initial commit of ebook 27025HEADmain

1 files changed, 7050 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/27025-0.txt b/27025-0.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..be7279b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/27025-0.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7050 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Old Familiar Faces, by Theodore Watts-Dunton
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Old Familiar Faces
+
+
+Author: Theodore Watts-Dunton
+
+
+
+Release Date: October 25, 2008  [eBook #27025]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD FAMILIAR FACES***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1916 E. P. Dutton and Company edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org.  Many thanks to Kensington Central
+Library (http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/libraries/) for providing the copy
+from which the illustrations are taken.
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   OLD
+                                 FAMILIAR
+                                  FACES
+
+
+                                    BY
+                                 THEODORE
+                               WATTS-DUNTON
+
+                                AUTHOR OF
+                                 “AYLWIN”
+
+                                 NEW YORK
+                         E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
+                                  MCMXVI
+
+                   THE ATHENÆUM PRESS, LONDON, ENGLAND.
+
+  [Picture: Mrs. William Morris.  “She was the most lovely woman I have
+      ever known, her beauty was incredible.”—Theodore Watts-Dunton]
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+For some years before his death it was the intention of Theodore
+Watts-Dunton to publish in volume form under the title of ‘Old Familiar
+Faces,’ the recollections of his friends that he had from time to time
+contributed to _The Athenæum_.  Had his range of interests been less wide
+he might have found the time in which to further this and many other
+literary projects he had formed; but he was, unfortunately, very slow to
+write, and slower still to publish.  His long life produced in published
+works a number of critical and biographical essays contributed to
+periodicals and encyclopædias, a romance (‘Aylwin’), a sheaf of poems
+(‘The Coming of Love’), two of the most stimulating critical
+pronouncements that his century produced (‘Poetry’ and ‘The Renascence of
+Wonder’), a handful of introductions to classics—and that is all.
+
+Only those who were frequent visitors at “The Pines” can form any idea of
+his keen interest in life and affairs, which seemed to grow rather than
+to diminish with the passage of each year, even when 81 had passed him
+by.  At his charmingly situated house at the foot of Putney Hill, he
+lived a life of as little seclusion as he would have lived in Fleet
+Street.  Here he received his friends and acquaintances, and there was
+little happening in the world outside with which he was unacquainted.
+
+He was a tremendous worker, and only a few months before his death he
+wrote of “the enormous pressure of work” that was upon him, telling his
+correspondent that he had “no idea, no one can have any idea, what it is.
+I am an early riser and breakfast at seven, and from that hour until
+seven in the evening, I am in full swing of my labours with the aid of
+two most intelligent secretaries.”
+
+To outlive his generation is, perhaps, the worst fate that can befall a
+man; but this cannot truly be said of Theodore Watts-Dunton, who seemed
+to be of no generation in particular.  His interest in the life of the
+twentieth century, a life so different from that of his own youth and
+early manhood, was strangely keen and insistent.  Sometimes in talking of
+his great contemporaries, Tennyson, Meredith, Swinburne, Rossetti,
+Morris, Matthew Arnold, Borrow, there would creep into his voice a note
+of reminiscent sadness; but it always seemed poetic rather than personal.
+It may be said that he never really grew up, that his spirit never tired.
+His laugh was as youthful as the hearty “My dear fellow,” with which he
+would address his friends.
+
+His most remarkable quality was his youth.  His body had aged, his voice
+had shrunk; but once launched into the subject of literature, Greek verse
+in particular (he regarded the Attic tongue as the peculiar vehicle for
+poetic expression), he seemed immediately to become a young man.  When
+quoting his favourite passage from Keats, his voice would falter with
+emotion.
+
+    Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
+    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
+
+These lines he regarded as the finest in English poetry.
