Part 5

In a recent monograph upon his friend Meissonier, Alexandre Dumas has quoted some petulant and childish sayings of the great painter which would have been better left in oblivion. Dumas prefaces them by the phrase ‘J’ai entendu Meissonier dire, mais peut-être, il est vrai, ne le disait-il qu’à moi:’ in these last words, ‘_ne le disait-il qu’à moi_,’ lies the whole gist of the matter, in these few words are contained the confession of the consciousness which should have preserved Meissonier’s impetuous and unconsidered self-revelations from being, after his death, made public by his friend. It is just these things which are said only to us, which are said perhaps foolishly, perhaps hastily, perhaps stupidly, but in any way said in entire good faith, and in the conviction of the good faith of the confidant, which should never be repeated, above all when the ground is closed over the speakers of them. It will be said that there is nothing in this recollection of Meissonier which is in any way to his discredit. There is not. Yet it is none the less a violation of confidence; and in a sense it dwarfs the stature of him. One of the chief characteristics of genius is an extreme youthfulness of feeling and of impulse, often also of expression; the great artist is always in one side of his nature a child. But this fact, which is so lovable and engaging in him in his lifetime, makes him continually, in his careless and confidential utterances, say what is natural, and may even be beautiful in its spontaneity and suitability to the moment of its expression, but which loses its colour, its light, its charm, as a dried and pressed flower loses them when it is reproduced after death in the rigidity of type.

Taine set a fine example in his will when he enjoined on his heirs to burn all the documents in which he had written down all he had heard from his contemporaries. The rose should be always hung before the door wherever two or three are gathered together in familiar intercourse, and the inquisitive, censorious, malignant world is listening cunningly at the keyhole. The world will not go away for the rose; but those within should enforce respect for its symbol, and should stuff up the keyhole.

I once knew and liked for several years a diplomatist who was very popular in society. He was often with me, and one day he unfortunately told me that it was his habit to write down every night, no matter how late it might be when he went home, the record of everything witty, or interesting, or singular, that he had heard during the day, and the names of all the persons whom he had met and with whom he had conversed. ‘I have done this,’ he added, ‘ever since I was an unpaid _attaché_, and these volumes, which are many, as you may imagine, will not be published until the time designated to my executors in my will.’ Ever after this confession from him I saw him with much less pleasure; these bulky volumes, though unseen, cast their grim shadow over the present and the future; I never again laughed and talked with him without the recollection that he was treasuring up the nonsense I spoke or repeated to write it down in black and white before he allowed himself to sleep. The thought was a ghost at every intellectual banquet at which he and I met. I wanted to call out to our companions,

‘There’s a chiel amang you takin’ notes.’

As he was a man who had his _petite entrée_ into the arcana of politics, and was personally acquainted with the most distinguished people of Europe, he must have burned a good deal of post-midnight oil over his nightly chronicle, and I wonder he could keep awake to make it.

He died some years since, and of those voluminous records there is nothing said in the press as yet. No doubt, however, they will see the light some day; and some heir or heirs will make a round sum of money out of them. There is a kind of treason in this habit of committing to paper for ultimate publication what is said by those around us. If the matter be emended and emasculated when printed, it loses all interest; if published verbatim, the publication constitutes a betrayal. Social intercourse is surely based on the tacit assumption that what is said in it is said under cover of the white flag of mutual trust. I do not think that we have any right whatever to make any kind of private conversation public. The motive for doing so can never be a very high one. There is, no doubt, a great temptation in the wish to tell what we know about a friend whose character we see was unknown or misunderstood by the world in general, even probably by his intimate associates; but I doubt if we have the right to do so. If he revealed his natural inner self more completely to us than to others, it was no doubt because we inspired him with a more complete confidence or sympathy than did others. Shall that confidence or that sympathy be abused or betrayed by any man or woman of common honour?

It is a fact which is to be regretted that the faculty of inspiring confidence is, unfortunately, often allied to an utter faithlessness in keeping it. Those who most attract it are often those who most betray it. The sympathy which draws out our secrets is frequently united to considerable treachery in using them. Even those who are in many ways faithful and sincere betray after death those who trusted them in life, by revelations of their correspondence, either intentional or careless.

‘Cachez votre vie: étalez votre esprit,’ is a wise counsel; but it is this which the world will not permit if it can by any torment prevent it. He who has once allowed his wit to shine, and dazzle the eyes of his contemporaries, is expected to live his life for ever afterwards with open doors.

