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SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 IN GOOD COMPANY 
 GOD AND THE ANT 
 CAPTAIN SHANNON 
 Etc., Etc. 
 
SWINBURNE 
 
 AS I KNEW HIM 4 4 
 
 WITH SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS 
 FROM THE POET TO HIS COUSIN THE 
 HON. LADY HENNIKER HEATON 
 
 By COULSON KERNAHAN d» 
 
 • 
 
 London: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 
 New York: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXIX 
 
Printed in Great Britain by R. Clay &> Sons, Ltd., London and Bungay. 
 
TO 
 
 MAURICE BARING 
 
 Dear M. B., 
 
 It is to the poet of whom I here write that 
 
 I owe, if indirectly, my friendship with you, whose 
 
 Dramatic Poems I hold to be greater and more 
 
 beautiful than those of any living poet. That he 
 
 had read and admired work of yours, I have cause 
 
 to know, and that he has no truer admirer than 
 
 you, I am equally aware. May I then link his 
 
 name with yours, in the dedication of this little 
 
 volume? 
 
 C. K. 
 
 
BY WAY OF PREFACE 
 
 THE WHY AND THE WHEREFORE OF THE 
 CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK, TO WHICH IS 
 ADDED A SWINBURNE " STORY " 
 
 SOON after I had finished the writing of 
 this small volume, two friends, whom 
 it is my wife's and my own happiness often 
 to welcome to our home — Sir John and the 
 Hon. Lady Henniker Heaton — were here ; 
 and as the latter is a cousin of Swinburne's, 
 I told our visitors that I had written a 
 second instalment of recollections. They 
 had already seen my previous reminiscences 
 of the great poet, and expressed themselves 
 as interested to see these. 
 
 They were then so good as to say that 
 I might have the use of the letters here for 
 the first time printed. That I was grateful 
 
 vii 
 
viii BY WAY OF PREFACE 
 
 so to be privileged, and remain grateful, 1 
 need hardly record, for one letter at least 
 has singular charm and is very characteristic 
 of the writer. 
 
 Half a dozen words from a great man are 
 of infinitely more interest and importance 
 than what a little man may, in very many 
 words, say of him. That is why I adopt the 
 unusual course of printing at the beginning 
 of this book, instead of at the end, in an 
 Appendix, the four letters in question. 
 
 When I penned my recollections oi 
 Swinburne (for In Good Company) I did 
 so with some reserve. Very little, either of 
 his early life or of his later days with that 
 "hero of friendship" Watts-Dunton, was 
 known to the outside world, and I did not 
 feel free to set down all that was within my 
 knowledge. 
 
 Now that Mr. Gosse's masterly and 
 brilliant Life as well as Swinburne s Letters 
 have been published, and the facts are widely 
 known — have, indeed, been the occasion of 
 
BY WAY OF PREFACE ix 
 
 some controversy — the reserve of which I 
 have spoken seems to me no longer necessary. 
 On the contrary, a wise frankness strikes 
 one as the better course. May I also say 
 that though I have written frankly of Watts- 
 Dunton, as well as of Swinburne, and have 
 not sought to paint him as other than he 
 was, and so not without human failings, my 
 affection for him, and the honour in which 
 I bear him, have only deepened with the 
 passing of the years ? In the whole history 
 of literary friendships, there is no chapter 
 more beautiful than Watts- Dunton's whole- 
 hearted and great-hearted devotion to what 
 he believed to be the best interests of his 
 friends Swinburne and Rossetti. 
 
 I conclude with a new and true "story" 
 concerning Swinburne. 
 
 Two elderly maiden ladies, with whom 
 " birth " counted for everything, and " brains," 
 even genius, scarcely at all, chanced to see 
 the exquisitely beautiful miniatures which 
 
 Lady Henniker Heaton (nie the lion. 
 
 b 
 
x BY WAY OF PREFACE 
 
 Sermonda Burrell) was so kind as to allow 
 to be reproduced in The Letters of Swin- 
 burne, which Dr. Arthur Compton-Rickett 
 and the late Mr. Thomas Hake so ably 
 edited. 
 
 " Who is this Mr. Swinburne, of whom we 
 hear so much ? " the elder lady asked. " We 
 know, of course, that he is a poet, but who 
 are his people ? " 
 
 " Oh, he's the son of Admiral Charles 
 Swinburne, who came of an old Northumber- 
 land family, and of Lady Jane Ashburnham, 
 of Battle Place, Sussex," was the reply. 
 " That," pointing to the miniature of Issabella 
 Burrell, Countess of Beverley, and ancestress 
 of the present Duke of Northumberland, 
 "was his great-grandmother. Those," in- 
 dicating the miniatures of Frances Julia 
 Burrell, Duchess of Northumberland, and 
 Elizabeth Burrell, Duchess of Hamilton and 
 Marchioness of Exeter, "were his great- 
 grand-aunts." 
 
 "Is that Really so!" exclaimed the elder 
 
BY WAY OF PREFACE xi 
 
 lady, vastly impressed. il I had no idea he 
 was so highly connected." Then, turning to 
 her sister: " Do remind me, directly we get 
 back, to order some of his books." 
 
 Frognal, 
 Fairlight, 
 
 Near Hastings. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 JAP. 
 
 Letters from A. C. Swinburne to his 
 Cousin, the Hon. Lady Henniker 
 Heaton .... 
 
 I. The Story of a Dear Deceit . 
 
 II. " Oh, those Poets ! " . 
 
 III. George Borrow in a Frock-coat 
 
 IV. " In the Days of our Youth " : Philip 
 
 Marston's " Hush ! " Story . 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 5 
 
 17 
 26 
 
 37 
 
 44 
 
 V. A. C. S. and R. L .S. . 
 
 VI. The Laureateship ; a Cartoon in the 
 Pall Mall Gazette; and some 
 Woman Poets whose Work Swin- 
 burne ADMIRED . . . .51 
 
 VII. A Sonnet in the Athenaeum, and 
 
 more "Dear Deceit" ... 73 
 
 VIII. "Puck of Putney Hill" ... 80 
 
 IX. A Paragraph in the Westminster 
 
 Gazette ..... 94 
 
 X. "All my Memories of him are Glad 
 
 and Gracious Memories" . . 100 
 
 XUl 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 LETTERS FROM A. C. SWINBURNE 
 
 TO HIS COUSIN, THE HON. LADY 
 
 HENNIKER HEATON 
 
 The Pines, 
 Sept. 9, 1903. 
 
 DEAR Cousin Sermonda, 
 It will give us both great pleasure 
 to accept your invitation for the 1 8th. 
 
 I long to make acquaintance with Peregrine 
 in the flesh. Persons of his age are in- 
 variably so good and kind to me, that I 
 count with some confidence on his friendly 
 patronage. With many thanks. 
 
 Your affectionate cousin, 
 
 A. C. Swinburne. 
 
 Note. — The "person" lure mentioned is my young 
 friend Peregrine, eldest son of Sir John and Lady 
 Henniker Heaton, and heir to the baronetcy. 
 
 B 
 
2 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 The Pines, 
 
 Putney Hill, S.W. 
 Sept. 10, 1903. 
 Dear Cousin Sermonda, 
 
 I am very sorry to say that Mr. 
 Watts- Dunton, who was so much pleased at 
 the idea of our visit, has just received some 
 grave news from friends in the country, 
 which will make it impossible for us to be 
 with you on the 18th. 
 
 The week after next we go to the seaside, 
 not far from Lancing. I cannot say what a 
 bitter disappointment it is to me to have 
 to postpone the pleasure of being presented 
 to Peregrine. I was looking forward to it 
 with longing and delight. 
 
 Your affectionate cousin, 
 
 A. C. Swinburne. 
 
 The Pines, 
 Dec. 7, 1904. 
 Dear Cousin Sermonda, 
 
 I am delighted to hear of the advent of 
 an adorable person, whose feet I long to kiss, 
 and greatly honoured by the proposal that I 
 should stand sponsor to an angel from heaven. 
 Only, you see, as that is very truly my 
 view of a new-born baby, it would be 
 impossible for me to take any part, direct or 
 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 3 
 
 indirect, in a religious ceremony which repre- 
 sents it as "a child of wrath " — words which 
 seem to me the most horrible of all blas- 
 phemies — standing in need of human inter- 
 vention to transmute it into "a child of 
 grace." I fear I must shock, but I trust I 
 may not offend you by the avowal of an 
 opinion which I have often enough, and 
 plainly, put forward in public. 
 
 I am none the less gratified by your kind- 
 ness in wishing to associate me in any 
 way with a child of yours. If only the 
 ceremony were secular, it would be to me 
 the very greatest pleasure as well as honour 
 to take any part in welcoming the arrival on 
 earth of a baby, in whose eyes (I always 
 think and maintain) we see all that we ever 
 can see here of heaven. 
 
 I am fairly well, thanks, and rejoice to hear 
 so good an account of Peregrine, whose kiss 
 I beg to return with interest. Mrs. Watts- 
 Dunton joins with me in all good wishes to 
 both of you, and thanks for yours. 
 
 Your affectionate cousin, 
 
 A. C. Swinburne. 
 
 Note. — The " adorable person " here mentioned is 
 another young friend of mine, Mary Araluen Henniker 
 Heaton, only daughter of Sir John and Lady Henniker 
 Heaton. 
 
4 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 The Pines, 
 June 24, 1907. 
 My dear Cousin, 
 
 Thanks for three charming photo- 
 graphs. Peregrine on (or off) Midget must 
 be a very sweet sight. 
 
 The little sister is most lovely. 
 But the charm of four weeks old is simply 
 inexpressible. 
 
 I return your volume with my name 
 written on the leaf. The Inscription to your 
 friend, the Princess, must be supplied by 
 yourself. 
 
 Ever sincerely yours, 
 
 A. C. Swinburne. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 THE STORY OF A DEAR DECEIT 
 
 FACING me on my library wall as I 
 pen these lines hangs a picture — 
 Swinburne's treasured portrait of Victor 
 Hugo. Writing to his sister on his own 
 birthday, April 5, 1897, Swinburne says, 
 in an unpublished letter: " Walter " (Watts- 
 Dunton) "has given me as a birthday present 
 a magnificent photograph (framed) of Victor 
 Hugo, taken standing on a lonely cliff in 
 Guernsey, and in a lovely high wind which 
 must have made the snapshot a miracle of 
 luck and skill. It is a superb likeness. One 
 can almost see the living light in his wonderful 
 eyes." 
 
 Oh, /hose poets ! was my comment when 
 
 I first saw this letter. For all the time, as 
 
 5 
 
6 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 any reader of these lines would see at a 
 glance, the picture, so far from being the 
 "moment's monument" of a fortunate snap- 
 shot, is a carefully, even affectedly posed 
 painting. Possibly the artist had in mind 
 the famous picture of Napoleon at St. Helena, 
 for Hugo stands on a narrow shelf of rock, 
 jutting out into the sea. His arms are self- 
 consciously, almost defiantly folded. His 
 collar is carefully arranged around his bust in 
 the correct and open-necked Byronic roll. 
 His cape streams, bannerwise, behind him in 
 the breeze, and even the clothing around his 
 lower limbs is picturesquely draped in every 
 fold. The poet, majestic of brow and magis- 
 terial of frown, has his eyes fixed and intent, 
 as if in rhapsody, upon the vastness of 
 old ocean, with which one is presumably 
 intended to understand his great mind is 
 communing. 
 
 It is a fine and striking picture, for the 
 gift of which I was very grateful, and to me, 
 at least, it has memories and associations 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 7 
 
 which make it more than precious. But none 
 other than a poet — a poet, that is, of the 
 type which only imagines, and rarely if ever 
 reasons, as was the case with Swinburne — 
 could have persuaded himself into believing 
 that it was a snapshot from life. Yet these 
 are the poets who most delight and fascinate 
 us, for they see life with a child's freshness of 
 eyes, and retain to the last not a little of the 
 child-heart and of childhood's illusions. 
 
 This was the factor which Watts-Dunton 
 had before him when he set out to effect an 
 entire change in Swinburne's habits and life. 
 The weaknesses, inherited or acquired, of 
 genius are matters upon which, were it pos- 
 sible to do so, one would prefer to remain 
 silent ; but the fact that the "last infirmity of 
 noble mind" of which Milton sings was, in 
 Swinburne's case, though only in early life, 
 alcoholic excess, has lately so repeatedly 
 been stated in print, and indeed is so much a 
 matter of common knowledge, that one need 
 no longer hesitate to speak of it. That is 
 
8 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 why I propose here to tell, I believe for the 
 first time, the story of Watts- Dunton's dear 
 deceit and loving and lovable guile, when he 
 set himself the task of which I have spoken. 
 
 Naturally, I do not write as an eyewitness, 
 for all this happened not far from forty years 
 ago. I tell the story for what it is worth, as 
 it was told to me by an old and intimate 
 friend of Swinburne and of Watts-Dunton, 
 who was frequently in their company at 
 the time. 
 
 When Watts-Dunton took Swinburne in 
 hand, the latter had been drinking brandy 
 steadily and for some time, the result being — 
 one need not go into medical details — that 
 he was physically so prostrated as to be 
 unable to leave his bed for three weeks. 
 Watts-Dunton knew that he was dealing 
 with one who, his genius and his great brains 
 notwithstanding, was in some respects a child. 
 He knew too that suddenly and entirely to 
 cut off all alcohol would, in the case of one 
 so accustomed to, and in a sense so depend- 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM o 
 
 ent upon it, be unwise, and might even 
 endanger life. This then is how he went to 
 work. 
 
 " Do you know, Algernon," he began, 
 taking up the glass of brandy-and-water 
 which stood by Swinburne's bedside and 
 looking at it sourly, "this stuff isn't a drink 
 in any real sense of the word. It is a drug, 
 a medicine, to be taken only when prescribed 
 by doctors — beastly stuff in my opinion at 
 any time, and the very last drink in the world 
 for a poet. Look at our great Tennyson. 
 What does he drink? Port, that divinest 
 nectar of the grods, the life-blood of the vine, 
 distilled sunshine, as it were, caught and 
 chaliced in the red heart of such grapes as 
 grow nowhere out of old Spain, land of 
 sunshine and song and lovely women. 
 