+
+He possessed the great gift of conversation.  Every subject seemed to
+develope quite naturally out of that which had preceded it, and although
+in a single hour he would have passed from Æschylus and Sophocles to
+twentieth-century publishers, there was never any break or suspicion of a
+change of topic.  Seated on the sofa in the middle of his study, with
+reminders of his friendship with Rossetti gazing down upon him from the
+walls, he welcomed his friends with that almost boyish cordiality that so
+endeared him to their hearts.  If they had been doing anything of which
+the world knew, he would be sure to have heard all about it.  His mind
+was as alert as his memory was remarkable; but above all he was possessed
+of a very real charm, a charm that did not vanish before the on-coming
+years.  It was this quality of interesting himself in the doings of
+others that retained for him the friendships that his personality and
+cordiality had created.
+
+Few men have been so richly endowed with great friendships as Theodore
+Watts-Dunton: Swinburne, the Rossettis, William Morris, Matthew Arnold,
+Tennyson, Borrow, Lowell, Latham, men of vastly dissimilar temperaments;
+yet he was on terms of intimacy with them all, and as they one by one
+passed away, to him was left the sad duty of giving to the world by far
+the most intimate picture of their various personalities.  There was
+obviously some subtle quality in Watts-Dunton’s nature that not only
+attracted to him great minds in the world of art and letters; but which
+seemed to hold captive their affection for a lifetime.  Even an
+instinctive recluse such as Borrow, a man almost too sensitive for
+friendship, found in Watts-Dunton one whose capacity for friendship was
+so great as to override all other considerations.  Watts-Dunton was “the
+friend of friends” to Rossetti, who wished to make him his heir, and was
+dissuaded only when he saw that to do so would pain his friend, who
+regarded it as an act of injustice to Rossetti’s own family.  During his
+lifetime Swinburne desired to make over to him his entire fortune.  The
+man to whom these tributes were paid was undoubtedly possessed of some
+rare and strange gift.
+
+                  [Picture: Algernon Charles Swinburne]
+
+The greatest among his many great friendships was with Swinburne.  For
+thirty years they lived together at “The Pines” in the closest unity and
+accord.  They would take their walks together, discuss the hundred and
+one things in which they were both interested, living, not as great men
+sometimes live, a frigid existence of intellectual loneliness; but
+showing the keenest interest in the affairs of the everyday, as well as
+of the literary, world.  When death at last severed the link that it had
+taken upwards of thirty years to forge, it is not strange that there
+should be no reminiscences written of the man who had been to
+Watts-Dunton more than a brother.
+
+It was not always easy to get Watts-Dunton to talk of those he had known
+so intimately; but when he did so it was frankly and freely.  Once when
+telling of some characteristic act of generosity on the part of that
+strangely composite being, half genius, half schoolboy, William Morris,
+he remarked, “Yes, Morris was a very dear friend of mine; but he had
+strange limitations.  Swinburne had the utmost contempt for the
+narrowness of his outlook.  It was incredible!  Outside his own domain he
+was unintelligent in his narrowness, and frequently bored and irritated
+his friends.”
+
+As artist, poet, and craftsman, however, Watts-Dunton spoke with
+enthusiasm of Morris; but intellectually he regarded him as inferior to
+Mrs. Morris.  On the day following the announcement of her death, the
+present writer happened to be taking tea at “The Pines,” and the
+conversation not unnaturally turned upon the Morrises.  Watts-Dunton
+called attention to the large number of magnificent Rossetti portraits of
+her that hung from the walls of his study.  “A remarkable woman,” he
+said, “a most remarkable woman; superior to Morris intellectually, she
+reached a greater mental height than he was capable of, yet few knew it.”
+Then he proceeded to tell how she had acquired French and Italian with
+the greatest ease and facility.  When Morris had met her she possessed
+very few educational advantages; yet she very quickly made good her
+shortcomings.  When reminded that Mr. H. Buxton Forman had recently
+written that he had seen beautiful women in all quarters of the globe,
+“but never one so strangely lovely and majestic as Mrs. Morris,”
+Watts-Dunton remarked, “She was the most lovely woman I have ever known,
+her beauty was incredible.”