People who are famous are invariably accused of being self-conscious, reserved, monosyllabic, lacking in candour, in expansiveness, in inclination to converse. What more natural than that they should be so, since they know that their most intimate companion may not be able to resist the temptation of recording and retailing everything they say? If they speak as they feel, they are accused of ‘giving themselves away,’ as the English slang phrases it; if they be as reserved and as silent as it is possible to be without offence to society, they are accused of _morgue_, of vanity, of arrogance. In either case, whatever they do say, whether it be much or be little, will be certainly exaggerated, misrepresented, and disliked. Meissonier may, in a weak moment, wish he were Fortuny; Tennyson may, in an irritable hour, prefer money to fame; and each may say so to a trusted companion. But it is hard that the evanescent, unwise desire should be soberly published many years after in each case by a hearer who was deemed a friend.

We are none of us, perhaps, as loyal as we ought to be in speech. We are too thoughtless in what we repeat; and many, for sake of an epigram or a _jeu de mot_, sacrifice the higher duties of respect for confidence and silence on it. But speech may have the excuse of unpremeditation, haste, the contagion of conversation going on around. The indiscretions of written and of printed words share none of these excuses. Even if written in hurry or in carelessness, there is leisure enough when a proof sheet is received, between its reception and its publication, for all such revelations to be effaced. Have we a right to make public private conversations? I do not consider that we have. Intercourse, at all events the pleasure of intercourse, reposes on the tacit condition that its privacy is intangible. Intimate correspondence does the same. In letters we give hostages to our friends. It should be understood that such hostages are not to be led, like captives, into the public market-place and sold.

In the many memories of intimacy with Alfred Tennyson which have been published since his death, few would, I think, have pleased a man so reluctant to be observed and commented on as was he. The fulsome adulation would scarcely have sufficed to reconcile him to the cruel dissection.

Famous people, like obscure ones, do not weigh every syllable they speak; and the former pay heavily for imprudent utterance, whilst the latter sin scot-free because nobody cares a straw what they say or do not say. Tennyson, in an imprudent moment, said once to Henry Irving that Shelley had no sense of humour. It is quite true that Shelley had not: his life would have been brighter and happier if he had been able to laugh oftener; and it is exceedingly unfair to Tennyson to twist this statement of an actual fact into a depreciation of Shelley to his own self-praise. Even if he implied that he were the greater poet of the two, should a friend deride this, should a trusted companion record it?

Mr Knowles relates how Tennyson, speaking of his habit of composing verses which he never wrote down as he sat over the winter’s fire, added, ‘How many hundreds of fine lines went up the chimney and vanished!’ The world cries out, ‘What! did he call his own verses fine?’ Why should he not? He must have known that he enriched the English language with scores of fine lines, as I suppose he must have known that he made many with false quantities, which halt painfully. But are these careless, natural phrases, utterances which should be produced in print? Nothing can divest such _post-mortem_ revelations of a suspicion of treachery. They suggest the note-book of the diplomatist, in which at nightfall were recorded all the witty sayings and careless confidences heard during the daytime.

Mr Knowles, who admired Tennyson extremely, and lived for many years in his close intimacy, puts into print the saying of Tennyson that he wished he could have had the money which his books had brought without the nuisance of the fame which accompanied it. This was not an heroic speech, though it might be a natural one. It was probably a wrathful ebullition excited by the irritation of public comment and the prying impertinence of public curiosity. But it is the kind of speech which is never intended for reproduction in print. We all have these moments of ungrateful impatience with our lot. The king wishes himself in the hovel, the hind wishes himself on the throne. Whoso gathers the laurel longs for the cowslip, he who has the field flowers sighs for the myrtle and the bays. But it is not the place of a bosom friend to stereotype for all time the reproach of Fortune’s favourites to the magnificent caprices of Fortune. Certainly Tennyson, having been compelled to choose, would have chosen the poverty and fame of Homer or of Cervantes rather than a life of inglorious ease and obscure eating of good dinners. The imperishable record in print, of a passing mood of irritability in which he said otherwise, is therefore a cruel injustice done to him.

It is impossible for the ordinary mind, which is usually dense of perception and greedy of observation, to attempt to measure or conceive in any degree the unsupportable torment to a sensitive temper and an exalted intelligence of the mosquito swarm of inquisitive interrogators and commentators; of the exaggeration, the misrepresentation, the offensive calumnies, and the still more offensive admiration, which are the daily penalty of all greatness. The adoring American, perched staring in the pear tree outside the dining-room window, may well have embittered to Tennyson the meats and wines of his dinner-table within. If he had got up from his table and shot the spy, such a pardonable impulse should certainly have been considered justifiable homicide. That because a man has done something higher, better, more beautiful than his fellows, he is therefore to be subjected without resistance to their curiosity and comment, is a premiss so intolerable that it should not be permitted to be advanced in any decent society. The interviewer is the vilest spawn of the most ill-bred age which the world has yet seen. If he be received, when he intrudes, with the toe of the boot, he has but his fitting reception.