 " But brandy — bah ! the very smell of it 
 calls up sick-rooms, as well as wretched (and 
 retching) Cockney travellers on a Channel 
 steamer in a rough crossing. They tell me 
 that old Tennyson never drinks less than a 
 
to SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 bottle of port a day, and that its generous, 
 life-giving qualities make another man of 
 him, set his brain newly afire and singing, 
 like great seas in a storm, even when he is 
 no longer young. I was lucky enough to 
 get a few bottles of the very brand that he 
 drinks — first-class vintage year, too, my wine 
 merchant tells me. They're in the cellar at 
 this moment. I have half a mind to crack 
 a bottle now, to drink old Tennyson's health 
 and our very good selves. Do you feel like 
 joining me ? " 
 
 Swinburne, as eager now as a child hear- 
 ing for the first time of " rainbow gold," and 
 fretting at every moment's delay in setting 
 out to find the exact spot where the bow 
 touches earth, was sitting up in bed, chafing 
 the palms of his hands together exultantly 
 and impatiently. 
 
 " Oh yes, do get one up ! How perfectly 
 delightful ! The very port which Tennyson 
 drinks, and such a wine as you tell me ! " 
 He pushed the brandy-and-water aside, 
 
SWINBURNE AS i KNEW IIIM u 
 
 almost with disfavour. "But do be quick; 
 I'm dying to taste it." The port, casketted 
 in a wicker cradle, and lying at an angle as 
 little as possible out of the horizontal, so as 
 not to disturb the beeswing, was carried, as 
 carefully as if every drop were worth a 
 fortune, to the bedside for Swinburne's in- 
 spection. Eulogizing the condition, colour 
 and bouquet of the wine, Watts-Dunton filled 
 two glasses, and the toast, " Tennyson, and 
 our noble selves," was given. Swinburne 
 drank his share ecstatically, with many a 
 murmured: "Ah!" and "Nectar for the 
 gods, indeed ! " Watts-Dunton meanwhile 
 grumbling contemptuously between his sips : 
 "Brandy, forsooth! doctor's stuff! What 
 poet would drug himself with brandy when 
 he can get so divine a draught as this ! " 
 
 And so brandy disappeared from Swin- 
 burne's table, and for a month or more the 
 two friends — the one quaffing generously, 
 the other sipping more cautiously — drank 
 port together. 
 
12 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 Then Watts- Dunton, affecting to rub his 
 open palm over the small of his back, very- 
 much as sufferers from " that tired feeling " 
 are pictured in quack medicine advertise- 
 ments, grumbled : " I don't know how you 
 feel, my boy, but you and I are not perhaps 
 such rough and hardy Berserkers as old 
 Tennyson, or it may be we don't get as much 
 active exercise in the day as he, but I for 
 one begin to find port a trifle heavy. One 
 of the biggest wine-growers from the Conti- 
 nent told me the other day that Burgundy is 
 the best of all drinks in a climate like ours. 
 It is lighter than port, which is apt to clog 
 the liver unless you are sparing with it. A 
 glass or two of port to sip over your walnuts 
 after dinner can't be beaten, but at any other 
 time of the day, he says, whether at dinner 
 or between meals, there is nothing in the 
 world so fine as good, generous old Burgundy. 
 It's blood-making, nerve-strengthening, body- 
 building, brain-firing. It's the wine that our 
 Dumas' immortal Three Musketeers, Athos, 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 13 
 
 Porthos and Aramis, not forgetting the finest 
 fellow of them all, D'Artagnan, thrived on, 
 made love on, fought on ; and most of all — 
 you are half a Frenchman, you tell me — it 
 is the wine of your own La Belle France. 
 I picked up a case the other day, and I 
 propose we sample a bottle at lunch, if 
 only to drink to Dumas and the immortal 
 three." 
 
 Again the ruse succeeded. Warned off 
 brandy or warned off port for the very good 
 reason that he was injuring his bodily health 
 and unduly inflaming and exciting a too-in- 
 flammable and too-excitable brain, Swinburne 
 would have paid no heed. Put as Watts- 
 Dunton put it, the poet and the child in 
 Swinburne responded. The Burgundy was 
 broached, the immortal three toasted, and 
 the poet vowed again and again that there 
 was no such wine as the glorious Burgundy 
 of old France, which for a month or two 
 displaced the Tennyson port. 
 
 Then Watts-Dunton, with no little hair- 
 
i 4 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 rumpling and hair-smoothing, delivered him- 
 self portentously somewhat as follows : 
 
 " I've been dining out a good deal lately ; 
 and, casting an eye around at the most ex- 
 clusive clubs and elsewhere, I asked myself: 
 ' What is it, after all, that gentlemen drink ? ' 
 I'm no snob, I hope, and I use the word 
 in this instance not only in the sense of 
 birth and breeding, but in the sense of that 
 selective instinct (it is born in the blood, I 
 believe), that delicate and cultivated taste 
 which is satisfied only with the best ; and to 
 the question, ■ What is the best in the matter 
 of wine ? ' there is only one answer — claret. 
 Even Burgundy is a trifle coarse and gross 
 beside it. The canaille won't, so I'm told, 
 touch claret. Only an educated taste, only 
 the palate of a connoisseur, can appreciate it. 
 There is no other wine in the world which, 
 in bouquet, in fragrance, in delicate and 
 delicious flavour and aroma, can for a moment 
 compare with the best claret." 
 
 Once aeain Swinburne was induced to 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 15 
 
 transfer his allegiance, this time from Bur- 
 gundy to claret, just as he had previously 
 transferred his allegiance from brandy to 
 port, and from port to Burgundy. Then, 
 having by such dear deceit lured a wayward 
 and rebellious child, a half-irresponsible poet 
 who was deaf to appeals of reason and self- 
 interest, from the perilous place where he 
 had been standing to one of less imminent 
 danger, thence to surer foothold still, and 
 then to comparative safety — Watts- Dunton 
 made the final effort. 
 
 All this time, Swinburne, each step chosen 
 for him by Watts-Dunton, was led to believe 
 that he was acting by his own choice, and so 
 he was led to believe to the last. 
 
 " There's a theory of mine, a pet theory, 
 that I want to ask your opinion about." Thus 
 Watts-Dunton to Swinburne after claret, and 
 claret only, had held the field at The Pines 
 for a month or so. "It is this, that wherever 
 you are, you should drink the 'wine of the 
 country.' If one is in Scotland, one drinks 
 
16 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 the wine of the country, Scotch whisky ; if 
 in Ireland, Irish whisky ; if in Germany, 
 hock or German moselle ; in France, graves, 
 sauterne, claret, Burgundy or champagne ; 
 in Spain or Portugal, port ; in Italy, chianti. 
 What is our England's wine of the country ? 
 Why, whether drunk out of the cool depths 
 of a pewter or china mug, in some quaint 
 old English inn with diamond-paned win- 
 dows, sanded floors and oaken benches, or 
 out of a silver tankard from His Lordship's 
 sideboard — the most refreshing, appetizing, 
 stimulating, healthiest, best and most natural 
 of all drinks for an Englishman is Charles 
 Stuart Calverley's ' beverage for feasting 
 gods,' Shakespeare's brown October, our own 
 glorious and incomparable British beer ! " 
 
 And so, to Shakespeare's brown October 
 having thus lured Swinburne — to Shake- 
 speare's brown October, otherwise bottled 
 beer, Watts-Dunton thereafter kept his poet 
 friend, and to the end. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 " OH, THOSE POETS ! " 
 
 SWINBURNE had carried me off to show 
 me some bibliographical treasures he had 
 recently acquired. At lunch he had had no 
 more than his usual glass of beer, and when 
 he rose from the table was as quiet and self- 
 controlled as any of us. Upstairs, in his own 
 room, however, the conversation chancing to 
 turn upon a subject on which he felt keenly, 
 he suddenly became extraordinarily excited, 
 clasping and unclasping his hands convul- 
 sively, twitching his limbs, his eyes glittering 
 unnaturally, the veins on the temples "cord- 
 ing " and pulsing visibly, until at last — I know 
 it sounds preposterous to say so, but so it 
 was — he had literally, if one may so word it, 
 
 u talked himself drunk." " Inebriated by 
 d 17 
 
iS SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 the exuberance of his own verbosity," said 
 Beaconsfield of Gladstone. There spoke 
 the novelist, the coiner of phrases. What 
 I have said of Swinburne is more than a 
 phrase : it is a fact. Once again life plagiar- 
 ized literature ; once again what had first 
 existed as an idea in the brain of a man of 
 imagination took form thereafter in actual 
 flesh and blood. Swinburne had been talking 
 rapidly, volubly, brilliantly, all the time, but 
 now the talk poured out faster and more 
 brilliantly than ever, with never a moment's 
 hesitation in the choice of a word or an image. 
 Yet every word was the golden word, every 
 image was the one inevitable illustration from 
 the physical world which, in an imaginative 
 sense, counterparted the truth in the world 
 of thought, on which the poet was expatiating. 
 His voice, which, if thin and reedy, had con- 
 siderable carrying power, was now keyed to 
 a shriller note, and so must have reached the 
 room below. Anyhow, I was aware of a 
 scrambling step upon the stairs, and Watts- 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 19 
 
 Dunton entered, hurriedly and agitatedly. 
 A glance at Swinburne told him all. White 
 and worried, Watts-Dunton said to me — not 
 in a whisper, for Swinburne's deafness made 
 that unnecessary, but in a sort of " aside" 
 which he hoped would escape the other's 
 notice : " For God's sake, don't say another 
 word to induce him to continue talking ! He 
 must be got to lie down, and if possible to 
 sleep, or I shall have him half out of his 
 mind to-night." 
 
 Though I was not conscious of having said 
 or done anything unduly to excite Swinburne, 
 I never recall the incident without gratitude 
 to Watts-Dunton for his extraordinary 
 gentleness — not only to Swinburne, whose 
 very weakness, to say nothing of the love 
 Watts-Dunton bore him, entitled the poet to 
 such consideration, but also to me, by whom 
 no such consideration was deserved. I felt 
 that I ought, long before, to have observed 
 that Swinburne was so unduly exciting him- 
 self as to threaten "a scene." From this I 
 
20 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 ought to have done what was possible to 
 guard him — and Watts-Dunton, on whom, 
 as I well knew, the burden of all such trouble 
 inevitably fell — by starting, conversationally, 
 a hare of another colour, thereby to distract 
 Swinburne's attention, and to set the grey- 
 hounds of his marvellous talk coursing in 
 other directions. 
 
 Watts-Dunton, always thoughtful for 
 others, instantly divined my uneasiness of 
 mind. 
 
 " Don't be unhappy about this business, 
 dear boy," he found time, even then, to say 
 under his breath to me. " It's no fault what- 
 ever of yours. The same thing has happened 
 over and over again. Now you know why 
 I try to keep some of those, who have every 
 right to be so left, from being left alone with 
 Algernon. Some of them are jealous of my 
 interference, as they call it, and say unkind 
 things of me. They accuse me of jealously 
 seeking to keep him away from them. It is 
 true that I do so keep them away — one dear 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 21 
 
 soul especially, whom he loves, whom I love, 
 and who I am sure loves him. But I don't do 
 so for any such reason as is attributed to me. 
 The dear soul of whom I speak is almost as 
 excitable by nature as he. There is genius 
 there, too. But the excitability of the one 
 reacts on the excitability of the other, and 
 then there is trouble for him and for me. 
 When that dear soul whom I love and 
 honour — but who thinks, I fear, unkindly of 
 me — is gone, I have the very deuce of a time 
 in trying to soothe and to quiet him. And 
 in other cases, I know very well what some 
 who come here say and think of me. I 
 know the ungenerous impression — that I'm 
 jealous, that I play the watch-dog (so I do) — 
 which gets abroad. But on my soul, dear 
 boy, what I do, in keeping him from certain 
 folk, is done from love of Algernon, and in 
 what seems to me the best interests of his 
 great genius. 
 
 " I can't say all this, so I must be content 
 to be misunderstood even by some whom 
 
22 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 I love, and to be misrepresented by some 
 who, I fear, don't like me. They abuse me 
 while I'm alive, and one or two of them will, 
 I know, slander me when I'm dead. It can't 
 be helped, though few men wince more, or 
 are pained more thus to be misunderstood 
 than I. 
 
 " As for this afternoon's happenings, if any- 
 one is to blame, it is I, for not foreseeing, 
 earlier, that Algernon was in the mood and 
 the condition to work up to an outbreak. 
 Then I should have persuaded him to go 
 straight off to sleep after lunch. In any case, 
 I ought to have warned you not to let him 
 talk too much, or too animatedly." 
 
 Here Swinburne, who, for all his excitement 
 and irresponsibility, was clapping an uncom- 
 monly shrewd, if angry eye upon the pair of 
 us, broke in : 
 
 " That is always the way," he said, address- 
 ing me, and vehemently. " Whenever I have 
 the great luck to get a good fellow up here, 
 to bear me company, to interest me by his 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 23 
 
 talk, and to be interested in mine — when- 
 ever that happens, which is rarely enough 
 nowadays, God knows, and when the battle 
 of wits is at its best — thought-rapier meeting 
 and parrying thought-rapier, or thrusting 
 home — in comes our dear, watchful Watts- 
 Dunton, to carry off my good fellow com- 
 panion, and to coax and to wheedle me to 
 bed." 
 
 " Don't go ! " he continued imploringly. 
 " We'll finish our talk, Watts-Dunton or no 
 Watts-Dunton." 
 
 The last-named was meanwhile emphatic- 
 ally negativing Swinburne's request by 
 much portentous head-shaking and frowning 
 at me over his friend's shoulder, and was 
 striving, with almost a woman's patience and 
 gentleness, to soothe the other's excitement. 
 In the end, Watts-Dunton prevailed, and 
 persuaded Swinburne to the siesta on which 
 so much depended. 
 