+
+In answer to a question he went on to say that Rossetti painted her lips
+with the utmost faithfulness.  In spite of her beauty and her high mental
+qualities, she was very shy and retiring, almost fearful, in her attitude
+towards others.
+
+In literature and criticism Watts-Dunton stood for enthusiasm.  His
+gospel as a critic was to seek for the good that is to be found in most
+things, literary or otherwise; and what is, perhaps, most remarkable in
+one who has known so many great men, he never seemed to draw invidious
+comparisons between the writers and artists of to-day and those of the
+great Victorian Era.
+
+Life at “The Pines” was as bright as naturally cheerful and bright people
+could make it, people who were not only attracted to and interested in
+each other; but found the world an exceedingly good place in which to
+live.  The home circle was composed of Swinburne, Watts-Dunton, his two
+sisters, Miss Watts and Mrs. Mason.  To these must be added Mr. Thomas
+Hake, for many years Watts-Dunton’s friend and secretary, who was in
+daily attendance.  Later the circle was enlarged by the entry into it of
+the young and accomplished bride, the present Mrs. Watts-Dunton.
+
+“The Pines” would have seemed a strange place without “the Colonel,” as
+Watts-Dunton always called Mr. Hake, adopting a family name given to him
+when a boy on account of his likeness to his cousin, General, then
+Colonel, Gordon.  Nothing amused Watts-Dunton more than for some caller
+to start discussing army matters with the supposed ex-officer.  He would
+watch with a mischievous glee Mr. Hake’s endeavours to carry on a
+conversation in which he had no special interest.  Watts-Dunton never
+informed callers of their mistake, and to this day there is one friend of
+twenty-five years’ standing, a man keenly interested in National Defence,
+who regards Mr. Hake as an authority upon army matters.
+
+“No living man knew Borrow so well as Thomas Hake,” Watts-Dunton once
+remarked to a friend.  To the young Hakes Lavengro was a great joy, and
+they would often accompany him part of his way home from Coombe End.  On
+one occasion Borrow said to the youngest boy, “Do you know how to fight a
+man bigger than yourself?”  The lad confessed that he did not.  “Well,”
+said Borrow, “You challenge him to fight, and when he is taking off his
+coat, you hit him in the stomach as hard as you can and run for your
+life.”
+
+Swinburne and Watts-Dunton had first met in 1872.  In 1879 they went to
+live together at “The Pines,” and from that date were never parted until
+Swinburne’s death thirty years’ later.  In no literary friendship has the
+bond been closer.  Watts-Dunton’s first act each morning was to visit
+Swinburne in his own room, where the poet breakfasted alone with the
+morning newspapers.  During the morning the two would take their daily
+walk together, a practice continued for many years.  “There is no time
+like the morning for a walk,” Swinburne would say, “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.”  His perfect
+health he attributed entirely to this habit.
+
+In later years he would take his walks alone.  It was during one of these
+that he met with an adventure that seemed to cause him some irritation.
+A young artist hearing that “the master” walked each day up Putney Hill
+lay in wait for him.  After several unsuccessful ventures he at length
+saw a figure approaching which he instantly recognized.  Crossing the
+road the youth went boldly up and said:—
+
+“If you are Mr. Swinburne, may I shake hands with you?”
+
+“Eh?” remarked the astonished poet.
+
+The young man repeated his request in a louder voice, remembering
+Swinburne’s deafness, adding:—
+
+“It is my ambition to shake hands with you, sir.”
+
+“Oh! very well,” was the response, as Swinburne half-heartedly extended
+his hand, “I’m not accustomed to this sort of thing.”
+
+Meal times at “The Pines” were occasions when there was much talk and
+laughter; for in both Swinburne and Watts-Dunton the mischievous spirit
+of boyhood had not been entirely disciplined by life, and in the other
+members of the household the same unconquerable spirit of youth was
+manifest.  Sometimes there were great discussions and arguments.
