(jlass_ 
 Book_ 
 
 H')L\ 
 
 ^ Gj^ 
 
 By bequest of * ^ 
 
 William Lukens Shoemaker 
 
CRITICAL KIT-KATS. 
 
CRITICAL KIT-KATS 
 
 EDMUND GOSSE 
 
 AUTHOR OF "gossip IN A LIBRARY," "QUESTIONS 
 AT ISSUE," ETC. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY 
 
 1896 
 
0ift 
 W. h. aboemaket 
 
 r S '06 
 
Detjfcatfon 
 To THOMAS HARDY 
 
 Mr Bear Hardt^ 
 
 Toil imll recollect^ J think — for we have 
 often laughed over the little incident — how^ many 
 years ago ^ you and /, having lost our way in the leafy 
 jnazes of the borough of Bridport^ asked a grave 
 young man our road to the railway -station. Not 
 content with misdirecting us^ the scoundrel must 
 needs officiously conduct us up terraced pathsy and 
 between zvalls clustered with creepers^ until he had 
 seen us fairly started on the highway that led out of 
 the opposite end of the town. How angry we were 
 when we found out that we had been duped, and 
 hozv astonished I I asked you, bitterly, if this was 
 the vaunted courtesy of your JVessex yokel. As we 
 kicked our heels at last, much too late for the train, 
 in the blank waiting-room, we speculated on the 
 
Dedication 
 
 "psychology of the thing. Was Bridport^ above all 
 other towns, the abode of inhospitable crime, or was 
 the young man an outlaw, fiyi'^'ig from justice, and 
 glad to revenge himself on the very prophet of his 
 county ? Or, was it not rather to he believed, as 
 your kind heart, grown philosophical, suggested, 
 that the young man, shocking as his advice had 
 proved, gave it in good faith, knowing no better ? 
 
 At all events, we two go no more to Bridport, 
 Perhaps, as your people say, ^^ Bridport is Bridport 
 stilly It remains with us, at least, as a symbol 
 for misleading criticism, and that dark young man 
 as the very Zoilus of his parish. In sending you 
 another book of mine — such a poor return, at hest^ 
 for your beautiful sylvan stories — how can I but 
 wonder whether my sign-board work may not after 
 all be of the Bridport order ? What if every judg- 
 ment in it but misleads and misdirects ? A terrible 
 nightmare, under which my only consolation is that 
 you, even if you find me a false guide, will extend to 
 me the indulgence which finally determined that our 
 solemn miscreant, that hot summer afternoon, could 
 not have meant to deceive, but only ^^knew no better ^ 
 
Dedication vii 
 
 ^ake the little book^ then^for the sake of the com- 
 rade ^ not of the critic. 'Take it as a landmark in that 
 friendship, to me inestimably precious, which has 
 now lasted more than twenty years^ and will continue, 
 I hope and think, unbroken till one or other of us 
 can enter into no further earthly relations, 
 
 I am always y my dear Hardy, 
 
 Tours sincerely, 
 
 e. g. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 In an age when studies multiply, and our shelves groan 
 with books, it is not every interesting and original 
 figure to whom the space of a full-length or even a half- 
 length portrait can be spared. For the low comfortable 
 rooms where people dined in the last century, there was 
 invented the shorter and still less obtrusive picture called 
 a Kit-Kat,* and some of our most skilful painters have 
 delighted in this modest form of portraiture, which 
 emphasises the head, yet does not quite exclude the hand 
 of the sitter. I have ventured to borrow from the graphic 
 art this title for my little volume, since these are con- 
 densed portraits, each less than half-length, and each 
 accommodated to suit limited leisure and a crowded space. 
 They are essays in a class of literature which it is 
 strange to find somewhat neglected in this country, 
 since, if it can only be executed with tolerable skill, none 
 should be more directly interesting and pleasing. We 
 are familiar with pure criticism and with pure biography, 
 but what I have here tried to produce is a combination 
 * Or a Kit-Cat, for both forms are in use. 
 
X Preface 
 
 of the two, the life illustrated by the work, the work 
 relieved by the life. Such criticism as is here attempted 
 is not of the polemical order ; the biography excludes 
 that. We cease to be savage and caustic when we are 
 acquainted with the inner existence of a man, for the 
 relentlessness of satire is only possible to those who 
 neither sympathise nor comprehend. What is here 
 essayed is of the analytical, comparative, and descriptive 
 order; it hopes to add something to historical knowledge 
 and something to aesthetic appreciation. It aims, in 
 short, at presenting a little gallery of contemporary kit- 
 kats, modest in proportion, but large enough to show the 
 head and the hand. 
 
 Of the genesis of these essays, it may be sufficient to 
 say that several of them originated in the fact that I was 
 able to add something to the positive knowledge of a 
 figure suddenly made the object of increased curiosity. 
 In several cases, I have been aided by the family of the 
 subject, or by persons in possession of facts not hitherto 
 made public. In particular, in two instances, that 
 eminent poet who for many years honoured me with his 
 friendship, Robert Browning, laid upon me as a duty 
 the publication of what I have written. What is here 
 found, in matters of fact, regarding the Sonnets of his 
 Wife and the incidents of the career of Bed does, comes 
 with the authority and is presented at the desire of 
 
Preface xi 
 
 Browning. I need not produce my credentials in each 
 case, but I may be allowed to say that there is only one 
 of these essays in which I have been able to add nothing, 
 either from the report of others or from my own observa- 
 tion, to biographical knowledge. In several, the personal 
 impression is almost entirely my own or contributed to 
 me from unprinted sources. 
 
 If it should be suggested that these little studies leave 
 much unsaid and are far from exhausting the qualities of 
 their subjects, 1 can but put myself, while admitting the 
 charge to the full, under the protection of the most 
 genial of all great men of letters, and borrow what 
 Lafontaine says in the immortal epilogue to the Contcs : 
 
 Bornons ici cette carri^re : 
 
 Les longs ouvrages me font peur ; 
 
 Loin d'epuiser une mati^re, 
 
 On n'en doit prendre que la fleur. 
 
 That I have secured the fine flower of any of these 
 delicate spirits is more than I dare hope, but to do so 
 has at least been my aim and my design. 
 
 London, February 1896. 
 
Of the following Essays, those on ** The Sonnets from 
 the Portuguese^^ and " Thomas Lovell Beddoes" were 
 originally printed as prefaces to editions of the poems, 
 issued by Mr. J. M. Dent. For his kind permission 
 to reprint them my thanks are due to him, as for 
 similar courtesy to the proprietors of " The Fortnightly 
 Review^* " The Contemporary Review^"* " The Neto 
 Review,^* and " The Century Magazine^ All the 
 Essays have been carefully revisea, and in several 
 cases considerably enlarged. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 P'g' 
 
 The Sonnets from the Portuguese 
 
 
 
 I 
 
 Keats /■» 1894 . 
 
 
 
 19 
 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes , 
 
 
 
 . 29 
 
 Edward FitxGtrald . , 
 
 
 
 . 63 
 
 IValt Whitman . , , 
 
 
 
 93 
 
 Count Lyof Tolstoi , , 
 
 
 
 113 
 
 Chmstina Rossetti , , 
 
 
 
 . 133 
 
 Lord De Tabley . 
 
 
 
 163 
 
 Toru Dutt 
 
 
 
 . 197 
 
 M. Jose- Maria de Heredia , 
 
 
 
 213 
 
 Walter Pater 
 
 
 
 239 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson . 
 
 
 
 . 273 
 
THE SONNETS 
 FROM THE PORTUGUESE 
 
The Sonnets from the Portuauese 
 
 o 
 
 IT was in the second or 1850 edition of the Poems 
 in two volumes that the SonmUs from the Portuguese 
 were first given to the pubHc. The circumstances 
 attending their composition have never been clearly 
 related. Mr. Browning, however, eight years before 
 his death, made a statement to a friend, with the 
 understanding that at some future date, after his own 
 decease, the story might be more widely told. The 
 time seems to have arrived when there can be no 
 possible indiscretion in recording a very pretty episode 
 of literary history. 
 
 During the months of their brief courtship, closing, 
 as all the world knows, in the clandestine flight and 
 romantic wedding of September 12, 1846, neither poet 
 showed any verses to the other. Mr. Browning, in 
 particular, had not the smallest notion that the cir- 
 cumstances of their betrothal had led Miss Barrett 
 into any artistic expression of feeling. As little did he 
 suspect it during their honeymoon in Paris, or during 
 their first crowded weeks in Italy. They settled, at 
 length, in Pisa ; and being quitted by Mrs. Jamieson and 
 her niece, in a very calm and happy mood the young 
 couple took up each his or her separate literary work. 
 
Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Their custom was, Mr. Browning said, to write 
 alone, and not to show each other what they had 
 written. This was a rule which he sometimes broke 
 through, but she never. He had the habit of working 
 in a downstairs room, where theii meals were spread, 
 while Mrs. Browning studied in a room on the floor 
 above. One day, early in 1847, their breakfast being 
 over, Mrs. Browning went upstairs, while her husband 
 stood at the window watching the street till the table 
 should be cleared. He was presently aware of some 
 one behind him, although the servant was gone. It 
 was Mrs. Browning, who held him by the shoulder to 
 prevent his turning to look at her, and at the same 
 time pushed a packet of papers into the pocket of his 
 coat. She told him to read that, and to tear it up if he 
 did not like it ; and then she fled again to her own 
 room. 
 
 Mr. Browning seated himself at the table, and 
 unfolded the parcel. It contained the series of sonnets 
 which have now become so illustrious. As he read, his 
 emotion and delight may be conceived. Before he had 
 finished it was impossible for him to restrain himself, 
 and, regardless of his promise, he rushed upstairs, and 
 stormed that guarded citadel. He was early conscious 
 that these were treasures not to be kept from the 
 world ; '* I dared not reserve to myself," he said, " the 
 finest sonnets written in any language since Shake- 
 speare's." But Mrs. Browning Vv'as very loth indeed 
 to consent to the publication of what had been the very 
 notes and chronicle of her betrothal. At length she 
 
The Sonnets from the Portuguese 3 
 
 was persuaded to permit her friend, Miss Mary Russell 
 Mitford, to whom they had originally been sent in 
 manuscript, to pass them through the press, although 
 she absolutely declined to accede to Miss Mitford's 
 suggestion that they should appear in one of the 
 fashionable annuals of the day. Accordingly a small 
 volume was printed entitled Sonnets \ by | E. B. B. \ 
 Reading \ Not for Publication \ 1847 | , an octavo of 
 47 P'-igcs. 
 
 When it was determined to publish the sonnets in 
 the volumes of 1850, the question of a title arose. 
 The name which was ultimately chosen, Sonnets from 
 the Portuguese^ was invented by Mr. Browning, as an 
 ingenious device to veil the true authorship, and yet to 
 suggest kinship with that beautiful lyric, called Catarina 
 to Canioens, in which so similar a passion had been 
 expressed. Long before he ever heard of these poems, 
 Mr. Browning called his wife his "own little Portuguese," 
 and so, when she proposed ** Sonnets translated from 
 the Bosnian," he, catching at the happy thought of 
 " translated," replied, " No, not Bosnian — that means 
 nothing — but from the Portuguese ! They are Catarina's 
 sonnets I " And so, in half a joke, half a conceit, the 
 famous title was invented. 
 
 The ps3^chological moment at which the Sonnets from 
 the Portuguese were composed, was one of singular im- 
 portance. Although she was in her forty-first 3'ear 
 
Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 (according to some accounts, in her thirty-eighth), the 
 genius of Elizabeth Barrett was but newly come to its 
 maturity. In precocity of intelligence she had been so 
 remarkable as to become a type of childish attainment, 
 but as an artist she was very slow to develop. Her 
 earliest writings were strictly imitative ; the volumes 
 she published in her young womanhood were full of 
 interesting passages, but crude and jejune to an extra- 
 ordinary degree. Had Elizabeth Barrett died at the 
 age of thirty-three,* that is to say immediately after the 
 publication of The Seraphim^ she would scarcely live 
 among the English poets. It is to a subsequent period, 
 it is to the years between the loss of her brother 
 Edward at Torquay and her marriage, that those poems 
 belong which display her talent at their highest achiev- 
 ment. The two volumes of 1844 lifted her by a 
 bound to the highest place among the living poets of 
 her country, and seated her by the side of Tennyson. 
 These two, in the genial old age of Wordsworth, were 
 left the sole obvious inheritors of his throne, for 
 Robert Browning was still obscure save to a very few. 
 The change that in those years preceding her be- 
 trothal had come to Elizabeth Barrett was a purifying 
 and crystallising one. She had always had fire, and 
 she was to keep the coal burning on her tongue, like the 
 prophet, until the end of her career. But in the early 
 period, and again in the period of her decline, what 
 
 * I take for granted that the Coxhoe date of her birth, March 6, 1806, 
 must be the correct one. But the crux seems still unsettled. 
 
The Sonnets from the Portuguese 5 
 
 was lacking was light. Her style was turbid ; the poet 
 was not Sappho, standing in sunlight on the cliff of 
 Mitylcne, but Pythia, seated in the smoke and vapour 
 of Delphi, tortured by the vehemence of her own 
 utterance, torn by the message which she lacked the 
 art to deliver. Critics are beginning to see now, and 
 sorrowfully to admit, that what is causing the noble 
 figure of Elizabeth Barrett to recede gradually from 
 that front place in which Tennyson, for instance, and 
 Keats hold their pre-eminence, is her turbidity. The 
 best poetry may roll down violent places, but it remains 
 as limpid as a trout-stream ; what is unfortunate about 
 Mrs. Browning's is that it is constantly stained and 
 clouded. 
 
 But there was a period — we may roughly date it 
 between 1842 and 1850 — when these radical faults 
 affected her style least. It was then that she reached 
 the zenith of her genius, and, by a strange and fortu- 
 nate accident, it was then, also, that she attained her 
 greatest sum of happiness and health. Of this highest 
 period, the summit or peak was the short space during 
 which Robert Browning visited her as her affianced 
 lover, and it is not singular, perhaps, but it is at least 
 very interesting and pleasing, to find her writings at 
 that moment less affected than at any other time, before 
 or afterwards, by the errors which beset her. 
 
 In other words, the Sonnets from the Portuguese ^ al- 
 though they are by no means of equal merit, reach at their 
 best the highest art of which their author was capable, 
 and if we did not possess them, we should be forced to 
 
Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 form a considerably lower estimate of her possibilities 
 as an artist than we now do. She seems in the very 
 best of her work, outside the volumes of 1844, to be 
 utterly indifferent to technical excellence. Even in 
 those volumes we see that her laxity was absolutely 
 inherent, and that she is always liable to imperfection 
 and licence. But the Sonnets from the Portuguese prove 
 that she could, at her purest, throw off these stains and 
 blemishes, and cast her work in bronze, like a master. 
 They show her to us at her very best, and they form the 
 pinnacle of her edifice as an artistic constructor. Per- 
 haps, and to some readers, they may be neither the 
 most attractive nor the most amusing of her writings, 
 but to the critic they are certainly the least imperfect. 
 
 The natural bent of Elizabeth Barrett was certainly 
 not to the sonnet. She was too dithyrambic, too 
 tumultuous, to be willingly restrained within a rigid 
 form of verse. She employed none other of the regular 
 English metres, except blank verse, which she treated 
 with a sort of defiant desperation, and terza rima, in 
 which she successfully strangled her genius. Her 
 lyrics are all of her own invention or adaptation, and 
 they are commonly of a loose, wild form, fit to receive 
 her chains of adverbial caprices and her tempestuous 
 assonances. But her love of Shakespeare and Words- 
 worth drove her to emulation, and once and again she 
 over tost bind her ebullient melodies down to the strict 
 
The Sonnets from the Portuguese 7 
 
 mould of fourteen rhymed iambics. It is evident that 
 the difficulties she encountered piqued her to return to 
 the attack, for her occasional sonnets became more and 
 more frequent. It is interesting to note that, as befitted 
 so learned a student of the Italians, her sonnets, from 
 the first, were accurately built on the Petrarchan model. 
 We might have expected from her usual laxity of form 
 an adherence to the Elizabethan quatorzain, or, at least, 
 to some of those adaptations in which Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, and even Keats indulged. But Miss Barrett, 
 throughout her career, was one of the most rigid of 
 Petrarchans, and no fault can be found with the struc- 
 ture of her octetts and sestetts. 
 
 One of the earliest sonnets of her mature period was 
 that entitled *' The Soul's Expression," which is so 
 interesting as a revelation of her own consciousness 
 of the difficulties which technical art presented to her, 
 and so valuable an indication of the mode in which 
 she approached the sonnet-form, that it may here be 
 quoted : — 
 
 With stammering lips and insufficient sound, 
 
 I strive and struggle to deliver right 
 
 That music of my nature ^ day and night 
 
 With dream and thought and feeling, interwound^ 
 
 And inly answering all the senses round 
 
 With octaves of a mystic depth and height^ 
 
 Which step out grandly to the infinite 
 
 From the dark edges of the sensual ground ! 
 
 This song of soul I struggle to out hear 
 
 Through portals of the sense, sublime and zuhole^ 
 
Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 And utter all myself into the air : 
 
 But if I did it — as the thunder -roll 
 
 Breaks its own cloud — my flesh would perish there^ 
 
 Before that dread apocalypse of soul. 
 
 Fine as this is, eminently true to her own mood, and 
 singular for its self-knowledge, it cannot be said to 
 promise for its writer any great felicity as a sonneteer. 
 The perturbed imagery, the wild grammar, the lack of 
 a clarified and discipHned conception of style are 
 prominent in every line. Very much more successful, 
 however, and plainly inspired by the study of Words- 
 worth, is the famous sonnet, " On a Portrait by R. B. 
 Hay don," and in the years that immediately followed 
 her return from Torquay, Miss Barrett's sonnets came 
 thicker and faster, with a steady increase in the power 
 to give her own peculiar characteristics of expression 
 to this unfamiliar instrument. But the Sonnets from 
 the Portuguese went further still. The little harp or 
 lyre she had laboriously taught herself to perform upon, 
 had just become familiar to her fingers, when it was 
 called upon to record emotions the most keen, and 
 imaginations the most subtle, which had ever crossed 
 the creative brain of its possessor. 
 
 Great technical beauty, therefore, is the mark of 
 these wonderful poems. Not merely are the rhym^es 
 arranged with a rare science and with a precision which 
 few other English poets have had the patience to pre- 
 serve, but the tiresome faults of Miss Barrett's prosody, 
 those little foxes which habitually spoil her grapes, are 
 
The Sonnets from the Portuguese 9 
 
 here marvellously absent. Her very ear, which some- 
 times seemed so dull, with its " morning " and " inurn- 
 ing," its "Bacchantes" and "grant us," here seems to 
 be quickened and strung into acuteness. There is a 
 marked absence, in the Somicts from the Portuguese^ of 
 all slovenly false rhymes, of all careless half-meaningless 
 locutions, of all practical jokes played upon the parts 
 of speech. The cycle opens with a noble dignity, and 
 it is, on the whole, preserved at that high ethical level 
 of distinguished poetic utterance. 
 
 Of sonnet-cycles in the English language, there are 
 but very few which can even be mentioned in connec- 
 tion with that which we are describing. In the Eliza- 
 bethan age, many crowns woven of fourteen-petalled 
 blossoms were laid at the feet of unknown ladies. The 
 art which invested these groups of sonnets was mainly 
 of a thin and conventional order. It would task the 
 memory or the instinct of the best of English scholars 
 to tell at sight whether a given sonnet came from the 
 garland of Idea or of Fiikssa, of Delia or of Chloris. 
 Two cycles in that age immensely surpassed all the 
 rest, and we may safely say that the Amoretti of 
 Spenser form a set of poems as much greater than 
 those we have mentioned, as they are inferior to Shake- 
 speare's. In later times, we have one or two deliberate 
 sets of sonnets by Wor^'oworth, and since the days of 
 Mrs. Browning, Rossetti's House of Life. In foreign 
 poetry, it is natural to turn to the Sonetienkranz^ in 
 which, in 1807, Goethe darkly celebrated his passion 
 for Minna Herzlieb, the mysterious Ottilie of the 
 
ro Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Walilverwandtschaftcn. Among the five best or most 
 striking prolonged poems in the sonnet-form which 
 EngHsh hterature possesses, Miss Barrett's, however, 
 must unquestionably be reckoned. No competent critic 
 could put the languid sweetness and honeyed vagueness 
 of Spenser's daisy-chain of quatorzains in a rank so 
 high as these serried, nervous, and highly-developed 
 poems must hold, while V\/'ordsworth, perfect as he 
 constantly is in the evolution of a single sonnet, is 
 scarcely to be applauded for his conduct of any such 
 series of such poems, nor The River Diiddon or The 
 Ecclesiastical Sonnets to be compared for vital interest 
 with those v/e are considering. Miss Barrett, accord- 
 ingly, is left, on this occasion, with but two com- 
 petitors. Rossetti excels her by the volume and im- 
 petus of his imagery, and by his voluptuous intrepidity, 
 but she holds her own by the intense vivacity of her 
 instinct and the sincerity of her picture of emotion 
 Beside the immortal melodies of Shakespeare, hers may 
 be counted voluble, harsh, and slight ; but even here, 
 her sympathy with a universal passion, the freshness 
 and poignancy with which she treats a mood that is not 
 rare and almost sickly, not foreign to the common ex- 
 perience of mankind, but eminently normal, direct, and 
 obvious, give her a curious advantage. It is probable 
 that the sonnets written by Shakespeare to his friend 
 contain loveJier poetry and a style more perennially 
 admirable, but those addressed by Elizabeth Barrett to 
 her lover are hardly less exquisite to any of us, and to 
 many of us are more wholesome and more intelligible. 
 
The Sonnets from the Portuguese 1 1 
 
 Sincerity, indeed, is the first gift in literature, and 
 perhaps the most uncommon. It is not granted to more 
 than a few to express in precise and direct language 
 their most powerful emotional experiences. To those 
 who, like Mary Magdalene, have loved much, the art is 
 rarely given to define and differentiate their feelings. 
 The attempt to render passion by artistic speech is com- 
 monly void of success to a pathetic degree. Those who 
 have desired, enjoyed, and suffered to the very edge of 
 human capacit}^, put the musical instrument to their lips 
 to try and tell us what they felt, and the result is all dis- 
 cord and falsetto. There is no question that many of 
 the coldest and most affected verses, such as we are apt 
 to scorn for their tasteless weakness, must hide under- 
 neath the white ash of their linguistic poverty a core of 
 red hot passion. But the rare art of literary sincerity 
 has not been granted to these inarticulate lovers, and 
 what cost them so many tears affords us nothing but 
 fatigue or ridicule. 
 
 It is peculiarly true that women who are poets can or 
 will but seldom take us truly into their confidence in this 
 matter. A natural but unfortunate delicacy leads them 
 to write of love so platonically or so obscurely that we 
 cannot tell what it is they wish to communicate. Not to 
 seem so unmaidenly as to address a man, they feign to 
 be men themselves and languish at ihe ladies. We are 
 as much interested and as much convinced as we are at 
 the opera when broad-hipped cavaliers in silken tights 
 
12 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 dance with slightly shorter girls in skirts. It is a curious 
 fact that the amount of love-poetry written by women, 
 and openly addressed to men, is very scanty. Our 
 poetesses write : 
 
 / made a posy for my Love 
 Js fair as she is soft and fine^ 
 
 and wonder that we are faintly interested. It should be 
 " as tough as he is firm and strong," and then we might 
 really be inclined to conclude that the ditty was inspired 
 by experience or instinctive feeling. Lady Winchelsea's 
 honest praises of her husband, Ephelia's couplets on 
 that false J. G. who sailed away to Tangier and never 
 came back again, the sonnets of the fair rope-maker of 
 Lyons, Louise Labe, the tender, thrilling lyrics written 
 three hundred years later by Marceline Desbordes-Val- 
 more — these are almost the only poems in all literature 
 which one remembers as dealing, in lucidity and sin- 
 cerity alike, with the love of a man by a woman. 
 
 But the keynote of Elizabeth Barrett as an artist was 
 sincerity. It is this quality, with all that it implies, 
 which holds together the edifice of her style, built of 
 such incongruous materials that no less-tempered mortar 
 could bind it into a compact whole. At no period of her 
 literary life, even when she was too slavishly following 
 obsolete or tasteless models, was she otherwise than 
 sincere. She was not striving to produce an effect ; she 
 was trying with all the effort of which her spirit was 
 capable, to say exactly what was in her heart. When 
 sorrow possessed her, her verse sobbed and wailed with 
 
The Sonnets from the Portuguese 1 3 
 
 impatient human stress, and when at last, wliilc she 
 waited for Death to take her by the hair, it was Love 
 instead who came, she poured forth the heart of a happy 
 woman without stint or concealment. The typical in- 
 stance of the former class is the poem called '* De Pro- 
 fundis," written as soon after the drowning of her brother 
 Edward as the shattered nerves and beaten brain per- 
 mitted her to taste the solace of composition. It should 
 be read, in spite of its comparative inferiority, in con- 
 nection with the Sounds from tJie Portuguese^ for the 
 power it reveals is the same ; it is the capacity, while 
 feeling acutely and deeply, to find appropriate, sufficient, 
 and yet unexaggerated expression for the emotion. This 
 great neuropathic artist was a physician as well as a 
 sufferer, and could count her pulses accurately through 
 all the spasms of her anguish and her ecstasy. 
 
 When, in 1866, Robert Browning published the first 
 selection from his wife's poems, he arranged the pieces 
 in such a way as to give unobtrusive emphasis to the 
 connection between the Sonnets from the Portuguese zxiA 
 two short lyrics. Even if he had not placed '* Question 
 and Answer," and " Inclusions " immediately in front of 
 the sonnet-cycle, we might have been justified in conjec- 
 turing that they belonged to the same period and the 
 same mood. The arrangement of the Sonnets is his- 
 torical. They are not heaped together in accidental 
 sequence, as Spenser's and Shakespeare's seem to be, 
 but they move on from the first surprise of unexpected 
 passion to the final complete resignation of soul and 
 body in a rapture which is to be sanctified and heightened 
 
14 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 by death itself. It is therefore possible, I think, by 
 careful examination of the text, to insert in the sequence 
 of sonnets, at their obvious point of composition, the 
 two lyrics I have just mentioned ; and for that purpose 
 I will quote them here. 
 
 Taking the Sonnets in our hands, we meet first with 
 the record of the violent shock produced on the whole 
 being of the solitary and fading recluse by the discovery 
 that Love — laughing Love masquerading under the cowl 
 of Death — has invaded her sequestered chamber. Then 
 to amazement succeeds instinctive repulsion ; she shrinks 
 back in a sort of horror, in her chilly twilight, from the 
 boisterous entrance of so much heat and glow. But this 
 quickly passes, also, submerged in the sense of her own 
 unworthiness ; her hands are numb, her eyes blinded 
 and dazed — what has this guest of kings to do with her, 
 a mourner in the dust ? Then follows, in a crescent 
 movement of emotion, the noble image of Electra, pour- 
 ing her sepulchral urn and all its ashes at the feet of 
 Love, ashes that blight and burn, an affection so morbid 
 and vain that it may rather destroy than bless the heart 
 which provokes the gift. It is at this moment, I think, 
 between sonnets 5 and 6, that ''Question and Answer " 
 should be read, repeating the same idea, but repeating 
 it in a lower key, with less violence and perhaps a shade 
 less conviction : 
 
 Love you seek for, presupposes 
 Summer heat and sunny glow. 
 
 Tell me, do you find moss-roses 
 Budding, blooming in the snow ? 
 
The Sonnets from the Portuguese 15 
 
 Snow might kill the rose-tree^ s root — 
 Shake it quickly from your foot. 
 Lest it harm you as you go. 
 
 From the ivy where it dapples 
 
 A grey ruin, stone by stone. 
 Do you look for grapes or apples. 
 
 Or for sad green leaves alone 1 
 Pluck the leaves off, two or three — 
 Keep them for morality 
 
 When you shall be safe and gone. 
 
 But above these flutterings of the captured heart the 
 captor hangs enamoured and persistent, smiHng at the 
 fiat which bids him begone : and the heart begins to 
 thaw with the unreheved radiation. The poetess 
 acknowledges that she feels that she will stand hence- 
 forward in his shadow, that he has changed for her the 
 face of all the world. Still, she dares not yield. The 
 tide of her unworthiness flows up, and floods all the 
 creeks of her being ; she can but hide her eyes, from 
 which the tears are flowing, and bid him, if he will not 
 go and leave her, if he will persist in standing there 
 with eloquent eyes fixed upon her, to trample on the 
 pale stuff" of her life, too dead to be taken to his arms. 
 She is scarcely reasonable ; we feel her pulses reeling, 
 her limbs failing, and in the next sonnet the wave 
 recedes for the final forward rush. She will not pour 
 her poison on to his Venice-glass, she will not love him, 
 will not see him — and in the next line she is folded to 
 his arms, murmuring, *' I love thee ... I love thee ! " 
 
1 6 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 From this point forward the sonnets play, in their 
 exquisite masque, as if to celestial dance-music, with 
 the wild thoughts and tremulous frolics of accepted love, 
 with a pulse that ever sinks into more and more normal 
 beat, with an ever steadier and deeper flush of the 
 new-born life. And here, if the reader will lay down 
 the book at the close of sonnet i8, he may interpolate 
 the lovely lyric called " Inclusions ": 
 
 Oh, wilt thou have my hand. Dear, to lie along in thine? 
 As a little stone in a running stream, it seems to lie and pine. 
 Now drop the poor pale hand. Dear, unfit to pledge with thine. 
 
 Oh, wilt thou have my cheek. Dear, drawn closer to thine own ? 
 My cheek is white, my cheek is worn, by many a tear run down. 
 Now leave a little space. Dear, lest it should wet thine own. 
 
 Oh, must thou have my soul, Dear, commifigled with thy soul? 
 Red grows the cheek, and warm the hand; the part is in the 
 
 whole : 
 Nor hands nor cheeks keep separate, when soul is joined to soul. 
 
 We may pursue no further, save in the divine words of 
 the sonnets themselves, the record of this noble and 
 exquisite *' marriage of true minds." But we may be 
 thankful that the accredited chronicle of this episode in 
 life and literature, lifed far out of any vagueness of 
 conjecture or possibility of misconstruction, exists for 
 us, distinguishing, illuminating, perfuming a great page 
 of our national poetry. Many of the thoughts that 
 enrich mankind and many of the purest flowers of the 
 imagination had their roots, if the secrets of experience 
 
The Sonnets from the Portuguese 17 
 
 were made known, in actions, in desires, which could 
 not bear the light of day, in hot-beds smelling quite 
 otherwise than of violet or swectbriar. But this cycle 
 of admirable sonnets, one of the acknowledged glories 
 of our literature, is built patently and unquestionably 
 on the union in stainless harmony of two of the most 
 distinguished spirits which our century has produced. 
 
KEATS IN 1894 
 
Keats in 1894 
 
 Address ddli'vcred at Hampstead on occasion of the itnveiVmg tj t/it 
 yimcrican MoKument, July i6, 1 8 94. 
 
 It is with no small emotion that wc receive to-day, 
 from the hands of his American admirers, a monu- 
 ment inscrihed to the memory of Keats. Those of us 
 who may be best acquainted with the history of the 
 poet will not be surprised that you have convened us 
 to the church of Hampstead, although it was not here 
 that he was born, nor here that he died. Yet some 
 who are present to-day may desire to be reminded why 
 it is that when we think of Keats we think of Hamp- 
 stead. It is in his twenty- first 3^ear, in i8i6, that we 
 find the first record of his ascent of this historic 
 eminence. He appears, then, on the brow of Hamp- 
 stead Hill as the visitor, as the disciple, of Leigh 
 Hunt, in his cottage in the Vale-of-Health, a cottage, 
 so I am told, to this day the haunt of poets. He comes, 
 an ardent lad, with great, flashing eyes, and heavy, 
 golden curls, carrying in his hand a wreath of ivy for 
 the brows of Mr. Hunt. Nearly eighty years ago, this 
 pilgrimage of boyish enthusiasm — but a few months 
 after Waterloo, the last rumblings of the long European 
 wars still dying away in the distance. Our unhappy 
 
22 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 contest with that great, young republic, which you, 
 Sir, so gracefully represent to-day, just over and done 
 with. How long ago it seems, this, page of history 1 
 How dusty and shadowy ; and how fresh and near, 
 across the face of it, the visit of the boyish poet to his 
 friend and master on the hill of Hampstead I 
 
 Such, at all events, was the earliest appearance of 
 Keats in this place, and here the " prosperous open- 
 ing " of his poetical career was made. Here he first 
 met Shelley, Hay don, and perhaps Wordsworth. 
 Hence, in 1817, from under these pleasant trees and 
 the " leafy luxury " of the Vale-of-Health his earliest 
 volume was sent forth to the world. Here, in lodgings 
 of his own in Well Walk, he settled in the same sum- 
 mer, that he might devote himself to the composition 
 of Endymion. Here his best friends clustered round 
 him — Bailey and Cowden Clarke, Dilke and Armitage 
 Brown, and Reynolds. Here it was that, in the 
 autumn of 1818, he met at Wentworth Place that brisk 
 and shapely lady whose fascination was to make the 
 cup of his sorrows overflow ; hence it was, too, that 
 on the 18th of September, 1820, he started for Italy, a 
 dying man. All of Keats that is vivid and intelligent, 
 all that is truly characteristic of his genius and his 
 vitality, is centred around Hampstead, and you, his 
 latest Western friends, have shown a fine instinct in 
 bringing here, and not elsewhere, the gifts and tributes 
 of your love. 
 
 If we find it easy to justify the locality which you 
 have chosen for your monument to Keats, it is surely not 
 
Keats in 1894 23 
 
 less easy, altliough more serious and more elaborate, 
 to bring forward reasons for tbe existence of tbat 
 monument itself. In the first place, that you should 
 so piously have prepared, and that we so eagerly, and 
 so unanimously accept, a marble effigy of Keats — 
 what does it signify, if not that we and and you alike 
 acknowledge the fame that it represents to be durable, 
 stimulating, and exalted ? For, consider with me for 
 a moment how singularly unattached is the reputation 
 of this, our Ilampstcad poet. It rests upon no privilege 
 of birth, no " stake in the country," as we say ; it is 
 fostered by no alliance of powerful friends, or wide 
 circle of personal influences ; no one living to-day has 
 seen Keats, or artificially preserves his memory for any 
 private purpose. In all but verse his name was, as he 
 said, " writ in water." He is identified with no pro- 
 gression of ideas, no religious, or political, or social 
 propaganda. He is either a poet, or absolutely nothing — 
 we withdraw the poetical elements from our conception 
 of him; and what is left? The palest phantom of a 
 livery-stablekeeper's son, an unsuccessful medical 
 student, an ineffectual, consumptive lad, who died in 
 obscurity, more than seventy years ago. 
 
 You will forgive me for reminding you of this 
 absence of all secondary qualities, of all outer accom- 
 plishments of life, in the career of that great man, 
 whom we celebrate to-day, because, in so doing, I 
 exalt the one primary quality which raised him among 
 the principalities and powers of the human race, and 
 makes our celebration of him to-day perfectly rational 
 
24 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 and explicable to all instructed men and women. It 
 is not every one who appreciates poetry. It may be 
 that such appreciation is really a somewhat rare and 
 sequestered gift. But all practical men can under- 
 stand that honour is due to those who have performed 
 a difficult and noble task with superlative distinction. 
 We may be no politicians, but we can comprehend the 
 enthusiasm excited by a consummate statesman. Be it 
 a sport or a profession, an art or a discovery, all men 
 and women can 'acquiesce in the praise which is due to 
 him who has exercised it the best out of a thousand who 
 have attempted it. This, then, would be your answer 
 to any who should question the propriety of your zeal 
 or of our gratitude to-day. We are honouring John 
 Keats, we should reply in unison, because he did with 
 superlative charm and skill a thing which mankind has 
 agreed to include among the noblest and most elevated 
 occupations of the human intelligence. We honour, in 
 the lad vAio passed so long unobserved among the 
 inhabitants of Hampstead, a poet, and nothing but a 
 poet, but one of the very greatest poets that the modern 
 world has seen. 
 
 The Professor of Poetry at Oxford reminds me that 
 Tennyson was more than once heard to assert that 
 Keats, had his life been prolonged, would have been 
 our greatest poet since Milton. This conviction is one 
 nov\^ open to discussion, of course, but fit to be pro- 
 pounded in any assemblage of competent judges. It 
 may be stated, at least, and yet the skies not fall upon 
 our heads. Fifty years ago to have made such a pro- 
 
Keats in 1894 25 
 
 position in public would have been tbougbt ridiculous, 
 and sixty years ago almost wicked. When the late 
 Lord Houghton — a name so dear to many present, a 
 name never to be mentioned without sympathy in any 
 collection of literary persons — when Monckton Milnes, 
 as in 1848 he still was, published his delightful life of 
 Keats, it was widely looked upon as a rash and fantastic 
 act to concentrate so much attention on so imperfect a 
 career. But all that is over now. Keats lives, as he 
 modestly assured his friends would be the case, among 
 the English poets. Nor among them, merely, but in 
 the first rank of them — among the very few of whom 
 we instinctively think whenever the characteristic verse- 
 men of our race are spoken of. 
 
 To what does he owe his pre-eminence — he, the 
 boy in this assemblage of strong men and venerable 
 greybeards, he who had ceased to sing at an age when 
 most of them were still practising their prosodical 
 scales ? To answer this adequately would take us 
 much too far afield for a short address, the object of 
 which is simply to acknowledge with decency your 
 amiable gift. But some brief answer I must essay to 
 make. Originality of poetic style was not, it seems 
 to me, the predominant characteristic of Keats. It 
 might have come with ripening years, but it cannot 
 be at all certain that it would. It never came to Pope 
 or to Lamar tine, to Virgil or to Tennyson. It has 
 come to poets infinitely the inferiors of these, infinitely 
 the inferiors of Keats. Those who strive after direct 
 originality forget that to be unlike those who have 
 
26 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 preceded us, in all the forms and methods of expression, 
 is not by any means certainly to be either felicitous or 
 distinguished. There is hardly any excellent feature 
 in the poetry of Keats which is not superficially the 
 feature of some well-recognised master of an age pre- 
 cedent to his own. He boldly takes down, as from 
 some wardrobe of beautiful and diverse raiment, the 
 dress of Spenser, of Milton, of Homer, of Ariosto, of 
 Fletcher, and wears each in turn, thrown over shoulders 
 which completely change its whole appearance and pro- 
 portion. But, if he makes use of modes which are 
 already familiar to us, in their broad outlines, as the 
 modes invented by earlier masters, it is mainly because 
 his temperament was one which imperatively led him 
 to select the best of all possible forms of expression. 
 His excursions into other people's provinces were 
 always undertaken with a view to the annexation of 
 the richest and most fertile acres. 
 
 It is comparatively vain to speculate as to the future 
 of a man whose work was all done between the ages 
 of nineteen and four-and-twenty. Yet I think we may 
 see that what Keats was rapidly progressing towards, 
 until the moment when his health gave way, was a 
 crystallisation into one fused and perfect style of all 
 the best elements of the poetry of the ages. When 
 we think of Byron, we see that he would probably 
 have become absorbed in the duties of the ruler of a 
 nation ; in Shelley, we conjecture that all was being 
 merged in the politician and the humanitarian ; but in 
 Keats poetry was ever steadily and exclusively ascen- 
 
Keats in 1894 27 
 
 dant. Shall I say what will startle you if I confess 
 that I sometimes fancy that we lost in the author of the 
 five great odes the most masterful capacity for poetic 
 expression which the world has ever seen ? 
 
 Be this as it may, without vain speculation we may 
 agree that we possess even in this fragment of work, 
 in this truncated performance, one of the most splendid 
 inheritances of English literature. ** I have loved the 
 principle of beauty in all things," Keats most truly said, 
 ** the mighty abstract idea of beauty in all things." It 
 is this passion for intellectual beauty — less disturbed 
 perhaps by distracting aims in him than in any other 
 WTiter of all time — that sets the crown on our conception 
 of his poetry. When he set out upon his mission, as a 
 boy of twenty, he entered that " Chamber of Maiden 
 Thought " of which he speaks to Reynolds, where he 
 became intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere. 
 
 Many of his warmest admirers seem to have gone 
 with him no further, to have stayed there among the 
 rich colours and the Lydian melodies and the enchant- 
 ing fresh perfumes. But the real Keats evades them if 
 they pass no further. He had already risen to graver 
 and austerer things, he had already bowed his shoulders 
 under the burden of the mystery. But even in those 
 darker galleries and up those harsher stairs he took 
 one lamp with him, the light of harmonious thought. 
 The profound and exquisite melanchol}^ of his latest 
 verse is permeated with this conception of the loftiest 
 beauty as the only consolation in our jarring and be- 
 wildered world : 
 
Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Beauty is truth ^ truth beauty— that is all 
 Te know on earthy and all ye need to know. 
 
 And now, Sir, we turn again to you and to the gracious 
 gift you bring us. In one of his gay moods Keats 
 wrote to his brother George in Kentucky : " If I had a 
 prayer to make, it should be that one of your children 
 should be the first American poet." That wish was not 
 realised; the 'Mittle child o' the western wild" remained, 
 I believe, resolutely neglectful of the lyre its uncle 
 offered to it. But the prophecies of great poets are 
 fulfilled in divers ways, and in a broader sense all the 
 recent poets of America are of Keats's kith and kin. 
 Not one but has felt his influence ; not one but has 
 been swayed by his passion for the ethereal beauty ; 
 not one but is proud to recognise his authority and 
 dignity. 
 
 The ceremony of to-day, so touching and so signifi- 
 cant, is really, therefore, the pilgrimage of long-exiled 
 children to what was once the home of their father. 
 
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 
 
 IN a letter written to Kelsall in 1824, Beddoes makes 
 the following remarks on the poetical situation of the 
 moment: 
 
 " The disappearance of Shelley from the world seems, 
 like the tropical setting of that luminary to which his 
 poetical genius can alone be compared, with reference to 
 the companions of his day, to have been followed by 
 instant darkness and owl-season ; whether the voci- 
 ferous Darley is to be the comet, or tender full-faced 
 L. E. L. the milk-and-watery moon of our darkness, are 
 questions for the astrologers ; if I were the literary 
 weather-guesser for 1825 I would safely prognosticate 
 fog, rain, blight in due succession for its dullard 
 months." 
 
 When these words were written, the death of B3Ton 
 four months previously had closed, for English readers, 
 a romantic phase of our national verse. If Keats, 
 Shelley, and Byron, however, were gone, it maybe ob- 
 jected that all the other great poets of the age survived. 
 This is true in a physical sense, but how many of them 
 were still composing verse of any brilliant merit ? Not 
 
32 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Coleridge, long ago stricken dumb to verse ; not Words- 
 worth, prosing on without the stimulus of inspiration ; 
 even Moore or Southey were vocal no longer ; Campbell 
 and Scott had practically taken farewell of the Muse. 
 English poetry had been in blossom from 1795 to 1820 
 but the marvellous bloom was over, and the petals were 
 scattered on the grass. 
 
 The subject of this memoir began to write at the 
 very moment of complete exhaustion, when the age was 
 dazzled with excess of genius, and when the nation was 
 taking breath for a fresh burst of song. He had the 
 misfortune to be a young man when Keats and Shelley 
 were just dead, and when Tennyson and Browning were 
 schoolbo3^s. In the v/ords which have just been quoted 
 he has given a humorous view of the time, which shows 
 that, at the age of twenty-one, he had grasped its char- 
 acteristics. Among his exact contemporaries there was 
 no one, except Praed, who was some months his senior, 
 who inherited anything like genius. Beddoes was four 
 years younger than Hood, two years older than Eliza- 
 beth Barrett. No other name has survived worthy of 
 being even named beside his as a poet, except Macaulay, 
 with whom he has nothing in common. He was early 
 dissuaded from the practice of verse, and all that he has 
 left, which is of any sterling value, was composed 
 between 1 82 1, when he pubhshed The Improvisatore, • 
 and 1826, when he practically finished DeatK s Jest-Book 
 He belongs to those five years of exhaustion and me- 
 diocrity, and the effect of having to write at such a 
 period, there can be no doubt, dwarfed, restrained, and 
 
Thomas Lovell Bcddoes 33 
 
 finally quenched his poetical faculty. It is not saying 
 much, yet it is mere justice to insist, that Beddoes was, 
 during those five years, the most interesting talent en- 
 gaged in writing English verse. 
 
 Thomas Lovell Beddoes was born in Rodney Place, 
 Clifton, on the 20th of July, 1803. He was the eldest 
 son of a celebrated physician, Dr. Thomas Beddoes, 
 who died in 1809, and left his son to the guardianship 
 of Davies Giddy, afterwards known as Sir Davies Gil- 
 bert, P.R.S., who lived for thirty 3^ears longer. The 
 boy's mother, Anna, was a sister of Maria Edgeworth, 
 the novelist. He was educated at Bath Grammar 
 School and at the Charterhouse, where, as early as 1 8 1 7, 
 he began to write verses. Of his character at school, 
 where he showed signs at once of that eccentricity and 
 independence of manners which were to distinguish him 
 through life, a schoolfellow, Mr. C. D. Bevan, has pre- 
 served a very entertaining account, from which this 
 short extract may be given : 
 
 *'He knew Shakespeare well when I first saw him, 
 and during his stay at the Charterhouse made himself 
 master of all the best English dramatists, from Shake- 
 speare's time, or before it, to the plays of the day. He 
 liked acting, and was a good judge of it, and used to 
 give apt though burlesque imitations of the popular 
 actors, particularly of Kean and Macready. Though his 
 voice w^as harsh and his enunciation offensively con- 
 
 c 
 
34 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 ceited, he read with so much propriety of expression 
 and manner that I was always glad to listen : even when 
 I was pressed into the service as his accomplice, or his 
 enemy, or his love, with a due accompaniment of curses, 
 caresses, or kicks, as the course of his declamation re- 
 quired. One pla}^ in particular, Marlow's tragedy of 
 Dr. Fausius^ excited my admiration, and was fixed on 
 my memory in this way." 
 
 At school he came under the influence of Fielding, 
 and wrote a novel, entitled Cynthio and Bugboo^ the loss 
 of which we need scarcely deplore, as, according to the 
 same authority, it was marked by " all the coarseness, 
 little of the wit, and none of the truth of his original." 
 The fragments of his schoolboy verse, in particular the 
 rhapsody of Alfarahi^ display a very singular adroitness 
 in the manufacture of easy blank verse, and precocious 
 tendency to a species of mocking metaphysics, both 
 equally unlike a child. In July, 1 8 19, while still at 
 Charterhouse, a sonnet of his was printed in the Morn- 
 ing Post. On the 1st of May, 1820, Beddoes proceeded 
 to Oxford, and was entered a commoner at Pembroke, 
 which had been his father's college. 
 
 Although he had been a forward boy at school, Bed- 
 does passed through Oxford without any academic dis- 
 tinction. He was a freshman of eighteen when, in 1821, 
 he published his first volume, The Improvisatorey of 
 which he afterwards carefully tried to destroy ;» every 
 copy. In 1822 he published, as another thin pamphlet, 
 The Brides^ Tragedy^ which has also become extremely 
 rare. These two httie Dooks, the work of an under- 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 35 
 
 graduate less than twenty years of age, are the only 
 ones which Beddoes ever published. The remainder of 
 his writings, whether lyrical or dramatic, were issued 
 posthumously, not less than thirty years later. The 
 Brides* Tragedy attracted some notice in literary circles ; 
 it secured for the young Oxford poet the friendship of a 
 man much older than himself, but of kindred tastes, 
 Bryan Waller Procter. The dramatic poems of " Barry 
 Cornwall," of which Mirandola was then the latest, 
 had been appearing in rapid succession, and their 
 amiable author was a person of considerable influence. 
 It was Procter who, in 1823, introduced Beddoes to 
 Thomas Forbes Kelsall, a young lawyer practising at 
 Southampton. It had been thought well that Beddoes, 
 who was sadly behind-hand with his studies, should go 
 down to this quiet town to read for his bachelor's degree, 
 and he remained at Southampton for some months, in 
 great intimacy with Kelsall, and forming no other 
 acquaintance. 
 
 While he was at Southampton, Beddoes wrote a 
 great deal of desultory verse, almost all of a dramatic 
 order ; to this period belong The Second Brother and 
 Torrismond, among other fragments. Already he was 
 seized with that inability to finish, that lack of an 
 organic principle of poetical composition, which were to 
 prevent him from mounting to those heights of which 
 his facility and brilliancy seem to promise him an easy 
 ascent. The death of Shelley appears to have drawn 
 his attention to the genius of that writer, by which he 
 was instantly fascinated, and, as it were, absorbed. 
 
36 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Outside the small circle of Shelley's personal friends, 
 Beddoes was perhaps the first to appreciate the magni- 
 tude of his merit, as he was certainly the earliest to 
 imitate Shelley's lyrical work. His letters to Procter 
 and Kelsall are full of evidence of his over-mastering 
 passion for Shelley, and it was to Beddoes, in the first 
 instance, that the publication of that writer's Posthu- 
 mous Poems was due. In the winter of 1823 Beddoes 
 started a subscription with his two friends, and cor- 
 responded with John Hunt on the subject. They 
 promised to take 250 copies, but Hunt said that Mrs. 
 Shelley ought to have some profit. This seemed 
 hardly fair to Beddoes ; " for the twinkling of this very 
 distant chance we, three poor honest admirers of 
 Shelley's poetry, are certainly to pay." At this time 
 Beddoes was writing two romantic dramas. Lovers 
 Arrow Poisoned and The Last Man, both founded on 
 the tragic model of Webster, Cyril Tourneur, and 
 Middleton. Of these plays not very much was ever 
 written, and still less is now in existence. Of The 
 Last Man he writes, in February 1824: ''There are 
 now three first acts in my drawer. When I have got 
 two more, I shall stitch them together, and stick the 
 sign of a fellow tweedHng a mask in his fingers, with 
 * good entertainment for man and ass ' understood." 
 
 The year 1824 he spent in London, Oxford, and 
 Bristol. Already his eccentric shyness had grown upon 
 him. He writes to Kelsall from his lodgings in 
 Devereux Court, Temple, March 29, 1824: 
 
 ** Being a little shy, and not a little proud perhaps. 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 37 
 
 I have held back and never made the first step towards 
 discovering my residence or existence to any of my 
 family friends [in London]. In consequence I have 
 lived in a deserted state, which I could hardly bear 
 much longer without sinking into that despondency on 
 the brink of which I have sate so long. Your cheerful 
 presence at times (could we not mess together occasion- 
 ally ?) would set me up a good deal, but perhaps you 
 had better not draw my heavy company on 3^our 
 
 head I met an intelligent man who had lived at 
 
 Hampstead, seen Keats, and was read in his and the 
 poems of Shelley. On my mentioning the former by 
 accident to him, he complimented me on my similarity 
 of countenance ; he did not think much of K.'s genius, 
 and therefore did not say it insincerely or sycophantic- 
 ally. The same was said by Procter and Taylor 
 before." 
 
 Mrs. Procter, who had known both poets, made the 
 same remark about Beddoes to myself; but she added 
 that she never sav/ in the latter the extraordinary look 
 of inspiration which was occasionally to be detected in 
 the great eyes of Keats. 
 
 In the summer of 1824 Beddoes was hastily called 
 to Florence by the illness of his mother, who was living 
 there. She died before he could reach her, but he 
 spent some weeks there, saw Walter Savage Landor, 
 and then returned to Clifton in charge of his sisters. 
 In October of the same 3'ear he began to study 
 German, a language then but little known in this 
 country. He attacked it languidly at first, then 
 
38 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 with ever-increasing eagerness and zest. But the 
 Elizabethan drama was still his principal delight, and 
 he studied it, even in its least illustrious forms, with 
 extraordinary closeness and gusto. Writing to 
 Kelsall from Clifton (January 11, 1825), he remarks, 
 apropos of a revival of The Fatal Dowry of Massinger : 
 
 " Say what you will, I am convinced the man who 
 is to awaken the drama must be a bold trampling 
 fellow — no creeper into worm-holes — no reviver even, 
 however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold. 
 Such ghosts as Marloe, Webster, &c., are better 
 dramatists, better poets, I dare say, than any contem- 
 porary of ours, but they are ghosts — the worm is in their 
 pages — and we want to see something that our great- 
 grandsires did not know. With the greatest reverence 
 for all the antiquities of the drama, I still think that we 
 had better beget than revive, attempt to give the literature 
 of this age an idiosyncracy and spirit of its own, and 
 only raise a ghost to gaze on, not to live with. Just 
 now the drama is a haunted ruin. I am glad that you 
 are awakening to a sense of Darley. He must have 
 no little perseverance to have gone through so much 
 of that play ; it will perchance be the first star of a 
 new day." 
 
 The result of so much meditation on the drama 
 was the composition of more fragments. The Second 
 Brother^ Torrismond, and The Last Man occupied 
 Beddoes during the winter and spring of 1824-5. But 
 none of these approached completion. He then planned 
 the publication of a volume of lyrics, to be entitled 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 39 
 
 Oufidaua, or Effusions^ amorous , pathetic ^ and fantastical^ 
 which was to include most of the miscellaneous verses 
 reprinted in 1890, and others which are now lost. 
 On the 25th of May, 1825, Beddoes took an ordinary 
 bachelor's degree at Oxford. He writes to Kclsall 
 from Pembroke College, on the 8th of June, announcing 
 for the first time the most celebrated of his writings ; 
 
 " Oxford is the most indolent place on earth. I have 
 fairly done nothing in the world but read a play or two 
 of Schiller, ^schylus and Euripides — you I suppose 
 read German now as fast as English. I do not finish 
 that 2nd Brother you saw but am thinking of a very 
 Gothic-styled tragedy for which I have a jewel of a 
 name : 
 
 Death's Jestbook — ■ 
 
 of course no one will ever read it. Mr. Milman (our 
 poetry professor) has made me quite unfashionable 
 here by denouncing me as one of a * villainous school.' 
 I wish him another son." 
 
 He now suddenly determined to abandon literature, 
 which had suggested itself to him as a profession, and 
 take up the study of medicine. We find him, there- 
 fore, on the 19th of July, 1825, at Hamburg, "sitting 
 on a horse-hair sofa, looking over the Elbe, with his 
 meerschaum at his side, full of Grave, and abundantly 
 prosaic. To-morrow, according to the prophecies of 
 the diligence, he will set out for Hanover, and by the 
 end of this week mein Herr Thomas will probably be a 
 Doctor of the University of Gottingen " This, however, 
 
40 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 was rather premature. He did not become a doctor 
 until much later. It is important to obser\^e that the 
 exodus to Germany thus casually and nonchalantly 
 taken involved nothing less, as it proved, than a com- 
 plete alteration in all his habits. Except for very few 
 and brief visits, he did not return to England for the 
 rest of his life, and he so completely adopted the lan- 
 guage and thoughts of a German student as almost to 
 cease to be an Englishman. 
 
 At Gottingen the celebrated man of science, Prof. 
 Blumenbach, became the most intimate friend of 
 Beddoes. The latter threw himself with the utmost 
 ardour into the study of physiology and medicine. He 
 did not, however, at first abandon his design of becom- 
 ing an English dramatic poet. He writes to Kelsall 
 (Dec. 4, 1825): 
 
 " I am perhaps somewhat independent, and have a 
 competence adequate to my philosophical desires. There 
 are reasons why I should reject too much practice if it 
 did intrude ; really I am much more likely to remain a 
 patientless physician. And now I will end this un- 
 necessary subject, by telling you that DeatKs Jestbook 
 goes on like the tortoise, slow and sure ; I think it will 
 be entertaining, very unamiable, and utterly unpopular. 
 Very likely it may be finished in the spring or autumn." 
 
 His misanthropy, for it almost deserves so harsh a 
 name, grew upon him. " I feel myself," he wrote, ^*in 
 a measure alone in the world and likely to remain so, 
 for, from the experiments I have made, I fear I am a 
 non-conductor of friendship, a not-very-likeable person, 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 41 
 
 so that I must make sure of my own respect, and 
 occupy that part of the brain which should be employed 
 in imaginative attachments in the pursuit of immaterial 
 and unchanging good." In April, 1826, Death's Jest- 
 book is still lying ** like a snow-ball, and I give it a kick 
 every now and then, out of mere scorn and ill-humour ; 
 the 4th act, and I may say the 5th, are more than half 
 done, so that at last it will be a perfect mouse, but such 
 doggerell ! " None the less did he anticipate that the 
 poem would come *' like an electric shock among the 
 small critics." In October, 1826, it is "done and done 
 for, its limbs being as scattered and unconnected as 
 those of the old gentleman whom Medea minced and 
 boiled young. I have tried 20 times at least to copy 
 it fair." He intended at this time to send the MS. to 
 Kelsall and Procter to be seen through the press, but 
 he delayed until he could bring the poem himself to 
 London. 
 
 His monotonous existence in Gottingen was broken 
 in the spring of 1 828 by a visit of a few days to 
 England, where he took his degree of M.A. at Oxford, 
 and hurried back to Germany. Meanwhile he had left 
 Death's Jesthook with Procter and Kelsall for publica- 
 tion, but they decided that it must be "revised and 
 improved." In his fifth year in Germany, " having 
 already been at Gottingen the time which it is allowed 
 for any student to remain there," he transferred his 
 residence to Wurzburg, in Bavaria ; " a very clever 
 professor of medicine and capital midwife brought me 
 here, and a princely hospital." In 1831 there was 
 
42 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 again some abortive talk of publishing DeatKs Jesthook. 
 About this time Beddoes becam.e more and more 
 affected by opinions of the extreme radical order ; he 
 subscribed towards " the support of candidates who 
 were professed supporters of the Reform Bill/' and he 
 began to affect a warm personal interest in certain 
 revolutionary Poles who had taken up their abode in 
 Wiirzburg. He continued his medical studies with 
 great thoroughness, and in the summ^er of 1832 he 
 took his degree of doctor of medicine in the University, 
 being now in his thirtieth year. He was more and 
 more mixed up in political intrigue, and on the 25 th of 
 September, 1832, he somewhat obscurely says : 
 
 ** The absurdity of the King of Bavaria has cost me 
 a good deal, as I was obliged to oppose every possible 
 measure to the arbitrary illegality of his conduct, more 
 for the sake of future objects of his petty royal malice 
 than my own, of course in vain." 
 
 He was soon after obliged to fly, " banished by that 
 ingenious Jackanapes of Bavaria," in common with 
 several of his distinguished Wiirzburg friends. He 
 took refuge, first in Strassburg, then in Zurich. He 
 brought with him to Switzerland a considerable repu- 
 tation as a physiologist, for Blumenbach, in a testi- 
 monial which exists, calls him the best pupil he ever 
 had. It appears that he now assumed, what he after- 
 wards dropped, the degree of M.D., and had some 
 practice as a physician in the town of Zurich. In 1835 
 the surgeon Schoenlien proposed Beddoes to the 
 medical faculty of the University as professor of Com- 
 
Thomas Lovcll Beddoes 43 
 
 parative Anatomy, and the latter unanimously seconded 
 him. His election, however, was not ratified, accord- 
 ing to one of his letters, for political reasons, according 
 to another because he was found to be ineligible, from 
 his having published nothing of a medical character. 
 He spent several healthy and tolerably happy years in 
 Zurich, "what," he says in March, 1837, ** with a 
 careless temper and the pleasant translunary moods I 
 walk and row myself into upon the lakes and over the 
 Alps of Switzerland ; " and once more, as he quaintly 
 put it, he began " to brew small ale out of the water 
 of the fountain of the horse's foot," working again on 
 the revision of Death's Jcstbook, He also began to 
 prepare for the press a collection of his narrative and 
 lyrical poems, to be called The Ivory Gate. In 1838 he 
 was engaged in translating Grainger's work on the 
 Spinal Cord into German. 
 
 He had spent six years at Zurich, and was beginning 
 to feel that city to have become his settled home, when, 
 on the 8th of September, 1839, a political catastrophe 
 destroyed his peace of mind. A mob of six thousand 
 peasants, " half of them unarmed, and the other half 
 armed with sc3'thes, dung-forks and poles, led on by a 
 mad fanatic and aided by some traitors in the cabinet, 
 and many in the town," stormed Zurich, and upset the 
 liberal government of the canton. Beddoes observed 
 the riot from a window, and witnessed the murder of 
 the minister Hegetschweiler, who was one of his best 
 friends. He wrote : " In consequence of this state of 
 things, in which neither property nor person is secure, 
 
44 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 I shall find it necessary to give up my present resi- 
 dence entirely. Indeed, the dispersion of my friends 
 and acquaintance, all of whom belonged to the liberal 
 party, renders it nearly impossible for me to remain 
 longer here." He loitered on, however, until March, 
 1840, when his life was threatened by the insurgents, 
 and he was helped to fly from Zurich in secret by a 
 former leader of the liberal party, whom he had be- 
 friended, a man of the name of Jasper. 
 
 It is probable that the seven years Beddoes spent at 
 Zurich formed the happiest portion of his life. He was 
 never to experience tranquillity again. The next few 
 years were spent in what seems an aimless wandering 
 through the length and breadth of Central Europe. Little 
 is known of his history from this time forward. In 1 841 
 he was in Berlin, where he formed an acquaintanceship 
 with a young Dr. Frey, who remained his intimate friend 
 to the last. In 1842 he made a brief visit to England. 
 In 1843 he went to Baden in Aargau, where he seems 
 to have stored his library, and, so far as Beddoes 
 henceforth could be said to have a home, that home 
 was in this little town of Northern Switzerland, not 
 far from Zurich. He spent the winter of 1844 ^t 
 Giessen, attracted thither by Liebig and his famous 
 school of chemistry, after having lodged through the 
 summer and autumn at Basel, Strassburg, Mannheim, 
 Mainz, and Frankfurt in succession. At Giessen a 
 little of the poetic fervour returned to him, and it was 
 here that he wrote " The Swallow leaves her Nest," and 
 " In Lover's Ear a wild Voice cried." But most of his 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 45 
 
 verse now was written in German. He sa3.s (Nov. 
 13, 1844): "Sometimes to amuse myself 1 write a 
 German lyric or epigram, right scurrilous, many of 
 which have appeared in the Swiss and German papers, 
 and some day or other I shall have them collected and 
 printed for fun." It is needless to say that he never 
 issued this collection, and the German poems, doubtless 
 signed with a pseudonym or else anonymous, have 
 never been traced. 
 
 In August, 1846, he came to England for a consider- 
 able stay. Intending to remain six weeks, he loitered 
 on for ten months. His friends, few of whom had 
 seen him for more than twenty years, found him 
 altered beyond all recognition. He had become ex- 
 tremely rough and cynical in speech, and eccentric in 
 manners. I am informed by a member of his family 
 that he arrived at the residence of one of his relations, 
 Cheney Longville, near Ludlow, astride the back of a 
 donkey. He complained of neuralgia, and for six out 
 of the ten months which he spent in England, he was 
 shut up in a bedroom, reading and smoking, and ad- 
 mitting no visitor. In April, 1847, he went down to 
 Fareham, to stay with Mr. Kelsall, and this greatly 
 brightened him up. From Fareham he proceeded in 
 May to London, and there he met with his old friends 
 the Procters. From Mrs. Procter the present vn-iter 
 received a graphic account of his manners and appear- 
 ance. She told me that his eccentricities were so 
 marked that they almost ga\^ the impression of in- 
 sanity, but that closer observation showed them to be 
 
46 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 merely the result of a peculiar fancy, entirely unaccus- 
 tomed to restraint, and of the occasional rebound of 
 spirits after a period of depression. The Procters 
 found Beddoes a most illusive companion. He would 
 come to them uninvited, but never if he had been 
 asked, or if he feared to meet a stranger. On one 
 occasion, Mrs. Procter told me, they had asked Beddoes 
 to dine with them, and proceed afterwards to Drury 
 Lane Theatre. He did not come, and they dined alone. 
 On approaching the theatre, they saw Beddoes in 
 charge of the police, and on inquiry found that he had 
 just been arrested for trying to put Drury Lane on fire. 
 The incendiary, however, had used no more dangerous 
 torch than a five-pound note, and Mr. Procter had 
 little difficulty in persuading the police that this was 
 much more likely to hurt the pocket of Mr. Beddoes 
 than the rafters of the theatre. 
 
 In June, 1 847, Beddoes returned to Frankfurt, where 
 he lived until the spring of 1848 with a baker named 
 Degen, who was then about nineteen 3^ears of age — ■ 
 " a nice-looking young man dressed in a blue blouse, 
 fine in expression, and of a natural dignity of manner," 
 Miss Zoe King describes him. While Beddoes was in 
 Frankfurt his blood became poisoned from the virus of 
 a dead body entering a slight wound in his hand. This 
 was overcome, but it greatly weakened and depressed 
 him. For six months he would see no one but Degen. 
 He complained of disgust of life, and declared that his 
 republican friends in Germany had deserted him. He 
 persuaded Degen to become an actor, and he occupied 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 47 
 
 himself in teaching him Enghsh and other accomphsh- 
 ments, cutting himself off from all other company. At 
 this time " he had let his beard grow, and looked like 
 Shakespeare." In May, 1848, he left Frankfurt, in- 
 ducing Degen to accompany him, and the two com- 
 panions wandered together through Germany and 
 Switzerland. In Zurich Beddoes chartered the theatre 
 for one night, to give his friend an opportunity of 
 appearing in the part of Hotspur. 
 
 For about six weeks, so far as it is possible to discover, 
 Beddoes was tolerably happy. But he was separated 
 from Degen at Basel, where Beddoes took a room, in a 
 condition of dejected apathy that was pitiful to witness, 
 at the Cicogne Hotel. Here very early next morning 
 he inflicted a deep wound on his right leg, with a razor. 
 *' II etait miserable — il a voulu se tuer," as the waiter 
 who attended upon him said afterwards to Miss Zoe 
 King. He was, however, removed with success to the 
 Town Hospital, where his friends Dr. Frey and Dr. 
 Ecklin waited upon him. He had a pleasant private 
 room, looking into a large garden. He communicated 
 with his English friends, being very anxious to allay 
 all suspicion. He wrote to his sister : " In July I fell 
 with a horse in a precipitous part of the neighbouring 
 hills, and broke m}^ left leg all to pieces." He begged 
 no one in England to be anxious, and his version of 
 the catastrophe was accepted without question. The 
 leg, however, was obstinate in recovery, for the patient 
 stealthily tore off the bandages, and eventually gan- 
 grene of the foot set in. On the 9th of September it 
 
48 Critical KIt-Kats 
 
 became necessary to amputate the leg below the knee- 
 joint ; this operation was very successfully performed 
 by Dr. Ecklin. Beddoes seems to have been cheerful 
 during the autumn m^onths, and Degen came back to 
 Basel, lodging near him in the town. The poet gave 
 up all suicidal attempts, and it was considered that his 
 mind on this matter was completely cured. His bed 
 was covered with books, and he conversed and wrote 
 freely about literature and science. He talked of 
 going to Italy when he was convalescent, and in De- 
 cember he walked out of his room twice. The first 
 time he went out into the town, however, on the 26th 
 of January, 1849, he seems to have used his authority 
 as a physician to procure the deadly poison called 
 Kurara ; in the course of the evening Dr. Ecklin was 
 suddenly called to his bedside, and found the poet 
 tying on hi?s back insensible, with the following extra- 
 ordinary note, written in pencil, folded on his bosom. 
 It was addressed to one of the oldest of his English 
 friends, Mr. R. Phillips : 
 
 *' My dear Phillips, — I am food for what I am good 
 for — worms. I have made a will here, which I desire 
 to be respected ; and add the donation of ;^20 to Dr. 
 Ecklin my physician. W. Beddoes must have a case 
 (50 bottles) of Champagne Moet 1847 growth to drink 
 my death in. Thanks for all kindnesses. Borrow the 
 ;^200. You are a good and noble man, and your 
 children must look sharp to be like you. — Yours, if my 
 own, ever "T. L. B. 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddocs 49 
 
 *' Love to Anna, Henry, — ihe beddocs of i.ongvill 
 and Zoc and Emmcline King. Also to Kclsall, whom 
 I beg to look at my MSS. and print or not as fie thinks 
 fit. I ought to have been, [among a] variety of other 
 things, a good pi^ct. Life was too great a bore on one 
 peg, and that a bad one. Buy for Dr. Eckhn above 
 mentioned Reade's best stomach-pump." 
 
 He died at 10 p.m. the same night, and was buried 
 under a cypress in the cemetery of the hospital. The 
 circumstances of his death, now for the first time pub- 
 lished, were ascertained by Miss Zoe King, who visited 
 Basel in 1857, and saw Degen, Frey, Ecklin, and the 
 people at the Cicogne Hotel. After some delay, the 
 various MSS. of Beddoes were placed in Kelsall's hands, 
 and that faithful and admirable friend published that 
 version of Death's Jestbook, which seemed to him the 
 most attractive, in 1850 ; and this he followed, in 185 1, 
 by the Miscellaneous Poems^ with an unsigned Memoir. 
 These two volumes form the only monument hitherto 
 raised to the memory of the unfortunate poet. The 
 reception which was given to them was respectful, and 
 even sympathetic. It may be sufficient here to give 
 one instance of it, which has never been made public. 
 Miss Zoe King, in an unprinted letter to Kelsall, 
 says : ** I was at the Lakes with my uncle Edge- 
 worth just after receiving the Death's Jesthook, and 
 was ver}' much pleased to lend it to Mr. Tenny- 
 son. He was just arrived (^and at a distance from us) 
 on his weddmg tour, so that 1 merely saw him. He 
 
 D 
 
50 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 returned the book witn a few lines ol praise, rating it 
 highly." 
 
 It is not in the fragments that Beddoes has left 
 behind him that we can look for the work of a full- 
 orbed and serene poetical genius. It would be a narrow 
 definition indeed of the word " poet " which should 
 exclude him, but he belongs to the secondary order of 
 makers. He is not one of those whose song flows un- 
 bidden from their lips, those born warblers whom 
 neither poverty, nor want of training, nor ignorance, 
 can restrain from tuneful utterance. He belongs to 
 the tribe of scholar-poets, to the educated artists in 
 verse. In every line that he wrote we can trace the 
 influence of existing verse upon his mind. He is 
 intellectual rather than spontaneous. Nor, even within 
 this lower range, does his work extend far on either 
 hand. He cultivates a narrow field, and his impressions 
 of life and feeling are curiously limited and monotonous. 
 At the feast of the Muses he appears bearing little 
 except one small savoury dish, some cold preparation, 
 we may say, of olives and anchovies, the strangeness 
 of which has to make up for its lack of importance. 
 Not every palate enjoys this hors (Tceuvre^ and when 
 that is the case, Beddoes retires ; he has nothing else 
 to give. He appeals to a few literary epicures, who, 
 however, would deplore the absence of this oddly 
 flavoured dish as mucn as thai of any more important 
 piece de resistance. 
 
Tliomas Lovell Beddoes 51 
 
 As a poet, the great defect of Beddoes has ahxady 
 been indicated — his want of sustained invention, his 
 powerlessness in evolution. He was poor just where, 
 two hundred years earher, almost every playwright in 
 the street had been strong, namely, in the ability to 
 conduct an interesting story to a thrilling and appro- 
 priate close. From this point of view his boyish play, 
 The Brides^ Tragedy, is his only success. In this 
 case a story was developed with tolerable skill to a 
 dramatic ending. But, with one exception, he never 
 again could contrive to drag a play beyond a certain 
 point ; in the second or third act its wings would droop, 
 and it would expire, do what its master would. These un- 
 finished tragedies were like those children of Polynesian 
 dynasties, anxiously trained, one after another, in the 
 warm Pacific air, yet ever doomed to fall, on the borders 
 of manhood, by the breath of the same mysterious 
 disease. Dcatli's Jestbook is but an apparent exception. 
 This does indeed appear in the guise of a finished five- 
 act play ; but its completion was due to the violent 
 determination of its author, and not to legitimate 
 inspiration. For many years, in and out of season, 
 Beddoes, who had pledged his whole soul to the finish- 
 ing of this book, assailed it with all the instruments of 
 his art, and at last produced a huge dramatic Franken- 
 stein monster, which, by adroit editing, could be forced 
 into the likeness of a tragedy. But no play in literature 
 was less of a spontaneous creation, or was further from 
 achieving the ideal of growing like a tree. 
 
 From what Beddoes was not, however, it is time to 
 
52 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 pass to what he was. In several respects, then, he was a 
 poetical artist of consummate ability. Of all the myriad 
 poets and poeticules who have tried to recover the lost 
 magic of the tragic blank verse of the EHzabethans, 
 Beddoes has come nearest to success. If it were less 
 indifferent to human interests of every ordinary kind, 
 the beauty of his dramatic verse would not fail to fasci- 
 nate. To see how strong it is, how picturesque, how 
 admirably fashioned, we have only to compare it with 
 what others have done in the same style, with the tragic 
 verse, for instance, of Barry Cornwall, of Talfourd, of 
 Home. But Beddoes is what he himself has called "a 
 creeper into worm-holes." He attempts nothing per- 
 sonal ; he follows the very tricks of Marston and Cyril 
 Tourneur like a devoted disciple. The passions with 
 which he deals are remote and unfamiliar ; we may go 
 further, and say that they are positively obsolete. 
 
 In another place I have compared Beddoes in poetry 
 with the Helsche Breughel in painting. He dedi- 
 cates himself to the service of Death, not with a brood- 
 ing sense of the terror and shame of mortality, but from 
 a love of the picturesque pageantry of it, the majesty and 
 sombre beauty, the swift, theatrical transitions, the 
 combined elegance and horror that wait upon the sudden 
 decease of monarchs. His medical taste and training 
 encouraged this tendency to dwell on the physical 
 aspects of death, and gave him a sort of ghastly 
 familiarity with images drawn from the bier and the 
 charnel-house. His attitude, however, though cold and 
 cynical, was always distinguished, and in his wildest 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 53 
 
 fliglits of humour he commonly escapes vulgarity. In 
 this hesliovvs himself a true poet. As we read his singular 
 pages, we instinctively expect to encounter that touch of 
 prose which, in Landor's phrase, will precipitate the 
 whole, yet it never comes. Beddoes often lacks inspi- 
 ration, but distinction he can never be said to lack. 
 
 As a lyrist he appears, on the whole, to rank higher 
 than as a dramatist. Several of his songs, artificial as 
 they are, must always live, and take a high place in the 
 literature of artifice. As a writer of this class of poem 
 his experience of the Elizabethans was further kindled 
 and largely modified by the example of Shelley. Never- 
 theless his finest songs could never be taken for the 
 work of Shelley, or, indeed, attributed to any hand but 
 his own. Among them, the song in Torrismond is 
 perhaps the sweetest and the most ingenious ; 
 
 How many times do I love thee^ dear ! 
 Jell me how many thoughts there be 
 In the atmosphere 
 Of a new falPn year 
 Whose white and sable hours appear 
 
 The latest fiake of Eternity : 
 So many times do I love thee, dear. 
 
 How many times do I love, again ! 
 Tell me how many beads there are 
 In a silver chain 
 Of evening rain, 
 Unravelled from the tumhling main. 
 
 And threading the eye of a silver star : 
 So many times do I love, again. 
 
54 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Dream Pedlary the most exquisite : 
 
 DREAM-PEDLARY. 
 
 If there were dreams to sell. 
 
 What would ^ou buy ? 
 Some cost a passing hell. 
 
 Some a light sigh, 
 That shakes from Life's fresh crown 
 Only a rose leaf down. 
 If there were dreams to sell. 
 Merry and sad to tell, 
 And the crier rung the bell, 
 
 What would you buy ? 
 
 A cottage lone and still 
 
 With bowers nigh, 
 Shadowy, my woes to still 
 
 Until I die : 
 Such pearl from Lifers fresh crown 
 Fain would I shake me down : 
 Were dreams to have at will, 
 2 his would best heal my ill. 
 
 This would I buy. 
 
 The Song of the Stygian Naiades and Old Adam, the 
 Carrion Crow, are instances of fancy combined with 
 grisly humour, of a class in which Beddoes has no Eng- 
 lish competitor. The Harpagus ballad in the fourth act 
 of Death^s Jestbook, and ** Lord Alcohol," which I printed 
 for the first time in 1890, are less known, but no less 
 vivid and extraordinary. The former of these closes 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 55 
 
 in fierce stanzas, which Robert Browning almost ex- 
 travagantly admired, and was never weary of reciting: 
 
 From the old supper-giver* s poll^ 
 
 He tore the manykingdomed mitre ; 
 To him, who cost him his sorCs soul^ 
 
 He gave it ; to the Persian fighter : 
 And quoth. 
 Old art thou, but a fool in blood: 
 
 If thou hast made me eat my son, 
 Cyrus has ta^en his grandsire^s food ; 
 
 There's kid for child, and who hath won ? 
 
 All kingdomless is thy old head. 
 
 In which began the tyrannous fun ; 
 ThouWt slave to him, who should be dead ; 
 
 There's kid for child, and who hath won ? 
 
 Beddoes possesses great sense of verbal melody, a 
 fastidious ear, and considerable, though far from fault- 
 less, skill in metrical architecture. His boyish volume, 
 called The Improvisatorc, shows, despite its crudity, that 
 these gifts were early developed. To say more in 
 recommendation of Beddoes were needless. Those 
 readers who are able to take pleasure in poetry so grim, 
 austere, and abnormal, may safely be left to discover 
 his specific charms for themselves. 
 
 189a 
 
56 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Bibliographical Note. 
 
 During his own lifetime, with the exception of a few 
 brief contributions to periodicals, Beddoes published 
 nothing but two small volumes. One of these was 
 The Improvisatore^ issued at Oxford in 1 821, and so 
 successfully suppressed by its author, that not more 
 than five or six copies are known to exist. It was 
 reprinted for the first time in my 1890 edition, from a 
 copy in the collection of Mr. J. Dykes Campbell. The 
 other was The Brides^ Tragedy^ published by the 
 Rivingtons in 1822. This is rare, though by no 
 means so inaccessible as its predecessor. A second 
 edition appeared in 185 1. This play I reprinted from 
 a copy of the 1822 original in my own library. 
 
 At the time of Beddoes' death in 1849 the bulk of 
 his MSS. remained inedited. He specially bequeathed 
 his papers and the disposal of them to Thomas Forbes 
 Kelsall, a solicitor at Fareham, who was the oldest and 
 the most intimate of his English friends. The family 
 of the poet, whose knowledge of him had grown very 
 slight, were at first exceedingly undesirous that his 
 poetic MSS. should be preserved, although they were 
 willing to pay for the publication of any scientific 
 writings. Their repugnance was finally overcome, and 
 in 1850 Kelsall pubhshed, in a thin volume, Death^s 
 Jestbook. The editing of this poem was no light task, 
 for no fewer than three distinct texts, differing very 
 considerably between themselves, were found to exist. 
 Kelsall collated these three versions, and produced a 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 57 
 
 selected text of his own, to which I in the main ad- 
 hered. If the interest in Bcddocs should continue to 
 grow, it will always be possible to produce a variorum 
 edition of Death's Jestbook, a demand for which, how- 
 ever, is hardly to be expected. 
 
 In 185 1 Kelsall collected the miscellaneous poems 
 and dramatic fragments into a volume entitled Poons 
 by the late TlioDias Lovell Beddoes^ to which he prefixed 
 an anonymous memoir of the poet, which is a model of 
 loving care and respect for the memory of the departed ; 
 a man of whom it might then be said with unusual truth, 
 that he was a bard " whom there were none to praise 
 and very few to love." The result of Kelsall's zeal was 
 that, for the first time, the poetry of Beddoes began to 
 excite attention. Of Death's Jestbook very few copies 
 had been sold, and it is extremely rare in that original 
 condition. The sheets of this and of the Poems were 
 rebound, with a new title-page ("The Poems, posthu- 
 mous and collected, of Thomas Lovell Beddoes"), 1851, 
 in two volumes, to the second of which The Brides^ 
 Tragedy was added. In this form Beddoes is usually 
 known to collectors, but even these volumes are now 
 difficult to procure. The remainder of them was dis- 
 persed by auction in 1855, since which time until 1890 
 Beddoes was out of print. 
 
 In 1853 Miss Zoe King, Beddoes' cousin, wrote to 
 Kelsall : " I do not know whether I mentioned to you 
 the high terms of praise with which both Mr. and Mrs. 
 Browning spoke of the poems, just as they were pub- 
 lished." Miss Zoe King preserved a romantic interest 
 
58 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 in T. L. Beddoes, although she, like every other mem- 
 ber of his family, knew very little indeed about him 
 personally. She wrote to Kelsall : " I could give you 
 very little information of my early reminiscences of my 
 poor Cousin, as I was so much in awe of his reserve 
 and of his talents that I seldom conversed with him." 
 It was, nevertheless, Miss King for whom Kelsall pre- 
 served the highest consideration, and her wishes were 
 consulted in the next step which he took. He had 
 religiously preserved every scrap of Beddoes' writing, 
 and was anxious that these MSS. should be kept 
 together. In consequence of Miss King's report of the 
 admiration which the Brownings felt for Beddoes, and 
 the fact that Robert Browning was the only English 
 poet younger than himself in whom Beddoes took any 
 interest, Kelsall made up his mind to make him the 
 repository of the MSS. But he did not know him. 
 Towards the close, however, of Bryan Waller Procter's 
 life — I think in 1 866 or 1867 — Browning and Kelsall 
 met at his house on one single occasion, and the latter 
 then stated his request. 
 
 It is now proper to give the text of the papers by 
 which Kelsall made the transfer of the Beddoes MSS. 
 to Robert Browning ; 
 
 "Fareham, &/>f. 30, 1869. 
 
 *' It is my wish that after my death, when and so 
 soon as my wife may think proper, the whole of the 
 Beddoes MSS. and papers should be transferred to Mr. 
 Robert Browning, who has consented to accept the 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 59 
 
 charge. It is most desirable, however, that she should 
 look through them and remove the extraneous matter, 
 as there are letters of other people, accounts, &c., 
 which only swell the bulk without increasing the in- 
 terest. Mr. Browning is to have Miss King's Journal 
 from Switzerland and such of her letters as throw light 
 on Beddoes' life or death. As to the latter, I have 
 considered that my lips were sealed (relating to the 
 suicide) during Miss King's lifetime, since such was her 
 wish, altho' the fact has been communicated to me from 
 an independent source. When my wife and I went to 
 Basle in 1868, we visited Dr. Ecklin (Beddoes' much- 
 esteemed physician), and found that he had no doubt 
 as to the injuries which brought Beddoes to the hospital 
 having been self-inflicted, and that accident there was 
 none. 
 
 ** He saw a good deal of Beddoes during his stay at 
 the hospital before and after the amputation, and con- 
 sidered that in all their communications the origin of 
 his situation was an understood fact between them. 
 Dr. Ecklin added the startling information that the final 
 catastrophe was, in his opinion, the direct result of a 
 self-administered poison — all the symptoms being 
 otherwise wholly unaccountable, and corresponding to 
 those appropriate to the application of a very strong 
 poison called Kurara or [blank in MS.]. He was evi- 
 dently tired of life, and the fact of his being so, and 
 of having achieved his release, need not, after a fair 
 allowance for family hesitation, and in my opinion 
 should not, be withheld from the knowledge of those 
 
6o Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 who take a deep and true interest in Beddoes as a great 
 poet. 
 
 "Thos. F. Kelsall." 
 
 To this paper succeeded another : 
 
 " I transfer to Robert Browning all my interests and 
 authority in and over the MSS. and the papers of or 
 concerning the poet Beddoes, for him to act discre- 
 tionally for the honour of the poet. 
 
 " The greater portion of these MSS. was given by 
 him to me in his life-time, and the remainder placed at 
 my absolute disposal by his death-bed memorandum. 
 
 ** T. F. Kelsall. 
 
 ** Fareham, June 15, '72." 
 
 Shortly after this Mr. Kelsall died, and the box 
 containing the Beddoes papers was transmitted to Mr 
 Robert Browning. They remained locked up and 
 unexamined until, in July, 1 883, Mr. Browning invited 
 me to help him in undertaking a complete investigation 
 of the MSS. When we had reduced them to some 
 order, he lent them to me, and I made such transcripts 
 and collations as formed the basis of the edition of 
 1890. With regard to the circumstances of Beddoes' 
 death, which were then for the first time made public, it 
 was Mr. Browning's wish that Kelsall's instructions 
 should be followed, at a proper interval after the death 
 of Miss Zoe King, who was the last person to whom 
 the statement could give any personal pain. Miss 
 King died on Sept. 28, 1881, and I therefore judged 
 
Thomas Lovell Beddoes 6i 
 
 that the time had arrived for carrying out Kelsall's 
 directions. In 1893 I completed the task which my 
 revered friend, Mr. Browning, had laid upon me, by 
 prirting the Correspondence of Beddoes, in a single 
 volume. 
 
 In the preparation of all these volumes I received 
 invaluable aid from another deeply regretted friend, 
 JMr. J. Dykes Campbell, who was unequalled and 
 perhaps unapproached in his knowledge of the late 
 Georgian period of English poetical history. The Bed- 
 does Papers remain in the possession of Mr. Robert 
 Barrett Browning, who very kindly lent them to me 
 again, that I might revise my collation. 
 
EDWARD FITZGERALD 
 
Edward FitzGerald 
 
 In 1885 a great stimulus to curiosity about the trans- 
 lator of Omar Khayyam was given by the double 
 inscription, prologue and epilogue, ave atque valc^ in 
 which Lord Tennyson put forth his Tiresias to the 
 world under the shadow of the name of Edward Fitz- 
 Gerald. The curtain was for a moment drawn from 
 the personality of one of the most recluse and seques- 
 tered of modern men of letters, and we saw, with the 
 eyes of the Poet Laureate, one of the earliest and one 
 of the most interesting of his associates : 
 
 Old Fitz^ zvho from your suburb grange. 
 
 Where once I tarried for a whiky 
 Glance at the wheeling orb of change. 
 
 And greet it with a kindly smile ; 
 Whom yet I see as there you sit 
 
 Beneath your sheltering garden-tree. 
 And watch your doves about you fit ^ 
 
 And plant on shoulder, hand and knee. 
 Or on your head their rosy feet. 
 
 As if they knew your diet spares 
 Whatever moved in that full sheet 
 
 Let down to Peter at his prayers ; 
 Who feed on milk ana meal and grass!* 
 
 E 
 
66 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 This dedication, as we now learn, had been written 
 a week before FitzGerald's death, in June, 1883, when 
 the intimacy of the two poets had lasted for nearly fifty 
 years. Other friends, scarcely less dear or less ad- 
 mired, had already preceded Fitz Gerald to the grave. 
 Thackeray, a little before the end, in reply to his 
 daughter's inquiry which of his old friends he had 
 loved most, had answered, *' Why, dear old Fitz, to be 
 sure." Carlyle growled at the comparative rarity of 
 "your friendly human letters," and a few more — James 
 Spedding, Thompson of Trinity, Crabbe, Bernard 
 Barton — had tempted his woodland spirit from its haunts. 
 But few indeed among the living can boast of having 
 enjoyed even a slight personal acquaintanceship with 
 Edward FitzGerald, and almost his only intimate friend 
 now left is the editor of the Letters and Literary 
 Remains (Macmillan & Co. : 3 vols.), which have re- 
 vealed even to those who had placed Fitz Gerald's 
 genius highest and studied him most carefully an un- 
 suspected individuality of great force and charm. The 
 learned and accomplished Vice-Master of Trinity has 
 fulfilled his task in a manner almost too modest. He 
 leaves FitzGerald to speak to us without a commentary 
 from the pages of his matchless translations and from 
 the leaves of his scarcely less delightful letters. 
 
 Edward Purcell was born in a Jacobean mansion at 
 Bredfield, three miles from Woodbridge, in Suffolk, on 
 the 31st of March, 1809. His father had married a Miss 
 FitzGerald, and on the death of her father, in 18 18, he 
 assumed the name and arms of FitzGerald. The poet's 
 
Edward FitzGerald 67 
 
 childhood was spent in France, but at the age of thirteen 
 he went to a school at Bury St. Edmunds, where the 
 Spcddings, W. B. Donne, and J. M. Kemble were 
 among his schoolfellows. In 1 82(5 he was entered at 
 Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 1828 he formed the 
 friendship of two freshmen, slightly younger than 
 himself, who were to be his intimates for life, W. M. 
 Thackeray and W. H. Thompson, lately Master of 
 Trinit3\ He saw Lord Tennyson about this time, 
 although he did not make his acquaintance until they 
 left college ; but half a century later he retained a clear 
 recollection of the appearance of the Poet Laureate as 
 an undergraduate — " I remember him well, a sort of 
 Hyperion." 
 
 It is consistent with all that w^e learn of the shy 
 fidelit}' of FitzGerald that almost all the friendships of 
 his life were formed before he was one-and-twenty. 
 As early as 1830 he warns Thackeray not to invite him 
 to meet anybody ; *' I cannot stand seeing new faces in 
 the polite circles ; " and while the rest of the com- 
 panionship, each in his own way, turned to conquer 
 the world, FitzGerald remained obstinately and success- 
 fully obscure. In 1831 he was nearly caught, for a 
 very delicate and fantastic lyric, published anonymously 
 in the Af/icjicriint, attracted remark and was attributed 
 to Charles Lamb. FitzGerald took a farmhouse of his 
 father's on the battle-field of Naseby, and paid no heed 
 to the outstretched hands of the Sirens. He was in 
 easy circumstances and adopted no profession. The 
 seat of his family, and his own main residence until 
 
Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 1835, was Wherstead Lodge, a house beautifully placed 
 on the west bank of the Orwell, about tv/o miles from 
 Ipswich. Thence they removed to a less attractive 
 mansion, Boulge, near Woodbridge, in the same county, 
 close to the place of his birth, and there FitzGerald 
 resided until 1853. He then went to Farhngay Hall, 
 an old farmhouse, where Carlyle visited him ; in i860 
 he moved to lodgings in Woodbridge, and in 1873 ^o 
 Little Grange, where he remained until his death. 
 Nor, at first, did he give promise of being more than 
 an admirer, a contemplator, even in the fairy world of 
 literature. We get charming glimpses of his sympa- 
 thetic nature in some of the early letters. On the 7th 
 of December, 1832, he sa3^s : 
 
 ** The news of this week is that Thackeray has come 
 but is going to leave again for Devonshire directly. 
 He came very opportunely to divert my Blue Devils : 
 notwithstanding, we do not see very much of each 
 other : and he has now so many friends (especially the 
 Bulters) that he hiis no such wish for my society. He 
 is as full of good humour and kindness as ever. The 
 next news is that a new volume of Tennyson is out, 
 containing nothing more than you have in MS. except 
 one or two things not worth having 
 
 '* I have been poring over Wordsworth latety, which 
 has had much effect in bettering my Blue Devils : for 
 his philosophy does not abjure melancholy, but puts a 
 pleasant countenance upon it, and connects it with 
 humanity. It is very well, if the sensibility that makes 
 us fearful of ourselves is diverted to become a cause of 
 
Edward FitzGerald 69 
 
 sympathy and interest with nature and mankind : and 
 tliis I think Wordsworth tends to do. I think I told 
 you of Shakespeare's sonnets before : I cannot tell you 
 what sweetness I find in them. 
 
 * So hy Shakespeare's sonnets roasted, and Wordsworth's poems 
 basted. 
 My heart will be well toasted, and excellently tasted.* 
 
 **This beautiful couplet must delight you, I think." 
 In June, 1834, Thackeray was illustrating "my 
 Undine " (possibly a translation of Fouqu^'s romance) 
 " in about fourteen little coloured drawings, very nicely." 
 What has become of this treasure? In May, 1835, 
 some of the friends were together in the Lakes, and we 
 get, incidentally, a pleasant glimpse of the most illus- 
 trious of them : 
 
 "Alfred Tennyson stayed with me at Ambleside. 
 Spedding was forced to go home, till the last two days 
 of my stay here. I will say no more of Tennyson than 
 that the more I have seen of him, the more cause I have 
 to think him great. His little humours and grumpi- 
 nesses were so droll, that I was always laughing ; and 
 was often put in mind (strange to say) of my little un- 
 known friend, Undine — I must, however, say, further, 
 that I felt what Charles Lamb describes, a sense of de- 
 pression at times from the overshadowing of a so much 
 more lofty intellect than my own : this (though it may 
 seem vain to say so) I never experienced before, though 
 I have often been with much greater intellects : but i 
 could not be mistaken in the universalit}^ of his mind ; 
 
JO Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 and perhaps I have received some benefit in the now 
 more distinct consciousness of my dwarfishness." 
 
 His time, when the roses were not being pruned, and 
 when he was not making discreet journeys in uneventful 
 directions, was divided between music, which greatly 
 occupied his younger thought, and literature, which 
 slowly, but more and more exclusively, engaged his 
 attention. His loneliness, and the high standard by 
 which in his remote seclusion he measured all contem- 
 porary publications, gives an interest to his expressions 
 with regard to new books, an interest which centres 
 around himself more, perhaps, than around the work 
 criticised. For instance, he says, in April, 1838, to the 
 Quaker poet, Bernard Barton, who was his neighbour 
 at Woodbridge, and whose daughter he eventually 
 married. 
 
 " I am very heavy indeed with a kind of influenza, 
 which has blocked up most of my senses, and put a wet 
 blanket over my brains. This state of head has not 
 been improved by trying to get through a new book 
 much in fashion — Carlyle's French Revolution — written 
 in a German style. An Englishman writes of French 
 Revolutions in a German style I People say the book 
 is very deep ; but it appears to me that the meaning 
 seems deep from lying under mystical language. There 
 is no repose, nor equable movement in it : all cut up 
 into short sentences half reflective, half narrative ; so 
 that one labours through it as vessels do through what 
 is called a short sea — small, contrary-going waves caused 
 by shallows, and straits, and meeting tides, &c. I like 
 
Edward FitzGerald 71 
 
 to sail before the wind over the surface of an even-roll- 
 ing eloquence, like that of Bacon or the Opium-Eater. 
 There is also pleasant fresh-water sailing with such 
 writers as Addison. Is there any />o«^-sailing in litera- 
 ture ? that is, drowsy, slow, and of small compass ? 
 Perhaps we may say, some Sermons. But this is only 
 conjecture. Certainly Jeremy Taylor rolls along as 
 majestically as any of them. We have had Alfred 
 Tennyson here, very droll and very wayward, and much 
 sitting up of nights till two and three in the morning, 
 with pipes in our mouths : at which good hour we would 
 get Alfred to give us some of his magic music, which 
 he does between growling and smoking, and so to bed." 
 Few poets have been able to prepare for their life's 
 work by so long and so dreary a novitiate. In 1839 
 FitzGerald gives Bernard Barton a more than commonly 
 full account of his daily life. He goes with a fellow- 
 fisherman, "my piscator," two miles off to fish, and has 
 tea in a pothouse, and so walks home. " For all which 
 idle ease," he says, ** I think I must be damned." Or 
 else upon glorious sunshiny days he lies at full length in 
 his garden reading Tacitus, with the nightingale singing 
 and some red anemones flaunting themselves in the sun. 
 "A funny mixture all this; Nero, and the delicacy of 
 spring ; all very human, however. Then, at half-past 
 one, lunch on Cambridge cream cheese ; then a ride over 
 hill and dale : then spudding up some weeds from the 
 grass ; and then, coming in, I sit down to write to you." 
 No wonder thatCarlyle, groaning in London under the 
 weight of his work and his indigestion, would gird play- 
 
72 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 fully at the " peaceable man " at Woodbridge, with his 
 " innocent /«r niente life." FitzGerald on his part, was 
 by no means blind to the seamy side of the loud Carly- 
 lean existence, but wished it were calmer, and retired to 
 his Horace Walpole and his Tale of a Tub with fresh 
 gusto after being tossed, as he called it, on Carlyle's 
 " canvas waves." After an unusual burst of Chelsea 
 eloquence, FitzGerald proposes a retreat ; " We will all 
 sit under the calm shadow of Spedding's forehead." 
 Carlyle, meanwhile, after growing better acquainted with 
 FitzGerald, to whom Thackeray had first presented him, 
 became even more attached to him, and visiting him, 
 they scraped for human bones together in the Naseby 
 battle-field. Here is a scrap from a letter of Carlyle to 
 FitzGerald, dated October i6, 1844 : 
 
 " One day we had Alfred Tennyson here ; an unfor- 
 gettable day. He stayed with us till late ; forgot his 
 stick : we dismissed him with Macpherson^s Farewell. 
 Macpherson (see Burns) was a Highland robber ; he 
 played that Tune, of his own composition, on his way 
 to the gallows ; asked, ^ If in all that crowd the Mac- 
 pherson had any clansman ? ' holding up the fiddle that 
 he might bequeath it to some one. * Any kinsman, any 
 soul that wished him well ? ' Nothing answered, nothing 
 durst answer. He crushed the fiddle under his foot, 
 and sprang off. The Tune is rough as hemp, but strong 
 as a lion. I never hear it without something of emotion 
 — poqr Macpherson ; though the artist hates to play it. 
 Alfred's dark face grew darker, and I saw his lip slightly 
 quivering I " 
 
Edward FitzGcrald 73 
 
 The life that slipped away at Woodbriclge in a reverie 
 so graceful and so roseate was not undisturbed from 
 time to time by voices from the outer world calling it to 
 action ; but through a long series of years the appeal 
 was resolutely put by. When almost all his friends 
 were writers it could not be but that FitzGerald was con- 
 scious of a tendency to write, and there are signs in his 
 correspondence of an occasional yielding to the ten- 
 dency. But in all these early years he was never har- 
 assed by what he describes as '' the strong inward call, 
 the cruel-sweet pangs of parturition," which he observed 
 with the curiosity of a physician, in the spirits of Tenny- 
 son and Thackeray. He knew very well that he had 
 the power, if he chose, to pour out volume after volume, 
 like others of the mob of gentlemen who write with ease ; 
 but his belief was that, ** unless a man can do better, he 
 had best not do at all." It is in 1 847 that we find him, 
 as a lucky discovery of Mr. Aldis Wright's informs us, 
 plunging for the first time, though with the cryptic 
 anonymity which he would continue to observe, into 
 print. When Singer published his edition of Selden's 
 Table Talk in that year, the illustrative matter was con- 
 tributed by a gentleman whom the editor was not per- 
 mitted to name. Mr. Aldis Wright has found the originals 
 of these notes in FitzGerald's handwriting. Two 3'ears 
 later he set his initials at the foot of a desultory memoir 
 of Bernard Barton, prefixed to the subscription edition 
 of the collected poems of that mild and ineffectual bard, 
 who had died in the preceding February. It is remark- 
 able, however, that FitzGerald's first serious enterprise 
 
74 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 in authorship was undertaken so late as in his forty- 
 third 3^ear — at an age, that is to say, when most men 
 who are to be famous in letters have already given 
 copious evidence of their powers. 
 
 Fitz Gerald's first book, Euphranor^ was published by 
 Pickering in 1 851, a modest little volume not passing 
 much beyond the limits of a pamphlet. It seems to 
 have been the child of memories of Cambridge impreg- 
 nated by the Socratic talk of Spedding, who had 
 lately been visiting FitzGerald. It is a Platonic dialogue, 
 easily cast — somewhat in the manner, one may say, of 
 Berkeley's Alciphron — in a framework of landscape, 
 Cambridge courts and halls, the river, the locks, the 
 deep breeze blowing through the mays and the labur- 
 nums. The characters discuss the Godefridus of Sir 
 Kenelm Digby, and how the principles of chivalry can 
 be wholesomely maintained in modern life. Slight, 
 perhaps, and notably unambitious, Euphranor could 
 scarcely have been written by any one but FitzGerald 
 < — unless, possibly, in certain moods, by Landor — and 
 it remains the most complete and sustained of his prose 
 works. He had scarcely published it, and, as shyly as 
 Sabrina herself, had peeped from '* the rushy-fringed 
 bank " of Deben to see how the world received it, 
 before he found himself engaged on another little 
 anonymous volume. The tiny green* 1852 quarto of 
 Polonius lies before me at this moment, a presentation 
 
 * The grass-green cover of the original edition reminds us that "la 
 Verdad es siempre verde." 
 
Edward FitzGerald y^ 
 
 copy to the author's sister, "Andalusia De Soyres, 
 from her Aftccte. E. F. G." It is a collection of wise 
 saws and modern instances, some of them his own, 
 most of them borrowed from Bacon, Seldcn, Kenelm 
 Digby, and, of the living, Carlyle and Newman, the 
 whole graced by a charming and most characteristic 
 preface by FitzGerald himself. And now he began 
 with zeal to undertake the proper labour of his life- 
 time — he became a translator of poetry. 
 
 Six or seven years before this time, FitzGerald was 
 corresponding on familiar terms with a younger friend, 
 who survives him, and who appears to have been, to a 
 very singular degree, and in the full Shakespearean 
 sense, the "only begetter" of these ensuing transla- 
 tions. This was Mr. E. B. Cowell, now Professor of 
 Sanskrit at Cambridge. As early as 1846 Mr. Cowell 
 had introduced FitzGerald to Hafiz ; in 1852 we find 
 that the latter has " begun again to read Calderon with 
 Cowell ; " and from a letter written long afterwards to 
 the late Sir Frederick Pollock, we learn that their first 
 study of Calderon dated from at least 1850. Fitz- 
 Gerald cared for but little in Spanish literature. He 
 tried some of the other dramatists — Tirso de Molina, 
 Lop6 de Vega, Moratin, but he could take but scant 
 interest in these. His admiration of Calderon, on the 
 other hand, was inexhaustible, and he began to work 
 assiduously at the task of translating him, taking all 
 Shelley's pleasure in the "starry autos." The volume 
 called Six Dramas of Calderon^ freely translated by 
 Edward FitzGerald^ was issued by Pickering in 1853, 
 
76 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 and is the only one of all FitzGerald's publications 
 which bears his name upon it. The six plays are : 
 The Painter of his own Dishonour, Keep your own 
 Secret, Gil Perez the Gallician, Three Judgments at a 
 Blow, The Mayor of Zalanca, and Beware of Smooth 
 Water. The book is now of extreme scarcity, the 
 translator having withdrawn it from circulation in one 
 of his singular fits of caprice, partly, I believe, on 
 account of the severity with which its freedom as a 
 paraphrase was attacked. I am bound to say, however, 
 that I find no traces of irritation on this subject in his 
 letters of 1853, which refer to various reviews in a 
 very moderate and sensible spirit. 
 
 The Calderon had scarcely passed through the printer^s 
 hands when Fitz Gerald took up the study of Persian, 
 still in company with and under the direction of Mr. 
 Cowell. In 1854, when he was visiting that friend at 
 Oxford, he began to try his hand on a verse transla- 
 tion of the Saldmdn and Absdl of Jami, " whose 
 ingenious prattle I am stilting into too Miltonic verse." 
 This was published in 1856, anonymously, with a 
 picturesque " Life of Jami," and a curious frontispiece 
 of warriors playing polo. Meanwhile Mr. Cowell was 
 appointed Professor of History at a Calcutta college, 
 and one main stimulus to steady production was re- 
 moved out of FitzGerald's life. Yet, by good fortune 
 for us, Mr. Cowell's absence from England induced 
 FitzGerald to write to him more fully about his work 
 than he would have done if the friends could have met. 
 And here, on the 20th of March, 1857, we are allowed 
 
Edward FitzGerald 77 
 
 to be present at the first conception of what was after- 
 wards to become the famous and admired Omar 
 Khayydm : 
 
 ** To-day I have been writing twenty pages of a 
 metrical Sketch of the Mantic, for such uses as I told 
 you of. It is an amusement to me to take what liberties 
 I like with these Persians, who (as I think) are not 
 poets enough to frighten one from such excursions, 
 and who really do want a little art to shape them. I 
 don't speak of Jel^leddin whom I know so little of 
 (enough to show me that he is no great artist, how- 
 ever), nor of Hafiz, whose best is untranslatable because 
 he is the best musician of words. Old Johnson said 
 the poets were the best preservers of a language : for 
 people must go to the original to relish them. I am 
 sure that what Tennyson said to you is true : that 
 Hafiz is the most Eastern — or, he should have said, 
 most Persian — of the Persians. He is the best repre- 
 sentative of their character, whether his Saki and wine 
 be real or mystical. Their religion and philosophy is 
 soon seen through, and always seems to me cuckooed 
 over like a borrowed thing, which people, once having 
 got, don't know how to parade enough. To be sure, 
 their roses and nightingales are repeated enough ; but 
 Hafiz and old Omar Khayyam ring like true metal. 
 The philosophy of the latter is, alas ! one that never 
 fails in the world." 
 
 He was soon keenly engaged on his task ; had in 
 April opened up a correspondence with Garcin de 
 Tassy about texts of Omar in the Paris libraries. 
 
yS Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 This was the busiest year of FitzGerald's hterary Ufa. 
 In May he was already beginning to warn his friend of 
 another possible '* sudden volume of translations," the 
 desire to conquer a province of iEschylus in his peculiar 
 way having seized him. The only result, however, was 
 the preparation — but at what date I do not seem able 
 to discover — of that extraordinary translation of the 
 Agamemnon, eventually printed without name of author, 
 title-page, or imprint, in a hideous cover of grocer's 
 azure, which is one of the rarest of FitzGerald's issues. 
 In January, 1 85 8, he began the dismal business of 
 trying, and at first vainly trying, to find a publisher 
 bold enough to embark on the perilous enterprise of 
 printing the little pamphlet of immortal music called 
 The Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam. On the subject of 
 this publication much has been loosely said and con- 
 jecturally reported of late years. We may, therefore, 
 be glad to read FitzGerald's own account, in a letter to 
 the late Master of Trinity : 
 
 ''As to my own peccadilloes in verse, which never 
 pretend to be original, this is the story of Rubdiydt. 
 I had translated them partly for Cowell : young Parker 
 asked me some years ago for something for Fraser, and 
 I gave him the less wicked of these to use if he chose. 
 He kept them for two years without using : and as I 
 saw he didn't want them I printed some copies with 
 Quaritch ; and, keeping some for myself, gave him the 
 rest. Cowell, to whom I sent a copy, was naturally 
 alarmed at it ; he being a very religious man : nor have 
 I given any other copy but to George Borrow, to whom 
 
Edward FitzGerald 79 
 
 I had once lent the Persian, and to old Donne when he 
 was down here the other da}', to whom I was showing a 
 passage in another book which brought myold Omar up." 
 On the 15th of January, 1859, as Mr. W. Aldis 
 Wright has been kind enough to ascertain for me, 
 the Rubdiydt was issued, in the casual way above in- 
 dicated, and fell absolutely flat upon the market. There 
 is no evidence in FitzGerald's correspondence that it 
 attracted the smallest attention, and, except for a letter 
 from Mr. Ruskin, which circled the globe for ten years 
 (this sounds incredibly characteristic, but seems to be true) 
 before it reached its address, the first publication of his 
 magnificent poem appears to have brought FitzGerald no 
 breath of recognition from the world outside the circle 
 of his friends. The copies in Mr.Quaritch's shop seem to 
 have found no buyers, and to have gravitated rather 
 surprisingly soon to the fourpcnny boxes outside the 
 booksellers' stalls. Here Dante Gabriel Rossetti, so 
 legend relates, discovered the hid treasure in i860, and 
 proclaimed it among his friends, Mr. Swinburne being 
 forward in the generous race to make the poem appre- 
 ciated at its proper value. It marks a rise in the 
 barometer of popularity that Monckton Milnes (Lord 
 Houghton) is anxiously inquiring for a copy or two in 
 May, 1 86 1. Yet it was not until 1868 that a second 
 edition, now scarcely less rare and no whit less in- 
 teresting to the collector, was called for. Since that 
 time, much revised by its far too careful author, the 
 Rubdiydt of Omar Khayydm has been reprinted in all 
 manner of shapes, both on this side of the Atlantic and 
 
Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 on the other. To pursue the record of his literary life, 
 Fitzgerald translated two more plays of Calderon, the 
 Magico prodigiosoy at which Shelley had tried his hand, 
 and the Vida es Sueno^ which Trench had attempted. 
 These he never published, but in 1865 he printed them, 
 without title-page, and sent the strange Httle volume, in a 
 grey paper wrapper, to a few of his friends. With 
 the exception of the two CEdipus dramas, circulated in 
 the same quaint, shy way, in 1880, these were the last 
 of Fitzgerald's poetical translations. 
 
 He had grown more and miore interested in the 
 water-way leading from the pastoral meadows of Wood- 
 bridge to the sea, the salt road between the trees called 
 Bawdsey Haven, which brings you, if you go far 
 enough down it, to the German Ocean at last. His 
 favourite companions became fishermen and the cap- 
 tains of boats, and in 1867 an old wish was realised at 
 length, when FitzGerald became part owner of a 
 herring-lugger — The Meum and Tuum as he called 
 her, and possessed a captain of his own. Later on, 
 he bought a yacht, The Scandal. " Nothing but ship," 
 he says, from June to November, through all those 
 months, " not having lain, I believe, for three consecu- 
 tive nights in Christian sheets," but mostly knocking 
 about somewhere outside of Lowestoft. The theory 
 was that the lugger should pay her way, but Fitz- 
 Gerald and his captain, ** a grand, tender soul, lodged 
 in a suitable carcase," did not make the profit that they 
 hoped for, and after four years of considerable anxiety, 
 FitzGerald parted from his boat and from her master. 
 
Edward FitzGerald 8i 
 
 The latter was a humble friend in whom, physically 
 and spiritually, there must have been something splen- 
 didly attractive, and regarding whom FitzGerald uses 
 phraseology otherwise reserved for Tennyson and 
 Thackeray. The poet still kept a boat upon the 
 Dcben, but went out no more upon the deep after 
 herrings and mackerel, in company with his auburn- 
 haired and blue-eyed giant from Lowestoft, "altogether," 
 he says, " the greatest man I have known." 
 
 And so, almost imperceptibly, as the reader moves 
 down the series of these delightful letters, he finds 
 that the writer, in his delicate epicureanism, is, without 
 repining at it, growing old. A selection from his early 
 favourite poet, a Suffolk man like himself, George 
 Crabbe, is his last literary enterprise, and so on the 
 14th of June, 1883, in his seventy-fifth year, he rather 
 suddenl}^ passes away painlessly in his sleep. His 
 own words shall be his epitaph : "An idle fellow, but 
 one whose friendships were more like loves." 
 
 The strange issues of Calderon, of ^Eschylus, of 
 J^mi, of Sophocles, with which it was FitzGerald's 
 pleasure to confound bibliographers, are now great 
 rarities ; not one of all his printed works, except the 
 Omar KhayyaiUy has hitherto been easy to obtain. We 
 may generally say in looking over all these versions, 
 that FitzGerald more than any other recent translator 
 of poetry, carried out that admirable rule of Sir John 
 Denham's, that the translator's business is not " alone 
 to translate language into language, but poesie into 
 poesie; and poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in 
 
 F 
 
Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 pouring out of one language into another, it will all 
 evaporate, if a new spirit be not added in the trans- 
 lation." FitzGerald's versions are so free, he is so 
 little bound by the details of his orignal, he is so 
 indifferent to the timid pedantry of the ordinary writer 
 who empties verse out of the cup of one language into 
 that of another, that we may attempt with him what 
 would be a futile task with almost every other English 
 translator — we may estimate from his versions alone 
 what manner of poet he was. 
 
 In attempting to form such an estimate we are bound 
 to recognise that his best-known work is also his best. 
 The Omar Khayyam of FitzGerald takes its place in 
 the third period of Victorian poetry, as an original 
 force wholly in sympathy w^th other forces of which 
 its author took no personal cognisance. Whether or 
 no it accurately represents the sentiments of a Persian 
 astronomer of the eleventh century is a question which 
 fades into insignificance beside the fact that it stimu- 
 lated and delighted a generation of young readers, to 
 whom it appealed in the same manner, and along 
 parallel lines with, the poetry of Morris, Swinburne, 
 and the Rossettis. After the lapse of thirty years we 
 are able to perceive that in the series of poetical publi- 
 cations of capital importance which marked the close of 
 the fifties it takes its natural place. In 1858 appeared 
 The Defence of Guinevere; in 1859, the Rubdiydt of 
 Omar Khayyam; in i860. The Queen -Mother and 
 Rosamond; in 1862, Goblin Market; while, although 
 the Poems of D. G. Kossetti did not finally see the 
 
Edward FitzGerald 
 
 light till 1870, bis presence, his spiritual influence, had 
 animated the group. That FitzGerald was ignorant of, 
 or wholly indillerent to, the existence of these his com- 
 peers did not affect his relationship to them, nor their 
 natural and instinctive recognition of his imaginative 
 kinship to themselves. The same reasscrtion of the 
 sensuous elements of literature, the same obedience to 
 the call for a richer music and a more exotic and im- 
 passioned aspect of manners, the same determination 
 to face the melancholy problems of life and find a 
 solace for them in art, were to be found in the anony- 
 mous pamphlet of Oriental reverie as in the romances, 
 dramas, songs, and sonnets of the four younger friends. 
 So much more interesting to us, if we will look 
 sensibly at the matter, is FitzGerald than the Omar 
 Khayyam whose mantle he chose to masquerade in 
 that we are not vexed but delighted to learn from Mr. 
 Aldis Wright that the opening stanza, which ran thus 
 in the edition of 1859 : 
 
 Awake ! for morning in the bowl of night 
 Has flung the stone that puts the stars to flight ; 
 
 And lo ! the hunter of the East has caught 
 The Sultanas turret in a noose of lights 
 
 is wholly his own, and represents nothing in the 
 original. It was judged by his earliest critics to be 
 too close a following of the fantastic allusiveness of the 
 Persian, and the poet — surely with his tongue set in 
 his cheek — modified his own invention to the smoother 
 but less spirited ; 
 
84 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Wahe ! for the sun behind yon Eastern height 
 Has chased the session of the stars from night ; 
 And^ to the field of heaven ascending, strikes 
 The Sultanas turret with a shaft of light. 
 
 It is well to remind ourselves of these two versions, 
 of which each is good, though the first be best, because 
 Fitz Gerald was sufficiently ill-advised to exchange for 
 both a much tamer version, which now holds its place 
 in the text. These alterations, however, are very 
 significant to the critic, and exhibit the extreme care 
 with which FitzGerald revised and re-revised his work. 
 
 To judge, however, of his manner as a translator, or 
 rather as a paraphraser, we must examine not merely 
 the most famous and remarkable of his writings, but 
 his treatment of Spanish and Greek drama, and of the 
 narrative of J ami. It appears that he took Dryden's 
 licence, and carried it further ; that he steeped himself 
 in the language and feeling of his author, and then 
 threw over his version the robe of his own peculiar 
 style. Every great translator does this to some extent, 
 and we do not recognise in Chapman's breathless 
 gallop the staid and polished Homer that marches 
 down the couplets of Pope. But then, both Pope and 
 Chapman had, in the course of abundant original com- 
 position, made themselves each the possessor of a style 
 which he threw without difficulty around the shoulders 
 of his paraphrase. In the unique case of FitzGerald — 
 since Fairfax can scarcely be considered in the same 
 category — a poet of no marked individuality in his 
 
Edward FitzGerald 85 
 
 purely independent verse created for himself, in the 
 act of approaching masterpieces of widely dificrent 
 race and age, a poetical style so completely his own 
 that we recognise it at sight as his. The normal 
 instances of this manner are familiar to us in Omar 
 Khayyam. They are characterised by a melody which 
 has neither the variety of Tennyson nor the vehemence 
 of Mr. Swinburne, neither the motion of a river nor of 
 the sea, but which rather reminds us, in its fulness and 
 serenity, of the placid motion of the surface of a lake, 
 or of his own grassy estuary of the Deben ; and finally 
 by a voluptuous and novel use of the commonplaces of 
 poetry — the rose, the vine, the nightingale, the moon. 
 There are examples of this typical manner of FitzGerald 
 to be found in Omar Khayyam^ which are unsurpassed 
 for their pure qualities as poetry, and which must 
 remain always characteristic of what was best in a 
 certain class of Victorian verse. Such are : 
 
 Jlas, that spring should vanish with the rose ! 
 That youth'' s sweet-scented manuscript should close / 
 
 7he nightingale that in the branches sang, 
 jihy whence and whither f own again, who knows I 
 
 and (a gem spoiled in recutting, after the first edition, 
 by the capricious jeweller) : 
 
 Thus with a loaf of bread beneath the bough, 
 A flask of wine, a book of verse — and thou 
 
 Beside me singing in the wilderness — 
 And wilderness is Paradise enow. 
 
86 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Nothing quite so good, perhaps, as these and many 
 more which might be quoted from the Omar Khayyam^ 
 is to be found in the other translations, yet wherever 
 the latter are happiest they betray the same hand and 
 murmur the same accents. It is in The Mighty 
 Magician that we meet with such characteristic stanzas 
 as this : 
 
 Who that in his hour of glory 
 
 Walks the kingdom of the rose, 
 And misapprehends the story 
 
 Which through all the garden blows s 
 Which the southern air who brivgs 
 It touches, and the leafy strings 
 
 Lightly to the touch respond ; 
 And nightingale to Jiightingale 
 
 Answering on hough beyond—^ 
 Nightingale to nightingale 
 
 Answering on bough beyond. 
 
 While the following passage, perhaps the richest and 
 most memorable in FitzGerald's minor writings, is 
 found in the Saldmdn and Absdl: 
 
 When they had saiPd their vessel for a moon, 
 And marr'd their beauty with the wind o" the sea, 
 Suddenly in mid-sea reveal' d itself 
 An isle, beyond imagination fair ; 
 An isle that was all garden ; not a flower. 
 Nor bird of plumage like the flower, but there s 
 Some like the flower, and others like the leaf; 
 Some, as the pheasant and the dove, adorned 
 
Edward FitzGerald 87 
 
 Jilth crown and collar^ over zuhm, alone. 
 The jezuelPd peacock like a sultan shone : 
 While the musicians^ and among them chief 
 The nightingale^ sang hidden in the trees^ 
 Which ^ arm in arm^ from fingers quivering 
 With any breath of air, fruit of all kind 
 Down scattered in profusion to their feet. 
 Where fountains of szueet water ran between^ 
 And sun and shadow chequer-chased the green^ 
 This Iram-gardcn seem'd in secrecy 
 Blowing the rosebud of its revelation ; 
 Or Paradise, forgetful of the dawn 
 Of Audit ^ lifted from her face the veil. 
 
 In reading these sumptuous verses the reader may 
 be incHned to wonder why Saldmdn and Absdl is not 
 as widely known and as universally admired as the 
 Omar Khayydm. If it were constantly sustained at 
 anything like this level it would be so admired and 
 known, but it is, unfortunately, both crabbed and 
 unequal. 
 
 It was in 1854, as FitzGerald reminds Professor 
 Cowell in a very interesting letter, that these friends 
 began to read J^mf together. We have seen that it 
 was not until 1856 and after the completion of the 
 Saldmdn and Absdl that the same friend placed Omar 
 in FitzGerald's hands. The paraphrase of Jami, there- 
 fore, is the earlier of the two, and represents the style 
 of the English poet at a stage when it was still 
 unfinished and, I think, imperfectly refined. The 
 narrative of J^mi is diff'use, and, as FitzGerald soon 
 
Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 found, " not line by line precious ; " he was puzzled 
 how to retain his character and yet not permit it to be 
 tedious, and he has not wholly succeeded in clearing 
 his poem from the second horn of the dilemma. 
 The original text of 1856 differs in almost every line, 
 and sometimes essentially, from that now published in 
 FitzGerald's work. I do not know on what the later 
 text is founded, but probably on a revision found 
 among his papers. I confess that the bolder early 
 version seems to me considerably the more poetical. 
 Sdldman and Absdl consists of a mystical preliminary 
 invocation, in which the problem of responsibility and 
 free-will, in the form which interested the English 
 poet so much, is boldly stated and the double question 
 put: 
 
 If I — this spirit that inspires me whence ? 
 If thou — then what this sensual impotence ? 
 
 and of the story, told in three parts, with a moral or 
 transcendental summing-up at the close. The metrical 
 form chosen for the main narrative is blank verse, with 
 occasional lapses into rhyme. These, in all proba- 
 bility, respond to some peculiarity in the Persian 
 original, but they are foreign to the genius of English 
 prosody, and they produce an effect of poverty upon 
 the ear, which is alternately tempted and disappointed. 
 There are, moreover, incessant interludes or episodical 
 interpolations, which are treated in an ambling measure 
 of four beats, something like the metre of Hiawatha^ 
 but again with occasional and annoying introductions 
 
Edward FitzGerald 89 
 
 of rhyme. It is obvious, at the outset, that we do not 
 see FitzGerald here exercising that perfect instinct for 
 form which he afterwards developed ; he was tram- 
 melled, no doubt, by his desire to repeat the eflccts he 
 discovered in the Persian, and had not yet asserted his 
 own genius in what Dryden called metaphrase. Never- 
 theless, Saldmdn and Absdl contains passages of great 
 beauty, such as that in which the poet, in wayward 
 dejection, confesses that his worn harp is no longer 
 modulated, and that 
 
 Methinks 
 *Tzcere time to break and cast it in the fire : 
 The vain old harp, thaty breathing from its strings 
 No music more to charm the ears of many 
 Mayy from its scented ashes , as it burns, 
 Breatl)e resignation to the harper'' s soul. 
 
 And the description of Absal, the lovely infant nurse of 
 the new-born Sal^man (1856 text) : 
 
 Her years not twenty ^ from the silver line, 
 Dividing the musk-harvest of her hair, 
 Down to her foot y that trampled crowns of kings ^ 
 A moon of beauty full. 
 
 Very curious and charming, too, are the descriptions 
 of Sal^man's victory over the princes at polo, and his 
 headlong ride to the shore of the abyss that was 
 haunted by the starry dragon, and whose island crags 
 cuts its surface " as silver scissors slice a blue brocade." 
 
 A third Persian poem, the Bird-Parliament of Farid- 
 
90 Critical KIt-Kats 
 
 Uddin Attar, written immediately after the publication of 
 Omar Khayyam in 1859, was first printed by Mr. Aldis 
 Wright thirty years later, and forms a very important 
 addition to FitzGerald's works. It is a long, mystical 
 piece of Oriental transcendentaHsm, the best part of 
 which is the opening pages, in which the various birds 
 are introduced, spreading their jewelled plumage one 
 by one before the tajidar, the royal lapwing, who is 
 their shah or sultan. When the poem becomes purely 
 philosophical, it seems to me to become less attractive, 
 perhaps sometimes a little tedious ; yet the versification 
 is always charming, the heroic couplet treated as 
 smoothly and correctly as by Congreve or Addison, but 
 with far greater richness. 
 
 Of Fitz Gerald as a prose writer there has hitherto 
 been little known. His correspondence now reveals 
 him, unless I am much mistaken, as one of the most 
 pungent, individual, and picturesque of English letter- 
 writers. Rarely do we discover a temperament so 
 mobile under a surface so serene and sedentary ; rarely 
 so feminine a sensibility side by side with so virile an 
 intelligence. He is moved by every breath of Nature ; 
 every change of hue in earth or air affects him ; and 
 all these are reflected, as in a camera obscura, in the 
 richly-coloured moving mirror of his letters. It will 
 not surprise one reader of this correspondence if the 
 name of its author should grow to be set, in common 
 parlance, beside those of Gray and Cowper for the 
 fidelity and humanity of his addresses to his private 
 friends. Meanwhile, we ought, perhaps, to have remem- 
 
Edward FitzGerald 91 
 
 bered what beautiful pages there were in Euphranor^ 
 and in particular to have recalled that passage about 
 the University boat-races which Lord Tennyson, no 
 easy critic to satisfy, has pronounced to be one of the 
 most beautiful fragments of English prose extant. 
 Not many in this generation have met with Euphrauor^ 
 and I may quote this passage with the certainty that it 
 is new to all or nearly all of my readers : 
 
 "Townsmen and gownsmen, with the tassell'd 
 Fellow-commoner sprinkled here and there — reading 
 men and sporting men — Fellows, and even Masters of 
 Colleges, not indifferent to the prowess of their respec- 
 tive crews — all these, conversing on all sorts of topics, 
 from the slang in Bell's Life to the last new German 
 revelation, and moving in ever-changing groups down 
 the shore of the river, at whose farther bend was a 
 little knot of ladies gathered up on a green knoll faced 
 and illuminated by the beams of the setting sun. Be- 
 yond which point was at length heard some indistinct 
 shouting, which gradually increased, until ' They are 
 off — they are coming I ' suspended other conversation 
 among ourselves ; and suddenly the head of the first 
 boat turned the corner ; and then another close upon 
 it ; and then a third ; the crews pulling with all their 
 might compacted into perfect rhythm ; and the crowd 
 on shore turning round to follow along with them, 
 waving hats and caps, and cheering, ' Bravo, St. 
 John's 1 ' * Go it, Trinity I ' — the high crest and blowing 
 forelock of Phidippus's mare, and he himself shouting 
 encouragement to his crew, conspicuous over all — until, 
 
92 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 the boats reaching us, we also were caught up in the 
 returning tide of spectators, and hurried back toward 
 the goal '; where we arrived just in time to see the 
 ensign of Trinity lowered from its pride of place, and 
 the eagle of St John's soaring there instead. Then, 
 waiting a little while to hear how the winner had won, 
 and the loser lost, and watching Phidippus engaged in 
 eager conversation with his defeated brethren, I took 
 Euphranor and Lexilogus under either arm (Lycion 
 having got into better company elsewhere) and walked 
 home with them across the meadow leading to the 
 town, whither the dusky troops of gownsmen with all 
 their confused voices seemed as it were evaporating in 
 the twilight, while a nightingale began to be heard 
 among the flowering chestnuts of Jesus." 
 
 Who is rashly to decide what place may not finally 
 be awarded to a man capable of such admirable feats 
 in English prose and verse ? There can be little doubt 
 that when much contemporary clamour has died out 
 for ever, the clear note of the Nightingale of Wood- 
 bridge will still be heard from the alleys of his Persian 
 garden. 
 
 1889. 
 
WALT WHITMAN 
 
Walt Whitman 
 
 r ATIMA was permitted, nay encouraged, to make use 
 of all the rooms, so elegantly and commodiously fur- 
 nished, in Bluebeard Castle, with one exception. It 
 was in vain that the housemaid and the cook pointed 
 out to her that each of the ladies who had preceded her 
 as a tenant had smuggled herself into that one forbidden 
 chamber and had never come out again. Their sad ex- 
 perience was thrown away upon Fatima, who pene- 
 trated the fatal apartment and became an object of 
 melancholy derision. The little room called " Walt 
 Whitman," in the castle of literature, reminds one of 
 that in which the relics of Bluebeard's levity were 
 stored. We all know that discomfort and perplexity 
 await us there, that nobody ever came back from it with 
 an intelligible message, that it is piled with the bones of 
 critics ; yet such is the perversity of the analytic mind, 
 that each one of us, sooner or later, finds himself peep- 
 ing through the keyhole and fumbling at the lock. 
 
 As the latest of these imprudent explorers, I stand a 
 moment with the handle in my hand and essay a defence 
 of those whose skeletons will presently be discovered. 
 Was it their fault ? Was their failure not rather due 
 
96 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 to a sort of magic that hangs over the place ? To drop 
 metaphor, I am sadly conscious that, after reading what 
 a great many people of authority and of assumption 
 have written about Whitman — reading it, too, in a 
 humble spirit — though I have been stimulated and en- 
 tertained, I have not been at all instructed. Pleasant 
 light, of course, has been thrown on the critics them- 
 selves and on their various peculiarities. But upon 
 Whitman, upon the place he holds in literature and life, 
 upon the questions, what he was and why he was, surely 
 very little. To me, at least, after all the oceans of talk, 
 after all the extravagant eulogy, all the mad vitupera- 
 tion, he remains perfectly cryptic and opaque. I find no 
 reason given by these authorities why he should have 
 made his appearance, or what his appearance signifies. 
 I am told that he is abysmal, putrid, glorious, universal 
 and contemptible. I like these excellent adjectives, 
 but I cannot see how to apply them to Whitman. Yet, 
 like a boy at a shooting-gallery, I cannot go home till I, 
 too, have had my six shots at this running-deer. 
 
 On the main divisions of literature it seems that a 
 critic should have not merely a firm opinion, but sound 
 argument to back that opinion. It is a pilgarlicky mind 
 that is satisfied with saying, ** I like you, Dr. Fell, the 
 reason why I cannot tell." Analysis is the art of telling 
 the reason why. But still more feeble and slovenly is 
 the criticism that has to say, " I liked Dr. Fell yester- 
 day and I don't like him to-day, but I can give no 
 reason." The shrine of Walt Whitman, however, is 
 strewn around with remarks of this kind. Poor Mr. 
 
Walt Whitman 97 
 
 Swinburne has been cruelly lauglied at for calling him 
 a "strong-winged soul, with prophetic lips hot with the 
 blood-beats of song," and yet a drunken apple-woman 
 reeling in a gutter. But he is not alone in this incon- 
 sistency. Almost every competent writer who has 
 attempted to give an estimate of Whitman has tumbled 
 about in the same extraordinary way. Something 
 mcphitic breathes from this strange personality, some- 
 thing that maddens the judgment until the wisest lose 
 their self-control. 
 
 Therefore, I propound a theory. It is this, that there 
 is no real Walt Whitman, that is to say, that he cannot 
 be taken as any other figure in literature is taken, as 
 an entity of positive value and defined characteristics, 
 as, for instance, we take the life and writings of Racine, 
 or of Keats, or of Jeremy Taylor, including the style 
 with the substance, the teaching with the idiosyncrasy. 
 In these ordinary cases the worth and specific weight 
 of the man are not greatly affected by our attitude 
 towards him. An atheist or a quaker may contemplate 
 the writings of the Bishop of Dromore without sympathy; 
 that does not prevent the Holy Dying from presenting, 
 even to the mind of such an opponent, certain defined 
 features which are unmodified by like or dislike. This 
 is true of any fresh or vivid talent which may have 
 appeared among us yesterday. But I contend that it 
 is not true of Whitman. Whitman is mere bathybiiis ; 
 he is literature in the condition of protoplasm — an in- 
 tellectual organism so simple that it takes the instant 
 impression of whatever mood approaches it. Hence 
 
 G 
 
98 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 the critic who touches Whitman is immediately con- 
 fronted with his own image stamped upon that viscid 
 and tenacious surface. He finds, not what Whitman 
 has to give, but what he himself has brought. And 
 when, in quite another mood, he comes again to Whit- 
 man, he finds that other self of his own stamped upon 
 the provoking protoplasm. 
 
 If this theory is allowed a moment's consideration, 
 it cannot, I think, but tend to be accepted. It accounts 
 for all the difficulties in the criticism of Whitman. It 
 shows us why Robert Louis Stevenson has found a 
 Stevenson in Leaves of Grass, and John Addington 
 S3^monds a Symonds. It explains why Emerson con- 
 sidered the book " the most extraordinary piece of wit 
 and wisdom that America has yet [in 1855] produced;" 
 why Thoreau thought all the sermons ever preached 
 not equal to it for divinity ; why Italian dilettanti and 
 Scandinavian gymnasts, anarchists and parsons and 
 champions of women's rights, the most opposite and 
 incongruous types, have the habit of taking Whitman 
 to their hearts for a little while and then flinging him 
 away from them in abhorrence, and, perhaps, of draw- 
 ing him to them again with passion. This last, however, 
 I think occurs more rarely. Almost every sensitive and 
 natural person has gone through a period of fierce 
 Whitmanomania ; but it is a disease which rarely 
 afflicts the same patient more than once. It is, in fact, 
 a sort of highly-irritated egotism come to a head, and 
 people are almost always better after it. 
 
 Unless we adopt some sucn theory as this, it is 
 
Walt Whitman 99 
 
 dilTicult to account in any way for the persistent influ- 
 ence of Walt Whitman's writings. They have now 
 lasted about forty years, and show no sign whatever of 
 losing their vitality. Nobody is able to analyse their 
 charm, yet the charm is undeniable. They present no 
 salient features, such as have been observed in all other 
 literature, from Homer and David down to the latest 
 generation. They offer a sort of Plymouth Brethren- 
 ism of form, a negation of all the laws and ritual of 
 literature. As a book, to be a living book, must con- 
 tain a vigorous and appropriate arrangement of words, 
 this one solitary feature occurs in Leaves of Grass. I 
 think it is not to be denied by any candid critic, how- 
 ever inimical, that passages of extreme verbal felicity 
 are to be found frequently scattered over the pages of 
 Whitman's rhapsodies. But, this one concession made 
 to form, there is no other. Not merely are rhythm 
 and metre conspicuously absent, but composition, 
 evolution, vertebration of style, even syntax and the 
 limits of the English tongue, are disregarded. Every 
 reader who comes to Whitman starts upon an expedi- 
 tion to the virgin forest. He must take his conveni- 
 ences with him. He will make of the excursion what 
 his own spirit dictates. There are solitudes, fresh air, 
 rough landscape, and a well of water, but if he wishes 
 to enjoy the latter he must bring his own cup with 
 him. When people are still young and like roughing 
 it, they appreciate a picnic into Whitman-land, but it 
 is not meant for those who choose to see their intellec- 
 tual comforts round them. 
 
 Lora 
 
loo Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 In the early and middle years of his life, Whitman 
 was obscure and rarely visited. When he grew old, 
 pilgrims not unfrequently took scrip and staff, and set 
 out to worship him. Several accounts of his appear- 
 ance and mode of address on these occasions have been 
 published, and if I add one more it must be my excuse 
 that the visit to be described was not undertaken in 
 the customary spirit. All other accounts, so far as I 
 know, of interviews with Whitman have been written 
 by disciples who approached the shrine adoring and 
 ready to be dazzled. The visitor whose experience — 
 and it was a very delightful one — is now to be 
 chronicled, started under what was, perhaps, the dis- 
 advantage of being very unwilling to go ; at least, it 
 will be admitted that the tribute — for tribute it has to 
 be — is all the more sincere. 
 
 When I was in Boston, in the winter of 1 884, I 
 received a note from Whitman asking me not to leave 
 America without coming to see him. My first instinct 
 was promptly to decline the invitation. Camden, New 
 Jersey, was a very long way off. But better counsels 
 prevailed ; curiosity and civility combined to draw me, 
 and I wrote to him that I would come. It would be 
 fatuous to mention all this, if it were not that I particu- 
 larly wish to bring out the peculiar magic of the old 
 man, acting, not on a disciple, but on a stiff-necked and 
 froward unbeliever. 
 
 To reach Camden, one must arrive at Philadelphia, 
 
Walt Whitman loi 
 
 where I put up on the 2nd of January, 1885, ready to 
 pass over into New Jersey next morning. I took the 
 hall-porter of the hotel into my confidence, and asked 
 if he had ever heard of Mr. Whitman. Oh, yes, they 
 all knew " Walt," he said ; on fine days he used to 
 cross over on the ferry and take the tram into Philadel- 
 phia. He liked to stroll about in Chestnut Street and 
 look at the people, and if you smiled at him he would 
 smile back again ; everybody knew ** Walt." In the 
 North, I had been told that he was almost bedridden, 
 in consequence of an attack of paralysis. This seemed 
 inconsistent with wandering round Philadelphia. 
 
 The distance being considerable, I started early on the 
 3rd, crossed the broad Delaware River, where blocks 
 of ice bumped and crackled around us, and saw the 
 flat shores of New Jersey expanding in front, raked by 
 the broad morning light. I was put ashore in a crude 
 and apparently uninhabited village, grim with that 
 concentrated ugliness that only an American township 
 in the depth of winter can display. Nobody to ask the 
 way, or next to nobody. I wandered aimlessly about, 
 and was just ready to give all I possessed to be back 
 again in New York, when I discovered that I was 
 opposite No. 328 Mickle Street, and that on a minute 
 brass plate was engraved "W. Whitman." I knocked 
 at this dreary little two-storey tenement house, and 
 wondered what was going to happen. A melancholy 
 woman opened the door ; it was too late now to go 
 away. But before I could speak, a large figure, hob- 
 bling down the stairs, called out in a cheery voice, " Is 
 
I02 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 that my friend ? " Suddenly, by I know not what 
 magnetic charm, all wire-drawn literary reservations 
 faded out of being, and one's only sensation was of 
 gratified satisfaction at being the " friend " of this very 
 nice old gentleman. 
 
 There was a good deal of greeting on the stairs, and 
 then the host, moving actively, though clumsily, and 
 with a stick, advanced to his own dwelling-room on 
 the first storey. The opening impression was, as the 
 closing one would be, of extreme simplicity. A large 
 room, without carpet on the scrubbed planks, a small 
 bedstead, a little round stove with a stack-pipe in 
 the middle of the room, one chair — that was all the 
 furniture. On the walls and in the fireplace such a 
 miserable wall-paper — tinted, with a spot — as one 
 sees in the bedrooms of labourers* cottages; no pictures 
 hung in the room, but pegs and shelves loaded with 
 objects. Various boxes lay about, and one huge 
 clamped trunk, and heaps, mountains of papers in a 
 wild confusion, swept up here and there into stacks 
 and peaks ; but all the room, and the old man himself, 
 clean in the highest degree, raised to the ;^th power of 
 stainlessness, scoured and scrubbed to such a pitch that 
 dirt seemed defied for all remaining time. Whitman, 
 in particular, in his suit of hodden grey and shirt 
 thrown wide open at the throat, his grey hair and 
 whiter beard voluminously flowing, seemed positively 
 blanched with cleanliness ; the whole man sand-white 
 with spotlessness, like a deal table that has grown old 
 under the scrubbing-brush. 
 
Walt Whitman 103 
 
 Whitman sat down in the one chair with a small 
 poker in his hand and spent much of his leisure in 
 feed'ng and irritating the stove. I cleared some papers 
 away from off a box and sat opposite to him. When 
 he was not' actively engaged upon the stove his steady 
 attention was fixed upon his visitor, and I had a perfect 
 opportunity of forming a mental picture of him. He 
 sat with a very curious pose of the head thrown back- 
 ward, as if resting it one vertebra lower down the 
 spinal column than other people do, and thus tilting his 
 face a little upwards. With his head so poised and 
 the whole man fixed in contemplation of the inter- 
 locutor, he seemed to pass into a state of absolute 
 passivity, waiting for remarks or incidents, the glassy 
 eyes half closed, the large knotted hands spread out 
 before him. So he would remain, immovable for a 
 quarter of an hour at a time, even the action of speech 
 betraying no movement, the lips hidden under a 
 cascade of beard. If it be true that all remarkable 
 human beings resemble animals, then Walt Whitman 
 was like a cat — a great old grey Angora Tom, alert in 
 repose, serenely blinking under his combed waves of 
 hair, with eyes inscrutably dreaming. 
 
 His talk was elemental, like his writings. It had 
 none of the usual ornaments or irritants of conversation. 
 It welled out naturally, or stopped ; it was innocent of 
 every species of rhetoric or epigram. It was the 
 perfectly simple utterance of unaffected urbanity. So, 
 I imagine, an Oriental sage would talk, in a low 
 uniform tone, without any excitement or haste, without 
 
104 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 emphasis, in a land where time and flurry were 
 unknown. Whitman sat there with his great head 
 tilted back, smiling serenely, and he talked about 
 himself. He mentioned his poverty, which was patent, 
 and his paralysis ; those were the two burdens 
 beneath which he crouched, like Issachar ; he seemed 
 to be quite at home with both of them, and scarcely 
 heeded them. I think I asked leave to move my box, 
 for the light began to pour in at the great uncurtained 
 window ; and then Whitman said that some one had 
 promised him a gift of curtains, but he was not eager 
 for them, he thought they **kept out some of the light." 
 Light and air, that was all he wanted ; and through 
 the winter he sat there patiently waiting for the air 
 and light of summer, when he would hobble out agam 
 and bask his body in a shallow creek he knew " back 
 of Camden." Meanwhile he waited, waited with infinite 
 patience, uncomplaining, thinking about the sand, and 
 the thin hot layer of water over it, in that shy New 
 Jersey creek. And he winked away in silence, while 
 I thought of the Indian poet Valmiki, when, in a trance 
 of voluptuous abstraction, he sat under the fig-tree and 
 was slowly eaten of ants. 
 
 In the bareness of Whitman's great double room 
 only two objects suggested art in any way, but each of 
 these was appropriate. One was a print of a Red 
 Indian, given him, he told me, by Catlin ; it had inspired 
 the passage about '* the red aborigines " in Starting from 
 PaumanoL The other — positively the sole and only 
 thing that redeemed the bareness of the back-room 
 
Walt Whitman 105 
 
 where Whitman's bound works were stored — was a 
 photograph of a very handsome young man in a boat, 
 sculHng. I asked him about this portrait and he said 
 several notable things in consequence. He explained, 
 first of all, that this was one of his greatest friends, a 
 professional oarsman from Canada, a well-known sport- 
 ing character. He continued, that these were the 
 people he liked best, athletes who had a business in 
 the open air ; that those were the plainest and most 
 aflectionate of men, those who lived in the light and 
 air and had to study to keep their bodies clean and 
 fresh and ruddy ; that his soul went out to such people, 
 and that they were strangely drawn to him, so that at 
 the lowest ebb of his fortunes, when the world reviled 
 him and ridiculed him most, fortunate men of this kind, 
 highly prosperous as gymnasts or runners, had sought 
 him out and had been friendly to him. " And now," 
 he went on, '' I only wait for the spring, to hobble out 
 with my staff into the woods, and when I can sit all 
 day long close to a set of w^oodmen at their work, I 
 am perfectly happ}^, for something of their life mixes 
 with the smell of the chopped timber, and it passes 
 into my veins and I am old and ill no longer." I 
 think these were his precise words, and they struck me 
 more than anything else that he said throughout that 
 long and pleasant day I spent with him. 
 
 It might be supposed, and I think that even admirers 
 have said, that Whitman had no humour. But that 
 seemed to me not quite correct. No boisterous humour, 
 truly, but a gentle sort of sly fun, something like 
 
io6 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Tennyson's, he certainly showed. For example, he 
 told me of some tribute from India, and added, with a 
 twinkling smile, " You see, I * sound my barbaric yawp 
 over the roofs of the world.'" But this was rare: 
 mostly he seemed dwelling in a vague pastoral past life, 
 the lovely days when he was young, and went about 
 with '' the boys " in the sun. He read me many things ; 
 a new " poem," intoning the long irregular lines of it 
 not very distinctly ; and a preface to some new edition. 
 All this has left, I confess, a dim impression, swallowed 
 up in the serene self-unconsciousness, the sweet, digni- 
 fied urbanity, the feline immobility. 
 
 As I passed from the little house and stood in dull, 
 deserted Mickle Street once more, my heart was full 
 of affection for this beautiful old man, who had just 
 said in his calm accents, ** Good-bye, my friend 1 " 
 I felt that the experience of the day was embalmed by 
 something that a great poet had written long ago, but 
 I could not find what it was till we started once more 
 to cross the frosty Delaware ; then it came to me, and 
 I knew that when Shelley spoke of 
 
 Peace within and calm around. 
 
 And that content^ surpassing wealth. 
 
 The sage in meditation found. 
 
 And walked with inward glory crowned, 
 
 he had been prophesying of Walt Whitman, nor shall 
 I ever read those lines again without thinking of the 
 old rhapsodist in his empty room, glorified by patience 
 and philosophy. 
 
Walt Whitman 107 
 
 And so an unbeliever went to see Walt Whitman, 
 and was captivated without being converted. 
 
 It is related ot the great Condd that, at the opening 
 of his last campaign, sunken in melancholy, half mad- 
 dened with fatigue and the dog-star heat of summer, 
 ha^nng reached at length the cool meadows in front of 
 the Abbey of St. Antoine, he suddenly leaped from his 
 horse, flung away his arms and his clothing, and rolled 
 stark-naked in the grass under a group of trees. 
 Having taken this bath amidst his astonished officers, 
 he rose smiling and calm, permitted himself to be 
 dressed and armed anew, and rode to battle with all 
 his accustomed resolution. The instinct which this 
 anecdote illustrates lies deep down in human nature, 
 and the more we are muffled up in social conventions 
 the more we occasionally long for a whimsical return 
 to nudity. If a writer is strong enough, from one 
 cause or another, to strip the clothing off from civilisa- 
 tion, that writer is sure of a welcome from thousands 
 of over-civilised readers. 
 
 Now the central feature of the writings of Walt 
 Whitman is their nakedness. In saying this I do not 
 refer to half-a-dozen phrases, which might with ease 
 be eliminated, that have thrown Mrs. Grundy into fits. 
 No responsible criticism will make a man stand or fall 
 by what are simply examples of the carrying of a theory 
 to excess. But of the theory itself I speak, and it is 
 one of uncompromising openness. It is a defence of 
 
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 bare human nature, stripped, not merely of all its 
 trappings and badges, but even of those garments 
 which are universally held necessary to keep the cold 
 away. In so many of his writings, and particularly, of 
 course, in the Discours of 1750, Rousseau undertook 
 the defence of social nudity. He called upon his world, 
 which prided itself so much upon its elegance, to divest 
 the body politic of all its robes. He declared that 
 while Nature has made man happy and virtuous, society 
 it is that renders him miserable and depraved, there- 
 fore let him get rid of social conventions and roll naked 
 in the grass under the elm-trees. The invitation, as I 
 have said, is one which never lacks acceptance, and 
 Rousseau was followed into the forest by a multitude. 
 
 If Walt Whitman goes further than Rousseau, it 
 merely is that he is more elementary. The tempera- 
 ment of the American is in every direction less com- 
 plex. He has none of the restless intellectual vivacity, 
 none of the fire, none of the passionate hatred of 
 iniquity which mark the French philosopher. With 
 Walt Whitman a coarse simplicity suffices, a certain 
 blunt and determined negation of artificiality of every 
 kind. He is, roughly speaking, a keenly observant 
 and sentient being, without thought, without selection, 
 without intensity, egged on by his nervous system to 
 a revelation of himself. He records his own sensations 
 one after another, careful only to present them in 
 veracious form, without drapery or rhetoric. His 
 charm for others is precisely this, that he observes so 
 closely, and records so great a multitude of observa- 
 
Walt Whitman 109 
 
 tions, and presents them with so complete an absence 
 of prejudice, that any person who approaches his 
 writings with an unbiassed mind must discover in 
 them a reflection of some part of himself. This I 
 believe to be the secret of the extraordinary attraction 
 which these rhapsodical utterances have for most 
 emotional persons at one crisis or another in their 
 life's development. But I think criticism ought to be 
 able to distinguish between the semi-hysterical pleasure 
 of self-recognition and the sober and legitimate delights 
 of literature. 
 
 The works of .Walt Whitman cover a great many 
 pages, but the texture of them is anything but subtle. 
 When once the mind perceives what it is that Whit- 
 man says, it is found that he repeats himself over and 
 over again, and that all his " gospel " (as the odious 
 modern cant puts it) is capable of being strained into 
 very narrow limits. One *' poem " contains at least 
 the germ of all the sheaves and sheaves of writing 
 that Whitman published. There is not one aspect 
 of his nature which is not stated, or more than broadly 
 hinted at, in the single piece which he named after 
 himself, " Walt Whitman." It was appropriately 
 named, for an unclothing of himself, an invitation to 
 all the world to come and prove that, stripped of his 
 clothes, he was exactly like everybody else, was the 
 essence of his religion, his philosophy, and his poetry. 
 
 It is not unfair to concentrate attention on the 
 section of sixty pages which bears the name "Walt 
 Whitman" in the volume of his collected writings. 
 
no Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 It is very interesting reading. No truly candid person 
 meeting with it for the first time, and not previously 
 prejudiced against it, could but be struck with its 
 felicities of diction and its air of uncontrolled sincerity. 
 A young man of generous impulses could scarcely, I 
 think, read it and not fall under the spell of its sym- 
 pathetic illusions. It contains unusually many of those 
 happy phrases which are, I contend, the sole purely 
 literary possession of Whitman. It contains dozens 
 of those closely-packed lines in each of which Whitman 
 contrives to concentrate a whole picture of some action 
 or condition of Nature. It contains, perhaps, the finest, 
 certiainly the most captivating, of all Whitman's natural 
 apostrophes : 
 
 Press close, bare-bosom' d night. Press close, magnetic, nourish' 
 
 ing night ! 
 Night of south winds I night of the large few stars! 
 Still, nodding night I mad, naked summer night I 
 Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath' d earth ! 
 Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees ! 
 Earth of departed sunset / earth of the mountains, misty-topt ! 
 Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue / 
 Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river ! 
 Earth of the limpid grey of clouds, brighter and clearer for my 
 
 sake ! 
 Far-swooping, elbow* d earth 1 rich, apple-blossom' d earth ! 
 Smile, for your lover comes ! 
 
 All this represents the best side of the author ; but 
 "Walt Whitman " exhibits his bad sides as well — his 
 brutality, mis-styling itself openness, his toleration of 
 
Walt Whitman 1 1 1 
 
 the ugly and the forbidden, his terrible laxity of thought 
 and fatuity of judgment. 
 
 If he studies **Walt Whitman " carefully, a reader 
 of middle life will probably come to the conclusion 
 that the best way to classify the wholly anomalous and 
 irregular writer who produced it is to place him by 
 himself as a maker of poems in solution. I am inclined 
 to admit that in Walt Whitman we have just missed 
 receiving from the New World one of the greatest of 
 modern poets, but that we have missed it must at the 
 same time be acknowledged. To be a poet it is not 
 necessary to be a consistent and original thinker, with 
 an elaborately-balanced system of ethics. The absence 
 of intellectual quality, the superabundance of the 
 emotional, the objective, the pictorial, are no reasons 
 for undervaluing Whitman's imagination. But there 
 is one condition which distinguishes art from mere 
 amorphous expression ; that condition is the result of 
 a process through which the vague and engaging obser- 
 vations of Whitman never passed. He felt acutely 
 and accurately, his imagination was purged of external 
 impurities, he lay spread abroad in a condition of 
 literary solution. But there he remained, an expanse 
 of crystallisable substances, waiting for the structural 
 change that never came ; rich above almost all his 
 coevals in the properties of poetry, and yet, for want 
 of a definite shape and fixity, doomed to sit for ever 
 apart from the company of the Poets. 
 
 1893. 
 
COUNT LYOF TOLSTOI 
 
Count Lyof Tolstoi 
 
 It has been the misfortune of Count Tolstoi to become 
 widely known in the West of Europe at the very moment 
 when he was performing a complete change of dress. 
 The legitimate enthusiasm which his works of the ima- 
 gination might awaken has been confused with the 
 perhaps equally legitimate, but certainly much more 
 obvious and vulgar surprise at the amazing character of 
 his new social and religious views. If the alteration had 
 taken place sooner or later, it would have been pleasanter 
 for us and juster to him. If he had always written in 
 a language ^hi-b wc. cculd understand, we should long 
 ago have comprehended the nature of his literary genius, 
 and should have been less startled by his moral trans- 
 formation ; if the presentation to Europe had been de- 
 layed, we should have taken his work as a whole. But 
 in point of fact, we were constantly being assured that 
 behind the dyed curtains of that Scythian tent there sat 
 a mysterious chieftain, arrayed in all the splendours of 
 the Orient. We tear the veil aside at last, and discover 
 a gentleman /« piiris natnralibiis^ selecting a new set of 
 garments. It is true that this disturbing circumstance 
 has enormously added to the fame and success of the 
 Russian \\Titer, and that a hundred persons are found 
 
ii6 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 to discuss his nakedness to one who cares to think of 
 what he was when he was clothed. But this is Httle 
 consolation to the student of pure literature, who feels 
 inclined to drive out the social group, and to guard Count 
 Tolstoi's doors till he has wrapped himself once more 
 in raiment, whether civilised or savage. 
 
 Of the moral speculations of the great Russian 
 novelist nothing shall here be said. Most of what has 
 passed for recent criticism has occupied itself with a 
 vain and capricious agitation of Tolstoi's views on mar- 
 riage, on education, on non-resistance to authority, to 
 the exclusion of all other considerations. It would be 
 absurd to deny that some of these theories irresistibly 
 invite discussion, or that the distinguished gravity of 
 the author is not justly fascinating to an age which has 
 been exhausted and lacerated by the funniness of its 
 funny men. But it is difficult not to see, also, that 
 speculation of this kind has been pursued in one form 
 or another by every generation, that it has never yet 
 succeeded in solving the riddle of this painful earth, 
 and that in contrast to its evasiveness and intangibility, 
 the positive consideration of literature as literature has 
 a great charm. In these few words, then, Tolstoi will 
 not be treated as the prophet or saviour of society, but 
 as the writer of novels. For this extremely unpopular 
 mode of regarding him, a critic's best excuse is to recall 
 those touching and noble words written by Tourgenieff 
 in his last hours to his great successor : 
 
 " Dearest Lyof Nikolaievitch, it is long since I wrote 
 to you. I have been in bed, and it is my death-bed. I 
 
Count Lyof Tolstoi 117 
 
 cannot get well ; that is no longer to be thought of. I 
 write to you expressly to assure you how happy I have 
 been to be your contemporary, and to present to you a 
 last, a most urgent request. Dear friend, come back to 
 literary work I This gift came to you whence all gifts 
 come to us. Ah ! how happy should I be if I could 
 think that you would listen to my request. My friend, 
 great writer of our land of Russia, grant me this 
 request." 
 
 The author of Anna Karcnine has granted it in some 
 degree, but how rarely, how fitfully, with how little of 
 the artist's fire and consecration I Let us hope that in 
 a near future he will give us of the things of the spirit 
 in less niggardly a fashion. Let him remember that at 
 the present moment there is no man living from whom 
 a sane and complete work of fiction, on a large scale, 
 would be more universally welcomed. 
 
 The life of the Russian novelist has often been nar- 
 rated, but presents no features of very remarkable 
 interest. Count Lyof Nikolaievitch Tolstoi was born 
 on August 28 (o.s.), 1828, at Yasnaya Pol3^ana, an 
 estate on the road to Orel, a few miles out of Tula, in 
 the centre of Russia. This place and its suiTOundings 
 were described in a very charming paper contributed by 
 Mr. Kennen to The Century Magazine for June 1887. 
 Yasnaya Polyana has been the alpha and omega of 
 Tolstoi's life, all absences from it being of the nature of 
 
ii8 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 episodes. He has made it his sole residence for the 
 last thirty years, and it is the scene of his much talked- 
 of social experiments. 
 
 Western Europe was long under the impression that 
 Tourgenieff and Tolstoi were isolated apparitions on a 
 bare stage. But as familiarity with Russian fiction in- 
 creases in the West, we see the same structural growths 
 proceeding in Russia as in the other countries of the 
 v>/orld. The novel there, in its modern form, began to 
 exist about 1840, and Gogol, whose Dead Souls ap- 
 peared in 1842, was its creator. The "Men of the 
 Forties," as they are called, arose out of the shadow of 
 Gogol, and were young men when his book made its 
 first profound sensation. The birth dates of GontcharofF, 
 1 81 3, Tourgenieff, 1818, Pisemsky, 1820, and Dostoiefif- 
 sky, 1 82 1, explain why these four illustrious novelists 
 were aroused and fired by the publication of Dead Souls. 
 It came to them, with its realism, its deep popular sym- 
 pathy, and its strange humour, as a revelation at the 
 very moment when the brain of a young man of genius 
 is most incandescent. But Tolstoi, younger by seven 
 years than the youngest of these, did not arrive at in- 
 tellectual maturity till after the first ardour of the new 
 life had passed away. Russia, in its rapid awakening, 
 was a different place in 1850 from what it had been in 
 1840, and to understand Tolstoi aright we must distin- 
 guish him from the men of the Forties. 
 
 In endeavouring to form an idea of the literary influ- 
 ences which moulded his mind, we are likely to be more 
 perplexed than aided by the strange book called Child" 
 
Count Lvof Tolstoi 
 
 Jioody Boyhood^ Yoidhy which bears a striking relation to 
 the recently published autobiography of the infancy and 
 adolescence of Pierre Loti. In each book the portrait 
 is so different from what, one is convinced, any other 
 person, however observant and analytical, would have 
 made of the child in question, that one is dubious how 
 far the tale should be looked upon as a charming and 
 unconscious fiction. In Tolstoi the little anecdote of 
 the imaginary dream, the incidents of which by being 
 repeated, grew to seem absolutely true, and moved the 
 inventor to tears of self-pity, though given as a sign of 
 scrupulous verity in autobiography, points to a tendency 
 which is very natural and in a novelist very fortunate. 
 But a strange fact is that these semi-mythical, in- 
 tensely personal and curiously minute notes of the mind 
 of a child were not made late in life, when the memory 
 often recurs to the remotest past, but at the starting-point 
 of the writer's career. Before he had started he stopped 
 to look back, and he began in literature where most 
 old men leave off. The Childhood^ Boyhood^ YoutJi^ was 
 commenced as early as 185 1, before Tolstoi opened 
 his brief adventure as a soldier. This book appears to 
 be one of its author's favourites ; he was long caressing 
 it before it first appeared, and he has entirely remoulded 
 it once, if not twice. It is excessively ingenious, and 
 one notes with interest that the first book which attracted 
 the future agriculturist's attention was a treatise on the 
 growing of cabbages. The analysis of the feelings of 
 a nervous child has seldom been carried out in a more 
 masterly fashion. But the book is often dull, 
 
I20 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 which the author's later work can hardly be accused 
 of being. 
 
 It was Caucasia, that Wunderland of Russian senti- 
 ment and romance, which first awakened the ima- 
 gination of Tolstoi. The Vicomte de Voglie, in his 
 delightful chapter on the idealism of Russia, has shown 
 us what a Byronic fascination was exercised by the 
 moonlit gorges of the Caucasus on the poets of seventy 
 years ago. It was to a province steeped in romantic 
 melancholy, penetrated by reminiscences of Pouchkine 
 and Lermantof, that Tolstoi, a spirit of a very different 
 order, travelled in 185 1. Suddenly captured by the 
 genius of the place, he enlisted in the army, and 
 becc,me an officer of artillery in a mountain fortress 
 over the Terek. Here he began to be an author, 
 though he published none of his Caucasian studies till 
 he had left the Caucasus, on the breaking out of the 
 Turkish war, in 1853. The contrast between the 
 Asiatic and himself is the first problem which moves 
 him in the world of fiction. Now it is illustrated by 
 Olenine, the victim of ennui, who flings himself into 
 the friendship of the savage Orientals ; now by Jiline, 
 who, unwillingly, and after a gallant struggle, is cap- 
 tured and made to live among them, but ultimately 
 casts his chains aside ; now by the gross and comfort- 
 loving Kosteline, who pines away in the Tartar camp, 
 and dies. In each case, though not always so roman- 
 tically as in The Cossacks^ what interests the novelist is 
 
Count Lyof Tolstoi 121 
 
 the difference of race and instinct, rendering the inner 
 meaning of those outward trappings whose barbaric 
 picturesqueness tempts him to loiter on its details. 
 Tolstoi left the Caucasus a skilful writer, expert in the 
 conduct of a narrative, but still tinged with the blue 
 mist of romanticism. 
 
 But he had hardly started on the three years' laborious 
 campaign in which he was to learn so much of life, 
 than there was published at home a book which revealed 
 to Russian readers a new genius. Polikoiichka was 
 issued in 1854, the year after The Cossacks appeared, 
 and if it achieved a less popular success, it deserved 
 closer attention. It may be that Tolstoi, who has filled 
 wider canvasses, has never painted a genre-picture 
 more thoroughly characteristic of himself than this 
 study of manners on a large Russian estate. Poli 
 koiichka is the story of a serf, who practises as a 
 veterinary surgeon, but who is really a quack and a 
 thief, through weakness and drink, since he is not 
 essentially a bad fellow. His mistress, the Barina, q 
 sentimentalist, pities him, and believes that if he went 
 through an ordeal, on his honour, it might be the 
 saving of him. Accordingly she sends him to a neigh- 
 bouring town to fetch a large sum of money. Every 
 one, even the man's own wife, believes that he will either 
 steal it or squander it on drink. However, he starts, 
 gets the money, returns faithfully, and just before 
 reaching home loses it. Unable to face the shame of 
 this discovery, he hangs himself, and the money is 
 found, all safe, directly afterwards. 
 
122 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 We may take Polikouchka as typical of Tolstoi's 
 work at this time. We first notice that, although the 
 book is short and episodical, the author has lavished 
 upon us an astounding number of types, all sharply 
 defined. The recruiting scene in the Mir directly 
 points to the skill with which the vast spaces of War 
 and Peace were presently to be made to swarm with 
 human life. Then the power of sustained analysis of 
 the complex phenomena of character, in its stranger 
 forms, is already seen to be completely developed. 
 The mixture of vanity, cupidity, honour and stupidity 
 which riots in the brain of Polikouchka as he drives off 
 to fetch the money is described with a masterly effect, 
 and in a manner peculiar to Tolstoi. Nor is this story 
 less typical of its author in its general construction 
 than in its specific features. In later years, indeed, 
 Tolstoi rarely opens a tale with the sprightly gaiety of 
 Polikouchka^ yet he has preserved the habit — he pre- 
 serves it even in the Kreutzer Sonata — of beginning his 
 stories with a scene of an amusing nature. In Poli- 
 kouchka the tragical, the mystical element is delayed 
 longer than has since been the author's wont, but it 
 comes. The ghost of the suicide fingering about for 
 the money in Doutlov's house on the fatal night is a 
 signal for the conventionality of the tale, as a piece of 
 literature, to break up, and this book, which began so 
 gaily and with its feet so firmly planted on common 
 life, closes in a scene of wild and scarcely intelligible 
 saturnalia. 
 
 Unless I am mistaken, and no exact bibliography of 
 
Count Lyof Tolstoi 123 
 
 Tolstoi's writings seems to be at hand — the story which 
 we call Katia (and the Russians Conjugal Happiness) 
 was written while the novelist was still fighting the 
 Turks. The extraordinary volume named Sketches from 
 Sevastopol certainly belongs to this period. Totally 
 distinct as these are — the one being a study of peaceful 
 upper-class life on a Russian estate, the other reflecting 
 the agitation and bewilderment of active war — they 
 show an advance in intellectual power which takes 
 much the same direction in either case. Tolstoi is now 
 seen to be a clairvoyant of unexampled adroitness. If 
 *' adroit " be thought an adjective incompatible with 
 clairvoyance, it has at least not been used here without 
 due consideration. The peculiar quality of Tolstoi's 
 imagination seems to require this combined attribution 
 of the intentional and the accidental. His most 
 amazing feats in analysis are henceforth not strictly 
 experimental, but conjectural. The feelings of Mik- 
 hallov when the bomb burst, and he was wounded, 
 may have been experienced ; those of Praskouchine, 
 who was killed, can but have been created. Few 
 readers have not been forced to acknowledge the 
 amazing power of the passage last alluded to. But to 
 call it realism, in the ordinary sense, is to rob it of 
 half its value as a singularly lofty exercise of the 
 imagination. Yet it is precisely in this aptitude for 
 conjectural analysis that the occasion is presented for 
 ambition to o'ervault itself. It is the mind that sees 
 the non-experienced quite as clearly as the experienced, 
 which is most liable to lose consciousness of the 
 
124 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 difference between reality and unreality. The spirit 
 that " walks upon the winds with lightness " may step 
 into the cloud of mysticism without having noticed its 
 presence. 
 
 The year 1858 was a great period of awakening in 
 Russian fiction. It saw the publication of Gontcharoft's 
 masterpiece, Oblomof; Pisemsky then rose to a height 
 he was never to touch again in his great realistic novel, 
 A Thousand Souls ; Tourgenieff produced his exquisite 
 Assjaj and prepared the distinguished and pathetic 
 surprise of his Nest of Nobles. Dostoieflfsky, still away 
 in Siberia, was putting together his notes for the The 
 House of the Dead. Tolstoi, plunged for the moment 
 in the fashionable life of St. Petersburg and Moscow, 
 could not be ignorant of this sudden revival of letters, 
 nor unmoved by it. Hitherto he had been content to 
 obtain striking effects within restricted limits. If his 
 short stories had not always closed with artistic 
 regularity, it was that he felt the true observer's dis- 
 inclination to draw the strings together artificially. But 
 he could be contented with small spaces no longer. 
 His mind was now set on the production of works 
 whose proportions should be properly related to the 
 vast and complex mass of figures which was ever 
 moving in procession under his eyelids. 
 
 His next important publication. Three Deaths ^ which 
 came out in 1859, resembles a bundle of studies by a 
 great artist who contemplates a gigantic composition. 
 
Count Lyof Tolstoi 125 
 
 The opening description of the sick lady in her 
 carriage, travclHng in an atmosphere of eau-de-Cologne 
 and dust, with its undemonstrative inventory of telling 
 details, and its extreme sincerity of observation, is 
 exactly like a page, like any page, from the two great 
 novels which were to succeed it. But the volume is 
 not without faults ; of three selected deaths, two should 
 scarcely have been taken from the same class of the 
 same sex. The final picture of the conscience-smitten 
 coachman chopping a cross is not without a certain 
 vagueness. We hurry on, since a book awaits us 
 which drowns TJiree Deaths as a star is drowned in the 
 sunrise. 
 
 Tolstoi was thirty-two when he published his first 
 great novel, War and Peace ^ in 1 860. Very soon after 
 its appearance, he took himself out of society, and 
 began his retirement at Yasnaya Polyana. For fifteen 
 years the world heard comparatively little of him, 
 and then he crowned the edifice of his reputation 
 with the successive volumes oi Anna Karent'ne (iSy^- 
 77). It is by these two epics of prose fiction, 
 these massive productions, that he is mainly known. 
 By degrees the fame of these amazing books passed 
 beyond the ring of the Russian language, and now 
 most educated persons in the West of Europe have 
 read them. They dwarf all other novels by compari- 
 son. The immense area of place and time which 
 they occupy is unexampled, and the first thing which 
 strikes us on laying them down is their comprehensive 
 character. 
 
126 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 The work of no other novelist is so populous as that 
 of Tolstoi. His books seem to include the entire 
 existence of generations. In War and Peace we live 
 with the characters through nearly a quarter of a 
 century. They are young when we are introduced to 
 them ; we accompany them through a hundred vicissi- 
 tudes of disease and health, ill fortune and good, to 
 death or to old age. There is no other novelist, whose 
 name I can recall, who gives anything like this sense 
 of presenting all that moves beneath the cope of 
 heaven. Even Stendhal is dwarfed by Tolstoi, on his 
 own ground; and the Russian novelist joins to this 
 anthill of the soldier and the courtier, those other 
 worlds of Richardson, of Balzac, of Thackeray. 
 Through each of Tolstoi's two macrocosms, thronged 
 with highly vitalised personages, walks one man more 
 tenderly described and vividly presented than any of 
 the others, the figure in whom the passions of the 
 author himself are enshrined, Pierre Bezouchof in the 
 one case, Levine in the other. This sort of hero, to 
 whose glorification, however, the author makes no 
 heroic concessions, serves to give a certain solidity and 
 continuity to the massive narration. 
 
 These two books are so widely known, that in so 
 slight a sketch as this, their constitution may be taken 
 as appreciated. Their magnificent fulness of life in 
 movement, their sumptuous passages of description, 
 their poignancy in pathos and rapidity in action, their 
 unwavering devotion to veracity of impression, without 
 squalor or emphasis — these qualities have given intel- 
 
Count Lyof Tolstoi 127 
 
 lecUm] enjoyment of the highest kind to thousands of 
 Engh'sh readers. They are panoramas rather than 
 pictures, yet finished so finely and balanced so har- 
 moniously that we forget the immense scale upon which 
 they are presented, in our unflagging delight in the 
 variety and vivacity of the scene. No novelist is less 
 the slave of a peculiarity in one of his characters than 
 Tolstoi. He loves to take an undeveloped being, such 
 as Andr^ in War aiid Peace^ or Kitty Cherbatzky in 
 Anna Karcninc, and to blow upon it with all the winds 
 of heaven, patiently noting its revulsions and advances, 
 its inconsistencies and transitions, until the whole 
 metamorphosis of its moral nature is complete. There 
 is no greater proof of the extraordinary genius of Count 
 Tolstoi than this, that through the vast evolution of 
 his plots, his characters, though ever developing and 
 changing, always retain their distinct individuality. 
 The hard metal of reflected life runs ductile through 
 the hands of this giant of the imagination. 
 
 IV 
 
 In 1877 Anna Karcmne was finished, and the ap- 
 plause with which it was greeted rang from one end of 
 Russia to the other. But the author remained in un- 
 broken seclusion at Yasnaya Polyana. He began to 
 write another romance on the same colossal scale, this 
 time taking up the history of Central Europe at a point 
 somewhat subsequent to the close of War and Peace. 
 Before he had written many chapters, that crisis, that 
 
128 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 social and religious conversion ensued, which has 
 tinctured his life and work ever since. He threw his 
 novel aside, and, at first, he was swallowed up in 
 didactic activity, composing those volumes on religion, 
 education, and sociology which have created so great a 
 stir. But he has to some sHght degree, perhaps in 
 answer to TourgeniefFs dying prayer, returned to the 
 exercise of his talent, and has added new stories, 
 most of them short, and most of them eccentric or 
 mythical, to his repertory. He has composed very 
 simple tales for children and peasants, and some of 
 these are of a thrilling naiVetd. He has written, 
 for older readers, A Poor Devil and The Death of Ivan 
 Iliitch, 
 
 To readers who desire a direct introduction to the 
 work of Count Tolstoi no better volume can be recom- 
 mended than that latest mentioned. It is an unsur- 
 passed example of his naturalism, with its instinctive 
 and yet imaginative interpretation of the most secret 
 sentiments of the soul. It is piteously human; nay, 
 the outcome of it all, pushed to its logical conclusion, 
 is of a kind to break the very heart. Yet it is scarcely 
 morbid, because wholesomely observed ; nor cynical, 
 because interpenetrated with pity and love. Ivan 
 Iliitch is a successful lawyer, rising to a brilliant and 
 commanding position in the world, who sickens of an 
 obscure internal complaint, and slowly dies. His in- 
 stincts, his thoughts, are followed and evenly chronicled 
 with extreme minuteness, till all is obscured in the 
 final misery of dissolution. The feelings of the un- 
 
Count Lyof Tolstoi 129 
 
 happy wretch himself, of his wife, children, servants, 
 and friends, are rendered by Tolstoi with that curious 
 clairvoyance which we have seen to be his cardinal 
 gift. 
 
 In reflecting upon such a book as The Death of Ivan 
 Iliitch, it is natural to ask ourselves in what the realism 
 of Tolstoi consists, and how it differs from that of 
 M. Zola and Mr. Hov/ells. In the first place, their 
 habit of producing an impression by exhaustingly re- 
 cording all the details which it is possible to observe 
 is not his. Tolstoi, if they are called realists, should 
 be styled an impressionist, not in the sense used by 
 the artists of the present moment, but as Bastien 
 Lepage was an impressionist in painting. If Zola and 
 Howells fill the canvas with details to its remotest 
 corner, Tolstoi concentrates his attention upon one 
 figure or group, and renders the effect of that single 
 object with a force and minute exactitude, which is 
 positively amazing, and which far surpasses theirs. 
 Of course, a book on such a scale as War and Peace 
 would not have been conducted to a close at all if the 
 Zola method had been brought to bear upon it. But 
 an examination of Tolstoi's short tales will show that 
 even when he has no need of husbanding space he 
 adopts the same impressionist manner. With him, 
 though observation is vivid, imagination is more 
 vigorous still, and he cannot be tied down to describe 
 more than he chooses to create. 
 
 This may serve to explain why his style sometimes 
 seems so negligent, and even confused, and why his 
 
 I 
 
130 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 stories invariably present lacunce^ blank omissions 
 where the writer has simply overlooked a series of 
 events. The progress of Anna's mind, for example, 
 from after her first meeting with Wronsky to the 
 original formation of her infatuated feeling for him, is 
 a hiatus. For some reason or other, it did not interest 
 the novelist, and he blandly omitted to touch it. His 
 lapses of memory, his negligence, may likewise account 
 for the tedious and interminable length at which certain 
 episodes are treated. There are some country scenes 
 in Anna Karenine^ in the course of which the author 
 seems to have gone to sleep, and to be writing on 
 automatically. Occasionally, Tolstoi's love of what is 
 real leads him to distinct puerility, as in The Story of 
 a Horse, where the satire, and something in the very 
 tone of the narrator's voice remind us, but not favour- 
 ably, of Hans Andersen. Yet these are slight points, 
 and they simply indicate the limits of a very noble 
 genius. 
 
 The realists in Russia, as well as elsewhere, have 
 given us many good gifts — they have awakened our 
 observation, have exposed our hallucinations, have 
 shattered our absurd illusions. It is mere injustice to 
 deny that they have been seekers after truth and life, 
 and that sometimes they have touched both the one 
 and the other. But one great gift has commonly eluded 
 their grasp. In their struggle for reality and vividness, 
 they have too often been brutal, or trivial, or sordid. 
 Tolstoi is none of these. As vital as any one of them 
 all, he is what they are not — distinguished. His radical 
 
Count Lyof Tolstoi 131 
 
 optimism, his belief in the beauty and nobihty of the 
 human race, preserve him from the Scylla and the 
 Charybdis of naturaHsm, from squalor and insipidity. 
 They secure for his best work that quality of personal 
 distinction which does more than anything else to give 
 durability to imaginative literature. 
 
 1890. 
 
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI 
 
Christina Rossetti 
 
 Woman, for some reason which seems to have 
 escaped the philosopher, has never taken a very pro- 
 minent position in the history of poetry. But she has 
 rarely been absent altogether from any great revival oi 
 poetic literature. The example of her total absence 
 which immediately flies to the recollection is the most 
 curious of all. That Shakespeare should have had no 
 female rival, that the age in which music burdened 
 every bough, and in which poets made their appear- 
 ance in hundreds, should have produced not a solitary 
 authentic poetess, even of the fifth rank, this is curious 
 indeed. But it is as rare as curious, for though women 
 have not often taken a very high position on Parnassus, 
 they have seldom thus wholly absented themselves. 
 Even in the iron age of Rome, where the Muse seemed 
 to bring forth none but male children, we find, bound 
 up with the savage verses of Juvenal and Persius, those 
 seventy lines of pure and noble indignation against the 
 brutality of Domitian which alone survive to testify to 
 the genius of Sulpicia. 
 
 If that distinguished lady had come down to us in 
 seventy thousand verses instead of seventy lines, would 
 her fame have been greatly augmented ? Probably 
 
136 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 not. So far as we can observe, the strength of the 
 great poet-women has been in their selection. Not 
 a single poetess whose fame is old enough to base a 
 theory upon has survived in copious and versatile 
 numbers. Men like Dryden and Victor Hugo can- 
 strike every chord of the lyre, essay every mode and 
 species of the art, and impress us by their bulk and 
 volume. One very gifted and ambitious Englishwoman 
 of the last generation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 
 essayed to do the same. But her success, it must be 
 admitted, grows every day more dubious. Where she 
 strove to be passionate she was too often hysterical ; 
 a sort of scream spoils the effect of all her full tirades. 
 She remains readable mainly where she is exquisite, 
 and one small volume would suffice to contain her pro- 
 bable bequest to posterity. 
 
 It is no new theory that women, in order to succeed 
 in poetry, must be brief, personal, and concentrated. 
 This was recognised by the Greek critics themselves. 
 Into that delicious garland of the poets which was 
 woven by Meleager to be hung outside the gate of the 
 Gardens of the Hesperides he admits but two women 
 from all the centuries of Hellenic song. Sappho is 
 there, indeed, because " though her flowers were few, 
 they were all roses," and, almost unseen, a single 
 virginal shoot of the crocus bears the name of Erinna. 
 That was all that womanhood gave of durable poetry 
 to the literature of antiquity. A critic, writing five 
 hundred years after her death, speaks of still hearing 
 the swan-note of Erinna clear above the jangling chatter 
 
Christina Rossetti 137 
 
 of the jays, and of still thinking those three hundred 
 hexameter verses sung by a girl of nineteen as lovely 
 as the loveliest of Homer's. Even at the time of the 
 birth of Christ, Erinna's writings consisted of what 
 could be printed on half a dozen pages of this volume. 
 The whole of her extant work, and of Sappho's too, 
 could now be pressed into a newspaper column. But 
 their fame lives on, and of Sappho, at least, enough 
 survives to prove beyond a shadow of doubt the lofty 
 inspiration of her genius. She is the type of the 
 woman-poet who exists not by reason of the variety or 
 volume of her work, but by virtue of its intensity, its 
 individuality, its artistic perfection. 
 
 At no time was it more necessary to insist on this 
 truth than it is to-day. The multiplication of books of 
 verse, the hackneyed character of all obvious notation 
 of life and feeling, should, one would fancy, tend to 
 make our poets more exiguous, more concise, and more 
 trimly girt. There are few men nowadays from whom 
 an immense flood of writing can be endured without 
 fatigue ; few who can hold the trumpet to their lips for 
 hours in the market-place without making a desert 
 around them. Yet there never was a time when the 
 pouring out of verse was less restrained within bounds. 
 Everything that occurs to the poet seems, to-da}', to 
 be worth writing down and printing. The result is 
 the neglect of really good and charming work, which 
 misses all effect because it is drowned in stuff that is 
 second- or third-rate. The women who write, in 
 particular, pursued by that commercial fervour which is 
 
138 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 so curious a feature of our new literary life, dnd which 
 sits so inelegantly on a female figure, are in a ceaseless 
 hurry to work off and hurry away into oblivion those 
 qualities of their style which might, if seriously and 
 coyly guarded, attract a permanent attention. 
 
 Among the women who have written verse in the 
 Victorian age there is not one by whom this reproach 
 is less deserved than it is by Miss Rossetti. Severely 
 true to herself, an artist of conscientiousness as high as 
 her skill is exquisite, she has never swept her fame to 
 sea in a flood of her own outpourings. In the follow- 
 ing pages I desire to pay no more than a just tribute of 
 respect to one of the most perfect poets of the age — 
 not one of the most powerful, of course, nor one of the 
 most epoch-making, but to one of the most perfect — 
 to a writer toward whom we may not unreasonably 
 expect that students of English literature in the twenty- 
 fourth century may look back as the critics of Alexandria 
 did toward Sappho and toward Erinna. 
 
 So much has been written, since the untimely death 
 of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, on the circumstances of his 
 family history, that it is not requisite to enter very 
 fully into that subject in the present sketch of his 
 youngest sister. It is well known that the Italian poet 
 Gabriele Rossetti, after a series of romantic adventures 
 endured in the cause of liberty, settled in London, and 
 married the daughter of another Italian exile, G. 
 Polidori, Lord Byron's physician. From this stock, 
 three-fourths of which was purely Italian, there sprang 
 four children, of whom Dante Gabriel was the second, 
 
Christina Rossetti 139 
 
 and Christina Gcorgina, born in December, i(S30, the 
 youngest. There was nothing in the training of these 
 children which foreshadowed their various distinction 
 in the future ; although the transplanted blood ran 
 quicker, no doubt, in veins that must now be called 
 English, not Italian, even as the wine-red anemone 
 broke into flower from the earth that was carried to 
 the Campo Santo out of Palestine. 
 
 We cannot fathom these mysteries of transplantation. 
 No doubt a thousand Italian families might settle in 
 London, and their children be born as deaf to melody 
 and as blind to Nature as their playfellows long native 
 to Hoxton or Clerkenwell. Yet it is not possible to 
 hold it quite an accident that this thousand and first 
 family discovered in London soil the precise chemical 
 qualities that made its Italian fibre break into clusters 
 of blossom. Gabriel Rossetti, both as poet and painter, 
 remained very Italian fo the last, but his sister is a 
 thorough Englishwoman. Unless I make a great mis- 
 take, she has scarcely visited Italy, and in her poetry 
 the landscape and the observation of Nature are not 
 only English, they are so thoroughly local that I doubt 
 whether there is one touch in them all which proves 
 her to have strayed more than fifty miles from London 
 in any direction. I have no reason for saying so 
 beyond internal evidence, but I should be inclined 
 to suggest that the county of Sussex alone is 
 capable of having supplied all the imagery which Miss 
 Rossetti's poems contain. Her literary repertory, 
 too, seems purely English ; there is hardly a solitary 
 
140 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 touch in her work which betrays her transalpine 
 parentage. 
 
 In a letter to myself, in words which she kindly lets 
 me give to the public, Miss Rossetti has thus summed 
 up some valuable impressions of her earliest bias toward 
 writing : 
 
 '' For me, as well as for Gabriel, whilst our ' school' 
 was everything, it was no one definite thing. I, as 
 the least and last of the group, may remind you that 
 besides the clever and cultivated parents who headed 
 us all, I in particular beheld far ahead of myself the 
 clever sister and two clever brothers who were a little 
 (though but a little) my seniors. And as to acquire- 
 ments, I lagged out of all proportion behind them, and 
 have never overtaken them to this day." 
 
 I interrupt my distinguished friend to remark that, 
 even if we do not take this modest declaration with a 
 grain of salt, it is interesting to find one more example 
 of the fact that the possession of genius by no means 
 presupposes a nature apt for what are called acquire- 
 ments. Miss Rossetti proceeds : 
 
 *' If any one thing schooled me in the direction of 
 poetry, it was perhaps the delightful idle liberty to 
 prowl all alone about my grandfather's cottage-grounds 
 some thirty miles from London, entailing in my child- 
 hood a long stage-coach journey ! This privilege came 
 to an end when I was eight years old, if not earlier. 
 The grounds were quite small, and on the simplest 
 scale — but in those days to me they were vast, varied, 
 worth exploring. After those charming holidays ended 
 
Christina Rossetti 141 
 
 I remained pent up in London till I was a great girl of 
 fourteen, when delight reawakened at the sight of 
 primroses in a railway cutting, — a prelude to many 
 lovely country sights." 
 
 My impression is that a great deal of judicious 
 neglect was practised in the Rossetti family, and that, 
 like so many people of genius, the two poets, brother 
 and sister, contrived to evade the educational mill. 
 From the lips of Miss Christina herself I have it that 
 all through her early girlhood she lay as a passive 
 weight on the hands of those who invited her to explore 
 those bosky groves called arithmetic, grammar, and 
 the use of the globes. In Mr. R. L. Stevenson's little 
 masterpiece of casuistry called On Idlers and Idlings 
 he has discussed the temper of mind so sympathetically 
 that I will say no more than this, that Philistia never 
 will comprehend the certain fact that, to genius, Chapter 
 VI., which is primroses in a railway cutting, is often 
 far more important than Chapter XIII., which happens 
 to be the subjunctive mood. But for these mysteries 
 of education I must refer the ingenuous reader to Mr. 
 Stevenson's delightful pages. 
 
 From her early childhood Miss Rossetti seems to 
 have prepared herself for the occupation of her life, 
 the art of poetry. When she was eleven her verses 
 began to be noticed and preserved, and an extremely 
 rare little volume, the very cynosure of Victorian 
 bibliography, permits us to observe the development of 
 her talent. One of the rarest of books — when it occa- 
 sionally turns up at sales it commands an extravagant 
 
142 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 price — is Verses by Christina G. Rosseth] privately 
 printed in 1847, at the press of her grandfather Mr. G. 
 Polidori, " at No. 15, Park Village East, Regent's Park, 
 London." This little volume of sixty-six pages, dedi- 
 cated to the author's mother, and preceded by a pretty 
 little preface signed by Mr. Polidori, is a curious revela- 
 tion of the evolution of the poet's genius. There is 
 hardly one piece in it which Miss Rossetti would choose 
 to reprint in a collected edition of her works, but there 
 are many which possess the greatest interest to a 
 student of her mature style. The earliest verses — 
 since all are dated — show us merely the child's desire 
 for expression in verse, for experiment in rhyme and 
 meter. Gradually we see the buddings of an individual 
 manner, and in the latest piece, '* The Dead City," the 
 completion of which seems to have led to the printing 
 of the little collection, we find the poet assuming some- 
 thing of her adult manner. Here are some stanzas 
 from this rarest of booklets, which will be new, in every 
 probability, to all my readers, and in these we detect, 
 unmistakably, the accents of the future author of 
 Goblin Market: 
 
 In green emerald baskets were 
 Sun-red apples^ streaked and fair s 
 Here the nectarine and peach. 
 And ripe plum lay, and on each 
 The bloom rested everywhere. 
 
 Grapes were hanging overhead^ 
 Purple, pale^ and ruby-red, 
 
Christina Rossetti 143 
 
 And in the panniers all around 
 Yellow melons shone ^ fresh-found. 
 With the dew upon them spread. 
 
 And the apricot and pear. 
 And the pulpy fig were there. 
 
 Cherries and dark mulberries^ 
 
 Bunchy currants, strawberries. 
 And the lemon wan and fair. 
 
 By far the best and most characteristic of all her 
 girlish verses, however, are those contained in a long 
 piece entitled " Divine and Human Pleading," dated 
 1846. It is a pleasure to be the first to publish a 
 passage which the author needs not blush to own after 
 nearly fifty years, every stanza of which bears the 
 stamp of her peculiar manner : 
 
 A woman stood beside his bed : 
 
 Her breath was fragrance all ; 
 Round her the light was very bright, 
 
 The air was musical. 
 
 Her footsteps shone upon the stars, 
 
 Her robe was spotless white ; ' 
 Her breast was radiant with the Cross, 
 
 Her head with living light. 
 
 Her eyes beamed with a sacred fire. 
 
 And on her shoulders fair. 
 From underneath her golden crown. 
 
 Clustered her golden hair. 
 
144 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Tet on her bosom her white hands 
 
 Were folded quietly : 
 Yet was her glorious head bowed low 
 
 In deep humility. 
 
 In these extracts from the volume of 1847 we see 
 more than the germ ; we see the imperfect development 
 of two qualities which have particularly characterised 
 the poetry of Miss Rossetti — in the first an entirely 
 direct and vivid mode of presenting to us the impression 
 of richly coloured physical objects, a feat in which she 
 sometimes rivals Keats and Tennyson ; and in the 
 second a brilliant simplicity in the conduct of episodes 
 of a visionary character, and a choice of expression 
 which is exactly in keeping with these, a sort of Tuscan 
 candour, as of a sacred picture in which each saint or 
 angel is robed in a dress of one unbroken colour. 
 These two qualities combined, in spite of cheir apparent 
 incompatibility — an austere sweetness coupled with a 
 luscious and sensuous brightness — to form one side of 
 Miss Rossetti's curious poetic originality. 
 
 Three years later, in 1850, she was already a finished 
 poet. That charming and pathetic failure. The Germ^ 
 a forlorn little periodical which attempted to emanate 
 from the new group of Preraphaelites, as they called 
 themselves, counted her among its original contri- 
 butors. Her brother Gabriel, indeed, who had already 
 written, in its earliest form, his remarkable poem of 
 The Blessed Damozel, was the central force and prime 
 artificer of the movement, which had begun about a 
 
Christina Rossetti 145 
 
 year before. It was a moment of transition in English 
 poetry. The old race was dying in its last representa- 
 tive, Wordsworth. Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Browning, Miss 
 Barrett were the main figures of the day, while the 
 conscience of young men and women addicted to verse 
 was troubled with a variety of heresies, the malignity 
 of which is hardly to be realised by us after fifty years. 
 Mr. Bailey's Festus was a real power for evil, strong 
 enough to be a momentary snare to the feet of Tenny- 
 son in writing Maud, and even of Browning. A host 
 of **Spasmodists," as they were presently called, suc- 
 ceeded in appalling the taste of the age with their vast 
 and shapeless tragedies, or monodramas. 
 
 Then, with a different voice, but equally far removed 
 from the paths of correct tradition in verse, came Clough, 
 singing in slovenly hexameters of Oxford and the plea- 
 sures of radical undergraduates in highland bothies. 
 Clough, with his hold on reality, and his sympathetic 
 modern accent, troubled the Preraphaelites a little ; they 
 were less moved by a far more pure and exquisite music, 
 a song as of Simonides himself, which also reached them 
 from Oxford, when Matthew Arnold, in 1849, made 
 his first appearance with his lovely and long neglected 
 Strayed Reveller. Mr. Coventry Patmore, with his 
 Poems of 1844, was a recognised elder brother of their 
 own, and almost everything else which was to be well 
 done in verse for many years was to arise from among 
 themselves, or in emulation of them. So that never 
 was periodical better named than The Germ, the seed 
 which put tortn two cotyledons, and then called itself 
 
 K 
 
146 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Aii: and Letters; and put lorth two more little leaves, 
 and then seemed to die. 
 
 Among the anonymous contributions to the first 
 number of The Germ — that for January, 1850 — are two 
 which we know to be Miss Rossetti's. These are, 
 " Where Sunless Rivers Weep," and " Love, Strong 
 as Death, is Dead." In the February number, under 
 the pseudonym of Ellen Alleyn, she printed "A Pause 
 of Thought," the song, " Oh, Roses for the Flush of 
 Youth," and " I said of Laughter, It is Vain." To the 
 March number, then styled Art and Letters^ Ellen 
 Alleyn contributed a long piece called '' Repining," 
 which does not seem to have been reprinted, and 
 *' Sweet Death " (" The Sweetest Blossoms Die "). To 
 the fourth and last number, in which an alien and far 
 more commonplace influence may be traced than in the 
 others, she contributed nothing. Of her seven pieces, 
 however, printed in The Germ in 1850, when she was 
 twenty, there are five (if we omit **A Pause of 
 Thought" and "Repining") which rank to this day 
 among her very finest lyrics, and display her style as 
 absolutely formed. Though the youngest poet of the 
 confraternity, she appears indeed in The Germ as the 
 most finished, and even, for the moment, the most 
 promising, since her brother Gabriel, if the author of 
 The Blessed Damozel, was also responsible for those 
 uncouth Flemish studies in verse which he very wisely 
 refused in later years to own or to republish. 
 
 Time passed, and the obscure group of boys and 
 girls who called themselves Preraphaelites found them- 
 
Christina Rossetti 147 
 
 selves a centre of influence and curiosity. In poetry, 
 as in painting and sculpture, they conquered, and more 
 readily, perhaps, in their pupils than in themselves. 
 The first independent publications of the school, at 
 least, came from visitors who had been children in 
 1850. These books were scarcely noticed by the 
 public ; if Mr. Morris's Defence of Guinevere attracted 
 a few readers in 1858, Mr. Swinburne's Queeji Mother 
 fell still-born from the press in i860. These prepared 
 the way for real and instantaneous successes — for Miss 
 Rossetti's Goblin Market in 1862, for Mr. Woolner's 
 My Beautiful Lady \vi 1863, for Mr. Swinburne's dazzling 
 Atalanta in Calydon in 1865. At last, in 1870, there 
 tardily appeared, after such expectation and tiptoe 
 curiosity as have preceded no other book in our gene- 
 ration, the Poems of Gabriel Rossetti. 
 
 It is with these poets that Miss Rossetti takes her 
 historical position, and their vigour and ambition had a 
 various influence upon her style. On this side there 
 can be no doubt that association with men so Learned 
 and eager, so daring in experiment, so well equipped 
 in scholarship, gave her an instant and positive advan- 
 tage. By nature she would seem to be of a cloistered 
 and sequestered temper, and her genius was lifted on 
 this wave of friendship to heights which it would not 
 have dreamed of attempting alone. On the other hand, 
 it is possible that, after the first moment, this associa- 
 tion with the strongest male talent of the time has not 
 been favourable to public appreciation of her work. 
 Critics have taken for granted that she was a satellite, 
 
148 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 and have been puzzled to notice her divergences from 
 the type. Of these divergences the most striking is the 
 religious one. Neither Gabriel Rossetti, nor Mr. Swin- 
 burne, nor Mr. Morris has shown any sympathy with, 
 or any decided interest in, the tenets of Protestantism. 
 Now Miss Christina Rossetti's poetry is not merely 
 Christian and Protestant, it is Anglican ; nor her divine 
 works only, but her secular also, bear the stamp of 
 uniformity with the doctrines of the Church of England. 
 What is very interesting in her poetry is the union of 
 this fixed religious faith with a hold upon physical 
 beauty and the richer parts of Nature which allies her 
 with her brother and with their younger friends. She 
 does not shrink from strong delineation of the pleasures 
 of life even when she is denouncing them. In one of 
 the most austere of her sacred pieces, she describes the 
 Children of the World in these glowing verses : 
 
 Milk-white, wine-fiushed, among the vines ^ 
 Up and down leaping^ to and fro. 
 Most glad, most full, made strong with wines y 
 Blooming as peaches fear led with dew, 
 Their golden windy hair afloat, 
 Love-music warbling in their throat, 
 Toung men and women come and go. 
 
 There is no Hterary hypocrisy here, no pretence that 
 the apple of life is full of ashes ; and this gives a start- 
 ling beauty, the beauty of artistic contrast, to the poet's 
 studies in morality. Miss Rossetti, indeed, is so 
 didactic in the undercurrent of her mind, so anxious to 
 
Christina Rossetti 149 
 
 adorn her tale with a religious moral, that she needs 
 all her art, all her vigorous estimate of physical love- 
 liness, to make her poetry delightful as poetry. That 
 she does make it eminently delightful merely proves 
 her extraordinary native gift. The two long pieces she 
 has written, her two efforts at a long breath, are 
 sustained so well as to make us regret that she has not 
 put out her powers in the creation of a still more com- 
 plete and elaborated composition. Of these two poems 
 Goblin Market is by far the more popular ; the qther, 
 The Princess Progress, v/hich appeared in 1866, has 
 never attracted such attention as it deserves. 
 
 It is not necessary to describe a poem so well known 
 to every lover of verse as Goblin Market. It is one of 
 the very few purely fantastic poems of recent times 
 which have really kept up the old tradition of humoresque 
 literature. Its witty and fantastic conception is em- 
 broidered with fancies, descriptions, peals of laughing 
 music, which clothe it as a queer Japanese figure may 
 be clothed with brocade, so that the entire effect at last 
 is beautiful and harmonious without ever having ceased 
 to be grotesque. I confess that while I dimly perceive 
 the underlying theme to be a didactic one, and nothing 
 less than the sacrifice of self by a sister to recuperate a 
 sister's virtue, I cannot follow the parable through all its 
 delicious episodes. Like a Japanese work of art, again, 
 one perceives the general intention, and one is satisfied 
 with the beauty of all the detail, without comprehending 
 or wishing to comprehend every part of the execution. 
 For instance, the wonderful scene in which Lizzie sits 
 
150 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 beleaguered by the goblins, and receives with hard-shut 
 mouth all the syrups that they squeeze against her skin 
 — this from the point of view of poetry is perfect, and 
 needs no apology or commentary; but its place in the 
 parable it would, surely, be extremely hard to find. 
 It is therefore, astonishing to me that the general public, 
 that strange and unaccountable entity, has chosen to 
 prefer Goblin Market, which we might conceive to be 
 written for poets alone, to The Prince's Progress, where 
 the parable and the teaching are as clear as noonday. 
 The prince is a handsome, lazy fellow, who sets out late 
 upon his pilgrimage, loiters in bad company by the 
 way, is decoyed by light loves, and the hope of life, 
 and the desire of wealth, and reaches his destined 
 bride at last, only to find her dead. This has an obvious 
 moral, but it is adorned with verse of the very highest 
 romantic beauty. Every claim which criticism has to 
 make for the singular merit of Miss Rossetti might be 
 substantiated from this little-known romance, from 
 which I must resist the pleasure of quoting more than 
 a couple of stanzas descriptive of daybreak : 
 
 jlt the death of night and the birth of day ^ 
 
 When the owl left off his sober play, 
 
 And the bat hung himself out of the way,-^ 
 
 Woke the song of mavis and merle^ 
 And heaven put off its hodden grey 
 For mother-d -pearl. 
 
 Peeped up daisies here and there^ 
 Here^ there^ and everywhere : 
 
Christina Rossetti 151 
 
 Rose a hopeful lark in the air^ 
 
 Spreading out towards the sun his breast ; 
 While the moon set solemn and fair 
 Away in the West. 
 
 With the apparent exceptions of Goblin Market and 
 The Princess Progress, both of which indeed are of a 
 lyrical nature, Miss Rossetti has written only lyrics. 
 All poets are unequal, except the bad ones, who are 
 uniformly bad. Miss Rossetti indulges in the privilege 
 which Wordsworth, Burns, and so many great masters 
 have enjoyed, of writing extremely flat and dull poems 
 at certain moments, and of not perceiving that they are 
 dull or flat. She does not erf in being mediocre ; her 
 l3nncs are bad or good, and the ensuing remarks deal 
 with that portion only of her poems with which criticism 
 is occupied in surveying work so admirably original as 
 hers, namely, that which is worthy of her reputation. 
 Her lyrics, then, are eminent for their glow of colour- 
 ing, their vivid and novel diction, and for a certain 
 penetrating accent, whether in joy or pain, which rivets 
 the attention. Her habitual tone is one of melancholy 
 reverie, the pathos of which is strangely intensified by 
 her appreciation of beauty and pleasure. There is not 
 a chord of the minor key in " A Birthday," and yet the 
 impression which its cumulative ecstasy leaves upon 
 the nerves is almost pathetic : 
 
 My heart is like a singing- bird 
 Whose nest is in a watered shoot; 
 
152 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 My heart is like an apple-tree 
 
 Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit ; 
 My heart is like a rainbow-shell 
 
 That paddles in a halcyon sea; 
 My heart is gladder than all these 
 
 Because my love is come to me. 
 
 Raise me a dais of silk and down ; 
 
 Hang it with vair and purple dyes s 
 Carve it in doves and pomegranates. 
 
 And peacocks with a hundred eyes ; 
 Work it in gold and silver grapes^ 
 
 In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys ; 
 Because the birthday of my life 
 
 Is come, my love is come to me. 
 
 It is very rarely, indeed, that the poet strikes so jubilant 
 a note as this. Her customary music is sad, often 
 poignantly sad. Her lyrics have that desideriiim^ that 
 obstinate longing for something lost out of life, which 
 Shelley's have, although her Christian faith gives her 
 regret a more resigned and sedate character than his 
 possesses. In the extremely rare gift of song-writing 
 Miss Rossetti has been singularly successful. Of the 
 poets of our time she stands next to Lord Tennyson in 
 this branch of the art, in the spontaneous and complete 
 quality of her lieder^ and in their propriety for the purpose 
 of being sung. At various times this art has flourished 
 in our race ; eighty years ago, most of the poets could 
 write songs, but it is almost a lost art in our generation. 
 The songs of our living poets are apt to be over- 
 
Christina Rossetti 153 
 
 polished or under-polished, so simple as to be bald, or 
 else so elaborate as to be wholly unsuitable for singing. 
 But such a song as this is not unworthy to be classed 
 with the melodies of Shakespeare, of Burns, of Shelley : 
 
 Oh^ roses for the jiush of youth. 
 
 And laurel for the perfect prime ; 
 But pluck an ivy-branch for me 
 
 Grown old before my time. 
 
 Oh, violets for the grave of youth. 
 
 And bay for those dead in their prime ; 
 
 Give me the withered leaves I chose 
 Before in the old time. 
 
 Her music is very delicate, and it is so small praise 
 to her that she it is who, of hving verse-writers, has 
 left the strongest mark on the metrical nature of that 
 miraculous artificer of verse, Mr. Swinburne. In his 
 Poems and Ballads, as other critics have long ago 
 pointed out, as was shown when that volume first 
 appeared, several of Miss Rossetti's discoveries were 
 transferred to his more scientific and elaborate system 
 of harmonies, and adapted to more brilliant effects. 
 The reader of Mr. Swinburne would judge that of all 
 his immediate contemporaries Miss Rossetti and the 
 late Mr. FitzGerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam, 
 had been those who had influenced his style the most. 
 Miss Rossetti, however, makes no pretence to elaborate 
 metrical effects ; she is even sometimes a little na'ive, 
 a little careless, in her rough, rhymeless endings, and 
 
154 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 metrically her work was better in her youth than it 
 has been since. 
 
 The sonnets present points of noticeable interest. 
 They are few, but they are of singular excellence. 
 They have this peculiarity, that many of them are 
 objective. Now the great bulk of good sonnets is 
 purely subjective — occupied with reverie, with regret, 
 with moral or rehgious enthusiasm. Even the cele- 
 brated sonnets of Gabriel Rossetti will be found to be 
 mainly subjective. On the question of the relative merit 
 of the sonnets of the brother and the sister, I hold a view 
 in which I believe that few will at present coincide ; 
 I am certain Miss Rossetti herself will not. If she 
 honours me by reading these pages, she may possibly 
 recollect a conversation, far more important to me of 
 course than to her, which we held in 1870, soon after 
 I had first the privilege of becoming known to her. I 
 was venturing to praise her sonnets, when she said, 
 with the sincerity of evident conviction, that they 
 ** could only be admired before Gabriel, by printing his 
 in the Fortnightly Review, showed the source of their 
 inspiration." I was sure then, and I am certain now, 
 that she was wrong. The sonnets are not the product 
 of, they do not even bear any relation to those of, her 
 brother. 
 
 Well do I recollect the publication of these sonnets 
 of Gabriel Rossetti, in 1869, when, at a moment when 
 curiosity regarding the mysterious painter-poet was at 
 its height, they suddenly blossomed forth in a certain 
 number of the Fortnightly Review^ in whose solemn 
 
Christina Rossetti 155 
 
 pages we were wont to see nothing lighter or more 
 literary than esoteric politics and the prose mysteries 
 of positivism. We were dazzled by their Italian 
 splendour of phraseology, amazed that such sonorous 
 anapests, that such a burst of sound, should be caged 
 within the sober limits of the sonnet, fascinated by 
 the tenderness of the long-drawn amorous rhetoric ; 
 but there were some of us who soon recovered an 
 equilibrium of taste, in which it seemed that the 
 tradition of the English sonnet, its elegance of phrase, 
 its decorum of movement, were too rudely dis;^laced by 
 this brilliant Italian intruder, and that underneath the 
 melody and the glowing diction, the actual thought, 
 the valuable and intelligible residue of poetry, was too 
 often much more thin than Rossetti allowed it to be 
 in the best of his other poems. As to Gabriel Rossetti's 
 sonnets being his own best work, as has been asserted, 
 I for one must entirely and finally disagree. I believe 
 that of all his poetry they form the section which will 
 be the first to tarnish. Quite otherwise is it with Miss 
 Christina Rossetti. It is in certain of her objective 
 sonnets that her touch is most firm and picturesque, 
 her intelligence most weighty, and her style most 
 completely characteristic. The reader need but turn 
 to " After Death," "On the Wing," "Venus's Looking- 
 Glass" (in the volume of 1875), and the marvellous 
 **A Triad"* to concede the truth of this ; while in the 
 
 ♦ Why has Miss Rossetti allowed this piece, one of the gems of the volume 
 of 1862, to drop out of her collected poems? 
 
156 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 more obvious subjective manner of sonnet-writing she 
 is one of the most successful poets of our time. In 
 " The World," where she may be held to come closest to 
 her brother as a sonneteer, she seems to me to surpass 
 him. 
 
 From the first a large section of Miss Rossetti's work 
 has been occupied with sacred and devotional themes. 
 Through this most rare and difficult department of the 
 art, which so few essay without breaking on the Scylla 
 of doctrine on the one hand, or being whirled in the 
 Charybdis of commonplace dulness on the other, she 
 has steered with extraordinary success. Her sacred 
 poems are truly sacred, and yet not unpoetical. As a 
 religious poet of our time she has no rival but Cardinal 
 Newman, and it could only be schismatic prejudice or 
 absence of critical faculty which should deny her a 
 place, as a poet, higher than that of our exquisite master 
 of prose. To find her exact parallel it is at once her 
 strength and her snare that we must go back to the 
 middle of the seventeenth century. She is the sister of 
 George Herbert ; she is of the family of Crashaw, of 
 Vaughan, of Wither. The metrical address of Herbert 
 has been perilously attractive to her ; the broken stanzas 
 of " Consider " or of " Long Barren " remind us of the 
 age when pious aspirations took the form of wings, or 
 hour-glasses, or lamps of the temple. The most thrill- 
 ing and spirited of her sacred poems have been free 
 from these Marini-like subtleties. There is only what 
 is best in the quaint and fervent school of Herbert 
 visible in such pieces as **The Three Enemies," *'A 
 
Christina Rossetti 157 
 
 Rose Plant in Jericho," " Passing Away, saith the World," 
 and ** Up Hill." Still more completely satisfactory, 
 perhaps, is " Amor Mundi," first included in the Poems 
 of 1875, which takes rank as one of the most solemn, 
 imaginative, and powerful lyrics on a purely religious 
 subject ever printed in England. 
 
 These critical and biographical remarks were mainly 
 written in 1882, but not printed until 1893. They were 
 undertaken at the suggestion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
 who was kind enough to consider that I had an appre- 
 ciation of his sister such as is more common now than 
 fourteen years ago. They were scarcely finished when 
 the news came of his death, and in the agitation pro- 
 duced by that event, I thought it better to put aside for 
 a time my criticism of Christina. 
 
 It will, perhaps, be not inappropriate for me to record 
 here my few personal recollections of this illustrious 
 lady. It was not my privilege to meet her more than 
 some dozen times in the flesh, and those times mainly 
 in the winter of 1870-71. But on most of those occa- 
 sions I had the good fortune to converse with her for a 
 long while ; and up to a few months before her death 
 we corresponded at not particularly distant intervals. 
 She is known to the world, and very happily known, by 
 her brother's portraits of her, and in particular by the 
 singularly beautiful chalk drawing in profile, dated i Z66. 
 I think that tasteful arrangement of dress might have 
 made her appear a noble and even a romantic figure so 
 
158 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 late as 1870, but, as I suppose, an ascetic or almost 
 methodistical reserve caused her to clothe herself in a 
 style, or with an absence of style, which was really 
 distressing; her dark hair was streaked across her olive 
 forehead, and turned up in a chignon ; the high stiff 
 dress ended in a hard collar and plain brooch, the 
 extraordinarily ordinary skirt sank over a belated crino- 
 line, and these were inflictions hard to bear from the 
 high-priestess of PreraphaeHtism. When it is added 
 that her manner, from shyness, was of a portentious 
 solemnity, that she had no small talk whatever, and 
 that the common topics of the day appeared to be 
 entirely unknown to her, it will be understood that she 
 was considered highly formidable by the young and the 
 flighty. I have seen her sitting alone, in the midst of 
 a noisy drawing-room, like a pillar of cloud, a Sibyl 
 whom no one had the audacity to approach. 
 
 Yet a kinder or simpler soul, or one less concentrated 
 on self, or of a humbler sweetness, never existed. And 
 to an enthusiast, who broke the bar of conventional 
 chatter, and ventured on real subjects, her heart seemed 
 to open like an unsealed fountain. The heavy lids of 
 her weary-looking, bistred, Italian eyes would lift and 
 display her ardour as she talked of the mysteries of 
 poetry and religion. My visits to her, in her mother's 
 house, 56 Euston Square, were abruptly brought to a 
 close. On May I, 1 87 1, I received a note from her elder 
 sister Maria warning me not to dine with them on the 
 following Tuesday, as her sister was suddenly and 
 alarmingly ill. This was, in fact, the mysterious com- 
 
Christina Rossetti 159 
 
 plaint which thenceforth kept Christina bedridden, and 
 sometimes at the point of death, for two years. She 
 recovered, but the next time I saw her — she was well 
 enough to be working in the British Museum in the 
 summer of 1873 — she was so strangely altered as to be 
 scarcely recognisable. 
 
 By degrees, to my great satisfaction, Miss Christina 
 came to look upon me as in some little sense her 
 champion in the press. *'The pen you use for me has 
 always a soft rather than a hard nib," she said, and in 
 truth, whenever I found an opportunity of praising her 
 pure and admirable poems, I was not slow to employ 
 it. That I w^as not exempt, however, from an occasional 
 peck even from this gentlest of turtle-doves, a letter 
 (written in December 1 875) reminds me. I had reviewed 
 somewhere the first collected edition of her Pocms^ 
 and I had ventured to make certain reservations. 
 There are some points of valuable self-analysis which 
 make a part of this letter proper to be quoted here : 
 
 " Save me from my friends I You are certainly up 
 in your subject, and as I might have fared worse in 
 other hands I will not regret that rival reviewer [jMr. 
 Theodore Watts] who was hindered from saying his 
 say. As to the lamented early lyrics, I do not suppose 
 myself to be the person least tenderly reminiscent of 
 them [I had grumbled at the excision of some admirable 
 favourites] ; but it at any rate appears to be the 
 commoner fault amongst verse-writers to write what is 
 not worth writing, than to suppress what would merit 
 hearers. I for my part am a great believer in the 
 
i6o Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 genuine poetic impulse belonging (very often) to the 
 spring and not to the autumn of life, and some estab- 
 lished reputations fail to shake me in this opinion ; at 
 any rate, if so one feels the possibility to stand in 
 one's own case, then I vote that the grace of silence 
 succeed the grace of song. By all which I do not 
 bind myself to unbroken silence, but meanwhile I 
 defend my position — or, you may retort, I do not 
 defend it. By-the-by, your upness does not prevent my 
 protesting that Edith and Maggie did not dream or even 
 nap ; Flora did ; but have I not caught you napping ? 
 Do, pray, come and see me and we will not fight." 
 
 It is difficult to speak of either of the Rossetti ladies 
 without a reference to the elder sister, whom also I had 
 the privilege of knowing in early days. She left upon 
 me the impression of stronger character, though of 
 narrower intellect and infinitely poorer imagination. I 
 formed the idea, I know not whether with justice, that 
 the pronounced high-church views of Maria, who throve 
 on ritual, starved the less pietistic, but painfully con- 
 scientious nature of Christina. The influence of Maria 
 Francesca Rossetti on her sister seemed to be like that 
 of Newton upon Cowper, a species of police surveillance 
 exercised by a hard, convinced mind over a softer and 
 more fanciful one. Miss Maria Rossetti, who generally 
 needed the name of Dante to awaken her from a certain 
 social torpor, died in 1876, but not until she had set 
 her seal on the religious habits of her sister. Such, 
 at least, was the notion which I formed, perhaps on 
 slight premises. 
 
Christina Rossetti l6i 
 
 That the conscience of the younger sister was, in 
 middle life, so tender as to appear almost morbid, no 
 one, I think, will deny. I recall an amusing instance 
 of it. In the winter of 1874, I was asked to secure 
 some influential signatures to a petition against the 
 destruction of a part of the New Forest. Mr. Swin- 
 burne promised me his, if I could induce Miss Christina 
 Rossetti to give hers, suggesting as he did so, that the 
 feat might not be an easy one. In fact, I found that 
 no little palaver was necessary ; but at last she was so 
 far persuaded of the innocence of the protest that she 
 wrote Chr; she then stopped, dropped the pen, and 
 said very earnestly, " Are you sure that they do not 
 propose to build churches on the land ? " After a 
 long time, I succeeded in convincing her that such a 
 scheme was not thought of, and she proceeded to 
 write istina G. Ros, and stopped again. " Nor school- 
 houses ? " fluctuating with tremulous scruple. At 
 length she finished the signature, and I carried the 
 parchment off to claim the fulfilment of Mr. Swin- 
 burne's promise. And the labourer felt that he was 
 worthy of his hire. 
 
 On the 6th of July, 1876, I saw Christina Rossetti 
 for the last time. I suppose that her life, during the 
 last twenty years of it, was as sequestered as that of 
 any pious woman in a religious house. She stirred 
 but little, I fancy, from her rooms save to attend the 
 services of the Anglican church. That her mind con- 
 tinued humane and simple her successive publications 
 and her kind and sometimes playful letters proved. 
 
1 62 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Misfortunes attended her family, and she who had been 
 the centre of so eager and vivid a group, Hved to find 
 herself almost solitary. At length, on the 29th of 
 December, 1894, after prolonged sufferings borne with 
 infinite patience, this great writer, who was also a 
 great saint, passed into the region of her visions. 
 
LORD DE TABLEY 
 
Lord De Tabley 
 
 A PORTRAIT 
 
 It will not be disputed, I think, by any one who en- 
 joyed the friendship of the third Lord De Tabley 
 that no more singular, more complicated, more pathetic 
 nature has been — I dare not say revealed — but indi- 
 cated to us in these late times. His mind was like a 
 jewel with innumerable facets, all slightly blurred or 
 misted ; or perhaps it would be a juster illustration to 
 compare his character to an opal, where all the colours 
 lie perdue, drowned in a milky mystery, and so arranged 
 that to a couple of observers, simultaneously bending 
 over it, the prevalent hue shall in one case seem a pale 
 green, in the other a fiery crimson. This complication 
 of Lord De Tabley's emotional experience, the ardour 
 of his designs, the languor of his performance, the 
 astonishing breadth and variety of his sympathies, his 
 intense personal reserve, the feverish activity of his 
 intellectual life, the universality of his knowledge, like 
 that of a magician, the abysses of his ignorance, like 
 those of a child, all these contrary elements fused in 
 and veiled by a sort of radiant dimness, made his 
 nature one of the most extraordinar}', because the 
 most inscrutable, that I have ever known. Tennysoa 
 
1 66 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 said to me of Lord De Tabley, in 1888, "He is 
 Faunus ; he is a woodland creature I " That was one 
 aspect, noted with great acumen. But that was a 
 single aspect. He was also a scholar of extreme 
 elegance, a numismatist and a botanist of exact and 
 minute accompHshment, the shyest of recluses, the most 
 playful of companions, the most melancholy of solitaries, 
 above all and most of all, yet in a curiously phantasmal 
 way, a poet. It would need the hand of Balzac to 
 draw together into a portrait threads so slight, so deli- 
 cately elastic, and so intricately intertwined. When 
 all should be said, however, in the most fastidious 
 language, something would escape, and that would be 
 the essential being of the strangest and the most 
 shadowy of men. 
 
 John Byrne Leicester Warren, the third and last 
 Baron De Tabley, was born at Tabley House, Cheshire, 
 on April 26, 1835. He was the eldest son, and his 
 mother, Catherina Barbara, daughter of Jerome, Count 
 De Salis, from whom he inherited his sensibility and 
 his imagination, gave, I have heard, to the ceremony 
 of his baptism something of a romantic character, his 
 godfather, Lord Zouche, having brought water from 
 the river Jordan for the christening. For the first 
 twelve or thirteen years of his life, until he went to 
 Eton, indeed, he lived mostly with his mother in the 
 south of Europe, and faint impressions of this childish 
 
Lord De Tabley 167 
 
 exile seemed to be always returning to him in later 
 life. 
 
 In these early days in Italy and Germany the 
 foundation was laid of his love of botany, coins, 
 minerals, and fine art, by the companionship of his 
 godfather, then Robert Curzon, who travelled with 
 his parents, and who bought for them the beautiful 
 Italian things — enamels, majolica, medals, and statuettes 
 — which are now the ornament of Tabley House. He 
 was a finished connoisseur, and in his company the 
 little Johnny visited old shops and museums, eager to 
 begin, at ten years of age, a collection of his own. He 
 was meanwhile being very carefully prepared for Eton. 
 
 In 1845 the death of his younger brother made 
 centre about John Warren the hopes of the family, 
 and no more male children were born to his father. 
 From Eton he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford. 
 Among his close Oxford friends, there survive Sir 
 Henry Longley, who is now his executor, and Sir 
 Baldwyn Leigh ton, who, in 1864, become his brother- 
 in-law. Henry Cowper, Lord Edward Clinton, and 
 the late Lord Lothian were among his close companions. 
 Prince Frederick of Holstein, who died some ten years 
 ago, was a very great friend up to the last. But by 
 far the dearest of his college intimates was George 
 Fortescue, a young man of extraordinary promise, a 
 few weeks older than himself, who awakened in Warren 
 the passion for poetry, and was all to him that Arthur 
 Hallam was to Tennyson. Fortescue would, perhaps, 
 have been a poet had he lived ; at all events, the two 
 
1 68 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 friends wrote verses in secret, and, as shall presently 
 be told, in secret published them. This delightful 
 association, however, was suddenly snapped; on 
 November 2, 1859, George Fortescue lost his footing 
 while climbing a mast on board the yacht of the late 
 Earl of Drogheda in the Mediterranean, fell, and was 
 killed. This incident was one from which John 
 Warren never entirely recovered ; after the first agony 
 of grief he mentioned his friend no more, and would 
 fain have obliterated his very memory. 
 
 Before this deplorable catastrophe, however, Warren 
 had entered life. He had taken his degree in 1856, with 
 a double second-class in classics and modern history. 
 In the autumn of 1858 Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 
 going out to Turkey for the last time, to bid farewell to 
 the Sultan, was permitted to take with him three unpaid 
 temporary attaches. He chose John Warren, Lord 
 Sandwich (then Lord Hinchinbrooke), and Mr. J. R. 
 Swinton, the portrait-painter. The visit to Constan- 
 tinople was, on the whole, fairly agreeable. Warren 
 made the acquaintance of Lord Strangford, with whom 
 he found himself infinitely in sympathy, and whose 
 close friend he remained until Lord Strangford's un- 
 timely death. He went reluctantly, but Lord Strang- 
 ford's companionship was a joy to him, and as numis- 
 matics were now the passion of his life, he was able to 
 dig in the Troad for the coins of Asia Minor, and to scour 
 the bazaars of Stamboul for Greek federal moneys. The 
 months spent in Turkey were not without stimulus and 
 interest ; unhappily he suffered from dysentery and had 
 
Lord De Tabley 1 69 
 
 to come home. This disease he never entirely con- 
 quered ; only the other day he wrote from Ryde, ** I am 
 just as bad as I was with the Cannings at Constan- 
 tinople." 
 
 After his return to England, the shock of Fortescue's 
 death at first unfitted him for all mental exertion. But 
 he struggled against his unhappiness, continued his 
 numismatic studies, seriously determined to become a 
 poet, and began to see a little more of that Cheshire life, 
 in his father's noble old house, which hitherto he had 
 known so little. His talents attracted the attention of 
 family friends and neighbours, such as Mr. Gladstone 
 and Lord Houghton, with both of whom, but especially 
 with the former, he became on intimate terms. He was 
 called to the Bar in i860. The Cheshire Yeomanry 
 had its headquarters in Tabley Park, and John Warren 
 was first an officer in, and then captain of it, until he 
 came into the title in 1887, when, to the regret of the 
 neighbourhood, he gave up this local interest. All these 
 things will sound strange to those who only knew Lord 
 De Tabley as a poet ; still stranger to those who knew 
 him as a man may sound the fact that in 1868, urged by 
 his father, and under the particular aegis of Mr. Glad- 
 stone, he unsuccessfully contested Mid-Cheshire in the 
 Liberal interest. What is less known is that, a little 
 while before Mr. Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill, 
 Warren had determined to try for a seat again ; but 
 events presently converted him into a Liberal Unionist. 
 At his father's second marriage in 1 871, he left his 
 home in Cheshire, and went to reside in London. 
 
170 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 In the' later sixties, when he was more and more 
 devoting himself to poetry and science, he was less of 
 of a recluse than at any other period of his life. After 
 the publication of his Philoctetes in 1867, the late Lord 
 Houghton introduced him to Tennyson, who was always 
 a warm admirer of his poetry. Warren's acquaintance 
 with Tennyson became almost intimate for seven or 
 eight years, although he could not quite get over a certain 
 terror of that formidable bard. (After 1880, I think, 
 he never saw him.) Several incidents, among which I 
 will only mention the death of his mother in February, 
 1869^ and of his sister, Lady Bathurst, in 1872, tended 
 to deepen and irritate his melancholy, which had already 
 become chronic when I first knew him in 1875. Suc- 
 cessive annoyances and disappointments so fostered 
 this condition, that about 1880 he practically disappeared. 
 That was the beginning of the time to which Sir Mount- 
 stuart Grant Duff refers, in the valuable and interesting 
 notice of De Tabley which he contributed to the Spec- 
 tator of December 7, 1895, when he says that people 
 declared " Warren has two intimate friends. The first 
 he has riot seen for five years, the second for six." 
 
 The death of his father, in 1887, roused him from 
 his social lethargy. He found the estate practically in- 
 solvent, and only by the sacrifice of the whole of his 
 own private fortune, and the greatest economy during 
 the remainder of his life, was he able to prevent the 
 sale and secure the retention of the family mansion. In 
 1893 the success of his Poems gave him an instant of 
 fame, which greatly comforted and cheered him. That 
 
Lord De Tabley 171 
 
 year was probably, on the whole, the brightest of his 
 life. But he was already looking old, and those who 
 have seen him ever since at short intervals must have 
 noticed how rapidly he was ageing and weakening. 
 When, this last summer, he lunched with me to meet 
 Mr. Bailey, the author of Festus^ a man more than twenty 
 years his senior, I could but wonder whether any 
 stranger could have conceived Lord De Tabley to be the 
 younger. All this autumn his face had the solemn Tro- 
 phonian pallor, the look of the man who has seen Death 
 in the cave. Yet the end was unexpected. He was 
 planning to spend the winter at Bournemouth with his 
 sister, Lady Leighton, but lingered on, as his wont was, 
 in his lodgings at Ryde. He was positively ill but a 
 day or two, sinking rapidly, and passing away, without 
 suffering, on November 22, 1895, in his sixty-first year. 
 The coffin was brought to his beautiful home in Cheshire, 
 and buried in the grass of Little Peover churchyard, 
 where he had wished to lie. Earth from the Holy Land 
 was sprinkled over him, and the grave was filled up with 
 clods from a certain covert where he had loved to 
 botanise. Such is the meagre outline of a life, whose 
 adventures were almost wholly those of the soul. 
 
 John Warren's first enterprise in the world of pub- 
 lished poetry was a very obscure little volume, issued in 
 1859, under the title of Poems. By G. F. Preston. 
 This was the conjoint pseudonym of two Oxford friends, 
 
172 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 of whom George Fortescue was the other. A rarer 
 volume scarcely exists, for nobody bought it, and almost 
 every copy disappeared, or was destroyed. It is a mere 
 curiosity, for it contains not a single piece that deserves 
 to live, although it is interesting to find in it several 
 subjects and titles which Warren afterwards used again. 
 Immense is the advance, in every direction, marked by 
 Praeterita^ a volume entirely by Warren, published in 
 1863, under another pseudonym, " William Lancaster." 
 The moment was not favourable to the issue of poetry 
 of a contemplative and descriptive order. Mrs. Brown- 
 ing and Clough were lately dead ; Tennyson, while 
 preparing the Enoch Arden volume, had published 
 nothing since The Idylls of the King; Matthew Arnold, 
 who appeared to have given up the practice of poetry, 
 in which no one encouraged him, was a professor at 
 Oxford ; Robert Browning had been silent since the cold 
 reception of Men and Women. It was a dead time, 
 before the revival and wild revels of the Preraphael- 
 ites. No verse that was not smoothly Tennysonian 
 and mildly idyllic was in favour with the public. 
 
 Warren's modest volume had no success, nor is it 
 probable that it has ever possessed more than a very 
 few readers. Yet its merits should have been patent 
 to at least one reviewer. The splendour of diction 
 which was afterwards to distinguish his poetry Warren 
 had not yet discovered. Praeterita is noticeable mainly 
 for two qualities — for the close and individual observa- 
 tion of natural phenomena, in which not even Tenny- 
 son excelled Lord De Tabley, and for the technical 
 
Lord De Tabley 173 
 
 beauty of the blank verse pieces, which are usually 
 better made than the lyrical. Of the former of those 
 qualities specimens may be given almost at random, as 
 this of a frosty day in the country : 
 
 When the waves are solid foor. 
 
 And the clods are iron-bound. 
 And the boughs are crystalFd hoar. 
 
 And the red leaf nailed aground ; 
 
 When the fieldfare^ s flight is slozu^ 
 
 And a rosy vapour-rim, 
 Now the sun is small and low^ 
 
 Belts along the region dim ; 
 
 When the ice-crack flies and flaws. 
 Shore to shore, with thunder shocky 
 
 Deeper than the evening daws. 
 Clearer than the village clock. 
 
 (De Tabley was, like Wordsworth, a bold and graceful 
 skater, and used, it is said, to cut his own name in full 
 on the ice of Tabley Lake without pausing) ; or this 
 description of dawn : 
 
 ere heaven's stubborn bar and subtle screen 
 Crumbled in purple chains of sailing shower 
 And bared the captive morning in his cell i 
 
 while his mosaic of delicate and minute observation of 
 aerial phenomena is displayed in conjunction with the 
 excellence of his blank verse in this study of ** tremulous 
 evening " : 
 
174 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 The weeds of night coast round her lucid edge^ 
 
 Yoked under bulks of tributary cloud ; 
 
 The leaves are shaken on the forest flowers^ 
 
 And silent as the silence of a shrine 
 
 Lies a great power of sunset on the groves. 
 
 Greyly the fingered shadows dwell between 
 
 The reaching chestnut-branches. Grey the mask 
 
 Of twilight, and the bleak unmellow speed 
 
 Of blindness on the visage of fresh hills. 
 
 Here every epithet is felt, is observed ; and the 
 volume is full of such pictures and of such verse. 
 Nevertheless, the book is not interesting ; its beauties 
 are easily overlooked, and we feel, in glancing back, 
 that it gave an inadequate impression of its author's 
 powers. Similar characteristics marked the volumes 
 called Eclogues and Monodramas and Studies in Verse. 
 
 Then came the publication of Atalanta in Calydon^ 
 and Warren's eyes were dazzled with the emergence of 
 this blazing luminary from the Oxford horizon, which 
 he had himself so lately left. 
 
 Of Mr. Swinburne's influence on Warren's imagina- 
 tion, on his whole intellectual character, there can be 
 no question. Personal influence there was none ; he 
 recollected, dimly, the brilliant boy at Eton, two years 
 his junior ; and once, in 1877, I persuaded these two 
 men, of talents and habits of mind so diverse, to meet 
 at dinner in my house ; with that exception — and 
 Warren, was absolutely tongue-tied throughout the 
 eventful evening — he never (I think) saw the poet 
 whose work had so deeply ploughed up his prejudices 
 
Lord De Tabley 175 
 
 and traditions. But he had been one of tlic very first 
 to read /Ualaiita, and he had tormented G. H. Lewes 
 into a grudging permission to let him write about it in 
 ihc Fortnighlly Review. His article appeared, and was 
 one of those which earliest called attention to Mr. 
 Swinburne's genius ; but Lewes, although Warren's 
 criticism was signed, had toned down the ardour of it, 
 and had introduced one or two slighting phrases. 
 These editorial corrections poor Warren carried about 
 with him, like open wounds, for, it is no exaggeration 
 to say, thirty years, and to the last could never be 
 reminded of Mr. Swinburne without a shudder at the 
 thought of what he must think that Warren thought he 
 thought. Alas ! at times his life was made a perfect 
 nightmare to him by reverberated sensibilities of this 
 kind. 
 
 The importance of the stimulus given to Warren by 
 Mr. Swinburne's early publications was seen in the 
 metrical drama after the antique, Philoctdcs, printed in 
 1867. It was announced as *'byM.A.," which meant 
 Master of Arts, a further excess of anonymity, but 
 which was interpreted as meaning Matthew Arnold, to 
 the author's unfeigned dismay. This rumour — instantly 
 contradicted, of course — gave a certain piquancy to the 
 book, and this was the one of all Warren's early 
 volumes which may be said to have received an 
 adequate welcome. It was compared virith Merope, and 
 its superiority to that frigid fiasco was patent. In 
 Philocktcs Warren, undisturbed by the circumstance 
 that Sophocles had taken the same story for one of the 
 
176 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 most stately of his tragedies, undertook to develop the 
 character of the wounded exile in his solitary cave in 
 Lemnos, and under the wiles of Ulysses. In the poem 
 of Sophocles no woman is introduced, but Warren 
 creates ^gle, a girl of the island, humbly devoted to 
 Philoctetes. Instead of the beautiful, delicate Neopto- 
 lemus of Sophocles, the modern poet makes the com- 
 panion of Ulysses a rougher figure, and omits Heracles 
 altogether. This plot, indeed, is quite independent of 
 that of Sophocles. He introduces a chorus of fisher- 
 men, who chant unrhymed odes, often of extreme beauty, 
 in this manner : 
 
 Pan is a god seated in nature^ s cave, 
 
 Abiding with us^ 
 
 No cloudy ruler in the delicate air-belts^ 
 
 But in the ripening slips and tangles 
 
 Of cork-woods^ in the bull-rush pits where oxea 
 
 Lie soaking, chin-deep ; 
 
 In the mulberry-orchard. 
 
 With milky kexes and marrowy hemlocks, 
 
 Among the floating silken under-darnels. 
 
 He is a god, this Pan, 
 
 Content to dwell among us, nor disdains 
 
 The damp, hot wood-smell s 
 
 He loves the flakes pine-boles sand-brown. 
 
 To give any impression of a tragical drama by brief 
 extracts is impossible. But Warren put a great deal 
 of himself into the soliloquies of the lame warrior, and 
 few who knew him but will recognise a self-conscious 
 portrait when Ulysses tells his companion that 
 
Lord De Tabley 177 
 
 Persuasion^ Pyrrhus, is a delicate things 
 And very intricate the toil ofzvords 
 Whereby to smoothe away the spiteful past 
 From a proud heart on edge with long disease ; 
 For round the sick man, like a poison d mist. 
 His wrongs are ever brooding. He cannot shake 
 Ihese insects of the shadow from his brow 
 In the free bountiful air of enterprize. 
 Therefore expect reproaches of this man 
 And bitter spurts oj anger ; for much pain 
 Hath nothing healed his wound these many years. 
 
 The publication of Philodetes, however, marks a 
 period of healing almost like that of the Lemnian hero's 
 own return. The shy and self-distrusting poet was 
 conscious of a warm tide of encouragement. From 
 many sides greetings flowed in upon him. Tennyson, 
 though deprecating the composition of antique choral 
 dramas as not a natural form of art, applauded ; Robert 
 Browning was enthusiastic ; Mr. Gladstone, an old 
 family friend, was warm in congratulation. This was 
 the one bright moment in Warren's early literary life ; 
 something like fame seemed to reach him for a moment, 
 and his delicate, shy nature expanded in the glow of it. 
 It passed as quickly as it came, and a quarter of a 
 century was to go by, and nearly the whole remaining 
 period of his life, before he tasted popular praise again. 
 
 Encouraged by this ephemeral success and applause, 
 and under the stress of a violent and complicated 
 private emotion, Warren wrote in 1868 another antique 
 drama, his Orestes, in my judgment the most completely 
 
 M 
 
178 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 satisfactory of his works, and the most original. It 
 was not, however, well received. The classical re- 
 viewers were stupefied to discover that the hero was 
 not the celebrated son of Agamemnon, but a wholly 
 fictitious Orestes, " prince of the Larissaean branch of 
 the Aleuadae." This fact alienated sympathy while it 
 puzzled the critics, who received with frigid caution a 
 play, the plot of which seemed to lay a trap for their 
 feet. Why Warren, with characteristic lack of literary 
 tact, chose the unhappy name of Orestes for his hero, 
 I know not ; when it was too late, he bewailed his 
 imprudence. But the reception of this noble poem — 
 which, some day or other, must be re-discovered and 
 read — was one of the tragical events in Warren's life. 
 This should, too, have been the moment for him to 
 drop the veil, and come forward in his real person ; but 
 all he could persuade himself to concede was a return 
 to the old unmeaning pseudonymn, ** William Lan- 
 caster." 
 
 The neglect was trebly undeserved. Orestes was 
 one of the most beautiful poems that English literature 
 produced between the generation of Arnold and that of 
 Rossetti. The plot is simple, dignified, and dramatic, 
 the verse strong and vivid, well-knit, and not of a too- 
 waxy sweetness. There is a scene near the close — 
 where Orestes, who has discovered that his mother, 
 Dyseris, is dishonoured in the love of Simus, an 
 adventurer, turns upon her, breaking the chain of filial 
 awe, and denounces her crimes to her face, going too 
 far, indeed, and accusmg her, talseiy, ol a design upon 
 
Lord De Tabley 179 
 
 his own life — which is magnificent, with the stately, 
 large passion of Racine. It is unfortunate that to 
 quote intelligibly any of this species of poetry demands 
 a wider space than can here be spared. But I hope 
 that whatever revival of Lord De Tabley's poetry may 
 be made, will without fail include Orestes. 
 
 In the next years he essayed, still as William Lan- 
 caster, to write novels. He made no mark, though, I 
 believe, a little money, by A Screw Loose, 1868, and 
 Ropes of Sand ^ 1869. He returned to his true vocation 
 in the volume of poems entitled Rehearsals^ 1870, when 
 for the first time a title-page carried the full name John 
 Leicester Warren. Searching the Net followed in 1873, 
 and we may take these two books together, for they 
 were identical in character, and they displayed the poet 
 at his average level of execution. In these dramatic 
 monologues, songs, odes, and sonnets we find a talent, 
 which in its essence was exquisite, struggling against 
 a variety of disadvantages. Among these — and it is 
 necessary to mention them, for they were always Lord 
 De Tabley's persistent enemies — two w^ere peculiarly 
 prominent, want of concentration and want of critical 
 taste. The importance of the first-mentioned quality, 
 in his case, was exemplified by the success of the 
 volume of 1893, which mainly consisted of the best 
 things, and nothing but the best, which he had previ- 
 ously published. The second led him to produce and 
 to print w^hat was not reprinted in 1893, and to give it 
 just as much prominence as he gave his best pieces. 
 Nothing else will account for the neglect of such things 
 
i8o Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 as lie strewn about the pages of these unequal volumes, 
 pictures like : 
 
 Where deep woods swoon with solitude divine^ 
 I wait thee there, arm-deep injlowery twine. 
 Where gleam Jiushed poppies in among grey tares ; 
 Grape-clusters mellow near, and tumbled pears 
 Are brown in orchard-grass. The fern-owl calls 
 At eve across the cloven river-falls. 
 Whose flood leaves here an island, there a swan. 
 
 Or this, from the fine dramatic fragment called 
 "Medea": 
 
 The sullen king turns roughly on his heel, 
 W^hirling his regal mantle round his eyes, 
 And so departs, with slow steps, obstinate; 
 Ah, but the queen, the pale one, beautiful. 
 Prone, in the dust her holy bosom laid. 
 Mingles her outspread hair with fallen leaves^ 
 And sandal-soil is on her gracious head. 
 Ah, lamentable lady ^ pit ful f 
 
 Warren's next work was a drama, on which he was 
 working long, and from which he expected much. But 
 The Soldier of Fortune^ 1876, proved the worst of his 
 literary disasters. It was a vague German story of the 
 sixteenth century put into blank verse, and cut into 
 five huge acts ; this " play " extends to between four 
 and five hundred pages. It is essentially undramatic, 
 mere bed-rock, through which run veins of pure gold of 
 poetry, but in an impregnable condition. The Soldier 
 
Lord Dc Tablcy i8i 
 
 of Fortune is full of beautiful lines, one of which, in 
 
 particular, has always run in my memory — 
 
 On worm-drilPd vellums of Id-time revenges^ — 
 
 but it is perfectly hopeless as a piece of literature. He 
 told me lately — I know not whether in pardonable 
 exaggeration — that not a single copy of it was sold. 
 He was deeply irritated and wounded, and now began 
 that retirement from the public which lasted obstinately 
 for seventeen years. 
 
 At last his brother-in-law. Sir Baldwyn Leighton, 
 persuaded him that a new generation had arisen, to 
 whom he might make a fresh appeal. Others encour- 
 aged this idea, and by degrees the notion that a selection 
 of the best things in his old books, supplemented by 
 what he had written during these years of eclipse, 
 might form a volume which people would read with 
 pleasure. The result was Poems Dramatic and Lyrical^ 
 of 1893, which still represents Lord De Tabley to the 
 majority of readers. This book enjoyed a genuine and 
 substantial success, quite as great as verse of this 
 stately order could enjoy. He was encouraged to write 
 more, and, to our general astonishment, he was able, 
 in the spring of 1895, to produce, in identical form, a 
 second series of the Poems. This was respectfully 
 received, but so enthusiastic a welcome as greeted 
 the concentrated selection of 1893 was hardly to be 
 looked for. 
 
 From the new poems in the volume of 1893 a frag- 
 ment of that entitled " Circe " may here be quoted : 
 
i8z Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Reared across a loom. 
 Hung a fair web of tapestry half done. 
 Crowding with folds and fancies half the room: 
 Men eyed as gods, and damsels still as stone 
 Pressing their brows alone. 
 In amethystine robes, 
 
 Or reaching at the polished orchard-globes. 
 Or rubbing parted love-lips on their rind. 
 While the wind 
 
 Sows with sere apple-leaves their breast and hair s 
 And all the margin there 
 Was arabesqued and bordered intricate 
 With hairy spider-things 
 That catch and clamber. 
 And -salamander in his dripping-cave, 
 Satanic ebon-amber ; 
 
 Blind-worm, and asp, and eft of cumbrous gait. 
 And toads who love rank grasses near a grave. 
 And the great goblin moth, who bears 
 Between his wings the ruined eyes of death; 
 And the enamelled sails 
 
 Of butterflies who watch the morning^ s breath. 
 And many an emerald lizard with quick ears. 
 Asleep in rocky dales ; 
 And for an outer fringe embroidered sm.all, 
 A ring of many locusts, horny-coated, 
 A round of chirping tree-frogs merry-throated. 
 And sly, fat fishes sailing, watching all. 
 
 This sumptuous picture, a sort of Shield of Achilles in 
 a fragment of an epic, is very strongly composed. 
 
 If we examine the central and typical qualities oi 
 
Lord De Tablcy 1 83 
 
 Lord Dc Tablcy as a poet, we are struck first by the 
 brocaded magnificence of his style. This steadily grew 
 with his growth, and was an element of real originality. 
 It is to be distinguished from anything like tinsel or 
 flash in what he wrote; it was a genuine thing, fostered, 
 in later years, by a very close study of the diction of 
 Milton, which gave him more and more delight as he 
 grew older. He liked to wrap his thought in cloth of 
 gold, to select from the immense repertory of his 
 memory the most gorgeously sonorous noun, the most 
 imperial adjective, at his command. In all this he was 
 consciously out of sympathy with the men of our own 
 time, who prefer the rougher, directcr verbiage, or else 
 a studied simplicity. The poetry of Lord De Tabley 
 was not simple ; when he tried to make it homely, he 
 utterly failed. His efforts at humour, at naive pathos, 
 were generally unfortunate. But, when his melan- 
 choly, dignified Muse stalked across the stage wrapped 
 in heavy robes, stifif with threads of gold, she rose to 
 her full stature and asserted her personal dignity with 
 success. It was with the gorgeous writers of the 
 middle of the seventeenth century that Lord De Tabley 
 found himself in fullest sympathy, with Milton and 
 Crashaw in verse, with Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas 
 Browne in prose. So, among poets of the present 
 century, his sympathies were all with Keats and 
 Browning, while for Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold 
 he had a positive indifference ; he liked a weighty form 
 and full colour in style, and it was in the production of 
 such a manner that he excelled. 
 
184 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Another central quality which distinguishes him as a 
 poet is his extremely minute and accurate observation 
 of natural phenomena. Many poets of a high order 
 recognise no flower but the rose, and no bird but the 
 nightingale, and are fortunate if the whale is not their 
 only fish. But among his exceptional accomplishments, 
 Lord De Tabley counted an exact knowledge of several 
 branches of science. In botany, in particular, and in 
 ornithology, his reputation at certain points was Euro- 
 pean ; I believe I am right, for instance, in saying that 
 he was the first living authority on the Brambles. His 
 eye, trained in many branches of observation, served 
 him admirably as a poet ; for the general reader, it 
 served him, perhaps, too well, bewildering the untaught 
 brain with the frequency and the exactitude of his 
 images drawn from the visible world of earth and sky. 
 In these he is not less accurate than Tennyson, and 
 he sometimes pushes his note of nature still further 
 into elaborate portraitures of country life than Tenny- 
 son, with greater tact, ever cared to do. 
 
 If I am asked to say, at once, wherein I consider 
 that the strength and weakness alike of this poet con- 
 sisted, I reply in his treatment of detail. His theory 
 of execution was one in which detail took a paramount 
 place. Jewels five words long were what he delighted 
 in and desired to produce, and to secure them he sacri- 
 ficed the general rotundity and perfection of his work. 
 In this, as in certain other points, he resembled the 
 great Jacobean poets. Like Cyril Tourneur, or like 
 Giles Fletcher, to mention two very dissimilar writers, 
 
Lord De Tabley 185 
 
 with each of whom he presented certain analogies, he 
 was so fascinated with a single line that was 
 specially exquisite or thrilling, a single image which 
 was novel and picturesque, that he was content to 
 leave it set in a ragged passage which was almost 
 wholly without charm. He even seemed, as they often 
 seem, to prefer to wear his rubies and opals on a dingy 
 texture that they might beam from it more radiantly. 
 The splendid single line is out of fashion now — fifty 
 years ago it was absolutely dominant in English poetry 
 — and Lord De Tabley's resolute cultivation of it gave 
 his verse an old-fashioned air. We are just now all in 
 favour of a poetry in which the force and beauty are 
 equally distributed throughout, and in which execution, 
 not of a line or of a stanza, but of a complete poem, is 
 aimed at. But this is really a fashion rather than 
 a law. 
 
 m 
 
 In some dedicatory verses to myself, which Lord 
 De Tabley printed in 1893, he said that " twtnty years 
 and more" were then " ended" since the beginning of 
 our friendship. His memory slightly stretched the 
 period, but it was in the winter of 1875 that I met 
 him first. I have no recollection of the event ; one 
 week I had never heard of him, the next week he had 
 become part of my existence. Long afterwards he 
 told me that, crossing Hyde Park one Sunday morn- 
 ing, after a painful interview with an old companion, 
 he had observed to himself that his acquaintances had 
 
1 86 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 fallen below the number which he could count on the 
 fingers of his two hands ; his principle was that one 
 should not be acquainted with fewer than ten people in 
 all, and so he determined to know Mr. Austin Dobson and 
 myself, ** to add a little new blood," as he put it. For 
 my part, I was too raw and inexperienced to appreciate 
 the distinction of his choice, but not too dull to value 
 the soft goings and comings of this moth-like man, so 
 hushed and faded, like a delicate withered leaf, so 
 mysterious, so profoundly learned, so acutely sensitive 
 that an inflection in the voice seemed to chill him like 
 a cold wind, so refined that with an ardent thought the 
 complexion of his intellect seemed to flush like the 
 cheek of a girl. 
 
 He was forty at that time, but looked older. Those 
 who have seen him in these last years recall a finer 
 presence, a more " striking " personality. Of late he 
 carried upon his bending shoulders a veritable tete de 
 rot en exil; he reminded us, towards the end, of one 
 of the fallen brethren of Hyperion. But in 1875, in 
 his unobtmsive dress, with his timid, fluttering manner, 
 there was nothing at all impressive in the outer guise 
 of him. He seemed to melt into the twilight of a 
 corner, to succeed, as far as a mortal can, in being 
 invisible. This evasive ghost, in a loose snuff-coloured 
 coat, would always be the first person in the room to 
 be overlooked by a superficial observer. It was in a 
 Ute-d-Ute across the corner of the mahogany, under a 
 lamplight that emphasised the noble modelling of the 
 forehead, and lighted up the pale azure eyes, that a 
 
Lord De Tahley 187 
 
 companion saw what manner of man he was dealing 
 with, and half-divined, perhaps, the beauty and wisdom 
 of this unique and astonishing mind. It was an 
 education to be permitted to listen to him then, to 
 receive his slight and intermittent confidences, to pour 
 out, with the inconsiderate egotism of youth, one's own 
 hopes and failures, to feel this infinitely refined and 
 sensitive spirit benignantly concentrated on one's 
 prentice efforts, which seemed to grow a little riper 
 and more dignified by the mere benediction of that 
 smile. His intellect, in my opinion, was a singularly 
 healthy one, and, therefore, in its almost preternatural 
 quickness and many-sidedness, calculated to help and 
 stimulate the minds of others. It did not guide or 
 command, it simply radiated light around the steps of 
 a friend. The radiance was sometimes faint, but it 
 was exquisite, and it seemed omnipresent. 
 
 Yet it is unquestionable that to most of those who 
 saw Lord De Tabley casually, his manner gave the 
 impression more of hypochondria than of health. 
 That excessive sensitiveness of his, which shrank 
 from the slightest impact of what was, or what even 
 faintly seemed to be, unsympathetic, could but produce 
 on the superficial observer an idea of want of self- 
 command. To pretend that the equilibrium of his 
 spirit was not disturbed would be idle ; the turmoil 
 of his nerves was written on those fierce and timid 
 eyes of his. But it is only right now to say, and to 
 say with insistence, that it was no indulgence of eccen- 
 tricity, no wilful melancholy, that made him so quiver- 
 
1 88 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 ing and shrinking a soul. He had suffered from 
 troubles such as now may well be buried in his grave, 
 sorrows that beset him from his youth up, disappoint- 
 ments and disillusions that dogged him to the very close 
 of his career, and made death itself almost welcome 
 to him, although he loved life so well. He was one 
 who, like Gray, "never spoke out," and only those 
 who knew him best could divine what the foxes were 
 that gnawed the breast under the cloak. Very few 
 human beings are pursued from the beginning of life 
 to its close with so many distracting griefs and per- 
 plexities, such a combination of misfortunes and wear- 
 ing annoyances, as this gentle-hearted poet, who grew, 
 at last, so harried by the implacable ingenuity of his 
 destiny that a movement or a word would awaken his 
 fatalistic alarm. 
 
 The knowledge of this should now accojint for a 
 good deal that puzzled and even grieved his friends. 
 Moral and physical suffering had rendered the epidermis 
 of his character so excessively thin that the merest 
 trifle pained him ; he was like those unfortunate persons 
 who are born without a scarf-skin, on whom the pres- 
 sure of a twig or the grip of a hand brings blood. 
 This sensitiveness was pitiable, and the results of it 
 even a little blameworthy, since, if they entailed 
 wretchedness on himself, they caused needless pain to 
 those who truly loved him. I doubt if any friend, 
 however tactful in self-abnegation, got through many 
 years of Lord De Tabley's intimacy without an electric 
 storm. His imagination aided his ingenuity in self- 
 
Lord De Tabley 189 
 
 torture, and conjured up monsters of malignity, spectres 
 that strode across the path of friendship and rendered 
 it impassable. But his tempestuous heat was not 
 greater than his placability, and those who had not 
 patience to wait the return of his kinder feelings can 
 scarcely have been worthy of them. 
 
 He lived for friendship — poetry and his friends were 
 the two lode-stars of his life. Yet he cultivated his 
 intimates oddly. He sometimes reminded me of a bird- 
 fancier with all his pets in separate cages ; he attended 
 to each of them in turn, but he did not choose that they 
 should mix in a general social aviary. He was not un- 
 willing to meet the acquaintances of his friends, but he 
 did not care to bring his intimates much into contact 
 with one another. Probably the number of these last 
 was greater than any one of them was accustomed to 
 realise. At the head of them all, I think, stood Sir 
 Mountstuart Grant Duff; not far behind. Sir A. W. 
 Franks. Besides these companions of his youth, he 
 cultivated among the friends of his middle life. Sir Henry 
 Howorth, Mr. W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, and others, each 
 linked with him by a combination of tastes — anti- 
 quarianism, numismatics, zoology, horticulture, some 
 pursuit which made the woof of a texture in which 
 personal sympathy was the warp. But he lived among 
 the dead, and to these his attitude was much the same 
 as that of a priest in the shrine of his vanished deities. 
 To him the unseen faces were often more real than the 
 living ones. 
 
 The side on which I was most capable ot appreciating 
 
190 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Lord de Tabley's gifts as a collector was the biblio- 
 graphical. If I am anything of a connoisseur in this 
 direction, I owe it to his training. His zeal in the 
 amassing of early editions of the English poets was 
 extreme ; he was one of those who think nothing of 
 hanging about a book-shop at six in the morning, waiting 
 for the shutters to be taken down. But his zeal was 
 eminently according to knowledge. He valued his first 
 edition for the text's sake, not for the bare fact of rarity. 
 Every book he bought he read, and with a critical gusto. 
 A little anecdote may illustrate his spirit as a collector. 
 In 1877 he secured, by a happy accident, a copy of 
 Milton's Poems of 1645, a book which he had never met 
 with before. Too eager to wait for the post, he sent a 
 messenger round to my house with a note to announce 
 not merely the joyful fact, but — this is the interesting 
 point — a discovery he had made in the volume, namely, 
 that the line in the '* Nativity Ode," which in all later 
 editions has run, 
 
 OrFd in a rainbow, and like glories wearing, 
 
 originally stood, 
 
 Ihe enamelPa arras of the rainbow wearing, 
 
 " which," as he said, " is a grand mouthful of sound, 
 and ever so much better than the weak Mike glories.' " 
 I shall not forget, when dining alone with him once 
 at Onslow Square, noticing that at the beginning of the 
 meal he was strangely distraught. At length, the post 
 came, and Warren (as he then was) tore open one 
 
Lord De Tabley 191 
 
 envelope wildly; he read the first words, and sank back 
 faint in his chair, hiding his eyes with his hands. I was 
 convinced that some terrible calamity had happened to 
 him, but it was only that he had secured a first edition of 
 Shelley's Alastor at a country auction, and — la joie 
 fatsait pcurl For some of his little, rare seventeenth- 
 century volumes, he had an almost petulant affection. 
 He has celebrated in beautiful verse his copy of Suck- 
 ling's Fragmenta Aurca ; and perhaps I may be allowed 
 to tell one more bibliomaniac story. On a certain occa- 
 sion when I was at his house, Robert Browning and 
 Frederick Locker being the other guests, Warren had 
 put on the table his latest prize, a copy of Sir William 
 Davenant's Madagascar of 1638. Browning presently 
 got hold of the little book, and began reading passages 
 aloud, making fun of the poetry (which, indeed, is pretty 
 bad) with " Listen, now, to this," and " Here's a fine 
 conceit." Warren bore it for a little while, and then he 
 very gently took the volume out of Browning's hands, 
 and hid it away. " Oh ! " he explained to me after- 
 wards, ** I could not allow him to patronise Davenant." 
 
 A particular favourite with him was Quarles, as com- 
 bining the metaphysical poet with the emblematist. He 
 had a curious theory that the influence, not only of 
 Quarles, but of Alciati, could be traced in the designs 
 of Blake, another special object of his study. Before 
 I leave bibliography I am tempted to quote a passage 
 from one of De Tabley's delightful letters, now nearly 
 twenty years old : 
 
 " I have been cheered up by bujang to-day a copy of 
 
192 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Henry Lawes' Ayres for the Theorbo; or^ Bas Viol, 
 1653, with some Herrick and Lovelace pieces set. Also 
 a Spenser of 16 10, the first collected Folio, with nice 
 little plates to the Shepherd's Calendar — one each month. 
 I must tell you, for very idiocy — I had the most vivid 
 dream last night that you and I were cardinals, turning 
 over books in the Vatican Library. I remember the 
 look of my own red stockings. We were both in car- 
 dinal red from top to toe. I felt quite pleased to be so 
 smart, but your robes seemed better made. How infi- 
 nitely absurd ! But so vivid. A certain room I re- 
 membered in the Vatican came back fresh, and the exact 
 dress of the old creatures I saw at the Council (in 
 1869)." 
 
 Bibliography and the ardour of the collector led 
 Warren by degrees into a department where he was 
 destined to exercise a considerable influence. His love 
 of books extended to a study of those marks of owner- 
 ship which are known as ex-libris, and in 1880 he pub- 
 lished A Guide to the Study of Book-plates, a handsomely 
 illustrated volume which has been the pioneer of many 
 interesting works, and of a whole society of students 
 and annotators. He was led to the historical study of 
 the book-plate by his love of heraldry, which was to 
 be traced, too, in more than one passage of his poetry. 
 I cannot recollect that his enthusiasm for books extended 
 to bindings. His own library, of which it was his inten- 
 tion to prepare a privately printed catalogue — a project 
 which his premature death has frustrated — was not 
 conspicuous bibliopegically. He belonged to the class of 
 
Lord De Tahlcy 193 
 
 bibliophiles whose books lie strewn over sofas and arm- 
 chairs, instead of being ranged in cases like jewels. Hi3 
 servant, I recollect his telling me, became so incensed 
 with his books that he grew to regard them as personal 
 enemies, and when, about 1879, Warren proposed to 
 move from Onslow Square, this man snorted with the 
 joy of battle, and said, "At last I'll be even with them 
 dummed books." 
 
 He was writing poetry to the last, and I think, from 
 what he very lately wrote to me, that a volume of MS. 
 verses will be found almost ready for the press. It 
 was a great pleasure to him to know that many of his 
 fellow-craftsmen were now eager to receive his work. 
 Mr. Austin Dobson had always been an admirer, and 
 one of the latest tributes which cheered De Tabley 
 was a copy of verses from this friend of twenty years, 
 which I have the privilege of printing here for the first 
 time : 
 
 Still may the Muses foster thee^ Friend, 
 
 JVh, while the vacant quidnuncs stand at gaze. 
 Wondering what Prophet next the Fates will send^ 
 
 Still tread' St the ancient ways ; 
 Still climb'' St the clear-cold altitudes of Song, 
 
 Or, lingering " by the shore of old Romance,^ 
 Heed' St not the vogue, how little or how long. 
 
 Of marvels made in France. 
 Still to the summits may thy face be set ; 
 
 And long may we, that heard thy motning rhymi^ 
 Hang on thy mid- day music, nor forget 
 In the hushed even-time / 
 
194 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Mr. Theodore Watts, too — v/hose touching and pic- 
 turesque anecdotes in the Aihenceum of November 30 
 are of real value in forming an impression of Lord 
 De Tabley's character — was a constant and judicious 
 encourager of his art. 
 
 In those three latest years of his partial reappearance 
 in the world of letters, Lord De Tabley has rejoiced 
 many of his old friends by a renewal of the early 
 delightful relations. He has formed new friendships, 
 too, among those who will remember his noble head 
 and gentle, stately manners when we older ones have 
 joined him. He appreciated the company of several 
 members of the new school of poets, and especially 
 that of Mr. William Watson, Mr. John Davidson, and 
 Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson. The last named, I 
 think, in particular, enjoyed a greater intimacy with 
 him than any other man who is now less than thirty- 
 five years of age. There has been so much of the 
 elder generation, then, in this little memoir, that I 
 prefer to close with a few words written to me by this 
 latest friend when the death was announced — words 
 which Mr. Benson kindly permits me to print : 
 
 ** Lord de Tabley always struck me as being a 
 curious instance of the irony of destiny — a man with 
 so many sources of pleasure and influence open to him 
 — his love of literature, his mastery of style, his 
 conversational charm, his social position, his affectionate 
 nature — yet bearing always about with him a curious 
 attitude of resignation and disappointment, as though 
 life were, on the whole, a sad business, and, for the 
 
Lord De Tahley 195 
 
 sake of courtesy and decency, the less said about it the 
 better. I must repeat the word 'courtesy,' for, hke a 
 subtle fragrance, it interpenetrated all he did or said. 
 It seemed the natural aroma of an exquisitely sensitive, 
 delicate, and considerate spirit. There was something 
 archaic, almost, one might say, hierarchical, about his 
 head, with its long, rippled, grey hair, the transparent 
 pallor of complexion, the piercing eye. He dressed 
 with the same severity, and, though I never heard him 
 speak of religion, there was about him a certain monastic 
 stateliness of air which one sees most frequent'y in 
 those who combine worldly position with the possession 
 of a tranquillising faith. He contrived to inspire 
 affection to a singular extent. Perhaps there was a 
 certain pathos about his life and the strange contradic- 
 tions it contained, but I think there was also in him a 
 deep need of affection, and, in spite of his determined 
 effort after courage and calm, an intimate despair of 
 gaining the encouragement of others." 
 
 This is beautifully said, I think, and delicately felt, 
 yet, like all our attempts to analyse the fugitive charm 
 of this extraordinary being, it leaves the memory un- 
 satisfied. 
 
TORU DUTT 
 
Toru Dutt 
 
 If Toru Dutt were alive, she would still (in 1882) be 
 younger than any recognised European writer, and 
 yet her fame, which is already considerable, has been 
 entirely posthumous. Within the brief space of four 
 years which now divides us from the date of her 
 decease, her genius has been revealed to the world 
 under many phases, and has been recognised in 
 France and England. Her name, at least, is no 
 longer unfamiliar in the ear of any well-read man or 
 woman. But at the hour of her death she had pub- 
 lished but one book, and that book had found but two 
 reviewers in Europe. One of these, M. Andrd Theuriet, 
 the well-known poet and novelist, gave the Sheaf 
 gleaned in French Fields adequate praise in the Revue 
 des Deux Mondes; but the other, the writer of the 
 present notice, has a melancholy satisfaction in having 
 been a little earlier still in sounding the only note of 
 welcome which reached the dying poetess from England. 
 It was while Professor W. Minto was editor of the 
 Examiner^ that one day in August, 1876, in the very 
 heart of the dead season for books, I happened to be 
 in the office of that newspaper, and was upbraiding the 
 whole body of publishers for issuing no books worth 
 
200 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 reviewing. At that moment the postman brought in a 
 thin and sallow packet with a wonderful Indian post- 
 mark on it, and containing a most unattractive orange 
 pamphlet of verse, printed at Bhowanipore, and entitled 
 * 'A Sheaf gleaned in French Fields^ by Toru Dutt. " This 
 shabby little book of some two hundred pages, without 
 preface or introduction, seemed specially destined by 
 its particular providence to find its way hastily into 
 the waste-paper basket. I remember that Mr. Minto 
 thrust it into my unwilling hands, and said " There ! see 
 whether you can't make something of that." A hope- 
 less volume it seemed, with its queer type, published 
 at Bhowanipore, printed at the Saptahiksambad Press ! 
 But when at last I took it out of my pocket, what was 
 my surprise and almost rapture to open at such verse 
 as this : 
 
 Still barred thy doors 1 The far-east glows^ 
 
 The morning wind blows fresh and free, 
 Should not the hour that wakes the rose 
 Awaken also thee ? 
 
 All look for thee. Love, Light, and Song—— 
 
 Light in the sky deep red above, 
 Song, in the lark of pinions strong, 
 
 And in my heart, true Love* 
 
 Apart we miss our nature's goal. 
 
 Why strive to cheat our destinies ? 
 Was not my love made for thy soul? 
 
 Thy beauty for mine eyes? 
 
Toru Dutt 20 1 
 
 No longer sleepy 
 
 Ohy listen now ! 
 J tvait and weepy 
 
 But where art thou I 
 
 When poetry is as good as this it docs not much 
 matter whether Rouveyre prints it upon Whatman 
 paper, or whether it steals to light in blurred type from 
 some press in Bhowanipore. 
 
 Toru Dutt was the youngest of the three children of 
 a high-caste Hindu couple in Bengal. Her father, 
 who survived them all, the Baboo Covin Chundcr Dutt, 
 was himself distinguished among his countrymen for 
 the width of his views and the vigour of his intelligence. 
 His only son, Abju, died in 1865, ^^ the age of fourteen, 
 and left his two younger sisters to console their parents. 
 Aru, the elder daughter, born in 1854, was eighteen 
 months senior to Toru, the subject of this memoir, 
 who was born in Calcutta on the 4th of March, 1856. 
 With the exception of one year's visit to Bombay, 
 the childhood of these girls was spent in Calcutta, at 
 their father's garden-house. In a poem I printed for 
 the first time, Toru refers to the scene of her earliest 
 memories, the circling wilderness of foliage, the shining 
 tank with the round leaves of the lilies, the murmuring 
 dusk under the vast branches of the central casuarina- 
 tree. Here, in a mystical retirement more irksome to 
 an European in fancy than to an Oriental in reality, 
 the brain of this wonderful child was moulded She 
 was pure Hindu, full of the typical qualities of her 
 
202 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 race and blood, and preserving to the last her apprecia- 
 tion of the poetic side of her ancient religion, though 
 faith itself in Vishnu and Siva had been cast aside 
 with childish things and been replaced by a purer faith. 
 Her mother fed her imagination with the old songs and 
 legends of their people, stories which it was the last 
 labour of her life to weave into English verse ; but it 
 would seem that the marvellous faculties of Toru's 
 mind still slumbered, when, in her thirteenth year, her 
 father decided to take his daughters to Europe to learn 
 English and French. To the end of her days Toru 
 was a better French than English scholar. She loved 
 France best, she knew its literature best, she wrote its 
 language with more perfect elegance. The Dutts 
 arrived in Europe at the' close of 1869, and the girls 
 went to school, for the first and last time, at a French 
 pension. They did not remain there very many 
 months ; their father took them to Italy and England 
 with him, and finally they attended for a short time, 
 but with great zeal and application, the lectures for 
 women at Cambridge. In November, 1873, they went 
 back again to Bengal, and the four remaining years oi 
 Toru's life were spent in the old garden-house at 
 Calcutta, in a feverish dream of intellectual effort and 
 imaginative production. When we consider what she 
 achieved in these forty-five months of seclusion, it is 
 impossible to wonder that the frail and hectic body 
 succumbed under so excessive a strain. 
 
 She brought with her from Europe a store of 
 knowledge that would have sufficed to make an English 
 
Toru Dutt 
 
 or French girl seem learned, but which in her case was 
 simply miraculous. Immediately on her return she 
 began to study Sanskrit with the same intense applica- 
 tion which she gave to all her work, and mastering the 
 language with extraordinary swiftness, she plunged into 
 its mysterious literature. But she was born to write, 
 and despairing of an audience in her own language, 
 she began to adopt ours as a medium for her thought. 
 Her first essay, published when she was eighteen, 
 was a monograph in the Bengal Magazine, on Leconte 
 de Lisle, a writer with whom she had a sympathy 
 which is very easy to comprehend. The austere poet 
 of La Mori de Vahniki was, obviously, a figure to 
 whom the poet of Sindhu must needs be attracted on 
 approaching European literature. This study, which was 
 illustrated by translations into English verse, was fol- 
 lowed by another on Josdphin Soulary, in whom she saw 
 more than her maturer judgment might have justified. 
 
 There is something very interesting and now, alas 1 
 still more pathetic in these sturdy and workmanlike 
 essays in unaided criticism. Still more solitary her 
 work became, in July, 1874, when her only sister, 
 Aril, died, at the age of twenty. She seems to have 
 been no less amiable than her sister, and if gifted with 
 less originality and a less forcible ambition, to have 
 been finely accomplished. Both sisters were well- 
 trained musicians, with full contralto voices, and Aru had 
 a faculty for design which promised well. The romance 
 o^ Mile. D'Arvers was originally projected for Aru to 
 illustrate, but no page of this book did Aru ever see. 
 
204 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 In 1876, as we have seen, appeared that obscure 
 first volume at Bhowanipore. The Sheaf gleaned in 
 French Fields is certainly the most imperfect of Toru's 
 writings, but it is not the least interesting. It is a 
 wonderful mixture of strength and weakness, of genius 
 overriding great obstacles and of talent succumbing to 
 ignorance and inexperience. That it should have been 
 performed at all is so extraordinary that we forget to 
 be surprised at its inequality. The English verse is 
 sometimes exquisite ; at other times the rules of our 
 prosody are absolutely ignored, and it is obvious that 
 the Hindu poetess was chanting to herself a music 
 that is discord in an English ear. The notes are no less 
 curious, and to a stranger no less bewildering. Nothing 
 could be more na'ive than the writer's ignorance at some 
 points, or more startling than her learning at others. 
 
 On the whole, the attainment of the book was 
 simply astounding. It consisted of a selection of 
 translations from nearly one hundred French poets, 
 chosen by the poetess herself on a principle of her own 
 which gradually dawned upon the careful reader. She es- 
 chewed the Classicist writers as though they had never 
 existed. For her Andrd Chenier was the next name 
 in chronological order after Du Bartas. Occasionally 
 she showed a profundity of research that would have 
 done no discredit to Mr. Saintsbury or le doux Asselli- 
 neau. She was ready to pronounce an opinion on 
 Napol le Pyrenean or to detect a plagiarism in Baude- 
 laire. But she thought that Alexander Smith was still 
 alive, and she was curiously vague about the career of 
 
Toru Dutt 20; 
 
 Sainte Beuve. This inequality of equipment was a 
 thing inevitable to her isolation, and hardly worth 
 recording, except to show how laborious her mind was, 
 and how quick to make the best of small resources. 
 
 We have already seen that the Sheaf gleaned in 
 French Fields attracted the very minimum of attention 
 in England. In France it was talked about a little 
 more. M. Garcin de Tassy, the famous Orientalist, 
 who scarcely survived Toru by twelve months, spoke 
 of it to Mile. Clarisse Bader, author of a somewhat 
 remarkable book on the position of women in ancient 
 Indian society. Almost simultaneously this volume 
 fell into the hands of Toru, and she was moved to 
 translate it into English, for the use of Hindus less 
 instructed than herself. In January, 1877, she accord- 
 ingly wrote to Mile. Bader requesting her authorisation, 
 and received a prompt and kind reply. On the i8th of 
 March Toru wrote again to this, her solitary corre- 
 spondent in the world of European literature, and her 
 letter, which has been preserved, shows that she had 
 already descended into the valley of the shadow of 
 death : 
 
 " Ma constitution n'est pas forte ; j'ai contracts une 
 toux opiniatre, il y a plus de deux ans, qui ne me 
 quitte point. Cependant j'espere mettre la main k 
 I'oeuvre bientot. Je ne peux dire, mademoiselle, combien 
 votre affection — car vous les aimez, votre livre et votre 
 lettre en t^moignent assez — pour mes compatriotes et 
 mon pays me touche ; et je suis fiere de pouvoir le dire 
 que les hdrofnes de nos grandes ^pop^es sont dignes de 
 
2o6 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 tout honneur et de tout amour. Y a-ti-il d'heroYne plus 
 touchante, plus aimable que Sita ? Je ne le crois pas. 
 Qitand f eniends ma mkre chanter^ le soir, les vieux chants 
 de nofre pays, je pleure presque toiijours. La plainte de 
 Sita, quand, bannie pour la seconde fois, elle erre dans 
 la vaste foret, seule, le desespoir et Teffroi dans Tame, 
 est si pathetique qu'il n'y a personne, je crois, qui 
 puisse I'entendre sans verser des larmes. Je vous 
 envois sous ce pli deux petites traductions du Sanscrit* 
 cette belle langue antique. Malheureusement j'ai et^ 
 obligee de faire cesser mes traductions de Sanscrit, il y 
 a six mois. Ma sant6 ne me permet pas de les 
 continuer." 
 
 These simple and pathetic words, in which the dying 
 poetess pours out her heart to the one friend she had, 
 and that one gained too late, seem as touching and as 
 beautiful as any strain of Marceline Valmore's immortal 
 verse. In English poetry I do not remember anything 
 that exactly parallels their resigned melancholy. Before 
 the month of March was over, Torn had taken to her 
 bed. Unable to write, she continued to read, strewing 
 her sick room with the latest European books, and 
 entering with interest into the questions raised by the 
 Society Asiatique of Paris in its printed Transactions, 
 On the 30th of July she wrote her last letter to Mile. 
 Clarisse Bader, and a month later, on the 30th of 
 August, 1877, at the age of twenty-one years, six 
 months, and twenty-six days, she breathed her last in- 
 her father's house in Maniktollah Street, Calcutta. 
 
 In the first distraction of grief it seemed as though 
 
Toru Diitt 207 
 
 her unequalled promise had been entirely blighted, and 
 as though she would be remembered only by her single 
 book. But as her father examined her papers, one 
 completed work after another revealed itself. First a 
 selection from the sonnets of the Comte de Grammont, 
 translated into English, turned up, and was printed in 
 a Calcutta magazine ; then some fragments of an 
 English story, which was printed in another Calcutta 
 magazine. Much more important, however, than any 
 of these was a complete romance, written in French, 
 being the identical story for which her sister Aru had 
 proposed to make the illustrations. In the meantime 
 Toru was no sooner dead than she began to be famous. 
 In May, 1878, there appeared a second edition of the 
 Sheaf gleaned in French Fields^ with a touching sketch 
 of her death, by her father; and in 1879 was published, 
 under the editorial care of Mile. Clarisse Bader, the 
 romance of Le Journal de Mile, UArvers^ forming a 
 handsome volume of 259 pages. .This book, begun as 
 it appears before the family returned from Europe, and 
 finished nobody knows when, is an attempt to describe 
 scenes from modern French society, but it is less in- 
 teresting as an experiment of the fancy, than as a 
 revelation of the mind of a young Hindu woman of 
 genius. The story is simple, clearly told, and interest- 
 ing ; the studies of character have nothing French 
 about them, but they are full of vigour and originality. 
 The description of the hero is most characteristically 
 Indian : 
 
 " II est beau en effet. Sa taille est haute, mais 
 
20 8 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 quelques-uns la trouveraient mince ; sa chevelure noire 
 est bouclee et tombe jusqu'a la nuque ; ses yeux noirs 
 sont profonds et bien fend us ; le front est noble ; la 
 levre superieure, couverte par une moustache naissante 
 et noire, est parfaitement modelee ; son menton a 
 quelque chose de severe ; son teint est d'un blanc 
 presque feminin, ce qui denote sa haute naissance." 
 
 In this description we seem to recognise some Surya 
 or Soma of Hindu mythology, and the final touch, 
 miCaningless as applied to an European, reminds us 
 that in India whiteness of skin has always been a sign 
 of aristocratic birth, from the days when it originally 
 distinguished the conquering Aryas from the indi- 
 genous race of the Dasyous. 
 
 As a literary composition Mile. UArvers deserves 
 considerable commendation. It deals with the ungovern- 
 able passion of two brothers for one placid and beautiful 
 girl, a passion which leads to fratricide and madness. 
 That it is a very melancholy and tragical story is 
 obvious from this brief suggestion of its contents, but it is 
 remarkable for coherence and self-restraint no less than 
 for vigour of treatment. Toru Dutt never sinks to 
 melodrama in the course of her extraordinary tale, and 
 the wonder is that she is not more often fantastic and 
 unreal. 
 
 But I believe that the original English poems, which 
 I presented to the public for the first time in 1882, will 
 be ultimately found to constitute Tora's chief legacy to 
 posterity. These ballads form the last and most 
 matured of her writings, and were left so far fra. mentary 
 
Torn Dutt 209 
 
 at her death that the fourth and fifth in her projected 
 series of nine were not to be discovered in any form 
 among her papers. It is prol^nble that she had not 
 even commenced them. Her father, therefore, to give 
 a certain continuity to the series, filled up these blanks 
 with two stories from the VisJinupurana which origi- 
 nally appeared respectively in the Calcutta Revicu) 
 and in the Bengal Magazine. These are interesting, 
 but a little rude in form, and they have not the same 
 peculiar value as the rhymed octo-S3'llabic ballads. In 
 these last we see Toru no longer attempting vainly, 
 though heroically, to compete with European literature 
 on its own ground, but turning to the legends of her 
 own race and country for inspiration. No modern 
 Oriental has given us so strange an insight into the 
 conscience of the Asiatic as is presented in the stories 
 of "Prehlad" and of "Savitri/'or so quaint a piece 
 of religious fancy as the ballad of " Jogadhya Uma." 
 The poetess seems in these verses to be chanting to 
 herself those songs of her mother's race to which she 
 always turned with tears of pleasure. They breathe a 
 Vedic solemnity and simplicity of temper, and are 
 singularly devoid of that littleness and frivolity which 
 seem, if I may judge by a slight experience, to be the 
 bane of modern Indian literature. 
 
 As to the merely technical character of the poems, 
 it may be suggested that in spite of much in them that 
 is rough and inchoate, they show that Toru was 
 advancing in her mastery of English verse. Such a 
 stanza as this, selected out of many no less skilful 
 
 o 
 
2IO Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 could hardly be recognised as the work of one by 
 whom the language was a late acquirement : 
 
 What glcrious trees ! The sombre saul. 
 
 On which the eye delights to rest — 
 The betel-nut, a pillar tall. 
 
 With feathery branches for a crest — 
 The light-leaved tamarind spreading wide—^ 
 
 The pale faint- scented bitter neem. 
 The seem u I, gorgeous as a bride. 
 
 With flowers that have the rubfs gleam. 
 
 In other passages, of course, the text reads like a trans- 
 lation from some stirring ballad, and we feel that it 
 gives but a faint and discordant echo of the music 
 welling in Toru's brain. For it must frankly be con- 
 fessed that in the brief May-day of her existence she 
 had not time to master our language as Blanco White 
 did, or as Chamisso mastered German. To the end of 
 her days, fluent and graceful as she was, she was not 
 entirely conversant with English, especially with the 
 colloquial character of modern speech. Often a very 
 fine thought is spoiled for hypercritical ears by the queer 
 turn of expression which she has innocently given to 
 it. These faults are found to a much smaller degree 
 in her miscellaneous poeitis. Her sonnets, printed in 
 1882, seem to me to be of great beauty, and her longer 
 piece entitled ** Our Casuarina Tree," needs no apology 
 for its rich and mellifluous numbers : 
 
 Like a huge python, winding round and round 
 The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars^ 
 
Torn Diitt 2 1 I 
 
 Up to its very summit near the stars, 
 A creeper climbsy in whose embraces bound 
 
 No other tree could live. But gallantly 
 The giant wears the scarj, and fewer s are hung 
 In crimson clusters all the boughs among^ 
 
 Whereon all da^ are gathered bird and bee ; 
 And oft at nights the garden overfows 
 With one sweet song that seem^ to have no close^ 
 Sung darkling from our tret while men repose. 
 When fr St my casement is wide open thrown 
 
 At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest ; 
 
 Sometimes — and most in winter — on its crest 
 A grey baboon sits statue-like alone 
 
 Watching the sunrise ; while on lower boughs 
 His puny offspring leap about and play ; 
 And far and near kokilas hail the day ; 
 
 And to their pastures wend our sleepy cows / 
 And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast 
 By that hoar tree, so beautiful and vast, 
 
 The water-lilies spring, like snozv enmassed, 
 
 • # • • 
 
 Therefore 1 fain would consecrate a lay 
 Unto thy honour. Tree, beloved of those 
 Who now in bkssed sleep, for aye, repose; 
 Dearer than life to me, alas I were they I 
 
 MaysU thou be numbered when my days are dtne 
 With deathless Trees — like those in Borrowdale, 
 Under whose azvful branches lingered pale 
 
 *' Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton. 
 And Time, the shadow y" and though weak the verse 
 That would thy bciiuty fain, oh fain rehearse. 
 May Love defend thee from Oblivion'' s curse. 
 
212 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 It is difficult to exaggerate when we try to estimate 
 what we have lost in the premature death of Toru Dutt. 
 Literature has no honours which need have been be- 
 yond the grasp of a girl who before the age of twenty^ 
 one, and in languages separated from her own by so 
 deep a chasm, had produced so much of lasting worth. 
 And her courage and fortitude were worthy of her in- 
 telligence. Among ** last words " of celebrated people, 
 that which her father has recorded, *^ It is only the 
 physical pain that makes me cry," is not the least re- 
 markable, or the least significant of strong character. 
 It was to a native of our island, and to one ten years 
 senior to Toru, to whom it was said, in words more 
 appropriate, surely, to her than to Oldham, 
 
 Thy generous fruits^ though gathered ere their prime, 
 
 Still showed a quickness, and maturing tim,e 
 
 But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of Rime, 
 
 That mellow sweetness was all that Toru lacked to 
 perfect her as an English poet, and of no other Oriental 
 who has ever lived can the same be said. When the 
 history of the literature of our country comes to be 
 written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this 
 fragile exotic blossom of song. 
 
 1882. 
 
M. JOSE-MARIA DE HEREDIA 
 
M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 
 
 1 HAT M. Zola will, in due course of time, push his 
 way into the Institute, and become authorised to wear 
 the greenest of palm-shoots, is doubtless inevitable, nor 
 have I any objection to offer. But, for the life of me, 
 I cannot understand wh}', all of a sudden, the English 
 press has become so exceedingly anxious to see this 
 little affair of literary honour arranged. The reception 
 given in this country to the latest election at the French 
 Academy was comically unaccountable. Why has it 
 abruptly become necessary that a dignified, ancient and 
 scholarly body should open its doors to the author of 
 Pot-Bouille^ knocking so noisily upon them with re- 
 verberations of congenial brass ? The spirit of modern 
 democracy, we are told, demands that the possessor of 
 such swarms of editions should be an Academician, and 
 when he is kept waiting for a little while (it wnll only be 
 for a little while — calm yourself, beating heart of the 
 democracy !), shouts out that the Academy is decrepit 
 and obsolete, and must be swept off the face of the earth. 
 Permit the great M. Zola to kick his heels in the cold, 
 while you let in a gentleman who has only written a few 
 sonnets? Shameful nepotism, shocking decrepitude I 
 The fact is, it is time that we should cease to laugh at 
 
2i6 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 the French for their affection for the Russians. We are 
 making ourselves still more ridiculous by our prepos- 
 terous solicitude for M. Zola. 
 
 With those who regret that our Tudor kings started 
 no such literary order of merit as the French Academy, 
 I do not greatly sympathise, and still less with those 
 who recommend the creation to-day of a brand-new in- 
 stitution of the kind. Still, looking across the water 
 to France, I do see that there are functions which so 
 ancient a body as that which sits in the Mazarine Palace 
 can, and does, exercise with high advantage to the 
 public. The inclusion of M. Zola, though not neces- 
 sarily foreign to the aim of such a body, does eminently 
 strike me as not being one of those functions. He has 
 his editions, his wealth, and his fame, the tributes of 
 the democracy. But what a set of men in the position 
 of the thirty-nine electing Academicians, raised above 
 fear of public displeasure, made a law unto themselves, 
 can do is to protect and reward distinguished and deli- 
 cate talent, of a very original order, which does not 
 appeal to the loud public. The French Academy can 
 afford to wave aside the novelist who comes with 
 all his drums and trumpets, and a flushed cohort 
 of camp followers shouting in his wake, and can say 
 to the poet who does not strive nor cry, who culti- 
 vates a noble art in austerity, "Be pleased, sir, to 
 join our company ; there will be room for this popular 
 gentleman by-and-by." That the French Academy 
 has done this by electing M. de Heredia to the seat 
 vacated by the death of M. de Mazade seems to me 
 
M. Jose-Maria de HercJia 217 
 
 an unusually efTective exercise of a wholesome and 
 valuable privilege. 
 
 Wholesome, because it is necessary for the health of 
 the intellectual life in this crowded and degenerated 
 atmosphere of ours to be encouraged to climb the heights 
 and taste the colder air ; valuable, because it rewards a 
 decent and dignified ambition in a mode that is more 
 direct than any other which is open to the literary world 
 of to-day. The election of M. de Hercdia to the French 
 Academy is an important and critical event in the 
 imaginative history of our time, because it is a public 
 statement of the value set by a group of men of high 
 and yet dissimilar intellectual character on work that is 
 superlatively well done, on the work of a craftsman who 
 has not allowed himself to be hurried or disturbed by 
 any pressure from w^ithout, who has not cared to move 
 an inch from his path to please the many or the few, 
 who has spent half a lifetime in the pursuit of a 
 splendid perfection, a faultless magnificence in concen- 
 trated and chiselled verse. It is the occasional appear- 
 ance, in our slipshod world, of artists so consummate 
 as M. de Hcredia that keeps poetry from being degraded 
 to a mere shabby volubility. Dafa Rofnanis venia est 
 indigiia pociis^ and the only way in which the standard 
 can be raised to its normal severity is by occasional 
 reference to those writers who live up to the most rigid 
 executive ideal. It is as a jew^eller in verse, a poetical 
 artificer of the very highest merit that M. de Heredia 
 has earned for himself the applause of the Institute. 
 We hear a great deal of the experimentalists who are 
 
21 8 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 trying to dissolve and deliquesce the prosody of France. 
 Let us acquaint ourselves, in justice, with the man who 
 has done most during the last ten years to keep it as 
 hard and as brilliant as fine bronze. 
 
 So far as I am aware, no biography or even bio- 
 graphical sketch of M. de Heredia has ever been pub- 
 lished. His is the proud and self-contained nature, no 
 doubt, that shrinks from publicity as from a familiar 
 touch. The details I give below are the mosaic of an 
 affectionate though secret admirer, who has carefully 
 stored up, through more than twenty years, every scrap 
 of information which has fallen in his way respecting 
 a poet whose genius is intimately sympathetic to him. 
 
 Jose-Maria de Heredia is a Cuban by birth. He 
 traces his ancestry direct from one of the first con- 
 querors of the New World. He is of the bluest blood 
 of Spanish colonial aristocracy. He tells me that he is 
 the direct descendant of that Adelantado don Pedro de 
 Heredia, who came to America in the company of the 
 second Admiral Diego Columbus, and who founded 
 Cartagena in the West Indies. To this ancestor he 
 has alluded in several of his poems. In the extreme 
 south of the island, above the bay and city of Santiago 
 de Cuba, in a glen of the Sierra Maestra looking over 
 the ocean southward towards Jamaica, he was born on 
 the 22nd of November, 1842. His home was the 
 coffee plantation of La Fortuna, one of the last posses- 
 
M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 219 
 
 sions of a noble but impoverished family. On tlic 
 mother's side, however, he is of French origin. At 
 the age of eight he was brought to Paris, and received 
 his earliest education at the College of St. Vincent at 
 Senlis. Nine years in Europe made a Frenchman of 
 him, but at seventeen he went back to Cuba. For a 
 year he worked at the University of Havannah ; then, 
 about i860, finally returned to France, and took up his 
 studies in the law. He tells me that he sadly neglected 
 them, and then, with greater zest, entered the Ecole 
 des Chartes. In Cuba, I am told, they reproach him 
 with having robbed Spain of a Spanish poet ; but, 
 in truth, M. de Pleredia is scarcely more a Spaniard 
 than Rossetti was an Italian. 
 
 In 1862 he published his first verses in the then 
 existing Revue de Park, the far-away ancestor of MM. 
 Darmesteter and Ganderax's new venture. I know 
 not what these "first verses " were. But in 1866 he 
 was one of the happy band of lyric boys who started 
 the Pamasse Contcmporain^ that Germ of France. This 
 anthology was brought oiit under the auspices and the 
 patronage of M. Leconte de Lisle, whose influence over 
 recent French poetry has been greater than that of 
 any other person. Among the youthful Parnassian* 
 were almost all the men who have since that day come 
 prominently to the front in poetical literature — Sully 
 Prudhomme and Francois Coppee, Paul Verlaine and 
 CatuUe Mendes, Stdphane Mallarmd and Ldon Dierx. 
 Among them, and from the very first, the young 
 Heredia distinguished himself by the severe ideal of 
 
220 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 his art, and by his disdain of the common tricks by 
 which men rise. He remembered the blood of the 
 founder of Cartagena. 
 
 In one of his deHcious essays, M. Anatole France, 
 himself a Parnassian, recalls the features of that happy 
 tim.e. He has a little vignette portrait of each of his 
 old comrades, and here is what he says of the poet of 
 Les Trophees : 
 
 " Alone, or almost alone, in our cenade, M. Jose- 
 Maria de Heredia, although defrauded of a great part 
 of the treasure of his ancestors, the conquistador eSy 
 affected the young gentleman of fashion, and smoked 
 excellent cigars. His neckties were as splendid as his 
 sonnets. But it was of the sonnets alone that we were 
 jealous ; for we all disdained the gifts of fortune. We 
 loved nothing but fame, and we wished that if we were 
 famous it might be in a discreet and almost secret 
 way." 
 
 Alread}^, in this ver}^ early time, it was the magnifi- 
 cent precision of Heredia's sonnets which attracted the 
 attention of his elders ; and Theophile Gautier, that 
 benevolent Olympian, exclaimed, on putting down the 
 Parnasse Contemporain^ '^ Heredia, I love you, be- 
 cause the name you bear is exotic and sonorous, and 
 because you make verses that curl up at the ends like 
 heraldic scallops." 
 
 The rest of the Parnassians, one after another, com- 
 mitted little volumes of independent verse, the first 
 steps in so many active poetic careers. M. de Heredia 
 alone remained aloof and impersonal, now and then 
 
M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 221 
 
 dropping an impeccable sonnet into somebody else's 
 nest. He was prominent in the second Parnasse 
 ContcwporaiHy that of 1869. My own first acquaint- 
 ance with him was made in a volume of So7vtcts et 
 Eattx- forties, published by Lemerre in 1869, and now 
 extremely rare. I copied out, more than twenty years 
 ago, from this expensive and unattainable work, a 
 sonnet which appeared to me then, as it still appears, 
 of a magnificent and refulgent perfection. This was 
 Lcs Couqiicrants^ now the first of a sequence of eight 
 poems : 
 
 Comme un vol ae gerfauts hors du charnier natal. 
 Fatigues de porter leurs mishes hautainesj 
 De Pal OS de Moguer, routiers et capitaines 
 Partaient^ ivres d'un reve k'ero'ique et brutaL 
 
 Us allaient conquerir le fabuleux metal 
 ^e Cipango murit dans ses mines lointaines, 
 Et les vents alizes inclinaient leurs antennes 
 Aux bords mysterieux du monde Occidental, 
 
 Chaque soir, esperant des lendemains epiqueSy 
 Vaxur phosphorescent de la mer des Tropiques 
 Enchantait leur sommeil d'un mirage dore ; 
 
 Ou penches a I'avant des blanches caravelles^ 
 lis regardaient monter en un del ignore 
 Du fond de r Ocean des etoiles no uv elks, 
 
 A little later, in the charming Le Lt'vre des Sonnets 
 edited by Charles Asselineau, other specimens came to 
 light, and under the same mysterious conditions. It 
 
222 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 became, at last, a sort of collector's joy to watch 
 the newspapers and reviews for stray sonnets of 
 Heredia. Once there came, I forget where, a batch of 
 no fewer than twenty-five at once, an event only to be 
 paralleled, as a fact of exciting poetical significance, 
 with the publication of Rossetti's House of Life in the 
 Fortnightly Review fox 1869. Those were days when 
 a man might trudge forth from his house at the morn- 
 ing hour and meet angels in the street. "A happy 
 time that was," as Wordsworth says, "triumphant 
 looks Were then the common language of all eyes." I 
 hope the young poetical fellows nowadays enjoy them- 
 selves with as much gaiety as we did in our implacable 
 fanaticism for verse ; but I fancy that the incessant 
 paragraph and the newspaper column, avid of informa- 
 tion, must lessen their pleasures. Half of ours lay in 
 cjur remoteness and our concentrated narrowness of 
 interest. 
 
 Much has changed since then, both in London and 
 Paris. The whole face of fashion has altered ; the 
 most famous names have become part of the heritage 
 of history; youth, that made us what we were, and 
 painted the dull places with such fiery colours, has 
 passed. Only one thing remains absolutely unchanged, 
 and that is the work of M. de Heredia. He reminds 
 us of some craftsman in his studio, fingering his wax 
 and hammering his thin plates of metal, while an army 
 marches into his town, and is in turn driven out of it. 
 He looks up, pale and dreamy, at the fall of afternoon, 
 and has not heard an echo of the long day's battle. 
 
M. Jose-Maria de Hcredia 223 
 
 The poet fashions his exquisite verses, one by one, 
 and the world may look at them or not, as it pleases. 
 Last summer, for the first time, M. de Hercdia deigned 
 to collect his scattered sonnets into a volume, Lcs 
 TropJiccs* a thirteenth edition of which had been 
 printed before the close of 1893. If he waited long, 
 until his life had passed its fiftieth year, before making 
 an appeal to the great public, his reticence has received 
 its reward. Rarely, indeed, has a book of poems so 
 severe in form, making so stern a demand upon the 
 gravity of the reader, achieved so substantial a success. 
 And now, with the slender yellow volume of Lcs Tro- 
 phe'cs in his hand, he steps lightly up the staircase of 
 the French Academy. 
 
 In all the literatures of Europe, the sonnet is pre- 
 eminent in its pathetic and rhetorical forms. It is 
 mainly subjective and Petrarchan. Any reader who 
 turns over the leaves of a competent selection of English, 
 or French, or Italian sonnets must be struck with the 
 fact that in their large majority they express the secret 
 sentiment or emotional experience of the soul, and that 
 even where they seem to be descriptive, they deal mainly 
 with the effect of external phenomena on the moods 
 of the writer. No species of poetry is more confidential 
 than the sonnet ; none has been used, since its first 
 
 * Les Trcphees. Par Jose-Maria de Heredia. Paris : Alphonse Lemerre, 
 1893. 
 
224 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 invention, more persistently for the transmission of 
 those secret thoughts which almost evade articulate 
 expression. The innumerous sonnet-cycles of the 
 Elizabethan age, from those of Shakespeare and 
 Spenser downvi^ards, were either pure exercises in 
 Petrarchan amorosity, or they gave voice to an im- 
 possible emotion of which the direct utterance would 
 have been indiscreet. The sonnets of Milton are louder 
 in tone, and more impersonal ; they represent, how- 
 ever, the element of pure and mellifluous eloquence 
 rather than of detached poetical observation. The 
 tone is no longer the whisper of a lover in pain, but 
 although the sonneteer speaks from the rostrum, the 
 appeal is always to his own experience and desires. 
 
 It is the same in French poetry. It would be difficult 
 to collect out of the abundant Petrarchist literature of 
 the sixteenth century a very small anthology of really 
 objective sonnets. There are one or two of Ronsard's ; 
 there is the m3^sterious and beautiful octett of Amadis 
 Jamyn's '' Les ombres, les esprits, les idoles afifreuses " ; 
 it would require some research to discover any other 
 specimens into which the personal note of confession, 
 entreaty, or rhetoric did not enter. When the revival 
 of the sonnet began — in England more than a hundred 
 years ago, in France more recently — the form was 
 again captured for purely subjective uses. There are, 
 of course, a few impersonal examples of Wordsworth 
 and Keats. In our own day we have received some 
 exquisite objective sonnets from Miss Christina Rossetti. 
 But these are rare in England, and no less rare in France, 
 
M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 225 
 
 where the difTcrcnce between the two classes of sonnet, 
 the introspective or philosophical, and the external or 
 decorative, cannot be more clearly seen than by com- 
 paring the work of the two most eminent living 
 sonneteers of France — M. Sully Prudhomrae and M. 
 de Heredia. If objective sonnets are rare in every 
 collection, what must be our surprise to find that Les 
 Trophecs consists exclusively of this species of com- 
 position. 
 
 In the hands of M. de Heredia the sonnet takes a 
 form of absolute regularity. The two rhymes of his 
 octett (ab-ba-ab-bd) never change their positions ; his 
 sestett is permitted but two arrangements (ccd-cde or 
 ccd-ccd). He permits himself no licence of any kind ; 
 the frame is given to him, he has to fill it with absolute 
 exactitude. This image of a picture in a gallery of 
 paintings is one which it is difficult to dispense with in 
 considering M. de Heredia's book. We find ourselves 
 moving leisurely down a beautiful corridor, the walls of 
 which are decorated, at regular intervals, with very 
 highly finished panel-pictures, all of exactly the same 
 size. It is now easy to understand why the public has 
 been for so many 3'ears excluded from this gallery. 
 The conscientious artist has not been willing that his 
 work should be examined until it was complete, and 
 the labour of completion has occupied half a lifetime. 
 My eminent friend will forgive me, I think, if I quote 
 in this connection a few words from a letter to myself : 
 **Si je m'en suis tenu au sonnet," he says, " c'est que 
 je trouve que dans sa forme k la fois mystique et 
 
 P 
 
226 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 mathematique, c'est le plus beau des poemes k forme 
 fixe et qu'il exige, par sa brievete et sa difficulte, une 
 conscience dans I'execution et une concentration de la 
 pensee qui ne peuvent qu'exciter et pousser a la per- 
 fection I'artiste digne de ce beau nom." 
 
 The first thing to be observed, in advancing along 
 this rare and singular gallery, is that the paintings are 
 by no means of an accidental arrangement or set in 
 desultory sequence. The book is an attempt to present 
 to the inward eye a regular series of carefully selected 
 scenes from the imaginative history of the world. We 
 shrink with horror from the notion of a weltgeschichte in 
 quatorzains, and M. de Keredia, who is a master of the 
 art of literary tact, would shudder sympathetically with 
 us. What he designs is no more than a rapid descent 
 of the ages, with here and there a momentary revela- 
 tion of some highly suggestive and entertaining scene, 
 or incident, or personage, rapidly given and as rapidly 
 withdrawn, but seen for that moment with all the pre- 
 cision and effulgence possible, so that in the dimness of 
 the grey past this one figure or incident may blaze out 
 like a veritable luminary. For this purpose, every- 
 thing needless, trifling or accidental, every triviality of 
 expression, every superfluous phrase or image, must 
 be rigidly suppressed. In so sudden and brief a revela- 
 tion every touch must burn. 
 
 The central characteristic, then, of these splendid 
 sonnets is their technical perfection. There is nothing 
 loose or ungirt, nothing said vaguely because it would 
 take time and labour to be precise. M. de Heredia 
 
M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 227 
 
 opens his poem — for Lcs TropJurs is really one poem 
 in many sections — with a sonnet "L'Oubli." Oblivion, 
 indeed, is the enemy he attacks. The temple on the 
 Grecian promontory is ruined ; its goddesses of marble 
 and its heroes of bronze lie broken and defaced under 
 the dry and wind-blown grasses ; the sea at the foot of 
 the headland moans and bewails the dead sirens of long 
 ago. Not stone and not metal can defy oblivion ; the 
 only truly immortal art, which no caprice of man or 
 time can destroy, is verse. And so, in verse that shall 
 be as like hammered bronze and carven marble as he 
 can make it, the proudest of modern poets will try to 
 save the fleeting world of beauty from decay. 
 
 Greece, first — since the savage and oriental parts of 
 human development, which appeal so intimately to his 
 master, M. Leconte de Lisle, have little or nothing to 
 say to M. de Heredia. For him the symbol must be 
 clear, brilliant, physical ; he has no pleasure in 
 mysticism or in the twilight of the intelligence. And 
 this, indeed, must be confessed at once, that those who 
 seek for tender notes and sunken lights, the vague 
 S3'mpathies of the soul, the melancholy music of 
 experience, may go elsewhere ; the poet of Les Trophies 
 is not for them. No man has less been touched by the 
 malady of the age, no one is less attracted to the 
 unknown and the distressful. M. de Heredia gazes 
 straight at clear and beautiful things seen in a blaze of 
 light ; almost every sonnet of his gives an impression 
 of translucent air and brilliant sunshine. Alone, among 
 French poets of to-day, the prevailing note of his work 
 
228 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 is joyous and heroic. Those ages of the world's 
 history please him in which the symboHsm of the 
 imagination was sumptuous and noble. He possesses 
 not a little of the grandiloquence of the race from which 
 he sprang. His sonnets have the sound of a clarion, 
 the human voice concentrated and uplifted by being 
 blown through fine brass. 
 
 In the vestibule of his gallery of paintings we find 
 six magnificent studies of Hercules and the Centaurs. 
 This hero pleases him ; he goes forth against lions, 
 against centaurs (those emblems of hysterical human 
 weakness), against perplexed and obscure hydras ; he 
 is strong and clear-headed, a lover of work strenuously 
 fulfilled. So we find this story of Hercules told in a 
 set of ringing sonnets, and we fancy ourselves opening 
 the cabinet of a fifteenth-century Florentine medallist. 
 With these and a few other exceptions, the Greek 
 portion of Les Trophees may be passed over more 
 rapidly than the rest. The sonnets dealing with the 
 gods and the fiymphs are somewhat cold ; they are 
 marble plaques in low relief, like fragments of a 
 translation of Sophocles into sculpture. In this section 
 of his book, the poet becomes most truly inspired, as 
 it seems to me^ when he deals with the legend oi* 
 Pegasus, an animal for whom he nourishes a very 
 tender regard. From several Perseus and Andromeda 
 sonnets I select one, as it seems to me, of incomparable 
 beauty : 
 
M. Josc-Maria de Ilcrcdia 229 
 
 Au milieu de P'ecume arritant son essor^ 
 Le Cavalier vainqueur du monstre et de Meduse^ 
 tluisseliint d'une have horrible ou le sang fuse ^ 
 Em parte entre scs bras la vierge aux cheveux d^or, 
 
 Sur Pe talon divin^frlre de Chrysaor, 
 i^-'z piaff'e dans la mer et hennit et refuse, 
 II a pose r Amante e per due et confuse 
 ^i lui rit et Petreint et qui sanglote encor, 
 
 II Vembrasse. La houle enveloppe leur groupe. 
 
 rile, d^un faible effort, ram>,ne sur la croupe 
 
 Ses beaux picdj quenfuyant baise unfot vagabond: 
 
 Mais Pegase irrite par le fouet de la lame, 
 A Pappel du Her OS senlcvant d'un seul bond^ 
 Bat le del ebloui de ses ailes de famme. 
 
 As we decline to the latest schools of Greece, such 
 successes as these are oftener repeated. In dealing with 
 the sturdier pictures of antique Hfe, I think that no 
 critic can deny the superiority of M. Leconte de Lisle. 
 The Hyperion of Keats is probably the only modern 
 rival of the best portions of Lcs Poemcs Antiques. 
 M. de Heredia cannot connpress this vast music into the 
 brief compass of his sonnet, nor do the exigencies of 
 his form, complicated and concentrated as it is bound 
 to be, permit these broader effects. But when it is 
 noi the tragedians whom he essay's to follow, but when 
 the lapidary art of the Aniliology inspires him, when a 
 runner, or a charioteer, the tomb of a grasshopper, or 
 the prayer of shepherds to Pan, is the subject of one 
 
230 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 of his lucid and admirable sonnets, then he rises to the 
 height of his genius. Nor, let it at once be said, with 
 this sympathy for the civilised decline of a social 
 order, does any littleness, any alexandrianism, any 
 love of the quip or the conceit find place. All is on a 
 restrained scale, but as pure and dignified as a relief 
 by Donatello. 
 
 When the poet reaches Rome and the incursion of 
 the Barbarians, the same characteristics are displayed. 
 There is scarcely a touch of Virgil, nothing of Horace 
 or Lucretius, but not a little of Catullus, and the very 
 soul of Martial. Not merely, as may be seen by the 
 comparison of the sonnet called " Lupercus " with the 
 1 1 8th epigram of the first book, is the very wine of 
 the last-named poet poured, without loss of a drop 
 spilled or diluted, into the chalice of the sonnet, but 
 that is said which the manner of Martial suggests, yet, 
 if it be not blasphemy to think so, better said. Will the 
 shade of Desire Nisard permit it to be whispered, for 
 instance, that this is written as Martial would have 
 written it, with modern knowledge, and a modern 
 vocabulary to aid him ? 
 
 AUX MONTAGNES DIVINES. 
 
 Geminus Servus 
 et pro suis conservis. 
 
 Glaciers hieus, pics de marhre et d^ardoise, granits. 
 Moraines dont le vent, du Nethou jusqu^a Begle, 
 Arrache, brule et tord le froment et le seigle. 
 Cols abrupt s^ lacs, for ets pleines d"* ombre et de rdds! 
 
M. Josc-Maria de Heredia 231 
 
 Antres sourds^ noirs vallons que hs ancicns bannis^ 
 Pluto t que de ployer sous la servile regle^ 
 Hanterent avec Pours, le loupy Visard et Vnigle^ 
 Precipices^ torrents, gouffres, soyez benis ! 
 
 Ayant fui Pergastule et le dur municipe, 
 
 Vesclave Geminus a d'cdi'e ce cippe 
 
 Aux Mont 5^ gardiens sacres de Papre liber t'e ; 
 
 Et sur ces sommets clairs ou le silence vibre, 
 
 Dans Pair inviolable, immense et pur, jete^ 
 
 Je erois entendre encor le cri d'un homme libre t 
 
 In the section of his book entitled 77?^ Middle Ages 
 and the Renaissance^ M. de Heredia rehnquishes himself 
 to the pleasure of seizing little characteristic episodes, 
 and treating them in the manner of a goldsmith. We 
 find sonnets in which a picture of mediaeval societ}' is 
 given with the rigidity, the clear, shadowless colour, 
 and the transparency of a stained-glass window at 
 Chartres or Le Mans; in which Balthazar, Melchior, 
 and Caspar, on their road to Bethany, cross a back- 
 ground of turquoise-coloured enamel ; in which an 
 epitaph is murmured over the extremely irreligious 
 corpse of Hyacinthe, Seigneur de Maugiron, while 
 tears furrow the rose-paint on the cheeks of Henri III. ; 
 in which a fading sheet of vellum, illuminated by Clovis 
 Eve, is congratulated on having been caressed by the 
 fingers of Diane de Poictiers. The censer, set with 
 rubies, pearls, and beryls, over the chiselling of which 
 Fray Juan de Segovia wore out his eyesight, this is 
 
232 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 more, one feels, to M. de Heredia than the ritual in 
 which it is to be waved, and it is part of his sincerity 
 that he apes no wide human sympathies in his con- 
 spectus of historical impressions. 
 
 But he is Cuban and a descendant of the Conquis- 
 tadores; and he is lifted to more heroic flights, and 
 a grander, because broader, conception of life, when, in 
 a series of sonnets from which I have already quoted 
 one, he celebrates the deeds of his colonial ancestors. 
 He passes on to a lament over the decay of Spanish 
 pride in the Americas, bewailing in one melodious 
 sonnet after another the ruin of such dazzling hopes 
 and the waste of prowess so magnificent. None of the 
 poems of this section is more grandiose, nor any more 
 interesting to us Englishmen, than the following on 
 the decline of Cartagena ; 
 
 A UNE VILLE MORTE. 
 
 Cartagena de Indias, 
 1532-1583-1697. 
 
 Morne ViUe^jadis reine des Oceans! 
 Aujourd^hui le requin pursuit en paix les scombres 
 Et le nuage errant allonge seul des ombres 
 Sur ta rade ou roulaient les gallons geants, 
 
 Depuis Drake et Vassaut des Anglais me ere ant s^ 
 Tes murs desempares croulent en noirs decombres^ 
 Et, comme un glorieux collier de perles sombres, 
 Des boulets de Pointis montrent les trous beants. 
 
M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 233 
 
 Entre le del qui brule et la mcr qui moutonne^ 
 
 Au somnolent soleil (Tun midi monotoney 
 
 Tu songeSy Guerriere^ aux vieux Conquistadors ; 
 
 Et dans V'cnervement des nuits chaudes et cnlmes^ 
 
 Servant ta gloire eteinte, o Cite^ tu Vendors 
 
 Sous les palmiers, au long fremissement des palmes. 
 
 We pass on to " The Orient and the Tropics." Here, 
 again, we seem to catch something of the accent of M. 
 Leconte de Lisle, to whom such figures as Kham and 
 Hathor seem naturally dedicated. But in Japan M. de 
 Heredia recovers the whole of his originality. He has 
 succeeded, alone among poets of the West, in extract- 
 ing from the art and the history of that miraculous 
 archipelago its heroic and chivalrous splendour. 
 
 We are accustomed to an infusion of the sweeter 
 tones, the more diaphanous graces of Japanese life into 
 our poetry and our painting. What is novel, what M. de 
 Heredia alone has given, is the mystery of the ancient 
 aristocracy of Japan, with its fierce disregard of life, 
 its savage sumptuousness, its extraordinary fulness of 
 violent and vivid colour. He paints for us the Daimio 
 on the field of battle, fluttering his satin-covered iron 
 fan in front of his glaring eyes, while the lacquer coat- 
 of-mail creaks on his panting bosom ; or he gives us so 
 strange a glimpse into the life of bygone Japan as is 
 packed into this amazing sonnet : 
 
234 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 LE SAMOURAI. 
 
 C'etait un homme a deux sabres. 
 
 D^un doigt distrait frolant la sonore bwa, 
 A tr avers les bambous tresses en fine latte, 
 Elle a vUj par la plage eblouissante et plate, 
 S'avancer le vainqueur que son amour reva, 
 
 C^est lui. Sabres aufianc, V event ail haut, il va. 
 La cordeliere rouge et le gland ecarlate 
 Coupent Varmure sombre, et, sur Pepaule, eclate 
 Le blason de Hizen ou de Tokungazva. 
 
 Ce beau guerrier vetu de lames et de plaques, 
 Sous le bronze, la soie et les brillantes laques, 
 Semble un crustace noir, gigantesque et vermeil, 
 
 II Pa vue, II sourit dans la bar be du masque, 
 
 Et son pas plus hdtif fait rehire au soleil 
 
 Les deux antennes d^or qui tremblent a son casque. 
 
 The sequence of Les Trophies closes with a series 
 of selected sonnets entitled '' Nature and Dream." In 
 these the poet quits the field of history, and concen- 
 trates his vision on such episodes of modern life and 
 landscape as are specially sympathetic to him. He 
 admits many things here that help us to form an exact 
 impression of his own mind. He dwells with affec- 
 tionate complacency over the destruction of all that 
 made Sicily what she was in antiquity, and the dura- 
 bility amid the general wreck of a few coins in which 
 
M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 235 
 
 the beauty of the Sicihan virgins is still immortal. He 
 raises a picture of the gorgeous funerals of ancient 
 Greek warriors, descending to Hades surrounded by 
 all the pomp and glory of their fellow-countrymen, 
 while the French poet himself will one of these days 
 share the inglorious burial which is administered in turn 
 to all members of the democracy ; 
 
 Et pourtant fat reve ce destin glorieux 
 De tomber au sohil a'uisi que lei a'ieuXy 
 Jeune encore et pleure des h'eros et des vierges. 
 
 In his aspect of nature, in his moods towards life as it 
 manifests itself to us to-day, there is no petulance but 
 a marked and ever-present sense of regretful loss, only 
 to be redeemed by a passionate and vivid realisation of 
 scenes and objects otherwise lost for ever. 
 
 It should, perhaps, be added here that the volume of 
 Lcs Trophecs is not entirely devoted to sonnets. There 
 are three mediaeval Spanish romances, composed in 
 tcrza 7'ifiia, and a somewhat extended epical study, in 
 couplets, called Lcs Conquerants de VOr. Each of 
 these is vigorously written, and worthy of study, but 
 neither induces the critical reader to waver in his 
 conviction that the sonnet was the province of poetry 
 which M. de Heredia was born to occupy. 
 
 Nor has he confined himself entirely to verse. M. de 
 Heredia is the author of a translation, in four large 
 volumes, of La ComjiUte du Mcxiqiic of Bernal Diaz, in 
 which, by a sustained eftbrt of st^'le, he has transformed 
 the entii-e nairative into such French of the sixteenth 
 
236 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 century as Agrippa d'Aubigne might have signed. 
 Lastly, in 1894, in a little book illustrated by Daniel 
 Vierge, the poet gave us a version of that curious 
 picaresque romance, La Nonne Alferez, 
 
 III 
 
 To call Jose-Maria de Heredia a great poet would 
 be to misuse language. He lacks the breadth and 
 humanity of the leaders of poetry. But, beyond all 
 question, he is a great poetic artist and probably the 
 most remarkable now alive in Europe. The few 
 quotations which I have been able to give in the 
 preceding pages will undoubtedly be enough to prove 
 this fact to any who have not yet made the acquaint- 
 ance of his work ; and M. de Heredia is none of those 
 writers from whom an indulgent reviewer can select 
 pieces which give an impression of far higher merit 
 than the perusal of the actual volume justifies. 
 
 Perhaps his most singular characteristic, the evidence 
 of a self-control almost without parallel in recent litera- 
 ture, is the high level of workmanship which runs through 
 his entire published poetry. He must sometimes write 
 poor verse, one fancies, since he is mortal, but at least 
 he never publishes it. Some numbers in Les Trophe'es 
 are more interesting than others ; it is difficult to 
 admit that any are better written. From beginning to 
 end the book rings with melody, each sonnet brings 
 up before the inward eye a luminous picture, in a clear 
 sunlit atmosphere, flashing with colour, sharply defined, 
 
M. Jose-Maria de Heredia 237 
 
 completely provided with every artifice and accomplish- 
 ment of learning, taste, and craftsmanship. The only 
 objection, indeed, which one is inclined to bring against 
 M. de Heredia as a poet is the result of this uniform 
 strenuousncss. One wishes that all were not quite so 
 metallic in sound, so sumptuous in colour, so radiantly 
 and sonorously objective. The softer stop is missed, 
 the pathetic and mysterious qualities are neglected. 
 But in these slipshod days, it is no small thing to find 
 that poets still exist who hold their art in chivalric 
 honour, and who would rather be banished from their 
 country than allow a loose rhyme to escape them, or 
 commit a solecism in prosody. 
 
 1894. 
 
WALTER PATER 
 
Walter Pater 
 
 A PORTRAIT 
 
 Few recent events can have surprised and saddened 
 the sincere lovers of Hterature more than the death, in 
 middle life, of Walter Pater. A peculiar vexation, so 
 to speak, was added to the natural grief such a loss 
 must have caused, by the strange inexactitude, in 
 matters of detail, which marked almost all the notices 
 of his career which appeared at the time. In most of 
 these notices, it is true, there was manifested a wish to 
 pay homage to one oi the most exquisite, the most 
 self-respecting, the most individual prose-writers of the 
 age ; but knowledge, especially of his earlier years and 
 intellectual development, was lacking. He was one 
 who never had tempted the interviewer, who had never 
 chatted to the press about himself, and facts regarding 
 him were not at that abrupt moment forthcoming. 
 
 How far accidents of time and place were responsible 
 for aiding this condition of things it were now perhaps 
 idle to speculate. The fame of Walter Pater will not be 
 wrecked on the holiday of an editor or the indolence of 
 a reporter. It is grounded on the respect which has 
 not yet failed to follow pure and distinguished excel- 
 lence in the art of writing. As years go on, he will 
 
 Q 
 
242 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 more and more find his admirers, the rescuers of his 
 renown. A subtle and penetrating essay by Mr. 
 Lionel Johnson (in the Fortnightly Review for Sep- 
 tember 1894) has already pointed the way to those 
 whose business it will be to detect Pater's influence 
 upon his age, and to illustrate the individual merits of 
 his style. In the following pages an attempt will be 
 made to present the facts of the uneventful career of 
 the author of Marius, so oddly travestied at the moment 
 of his death, with some regard to continuity and truth. 
 In preparing this sketch, I have had the encouragement 
 and the help of tne surviving members of his family, 
 without whose co-operation 1 snouid not have under- 
 taken such a task. 
 
 A very considerable interest attaches to the parentage 
 of Walter Pater. His family was of Dutch extraction, 
 his immediate ancestors having, it is believed, come 
 over from the Low Countries with William of Orange. 
 I: was said, and our friend loved to believe it, that the 
 court-painter, Jean Baptiste Pater, the pupil of Watteau, 
 was of the same stock. If so, the relationship must 
 have been collater3\ and not direct, for when the 
 creator of so many delicate fetes champetres was painting 
 in Flanders — he died in 1 736 — the English Paters had 
 already settled at Olney, in Buckinghamshire, where 
 they lived all through the eighteenth century. Re- 
 served and shy, preserving many of their Dutch 
 customs, they are described in family tradition as 
 
Walter Pater 243 
 
 mixing little with their neighbours, and as keeping 
 through several generations this curious custom, that, 
 while the sons were always brought up as Roman 
 Catholics, the daughters were no less invariably trained 
 in the Anglican faith. The father of Walter Pater 
 quitted the Roman Church before his marriage, without 
 adopting any other form of faith, and his two sons were 
 the first Paters who were not brought up as Catholics. 
 
 Towards the close of the eighteenth century, the 
 poet Cowper was the fellow-townsman and the friend 
 of the Dutch emigrants in Olney, and the family long 
 possessed some of his verses in his own manuscript. 
 The son of the man who had known Cowper quitted 
 the Buckinghamshire household, and went out to 
 America. He settled in New York, associating chiefly 
 with the Dutch colony in that city ; here his son, 
 Richard Glode Pater, the father of the critic, was born. 
 The family came back in the beginning of the present 
 century, and settled at Shadwell, on the north shore of 
 the Thames, between Wapping and Stepney, a situation 
 now of extreme squalor, but eighty years ago still con- 
 sidered countrified and pleasant. Here, after his 
 father's death, Richard Glode Pater continued to live, 
 a medical practitioner working, mainly for the love of 
 them, among poor folks in the East End, refusing to 
 move into a more fashionable quarter, and despoiling 
 himself of his patrimony by his constant benevolence. 
 
 To the house in Shadwell, Richard Glode Pater 
 brought Maria Hill as his wife, and here were born to 
 him four children, two of them sons, of whom Walter 
 
244 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 was the second. The elder son, William Thomson 
 Pater, adopted his father's profession, and became the 
 head of a large lunatic asylum. He died unmarried, on 
 April 24, 1887, at the age of fifty-two, "quitting," in 
 his brother's words, " a useful and happy life." In 
 him, however, with the exception of a marked pleasure 
 in being surrounded with pretty objects, not a single 
 feature had ever shown itself of the peculiar intellectual 
 characteristics or tastes of his brother. The future 
 critic was bom at Shadwell, on August 4, 1839, re- 
 ceiving the names Waker Horatio, in compliment to a 
 cousin w^ho survives him. 
 
 Richard Glode Pater died so early that his second 
 son scarcely remembered him in later life. The mother 
 and grandmother left the house in Shadwell, and went 
 to live with a sister of the former at Enfield, where the 
 children were brought up. In the retired neighbour- 
 hood of Chase Side they took a house, which has since 
 been pulled down ; it possessed a large, old-fashioned 
 garden, in which the children found great delight. It 
 would be an error to trace in the imaginary portrait, 
 called The Child in the House ^ a definite picture of the 
 early surroundings of Walter Pater. The existence at 
 Enfield is hardly touched upon there, with the sole 
 exception of the "cry on the stair," announcing the 
 death of Florian Deleal's father; this, it appears, is a 
 reminiscence of the decease, not of his father, but of 
 his grandmother, which was so announced to the house- 
 hold at Enfield. So far as The Child in the House 
 depicts a veritable scene, it presents to us Fish Hall, 
 
Walter Pater 245 
 
 near Hadlow, Kent, the residence of his godmother 
 and cousin, Mrs. Walter H. May ; this mansion, part 
 of which was very old, was the favourite holiday-haunt 
 of the little Paters, and a place of mystery and romance 
 to Walter. 
 
 If, however. The Child in the House must be accepted 
 very guardedly as giving an impression of the physical 
 surroundings of Walter Pater's childhood, much more 
 of actual reminiscence has been put into Emerald Uth- 
 wart (a story now reprinted in the Miscellaneous Studies). 
 The first elements of education were given at the private 
 house of the head-master of the grammar-school at 
 Enfield, but the earliest crisis of Pater's life was the 
 entrance into King's School, Canterbury, at the age of 
 fourteen. The " old ecclesiastical city," to which 
 Emerald proceeds, is Canterbury, closely and exactly 
 described, and the features enumerated in the story — 
 *' the curiosities of the Precincts, the * dark entry,' the 
 rich heraldries of the blackened and mouldering cloister, 
 the ruined overgrown spaces where the old monastery 
 stood, the stones of which furnished material for the 
 rambling prebends* houses" — these were features at 
 Canterbury which immediately impressed the imagina- 
 tion of the shy and sensitive little boy, and remained 
 with him through life as having given him his earliest 
 experience of aesthetic pleasure. 
 
 It seems probable that, on the whole, this part of 
 Emerald Uthivart may be taken as strictly autobio- 
 graphical. Pater was happy at King's School, in spite 
 of his complete indifference to outdoor games. In his 
 
246 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 first years at public school he was very idle and back- 
 ward, nor was it till he reached the sixth form that his 
 faculties seemed really to awaken. He is remembered 
 as rather a popular boy, and as years went on his un- 
 questioned ability inspired respect. On the day of 
 Pater's funeral the Warden of Keble preached in the 
 Cathedral of Canterbury, and was able to record, in 
 touching phrases, the pride which the school had always 
 felt in him, and Pater's own persistent attachment to the 
 school. From the first, and before he went to Canter- 
 bury, Walter had been considered the ** clever " one 
 of the family ; not specially precocious, he was always 
 meditative and serious — marked from the very first for 
 the intellectual life. It is interesting to note that, quite 
 without prompting from without, and while still at 
 Enfield, all his thoughts were turned towards the 
 Church. He loved best to organise a sort of solemn 
 processional game, in which he took the part of bishop 
 or cardinal. From the time when he first began to 
 think of a future condition, his design was to be a 
 clergyman ; never, curiously enough, a priest in the 
 religion of his fathers, but in the Anglican ritual. 
 Throughout life, it may here be said, even in his later 
 days, when his thoughts turned back more and more 
 to theological pre-occupations, Walter Pater never had 
 any serious leaning towards Rome. Yet there can be 
 little question that the heritage of his ancestors, in 
 their obstinate adhesion to Catholicism, had much to 
 do with his haunting sense of the value of the sensuous 
 emblem, the pomp of colour and melody, in the offices 
 
Walter Pater 247 
 
 of religion. These tendencies had received a great 
 impetus while he was yet a little boy, and had not 
 proceeded to Canterbury, from a visit he paid to a 
 young friend who lived at Hursley. Here he attracted 
 the attention of Keblc, who walked and talked much 
 WMth him, and encouraged him in his religious aspira- 
 tions. Pater retained through life a vivid recollection 
 of this saintly man, although he never saw him again. 
 
 Shortly before he left school, as he was entering his 
 twentieth year. Pater read Modern Painters, and came 
 very abruptly under the influence of Ruskin. The 
 world of art was now for the first time opened to him. 
 It is necessary at this point to refute an extraordinary 
 fable, widely circulated at the time of his death, to the 
 effect that the finished and beautiful essay on " Winckel- 
 mann " was written, and even printed, while the author 
 was a schoolboy at Canterbury. The idea is prepos- 
 terous ; it was not until many years later that Pater 
 became aware of the existence of the German critic, 
 and his essay was composed and published long after 
 he was a Fellow of Brasenose. It is singular, indeed, 
 that he is not known to have made any attempt to 
 write, either as a schoolboy or an undergraduate, his 
 earUest essays being as mature in style as the author 
 was mature in years. Pater made no painful experi- 
 ments in authorship, or, if he did, he kept them to 
 himself. He did not begin to practise the art of 
 writing until he had mastered all its secrets. 
 
 On June 11, 1858, he entered Queen's College, 
 Oxford, as a com.moner, with an exhibition from Canter- 
 
248 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 bury ; and four years later, in the Michaelmas Term of 
 1862, he took his degree, gaining only a second class 
 in Literce Humaniores. Of these years of his under- 
 graduate life it does not appear that there is much to 
 reveal In bare rooms, in the dim back quadrangle of 
 his College, Pater worked quietly and unobtrusively, 
 making few friends, very shy and silent, hardly ob- 
 served in the noisy Oxford life of thirty-five years ago. 
 He was the pupil of Mr. W. W. Capes, now rector of 
 Liphook, then bursar and tutor of Queen's, and amongst 
 those very rare spirits who divined the man he was to 
 be was his earliest friend, Mr. Ingram Bywater, now 
 Regius Professor of Greek. It is not understood that 
 during these undergraduate days Pater's mind, a seed 
 slowly germinating in the darkness, showed much 
 partiality for pure literature or for plastic art. He wais 
 fascinated mainly by the study of logic and metaphysic, 
 which were his pastimes, while the laborious business 
 of classical scholarship occupied all but his leisure 
 moments. Whether any record of these silent years 
 remains, even with the few friends who shared them, 
 seems doubtful. Pater never kept a diary, rarely wrote 
 letters, and at this time offered no salient points for 
 observation to seize upon. Yet one far-seeing man 
 had noted the peculiar originality of Pater's tempera- 
 ment. Having in the ordinary course of his studies 
 submitted some work to Jowett, that astute observer 
 was so much struck with his power that he very 
 generously offered to coach him for nothing. The offer 
 was gratefully accepted, and Pater used to describe the 
 
Walter Pater 249 
 
 thrill of gratification, and, still more, of astonishment, 
 which he experienced when Jowctt said to him one 
 day, as he was taking his leave : " I think you have a 
 mind that will come to great eminence." Unhappily, 
 some years after there was a complete estrangement 
 of sympathy between Jowett and Pater. But it is 
 pleasant to record that, in the last year of the life of 
 each, it was removed, and that Jowett was among those 
 who congratulated Pater most cordially on his Plato 
 and Platonism. 
 
 In 1862 — his degree had been a disappointments- 
 Pater, now three-and-twenty, took rooms in the High 
 Street, Oxford, and read with private pupils. Of 
 these Mr. T. H. S. Escott has told us in his pleasant 
 reminiscences of Oxford that he was one. Another 
 pupil, of somewhat later date, was Mr. Charles Lancelot 
 Shad well, now Fellow of Oriel, destined to become the 
 most intimate of all Pater's friends, and now the guar- 
 dian and editor of his papers. But still no definite aim 
 seemed to have revealed itself to the future critic ; he 
 was reading and meditating deeply, but he had as 3'et 
 no call to create. Time went by ; in 1864 Pater was 
 elected a Fellow of Brasenose College, and went into 
 residence there. With this change in his material 
 existence, a change came over his mind. His sympathies 
 grew wider and more human, he became more of a 
 student of poetry, he formed more friendships, and was 
 more assiduous in their cultivation. Of his earliest 
 efforts after literary expression, all, it is believed, were 
 destroyed by himself, with the solitary exception of the 
 
250 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 little study of a pure and brilliant spirit of youth, called 
 ^*Diaphaneite,"of whichtheMS., dated July 1864, was 
 found after his dearti and published by Mr. Shadwell in 
 the Miscellaneous Studies of 1895. At last, in 1866, at 
 the age of twenty-seven, he ventured to write and to 
 print a little essay, a note or fragment, on Coleridge. 
 We may read this first expression of a new writer to- 
 day in the Appreciations. We shall find little of the 
 peculiar charm of the mature Pater. His interest is 
 solely in Coleridge, the metaphysician, the critic of 
 thought ; that this same philosopher was an exquisite 
 poet has not occurred to him, he positively forgets to 
 mention the fact. As far as style is concerned, the Httle 
 essay is correct and cold, without oddity, but with little 
 trace of the harmonious felicity which was about to 
 develop. 
 
 Vast is the change when we meet Walter Pater next. 
 He had come from school with a tendency to value all 
 things German. The teaching of Jowett and of T. H. 
 Green tended to strengthen this habit, but Mr. Capes 
 warned him against its excess, and endeavoured, at first 
 with but little success, to attract him to the lucidity and 
 gaiety of French literature. Pater's studies in philo- 
 sophy now naturall}' brought him to Goethe, so massive 
 an influence in the Oxford of that day, and the teaching 
 of Goethe laid a deep impress upon his temperament, 
 upon his whole outlook on the intellectual life. It was 
 natural that one so delicately sensitive to the external 
 symbol as was Pater should be prepared by the com- 
 panionship of Goethe for the influence of a man who was 
 
Walter Pater 2 ; i 
 
 Goethe's master in this one direction, and it was to a 
 spirit inflammable in the highest degree that in 1866 
 was laid the torch of Otto Jahn's Life of Winckclmann, 
 the Biograpliische Au/scitze. There was everything in 
 the character and career of the great German restorer 
 of Hellenic feeling to fascinate Pater, who seemed, 
 through Ruskin, Goethe and Hegel, to have travelled to 
 his true prototype, to the one personality among the 
 dead which was completely in sympathy with his own. 
 Pater, too, among the sandhills of a spiritual Branden- 
 burg, had held out arms of longing towards ideal beauty, 
 revealed in physical or sensuous forms, yet inspired and 
 interpenetrated with harmonious thought. The troubled 
 feverish vision, the variegated and indeed over-decorated 
 aesthetic of Ruskin, had become wearisome to Pater — 
 not simple enough nor sensuous enough. Winckelmann 
 was the master he wanted, who could " finger those 
 pagan marbles with unsinged hands, with no sense of 
 shame or loss," who could live serenely " in a world of 
 exquisite but abstract and colourless form ; " and it was 
 with the study of Winckelmann that he became himself 
 a writer. 
 
 His famous essa3^on "Winckelmann " was the result 
 of this new enthusiasm. It was published in the 
 IVestniinster Reviiw for January 1867, the author being 
 now in his twent^'-eighth year. From this time Pater's 
 advance, though slow, w^as unbroken. Mr. John Morley 
 having, in 1867, taken the editorship of the Fortnightly 
 Revieiv, called around him immediately a group of the 
 most brilliant young men of the day. Walter Pater was 
 
252 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 in no undue haste to respond to the appeal. In 1868, 
 inventing a name which has since sunken into disrepute 
 and even ridicule, he wrote an essay on ** Esthetic 
 Poetry," in which the early work of Mr. William Morris 
 received prompt and judicious analysis. Then followed 
 the series which are still so potent in their peculiar 
 charm, the magnificent and most characteristic " Notes 
 on Lionardo de Vinci," in November 1869; the "Fra|;- 
 ment on Sandro Botticelli" in August 1870; the ^* Pico 
 della Mirandula " in October, and the ^' Michelangelo " 
 in November 187 1. In 1873 most of these, and others, 
 were published together in the memorable volume 
 originally entitled Studies in the History of the Re- 
 naissance. 
 
 At this point he became partly famous. We may 
 look back over the years which followed his fellowship, 
 and see that, with the accession of humanistic ideas, 
 he had gradually lost all belief in the Christian rehgion. 
 This was the point, in his whole career, at which he 
 was furthest from the Anglican faith. His intention, 
 on relinquishing the idea of entering the Church of 
 England, had been to become a Unitarian minister. 
 This also he had abandoned by 1 864. But that Pater's 
 interest in ecclesiastical matters was never really dead, 
 and that it soon began to revive, is proved by an 
 anecdote with which the Bishop of Peterborough 
 obliges me. He remembers dining with him in 1873, 
 in company with Bonamy Price. Conversation turned 
 on ecclesiastical matters, and Pater passed on to a 
 dreamy monologue about the beauty of the Reserved 
 
Walter Pater 253 
 
 Sacrament in Roman churches, which " gave them all 
 the sentiment of a house where lay a dead friend." 
 This immediately aroused the Protestantism of Bonamy 
 Price, and a theological discussion ensued which waxed 
 so warm that Dr. Creighton had to suggest a retreat to 
 the drawing-room. When he came up for election at 
 Brasenose it was as a non-clerical fellow — I think the 
 first who ever was appointed there — that Pater took 
 his place in the society. In the next year, in company 
 with Mr. Shadwell, he paid his first visit to Italy, and 
 at Ravenna, Pisa, Florence, formed those impressions 
 of the art of the Renaissance which were so power- 
 fully to colour all his own future work as an artist. In 
 1858, when he came to Oxford, his sisters had migrated 
 to Heidelberg, and here it was his custom to spend the 
 long vacation, making no friends among the Germans, 
 however, and never, in all those years, troubling him- 
 self to learn to speak their language. 
 
 The costume of Walter Pater had been the ordinary 
 academic dress of the don of the period, but in May 
 1869 he flashed forth at the Private View of the Royal 
 Academy in a new top hat and a silk tie of brilliant 
 apple-green. This little transformation marked a crisis ; 
 he was henceforth no longer a provincial philosopher, 
 but a critic linked to London and the modem arts. 
 Where he touched the latter was through the Pre- 
 raphaelites, especially through the extreme admiration 
 
254 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 he had conceived for the works of Mr. Burne-Jones, 
 then much talked about, but rarely seen. At no time, 
 I think, had he much personal knowledge either of that 
 painter or of Rossetti. With Mr. Swinburne he became 
 about that date more intimate. The poet was a not 
 unfrequent visitor in those years to Pater's college 
 rooms. To all young Oxford, then, the name of Mr. 
 Swinburne was an enchantment, and there used to be 
 envious traditions of an upper window in Brasenose 
 Lane thrown open to the summer night, and, welling 
 forth from it, a music of verse which first outsang and 
 then silenced the nightingales, protracting its harmonies 
 until it disconcerted the lark himself at sunrise. 
 
 After this, it is a notable instance of the art of sinking 
 to record that I first set eyes on Pater in 1 871, as he 
 and Mr. Swinburne were dismounting from a hansom 
 cab at Gabriel Rossetti's door in Cheyne Walk. Almost 
 unknown to the world, he was already an object of 
 respect to me as the author of those " Notes on 
 Lionardo," which had seemed to give a new aspect to 
 the whole conception of Italian art. In 1872 I was 
 presented to him in the studio of William Bell Scott : 
 it was not until the early months of 1 874 that I first 
 began to visit him at Oxford, and so opened a friend 
 ship which was never clouded for a moment in the 
 course of more than twenty years. From this point, 
 then, although my opportunities of seeing Pater, 
 especially in Oxford, were but occasional, I can record 
 something from personal knowledge. 
 
 In 1869, removing from Brasenose many of the 
 
Walter Pater 2C 
 
 :)3 
 
 pretty objects and bric-ci-brac with which he had been 
 the first man in Oxford to decorate college rooms, 
 Pater furnished a little house in Norham Gardens, 
 No. 2 Bradmore Road, his sisters returning from 
 Heidelberg to keep house for him. Once settled here. 
 Pater blossomed out into considerable sociability, en- 
 tertaining and being entertained in the cordial Oxford 
 way. He had now a large circle of pleasant acquaint- 
 ances ; I cannot remember that he had many intimate 
 friends. Besides those whom I have mentioned already, 
 I can but recall Mark Pattison, Dr. Mandcll Creighton 
 (now Bishop of Peterborough), and Miss Mary Arrwld, 
 soon to marry an accomplished young member of 
 Pater's own college, Mr. Humphry Ward. To these 
 he would doubtless talk, to each in a difTcrent way, of 
 the interests most deeply rooted in his heart, " of 
 charm, and lucid order, and labour of the file," and to 
 a very few London friends also. The rest of the 
 w^orld found him affable and acquiescent, already in 
 those remote days displaying a little of that Renan 
 manner which later on became emphasised, a manner 
 which trifled gracefull}' and somewhat mysteriously with 
 a conrpanion not entirely in sympathy. 
 
 Pater's relation to the Rector of Lincoln was amus- 
 ing. It was at once confiding and suspicious. " Patti- 
 son is charming," he used to murmur, " wh.cn he's 
 good. Shall we go over and see if he is good this 
 afternoon? " But he was worried by a certain wilful- 
 ness in the Rector ; he could prove to be so far from 
 good, so absolutely naughty. I remember on one 
 
256 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 occasion — I think in the autumn of 1875 — when the 
 Rector, on a visit at Bradmore Road, had been 
 dehcious : he had talked, in his most distinguished 
 way, on a dozen rare and exquisite topics. He left, 
 begging Pater to come to him next day, and kindly 
 extending the invitation to me. Accordingly we went, 
 but the charm was broken. A frivolous demon had 
 entered into the Rector ; he talked of croquet and of 
 petticoats. We went back, sad and silent, to Bradmore 
 Road, and, just as we reached home. Pater said, with 
 solemn firmness, "What Pattison likes best in the 
 world, no doubt, is romping with great girls in the 
 gooseberry-bushes ! " 
 
 The vacations in these years were very pleasant to 
 Pater ; thc}^ were almost always spent abroad — in 
 France, in the company of his sisters. He would walk 
 as much as possible, scouring a neighbourhood for 
 architectural features, and preserving those impressions 
 of travel, which most of us lament to find so fugitive, 
 with astonishing exactitude. He was no linguist, and 
 French was the only language in which he could even 
 make his wants understood. Although so much in 
 Germany in his youth, he could speak no German. 
 When he was travelling he always left a place, if any 
 one staying in the hotel spoke to him. He had no wish 
 to be competent in modern languages ; he used to say : 
 ** Between 3'ou and me and the post, I hate a foreigner," 
 and when exotic persons of distinction threatened to 
 visit Brasenose, Pater used to disappear until he was 
 sure that they had gone. He loved the North of 
 
Walter Pater 257 
 
 France extremely, and knew it well. He was alwavs 
 planning a scries of studies on the great ecclesiastical 
 towns of France, yet wrote no more than a couple of 
 these — on Amiens and on Vezelay. So eagerly did he 
 prosecute these holiday tours, that he habitually over- 
 walked himself, thus losing much of the benefit which 
 he might otherwise have gained from the only form of 
 exercise he ever indulged in. I note, in a letter of 
 1877, describing a visit to Azay-le-Rideau, this charac- 
 teristic sentence : " We find always great pleasure in 
 adding to our experiences of these French places, and 
 return always a little tired indeed, but with our minds 
 pleasantly full of memories of stained glass, old 
 tapestries, and new wild flowers." These excursions 
 rarely extended further than the centre of France, but 
 once, I think in 1882, Pater went alone to Rome, and 
 spent the winter vacation there. He could ill endure 
 exciting travel, or too rapid hurrying from one impres- 
 sive place to another. His eye absorbed so slowly, 
 and his memory retained what he saw so completely, 
 that to be shown too much was almost physical pain to 
 him, and yet he was always inflicting it upon himself. 
 
 Some time after I knew him first, that entertaining 
 skit. The New Republic^ was produced, and achieved 
 great popular success. Pater had his niche in this 
 gallery of caricatures, under the title of Mr. Rose. It 
 has been represented that he suffered violent distress 
 from this parody of his style and manner, that it caused 
 him to retire from society and to abandon the prosecu- 
 tion of literature. Notlung in the world could be 
 
 R 
 
258 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 further from the truth. He thought the portrait a 
 Httle unscrupulous, and he was discomposed by the 
 freedom of some of its details. But he admired the 
 cleverness and promise of the book, and it did not 
 cause him to alter his mode of life or thought in the 
 smallest degree. He was even flattered, for he was an 
 author much younger and more obscure than most ot 
 those who were satirised, and he was sensible that to 
 be thus distinguished was a compHment. What he 
 liked less, what did really rufQe him, was the persistence 
 with which the newspapers at this time began to attri- 
 bute to him all sorts of " aesthetic " follies and extra- 
 vagances. He said to me, in 1876: "I wish they 
 wouldn't call me * a hedonist ' ; it produces such a bad 
 effect on the minds of people who don't know Greek." 
 And the direct result of all these journalistic mosquito- 
 bites was the suppression of the famous ^' Conclusion " 
 in the second (1877) edition of his Renaissance. 
 
 The source of his very long silence — for twelve years 
 divided his second book from his first — I hardly know, 
 unless it be attributed to the painful slowness of his 
 methods of composition, and his extreme soHcitude for 
 perfection of style. At last, in February, 1885, was 
 published his romance of Marius the Epicurean^ the 
 work by which, I believe. Pater will pre-eminently be 
 known to posterity. In the meantime had appeared, in 
 the Fortnightly Review for 1876, several of those Greek 
 studies, on Demeter and Persephone, on the Marbles 
 of ^gina and the like, which Mr. Shadwell collected 
 in a posthumous volume in 1895 ; The Child in the 
 
Walter Pater 259 
 
 House, too, in its earliest form, belongs to 1878, though 
 first published as a book in the summer of 1894. 
 The success of Man'tts was as great as that of a 
 book so grave and strenuous could be. In 18S7 Pater 
 followed it by a series of four Imaginary Portraits, 
 studies in philosophic fiction, one of which, " Denys 
 I'Auxerrois," displays the peculiarities of his style with 
 more concentrated splendour than any other of his 
 writings. In 1889 he collected some of his miscellaneous 
 critical studies into a volume called ylpprccialions, with 
 an Essay on Style. In 1893 he published his highly 
 finished college lectures on Plato and Platonisni in a 
 volume of rare dignity and humanistic beauty. Finally, 
 in the early summer of 1894, The Child in the House 
 was issued from the Oxford Press of Mr. Daniel, as a 
 precious toy for bibliomaniacs. This list of publica- 
 tions practically resumes the events in Pater's life 
 through twenty years. 
 
 During that period the household was moved once, 
 in 1886, to Kensington, and again, in 1893, back to 
 Oxford, where he fitted up a house in St. Giles. But, 
 all the while, Pater's real home was in his rooms at 
 Brasenose, where he passed a quiet, cloistered, and 
 laborious existence, divided between his college duties 
 and his books. His later years were comforted by a 
 great deal of consideration and afiection from those 
 around him ; noiseless, as he was, and in a sense 
 unexhilarating, he became increasingly an object of 
 respectful admiration to 3'oung Oxford men, whom, on 
 his part, he treated with the most courteous indulgence. 
 
26o Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Of this generation, one disciple came to proffer a tribute 
 of hero-worship, and remained to become an intimate 
 friend ; this was the Rev. F. W. Bussell, now Fellow of 
 Brasenose, whose tender solicitude did much to render 
 the latest of Pater's years agreeable to him. Pater 
 acted for some time as dean and tutor of his college, 
 entering assiduously into the councils and discipline of 
 the society, but he never accepted, if indeed it were 
 ever offered, any university office. He shrank from 
 all multiplication of responsibihty, from anything which 
 should break in upon the sequestered and austere 
 simplicity of his life. As time went on, a great change 
 came over his relation to religious matters. When I 
 had known him first he was a pagan, without any guide 
 but that of the personal conscience ; years brought 
 gradually with them a greater and greater longing for 
 the supporting solace of a creed. His talk, his habits, 
 became more and more theological, and it is my private 
 conviction that, had he lived a few years longer, he 
 would have endeavoured to take orders and a small 
 college living in the country. 
 
 Report, which found so much to misrepresent in a 
 life so orderly and simple, has erred even as to the 
 place and occasion of his death. He was taken ill with 
 rheumatic fever in the month of June 1894, being, 
 as he remained to the end, not in college, but with his 
 sisters in their house in St. Giles. He was recovering, 
 and was well enough to be busy upon a study on 
 Pascal, which he has left nearly completed, when, in 
 consequence of writing too close to an open window, 
 
Walter PiitcT 261 
 
 pleurisy set in and greatly reduced his strength. 
 Again he seemed convalescent, and had left his room, 
 without ill-eft'ect, on July 29, when, repeating the ex- 
 periment next day, the action of the heart failed, and 
 he died, on the staircase of his house, in the arms of 
 his sister, at ten o'clock on the morning of Monday, 
 July 30, 1894. Had he lived five days longer, he 
 would have completed his fifty-fifth year. He was 
 buried, in the presence of many of his oldest friends, 
 in the beautiful cemetery of St. Giles at Oxford. 
 
 When Pater was first seized with an ambition to 
 write, the individuals of his own age with whom he 
 came into competition were mainly poets. Those were 
 the early days of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti, of 
 Morris, of Swinburne ; and most of the still younger 
 men made their first steps in the field of verse, how- 
 ever far they might afterwards diverge from it. Pater, 
 in this nest of singing-birds, resolved to be in prose no 
 less painstaking, no less elaborate, no less bound by 
 rule and art than the poets were. He is to be dis- 
 tinguished from those who had so much to say that 
 their speech was forced out of them in a torrent, nor 
 less from those whose instinct led them to bubble 
 forth in periods of a natural artless grace. If we take 
 these symbols of a mountain-stream or of a fountain 
 for other prose-writers who have won the ear of the 
 public with little effort, then for Pater the appropriate 
 
262 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 image seems the artesian well, to reach the contents of 
 of which, strata of impermeable clay must be laboriously 
 bored. It was not that there was any lack of material 
 there, nor any doubt about the form it must take when 
 it emerged, but that it was so miraculously deep down 
 and hard to reach. I have known writers of every 
 degree, but never one to whom the act of composition 
 was such a travail and an agony as it was to Pater. 
 
 In his earlier years the labour of lifting the sentences 
 was so terrific that any one with less fortitude would 
 have entirely abandoned the effort. I recollect the 
 WTiting of the opening chapters of Marius^ and the 
 stress that attended it — the intolerable languor and 
 fatigue, the fevers and the cold fits, the grey hours of 
 lassitude and insomnia, the toil as at a deep petroleum 
 well when the oil refuses to flow. With practice, this 
 terrific effort grew less. A year or two ago I was re- 
 minding him of those old times of storm and stress, and 
 he replied, " Ah ! it is much easier now. If I live long 
 enough, no doubt I shall learn quite to like writing." 
 The public saw the result of the labour in the smooth 
 solidity of the result, and could suppose, from the very 
 elaboration, that great pains had been taken. How 
 much pains, very few indeed can have guessed I 
 
 It may be of interest to record the manner in which 
 this most self-conscious and artistic of prose-writers 
 proceeded. First of all, another pretty fable must be 
 knocked on the head. It has been said, and repeated, 
 that Pater composed his best sentences without any 
 relation to a context, and wrote them down on little 
 
Walter Pater 263 
 
 squares of paper, ready to stick them in at appropriate 
 and elTective places. This is nonsense ; it is quite 
 true that he used such squares of paper, but it was for 
 a very different purpose. He read with a box of these 
 squares beside him, jotting down on each, very roughly, 
 anything in his author which struck his fancy, either 
 giving an entire quotation, or indicating a reference, or 
 noting a dispo;?ition. He did not begin, I think, any 
 serious critical work without surrounding himself b}' 
 dozens of these little loose notes. When they were 
 not direct references or citations, they were of the 
 nature of a mcmon'a tcchnica. Here is an example : 
 
 *' Something about the gloomy Byzantine archit., 
 belfries, solemn night come in about the birds attracted 
 by the Towers." 
 
 Here is another : 
 
 " ? did he suppose predestination to have taken place, 
 only after the Fall ? " 
 
 These papers would be placed about him, like the 
 pieces of a puzzle, and when the right moment came 
 the proper square would serve as a monitor or as a 
 guide. 
 ^ Having prepared his box of little squares, he would 
 ' begin the labour of actual composition, and so con 
 scious was he of the modifications and additions which 
 would supervene that he always wrote on ruled paper, 
 leaving each alternate line blank. Mr. Austin Dobson 
 reminds me that Goldsmith did the same. On this 
 broad canvas of alternate lines, then. Pater would 
 slowly begin to draw his composition, the cartoon of 
 
264 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 what would in time be a finished essay. In the first 
 draft the phrase would be a bald one ; in the blank 
 alternate line he would at leisure insert fresh descriptive 
 or parenthetical clauses, other adjectives, more ex- 
 quisitely related adverbs, until the space was filled. 
 It might then be supposed that the MS. was complete. 
 Far from it I Cancelling sheet by sheet, Pater then 
 began to copy out the whole— as before, on alternate 
 lines of copy-book pages ; this revise was treated in 
 the same way — corrected, enlarged, interleaved, as it 
 v/ere, with minuter shades of feeling and more elaborate 
 apparatus of parenthesis, i^ 
 
 No wonder that certain disadvantages were attendant 
 upon the excessive finish of such a style. It is not 
 possible to work in this way, with a cold hammer, and 
 yet to avoid a certain deadness and slipperiness of 
 surface. Pater's periods, in attaining their long-drawn 
 harmony and fulness, were apt to lose vigour. Their 
 polish did not quite make up for their languor, for the 
 faintness and softness which attended their slow 
 manipulation. Verse will bear an almost endless labour 
 of the file ; prose, as the freer and more spontaneous 
 form, is less happy in subjection to it. " What long 
 sentences Plato writes I " Pater says in his Platonism^ 
 and no doubt Plato might return the compliment. 
 The sentences of the Oxford critic are often too long, 
 and they are sometimes broken-backed with havimg 
 had to bear too heavy a burden of allusion and illustra- 
 tion. His style, however, was his peculiarity. It 
 had beautiful qualities, if we have to confess that it 
 
Walter Pater 265 
 
 had the faults of those qualities. It was highly indivi- 
 dual ; it cannot be said that he owed it to any other 
 writer, or that at any period of his thirty years of 
 literary labour he faltered or swerved from his own 
 path. He was to a high degree self-centred. Pater 
 did not study his contemporaries ; a year or two ago, 
 he told me that he had read scarcely a chapter of Mr. 
 Stevenson and not a line of Mr. Kipling. " I feel, from 
 what I hear about them," he said, *' that they are 
 strong ; they might lead me out of my path. 1 want 
 to go on writing in my own way, good or bad. I 
 should be afraid to read Kipling, lest he should come 
 between me and my page next time I sat down to 
 write." It was the excess of a very native and 
 genuine modesty. He, too, was strong, had he but 
 known it, strong enough to have resisted the magnets 
 of contemporary style. Perhaps his own writing 
 might have grown a little simpler and a little more 
 supple if he had had the fortitude to come down and 
 fight among his fellows, 
 
 IV 
 
 Walter Pater was another of those discreet spirits 
 who, like Gray, " never speak out." He was cautious, 
 reserved, and shy in his relations even with his 
 friends ; he seemed to possess no medium through 
 which to approach them very closely. An extremely 
 affectionate disposition took the place of expansiveness, 
 and the young people who in later years gathered 
 around him mistook the one for the other. Each found 
 
266 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 in Pater what he brought ; each saw in that patient, 
 courteous, indulgent mirror a pleasant reflection of 
 himself. The inaccessibility of Pater is another of 
 those fables which have to be destroyed ; no one was 
 less a hermit, no one was more easily amused or 
 better pleased to bid a congenial companion welcome. 
 He was an assiduous host, a gracious listener; but who 
 could tell what was passing behind those half-shut, 
 dark-grey eyes, that courteous and gentle mask ? He 
 liked the human race, one is inclined to say, liked its 
 noise and neighbourhood, if it were neither too loud nor 
 too near, but his faith in it was never positive, nor 
 would he trust it to read his secret thoughts. 
 
