s- iiv *i"' CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Al Jn^s^ Date Due /tub rifc taa2^j_ . The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027149776 FIRST SERIES CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS Cornell University Library PN 761.H31 ser.1 1920 Contemporary portraits .first, series 1924 027 149 776 BOOKS BY FRANK HARRIS THE VEILS OF ISIS GREAT DAYS A Novel THE BOMB A Novel MONTES THE MATADOR UN path' D WATERS THE MAN SHAKESPEARE THE WOMEN OF SHAKESPEARE SHAKESPEARE AND HIS LOVE A Play CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS By FRANK HARRIS NEW YORK BRENTANO'S PUBLISHERS EM. 913567 Copyright IQZO By Frank Harris Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS page Carlyle I Ren AN 34 Whistler: Artist and Fighter 66 Oscar Wilde 97 John Davidson: Ad Memoriam 127 Richard Middleton: Ad Memoriam 159 Sir Richard Burton 178 George Meredith 198 Robert Browning 219 Swinburne: The Poet of Youth and Revolt 228 Talks with Matthew Arnold 240 Guy de Maupassant 257 Talks with Paul Verlaine 269 Fabre 283 Maurice Maeterlinck 302 Rodin 314 Anatole France 329 INTRODUCTION LIFE needs reporters, and creates them every- where. Not a tree but keeps a tally of the winters and summers it has passed, and in its knots and nodes bears witness to the storms and strains it has endured. Nature even, motionless and inarticulate Nature, is occupied with its autobiography, and preserves its record; buried forests write their history in coal- fields, forgotten seas depict their vicissitudes, and show us the form and imprint of their inhabi- tants in chalk cliffs and gravel-beds; the hardest granite and porphyry blocks testify to their fiery ori- gin and describe the chief mishaps they have suf- fered. Even the blazing suns analyze themselves through the spectroscope, and invisible stars register their weight and orbit in the deflection of neighbor- ing planets. Not a thought in the mind but inscribes itself in the furthest star, and the development of all sentient life from the dawn of time, is to be read again in the being of the youngest child. And if all creation, from the sun to the grain of sand, tells its story and records its fate, how much the more shall man sing his sorrow and his vi INTRODUCTION joy? For man is something more than a reporter; and that something more is the source and secret of his ineffable superiority : he is artist as well. He di- vines the hidden meaning in nature, the half-disclosed aim, and he does this by virtue of the fact that the eternal purpose works in him even more clearly than without him, and shows itself in his very growth. The artist is not content merely to report his suffer- ings and his pleasures, he makes epics of his adven- tures, dramas of his strugglings, lyrics of his love. Accordingly when telling of the great men he has met and known the artist-reporter is a prey to conflicting duties. As a reporter he is intent on giv- ing an exact likeness, scrupulously setting down just what his subject said ; as an artist he wants to make the portrait a picture and therefore he elaborates and arranges — exaggerating or diminishing this or that feature — in order the better to express the very essence of his sitter's soul. And the sitter is never a fixed quantity; he is always changing, and whether developing or fossilizing has always possibilities in him, the infinite interest of what might have been or may yet be. The obligation on the artist is to create — to make the greatest work of art possible, and there is no other. But still the questions tease: when and how far should one sacrifice truth to beauty, the actual to that which is in process of becoming, the real to the ideal? It seems to me that in proportion as INTRODUCTION vii the subject is great, one is bound to adhere more closely to the fact. Truth is needed by the artist in order to make great men credible and their greatness comprehensible. Men of little more than ordinary stature may be handled with greater freedom. One warning must be given here. When I repro- duce conversations in this book and put the sayings of my contemporaries in inverted commas, it must not be assumed that these are literally accurate : they are my recollection of what took place. The re- ports are perhaps more exact than most memories would be for this reason; that from the moment of the talk I have been accustomed to tell the story of my meeting and conversation with this or that dis- tinguished man almost as fully as I have set it down here. And once told, the tale was not afterwards al- tered by me, at least not consciously, and my verbal memory is unusually good. But I am always artist rather than reporter and pretend to spiritual divina- tion and not to verbal accuracy. I put these portraits forth, therefore, as works of art. "Here," I say to my readers, "are some of the most noteworthy of my contemporaries as they appeared to me." New York, 19 15. CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS CARLYLE THE servant girl at his house told me that Mr. Carlyle had gone for his usual walk on Chel- sea Embankment, so I went off to find him. It was a Sunday in June, about midday ; the air was light, the sun warm ; the river shone like a riband of silk in the luminous air. My heart beat fast ; I was going to meet the great- est of living men, the only one, indeed, of my con- temporaries who spoke to me with authentic inspira- tion and authority. Browning I knew was among the Immortals, one of the very greatest of English poets; a thinker, too, of high impartial curiosity; but apart from his poetic gift, Browning seemed to me a well-read Englishman of ordinary stature, whereas Carlyle was of the race of the giants; like Luther, like Mahomet, one of the elemental forces of humanity. I see now that I rated him above his worth, mistaking literary gift and Biblical solemnity of manner for insight; but then I was all reverence and my heart was thumping — Ah, did you once see Shelley plain? 2 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS What would he say to me — what memorable thing? Every time we had met he had said some- thing I could never forget, something that would remain always as part of the furniture of my mind. What would he say to-day? What did I want him to talk about? He would not be directed: 'twas better to let him take his own course. . . . He looked, I thought, the prophet; his clothes loose and careless, for comfort, not show; the shaggy, unkempt grey thatch of hair ; the long head, the bony, almost fleshless face of one who had fasted and suffered; the tyrannous overhanging cliff fore- head; the firm, heavy mouth and out-thrust, challeng- ing chin — the face of a fighter; force everywhere, brains and will dominant ; strength redeemed by the deepset eyes, most human, beautiful ; by turns pierc- ing, luminous, tender-gleaming; pathetic, too, for the lights were usually veiled in brooding sadness broken oftenest by a look of dumb despair and regret; a strong, sad face, the saddest I ever studied — all petrified, so to speak, in tearless misery, as of one who had come to wreck by his own fault and was tortured by remorse — the worm that dieth not. Why was he so wretched? What could be the meaning of it? Age alone could not bring such anguish? What crown had he missed? He had done so much, won imperishable renown; what more did he • • • ■ ' ■ "Th« end of all this is," I said, before going back to London, "the end of all this is, that you will not write?" "No, no, Frank," he said, "that I cannot write un- der these conditions^ If I had money enough ; if I could shake off Paris and forget those awful rooms of mine and get to the Riviera for the winter and live in some seaside village of the Latins or Etrurians with the wine-colored sea at my feet, and the blue sky above, and the scent of rosemary and myrtle at my nostrils, and God's sunlight about me and no care for money, then I would write as naturally as a bird sings, because one is happy and cannot help it. . . ." But when the occasion was given him, and he spent a whole winter on the Riviera, he composed nothing more than a couple of verses of a ballad on A Fisher Boy, verses which were never even written down. The will to live had almost left him: so long as he could live pleasantly and without effort he was 126 CONtEMPORARY PORTRAITS content; but as soon as ill-health came or pain, or even discomfort, he grew impatient for deliverance., One day when out driving in the last months Ross remonstrated with him for Stopping too frequently to drink: "You know you shouldn't, Oscar^ the doctors said you shouldn't; it is poison to you." For one moment the sad eyes held him : "Why not, Bobbiei What have I to live for?" And his best friend could only bow his head. But to the last he kept his joyous humor and charming gaiety. His disease brought with it a cer- tain irritation of the skin, annoying rather than painful. Meeting this same friend after some weeks of separation he wanted to apologize for scratch- ing himself: "Really," he exclaimed, "I'm more like a great ape than ever; but I hope you'll give me a lunch, Bobbie, and not a nut." At the very last, he asked for champagne and when it was brought declared that he was "dying be- yond his means" — his happy humor lighting up even his death-bed. JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM IT was in 1890 that I first met John Davidson: he had sent The Ballad of the Nun to me for publi- cation in The Fortnightly Review. I read the poem, as indeed I read every contribution in those early days, hoping it was a masterpiece, and this time I was not disappointed. I can still recall the thrill of these verses : The adventurous sun took heaven by storm; Clouds scattered largesses of rain; ^he sounding cities, rich and warm. Smouldered and glittered in the plain. Sometinjes it was a wandering wind. Sometimes the fragrance of the pine, Sometimes the thought how others sinned, That turned her sweet bleod into wine. -X Sometimes she heard a serenade Complaining sweetly far away; She said, "A yoimg man woos a maid"; And dreamt of love till break of day. 127 128 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS For still night's starry scroll unfurled. And still the day came like a flood: It was the greatness of the world ' That made her long to use her blood. Naturally I was eager to meet such a singer: I wrote to him, telling him of the, joy his ballad had given me, and hoped that he would call when he had nothing better to do. A day or two later he came, and I took to him at first sight. He was a little bdow middle height, but strongly built with square shoulders and remarkably fine face and head: the features were almost classically regular, the eyes dark brown and large, the forehead high, the hair, moustache and small "Imperial" as black as jet: he carried a monocle, was always well-dressed and looked like a handsome Frenchman. His manners were perfectly frank and natural : he met every one in the same unaffected, kindly, human way: I never saw a trace in him of snobbishness or incivility. Pos- siWy a great man, I said to myself, certainly a man of genius, for simplicity of manner alone is in Eng- land almost a proof of extraprdinary endowment. I soon noticed one little peculiarity in Davidson, which I afterwards remarked in other poets : his enuncia- tion was exceptionally distinct: every word had its value to him, each syllable its weight. I met him with a slight embarrassment. Though I was editor of the review, the managing director, JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 129 Mr. Frederic Chapman, expected to be consulted be- fore any abnormal expense was incurred or any ex- traordinary article accepted. In my elation I had laid The Ballad of the Nun before him and hoped he would allow me to pay £50 for it. To my aston- ishment he scouted the idea : "poetry didn't pay," he assured me, "never had paid, never would pay; a fiver was plenty to give for any poem : all poets were hard up . . . five pounds would buy the best any of them could do." It was no use trying to alter his opinion. I had scarcely made up my mind to plead poverty to Da- vidson when Chapman came to my room and begged me not to publish the poem on any account: he had read the verses I had praised and he thought them disgustingly licentious. In vain I argued and quoted : I was up against the tradesman's view of art, and an English tradesman at that There was nothing to he done but accept the brainless decision or throw up my post. I had to be taught that to edit a review in London is not to be a priest in the Temple of the Spirit, but the shopman pander to a childish public with an insatiable appetite for whatever is convene tional and commonplace. Davidson made such a good impression on me that I told him the truth : the poem would have its place in English literature, but my directors would not publish It. He took the disappointment perfectly, confessed that he would have liked the ballad to ap- I30 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS pear in The Fortnightly; adding handsomely that my appreciation of it was sufficient compensation, and so forth. From that time on we were friends, and met half a dozen times every season as one meets friends in London. Such of our meetings as marked rings of growth in our intimacy I shall find a mournful pleas- ure in recalling here, for long before the tragic end Davidson had become dear to me. The growth of friendship like the growth of love in my experience proceeds often by leaps and bounds and not by gradual, imperceptible accretions as the young are apt to imagine. Like love, friendship has to be won, is indeed also a twin flower of desire and conquest. I accuse myself now of taking Davidson's friendship too much for granted; but it seemed valu- able to me from the first, and I tried to introduce hini to people who might have been of use to him. He was unwilling to come out of his shell, not from shyness, but pride. Once, however, I succeeded. I took him to a house at Wimbledon where his poetry was already known and loved. As soon as Davidson found he was among friends and admirers who could appreciate his work, he let himself go with the ingenuousness of a boy. He recited passages that he liked in his own work or the work of others, and, of course, one noticed immediately that he had an extraordinary knowledge of the best English JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 131 poetry. Like most poets, he chanted his lines, mark- ing the metre of the verse a little too distinctly; but there was a certain impressiveness in the peculiarity. And how sincere he was and how enthusiastic when repeating the verses he loved : one could hear thrill- ing across the rhythm his intimate understanding and generous admiration. It was in this spirit he quoted something of Burns, whom I had been/running down just to see if his patriotism would revolt. He had no conscious local vanity, and he recognized certain of Burns's limitations, but, as a Scot, he could not help overrating him. Again and again on this occasion Davidson com- plained of his memory; but the listeners had reason to wonder at its fidelity. He complained, too, as I often heard him complain afterwards, of his fum- bling speech. "With a pen in hand I am articulate," he cried, "but my tongue's a poor instrument." It was, in fact, a very good instrument, though doubt- less his pen was better. It is only in his books that the creative artist can reveal his peculiar gift; in coriversation, however mtimate, he seldom is able to show more than the intellectual or critical side of his talent. This ana- lytic critical faculty is only the obverse of the syn- thetic creative power, and whatever shortcomings there are in the one can usually be traced in the other. Goethe overpraised honest mediocrities be- cause there was such heavy German paste in him . 132, CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS that he could enjoy drivel and produce deserts of dullness such as ensure oblivion to the Wanderjahre. I felt pretty sure that Davidson would not give me ready-made or popular judgments; as an original poet he would have his own creed, a new canon. Aad a most original critic he showed himself, as I had expected. What appeared at first to be a freakish sincerity marked all his literary judgments ; most of his pref- erences were based on reason, though the reason didn't alwiays seem adequate. This tantalizing un- expectiedness was, of course, the tap-root of his genius, the proof of his originality. Let me recall some of his judgments. He declared that " 'The Song of the Shirt' was the most important English poem of the nineteenth century: 'The woman in unwomanly rags plying her needle and thread' was of the very stuff of great poetry." And James Thomson in natural endowment was the first English poet of his time, high throned among the Immor- tals. Tennyson, on the other hand, was only a mas- ter-craftsman, both he and Browning mere bour- geois optimists. Burns could see, he said, and Blake had vision at times, and Wordsworth profoundly; Swinburne was nothing but an amorist. Davidson's reverence was all for the spirit and not the letter, sincerity to him was the hall-marki of genius. Among the living Meredith was "our foremost man of letters," while Yeats was only "the JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 133 seer of the twilight, the singer of *pearl-palc' fingers and 'dove-grey' seaboards," and' Shaw hardly more than a "humorist." His appreciation of form as became a poet was wellnigh perfect, but all his ad- miration even in those early days went to the teach- ers and not to the singers. Gradually we won Davidson to speak of himself: he had come, he said, of Scotch peasant stock: put his thick strong hands with short spatulated fingers forward as evidence of his workman origin — "the mark of the ploughman," he calfed them. And then he spoke of the delicacy of constitution shown in his relatively thin neck ; one would think, he said, that a thick neck would show a brain well fed with large blood vessels; as a matter of fact, it's always a sign of exorbitant animalism. I had noticed his comparatively thin neck, too, and mentioned that it usually went with other signs of delicacy, such as fine silky thick hair: but Davidson contended that his hair was not fine and not thick, and when he saw me unconvinced he suddenly put up his hand and in a twinkling plucked off a "transformation" and dis- covered an astonishing dome of bald forehead. We couldn't help laughing, and I asked him why he wore such a thing. "1 was prematurely bald," he said, "and a littlie ashamed of looking so old; now I'm thinking of leaving my head as it is ; but the flies an? noy me, and so I put off the decision." A few years later he doffed the disguise finally, and I think his 134 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS appearance was improved thereby, for his fore- head was remarkable — domed like Swinburne's and Shakespeare's. Thinking over my first long talks with Davidson I came to the conclusion that, having sprung^from the people and suffered a good deal from poverty, he gave undue importance to the condition of the laboring class and the poor without sufficient sym- pathy with the intellectuals who deserve more help and are still worse off. Besides, he was -a little in- fluenced by the undeserved neglect sjhown to his own works. He had a passionate admiration for all the great spirits of the past, and even for the really great of his own generation : but he was apt to be un- just to the lesser lights of the time who for some reason or other had achieved popularity. He cDuld not stand Henley, for instance, and spoke of him disdainfully .-said laughingly: "I-wrote a couplet on him once because he's always sheltering himself behind Byron to depreciate -contempo-raries more important than his idol : Behind the gallant verse, the gallant prose; A little soul: its finger to its nose. "You remember," he added, "how Lamb called Wordsworth 'the Beadle of Parnassus' — good? isn't it? We don't want, beadles !" "Excellent," I cried, "I hadn't heard it before. JOHN DAVIDSON: iVD MEMORIAM 135 My judgment of Henley," I went on, "is as disr dainful as yours: I always called hini Pistol Redivi- vus. You reraeinber his verse: It matters not how straight the gate. How ciharged with punishment the scroll, - I am the Master of my fate; I am the Captain of my Soul." "It does, indeed, deserve to be called 'The Swan Song of Pistol I' " cried Davidson. "Yet one couldn't help pitying him," I rejoined, "with his splendid torso and leonine head, and those terrible, twisted legs," '•'Why 'pity'?" replied Davidson; "after all, it was his own fault. If a man will take brainless risks, he has only himself to blame for the inevitable con- sequences." I thought this a h?ird saying. , "You would not exclude pity," I cried: "thank God I we don't all get punished according to our transgressions. The world would be a dreadful place if Justice reigned: which of us would escapd whipping?'' "I don't agree," cried Davidson, with a Scotch love of argument and a certain personal bitterness in the tone ; ''I only want justice, nothing more, nothing less. Do you remember the astonishing lines? I think them as fine as anything of Shake- speare: 136 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS This toils my body, this consumeth age. That only I to all men just must be. And neither gods nor men be just to me. >,, "A cry from the inmost heart — eh?" I nodded, for I knew The Spanish Tragedy, and Davidson went on: "See how Stephen Phillips is being puffed into popularity by the academic critics, the Sidney Colvins and other such nonentities : it irritates and disgusts me. "Some of his dramatic stuff," I chimed in, "is in- deed uninspired enough to be popular/' "You should print my verse about him as a cor- rective," cried Davidson, and he recited merrily: Because our Homer sometimes nods The Ancient Bikrd who went before. Is that a reason, oh, ye Gods, Should Stephen Phillips always snore? "His Paolo and Francesca seems to me a beauti- ful love-duet," I said, "not nearly so fine as Romeo and Juliet, but still in its own way delightful and in- teresting." "No Mercutio, no Nurse; nothing objective in it," cried Davidson, "a mere lyric of love." I could not accept his judgment, and to find out just where he stood I said something in praise of JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 137 Dowson. Davidson was a little unfair to him, too, I thought. "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fash- ion," strikes a note that always vibrates in me : but he would not have it. "One swallow does not make a summer," he cried, "nor one poem a poet : a poet is a sacred singer, not a sort of mechanical toy with only one tune in its throat." (He appeared to forget that this canon ruled out his favorite. Hood.) While admitting whatever force there was in his contention, I insisted that all artists today, especially all poets and writers in England, were lamentably underpaid and misesteemed. "Don't for God's sake let us grudge any of them such popularity as they may win. They'll never get enough appreciation of any sort to make up for their trials. . . . "No writer in England should ever dispute the justice of the reward given to any of our clan: we should all exalt our work like actors do, and try to get more for it, but never depreciate another of the tribe. By holding together we shall the sooner come into our kingdom." Davidson, I believe, did not realize fully what I was driving at; nor did I care to push my theories on him, being more intent at the moment on getting a fair mental portrait of him. It was his sincerity which struck me most at the 138 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS outset; three or four years later he shoTeed me that his unswerving loyalty to truth was an even deeper characteristic and had brought him to many-sided wisdom. He saw his own people with the unflinch- ing direct vision which Dante turned on his Flor- entines. "The English," he said one day, "from the peer to the prentice, are the middle-class of Europe, the prosperous pushing shopwalkers of the world." • Napoleon saw it first, but Davidson realized the truth a little more completely. Davidson was probably the first to declare that "the modern scientific spirit in literature, the re- solve to see things as they are, and say what we are relentlessly is a great mood. The mood in which men and women wish to be and be known, as they are, to respect and be respected, to love and be loved simply for what they are, is the greatest mood for hundreds of years." Such a view proves by itself that Davidson had real insight, and his judgments were usually sane enough if his point of view were taken Into account. This fairness of judgment, howevef, never excluded a love of whimsical overstatement. Once in a com- bative mood he asserted tiiat one good poem was worth a dozen short stories. I didn't feel inclined to treat the absurdity seriously; but he persisted, gravely assuming that the survival of Homer's poetry proved its superiority over all prose. At JONN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 139 length I was compelled to ask him which verses in Honier he would put above the story of The Prodi- gal Son? Was any poetry better than: "This my son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found." He laughed at once charmingly. "We all know our own trade best," he chuckled, delighted at having drawn me. The worst of any attempt to give a pen-portrait 'of a man one has knowh is that one is so apt to deal chiefly with his intellect and give a picture of his mind without showing his heart and temperament. It should be impossible for me to talk of Davidson without insisting again and again on his generous sympathy and the charm of his cbmpanibnship. His whimsicalities of judgment were really proof of his chivalric earnestness. If he had thought that Hen- ley had been ill-used by the world, or if he had felt that Henley had given great work, or much love to the world, nothing would have induced him to say a word against him. His thirst was for justice: he was always "trying to establish the equitable balance: James Thomson had been neglected, therefore he overpraised James Thomson. Meredith was pass- ing through his day almost unnoticed. Davidson never let his name go by without the warmest com- mendation. And this chivalry of disposition went 140 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS with a sweet temper, a quick sense of humor, and the most generous appreciation of his friends and of contemporary work. He endured poverty, too, heroically and without murmur or tinge of envy, though with the years it became increasingly burdensome to him. His wife and he came to stay a few days with us once. Mrs. Davidson was a very pretty and very charming per- son, whom I was glad to know better. I found her very simple and sympathetic. One evening the fire was a little warm, and Davidson and I had talked philosophy for some time and wearied the ladies. At length Davidson began reciting one of his later philosophic poems, in his usual somewhat monoto- nous chanting way: it was very long, and he went on and on, encouraged by my interest; suddenly we discovered that Mrs. Davidson had fallen asleep. Davidson took the interruption perfectly. "No wonder she fell asleep," he said sympathetic- ally. "She must be tired out. We are too poor to keep a servant always, and sometimes the household work is too much for her, poor dear ! "Isn't it a shame?" he added, "that I can'^t get a decent living for myself and my wife; though I work incessandy, and as hard as ever I can." "What do your books bring in?" I asked. "About a hundred pounds a year," he replied; "I couldn't live on them : but now and then I get a wind- fall that tides us along. Lewis Waller gave me £250 JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 141 for my translation of Ruy Bias. Did you see the play? I galled it The Queen's Romance: it went about fifty^nlghts. If it had gone another week, I'd have made more money out of it. I think luck has been a little i^gainst me. Mrs. Langtry, you know, Lady de Battle, gave me £250 for a play: Mile. Mars: it went iato rehearsal; I had built mountain- ous hopes on it : ^ng Edward suddenly paid a visit to her theatre and in consequence the play she had, revived and she didn't need mine. Tree, too, paid me for a translation of Cyrano de Bergerac; but riever put it on, and George Alexander for a play on Launcelot and Mrs. Patrick Campbell for a version of the Phedre. I don't know what we should have done without such windfalls. Before our two boys grew up and began to fend for themselves it was often very hard to make both ends meet." "Is it quiet where you live now?" I asked. "Streatham is rather noisy," he replied, "but the noises don't prevent my writing, thank Godl" "Why don't you do more journalism?" I probed further, thinking that this might be the means by which his writing talent could come to the assistance of his genius. "I'm unfitted for it," he replied, "for anything at all indeed except poetry: prose takes me more time and effort. I must just go on as best I can : there's no other outlet or hope for^e." "What a shame 1" I cried, "that men of letters are 142 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS not subsidized in England ! Have you ever ap- proached the Government for a pension?" "Friends have spoken of it," he replied, "but I don't think anything has been done." "Something must be done," I urged; "you should stir them up, get them to act." "No good now," he said, "something may be done later when the Liberals come in. I've always been a Radical, you know," he added, a little proudly, I thought. I don't know why it never struck me that I should use any of the papers I edited to puff Davidson into prominence. I cannot account for my own shame- ful negligence in this respect. I can only admit the fact and partially explain it by saying that Davidson always seemed to me properly appreciated. All the writers I spoke to about him recognized his genius : they didn't perhaps put him as high as I did, but one and all realized that he would be among the English poets when he died. It seemed almost impertinent to praise such a master; but this excuse is rather an apology than the simple truth: the truth is, I never thought of puiEng Davidson any more than Ber- nard Shaw or Harold Frederic, or anyone who didn't expressly ask to be noticed. My dreadful negligence in this respect was brought home to me bitterly when it was too late, for I was told that Davidson had been hurt a little by my reticence. Had he said a word to me I'd have done anything I could: but he JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 143 was too proud to ask, I suppose, and I too much en- grossed in other matters to think even of helping my friend. The only plea I can urge in mitigation of my seeming callousness is that today the fight is so hot for all of us writers and artists, that we are apt to overlook even sacred obligations if they are not pressed upon our notice. About this time my health broke down, and for some yea.rs I was in many difficulties: when I par- tially emerged in 1904, or 1905, I met Davidson again, and found him changed : he had grown self- assertive, and at the same time had developied a cer- tain bitterness of attitude which seemed out of tune with his kindly temperament and fair habit of mind. All men need to have a good conceit of themselves in order to go through life sanely; we should all grow thick, hard shells of conceit like lobsters to protect our sensibilities from rude hands. And if this is true of all men it is tenfold truer of the writer and artist who has to persist in being at his best and doing his best in spite of the amused contempt or neglect of his contemporaries. The conditions of life for the poet or artist are a thousand times severer than most men imagine. In the usual walks of life— in trade or in the profes- sions — high talent or industry is associated with re- ward; the barrister who becomes a learned law- yer or a great advocate, the doctor who shows exceptional capacity Is almost certain to win position 144 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS and a competence; at fifty