Part 16

I have written at greater length than I intended, in hinting and in hoping that Wilde was at times under the subjection of powers and forces of darkness outside himself. I say “at times” intentionally, and for the following reason. It would be gratifying to one’s _amour propre_ (I use a French term for once, as it expresses my meaning more nearly than any English equivalent) could I take high ground, and aver that I was vaguely conscious--warned, as it were, by some fine instinct--of evil in the presence of Wilde, but so to aver would be untrue. I have not lived to nearly threescore years without meeting men from whom one does thus instinctively shrink, and concerning whom one found it impossible to breathe the same air. I experienced nothing of the sort in Wilde’s company, and, since his guilt seems uncontrovertible, I ask myself whether it is not possible that Wilde lived a sort of Jekyll and Hyde life, of the latter of which I saw nothing, inasmuch as just as some wounded or plague-stricken creature withdraws itself from the herd, so, during the Hyde period of madness or of obsession, some instinct moved him to withdraw from his home, his haunts and the companions of his everyday life, only to return when the obsession or madness had passed, and once again he was his sane and normal self.

This “periodicity” is not infrequent in madness, whether the madness be due to a brain derangement, explainable by pathology, or to some such demoniacal possession as that of which I have spoken. A memorable instance is that of Mary Lamb, who was herself aware of the return of homicidal mania, and at such times of her own accord placed herself under restraint. Recalling the fact that I saw in Wilde no sign either of the presence of evil or of insanity, I ask myself whether in picturing Dorian Grey as at one season living normally and reputably, and at another disappearing into some oblivion of iniquity, he was not consciously or unconsciously picturing for us his own tortured self. I write “tortured” advisedly, for whether he were wholly, or only partly, or not at all, responsible, I refuse to believe that the man, as in his saner moments I knew him, _could_ sink thus low, without fighting desperately, if vainly--how desperately only the God who made him knows--before allowing himself in the hopelessness of despair to forget his failures in filth, as other unhappy geniuses have before now drowned their souls in drink.

One talk with him I particularly remember. I had been reading the proofs of _Dorian Grey_, and, on our next meeting, I said that he had put damnable words into the mouth of one of his characters.

“Such poisonous stuff is not likely to affect grown men and women,” I said, “but for a writer of your power and persuasiveness to set up a puppet like Lord Henry to provide ready-made excuses for indulgence, and to make evil seem necessary, unavoidable, and easy, by whispering into the ears of readers, of impressionable age and inflammable passion, that ‘the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it’--when you do that, you are helping to circulate devils’ doctrines in God’s world.”

Wilde was visibly perturbed.

“You are quite right,” he said. “It _is_ damnable; it _is_ devils’ doctrine. I will take it out.”

But, alas, other influences, whether within himself in the shape of the whisperings of some evil spirit, by which he was, as I believe, at times possessed, or in the form of so-called friends, whose influence over him was of the worst, I cannot say, but some days after the conversation recorded above I received the following letter:

GRAND HÔTEL DE L’ATHENÉE, 15 RUE SCRIBE, PARIS.

MY DEAR KERNAHAN,

Thank you for your charming letter. I have been very ill and unable to correct my proofs, but have sent them off now. _I have changed my mind about the passage about temptation._ One can’t pull a work of art about without spoiling it, and after all it is merely Luther’s “Pecca Fortiter” put dramatically into the lips of a character.

Do you think I should add to preface the definition of “morbid” and “unhealthy” art I gave in the _Fortnightly_ for February? The one on morbidity is really good.

Will you also look after my “wills” and “shalls” in proof! I am Celtic in my use of these words, not English.

You are excellent on Rossetti. I read you with delight.

Your sincere friend, OSCAR WILDE.

When next I met Wilde I recurred to the matter, but it was then too late, for the book, he said, was in great part printed. Moreover, he had now another excuse to put forward.