 I have sometimes been asked whether the 
 extraordinary influence which Watts-Dunton 
 
24 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 exercised over Swinburne, Rossetti, and 
 others was or was not due to some power 
 mesmeric or magnetic, but here was no 
 mesmerism nor magnetism, other than 
 patience, forbearance, solicitude, under- 
 standing, and devotion. Watts-Dunton was, 
 I happened to know, ill, tired, and over- 
 wrought that morning, for reasons of his own, 
 but when those he loved had need of him he 
 thought never of himself 
 
 Reservations there should and must be, 
 when writing of the private life of those into 
 whose home one is welcomed as a friend, and 
 it was not my intention ever to tell this story 
 in print. More than one intimate picture of 
 life at The Pines has, however, recently been 
 drawn ; the doors of that home have in a 
 sense been thrown wide to the public eye ; 
 and Swinburne's temperamental weaknesses 
 and defects have been made the subject 
 of discussion. For this reason, and because, 
 since his death, unkind things have been said 
 of Watts- Dunton's wardenship of Swinburne, 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 25 
 
 I no longer feel the same hesitation in putting 
 this memory-impression on record. If of 
 small worth in itself, it may serve to show 
 that at least Watts- Dunton had no easy task, 
 and that he discharged it in a spirit of self- 
 sacrifice and sincerity. 
 
 E 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 GEORGE BORROW IN A FROCK-COAT 
 
 I DO not recall a face over which so many 
 and such swiftly changing expressions 
 passed as Swinburne's. Mischief, malice (only 
 in the mischievous, not in the evil sense), 
 anger, pity, sorrow, fun, hate, humour, 
 scorn, and many another expression came 
 and went there, as cloud-shadows chase 
 each other across a field of corn. One 
 subject there was which he barred. Had 
 I been so stone deaf as to be unable to 
 hear a word that was said, I should always 
 have known, so long as I could have seen 
 Swinburne's face, when Watts-Dunton was 
 on the eternal subject, as it was with him, 
 of gypsies. 
 
 The first symptom would be the fading 
 
 26 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 27 
 
 away of all light, interest, and animation 
 from Swinburne's generally interested and 
 animated face. I do not say I was re- 
 minded of the sudden darkening of a land- 
 scape which a few moments before had 
 been flooded with sunlight, for though the 
 glory and the glamour be then gone, the 
 landscape itself remains unchanged. 
 
 When Watts-Dunton got upon his be- 
 loved, and to my thinking somewhat boring, 
 subject of gypsies, Swinburne's face not 
 only lost animation and interest (as a land- 
 scape might lose sunlight), but the expres- 
 sion so changed that in an Irish sense I 
 should describe it as an expression in which 
 there was no expression. Not only — again 
 to use the landscape metaphor — had the 
 sunlight faded away, but a mist had sud- 
 denly intervened, and so had made a mere 
 negation, as it were, of what had been 
 landscape. 
 
 Thereafter the poet relapsed into bore- 
 dom so unrelieved that I was reminded of 
 
28 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 what a certain wit once said when I 
 mentioned the name of a man known to 
 us both. 
 
 " Oh yes. You mean Headland," said 
 the wit. 
 
 " ' Headland ' ? " I repeated. " Why ■ Head- 
 land ' ? That is not part of his name." 
 
 ''Living near Hastings as you do," was 
 the answer, " you must have noticed how 
 Beachy Head seems to stand out, to brood 
 over, and to dominate all that part of the 
 coast." 
 
 "Often," I replied. 
 
 "Well, the habitual gloom of the friend 
 of whom we are speaking is like that — it 
 seems to brood and to dominate over 
 every one and everything. That is why I 
 call him Headland. He is a sort of 
 Beachy Head, a headland, of unrelieved 
 hump." 
 
 Similarly Swinburne's "speaking" face 
 proclaimed aloud his unmitigated boredom 
 at mention of gypsies. A bird, suddenly 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 29 
 
 finding itself trapped, might at first, and 
 in search of a way out, turn its head this 
 way and that with the same sudden, quick 
 movement. Then, seeing that way out 
 there was none — that Watts- Dunton was 
 well astride of his hobby, and meant riding 
 on — over Swinburne's face would come, 
 first of all, the prodigious gloom of bore- 
 dom. This gloom would sometimes give 
 way to an almost angry glare in his pale 
 green eyes, but thereafter he would relapse 
 into such vacuum of brown study as never 
 was, since this world was without form or 
 void. 
 
 I, too, in my own way, wearied of Watts- 
 Dunton's gypsy dissertations, and jibbed, 
 conversationally, at mention of " Romany 
 Ryes," ''Romany chals," " dukkeripens," 
 "gorgios," and the like. The fact is, that 
 Watts-Dunton's gypsy talk always struck 
 me as unreal. I do not for a moment 
 doubt his sincerity, but I had long ago 
 settled with myself that if this great- 
 
30 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 hearted man, my dear friend, as he was, 
 had a weakness (and as Emerson some- 
 where says, should an angel come to preach 
 the moral law, we must be prepared to find 
 that he keeps a bottle in a cupboard, or 
 has some other habit or infirmity for which 
 one must be ready to make allowance) — 
 Watts-Dunton's weakness was surely some- 
 thing uncommonly like a " pose " in regard 
 to gypsies. He delighted to think himself 
 at heart half a gypsy. He never to my 
 knowledge contradicted (I am not sure that 
 it did not please him) the tradition, whence 
 arising I do not know, that as a young man 
 he had not only been closely associated 
 with gypsies, but for a time had actually 
 lived with them. I do not say it was all 
 tradition, but I suspect accretions. The 
 first great man on whom the youthful 
 Watts-Dunton had set eyes was George 
 Borrow. Then and there Lavengro won 
 the boy's worship, and there is no worship 
 more lasting than a boy's. Only the other 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 31 
 
 day a soldier friend of mine, feted and 
 lionized by his fellows, and decorated by 
 the King for an act of consummate bravery, 
 told me that when, by invitation, he re- 
 visited his old school, he felt himself an 
 entire nonentity, compared with the not 
 very important or distinguished cleric who 
 was still Head Master. My friend assured 
 me that when, waiting in an ante-room, he 
 first heard outside the door the voice which 
 has once inspired terror in that little world, 
 — his (my soldier friend's) heart jumped, 
 and he was still conscious of the feeling of 
 awe and trepidation with which he and 
 others had once awaited the great man's 
 entrance. 
 
 It was so, perhaps, that Watts- Dunton 
 felt about George Borrow. The author of 
 Aylwin had won his own place in the 
 world, and was on terms of intimacy with 
 men as fully entitled to respect as Borrow. 
 But them Watts- Dunton had known before 
 they had attained eminence. As Venus was 
 
32 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 supposed to have had no mother, but to 
 have arisen in immortal and perfect beauty 
 from the foam of the sea, so — to strain 
 fancy extravagantly — Borrow, when he first 
 came within Watts- Dunton's ken, was al- 
 ready a god, and a god he remained in his 
 hero-worshipper's eyes to the last. Com- 
 ment has been made upon the fact that, 
 remembering how closely associated Watts- 
 Dunton was with men of marked person- 
 ality, it is strange how little any of them 
 seem to have influenced him. True as the 
 remark may be of Rossetti, Swinburne, and 
 others, it is not true of Borrow. His 
 influence is evident in almost every page 
 of Aylwin. Possibly had he not lived, 
 and had Watts-Dunton not come under his 
 influence early in life, Alywin would 
 never have been written. It was, I sus- 
 pect, solely because of Borrow's associa- 
 tions with gypsies that Watts-Dunton 
 must needs assume something of the same 
 picturesque pose. Being his only pose, it 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 33 
 
 may be forgiven him, but a pose it always 
 seemed to me ; and I am not sure that 
 Swinburne's boredom and impatience at the 
 mention of gypsies was not due to the fact 
 that he felt very much as I felt upon the 
 matter. Though Watts- Dunton liked to 
 think of himself, and was pleased that 
 others should think of him, as half a gypsy 
 and all a Bohemian, he v/as, as a matter 
 of fact, an eminently respectable suburban 
 solicitor, conservative of habit and tastes, 
 and so far from wishing to set at nought 
 the established conventions, I am by no 
 means sure that, in his heart, he did not 
 entertain an unhappy, because secret and 
 hopeless, passion for the late Mrs. Grundy. 
 I say " hopeless " for the reason that he 
 felt that, if not exactly "another's," she 
 could, none the less, " never be his." The 
 Borrow pose forbade the banns. Society 
 (though never a suitor for her hand, Watts- 
 Dunton liked to think of Dame Society as 
 one of his Might-have- Beens, with whom 
 
 F 
 
34 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 he occasionally permitted himself to ex- 
 change non-committal compliments) would 
 have consigned such a bride and bride- 
 groom to social Coventry. Society had 
 accepted and approved the Borrow pose. 
 She invited Watts-Dunton to her At Homes 
 (only half-expecting him to come) because 
 Borrow, being dead, Society thought well 
 to applaud Borrovianism and Bohemianism, 
 so long as not overdone. She might have 
 elevated her eyebrows at Borrow in the 
 flesh, have thought him over-large, over- 
 loud, over-lusty, and likely badly to trample 
 her carpets and to bring mud into the 
 house. But Borrovianism in patent leather 
 shoes and a frock-coat, wedded to Watts- 
 Dunton's delightful manners and great repu- 
 tation as an intimate of celebrities, was an 
 attraction at Society's receptions. And all 
 the while, had Borrow and Watts-Dunton 
 been compelled to make shift with each 
 other's company (as, for instance, on a 
 desert island) for a week or two, what a 
 disillusionment there would have been ! As 
 
SWINl'.URNE AS I KNEW HIM 35 
 
 it was, the two men met only rarely to 
 exchange civilities and a few words at Dr. 
 Hake's ; and so to the last, Borrow — the 
 first great man that Watts- Dunton ever 
 saw — loomed large and godlike in his eyes, 
 as first seen through the golden mists of a 
 romantic boy's imagination. 
 
 While Watts-Dunton was indulging in 
 Borrow and " Children of the Open Air " 
 talk at receptions, he was in heart in the 
 suburbs with Mrs. Grundy, and worshipping 
 propriety as personified in Tennyson. Me 
 had deep personal love for Rossetti and 
 for Swinburne, and may be said to have 
 supervised, censored, and criticized both 
 their lives and their poetry, but he stood 
 in no awe of either, which he did of 
 Tennyson, both as poet and as man. Not 
 for Swinburne, nor for Rossetti, scarcely 
 even for Shakespeare, had Watts-Dunton 
 such worshipping reverence as for Tennyson 
 and Borrow. So far as I am aware, the 
 following sonnet to Tennyson on his eighty- 
 second birthday has never been included in 
 
36 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 any collection of Watts- Dunton's poems, 
 nor in any anthology. Hence it is likely 
 to be new to the reader : 
 
 If Nature loves thee, so does conquering Time ; 
 The lyre that sixty years ago was strung 
 To beauty, when thy song of morn was sung, 
 
 Time touched with thee till beauty grew sublime. 
 
 The voice which ravished, in that morning rhyme, 
 Ears of a day now dead and lit its tongue, 
 Grown now to godlike — neither old nor young — 
 
 Rings through the world in an immortal prime. 
 
 Shall I, then, fear these fourscore years and two 
 That crown thy brow with eld's prerogative — 
 Wise thoughts and love and all that age can give ? 
 
 Why should I fear, since nothing dare subdue 
 
 The song that helped our fathers' souls to live 
 
 And bids the waning century bloom anew ? 
 
 The sonnet is saved by the last two lines. 
 The twelve preceding lines are ordinary. 
 Then, with the startlingness of a thunder- 
 clap on some slowly dragging day, seem- 
 ingly too dull and ordinary for thunder, the 
 sonnet suddenly rises, in the final line, at 
 least, into the poetry that throbs and sings : 
 
 The song that helped our fathers' souls to live 
 And bids the waning century bloom anew. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 "in the days of our youth": 
 philip marston's "hush!" story 
 
 THE fact that Swinburne "ran wild" 
 in his early days is now so well known 
 that to the telling of a story of those early 
 days there can surely be no objection. It 
 was told me by Philip Bourke Marston, the 
 blind poet, to whom his godmother, Dinah 
 Mulock Craig, author of John Halifax, 
 Gentleman^ addressed her well-known poem, 
 " Look at me with thy large brown eyes, 
 Philip, my king." That was, of course, when 
 Marston was a child and before he was blind. 
 It was to him that Rossetti addressed a 
 lovely sonnet. 
 
 " Have you heard," Marston said one day 
 
 37 
 
38 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 in the 'eighties, "why Swinburne left the 
 Arts Club?" 
 
 I replied that I had not heard why Swin- 
 burne had left the club in question. 
 
 " And you have perhaps heard that he was 
 expelled ? " 
 
 " Yes, I have so heard," was the answer. 
 
 " Ah! that comes of trying to hush things 
 up ! " said Marston, anger coming into his 
 beautiful but sightless eyes, and into his soft, 
 musical, melancholy, half-lisping voice. 
 
 "If there is one thing," he went on, "of 
 which I am certain, it is that I am not long 
 for this world. Some of you will soon be 
 following me to my last home under the 
 daisies. There will be a line or two in the 
 papers about the ending to the sad life of a 
 young poet, and the Athenceum and the 
 Academy will say, as kindly as possible, all 
 that there is to be said — it isn't much — in 
 their obituary column. Except that I shall be 
 sorry never again to feel a woman's lips on 
 mine, never to have a friend sit by my side, 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 39 
 
 smoking" and sipping meanwhile at wine or 
 whisky, to read me his poem or story, and 
 that I shall be sorry never again to feel the 
 throb, thrill, throes, pang and triumph that go 
 to the birth of a lyric, a song or a sonnet — 
 except for these, I don't very much care how 
 soon it is that the big black extinguisher, 
 Death, comes down upon the wind-flickered 
 taper of my little life, and that I slip away 
 into the Great Dark. Here I sit, night after 
 night, often alone, by the fireside of this 
 dingy room, in a dingy apartment house of 
 this God-forsaken thoroughfare and harlots' 
 walk of the Euston Road — to think, and to 
 think, and to think, and often to drink, and 
 to drink, and to drink, if only the drinking 
 will drown or deaden the thinking. Some of 
 you tell me that I drink too hard, that I'm 
 injuring my health, shortening my life. Per- 
 haps if you who so talk had to sit here, 
 night after night, companioned only by my 
 thoughts, in my loneliness, and in my dark- 
 ness — perhaps you too would drink more 
 
40 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 than is quite good for you, if only to escape 
 from thinking. But when I'm gone and 
 under the daisies (pretty soon it will be now), 
 for God's sake don't try to hush up and to 
 hide away whatever there was or is in my 
 life that the world calls 'foolish,' or 'sinful,' 
 or 'wrong.' Speak about it, openly and 
 plainly. Then folk will say, ' Is that all ? 
 It might have been worse. In fact we 
 thought it was worse,' and straightway they 
 will forget it. But make a mystery of it, 
 go about with finger on lip, crying, ' Hush ! 
 It is better not mentioned', and they will 
 magnify it, lift up hands in horror, hint that 
 it was a whole world of wickedness worse 
 than it was, and whisper about it to whom- 
 ever they meet, and wherever they go, as 
 long as ever they live. 
 
