
 verse, indicate the irregularity of his taste, in which 
 something of Burns is combined with more than a 
 touch of Baudelaire, and with a wildness, some- 
 times very ghastly and sinister, which is wholly his 
 own. But he is perhaps the most interesting purely 
 lyrical writer of modern Sweden. 
 
 In Oscar Levertin there was less phosphores- 
 cence and more witchery ; he was not such an 
 improvisatore as Froding, but a finer craftsman. 
 He was a Jew of Frisian extraction, born in 
 Ostergotland in 1862. He had attained great 
 eminence as a prose-writer, particularly in historical 
 criticism, before his superb talent as a poet was 
 revealed in 1891 by the publication of his " Legends 
 and Songs." This volume, which he wrote at Davos 
 while waiting for what he believed would be a 
 hopeless struggle with consumption, produced a 
 great sensation in Sweden. It has been said that 
 the new epoch in Swedish poetry dates from the 
 appearance of that volume. Levertin's use of 
 language is magical, and his lyrics give a poignant 
 expression to those feelings of frustrated passion 
 and disillusioned longing which are so charac- 
 teristic of the latest generation of Northerners. 
 Levertin died in Stockholm in 1906. 
 
 Verner von Heidenstam, who was born in 1859, 
 was the author of early poems of great beauty and 
 originality, but he has now become principally 
 known as a prose-writer whose monumental simpli- 
 city and classic beauty of style leave him without a 
 
240 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 rival among his contemporaries. Per Hallstrom, 
 born in 1866, was one of those who were started on 
 their poetical career by the revival of 1891 ; but he 
 has written very little verse. He is known as a 
 novelist of singularly penetrative fancy, and as a 
 master of detail in observation. The production of 
 poetry, as we understand it, is not very abundant in 
 Sweden to-day. The word diktare, like dichter in 
 German, does not mean poet in our English sense, a 
 writer in verse, but an imaginative author generally. 
 A novelist is call a diktare. But the Swedish 
 language has a word, skald, which seems to answer 
 precisely to the English word poet. It is needful to 
 remember this in dealing with Swedish literature, 
 or offence may be given by denying the title of poet 
 to very distinguished masters of prose. 
 
 The new literature of Sweden is largely naturalistic, 
 but in the new poetry of Sweden there is more than 
 a trace of mysticism, which gives a strange perfume 
 to the realism of such austere writers as Strindberg 
 and Hallstrom, as well as to the more romantic 
 idealism of Verner von Heidenstam and Selma 
 Lagerlof. But, whatever their individual tendencies, 
 these new writers, whether in prose or verse, 
 distinguish themselves by the vigour and the 
 novelty which they have reintroduced into the 
 somewhat exhausted literature of their country ; 
 and in this admirable labour it is manifest that 
 Snoilsky was the direct pioneer of them all. 
 
 1911. 
 
EUGENE MELCHIOR DE 
 
 VOGUE 
 
 1848-1910 
 
EUGENE MELCHIOR DE 
 VOGUE 
 
 IN these days, when competent literary work is 
 carried out punctually and monotonously by a large 
 body of more or less professional writers, something 
 more than the technical excellence of what is written 
 is needed to arrest our attention to the man who 
 writes. The author must offer some salient charac- 
 teristic, some definite mental colour or spiritual 
 form, if he is to be disengaged from the mob of 
 gentlemen who sweep carefully and briskly over a 
 wide variety of subjects. There must be a concin- 
 nity ; the parts of a man's talent, character, history, 
 idiosyncrasy must be so fitted together as to present 
 a harmonious and definite effect. In such a con- 
 cinnity the work and person of the late Vicomte de 
 Vogiid do present themselves. On the crowded 
 literary stage somebody always made an appearance 
 when it was he who entered ; a blank is manifest 
 now that he so suddenly and untimely quits it for 
 ever. In the few words that follow, written before 
 the leaders of critical opinion in France have had 
 time to sum up his qualities, an effort will be made 
 
244 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 to say how that dignified and austere figure struck 
 an English contemporary. 
 
 There was little in the person of Melchior de 
 Vogue to attract the idle curiosity of the crowd, and 
 in consequence he was never one of the notabilities 
 of the boulevard. He was independent, austere, 
 rather cold in manner, aloof from the crowd. He 
 offered no affectation for the journalist, no eccen- 
 tricity for the caricaturist. There was that in his 
 outer presence which transmitted feeling with diffi- 
 culty. Full of bonte as he was, he could not give an 
 impression of bonhomie. He was timid, reserved, and 
 conscious of his moral and intellectual superiority ; 
 the unreasoning quality in his fellow-men never 
 ceased to distress and alarm him. He was the head 
 of the younger branch of an ancient family, which 
 had, in times past, scarcely distinguished itself by 
 anything except its pride; "1'orgueil des Vogu " 
 had always been a proverb. In the eminent writer 
 who has now left us the family characteristic took 
 the form of a dignified withdrawal from controversy. 
 He would not strive nor cry, but his tall, stiff figure, 
 his careful dress, his limpid, penetrating eyes, his 
 hard voice with the odd break in it, all combined 
 to testify to the imperious, dictatorial, and self- 
 concentrated nature which good breeding and 
 good taste held in a perpetual outward control. He 
 gave a sustained impression of suavity and serenity 
 The ideal of Melchior de VogU6 was one of pure, 
 unimpassioned intellectuality. His central ambition 
 w as to rule by sheer mental predominance. He was 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 245 
 
 not indifferent to the passions of the hour, but he 
 preferred not to be drawn into their vortex. He 
 was not insensitive to the sorrows of the world, but 
 he was thoroughly determined to stand outside all 
 the coteries which battled about them in the public 
 arena. He meant to help, but it must be by means 
 of a long arm from outside. 
 
 This is the external view of the grave and punc- 
 tilious aristocrat who occupied so large a place in the 
 literary life of his time, and with whom, however, 
 even in Paris, nobody was ever known to take a 
 liberty. The internal view will, doubtless, be 
 presently expressed by numerous and ardent friends. 
 Vogue was a stoic, but beneath his moral austerity 
 there glowed a humanity none the less attractive 
 because it was veiled by reserve. This cold, stiff 
 man, who rarely smiled, who moved upon his 
 appointed way as though his head were in the 
 clouds, possessed an inward serenity which was 
 founded, not on egotism, but on tenderness of 
 aspiration. His peculiar earnestness and power 
 were intensified by that content, 
 
 surpassing wealth, 
 
 The sage in meditation found, 
 
 And walked with inward glory crowned. 
 
 The subject of his meditation was the redemption of 
 the spirit of man. He found that spirit walking in 
 a dry place, and he pondered long on a mode of 
 leading it back into the oasis of dreams. He was 
 faithful in hope ; sad, but never discouraged ; it 
 
246 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 seemed better to do nothing than to do what was 
 hasty or commonplace. At length his patience left 
 him. He found that the soul was being stifled in 
 the French culture of his day, and he undertook its 
 resuscitation. He tore away the cere-clothes of 
 pseudo-scientific dogmatism, and he wrote (in his 
 manifesto of 1885) : 
 
 " A quoi bon vivre, si ce n'est pour s'instruire, 
 c'est-a-dire pour modifier sans relache sa pense ? 
 Notre ame est le lieu d'une perpetuelle metamor- 
 phose : c'est meme la plus sure garantie de son 
 immortalite. Les deux idees ne sont jamaisseparees 
 dans les grands mythes ou la sagesse humaine a 
 resume ses plus hautes intuitions." 
 
 This was strange language in the Paris of a quarter 
 of a century ago, although it may seem natural 
 enough to-day. If it is natural to-day it is largely 
 because Melchior de Vogue condemned the literary 
 Pharisaism which denied all modification and all 
 intuition, and that jeered at the unseen and the 
 unobserved. He is worthy of honour and attention 
 because, in a dark hour, he stood out for loyalty, for 
 religion, for hope and consolation. To him is due 
 the reappearance of mystery and illusion in French 
 imaginative literature. Weariness and emptiness had 
 fallen upon the fields of literature, and it was Vogii6 
 who called down once more upon them the dews of 
 virtue and beauty. He has been called the Chateau- 
 briand of the Third Republic, and the comparison is 
 not without suggestiveness. 
 
 Marie Eugene Melchior de Vogii6 was born at 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 247 
 
 Nice on February 24, 1848. Long afterwards, 
 when he was admitted to the French Academy, 
 it was whimsically remarked that, without close 
 examination of the facts, no future historian would be 
 able to decide whether he was born under a king or 
 under a republic, in France or in Italy, a member of 
 the nobility or a simple citizen. To these hesita- 
 tions may be added another : whether his birthplace 
 was really Nice by the accident of a visit, or the 
 ancestral castle of Gourdan, where all his early life 
 was to be passed. Gourdan, the home of the cadet 
 branch of the Vogue family, stands, deep in woods, 
 near the summit of the Coiron, a chain of the 
 Cevennes, in the wildest part of the wildest province 
 of France, the Ardeche. Immediately around it 
 the volcanic basalt takes shapes of grotesque and 
 sinister violence, which filled the imagination of 
 the child with wonder. From his mother, a very 
 beautiful Englishwoman, who survived until 1910, 
 Melchior obtained his earliest impressions of an 
 exotic language and literature. He has described 
 how, at a very tender age, he fell under the charm 
 of the vast and deserted library at Gourdan, fitted 
 out in the eighteenth century with everything proper 
 for the boredom of a nobleman. 
 
 It was to another source, however, as he has told 
 us in one of his rare moments of self-revelation, 
 that he owed the bias of his life. He was taken, as 
 a child, to see the curiosities of his own immediate 
 neighbourhood, and these included, in that noble 
 valley of the Rhone, the amphitheatres, aqueducts, 
 
248 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 triumphal arches, and ruined mausoleums of Roman 
 Gaul. It was at Orange, or Nimes, or Cavaillon 
 that he felt " les premieres secousses de 1'ame," the 
 earliest sensations of the majesty of the great 
 dead past : 
 
 " Depuislors" (he continues), "les hasards d'une 
 existence errante ont fait relever les visions pareilles 
 sous mes pas, au Colisee, a 1'Acropole, dans les 
 ruines d'Ephese et de Baalbeck, sous les pylones de 
 Louqsor et sous les coupoles de Samarcande ; j'ai 
 admire partout, mais je n'ai retrouve nulle part 
 1'ivresse toute neuve, l'blouissement laisse dans mes 
 yeux par les reliques de Provence, par les blocs 
 romains tremblants a midi dans la vapeur d'or, sur 
 le pale horizon d'oliviers d'ou monte la plainte 
 ardente des cigales." 
 