+Watts-Dunton had more than a passing interest in science, whereas, to
+Swinburne it was anathema, although his father was strongly scientific in
+his learning.  The libraries of the two men clearly showed how different
+were their tastes; for that of Watts-Dunton was all-embracing,
+Swinburne’s was as exclusive as his circle of personal friends.  The one
+was the library of a critic, the other that of a poet.
+
+Swinburne enjoyed nothing better than a discussion, and he was a foe who
+wielded a stout blade.  He fought, however, with scrupulous fairness,
+never interrupting an adversary; but listening to him with a deliberate
+patience that was almost disconcerting.  Then when his turn came he would
+overwhelm his opponent and destroy his most weighty arguments in what a
+friend once described as “a lava torrent of burning words.”  He possessed
+many of the qualities necessary to debate: concentration, the power of
+pouncing upon the weak spot in his adversary’s argument, and above all a
+wonderful memory.  What he lacked was that calm and calculating frigidity
+so necessary to the successful debater.  Instead of freezing his opponent
+to silence with deliberate logic, he would strive rather by the
+tempestuous quality of his rhetoric to hurl him into the next parish.
+
+There were times when he would work himself up into a passion of
+denunciation, when, trembling and quivering in every limb, he would in a
+fine frenzy of scorn annihilate those whom he conceived to be his
+enemies, and in scathing periods pour ridicule upon their works.  But if
+he were merciless in his onslaughts upon his foes, he was correspondingly
+loyal in the defence of his friends.  He seemed as incapable of seeing
+the weakness of a friend as of appreciating the strength of an enemy.
+
+The things and the people who did not interest him he had the fortunate
+capacity of entirely forgetting.  A friend {15} tells of how on one
+occasion he happened to mention in the course of conversation a book by a
+certain author whom he knew had been a visitor at “The Pines” on several
+occasions, and as such was personally known to Swinburne.
+
+“Oh! really,” Swinburne remarked, “Yes, now that you mention it, I
+believe someone of that name has been so good as to come and see us.  I
+seem to recall him, and I seem to remember hearing someone say that he
+had written something, though I don’t remember exactly what.  So he has
+published a book upon the subject of which we are talking.  Really?  I
+did not know.”
+
+All this was said with perfect courtesy and without the least intention
+of administering a snub or belittling the writer in question.  Swinburne
+had merely forgotten because there was nothing in that author’s
+personality that had impressed itself upon him.  On the other hand, he
+would remember the minutest details of conversations in which he had been
+interested.
+
+In spite of his capacity for passionate outbursts and inspired invective,
+Swinburne was a most attentive listener, provided there were things being
+said to which it was worth listening.  At meal times when his attention
+became engaged he would forget everything but the conversation.
+Indifferent as to what stage of the meal he was at, he would turn to
+whoever it might be that had introduced the subject, and would talk or
+listen oblivious of the fact that food might be spoiling.  Fortunately,
+he was a small eater.
+
+On one occasion when lunching at “The Pines” Mr. Coulson Kernahan
+happened to remark that he had in his pocket a copy of Christina
+Rossetti’s then unpublished poem, ‘The Death of a First-born,’ written in
+memory of the Duke of Clarence.  Down went knife and fork as Swinburne
+half rose from his chair to reach across the table for the manuscript.
+“She is as a god to mortals when compared to most other living women
+poets,” he exclaimed.  Then, in his thin-high-pitched, but exquisitely
+modulated voice he half read, half chanted, two stanzas of the poem.
+
+    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.
+
+He stopped abruptly refusing to read the third and last stanza because it
+was unequal, and the poem was stronger and finer by its omission.  Then
+he said in a hushed voice, “For the happy folk who are able to think as
+she thinks, who believe as she believes, the poem is of its kind
+perfect.”