he can reckon on having a large income and an easy and honored life. But the poet or artist has to face an altogether different experience; the progress he makes in his art divorces him from popularity; it is ordinary sentiment in ordi- nary jingle that pays ; every step the artist makes of comprehension and accomplishment removes him further from the mass of men and from success. His growth leads him inevitably from the praise of his fellows to their disdain and hatred. If he feels it in him to reach the level of Dante or Shakespeare, he will pass from a certain popularity and respect, to contempt and dislike and may account himself for- tunate if the hatred of him does not turn to active persecution and punishment. And if in spite of all this, the soldier of the ideal dedicates his soul to the highest and dares the uttermost, he knows that his crown will be of thorns, his kingship a derision, his throne, a cross. All the time, it is true, he will be buoyed up by the consciousness that he is in intimate relation with the soul of things, or, if you will, by his own self-esteem. It is dangerous to take such self-assurance as a guide, though it is very difficult not to trust the high self- estimate which has helped you again and again to achievement. The higher one climbs the more diffi- cult and perilous the next ascfent. Failure is certain ultimately: failure and a fall. Sooner or later the dark hour comes for all of us. JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 145 When he was over forty years of age Davidson reached this pass. Starting from near the bottom of the social hierarchy, he had won to the very top : he had made a name as common as Smith immortal ; had crowned himself in the Temple not made with hands, eternal in the Heavens, and yet he was confronted with the vast indifference of the public that cares less for poets than for acrobats, and exposed to the envi- ous attacks of venomous poetasters and journalists, and this at a time when he was without money and without influence, but with health failing and disease threatening. It is to Davidson's honor that in that dread hour he never whimpered or whined or thought of giving in; instead of abating his high pretensions as a poet, he set them higher still; he would be a prophet as well, or rather he was a prophet, and what was true to him, that he would set forth with all emphasis. Alas ! in spite of his sincerity and unswerv- ing devotion to truth, in spite of all his gifts as a Sanger, and all his goodness as lover and father and friend, he could discover no light in the darkness, no sun, no star. But his courage held ; he would sing all encompassing Night, then, and Nothingness, and himself set therein sightless yet a god ! the only god, indeed ! That way madness lies: such pride dwarfs the mind and maims the soul. In the sad preface to his last work. Fleet Street and Other Poems, he says : "Men should no longer ^tWiniftcd's,. ;, F^irmile Avenne. . Streatliain.S.W, ' ' , " •■' , i m£ l^/r^ Lc(!i^ QUx^ 146 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS degrade themselves under such appellations as Chris- tian, Mohammedan, Agrtostic, Monist. Men are the Universe become conscious," and so forth. That "degrade themselves" is somewhat overpitched. No one calls himself Christian who does not feel that he is thereby doing his best to ennoble himself, and if Man is the Universe become conscious is there not hope in that and joy? Man's striving towards the best is as splendid as the struggle of the flower to the light, and there is a measure of happiness,' for both in the success and the sunshine. There is some truth in Davidsdri's gospel of the man-god, though he vastly overrated its importance. All we know of God or of the Time-Spirit and purpose of things is drawn from our knowledge of ourselves; to himself man is god, and the upward groping and growth of his own soul is the only revelation of the Divine which we mortals can know. This idea overpowered Davidson : he would not be- lieve that anyone else had ever seen it, or at least grasped its full significance, he, Davidson, and he alone, for the first time was the Universe grown con- scious, and perhaps for the last time; the supreme purpose being accomplished, the Universe might now dislimn and return to chaos. In his Testament he set forth the stupendous presumption: I dare not^ must not die: I am the sight And hearing of the infinite; in me JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 147 Matter fulfils Itself; before me none Beheld or heard, imagined, thought or felt; 4aid though I make the mystery known to men. It jnay be none hereafter shall achieve The perfect purpose of eternity; It may be that the Universe attains Self-knowledge only once; and when I cease To see and hear, imagine, think alnd feel. The end may come, and matter, satisfied. Devolve once more through wanton change, and tides Of slow relapse, suns, systems, galaxies. Back to ethereal oblivion, pure Accomplished darkness. Night immaculate Augmenting everlastingly in space. . . . He had lost all measure, he did not see that the coming to complete consciousness \§ a sign of maturity in the individual, and that all the great work, all the finest Achievements come later. The world Is young and not old, mankind a youth still, in the brisk morning of life indeed, surcharged with health and vigor, electric with courage and hope, eyes aglow with heavenly radiance! Instead of singing himself as the ultimate, Davidson should have sung himself as herald and harbinger of the great time coming. No Thor can drain the ocean I Davidson was not content with the fragment of fame he had achieved; he would have all men acknowledge his greatness; he was tra^cally ambitious, impious in self-asser- 148 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS tion ; the Scotch preacher vein in him becoming more and more dominant choked the sweet poetry. Every time we met from 1907 onwards there was deterioration in him : the worse he did, the higher he put his claims. If one praised his poetry and begged him to give the world more of it, he pooh-poohed it all. I reminded him once of how exquisitely he had written of larks and their singing, and he replied: "My dear Frank, Shelley did it better, and I have better things to do, greater songs to sing; which you will not listen to." "I'm ready to listen," I cried; but he shrugged his shoulders and drew silence about him as a garment. I was full of disquiet and distress about him and wondered how he would pull through. Then the news of his pension came and delighted me. It has come in the very nick of time, I exulted, to save him from himself: true, it is only £100 a year; but that to Davidson is a great deal, and it is the full and fitting and perfect reply of the Future to the vile journal- ists' attacks, on him of the moment. Now he is saved, I thought, and will surely do better than ever. A few days later I met him at the door of the Cafe Royal in Regent Street and congratulated him warmly. For the first time I thought he posed a little, was. inclined to be pompous. "It has done me good," he admitted, "but what I like about it is, it is evidently given for my latest JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 149 work. Some glimmering of the truth I've sung has pierced the darkness; it's a sort of recognition." "Oh, it's immense," I cried, "an English Govern- ment gives you money, says one poet is worth sav- ing, helping: it's extraordinary, it's everything: you must really be pleased and proud and content. We are all so gladl" He took it all with grave dignity, like a monarch receiving homage, I thought; and holding himself aloof a little for dignity's sake. I went on my way wondering how long the intoxi- cation would last. Some weeks later I met him again : he was down in the dumps. When I referred to his pension he flew out at me. "What's a hundred a year? How can one live on it? It's almost an insult. They give so-and-so two hundred and me one-^-it's absurd. . . . " "A good staff, literature," I replied, "but a poor crutch; still, a hundred a year keeps a roof over one's head and a door closed against the wolf." But why, I wondered, couldn't the English Gov- ernment give so that the gift itself should be dignified by the giving. Seeing that artists and prophets and writers have scant reward in the money way, and if they belong to the future by dint of greatness, scant honor in the present: why doesn't t^e House of Commons, the great Council of the Nation, set one day or one hour aside each year In which to do I50 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS them honor. The names of the selected candidates might then be put upon the roll of honor and the thanks of Parliament be accorded to them and re- corded. Those who seek riches and succeed, who, therefore, deserve least of their fellow-men, for they take much and give little or nothing, are awarded titles and peerages and all the rest of it; but those who have given their lives and labor to the ser- vice of man in the most disinterested way get neither wealth nor honor nor any sort of recognition. All this, it seems to me, is certain to be altered, and sooner than we think. The pension given to Davidson did not encourage him for long; it was not enough to cover his neces- sities. I thought his disappointment might be dis- sipated, and took him for a long talk. We dined and spent the evening together. Late that night he ^oke for the first time of suicide and his fear of cancer : he dwelt on the pain, and, above all, on the ignominy of the smell that accompanies the dreadful disease. "A stinking death," he called it, with the shuddering disgust of the artist. I made light of his fears, could not believe they were well founded, and if they were, assured him he would meet the Arch-Fear with per- fect courage as he had met and conquered worse devils throughout his life. After all, death has to be faced by all of us I "But cancer, cancer is disgusting," he cried; "I've always loathed and dreaded it. Do all one's fears in JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 151 life materialize to torture us? You say all our prayers are granted, perhaps all our fears, too, get realized?" After we had parted the talk came back to me, I felt that Davidson was really depressed', and re- proached myself for not having encouraged him by demonstrating the unreality of his fear; a vague anxiety at heart told me it was not well with him. Here is a verse from that time heavy with hope- less misery, which shows I had partly divined his mood : And defeat was my crown! When, naked, I wrestled with fate The destinies trampled me down: — I fought in the van and was great. And I won, though I wore no crown. In the lists of the world; for fate And the destinies trampled me down — The myrmidons trampled me down. The darkest page in Cervantes tells how even Quixote was trampled down by the swine : it is the same dreadful experience. When Davidson wrote that verse despair had taken hold of him : a little while later the news came that he had disappeared; a little later stiU that he had killed himself. The first words of the preface to his last work, Fleet Street, were published as the explanation ; 152 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS The time has come to make an end. There are several motives. I find my pension is not enough; I have there- fore still to turn aside and attempt things for which people •will pay. My health also counts. Asthma and other an- noyances I have tolerated for years; but I cannot put up with cancer. Here is what I have been able to learn of the manner of his death: A year or so before he had taken a small house in Penzance by the sea and gone there to live with his wife and younger son. He suffered now and then from pains in the lower intestines, which he looked upon as a symptom of some cancerous growth. One March evening, after working all day, he went out to post a batch of proofs to his publisher and never returned alive. At the inquest the doctor said he had found what he thought was a bullet hole in his head. There is a place on the cliffs where a young man had thrown himself into the sea some time before and been drowned. Davidson reached this spot af- ter nightfall; what decided him none can say: it is probable that he shot himself through the head while standing so that his body must fall into the waves surging fifty feet beloW. He was tragically resolved to make sure. The regret of all who knew him was intensified by the fact that he had never been so well-off : he had N DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 153 not ony the £100 a year of the Government; but his chief publisher, Mr. Grant Richards, had also very generously undertaken to give him another £100 a year regularly for his poetry and he could reckon on translation^ of plays and occasional articles to bring him in as much more ; but he had come to know his real value and his true position as seer and steers- , man to the ship, and the contrast betwee^n his deserv- ing and what the world gave was too humiliating. ^ Besides, he had done most of his work: the kernel of it was there in The Testaments already written; despairing Foreword written, too ; sufficient explana- tion : all the silly world deserved ; why should he bear the horrible dagger-thrusts gf pain any longer? — "the time has come to make an end." Had he but realized how his desperate deed would darken the outlook for others, he would have taken courage and waited for Nature's free- ing. . . . Dear, brave Davidson! The coroner's jury brought in a merciful verdict — "found drowned." The news shocked the town; every one had been talking of him and his pension, thinking him lucky to have got it, when suddenly h^ threw the money back in the faces of the givers and left the arena in disgust. For one moment the desperate act made men pause and think. Had he been treated badly? Were these poets not merely "the idle singers of an idle day" ; but men of character, capable of desperate 154 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS resolution, persons to be proud of and to emulate, and not merely amiable "cranks" to be half pitied, half despised? Some pretended he had killed himself because of a virulent journalistic attack on his Testaments by a rib- ald poetaster, but that was nonsense. Better than most men Davidson knew exactly the value and meaning of such envious slander. Years before, he had written, "If a poet or any other writer can be killed by criticism the sooner it is done the better." But for a moment the world questioned. Then the tide of life flowed on again and all was as before. The English troubled themselves as little about the suicide as they had troubled themselves about the poet or the prophet. What was his death, after all, but another man gone "where we all must go"? One word more, when after some three months of anxiety, misery and searching on the part of his sons and wife, the sea gave up its dead and what re- mained of John Davidson was found on the shore near Penzance, the eldest son resolved to bury his father as he would have wished to be buried. With the native refinement of the artist Davidson had al- ways hated the idea of being wound in swaddling' clothes and put in the earth to decay. He had told his boys whom he had treated as "pals" that he would prefer to be buried at sea and his sons now carried out his wishes. They took his remains in a funeral launch all draped in black and when far out- jdttN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 155 side the three miles limit, gave hingt to tho freedom and sweetness of the deep he loved. Now what is the true moral or permanent meaning of Davidson's life to us who remain and to those who are to come after us ? It was undeniably a greaft life, a life of splendid accomplishment, of heroic achievement. Whatever may be thought of his Testaments and his prose invocation of the Lords', and his contemptuous depreciation of the woman's movement, there can be no doubt that John Davidson was a man of large and liberal mind who spent himself in devotion to high purposes, a poet who might have been named Greatheart, whose best verses have passed into the language and form part of the inheritance of the race. The Last Journey is the finest poem of the sort in English literature, though both Browning and Arnold have treated the same subject. The last verses of it reach tragic grandeur : My feet are heavy now, but on I go, M^ head erect beneath the tragic years. The way is steep, but I would have it so; And dusty, but I lay the dust with tears, Though none can see me weep: alone I climb The ragged path that leads me out of time — Out of time and out of all. Singing yet in sun and rain, "Heel and toe from dawn to dusk, Round the world and home again." 156 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair That went before me still and made the pace. The earth is full of graves, and mine was tiiere Before my life began, my resting-place; And I shall find it out and with the dead Lie down for ever, all my sayings said — Deeds all done and songs all sung. While others chant in sun and rain,. "Heel and toe from dawn to dusk. Bound the werld and home again." What shall be said of the man who could write like that? Davidson will live with Burns, it seems to me; he is not so great a force: he has not Burns's pathos nor his tenderness nor his humor; but he does not write in a dialect: he is a master of pure English, and his best work touches extremes of beauty and tragic sadness. His appalling end, too, is a sort of natural canonization ; suicide carries with it the sanctity of supreme suffering, and such majestic singularity defies oblivion. This is part of Davidson's reward, that his name will be remembered for ever, and his unhappy fate will be used to make life easier for men of genius in the future. We must never forget, too, that if ar- tistic creation is the most difficult, most arduous, most nerve-shattering toil in the world, yet when even partially successful it has the highest recompense in triumphant joy, the glory of the spirit. Our friend, JOHN DAVIDSON: AD MEMORIAM 157 too, had his moments of exultation and ecstasy when he lived on the topmost height of man's achievement. But people say that Davidson was a failure, and talk of his suicide as proof of weakness. Whistler, they assert, won through to success and wealth, whereas Davidson gave up the fight in despair, there- fore Davidson was a smaller man. Such argument takes no account of the fact that perhaps of all ar- tists success is easiest to the painter and hardest to the poet or writer. The painter's art is universal and appeals to all men, whereas tht writer's appeal is limited to those of his own speech. Whistler was honored in France and his work bought for the Luxembourg long before he was even takefi seriously in England or America. Davidson had no such out- let: he had to win in England or lose altogether. Moreover, thousands of people can see beauty in a picture for one who loves poetry, and a picture can be finished in a week, whereas a poem of the same importance will take half a year. Davidson, in my opinion, was quite as big a man as Whistler, a nobler character, indeed, with just as deep and fair a mind, just as splendid an artistic en- dowment ; his cour&ge, too, was as high ; but the test he was put to was a thousandfold severer. Whistler often earned fifty pounds in an afternoon : he lived habitually at the rate of a couple of thousand pounds a y^ar, whereas Davidson could hardly earn a tenth of that sum. There were always people of great po- 1 5 8 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS sition who were eager to ask Whisdcr to lunch or dinner. At forty he was one of the personages in London; men pointed him out as he passed in the street, there was a "legend" about him. Davidson, on the other hand, was as little regarded as a butler or a bootblack. One of the rarest and most superb flowers of genius of our time, he was almost totally neglected : the fact does not say much for the garden or the gardeners. RICHARD MIDDLETON:ADMEMORIAM IT was in the aatumn of 1907 that Edgar Jepson introduC,ed me to Richard Middleton in the oflEce of Vanity Fair. A big man and perfectly self- possessed, his burly figure, thick black beard and fur- rowed forehead made hira look ten years older than he was : five and thirty, at least, I thought him till I caught the laughing, boyish gleam in his grey-blue eyes. He had assisted Jepson in the editing of the paper while I was in America, and on my return he helped me for some little time. He was casual, cheer- fully unpunctual, careless rather than critical in cor- recting other men's work, and these ordinary short- comings were somewhat harassing. One day he re- marked in the air, that if he could get paid for poetry he'd prefer writing to editing. I was a little sur- prised: I had not thought of him as a poet; but we soon came to an arrangement. His first verses sur- prised me; there was the singing quality in them, a happy ease of melody, a sureness and distinction of phrase which proved that he was indeed a poet. Bet- ter still, his best verses did not echo his forerunners ; imitative cadences there were, of course ; a few bor- IS9 i6o CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS rowed graces ; but usually the song was his own and not derived — a true poet. One day I asked my assistant why there had been no poetry of Middleton's in the last week's impres- sion : had he sent nothing? "Oh, yes," was the reply, "he sent in two or three poems as usual, but they were too free, I was afraid they'd shock Mrs. Grundy, so I'm about to return them." Needless to say that made me eager to read them : one was "The Bathing Boy." I published it promptly, and told Middleton what I thought, that it was finer than Herrick, with something of unso- phisticated beauty in it, pure loveliness. After that my defences went down before him. I published whatever he sent me as soon as I received it, and when he told me he wanted to do some stories, I was more than eager to see what his prose would be like ; a page of it convinced me ; a little too rhythmic and rounded, it had its own charm and was curiously characteristic. "The Bathing Boy" made me want to know Mid- dleton better. I found him deeply read in English, and of an astoundingly sure judgment in all matters of literature. His ripeness of mind excited my curi- osity, and I probed further. There was in him a modern mixture of widest comprehension with a child's acceptance of vice and suffering and all ab- normalities. I say a "child's" because it was purely RICHARD MIDDLETON i6i curious and without any tinge of ethical judgment. Here is a self-revealing couplet: A human blossom glad for human eyes. Made pagan by a child's serenity. At twenty-five Middleton had come to his full growth and was extraordinarily mature. In every respect a typical artist, he had no religious belief, death seemed to him the proper and only climax to the fleeting show, but he delighted in the pag- eantry of life, and the melody of words entranced him. This visible world and the passions of men and women were all his care. Even on the practical side he was world-taught, if not world-wise ; he had been educated at St. Paul's School, and then spent some years in an insurance office in the City: he had given up a large salary, he said, to write poetry. As I got to know and like him, I noticed that his head was massive, his blue eyes finely expressive, his characteristic attitude a digni- fied, somewhat disdainful acceptance of life's per- verse iniquities. When I lived I sought no wings, Schemed no heaven, planned no heU, But, content with little things. Made an earth, and it was well. I am anxious not to say one word more than he deserved,: I never heard, a new (thought from him : 1 62 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS I cannot call him, therefore, a bringcr of new light; at the same time, I scarcely ever found his judgment at fault: he could have said with Heine — "I stand on the topmost wave of all the culture of my time," and perhaps that is all we can ask of the poet. He was not taken by the popular idols; Tennyson, he thought, had only written half a dozen lyrics, and "Dowson, you know, left three"; he regarded Browning as the greatest poet since Shakespeare: "he has given us a greater body of high poetry," he would say, "than any other En^sh poet, though he never reached the magic of Keats." Blake he seemed to wince from ; the poet he praised ; but the prophet disquieted him, disturbed the serenity of his pagan, sad acquiescence in the mysteries of this unintelli- gible world. The least one can say of Middleton is that at twen- ty-five he stood as an equal among the foremost men of his time in knowledge of thought and of life, and was among the first of living singers in natural en- dowment. He was a love-poet, too, as the greatest have been, as Shakespeare and Keats, Goethe and Dante were, and it was this superb faculty that made me hope great things from him. Here is a verse which justifies hope, I think: Love played with us beneath the laughing trees. We praised him for his eyes and silv^ skin. And for the little teeth that shone within His ruddy lips; the bracken touched his knees. RICHARD MIDDLETON 163 Earth wrapped his body in her softest breeze. And through the hours that held no coimt of sin We kept his court, until above our din Night westward drove her glittering argosies. And this: Come, Death, and free me from these earthly walls That heaven may hold our final festivals The white stajs trembliiig under! I am too small to keep this passionate wonder Within my human frame: I would be dead That Grod may be our bed. I feel her breath upon my eyes, her hair Falls on me like a blessing, everywhere I hear her warm blood leaping. And life it seems is but a fitful sleeping. And we but fretful shades that dreamed before. That love, and are no more. Though he can rise to this height of passionate utterance, the unique distinction of this book of Mid- dleton's is that there is not a bad, hardly a weak poem in the whole volume: I know few books of which so much can be said. Middleton at twenty- seven had not only a wonderful lyrical gift: but the power of self-criticism of the masters. Som€ critics have gone so far as to say that his prose was better than his verse ; I do not agree with them; his prose was always the prose of a singer; 1 64 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS but he was nevertheless a story-teller of undoubted talent. His tales of boys are among the best in the language. His friend, Mr. Savage, tells us that "in his last year Middleton wrote scarcely any poetry at all . . .he came to love young children and people who are simple and kindly and not too clever . . . certainly he would not have written any more poems like his 'Irene' " — ^poems, that is, of passion. Well, I cannot go so far as that: I think had he lived he would have written both prose and poetry in the future as in the past: he told me more than once that he wrote stories because he found them more saleable. But the most passionate poems were his favorites as they were his best. "There is no demand for poetry," he would say, in wonder, laying stress on the word "demand," "no demand at all." And here we come to the tragedy of MIddleton's life as of a great many other lives. There is no "de- mand" in our Anglo-Saxon world for high literary or artistic work of any kind. If it is nevertheless produced, it is produced in spite of the fact that no one wants it and very few appreciate it; it must be given, therefore, and not sold, as love is given and friendship and pity and all high things. But in spite of all such arguments the tragedy remains, and the gloom of it darkens all our ways. Reading this volume of poems now in the light of what happened, it is easy to see the attraction which RICHARD MIDDLETON 165 Death held for Richard Middleton, the abyss entic- ing him again and again. He had lived and loved, sung his songs and told his stories, and the public V5(ouldn't listen, didn't care. Well, he doesn't care much either: life is only a dream, and this dream- er's too easily wearied to struggle, too proud to complain. A dozen poems show changing moods with the same changeless refrain: Too tired .to mock or weep The world that I have missed. Love, in your heaven let me sleep An hour or two, before I keep My unperturbed tryst. Or this, with its reminiscence of Swinburne : Shall tremble to our laughter. While we leave our tears to your hopeless years. Though there be nothing after ; And while your day uncloses Its lorn and tattered roses. We shall pluck the stars from your prison bars And bind celestial posies. Or this lovely verse: Gladly the rigging sings. But, oh ! how glad are we. Lords of the dreaming sea. And of delicious things; 1 66 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS We are more rich than kings. Or any mrai that be. While down eternity We beat witii shadowy wings. And this finally: No more than a dream that sings In the streets of space; Ah, would that my soul had , wings. Or a resting-place! ^ i As one turns the leaves one finds beauty every- where, on every page joy in living and in love, and everywhere serenity, the sad serenity of acquiescence, and now and again the high clear note that prom- ised so much to those who knew and loved him, and how could one help loving him if one knew him? For all the rich and curious things That I have found within my sleep. Are naught beside this child that sings Among the heather and the sheep; And X, who with expectsmt eyes Have fared across the star-lit foam. See through my dreams a new sun rise To conquer xmachieved skies. And bring the dreamer home. And this verse, perhaps the most characteristic of all, steeped as it is in *the contradictory essences of life: RICHARD MIDDLETON 167 I have been free, end had all heavem and hell Fo* prlsoii, until my piteous hands grew sore Striking the voiceless walls; and now it is well Even though I be a captive evermore. My grateful song shall fiU. my hiding-place To £nd Eternity hath so sweef a face. Ah, the "piteous hands" and "voiceless walls I" It is over a year now since Mr. Savage called on me and told me that Richard Middleton was dead; that he had killed himself in Brussels. L stared at him unable to realize it, shocked out of thought, amazed and aching. I had never thought of Mid- dleton as in distress or really poor: he had often spoken genially of his people, tenderly of a sister; ofjten when he was hard up declared that he would have to go home, "retire into country-quarters for my pocket's health," meeting poverty as it should be met, with good-humor. In 19 10 I noticed that his tone was a little sharper, and busied myself for him with this editor and that, and was relieved to see his contributions appearing wherever I had any influ- ence, notably in the Academy and The English Re- view. In the summer of 191 1 he gave me his book of poems to get published, thinking I had more influ- ence with publishers than I possessed; I told him, it would be published before the end of the year, and had good hopes in the matter. I could not conceal from him that there would be but little money in the 1 68 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS venture, though I kept the fact to myself that the most willing publisher I could find wanted the cost of the book guaranteed. Had I been asked as to his circumstances, I should have said that Middleton was making his way slowly but surely in the esteem and affection of all good readers ; that a certain num- ber of persons already counted him as the most promising of living English poets, and that their ad- miration was a forecast of fame. True, he had been ailing all through the summer; a tedious little malady, slow to get cured, plagued him with annoyance and self-disgust; true, he had talked now and then as one talks to intimate friends ^ in moments of depression of "going out," heart-sick for the time being of the Sisyphean labor; bat the weariness and disgust appeared to me to be super- ficial; his smile came as boyish, gay as ever; his joy in living, especially in Brussels, unvexed by the ghouls of English convention and respectability, seemed as deep as the sea. I have