 " It has been so," Marston went on, " about 
 Swinburne and the Arts Club. Some of his 
 friends tried to keep it a secret, and so set 
 suspicion and mischief afoot, which are afoot 
 still. Had they only been open about it all, 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 41 
 
 it would have been laughed over and for- 
 gotten long ago. Folk came to me with long 
 faces, and said, 'Have you heard? Swin- 
 burne expelled from the Arts Club ! ' Then 
 they nodded their silly heads and looked 
 wise at me, with a whole world of meaning, 
 as I could see, in their eyes." (Though 
 blind, Marston always spoke of "seeing/' and 
 instantly resented any word or act which 
 presupposed blindness on his part.) 
 
 "Then I tell them the facts as I am going 
 now to tell you, after which, except perhaps 
 for a moment's laugh, they never think of 
 the thing again. The story is that Swin- 
 burne and a friend — the friend bore a well- 
 known name — had been making a night of it, 
 and thereafter took a cab to the club. A 
 special committee meeting, whfch had for 
 some reason been called, was then sitting. 
 That it was well attended was evident from 
 the number of hats — silk, opera, bowlers : 
 it was before the days of crush hats — hang- 
 ing upon the cloak-room pegs. From whom 
 
 G 
 
42 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 the idea arose, Swinburne or his friend, I 
 do not know, but some Puck-like spirit of 
 mischief, seeing that the two were well- 
 primed for such foolery, whispered to one or 
 the other that, no one being just then present, 
 here was a chance to perform ' the hat trick ' 
 in a new sense and in record time. 
 
 " Hastily collecting the hats from the pegs, 
 the two Strayed Revellers placed them on 
 the floor in two long parallel lines. Then, 
 Swinburne and his friend each standing on 
 his right foot at the end of one row of hats, 
 his left ankle clasped in his left hand, the 
 word : ' One — Two — Three. Go ! ' was 
 given, and away in a wild, single-footed 
 Frog's Dance the two racers went, each hop 
 meaning the pancaking of a hat. 
 
 " Which won, I do not know, but when the 
 scandalized attendant arrived, it was to find 
 Swinburne and his friend breathless, and 
 executing a triumphant war dance, amid a 
 chaos of crushed hats, on the cloak-room 
 floor. The committee, interrupted in their 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 43 
 
 sitting, hastily adjourned the meeting to the 
 cloak-room. Here they found Swinburne 
 and his friend, screaming with laughter over 
 what each thought to be a gigantic joke. 
 Failing to see the joke, the committee hastily 
 held an emergency meeting, then and there, 
 to pass, unanimously, a resolution expelling 
 the two offending members from the club." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 A. C. S. AND R. L. S. 
 
 SWINBURNE was a poet who 
 "dropped" — not in the Silas Wegg 
 sense, but in the sense that what he then 
 wrote was inferior work — into prose. Steven- 
 son was a prose writer who occasionally 
 and successfully essayed verse. Swinburne 
 trotted his protesting and jibbing Pegasus 
 along the high-road of prose, instead of wing- 
 beating his way in the air : Stevenson's fancy 
 was to adorn the ankles of his mount, 
 Mercury-wise, with wings, to make believe 
 that he was flying. 
 
 Yet, gallant and knightly figures as both 
 were, not unakin in tastes, each with a 
 hankering after soldiering, and a close 
 
 connecting link in their intimate friendship 
 
 44 
 
SWINJ5URNE AS I KNEW 1JIM 45 
 
 with Mr. Gossc — it is surprising how little 
 Swinburne and Stevenson were drawn the 
 one to the other. 
 
 Stevenson's Letters to his Family and 
 Friends may be said to sweep the whole 
 field of contemporary literature and to stab 
 out of the darkness, if only in a sentence, 
 with the suddenness of a searchlight, a picture 
 of this or that author, his pitfalls and his 
 powers. Yet in the whole of the bulky two 
 volumes, there is only a single and passing 
 mention of Swinburne. 
 
 Swinburne, on the other hand, was only 
 half-hearted in his appreciation of Stevenson. 
 " His appreciation of Stevenson's novels was 
 lessened by the author's self-consciousness 
 and too purely literary style," writes Dr. A. 
 Compton-Rickett in The Letters of Swin- 
 burne. "In Stevenson's stories the style 
 is always disturbing the illusion, he would 
 say. 
 
 Nor concerning Stevenson's verse was 
 Swinburne more appreciative. The briefest 
 
46 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 of all the many letters in the volume edited 
 by Mr. Gosse and Mr. Wise runs as follows : 
 
 March 20, 1885. 
 My dear Gosse, 
 
 Many thanks for a very pretty little 
 book which I have just read through with 
 pleasure. My only criticism shall be that the 
 type is too small for the eyes of such readers 
 as it seemingly appeals to. Nursery books 
 ought to be printed with the types of a 
 Baskerville or a Bodoni. 
 
 Ever yours truly, 
 A. C. Swinburne. 
 
 To this letter the editors print a footnote : 
 " This note would be too slight to merit 
 publication were it not that the ' pretty little 
 book ' in question was R. L. Stevenson's 
 Child's Garden of Verse. Of this author 
 Mr. Gosse was, on many occasions, unable to 
 extract a word of praise from Swinburne. 
 Nor would he blame the friend of a friend ; 
 so that whenever the name of Stevenson was 
 brought up, Swinburne preserved an obstinate 
 silence." 
 
 Yet the two men had, as has been said, 
 much in common. Both retained a boy's 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 47 
 
 freshness of impression, a boy's eager 
 interests, as well as something of a boy's 
 heart, and both were child-worshippers and 
 childless. 
 
 Nor was either — I will not say adverse from 
 advertisement — but I may at least say insen- 
 sible to the value of being in evidence. 
 In a letter to Henry James, Stevenson 
 expresses his " indescribable admiration " of 
 one of the Literary Portraits which Henry 
 James had drawn. Speaking of the day when 
 these portraits were to be collected in one 
 gallery — that is to say, in a book — Stevenson 
 pleads : " Do put me in." For an article on 
 the — shall we say " unretiring " element in 
 some authors, " Do put me in," as a title 
 would be hard to beat. In Stevenson's case 
 the very frankness of the request somewhat 
 disarms criticism. To force an egotistic 
 meaning upon what was possibly meant only 
 to imply a very pretty compliment to Henry 
 James, were ungenerous. Swinburne's busi- 
 nesslike recognition — his many unbusinesslike 
 
48 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 characteristics notwithstanding — of the fact 
 that the success, even of poetry, depends not 
 a little upon advertisement, is evident from a 
 letter to his publisher, to whom he writes : 
 " I see no recent advertisement in the weekly 
 papers. I must request that there may be 
 enough of them inserted — as many as you 
 think fit or useful, and as prominently." 
 
 Other points, not a few, Swinburne and 
 Stevenson had in common ; and here possibly 
 some student of the writings of both may 
 interpose : " You are forgetting the greatest 
 of all their shared sympathies. What about 
 the sea?" 
 
 To such a question, the natural man in me 
 would be tempted to answer, coster-wise : 
 ' 'Wot abarht it?" 
 
 Between Stevenson's love of the sea and 
 Swinburne's there can be no comparison. 
 Stevenson was never happier than when 
 afloat, and he had made long voyages. 
 Swinburne's longest voyage was a Channel 
 crossing, and had it been much longer he 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 49 
 
 would have been badly bored at that. He 
 said to me once that the one thing which made 
 him regret that he was not a man of wealth 
 was that he could not afford to yield to the 
 desire of his heart and spend half his time 
 in sea cruising. He wished so to feel and to 
 think ; and, poet-like, he had persuaded him- 
 self that he actually did so feel and think — 
 just as, because he wished to think that his 
 precious portrait of Victor Hugo was a snap- 
 shot, he was equally sure that a snapshot and 
 nothing else it was. But a long sea cruise — 
 in imagination a joy — Swinburne would as 
 a reality have found unendurable. The 
 monotony, the being thus cabined and 
 restricted in movement, would have irked 
 him beyond measure. Into what unwisdom 
 — if only thereby to escape from boredom — 
 he might have been led, had he for any 
 length of time found himself aboard ship, 
 only a Watts-Dunton can say, just as with 
 such unwisdom only a Watts-Dunton could 
 
 have dealt. Luckily for himself and for 
 11 
 
50 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 Swinburne, this at least the author of Aylwin 
 was spared. 
 
 Swinburne loved the sea, in the sense of 
 being by the sea and of swimming in the sea. 
 The rest was self-deception. The belief he 
 entertained that Nature intended him for a 
 sailor (he repeatedly spoke to me of the sea 
 as his "natural element") was one of those 
 dear delusions which, in some shape or form, 
 most of us entertain, and even cherish about 
 ourselves. Stevenson's sea love was a 
 sailor's, and sea born : 
 
 This be the verse you grave for me : 
 Home is the sailor, home from sea. 
 
 Swinburne's was no more than a poet's — 
 imagined, and land born. The one had the 
 brine in his blood ; the other only at the 
 point of his pen. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE LAUREATESHIP ; A CARTOON IN THE " PALL 
 MALL GAZETTE " J AND SOME WOMAN POETS 
 WHOSE WORK SWINBURNE ADMIRED 
 
 I FOUND myself at thirty very much 
 what I was at thirteen, so I have some 
 reason to fear that if I live so long, I shall find 
 myself on the same points (like Landor) very 
 much the same at seventy as I was at 
 seventeen." 
 
 So wrote Swinburne to his friend Watts- 
 Dunton in a letter quoted in The Letters of 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne, issued under 
 the editorship of the late Mr. Thomas Hake 
 and Dr. A. Compton-Rickett. This and a 
 later and much fuller collection, Swinburne s 
 Letters, edited by Mr. Edmund Gosse and 
 
 Mr. T. J. Wise, together with the volume of 
 
 5i 
 
52 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 letters to his family and herself, published 
 some year or two ago by the poet's cousin, 
 Mrs. Disney Leith, cover the whole field of 
 Swinburne's correspondence. 
 
 Swinburne's expressed expectation of find- 
 ing himself, upon one point at least, "very 
 much the same at seventy as I was at seven- 
 teen," may, not without interest, be compared 
 with a statement in The Letters of Algernon 
 Charles Swinburne. "It may be truly said," 
 write the editors, " that in the deepest sense 
 of the word, the later Swinburne was far 
 more sensitive to religious influences, and 
 far more spiritual in his attitude towards life, 
 than was the author of Poems and Ballads." 
 
 To this I would add that Swinburne lived, 
 not only to change some of his views, but 
 also to deplore some of his earlier writings, 
 especially those in which he had assailed 
 Christianity and its Founder. He said to 
 me once, that one poem in particular he 
 would give a great deal to be able to recall. 
 
 " But to do so," he declared, with a hope- 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 53 
 
 less gesture, " would be to draw attention to 
 it afresh. The printed and published word 
 cannot be suppressed. It is like a poisonous 
 growth of which Watts-Dunton was telling 
 me. You cut it down to burn stalk and 
 flower and seed, that it may not propagate. 
 You dig it up root and branch, as you think, 
 and in a few weeks' time you find that some 
 accursed root, fibre, or filament, which had 
 evaded your search, has but become newly 
 virile by the cutting away of older parts, and 
 has concentrated into its diabolical and under- 
 ground self the vitality which had spent 
 itself more or less harmlessly above ground 
 and in the open air. Thus, as in the Biblical 
 story of the man out of whom devils had 
 been cast, the latter state of your garden is 
 worse than the first. It is so with my 
 unhappy poem. Any effort to suppress it 
 would but advertise the thing afresh, and 
 would prompt dishonest publishers and clis- 
 conscienced ' collectors ' (disconscienced, to 
 coin not too strong a word, not a few 
 
54 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 enthusiastic collectors eventually become) to 
 reprint the thing, even if privately ; and so 
 by putting what I may call * a price upon its 
 head,' to give it new importance and value. 
 I fear it must lie where it lay." 
 
 Nor was religion the only matter upon 
 which he lived to change his views. 
 
 To a friend who had apparently anticipated 
 the appointment of Swinburne to the Laure- 
 ateship after the death of Tennyson, he 
 wrote: " Let me conjure you not to inflict 
 on me the discredit by anticipation implied 
 in the title of future Laureate, an office 
 for which I expect to see all the poeticules 
 of New Grub Street pulling caps after the 
 death of Tennyson." 
 
 This was penned in 1874, and Tennyson 
 lived till 1892. 
 
 I am by no means sure that the Swinburne 
 who was once a rebel and a republican, but 
 in later life was more inclined to acquiesce in 
 than to defy the canons of conventionality, 
 and as years went by became a Conservative, 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 55 
 
 would, in the event of Tennyson's death, 
 have held the succession to the Laureateship 
 in the same contempt. 
 