“After I had left you,” he said, “I remembered that a friend of mine, a well-known critic, had read the book in manuscript when it was first written. He said something to the same effect as you did, but less strongly. Honestly it was that, more than anything else, which finally decided me to leave the passage in. Had I taken it out, he would have claimed that I did so in deference to his strictures, and haul down my flag to a professional critic I never have and never will.”

This incident (though Wilde has been dead sixteen years I have neither written of it nor spoken of it before) shows Wilde as weak, it shows him as yielding--as we all, alas, too often yield--to evil influences, and to inclination as opposed to conscience, and as a man who was determined to shine at all costs. His vanity would not allow him to withhold the word that he was pleased to think daring, original, and above all brilliant, though he knew that word to be only brilliantly bad. Even in his sinning, it seems to me, he fed and flattered his insatiable vanity, by electing, even in sin, to be unlike others; and how far vanity, even more than viciousness, was accountable for Wilde’s downfall, only the God who made him and the devil who fostered and fed that vanity, till it less resembled a pardonable human weakness than a hideous excrescence and disease, can ever truly say.

The setting of Wilde’s sun (which had risen on so fair a prospect, and with such promise of splendour) in foul quagmires of sin and shame, was the greatest tragedy I have known. I met his friend and mine, Mr. Hall Caine, immediately after the verdict and sentence. I have seen Caine ill, and I have seen him deeply moved, even distressed, but I remember always to his honour (for Wilde not seldom made Caine’s writing the butt of his wit) the anguish in his face as he said:

“God pity him in this hour when human pity there seems none! To think of it! that man, that genius as he is, whom you and I have seen fêted and flattered! whose hand we have grasped in friendship! a felon, and come to infamy unspeakable! It haunts me, it is like some foul and horrible stain on our craft and on us all, which nothing can wash out. It is the most awful tragedy in the whole history of literature.”

S. J. STONE, THE HYMN-WRITER

I

The Rev. S. J. Stone, M.A., was the author of two hymns that are known wherever the English tongue is spoken, one the beautiful Lenten litany of love, trust and repentance, “Weary of earth and laden with my sin”; the other that soul-stirring triumph-song, “The Church’s One Foundation,” which--set as it is to majestic battle-march music that fires the imagination--has become, as it were, the Marseillaise of the Church militant and victorious.

When Stone died, and where he wished to die, in the Charterhouse, the busy world learned that the Rector of a City Church, who had done memorable work in an East End parish, and was the author of some famous hymns, had passed away. Those who knew and loved him were aware that a great soul, a hero-heart, a rarely beautiful spirit, had gone to God.

In my little life, the years of which are fast approaching threescore, it has so happened that I have known, sometimes intimately, a number of so-called “eminent” women and men. I have known not a few who in intellectual power, in the brilliance of their gifts, their attainments and achievements, or in what is called “fame,” stood immeasurably higher than Stone. I have known none who, judged by the beauty, purity, and nobility of life and character, was half as great as he. I do not say this, be it noted, under the emotional stress which follows the death of a dearly-loved friend. In such an hour of bitter self-reproach when in retrospect we think of the kindly act which, had it been done (alas, that it was not done!) would have helped our friend through a time of trouble; the generous word which had it been spoken (alas, that it remained unspoken!) might have heartened him when we knew him to be most cast down--these and possibly our poignant sense of remorse, it may be for an actual wrong done, not infrequently cause us to lose our sense of proportion. For the time being at least we over-estimate what was good in him, and under-estimate what was indifferent, or worse.

It is not so that I write of S. J. Stone. Sixteen long years, in which life has never been, nor will be, quite the same, missing that loved presence, have passed away since he was laid to rest in Norwood Cemetery; and to-day with my own life’s end nearing I can say, not only for myself, but for many others who knew him, that so brave of heart was he as to make possible for us the courage of a Cœur de Lion, so knightly of nature as to make possible the honour of an Arthur or a Galahad, so nearly stainless in the standard he set himself, in the standard he attained, as to come, as near as human flesh and blood can come, almost to making possible the purity of the Christ.