+
+With glowing eyes and with hand that marked time to the music, he read
+once more the second verse, repeating the line, “half carol and half cry”
+three times, lowering his voice with each repetition until it became
+little more than a whisper.  Laying the manuscript reverently beside him,
+he sat perfectly still for a space with brooding eyes, then rising
+silently left the room with short swift strides. {17}
+
+Many of Swinburne’s friends have testified to his personal charm and
+courtliness of 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 would rise and come forward to welcome a
+visitor a suspicion of the shy nervousness of the introspective man and
+of the recluse on first facing a stranger.”  Mr. Coulson Kernahan has
+said, “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.
+
+“To no one would he defer quite so graciously and readily, to no one was
+he so scrupulously courtly in bearing as to those who constituted his own
+household.”
+
+If he felt that he had monopolized the conversation he would turn to
+Watts-Dunton and apologize, and for a time become transformed into an
+attentive listener.
+
+Lord Ronald Gower writes of Swinburne’s remarkable powers as a talker.
+Telling of a luncheon at “The Pines” in 1879, he writes:—“Swinburne’s
+talk after luncheon was wonderful . . . What, far beyond the wonderful
+flow of words of the poet, struck me, was his real diffidence and
+modesty; while fully aware of the divine gifts within him, he is as
+simple and unaffected as a child.” {18}
+
+                     [Picture: Theodore Watts-Dunton]
+
+But conversation at “The Pines” was not always of the serious things of
+life.  It very frequently partook of the playful, when the hearers would
+be kept amused with a humour and whimsicality, cauterized now and then
+with some biting touch of satire which showed that neither Swinburne nor
+Watts-Dunton had entirely grown up.
+
+Reading aloud was also a greatly favoured form of entertainment.
+Swinburne was a sympathetic reader, possessed of a voice of remarkable
+quality and power of expression, and he would read for the hour together
+from Dickens, Lamb, Charles Reade, and Thackeray.  To Mrs. Mason’s little
+boy he was a wizard who could open many magic casements.  He would carry
+off the lad to his own room, and there read to him the stories which
+caused the hour of bedtime to be dreaded.  When the nurse arrived to
+fetch the child to bed he would imperiously wave her away, hoping that
+Swinburne would not notice the action and so bring the evening’s
+entertainment to a close.  On one occasion the child stole down to
+Swinburne’s room after he had been safely put to bed, where the
+interrupted story was renewed.  When eventually discovered both seemed to
+regard the incident as a huge joke, and Swinburne carried the child to
+the nursery and tucked him up for the night.
+
+A great capacity for friendship involves an equally great meed of sorrow.
+At last the hour arrived when the friend who was nearer to him than a
+brother followed those who one by one he had mourned, and of the old
+familiar faces there were left to him only the two sisters, whose love
+and devotion had contributed so much to his domestic happiness, and his
+friend, Mr. Thomas Hake, who for seventeen years had acted as
+confidential secretary.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                                                     PAGE.
+
+             INTRODUCTION                                                5
+
+I.           GEORGE BORROW                                              25
+
+II.          DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI                                     69
+
+III.         ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON                                     120
+
+IV.          CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI                               177
+
+V.           DR. GORDON HAKE                                           207
+
+VI.          JOHN LEICESTER WARREN, LORD DE TABLEY                     219
+
+VII.         WILLIAM MORRIS                                            240
+
+VIII.        FRANCIS HINDES GROOME                                     277
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+MRS. WILLIAM MORRIS                                         _Frontispiece_
+
+A. C. SWINBURNE                                             to face page 8
+
+THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON                                                   18
+
+DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI                                                  70
+
+ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, ÆT                                          80, 120
+
+CHRISTINA ROSSETTI                                                     178
+
+MRS. ROSSETTI                                                          182
+
+DR. GORDON HAKE                                                        208
+
+WILLIAM MORRIS                                                         240
+
+FRANCIS HINDES GROOME                                                  278
+
+I.  GEORGE BORROW.