been told since that like Francis Adams he had tried already to kill himself, had indeed gone about for years hugging the idea that this door of deliverance was always open to him; but he had not shown me this soul-side; or perhaps I did not encourage his attempts at con- fession because of my own struggle with similar mel- ancholy. Whatever the explanation may be the news of his self-murder fell on me as a shock: he would not wait for success: he had gone to death RICHARD MIDDLETON 169 In hatred of living: the pity of it and the unavailing regret I I was told later of those four days in Brussels which he passed In the cold, hired bedroom, four days In which he forced himself to face the Arch- Fear and conquer it. At the beginning he wrote a post card telling what he was about to do, taking farewell of his friend. In high pagan fashion, before the long journey, and then in that last awful hour, with the bottle of chloroform before him, he wrote across the card: "A broken and a contrite spirit Thou wilt not despise." The awfulness of It, and- the pity deeper than tears. So here's an end, I ask forgetfulness Now that my little store of hours is spent, And heart to laugh upon my punishment — Dear God, what means a poet more or less? Well, It means everything to the poet and more than is generally Imagined to the nation from which he springs. Sooner or later all races must learn that their artists — the singers and painters and seers, the priests of the True, the Beautiful and the Good — are the rarest and most valuable of the sons of men. By the very nature of their high calling, they can expect no rSward from their contemporaries ;. their appeal is to the future ; their duty to set the course and chart the unattempted seas. More than decent 170 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS provision for their ne&ds, these soldiers of the ideal will not expect; but that should be given them by the State and such honor to boot as may be possible. Thanks to their puritanism, as much as to their purblind practicality, the English are behind most civilized races in recognizing this imperious duty. A short time ago John Davidson threw life up in disgust: he couldn't get a decent living in England, and he was a great poet; one of the immortals: now Richard Middleton shakes off the burden as too heavy. It were better to stone the prophets than to starve them, better hate than this ineffable callous contempt. Take it at its lowest; these poets and artists are, so to speak, the fairest flowers in the garden, the only perennial flowers indeed; what are the gardeners and governors thinking of to allow the glories of the place to be blasted by the biting wind of poverty and neglect ? even intelligent selfishness would shield and cherish them. There is another side to this British disdain of high work. In the Daily Mail I read : Today is tie birthday of the greatest of living English- men. Mr. Chamberlain is, indeed, more than that — ^he is the most illustrious statesman now alive in the world; but it is as the pre-eminent Englishman that his fellow-coun- trymen not in these islands alone, but in every province of the British Empire, will think of him. RICHARD MIDDLETON 171 Canning was a very famous Prime Minister aad the British authorities of the time would no doubt have smiled if they had been told that a little sur- geon's apprentice was a thousand times greater than Canning, and was destined to be ten thousand times more famous. Yet it was true : Canning taday is almost forgotten, siriking rapidly into oblivion, while the name of Keats is growing more and more sa^ cred : Keats already infinitely greater than Canning. And in fifty or a hundred years from today the names of John Davidson and Richard Middleton will be much better known and more highly esteemed even by Members of Parliament and journalists than the names of Chamberlain or Asquith or Bal- four. It is her best and greatest whom England disdains and neglects : her second-best and third-best and fiftieth-best are lauded to the brazen skies and rewarded beyond all possible desert. When I think of the fame of Chatterton and the halo that now surrounds his name, and the con- demnation which his neglect casts on his age, I am sure that in the time to come even Englishmen will condemn this twentieth-century England because of the tragic fates of Davidson and Middleton; for even Richard Middleton was a far greater poet and greater man than Chatterton, riper too, bringing achievement in his hands as well as promise. "But what can we do?" I may be asked, and the true answer is easy enough. We should cultivate 17? CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS reverence in us for 'what is really great and discard some of the reverence all are eager to express for what is not great, but often the reverse of great. Heartily know When the half-god's go The gods arrive. Such understanding is a plant of slowest growth. In the meantime, we might begin to question whether England should spend not £1,200 a year in pittances to starving poets and artists and their wido^ys and orphans, but £1,200,000 a year as a start: it were better to lose a Dreadnought than a Davidson or a Middleton. England gives twelve hundred pounds a year as a life pension to every Cabinet Minister, and that sum is considered enough to divide between all her un- fortunate poets and writers and those nearest and dearest to them. Now one John Davidson or one Richard Middleton is worth more- — ^let the truth be said boldly for once ! — one Richard Middleton is in himself rarer and in his work more valuable than all the Cabinet Ministers seen in England during his life- time. The Cabinet Minister has only to win in the lim- ited competition of the House of Commons ; he has only to surpass living rivals, the men of his own time ; but the poet might be the first of his generation and RICHARD MIDDLETON 173 yet deserve little: to win our admiration he has to measure himself with the greatest of all the past and hold his place among the Immortals. If one set of Cabinet Ministers were blotted out tomorrow, who can doubt, knowing the high-minded patriotism of the parliamentary office-seeker, who can doubt that another set of Cabinet Ministers would be forthcoming immediately? And it is just as certain that after a month or a year, the new set would be about as efficient or inefficient as their la- mented predecessors. But thinkers and poets like Davidson and Middleton are not forthcoming in this profusion. If there is no "demand" for them in England, there is assuredly no "supply" in the usual sense of that overworked word. Now what is the value of such men to the nation ? What are the true sects and singers and prophets worth? It is almost impossible to put any limit to their value. I do not hope to persuade Englishmen or Americans of this truth for many a year to come, though I have the highest warrant for it and am absolutely convinced of the fact. Even now we know that the wisest and best of mankind put the highest estimate on these reporters and teachers. Goethe has said in the most solemn way that the purpose of life itself — "the final cause and consummation of all natural and human activity is dramatic poetry." And we have higher and more unimpeachable tes- 174 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS timony than even Goethe's. If one reads the twelfth dbapter of Matthew carefully, it is plain that Jesus believed that to take false prophets for true and to missee and mistreat the true seer was the sin against the Holy Spirit, the sin which would never be for- given. We are apt to regard this statement as rhapsodical; but I take it as the plain statement of an eternal truth, and must set forth my belief here as best I can. It is plain that the nations which make amplest provision for their singer^s and artists and seers and treat them with the greatest kindness and respect, as France and Germany do, are indubitably the hap- piest of nations, the highest in civilization and in so far the strongest as well. A true spiritual standard of values is infinitely more difficult to establish than an economic standard, but it is even more necessary to the well-being of nations. We all know in these materialistic times that to debase the economic standard is to bring chaos into life; but we do not yet realize that to show disre- spect to the highest spiritual standard is still more fatal. To allow seers and artists to starve in a community is simply the incontrovertible symptom of mortal disease, the sure proof that in that community there is not enough reverence for high things, not enough respect for the powers and purposes of the soul to RICHARD MIDDLETON 175 keep the body-politic from decay and dissolution. Without a certam health of spirit there is no life possible to man, contempt of the highest brings mth it inevitably the death of the organism. Man does not live by bread alone or for bread. Civilization itself is nothing but the humanization of man in society and no class do so much to human- ize men as the priests of the Ideal, the seers and sing- ers and artists. Now that industrial communities, thanks to the achieved lordship of natural forces, can produce wealth in enormous quantities, provision should be made by every State for their men of genius. How it is done, does not matter very much; but it must be done and in countries like England and America it will never be done too lavishly. What shall be- come of people who take the children's bread and give it to the dogs? O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the Prophets and ston€St them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children to- gether even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold your house is left unto you desolate. The houses of those who despise the prophets are certain to be left desolate; the sentence endures for ever, it is a part of the nature of things and not one 176 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS jot or one tittle of it shall pass away. Let England take the lesson to heart. Davidson and Middleton, the one about fifty, the other at thirty, threw away their lives as not worth living, as impossible to be lived, indeed. Two of the finest spirits in England allowed practically to starve, for that is what it comes to: such a catas- trophe never happened before even in England. Under the old hidebound aristocratic re^me of the eighteenth century young Chatterton killed himself, and his death was regarded with a certain disquietude as a portent. But Chatterton was very young and stood alone, and the singularity of his fate allowed one to pass it over as almost accident. But here we have two distinguished men killing themselves after they have proved their powers. What does it mean? It means first of all that the present government judged in the most important of all functions is the worst government yet known even in England; judged by the highest standard it must be condemned pitilessly, for the first and highest object of all gov- ernments is to save just these extraordinary talents, these "sports" from whom, as science teaches, all progress comes, and to win from them their finest and best. The same government and the same people that allowed Davidson and Middleton to starve, got only a half product from Whistler ^nd punished Wilde RICHARD MIDDLETON 177 with savage ferocity, while ennobling mediocrities and millionaires, the dogs and the wolves, and wast- ing a thousand millions of pounds on the South African War. Siirely their houses are insecure! Fancy giving every Judge three thousand pounds a year retiring pension, and allotting Davidson a hundred and Middleton nothing ! The handwriting on the wall is in letters of fire. SIR RICHARD BURTON RALEIGH, Sir Walter of that ilk, has always seemed to me the best representative of Eliz- abethan England; for he could speak and act with equal inspiration. He was a gentleman and adven- turer, a courtier and explorer, a captain by sea and land, equally at home in Indian wigwam or English throne-room. A man of letters, too, master of a dignified, courtly English, who could write on uni- versal history to while away the tedium of prison. Raleigh touched life at many points, and always with a certain mastery; yet his advice to his son is that of a timorous prudence. "Save money," he says; "never part with a man's best friend," and yet he himself as a courtier could squander thousands of pounds on new footgear. One of the best "all- round" men in English history was Raleigh, though troubled with miich serving which, however, one feels came naturally to him; for he was always ab- solutely sceptical as to any after-life, and so won a concentrated and uncanny understanding of this life and his fellow-men. And yet Raleigh perished un- timely on a scaffold, as if to show that no worldly wisdom can be exhaustive, falling to ruin because he 178 SIR RICHARD BURTON 179 could not divine the perverse impulses of a sensual pedant. But in spite of the vile ingratitude of James and his base betrayal, aristocratic E;igland managed to use Walter Raleigh and rewarded him, on the whole, handsomely. He played a great part even in those spacious days ; was a leader of men in Ireland in his youth, a Captain of the Queen's Guard in manhood; and, ennobled and enriched, held his place always among the greatest, and at last died as an enemy of kings, leaving behind him a distinguished name and a brilliant page in the history of his country. But what would the England of today, the Eng- land of the smug, uneducated Philistine tradesmen, make of a Raleigh if they had one ? The question and its answer may throw some light on our boasted "progress" and the astonishingly selfish and self- satisfied present-day civilization of till-and-pill. Richard Burton I met for the first time in a Lonr don drawing-room after his return from the Gold Coast sometime in the eighties. His reputation was already world-wide — the greatest of African explor- ers, the only European who had mastered Arabic and Eastern customs so completely that he had passed muster as a Mohammedan pilgrim and had preached in Mecca as a Mollah. He knew a dozen Indian languages, too, it was said, and as many more European, besides the chief African dialects; i8o CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS was, in fine, an extraordinary scholar and a master of English to boot, a great writer. I was exceedingly curious, and very glad indeed to meet this legendary hero. Burton was in con- ventional evening dress, and yet, as he swung round to the introduction, there was an untamed air about him. He was tall, about six feet in height, with broad, square shoulders;, he carried himself like a young man, in spite of his sixty years, and was abrupt in movement. His face was bronzed and scarred, and when he wore a heavy moustache and no beard he looked like a prize-fighter; the naked, dark eyes — imperious, aggressive eyes, by no means friendly; the heavy jaws and prominent hard chin gave him a desperate air; but the long beard which he wore in later life, concealing the chin and pursed-out lips, lent his face a fine, patriarchal expression, subduing the fierce provocation of it to a sort of regal pride and courage. "Untamed" — that is the word which always recurs when I think of Burton. I was so curious about so many things in regard to him that I hesitated and fumbled, and made a bad impression on him; we soon drifted apart-— I vexed with myself, he loftily indifferent. It was Captain Lovett-Cameron who brought us closer together ; a typical sailor and good fellow, he had been Burton's companion in Africa and had sucked an idolatrous admiration out of the intimacy. Burton was his hero; wiser than anyone else, SIR RICHARD BURTON i8i stronger, braver, more masterful, more adroit; he could learn a new language in a week, and so forth and so on — hero-worship lyrical. "A Bayard and an Admirable Crichton in one," I remarked scoffingly. "Human, too," he replied seriously, "human and brave as Henry of Navarre." "Proofs, proofs," I cried. "Proofs of courage I" Cameron exclaimed, "every African explorer lives by courage: every day war- parties of hostile tribes have to be charmed or awed to friendliness; rebellious servants brought to obe- dience ; wild animals killed, food provided — all vicis- situdes Burton handled as a master, and the more difficult and dangerous the situation the more certain he was to carry it off triumphantly. A great man, I tell you, with all sorts of qualities and powers, and, if you followed his lead, the best of 'pals.' "No one would believe how kind he is ; he nursed me for six weeks through African fever — ^took care of me like a brother. You must know Dick really well: you'll love him." Thanks to Cameron, Burton and I met again and dined together, and afterwards had a long palaver. Burton unbuttoned, and talked as only Burton could talk of Damascus and that immemorial East; of India and its super-subtle peoples; of Africa and human life in the raw today as it was twenty thou- sand years ago ; of Brazil, too, and the dirty smear V 1 82 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS of Portuguese civilization polluting her silvered wa- terways and defiling even the immaculate wild. I can still see his piercing eyes, and thrill to his vivid, pictured speech; he was irresistible; as Cam- eron had said, "utterly unconventional." Being very young, I thought him too "bitter," almost as con- temptuous of his fellows as Carlyle ; I did not then realize how tragic-cruel life is to extraordinary men. Burton was of encyclopaedic reading; knew Eng- lish poetry and prose astonishingly; had a curious liking for "sabre-cuts of Saxon speech" — all such words as come hot from life's mint. Describing something, I used the phrase, "Frighted out of fear." "Fine that," he cried; "is it yours? Where did you get it?" His ethnological appetite for curious customs and crimes, for everything singular and savage in human- ity was insatiable. A Western American lynching yarn held him spell-bound; a crime passionel in Paris intoxicated him, started him talking, transfigured hini into a magnificent story-teller, with intermingled ap- peals of pathos and rollicking fun, camp-fire effects, jets of flame against the night. His intellectual curiosity was astonishingly broad and deep rather than high. He would tell stories of Indian philosophy or of perverse negro habits of lust and cannibalism, or would listen to descriptions of Chinese cruelty and Russian self-mutilation till the stars paled out. Catholic in his admiration and SIR RICHARD BURTON 183 liking for all greatness, it was the abnormalities and not the divinities of men that fascinated him. D§ep down in him lay the despairing gloom of utter disbelief. "Unaffected pessimism and constitu- tional melancholy," he notices, "strike deepest root under the brightest skies," and this pessimistic melan- choly was as native ta Burton as to any Arab of them all. He was thinking of himself when he wrote of the Moslem, "he cannot but sigh when contem- plating the sin and sorrow, and pathos and bathos of the world; and feel the pity of it, with its shifts and changes ending in nothingness, its scanty happi- ness, its copious misery." Burton's laughter, even, deep-chested as 4t was, had in it something of sad- ness. At heart he was regally generous; there was a large humanity in him, an unbounded charity for the poor and helpless; a natural magnanimity, too; "an unconditional forgiveness of the direst injuries" he calls "the note of the noble." His love of freedom was insular and curiously extravagant, showing itself in every smallest detail. "My wife makes we wear these wretched dress- qlo'thes," he cried one evehing. "I hate 'em — a liv- ery of shame, shame of being yourself. Broad arrows would improve 'em," and the revolt of dis- gust flamed in his eyes. Like most able, yet fanatical, lovers of liberty, he preferred the tyranny pf one to the anarchical 1 84 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS misrule of the many. "Eastern despotisms," he asserts, "have arrived nearer the ideal of equality and fraternity than any republic yet invented." "A master of life and books," I said of him after- wards to Cameron, "but at bottom as tameless and despotic as an Arab sheikh." Two extracts from his wonderful Arabian Nights are needed to give color to my sketch. I make no excuse for quoting therri, for they are superexcellent English, and in themselves worthy of memory. Here is a picture of the desert which will rank with Fromentln's best: Again I stood under the diaphanous skies, in air glori- ous as ether, whose every breath raises men's spirits like sparkling wine. Once more I saw the evening star hang- ing like a solitaire from the pure front of the western firmament; and the after-glow transfiguring and transform- ing, as by magic, the homely and rugged features of the scene into a fairyland lit with a light which never shines on other soils or seas. Then would appear the woollen tents, low and black, of the true Badawin, mere dots in the boundless waste of lion-tawny clays and gazelle-brown gravels, and the camp-fire dotting like a glow-worm the vil- lage centre. Presently, sweetened by distance, would be heard the wild, weird song of lads and lasses, driving, or rather pelting, through the gloaming their sheep and goats ; and the measured chant of the spearsmen gravely stalking behind their charge, the camels; mingled with the bleating of the flocks and the bellowing of the humpy herds ; while the reremouse flittered overhead with his tiny shriek, and ~^R RICHARD BURTON 185 the rave of the j ackal resounded through deepening glooms, and-^— most musical of music — ^the palm trees answered the whispers of the night breeze with the softest tones of fall- ing water. And here a Rembrandt ,etching of Burton story- telling to Arabs in the desert : The sheikhs and "white-beards" of the tribe gravely take their places, sitting with outspread skirts like hillocks on the plain, as the Arabs say, around the camp-fire, whilst I reward their hospitality and secure its continuance by reading or reciting a few pages of their favourite tales. The women and children stand motionless as silhouettes out- side the ring; and all are breathless with attention; they seem to drink in the words with eyes and mouth as well as with ears. The most fantastic flights of fancy, the wildest improbabilities, the most impossible of impossibili- ties appear to them utterly natural, mere matters of every- day occurrence. They enter thoroughly into each phase of feeling touched upon by the author; they takfe a personal pride in the chivalrous nature and knightly prowess of Tajal-Muluk; they are touched with tenderness by the self- sacrificing love of Azizah; their mouths water as they hear of heaps of untold gold ^ven away/ in largesse like clay; they chuckle with delist every time a Kazi or a Fakir — a judge or a reverend — is scurvily entreated by some Pantagruelist of the wilderness; and, despite their normal solemnity and impassibility, all roar with laughter,- sometimes rolling upon the ground till the reader's gravity is sorely tried, at the tales of the garrulous Barber and of Ali and the Kurdish sharper. To this magnetizing mood 1 86 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS the sole exception is when a Badawi of superior accom- plishments, -who sometimes says his prayers, ejaculates a startling "Astaghfaru'Uah" — I pray Allah's pardon — for listening to light mention of the sex whose name is never heard amongst the nobility of the desert. Even when I only knew Burton as a great per- sonality I touched the tragedy of his life unwittingly more than once. I had heard that he had come to grief as Consul in Damascus — ^Jews there claim- ing to be British subjects in order to escape Moham- medan justice, and when thwarted stirring up their powerful compatriots in London to petition for his recall; his superior at Beyrout always dead against him— ^eventually he was recalled, some said dis- missed. I felt sure he had been in the right. "Won't you tell me about it?" I asked him one evening. "The story's too long, too intricate," he cried. "Besides, the Foreign Office admitted I was right." When I pressed for details he replied: "Do you remember the cage at Loches, in which an ordinary man could not stand upright or lie at ease, and so was done to death slowly by constraint. Places under our Government today are cages like that to all men above the average size." The English could not use Burton; they could maim him. Englishmen are so strangely inclined to overpraise the men of past times and underrate their contem- SIR RICHARD BURTON 187 poraries that many have been astonished at my com- paring Burton with Raleigh. But, in truth, both in speech and action Burton was the greater man. He was a more daring and a more successful ex- plorer; an infinitely better scholar, with intimate knowledge of a dozen worlds which Raleigh knew nothing about, a greater writer, too, and a more dominant, irresistible personality. Young Lord Pem- broke once slapped Raleigh's face; no sane man would have thought of striking Burton. Aristocratic Elizabethan England, however, could honor ,Ra- leigh and put him to noble use, whereas Victorian England could find no place for Richard Burton and could win no service from him. Think of it I Bur- ton knew the Near East better than any Westerner has ever known it; he was a master of literary Arabic and of the dialects spoken in Egypt and the Soudan. Moreover, as he himself puts it modestly, "the acci- dents of my life, my long dealings with Arabs and other Mohammedans and my familiarity not only with their idiom, but with their turn of thpught and with that racial individuality which baffles descrip- tion" made Burton an ideal ruler for a Mohamme- dan people. He was already employed under the Foreign Office. Notwithstanding all this when we took Egypt we sent Lord Dufferin to govern it, and tossed a small consular post to Richard Burton as a bone to a dog. Dufferin knew no Arabic, and nothing about Egypt, 1 88 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS Burton knew more than anyone else on earth about both, and was besides a thousand times abler than the chattering, charming Irish peer. Yet Dufferin Was preferred before him. Deliberately I say that all England's mistakes in Egypt — and they are as numerous and as abominable as years of needless war have ever produced — came from this one blunder. This sin England is committing every day, the sin of neglecting the able and true man and preferring to him the unfit and second-rate, and therefore negli- gible, man ; it is the worst of crimes in a ruling caste, the sin against the Holy Spirit, the sin once labelled unforgivable. "No immorality," said Napoleon to his weak brother, "like the immorality pf taking a post you're not fitted for." No wonder Burton wrote that the "crass ignorance" (of England) "concerning the Oriental peoples which should most interest her, exposes her to the contempt of Europe as well as of the Eastern World." No wonder he condemned "the regrettable raids of '83-'84," and "the miserable attacks of Tokar, Teb, and Tamasi" upon the "gallant negroids who were battling for the holy cause of liberty and religion and for escape from Turkish task-masters and Egyptian tax-gath- erers." With heartfelt contempt he records the fact that there was "not an English official in camp . . . capable of speaking Arabic." Gladstone appointed Dufferin; Gladstone sent Gordon to the Soudan at the dictation of a journalist SIR RICHARD BURTON 189 as ignorant as himself ! Gladstone, too, appointed Cromer, and after Tokar and Teb we had the atro- cious, shameful revenge on the Mahdi's remains and the barbarous murders of Densjiawi; and a thou- sand thousand unknown tragedies besides, all be- cause England's rulers are incapable of using her wisest sons and are determined to pin their faith to mediocrities — like choosing like, with penguin gravity. "England," says Burton, "has forgotten, appar- ently, that she is at present the greatest Mohamme- dan empire in the world, and in her Civil Service examinations she insists on a smattering of Greek and Latin rather than a knowledge of Arabic." Here is what Burton thought about the English Civil Service ; every word of it true still, and every word memorable : In our day, when we live under a despotism of the lower "middle-class" who can pardon anything but superiority, the prizes of competitive service are monopolized by certain "pets" of the Mediocratie, and prime favourites of that jealous and potent majority — the Mediocrities who know "no nonsense about merit." It is hard for an outsider to realize how perfect is the monopoly of commonplace, and to comprehend how fatal a stumbling-stone that man sets in the way of his own advancement who dares to think for himself, or who thinks more or who does more than the mob of gentlemen-employees who know very little and do even less. "He knows too much" is the direst obstacle to oflScial 190 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS advancement in England — it would be no objection in France ; and in Germany, Russia, and Italy, the three rising Powers of Europe, it would be a valid claim for promo- tion. But, unfortunately for England, the rule and gov- ernment of the country have long been, and still are, in the hands of a corporation, a clique, which may be described as salaried, permanent and irresponsible clerks, the power which administers behind the Minister. They rule and . misrule; nor is there one man in a million who, like the late Mr. Fawcett, when taking Ministerial charge, dares to think and act for himself and to emancipate himself from the ignoble tyranny of "the office." With all its faults the English Civil Service is better than our Parliamentary masters. Like fish, a State first goes bad at the head. Burton used to tell how he came home and offered all East Africa to Lord Salisbury. He had concluded treaties with all the chiefs; no other Power was interested or would have objected. But Lord Salisbury refused the gift. "Is Zanzibar an island?" he exclaimed in wonder, and "Is East Africa worth anything?" So the Germans were allowed twenty years later to come in and cut "the wasp's waist" and bar England's way from the Cape to Cairo. England wasted Burton, left his singular talents unused, and has already paid millions of money, to say nothing of far more precious things (some of them^beyond price), for her stupidity, and Eng- land's account with Egypt is still all on the wrong SIR RICHARD BURTON 191 side — stands, Indeed, worse than ever, I imagine; for Egypt is now bitterly contemptuous of English rule. Egypt is a source of weakness to England therefore, and not a source and fount of strength, as she would havie been from the beginning if the old Parliamentary rhetor had had eyes as well as tongue, and had set Burton to do the work of teach- ing, organizing, and guiding which your Dufferins, Cromers, Kitcheners and the rest are incapable even of imagining. The worst of it Is that Burton has left no succes- sor. Had he been appointed he would have seen to this, one may be sure; would have established a great school of Arabic learning in Cairo, and trained a staff of Civil Servants who would have gladly ac- quired at least the elements of their work — men who would not only have known Arabic, but the ablest natives, too, and so have availed themselves of a little better knowledge than their own. But, alas! the chance has been lost, and unless something is done soon, Egypt will be England's worst failure, worse even .than India or Ireland. But I must return to Burton. I should, like to tell of ^n evening I spent once with him when Lord Lytton was present. Lytton had been Viceroy of India, the first and only Viceroy who ever under- stood his own infinite unfitness for the post. "I only stayed in India," he used to say, "to pre- vent them sending out an even worse man." 192 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS I asked him afterwards why he didn't recommend Burton for the post; for he knew something of Burton's transcendant quality. "They'd never send him," he cried, with uncon- scious snobbery. "He's not got the title or the posi- tion; besides, he'd be too independent. My God, how