 Mr. Gosse commits himself no farther than 
 to say : " It is reported that Queen Victoria, 
 discussing the matter with Gladstone, said : 
 ' I am told that Mr. Swinburne is the best 
 poet in my dominions.' I have reason to 
 believe that Queen Victoria did actually so 
 express herself; and I have reason too for 
 believing that a visit which the late Sir 
 James Knowles paid to The Pines, after the 
 death of Tennyson, was not altogether with- 
 out a purpose. That purpose was not, as I 
 have heard stated, to sound the poet in regard 
 to his accepting or not accepting the Laure- 
 ateship, if offered. On the contrary, I believe 
 that Sir James Knowles' errand was not to 
 sound Swinburne on that or any other subject, 
 but delicately, perhaps almost indirectly, to 
 convey to him the reason why the Laureate- 
 ship could not be offered to him, and that 
 Swinburne entirely approved the reason in 
 
56 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 question. As Mr. Gosse indicates, it was 
 not unconcerned with what Swinburne had 
 once written about the Czar. The erroneous 
 impression in regard to Sir James's visit was 
 gathered from something said by Watts- 
 Dunton. A certain person, chancing to hear 
 of the visit, inquisitively tried to "draw" the 
 author of Aylwin. Watts- Dunton, who re- 
 sented any attempt of the sort, was at first 
 minded to reply : " That is Mr. Swinburne's 
 business, not mine nor yours," but character- 
 istic amiability preventing him, he returned 
 an evasive answer, in which his zeal and his 
 jealousy for his friend's reputation made it 
 possible to put the flattering interpretation 
 upon the visit. 
 
 Swinburne himself was not a little angered 
 at this time by a cartoon which appeared, I 
 think, in the Pall Mall Gazette. 
 
 It depicted certain poets of the day as 
 competitors in a Parnassus scaling race for 
 the Laureateship. It was not because Swin- 
 burne saw himself pictured as a competitor 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 57 
 
 that he was angry, but because he saw 
 himself so pictured In company with the 
 late Eric Mackay, a poet from whose 
 unappreciated attentions Swinburne had 
 been suffering. Mackay, who was an en- 
 thusiastic admirer of Swinburne, had written 
 what the latter considered a fulsome and 
 offensively flattering letter, in which he 
 expressed the intention of dedicating a book 
 of his own poems to Swinburne. No reply 
 being received, Mackay sent a second letter 
 to the same effect ; and a reply to this 
 second letter not being forthcoming, a third, 
 which, like its predecessors, remained un- 
 answered. I am not sure that a fourth or 
 even a fifth letter was not sent, but Swinburne 
 remaining obdurately silent, Mackay wrote 
 to Watts-Dunton, inquiring whether Swin- 
 burne had received or had not received the 
 letters in question, and if so, why no answer 
 had been returned. Watts-Dunton, who had 
 more than enough to do to answer his own 
 
 letters, and moreover was annoyed by the 
 
 1 
 
58 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 assumption that any one had the right to call 
 him to account on the question of Swinburne 
 answering or not answering letters, was 
 disposed at first to leave what he considered 
 an impudent communication without a reply. 
 Again, however, his incurable amiability 
 prevailed, and he wrote Mackay as nearly 
 as I remember to the following effect : 
 
 Dear Sir, 
 
 I have received your communication 
 in which you are good enough to inform me 
 that Mr. Swinburne — whom you say you do 
 not know personally — has failed to reply to 
 certain letters sent by you to this address. 
 I know nothing about the matter, but may 
 point out that if Mr. Swinburne had replied, 
 his doing so would have been a courtesy. 
 In not replying, as is you tell me the case, he 
 is surely, since you do not know him person- 
 ally, within his rights. Were I you, I should 
 so regard the matter, and dismiss . it from 
 consideration. He is to my knowledge an 
 uncertain correspondent, and often leaves 
 letters of importance unanswered. In any 
 case, the matter is no business of mine, nor 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 59 
 
 one in which I can interfere, so, with much 
 regret, I remain, 
 
 Yours truly, 
 
 Theodore Watts-Dunton. 
 
 There one might have supposed the matter 
 would have ended. The advice given was 
 obviously sensible, and Mackay would have 
 done well to follow it. He did not do so. 
 Having ascertained, or being already aware, 
 that Swinburne's custom was each morning 
 to take a walk, generally in a certain direc- 
 tion, Mackay laid his plans accordingly, and 
 Swinburne, pelting along deep in thought, 
 found himself suddenly pulled up by a 
 stranger, who stepped out and across his path. 
 
 " I believe I have the honour of addressing 
 Mr. Swinburne, the great poet," said the 
 stranger, raising his hat with a ceremonial 
 bow. 
 
 "My name is Swinburne. What do you 
 want of me?" inquired the poet suspiciously, 
 misliking his man, as he thereafter said, at 
 sight. 
 
6o SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 " May I have the honour of a few words 
 with you, sir? My name is Eric Mackay. 
 I wrote to you " 
 
 "Certainly not. I do not know you, sir. 
 Good morning," Swinburne snapped, cutting 
 him short, and stamping indignantly away to 
 continue his walk. 
 
 The next morning brought another letter 
 from Mackay. It was not complimentary, 
 but all I need say of it here is that it conveyed 
 the information that the writer's forthcoming 
 book of poems would not be dedicated to 
 Algernon Charles Swinburne. Then, at last, 
 Swinburne sent Mackay a letter. As I 
 remember it, the text was as follows : 
 
 Mr. Swinburne has received a letter from 
 a Mr. Mackay — whom he does not know — in 
 which Mr. Mackay informs Mr. Swinburne 
 that he does not propose dedicating any book 
 of his to Mr. Swinburne, nor, indeed, of so 
 much as mentioning his name in future, by 
 which decision Mr. Swinburne is honoured, 
 and relieved. 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 61 
 
 Eric Mackay was not the only contempo- 
 rary bard on whom Swinburne was severe, 
 as when he inquired concerning Lewis 
 Morris: "Who is he — Tennyson's under- 
 butler?" but against no one, remembering 
 that the two had once been friends, was he 
 so bitter as against W. Bell Scott. He 
 even permitted himself scornful reference to 
 Rossetti, when explaining that it was Rossetti's 
 4< derogatory and dignity-forgetting habit" 
 of writing letters to strangers which had 
 brought Bell Scott, then a drawing-master, 
 "into a circle into which he should never 
 have been admitted." Rossetti had seen a 
 poem in a magazine, and had written in 
 "impulsive and expansive praise" to the 
 author. "With what result?" demanded 
 Swinburne furiously. " This — that the fellow, 
 who was morose, jealous, and envious, came 
 at last to hate Rossetti with ineradicable, 
 deadly and venomous hate." 
 
 Another bard he disliked was Roden Noel. 
 I knew Noel, and, admiring some of his 
 
62 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 poems, said as much to him one day. To 
 my surprise he replied : "I am glad you do, 
 for if you did not, I could never like you, nor, 
 for the matter of that, any one else who did 
 not like my work." This staggering remark 
 so lessened my interest in Noel that I entered 
 no protest when, mentioning him to Swin- 
 burne one day, I added that I had been told, 
 whether rightly or wrongly I did not know, 
 that Noel was related to Byron, Swinburne 
 viciously replied : " Even poets must be 
 allowed their poor relations. If Noel be a 
 relation to Byron, he is, intellectually at 
 least, a poor relation. Compared with Byron, 
 intellectually, he is infantile — a sort of Baby 
 Byron, a Booby Byron, if you like." I 
 suspect that the fact that I had previously 
 told Swinburne that Robert Buchanan was 
 perhaps Noel's most intimate friend was 
 more responsible for the alliterative onslaught 
 than anything ''infantile" either in Noel's 
 poems, intellect, or personality. 
 
 Of two women poets of the younger school 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 63 
 
 I heard Swinburne speak with very marked 
 respect. One was Mrs. Clement Shorter. 
 "Technically," he said, "some of her work, 
 like not a little of Mrs. Browning's, is some- 
 what imperfect. In Mrs. Shorter's case, 
 what in any one else one would call and 
 count imperfection, seems not so much im- 
 perfection as a variant from type. Do you 
 know a flower called the Rose of Sharon ? — 
 and, by the bye, if there should be anything 
 so English and so countrified, so human and 
 so natural in Paradise, as an old English 
 public-house, what a perfect title ' The Rose 
 of Sharon ' would be ! 'The Rose of Sharon ! ' 
 — really, I should feel quite reconciled to the 
 orthodox heaven if only I could be certain 
 of finding anything so delightful there as a 
 4 Rose of Sharon ' public-house. But what I 
 was going to say is that Walter was showing 
 me a petal of the Rose of Sharon the other 
 day, and, unlike most flowers (he says), if 
 you bisect a petal the two halves would not 
 be exact halves, as the Rose of Sharon petal 
 
64 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 is a little lop-sided. But although this flower 
 differs from most other flowers by having a 
 slightly irregular petal, it is not any the less 
 lovely : it is not an imperfection — it is only 
 a variant from type, like your friend Mrs. 
 Snorter's poems. And she is not any less 
 a poet for that reason than I am less a 
 flower-lover than Watts-Dunton. His know- 
 ledge of flowers is scientific ; mine isn't. He 
 is a botanist; I'm not. But I really believe 
 that my love of flowers is born of something 
 deeper in me than there is, so far as flowers 
 are concerned, in him, for all his botanical 
 precision and knowledge ; and though I 
 grant that he is the better botanist, I do not 
 concede that he is a truer flower-lover, any 
 more than I think our Irish woman poet is 
 any less a true poet than some others, the 
 petals of whose poems are strictly 'regular,' 
 and because she sings, as the Rose of Sharon 
 blows, in the wild, sweet way that Nature 
 taught her." 
 
 Swinburne was also extremely interested 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 65 
 
 in the poems of " E. Nesbit " (Mrs. Hubert 
 Bland). He did not confine himself to an 
 expression of admiration, but did what I 
 knew him to do only in the case of Francis 
 Hindes-Groome — went out of his way to 
 bring her work to the friendly notice of 
 reviewers. 
 
 One of the most lovable of men and 
 kindest of editors was the late F. W. Robin- 
 son, the novelist ; but he was no judge of 
 poetry, as witness the fact that he accepted 
 and printed every scrap of verse I sent to the 
 magazine he was then editing. Knowing 
 that Swinburne held Robinson's opinion on 
 poetry as of small worth, I was surprised that 
 he should expatiate at length to the latter on 
 the power and beauty of Mrs. Bland's poems. 
 Robinson had seen the book, and, possibly 
 more to please Swinburne than because he 
 really appreciated its beauty, he attempted 
 some complimentary, but lengthy and not 
 very illuminating criticisms. 
 
 Swinburne, most easily bored of men (he 
 
66 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 wrote of one whom he really loved, one 
 whom he would have moved heaven and 
 earth to serve — John Nicoll : " I won't see 
 Nicoll again ! He spent the time reading 
 his own stuff to me "), cut Robinson's criti- 
 cisms short impatiently : " Yes, yes, my dear 
 Robinson. Every one talks kind things 
 about Miss Nesbit's poems. But those who 
 admire must do more than talk. They must 
 do what they can to make the book more 
 widely known — to make it sell. Can you 
 review it anywhere?" 
 
 Robinson replied that there was no journal 
 to which he contributed reviews, but sug- 
 gested that a notice should appear in his 
 own little publication, Home Chimes. 
 
 "That will do," said Swinburne. "A 
 most admirable little magazine, to which 
 Watts-Dunton and I have had the honour to 
 contribute. Who does the reviewing there ? " 
 
 Robinson replied that there was no review 
 section, but he could write and work in a 
 little paragraph about the book. 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW II IM 67 
 
 Swinburne was clearly not satisfied by the 
 promise of a paragraph by Robinson, perhaps 
 because he hoped for something more im- 
 portant than a paragraph, perhaps because 
 he thought that no weight attached to 
 Robinson's opinion of poetry. " Who else 
 writes for you ? " he asked. 
 
 ''Jerome does a 'Gossips' Corner,'" was 
 the reply. 
 
 "Jerome K. Jerome! the man for whose 
 delightful contributions — so fresh and joyous 
 in their humour — we look with such interest," 
 said Swinburne. "That portion of your 
 magazine, 'Gossips' Corner,' is very widely 
 read. I think if you can persuade Mr. 
 Jerome to say something about E. Nesbit's 
 book there, it would help much more than an 
 isolated paragraph would." 
 
 And so it came about that a considerable 
 space of " Gossips' Corner " was devoted 
 to the "discovery of a new poet," E. 
 Nesbit, who, I may mention, is the 
 sister of Mary Nesbit, to whom Philip 
 
6S SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 Marston was engaged. A pathetic story, 
 first appearing in a popular American journal, 
 and since reprinted in this country, has been 
 circulated concerning the circumstances of 
 Mary Nesbit's death. It is that Philip, 
 entering the room where she had been 
 reading, called her by name. As she did 
 not answer, he thought her to be sleeping, 
 and so felt his way, blind man as he was, 
 toward her seat, that he might waken her 
 by a caress — to find her dead. This story, 
 told in what one would assume to be a 
 well-informed quarter, had only the smallest 
 foundation in fact. In Swinburne s Letters 
 there is one to Philip Marston on the sub- 
 ject of E. Nesbit's book of poems, Lays 
 and Legends. 
 
 The Pines, 
 
 Putney Hill, S.W. 
 
 November 15, 1886. 
 My dear Philip, 
 
 Some days ago I called Watts' atten- 
 tion to what struck me as the remarkable 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 69 
 
 merit of some poems in a volume I had lately 
 received from the author — poems which 
 reminded me, in some of their finer charac- 
 teristics, rather of your own than of any other 
 contemporary's. I am naturally much inter- 
 ested to hear of your connection with the 
 author. 
 
 I thought "Absolution" certainly a power- 
 ful poem — perhaps as much in the style of 
 Lee Hamilton's poems as of yours — very well 
 conceived and constructed. I had read before 
 (I forget where, but quite lately) " The Sing- 
 ing of the Magnificat," and it had struck me 
 as something quite out of the common in 
 conception. It is a pity the closing couplet 
 should be so fiat, but that might easily be 
 remedied. 
 
 " Baby's Birthday " is a charming litfle 
 piece, and I am rather fastidiously exacting 
 with respect to poetry on the great subject 
 of "Baby." 
 
 The first part of " Children's Playgrounds 
 in the City " I like very much ; and the whole 
 of the poem called "The Dead to the Living " 
 is powerfully pathetic. 
 