I am not unaware what will be in the mind of many who read these words. Some will suspect me if not of insincerity, at least of the foolish use of superlative and hyperbole. Not a few will hold my last comparison as scarcely reverent. And all the while there will not be a single woman or man, with any intimate knowledge of Stone, who, reading what I have written, will not say, at least of what is wholly appreciative (many will resent what I have hereafter to say of his temperamental weaknesses and human defects), “All this is truth, sober and unexaggerated, and yet the man himself was in many respects infinitely greater than he is drawn.”

II

Ever since Stone died my intention has been, before laying down my own pen, some day and so far as I am able, to picture him as I knew him. It seemed to me a duty, no less than a trust, that some of us should put on record what manner of man it was who wrote these noble hymns, and how nobly he lived and died. My reason for delaying thus long about what to me is a labour of love, was the difficulty of picturing Stone as he was, without seeming to exaggerate. Fortunately it has not been left only to me to bear tribute, for the Rev. F. G. Ellerton, Vicar of Ellesmere, to whose father we owe the famous hymn, “Saviour, again to Thy dear Name we raise,” has written a Memoir of his former Vicar (I recollect Mr. Ellerton as Stone’s curate, more than a score of years ago), which was prefixed to a volume of “Selections” from Stone’s _Poems and Hymns_. Only one who had lived and worked with Stone could have drawn so true and sympathetic a picture of Stone the Christian, Stone the Churchman, Stone the hymn-writer, and Stone the man; and, except for the fact that Mr. Ellerton and I approach our subjects from different standpoints, his beautiful Appreciation will be found amply to confirm what I say in my briefer Silhouette.

It is to a sister of mine that I owe my first meeting with Stone. From her girlhood upward she had contributed poems, sketches and stories to the magazines, earning each year by her pen sums which to the rest of us--how wonderful it all was!--seemed princely, and very proud of her we all were.

Ill-health, and her determination never, after marriage, to let her writing interfere with her duties as wife and mother, have prevented her from following up, except very occasionally, the work in literature which she so loved, though two years ago she was able to publish, and with success, a first long novel.

But at that time she had made some girlish reputation as a writer of religious verse, and was commissioned to contribute “A Golden Song” each week to a well-known periodical. Stone’s attention was attracted by the sweet-briar simplicity and beauty of some of these “Golden Songs,” and when he and my sister chanced to meet, each was singularly drawn to the other, and so it was that first she and he, thereafter he and I, became friends and remained so to the end.

Now let me try to describe Stone as he was at the time of our first meeting, when he was in early middle life. Emerson said once that we take a man’s measure when first we meet him--and every time we meet him. One’s first comment at sight of Stone would inevitably have been: “A Man!” And one’s second: “An Englishman!”

Englishman was written, as the phrase runs, “all over him”--in appearance, in voice, as well as bearing--and I can conceive no disguise out of which the unmistakable Englishman would not have peeped. Unmistakably English as he was in appearance, yet, when one talked with him, and he became interested, enthusiastic, excited, when he spoke of his life’s work, his life’s hopes and dreams, but most of all when one could induce him to talk of England, Oxford, patriotism, loyalty, love, duty or poetry, and saw the flash in the eye, the throb at the temples, and heard the thrill in the voice, one’s next comment was, “Here surely is not part Anglo-Saxon, but all Celt!”

The Celt in him, for--though he never told us whence it came--the quicksilver of Celtic blood, there must have been in his veins, made mock continually of the Anglo-Saxon. Yet, either the Fairy Godmother, or the forgotten forbear who was responsible for this freakish intermingling of quick-running Celtic blood, all ardour and eagerness, with the slower, surer and steadier pulsing of an Anglo-Saxon strain, doled out to Stone none of the Celtic defects but only of the Celtic best. From the irritability, uncertainty, and the “impossibility” which make some Celts--at all events some of us Irishmen--an inscrutable problem and mystery of Providence, as well as an ever-present perplexity to our best friends, Stone was entirely free. In that respect he was inwardly, and in character, as truly English as he was truly English in the outer man.