he'd kick over the traces and upset the cart!" The eternal dread and dislike of genius ! And yet that very evening Burton had shown qualities of pru- dence and wisdom far beyond Lytton's comprehen- sion. But I must hasten. I found myself in Venice once with time on my hands, when I suddenly remembered that across the sea at Trieste was a man who would always make a meeting memorable. I took the next steamer and called on Burton. I found the desert lion dying of the cage ; dying of disappointment and neglect; dying because there was no field for the exercise of his superlative abilities ; dying because the soul in him could find nothing to live on in Trieste; for in spite of his talent for literature, in spite of his extraordinary gift of speech, Burton was at bot- tom a man of action, a great leader, a still greater governor of men. While out walking one afternoon we stopped at a little cafe, and I had an object-lesson in Burton's mastery of life. His German was quite good, but nothing like his Italian. He seemed to know the people of the inn and every one about by intuition, SIR RICHARD BURTON 193 and in a few minutes had won their confidence and admiration. For half an hour he talked to a de- lighted audience in Dante's speech, jewelled with phrases from the great Florentine himself. As we walked back to his house he suddenly cried to me: "Make some excuse and take me out tonight; if I don't get out I shall go mad. . . ." We had a great night- — Burton giving pictures of his own life ; telling of his youth in the Indian Army when he wandered about among the natives dis- guised as a native (I have always thought of him as the original of Kipling's "Strickland"). His fel- low-officers, of course, hated his superiority; called him in derision "the white nigger"; Burton laughed at it all, fully compensated, he said, for their hatred by the love and admiration of Sir Charles Napier {P-eccavi, "I have Scinde," Napier), hero recogniz- ing hero. It was to Napier, and at Napier's request, that he sent the famous "report" which, falling into secretarial hands, put an end to any chance of Bur- ton's advancement in India — the tragedy again and a^ain repeated of a great life maimed and marred by envious, eyeless mediocrities. What might have been, what would have been had he been given power — a new earth if not a new heaven — the theme of his inspired Report. I gbt him to talk, too, about The Scented Garden, which he had been working at for some time. Lady 194 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS Burton afterwards burnt this book, it will be remem- bered, together with his priceless diaries, out of sheer prudery. He told me (what I had already guessed) that the freedom of speech he used, he used deliber- ately, not to shock England, but tb teach England that only by absolute freedom of speech and thought could she ever come to be worthy of her heritage. "But I'm afraid it's too late," he added; "Eng- land's going to some great defeat; she's wedded to lies and mediocrities." ... He got bitter again, and I wished to turn his thoughts. "Which would you really have preferred to be," I probed, "Viceroy of India or Cons,ul-General of Egypt?" "Egypt, Egypt!" he cried, starting up, "Egypt! In India I should have had the English Civil Serv- ants to deal with — the Jangali, or savages, as their Hindu fellow-subjects call them — and English preju- dices, English formalities, English stupidity, Eng- lish ignorance. They would have killed me in India, thWarted me, fought me, intrigued against me, mur- dered me. But in Egypt I could have made my own Civil servants, picked them out, and trained them. I could have had natives, too, to help. Ah, what a chance ! "Iknow Arabic better than I know Hindu. Arabic is my native tongue; I know it as well as I know English. I know the Arab nature. The Mahdi SIR RICHARD BURTON 195 business could have been settled without striking a blow. If Gordon had known Arabic well, spoken it as a master, he would have won the Mahdi to friendship. To govern well you must know a people — know their feelings, love their dreams and aspira- tions. What did Dufferift know of Egypt? Poor Dufferin, what did he even knqw of Dufferin? And Cromer's devoid even of Dufferin's amiability 1" The cold words do him wrong, give no hint of the flame and force of his disappointment; but I can never forget the bitter sadness of it: "England finds nothing for me to do, makes me an office-boy, exiles me here on a pittance." The caged lion ! I have always thought that these two men, Carlyle and Burton, were the two greatest governors ever given to England. The one for England herself, and as an example to the world of the way to turn a feudal, chivalrous State into a great modern indus- trial State; the other the best possible governor of Mohammedan peoples — two more prophets whom England did not stone, did not even take the trouble to listen to. She is still paying, as I have said, some- what dearly for her adders' ears and must yet pay still more heavily. I have found fault with Carlyle because he was a Puritan, deaf to music, blind to beauty. Burton went to the other extreme : he was a sensualist of extrava- gant appetite learned In ei^ery Eastern and savage 196 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS vice. His coarse, heavy, protruding lips were to me sufficient explanation of the pornographic learning of his Arabian Nights. And when age came upon him; though a quarter of what he was accustomed to eat in his prime would have kept him in perfect health, he yielded to the habitual desire and suffered agonies with indigestion, dying, indeed, in a fit of dyspepsia brought on by over-eating. And with these untamed appetites and desires he was peculiarly sceptical and practical; his curiosity all limited to this world, which accounts to me for his infernal pedantry. He never seemed to realize that wisdom has nothing to do with knowledge, literature nothing to do with learning. Knowledge and learning, facts, are but the raw food of experience, and literature is concerned only with experience itself. A child of the mystical East, a master of that Semitic thought which has produced the greatest religions, Burton was astoundingly matter-of-fact. There was no touch of the visionary in him — ^the curious analogies everywhere discoverable in things disparate, the chemical reactions of passion, the astounding agree- ment between mathematical formulae and the laws of love and hatred, the myriad provoking hints, like eyes glinting through a veil, that tempt the poet to dreaming, the artist to belief, were all lost on Bur- ton. He was a master of this life and cared nothing for any other; his disbelief was characteristically bold and emphatic. He wrote : SIR RICHARD BURTON 197 The shivered clock again shall strike, the broken reed shall pipe again. But we, we die, and Death is one, the doom of Brutes, the doom of Men. But, with all his limitations and all his shortcomings, Burton's place was an Eastern throne and not the ignoble routine of a petty Consular office. At length the good hour came; he died. As he had lived alone: He was not missed from the desert wide. Perhaps he was found at the Throne. GEORGE MEREDITH THE publication of Meredith's letters has been a literary event : they appear to have surprised the general public and touched it to unwonted regret. In a peculiar way, they have set the seal upon a repu- tation which has been growing now for over sixty years, since the appearance indeed of his first novels and poems. Fifty years ago Carlyle noticed his work, and his fame widened with every book, took on a ring, so to speak, every year, and grew slowly as trees grow which are destined to last for centuries. In the eighties, when Meredith was well over fifty, the younger generation began to speak of him with reverence; to us he stood with Browning and Swin- burne among the Immortals. But Browning lived a life apart and held himself aloof from men of letters and journalists; while Swinburne showed every now and then a vehemence of anger and a deplorable extravagance of speech which made one almost ashamed of even his generous and clear- sighted judgments. Those of us who had the honor and the delight of knowing Meredith personally had seldom anything to forgive him; we knew that he was not only one of the greatest of English letter- 198 GEORGE MEREDITH 199 writers, not only a splendid creative artist and poet, but something more, even than that; a most noble and inspiring personality, perhaps the widest and deepest mind born in England since Blake. I could give many instances of his generosity and sympathy, the eagerness with which he championed any cause or person that seemed to him worthy, or merely in need of help; but I must content myself with one, and thus pay a personal debt. Shortly after I was appointed editor of The Fort- nightly I wrote my first short stories, and, as some friends spoke well of them, I showed them to Fred- eric Chapman, the managing director of Chapman and Hall, who controlled the review. He liked them and wished me to publish them : accordingly, I pub- lished The Modern Idyll in The Fortnightly. Ip was bitterly attacked by the unco' guid: the Rev. Newman Hill wrote a furious letter about it, and, to my amazement. The Spectator, for which I had written for years, joined in the hue and cry with peculiar malevolence. The result was that the direc- tors of Chapman and Hall met and instructed me not to insert any more of my stories in the review. I saw them, and, without giving Frederic Chapman away, told them what I tl^ought of their literary judgment and handed them my resignation. Frederic Chapman begged me to reconsider the matter, but I was obstinate. A day or two afterwards Chapman came to me and told me that Meredith was in his / I 200 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS room, and that he was praising my story enthusias- tically: "Would I come across and see him?" I was naturally eager to see the king of contem- porary writers, and jumped at the opportunity. As Meredith got up from the arm-chair to greet me, I was astonished by the Greek beauty of his face set off by wavy silver hair and the extraordinary vivacity of ever-changing expression, astonished, too, by the high, loud voice which he used in ordinary conversation, and by the quick-glancing eyes which never seemed to rest for a moment on any object, but flitted about curiously, like a child's. The bright quick eyes seemed to explain Meredith's style to me, and give the key to his mind. The good fairies had dowered this man at birth with a profusion of con- tradictory gifts — beauty of face and strength of body and piercing intelligence. They had given him artistic perceptions as well as high courage ; generos- ity and sweetness of soul together with great self- control — all the enthusiasms and idealisms, and yet both feet steadfast on Mother Earth in excellent bal- ance. But the bad fairy, who couldn't prevent him seeing everything, could hinder him from dwelling patiently on insignificant things, or what seemed in- significant to him ; the eyes flitted hither and thither butterfly fashion, and the style danced about for van- ity's sake to keep the eyes company. But at the moment I was more impressed by the kindly humanity of the man than even by his genius. GEORGE MEREDITH 201 As soon as he heard what had happened he declared he would see the directors himself; "Perhaps they will listen to me," he cried, with friendhest interest ; "they mustn't be allowed to stand in our light," he ^ddedj.wlth a humorous twinkle. Frederic Chapman told me afterwards that Meredith had come up to London on purpose to speak for me to the directors, and he soon induced them to recall their insulting notice. I am proud to put on record this instance of Mere- dith's kindness to an unknown stranger, for such human sympathy is rare indeed among English writ- ers. So far as I know, Meredith was the only man of his generation who took the high responsibilities of genius seriously: an uncrowned king, he never forgot that sympathetic kindness to juniors and In- feriors was a duty of his position^ I could fill a book with instances of his generous appreciations and helpful kindness ; but I cannot re- sist the temptation to reproduce here the conclusion of one of his letters to me just to give an idea of the familiar charm and sweet-natured tact of his friendship. He had written asking me why I hadn't brought out a book which had been announced? The public, I replied, didn't care for my work, and the illiterate prudery of the Press was revolting. He wrote at once calling on me to pay no attention to the malice of journalists or the religiosfty of the 202 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS feeblq-minded. The letter was in the strain of Mary Coleridge's famous verse : Narrow not thy walk to keep Pace with those who, half asleep. Judge thee now. . . . and it ended with the encouragement of hts own example : "I am an old offender before the public. There were meetings at Book Clubs headed by clergy over the country to denounce R. Feverel as an immoral production. The good beast is doubtful of the smell of me still, and, as I am not guided by his opinion, you must take the fact to weigh in the scales against my judgment. "Yours ever, ' "George Meredith." Again and again he cheered younger ones to the work, and whenever anybody wrote to him he an- swered at once, and always with the enthusiasm that regards difficulties as rungs of the ladder. One might have thought he had nothing else to do but play good Samaritan and encourage the faint- hearted. His own courage was of the finest. In 1896 he wrote to me that Jie had come up to London for an operation. A foolish fear seized me: I realized what it would mean to lose him. I called at once GEORGE MEREDITH 203 and found him in bed laughing and chatting with friends who had come to see him. Evidently he was ready and willing to face the worst. ~ No need even for resolution: he had aqcustomed himself to look upon the Arch-Fear as a friend. Nothing finer could be imagined or wished : "Science has abolished pain," he said gaily, "and with pain even the need of steeling oneself: the doctors h^ve made the ford easy, we can't even feel the chill of the water." It was good to meet the old hero and find him superior to his fate, light-hearted indeed, knowing that, whatever happened, he had fought a great fight and won many a victory. Now and again, however, little disappointments came to show me he was human. Talking one day about his French Odes, which I admired, "Aylwin" was mentioned, and to my amazement he praised parts of it. That he should even have been able to read the drivel made me gasp: but Theodore Watts-Dunton as a writer for The Athenaum had a certain influence : the question imposed itself : did Meredith care so much for popu- larity? Yet I had only to get on a larger subject with him to find at once the imperial sweep of mind, like a broad landscape on the downs when you can see over the hills the wide expanse of sea meeting the reach of sky. It is curious that the little weak- nesses, even the faults of those we love, do not touch our affection or even diminish our reverence. Often 204 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS indeed they make the character dearer to us, more human, more lovable. But there are differences of opinion which go deep- er, and after ten years' friendship I was at kngth to meet one of these in Meredith. The incident may be put on record, though it stands alone, because every close reader of his works, and especially of his poetry, will admit that it was eminently characteristic. All the world knows that Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprison- ment with hard labor; but very few have heard that this punishment had been previously condemned as inhuman by a Royal Commission. Acting on the sug- gestion of the Commission that the frightful sen- tence should always be mitigated I got up a petition for the remission of part of the term. I was in- formed on good authority that if Meredith headed the petition and I could get five or six other men of letters to support the request, the Government would grant it without further ado. I jumped at the chance, feeling sure I had only to ask Meredith to get his consent ; but to my astonishment he replied that he couldn't do as I wished, and when I pressed him to let me see him on the matter, he answered that he would rather not meet me for such a purpose as his mind was made up. I was simply dumb- founded, and at a complete loss. I knew it was not courage that was lacking, or want of imagination: what could be the reason? When I turned elsewhere , GEORGE MEREDITH 205 t and failed I was not astonished; how could I be angry with the sheep when the bell-wether had played false. A little later I made it my business to meet Mere- dith as if by chance and have it out with him. To my amazement he defended his want of sympathy: abnormal sensuality in a leader of men, he said, was a crime, and should be punished with severity. Again and again he repeated that all greatness was based on morality, that irhmorality and a fortiori, abnor- mal immorality was a proof of degeneracy; Wilde was "an arrested development" ; he became emphatic, loud, rhetorical. On the other hand, I argued that abnormal vice was a monomania and should be treated as a mental aberration: it wasn't catching; one didn't pUnish crippFes and so on. He wouldn't listen; ^s he had said his mind was made up, and at length I had to accept the fact that a hero could allow the maimed and deformed on his own side to be tortured by the enemy. It has since been pointed out to me that Meredith's poems discover the same relentless, stoic severity; but the explanation did not interest me greatly. Meredith as a leader of thought and men died for me then, and my sorrow was embittered with im- patient disdain. The foremost Englishman after twenty centuries had not climbed to the Christ height. ^ There is something to be said in his excuse ; though not much. He had a poor opinion of Oscar Wilde's 2o6 , CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS writings, he would not hear of placing him in the front rank; he was a poseur he said. Wilde had laughed at his obscurity and tortuous style in one of his Essays ; but I was convinced that that circum- stance had nothing consciously to do with Meredith's attitude. Meredith was so noble and lovable that no mean suspicion could attach to his misjudging. The truth is, he had scant' appreciation for Wilde's extraordinary sweetness of nature and ex- quisite .sunny humor ; probably he had never known him at all intimately. But to me the fact remained that he had defended the barbarous punishment of a man of genius when punishment was wholly in- defensible. For some years I had no further communication with him : I could not even write to him : I should have had to probe the wound: why did he act so? How could he? I couldn't think of "the great re- fusal" dispassionately. A little later Meredith gave me another shock of surprise and disappointment, followed by just as im- patient and certain condemnation. In the South African dispute he persisted in saying that there were faults on both sides. While admitting that the war was unnecessary and that the British were chiefly to blame, he proposed coolly that Johannes- burg and the mines should be taken from the Boers. The other day when the Hon. Alfred Lyttleton died, it was said of him in eulogy that he was an ideal GEORGE MEREDITH 207 Englishman, who always held with "his own people, right or wrong." It really seems as if Englishmen are fated to be insular, provincial even, whenever their own country is concerned. Meredith saw cer- tain virtues of stubborn manfulness in the Boers; but he had no right notion of them in relatibn to the British emigrants and the future of South Africa, no realization of the fact that foreign miners can hardly be regarded as bona fide settlers, and that German Jew financiers are not apt to be good riilers. He took it for granted that the Boers maltreated the Kaffirs, and that their civilization was far lower than ours. When I asked him to protest against the dreadful mortality In the Concentration Camps, he told me that he didn't believe the mortality could be lessened. He protested. It Is true. In the Daily News and elsewhere against some of the worst ex- cesses of the British during the war; but he seemed to have no idea that the burning of peaceable farm- houses was barbarous, and that no civilized people except the British had been guilty of such a crime in the last hundred years. The awful mortality in the Concentration Camps cannot be explained away, and the whole policy remains as a blot on the English name for ever. But It was impossible to^bc angry with Meredith for long. His faults were so manifestly faults due to his birth and training that one simply had to for- give and forget them. It Is almost impossible for 208 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS an Englishman to reach the impartiality frequently shown by distinguished men of other races. It may, of course, be argued that the strength and success of the English come from just this inability to see a foreigner's point of view and sympathize with it. But the Romans tried patriotism instead of human- ity and found it fail them, and it may be that the British will yet come to grief for the same reason. However that may be, the fact is that in the South African War no Englishmen of note, with the excep- tion of Mr. Frederic Harrison, and Mr. Bernard Shaw, were at all able to judge events impartially, and they were Imperfectly acquainted with the Boers and their desires. It is scarcely possible to hope that any man will always rise superior to the prejudices of his race and upbringing. In nine cases out of ten Meredith stood for the right, even when the right was unpopular. At the very commencement of the agitation for Women's Suffrage he struck In for the women and their demands in whole-hearted fashion. His short- comings even were not shortcomings of character or of courage. About this time, at seventy-four or five years of age, he began to talk as if his work were done and the account settled. But later still I met him again; and found his mind as vivacious as it had been twenty years before. In particular I remember one afternoon above his house on Box Hill when he was GEORGE MEREDITH 209 being driven in his little donkey-chair. I went over and spoke to him and found him the same as ever, as friendly and clear-sighted and affectionate as in the earlier days. His letters show one that up to the very end his intellect was as keen, his perception as fine, and his judgment as sure as ever. They contain, Indeed, the finest criticism in the language. Here Is how he ranks himself : Men to whom I bow my head (Shakespeare, Goethe, and, in their way, Moliere, Cervantes) are Realists au fond. But they have the broad arms of Idealism at command. They give us Earth; but it is earth with an atmosphere. And here Is Victor Hugo judged by a master: On re-reading V. Hugo's Les Cymballers du Boi I am confirmed in a cloyed sensation I first experienced. The alliteration is really so persistent that^ the ears feel as if they had been horribly drummed on. Power of narrative, I see. Mimetic power of a wonderful kind and flow of verse; also extraordinary. I am not touched by any new mnsic in it. I do hot find any comprehension of human nature, or observation, or sympathy with it. I per- ceive none of the subtleties, deep but unobtrusive, that show that a mind has travelled. Great windy phrases, and what I must term (for they so hit my sense) encaustic imageries, do not satisfy me any longer, though I remem- ber a p^iod when they did. . . . The article on the "Travailleurs de la Mer" is Morley's. 2IO CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS I think it scarcely does justice to the miraculous descriptive power. The Storm is amazing: I have never read any- thing like it. It is next to Nature in force and vividness. Hugo rolls the sea and sweeps the heavens; the elements are in his hands. He is the largest son of his mother earth in this time present. Magnificent in conception, un- surpassed — ^leagues beyond us all — ^in execution. Not (nur Schade!) a philosopher. There's the pity. With a philo- sophic brain, as well as his marvellous poetic energy, he would stand in the front rank of glorious men for ever. This word about English prose hits the centre : The prose in Shakespeare and in Congreve is perfect. Apart from drama. Swift is a great exemplar ; Bolingbroke, and in his mild tea-table way, Addison, follow. Johnson and Macaulay wielded bludgeons ; they had not the strength that Can be supple. And the masters of his own time are judged from the same height: I can hardly say I think Tennyson deserves well of us ; he is a real singer, and he sings this mild fluency to this great length. Malory's Morte d' Arthur is preferable. Fancy one affecting the great poet and giving himself up (in our days — ^he must have lost the key of them) to such dandiacal fluting. . . . The praises of the book shut me away from my fellows. To be sure, there's the mag- nificent "Lucretius." I return Buskin's letter, a characteristic one. It is the spirituality of Carlyle that charms him. What he says GEORGE MEREDITH 211 of Tennyson I too thought in my boy's daya — that is, be- fore I began to think: Tennyson has many spiritual indi- cations, but no philosophy, and philosophy is the palace of thought. In another letter he writes with proper disdain of Ruskin's "monstrous assumption of wisdom." His judgment of Carlyle is magnificent and kindly: He was the greatest of the Britons of his time — and after the British fashion of not coming near perfection; Titanic, not Olympian; a heaver of rocks, not a shaper. But if he did not perfect work, he had lightning's power to strike out marvellous pictures and reach to the inmost of men with a phrase. . . . In reading Carlyle, bear in mind that he is a humorist. The insolence offensive to you is part of his humour. He means what he says, but only as far as a humorist can mean what he says. See the difference between him and Emerson, who is, on ihe contrary, a philosopher. The hu- morist, notwithstanding, has much truth to back him. Swim on his pages, take his poetry^ and fine grisly laughter, his manliness, together with some splendid teaching. I don't agree with Carlyle a bit — but I do enjoy him. And this superb defence of the Good and True in the shape of advice to his son: The Bible is outspoken upon facts, and rightly. It is -because the world is stupidly shamefaced that it cannot 212 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS come Into contact with the Bible without convulsions. I agree that the Book should be read out, for Society is a hypocrite, and I would accommodate her in nothing; though for the principle of Society I hold that men should be ready to lay down their lives. Belief in religion has done and does this good to the young ; it floats them through the perilous period when the appetites most need control and transmutation. If you have not the belief, set your- self to love virtue by understanding that it is your best guide, both as to what is due to others, and what is for your positive personal good. If your mind honestly re- jects it, you must call on your mind to supply its place from your own resources. Otherwise you will have only half done your work, and that is mischievous. You know how Socrates loved truth. Truth and virtue are one. Look for the truth in everything, and foUow it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your under- standing wavers whenever you chance to doubt that He leads to good. We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. Again and again these letters show flashes of Shakespearean insight: all his letters to Lady Ulrica Duncombe (and most especially his letter in defence of the sensual passion of his own Diana of the Cross- ways) are quite extraordinary. He sees that Lady Ulrica, like most English women, "is kindled more martially than amorously; not so much softened as elevated." He talks superbly of woman's courage as "elastic," subject to ups and downs, that is; but GEORGE MEREDITH 213 always finding strength again in her affections; he will not have man or woman condemned rigorously for a sensual slip ; he would have marriage modified, shocked England indeed by proposing to legalize marriage with a time limit, say of ten years: de- clared against himself that "it is not wholesome even for great men to be adored while they breathe" ; deplored the fact that "the English don't want their novels to be thoughtful, the characters to be deeply studied," positively preferring conven- tional surface sketches: and a propos of something in the South African War he tells his countrymen that "their apathy to their evil deeds is not only a crime, but perceptibly written by history as the cause of national disaster." On every page indeed he shows, to use his own phrase, "a mind that has travelled." When seventy-seven years of age he concluded that "England has little criticism beyond the expres- sion of personal likes or dislikes, the stout vindica- tion of an old conservatism of taste" ; and he adds, "I have seen many reviews, not one criticism of my books in prose or verse." Was there ever such a condemnation of English men of letters? The last letter is on the same high level. It was called forth by the death of Swinburne, and is boyishly enthusiastic: "Song was his natural voice. He was the great- est of our lyrical poets — of the world I could say. 214 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS considering what a language he had to wield." But many years before he had put his finger on the poet's weakness : Swinburne is not subtle; and I don't see any internal centre from which springs anything that he does. He will make a great name, but whether he is to distinguish himself solidly as an artist I would not willingly prog- nosticate. No greatness seemed to escape him; his judg- ments even of Russian writers show the same in- tuitive appreciation. It was characteristic of him, I think, that he underrated German literature; probably because it is a little weak in the romantic and heroic elements he most prized and because he is not a master of the language. But he would have praised the Nie- belungen Lied and the poems of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Heine had he known them. Again and again we find him coupling Goethe with Shake- speare with significant assurance. Take him for all in all there is no greater figure in English literature, except Shakespeare himself; in spite of his imperfect accomplishment Meredith should rank with Emerson and Blake among our noblest. I do not care much for his novels, one can get his mind be;tter through his poems, and best of all though these letters. But certain of his poems will live as long as the language, and there are GEORGE MEREDITH 215 pages of his novels, such as the love-idyll in Richard Feverel, which are of the same quality. Here is a short poem almost as fine as Goethe's best; indeed it Is almost a rendering of the magical verse be- ginning: Ueber alien Gipfeln ist Ruh.^ Dirge in Woods A wind sways the pines J And below Not a breath of wild air; Still as the mosses that glow On the flooring and over the lines Of the roots here and there. The pine tree drops its dead; They are quiet as under the sea. Overhead, overhead Bushes life in a race. As the clouds the clouds chase; And we go, And we drop like the fruits of the tree. Even we. Even so. •I have Englished this verse so that my readers may compare the two masters; but my rendering is shockingly inferior to the original. O'er all the hilltops is silence now. From all the forest hearest thou Hardly a breath. The birds in the woodlands are nesting. Patience — soon thou will be resting Gently in Death. 