 Come and see me, if you can, on Friday 
 next, and I will read you a lyric made near 
 Beach y Mead, while returning from a long 
 
70 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 walk thither. I am very much in love with 
 Eastbourne. Do you know it ? 
 Ever sincerely yours, 
 
 A. C. Swinburne. 
 
 P.S. — I had forgotten to mention the poem 
 " Two Christmas Eves," which struck me as 
 singularly powerful and original ; the sort of 
 poem that Charlotte Bronte might have 
 written if she had had more mastery of the 
 instrument of verse. 
 
 One other remark of Swinburne's concern- 
 ing a woman poet — this time not a con- 
 temporary — occurs to me. Calling one day, 
 unexpectedly, at The Pines, I found him 
 alone. He was standing by the book-case — 
 Watts-Dunton's, not his own — with an open 
 volume in his hand ; and I knew by the way 
 he had pursed his lips — so that he whistled 
 rather than breathed every time he took a 
 breath — and by the fact that he was bobbing 
 up and down upon his toes, but without 
 shifting his feet (reminding me of the way 
 one jigs a child when playing at " Ride-a- 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW IIIM 71 
 
 cock horse to Banbury Cross "), that he was 
 excited about something. 
 
 For once — punctilious almost to formality 
 as Swinburne was in the courtliness with 
 which he met or parted from a caller, no 
 matter whether that caller were stranger or 
 intimate friend — he omitted the conventional 
 greeting. 
 
 " I'm so glad you have come," he said, 
 " for one likes to share one's finds. I had 
 forgotten this thing's very existence, and 
 lighted on it only by chance when looking 
 for something else." 
 
 With a great parade of gravity — mock- 
 gravity, for the twinkle in his eye belied 
 the judicial stateliness — he beckoned me 
 to a chair, and then llopped the book 
 on the table in front of me, pointing 
 slyly to an inscription on the fly-leaf. The 
 volume was, I believe, The Lady of the 
 Lake ; but, in any case, it was a presentation 
 copy from Sir Walter Scott of one of his 
 own works to Joanna Baillie, and in the 
 
72 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 inscription he hailed Joanna as a " Sublime 
 Genius." 
 
 " And I am not allowed," Swinburne com- 
 mented, "to pay my tribute to the immortal 
 Hugo, without being told that my piling-up 
 of superlatives is preposterous, and that 
 my paeans of praise-giving hyperbole make 
 ridiculous alike the praiser and the praised." 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 A SONNET IN THE " ATHEN/EUM," AND 
 MORE "DEAR DECEIT" 
 
 IN the collection of Swinburne's letters 
 for which Mr. Gosse and Mr. T. J. Wise 
 are responsible, there is a letter to the former 
 in which Swinburne writes of a new poem 
 of his, "On the Cliffs": 
 
 "Watts — as I possibly may have told you 
 — says (what a man generally likes to hear 
 of his latest work) that it is the best poem I 
 ever wrote." 
 
 To this the editors append a note in which 
 they remark, and truly : "It may be observed 
 that Watts said this on every successive 
 occasion." 
 
 If I may speak in terms of finance, I 
 
 should say that Watts- Dunton was always 
 l 73 
 
74 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 prepared to honour Swinburne's note of hand 
 on presentation. He not only kept, as it 
 were at a bank, a generous balance of praise 
 upon which Swinburne could draw at 
 pleasure ; he went even further, and on 
 one occasion, within my knowledge, drew a 
 blank cheque in Swinburne's favour. A 
 friend of theirs had died, and on opening the 
 AthencBunty of which (minus the advertisement 
 page) I nearly always saw an advance copy, 
 I found a memorial sonnet by Swinburne, 
 and an obituary notice by Watts- Dunton, in 
 which he referred to " Mr. Swinburne's 
 noble sonnet." 
 
 This was on Thursday afternoon, the 
 Athenceum publishing day being Friday ; 
 and Watts-Dunton called to see me almost 
 as I laid down the journal. 
 
 " I have just been reading you in to- 
 morrow's Athen&um" I said. " You have 
 never written a more beautiful memorial 
 article." 
 
 He made a modest depreciatory gesture, 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 75 
 
 but his eyes were ashine, as always happened 
 when he was pleased by an appreciative 
 word. 
 
 " But do you really think Swinburne's 
 sonnet is what you call it — 'noble'?" 1 
 asked. " Few can lord it in a spacious 
 Pleasure-House of Song like Swinburne ; 
 but when he elects to enter the exquisite 
 Gothic chapel in miniature, which we call 
 a sonnet — more like a cell than a chapel, 
 in its chased and carved compactness and 
 austerity — he seems to me so ill at ease as 
 sometimes to be almost ineffective. He has 
 written noble sonnets, but of this one ' noble ' 
 is almost the last word I should have used." 
 
 Watts-Dunton's face fell like a scaffolding 
 when a workman knocks away the under- 
 pinning. Evidently he was perturbed. " The 
 fact is, my dear boy," he explained, ''that I 
 had not read the sonnet when I wrote my 
 notice, and indeed haven't seen it yet." 
 
 He lifted my Athcuccum, and, with eyes 
 close to the page, pored laboriously, as some 
 
76 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 short-sighted person might pore, over the 
 lines. Then he emitted an uneasy " Ah-h-h ! " 
 and, forgetful of my presence, sat back 
 wandering- eyed, wrinkled of brow, troubled 
 of face, like one seeking a way out of a 
 difficulty. 
 
 "A bad business!" he said absently — for 
 him almost irritably. "As a rule I see 
 practically everything that Swinburne writes. 
 It so happens that this particular sonnet I 
 didn't. You are quite right. It is woolly ; 
 it is unworthy of him. I wish it had never 
 seen print. I wish, immeasurably, that I 
 hadn't spoken of it, but Maccoll (the editor) 
 wanted to get Swinburne's sonnet and my 
 notice into this week's issue, and, without 
 seeing what Algernon had written, I thought 
 that just for once I might draw a bow at a 
 venture and speak of his sonnet as I did. 
 A bad business ! " 
 
 Then he went on to say that it had been 
 his habit for a long time " to perjure himself, 
 if one so liked to call it," by invariably 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 77 
 
 praising anything and everything, in the 
 shape of a new poem, which Swinburne 
 brought to him. 
 
 " If I can," Watts-Dunton said, " I assure 
 him that he has never done anything better, 
 and I'll tell you how the state of things came 
 about. There was a time, it is many years 
 ago, when, as a result of the careless way he 
 was living, he had got himself into such 
 indifferent health, both of body and mind, 
 that all he wrote was worthless ; and at last 
 he was persuaded in his own mind that the 
 power ever again to write poetry was gone. 
 Then one day he brought me, timidly and 
 diffidently, something he had attempted, 
 which seemed to him, he said, passable. 
 When I vowed that the verses were the best 
 he had ever written, he seemed like another 
 man, and went away as gleefully as a child. 
 That was the turning-point, and thence 
 onward the lost gift came back little by 
 little, until at last he had regained something 
 like his old powers. 
 
78 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 " A long time after, he remarked doubtfully 
 of the same poem : ' This thing strikes me 
 as very indifferent stuff, but I remember 
 when I first showed it to you that you said 
 it was the best thing I had ever done. Is 
 that your opinion still ? ' 
 
 " ' No, my dear Algernon,' I averred 
 stoutly. ' I think it is the very worst.' 
 
 "To tell him so then did no harm, as his 
 confidence in himself and in his power to do 
 good work was restored. Had I so told 
 him at the time, he might have relapsed into 
 the slough of despair and apathy into which 
 he had sunk, and out of which I was trying 
 to lift him. But disingenuousness of that 
 sort, even with the best of intentions, has its 
 danger. Having got him versing again, I 
 wished to keep him versing, and feared, in 
 those early days, when his recovery was 
 unassured and seemed so conditional, to 
 throw him back by any rough word or wind 
 of criticism. And so, to my shame — I must 
 throw myself on the mercy of my friends and 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 79 
 
 his friends — I got into the way of praising, 
 whenever it was humanly possible to do so, 
 whatever he brought me ; and so far as I 
 can see, not until death comes to call the one 
 or the other of us away, and so to deliver me 
 out of the coils into which I have got myself, 
 shall I be set free." 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 "PUCK OF PUTNEY HILL " 
 
 SINGULARLY happy as was the rela- 
 tionship between Swinburne and Watts- 
 Dunton, the friendship began with a stock 
 in common of the smallest. Swinburne was 
 an aristocrat. The peerage on his father's 
 side had, I understood him to say, been 
 extinct for some centuries. The Swinburnes 
 were a Border family, and in the poet's own 
 words, " Hotspur's lineal blood in direct 
 descent " was in his veins. On his mother's 
 side he was a grandson of the Earl of 
 Ashburnham. 
 
 Watts-Dutton was of middle-class stock. 
 He was educated at some private school of 
 no traditions, and afterwards by his father, 
 
 whereas Swinburne was at Eton and Balliol. 
 
 80 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 81 
 
 The Swinburnes were Anglicans with Catholic 
 forbears ; Watts- Dunton was brought up as 
 a Nonconformist, and, as he said to me 
 more than once, his "leanings were strongly 
 Nonconformist." 
 
 These widely differing starting-points and 
 standpoints heightened rather than lessened 
 the friendship. Even those who most love 
 the sound of their own voice soon tire of 
 speaking words to be repeated by an echo. 
 There is no interchange of ideas with those 
 who think exactly as we think, whereas, as 
 George Meredith has said : " Dissent rincrs 
 out finely." 
 
 The very dissimilarity of starting-points 
 and standpoints — accepted as facts by each, 
 and so never discussed — which existed be- 
 tween Swinburne and Watts-Dunton lent 
 uncertainty, and so lent interest to the other's 
 views. 
 
 Only in regard to Swinburne's Puck-like 
 love of mischief and leg-pulling was the 
 understanding between the two imperfect. 
 
 M 
 
82 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 To have been accounted deficient in a 
 sense of humour — his own was of a somewhat 
 heavy order — would have aroused Watts- 
 Dunton's hurt and wrathful resentment. 
 Hence, though his friend's mischievous and 
 impish moods troubled and perplexed him, 
 Watts- Dunton affected always to be vastly 
 and indulgently amused by them. But there 
 was more of uneasiness than of mirth in his 
 laughter. He was too loyal a friend to admit 
 as much even to himself, for even to himself 
 he was the partisan and champion of those 
 he loved ; but could he, with the impartiality 
 of which he was constitutionally incapable, 
 have sat down in cold blood to trv to arrive 
 at his real, if private opinion of Swinburne's 
 perverseness, that opinion would have been 
 that he " did not know which way to take it." 
 Mr. Kipling has entitled a book Puck of 
 Pook's Hill. Small wonder if Watts- Dunton 
 found his friend something of a " Puck of 
 Putney Hill." To-day Swinburne paid you 
 a pretty compliment by averring that yours 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 83 
 
 was the shapeliest of legs. To-morrow he 
 paid you a still prettier compliment — for he 
 was stiffly formal to all whom he did not 
 choose to welcome within his own circles, and 
 the fact that he tried to "draw" you was 
 proof in itself of his liking and trust — by 
 pulling the same leg vigorously. 
 
 I remember an allusion being made to 
 Watts- Dunton's famous Encyclopedia Brit- 
 annica article on Poetry. 
 
 For the moment I thought Swinburne was 
 really angry ; his eyes, as well as his voice, 
 seemed to snap as he said : "I knew we 
 should come to that article sooner or later. 
 Just as surely as when Walter's friend, Mr. 
 Hall Caine — with heart big to breaking, a 
 brain clammy with perspiring thought, is 
 brought to birth of a letter in a widely circu- 
 lated newspaper — just as surely as when that 
 happens we know that Mr. Caine has a new 
 novel ready for the market, just as every 
 road is said to lead to Rome, so, in this 
 house, whenever there is talk of poetry, the 
 
84 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 road inevitably leads to that Encyclopedia 
 article." 
 
 I had just told a story. Swinburne had 
 thoroughly enjoyed it — rarely have I seen 
 him enjoy a story more — and was in high 
 good humour ; so this sudden manifestation 
 of something like temper — the snap, as it 
 were, in passing, at the calves of Caine, the 
 dog-in-the-mangerish growl (for one generally 
 so generous) at mention of the very article 
 which Watts- Dunton had so often heard 
 Swinburne enthusiastically praise — took 
 Watts- Dunton not a little by surprise. 
 
 I see him now, as he laid down knife and 
 fork — he was carving at the time — to cast 
 an anxious, brow-wrinkled, and troubled, but 
 uncommonly shrewd and penetrating look at 
 the speaker. Possibly he was relieved to 
 catch a glint of fun in Swinburne's eyes, but 
 even so, his extraordinary loyalty to a friend 
 would not allow the gibe at Hall Caine to 
 pass without a protest. 
 
 "It is not at all necessary to remind me 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 85 
 
 that Caine is my friend rather them yours," 
 Watts-Dunton replied. " He is a writing 
 fellow, of course, and the ways of the writing 
 fellows are not your ways, and I hope not 
 mine. But Caine has a heart of gold. In 
 some ways he is among the salt of the earth, 
 and really I must protest, my dear Algernon, 
 against what you have just said about him, 
 for he doesn't in the least deserve it. It may 
 be true of some writing fellows, but it isn't 
 true of him." 
 
 " I do not wish to discuss the merits or the 
 demerits of your friend Mr. Caine," answered 
 Swinburne severely. " They do not interest 
 me. I merely observed, and repeat it, that 
 whenever the subject of poetry is mentioned, 
 I know that sooner or later we shall arrive at 
 the Encyclopedia article." 
 
 Watts-Dunton, disturbed, and taking the 
 matter very seriously, rumbled self-defensively 
 to the effect that he had always been given 
 to understand that Swinburne liked the 
 article. 
 
86 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 " I do like it," retorted Swinburne, speak- 
 ing with sharp decisiveness. "It is monu- 
 mental. It is a Great Pyramid of criticism, 
 standing almost alone, as it were, in a sandy 
 desert of dry, arid, lifeless criticism. But 
 think how badly I was treated in the matter 
 of that article. I had forgotten the whole 
 affair until this morning, when something 
 brought it back to memory." 
 