He was of exceptional physique and presence. Only slightly above the middle height, but muscular of limb, broad and square-shouldered, and deep-chested as a lion, Stone was a fine specimen of virile manhood. Proud of his strength, for, though devoid of vanity, he had his full share of what I may call a seemly and proper pride, he carried himself well and erectly--head up, shoulders squared--walking with a step that was firm, steady and soldierly.

And here I may interpolate that, a soldier’s grandson as he was, all Stone’s boyhood longings were set on soldiering. Only the knowledge that it was the heart’s desire of the father and mother he so revered that he should follow his father by taking Holy Orders, and later the conviction that he was called of God to the ministry, kept him from a commission in the Army. His renunciation of his boyhood’s dream was the first great act of obedience in a life of consistent obedience and devotion to duty. The sacrifice--as it was--of his own wishes, was made manfully and uncomplainingly, and he threw himself whole-heartedly thereafter into his ministerial work. But the pang remained, and to the last, when he spoke of soldiering, there was that in his voice and in his eye which reminded one of an exile, looking across far waters to the land of his birth. To Stone, to have led a company, or a half-company, and for the first time, into action in the service of his Sovereign and of his country, would have been, in the words of George Meredith, the very “bend of passion’s rapids,” as supreme a moment as Rossetti’s “sacred hour for which the years did sigh.” That he would have made a gallant soldier, I am sure, but not a great one. Leading a charge, he would have been irresistible, but his was too highly-strung, too impulsive a temperament, calmly to plan out and to carry through the cold-blooded details of a campaign. He was to the last a soldier in heart, if not in looks, for, by the beard and a certain breezy bluffness of presence, he might very well have passed for a sailor. The head was finely moulded and on large leonine lines, the forehead broad, full and lofty, the nose strong, straight, purposeful and well-proportioned, and the set of the firm mouth, and the shaping of the determined chin, were in keeping with the forcefulness and the frankness of the eyes and of the whole face. The darkness--so dark as to be almost black--of the straight thick hair, which was brushed up and off the forehead, accentuated the Saxon ruddiness of his complexion and the glossy red-brown (like that of a newly-fallen chestnut) of his crisply curling moustache and beard, which in sunlight were almost auburn.

His eyes instantly challenged and held your own, for he invariably looked the person to whom he spoke fully and fearlessly, but never inquisitively (one cannot think of the word in connection with Stone), in the face; and it was his eyes that most remained in your memory when he was gone. “Intent,” set, and full of fire, the look in them was like the spoken word of command which calls soldiers to attention. Brown in colouring, they were not the hard, glittering and unrevealing brown which one sometimes sees in woman or in man, but eyes that, when he was reading poetry, could shine as if his soul were a lit taper, of which they were the flame. At other times, I have seen them as merry as a happy boy’s, as untroubled as cool clear agate stones at the bottom of a brook. His were eyes that recalled the love and devotion which look out at us from the eyes of some nobly-natured dog, yet eyes that when he was preaching, and the very soul within him was trembling under a terrible sense of responsibility to his people and to God, could burn fiercely red, like a fanned coal in a furnace, but always as true, brave and loyal eyes as ever looked out of human head.

III

In the fact that Stone was at heart intensely human lay the secret of his hold upon the hearts of others. I have claimed high place for him and have called him by high name, but a “saint” at least I have never called him nor claimed him to be. We have been told that it is impossible to be heroic in a high hat, nor is it easy to picture a “saint” in a very pepper of a temper (to say nothing of a boating sweater) at loggerheads, and more than half minded to knock down, a foul-mouthed bargee. Stone’s Homeric laughter would not have accorded ill with some Valhalla of the gods, but his rollicking sense of fun, his schoolboy high spirits, still remembered affectionately and joyfully as they are by some who were with him, first as a boy, and thereafter as more than a middle-aged man at Charterhouse, suggest neither a nimbus nor the Saints’ Calendar.

