Part 10

“Come again soon, dear fellow. Come again soon,” he said, as he held my hand in a long clasp. And when I had passed out of his sight and he out of mine, his voice followed me pathetically, almost brokenly into the night, “Come again soon, Kernahan. Come again soon, dear boy. Don’t let it be long before we meet again.”

It was not long before we met again, but it was, alas, when I followed to his long home one who, great as was his fame in the eyes of the world as poet, critic, novelist and thinker, is, in the hearts of some of us, who grow old, more dearly remembered as the most unselfish, most steadfast, and most loving of friends.

WHEN STEPHEN PHILLIPS READ

I

One afternoon in the nineties, I called upon my friend Mrs. Chandler Moulton, the American poet. She had taken a first-floor suite of rooms in a large house in the west of London, in which other paying guests were also just then staying. I was shown into the reception room attached to Mrs. Moulton’s suite, and was told that she would be with me in a few minutes. Almost immediately after, another of Mrs. Moulton’s friends, Madame Antoinette Sterling, called, and was shown into the room where I was waiting. We had met before, and fell to chatting. Madame Sterling happened to mention the piece in her repertoire, which was not only her own favourite, but was also that which, in her opinion, best suited her voice. When I said that by some chance I had been so unfortunate as to miss hearing her sing it, she replied quickly:

“If that is so, I will sing it for you now.”

Then she rose, and drew herself up statuesquely--as it were to “attention”--and to her full height, a striking figure. Grant Allen once said to me that he suspected she had a strain of Red Indian blood in her veins. If that be so--I do not know--it showed itself in a certain proud imperturbability of bearing, and by the fact that she stood, if not exactly stock-still, at least almost motionless and gestureless. It showed itself, too, in the high cheek-bones; in the swarthiness of her complexion, and the snaky smooth coils of black hair that, parted low and loosely over the brow, toned down, and softened into womanliness, the almost masculine massiveness of the strong purposeful features. Throwing back her head, like a full-throated thrush, and with her hands clasped simply in front of her, she began to sing, low and flute-like at first, but as she went on letting her glorious voice swell out in an organ-burst of song.

The effect was singular. The London season was at its height, and the house was full of visitors, chiefly, I believe, Americans. When Madame Sterling began to sing, we could distinctly hear the buzz of conversation coming up from the floor below. Overhead, one could hear the restless movement of feet, and sounds like those which come from a kitchen--the chink of china and the clashing together of knives, forks, and spoons, as if in preparation for a meal--were also audible.

But as the first few notes of the rich, full, noble, and far-carrying contralto rang out, the chatter of voices below, the shuffle of feet, or of furniture overhead, even the necessary commonplace, vulgar sounds that came from the basement and the kitchen, were suddenly checked, shamed, and silenced; and, as the singer’s voice deepened into full diapason, one almost fancied that not only the men and women gathered together in different rooms under that one roof, but the very house itself, even the dead and inanimate pieces of furniture, were strained and stilled in listening silence.

I am reminded of this old-time and almost forgotten incident by an “Impression of Stephen Phillips,” contributed under the initials “H.W.B.” to the _Outlook_ of December 18, 1915, by Mr. Horace Bleackley, the distinguished novelist. Just as that noisy boarding-house was at first surprised, and then, as it were, frozen into a strange, almost uncanny silence by Madame Sterling’s marvellous notes, so, by the majesty of spoken words, Stephen Phillips compelled an unwilling company to a like hushed and awed reverence.

“It was an evening party in an undergraduate’s rooms at Christ Church, Oxford, about twenty-seven years ago,” writes Mr. Bleackley. “It was a decorous gathering--not a ‘wine’--but there had been music and mirth, and none of us were at all inclined towards serious things. Suddenly the host announced that a member of the Benson Company--several of whom were our guests on this occasion--would give a recitation. A grave and thoughtful young man rose before us, with the features of a Greek god, whom most of us recognised at a glance (for we all had been at the theatre that week) as the Ghost in _Hamlet_. Somewhat resentfully we relapsed into silence, few showing any signs of enthusiasm, for scarcely any of us had the slightest doubt that we were going to be bored.