 " Badly — you — were — treated ! ' ; repeated 
 the mystified Watts-Dunton, peering at his 
 friend from under his brow with bright, 
 bird-like, but troubled eyes. "Why, how's 
 that ? " 
 
 Swinburne turned to me. " Baynes, the 
 editor, meant, I understand, to ask either 
 Matthew Arnold or myself to write the article 
 on Poetry. Then Robertson-Smith, the other 
 editor, happened to come across something 
 that Walter here had written on the subject, 
 and although it was unfinished, and exceeded 
 the allotted length, nothing would do but that 
 Robertson-Smith should clap it in as it was ; 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 87 
 
 and Arnold and I were cuckoo'd out of our 
 chance by a hated rival and interloper who 
 pretended to be our very good friend." 
 
 "What a memory you have!" ruminated 
 the much-relieved Watts-Dunton. " Ton my 
 word, I believe you are right, and that 
 Robertson-Smith did happen to see some- 
 thing of mine on poetry, and then and there 
 decided that it would suit his purpose. But 
 you are not quite correct in saying that it 
 went in as it was. Robertson-Smith — man 
 of immense knowledge ; he impressed me so 
 much that when he was present I forgot 
 every one else — made a few marginal altera- 
 tions, and they were so marvellous, absolutely 
 marvellous, that I adopted every one, every 
 one ! But, my dear Algernon, you would 
 have done an infinitely finer article than I 
 ever could. I had no idea that you were 
 feeling sore about it. Why on earth didn't 
 you speak of it before ? Why nurse a 
 grievance for years and spring it upon me 
 this morning ? " 
 
S8 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 There, so far as Swinburne was concerned, 
 the matter ended. By what tactful remark 
 (no one could be more tactful when so 
 minded)] he had soothed Watts-Dunton and 
 turned the conversation I am unable to say. 
 Some remark which a fellow-guest, Francis 
 Hindes-Groome, made to me caused me to 
 miss Swinburne's reply. The whole incident 
 was trivial, and I put it on record here only 
 because it seems to me to bear upon what I 
 have said of the rare occasions when the 
 understanding between the two friends was 
 imperfect. Watts-Dunton, as I have said, 
 had taken the matter seriously, which Swin- 
 burne had never intended. That the latter 
 had, the next minute, entirely dismissed the 
 whole thing from consideration was evident. 
 Not so Watts-Dunton. He was troubled 
 about it, was brooding over it, and wondering 
 whether more lay behind, as was clear from 
 the shadow which rested on his face for the 
 remainder of the afternoon. 
 
 His tendency to magnify trifles — to be 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 89 
 
 over-anxious, almost to fussiness, concerning 
 Swinburne was good for neither. 
 
 Sometimes it came near to making both 
 ridiculous. In The Letters of Swinburne 
 there is a passage which one might think 
 had been taken from a burlesque of the book, 
 rather than from the book itself: 
 
 A visitor had let fall some remark about 
 Hazlitt's critical work, and Swinburne's face 
 assumed an expression of frozen anger. 
 
 " We don't mention Hazlitt's name here," 
 said Watts-Dunton in a hurried whisper, as 
 if reference had been made to an objectionable 
 neighbour. " Neither I nor Swinburne care 
 to talk about him on account of his abominable 
 treatment of Coleridge." 
 
 Could anything more comically recall 
 Alice in Wonderland and the Mad Hatter? 
 
 Reverting to Swinburne's lodged protest 
 against all mention of the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica article, my explanation of the 
 matter is simple. As I have said, he had 
 enjoyed the story I had told. He was in the 
 
 N 
 
9 o SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 mood for stories — hoped, perhaps, that more 
 would be forthcoming, or, more likely still, 
 was consuming with impatience to tell what 
 he considered a particularly good story of 
 his own. Hence he was not disposed to 
 have the gaiety eclipsed by the interpolation 
 of a dark body (in the shape of a very solid 
 and chunk-like Encyclopedia Britannic a 
 article) between the sunshine, the laughter, 
 and ourselves. That was why he had 
 snapped in passing at the calves of Hall 
 Caine, concerning whom Watts-Dunton had 
 already irked Swinburne by telling in full the 
 facts concerning the writing of Caine's novel, 
 The Shadow of a Crime (they would fill a 
 chapter were I to tell them here). A chance 
 apologetic reference to the indifference of his 
 carving by Watts-Dunton — he had splashed 
 the cloth — gave me the opportunity to switch 
 off the conversation from Hall Caine's novel 
 to a carving story. Either the switch off or 
 the story had delighted Swinburne, and his 
 exasperation when the Encyclopedia article 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 91 
 
 threatened a return to serious subjects was 
 the one and only cause of his speaking as he 
 did of Caine and of the article. 
 
 Perhaps I may be allowed to end this 
 chapter by telling the story — recalled to mind 
 by what Watts-Dunton said of his carving — 
 which amused Swinburne. 
 
 With Coventry Patmore and his two sons, 
 M ilnes and Tennyson (one, I believe, the 
 godson of Lord Houghton, the other of the 
 Laureate), I had, many years ago, some 
 acquaintance. Coventry Patmore and his 
 son Tennyson I knew only slightly, but 
 Milnes Patmore and I often foregathered, and 
 it was, I think, he who told me this story of 
 his doctor brother. 
 
 At the beginning of Dr. Tennyson Pat- 
 more's medical career, when he was only 
 a student, he dined at the house of a well- 
 known Society woman whom we will call 
 Lady Alice. Not without weaknesses of 
 her own — for, though nearer sixty than fifty, 
 she made herself something" of a laughing- 
 
92 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 stock by affecting and dressing the part of 
 a young woman — Lady Alice was uncom- 
 monly hard upon the weaknesses of other 
 folk. Next to being thought young, she 
 loved to be thought witty. What she took 
 to be wit was often no more than rudeness, 
 for she had a sharp tongue, of which others 
 were made to feel the edge, with no thought 
 of, or consideration for, their feelings. Mr. 
 Tennyson Patmore, who was then, his brother 
 said, a young medical student, and shy with 
 the modesty which is so much more accept- 
 able in very young men than assurance, had 
 been asked to carve a chicken. Carving did 
 not then happen to be one of his accomplish- 
 ments, but the bird was on the table directly 
 in front of him, and, rather than decline to do 
 as asked, he had manfully done his best, the 
 said " best " being rather bad for the bird, as 
 well as for the tablecloth. 
 
 Looking down the table, and seeing a 
 young and shy guest in difficulties, Lady 
 Alice, instead of turning a blind eye or trying 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 93 
 
 to cover her guest's confusion, as most 
 hostesses or any considerate woman would 
 have done, chose instead to advertise her 
 alleged wit by calling down the table rude 
 things about her guest's carving. What it 
 was she said I am not sure, but I remember 
 that she ended by remarking : " Well, Mr. 
 Patmore, you may be, for all I know, a very 
 clever surgeon, but looking at your carving 
 and my cloth, I can only say that if I wanted 
 a leg off I should not come to you to do it." 
 " And then my exasperated brother, 
 generally the most courteous and considerate 
 of men," said Captain Milnes Patmore, in 
 telling me the incident, " made the one rude, 
 but, in view of the provocation he had 
 received, I can't help thinking pardonable 
 remark of his life. " ' No, Lady Alice,' he 
 answered suavely. ' But, you see, you are 
 not a chicken.' ' 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 A PARAGRAPH IN THE " WESTMINSTER GAZETTE" 
 
 ALGERNON has a poem in this 
 month's Nineteenth Century" said 
 Watts-Dunton to me one morning. " If he 
 asks you whether you have seen it — by the 
 bye, have you ? " 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 "Ah! I won't ask you just now what you 
 think of it. He has gone for a walk across 
 Putney Common, and may be in any moment. 
 But what I wanted an opportunity of men- 
 tioning to you, before you see him, was just 
 this — say all you possibly can to him in 
 praise of it. I have been at him, for ever so 
 long, to write poems with shorter lines. His 
 longer line poems lend themselves to his 
 
 besetting sin — verbosity, and " 
 
 94 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 95 
 
 Just then, Swinburne suddenly — not en- 
 tered, but exploded into the room like a 
 flung cracker. A firework of that name, 
 tossed in by the hand of a mischievous boy, 
 could not more crreatly have disconcerted the 
 plotting pair of us. The joy (to the school- 
 boy flinger) of the flung cracker is twofold — 
 it comes as a surprise and it takes one with 
 glorious uncertainty. And just as the fire- 
 work cracks hither and thither — no one 
 knowing where next — so Swinburne ex- 
 ploded crackerwise about the room, now in 
 this corner, now in that, letting off sharp, 
 short, hissing sounds, as of a burning fuse, 
 and repeating : " It is not senility, it is 
 anility ! " in a voice that had the viciousness 
 of a whip-crack. 
 
 Watts- Dunton, who had now gathered, 
 from the fact that Swinburne held a book 
 in his hand and was waving it menacingly 
 in the air, that .all this "to do," this tornado, 
 was mainly "literary," and was a letting off 
 of pent-up steam which had accumulated on 
 
96 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 a solitary walk, was more solicitous about 
 his friend's outer garments than about his 
 inner and mental condition. " My dear 
 fellow," he protested, " you are soaked, 
 soaked, and must change instantly." 
 
 Swinburne, "all of a glow," partly from 
 the slashing of the rain, the buffeting of the 
 wind, and partly from excitement, shook 
 himself, dogwise, as if to dry his coat. 
 
 "I won't change! I'm perfectly dry," he 
 replied mutinously. Again he waved the 
 book in air, again he repeated his shrill 
 chant: "It is not senility, it is anility!" 
 
 " What is, my dear boy ? " inquired Watts- 
 Dunton cajolingly, as one who humours a 
 spoilt child. 
 
 " Palgrave's Golden Treasury" replied 
 Swinburne. " I've got the Second Series (just 
 out) here, bought it as I was starting for my 
 walk, and have been dipping into it going 
 along. And what do you think ? What do 
 you think ? " 
 
 "Well, well, nothing very dreadful, I'm 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 97 
 
 sure," said Watts- Dunton. " You have 
 always thought Palgrave something of a 
 good- hearted old duffer. We all know that 
 it was Tennyson's judgment, Tennyson's 
 choice, which made the First Series of The 
 Golden Treasury so admirable and so suc- 
 cessful ; but dear old Palgrave isn't likely to 
 go very far wrong, and he can't have done 
 anything to offend you or me by quoting our 
 unworthy or inferior work, or by leaving us 
 out, for, if I remember rightly, there are no 
 living poets included." 
 
 Swinburne flung wide his arms — palms 
 open, fingers flicking, as if in despair that 
 any one should interpose such talk and such 
 excuse in face of such wrongs as his. He 
 was now almost hoarse, as well as shrill 
 with rage. 
 
 " Seventeen jingles by Arthur O'Shaugh- 
 nessy!" he screamed, hurling the offending 
 volume from him and again exploding, 
 crackerwise, about the room, to the immi- 
 nent danger of all present (a nervous woman 
 o 
 
98 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 might, as when frightened by a mouse, have 
 been moved to mount a chair). " Seventeen 
 jigging, polka-like, and wholly pestilent jingles 
 by that miserable mimic and monkey 
 O'Shaughnessy, and not so much as a poem, 
 not so much as a line, by that exquisitely 
 sweet and truest of all our younger poets, the 
 dear friend of all us here, Philip Marston." 
 
 At that, even Watts-Dunton's brows 
 gathered ominously, almost menacingly. 
 
 For once, and by a curious coincidence, it 
 fell to me to quell the storm. On the way 
 down to The Pines I had bought an early 
 Westminster Gazette, and drawing it now 
 from my pocket, I pointed silently to a head- 
 line : " Death of Professor F. T. Palgrave." 
 
 In an instant the anger and the excitement 
 passed from Swinburne's eyes and face. 
 He was not only silenced, he was as one 
 rebuked, and (he felt) deservedly so. 
 
 " I am very, very sorry," he said, with 
 singular and gentle simplicity, " and sorry for 
 what was said just now. I did not know, 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 99 
 
 and all my memories of him are glad 
 and gracious memories. They are grateful 
 memories, too, for the many kindnesses he 
 did me." 
 
 He looked me fully, steadily, challengingly 
 in the face for a few moments, as if half- 
 ashamed to be thus speaking and yet deter- 
 mined not to be shamed out of so speaking. 
 He seemed, too, to be probing, as it were, into 
 my eyes, as if to discover how far I under- 
 stood or did not understand what was in his 
 mind. Then, in a low and subdued voice, he 
 added : " I think I will go to my room for a 
 little while," and noiselessly slipped away. 
 

 CHAPTER X 
 
 "ALL MY MEMORIES OF HIM ARE GLAD 
 AND GRACIOUS MEMORIES " 
 
 IF in these later chapters I have spoken 
 less reservedly than in a previously 
 published work of the failings and imper- 
 fections which the great of the earth share, 
 not equally, but unequally, with smaller folk 
 — for in the great the human side is in excess, 
 as well as that which is "on the side of the 
 angels" — it is with no wish to afford "little 
 minds " an opportunity, as Stevenson some- 
 where says, "to sneer at their betters." On 
 the contrary, we who are of the small of the 
 earth, should surely respect and revere the 
 great more greatly for the fact that, though 
 the great share with us the infirmities which 
 
 IOO 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 101 
 
 keep us small, they have succeeded in attain- 
 ing greatness, their failings notwithstanding. 
 Nor do I propose to attribute either 
 Swinburne's infirmities or his achievements 
 (the noble legacy of song he has left us) to 
 the " artistic temperament." That the artistic 
 temperament has bequeathed to us, as is 
 often maintained, countless and precious 
 works of art, I insistently deny. The men 
 and women to whom we owe most in Liter- 
 ature, Music, and Art gave us of their best 
 and noblest, not because of, but in spite of 
 the artistic temperament, which makes gener- 
 ally merely for erratic mediocrity. Swinburne 
 was a man, not of artistic temperament, but 
 of genius. Which of the two writers — Charles 
 Lamb, in speaking of "the sanity of true 
 genius," or Heine, in describing genius as 
 "like the pearl in the oyster, only a splendid 
 disease," is right we will not here inquire. 
 Whichever point of view one takes, it is well 
 to bear in mind, alike of genius or of medio- 
 crity, of gentleman or of hind, the precept : 
 
io2 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 " Be pitiful, for every one is fighting a hard 
 battle." 
 