 I have already suggested his likeness to Renan in 
 the attitude of his mind. The great Frenchman has 
 described, in his autobiography, the tendency which 
 led him to refrain from opposition and argument, and 
 to bow the head in the conversational house of 
 Rimmon. Walter Pater had these concessions, mere 
 escapes of the soul from undue pressure, and he had, 
 too, quite unconsciously, some of the very tricks of 
 speech of Renan — especially the " no doubt " that 
 answered to the Frenchman's incessant *'n'en doutez 
 pas." With natures hke his, in which the tide of 
 physical spirits runs low, in which the vitality is luke- 
 warm, the first idea in the presence of anything too 
 vivacious is retreat, and the most obvious form of 
 social retreat is what we call ** affectation." It is not 
 to be denied that, in the old days. Pater, startled by 
 strangers, was apt to seem affected : he retreated as 
 
Walter Patcr 267 
 
 into a fortress, and enclosed himself in a sort of solemn 
 effeminacy. It was, at its worst, mild in comparison 
 with what the masters of preposterous behaviour have 
 since accustomed us to, but it reminded one too much 
 of Mr. Rose. It was put on entirely for the benefit of 
 strangers, and to his inner circle of friends it seemed 
 like a joke. Perhaps in some measure it was a joke ; 
 no one could ever quite tell whether Pater's strange 
 Hctus was closer to laughter or to tears. 
 
 A nature so enclosed as his, so little capable of 
 opening its doors to others, must have some outlet of 
 relief. Pater found his outlet in a sort of delicate, 
 secret playfulness. There are animals which sit 
 all day immovable and humped up among the riot 
 of their fellows, and which, when all the rest of the 
 menagerie is asleep, steal out upon their slip of green- 
 sward and play the wildest pranks in the light of the 
 moon. Pater has often reminded me of some such 
 armadillo or w^ombat. That childishness which is the 
 sign-manual of genius used to come out in the oddest 
 way when he was perfectly at home. Those who think 
 of him as a solemn pundit of aesthetics may be amazed 
 to know that he delighted in very simple and farcical 
 spectacles and in the broadest of humour. His favourite 
 among modern playwrights was Mr. Pinero, and I shall 
 never forget going with him to see The Magistrate^ 
 when that piece was originally produced. Not a 
 schoolboy in the house was more convulsed with 
 laughter, more enchanted at the romping ** business " 
 of the play, than the author of Mariiis. He had the 
 
268 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 gift, when I knew him first, of inventing little farcical 
 dialogues, into which he introduced his contemporaries ; 
 in these the Rector of Lincoln generally figured, and 
 Pater had a rare art of imitating Pattison's speech and 
 peevish intonation. One playful fancy, persisted in so 
 long that even close and old friends were deceived by 
 it, was the figment of a group of relations — Uncle 
 Capsicum and Uncle Guava, Aunt Fancy (who fainted 
 when the word '' leg " was mentioned), and Aunt Tart 
 (for whom no acceptable present could ever be found). 
 These shadowy personages had been talked about for 
 so many years that at last, I verily believe. Pater had 
 almost persuaded himself of their existence. Perhaps 
 these little touches will be thought too trifling to be 
 mentioned, but I hold that they were all a part and 
 parcel of his complex and shrouded intellectual life, 
 and therefore not to be forgotten. 
 
 He had great sweetness and uniformity of temper, 
 and almost the only thing that ever ruffled him was a 
 reference to an act of vandalism committed at Brasenose 
 while he was on the governing body. The college had 
 a group, called '* Cain and Abel," cast in lead, a genuine 
 work by John of Bologna. For some reason or other 
 this was thought inconvenient, and was sold for old 
 lead, a somewhat barbarous proceeding. Pater, from 
 indolence, or else from indifference to late Itahan sculp- 
 ture, did not stir a finger to prevent this desecration, and 
 in later years a perfectly unfailing mode of rousing him 
 would be to say, artlessly, " Was there not once a group 
 by John of Bologna in the college ? " However sunken 
 
Walter Pater 269 
 
 in reverie, however dreamily detached, Pater would sit 
 up in a moment, and say, with great acidity, " It was 
 totally devoid of merit, no doubt." 
 
 Pater showed much tact and good sense in his attitude 
 towards the college life. He lectured rarely, I believe, 
 in later years ; in the old days he was an assiduous 
 tutor. His temperament, it is true, sometimes made it 
 difficult to work with him. On one occasion, at the 
 examination for scholarships, he undertook to look over 
 the English essays ; when the examiners met to compare 
 marks. Pater had none. He explained, with languor, 
 " They did not much impress me." As something had 
 to be done, he was asked to endeavour to recall such 
 impressions as he had formed ; to stimulate his memory, 
 the names were read out in alphabetical order. Pater 
 shook his head mournfully as each was pronounced, 
 murmuring dreamily, ** I do not recall him," " He did 
 not strike me," and so on. At last the reader came to 
 the name of Sanctuary, on which Pater's face lit up, and 
 he said, " Yes ; I remember ; I liked his name." 
 
 My friend, Dr. Henry Jackson, gives me an anecdote 
 which illustrates a more practical side to his character. 
 In 1870, having just begun to lecture at Trinity, our 
 Cambridge Platonist found himself seated next Pater at 
 dinner in Brasenose. He said to him : " I believe you 
 lecture constantly on The Republic. How do you get 
 through it in time ? It seems as though lecturing three 
 times a week for three terms, it would be impossible to 
 deal adequately within a year with all the problems and 
 the fallacies." " Oh ! " said Pater, " I always begin by 
 
270 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 telling them that Socrates is not such a fool as he seems, 
 and we get through nicely in two terms." He grew 
 more and more inclined to take an indulgent view of the 
 young people. A year or two ago, I remember his say- 
 ing, when somebody asked him whether the horse-play 
 of the undergraduates did not disturb him, '* Oh I no ; 
 I rather enjoy it. They are like playful young tigers, 
 that have been fed." He was not a " progressive " ; 
 our friend the Bishop of Peterborough recalls a serious 
 discussion in common-room at Brasenose, on the burn- 
 ing subject of university reform. Pater interposed in 
 the thick of the fray with the somewhat disconcerting 
 remark, " I do not know what your object is. At present 
 the undergraduate is a child of nature ; he grows up 
 like a wild rose in a country lane ; you want to turn him 
 into a turnip, rob him of all grace, and plant him out in 
 rows." And his remark, concerning bonfires in the quad, 
 that they lighted up the spire of St. Mary's so beauti- 
 fully, will long be remembered. 
 
 The perennial conflict in his members, between his 
 exquisite instinct for corporeal beauty on the one hand 
 and his tendency to ecclesiastical symbol and theological 
 dogma on the other, is the secret, I think, of what made 
 the character of Pater so difficult for others to elucidate, 
 in some measure also so painful and confusing for him- 
 self. He was not all for Apollo, nor all for Christ, but 
 each deity swayed in him, and neither had that perfect 
 homage that brings peace behind it. As Alphonse 
 Daudet says of some thinker, *' Son cerveau etait una 
 cathedrale desaffectee," and when he tried, as he bade us 
 
Walter Pater 271 
 
 try, " to burn jilvvays with the hard, gcm-Hkc flame " of 
 aesthetic observation, the flame of another altar mingled 
 with the fire and darkened it. Not easily or surely 
 shall we divine the workings of a brain and a conscience 
 scarcely less complex, less fantastic, less enigmatical, 
 than the face of Mona Lisa herself. Pater, as a human 
 being, illustrated by no letters, by no diaries, by no im- 
 pulsive unburdenings of himself to associates, will grow 
 more and more shadowy. But it has seemed well to 
 preserve, while still they are attainable, some of the 
 external facts about a writer whose polished and con- 
 centrated work has already become part of the classic 
 literature of England, and who will be remembered 
 among the writers of this age when all but a few are 
 forgotten. 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 
 
 PERSONAL MEMORIES 
 
 In setting down my recollections of Louis Stevenson, 
 I desire to confine the record to what I have myself 
 known and seen. His writings will be mentioned only 
 in so far as I heard them planned and discussed. Of 
 his career and character I shall not attempt to give a 
 complete outline ; all I purpose to do is to present those 
 sides of them which came under my personal notice. 
 The larger portrait it will be his privilege to prepare 
 who was the closest and the most responsible of all 
 Stevenson's friends ; and it is only while we wait for 
 Mr. Sidney Colvin's biography that these imperfect 
 sketches can retain their value. The most that can be 
 hoped for them is that they may secure a niche in his 
 gallery. And now, pen in hand, I pause to think how 
 I can render in words a faint impression of the most 
 inspiriting, the most fascinating human being that I 
 have known. 
 
 It is nearly a quarter of a century since I first saw 
 Stevenson. In the autumn of 1870, in company with a 
 former schoolfellow, I was in the Hebrides. We had 
 
276 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 been wandering in the Long Island, as they name the 
 outer archipelago, and our steamer, returning, called at 
 Skye. At the pier of Portree, I think, a company came on 
 board — "people of importance in their day," Edinburgh 
 acquaintances, I suppose, who had accidentally met in 
 Skye on various errands. At all events, they invaded 
 our modest vessel with a loud sound of talk. Professor 
 Blackie was among them, a famous figure that calls for 
 no description ; and a voluble, shaggy man, clad in 
 homespun, with spectacles forward upon nose, who, it 
 was whispered to us, was Mr. Sam Bough, the Scottish 
 Academician, a water-colour painter of some repute, 
 who was to die in 1878. There were also several 
 engineers of prominence. At the tail of this chatty, 
 jesting little crowd of invaders came a youth of about 
 my own age, whose appearance, for some mysterious 
 reason, instantly attracted me. He was tall, preternatur- 
 ally lean, with longish hair, and as restless and questing 
 as a spaniel. The party from Portree fairly took 
 possession of us; at meals they crowded around the 
 captain, and we common tourists sat silent, below the 
 salt. The stories of Blackie and Sam Bough were 
 resonant. Meanwhile, I knew not why, I watched the 
 plain, pale lad who took the lowest place in this pri- 
 vileged company. 
 
 The summer of 1 870 remains in the memory of 
 western Scotland as one of incomparable splendour. 
 Our voyage, especially as evening drew on, was like an 
 emperor's progress. We stayed on deck till the latest 
 moment possible, and I occasionally watched the lean 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 277 
 
 youth, busy and serviceable, with some of the little 
 tricks with which we were later on to grow familiar — 
 the advance with hand on hip, the sidcwise bending of 
 the head to listen. Meanwhile darkness overtook us, 
 a wonderful halo of moonlight swam up over Glenelg, 
 the indigo of the peaks of the Cuchullins faded into the 
 general blue night. I went below, but was presently 
 aware of some change of course, and then of an un- 
 expected stoppage. I tore on deck, and found that we 
 had left our track among the islands, and had steamed 
 up a narrow and unvisited fiord of the mainland — I 
 think Loch Nevis. The sight was curious and be- 
 wildering. We lay in a gorge of blackness, with only 
 a strip of the blue moonlit sky overhead ; in the dark 
 a few lanterns jumped about the shore, carried by 
 agitated but unseen and soundless persons. As I 
 leaned over the bulwarks, Stevenson was at my side, 
 and he explained to me that we had come up this loch 
 to take away to Glasgow a large party of emigrants 
 driven from their homes in the interests of a deer-forest. 
 As he spoke, a black mass became visible entering the 
 vessel. Then, as we slipped off shore, the fact of their 
 hopeless exile came home to these poor fugitives, and 
 suddenly, through the absolute silence, there rose from 
 them a v;ild kerning and wailing, reverberated by the 
 cliffs of the loch, and at that strange place and hour 
 infinitely poignant. When I came on deck next morn- 
 ing, m}' unnamed friend was gone. He had put off with 
 the engineers to visit some remote lighthouse of the 
 Hebrides. 
 
278 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Tkis early glimpse of Stevenson is a delightful 
 memory to me. When we met next, not only did I 
 instantly recall him, but, what was stranger, he remem- 
 bered me. This voyage in the Clansman was often 
 mentioned between us, and it has received for me a 
 sort of consecration from the fact that in the very last 
 letter that Louis wrote, finished on the day of his 
 death, he made a reference to it. 
 
 In the very touching " Recollections " which our 
 friend Mr. Andrew Lang has published, he says : " I 
 shall not deny that my first impression [of Stevenson] 
 was not wholly favourable." I remember, too, that 
 John Addington Symonds was not pleased at first. It 
 only shows how different are our moods. I must con- 
 fess that in my case the invading army simply walked 
 up and took the fort by storm. It was in 1877, or late 
 in 1876, that I was presented to Stevenson, at the old 
 Savile Club, by Mr. Sidney Colvin, who thereupon left 
 us to our devices. We went downstairs and lunched 
 together, and then we adjourned to the smoking-room. 
 As twilight came on I tore myself away, but Stevenson 
 walked with me across Hyde Park, and nearly to my 
 house. He had an engagement, and so had I, but I 
 walked a mile or two back with him. The fountains of 
 talk had been unsealed, and they drowned the conven- 
 tions. I came home dazzled with my new friend, 
 saying, as Constance does of Arthur, ^' Was ever such 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 279 
 
 a gracious creature born ? " That impression of in- 
 effable mental charm was formed at the first moment of 
 acquaintance, and it never lessened or became modified. 
 Stevenson's rapidity in the sympathetic interchange of 
 ideas was, doubtless, the source of it. He has been 
 described as an " egotist," but I challenge the descrip- 
 tion. If ever there was an altruist, it was Louis 
 Stevenson ; he seemed to feign an interest in himself 
 merely to stimulate you to be liberal in your con- 
 fidences.* 
 
 Those who have written about him from later im- 
 pressions than those of which I speak seem to me to 
 give insufficient prominence to the gaiety of Stevenson. 
 It was his cardinal quality in those early days. A 
 childlike mirth leaped and danced in him ; he seemed 
 to skip upon the hills of life. He was simply bubbling 
 with quips and jests ; his inherent earnestness or 
 passion about abstract things was incessantly relieved by 
 jocosity; and when he had built one of his intellectual 
 castles in the sand, a wave of humour was certain to 
 sweep in and destroy it. I cannot, for the life of me, 
 recall any of his jokes ; and written down in cold blood, 
 they might not be funny if I did. They were not wit 
 so much as humanity, the many-sided outlook upon 
 
 • This continued to be his characteristic to the last. Thus he described 
 an interview he had in Sydney with some man formerly connected with the 
 " black-biniing " trade, by saying: "He was very shy at first, and it was 
 not till I told him of a good many of my escapades that I could get him to 
 thaw, and then he poured it all out. I have always found that the best way 
 of getting people to be confidential." 
 
28o Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 » ' • — 
 
 life. I am anxious that his laughter-loving mood should 
 not be forgotten, because later on it was partly, but I 
 think never wholly, quenched by ill health, responsi- 
 bility, and the advance of years. He was often, in the 
 old days, excessively and delightfully silly — silly with 
 the silliness of an inspired schoolboy ; and I am afraid 
 that our laughter sometimes sounded ill in the ears of 
 age. 
 
 A pathos was given to his gaiety by the fragility of 
 his health. He was never well, all the years I knew 
 him; and we looked upon his Hfe as hanging by the 
 frailest tenure. As he never complained or maundered, 
 this, no doubt — though we were not aware of it — added 
 to the charm of his presence. He was so bright and 
 keen and witty, and any week he might die. No one, 
 certainly, conceived it possible that he could reach his 
 forty-fifth year. In 1879 his health visibly began to 
 run lower, and he used to bury himself in lonely Scotch 
 and French places, " tinkering himself with solitude," 
 as he used to say. 
 
 My experience of Stevenson during these first years 
 was confined to London, upon which he would make 
 sudden piratical descents, staying a few days or weeks, 
 and melting into air again. He was much at my house; 
 and it must be told that my wife and I, as young 
 married people, had possessed ourselves of a house too 
 large for our slender means immediately to furnish. 
 The one person who thoroughly approved of our great, 
 bare, absurd drawing-room was Louis, who very 
 earnestly dealt with us on the immorality of chairs and 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 281 
 
 tables, and desired us to sit always, as he delighted to 
 sit, upon hassocks on the floor. Nevertheless, as 
 arm-chairs and settees straggled into existence, he 
 handsomely consented to use them, although never in 
 the usual way, but with his legs thrown sidewise over 
 the arms of them, or the head of a sofa treated as a 
 perch. In particular, a certain shelf, with cupboards 
 below, attached to a bookcase, is worn with the person 
 of Stevenson, who would spend half an evening while 
 passionately discussing some great question of morality 
 or literature, leaping sidewise in a seated posture to 
 the length of this shelf, and then back again. He was 
 eminently peripatetic, too, and never better company 
 than walking in the street, this exercise seeming to 
 inflame his fancy. But his most habitual dwelling- 
 place in the London of those days was the Savile Club, 
 then lodged in an inconvenient but very friendly house 
 in Savile Row. Louis pervaded the club ; he was its 
 most affable and chatty member ; and he lifted it, by 
 the ingenuity of his incessant dialectic, to the level of a 
 sort of humorous Academe or Mouseion. 
 
 At this time he must not be thought of as a success- 
 ful author. A very few of us were convinced of his 
 genius ; but with the exception of Mr. Leslie Stephen, 
 nobody of editorial status was sure of it. I remember 
 the publication of ^« Inland Voyage in 1878, and the 
 inability of the critics and the public to see anything 
 unusual in it. 
 
 Stevenson was not without a good deal of innocent 
 oddity in his dress. When I try to conjure up his 
 
282 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 figure, I can see only a slight, lean lad, in a suit of blue 
 sea-cloth, a black shirt, and a wisp of yellow carpet 
 that did duty for a necktie. This was long his attire, 
 persevered in to the anguish of his more conventional 
 acquaintances. I have a ludicrous memory of going, 
 in 1878, to buy him a new hat, in company with Mr. 
 Lang, the thing then upon his head having lost the 
 semblance of a human article of dress. Aided by a 
 very civil shopm.an, we suggested several hats and caps, 
 and Louis at first seemed interested ; but having pre- 
 sently hit upon one which appeared to us pleasing and 
 decorous, we turned for a moment to inquire the price. 
 We turned back, and found that Louis had fled, the 
 idea of parting with the shapeless object having proved 
 ,too painful to be entertained. By the way, Mr. Lang 
 will pardon me if I tell, in exacter detail, a story of 
 his. It was immediately after the adventure with the 
 hat that, not having quite enough money to take him 
 from London to Edinburgh, third class, he proposed to 
 the railway clerk to throw in a copy of Mr. Swinburne's 
 Queen-Mother and Rosamond. The offer was refused 
 with scorn, although the book was of the first edition, 
 and even then worth more than the cost of a whole 
 ticket. 
 
 Stevenson's pity was a very marked quality, and it 
 extended to beggars, which is, I think, to go too far. 
 His optimism, however, suffered a rude shock in South 
 Audley Street one summer afternoon. We met a stal- 
 wart beggar, whom I refused to aid. Louis, however, 
 wavered, and finally handed him sixpence. The man 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 283 
 
 pocketed the coin, forbore to thank his benefactor, but, 
 fixing his eye on me, said, in a loud voice, " And what 
 is the other Httle gentleman going to give me?" " In 
 future," said Louis, as we strode coldly on, " / shall be 
 * the other little gentleman.' " 
 
 In those early days he suffered many indignities on 
 account of his extreme youthfulness of appearance and 
 absence of self-assertion. He was at Inverness — being 
 five or six and twenty at the time — and had taken a 
 room in a hotel. Coming back about dinner-time, he 
 asked the hour of table d'hote, whereupon the landlady 
 said, in a motherly way : " Oh, I knew you wouldn't 
 like to sit in there among the grown-up people, so I've 
 had a place put for you in the bar." There was a frolic 
 at the Royal Hotel, Bathgate, in the summer of 1879. 
 Louis was lunching alone, and the maid, considering 
 him a negligible quantity, came and leaned out of the 
 window. This outrage on the proprieties was so sting- 
 ing that Louis at length made free to ask her, with irony, 
 what she was doing there. *' I'm looking for my lad," 
 she replied. " Is that he ? " asked Stevenson, with 
 keener sarcasm. ^' Weel, I've been lookin' for him a' 
 my life, and I've never seen him yet," was the response. 
 Louis was disarmed at once, and wrote her on the spot 
 some beautiful verses in the vernacular. " They're no 
 bad for a beginner," she was kind enough to say when 
 she had read them. 
 
 The year 1879 was a dark one in the life of Louis. 
 He had formed a conviction that it was his duty to go 
 out to the extreme west of the United States, while his 
 
284 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 family and the inner circle of his frinds were equally- 
 certain that it was neither needful nor expedient that he 
 should make this journey. As it turned out, they were 
 wrong, and he was right ; but in the circumstances their 
 opinion seemed the only correct one. His health was 
 particularly bad, and he was ordered, not West, but 
 South. The expedition, which he has partly described 
 in The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains^ was 
 taken, therefore, in violent opposition to all those whom 
 he left in England and Scotland ; and this accounts for 
 the mode in which it was taken. He did not choose to 
 ask for money to be spent in going to California, and it 
 was hoped that the withdrawal of supplies would make 
 the voyage impossible. But Louis, bringing to the front 
 a streak of iron obstinacy which lay hidden somewhere 
 in his gentle nature, scraped together enough to secure 
 him a steerage passage across the Atlantic. 
 
 The day before he started he spent with my wife and 
 me — a day of stormy agitation, an April day of rain- 
 clouds and sunshine ; for it was not in Louis to remain 
 long in any mood. I seem to see him now, pacing the 
 room, a cigarette spinning in his wasted fingers. To the 
 last we were trying to dissuade him from what seemed to 
 us the maddest of enterprises. He was so ill that I did 
 not like to leave him, and at night — it was midsummer 
 weather — we walked down into town together. We 
 were by this time, I suppose, in a pretty hysterical state 
 of mind, and as we went through Berkeley Square, in 
 mournful discussion of the future, Louis suddenly pro- 
 posed that we should visit the so-called " Haunted 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 285 
 
 House," which then occupied the newspapers. The 
 square was quiet in the decency of a Sunday evening. 
 We found the house, and one of us boldly knocked at 
 the door. There was no answer and no sound, and we 
 jeered upon the door-step ; but suddenly we were both 
 aware of a pale face — a phantasm in the dusk — gazing 
 down upon us from a surprising height. It was the 
 caretaker, I suppose, mounted upon a flight of steps : 
 but terror gripped us at the heart, and we fled with foot- 
 steps as precipitate as those of schoolboys caught in an 
 orchard. I think that ghostly face in Berkeley Square 
 must have been Louis's latest European impression for 
 many months. 
 
 m 
 
 All the world now knows, through the two books 
 which I have named, what immediately happened. 
 Presently letters began to arrive, and in one from Mon- 
 terey, written early in October 1879, he told me of 
 what was probably the nearest approach of death that 
 ever came until the end, fifteen years later. I do not 
 think it is generally known, even in the inner circle of 
 his friends, that in September of that year he w^as 
 violently ill, alone, at an Angora-goat ranch in the 
 Santa Lucia Mountains. " I scarcely slept or ate or 
 thought for four days," he said. '* Two nights I lay 
 out under a tree, in a sort of stupor, doing nothing but 
 fetch water for myself and horse, light a fire and make 
 coffee, and all night awake hearing the goat-bells ringing 
 and the tree-toads singing, when each new noise was 
 
286 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 enough to set me mad." Then an old frontiersman, a 
 mighty hunter of bears, came round, and tenderly 
 nursed him through his attack. ''By all rule this 
 should have been my death ; but after a while my spirit 
 got up again in a divine frenzy, and has since kicked 
 and spurred my vile body forward with great emphasis 
 and success." 
 
 Late in the winter of 1879, with renewed happiness 
 and calm of life, and also under the spur of a need of 
 money, he wrote with much assiduity. Among other 
 things, he composed at Monterey the earliest of his 
 novels, a book called A Vendetta in the TVest, the manu- 
 script of which seems to have disappeared. Perhaps 
 we need not regret it ; for, so he declared to me, " It 
 was about as bad as Ouida, but not quite, for it was 
 not so eloquent." He had made a great mystery of his 
 whereabouts ; indeed, for several months no one was to 
 know what had become of him, and his letters were to 
 be considered secret. At length, in writing from Mon- 
 terey, on November 15, 1879, he removed the embargo : 
 " That I am in California ma}^ now be published to the 
 brethren." In the summer of the next year, after a 
 winter of very serious ill health, during which more 
 than once he seemed on the brink of a galloping con- 
 sumption, he returned to England. He had married in 
 California a charming lady whom we all soon learned 
 to regard as the most appropriate and helpful companion 
 that Louis could possibly have secured. On October 8, 
 1880 — a memorable day — he made his first appearance 
 in London since his American exile. A post-card from 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 287 
 
 Edinburgh had suninioncd me to "appoint with an 
 appointment" certain particular friends; "and let us 
 once again," Louis wrote, " lunch together in the Sa\ile 
 Halls." Mr. Lang and Mr. Walter Pollock, and, I 
 think, Mr. Ilenle}', graced the occasion, and the club 
 cellar produced a bottle of Chambertin of quite uncom- 
 mon merit. Louis, I may explain, had a peculiar pas- 
 sion for Burgundy, which he esteemed the wine of 
 highest possibilities in the whole Bacchic order; and I 
 have often known him descant on a Pommard or a 
 Montraclict in terms so exquisite that the listeners 
 could scarcely taste the wine itself. 
 
 Davos-Platz was now prescribed for the rickety lungs; 
 and late in that year Louis and his wife took up their 
 abode there, at the H6tcl Buol, he carrying with him a 
 note from me recommending him to the care of John 
 Addington Symonds. Not at first, but presently and 
 on the whole, these two men, so singular in their gene- 
 ration, so unique and so unlike, "hit it off," as people 
 say, and were an intellectual solace to each other ; but 
 their real friendship did not begin till a later year. I 
 remember Stevenson saying to me next spring that to 
 be much with Symonds was to " adventure in a 
 thornwood." It w^as at Davos, this w^interof 18S0, that 
 Stevenson took up the study of Hazlitt, having found a 
 publisher who w\is willing to bring out a critical and 
 biographical memoir. This scheme occupied a great 
 part of Louis's attention, but was eventuall}^ dropped ; 
 for the further he progressed in the investigation of 
 Hazlitt's character the less he liked it, and the squalid 
 
288 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 Ui)er Amoris gave the coup de grace. He did not know 
 what he would be at. His vocation was not yet ap- 
 parent to him. He talked of writing on craniology and 
 the botany of the Alps. The unwritten books of 
 Stevenson will one day attract the scholiast, who will 
 endeavour, perhaps, to reconstruct them from the refer- 
 ences to them in his correspondence. It may, there- 
 fore, be permissible to record here that he was long 
 proposing to write a life of the Duke of Wellington, for 
 which he made some considerable collections. This was 
 even advertised as *' in preparation," on several occa- 
 sions, from 1885 until 1887, but was ultimately aban- 
 doned. I remember his telling me that he intended to 
 give emphasis to the "humour" of Wellington. 
 
 In June, 1881, we saw him again; but he passed 
 very rapidly through London to a cottage at Pitlochry 
 in Perthshire. He had lost his hold on town. " Lon- 
 don," he wrote me, " now chiefly means to me Colvin 
 and Henley, Leslie Stephen and you." He was now 
 coursing a fresh literary hare, and set Mr. Austin 
 Dobson, Mr. Saintsbury, and me busily hunting out 
 facts about Jean Cavalier, the romantic eighteenth- 
 century adventurer, whose life he fancied that he would 
 write. His thoughts had recurred, in fact, to Scottish 
 history ; and he suddenly determined to do what seemed 
 rather a mad thing — namely, to stand for the Edin- 
 burgh professorship of history, then just vacant. We 
 were all whipped up for testimonials, and a little pam- 
 phlet exists, in a pearl-grey cover — the despair of 
 bibliophiles — in which he and a strange assortment of 
 
Robert Louis Stc\ cnson 289 
 
 his friends set forth his claims. These required nimble 
 treatment, since, to put it plainly, it was impossible to 
 say that he had any. His appeal was treated by the 
 advocates, who were the electing body, with scant con- 
 sideration, and some worthy gentleman was elected. 
 The round Louis was well out of such a square hole as 
 a chair in a university. 
 
 But something better was at hand. It was now, and 
 in the peace of the Highlands, that Louis set out to 
 become a popular writer. The fine art of "booming" 
 had not then been introduced, nor the race of those 
 who week by week discover coveys of fresh geniuses. 
 Although Stevenson, in a sporadic way, had written 
 much that was delightful, and that will last, he was yet 
 — now at the close of his thirty-first year — by no means 
 successful. The income he made b}^ his pen was still 
 ridiculously small ; and Mr. John Morley, amazing as 
 it sounds to-day, had just refused to give him a book to 
 write in the English Men of Letters series, on the ground 
 of his obscurity as an author. All this was to be changed, 
 and the book that v/as to do it was even now upon the 
 stocks. In August the Stevensons moved to a house 
 in Braemar — a place, as Louis said, "patronised by 
 the ro3'alty of the Sister Kingdoms — Victoria and 
 the Cairngorms, sir, honouring that country-side by 
 their conjunct presence." Hither I was invited, and 
 here I paid an ever memorable visit. The house, 
 as Louis was careful to instruct me, was entitled 
 " The Cottage, late the late Miss McGregor's, Castle- 
 ton of Braemar " ; and thus I obediently addressed my 
 
 T 
 
290 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 letters until Louis remarked that " the reference to a 
 deceased Highland lady, tending as it does to foster 
 unavailing sorrow, may be with advantage omitted from 
 the address." 
 
 To the Cottage, therefore, heedless of the manes of 
 the late Miss McGregor, I proceeded in the most violent 
 storm of hail and rain that even Aberdeenshire can 
 produce in August, and found Louis as frail as a ghost, 
 indeed, but better than I expected. He had adopted a 
 trick of stretching his thin limbs over the back of a wicker 
 sofa, which gave him an extraordinary resemblance to 
 that quaint insect, the praying mantis ; but it was a 
 mercy to find him out of bed at all. Among the many 
 attractions of the Cottage, the presence of Mr. Thomas 
 Stevenson — Louis's father — must not be omitted. He 
 was then a singularly charming and vigorous personality, 
 indignantly hovering at the borders of old age (" Sixty- 
 three, sir, this year ; and, deuce take it ! am I to be 
 called ' an old gentleman ' by a cab-driver in the streets 
 of Aberdeen ? ") and, to my gratitude and delight, my 
 companion in long morning walks. The detestable 
 weather presently brought all the other members of the 
 household to their beds, and Louis in particular became 
 a wreck. However, it was a wreck that floated every 
 day at nightfall ; for at the worst he was able to come 
 down-stairs to dinner and spend the evening with us. 
 
 We passed the days with regularity. After break- 
 fast I went to Louis's bedroom, where he sat up in bed, 
 with dark, flashing eyes and ruffled hair, and we played 
 chess on the coverlet. Not a word passed, for he was 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 291 
 
 strictly forbidden to speak in the early part of the day. 
 As soon as he felt tired — often in the middle of a game 
 — he would rap with peremptory knuckles on the board 
 as a signal to stop, and then Mrs. Stevenson or I would 
 arrange his writing materials on the bed. Then I would 
 see no more of him till dinner-time, when he would ap- 
 pear, smiling and voluble, the horrid bar of speechless- 
 ness having been let down. Then every night, after 
 dinner, he would read us what he had written during 
 the day. I find in a note to my wife, dated Septem- 
 ber 3, 1 88 1 : *' Louis has been writing, all the time I 
 have been here, a novel of pirates and hidden trea- 
 sure, in the highest degree exciting. He reads it to us 
 every night, chapter by chapter." This, of course, was 
 Treasure Island^ about the composition of which, long 
 afterward, in Samoa, he wrote an account in some parts 
 of which I think that his memory played him false. I 
 look back to no keener intellectual pleasure than those 
 cold nights at Braemar, with the sleet howling outside, 
 and Louis reading his budding romance by the lamp- 
 light, emphasising the purpler passages with lifted voice 
 and gesticulating finger. 
 
 IV 
 
 Hardly had I left the Cottage than the harsh and 
 damp climate of Aberdeenshire was felt to be rapidly 
 destroying Louis, and he and his wife fled for Davos. 
 Before the end of October the}' were ensconced there in 
 a fairly comfortable chalet. Here Louis and his step- 
 
292 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 son amused themselves by setting up a hand-press, 
 which Mr. Osbourne worked, and for which Louis pro- 
 vided the literary material. Four or five laborious little 
 publications were put forth, some of them illustrated by 
 the daring hand of Stevenson himself. He complained 
 to me that Mr. Osbourne was a very ungenerous pub- 
 lisher — '^ one penny a cut, and one halfpenny a set of 
 verses ! What do you say to that for Grub Street ? " 
 These little diversions were brought to a close by the 
 printer-publisher breaking, at one fell swoop, the 
 press and his own finger. The little " Davos Press " 
 issues now fetch extravagant prices, which would have 
 filled author and printer with amazement. About this 
 time Louis and I had a good deal of correspondence 
 about a work which he had proposed that we should 
 undertake in collaboration — a retelling, in choice literary 
 form, of the most picturesque murder cases of the last 
 hundred years. We were to visit the scenes of these 
 crimes, and turn over the evidence. The great thing, 
 Louis said, was not to begin to write until we were 
 thoroughly alarmed. " These things must be done, 
 my boy, under the very shudder of the goose-flesh." 
 We were to begin with the " Story of the Red Barn," 
 which indeed is a tale pre-eminently worthy to be 
 retold by Stevenson. But the scheme never came off, 
 and is another of the dead leaves in his Vallombrosa. 
 
 We saw him in London again, for a few days, in 
 October 1882 ; but this was a melancholy period. For. 
 eight months at the close of that year and the beginning 
 of 1883 he was capable of no mental exertion. He was 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 293 
 
 in the depths of lan:;uor, and in nightly apprehension 
 of a fresh attack. He slept excessively, and gave 
 humorous accounts of the drowsiness that hung upon 
 him, addressing his notes as '* from the Arms of Por- 
 pus " (Morpheus) and " at the Sign of the Poppy." 
 No climate seemed to relieve him, and so, in the autumn 
 of 1882, a bold experiment was tried. As the snows of 
 Davos were of no avail, the hot, damp airs of Hy^res 
 should be essayed. I am inclined to dwell in some 
 fulness on the year he spent at Ilyeres, because, 
 curiously enough, it was not so much as mentioned, 
 to my knowledge, by any of tlie writers of obituary 
 notices at Stevenson's death. It takes, neverthe- 
 less, a prominent place in his life's history, for his 
 removal thither marked a sudden and brilliant, though 
 only temporary, revival in his health and spirits. 
 Some of his best work, too, was written at H3'eres, and 
 one might say that fame first found him in this warm 
 corner of southern France. 
 
 The house at Ilyeres was called " La Solitude." It 
 stood in a paradise of roses and aloes, fig-marigolds 
 and olives. It had delectable and even, so Louis de- 
 clared, " sub-celestial " views over a plain bounded by 
 *' certain mountains as graceful as Apollo, as severe as 
 Zeus " ; and at first the hot mistral, which blew and 
 burned where it blew, seemed the only drawback. 
 Not a few of the best poems in the Underwoods reflect 
 the ecstasy of convalescence under the sides and per- 
 fumes of La Solitude. By the summer Louis could 
 report " good health of a radiant order:" It was while 
 
294 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 he was at Hyeres that Stevenson first directly addressed 
 an American audience, and I may record that, in Sep- 
 tember 1883, h^ told me to '' beg Gilder your prettiest 
 for a gentleman in pecuniary sloughs." Mr. Gilder was 
 quite alive to the importance of securing such a contri- 
 butor, although when the Amateur Emigrant had entered 
 the office of The Century Magazine in 1 879 he had been 
 very civilly but coldly shown the door. (I must be 
 allowed to tease my good friends in Union Square by 
 recording that fact !) Mr. Gilder asked for fiction, but 
 received instead The Silverado Squatters^ which duly 
 appeared in the magazine. 
 
 It was also arranged that Stevenson should make an 
 ascent of the Rhone for The Century, and Mr. Joseph 
 Pennell was to accompany him to make sketches for the 
 magazine. But Stevenson's health failed again : the 
 sudden death of a very dear old friend was a painful 
 shock to him, and the winter of that year was not pro- 
 pitious. Abruptly, however, in January 1884, another 
 crisis came. He went to Nice, where he was thought 
 to be dying. He saw no letters ; all his business was 
 kindly taken charge of by Mr. Henley ; and again, for 
 a long time, he passed beneath the penumbra of steady 
 languor and infirmity. When it is known how con- 
 stantly he suffered, how brief and flickering were the 
 intervals of comparative health, it cannot but add to the 
 impression of his radiant fortitude through all these 
 trials, and of his persistent employment of all his lucid 
 moments. It was pitiful, and yet at the same time 
 very inspiriting, to see a creature so feeble and so ill 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 295 
 
 equipped for the struggle bear himself so smilingly and 
 so manfully through all his afflictions. There can he 
 no doubt, however, that this latest breakdown vitally 
 aflcctcd his spirits. He was never, after this, quite 
 the gay cliild of genius that he had previously been. 
 Something of a graver cast became natural to his 
 thoughts; he had seen Death in the cave. And now 
 for the first time we traced a new note in his writings 
 — the note of " Pulvis et Umbra." 
 
 After 1S83 my personal memories of Stevenson be- 
 come very casual. In November 1884, he was settled 
 at Bournemouth, in a villa called Bonaltie Towers, and 
 there he stayed until, in March 1885, he took a house 
 of his own, which, in pious memory of his grandfather, 
 he named Skerryvore. In the preceding winter, when 
 I was going to America to lecture, he was particularly 
 anxious that 1 should lay at the feet of Mr. Frank R. 
 Stockton his homage, couched in the following lines : 
 
 My Stockton if I failed to like. 
 
 It were a sheer depravity ; 
 For I went down with the '* Thomas Hy\e^ 
 
 jlnd up with the " Negative Gravity." 
 
 He adored these tales of Mr. Stockton's, a taste which 
 must be shared by all good men. To my constant 
 sorrow, I was never able to go to Bournemouth during 
 the years he lived there. It has been described to me, 
 by those who were more fortunate, as a pleasure that 
 was apt to tantalize and evade the visitor, so constantly 
 
296 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 was the invalid unable, at the last, to see the friend 
 who had travelled a hundred miles to speak with him. 
 It was therefore during his visits to London, infrequent 
 as these were, that we saw him at his best, for these 
 were made at moments of unusual recovery. He 
 generally lodged at what he called the " Monument," this 
 being his title for Mr. Colvin's house, a wing of the 
 vast structure of the British Museum. I recall an 
 occasion on which Louis dined with us (March 1886), 
 because of the startling interest in the art of strategy 
 which he had developed — an interest which delayed the 
 meal with arrangements of serried bottles counter- 
 scarped and lines of cruets drawn up on horseback 
 ready to charge. So infectious was his enthusiasm 
 that we forgot our hunger, and hung over the em- 
 battled table-cloth, easily persuaded to agree with him 
 that neither poetry nor the plastic arts could compete 
 for a moment with ^' the finished conduct, sir, of a large 
 body of men in face of the enemy." 
 
 It was a little later that he took up the practice of 
 modelling clay figures as he sat up in bed. Some of 
 these compositions — which needed, perhaps, his elo- 
 quent commentary to convey their full effect to the 
 spectator — were not without a measure of skill of de- 
 sign. I recollect his saying, with extreme gravity, " I 
 am in sculpture what Mr. Watts is in painting. We 
 are both of us pre-occupied with moral and abstract 
 ideas." I wonder whether any one has preserved 
 specimens of these allegorical groups of clay. 
 
 The last time I had the happiness of seeing Steven- 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 297 
 
 son was on Sunday, August 21, 1887. He had been 
 brought up from Bournemouth the day before in a 
 wretched condition of health, and was lodged in a 
 private hotel in Finsbury Circus, in the City, ready to 
 be easily moved to a steamer in the Thames on the 
 morrow. I was warned, in a note, of his passage 
 through town, and of the uncertainty whether he could 
 be seen. On the chance, I went over early on the 
 2 1 St, and, very happily for me, he had had a fair 
 night, and could see me for an hour or two. No one 
 else but Mrs. Stevenson was with him. His position 
 was one which might have daunted any man's spirit, 
 doomed to exile, in miserable health, starting vaguely 
 across the Atlantic, with all his domestic interests 
 rooted up, and with no notion where, or if at all, they 
 should be replanted. If ever a man of imagination 
 could be excused for repining, it was now. 
 
 But Louis showed no white feather. He was radiantly 
 humorous and romantic. It was church time, and there 
 was some talk of my witnessing his will, which I could 
 not do, because there could be found no other reputable 
 witness, the whole crew of the hotel being at church. 
 This set Louis off on a splendid dream of romance. 
 "This," he said, "is the way in which our valuable 
 city hotels — packed, doubtless, with rich objects of 
 jewellery — are deserted on a Sunday morning. Some 
 bold piratical fellow, defying the spirit of Sabbata- 
 rianism, might make a handsome revenue by sacking 
 the derelict hotels between the hours of ten and 
 twelve. One hotel a week would suffice to enable such 
 
298 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 a man to retire into private life within the space of a 
 year. A mask might, perhaps, be worn for the mere 
 fancy of the thing, and to terrify kitchen-maids, but 
 no real disguise would be needful to an enterprise 
 that would require nothing but a brave heart and a 
 careful study of the City Postal Directory." He 
 spoke of the matter with so much fire and gallantry 
 that I blushed for the youth of England and its lack 
 of manly enterprise. No one ever could describe 
 preposterous conduct with such a convincing air as 
 Louis could. Common sense was positively humbled 
 in his presence. 
 
 The volume of his poems called Underwoods had just 
 appeared, and he inscribed a copy of it to me in the 
 words " at Todgers', as ever was, chez TodgerSy Peck- 
 sniff street." The only new book he seemed to wish 
 to carry away with him was Mr. Hardy's beautiful 
 romance. The WoodlanderSy which we had to scour 
 London that Sunday afternoon to get hold of. In the 
 evening Mr. Colvin and I each returned to " Todgers' " 
 with the three volumes, borrowed or stolen somewhere, 
 and wrapped up for the voyage next day. And so the 
 following morning, in an extraordinary vessel called the 
 Ludgate Hill — as though in compliment to Mr. Stock- 
 ton's genius — and carrying, besides the Stevensons, 
 a cargo of stallions and monkeys, Mr. and Mrs. Steven- 
 son and Mr. Lloyd Osbourne steamed down the Thames 
 in search of health across the Atlantic and the Pacific. 
 The horses, Louis declared, protruded their noses in an 
 unmannerly way between the passengers at dinner, 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 299 
 
 and the poor little grey monkeys, giving up life for a 
 bad job on board that strange, heaving cage, died by 
 dozens, and were flung contemptuously out into the 
 ocean. The strangest voyage, however, some time 
 comes to an end, and Louis landed in America. He 
 was never to cross the Atlantic again ; and for those 
 who loved him in Europe he had already journeyed 
 more than half-way to another world. 
 
 It is impossible to deal, however lightly, with the 
 personal qualities of Robert Louis Stevenson without 
 dwelling on the extreme beauty of his character. In 
 looking back over the twenty years in which I knew 
 him, I feel that, since he was eminently human, I ought 
 to recall his faults, but I protest that I can remember 
 none. Perhaps the nearest approach to a fault was a 
 certain want of discretion, always founded on a wish to 
 make people understand each other, but not exactly 
 according to wisdom. I recollect that he once em- 
 broiled me for a moment with John Addington Symonds 
 in a manner altogether bloodthirsty and ridiculous, so 
 that we both fell upon him and rended him. This 
 little weakness is really the blackest crime I can lay to 
 his charge. And on the other side, what courage, what 
 love, what an indomitable spirit, what a melting pity ! 
 He had none of the sordid errors of the little man 
 who writes — no sick ambition, no envy of others, no 
 exaggeration of the value of this ephemeral trick of 
 
300 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 scribbling. He was eager to help his fellows, ready to 
 take a second place, with great difficulty offended, by 
 the least shovv' of repentance perfectly appeased. 
 
 Quite early in his career he adjusted himself to the 
 inevitable sense of physical failure. He threw away 
 from him all the useless impediments : he sat loosely 
 in the saddle of life. Many men who get such a warn- 
 ing as he got take up something to lean against ; 
 according to their education or temperament, they 
 support their maimed existence on religion, or on 
 cynical indifference, or on some mania of the collector 
 or the dilettante. Stevenson did none of these things. 
 He determined to make the sanest and most genial use 
 of so much of life as was left him. As any one who 
 reads his books can see, he had a deep strain of 
 natural religion ; but he kept it to himself; he made no 
 hysterical or ostentatious use of it. 
 
 Looking back at the past, one recalls a trait that had 
 its significance, though one missed its meaning then. 
 He was careful, as I have hardly known any other man 
 to be, not to allow himself to be burdened by the 
 weight of material things. It was quite a jest with us 
 that he never acquired any possessions. In the midst 
 of those who produced books, pictures, prints, bric-k- 
 brac, none of these things ever stuck to Stevenson. 
 There are some deep-sea creatures, the early part of 
 whose life is spent dancing through the waters ; at 
 length some sucker or tentacle touches a rock, adheres, 
 pulls down more tentacles, until the creature is caught 
 there, stationary for the remainder of its existence. 
 
Robert Louis Stevenson 301 
 
 So it happens to men, and Stevenson's friends, one 
 after another, caught the ground with a house, a fixed 
 employment, a "stake in hfe;" he alone kept dancing 
 in the free element, unattached. I remember his say- 
 ing to me that if ever he had a garden he should like it 
 to be empty, just a space to walk and talk in, with no 
 flowers to need a gardener nor fine lawns that had to 
 be mown. Just a fragment of the bare world to move 
 in, that was all Stevenson asked for. And we who 
 gathered possessions around us — a little library of rare 
 books, a little gallery of drawings or bronzes — he 
 mocked us with his goblin laughter ; it was only so 
 much more luggage to carry on the march, he said, so 
 much more to strain the arms and bend the back. 
 
 Stevenson thought, as we all must think, that litera- 
 ture is a delightful profession, a primrose path. I 
 remember his once saying so to me, and then he 
 turned, with the brimming look in his lustrous eyes 
 and the tremulous smile on his lips, and added, " But 
 it is not all primroses, some of it is brambly, and most 
 of it uphill." He knew — no one better — how the hill 
 catches the breath and how the brambles tear the face 
 and hands ; but he pushed strenuously, serenely on, 
 searching for new paths, struggling to get up into the 
 light and air. 
 
 One reason why it was difficult to be certain that 
 Stevenson had reached his utmost in any direction was 
 what I will call, for want of a better phrase, the 
 energetic modesty of his nature. He was never satisfied 
 with himself, yet never cast down. There are two 
 
302 Critical Kit-Kats 
 
 dangers that beset the artist — the one is being pleased 
 with what he has done, and the other being dejected 
 with it. Stevenson, more than any other man whom I 
 have known, steered the middle course. He never 
 conceived that he had achieved a great success, but he 
 never lost hope that by taking pains he might yet do 
 so. Twelve years ago, when he was beginning to 
 write that curious and fascinating book, Prince OttOy 
 he wrote to me describing the mood in which one 
 should go about one's work — golden words, which I 
 have never forgotten. " One should strain," he said, 
 ''and then play, strain again, and play again. The 
 strain is for us, it educates ; the play is for the reader, 
 and pleases. In moments of effort one learns to do the 
 easy things that people like." 
 
 He learned that which he desired, and he gained more 
 than he hoped for. He became the most exquisite 
 English writer of his generation ; yet those who lived 
 close to him are apt to think less of this than of the 
 fact that he was the most unselfish and the most lov- 
 able of human beings. 
 
 1895.