2i6 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS I have given his written judgments of his literary contemporaries at some length because they show, I think, the ripest critical faculty to be found in any literature. This man, one would say, had the widest, fairest mind imaginable: It fails nowhere. If one compares him with the best critics so called, his- superiority is astounding: matched with him the Hazlitts and Sainte Beuves are pigmies: Swin- burne continually overshoots the mark in praise or blame: Matthew Arnold Is snobbish, and pttty and hidebound : Emerson is puritanical ; even Goethe lacks the subtle sureness of appreciation, the vivid painting phrases. Shakespeare alone has the same imperial vision wedded to magic of expression. These Letters give me the same sense of fullness as Meredith's wonderful talk; I have often come away from him feeling that on everything we had discussed his judgment was final. I have never met so fine a mind, so perfect a mirror; were it not for that harshness of moral condemnation of~ which I have given an instance, and that bias of insular patriotism, I should have Said that in Mere- dith, as in Shakespeare, one touched the zenith of humanity. In these crucial matters he fell short of the Ideal. In virile virtues he was better endowed than Shake- speare : he had loved passionately, but had not lost himself In passion: he had fought again and again for unpopular causes and had stood against the GEORGE MEREDITH 217 world for the Right with heroic courage : he Tiad accepted all the conditions of life without murmur or complaint, and had triumphed over all difficulties ; he had lived in poverty without cringing or revolt; one of our Conquerors for all time; after a more desperate battle than Browning waged he had won to greater sweetness of nature. I call him a great man and a noble, not so great as Shakespeare, who rose above race-vanity and above condemnation of even the worst of men to those heights \5rhere "par- don's the word to all" and where malice itself can only mean forgiveness. But Meredith's life and be- ing are witness enough that this age of ours is the noblest age in all history, for he did not dwarf his contemporaries and his stature is proof sufficient that men will yet be born on earth greater than any of our models. Nature is always surpassing her- self, and her most prodigious achievement today but prepares a nobler accomplishment tomorrow. It is worth notice perhaps that Meredith did not pass almost unrecognized through life as Shake- speare passed and Cervantes. He was fairly well known to a good many of us. Barrie and Max Beer- bohm wrote of him during his lifetime as the great- est man since Shakespeare : Lord Morley took care that he should have the Order of Merit, and though his novels never had a large sale and his poems hardly covered the co^t of publication, all the best readers in the English-speaking lands were his de- 2i8 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS v5lsd and enthusiastic friends and admirers. He was the one writer of the time of whom we were all proud. He went through life crowned, and nothing he said or did injured his reputation or tarnished the sovereign lustre of his genius. He was poor with dignity and a friend of man without affectation or snobbishness : his joy in living, his sympathy, his happy valiance made life brighter to all of us. ROBERT BROWNING IT was as a student in Gottingen that I first got to know Robert Browning. The passion of the lyrics "The Last Ride Together," "In a Gondola," and many others enthralled me, and the "Men and Women" taught me that the great lover was a great man to boot; but it was "The Ring and the Book" which gave me his measure, allowed me, so to speak, to lay my ear to the page and listen to Browning's heart beat. Curiously enough, a little thing became a sort of symbol of my liking for the man, the gen- erous kindly warmth of hiS/dedicationS to John Ken- yon and Barry Cornwall and Sergeant Talfourd. The world knows little about these almost forgot- ten worthies, but just because of that the notices re- nlinded me of Balzac's numerous dedications, and everything connected' with Balzac, however remote, has a certain significance for me. For Balzac is one of the "Sacred Band" who has enlarged one's con- ception of human capacity and given new horizons to the spirit. Browning profited by this connection, and when some yqars later I came to London to work I hoped to meet the poet who was at least half a seer as a poet should he. I used to call Browning 219 220 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS to myself "Greatheart," for his courage and con- fidence and hope, and as "Greatheart" I often spoke of him. One day, I think ini888ori889,I went to lunch at Lady Shrewsbury's. It was a large party; an earl was on the right of the hostess and a promi- nent Member of the House of Commons on her left: opposite me, about the middle of the table, was a small man inclined to be stout, carefully dressed, with healthy tanned skin, blue eyes and silver hair. He had a red tie on, and to my shortsightedness seemed commonplace. Suddenly some one addressed him as Mr. Browning. Breathless I turned to my neighbor, a lady: "Is that Robert Browning the poet?" I asked in wonder. "I think so," she re- plied, a little surprised at my tone, "he's nice, isn't he? But I'm afraid I don't know much about poetry: I don't care for it really: I'm not liter- ary." I hardly heard her chatter: so that was Rob- ert Browning: I gazed and gazed, studied his face, his eyes, his expression ; but could not see anything : his eyes were blue and clear, his nose a little beaked; but there was nothing distinguished about him, I had to admit to myself, nothing peculiar even, nothing remarkable. Of course, I took myself to task at once: "What had I expected, a giant or an ogre?" "No, no," my heart replied, "yet I had hoped to catch in eyes or expression something to ROBERT BROWNING 221 show the greatness of the spirit; but nothing, noth- ing." He spoke to his neighbors in a low tone, kept the quiet manners and reserve of the ordinary gen- tleman, using politeness perhaps as a barrier be- tween himself and the world. I was introduced to him, and told him how glad I was to meet him; how his work had delighted me. He bowed as if I had been using ordinary conventional phrases and turned away, his cool, indifferent manner fencing him off from my enthu- siastic admiration. I could get nothing from him, no glint of fire from the polished flint. I met him again and again that season, but never got inside his armor. Once or twice I had hardly spoken to him, I had contented myself with bowing, so convinced I was that it was impossible to enter into intimate relations with him. One day I was at Mrs. Jeune's at lunch. On her right she had Russell Lowell, the American Am- bassador: on her left a Cabinet Minister. I was at the other end of the table, on the left of the host, who had Browning on his right hand. The conver- sation at our end of the table was formal and dull, but Russell Lowell was in great form and kept the table interested and amused to judge by the laughter of the pretty women. At the end of lunch Russell Lowell got up to go, excusing himself, and the bevy of women all gath- 222 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS ered about him talking and laughing. It made a good picture, Lowell with /his leonine grey head, bright and happy as a schoolboy, and the women flirting with him with that happy mixture of con- fidence and familiarity that young women often show distinguished men on the verge of old age. I had gone round to Browning's side of the table. I don't know how the conversation commenced, but I remember quoting in illustration of something I said, a verse of Rabbi Ben Ezra with passionate ap- preciation. Suddenly there came a peal of laughter from the other end of the room. Lowell, exclaiming "the one privilege of age," was kissing the pretty hands extended to him when taking his leave. Suddenly Browning clutched my arm. "But what has he done," he said, indicating Low- ell with his head at the other end of the room, "what has he done to be so feted?" The tone was so angry, so bitter, that I started. "He has lived for just that," I replied, "that is why he made verse and not poetry. He wanted the facile admiration of the moment and the liking of pretty women: he has got them. But there are three or four who honor you at this table, who don't care whether Lowell is alive or dead." "One tries to console oneself with thoughts like that," Browning admitted, "but it is difficult as one grows older. When one is young, one is so occupied ROBERT BROWNING 223 with the work that one doesn't much care whether it is liked or disliked, but later, when one has fought and had, at any rate, a partial success, it is hard to see others who have not fought at all, put before one." Naturally I did my best to show him the other side. I spoke to him of the enthusiastic admiration of the little group of literary students at Heidelberg and Gottingen, who thought more of him than of any living poet. His only competitor in our admira- tion, I told him, was Victor Hugo; if he had paid a visit to Germany we should have chaired him through the streets. He appeared to be gratified. We went away together and walked, I remember, across the park, and from that day on I began to know him. I soon found that all he had to give he had given in his books : in fact, I came to see that the poetry, the mere words, or, if you will, the in- spiration of the moment had lent him thoughts be- yond his seeing. > Take this verse in which he shows that injustice, or wrong may have a good result as a spur: Then, welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough. Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go ! Be our joys three-parts pain! Strive, and hold cheap the strain; Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! 224 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS Or this one with its lofty optimism: Therefore I summon age To grant youth's heritage, Life's struggle having so far reached its term: Thence shall I pass, approved A man, for aye removed From the developed brute; a God though In the germ. Here is the heart of his song and it is mere Chris- tian: Not once beat "Praise be Thine ! "I see the whole design, "I, who saw power, see now love perfect too: "Perfect I call Thy plan: "Thanks that I was a man ! "Maker, remake, complete, — I trust what Thon shalt do!" No honest human soul can call the plan "perfect." Browning was certainly bigger in his writings than he was in intimacy. He is often spoken of as the least inspired of poets. To my mind he owed more to verse and the inspiration of reflection than any man of genius I ever met. His belief as shown in the Rabbi Ben Ezra and other poems is uncompro- mising, definite, clear, authoritative as the utterance of a Jewish prophet. But when you probed the man in quiet conversation, you found no such certainty. ROBERT BROWNING 125 His beliefs were really a mere echo of his child- hood's faith, and his optimism was of health and sound heart rather than of insight. He was not one of those who had gone round the world and returned to his native place; he had always lingered in the vicinity of home without seeking to justify his pref- erence. His was a bookish mind, and apart from books not eventfuUy original. He had spent many years in Italy without knowing the Italian, and had lived on the crater-edge of socialist unrest almost without noticing it. Unfortunately for his fame he had always had a competence, enough to live on comfortably and so had never to struggle with the necessities and learn their lesson. Had he ever gone hungry and been forced to eat "the bitter-salt bread" of humiliation that Dante spoke of he might have become a world-poet. As it was he accepted all the pitiable conventions of London society be- cause he was used to them, just as he donned the dress. I have heard him tell a fairly good story; I never heard him say anything original. In fact, if I had not known his poetry I should have met him and talked to him many times without ever imagining that he was a man of any distinction of mind. Of course, all this may well be my fault: some- thing in me may have displeased him: I sought to explain it to myself by saying we were not of the same generation. For Frederic Harrison gives a dif- 226 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS ferent picture of him, speaks of him as '.'genial, full of story and jest" ; but even he, who finds something good to say of all the men of that time, does not record anything remarkable of Robert Browning. Again and again I tried to find out something about the married life of the Brownings; it was hardly possible that two sensitive poets should have lived together for twenty years in perfect harmony, but till lately I never heard an authentic word on the subject. A short time ago, however, I met a relative of the Tennysons who told me that she had heard from the poet laureate that the Brownings often quarrelled like ordinary folk, and the root of their disagreement was usually the jealousy he felt when his wife's poetry was overpraised. I am not inclined to attribute much weight to this report. I think it may be taken that, on the whole, the Brown- ings lived happily together, and so far as I could learn, his faithfulness was not even questioned in scandal-loving London. It is certain that Browning spoke of his wife to the very end with fanatical ad- miration. What a wretched silhouette this is to give of Rob- ert Browning; what a poor thin sketch! It would have been better, I think I hear the reader say, to have said nothing at all about him. Yet I cannot agree with this ; if I failed to get near -Browning it was not through lack of desire on my part, or lack of sympathy. My utter failure simply shows how hard ROBERT BROWNING 227 it Is for us to know our fellow-men rightly even when we approach them in the best spirit. Yet the magic of his noble optimism and the music of his verse are always with me : Rejoice we are allied To That which doth provide And not partake, effect and not receive ! A spark disturbs our clod; Nearer we hold of God Who gives, than of His tribes that take, I must believe. I The failure to find anything heroic or wise or of deepest humanity in Browning should simply warn the reader that the mirror of my soul held up for these reflections is after all a poor clouded mirror, dulled with fog of life and stained with soilure of earth, untrustworthy even at its brightest.- SWINBURNE: THE POET OF YOUTH ' AND REVOLT SWINBURNE Is dead; and a part of our youth seems to have passed with him, to have dropped into the dim backward and abysm of Time. The natural regret is overpowered by the insurgent thrill of memory. Swinburne was the hot voice of youth and the joy of living, the cry of revolt against the smug Victorian respectability, and the syrupy creed of Tennyson. ]For many years he was the most vital thing in England, and naturally, in Eng- lish fashion, the authorities passed him by and made a lackey, laureate In his place. The soul of the new paganism was In him, which is the soul of yester- day and today and many a day to come. With right instinct the whole cry of ha'penny critics is quoting "The Garden of Proserpine" with Its pagan hopelessness : From too much love of living. From hope and fear set free. We thank with brief thanksgiving. Whatever Gods may be, 22S SWINBURNE 229 That no life lives for ever. That dead men rise up never, That even the weariest river. Winds somewhere safe to sea. And the passion of paganism, too, he rendered again and again, deathlessly (though the journalists are afraid to quote it) in "The Leper" and ''Faus- tine," and perhaps most characteristically in these lines from "Anactoria," where Sappho herself aches for fulfilment. Alas, that neither moon nor snow nor dew. Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through. Assuage me, nor allay me, nor appease. Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease. Till time wax faint in all his periods. Till Fate undo the bondage of the Gods; And lay to slake and satiate me all through, Lotus and Lethe on my lips like dew. And shed around and over and under me Thick darkness and the insuperable sea. But Swinburne was more than a poet of passion and despair, he has turned into incomparable music all the culture and idealisms, the faiths and follies of youth, and it is this which gives him European importance, and makes him more interesting than a Leopardi or a Verlaine. The choruses of the "Atalanta in Calydon" lent to English for the first time the plangent syllabifica- 230 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS tion and sonorous melody of the best work of Soph- ocles or Euripii3es; the beat and music of the verse are irresistible : Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time with a gift of tears ; Grief with a glass that ran. And Eyesight and speech they wrought As veils of the soul therein, A time for labour and thought, A time to serve and to sin. Who can ever forget the lament of Meleager and the glorious answer of Atalanta : I would that with feet Unsandall'd, unshod. Overbold, overfleet, I had swum not, nor trod From Arcadia to Calydon northward A blast of the envy of God! What did it matter to us ^hat the phrase "A blast of the envy of God" was taken from Euri- pides; it had a new weight in English, an added value. Goethe himself never gave nobler music to Pan- theism than Swinburne did in "Hertha." SWINBURNE 231 I am that which began. Out of me the years roll. Out of me God and man — I am equal and whole. '^ God changes and Man, and the form of them Bodily: I am the soul. But what dost thou now Looking Godward to cry, "I am I; Thou art Thou; I am low; Thou art high." I am thou whom thou seekest to find. Find thou but thyself. Thou art I. I the seed that is sown. And the plough-cloven clod. And the ploughshare drawn thorough The germ and the sod. The seed and the sower, the deed and the doer. The dust which is God! AH the hero-worship of youth is in Swinburne, magnificently rendered in the poems to Landor, Hugo, Gautier, and Blake, and in the prose poems to Shakespeare and Scott. All obvious, fixed stars, one might object, but that, too, is youth's way, and is right so far as it goes. The deathless faith in man and the Kingdom of Man upon earth; the passion for equality, and the superb contempt for popes arid 232 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS crowns and false values — all youth's idealisms and revolts set to glorious music once for all, and made imperishable. Swinburne was the poet of youth, and his heritage is as wide as the world, and his lovers as numerous as the sands of the sea, for all youths will love him and quote him with hot hearts and passionate tears so long as English is spoken. Before I ever met Swinburne I had a certain image of him in my mind, a sort of composite photo- graph built up partly from his verses and even more from talks about him with men who had known him intimately. Whistler in particular, I remember, had given me a snapshot of him when he lived in Cheyne Walk with Rossetti — an inimitable unforgettable silhouette etched into a grotesque, as if the gall-acid had run upon the plate broadening the lines and deepening the shadows to caricature. He told of the weird sitting room turned into a me- nagerie of wild beasts by Rossetti into which Swinburne burst one summer morning, naked as the day he was born, wild with enthusiasm over some Greek verses he had just discovered which he in- sisted upon chanting with frantic gestures : "There he was," Whistler concluded, "swimming about like a blonde Bacchante drunken with sound." I only give the sketch to warn my readers that every one of us carries to a meeting with any of the immortals certain preconceived ideas and prejudgments which twist and tinge the impression they make on us. In SWINBURNE 233 order to give a true image, a perfect representment, the mind at such a time ought to be a pure sensitized plate ; but It is not ; it Is a plate, so to speak, already scratched with Innumerable lines and warped in a hundred fires, and even the image thus received can- not be reproduced with perfect fidelity. As I lived near Putney for a good many years I saw Swinburne frequently. Driving into town about noon I used to look out for him, and met him or passed him hundreds of times till his figure became familiar to me. He was not of Imposing appear- ance ; about five feet four, or perhaps five in height, with sloping bottle shoulders, pigeon chest, and dis- proportionjately large hips. There was a certain vigor or pcrklness in his walk : his legs at least were strong, and carried the little podgy body briskly. He usually wore a great felt wideawake, which made his head look like a melon, and as he jerked along talking to himself and swinging his arms, with his head thrown back and his unkempt auburn-grey beard floating, one felt inclined to smile. Whenever he saw a pretty child in a perambulator he used to stop and notice it, and nursemaids still tell stories of how he mistook little boys for girls. He was a lover of children and of beauty at all times. When I began to edit The Fortnightly Review I wrote asking Swinburne to contribute, and from time to time he sent me articles and poems, all writ- 234 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS ten in a round schoolboy hand, with extraordinary care and clearness. The printers, of course, paid no attention to his reasoned punctuation, and their mistakes used to annoy him excessively; he insisted upon revise after revise-^a proceeding I felt to be natural enough in regard to his poetry, but extrava- gantly meticulous and conceited when his prose alone was concerned. I never could take his prose seri- ously; somehow or other it always reminded me of the little wooden painted marionettes of a child's Noah's ark. Even when the judgments were wise and shrewd, and whenever lyric poetry was in ques- tion, Swinburne's opinions were nearly always finely right and sometimes of surprising divination, yet the wording of them was always antithetical, labored and stilted to a degree. His judgments of prose writers, dramatists, or novelists were as faulty as his prose; he overpraised Scott and Dickens absurdly, ranking them with the greatest, probably because his own faculty of thought was immature. Yet his criticism was invariably interesting; he usually had some reason for the faith that was in him. For years and years I had no closer relations with Swinburne. About 1897 or 1898, however, some things I had written about Shakespeare interested Swinburne's friend, Mr. Theodore Watts, who came to see me about them, and then asked me to dine, to meet Swinburne. I accepted and went one evening to the Pines. The dinner was very English; I mean / SWINBURNE 235 by that there were- no modern kickshaws or French sorbets or savories; but very plain, old-fashioned English fare : there were two chickens, I remember, and roast beef and apple pie with custard— enough for a dozen men, and a couple of bottles of sound Burgundy to promote good-will. We all appeared to be blessed with keen appetites, and after dinner settled down to talk. I don't know why, but the conversation fell on Henley and his enthusiastic praise of Monte Crista and The Three Musketeers, which seemed to me bojash, exaggerated. I ventured to remark that I would father have written Le Vicomte de Brage- lonne than all the rest of Dumas put together were it only for the character of Louise de la Valliere, and I was astonished to find that Swinburne agreed with me enthusiastically, indeed he put la Valliere "among the finest women-portraits in French liter- ature." I could not help saying a word for Manon Lescaut and La Cousine Bette, — and the Master admitted their claims to supremacy with delighted smile and nod. Emboldened by this accord I ventured to ask whether he really placed Hugo beside Shakespeare, and was dumbfounded to find that he did; he quoted some verses of Hugo — from "La Legende des Siecles," I think; magnificent rhetoric which he gave wonderfully, his whole face lighting up, the auburn mane thrown back, the greenish eyes flaming, the 236 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS great dome of the forehead lending weight to the swift sonorous words. I did not dare to touch on Shakespeare with him : he Ihad evidently been accustomed and encouraged to play pontiff to such an extent that to have differed from him would have been lese-majeste at the least, and, besides, his opinions on the suoject were known to me, and I had ijo desire to shake them. I preferred to keep the ball rolling while study- ing his face and manner. When he quoted poetry he mouthed it, as all poets are inclined to do, bring- ing out the value of the metre at the cost of the sense and magic of expression. Poets are often mu- sicians first and intelligences afterwards. His pronunciation of French was that of a native, and he seemed to know all French poetry by heart. To semething he said I muttered Prudhomme's "Je suis las des mots. . . ." and again he caught fire and went on quoting with intense enjoyment the great verse and hopeless refrain: Pour ne pas sentir h. ma derniere henre Que le coEur se fend; Pour ne plus penser, pour que I'homme meure Comme est n^ I'enfant. Vous qui m'aiderez daus mon agonle^ Ne me dites rien Faites que j'entends un pen d'harmonie £t je mourrai bien. SWINBURNE 237 I have never met anyone whose knowledge of Greek, English and French poetry was at all com- parable to Swinburne's; as soon as you began to quote any fine passage he would take it up and go on declaiming endlessly. Wheii he got interested he crossed his legs and uncrossed theni, tossing one upon the other rapidly, while his fingers were twitching and his head jerk- ing about, almost like an epileptic. He was evi- dently intensely excitable; the mind and nerves far stronger than the body — over-engined, so to speak, like Shakespeare. Indeed, in a thousand ways he reminded me of what Shakespeare must have been : the same swiftness of speech and thought, the same nervous excitability, and much the same physique, the little podgy body, the domed forehead, the auburn hair, only the eyes were different — Shake- speare's a light hazel, Swinburne's a greenish-grey. I picture Shakespeare as a little larger and stronger, with a more resolute jaw and chin; handsomer too, if his contemporaries are to be believed, and of far sweeter manners. I wanted Swinburne to tell me of . Rossetti, in whom I have always been intensely interested; but with characteristic courtliness he referred me to Mr. Theodore Watts, who "knew Rossetti most in- timately." I felt impelled to follow his lead, for already sev- eral things had become plain to me, the most impor- 238 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS tant being'that Swinburne in his books hiad said all he had to say of any moment, and could not be led by me to peer into the unknown or unfamiliar; I was too late; his mind had passed the period of growth and become fossilized. Swinburne was far older at sixty-two or three than Carlyle was at eighty; his intellectual sympathies were cast iron; they could not be widened, whereas Carlyle was as eager to hear and consider new Ideas as a boy. When I mentioned Carlyle with praise, the light died out of Swinburne's face; it became lifeless and forbidding; clearly his mind was made up about Carlyle and could not be altered. Altogether Swinburne seemed to me a creature of extraordinary talent rather than a man of real genius. Take away from him his divine gift of song and he would hardly have become known in litera- ture. There was no elevation in his mind; no hu- mor in his outlook; no width of understanding; no fertility of ideas. He was an astonishing poet, but not by any means an astonishing intelligence ; he had five or six main ideas, or rather sympathies, and no "wish to enlarge the meagre store. It was evidently Mr. Theodore Watts who inspired the so-called im- perialism of his later years. He was a Jingo at sixty, thanks to this intimate friend, or dry nurse as I called him In my thought, just as he was a, republi- can at thirty, thanks to MazzinI and Hugo. He never seemed to have grown mentally after his sev- SWINBURNE 239 enteenth year. It was his want of intelligence which left him stranded at forty-five as the poet of youth.. Still, he was always an interesting and attractive personality; he had high courtesies in him and in- born loyalties, and an aristocratic contempt for all conventional lies and false values. He always lived, too, in a nobly serious way for the things of the spirit, the things that have enduring worth and the consecration of the ideal. The English people should have insisted on bury- ing Swinburne in the Abbey, were it only for his high Idealism of character; but English authority was too ignorant, its temper too conventional, and, after all, it is perhaps as well that this flaming eager spirit should not be housed with second-rate politicians and actors. I like to think of Shakespeare in the little church at Stratford and of Swinburne down there at Bonchurch. in ground shaken by the swing and thunder of the long rollers. Great men should be alone in death as in life, and no better resting-place could be found for Swinburne than the seashore where he had played as a boy. Did he not write : But when my time shall be. Oh, Mother, O my Sea, Alive or dead, take me. Me, too, my Mother. TALKS WITH MATTHEW ARNOLD MANY years ago I gave the following pen portrait of Matthew Arnold, and almost immediately after received a number of letters re- gretting that I had not written at greater length about him. Some of my correspondents insisted that Arnold was a great English poet, and ought to have had much more said about him, or else nothing at all. Perhaps they were right; at any rate, I am inclined to follow their wishes in the matter and report a few of the many conversations I had with Matthew Arnold in the ten years of our acquain- tance. I shall perhaps be forgivenfor reproducing here the pen and ink portrait of him to which I allude above. I called him the latest Apostle to the Gentiles. "A tall man, who, in spite of slight frame and square shoulders, had at least in later life something of the scholar's stoop. A rather long, pale, brood- ing face, hair parted in the middle over a head a little too flat for thorQughgoing belief; a long, well- shaped nose — a good rudder — a strong, but not bony chin ; altogether a well-balanced face, lighted by pale greyish thoughtful eyes. Two side whiskers lent 240 TALKS WITH MATTHEW ARNOLD 241 their possessor the air of a butler of a good house, the shaven lip allowed one to see th« sinuous, curv- ing lips of the orator or poet. "He believed himself to be both a poet and prose- writer of the first rank; his contemporaries took him at his own valuation, for he had the hall-mark of Oxford upon him, and his father was well known; but the present generation is inclined to question his claims. As a prose-writer he preached too much from too narrow a choice of texts, and he was rather a poet of distilled distinction and cultivation than of inspiration or passion. "By intellect shall no man storm Heaven: the great of heart alone do that, and the passion-driven and the world-weary." I had met Matthew Arnold here and there a great many times before I got the chance of a good frank talk with him ; he was always very courteous, very ingenuous even; he never shut himself up in armoted politeness as Browning usually did: he was always charmingly open and frank, like a well- bred schoolboy. Yet somehow or other I had no opportunity of a long talk with him for some years. One day at a luncheon party the whole table began discussing Mr. Rider Haggard's Jess, which had just then appeared, and Matthew Arnold was asked to give his opinion of it. The author was present, I remember. Matthew Arnold spoke very warmly of the pleasure the book had, given him, and the in- 242 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS terest he had taken in it ; but confessed at length that he liked the matter-of-fact sister better than he liked Jess. He took, in fact, a quite naive, almost boyish view of the book. As the party broke up he said he would like to speak with me about something, and we drove together to the Athenaeum Club. On the way I asked him how he came to praise Jess so warmly. His praise-had astonished me I confessed, as the book had no weight or place in letters ; all of which to my astonishment he admitted at