Part 9

It is strange to go over the old ground when he with whom one travelled over it in former times is no more present to answer and to hold his own view against the world. There certainly was a great charm in Arnold, even though he could be very patronising. But there was in all he said a kind of understood though seldom expressed sadness, as if to say, “It will soon be all over, don’t let us get angry; we are all very good fellows,” etc. He knew for years that though he was strong and looked very young for his age, the thread of his life might snap at any moment. And so it did—_felix opportunitate mortis_. Not long before his death he met Browning on the steps of the Athenæum. He felt ill, and in taking leave of Browning he hinted that they might never meet again. Browning was profuse in his protestations, and Arnold, on turning away, said in his airy way: “Now, one promise, Browning: please, not more than ten lines.” Browning understood, and went away with a solemn smile.

Arnold was most brilliant as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, from 1857 to 1867. He took great pains in writing and delivering his lectures. He looked well and spoke well. Some of his lectures were masterpieces, and he set a good example which was followed by Sir Francis Doyle, 1867–77, well known by his happy occasional poems, then by John Shairp from 1877 to his death, and lastly by Francis Palgrave from 1885–95. The best of Arnold’s lectures were published as essays; Shairp’s lectures appeared after his death, and have retained their popularity, particularly in America. Palgrave’s lectures, we may hope, will soon appear. They were full of most valuable information, and would prove very useful to many as a book of reference. I have known no one better informed on English poetry than my friend Palgrave. His “Golden Treasury” bears evidence of his wide reading, and his ripe judgment in selecting the best specimens of English lyric poetry. One had but to touch on any subject in the history of English literature, or to ask him a question, and there was always an abundance of most valuable information to be got from him. I owe him a great deal, particularly in my early Oxford days. For it was he who revised my first attempts at writing in English, and gave me good advice for the rest of my journey, more particularly as to what to avoid. He is now one of the very few friends left who remember my first appearance in Oxford in 1846, and who were chiefly instrumental in retaining my services for a University which has proved a true Alma Mater to me during all my life. Grant (Sir Alexander), Sellar, Froude, Sandars, Morier, Neate, Johnson (Manuel), Church, Jowett, all are gone before me.

Here are some old verses of his which I find in my album:—

An English welcome to an English shore Such as we could, some four years since we gave thee, Not knowing what the Fates reserved in store Or that our land among our sons would have thee; But now thou art endenizen’d awhile Almost we fear our welcome to renew:[11] Lest what we seemed to promise, should beguile, When all we are is open to thy view. But yet if aught of what we fondly boast— True-hearted warmth of Friendship, frank and free, Survive yet in this island-circling coast, We need not fear again to welcome thee:— So may we, blessing thee, ourselves be blest, And prove not all unworthy of our guest.

What happy days, what happy evenings we spent together lang syne! How patient they all were with their German guest when he first tried in his broken English to take part in their lively and sparkling conversations. Having once been received in that delightful circle, it was easy to make more acquaintances among their friends who lived at Oxford, or who from time to time came to visit them at Oxford. It was thus that I first came to know Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, and others.

Ruskin often came to spend a few days with his old friends, and uncompromising and severe as he could be when he wielded his pen, he was always most charming in conversation. He never, when he was with his friends, claimed the right of speaking with authority, even on his own special subjects, as he might well have done. It seemed to be his pen that made him say bitter things. He must have been sorry himself for the severe censure he passed in his earlier years on men whose honest labour, if nothing else, ought to have protected them against such cruel onslaughts. Grote’s style may not be the very best for an historian, but in his _Quellenstudium_ he was surely most conscientious. Yet this is what Ruskin wrote of him: “There is probably no commercial establishment between Charing Cross and the Bank, whose head clerk could not have written a better History of Greece, if he had the vanity to waste his time on it.” Of Gibbon’s classical work he spoke with even greater contempt. “Gibbon’s is the worst English ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike incapable either of picturesqueness or wit, his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a flat sentence turgid.” I feel sure that Ruskin, such as I knew him in later years, would have wished these sentences unwritten.

He was really the most tolerant and agreeable man in society. He could discover beauty where no one else could see it, and make allowance where others saw no excuse. I remember him as diffident as a young girl, full of questions, and grateful for any information. Even on art topics I have watched him listening almost deferentially to others who laid down the law in his presence. His voice was always most winning, and his language simply perfect. He was one of the few Englishmen I knew who, instead of tumbling out their sentences like so many portmanteau, bags, rugs, and hat-boxes from an open railway van, seemed to take a real delight in building up their sentences, even in familiar conversation, so as to make each deliverance a work of art. Later in life that even temperament may have become somewhat changed. He had suffered much, and one saw that his wounds had not quite healed. His public lectures as Professor of Fine Art were most attractive, and extremely popular at first. But they were evidently too much for him, and on the advice of his medical friends he had at last to cease from lecturing altogether. Several times his brain had been a very serious trouble to him. People forget that, as we want good eyes for seeing, and good ears for hearing, we want a strong, sound brain for lecturing.

I have seen much of such brain troubles among my friends, and who can account for them? It is not the brain that thinks, nor do we think by means of our brain; but we cannot think without our brain, and the slightest lesion of our brain in any one of its wonderful convolutions is as bad as a shot in the eye.

If ever there was an active, powerful brain, it was Ruskin’s. No doubt he worked very hard, but I doubt whether hard work by itself can ever upset a healthy brain. I believe it rather strengthens than weakens it, as exercise strengthens the muscles of our body. His was, no doubt, a very sensitive nature, and an overwrought sensitiveness is much more likely to cause mischief than steady intellectual effort. And what a beautiful mind his was, and what lessons of beauty he has taught us all. At the same time, he could not bear anything unbeautiful; and anything low or ignoble in men revolted him and made him thoroughly unhappy. I remember once taking Emerson to lunch with him, in his rooms in Corpus Christi College. Emerson was an old friend of his, and in many respects a cognate soul. But some quite indifferent subject turned up, a heated discussion ensued, and Ruskin was so upset that he had to quit the room and leave us alone. Emerson was most unhappy, and did all he could to make peace, but he had to leave without a reconciliation.

It is very difficult to make allowance for these gradual failures of brain power.

Again and again I have seen such cases at Oxford, where men were clearly no longer themselves, and yet had to be treated as if they were; nay, continue to exercise their old influence till at last the crash came, and one began to understand what had seemed so strange, and more than strange, in their behaviour. I believe there are as many degrees of insanity as there are of shortsightedness and deafness, and the line that divides sanity from insanity is often very small. I have had to watch the waverings of this line in several cases, and it is enough to upset one’s own equilibrium to have to deal with a friend who to-day is quite like himself and quite like ourselves, and the next day a raving lunatic. My predecessor at Oxford, Dr. Trithen, half Russian, half Swiss by birth, and a man of extraordinary gifts and wonderfully attractive, went slowly out of his mind and had at last to be sent to an asylum. But even then he wrote the most reasonable and touching letters to me on all sorts of subjects, though when I went to see him he was quite unapproachable. Fortunately he died soon after from brain disease, but who could say what was the cause of it? Nothing remains of him but the edition of a Sanskrit play, the Vîracharitra.

But his knowledge of Sanskrit and all sorts of languages, his peculiar power of mimicry in imitating the exact pronunciation of different dialects, and his knack of copying Oriental MSS. so that one could hardly tell the difference between the original and the copy were quite amazing. He might have grown to be another Mezzofanti if the fates had not been against him. He was the very type of a fascinating Russian, full of kindness and courtesy, sparkling in conversation, always ready to help others and most careless about himself; but there always was an expression in his coruscating eyes which spoke of danger, and foreboded the tragedy which finished his young and promising life.

Painful as these intellectual breakdowns are, they are not half so painful as when we see in our friends what is at first called mere wrongheadedness, but is apt to lead to a complete deterioration of moral fibre, and in the end to an apparent inability to distinguish between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood. In the former case we know that a slight lesion in one of the ganglion cells or nerve-fibres of the brain is sufficient to account for any disturbance in the intellectual clock-work. The man himself remains the same, though at times hidden from us, as it were, by a veil, and we feel towards him the same sorrowful sympathy which we feel towards a man who has lost the use of his eyes or his legs, who cannot see or cannot walk. We know that the instruments are at fault, not the operator. But it is very difficult to make the same allowance in cases of moral deterioration. Here instruments and operator seem to be the same, though, for all we know, here too the brain may be more at fault than the heart. A well-known oculist maintained that the peculiarities, or what he called the distortions, in Turner’s latest pictures were due to a malformation in the muscles of his eyes. He actually invented some spectacles by which everything that seemed ill-proportioned in Turner’s latest productions came right if looked at through these corrective lenses. May not what we call shortsightedness, conceit, vanity, envy, hatred and malice—all, as it seems, without rhyme or reason—be due in the beginning to some weakness or dimness of sight that might have been corrected, if treated in time, by those who are nearest and dearest to the sufferer? This may seem a dangerous view of moral responsibility; but, if so, it can be dangerous to the sufferer only, not to those who ought to sympathise, _i.e._ to feel and suffer, with him. To me it has proved a solution of many difficulties during a long and varied intercourse with men and women; the only difficulty is how to make these invalids harmless to themselves.

Ruskin’s influence among the undergraduates at Oxford was most extraordinary. He could persuade the young Christ Church men to take spade and wheelbarrow and help him to make a road which he thought would prove useful to a village near Oxford. No other professor could have achieved that. The road was made, but was also soon washed away, and, of course, Ruskin was laughed at, though the labour undergone by his pupils did them no doubt a great deal of good, even though it did not benefit the inhabitants of the village for any length of time. It was sad to see Ruskin leave Oxford estranged from many of his friends, dissatisfied with his work, which nevertheless was most valuable and highly appreciated by young and old, perhaps by the young even more than by the old. His spirit still dwells in the body, and if any one may look back with pride and satisfaction upon the work which he has achieved it is surely Ruskin.

Another though less frequent visitor to Oxford was Tennyson. His first visit to our house was rather alarming. We lived in a small house in High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment was not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a Poet Laureate. He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford was almost empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked him to dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time almost all the shops were in the market, which closed at one o’clock. My wife, a young housekeeper, did her best for our honoured guest. He was known to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out when he found the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He was pleased, however, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the only advantage he got from being Poet Laureate, that he generally received the liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast we had rather plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of cutlets, and were not a little surprised when our guest arrived to see him whip off the cover of the hot dish, and to hear the exclamation: “Mutton chops! the staple of every bad inn in England.” However, these were but minor matters, though not without importance at the time in the eyes of a young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the Immortals. He was simply delightful and full of inquiries about the East, more particularly about Indian poetry, and I believe that it was then that I told him that there was no rhyme in Sanskrit poetry, and ventured to ask him why there should be in English. He was not so offended as Samuel Johnson seems to have been when asked the same question. The old bear would probably have answered my question by, “You are a great fool, sir; use your own judgment,” while Tennyson gave the very sensible answer that rhyme assisted the memory.

It is difficult to define the difference between an Oxford man and a Cambridge man; but if Ruskin was decidedly a representative of Oxford, Tennyson was a true son of the sister University. I had been taught to admire Tennyson by my young friends at Oxford, many of whom were enthusiastic worshippers of the poet. My friends often forgot that I had been brought up on German poetry, and that though I knew Heine, Rückert, Eichendorff, Chamisso, and Geibel, to say nothing of Goethe, Schiller, Bürger, and even Klopstock, their allusions to Tennyson, Browning, nay, to Shelley and Keats, often fell by the wayside and were entirely lost on me.

However, I soon learnt to enjoy Tennyson’s poetry, its finish, its delicacy, its moderation—I mean, the absence of all extravagance; yet there is but one of his books which has remained with me a treasure for life, his “In Memoriam.” To have expressed such deep, true, and original thought as is contained in each of these short poems in such perfect language, to say nothing of rhyme, was indeed a triumph. Tennyson was very kind to me, and took a warm interest in my work, particularly in my mythological studies. I well remember his being struck by a metaphor in my first Essay on Comparative Mythology, published in 1856, and his telling me so. I had said that the sun in his daily passage across the sky had ploughed a golden furrow through the human brain, whence sprang in ancient times the first germs of mythology, and afterwards the rich harvest of religious thought.

“I don’t know,” he said, “whether the simile is quite correct, but I like it.” I was of course very proud that the great poet should have pondered on any sentence of mine, and still more that he should have approved of my theory of seeing in mythology a poetical interpretation of the great phenomena of nature. But it was difficult to have a long discussion with him. He was fond of uttering short and decisive sentences: his yes was yes indeed, and his no was no indeed.

It was generally after dinner, when smoking his pipe and sipping his whiskey and water, that Tennyson began to thaw, and to take a more active part in conversation. People who have not known him then, have hardly known him at all. During the day he was often very silent and absorbed in his own thoughts, but in the evening he took an active part in the conversation of his friends. His pipe was almost indispensable to him, and I remember one time when I and several friends were staying at his house, the question of tobacco turned up. I confessed that for years I had been a perfect slave to tobacco, so that I could neither read nor write a line without smoking, but that at last I had rebelled against this slavery, and had entirely given up tobacco. Some of his friends taunted Tennyson that he could never give up tobacco. “Anybody can do that,” he said, “if he chooses to do it.” When his friends still continued to doubt and to tease him, “Well,” he said, “I shall give up smoking from to-night.” The very same evening I was told that he threw his pipes and his tobacco out of the window of his bedroom. The next day he was most charming, though somewhat self-righteous. The second day he became very moody and captious, the third day no one knew what to do with him. But after a disturbed night I was told that he got out of bed in the morning, went quietly into the garden, picked up one of his broken pipes, stuffed it with the remains of the tobacco scattered about, and then, having had a few puffs, came to breakfast, all right again. Nothing was said any more about giving up tobacco.

He once very kindly offered to lend me his house in the Isle of Wight. “But mind,” he said, “you will be watched from morning till evening.” This was in fact his great grievance, that he could not go out without being stared at. Once taking a walk with me and my wife on the downs behind his house, he suddenly started, left us, and ran home, simply because he had descried two strangers coming towards us.

I was told that he once complained to the Queen, and said that he could no longer stay in the Isle of Wight, on account of the tourists who came to stare at him. The Queen, with a kindly irony, remarked that she did not suffer much from that grievance, but Tennyson, not seeing what she meant, replied: “No, madam, and if I could clap a sentinel wherever I liked, I should not be troubled either.”

It must be confessed that people were very inconsiderate. Rows of tourists sat like sparrows on the paling of his garden, waiting for his appearance. The guides were actually paid by sightseers, particularly by those from America, for showing them the great poet. Nay, they went so far as to dress up a sailor to look like Tennyson, and the result was that, after their trick had been found out, the tourists would walk up to Tennyson and ask him: “Now, are you the real Tennyson?” This, no doubt, was very annoying, and later on Lord Tennyson was driven to pay a large sum for some useless downs near his house, simply in order to escape from the attentions of admiring travellers.

Why should not people be satisfied with the best that a poet is and can give them, namely his poetry? Why should they wish to stare at him? Few poets are greater than their poetry, and Tennyson was not one of them. Like all really great men, Tennyson disliked the worship that was paid him by many who came to stare at him and to pour out the usual phrases of admiration before him. Tennyson frequently took flight from his intending Boswells, and he was the very last man to appreciate the “_Il parle_” by which in Paris all conversation was hushed whenever Victor Hugo was present at a dinner and spoke to his neighbour, possibly only to ask him for the _menu_.

People have learnt after his death what a possession they had in Tennyson. He may not rank among the greatest poets of England, but there was something high and noble in him which reacted on the nation at large, even though that influence was not perhaps consciously realised. Anyhow, after his death, it was widely felt that there was nobody worthy to fill his place; and why was it not left empty, as in the Greek army, where, we are told, a place of honour was reserved for a great hero who was supposed to be present during the heat of the battle, and to inspire those who stood near his place to great deeds of valour?