In later life, when the endless calls upon his time barred him from following, other than rarely, the field sports that he so loved, and even from the exercise which was so necessary for a man of his physique, Stone not only put on weight, as happens always with athletes out of training, but developed a tendency to stoutness--not, I gather, from some study of the Old Masters, in keeping with the character of Saints, who as a class do not appear to run to flesh.

Neither in looks nor in his life was there anything about Stone of the ascetic who, living aloof and apart, tells over to himself--the beads, as it were, in a rosary of self-mortification--the list of pleasures denied, until in the contemplation of his self-denials he comes at last to find a melancholy pleasure. Stone, on the contrary, was the most natural and normal of men, with a healthy appetite for the good things of this world. If he fasted, as was the case during such a season as Holy Week, none knew of it except himself. He held that the season, in which the Church bids us look back in awe and worship upon the agony of our Lord’s Passion, is not a time for bodily indulgence by Christ’s minister. But fasting in a monkish sense, or as followed by the Roman Catholic Church, he neither followed himself nor enjoined others to follow, and such fasting as he practised was more in the way of salutary discipline than anything else, and he imposed no fasting upon others.

None the less, though Stone was, as I have said, no saint, I doubt whether any saint who was ever canonised had half so child-pure a heart or lived half so stainless a life. His was not the negative purity of the cold-blooded, the anæmic, or the passionless, to whom the temptations of the flesh made small appeal. He was a full-blooded, healthy and whole-natured man, a splendid “animal,” by whom the animal (which by God’s wisdom and grace is in us all) was not done violence to, stamped down, crushed out, and unnaturally suppressed, to his own physical and spiritual detriment and even danger. That is the unwisest of all courses to pursue. By mutilating and maiming the beautiful work and image of God in us, which since He made it must in itself be innocent and beautiful, we sin against our own human nature and against God. Human nature is like a tree. It must have space in which to fulfil the purpose for which it was intended, and in which to grow. Crush down, and seek to crush out, its natural expansion, and it takes distorted shapes (crippled limbs, as it were, on the tree of life) and hideous fungus-like boles and excrescences appear on what would otherwise have been a fair, straight, and shapely young growth. In Stone (to return to my original metaphor) the animal, which is in us all, was not a beast to be bludgeoned down, or to drag us to earth, but a beautiful wild and winged creature which brings strength and gladness to human life, and, wisely guided and controlled, may even bear us aloft and afar. In Stone it was so dominated by an iron will, so sublimated by knightly and noble ideals, and by his innate purity of soul, as to make impossible what was gross, sensual or base. And may I add, perhaps wickedly, that the animal in him was sometimes a joy as when by sheer brute force, if you like so to call it, he fell upon (so I was once told) three blackguards who, late one dark night, were foully assaulting a poor girl in what was then a lonely part of London Fields. Stone heard her screams, rushed to her help, and knocked out his first man with one blow. Then he closed with number two, and trouncing him so soundly that the fellow howled for mercy, flung him to the ground, and made off after number three, who had taken to his heels.

I can well imagine Stone’s sportsmanlike joy and the flash of his eyes when, as I am informed, he said, “Thank heaven I learned to use my fists at Charterhouse! and thank heaven for what rowing did for my biceps at Oxford. I think I’ve given those two scoundrels a lesson.” He shook his head reminiscently and mournfully. “I’d have given five pounds to have got my fists on that third rascal’s hide. Honestly, I’ve enjoyed pommelling those other two scoundrels more than anything that has happened since I came to Haggerston.”

Then, seeing, perhaps, a whimsical look in his companion’s eye, and perhaps already asking himself whether “taking on” three blackguards at fisticuffs, and badly punishing two out of the three in a fair fight, would by every one be considered decorous or becoming in a clergyman, he broke into infectious laughter that was directed entirely against himself.