 "All my memories of him are glad and 
 gracious memories. They are grateful 
 memories, too, for the many kindnesses he 
 did me." So said Algernon Charles Swin- 
 burne of Francis Palgrave ; and in my own 
 way, and for my own small part, I would ask 
 to be permitted so to say of him. A great 
 poet, he was also a great gentleman, perhaps 
 the knightliest poet figure to pass this way 
 since the Elizabethan days, in which, surely, 
 Swinburne should have been born ? Swin- 
 burne, in top-hatted Victorian and later 
 times, when poets and men of letters come 
 under an Income Tax scale, and are rated 
 with the surgeon and the notary as members 
 of a " profession " ; when the poet sings, not 
 as birds sing, for sheer joy of life, for love's 
 sake, or, it may be, sings for no more than a 
 song's sake, but sings to print his songs in a 
 book to sell, — has always seemed to me as 
 one born out of due time. But Swinburne 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 103 
 
 (beard and all), cloaked and sworded, and 
 companioned by Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir 
 Philip Sidney, Sir John Suckling, Lovelace 
 and many another Elizabethan poet soldier 
 or poet courtier — for born courtier Swinburne 
 was, as well as born poet — is as real, as natural, 
 almost as familiar a figure as if, so pictured, 
 his portrait was hanging for all to see at 
 Hampton Court or the National Gallery. 
 
 One day Swinburne's portrait, not as he 
 might have been, but as he was, may so 
 hang. It is like to be a distant day, for we 
 as a people are in no haste to acknowledge 
 what we owe to the poets. In estimating 
 her " National Debt," her moral, not money 
 obligations, Britannia is apt to leave poets 
 out of the reckoning. She has, in fact, always 
 treated them hardly. James Watt gave us 
 the steam engine ; Algernon Charles Swin- 
 burne gave us Atalanta in Calydou. Each 
 was a gift, though in decree or in use the 
 two gifts could scarcely be farther apart. 
 But of James Watt we did not say : " You 
 
104 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 have given us the steam engine. Good ! 
 But now you must give us another steam 
 engine. It must be a greater piece of work 
 than the first, or we shall say, ' James Watt 
 is played out.' It must not in any way 
 resemble the first, or we shall say : ' James 
 Watt is merely repeating himself. This 
 steam engine is in effect merely an echo of 
 work already done.' " 
 
 No. We took the steam engine from 
 James Watt, the miner's safety lamp from 
 Sir Humphry Davy (the list might be 
 indefinitely extended), and were grateful. It 
 is not so we treat the poet, the author. The 
 other day some one said to me: "I've got 
 a grievance against your friend Jacobs. 
 None of his later books is a patch upon 
 Many Cargoes. 
 
 " I do not agree," I replied ; "but if I did, 
 and had W. W. Jacobs written nothing else 
 but Many Cargoes, I, for one, should be 
 grateful for a laughter-making book which 
 I never take up without new delight, a book 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 105 
 
 which has scores of times made me forget 
 my worries, has taken me out of myself, 
 and has reminded me that this dear, old, much- 
 abused world is still a delightfully droll and 
 amusing* place in which to live. 
 
 "So far from having a grievance, it seems 
 to me that you should take Many Cargoes 
 from Mr. W. W. Jacobs, The Recessional 
 from Mr. Kipling, as we took the steam 
 engine from Watt, the safety lamp from 
 Davy, and even if neither author wrote 
 anything so good again, or wrote no other 
 word, you and I have reason to be, and 
 should be, infinitely grateful." 
 
 In reading certain criticisms of Swinburne's 
 later work, I am reminded of the popular 
 recitation about the man who listened for 
 the first time to the nightingale — listened far 
 into the night with ravished ear. But in the 
 end the sheer wonder of the novelty passed. 
 The man, being only human, wearied, yawned, 
 and bethought him of bed — yet still the night- 
 ingale sang on. That which had once been 
 
106 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 a rapture became something of an infliction. 
 While the singer thus transformed the startled 
 and stagnant pools of midnight into jettying 
 fountains of throbbing song (as the moon 
 had transformed the darkened plains into 
 lagoons of lovely light), the man could not 
 compose himself for slumber ; until at last, 
 if I remember the recitation rightly, he got 
 out of bed, stole softly downstairs for his 
 gun, and, as the final line tells : " I shot 
 that nightingale." 
 
 Of Swinburne's earlier work some critics 
 said that it was the divinest music ; of his 
 later that it was very fine, but they had 
 heard it all before, which would be equally 
 true of the nightingale, though the singer 
 remains none the less a nightingale for that. 
 Then at last, if they did not precisely shoot 
 their nightingale with a gun, they did their 
 best, or worst, to kill his poems by their 
 criticisms, and all because of a change which 
 had come about, not in his zvork, but in 
 themselves. 
 
SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 107 
 
 For the marvel of Swinburne was that 
 though, like the nightingale, he sang his 
 noblest songs in what one may call the 
 mating season of man's life, the note of 
 passion was never entirely lost. 
 
 Some who are no longer young, some of 
 us, indeed, who are already old, can still take 
 up our Swinburne and dream ourselves back 
 into the days when we and all that seemed 
 loveliest in the world were young together. 
 Those were days when every newly dawning 
 morning had a glory of its own, when down 
 the emerald-misted aisles of woodland glades 
 we looked to see riding a knight and a lady, 
 and when in forest paths we seemed to catch 
 afar the flutter or flash of white robes, as of 
 some ever-fleeing fairy or nymph. 
 
 Perhaps it is only upon those who are 
 young in years, or those who, if middle-aged 
 or actually old, still retain some youthfulness 
 of heart, that the spell and the glamour of 
 Swinburne fall. He is to some of us — as he 
 will be to many a man and woman, many a 
 
108 SWINBURNE AS I KNEW HIM 
 
 youth and maiden, a hundred, or perhaps 
 hundreds of years hence — the divinest and 
 most majestic singer of the Sunrise and the 
 Sea, yet, none the less, an immortal youth, a 
 Peter Pan of poetry who never grew old, 
 but remained in love with Life, in love 
 with Love, and in love with Song, to his 
 own life's end. 
 
 THE END 
 
BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 IN GOOD COMPANY 
 
 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF SWINBURNE, LORD ROBERTS, 
 
 WATTS-DUNTON, OSCAR WILDE, EDWARD WHYMPER, 
 
 S. J. STONE, STEPHEN PHILLIPS 
 
 BY 
 
 COULSON KERNAHAN 
 
 London: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD 
 Price 5 s. 
 
 SOME OPINIONS 
 
 The Nation (New York). Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, writing- in 
 British Weekly, says: "Mr. Coulson Kernahan's admirable 
 book, In Good Company, is enthusiastically praised in that 
 fastidious journal, the New York Nation. The reviewer gives 
 high praise to Mr. Kernahan's ' deliberately executed literary 
 portraits, composed and finished with a clear consciousness 
 that portrait painting is a fine art with a technique beyond the 
 reach of the cheerful chatterbox. Mr. Kernahan tells a 
 number of good stories — a capital one of Lord Tennyson — but 
 he uses them, subordinates them to a central artistic inten- 
 tion. . . . He understands what has never dawned upon most 
 of our cheerful gossips and our loose amorphous-minded 
 literary radicals — namely, that seven-eighths of the value of an 
 appreciation depends directly upon the value of the appreciat or, 
 
 that the definition anil measurement of a talent or a character 
 can be made only by a man with measures and definitions, 
 
 and finally, that a winsomo style in prose comes from a man 
 whose heart is good.' This is high praise and it is well 
 merited." 
 
SOME OPINIONS 
 
 The Times. — "We have enjoyed Mr. Kernahan's book so 
 much that we find ourselves asking- what the reason can be. 
 For the most part snapshot reminiscences of celebrities, though 
 we can no more help reading them than we can help turning 
 the pages of a picture paper, leave us with a slight feeling of 
 depression. The little pictures are so real, so authentic — and 
 yet if Tennyson really said this or did that have we missed so 
 very much by never having known Tennyson? And thus we 
 determine to check our natural instinct of reverence, and come 
 rather to disbelieve in great men. The impression that Mr. 
 Kernahan's book produces is the exact opposite of this. He 
 is a good but by no means a blind hero-worshipper; he makes 
 little use of stories of personalities. . . . But he succeeds very 
 singularly in making us feel that to all these men life was a 
 rich and remarkable affair, and that, after all, is what we want 
 to know about ; that is what we cannot altogether get from 
 their books. The average person is chiefly struck by the 
 eccentricities of the great ; Mr. Kernahan, on the other hand, 
 bears witness to the fulness, sincerity, and passion with which 
 great men live compared with lesser men. It is our method, 
 indeed, of passing time and spending money that should rightly 
 be called eccentric — not theirs. 
 
 "Consider, for instance, what the present of a bunch of 
 flowers meant to Swinburne. . . . This was an important 
 event to him ; his next day would begin with a solitary ecstasy 
 over a bunch of flowers. We must change our focus altogether 
 if we want to understand how the day which begins with the 
 contemplation of lilies is lived by the poet. Many incidents 
 must be blurred ; others brought out with a sudden and 
 amazing intensity. And this impression of a change in the 
 focus is still with us when Mr. Kernahan writes of Watts- 
 Dunton, although, of course, it is a very different change. 
 
 " The study of Edward Whymper gives us another view of 
 the life which has got itself out of the rut, though in his case this 
 was achieved by no bias of extraordinary genius, unless, as 
 sometimes seems to be the case, to be a ' character ' is to be 
 an artist, although you produce no work of art. The account 
 of this masterful, independent, and self-isolated man, who lived 
 for choice at the top of a high house in Southend, with a house- 
 keeper in the basement and the intervening storeys completely 
 unfurnished, so that he might feel himself alone, interests us 
 like one of those portraits of queer people painted to perfection 
 by Borrow. We would draw attention in particular to the 
 delightful scene with the photograph of himself when he had 
 already kept Mr. Kernahan waiting from 8.30 to 12.30 for his 
 supper. . . . But, like all Mr. Kernahan's studies, this is a 
 portrait, and we have no right to spoil it by picking out a 
 
SOME OPINIONS 
 
 handful of eccentricities ; for he makes us understand that the 
 queer ways of the great are for the most part only an impatient 
 short cut to a life beyond our reach." 
 
 Observer. — " It is a long time since there has been published 
 so attractive, so pleasant a volume of sketches as this. Mr. 
 Kernahan's own company is quite as good and probably far 
 more agreeable than that of some of the friends he writes 
 about. "His book is quite free from egotism, and yet gives the 
 reader a very clear idea of the author. . . . Let the reader 
 turn to the account of Edward Whymper. Pace Mr. Kernahan, 
 Mr. Whymper was a bear, and a rude bear ; yet we are glad 
 Mr. Kernahan put up with him, for, in consequence, ' out of 
 the strong has come forth sweetness.' Mr. Kernahan is 
 equally felicitous in his study of one of the gentlest and noblest 
 of men, Lord Roberts. There the real modesty of the great, 
 the clear attractiveness of the gentleman, is exemplified again 
 and again. The sketch of Swinburne is an invaluable supple- 
 ment to Mr. Gosse's Life, which dismisses the life at The Pines 
 rather too hastily. . . . This is a delightful book, which should 
 make a new circle of readers for Mr. Kernahan's imaginative 
 work." 
 
 Daily Chronicle. — "One of the pleasantest books that has 
 come the way of publishing lately is Mr. Coulson Kernahan's 
 /;; Good Company. With much to tell in anecdote and impres- 
 sion of distinguished contemporaries, Mr. Kernahan is here 
 more than merely diverting, for, in accordance with invariable 
 custom, a tone of definite purpose and practical point illumines 
 every page. Especially is this so in the chapter on Lord 
 Roberts, where is told the story of the friendly relations exist- 
 ing for many years between the writer and the fighter in their 
 common zeal for the well-being of our land. Mr. Kernahan's 
 keen advocacy of National Service, through the Territorial 
 Force, and, later, in the volunteering for active service in the 
 war, won Lord Roberts's warmest appreciation, and resulted 
 in an acquaintance mutually advantageous. To this very 
 interesting piece of reminiscence Mr. Kernahan prefixes his 
 poem, ' Ordered Out,' one of the best tributes, certainly, paid 
 in verse to the memory of a great soldier. 
 
 "A touching and lifelike sketch follows of an intimate 
 friend. ' One day, 1 says Mr. Kernahan, 'I hope to show 
 Stephen Phillips as hi* really was;' and certainly no man is 
 
 belter fitted to undertake a task so delicate. Here, in a 
 chapter all too brief, we arc given a sympathetic glimpse of 
 the scene and the effect produced 'When Stephen Phillips 
 
 Read.' The actual thing must have been a great experience 
 indeed. 
 
 " Excellent reading on the life (now established in romantic 
 
SOME OPINIONS 
 
 tradition) at The Pines, Putney, is afforded in a chapter on 
 Swinburne, whom Mr. Kernahan knew well, and on Watts- 
 Dunton, whom, perhaps, he knew even better. The author 
 of Ayhvin is viewed amusingly as the ' Ogre of the 
 Athenaum ' and as the prince of literary amateurs, as well 
 as the upright downright ' good fellow ' he was to those who 
 knew him best. Sidelights, such as these, from a book-loving 
 household, are excellent material in the hand of one who 
 displays them so well. 
 
 " Other figures in the Good Company include Wilde, Edward 
 Whymper, the veteran mountaineer, S. J. Stone, the City 
 rector, who wrote the famous hymn, ' The Church's One 
 Foundation,' and several incidentally. First and last is Mr. 
 Kernahan himself, who has produced a fascinating book of 
 personal recollections in delightful English prose. His wider 
 remembrances, already ' threatened,' ought to follow soon." 
 
 The Outlook (the Book of the Week).— " Delightfully attrac- 
 tive. . . . We end as we began, in gratitude for a feast of 
 generosity, which warms the air, and brings back the almost 
 forgotten promise of springtide and the sun." 
 

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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY