Part 1

IN GOOD COMPANY

IN GOOD COMPANY

SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF SWINBURNE, LORD ROBERTS WATTS-DUNTON, OSCAR WILDE EDWARD WHYMPER, S. J. STONE STEPHEN PHILLIPS

BY COULSON KERNAHAN

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXVII

SECOND EDITION

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND

TO

THE HON. MRS. ARTHUR HENNIKER

MY DEAR MRS. HENNIKER,

It is many years since we first met at the house of one whom we both loved, whose memory we both cherish. It was that friend’s hope that you and I should become, and should remain friends; and that the hope has been realised has given me many happy hours--sometimes in your company as my gracious hostess, sometimes, scarcely less closely in your company, as a reader of your delightful and beautiful stories. Were your gallant General--I remember how proud he was of those stories--alive to-day, I should have asked to be allowed to dedicate this book to the two of you. Now that--alas for the England that he so faithfully loved, so nobly served--he is with us no more, may I inscribe it to yourself and to his honoured memory?

Yours ever sincerely, COULSON KERNAHAN.

FOREWORD

One of the subjects of these studies said in my hearing, that “Recollections” are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memory, or have never, themselves, done anything in life worth remembering.

To the second indictment I plead guilty, but my best excuse for the publication of this volume is that I write while the first indictment fails. My memory is still good, and the one thing which seems most worth remembering in my life is my undeservedly fortunate friendships.

In writing of my friends and of those with whom I was associated, I am, therefore, I believe, giving of my best. I ought to add that these papers were penned for inclusion in a volume of frankly personal and intimate “Recollections.” A work of that sort is the one book of his life in which an author is allowed some freedom from convention. That is why I hope to be pardoned should any passage, letter, or incident in these pages seem too intimate or too personal.

The reason why the studies are printed separately is that the ship in which I hope to carry the bulk of my threatened “Recollections” (if ever that ship come to port) will be so heavily weighted a vessel, that I am lightening it by unloading a portion of the cargo at the friendly harbour of The Bodley Head.

To drop figurative language and to speak plainly, I may add that, though there is some attempt at a more or less finished portrait in some of my pen-pictures, that of Lord Roberts is no portrait, but merely a chronicle. His personality, at least, is too well known and loved to need either analysis or description.

The paper _When Stephen Phillips Read_, mere snapshot as it is of one aspect of his personality, was not written for the present volume, with which, indeed, it is hardly in keeping. I include it by the wish of Mr. John Lane who, years hence, will be remembered as the faithful friend, as well as the generous and discriminating admirer, of the distinguished poet, of whose work it is his pride also to be the publisher.

Mr. Lane was anxious--knowing that my friendship with the poet was long and close--that I should write of Stephen Phillips as fully as I have here written of some others; but it is only under impulse that I seek to picture the inner self and personality of my friends, and I cannot do so while the sense of loss is comparatively new. In the case of two of whom I have thus written, many years had elapsed before I put pen to paper.

At his best--as the three friends who made such unexampled and such self-sacrificing efforts on his behalf, Sir Sidney and Lady Colvin and Mr. Stephen Gwynn, will, I think, agree--there was something approaching the godlike in Stephen Phillips. Of what was weak, and worse, in him I need not here speak, since, because he so loathed hypocrisy, he hid it from none.

One day I hope to show Stephen Phillips as he really was, and as not many knew him. I have heard him described as a man of brooding and morbid aloofness. There is truth in the description, but it is equally true to say that, at times, he could be as healthily jovial and unconstrained, as high-spirited as a happy schoolboy. His exquisite and extraordinary sense of humour was--I had almost written his “salvation,” and that not only under success which, coming early in life, might well have turned the head of a smaller man, but also in adversity which, when it came, was as crushing as his success had been complete. When this adversity, when tragic unhappiness, overtook him, he bore them with courage, and reproached no one except himself.

If as a poet he was at first overpraised, it is equally true that, towards the end, and since his death, the splendour, beauty and power of his poetry have often been underestimated. Time will set that right, and will rank him, I believe, as a true and, within his limits, a great poet.

That Stephen Phillips, the man, gave no cause for sorrow and concern to those of us who loved him, I do not maintain, nor would he wish me to do so, for no one was more ready to acknowledge his weaknesses--deeply and almost despairingly as he deplored them--and none suffered intenser agony of remorse for ill-doing than he.

Knowing him as I did, I unhesitatingly aver that his ideals and his longings were noble, and that the soul of the man was good. That all is well with him, and that he is at rest, I have no doubt. Never have I seen such fulness of peace and such beauty on the face of the newly dead, as when I knelt--to commend his passing soul to his Maker--by the bed on which lay what was mortal of Stephen Phillips. All that was weak and unworthy seemed to have fallen away as something which never was, which never could be, a part of his true self. In death, even his youth returned to him. As he lay there, white-robed, and with his hair tossed boyishly over his forehead, he looked so young that one might have thought him to be a happy and sleeping boy-chorister, dreaming of the poet-mother whom he so loved, and to join whom in Paradise may not his soul even then have been hastening?

C. K.

SAVAGE CLUB, LONDON.

CONTENTS

PAGE

A. C. SWINBURNE 1

LORD ROBERTS 32

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON AS THE “OGRE OF THE ‘ATHENÆUM’” 67

WHY THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON PUBLISHED ONLY TWO BOOKS 84

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON AS AN AMATEUR IN AUTHORSHIP AND AS A GOOD FELLOW 102

ONE ASPECT OF THE MANY-SIDEDNESS OF THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 111

THE LAST DAYS OF THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 126

WHEN STEPHEN PHILLIPS READ 139

EDWARD WHYMPER AS I KNEW HIM 149

OSCAR WILDE 189

S. J. STONE, THE HYMN-WRITER 236

IN GOOD COMPANY

A. C. SWINBURNE

Had some old Pagan slept a thousand years, To wake to-day, and stretching to the stars Gaunt arms of longing, called on Venus, Mars, June and Jove, Apollo and his peers; And heard, for answer, echoing from the spheres, “Thy gods are gone: the gods of old are dead. It is by Christ thou shalt be comforted, The pitying God who wipes away all tears.”

Such answer had there come, deaf ears, in scorn Had turned the Pagan, and deaf ears turn we To other voices, on this April morn, Since he who sang the sunrise and the sea Shall sing no more. Deaf are we and forlorn, The gods are dead, and dead is Poetry.

_April 10, 1909._

I

Swinburne was furious.

I had lunched with him and Watts-Dunton at The Pines, and after I had smoked a cigarette with the latter, the author of _Atalanta in Calydon_ had invited me upstairs to his sanctum, that he might show me the latest acquisition to his library--a big parchment-bound book tied with ribbons--the Kelmscott reprint of one of Caxton’s books. He waxed enthusiastic, I remember, over the Rape of Danae. Then he took up the proofs of an article on John Day which he was contributing to the _Nineteenth Century_ that he might read some passages from it. To verify a quotation, he walked to his shelves in search of a book, talking volubly meanwhile, and turning, as was his custom, to look directly at the person whom he was addressing. Unlike Watts-Dunton, whose library was a witness to the catholicity of the owner’s interests and of his tastes, Swinburne’s library was comparatively small and select, for he was as exclusive in regard to the books he admitted to his shelves as he was in regard to the men and women he admitted to his friendship. Knowing exactly, I suppose, where the required volume was to be found, his hand went as confidently towards it--even though his face was turned away from it, and towards me--as the fingers of a musician go towards the keys of a piano at which he does not look. For once Swinburne’s instincts played him false. Taking down the book without glancing at it, and still pouring out a torrent of words, he opened it, his eyes on my face, and shaking the forefinger of his right hand at me, said:

“Here it is! Listen!” and dropped his eyes upon the page.

To my astonishment his face suddenly crimsoned, the eyes that might once have been bright blue, but were now faded, and, in fading, seemed to have caught and retained something of the colour of the great seas and of the grassy fields upon which they have so often and so lovingly lingered, glowed with green fire like that we see in the eyes of an angry cat, and he flung the book away from him in a tornado of wrath. He had taken down the wrong volume, an anthology, and opened at a page on which was printed a poem by the particular writer who, like the wearer of a red coat intruding thoughtlessly upon the domain of an angry bull, happened at that particular moment to be the subject of a poet’s capricious wrath--for on occasion I have heard Swinburne speak with kindly, if contemptuous toleration, of a writer whose damnation in this world and the next he seemed at another time ardently to desire.

“Of all my imitators,” he shrilled, literally quivering with the tempestuousness of his passion, “this fellow (mentioning a poet whose name I suppress) is the most intolerable. I claim--and you, I know, will admit the justice of the claim--that perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of my work in poetry is that I have taken old and hackneyed metres, and have tried to transform them from a mere jingle, and a mere jig-jig, into music. This pestilent ape has vulgarised what I have done by servile imitations of my manner and of my methods; but, what I had transformed into music, he has transformed back into the vilest and most jigging of jingles.”

When a poet of Swinburne’s eminence thus turns the searchlight of criticism upon himself, and seeks to lay bare, in a few pregnant sentences, what he considers the secret of his art and of his success, one must necessarily be interested and even fascinated. On this occasion, however, I was more concerned about the singular state of nervous excitability into which my host had worked himself than curious to draw him out by further discussion.

Sir James Barrie says somewhere that “Temper is a weapon which we handle by the blade,” a tragic instance of the truth of which I had in mind at that moment. A certain distinguished writer, now dead, who like Swinburne was a good hater, and scarcely less excitable than he, had made, or imagined that he had made (the vagaries of the artistic temperament are many), a deadly enemy of a fellow craftsman and critic. Every adverse review of his work, or unfriendly reference to himself, which appeared in the public Press, he insisted on attributing, directly or indirectly, to the malignity of this supposed enemy. A not ungenerous man at heart, in spite of--possibly because of--his blaze of a temper and quickness to take offence, the distinguished writer in question had shown much interest in a struggling young author of his own nationality, and had not only assisted him financially, but had been at great pains to find a publisher for the lad’s first book, and had importuned his friends on the Press to review the work favourably and at length. The first notice to appear was adverse in the extreme, and the distinguished writer instantly declared that he saw in it the hand of his enemy, who had sought to stab at him by damning the work of a young fellow known to be his friend and protégé.

Flinging the paper containing the review upon the ground, he stamped upon it, and about the room, working himself up finally into so furious a passion that it brought on a seizure from which he never entirely recovered, and that practically ended his career.

“Temper is a weapon which we handle by the blade.”

This story I had only recently heard, and had good reason for believing. Seeing my host literally trembling and quivering in every limb with the intensity of the excitement, and of the anger into which he had worked himself, my one anxiety was to distract the attention of this representative of the proverbially irritable race of geniuses from the disturbing subject, and to soothe him back to his normal calm. Unfortunately for me, his deafness made my task difficult, but I chanced to hit upon a topic in which he was keenly interested, and, little by little, he quieted down, until I could see that he had talked himself out and was ready for the afternoon nap in which it was his custom to indulge.

Remembering that incident, and others like it within my knowledge, I ask myself how it is possible to judge men and women of genius--men and women to whose great brains the live blood rushes at a thought or at a word; whose passions are like a laid fuse, ready to take fire and to explode the mine at a touch--by the same standard which we apply to the cold-blooded, sluggish-brained, lethargic and perhaps more fortunate mortals to whom impulse is unknown, upon whom passion has no sway, and who rarely commit themselves to any expression or to any action, noble or mean, wise or indiscreet, without first of all carefully weighing the results and counting up the costs.

“It is apparently too often a congenial task,” says George Eliot in her _Essay on Heine_, “to write severe words about the transgressions of men of genius; especially when the censor has the advantage of being himself a man of no genius, so that those transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; he, forsooth, never lacerated anyone by his wit or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion; and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that lies in transcendent power.”

II

Of all controversialists (and he dearly loved a verbal encounter) to whom I have ever listened, Swinburne was incomparably the most crushing. He fought with scrupulous and knightly fairness, never stooping to take a mean advantage of an adversary, and listening patiently, punctiliously even, while the other side was making its points. But, when his turn came, he carried everything before him. Vesuvius in eruption could not more effectually overwhelm or consume the rubble around its crater than Swinburne could scarify or sweep away, by a lava-torrent of burning words, the most weighty arguments of his opponents.

So, too, with his conversation. When he was moved by his subject, when he talked in dead earnest, he did nothing else. He forgot everything. In the middle, or even at the beginning of a meal, he would lay down knife and fork, and turn to face his listener, quite oblivious of, or indifferent to the fact that his dinner or lunch was spoiling.

On one occasion I happened, half-way through lunch, to mention that I had in my pocket a copy of Christina Rossetti’s latest poem, written in memory of the Duke of Clarence, and entitled _The Death of a First-born_.

Down went knife and fork as he half rose from his chair to stretch a hand across the table for the manuscript.

“She is as a god to mortals when compared to most other living women poets,” he exclaimed in a burst of Swinburnian hyperbole.

Then in his thin, high-pitched but exquisitely modulated and musical voice he half read, half chanted two verses of the poem in question:

One young life lost, two happy young lives blighted With earthward eyes we see: With eyes uplifted, keener, farther-sighted We look, O Lord, to Thee.

Grief hears a funeral knell: Hope hears the ringing Of birthday bells on high. Faith, Hope and Love make answer with soft singing, Half carol and half cry.

Then he stopped abruptly.

“I won’t read the third and last verse,” he said. “One glance at it is sufficient to show that it is unequal, and that the poem would be stronger and finer by its omission. But for the happy folk who are able to think as she thinks, who believe as she believes on religious matters, the poem is of its kind perfect. Let me read that second verse again,” and with glowing eyes, with hand marking time to the music, he read once more:

Grief hears a funeral knell: Hope hears the ringing Of birthday bells on high. Faith, Hope and Love make answer with soft singing, Half carol and half cry.

The last line, “Half carol and half cry,” he repeated three times, lowering his voice with each repetition, until at last it was little more than a whisper, and so died away, like the undistinguishable ceasing of far-off music.

Laying the manuscript reverently beside him, he sat perfectly still for a space and with brooding beautiful eyes. Then rising without a word he stole silently, softly, almost ghost-like, but with short, swift steps out of the room.

III

Though it was my privilege to count among my friends several personal friends of Swinburne--notably the late Theodore Watts-Dunton, Philip Bourke Marston, and the dearest and closest of all my friends, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton--it was not until the first weeks of 1892 that I met him personally.

I was invited to lunch at The Pines, and the first thing that struck me as I entered the dining-room and took the extended hand, which was soft and limp, and had no sturdiness in the grasp, was the singular charm and even courtliness of his bearing. Unmistakably an aristocrat, and with all the ease and polish which one associates with high breeding, there was, even in the cordiality with which he rose and came forward to welcome me, a suspicion of the shy nervousness of the introspective man and of the recluse on first facing a stranger. It had passed in a few minutes, and I saw no trace of it at any of our subsequent meetings, but to the last his courtliness remained. I have seen him angry, I have heard him furiously dissent from and even denounce the views put forward by others, but never once was what, for want of a better word, I must call his personal deference to those others relaxed. With him the proverbial familiarity which is said to breed contempt, bred only more consistent and insistent courtesy. To no one would he defer quite so graciously and readily, to no one was he so scrupulously courtly in his bearing, as to those who constituted the household in which he lived. On the occasion of this first meeting with him he talked with extraordinary animation, sitting up erectly in his chair and moving his body or limbs stiffly and jerkily. He had not long returned from his forenoon walk, and, if I may be pardoned so far-fetched a comparison, he was like a newly-opened bottle of champagne, bubbling and brimming over with the buoyant, beady, joyous and joy-giving wine of morning. Watts-Dunton, always generously ready to interest himself, and to endeavour to interest others, in the work of a young writer of ability, was anxious to talk about my friend, Richard Le Gallienne. He might as well, by making a stopper of his open hand, have tried permanently to prevent the overflow of the champagne bottle which I have used for the purpose of a fanciful comparison. The moment he withdrew his hand, the instant he ceased to speak of Le Gallienne, Swinburne, as represented by the newly-opened bottle, was bubbling over again about his walk. The wine of it was in his veins and seemed to have intoxicated him.

“There is no time like the morning for a walk!” he declared, turning to me with enthusiasm. “The sparkle, the exhilaration of it! I walk every morning of my life, no matter what the weather, pelting along all the time as fast as I can go; and it is entirely to my daily walk that I attribute my perfect health.”

On hearing that I, too, was a great, as well as a fast walker, Swinburne looked me up and down challengingly, and said with a smile that was almost like a merry boy’s:

“Yes! but I think I could outwalk you, and get there first, for all your six feet!” Then, turning to Watts-Dunton, he apologised playfully for having monopolised the talk, and said, “Now tell me about your young poet. His is certainly the most beautiful poet-face since Shelley’s.”

Watts-Dunton replied by reading some extracts from a “Note on Swinburne” which Le Gallienne had contributed to _Literary Opinion_, Swinburne listening with downbent head meanwhile. When Watts-Dunton had made an end of it, and Swinburne had expressed his appreciation, the latter inquired how I first came to know Le Gallienne, and learning that when I was acting as the Editor of the English edition of _Lippincott’s Magazine_ I had, in that capacity or incapacity, accepted one of Le Gallienne’s first published articles, _The Nature Poems of George Meredith_, he asked if I knew Sir J. M. Barrie, who he considered had been much influenced by the author of _The Ordeal of Richard Feverel_.

“Only slightly,” I answered. “I suggested, in fact organised a dinner to dear old F. W. Robinson, in whose magazine _Home Chimes_ much of the early work of Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, Zangwill, Eden Phillpotts, G. B. Burgin, and many others, who have since come into their own, appeared. Jerome took the chair and Barrie the vice-chair, and the dinner was something of a record in the list of distinguished men present, and was, I believe, one of the few functions of the sort of which an account appeared in the _Athenæum_. It was there I first met Barrie.”

“Robinson of _Grandmother’s Money_,” cried Swinburne in an ecstasy of enthusiasm. “You have mentioned the name of one of the very salt of the earth, and one of the dearest friends of both of us here. We contributed to the first number of _Home Chimes_. Watts-Dunton wrote a noble Sonnet of Greeting, and I printed my Sonnet _Near Cromer_ there. His novels, I grant, though eminently readable, as the reviewers say, are not great. Unlike Dr. Gilbert’s, they do not dovetail. Finishing one chapter, you are not restless and uneasy till you have read the next, and that is a fatal defect in a novelist.”

Speaking of Robinson and _Home Chimes_ reminded Swinburne of the fact that it was in that unfortunately named and defunct magazine that he had seen some of the best work of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet, concerning whom I had contributed an article to the current number of the _Fortnightly Review_. This article Swinburne had read and wished to discuss, for, whereas my friendship with Philip Marston was not of long standing, he had known the blind poet since the latter was a lad of fourteen, and on the day after Philip’s death had written a memorial sonnet which was subsequently printed in the _Athenæum_.