“For twenty minutes the actor held us spellbound. His voice was musical and his elocution that of a consummate artist. But this we had realised before. It was not the charm of his diction that enthralled us, but the melody of his verse--fresh and pure from the heavenly spring. And when he had finished there were awestruck whispers--which I seem to hear still--even from the Philistines: ‘It is his own poem!’ Few of that company can have been surprised when, about a decade later, all the world had hailed Stephen Phillips as one of the greatest of living poets.”

Mr. Bleackley’s “Impression” was gathered long before Phillips had reached the plenitude and the maturity of his power, for the poet was then a very young man, leaving Cambridge as he did without taking a degree, and joining his cousin’s Sir F. R. Benson’s touring theatrical company. Those who heard Phillips at his prime and at his best, will agree with me that his rendering of poetry cannot be described by such words as “reading,” “recitation,” or “recital.” The plain unexaggerated fact is that by mere words his rendering of poetry cannot be described.

I am not writing of his acting, nor of his public reading, for, excellent and memorable as were both, I doubt whether those who have heard and seen Phillips only upon the stage, or the platform, have any idea what he was like at his best--and at his best he never was in public. It was in his own or in a friend’s home, and in the company only of intimates, of whose sympathy and understanding he was assured, that Phillips was his natural self, and therefore, his natural self (alas, that he was not always that natural self!) being inherently noble, at his highest and best. I have heard spiritualists assert that the presence of one single person of unsympathetic temperament has made it impossible to attain the necessary trance condition on the part of the medium, and so has brought a séance to nought.

Whether that be so or not I cannot say, for I have no knowledge of spiritualism, but I recall occasions when Stephen Phillips had been strangely disappointing, and, in explaining his failure to me afterwards, he said:

“I couldn’t help it. That man or that woman’s very presence spoilt everything and put me off. I seemed to feel his or her cold and fish-like eyes fastened upon me as I read. I was all the time as aware of that person’s boredom as sailors are aware, by the change in the coldness of the atmosphere, of approaching bergs. Worse, I was like a skater, fallen into a hole under the ice; who can find no way out, but is held down and drowned under a roof of solid and unbroken ice. One man, one woman, like that in my audience, or even in a room, keeps me self-conscious all the time, and so makes poetry impossible; for poetry, high poetry, is the sublimation, the exaltation, of the senses into soul. It is the forgetting of self, the losing, merging and fusing of one’s very individuality into pure thought, and into visions and revelations of the Truth and the Loveliness that are of God.”

II

It has been my fortune to know not a few poets. It has been my fate to play listener while they, or most of them, read aloud their verses. To them, presumably, some sort of satisfaction was to be derived from the self-imposed task; otherwise I should not have been thus afflicted. To me the case was one of holding on, directly under the enemy’s artillery and without returning his fire, the casualties in my own moral garrison being heavy. I was in fact for the most part as severely punished as was Stephen Phillips on one occasion of which he told me.

The wife of a friend of his was chatting in her drawing-room one afternoon with two or three callers, among whom was Phillips. To them entered the host her husband, who, drawing the author of _Marpessa_ aside, whispered to him, “Come along, Phillips, let’s enjoy ourselves!”

“I was rather tiring of the drawing-room talk,” said Phillips, in relating the incident, “and my host’s alluring words were like Hope. They told a flattering tale. ‘Rumour has it,’ I said to myself, ‘that there are in his cellars some bottles of port upon which it is good to look when the colour is tawny in the glass. Nectar for the gods, was the way one connoisseur described it. Does this mean that my host is going to crack a bottle in my honour? Does this mean he is going to fit me out with one of those choice cigars which he has also the reputation of possessing?’ ‘Come along, Phillips, and let’s enjoy ourselves!’ were his words.