There has been lately published the following personal description of a great writer whom I will not especially designate. It runs as follows: ‘The first impression one gets is of a small man with large feet, walking as if for a wager, arms swinging hither and thither, and fingers briskly playing imaginary tunes in the air as he goes. Then, as the eccentric shape comes nearer, one is aware of a stubby beard and peeping eyes expressive of mingled distrust and aversion; a hideous hat is clapped down on the broad brow, which hat, when lifted, displays a bald expanse of skull bearing no sort of resemblance whatever to the counterfeit (_sic_) presentiments of Apollo; and yet, incongruous though it seems, this little vacuous, impatient, querulous being is no other than—’ And then there is named one of the greatest masters of language whom the world has ever owned.

Yet who, having read this infamous portrait of physical defects, whether it be truth or libel, can ever again entirely divest his memory of it, can ever wholly prevent its arising in odious ridicule between him and his rapturous sense of the perfect music of a great style? Shakespeare cursed those who would not let his bones alone; the living genius may with equal justice curse those who will not let alone his living form and features. There are only two classes of persons who may be certain of seeing every physical fault or deformity or affliction in face or form brutally written down in print: they are the man of genius in the reports of his contemporaries, and the escaped criminal on the handbills and search-warrants of the police. Renan and Arton receive exactly the same measure.

The vulgar, the Herr Omnes of Luther, cannot comprehend the hatred, the loathing of observation and comment, which are of the very essence of the poetic temperament. Yet it is strange to think that being mobbed can be agreeable to anyone. The sense of being pursued by incessant curiosity, as often as not a merely malignant curiosity, must poison the hours of life to the proud and sensitive nature. Such curiosity existed, no doubt, in the days of Ovid, in the days of Alkibiades; but modern inquisitiveness is far worse, being armed with all the modern powers to torture. The intolerable Kodak, the intolerable interviewer, the artifices of the press, the typewriter, the telegraph, the telephone, the greedy, indelicate, omnivorous mind of the modern public—all contribute to make of celebrity a Gehenna.

Creation is the paradise of the artist or poet; sympathy, if it be also true, is balm to him; for the opinion of others he will never greatly care if his lips have been truly touched with the coal from the altar, yet the sense of his influence over them will be welcome to him; but the espionage of the multitude will be always to him irritating as mosquito bites, pestilent as a swarm of termites, darkening like a locust flight the face of the sun.

It is hard to think that one who has an illustrious name cannot idly gossip with an intimate friend without every careless word being stereotyped. One is grateful to Mr Knowles for telling us that Tennyson declared he would shake his fists in the face of Almighty God if He, etc., etc. One rejoices to know of this outburst of honest indignation at the unpitied sufferings of the helpless and the harmless, this grand flinging of the phylacteries in the face of a hypocritical and egotistic world. At the same time it is surely impossible to admit that such a spontaneous and impassioned expression of emotion ought, by any hearer of it, to have been, in cold blood, put on record and produced in print?

Poor dead singer of Ida and Œnone! The ruthless inquisitors who poisoned his life still pursue him even beyond the cold waters of the Styx! There is something infinitely pathetic in the knowledge of how, all his life long, Tennyson endeavoured to avoid the intrusion of the crowd, and of how utterly useless all his wishes and endeavours were, and how those whom he trusted and confided in, bring out the dead children of his spoken thoughts naked in the sight of the multitude whom he shunned.

The confidential utterances of great men and women should no more be desecrated by being told to the public than tears and kisses should be profaned by the publicity of a railway station.

The general reader can no more understand why Tennyson suffered so intensely at seeing a chestnut tree felled in full flower than they can understand the course in the heavens of Argol or Altair. To spread out before them these delicate, intricate, bleeding fibres of the soul is to slay Pegasus and Philomel to make a workhouse meal.

Mr Knowles alleges that it is necessary for him and other intimate friends of Tennyson to say all they thought of him, and repeat all he said, because a similar record of Shakespeare’s conversations would be so precious a treasure to the world. This, also, is a questionable premiss. Shakespeare, happy in so much, was happiest of all in the obscurity in which his personality is sheltered; and the world is to be congratulated that it knows too little of the man to squabble and dwarf and disfigure him to the detriment of his works, as it does Byron and Shelley. What the man is matters so little. Psychology is but another name for curiosity, envy, or _dénigremené_. Whether the orchid grow on a rotten tree, or the lily on a dunghill, affects not the beauty of the orchid or the fragrance of the lily. What Horace was, or was not, at the Augustan Court cannot touch the exquisite grace of his style, the lovely lines of his pictures in words. The more we look at any writer the less we are likely to do justice to his creations, because his personality will exercise upon us either a great attraction or a great repulsion. It would be better for all works if, like Cologne Cathedral, they were without known progenitors.