once with a certain amused carelessness. "Why then did you praise the book?" I asked. "I feel," he replied, "that an oldiellow should be very sympathetic to the young writers, even if they art not all Thackerays and Fieldings, Can we ex- pect giants always, or should we not rather be thank- ful for what we get? Jess is a good healthy book enough, schoolboyish, as you say; but then we Eng- lish rather like schoolboy fiction. Robinson Crusoe and Tom Jones are both rather boyish, and David Copperfield, is that profound?" and he smiled at me deprecatingly. "Forgive me," I replied, "as you praised the book out o"f kindness I have nothing to say. But you know the young ones hope always that their seniors will rise to the height of every argument with some great word of exact appreciation. But you wanted to ask me about something, you said?" "I wanted to ask you," he replied, "about a quite TALKS WITH MATTHEW ARNOLD 243 personal matter. I have been invited to lecture in America. I should very much' like, to do it; partly perhaps from vanity, chiefly I think because the terms offered me are very good. But I should not like to make a fiasco of it. You know America In- timately; I was wondering If you could tell me whether I should be likely to succeed or to fail. Be- lieve me, I am not asking in order to be flattered: I really should like to know before I make up my mind whether to go or stay. Your opinion will have weight with me." "It is delightfully flattering of you," I replied, "to ask for my opinion. But, as you have asked me, I can only tell you the plain unvarnished truth. There are a few people In every city in America, and even in some towns, who will know you before they see you, who will be able to understand and appreciate the best you can give them ; but they are so few, these didsen ones, so few, that they are utterly swamped by the masses of people who will come to see you because they have heard from others that you are a great poet, a great English poet, too, and they will flock to hear you and measure you by their standard, which is not yours at all. They will judge you primarily as an orator or rather as a public speaker. Is your voice resonant and good, your de- livery clear and strong? if so they will say you are 'magnetic,' and will be prepared to believe that you are a great man ; but If your delivery Is halting and 244 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS slow and your elocution faulty, they will probably go away to make lewd jests about you; in matters of art they are barbarians." "Goodness me," he exclaimed, "you frighten me. I have no elocution whatever: I even read my own poetry very badly, I believe. I remember my wife used to say to me, 'I cannot bear to hear you read your verses, Matthew, you do mouth them so.' I am afraid," he went on, laughing heartily at the remi- niscence, "I am afraid, you know, that all poets are inclined to lay too much stress upon the metrical quality of their poetry. I have noticed that actors usually slur over the metrical quality and accentuate the sense. Is that what you call good elocution?" "It is what the average American calls good elo- cution," I said, "which is more to the point. Per- sonally, I prefer whatever is peculiar, individual, characteristic." "I see," he said, as if thinking over it, "I See. You don't think then that I should be a success in America?" "A success with the few, certainly," 1 replied, "but not with the many, certainly not with the many unless you practise elocution vigorously before start- :„». " mg. "It frightens me," he said, "it seems a little ter- rifying." "But surely," I went on, "you never thought you would be a popular success in America; you would TALKS WITH MATTHEW ARNOLD 245 not be a popular success in London, where the so- ciety is aristocratic, where the masses take their tone from the few, where popular opinion is formed from above, like water on sand, which as it sinks spreads over ever-widening strata. Even in our aristocratic society you would be above the heads of all but the best of your audiences. How can you hope to be popular? Your appeal is to the future, and not to the present." "It is very kind of you to put it in that way," he said, "and perhaps true; still, it disappoints one a little. I am afraid, though, you are right," he added, after a pause, "nevertheless, I think you have de- cided me to go," and he began to laugh, "perhaps for the sake of that remnant you speak of who will understand and appreciate." ^ "Oh, yes," I replied warmly, "a remnant that will understand you better, I am inclined to believe, than you are understood even in England. Only they will make no sign: you will hardly know that they are among your audience ; but they will be there eager to see and hear the man who wrote 'Thyrsis' and 'The Scholar-Gipsy' and 'Dover' and a dozen other splendid things." I remember another talk just after he had writ- ten, a poem on a dog — an exquisite requiem — ^for The Fortnightly Review. I went to ask him to write me an appreciation of Ernest Renan, whom I had 246 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS met and had had long talks with in the College de France. "I see you have divined it," said Matthew Ar- nold, "divined that Renan was always my teacher; my teacher in the view he toojc of St. Paul and the Bible generally, though to me he seemed a ILttle su- perficial in his treatment of Jesus. But a great teacher, nevertheless, a man who appealed to the soul always. He was the first, too, to discover for us the Celtic genius. A great writer!" I felt inclined to ask him why he had never ad- mitted in print the greatness of his dpbt to Renan, but thought it more courteous to restrain myself. On another occasion Arnold showed, I thought, a distinct vein of humor. "You know," he said, "it is very funny to me — years ago when I wrote prose all the editors whom I knqw used to say to me : " 'Oh, Arnold, why don't you write poetry?' "And now as soon as I begin writing poetry you say to me : " 'Oh, Arnold, why don't you write prose?' " and he laughed heartily at the implied criticism. After his return from America I wrote asking him to write something for me, and then went to see him in order to urge him to contribute. "Don't ask me 1" he cried, "don't ask me. I will not write articles; America has saved me from that; it has given me money and made me independent, TALKS WITH MATTHEW ARNOLD 247 that much I owe it. But you were quite right about the audiences. The remnant is utterly swamped by the vulgar opinion of the mass. What an opinion ! What a mass! What a civilization I Almost it makes one despair of humanity. The vulgarity of them doesn't frighten one as much as their intensity — the energy, force, and tumult of them all rushing — whither? It frightens me to think of America." One can hardly help asking: Was Matthew Ar- nold a great poet; one of the fixed stars in the lit- erary heaven; will he live there with Browning and Swinburne and Tennyson? He thought he would; declared, indeed, more than once, that his future place was at least as well assured as theirs. "Tennyson has no ideas," he would say, "Brown- ing's gerfius is almost hidden by scorias; my little things are slight if you will, but surely they are of gold — seven times refined." Arnold was mistaken in this self-estimate, alto- gether mistaken, I believe. He was right in many things; his opinions on matters of the day and hour were usually worth hearing; he was an excellent jour- nalist, the best indeed of his time ; but hardly more than that; to the last he remained a sort of smaller Renan, Renan at second-hand, a puritanic Renan. He brought no new and fruitful ideas into life; he created no new types; he is scarcely more than a 248 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS graceful singer of commonplaces. Sometimes, when Iqoking at him, I thought he was a Jew ; there was surely Hebrew blood in his veins; at any rate, his deepest words are about religion and the life of the spirit : The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Eetreating to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear, And naked shingles of the world. He had no inkling that the tide of faith was al- ready on the turn and would soon be again at flood. Matthew Arnold as Critic Since writing of Arnold's poetry and person I have found myself plagued by his critical prose work, and must at all costs try to rid my soul of the unholy obsession. I think I may dismiss his critical writ- ings on religion and on politics without more ado. His views on religion were taken from Renan and "Bayswatered" down to suit English taste with cheap English puritanic prejudices altogether un- worthy of a master. His views on politics were even more superficial and vain, though he said things about TALKS WITH MATTHEW ARNOLD 249 the middle and lower classes in England which are as witty as they are true. But Itiis best things in this field were all borrowed from Heine and he took care not to sponsor any significant part of Heine's tremendous indictment of the British oligarchy and British laws. One doubts whether he was capable even of appreciating its power and pertinence. Inasmuch as Arnold was first and last a man of letters, one is surely doing him no disservice by treat- ing his literary judgments alone. It is curious to notice that even his conceit has some relation to his power as the shadow has some resemblance to the figure. He thought far too highly of his own academic poetry; but, after all, he only compared himself with his contemporaries; he overestimated his critical faculty extravagantly, but he was careful to avoid the supreme tests. We must not look to him for any revision of the secular judg- ments of Homer or Dante or Shakespeare. He will quote Isolated lines of Homer and Dante and extol their beauty; but the passages he selects are usually bethumbed passages, or moral aphorisms seldom startling or significant, and when he laments "the imperfections of Shakespeare" In comparison with "the perfection of Homer," we are fain to forgive the absurdity, though it was a characteristic aberra- tion of the schoolmaster. As a rule he approaches the gods on his knees with becoming reverence. With the same instinctive shrinking he avoids the 250 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS highest function of criticism In his own time ; no new star ever swims into his ken; he does not affect the rapture of discovery. He would never praise Victor Hugo as Swinburne dared to praise him: so far as I know he never even discusses Balzac or Blake, and when he talks of Milton or Goethe he only ven- tures a cursive commentary on Scherer's well-kn6wn judgments. But about the writers of the second or third mag- nitude he has much to say, and wh^t he has to say he says on the whole excellently well, so well in- deed, with such measure, such lightness of touch and humorous felicity, that one loves to listen to him and applaud him. It seems unkind to find fault with so agreeable a guide, who has been at such pains to cultivate amiable manners. But, after all, as Matthew Arnold himself knew, "the disinterested reader will have truth," and one ought not to be "satisfied with fine writing about the object of one's study"; it is indeed our "business to learn the real truth about the important men and things and books which interest the human mind." What, then, is the truth about Matthew Arnold and his critical faculty? Let us try to take a test case that shall be favor- able to him, the case of some poet who has been misrated and misunderstood; let us not take Ver- laine, whom he never seems to have noticed, nor Heine, where his cruel misjudging may be attributed TALKS WITH MATTHEW ARNOLD 251^ in part at least to his insufficient knowledge of Ger- man; but let us take Keats, Keats who was of the preceding generation, Keats who died at twenty-six, whom he should, therefore, one would think, have been able to see fairly and to classify with precision. The task was not difficult. Bjowning finds a njagical word with which to praise him — "Keats, him even 1" : Tennyson, whose want of intelligence Arnold de- plored, declared that Keats lived "in the very heart of poetry"; what will Matthew Arnold say of Keats ? I He starts well by accepting Milton's famous say- ing that poetry should be "simple, sensuous, impas- sioned." None of us can wish a better judgment on Keats than must result from such a measure. But to our astonishment after borrowing a fine criterion, Matthew' Arnold goes on at once to take exception to Keats's "sensuousness" : was he "anything more than sensuous"? he asks. Keats's poetry does not furnish him with any example of excessive sensuous- ness, and therefore he takes the Letters to Fanny Browne, though Keats is assuredly to be judged by his poetry and by his poetry alone, and not by love- letters thrown off in the heat of passionate youthful ardor. It would be as unfair to judge Keats by these letters as to judge Goethe by his letters written to Frau von Stein. But let us follow our guide. He declares that he sees "no reason whatever" for the publication of these letters: "they ought never to 252 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS have been published": a fortiori, therefore, they should not be discussed by a critic who takes his work seriously. But that would not suit your Puri- tan :_Arnold has discovered, he thinks, a dish that is rather "high"; he cannot resist the temptation to taste it, to roll it on his tongue, to savor it to the full before rejecting it, and thus at one and the same moment enjoy the sin and the condemnation of it. No more perfect example of hypocrisy could be de- sired 1 But, after all, what has Matthew Arnold found? Here are the worst passages he can discover in Keats's letters : You have absorbed me. ... I have no limit now to my love. ... I have been astonished that men should die martyrs for religion — I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more. I could be martyred for my Religion — Love is my religion. ... I cannot breathe without you. Now what on earth is there to take exception to in this ? There is nothing here which hasn't been said by Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe; much more sensuous stuff was written in the Song of Solomon, consecrated by the admiration of a hundred genera- tions ; a still more sensual because solely physical, ap- peal was made by Chaucer, whom Matthew Arnold praises for "health and sanity." But Chaucer lived a long time ago, and is th^ere- fore sacred, while Keats is almost of his own time, TALKS WITH MATTHEW ARNOLD 253 so Matthew Arnold whips him with the sad in- feridrity of his tepid temperament. Here we have "the merely sensuous man," he cries, "the man who is 'passion's slave.' " He uses the Shakespearean phrase without any inkling of the fact that Shake- speare has given a thousand proofs that he was more enslaved by passion than ever Keats was. Matthew Arnold, then, allows himself to talk of this letter as "the love-letter of a surgeon's apprentice." . . . "It has in its relaxed self-abandonment," he writes, "something underbred and ignoble, as of a youth ill-brought up !" No wonder Heine wanted to leave England in order to get quit of its "gentlemen, and live with unpretentious fools and rogues." This snobbish and vicious nonsense does not stand alone in Matthew Arnold's work, or I should have striven for pity's sake to forget it. Puritan preju- dice and English propriety debase and degrade all Arnold's critical work. He regrets the publication of Dowden's Life of Shelley: he does not "want the truth about Shelley's passion," though he assures us again and again that "truth, the real truth," is what "the disinterested reader" demands. Even this disgraceful priggish "underbred" and "ill-brought up" has its parallel elsewhere. Mat- thew Arnold writes from Paris that he has come across a new poet, one Heine, who "apes the bit- ter scepticism and world-weariness of Byron," but then Byron is an English lord, and has the right, 254 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS Matthew thinks, to feel disgust with ordinary life — "Byron had the entree everywhere." And so we find mixed with Puritan prejudice and English hypocrisy the essential oil, so to speak, of British snobbery. Nurtured in early Victorian gentility, Matthew Arnold does |^ot like the word "snob." Scherer gives instances of Goethe's extraordinary "snobbishness" (it is the very perfume of Germanic vulgarity ! ) , but Matthew Arnold will not have the word : he calls it "caporalism" striving fatuously to disguise the rank odor with a ridiculous neologism. Matthew Arnold could never have been a great critic, but he might surely have reached somewhat the same level as Swinburne had not English Puri- tanism debased his judgment and destroyed his in- tellectual honesty. He condemns Faust as a "seduction drama," though he praises Sophocles without measure in spite of the Greek's parricides and incest. He takes poor Burns as mentor, and asserts that passion "petrifies the feeling," though he himself has writ- ten: Ere the parting kiss be dry Quick, thy tablets. Memory ! He cannot even select the great lines in Dante, the "simple, sensuous, impassioned" lines, but praises beyond measure such a copy-book headline as In la tua voluntade e nostra face. TALKS WITH MATTHEW ARNOLD 255 He is curiously typical of the English middle-class in his hatred of simple, sensuous, impassioned poetry such as Heine's and his ready acceptance of the rh3mied rhetoric and coarse animalism of Byron, But, after all, he is best seen in his treatment of Keats and Milton. He condemns Macaulay's Essay on Milton not alone fqr "redundance of youthful enthusiasm," as Mr. Trevelyan condemns it; but because "the writer has not for his aim to see and to uttsr the real truth about his object." He finds his master, Scherer, declaring with much justice that "The Paradise Lost" is "a sort of 'tertiary' forma- tion, the copy of a copy, wholly factitious ... a false poem, a grotesque poem, a tiresome poem . . . but immortal ... it will be read for incom- parable lines." Matthew Arnold knows that the true judgment on Milton is even severer than Scherer's : he knows that it is English Puritanism which ruined Milton's poetry; he even says so once — "they (the Puri- tans) spoiled him," but he shuts his eyes to the truth. He is resolved to praise Milton, and he praises him for "elevation of style," and is not ashamed to say that his elevation of style is due to "a moral quality in him — ^his pureness." There we have it: the English Puritan is to be tickled at any cost, even of truth. For whence comes the "elevation" of Shakespeare or the elevation of Sophocles or the 256 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS elevation of Goethe or of Ecclesiastes or of the Psalms? Certainly not from "pureness." Had it not been for his debasing Puritanism Mat- thew Arnold must have told the truth that Keats, though handicapped by poverty, illness, and untimely death, stands higher as a poet than Milton, that he has shown a nobler spirit, and has left a richer legacy mainly because he was not degraded by Puri- tan falsehoods and by the childish Puritan miscon- ceptions both of God and man. Poor Matthew Arnold, how heavily handicapped he was by birth, how ill-brought up I The son of a schoolmaster-cleric of the strictest sect of British Pharisee! True, he had an extraordinary endow- ment; he was gifted with a French mind, French lucidity of vision, French amiability and urbanity, and, above all, with something of a Frenchman's high conscience in all intellectual and artistic mat- ters, but, alas, the Bad Fairy condemned the charm- ing little fellow to be born in an English upper-mid- dle-class home, and so he was trained painfully to be a sort of pinchbeck Wordsworth. It needs, as Arnold himself once said, "a miracle of genius" lijke Shakespeare to grow comparatively straight and high in such an atmosphere. GUY DE MAUPASSANT! MY memory almost Invariably connects per- sons by/ likeness or by contrast — for exam- ple, I think of 'Emerson and Nietzsche together as opposites, while Maupassant and Kipling resemble each other, though the talent of the one is peculiarly French and the talent of the other peculiarly Eng- lish. Both are born story-tellers of the first class, though characteristically enough the domain of the Frenchman is love, whereas the domain of the Eng- lishman is war. Both have written masterpieces. La Maison Tellier and L'Heritage are even finer than The Man Who Would be King or The Drums of the Fore and Aft. Both men came to immediate popularity, which means that both were on the or- dinary \eyt\ of thought and feeling, and wrote for ordinary men and women. The man in the street in Paris and in London finds himself in Maupassant and in Kipling; he has the same outlook, the same vague creed, the same hopes and fears, the same simple imperative instinct to achieve his own well- being and that of his country. Both men might * Souvenir* sur Ouy de Maupaisant (1883-1893). By Franfois, his Valet de Chambre. (Plon-Nourrit and Co., Paris.) 257 258 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS have been born three hundred years ago, for neither has had anything to do with the thought-currents peculiar to our time. There is, too, a curious phys- ical resemblance: de Maupassant, like Kipling, was short and broad and strong, and so ordinary-looking that it is difficult to make the reader see him by means of words. He was a Norman by descent, lumpy-shouldered, large-limbed; the oval of the face rather long; features regular; hair dark brown and thick; eyes greyish-blue. He would have passed unnoticed, save that he was handsonje, in any Euro- pean crowd. If you studied his looks you could see no trace of exceptional endowment, save per- haps something searching in the regard, a certain sensitiveness in the well-cut lips and in the refine- ment of small hands. De Maupassant, like Kip- ling, was healthy, courteous, well-mannered; both were made social lions ; but de Maupassant allowed himself to be swept away by the current, whereas Kipling in this respect seems stronger. Both men got the best out of themselves ; but Kipling had the longer wind, though the Frenchman plunged deeper into life. De Maupassant, like Kipling, met you fairly, and, while conscious of his achievements, was well aware, too, of some, at any rate, of his limita- tions — in fine, two ordinary healthy men, rather under than over middle height, gifted with an ex- traordinary writer's talent. Both men, like Franz Hals, depicted the life which they saw and lived GUY DE MAUPASSANT 259 with marvellous verisimilitude, making of ordinary- men 'unforgettable portraits — ^portraits that live in the memory like photographs transmuted into pic- tures by an incomparable brio of presentment. This book of 4^ Maupassant's valet ought to have been a masterpiece, for it deals with the last ten years of the great writer's brief life; it covers all hi^ best work and t^e appalling tragedy which brought his life and labor to an untimely and hot- rible end. The valet Frangois witnessed the trag- edy; lived through it, indeed, from the first scene to the last ; but he saw it and understood it without re- alizing its universal significance or putting it before us so that we too must realize It and the lesson of It. His book, therefore, is not an unique book — > hardly, indeed, a valuable book. There Is no pro- portion in it, no sense at all of the relative Impor- tance of events. Hundreds of pages are filled with trivialities : the furnishing of rooms, jburneyings In (France, Algeria, and Tunis, yachting excursions, dinners, feeble practical jokes and ordinary distrac- tions, which are interrupted by alarming hints of recurring illness always connected in some mysteri- ous way with the visits of a "dame a la robe gris perle"; then suddenly comes the confession of de Maupassant himself, who tells of unstrung, dis- cordant nerves — and "maklse Indiclble." There follows a casual description of the slow partial re- covery; then another visit of the lady whom Fran- 26o CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS gois now calls the "Vampire," and a day or two later de Maupassant worn to a rag, cuts his throat in a frenzy, and ends his life in a madhouse — "En- core un homme au rancart," as he cried himself in characteristic bitter modern phrase ; or as one might English it — "Another carcass for the dust-heap." Here is tragedy enough to fill a volume with won- der and regret and pity; the poor gifted, passionate, foolish, human being in the toils of necessity, a slave of his own passion, which to him is inexorable fate : Who shall contend with his lords. Or cross them or do them wrong? Who shall bind them as with cords? Who shall tame them as with song? For the hands of their kingdom are strong. In truth "the hands of their kingdom are strong." But there is hardly more than a hint of the astound- ing and awful tragedy in this book, hardly more than a suggestion anywhere of de Maupassant's trial as with fire and his utter incredible breakdown. Francois appears never to have seen much more than the outside of his master, and that, as I have said, was commonplace enough; but de Maupassant's temperament-Tvas abnormal and deserves a careful and sympathetic study. In order to give my readers an adequate compre- hension of de Maupassant's passionate endowment, or the strength of his temptation, or the horror of GUY DE MAUPASSANT 261 the tragedy, I should have to use plain words, and that is impossible in any English book. The tragedy is there, and the lesson flamed out in letters of fire; but the purblind British Puritans have unanimously decided that the ostrich policy is the most becoming and fitting policy for English writers, and we poor scribes are forced to bow to their infallible dicta- tion. "Little Mary" we may write about, it ap- pears, and "our obligations to our betters," and "our duties in that state of. life into which it has pleased God to call us" ; but the great human prob- lems are not to be discussed by us; truth holds no sanctuary for us, but for the free peoples and their teachers, for the Sudermanns and Brieux and Artzibacheffs and d'Annunzios, but not for the Grundy-ridden descendants of Shakespeare and Bacon. But to return to my text. If Frangois the valet has shown himself unable to depict his brilliant mas- ter, if he has not attempted to rise to the height of the great argument and justify the ways of God to men, he has incidentally painted himself as the very model of a wise and kindly valet, as a very honest, humble, reverent, human soul, and has besides re- produced dc Maupassant's daily" life for us, and given us little sketches of de Maupassant's mother and some of his friends which are immediately recognizable. This leads me to fear that because 1 knew de Maupassant intimately I am inclined to be 262 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS a little unjust to this book, which does after all per- haps in a degree make up for the want of personal knowledge, and does supply some of those little personal peculiarities which bring the man before us in his habit as he lived. Moreover, there are in this book a few pages of high Interest in which de Maupassant reveals himself, or at least his mind, to us at its best. I make no apology for transcrib- ing those which I regard as worthful and charac- teristic. I was introduced to de Maupassant by Blanche Macchetta, an exceedingly fair American with mag- nificent red hair, who figures in the first pages of this book as "the author of several novels" and "as intelligent as she was beautiful." We dined to- gether, and de Maupassant took away my breath by declaring that he hated writing and only whipped himself to the work by thoughts of the money he would make and the pleasant yachting trips which the money would buy for him : Pegasus only valu- able as a grocer's nag. To Frangois he confesses that this is not the whole truth, not even the best part of the truth. "There are in France some fifty thousand young men of good birth and fairly well off," he says, "who are encouraged to live a life of complete idleness. They must either cease to exist or rhust come to see that there can be no happiness, no health even, without regular daily labor of some sort. ... The need of work is in me," he con- GUY DE MAUPASSANT 263 eludes. "As soon, as I have finished all the novels and short stories I have in my head I shall write a sort of general analysis of my works, and then I'll review all the great writers whom I think I have understood. That would be an easy piece of work for me and of great interest to younger writers. Besides, it would delight me to reread again all the masters who have afforded me intellectual enjoy- ment." I As everyone knows, he admired Flaubert more than any modem writer; he used to speak of him as his jspiritual father, and insisted that after France had passed through a dozen revolutions and had forgotten all the other writers of the time, Flau- bert would be studied as a classic, as one "who had lent French prose divine grace and harmony." De Maupassant's praise of other writers was often astonishingly generous. Already, in '88, he talked of Bourget as a master, and of Zola as "a great writer ... a considerable literary value," though he could not help adding, with characteristic frankness, "personally, I don't like the man." He did not like his work either; indeed Zola's method of work was the absolute antithesis to his own, and if we consider the two ways we shall find that de Maupassant's method was right, and Zola's wrong. Here is the comparison as recorded by Frangois. First of all, de Maupassant admits that "Zola is a relentless •\yorkman, willing to undergo any labor. 264 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS He's now thinking of writing a novel on every dif- ferent class of laborer. But a man of real talent oughtn't to dojthat sort of thing. He should only write what he has felt, what he has seen and under- stood. I'd go even further and say he should only write of what he loves and of what he hates, of what he has lived, suffered and enjoyed. I'm not tempted to imitate Zola." It was well for him that he saw so truly, felt .so justly. There are books of Zola which are mere rubbish-heaps of industry, whereas every volume of de Maupassant is worth reading. De Maupassant sometimes forgot his own pre- cepts. His little story, "Les Deux Amis," made a painful impression on me. It tells of how two mid- dle-aged bourgeois in Paris during the siege of '71 went out on a fishing expedition in the Seine heedless of the fact that they were beyond their own lines. They were seized by a small German detachment; the officer tried to wring a valuable secret from them and when they refused to betray their compatriots they were put against a wall and summarily shot as spies. And, with the two bodies there before him, the German officer tells his servant to take the catch of fish and cook it for his dejeuner. It is a jjrutal touch; the pathos of the story being due tp the fact that the two Frenchmen are quite helpless and harm- less. De Maupassant, I found, had no facts to go on for this malevolent fiction ; a sorry performance, just GUY DE MAUPASSANT 265 as base in its way as Kipling's similar attack on the Russians for having tortured and flogged a British officer who had fallen into their hands. Both men seemingly cje^lighted to spread hate by senseless slander. Before leaving this book I must give some idea of de Maupassant's religious beliefs, for, after all, it is from what a man believes about this life and the life beyond the grave that we get his truest measure. He did not talk freely on such matters, even to his intimates. The death of his brother, however, and a visit to his tomb, stirred him to speech, and the account of these hesitating and partial confessions are the most interesting pages in the book. De Mau- passant was particularly self-centred and inaccessi- ble to strangers; but his family affections and his rare friendships were intensely passionate and ten- der. His mother was an ideal to him, and he mourned his brother as one who would not be com- forted. "I saw him die," he says. "According to the doctors, he should have died the day before ; but he was waiting for me and would not go without see- ing me once more and saying 'good-bye' to me again. 'Adieu . . . Au revoir peut-etre? . . . Qui sait?' " And then this word about Jesus. Pointing to the great figure of the Christ outside the cemetery, de Maupassant said: "Surely the finest intelligence and the most per- fect nature ever seen on earth when one thinks of 266 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS all He did! And He was only thirty-three when they crucified Him I . . . Napoleon I, whpm I ad- mire, though only for his genius, said of Him : 'In al| that that Man did — God or not — ^there is some- thing mysterious, incomprehensible. . . .' " Yesterday I went out to "Les Ravenelles," his mother's villa in Nice. It is set on a little height behind the Rue de France, and here de Maupassant spent that ist of January, 1892, his last day on earth as a man among men. The "Vampire" in grey silk had just paid him another visit and had left him drained of strength and hope, exhausted, enerved, panting. In spite of his indescribable wretchedness and misery, that "malaise indicible," he would not alarm his mother by his absence on such a day; but dragged himself over from Cannes, and gave her whom he loved so tenderly the illu- sion at least that he was getting better. The effort cost him more than life. He returned to Cannes by train, and at two the next morning Frangois heard him ringing and hurried to his bedside, only to find him streaming in blood and out of his mind, crying — Au rancart! au rancart! Today I went through the little, low, two-storied villa, and sat where he had sat, and walked where he had walked. Here, on this raised, half-moon terrace, on that bright, clear day, with the Sunshine sparkling over there on the red roofs and the blue sea he had always taken such pleasure in; here he ' GUY DE MAUPASSANT 267 stood, another Antony, and fought a more terrible fight than the Roman ever imagined. I had seen him a month before, and had had a long, intimate talk with him which cannot be set down in these pages; but it enables me to picture him as he was on that fatal morning. He had taken Frangois with him to cook his food; he meant to give , himself every chance of winning in the fight, and now, the meal over, the strain of talking and pretending grew intolerable, and he came out here by himself, with only the blue, unheeding sky above and the purple, dancing sea in front to mock his agony. How desperately he struggled for control; now answering some casual remark of his friends, now breaking but into cold sweat of dread as he felt the rudder slipping from his hand ; called back to sanity again by some laughing remark, or some blessed sound of ordinary life, and then, again, swept off his feet by the icy flood of sliding memory and dreadful thronging imaginings, with the awful knowledge behind knocking at his consciousness that he was already mad, mad — ^never to be sane again, mad^— that the awful despairing effort to hold on to the slippery rock and not to slide down into the depths was all in vain, that' he was slipping, slip- ping in spite of himself, in spite of bleeding fingers, falling — falling. . . . Hell has no such horror I There in that torture chamber — did his agony last but a minute — he paid 268 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS all debts, poor, hounded, hunted creature with wild beseeching eyes, choking in the grip of the foulest spectre that besets humanity, . . , And all for what? For another mad hour with fhe "bourgeoise de plus grand chic. . . d'une beaute remarquable," all for another kiss from the stylish lady of really remarkable beauty, "to whom he was always glad to say 'good-bye.' " The worship of the great gcCddess Aselgeia is sweet indeed, honey to the hps; but the price she exacts from her devotees is appalling. How many of them I have known, and how brilliant they were : her victims are taken from the most gifted of the sons of men. Heine fell to her and Maupassant and scores of others whom for pity's sake one does not name — ^young and gifted and lovable. As the clown says in Twelfth Night: Pleasure •will be paid some time or other. TALKS WITH PAUL VERLAINfi NOWHERE is the growth of mankind so clearly to be seen as in their ideals. Before beginning one of his famous portraits, Plutarch tells his readers that on this occasion he is not going to talk to them of some famous general or states- man who should excite emulation in well-born youths ; but of a painter whose example no gentleman would think of following, a mere artist. Nearly twenty centuries later Bacon puts forth much the same view : in classifying men he gives the first .five or six ranks to statesmen, and artists are not even mentioned as among the great. But today we should put saints and prophets and artists high above generals and statesmen; indeed we esteem artistic power as the highest and rarest of human endowments and say that a general can only be great in so far as he wins his battles like an artist, that no saint can hold us, no prophet inspire, unless he, too, is gifted with the artist-faculty. And of all artists the greatest is he who works in words. Goethe says somewhere that Tacitus and his history are as valuable as Rome, that all Eng- land and English worth found expression in, 369 270 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS Shakespeare, in fact that the dream of life Itself is not so memorable as the telling. The workman and the merchant, the lawyer and doctor, the man of science, the soldier and the priest all live and labor as material for the Singer. Nothing endures like the word: "it liveth and it conquereth for ever- more." It is not wonderful then that men should be curious about the poets and artists of their own time. They will take more and more interest in them, and not less, as they advance In wisdom. I need no excuse, therefore, for talking here of Ver- laine, for he, too, was one of "the Sacred Band." Paul Verlaine did not look like one's Ideal of a poet: he is best to be seen In Rothenstein's pencil sketch; his likeness to Socrates was extraordinary. One could have sworn that the old Silenus-mask was come to life again In him. But Verlaine had not the figure of the great fighter: though of aver- age hfelght he was punily made and inclined to be podgy. With his careless, slovenly dress he would have passed unremarked in any street crowd, French or English. He seemed, Indeed, to wish to avoid notice: there was something timid and shy, a shrink- ing even. In his manner, due to constitutional ner- vousness rather than to reserve. With friends Ver- laine gave himself as freely and simply in talk as he did In his writings. I have never known any human being with such childlike, perfect frankness. TALKS WITH PAUL VERLAINE 271 such transparent sincerity in thought and being. After a couple of hours spent with him I found my- self wondering .whether everyone by mere frankness could be so charming. Of course it was the absence of malice in Verlaine, the absence of all spite, envy and hatred, the lovingkindness of the man which was so engaging, and a touch of gay ironic humor lent an ineffable fascination to his childlike good nature. The first evening he dined with me he told me of an adventure which seems to me characteristic. After he came out of prison in Belgium he mg,de his way to England. In London poverty forced him to offer himself as a teacher of French. "I was engaged," he said, "almost immediately by a clergyman at Bournemouse at seventy pounds a year, sans blanchissage. 'No washing' was won- derful to me," he added, "because I use so little" — and he smiled. "Ze train was arranged for me and everything, and I was met at ze station by a big man, a clergy- man. " 'Are you Mr. Verlaine?' he asked. "I say 'Yes,' and he shake me by the hand, and talk to me the most terrible French I have ever heard. His accent was more than an accent; it was a new language. One had to guess at his meaning. I had to tell him I could understand him better if he would talk English, though I only knew half a 272 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS dozen words. He took me to his house, which was the school, and treated me splendidly. He showed me ze room that was to be mine, and asked me to dinner. His wife was charming to me, and they both told me they were sure I should succeed. I could only say, 'I will do my best/ "After dinner ze clergyman told me he thought It better I should rest ze next day, and get to know ze place and school and everything. He was kind to me and thoughtful. There were colored texts in my room, very beautiful texts, and time-tables — the time to post letters, time to get up, time to go to bed — and there was a Bibte on my table de nuit; the clergyman was very English. I told him I was willing to begin work at once, but he would not hear of it, so I rested the whole day. Next morning he came into my room! to introduce me to the boys. " 'Your first class will be a drawing class,' he said. " 'Drawing!' I cried. 'I know nozzing of draw- ing-' " 'Every Frenchman,' he said, 'can draw.' " 'But I cannot draw,' I exclaimed in an agony, 'not at all ; I have never held a pencil in my life. I came to teach French; I really know French.' " 'Yes,' he say to me, smiling and putting his hand on my shoulder, 'but you do not know much English yet, and until you do know a little more English I think I had better go on teaching French!' TALKS WITH PAUL VERLAINE 273 . 'f " 'Mon Dieu, mon Dieu,' I said to myself, but I could not find words to answer him. He took me into the class and put a wooden cone on the table and told the boys to draw it. I was to correct zere drawings. "What I teach the boys I do not know. I taught myself more than I ever taught myself in my life. In a fever I studied light and shade for an hour. Of course I was a little better than the boys ; but I was no more master of drawing than he was master of French. Oh, his French, it was horrible! He talked out ze verbs in a loud voice, and ze class had to repeat zem after him, and no Frenchman could have understood what he was saying. Such a lan- guage I never heard in my life. He was very Eng- lish, but he was kind to me always. I had to go out long walks with the boys. Some of the older boys were interesting and ze country about Bourne- mouse was beautiful. That English life was new to me. It was strange and it absorbed me : it healed me. It was like an oasis in the burning desert of my life. I got quite well in Bournemouse, but why was it — seventy pounds a year, sans blanchissagef" and he murmured to himself, shrugging his shoulders, "sans blanchissage, et je m'en sers de si pen!" Again and again — "Seventy pounds a year, sans blanchissage." "I am glad you liked English life," I said to him, "and Bournemouth." 274 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS "It was healthy," he replied, "and ze clergyman he meant well with his texts and time-tables; and I learned a good deal of English, andi read some Shakespeare. Quel divine poete! I could never understand how that clergyman and Shakespeare could be of the same race." I was eager to find out how much Verlaine knew of Shakespeare; whether he had divined him at all. But when I pressed him he took refuge in generali- ties ; and when I tried to get to my end by compari- sons he would not be netted. He likened Shake- speare to Racine for beauty of phrase ; and when I tried to say that there was no magic in Racine, no word or thought comparable to Shakespeare's best, he accepted what I said with smiling good humor. His acquiescence was evidently of politeness and not agreement. It was difficult to get at the soul of the man, difr ficult to reconcile this charming faun-like creature with the hero of a strange and tragic story. Yet I felt that the two were identical ; behind Verlaine's openness and sincerity were deeps on deeps of feel- ing. Every one who has read his early lyrics must have heard of the tragedy, of his passionate ad- miration for the youth Arthur Rimbaud and the ter- rible outcome of it. It may all be told here very briefly. Verlaine left his wife and child and went to Brussels with Rimbaud. After living together some time they quarrelled, and Verlaine followed TALKS WITH PAUL VERLAINE 275 his-frlend one night to a brothel and in a fiti,of mad- jealousy shot him. While Rimbaud lay wounded in hospital, Verlaine was sentenced to a year's im- prisonment. It was in prison that the poet first came to repentance and the humility of the Chris- tian fait;h, and thus reached the apparent dishar- mony of his dual existence. For all through his life afterwards he floated from passion to repent- ance, from the lust of the flesh to sorrow for sin in perpetual alternation. And his poetry falls natu- rally into one or other of these categories. Never was there such a sinner and such sincerity of sorrow. But few know more than the bare outline of the tragic story, though Madame Verlaine is still alive, and her account of what happened forty years ago is easily obtained. She is, I believe, about to pub- lish her "Memoirs" and to relate in detail her rela- tions with "Verlaine," as she always calls her hus- band. Meanwhile it is of interest to psychologists just to consider what she has to tell of that almost accidental meeting with Rimbaud which had such a profound effect on Verlaine's life. Madame Ver- laine is now a comfortable-looking old lady, who has long lost the "thin arms" the poet sung, though "the merry eyes" of her youth are still to be divined. She is anything but diflident, and talks of her past life with complete frankness and a curious detachment. "We had just returned from the country," she began, "we had been staying at my husband's place 276 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS at Fampoux. We called at Lemerre's (the pub- lisher's). Verlaine was given a letter with some verses signed Rimbaud. 'They're very good!' he said, and showed them to my mother, to Charles Cros, and to Banville. 'Astoundingly good,' they all agreed. 'You must ask the poet to come to see you.' And on the spot they subscribed to pay the expense of the journey. At that time we were liv- ing with my father and mother in a little hotel in the Rue Nicolet. In the linen-room there was a little iron camp-bed, which my brother Charles de Sivry used to put at the disposal sometimes of any student friend who might be hard up. We decided to let Rimbaud have it. . . . Verlaine went to meet him at the station; while he was absent Rimbaud arrived: a great mane of untidy hair, fat cheeks, skin tanned by the sun, fine eyes though, and short trousers: he seemed shy and sulky. He must have been about my own age," Madame Verlaine went on meditatively, "about seventeen. Verlaine re- turned: we all began to talk. . . . From that mo- ment Verlaine altered to me. He went back to the life of the Cafe and the morning drink, and used often to come home in a bad temper. . . . Iwas very young and in my innocence put Verlaine' s liking for Rimbaud down to the beautiful things Rimbaud wrote ; for every one admired him, but all the same I said to myself that his influence on Verlaine was a bad one. . . , Then my son Georges was born, and TALKS WITH PAUL VERLAINE 277 he made up to me for the .constant scenes. . . . One morning I awoke with dreadful neuralgia. Verlaine went out as he said to fetch Dr. Cros. At noon he had not come back. Night came and no Verlaine. For four whole days my father searched Paris for him : he had gone away with Rimbaud and had take^i all his money with him (I had only a small in- come). . . . "At first I was completely overwhelmed. Then my courage returned: I wouldn't give my husband up without a struggle. I managed to find his ad- dress. I wrote to him in Brussels; finally he con- sented to see me. Off I went with my mother, leav- ing my child in Paris. I met Verlaine in the morning in a little hotel, I think it was called L'Hotel Liegois. I begged him to return with me. He re- fused. I proposed that we should travel: he re- fused. A new idea came to me. What if we went to New Caledonia, he had friends there, Louise Michel and others: we should see new countries? The idea appealed to him. He said he'd meet me that afternoon and tell me. ... At five o'clock that evening we met in the public garden near the sta- tion. He seemed sulky, as he often was after drink- ing coffee. 'Well?' I asked. "He replied casually that he'd go with me. "All trembling with joy I crossed the square to my mother : 'He accepts.' " 'What?' she cried. 278 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS " 'Don't let us waste time talking,' I said, 'let's start.' "We all went to the station and got Into the train for Paris. After it started we ate some cold chicken. Verlaine didn't speak a word: he pulled his hat down over his eyes and went to sleep. We reached the frontier, and had to get down for the Customs. Afterwards we went to the train. But Verlaine wasn't with us. We hunted everywhere for him high and low — in vain. The train was starting: the porters pushed us in: I was almost out of my mind. Suddenly, there before me on the platform was Verlaine. 'Jump in, jump in,' cried my mother to him. 'Come,' I cried, 'the train's starting.' 'I'm not going,' he replied, and he pulled ■ his soft felt hat down over his eyes resolutely. I never saw him afterwards. . . . > "At first I was dreadfully unhappy. Verlaine talks in a poem of my voice as 'weak,' that of a con- sumptive. It was true : regret made me ill. For five years I was as near death as could be. It was only the thought of my son that gave me the strength to struggle. Once the child got measles and was very ill. I'll never forget my anxiety: I was desperate. "Well, just then Verlaine wanted to see him. My mother consented, hoping to bring about a reconcilia- ■tion. I had no hope, hardly the wish, indeed; Ver- laine was so weak, so changeable. I stayed in the next room and would not see him. I did right: he TALKS WITH PAUL VERLAINE 279 never came back again. . . . Oh, he wrote me — in- terminable letters, innumerable I For three years I kept them without opening one. I remember getting one letter from him in which he said: " 'If you're not back with me by noon I'll kill t t myself.' "I only read it three years later. ... I suppose he loved me still, or thought he did. He was kind; but so weak, so unstable, untrustworthy — like water, terrible 1 I wanted to forget him, I succeeded at length, I had to." How natural the scenes, how lifelike the actors! Can one ever forget Verlaine on the platform, moody, pulling his hat down over his eyes, "I'm not going." And then the child-wife frantic with anxiety about her boy; but resolved not to see the father, and wait- ing in the next room till he should go : he had hurt her too deeply: "I wanted to forget him, I had to . . ." What a picture of life etched in by suf- fering I I was in constant relations with Verlaine, both as editor and friend, for the last few years of his life. I published some poems of his in The Fortnightly Review, though I had a good deal of difficulty with my directors in getting adequate payment for poetry, and French poetry was anathema to them. When I sent Verlaine his cheque he used to reply in a letter 28o CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS thanking me, and at the end of a month or so he would write me another letter saying he hoped I liked his poem, and would I send the money for it to the above address. Of course I wrote to him say- ing I had already sent the money and held his re- ceipt for it. He wrote back admitting the fact and excusing himself, saying he was so hard up that he liked to think he had not been paid. Of course I did what others would have done, and sent him more than I owed. There was something of the wisdom of the serpent mingled with his childlike frankness. In those latter days Verlaine was to be seen at his best in a restaurant on the Boul' Mich', where he often spent his evenings. He used to sit in a corner drinking and talking of poetry and literature with a little crowd of fervent admirers about him. Every student who came in made a point of passing his corner and of bowing to him in greeting with a "cher maitre." Verlaine accepted the homage with a child's un- feigned delight. It was to him a sort of apotheosis, the reward of much suffering. One night some one begged him to recite "Le pauvre Gaspard," a most characteristic poem, as characteristic perhaps of Ver- laine as "The Last Word" is of Matthew Arnold. The poem was suggested, I imagine, by a word of Alfred de Musset — "Je suis venu trop tard dans un monde trop vieux?" But the question is brought TALKS WITH PAUL VERLAINE 281 to intenser significance by Verlaine. The last verse runs: Suis-je n6 trop tot ou trop tard? Qu'est-ce que je fais en ce monde! Oh, vous tousj ma peine est profonde: Priez pour le pauvre Gaspard. He recited the verses perfectly, bringing out all the pathos of them, while marking the rhythm with a slight beat of his left hand. A silence as of un- shed tears followed, and in the silence he repeated the last verse again, as if to himself, slowly, sadly, and then suddenly his mood changed and in the last line he substituted "payez" for "priez," smiling at us the while mischievously. Of course we were all too eager to pay for this poor Gaspard. I have left myself practically no space to speak of Verlaine's achievement as a poet, but there is less need for that, as his work is known and loved wherever French is read. There is no more beau- tiful poetry ii;i the language. Verlaine's name will be coupled with Villon's in the future as a writer of the best French lyrics. His religious poems de- serve perhaps a higher place. He is the greatest Christian singer since Dante and his passionate sin- cerity of feeling brought new effects into French poetry. There is z singular directness and sim- plicity in his best verse which is very rare, and he uses a childlike repetition, common enough in Eng- 282 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS lish and German poetry, but almost unknown till his time in French poetry, with extraordinary im- pressiveness : / Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela, Et que je suis plv^S pauvre que personne, Vous connaissez tout cela, tout cela, Mais ce que j'ai^ mon Dieu^ je vous le donna. FABRE IS there any pleasure after forty like finding a new book, meeting a new man! The gasp of excitement, the hope, the flutterings of delight, the growing conviction that the book has widened the mental horizon, is a classic therefore, a possession of the spirit for ever — all the joys soon merged in curiosity as to the writer: who is he? How did life treat him? To what qualities in him do we owe this deathless work? There before me is the book Insect Life, the author's name, before unknown, now radiant — J. H. Fabre. Where does Browning talk of the de- light of seeing and naming a star? No shadow of doubt in the recognition, no hesitation possible. Fabre has revealed a new world to us; beneath our very feet indeed — the world of the infinitely littk, with its innumerable tiny inhabitants, each living his own life and dying his own death. The comedies and tragedies of their existence are shown us with simple, scrupulous care, and we realize at once that this world, too, is all fashioned like our own with purposes we cannot fathom, to ends in- conceivable — all mysterious, indeed, and wonderful 283 284 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS to us; now innocently beautiful as a June morning, now grotesque and petty, now sublime, now hor- rible: self-abnegation and love working through blood and lust to some unknown goal or-r— to no goal at all; for the darkness is impenetrable: the doubt will not be laid. The shallow, modern optimist is brought to shame at once. Fabre, it appears, is already a very old man — eighty-seven indeed; has worked as a naturalist in a village in Languedoc for three-quar- ters of a century; has written and published thirty volumes, and was only discovered by the wise men in Paris the other day, when, as he says himself a little sadly, "I'm past work." Yet there can be no question about his value. Maeterlinck calls Fabre "one of the glories of the civilized world . . . one of the most profound ad- mirations of my life." Rostand talks of him as a savant who "thinks like a philosopher and writes like a poet," and Richepin joins in the chorus. For the first time in my memory Frenchmen of all schools are agreed^that Fabre is one of the great naturalists of the world, and yet if he had died at eighty-five hardly one man in ten thousand of his own countrymen would have known his name. So much for popular appreciation of genius in a de- mocracy. Yet his life has been as noble as his work. The son of a poor peasant, he taught himself to read FABRE 285 by the light of a pine-cone — a tallow candle being too dear. After hours of, study on winter nights he used to lie with the sheep in order to get warm, and was often awakened by the howling around the fold of the savage wolves of the Rouergue. He paid his way through the College at Rodez by his services as a choir-boy, and then set himself to study Nature on an empty stomach, but with a new book of poetry in his pocket. Poverty has been his com- panion throughout his life: even now the house he lives m with his wife and children is a peasant's cottage distempered rose-red with jalousies painted pea-green, and his food and clothing are simple in the extreme. Yet he looks on life bravely, fairly, without affectation of triumph, or trace of bitter- ness: "It's wretched luck," he says, "that now I've got some good ideas I'm unable to carry them out. ... I can only think when I'm walking about, and," he adds with regret, "my legs have given out." I don't know how to begin telling all that Fabre has done in his seventy-five years of labor; the result is colossal. Ten volumes on insects and their lives and instincts, and ten or twelve other volumes with a practical lesson in each of them. One on the domestic animals, one on the animals useful to agriculture, another on insects hurtful to 'agriculture, another on botany, yet another on "The Earth" and a companion volume on !'The Heavens." There are besides lectures on zoology, 286 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS lectures on history and agricultural chemistry, chapters on coins and poetry — ^five thousand pages, in which one finds everywhere the patient, loying observations of the naturalist arranged by a most sincere artist and set to words by a poet. Fabre, it seems to me, has written the first book of the new Bible, the Bible of Nature. Let us take him as our guide in this new world for a little while. He begins by talking about the sacred beetle of the Egyptians, the common beetle of the South of France, which every one has seen on the road pushing an enormous ball ten times as big as himself up hill and down dale with feverish energy and indefatigable perseverance. Scarcely one observer in a hundred cares to notice that the booty is made up of cowdung or other excrement, that the beetle is one of the most assiduous of Na- ture's scavengers. Again and again the sturdy lit- tle creature in its gleaming black armor pushes the ball up some steep hill ; half-way up a blade of grass tree-like bars the way and suddenly ball and Sisyphus-workman roll to the bottom over and over again in hideous defeat. The beetle returns to his task undismayed, and after inconceivable efforts gets the ball where he wants it. Often he has to fight as well as labor. Another beetle will come down and perch on top of the ball and annex it, and strike down the true proprietor as soon as he advances to the attack. The beetle's FABRE 287 courage is beyond question; he attacks again and again until he drives away the robber or until he is convinced that the robber is the stronger, in which case he hurries back to the dung-hfcap and begins to form another ball, which he will again push to its destination. Worse even than the fobber is to be met with in the beetle's struggle for life. Sometimes another beetle quietly joins the proprietor and at first makes some show of aiding him by pulling the ball while the proprietor pushes it. After a little while, how- ever, the parasite usually tires of the work and calmly climbs on top of the ball, and allows the In- defatigable proprietor to push him as well as his dinner to the common refectory. When the beetle has got the ball where he wants it, in some sunny, quiet corner, he immediately be- gins to dig out a cave twenty times as large as him- self, and ten times as deep. As soon as he is lost to view the parasite seizes the opportunity and be- gins pushing the ball away for himself. But the proprietor, down in his cave, returns every now and then to the surface, and as soon as he misses the ball hurries after it and the parasite. Sometimes the parasite will coolly pretend the ball is his, but, as a rule, he does not want to fight, and therefore becomes very officious indeed in pushing the ball back to the refectory. When the proprietor has carefully lowered the ball into the cave the two con- 288 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS struct a roof, and thus shut themselves out from the world in a warm, half-dark cave. In solemn si- lence and shade they begin the most extraordinary bajiquet that has yet been recorded in the world. For twenty or thirty days they will sit opposite each other eating without intermission or pause day and night till the last atom has been consumed, leaving as proof of their powers a long thread of excre- ment which runs into yards each day, and each day weighs as much as' the feasters. And this Gargan- tuan banquet for private pleasure, subserves the public health, for the excrement of the sheep and cow is thus cleared away and prevented from in- fecting the upper air. But feeding is only one small part of the activity of the beetle. Fabre looks not upon hunger, nor upon love, but on maternity as the sovereign in- spirer of instinct. A male beetle will make a great booty and eat It, but when the female wishes to lay her eggs the two make a ball many times larger composed of finest nutriment for the benefit of the larva. They pick out a sunny bank and dig a large subterranean chamber in which the immense ball of food is gradually formed into the shape of a pear, and pressed and patted and beaten till the outside of it is as smooth as silk. This outside plays the part of a shell, and is soon hardened by the heat of the summer sun to the firmness of terra- cotta. This shell, so to speak, is intended to keep FABRE 289 the inside soft and eatable for several weeks in spite of the heat. The female lays her eggs in the small end of the pear, and round it she puts the finer milky nourish- ment of her own body for the little worm to eat as soon as it is born. With infinite care she closes the aperture over the egg so that a certain amount of air can penetrate to the larva, and then she and her mate leave their work and go in search of food. If the beetle is a glutton when it eats, it labors magnificently, and when constructing the nest for its young often goes without food for weeks at a time ; in fact it is an ebony jar of energy which it dispenses for its offspring. And the little worm when it wakes to life and looks about it for nourishment shows just as won- derful instinct. If you pierce his birthchamber with a needle and let the air in while trying to study him, he will at once close it up with excrement, and re- peat the experiment as often as you please. But how, it may be asked, does the little larva manage to get out of his terra-cotta prison? He has to reckon, it appears, on chance for salvation. The first rainy day will make his prison soft and spongy, and he can cut his way out into the light. If no rain falls he dies. The first day of his de- liverance he takes a sun bath. He will crawl up a blade of grass and sit sunning himself all day 290 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS long without an attempt to find food, the next day his appetite awakens, and his normal life be^ns. Fabre describes other nests as complicated as the nest of this beetle is simple; nests that are found five feet and six feet under ground ; nests with long corridors and galleries where not one pear is pre- pared for the offspring, but half a dozen ; and where the heat of the sun is tempered for the little naked worm. The maternal instinct, with its self-sacrifice and foresight and care, is often wise with the wisdom of a fiend, and cruel to a degree almost unknown among beings of a larger growth. The hardest problem for the mother is to ensure good food for her offspring — food that will remain soft and eata- ble and, if possible, fresh for weeks. Certain species have hit upon a remarkable way of solving the difficulty. Fabre found in their nests what at first seemed to him the carcasses of other beetles. Then he was struck by the fact that these carcasses had not gone bad. Studying the bodies, he dis- covered that the beetles were still alive, and they lived on under glass in his room for as much as a month or five weeks. Yet they could not move, and could do nothing to defend themselves — could Indeed be eaten while alive by the tiny, soft larva. They had been paralysed, in fact — but how? First of all he noticed that nearly all of them belonged to , one species, and then he discovered FABRE 291 that this species had the ganglia of motor-nefves concentrated just between the corselet over the chest and the corselet over the stomach. Here, then, was the vulnerable point. An experiment or two showed him that if he pricked them in this spot with a needle having a drop of ammonia on it he could paralyse the motor centres — in fact he could make the beetle as helpless as he had found it in the nest. The next thing was to find out whether this was the way their enemies proceeded. In a chapter called "A Clever Butcher" he tells us the story: he watched the insects at work. The insect he calls the Cerceris is the butcher. The Cerceris seizes the larger beetle by the head and -pushes him backwards till the corselet protecting the chest and the corselet protecting the stomach are sepa!rated; he then darts his sting into the ganglia between the two armors. Immediately the beetle falls as if struck by lightning. Its legs may move spasmodically for a second or two, but that's all. Its assailant stands watching its victim in its agony. When the Cerceris sees that the beetle is quiet he drags it off by the leg to lay up in warm storage for weeks and weeks, to be eaten bit by bit, while still alive by the little larva. No more horrible cruelty can be imagined. Tennyson was right when he talked of Nature lending evil dreams. But what cleverness in the Cerceris! Who taught the little ieast the vulnerable point? If chance discovered 292 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS the weak spot it needed reasoning power to act on the discovery and turn hazard into instinct. But Fabre will provide us with instances of still more intelligent cleverness and still more fiendish cruelty. I have never heard or read of a,ny fights so des- perate, so diabolically clever and cruel, as those Fabre describes between insects. Dozens of dif- ferent species paralyse their victims by stinging them in the nerve-centres. Not one bungles the op- eration or stings at random; knowledge directs the weapon — one might almost say scientific knowledge. As Fabre says, chance knows no rule. Many of these combats rather resemble a fight between a pirate and a merchant-ship — the differ- ence in size is more than made up by the difference in armament. The pirate is sure to win. But Fabre tells also of death-struggles where every con- ceivable advantage is with the big fellow, and yet the daring little assailant brings off the victory. For example, every one knows the terrible spider of the South — the spider with the black belly, the Tarantula — whose poisonous bite kills a mole or a small bird, and often makes even a man seriously ill. Well, there is a waspish creature called the Calicurgue Annele, or Pompile, not half the size of the Tarantula, and with a sting not a tithe as venomous, who does not hesitate to attack the great spider. On dissecting the Tarantula, Fabre found that the thorax was the place in which a sting would FABRE 293 paralyse its motor-nerves. He then brought the two enemies face to face. The disproportion in size, strength, and armor seemed enormous; yet the Pompile was not frightened. He walked round the spider and halted, as if to seize it by a limb. At once the great Tarantula rose on its hind legs and opened its mouth : Fabre saw the poison glistening on its dagger fangs. The Pompile walked away, but was not frightened. It was the Tarantula that showed fear and hate; he hurried after the Pom- pile and seized him; put his poison-fangs on him, but did not bite; why not? Fabre could not im- agine. But the fact remains. One day, however, the Pompile assaulted the Tarantula face to face and stung him — in the thorax? No, he knew a trick worth two of that, a trick which the human anatomist had overlooked. If he paralysed the motor-nerves the Tarantula might still bite him. With the utmost precision and care the Pompile stabbed the great spider in the mouth, thus rendering him incapable of using his fangs, and then, after examining his head to make sure it was powerless, he darted his sting into the thorax again and again, so that his young might not be incommoded by the spider's movements. The little inject is as clever as a surgeon practised in dissection. There is still another insect that attacks and conquers in the same way; but as soon as it has 294 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS brought off the stab in the mouth it executes a tri- umphal, ferocious war daipce round its victim. "Look at the great brute," it seems to say. "I've pricked him and made him harmless; I am a cham- pion at the game." Then having made sure that its victim is indeed powerless to strike, it proceeds scientifically to paralyse one motor-centre after the other, and sometimes there are a dozen that must be operated upon before the victim is entirely helpless. The love-making of many insects is just as inter- esting as their mortal combats. Fabre has a chap- ter on the pairing of the Scorpions of Languedoc, which is more fascinating than most of our novels. He begins by describing the creature. It is some three inches long, and straw-colored. Its tail, which it generally carries arched over its back, is in reality the stomach, and the last joint of it con- tains the poisonous sting. The poison itself looks like a drop of water, and no chemical analysis of it has yet been successful, for when the ingredients revealed by the analysis are again combined, the poison has lost its power. The sting itself is very strong and sharp, curved like the striking tooth of a snake, and, like the snake's poison-fang, the hole from which the poison issues is a little away from the end. The animal uses its front claws or pincers as a weapon or as a means of getting information. ^ Fabre keeps his scorpions in a glass cage, and FABRE 295 studies them at leisure. For the most part of the year they are quiet and solitary ; two are never seen together. But in April they begin to move about and get lively. He suddenly becomes aware that they are eating one another; here is a pair, and half of one is already consumed. Is it the result of a combat? A little later he finds another, and yet another instance of cannibalism. As the summer advances the fact becomes common. He begins to study it. He notices at once that the one eaten is always middle-sized and a little paler in color than the cannibal. In other words, it is the large brown female which eats the male. It is always the male which is eaten. Fabre pursues his investigation by night with a lantern. To his astonishment he finds a sort of ball going on. These creatures, which used to be so solitary and so shy now come out of the shade and hurry together in crowds under the light as to a dance. Their agility makes the onlooker smile. Clearly they are sorting themselves out in pairs. Here the male touches a female with the end of his claw, but immediately springs back again as if he had been burnt. Another pair join hands, but as soon as their tails meet and touch they move away from each other as if in disgust. At times there is a regular tumult; a whole crowd of claws and pincers and tails rubbing and touching and pincliingj one scarcely knows whether in anger or in love. The play is madder than a romp of kit- 296 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS tens. They all fly apart; then they begin to come together again. Suddenly Fabre notices a pair which take hands in a friendly way, and rub tails with manifest content. Side by side, claw in claw, they walk away together. They are evidently courting like a village boy and girl. Every now and then the male caresses the back of his companion with his tail. The female accepts his caress. To his amazement, they stop and kiss. There can be no doubt about it. Fabre has watched it again and again. The two faces — or what should be faces — come together and the two mouths meet. The two hands are clasped, too, the male sometimes lets loose one pair of pincers in order to pass his claw tenderly over the horny head of his com- panion. Clearly the pair are kissing; yet there is no face there, nothing but two eyes and a great cavity and a jaw, and still the two horrible masks evidently enjoy the embrace. Now and then the male pretends to bite her, and his mouth mumbles her mouth, while his front claws are caressing the horrible mask that is no doubt lovely in his sight. There is a French proverb which says the dove in- vented the kiss, but the scorpion, Fabre says, was before the dove. There is every trick of coquetry in this female. Suddenly she has had enough, and strikes the male's wrists away, and pretends to go off by herself. The male follows her, takes her claws in one of his, FABRE 297 and caresses her back with his tail. Again they re- sume their walk together. A piece of tile is in their way. At once the male works with his tail and one claw in order to make a cave underneath the tile. He tries to draw the female in; but she re- sists; she will not enter the newly made bridal- chamber. With sulky determination she draws the male from underneath the tile, and they continue their walk. For hours the courtship goes on. Again the male finds a sheltered nook; this time under a slate. Again, the female resists; but this time the m^le is more determined, gnd draws her resolutely toward the cave in spite of her resistance. But when she comes to the edge of the slate she finds support. Not only does slie root her claws in the ground, but curls her tail over so that it stems itself against the slate; she then stiffens into rigidity. The struggle continues minute after min- ute, but at length the male has to give in ; the pres- sure is relaxed and the walk resumed, with its caressings and hideous kissings« This courtship has all sorts of incidents. Every now and then the pair meet some other females, who always stop and watch the couple, perhaps out of jealousy, for now and then one throws herself on the female and holds her claws and does hdr best to stop the walk. The male protests against the interference. He pulls and drags at his com- panion in vain; he cannot budge the two females; 298 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS again and again he strains to the task, but without success. Suddenly he gives up the courtship and turns away. Another female is close by; he seizes her by the ciaws and invites her to continue the promenade, but she will not; she resists, struggl,es with him, and then scuttles away. Nothing daulit- ed, he goes to a third in the crowd of female on- lookers, and this time is more fortunate, the female accepts his claw and they go off together. With this lady the courtship is not so long. At the first piece of tile the male drops one claw of his com- panion and uses his free claw and his tail to hol- low out a cave. Little by little he enters, drawing the complacent female with him. Soon they have both disappeared. A movement or two of the tail on the inside and a little mound of sand is pushed up behind them; the door is shut, the couple are at home. Again and again Fabre lifts the tile, but discovers nothing: the claws are intertwined, the mouths touching, but as soon as the light falls on them the lovers separate ; yet in the morning, if he leaves them undisturbed, he always finds the tragedy com- pleted, the male has fulfilled the purpose of his brief life and is already partially devoured by the female. She goes to work quite calmly to eat him, and returns again and again to the loathsome feast until her lover is all consumed except the hardest parts of his claws and tail. All the coquetry, all FABRE 299 the love-making, all the caressing and kissing ends in the idurder of the lover and the disgusting feast on his remains. As if to complete the horrible parody o^f human life, these cannibal scorpions make noble, self-sac- rificing mothers. They take infinite care of their little ones, spending weeks on their nurture and training, weeks in which the mother does not even eat, so devoted is she to her young. Scorpions are supposed to be viviparous, but Fabre proves that their young come into the world in a sort of soft egg like a snake's egg, and have to be freed and cleansed by the mother. He tells, too, how the scorpion family is brought into the world in July, and how neiarly he missed the experience because some great naturalist had said the time was September. For years, he de- clares, he has read very little. He prefers the book of Nature which is open before him and which does not lie. Most of the printed books, he says, even those of the masters, are so full of errors that he prefers to see and record facts for himself. I should like to tell of Fabre's other activities and wider vieWs. There is an interview with Pasteur as a young man which is a masterpiece of ki(ndly ob- servation and sunny humor. Fabre's poetry, too, should be described; for he has a genuine poetic gift, childishly simple yet touching, with a rare feel- ing both for the color of words and their rhythm. 300 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS I like to picture him as he sits before his cottage ; the spare, bent figure ; the wide, soft hat, the soft, white, turned-down collar setting off the clean- shaven face — a finely balanced face which should have been drawn by Holbein, with its broad foref head, strong nose, and large, firm chin, for Hol- bein alone could give us the effect of the crow's-feet and the intent, piercing eyes, made small as if to shutter out the too strong light, the sharp eyes which are yet patient and at bottom sad, very, very sad. For this is the soul of the great searcher after truth : he will see all there is to be seen and brings to the task infinite courage and patience; but "van- ity of vanities, all is vanity" is to him the sorrowful conclusion of the whole matter: "I should like to believe in progress," he says, "in the gradual growth of intelligence from plane to plane, the progress upwards and development; I should like to believe in it if I could; but I can't. ... "I find God in my own heart more clearly than anywhere in the outside world. . . . "The world I have studied is a tiny world, and yet this little patch of life is an infinite ocean, still unsounded and full of undiscovered secrets. The light penetrates a little way below the surface; but lower down all is darkness and silence, abyss opening into abyss. , . . "Success in this world is to the noisy and combative, td those who talk about themselves in and out of season like FAB RE 301 cheap jacks at a fair: they become known because they make a fuss." "But have you reached no conclusion^ M. Fabre?" one asks. /'Does no hypothesis lead to the heart of the mys- tery?" He shakes his head. "I have found none. To science nature is an enigma without a solution. Every generation has its own pet hypothesis. We climb over the crumbling ruins of forgotten theories, but truth always escapes us. We have no net with which to capture truth. . . . "Are we not even a mystery to each other.'' Nay, is not each man a mystery to himself? a creature of infinite possibilities, of miserable imperfect achievement?" So talks a very wise man and certainly one of the best-read in the book of Nature of whom the centuries have left us any record. MAURICE MAETERLINCK THERE is nothing very new to be said of Maurice Maeterlinck's work. While still a young man he had won place as an European ce- lebrity. Plays like the Princesse Maleine and Pel- leas et Melisande were known at once and appre- ciated by the dozen or so lettered readers who are to be found in every capital. And the judgment of these refined jurors is very like the judgment of posterity in sympathetic comprehension. In spite of these early successes Maeterlinck has gone on working, and in La Vie des Abeilles and Le Tresor des Humbles, in Monna Vanna, and La Magdalena he has given record of the various stages of his soul's growth. Since the death of Tolstoy he has become one of the most interesting figures in modern Europe, and certainly the most popular. Yet when one surveys the whole of his work one is tempted to doubt whether he will excite > as much interest twenty years hence. His most characteristic and perhaps his best works so far are La Vie des Abeilles, Le Tresor des Humbles, and the play La Magdalena. Is there in them that 303 MAURICE MAETERLmCK 303 fount of new truth or rare beauty which ensures perdurable renown? The boundaries of art are continually being ex- tended and new fields added to her glorious do- main: Rousseau and Byron made descriptions of natural beauty a part of literature, and in our time the rights of citizenship, so to speak, have been conferred on the so-called lower animals. Fabre in France and, in lesser degree, Kipling in Eng- land have dramatized for us the stories of speechless suffering and inarticulate delight. This growth of sympathy and appreciation has its own peculiar charm, which is heightened by the novelty of the appeal: but I, do not feel sure that the work done in these outlying new fields is as valuable and enduring as work done at the centre. The one subject for the artist which can never grow old, or fall out of fashion or lose its pristine and permanent interest for us all, is main. What- ever has to do with humanity is of palmary im- portance: the heart does not alter or change: it is the same yesterday, today, and for ever. Paint a picture of a girl's love more passionate than the Antigone, call her Francesca and set her supernal radiance in the gloom of the Inferno, or christen her Gretchen and condemn her to madness and prison, still the picture mil delight every one, age after age, and confer immortality on its author. Would one say as much of a scene which describes 304 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS the loves or fears or hatreds of one of the lower animals? I do not think so. There are superb qualities in the Life of the Bees by Maeterlinck; chapters in which he shows himself a great naturalist; others, like Le Vol Nuptial, in which he unfolds all his poetic gift; but one never thinks of rereading the book, and as soon as it is read it begins to fade out of mem- ory. It is a charming and informative book which wc are delighted to have read; but there is nothing of permanent interest in it, no pages to which we can return again and again with thrilling delight as we return to the loves of Francesca and of Gretchen. Le Tresor des Humbles gives us the measure of the writer. In his earliest dramas, in La Princesse Maleine, as in Pelleas et Melisande, Maeterlinck won our hearts by a certain mysticism, a northern atmosphere, so to speak, of mist which lent a vague symbolism and spirituality to his personages while clothing his immaterial imaginings with the majesty of purple shadows. In these days of logical and clear materialism when even a poet like Matthew Arnold could write "miracles do not happen," though it would be far truer and more scientifically exact to say that whatever happens, is one long miracle, Mae- terlinck's early dramas came with something of the force of a revelation. Somehow or other he had MAURICE MAETERLINCK 305 .nanaged to drape his slight and insubstantial fig- ures with the magic of the Beyond, the wonder of the Unknown, arid all hearts beat high with the hope that at length a Prophet-seer had come who might give us an adequate interpretation of the Di- vine, a new reading of the myriad new and unco- ordinated facts of our unintelligible life. La Vie des Abeilles brought us from the tiptoe of expectance ~~to a more reasonable attitude, and Monna Fanna and the translation of Macbeth keyed our hope still lower; but at length in Le Tresor des Humbles Maeterlinck returned to his early inspiration, and in a series of essays gave a reasoned explanation of the faith that is in him. His first essay consisted of an elaboration of what Carlyle and Emerson have said about "Silence," with a slight though characteristic addition: "Without ^silence," Maeterlinck says, "love itself would have neither savor nor perfume of eternity. We have all known those sacred moments when lips separate and souls draw together without words: we ishould seek them ceaselessly. (// faut les rechercher sans cesse.) There is no silence so docile as this silence of love, and in truth it is the only silence which belongs to us mortals. The, other great silences of death and dolor and des- tiny are not under our control." The greater part of this Treasury of the Hum- hie is made up of essays on some of the great mys- 3o6 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS tics, on Ruysbroeck, on Novalis, on Emerson. I should like to be able to say that Maeterlinck had added something to this great Temple of the Spirit; but I have not found a single addition, nor even an explanation of any obscure statement Maeterlinck Is content simply to restate this or that thought which has pleased him and so to furnish himself with a suit of clothes, so to speak, pieced together from various royal wardrobes. It is true he does realize that the soul has a speech of its own; but he calls its speech silence; whereas silence is only a condition, and not even a necessary con- dition, of its audibility. I prefer Swinburne's word: Eyesight and speech he wrought As veils of the soul therein But just because Maeterlinck feels these elemental truths his language now and then assumes a pecu- liar pathos and wins a new spiritual significance. He tells us that "the souls of all our brethren are perpetually following us about mutely imploring from us some sign of recognition, some kiss of sym- pathy. But most of us never dare to reply to the beseeching invocation. It is the misfortune of our existence that we thus live separated from our soiils and fearful or ashamed of their tremulous noble de- sires." But how different this tentative statement is from the language of the true seers, how different MAURICE MAETERLINCK 307 and how inferior ; how pale and weak and hesitating. Maeterlinck is certain that "the writings of the mys- tics contain some of the purest and most brilliant gems in the treasure-house of humanity," but he has not added to the store : he is a Moses, so to speak, to whom it has not been given to enter the Prom- ised Land.' He can only survey it from afar, and his account of it is of hearsay and not of direct vision; it is that of a stranger, and not that of one of God's spies. But perhaps in suggesting this qualification we are asking too much of the artist : it is certain that Mae- terlinck is at his best when creating and not criti- cizing or reporting. His play of the Magdalene touches a higher note than he has reached in any essay. The storj^ as he tells it is of the simplest. The "Magdalene" is pursued by a Roman general, who proposes to her the usual bargain of the French stage : "If you will give yourself to me," he says roundly, "your prophet, Jesus, shall be set at liberty." The woman hesitates for a while; but at length tells her importunate suitor that what he sug- gests is out of the question. "It is the Prophet him- self," she declares, "who has made all such bargains for ever impossible and shameful." By virtue of this one beautiful word, the "Magdalene" of Mae- terlinck lifts us to reconciliation and a serener air. With the exception of recent photographs, the best likeness of Maeterlinck, I think, is that carica- 3o8 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS ture by Max Beerbohm which appeared some years ago, if I am not mistaken, in Vanity Fair. Every one knows the presentment of the big stout man in Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers and gaiters, with a lighted cigar in his hand and an air of infantile as- tonishment on the chubby face with the embryonic moustache and bulging forehead. There is some- thing ineffective, childlike, yet lumbering, in the ex- pression, and a something truculent as well, and this truculence is rendered subtly enough by the left hand thrust deep In the pocket of the knickers, and by the heavy thumb which holds aloft the lighted cigar. Maeterlinck's writings do not prepare one for fumbling Ineffectiveness, and still less for truculence : the tone of them Is uniformly persuasive, ingratia- ting, poetic, so much so Indeed that when you meet the man you are apt to be a little surprised by his self-assured manner, which is prone to become a trifle aggressive as of one not sure of his high place. I shall now tell of my meetings with Maeterlinck and try to render the impression his personality made upon me. Maeterlinck Is easily described: a broad Fleming of about five feet nine In height. Inclined to be stout; silver hair lends distinction to the large round head and boyish fresh complexion; blue-grey eyes, now thoughtful, now merry, and an unaffected off-hand manner. The features are not cut, left rather "In the. rough," as sculptors say, even the heavy jaw and MAURICE MAETERLINCK 309 chin are drowned in fat; the forehead bulges and the eyes lose color in the light and seem hard; still, an interesting and attractive personality. Maeterlinck's qualities show themselves quickly. He is very ingenuous and sincere not to say simple, and quite content to dismiss this subject or that with the ordinary ready-made conclusion : "All translations are bad, and resemble the orig- inal as monkeys resemble men. When you trans- late Bernard Shaw into French he loses all spice; when I see something of mine in English I hardly recognize it. You think my translation of Macbeth poor," lie went on; "I only did it because that of Frangois Victor Hugo seemed to me wretched; but then, you know, no Frenchman can understand Shakespeare, just as no Englishman understands Racine." I ventured to remark that worse had been said about Racine by French judges than by English: Joubert, for Instance, dismissed him contemptuously as "the Virgil of vulgar people"; but Maeterlinck would not have It: "A great poet . . . exquisite verses . . . unforgettable melodies." Such com- placent platitudes did away with even the wish to argue. In the first half-hour's talk I noticed two pecu- liarly French traits In Maeterlinck which both have their root, I Imagine, In a certain uneasy vanity. He loves to pick holes in his most famous contem- 310 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS poraries and to make fun of their weak points. We were talking of the success of his wife (Georgette Leblanc) in Ibsen's Masterbuilder: some one hap- pened to remark that it was a great play. "A great playwright, I should prefer to say," corrected Maeterlinck, "on the strength of a single fine play, Ghosts. The Masterbuilder seemed to me a little ridiculous ; that 'higher,' 'higher,' is really ir- resistibly comic. During the rehearsals we all held our sides, aching with If.ughter ; but it went all right, I confess." "Yes; it went all right," and the grotesque ele- ment in it was only visible to envious eyes. But Maeterlinck loves to blaguer, though he ought to know that the gods veil themselves from the pro- fane and are not to be seen by those who would hold them up to ridicule. The second characteristic which' Maeterlinck shares with most Frenchmen, and, indeed, with nearly all the Latins, is a habit more easily forgiven. We were all talking of boxing; the French cham- pion, Carpentier, had just beaten the English mid- dle-weight champion, Sullivan, in a fight at Monte Carlo, and beaten him with the utmost ease. To my astonishment Maeterlinck proclaimed himself a devotee of the art — "a splendid exercise," he said, "which I practise three or four times a week." And incited, perhaps, by a desire to rebuke my in- credulity, he announced his intention, after lunch, of MAURICE MAETERLINCK 311 going "to box hard for an hour or so." The idea of a stout man of fifty, after a copious lunch, going out to box struck me as somewhat ludicrous, though I should not like to say it was impossible if the pro- fessional antagonist were well "tipped" and gifted with a sense of humor. When not engaged in keeping up his reputation for strength of body and biting wit, Maeterlinck was very interesting. When one asked him which of his works he liked the best, he replied that he never looked at any of them after publication. "Only a dog goes back to his vomit," he said. "Once the thing is dbne, it has no further interest for me." The question, "What are you working at now?" brought the answer that at fifty it was very hard to beg^n any "really important work. Though I feel as well as ever I did," he went on, "I know that in the nature of things I cannot expect a much longer lease of health : the blow may fall at any time, er may be delayed for ten years; but it is pretty sure to fall soon, and why should one begin to build a ship which may never reach the sea?" "Cervantes," I replied, "did his best work after sixty, and some of Goethe's finest lyrics were writ- ten when he was over seventy; why should you wish to close the book at fifty?" "Those were giants," he interjected, "and excep- tions. Besides, I have no wish whatever to close the 312 CONTEMPORARY PORTRAITS book: I love life, and I go on working steadily: I only say that I'd find it veiy difficult now to begin any important book. I mean by that," he added hastily, "a book which would need a considerable time to complete." "As a matter of fact," he went on, "I am even now working at a sort of faery tale, trying to ex- press the inexpressible, to realize the immaterial and give form to pure fantasy, and so suggest at least meanings beyond the reach of words." The Maeterlinck who spoke in that way is the same man who wrote in youth the early mystical dramas, and in maturity Le Tresor des Humbles and La Magdalena, the man who, in spite of many weaknesses, has always at command the seduction of the poet and a breath, at least of the prophet's in- spiration. And how infinitely sincerer this simple confes- sion of his purpose is than the habit practised by most English writers of depreciating their art, and the ardor with which they give themselves to its service. We have only to compare this confession of Mae- terlinck with a characteristic utterance of one of the standard-bearers of the preceding generation to realize at once the distance we have travelled in the last twenty years. In an interesting article on La Voyante and Lourdes, which appeared in 1896, Zola suddenly exclaimed impatiently: MAURICE MAETERLINCK 313 "Ah! cette soif de I'Au-dela, ce besoin du divin." (Ah, this thirst for the Beyond, this need of the divine.) But instead of studying this extraordinary phe- nomenon; instead of asking himself whether this need in human iiature, this perpetual desire for the divine is not as essential as the need of food (for man does not live by bread alone) the great realist concluded simply that the hope was a mirage, the thirst imaginary, the longing a delusion. And now towards the end of his life Maurice Maeterlinck is tormented by the obsession just to give artistic form to this obscure and persistent de- sire which is stronger than the reason and more en- during, the thirst for something beyond ourselves and above — ^the sons of men dimly realising at length that they are in very sooth, the sons, too, of God. RODIN A BOOK has just been published about Rodin and his work by a M. Gsell. It is an admi- ra