“And what do you think happened? He lured me away to a dark and chilly library, and read Francis Thompson’s poems to me for three mortal hours. If that is his idea of enjoying himself it isn’t mine!”

Nor mine, I hasten to add, unless the reader were Stephen Phillips himself, to listen to whom was the most exquisite artistic pleasure imaginable. I agree with Mr. Bleackley that it was not Phillips’s voice, nor his diction, nor his art that enthralled the hearers, but I question whether Mr. Bleackley is right in attributing the effect produced to the fact that the poet was speaking his own poem. For that effect was the same whether the poem were by Phillips himself or by Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, or Swinburne. In ordinary conversation Phillips’s voice was not notably beautiful. It was clear, musical, resonant, and finely modulated--that was all. Had one done no more than talk with him, I am not sure that his voice would thus far have impressed itself upon the memory. But in speaking poetry, his voice was as different from the voice to which one was accustomed in conversation as is a lit taper from the same taper when unkindled. Poetry kindled the taper of his soul to flame, as only poetry could. His genius was more supremely evident at such times--that is to say, when he was _living_ poetry, when he was, as it were, caught up and filled by some Pentecostal spirit of poetry outside himself--than when he was, in travail and labour, if under the pure impulse of inspiration, creating poetry. Then from the man to whom we were listening the fetters of the senses (alas, that those fetters should sometimes hold so closely and so heavily as to drag us downwards to earth!) seemed to fall away, and his soul to soar back to the heaven whence he had fallen.

He would begin to read or to recite with slow unemotional deliberateness--the enunciation perfect, and the voice exquisitely modulated--but at first there was just a suspicion of a chant, an incantation, as if by a spell to call up the Spirit of Poetry before us. It was beautiful, it was the perfection of elocutionary art, but for the time being it seemed cold and afar from us and our lives, like the frozen marble beauty of Greek statuary. Soon his voice would deepen, and the room become strangely still. It was the listeners now who reminded one of statuary, for each sat unmoving, scarcely breathing, every sense, every thought, centred on the reader who, his great eyes ablaze, yet all unseeing, sat as if in a trance. This was no longer Stephen Phillips, our friend and intimate with whom we had walked and talked.

All of us know what it is suddenly and unexpectedly to hear that we shall see on earth, no more, a friend, who but yesterday was with us, and of us, alive and well, his familiar and happy self. “No! No! He is not dead! It cannot be! It must not be!” we cry out when first told--as if death were something unnatural and abnormal; as if it were but some oversight, some mistake, against which we have but to enter our protest, to move High God to set it right. But even as we thus cry out, even as we stagger back under the shock, and turn sick and faint--so unendurable is our first sense of pity for the dead--even then our pity passes, for we know it is we, the living, not the dead, who are in need of pity. Even then and thus early (so instantly ancient is death, once we realise that it has come) some strange new majesty, august and awful, has come between our friend and us, as if to withdraw him an æon and a world away.

And for the moment, and while the spell was upon him, and upon us, the soul of Stephen Phillips, when he was thus entranced by poetry, seemed scarcely less far-removed from us, and from our little world, than are the newly dead. For though to no mortal has the soul of a man been visible, to some of us who have listened to Stephen Phillips in those rare moments, it seemed as if _the soul of a man had at least become audible_.

Then, in some vague way, one’s thoughts wandered back to the time when God walked in the Garden in the cool of the evening, and His Voice was heard by mortals. For then the exigencies of Time and Space were abrogated. The little room, wherein the poet sat and read, while we listened, was so strangely transformed for us, that we saw the vision of Dante and Milton unfold themselves before our eyes. The poet could so speak a word as to make it seem like the Spirit of God breathing upon the face of the waters, and calling new worlds into being. He could so speak that single word as to make it almost a world in itself.

When in Swinburne’s second chorus in _Atalanta in Calydon_ Phillips came to the lines

He weaves, and is clothed with derision, Sows, and he shall not reap, His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep,

with the last word “sleep,” as it came from Stephen Phillips’s lips, the very world itself seemed to close tired eyes, to wander away into unconsciousness, and finally to fall on sleep.