Could Dante Rossetti ever have dreamed that Mr Leyland would preserve the poor, pathetic little note asking for the gift of more wine in his last illness, which Mr Val. Prinsep saw fit to publish in the _Art Journal_ of September 1892? If we may not trust our most intimate friends with our necessities, in whom can we confide? The whole of this aforesaid correspondence of Rossetti was never intended for, nor is it fitted for, publication. The general world has a right to see any artist’s completed work, and judge it as they may choose to do, but they have no right to be made acquainted with the hesitations, the self-torment, the fluctations, the depression, the exultation, which preceded its birth. These are the ecstasies and the agonies which precede all gestation and parturition, and are not for public exhibition. Mr Leyland, loving Rossetti well, should have burned all these letters before, or immediately after, the artist’s death. Mr Leyland was a man who knew his generation, and must have known the use which would be made of them. If a friend grant me a favour, and afterwards blab of that favour to our common acquaintances, I should prefer that such a favour had never been accorded. I think that most people will agree with this feeling. Yet reticence concerning favours done is not common in our times. Such reticence ought to be held the simplest obligation of honour; but the majority of persons do not so regard it. There is hardly a letter of any length ever written in which there are not some sentences liable to misconstruction, or open to various readings. It is grossly unfair to place any letter before those who are not in the possession of its key; that key which can alone lie in an intimate knowledge of its writer’s circumstances and temperament. If Rossetti were not rich enough to buy the wine he wanted in his weakness, the shame is not his, but that of the world which left him poor. To think that he was too poor even to ever see Italy is an intolerable disgrace to his contemporaries. He would have been wiser to have left his patrons and to have lived in Italy on a black crust and a plate of bean soup.

If the man of genius amass wealth, he is accused of avarice or of mercenary sale of his own talent. If he remain poor, or be in trouble, no language can sufficiently condemn his extravagance, his improvidence, his immorality. If he live with any kind of splendour, it is display and profligacy; if he endeavour to avoid remark, it is meanness, hauteur or poverty.

Men and women of genius when they have money are too generous with it, and when they have it not are too careless about the lack of it. Shakespeare, we are told, had the prudence to put his money together and to buy houses and lands, with shrewd eye to the main chance; but this is, after all, mere supposition on the part of posterity. We know so little of the circumstances of his life that, for aught we can tell, he may have had some sharp-eyed, true-hearted friend or factor, who thus transmuted the poet’s loose coins into solid fields and freeholds, as George Eliot had behind her George Lewis. I cannot believe that Titania’s laureate ever quarrelled over deeds of copyhold and questions of fees and betterments with the burgesses and notaries of Stratford-upon-Avon. More likely, far, that he was lying in the sun, dreaming, deep cradled in cowslips and ladysmocks, as his winged verses flew up with the bees into the budding lime boughs overhead, whilst some trusty friend or brother did battle in his name with the chafferers and the scriveners in the little town. And when all was settled, and the deeds of transfer only wanted signature and seal, that trusty go-between would shout across the meadows to waken Will from his day-dream, and Will would lazily arise and come across the grass, with the pollen of the bees and the fragrant yellow dust of the cowslips on his clothes, and, with his sweet, serene smile, would scrawl his name to parchments which he scarcely even read. That is, I would take my oath, how the stores of Shakespeare increased, and how New Place became his. Pembroke’s friend and Rosalind’s creator never cared much for lucre, I am sure; for land he might care, because he loved England: he loved her fields, her woods, her streams, and he saw them as her sons can never see them now, uninjured and undimmed, the Lenten lilies growing tall beneath the untrimmed hedges of hazel and hawthorn, the water meadows spreading broad and fair, without a curl of smoke in sight, save that which rose from the cottage hearths. Elizabethan England was meadow where it was not coppice, park where it was not forest, heathery moorland where it was not reedy mere. It was natural that Shakespeare should care to call his own some portion of that beautiful leafy kingdom of his birth.

Even so Scott loved his Scottish soil, and Tennyson cared to own Farringford and Hazelmere. Even so George Sand’s last dying words were of the trees of Nohant. Passion and pleasure and fame and love were in those last moments naught to her, but the green, fresh, dewy leafage of dead summers was still dear.