 Early he formed the design of becoming a 
 traveller. It may strike us as strange that one who 
 was to be the typically academic writer of his 
 generation seems to have had no more regular 
 education than could be given him, in a brief 
 passage, by the Fathers of Notre Dame at Auteuil. 
 At the age of twenty Melchior left "son chateau 
 farouche " in the Ardeche and started wandering in 
 Italy. There the war of 1870 found him. He 
 rushed back to France and, in company with an 
 elder brother, who was already commencing soldier 
 at St. Cyr, volunteered for the front. He fought at 
 Rethel, he was slightly wounded at Beaumont ; 
 towards the close of the long and tragic day at 
 Sedan his brother was shot dead at his side. 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 249 
 
 Melchior escaped, to be captured by the Prussians 
 and imprisoned for six months at Magdeburg. 
 
 With his release his practical career began. His 
 cousin, twenty years his senior, the Marquis de Vogue 
 himself now a member of the French Academy 
 proceeded to Constantinople as Ambassador of the 
 Republic, and Melchior, entering the diplomatic 
 career, accompanied him as secretary. This was 
 a period of awakening intellectual energy, the 
 effects of which were manifest in all the young 
 man's early writings, in the inevitable volume of 
 poems, without which no prose-writer considers 
 himself equipped (in Melchior de Vogue's case 
 never, I think, published), in his impressions of 
 Syria, of Palestine, of Egypt, which were enclosed 
 in his charming " Voyages au pays du passe " of 
 1876. It was at Constantinople that his soul was 
 first roused to a clear perception of the eternal 
 beauty of the past, and he spent, let us not say 
 that he wasted, months and years listening to the 
 waters of the Bosphorus as they broke in star- 
 showers under the secular cypresses. 
 
 In the winter of 1872 he visited Ephesus, Rhodes, 
 Byblos, Baalbeck, Jerusalem, everywhere intent 
 upon following, as though it were a strain of 
 fugitive music, the perpetual tradition of the past, 
 everywhere seeking among the ruins of antiquity 
 for the perennial melody of life. His earliest 
 impressions are of a gravity which may almost 
 make us smile, so little have they of the thoughtless 
 buoyancy of youth. But the writer dreaded in 
 
250 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 himself as much as he detested in others the 
 juvenile arrogance which breaks with bygone 
 dignities. What he would have said to the Nathans 
 and the Marinettis of to-day, the furious charlatans 
 whose instinct before antique beauty is to shatter 
 and defile, it is perhaps best that they should never 
 know. The earliest essays of the Syria and Palestine 
 series have the elegant naivete of unconscious art. 
 They would not have been written but for the 
 accident that a friend, Henri de Pontmartin, who 
 was prevented from accompanying Vogue, begged 
 for a detailed record, and, having received it, 
 would give the author no peace until he had per- 
 suaded him to send his letters to the Revue des 
 Deux Mondes. In the summer of 1875 Vogue 
 made a careful examination of Mount Athos, and 
 the result of this was likewise welcomed by the 
 Revue. 
 
 From Cairo Melchior de Vogue was promoted 
 to St. Petersburg in 1876. At the first shock the 
 contrast between the South and the North seemed 
 to be too severe, but he speedily regained his 
 balance of spirit, and the problems of Russian 
 history made a passionate appeal to his curiosity. 
 He taught himself the Russian language, in which 
 he presently became a proficient, and he threw 
 himself with vehemence into the study of a people 
 which was just beginning to attract warm sympathy 
 in France, but of whose literature, customs, and 
 traditions the French were still almost entirely 
 ignorant. In Russia Vogue found much ready help 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 251 
 
 and many suggestions. He buried himself in the 
 vast history of Soloviov, who was still alive, and, 
 unless I am misinformed, he found occasion to 
 attend the lectures of that eminent professor at 
 Moscow. He followed with keen attention the 
 archrcographic and ethnographic discoveries of 
 Kostmaroff, with whose enlightened and patriotic 
 liberalism Vogue was in full conformity. He was 
 led on to study the Russian character as it is 
 revealed by the great imaginative writers of the 
 third quarter of last century, the giants who, at the 
 time of his arrival in St. Petersburg, were, with the 
 exception of Gogol, all still alive and at the height 
 of their power. 
 
 It was part of the remarkable talent of Melchior 
 de Vogue that he was always ready to accept a new 
 view of life. He was keen to appreciate all forms 
 of vital beauty, however foreign they might be to 
 the traditions in which he himself had hitherto 
 been brought up. His spirit was from its birth a 
 wanderer, but it traversed the waste places of the 
 world without a trace of the brand of Cain upon its 
 brow. On the contrary, the shadow of the pale 
 leaf of the olive was always flickering against it. 
 Vogue, taking himself, as he did, infinitely au 
 sericux, very deeply interested in all the modifica- 
 tions of human life, already dreaming of how he 
 might restore serenity and faith to the outworn 
 intellectuality of France, was for a moment daunted 
 by the strangeness of Russia, and then violently, 
 and finally, fell in love with its indulgence and 
 
252 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 simplicity. In certain admirable recent studies 1 
 one of the best equipped of our younger critics 
 has dwelt on the great difficulty presented by "the 
 paradoxical thread which runs through the Russian 
 character." Thirty-five years ago this element of 
 paradox was unrecognised and undefined, even by 
 the Russians themselves. It puzzled and baffled 
 Vogii, with his logical Latin instinct, his perfect 
 reasonableness, his austere and authoritative temper 
 of mind, but it rather fascinated than repelled him. 
 What we have to deal with here, however, is not 
 the genius of Russia in itself, but the effect of that 
 genius on the mind of a Frenchman destined, 
 through his assimilation of certain elements in 
 it, to exercise a great influence on his own people. 
 Whether Vogue really comprehended Russia or not 
 is a question which I am not competent to answer, 
 and it lies aside from the present discussion. What 
 is interesting at this moment is the fact that a 
 young French writer, resident in St. Petersburg 
 between 1875 and 1882, carefully cultivating a rich, 
 full style which he restrained within the limits of 
 an almost classic purity, employed that style, with 
 all its gravity of reflection and profusion of imagery, 
 on the interpretation of an alien literature which 
 was remarkable for the opposites of all these 
 qualities, for turbulence, redundancy, stubbornness, 
 exaggerated emotion, and sensuous extravagance of 
 fancy. The strange material on which he worked 
 
 1 " Landmarks in Russian Literature," by Maurice Baring. 
 (Methuen & Co., 1910.) 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 253 
 
 not merely did not affect his method towards an 
 imitation of itself, but the more intimately he studied 
 it and extracted from it what was sympathetic to 
 his temperament, the more were the eminently 
 un-Russian qualities of Vogii, his serried thought, 
 the complication of his firm, ornate, rather old- 
 fashioned style, his perfect probity and moderation 
 of sentiment, emphasised in the careful progress of 
 his writings. 
 
 It was in the presence of Russia that his own 
 peculiar character became developed, one would 
 affirm, in a peculiarly un-Russian direction. That 
 he was absorbed, in these early diplomatic days, in 
 the social forms and habits of his adopted country 
 did not prevent him from remaining exquisitely 
 and rigidly French. He traversed the vast empire 
 from north to south ; he followed the conquering 
 army of General Annenkoff to Khiva and Samar- 
 kand ; he even sealed his troth to Russia by 
 marrying the general's sister, Anna Nicola'ievna, 
 who, with their four sons, survives him to-day. In 
 spite of all this, and in spite of the very strong 
 infusion of Russian sentiment into his character 
 and his strong streak of English blood, Melchior 
 de Vogue remained intensely French, and the 
 principal result of his study of Russia was that his 
 familiarity with the semi-Oriental order of ideas 
 gave him a weapon to use in his approching fight 
 in the West against the enemies of spiritual and 
 religious beauty. 
 
 Vogue's regular communication of Russian studies 
 
254 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 to the Revue des Deux Mondes, with which he was 
 identified until the end of his life, and from the 
 office of which he may be said to have stepped into 
 the French Academy, began in March 1879, upon 
 the publication of his " De Byzance a Moscou." 
 This rather abstrusely treated episode in Russian 
 literature of the sixteenth century must have struck 
 Buloz by its intrinsic merits, for it was given the 
 first place in the review. It is noticeable that 
 Vogii, in describing the singular vision which 
 appeared to the dying Czar Feodor in 1598, adopts 
 the attitude towards the inexplicable, the mys- 
 terious, which he was about to make characteristic 
 of all his writing. From this time forwards for 
 more than thirty years we may trace in the pages of 
 the Revue des Deux Mondes, in which most of his 
 books originally made their appearance, the deve- 
 lopment of Melchior de Vogii6's critical powers, 
 and their gradual progression, through archaeology 
 and history, to the analysis of pure literature and 
 philosophical politics. 
 
 In 1882 he quitted the diplomatic career and 
 returned to Paris, to devote himself without reserve 
 to the practice of literature. On October 15 
 of the following year there appeared in the 
 Revue des Deux Mondes the earliest of those 
 studies of the Russian novel which, in their 
 collected form, not only did more than anything 
 else to make Melchior de Vogii famous, but 
 offered him an unanticipated opportunity for exer- 
 cising a wide and salutary influence. It was about 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 255 
 
 this time that he made the acquaintance of, or at 
 least sealed his intimate friendship with, Taine, then 
 at the zenith of his glory, and busily labouring at 
 his colossal enterprise, the " Origines de la France 
 contemporaine." It would not be exact to say 
 that Vogue became the disciple of Taine, for his own 
 genius was by this time too mature for that, but 
 the probity and profundity of the elder writer made 
 a deep impression of encouragement on the mind 
 of the younger. Vogue was attracted to Taine by 
 a considerable similarity in their temperaments ; 
 the younger man was by birthright what the elder 
 had become under the stress of life, " majestueuse- 
 ment triste." They had a prodigious subject in 
 common, the divagations of the human intelligence, 
 its poverty and its weakness. Each had indulged, 
 in the examination of life and history, an ardent 
 curiosity ; each had been easily persuaded of the 
 preponderance of suffering and of the futility of 
 contending with it otherwise than by a' severe and 
 patient stoicism. 
 
 Taine became to Vogue a sort of living con- 
 science. At the mere thought of any concession 
 to the vulgarity of the crowd, the younger write r 
 blushed beforehand at the silence of the elder. They 
 exchanged impressions with regard to the foreign 
 literatures which each of them loved more than did 
 any other Frenchmen of their day ; and Vogue" read 
 the shorter tales of Tourgeniev aloud to Taine 
 when the latter lay on his death-bed (March 1893). 
 The account of Taine which Vogue gives in his 
 
256 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 " Devant le Siecle " has more human emotion in 
 it than perhaps any other page of his work. 
 
 The native-born exile, returning to his fatherland, 
 perceives alterations in thought and feeling more 
 emphatically than those who have never stirred out 
 of the environment of home. Melchior de Vogue, 
 coming back to Paris in 1882, was astonished to 
 find the men of letters, his friends, comparatively 
 oblivious of the strides which a positive utilitarian- 
 ism had made during his absence. In the novel, 
 in particular that is to say, in the branch of 
 literature which appeals most directly and most 
 abundantly to the average emotional reader the 
 development of what was called " naturalism " 
 had been extraordinary. Encouraged by the extreme 
 favour with which the stories of the Goncourts and his 
 own scientific and mechanical romances had been 
 received by the public, Zola ventured on a policy 
 of exclusion. He dared to close the doors of mercy 
 on any novelist who presumed to admit into his 
 work the least idealism, the least note of pity, the 
 least concession to faith or conjecture. All must 
 be founded on meticulous observation. The imagi- 
 native writer must be simply an " implacable 
 investigator eager to take the human machine to 
 pieces in order to see how its mechanism works." 
 This scientific theory Zola expounded in three 
 volumes of criticism, " Le Roman Experimental " 
 (1880), " Les Romanciers Naturalistes" (1881), and 
 " Mes Haines" (1882). He bore down all opposi- 
 tion by his vehement sincerity, and he was much 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 257 
 
 aided by the fact that for some years past all the 
 cleverest young writers had been tending in the 
 same direction, while the opposition of science to 
 religion had been rapidly gaining ground in 
 France. These were the years when the name of 
 God was being erased from the school-books of 
 Republican children, and when ardent provincial 
 mayors were renaming Rue de Notre Dame de 
 Bon-Secours, Rue de Paul Bert, or Passage de 
 1'Adoration des Mages, Avenue de la Gare. These 
 were the years when no valid resistance to the 
 presumptuous and exclusive domination of logic 
 seemed forthcoming in all the realms of French 
 intelligence. 
 
 Vogue, examining what had been published of late 
 by the principal imaginative writers of France, pro- 
 tested that the soul had been forgotten. Zola was 
 crying out, in his harsh and sincere voice, that the 
 novelist must teach nothing but the bitter know- 
 ledge of life, the proud and unflinching lesson 
 of reality. All pictures of society were to be 
 painted without prejudice or sympathy, without 
 comment, without effusion, in close agreement with 
 what Edmond de Goncourt, in a famous phrase 
 called " le document humain, pris sur le vrai, sur le 
 vif, sur le saignant." There was a great deal to be 
 said in favour of this cult of naturalism, which, 
 reasonably followed, was doing wonders in clearing 
 away the humbug, the dead flowers and last night's 
 rouge, from an outworn romanticism. There could 
 never be a return to the old romantic egoism, to a 
 
 R 
 
258 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 series of pseudo-biographies of a generation of 
 Rens and Obermanns. The supreme value of 
 reality and the absolute necessity of observation 
 were admitted beyond all denial. But in the course 
 of his Russian studies Vogii6 had discovered a school 
 of realists who were no less serious and thorough 
 than Zola, but who admitted far more spiritual 
 unction into their attitude to life. In Dostoieffsky 
 and Tolstoy he found great masters of fiction who 
 appreciated the value of scientific truth, but who 
 were not content to move a step in the pursuit of it 
 without being attended by pity and hope. 
 
 In 1883 Melchior de Vogue began to print his 
 series of studies of the Russian novel in the 
 pages of the Revue. He treated Gogol, Tourgeniev, 
 Dostoieffsky, and Tolstoy ; he traced the origins of 
 the tree of which they were the consummate 
 fruitage ; he showed how Pushkin, an enchanting 
 poet, had made the ground ready for these giants in 
 prose. The subject was not absolutely new, of 
 course, to French readers ; it had been treated 
 learnedly and amply by such excellent authorities as 
 Leroy-Beaulieu and Rambaud. Some of the novelists 
 themselves were already in the hands of Parisians, 
 Gogol and the now semi-Parisian Tourgeniev in 
 particular. But the two greatest of all were practi- 
 cally unknown, and it was while Vogue's successive 
 monographs were appearing in the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes that Dostoieffsky and Tolstoy were for the 
 first time competently rendered in French, and in 
 this language circulated through the instructed 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogiie 259 
 
 world. All over France there was running at that 
 time an increasingly sympathetic curiosity concern- 
 ing Russian thought and Russian manners. The 
 articles of Vogiie gratified this thirst for knowledge, 
 but it was not until they were reprinted in a volume 
 that their full significance was appreciated. 
 
 It was by " Le Roman Russe," which appeared 
 in the summer of 1886, that Melchior de Vogiie first 
 became widely known, and the " Avant-Propos '' 
 with which that volume was launched on the waters 
 of controversy is of all his writings the one which 
 has exercised the most lasting influence. This 
 critical preface to a contribution to criticism has the 
 extraordinary value of a manifesto, put forth with 
 equal passion and adroitness at the precise moment 
 when the reading world was ready to accept it. 
 Every circumstance connected with its publication 
 was happy. The articles on Russian literature, 
 spread over three years, had greatly increased the 
 prestige of the writer ; their success had led to the 
 introduction to French readers of the principal 
 Russian works described ; those works had been 
 read, were now being more eagerly than ever read, 
 still with some bewilderment at their strangeness ; 
 meanwhile the naturalistic theory of fiction, pushed 
 to extremities by Zola and his disciples, had begun 
 to pall upon their admirers. France was ready for 
 a new voice, a fresh wind of the spirit ; every one 
 was prepared to welcome a man daring enough to 
 proclaim that we had had enough of these dry 
 bundles of observations, this mechanical pursuit of 
 
260 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 purposeless phenomena : " Our living and mys- 
 terious flower, the genius of France, cannot be 
 plucked by botanists who merely catalogue dead 
 species in their hortus siccus." 
 
 The remarkable effect caused by the publication 
 of " Le Roman Russe " perhaps the most epoch- 
 making single volume of criticism issued in France 
 during our time was due to the unusual literary 
 conditions acted on by the daring and the sagacity 
 of a wise and fearless writer. The Naturalists had 
 pushed too far their formula that we can know 
 nothing but what we can see, and that the inexplicable 
 is the non-existent. From the dry positivism of this 
 law there seemed to be no appeal until Vogiie, who 
 had studied the Russians so closely, claimed to have 
 learned from them, if he had learned nothing else, 
 that there could be no more barren error than to 
 limit our affirmations by our exact and measured 
 experiences. He considered the theory of man- 
 kind as the Goncourts and Zola conceived it, and 
 he was courageous enough to declare it hopelessly 
 incomplete. Beyond it, stretching away in infinite 
 chequer of radiance and shadow, he pointed to the 
 domains of dreamland, untracked, unsuspected 
 by the authors of " Cherie " and " La Terre." 
 
 The original object of Vogiie in writing his 
 studies of the Russian novelists had been to draw 
 the two countries closer together by the inter- 
 penetration of the things of the spirit. He had 
 worked in certain definite zones of thought, whence 
 he had chosen typical individuals; he practically 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 261 
 
 confined himself to the four greatest masters of 
 Russian fiction. He treated each of these in the best 
 biographical temper, the man illustrating the work, 
 and both seen in relation to society. In the course of 
 this inquiry certain features of Russian imagination 
 had strongly impressed themselves upon him. Mr. 
 Maurice Baring has recently defined for us the 
 elements of the realism of the Russians, " their 
 closeness to nature, their gift of seeing things as 
 they are, and of expressing those things in terms 
 of the utmost simplicity." He proceeds to say 
 that this is " the natural expression of the Russian 
 temperament and the Russian character." This 
 realism Vogue compared with the formal and 
 mechanical realism of the French Naturalists, and 
 it opened his eyes to the fallacies of the latter. He 
 saw that the aptitudes of Tolstoy and Dostoieffsky 
 included a moral inspiration which alone could 
 excuse the harshness of the realistic method. 
 
 It had become the principle of literature in Paris 
 about 1885 to ignore the mystery which exists about 
 us, to repudiate the tiny parcel of divinity which 
 every human being contains. Vogue's answer to 
 Zola's challenge was that we must, indeed, affirm 
 nothing dogmatically with regard to the unknown 
 world, but that we should so far let ourselves go 
 as to be for ever trembling on the brink of it. 
 Realism, he pointed out, became odious at the 
 moment when the development of its dogma in- 
 sisted on the exclusion from its work of the element 
 of charity. Literature, instead of acting as a stony- 
 
262 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 hearted contemplator of wretchedness, should make 
 suffering supportable by an endless flow of pity. 
 Vogue spoke out, loud and bold, against the men 
 of letters who denied that literature should, in any 
 case, have a moral purpose, and who covered with 
 scorn the novelist that endeavoured to console and 
 fortify humanity. Which of you, he said in effect, 
 will dare to contemn Dostoieffsky, under whose 
 gigantic shadow you all shrink to a puny stature ? 
 When Edmond de Goncourt talked about the im- 
 mutable laws of beauty which demanded the 
 experimental treatment, Vogii replied that the 
 eminent connoisseur was confusing a material 
 thing, the technical beauty of execution, with a 
 divine and spiritual grace. The great word came 
 out at last, and the critic burned his ships "the 
 religious sentiment is, after all, indispensable." 
 
 When this had been said, there could be no 
 length of daring to which the critic would not be 
 expected to attain. He ventured to speak with 
 severity of the high priest of Naturalism, of the 
 mighty Stendhal himself. He did not scruple to 
 accuse " La Chartreuse de Parme " of abominable 
 dryness, nor to stigmatise " Rouge et Noir " as 
 disastrous and hateful. What he disliked in these 
 illustrious romances, and in the less weighty 
 examples of their posthumous children, was the 
 coldness and emptiness of their attitude to life. 
 On the other hand, in some English novelists, and 
 in particular in George Eliot, he found exactly what 
 he wanted realism, but realism expanded by 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 263 
 
 tenderness. Vogue's tribute to " Adam Bede " is 
 the most beautiful which George Eliot ever re- 
 ceived : " Une larme tombe sur le livre ; pourquoi 
 je defie le plus subtil de dire ; c'est que c'est beau 
 comme si Dieu parlait, voila tout." 
 
 Such is the temper of " Le Roman Russe." 
 Melchior de Vogue's attitude to religion in this mani- 
 festo, and throughout the remainder of his works, 
 was somewhat difficult to define, since he never 
 denned it himself. He said that life only begins 
 where we cease to understand it, and he strongly 
 reproved the positive arrogance which denies the 
 existence of the unseen and the unconfirmed. He 
 was stout in defence of the essential value of faith, 
 and he objected to an excessive dependence on 
 what is concrete and logical. Yet he never pushed 
 his tenderness of soul to the point of mysticism. 
 
 The manifesto of 1886 had a remarkable effect. 
 From all sides supporters came forward, souls 
 who had wandered in darkness under the night of 
 Naturalism. Vogue found himself persecuted by 
 would-be disciples, worried to lead down into the 
 hurly-burly a self-styled body of " Neo-Christians." 
 This was the absurd aspect of his influence ; what 
 alone he himself valued was the part he had been 
 enabled to take in the revival of idealistic literature 
 in France. He told his too ardent imitators, when 
 they came to him for a creed : " You must choose 
 your own mystery the great thing is to have one." 
 He probably hoped to see a definite reaction pre- 
 sently set in, not merely in literature, but in politics 
 
264 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 and manners, a return to classicism pure and simple, 
 the undiluted ancien regime; but the democracy 
 has grown too multiform and comprehensive for 
 that. 
 
 During the quarter of a century which had suc- 
 ceeded his famous " Avant-Propos " the Vicomte 
 de Vogue" lived a strenuous and uneventful life. 
 In 1889 he was admitted into the French Academy ; 
 from 1893 to 1898 he sat in the Palais Bourbon as 
 member for Annonay, the largest town, though not 
 the capital, of his own department of the Ardeche. 
 He travelled much ; he made stately appearances 
 in society ; otherwise his whole career was con- 
 centrated in literature. He was a poor and proud 
 aristocrat who made the writing of articles his 
 profession. None of his books repeated the sensa- 
 tional success of " Le Roman Russe," but for all of 
 them there was a loyal and respectful audience. 
 In the midst of the frenzied entente of 1893 he 
 published " Occurs Russes," in which were the tales 
 of Uncle Fedia, the colporteur, who gave his in- 
 nocent life to save Akoulina ; of Vassili Ivanovitch, 
 the tyrant landlord who came to life again while 
 the serfs were dancing round his death-bed ; of 
 Joseph Olnine and his magical robe of fur. He 
 wrote novels, of which the best is " Jean d'Agreve," 
 which has had passionate admirers, and which 
 describes the life of a modern Tristram and Iseult 
 in an elysian island somewhere off Hyeres. 
 This is marvellously written, but too lyrical to 
 be quite successful as a novel ; it is like what 
 
Eugene Melchior de Vogue 265 
 
 " Epipsychidion " might have been if Shelley had 
 written it in prose. One is surprised, on looking 
 back, to see how many volumes the punctual and 
 solid articles in the Revue des DcuxMondes contrived 
 to fill as the years went uniformly by. 
 
 The Vicomte Melchior de Vogue was a very 
 brilliant writer, but he was even more remarkable 
 as a man. He will be remembered because, when 
 weariness had fallen upon the world of letters, he 
 discovered an oasis with a magical fountain in it. 
 He tasted very sparingly of that well of waters him- 
 self. He was austere, superficially dry, painfully 
 haunted by the instability of things, chilled by the 
 precarious and fragile tenor of all earthly hopes. 
 But he was an idealist of the purest temper, and 
 his loyalty, clairvoyance, and a certain majesty of 
 mind were infinitely precious qualities in an age 
 so chaotic as that in which we live. 
 
 1910. 
 
ANDRE GIDE 
 
ANDRE GIDE 
 
 INTERNATIONAL taste in literary matters is apt to 
 be very capricious. France, well informed about 
 Stevenson and Mr. Kipling, full of curiosity regard- 
 ing Swinburne and Mr. Hardy, could not, to the 
 day of his death, focus her vision upon the figure 
 of George Meredith. These are classic names, but, 
 among those who are still competitors for immor- 
 tality, mere accident seems to rule their exotic 
 reputation. The subject of the following reflections 
 is an example of this caprice. He was born forty 
 years ago ; his life has been, it appears, devoted to 
 the art of writing, of which he has come to be 
 looked upon in France as a master. In Germany, 
 in Italy, he has a wide vogue, especially in the 
 former. By a confined, but influential, circle of 
 readers he is already looked upon as the most 
 interesting man of letters under the age of fifty. 
 But, so far as I have noticed, his name is almost 
 unknown in England. This is the more extra- 
 ordinary because, as I hope to suggest, his mind 
 is more closely attuned to English ideas, or what 
 once were English ideas, than that of any other 
 living writer of France. He has reproved (in 
 '.' Lettres a Angele " and elsewhere) the "detestable 
 
270 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 infatuation " of those who hold that nothing speaks 
 intelligibly to the French mind, nor can truly sound 
 well in a French ear, except that which has a French 
 origin. M. Gide has shown himself singularly 
 attentive to those melodies of the spirit which have 
 an English origin, but his own music seems as yet 
 to have found no echo here. 
 
 Of the career of M. Gide little has been stated, 
 since he is not one of those who talk freely about 
 themselves in their books. But I take him to be a 
 Southerner by extraction, born, or at least bred, in 
 Normandy ; an Albigense transplanted, with all his 
 hereditary Protestantism, from Languedoc to the 
 shores of the Channel. He says, somewhere, that 
 the Oc and Oil are equally familiar to his ear, and 
 that he is not more devoted to the blossom of the 
 apple than to that of the pomegranate. He has 
 been, too, it is evident, a great wanderer over the face 
 of Europe and Africa (" Amyntas "), and he affects, 
 with an easy grace, some of the airs of the cosmo- 
 politan. But in his heart I think that M. Gide is 
 faithful to the Norman orchards. He is a product 
 of Calvinism, and the extraordinary interest which 
 the movements of his mind present is due to the 
 concinnity they reveal in his moral basis. He 
 offers himself to us, rather shyly, but very per- 
 sistently, as a French Protestant who has grown up 
 and out, oh ! so far and so pathetically out, of the firm 
 low root based upon the " Institution Chretienne." 
 As a rule, the products of French Protestantism 
 have not much general value for an English reader. 
 
Andre Gide 271 
 
 Our race has gone so much further in that direction, 
 and with so much more variety ! The sacrifice of 
 Calvinism to the national unity of the French has 
 tended to dwarf the intellectual manifestations of 
 the sect. But in the writings of M. Gide it is, I 
 think, not too fantastic to discover what the import- 
 ance of a Huguenot training can be in the develop- 
 ment of a mind which has wholly delivered itself 
 from the Huguenot bondage. 
 
 The progress of M. Gide has been slow. He 
 attempted many things : sentimental autobiography, 
 something after the fashion of Mr. A. C. Benson ; 
 poems in which he followed Laforgue and floated 
 on the stream of symbolism ; miscellaneous and 
 extravagant tentatives, which were half prose, half 
 poetry. Gradually he gained confidence. In 1899 
 his fantastic dream of a Prometheus in the Paris of 
 our day was scornfully contested by the critics of 
 the moment. In his curious dramas, " Saul" and 
 " Le Roi Candaule," he felt his way 'towards a 
 more and more personal mode of expression. He 
 found it in his first serious novel, " L'Immoraliste," 
 in his essays (" Feuilles de route," " Pretextes "), in 
 his criticism. He has become what an early admirer 
 prophesied that he would become, "a luminous 
 Levite," one who with instant daily service tends the 
 altar of intelligence and grace. He has gradually 
 detached the singular originality of his temper from 
 those accidents of style that enwrap, as silk enwraps 
 a chrysalis, the formal parts of a new and ardent 
 writer. 
 
272 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 Among the early writings of M. Andr Gide, there 
 is one which, to my mind, stands out prominent 
 above the rest. It is as difficult to describe the 
 element which makes " Paludes " (1895) one f the 
 most exquisite of modern books as it would be to 
 analyse the charm of "Tristram Shandy." People 
 are fond of repeating that the French have no 
 humour, but "Paludes" is humorous from end to 
 end. It is not exactly a novel ; it is rather a satire 
 on the excess of introspection which leads clever 
 young men to write novels when they have nothing 
 of the least moment to communicate. It is the story 
 of a person who had a false conception of life, who 
 raised about him a whirlwind of painful agitation 
 because he did not realise that but one thing is 
 needful. The unnamed author searches for a 
 subject, and hits heavily upon the notion of a 
 Virgilian shepherd, a solitary Tityrus, who shall 
 inhabit a tower in the midst of a marsh, a palus, 
 and who shall cultivate his imagination there on 
 the absence of every interest and object, in a vain 
 search after originality. He starts upon his task, 
 but the story and no wonder progresses at a 
 snail's pace, interrupted by psychological digres- 
 sions, checked by the depressing criticism of 
 friends, and finally losing itself in a general vague- 
 ness and sterile melancholy. The solemn folly of 
 the novelist is contrasted with the bustle, the in- 
 sufficiency, the frivolity of the chattering com- 
 panions who surround him, and there is not less 
 satire of middle-class mental emptiness in these 
 
 
Andre Gide 273 
 
 latter than of the pompous excess of intellectual 
 pretension in the artist himself, tortured by his 
 own self-consciousness. What makes "Paludes" 
 extremely amusing to the consecutive student of 
 M. Gide's work is that it marks a sort of crisis of 
 good spirits, in which the youthful author turns 
 suddenly upon himself with a burst of elfin laughter, 
 and sweeps away the cobwebs of his own ingenuity. 
 But the actual tissue of the book, with its swift 
 alternations of beauty and fun, of malice and au- 
 dacity, cannot be unravelled in a critical survey. 
 " Paludes " lends itself, quite simply, to the pure 
 enjoyment of the reader. 
 
 It is, however, in a novel of sober fullness and 
 distinguished originality that M. Gide has now 
 definitely risen above the level of what is merely 
 ingenious, or fantastic, or suggestive. In "La 
 Porte Etroite" (1910) he has written one of the 
 most beautiful books which have been printed in 
 Europe for a long time. It is, therefore, as the 
 author of that noble story that I propose to dwell 
 at some considerable length. 
 
 The scene of " La Porte Etroite " is laid in the 
 neighbourhood of Havre, where there exists, and 
 has always existed, a numerous Huguenot con- 
 gregation. The hero of the story, who tells the 
 tale, is the only child of an austere and melancholy, 
 but passive widow ; she and he share the company 
 of a gentle English maiden lady, Miss Flora Ash- 
 burton, whose sunken fortunes have led her grate- 
 fully to accept this asylum. Between these pious 
 
 s 
 
274 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 gentlewomen JeYome gradually develops from 
 infancy to boyhood in a sheltered air. His only 
 diversion is an occasional visit to his cousins, the 
 Bucolins, who inhabit a large house, set in a great 
 tumultuous garden, close by at Fougueusemare. 
 The Bucolins are Protestants also, and worship at 
 the Havre "temple," but their religion is not so 
 sombre as that of Jerome's household, and in their 
 life there are exceptional circumstances. Uncle 
 Bucolin is an active man, engaged in business, and 
 Aunt Bucolin is more exceptional still, for she is a 
 Creole from Martinique, and she lies in bed half the 
 day, and in a hammock the other half. The char- 
 acter of Aunt Bucolin has always been felt to be 
 hostile to the heavenly calling, and as the years go 
 by she becomes more reckless. The Bucolins have 
 three children, the eldest of whom, Alissa, is two years 
 older than Jerome ; Juliette and Robert are younger. 
 Jerome cannot recollect a time when a kind of 
 vague and seraphic attraction has not projected 
 itself on his juvenile spirit from the presence and 
 voice of his cousin, Alissa. She has developed, and 
 is still developing, a delicate virginal beauty, of the 
 Tuscan order. To the boy's innocent pedantry her 
 pale oval face, and eyebrows tenderly arched, recall 
 the vision of Beatrice. There is, however, no 
 realisation of the nature of this feeling on his part 
 until, one day, a singular set of circumstances com- 
 bine to give it voice. In the unsuspecting absences 
 of Uncle Bucolin on business, in the innocence of 
 her two younger children, the Creole aunt finds her 
 
Andre Gide 
 
 2 75 
 
 opportunity to cultivate objectionable and dangerous 
 acquaintances, and Jerome is present at a "scene" 
 when the lady from Martinique is guilty of an odious 
 want of decorum. He flies to the room of his 
 cousin, Alissa, who alone is conscious of the horror 
 which surrounds them all, and who greets him, 
 turning as she kneels in supplication at her toilet- 
 table, with an agonised cry, " Oh, Jerome, pourquoi 
 reviens-tu ? " He cannot understand, or but very 
 vaguely divines, what is the cause of Alissa's beautiful 
 anguish, but he feels the celestial purity of her 
 sorrow ; he interprets her cry as including him, 
 adding his distress to the sum of humiliations ; and 
 this is the turning-point of his life. For the future 
 the boy will exist for no other purpose than to fill 
 the soul of Alissa with happiness and peace. 
 
 The terrible Creole woman presently cuts the 
 knot herself by disappearing with one of her 
 lovers, and the Bucolin family never hear of her any 
 more. Gradually they settle down again into their 
 customary mode of life, their pious attendance on 
 the means of grace, their cheerful relations with 
 others, their mutual devotion. The sinful branch 
 has been cut off; it has severed itself in a storm 
 and been carried away in a night by the wind. At 
 the chapel the incident is referred to, in the allusive 
 manner customary among the devout, in the course 
 of a powerful sermon on the text " Efforcez-vous 
 d'entrer par la porte etroite ! " The wide gate which 
 leadeth to destruction is picturesquely described, 
 and Aunt Bucolin, without actually being men- 
 
276 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 tioned, is recalled to every mind as one of the 
 noisiest of that over-dressed and loudly-laughing 
 multitude which the preacher sees gaily descending 
 to hell in the hideous exaggeration of sin. This 
 remarkable discourse makes a profound impression 
 upon Jerome. He imagines himself, against his will, 
 elbowed by the sin-stricken crowd, and stunned by 
 the noise of its laughter. Each step he takes divides 
 him further and further from the melancholy eyes of 
 Alissa. Suddenly the preacher makes a new and a 
 direct appeal : " Strive to enter in at the strait 
 gate ! " and dilates on the pure, the ineffable joy 
 which streams from a life of self-abnegation, a life 
 all devoted to sacrifice and holy sorrow. He com- 
 pares this state of grace, this strenuous " walk with 
 God," with an air played in a lovely garden on a 
 violin, an ecstasy at once strident and tender. 
 " Few there be," he exclaims, " who are chosen to 
 pursue this life of sanctification." " I will be one 
 of those few ! " says Jerome to himself. Looking 
 across the pews of the chapel, he sees the pure 
 countenance of Alissa all lighted up with the inward 
 radiance, and he consciously unites, for the first time, 
 the idea of her human love with that of the perfect 
 love of Christ. He undergoes a double conversion ; 
 he gives his soul without reserve to God and to Alissa. 
 This conjunction of influences acts decisively on 
 a spirit already prepared for it by the exercises of 
 religion and by the puritan discipline of family life. 
 As M. Gide very cleverly makes us feel, it is as 
 natural for his hero to submit to moral restraints as 
 
Andre Gide 
 
 277 
 
 it is for others to resist them. The instinctive habit 
 of the circle in which Jerome had been brought up 
 was to seek for happiness where others seek for 
 pleasure, and to find pleasure only in the Lord's 
 service. But in spite of this condition of mind and 
 heart, the world, with all its many-coloured show, 
 is rapidly expanding before the lad, and he begins 
 to comprehend, as many a pious youth has com- 
 prehended, that he cannot shelter his faith for ever 
 behind the almost monastic hedges of private habit. 
 In this crisis the love of Alissa seems to resemble 
 the pearl of great price of which the Gospel speaks ; 
 it is that for which Jerome will cheerfully and even 
 thankfully sell all that he has. It is with a hand of 
 extraordinary firmness and delicacy that the author 
 has drawn the years of adolescence, in which the 
 nature of Jerome widens and strengthens, without 
 ever failing to keep the figure of Alissa before him 
 like a star to guide him : 
 
 " Travail, efforts, actions pies, mystiquement 
 j'offrais tout a Alissa, inventant un raffinement de 
 vertu, a lui laisser souvent ignorer ce que je n'avais 
 fait que pour elle. Je m'enivrais ainsi d'une sorte 
 de modestie capiteuse et m'habituais, helas ! con- 
 sultant peu ma plaisance, a ne me satisfaire a rien 
 qui ne m'eut coute quelque effort." 
 
 But the interest of the story now centres in Alissa, 
 of whom we ask, as Jerome asks, what will be the 
 development of her riper and perhaps intenser 
 nature. Our first suspicion of a tragic destiny 
 comes over us in the course of a scene, very lightly 
 
278 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 and even laughingly conducted, where Jerome 
 involuntarily overhears a conversation in the garden 
 between his cousin and her father. Jerome himself 
 is the subject of their discussion, and his tendency 
 to lean on the spiritual strength of others is anim- 
 adverted upon. This leads to a talk between the 
 cousins themselves, in which Alissa significantly 
 asks him, "N'es-tu pas assez fort pour marcher 
 seul ? C'est tout seul que chacun de nous doit 
 gagner Dieu." She gently refuses to be his guide 
 any longer : the soul can have no other guide but 
 Christ. She winnows the vague grain of Jerome's 
 convictions, and his pious sentimentality is blown 
 away in chaff by the steady breeze of Alissa's clearer 
 theology. Still, he can but worship God in and 
 through her. That, she replies, he must not do, for 
 pure worship sees nothing between the worshipper 
 and God Himself. This is the first little rift within 
 the lute of their perfect unison of hearts, and it 
 marks the difference upon which their happiness is 
 to be ultimately shattered. 
 
 It would be to give a very false idea of this charm- 
 ing book to dwell to excess on the religious problem 
 which it raises. The story is one of domestic pro- 
 vincial life in the north of France, among gentle 
 and cultivated people, which is full of amusing 
 studies of character, natural and entertaining inci- 
 dents, and evidences of witty observation on the 
 part of the author. But the real subject of the 
 volume, the thread which runs through it and gives 
 it intellectual adhesion, after all is precisely a 
 
Andre Gide 
 
 279 
 
 searching analysis of the incompleteness and narrow- 
 ness of the moral psychology of Protestantism. The 
 author has seen how cruelly pietists suffer from 
 excess of scruple, how disastrously they can be 
 overwhelmed by the vain sentiment of sinfulness. 
 He deals with a state of soul which is more compre- 
 hensible in English society than in French, and which 
 has, perhaps, found no exponent before in the litera- 
 ture of France outside the ranks of those who have 
 examined the results of a Jansenist training. 
 
 The family councils, while admitting that the 
 ultimate marriage of Jerome and Alissa is a matter of 
 course, yet decide that a positive betrothal would be 
 injudicious while Jerome is so young. To this post- 
 ponement the wishes of Alissa also tend, although 
 the only scruple which she yet acknowledges is the 
 result of her slightly greater age, and the tendency, 
 which he continues to show, to lean unduly on her 
 judgment. The reader is made to perceive that 
 her character is much more fully developed, and set 
 on a much firmer basis, than that of her cousin. 
 Jerome meanwhile proceeds into the world ; he 
 studies for a profession in Paris ; he goes through 
 his term of military service at Nancy ; he engages 
 in a long journey through Italy. All these events, 
 by a natural process of experience, enlarge his 
 intelligence, explain to him the meaning of life, 
 modify his judgments on mankind. His pure and 
 devoted passion for Alissa, nevertheless, is subject 
 to no real diminution, although absence and physical 
 change obscure and sometimes make difficult the 
 
280 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 expression of it. Moreover, it is now almost entirely 
 restricted to correspondence. 
 
 While Jerome sees the world, however, in all its 
 variegated lights and colours, Alissa roams in the 
 shadow of the garden at Fougueusemare. She is 
 wholly occupied in being a mother to her old father 
 and to his family, in attending to her charities, and 
 in practising her religion. She grows neither sour 
 nor bitter, but she becomes interpenetrated by the 
 pangs of many exquisite scruples. The mother of 
 Jerome dies, and on her deathbed desires that she 
 may see the hand of her son close in formal 
 betrothal on the pale hand of Alissa ; but the girl 
 cannot persuade herself that she ought to bind her 
 young cousin with any vow ; she insists that they 
 should wait until Jerome is more sure of his own 
 mind. " Comprends," she adds, " que je ne parle 
 que pour toi-meme, car pour moi je crois bien que 
 je ne pourrai jamais cesser de t'aimer." At this 
 moment, infinitely perplexing for the young lover, 
 with his alternatives of docility and exasperation, the 
 mind of Alissa is slowly proceeding in a direction 
 still undetermined to her own consciousness. 
 
 From this point the relation between the lovers 
 becomes more and more tragical. Various incidents, 
 of a nature to enliven very agreeably and naturally 
 the pages of M. Gide, interpose to prolong the 
 inevitable delay, and to separate Jerome still further 
 from Alissa. These obstacles, however, seem to 
 Jerome to be exclusively of a material order ; his 
 fidelity to his purpose is unshaken, and he never 
 
Andre Gide 281 
 
 ceases to regard his cousin as his guiding-star. 
 Unfortunately, in the world of Paris and Italy, in 
 the turmoil of literature and society, he finds the 
 instinctive devoutness of his carefully guarded 
 youth break down in an indifference which he 
 deplores but scarcely tries to resist. Somewhere 
 Renan makes a very acute remark when he says, in 
 effect, " le plus grand nombre des hommes a besoin 
 d'un culte a deux degres." Jerome, in the advance- 
 ment of his years, rests more and more wholly 
 upon Alissa for his religious preservation. 
 
 His cousin perceives this, and she retires from 
 him. He must live for God by himself, or not at 
 all, and in response to his passionate indignation, 
 he receives a definite dismissal : " Adieu, mon ami. 
 Hie incipit amor Dei. Ah ! sauras-tu jamais 
 combien je t'aime ? Jusqu'a la fin je serai ton Alissa." 
 The young lover, more ardent than ever, cannot 
 but conceive that this is a trap laid for his too wary 
 feet. In spite of prudence and duty, he will fly to 
 protest to his cousin his entire, his unalterable 
 ardour, and he will put an end to a false position, 
 which scruples have made ridiculous, by insisting, 
 at once, on a full and open ceremony of betrothal. 
 He arrives, incontinently, at Fougueusemare, where 
 the family receive him with enthusiasm, but only 
 to find Alissa singularly changed. She avoids all 
 private conversation with him, exhibits what in 
 any one else would seem the evidences of coldness 
 or disdain, and feigns for it can but be feigning 
 to misunderstand every suggestion and every protest 
 
282 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 he makes. This mysterious situation culminates at 
 length in another scene, at a subsequent and final 
 visit to his uncle's house. Alissa now no longer 
 shrinks from being alone with her cousin ; she 
 desires him to see her as she is. She presents 
 herself to him very dowdily dressed, without any 
 ornament ; she 1 takes him into her private room, 
 whence all her pictures and her books have 
 disappeared, "remplaces uniquement par d'insigni- 
 fiants petits ouvrages de piete vulgaire pour lesquels 
 j'esprais qu'elle n'avait que du mepris." He finds 
 her altered in mind, in taste, in appearance ; she 
 has become wilfully colourless and dull ; she has 
 followed the cruel counsel of the theologian 
 abetissez-vous ! and to the protestations of Jerome's 
 anger and despair she replies with a gentle in- 
 difference. " ' Laisse-moi vite/ dit-elle et comme 
 s'il ne s'6tait agi que d'un jeu : ' Nous reprendrons 
 cette conversation plus tard.' " 
 
 The conversation is not resumed, and soon after 
 this Alissa fades into a decline and dies. Her 
 journals give evidence of a consuming passion for 
 Jerome, against which she has contended, vainly 
 stoical, to the end. I do not know where to find 
 elsewhere in recent fiction so pathetic a portrait of 
 a saint as M. Gide gives us in Alissa Bucolin. She 
 is like one of the religious women that the Sienese 
 painters of the fifteenth century loved to represent, 
 shadowless and pale, with the flame of sanctification 
 already quivering on their foreheads ; or like Santa 
 Fina,as Ghirlandajo conceived her at San Gimignano, 
 
Andre Gide 283 
 
 already lost to earth, " un fruit de souffrance " 
 crushed into the cup of God's infinite mercy. But 
 where the extreme skill of the author of " La Porte 
 Etroite " is displayed is in the fact that while no 
 element of Alissa's progress in holiness is caricatured 
 or exaggerated, while every symptom of it is recorded 
 with a perfect sympathy for herself and recognition 
 of her aims, it is not with approval that M. Gide 
 writes. We have not here a consecrated Huysmans 
 vapouring about the ecstasies of St. Lydvvine of 
 Schiedam, but a man of modern training, clear-eyed 
 and cool, who entirely appreciates the nature of the 
 error he so closely describes, and regards it with 
 deep disapprobation. The sacrifice which Alissa 
 makes to scruple and to faith is a vain sacrifice, 
 futile and wretched, a tribute to that religion 
 " against nature, against happiness, against common- 
 sense," which is the final outcome of Puritanism. 
 But to all such arguments surely there.is no better 
 reply than the old, familiar one of William Johnson 
 in " Mimnermus in Church" : 
 
 Forsooth the present tee must give 
 To that which cannot pass away; 
 
 All beauteous things for which we live 
 By laws of time and space decay. 
 
 But oh, the very reason why 
 
 I clasp them, is because they die ! 
 
 In 1911 M. Andr< Gide presented to his readers 
 a novel, " Isabelle," which is wholly unlike any 
 of his previous books in character and form, yet 
 
284 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 which could only have been written by himself. 
 This is a story of strange adventures, or rather 
 the revelation of bygone adventures, in a decayed 
 chateau of Normandy. Gerard Lacase, the sup- 
 posed author of the tale, who is writing for his 
 doctor's degree a thesis on the chronology of 
 Bossuet's sermons, is informed that an old gentle- 
 man, member of the Academic des Inscriptions et 
 Belles-Lettres, possesses as people do in that 
 wonderful France a number of unpublished docu- 
 ments, and in particular a Bible covered with 
 annotations by the very hand of Bossuet. Lacase 
 obtains an introduction to this M. Floche, who lives 
 in a country-house near Pont-1'Eveque, and in the 
 middle of September he goes down, in response to 
 an amiable invitation, to spend a few days at 
 Quartfourche. His arrival is described in some of 
 the most admirable pages that M. Gide has signed. 
 Nothing happens as he expected that it would. 
 The route is winding, interminable, aimless in the 
 vague light of fading afternoon. The park, when 
 the broken-down carriage, which has been sent to 
 conduct the guest from the train, reaches it at last, is 
 sombre, overgrown, and deserted. As Tennyson says : 
 
 He comes, scarce knowing what he seeks : 
 He breaks the hedge : he enters there : 
 
 TAe colour files Into his cheeks : 
 
 He trusts to light on something fair. 
 
 As a matter of fact, he lights on poverty, on eccen- 
 tricity, on a baffling moral horror, the exposure 
 
Andre Gide 285 
 
 of which, in a sense absolutely contrary to that 
 which his young enthusiasm expected, gives the 
 story its violent finale, its curiously disconcerting 
 denouement. 
 
 It would be manifestly unfair for me to spoil the 
 legitimate surprise of the reader, which is led up to 
 with an exquisite art. In fact, so far as the actual 
 composition of "Isabelle" is considered, M. Gide 
 has written nothing more instinct with his peculiar 
 magic. Possibly, however, on laying it down, and 
 on freeing himself from its immediate charm, the 
 reader will be inclined to regard this novel as a step in 
 the direction of M. Gide's enfranchisement from con- 
 vention rather than as a work of positive perfection. 
 It is an experiment in a mode hitherto unfamiliar to 
 him. An effect more purely objective than had been 
 produced in his earlier stories is here striven after. 
 The subject being, as we say, objective, it is possibly 
 a mistake to have told the narrative in the first 
 person, since it involves an attitude in the narrator 
 which is often not a little unbecoming. In order that 
 the mystery should be unwoven, it is found needful 
 that the young student of Bossuet should engage in 
 a series of investigations which that meticulous pre- 
 late could not but have judged exceedingly indelicate. 
 The young guest listens at key-holes, he spies out 
 the movements of his hostesses, he opens and reads 
 and acts upon a letter intended for no eyes so little 
 as for his own. Probably, when M. Gide began 
 his tale, he did not anticipate that it would be 
 necessary to represent his young hero in the act 
 
286 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 of so many outrages upon good manners. He was 
 intent on the psychology of his figures, upon the 
 play of character under extravagantly unusual 
 conditions. But this necessity, which involves the 
 reader in some embarrassment, could have been 
 avoided by a less personal method of delivery. 
 
 The cadences of M. Gide's prose are so delicious 
 that I cannot resist the temptation to quote one 
 more brief example chosen almost at random from 
 his latest romance : 
 
 " Isabelle ! . . . et ce nom qui m'avait deplu tout 
 d'abord, se revetait a present pour moi d'elegance, se 
 pn6trait d'un charme clandestin . . . Isabelle de 
 Saint Aurol ! Isabelle ! J'imaginais sa robe blanche 
 fuir au detour de chaque allee ; a travers 1'incon- 
 stant feuillage, chaque rayon rappelait son regard, 
 son sourire mlancolique, et comme encore 
 j'ignorais 1'amour, je me figurais que j'aimais et, 
 tout heureux d'etre amoureux, m'ecoutais avec 
 complaisance. Que le pare etait beau ! et qu'il 
 s'appretait noblement a la melancolie de cette 
 saison dclinante. J'y respirais avec enivrement 
 1'odeur des mousses et des feuilles pourrissantes. Les 
 grands marroniers roux, a demi depouills deja, 
 ployaient leurs branches jusqu'a terre ; certains 
 buissons pourprs rutilaient a travers 1'averse ; 
 1'herbe, aupres d'eux, prenait une verdeur aigue ; 
 il y avait quelques colchiques dans les pelouses du 
 jardin ; un peu plus bas, dans le vallon, une prairie 
 en tait rose, que Ton apercevait de la carriere ou, 
 quand la pluie cessait, j'allais m'asseoir ; ou, reveuse, 
 
Andre Gide 287 
 
 Mademoiselle de Saint-Aureol s'etait assise naguere, 
 peut-etre." 
 
 Among recent imaginative writers M. Gide is 
 perhaps the most obstinately individualist. No 
 subject interests him so deeply as the study of 
 conscience, and in one of his early volumes I find 
 this charming phrase, petulantly thrown forth to 
 annoy the Philistines "Chacun est plus prcieux 
 que tous." Nothing vexes M. Gide so much as the 
 illogical limits which modern discipline lays down 
 for the compression of the human will. He has 
 written in " L'Immoraliste" what I admit is an 
 extremely painful study of the irritation and misery 
 caused by a too definite divergence from the com- 
 fortable type. He is impatient of the worry which 
 is brought about by moral and religious abstrac- 
 tions, and this I take to be the central idea 
 pervading some of his strictly symbolical work, 
 such as the strange drama of " Le Roi Candaule" 
 and the stranger extravaganza of " Philoctete." 
 These are books which will never be popular, which 
 are even provoking in their defiance of popularity, 
 which, moreover, bear the stamp of the petulance 
 of youth, but which will always attract the few by 
 the remoteness of their vision and the purity of 
 their style. 
 
 The strength of M. Gide's genius consists, I 
 believe, in the delicate firmness of his touch as an 
 analyst. He has no interest in groups or types ; 
 his eye is fixed on the elected spirit, on the ethical 
 exception. One of his characters in " Le Pro- 
 
288 Portraits and Sketches 
 
 methee Mal-Enchaine " exclaims, " Les person- 
 nalites, il n'y a que cela d'interessant ; et puis les 
 relations entre personnalites ! " We have here the 
 strait gate through which the author takes all his 
 imaginary figures, and if their conventionality has so 
 flattened them out that they cannot pass the test, he 
 flings them from him. It is a most encouraging 
 matter to the admirers of M. Gide that his progress 
 as an artist has been definite and steady. He has 
 grown from year to year in his sense of harmony, 
 in his sympathy with human existence. In his 
 early books he gave a certain impression of 
 hostility to ordinary life ; his personal attitude was 
 a little arrogant, tending a little to lawless eccentri- 
 city. The beautiful human pages of " La Porte 
 Etroite" show how completely he has outgrown 
 this wilful oddity of aim. 
 
 There is no other writer in Europe, at the present 
 moment, whose development is watched with so 
 eager an interest, by the most sensitive and intelli- 
 gent judges, as is that of M. Gide. What will he do 
 next ; what will he grow into ? Those are ques- 
 tions which every student of living literature must 
 ask himself as he contemplates the author of 
 "Pretextes" and of " Nouvelles Pretextes." He 
 aims, we perceive, at giving a new direction to the 
 art of the novelist, but who can feel sure that 
 he has yet discovered the exact way in which this is 
 to be done ? Thus he is for ever experimenting ; 
 he is never satisfied, never content to be a cliche of 
 himself. He seems to stand alone in the France of 
 
Andre Gide 289 
 
 to-day, midway between the schools, now leaning a 
 little to the revolutionary, now to the retrograde 
 party. He is the opponent, I take it, of that rash 
 and undisciplined improvisation which so danger- 
 ously fascinates so many young writers nowadays. 
 On the other hand, he is not delivered up, bound 
 hand and pen, to the old logical lucidity of classic 
 France. There is something northern about his 
 genius, which loves to cultivate tremulous caprices 
 and the twilight hours, and dreads the excess of 
 light that glares through the system of French 
 intellectual discipline. 
 
 I have said that M. Andr Gide is more closely 
 attuned in many respects to the English than to the 
 French spirit. This is true, if we regard his 
 attitude as a little belated. Since 1900 our native 
 authors have adopted a vociferous tone, which is 
 certainly not that of " La Porte Etroite." English 
 literature has, in this twentieth century, set up a 
 megaphone in the market-place, and the prize is for 
 him (or her) who shouts the loudest. But when we 
 say that M. Gide is in sympathy with English ideas, 
 it is of a slightly earlier period that we are thinking. 
 He is allied with such tender individualists of the 
 close of the nineteenth century as Shorthouse and 
 Pater. Those who delight in the contrast between 
 types of character, exhibited with great dexterity by 
 a most accomplished hand, will follow the literary 
 career of M. Andre" Gide with curiosity. 
 
 1909-12. 
 
INDEX 
 
INDEX 
 
 ACTON, Lord, 159 
 
 " Age, The," Bailey's, 88 
 
 " Age of Elizabeth," Creigh- 
 ton's, 177 
 
 " Angel World," Bailey's, 
 85 
 
 Arnold, Matthew, 155, 202, 
 203 
 
 Ashburnham, Lady Jane 
 Henriette, 45 
 
 " Atalantain Calydon," Swin- 
 burne's, 5-6 
 
 BAILEY, Philip James, 61- 
 93. Parentage, 69; first 
 edition of " Festus," 71 ; 
 the "Festus" of 1901, 72; 
 the lyrical element in 
 " Festus," 73 ; the keynote 
 of "Festus," 76; the nar- 
 rative, 78 ; reviewers, 82 ; 
 first admirers and advo- 
 cates of " Festus," 84 ; 
 " The Angel World," 85 ; 
 "The Mystic," 87; "The 
 Age," 88; style and in- 
 fluence, 85-93 
 
 " Balder," DobelPs, 91 
 
 Balestier, Wolcott, 215-225. 
 Parentage, 216 ; early 
 career, 216 ; life in London, 
 217-220; characteristics, 
 220-223 
 
 Baudelaire, Swinburne's re- 
 view of, 5 
 
 "Bay of Seven Islands," 
 Whittier's, 144 
 
 Bellmann, C. M., 229 
 
 " Benefits Forgot," Balestier's, 
 217, 224 
 
 Bigg, John Stanyan, 91 
 
 Benson, Mr. A. C., 217 
 
 "Blake, William," Swin- 
 burne's, 52 
 
 "Borough, The," Crabbe : s, 
 146 
 
 " Bothwell," Swinburne's, 52 
 
 Brandes, Georg, 235 
 
 British Museum, n, 130, 131 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 
 8,42, 84, 112, 115 
 
 Browning, Robert, 54-55, 70, 
 130 
 
 Burton, Sir Richard, 32 
 
 "CARDINAL WOLSEY," Creigh- 
 
 ton's, 186 
 
 Carlisle, George, 8th Earl of, 6 
 Carlyle, Thomas, 65 
 Catullus, 37 
 Chambers, Robert, 89 
 " Chastelard," Swinburne's, 6 
 " Christian Year," Keble's, 156 
 Churchill, Randolph, Lord, 
 
 169, 170 
 
 Cladel, Leon, 56 
 " Coeurs Russes," Vogue's, 264 
 Coleridge, S. T., 200 
 Columbus, Samuel, 229 
 Concord Riots, 141 
 
294 
 
 Index 
 
 " Cosmo de Medici," Home's, 
 103 
 
 " Course of Time," Pollok's, 
 68 
 
 Crabbe, George, 145, 146 
 
 Creighton, Mandell, parent- 
 age, 166; at Oxford, 167, 
 177; characteristics, 167- 
 169 ; at Embleton, 177, 
 182; at Cambridge, 183; 
 in Peterborough, 186; in 
 London, 189; at Moscow, 
 195 ; as a preacher, 194 ; 
 person, 195 ; character and 
 temperament, 191 
 
 Creighton, Mrs., 172 
 
 " Culture and Anarchy," 
 Arnold's, 202 
 
 " DEAD LOVE," Swinburne's, 
 
 5 
 
 de Vere, Aubrey, 61-63. 
 Parentage, 119-210; char- 
 acteristics, 121 
 
 de Vogue, Eugene Melchior, 
 243-265. Person, 2 44-246 ; 
 parentage, 246; early life, 
 247 ; travels, 248 - 250 ; 
 talent, 251; Russian in- 
 fluence, 252-254 ; diplo- 
 matic career, 249-254; 
 Taine, 255; in Paris, 256; 
 studies of Russian novelists, 
 258-263 ; latest works, 264 ; 
 " Revue des Deux Mondes," 
 254-265 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 47, 108-100 
 
 Dobson, Mr. Austin, 232 
 
 Dostoieffsky, 56 
 
 Dryden, 229 
 
 Dunton, Mr. Theodore Watts-, 
 53 
 
 "EARTHLY PARADISE," 
 Morris's, 203 
 
 Eleonora, Ulrika, Queen, 229 
 Eliot, George, 16, 263 
 Emerson, R.W., 140-141, 210 
 " English Historical Review," 
 
 185, 189 
 " Erechtheus," Swinburne's, 
 
 42 
 " Essays in Little," Lang's, 
 
 210 
 
 "FAIR DEVICE, A.," Bales- 
 tier's, 223 
 
 " Fairy Tale, A," Bailey's, 88 
 " Faust," Goethe's, 72-74, 76 
 " Festus," Bailey's, 69-73 
 " Fifine at the Fair," Brown- 
 ing's, 54 
 "Flashes and Patches," 
 
 Snoilsky's, 238 
 Franzen, F. M., 230 
 Freeman, Edward, 177 
 " Friendship's Garland," 
 
 Arnold's, 202 
 Froding, Gustaf, 238 
 
 GAINSBOROUGH, 152 
 Gardiner, S. R., 183 
 Gaskell, Mrs., 40 
 Gautier, Th^ophile, 35, 206 
 Geijer, E. G., 230 
 Gide, Andr, 269-289 
 Gifford, William, 145 
 Gladstone, W. E., 157, 159 
 Goethe, influence on Bailey, 
 
 74 
 
 Goncourt, Edmond de, 28 
 Gray, Thomas, 140 
 Green, John Richard, 177 
 Grey, George, Sir, 176 
 ' Guitar and Harmonica," 
 
 Snoilsky's, 238 
 
 HALLSTROM, Per, 240 
 Hardy, Mr. Thomas, 218, 223, 
 269 
 
Index 
 
 295 
 
 Heidenstam, Verner af, 238 
 " Helen of Troy,' Lang's, zo\ 
 Hewlett, Mr. Maurice, 153 
 "History of the Papacy," 
 Creighton's, 174, 176, 186, 
 188, 189 
 
 Holmes, O. W., 140, 141 
 Holy Grail," Tennyson's, 
 130 
 
 Home " Orion," character- 
 istics, 98-100; early ad- 
 ventures, 101 ; marriage, 
 108 ; in Australia, 109 ; his 
 correspondence with Mrs. 
 E. B. Browning, 100-115 
 Hugo, Victor, 31, 34, 40, 41, 
 203 
 
 IBSEN, 56 
 
 " Idylls of the King," Tenny- 
 son's, 129 
 
 " Immoraliste, 1'," Gide's, 285 
 
 " In Memoriam," Tennyson's, 
 129 
 
 " Isabelle," Gide's, 282 
 
 JAMES, Mr. Henry, 215 
 "Jean d' Agreve," de Vogue's, 
 
 264 
 
 "John Inglesant," Short- 
 house's, 154-162 
 Jones, Sir Edward Burne-, 49 
 "Joseph and his Brethren,' 1 
 
 Wells's, 52 
 Jowett and Mazzini, 6 
 
 KEATS, John, 63, 101, 123, 231 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 221, 269 
 
 " LACON," Colton's, 64 
 Lagerlof, Selma, 240 
 Lamb, Charles, 53 
 Landor, W. S., 40, 44, 52, 53 
 Lang, Andrew, 199-211. Ver- 
 satility, 200 ; individuality 
 
 202 ; eclecticism, 204 ; per- 
 son, 206 ; wit, 209 ; tempera- 
 ment, 210 
 
 Leighton, F., 33 
 
 " Letters and Literary Re- 
 mains," Shorthouse's, 151- 
 152 
 
 " Letters to Dead Authors," 
 Lang's, 210 
 
 " Lettres i Angele,' 1 Gide's, 
 269 
 
 Levertin, Oscar, 238 
 
 " Life Drama, A.," Smith 
 (Alex.), 91 
 
 " Little Schoolmaster Mark," 
 Shorthouse's, 155 
 
 " Lucretius," Tennyson's, 129 
 
 Lytton, Sir E. Bulwer, 84 
 
 MACAULAY, Lord, 68 
 
 Malherbe, 229 
 
 " Manfred," Byron's, 72 
 
 Marston, P. B., 49 
 
 " Maud," Tennyson's, 129 
 
 Maupassant and Swinburne, 
 
 20-21, 27-31 
 Mazzini, 18 
 Meredith, George, 218 
 Milton, John, 209 
 Minto, William, 53 
 " Mis4rables, les," Hugo's, 40 
 Montgomery, James, 71 
 Morris, William, 42, 130, 155 
 Miiller, Max, 172 
 " Mystic," Bailey's, 87 
 
 " NATURAL THEOLOGY," 
 
 Lang's, 205 
 
 Newman, J. H., 122, 124-125 
 ' New Poems," Snoilsky's,236 
 " Night and the Soul," Bigg's, 
 
 9 1 
 "Night Thoughts," Young's, 
 
 81 
 North, Christopher, 124 
 
296 
 
 Index 
 
 " OLD FRIENDS," Lang's, 210 
 " Orchids," Snoilsky's, 233 
 " Orion," Home's, 103-107 
 Oscar II., 237 
 O'Shaughnessy, Arthur, 49 
 Ossian, 63 
 
 "PAPACY,History of," Creigh- 
 ton's, 174, 177, 186, 188, 
 189 
 
 " Paracelsus," Browning's, 69 
 
 Pascal, 205 
 
 " Patent Philtre," Balestier's, 
 223 
 
 Pater, Walter, 172, 288 
 
 " Philip van Artevelde," 
 Taylor's, 66-69, 71 
 
 " Philoctete," Gide's, 286 
 
 Poe, Edgar Allan, 29 
 
 " Poems and Ballads," Swin- 
 burne's, 5-6, 36 
 
 Pope, Alexander, 229 
 
 Pope, John XXII., 178 
 
 " Porte Entroite," Gide's, 
 271-282 
 
 " Promethee Mal-Enchaine," 
 Gide's, 286 
 
 " Prometheus," Home's, no 
 
 Purnell, Thomas, 53 
 
 " QUEEN - MOTHER," Swin- 
 burne's, 5 
 
 RALSTON, W. R. S., 131, 133 
 
 Redesdale, Lord, 13 
 
 " Revue des Deux Mondes," 
 
 254, 258, 265 
 " Ring and the Book," 
 
 Browning's, 54 
 " Roi Candaule," Gide's, 
 
 271 
 "Roman Russe, le," de 
 
 Vogue's, 863, 264 
 Romney, 152 
 Ronsard, 203-204 
 
 Rossetti, D. G., 39, 130, 155, 
 
 203 
 Ruskin, John, 153, 200 
 
 " SALATHIEL," Croly's, 68 
 
 Sartoris, Mrs., 33 
 
 Saturday Review, 177 
 
 " Saiil," Gide's, 271 
 
 Seeley, Sir J. R., 183 
 
 Shakespeare, 41, 42 
 
 Shakespere Society, New, 54 
 
 Shelley, P. B., 24, 67, 82-83 
 
 Shorthouse, J. H., 151-162, 
 219, 288 
 
 " Short Poems," Snoilsky's, 
 232 
 
 " Simon de Montfort, Life 
 of," Creighton's, 177 
 
 Smith, Henry, 172, 174 
 
 Snoilsky, Carl, 229-240. 
 Parentage, 231; contem- 
 poraries, 232; early life, 
 232 ; in Italy, 233 ; in Swe- 
 den, 234; literary work, 
 236-239 
 
 "Songs Before Sunrise," 
 Swinburne's, 6 
 
 " Songs in Time of Change," 
 Swinburne's, 52 
 
 "Sonnets," Sir Aubrey de 
 Vere's, 120 
 
 Southey, Robert, 65-67 
 
 Spasmodists, The, 91 
 
 Spectator, 5 
 
 Spedding, James, 132 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., 56, 207-208, 
 269 
 
 Stjernhjelm, 229 
 
 Swinburne, Adam de, Sir, 4 5 
 
 Swinburne, Admiral, 46-48 
 
 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 
 impression produced upon 
 early admirers, 3; earliest 
 works, 5-6; second period 
 of public fame, 6; "The 
 
Index 
 
 297 
 
 Atalanta," " Chastelard." 
 "Poems and Ballads," 
 "Songs Before Sunrise," 
 6 ; physical conditions 
 affecting genius, 8-15; 
 unique appearance, 10 ; 
 agility and brightness, 1 1 ; 
 love of swimming, 12-13; 
 characteristics, 14-15 ; Maz- 
 zini, 17-18; at Etretat, 19- 
 28; with Maupassant, 20-32 ; 
 at Vichy, 33 ; Victor Hugo, 
 34, 40-41 ; conversational 
 powers, 36-39; study of 
 Shakespeare, 41 ; the Athe- 
 nceum and Erechtheus, 42 ; 
 sentiment about literature, 
 43 ; intellectual tempera- 
 ment, 45; ancestry, 45 ; resi- 
 dence in London, 47 ; coun- 
 try home, 48 ; prodigious 
 worker, 51 ; Browning, 54- 
 
 55 ; Stevenson, 56; Ibsen 
 and Dostoieffsky, 56 ; Zola, 
 
 56 ; Cladel, 56 ; revolt 
 against the mid- Victorian 
 Era, 57 ; praise of the sea, 
 175 ; Tennyson, 130 
 
 Swinburne, Miss Isabel, 14 
 
 TAYLOR, Sir Henry, 66 
 Tegn6r, Esias, 230 
 Tennyson, Alfred, 84, 129-134 
 Thackeray, W. M., 84 
 
 Theocritus, 210 
 Thompson, George, 142 
 Thornycroft, Mr. Hamo, 132 
 
 182 
 
 Tolstoy, 261 
 
 "Tom Jones," Fielding's, 154 
 Tourgeniev, 258 
 " Tracts for the Times," 65 
 Trost, Sven, 232 
 
 VALLIN, Theodule, Capt, 23 
 
 Victorian Mid-Era, Swin- 
 burne's revolt against, 57 
 
 "Victorious Defeat," Bales- 
 tier's, 223 
 
 Virgil, 119 
 
 "Voyages au Paysdu passe"," 
 de Vogue* 's, 249 
 
 WARD, Humphry, Mrs., 187, 
 
 215 
 
 Warburg, Karl, 232 
 Whistler, J. A. McNeill, 155 
 Whittier, J. G., 137-147. Per- 
 son, 139; characteristics, 
 143 ; place as poet, 146 
 William IV., 64, 65 
 Winther, Christian, 233 
 Wise, Mr. Thomas J., 5 
 Wordsworth, W., 51, 65, 121- 
 
 124, 157 
 
 "Wrong Paradise, In the," 
 Lang's, 210 
 
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