James Russell Lowell once said that if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his voice shall but seem the nobler, for the sublime criticism of ocean; and the words recall Stephen Phillips to me as I write, for in his voice, when he was deeply stirred by poetry, there was something measured, unhasting, majestic, like the vastness of great waters, moving in flood of full tide under the moon.

I have tried to give the reader some idea of his rendering of poetry, and I have failed, for, as I have already said, it cannot be described. Some godlike spirit, outside himself, seemed, in these supreme and consecrated hours, suddenly to possess him, and, when the hour and the consecration were past, as suddenly to leave him. But, while that hour lasted, there was only one word for Stephen Phillips, poet, and that word was Genius.

EDWARD WHYMPER

AS I KNEW HIM

I

Though I head this article “Edward Whymper as I Knew Him,” I prefer first to write of Edward Whymper as he was before I knew him--or rather before he knew me. In the town where he and I were then living he had been dubbed “Bradlaugh turned Baedeker” by one resident who insisted on Whymper’s likeness to the late Charles Bradlaugh, and was aware that the Great Mountaineer had written various “Guides.” Another name by which he was known was “The Sphinx,” possibly because of his silence, his aloofness, and the mystery with which he was supposed to surround himself. To the good folk of the town he was indeed always something of an enigma. In the street he stalked straightforwardly along, looking only in front of him, set of mouth, stony of eye and severe of brow, if anyone either spoke to, or stared at him. On the journey up to London, when most people read their morning paper, he was rarely seen with a newspaper in his hand, but stared, pipe in mouth, out of the window, except when going through proofs or working at papers which he produced from a black leather bag, without which he was never seen in the train. On the journey down, when work for the day was done, his would-be sociable fellow passengers found Whymper taciturn and reticent, responding, or rather not responding, to any conversational advance, if possible, in a monosyllable.

The town in question was Southend, where he lived in Cliff Town Parade, and I, ten minutes’ walk away at Westcliff. Though he contended that there was no place within fifty miles of London with such fine air, and though he never wearied (like Robert Buchanan, who, as well as his brother poet, Sir Edwin Arnold, was at one time a resident of Southend) of extolling the atmospheric effects of sunshine and shadow upon the saltings, and though (again like Buchanan, who had said as much to me) he vowed that nowhere else in England were there to be seen more glorious pageants of sunrise and sunset--to the people of Southend, especially to his fellow travellers on the railway, he had taken an implacable dislike. When in London I was first introduced to him, he and I fell out upon the subject. Hearing that I lived at Southend, he asked me whether I did not agree with him that nowhere else would one meet such objectionable folk as those who journeyed backward and forward to town.

I replied that though Southend had no claim to be the home of rank and fashion (overrun as it was and is, during the summer months, by swarming hordes of East End trippers), I had found my fellow travellers and the residents generally--of the middle classes as they admittedly were--cordial, sociable, and kindly, and that for my part, so far from feeling as he did, I liked them and had many friends among them.

This for some reason exasperated Whymper, who launched out in fierce abuse of his unoffending fellow townsmen.

“My good sir,” he stormed, “I ask you where else in England, where else in God’s world if you like, will you come across such a collection and crew of defaulting solicitors, bagmen, undischarged bankrupts, shady stockbrokers and stock jobbers, potmen, pawnbrokers and publicans as on that particular railway which you and I use?”

I did not agree with him, and told him so plainly if courteously, whereupon, seeing that I was more amused than annoyed by his storming, he suddenly turned good-tempered, diverted the conversation into other channels, and when we parted was quite friendly.

His attitude on this occasion, as I afterwards discovered, was characteristically Whymperian. He could respect a man who stood up to him and was undismayed by his storming; he had “no use,” as the Americans say, for one who was ready cheaply and insincerely to profess himself entirely in agreement. He would at any time rather be bearded than humoured, and the fact that on our first meeting I refused to be browbeaten was, I now believe, one of the reasons why he and I thereafter became good friends.

One picture of Edward Whymper, as I saw him many times, is vivid in my memory. The morning train to town is on the point of starting, the guard has waved his flag, blown his whistle, and is urging late comers to “hurry up.” Along the platform, indifferent to the guard’s frantic arm-waving, never lengthening his step by so much as one inch, never quickening his pace by as much as by one second, but strolling as leisurely as if the train were not to start for an hour, and looking at each carriage for the face he is seeking, walks a closely-knit, sturdily-built man of middle height. His dress is unusual, as he is well aware, accounting for it once by reminding me of a great nobleman who, equally eccentric in the matter of dress, remarked, “Where I live, every one knows who and what I am, so it doesn’t matter what I wear. In London no one knows who and what I am, so I am equally free to please myself.”

More often than not Whymper, when going to town, wore a black greatcoat over a woollen sweater, and had a brown seal fur cap with lapels pulled down over the ears and fastened under the chin, for, like many who have spent much time in Canada, he felt colder in the damp and foggy climate of England, even when the temperature is moderate, than he did in the drier, clearer atmosphere of the Great Dominion, and when the thermometer stands at 40 degrees below zero.

But unusual as are a fur cap and sweater, when worn as I have seen Whymper wear them even when journeying to London, at the height of the season, they struck one as less incongruous than the ill-brushed, out-of-date silk hat in which, with black leather or cloth leggings, he occasionally weirdly arrayed himself. He sees my face at the window, stops, and, as leisurely as he had walked, enters the carriage and seats himself opposite to me, his back to the engine. To me he merely nods, or if on that occasion inclined to be loquacious, goes so far as to say “Good morning,” but never another word. The other occupants of the compartment he either entirely ignores or favours with a baleful glare. Then he puts his bag upon his knee, produces a packet of biscuits, and, looking out of the window all the time, munches them with jaws that move as rhythmically and methodically as if run by clockwork. His breakfast of dry biscuits finished, he dives into his bag for a flask, solemnly unscrews the stopper, as solemnly lifts the flask to his mouth, takes a drink, smacks his lips, replaces the stopper in the flask and then the flask in the bag, snaps the lock and puts the bag at his side. This done, he fishes in his pocket for pipe, tobacco and matches, charges and lights his pipe, takes with evident enjoyment two or three long draws at it, sniffing possibly with relish and with open nostrils at the smoke which rises from the bowl, settles himself comfortably in his corner, and then, and not till then, turns to me with a cheery “Well, and how are you this morning?” I reply with equal cheeriness, and probably the whole way up to town we talk--only we two--incessantly.

But had I, _before_ he had munched his biscuits, swigged at his flask, replaced the latter in his bag, lit his pipe and settled himself in the corner, addressed him in any way, I should have had the shortest of answers, and the chances are that for the rest of the journey he would have remained silent. That was Edward Whymper’s way, and a man who liked more to have his own way I never met. My liking was for himself, not for his ways; but since it was his whim to be let alone, to speak to no one and to be spoken to by no one until he had breakfasted and lit his pipe, I was quite willing so to let him go his own way, knowing that soon the oracle would speak of its own accord, and would say many things which were well worth anyone’s attention and hearing.

II

“In the _Memoir of Tennyson_ by his son, there will be a letter--only one--to myself,” said Whymper to me in 1897. “Except for the fact that it was one of the last, if indeed not the very last letter Tennyson penned, it doesn’t strike me as being important enough for inclusion. But it has a curious history. I had sent Tennyson a copy of one of my books, _Travels among the Great Andes of the Equator_. Here is his reply. I’ll read it to you:

‘DEAR SIR,

‘Accept my thanks for your most interesting volume. I don’t think I have been higher than about 7000 feet, and so I look on your Chimborazos and Cotopaxis with all the greater veneration.

‘Yours very truly, TENNYSON.’