+1803–1881.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+I have been reading those charming reminiscences of George Borrow which
+appeared in _The Athenæum_. {25}  I have been reading them, I may add,
+under the happiest conditions for enjoying them—amid the self-same
+heather and bracken where I have so often listened to Lavengro’s quaint
+talk of all the wondrous things he saw and heard in his wondrous life.
+So graphically has Mr. Hake depicted him, that as I walked and read his
+paper I seemed to hear the fine East-Anglian accent of the
+well-remembered voice—I seemed to see the mighty figure, strengthened by
+the years rather than stricken by them, striding along between the whin
+bushes or through the quags, now stooping over the water to pluck the
+wild mint he loved, whose lilac-coloured blossoms perfumed the air as he
+crushed them, now stopping to watch the water-wagtail by the ponds as he
+descanted upon the powers of that enchanted bird—powers, like many human
+endowments, more glorious than pleasant, if it is sober truth, as Borrow
+would gravely tell, that the gipsy lad who knocks a water-wagtail on the
+head with a stone gains for a bride a “ladye from a far countrie,” and
+dazzles with his good luck all the other black-eyed young urchins of the
+dingle.
+
+Though my own intimacy with Borrow did not begin till he was considerably
+advanced in years, and ended on his finally quitting London for Oulton,
+there were circumstances in our intercourse—circumstances, I mean,
+connected partly with temperament and partly with mutual experience—which
+make me doubt whether any one understood him better than I did, or broke
+more thoroughly through that exclusiveness of temper which isolated him
+from all but a few.  However, be this as it may, no one at least realized
+more fully than I how lovable was his nature, with all his
+angularities—how simple and courageous, how manly and noble.  His
+shyness, his apparent coldness, his crotchety obstinacy, repelled people,
+and consequently those who at any time during his life really understood
+him must have been very few.  How was it, then, that such a man wandered
+about over Europe and fraternized so completely with a race so suspicious
+and intractable as the gipsies?  A natural enough question, which I have
+often been asked, and this is my reply:—
+
+Those who know the gipsies will understand me when I say that this
+suspicious and wary race of wanderers—suspicious and wary from an
+instinct transmitted through ages of dire persecutions from the Children
+of the Roof—will readily fraternize with a blunt, single-minded, and shy
+eccentric like Borrow, while perhaps the skilful man of the world may
+find all his tact and _savoir faire_ useless and, indeed, in the way.
+And the reason of this is not far to seek, perhaps.  What a gipsy most
+dislikes is the feeling that his “gorgio” interlocutor is thinking about
+him; for, alas! to be the object of “gorgio” thoughts—has it not been a
+most dangerous and mischievous honour to every gipsy since first his
+mysterious race was driven to accept the grudging hospitality of the
+Western world?  A gipsy hates to be watched, and knows at once when he is
+being watched; for in tremulous delicacy of apprehension his organization
+is far beyond that of an Englishman, or, indeed, of any member of any of
+the thick-fingered races of Europe.  One of the results of this excessive
+delicacy is that a gipsy can always tell to a surety whether a “gorgio”
+companion is thinking about him, or whether the “gorgio’s” thoughts are
+really and genuinely occupied with the fishing rod, the net, the gin, the
+gun, or whatsoever may be the common source of interest that has drawn
+them together.
+
+Now, George Borrow, after the first one or two awkward interviews were
+well over, would lapse into a kind of unconscious ruminating bluntness, a
+pronounced and angular self-dependence, which might well disarm the
+suspiciousness of the most wary gipsy, from the simple fact that it was
+genuine.  Hence, as I say, among the few who understood Borrow his gipsy
+friends very likely stood first—outside, of course, his family circle.
+And surely this is an honour to Borrow; for the gipsies, notwithstanding
+certain undeniable obliquities in matters of morals and cusine, are the
+only people left in the island who are still free from British vulgarity
+(perhaps because they are not British).  It is no less an honour to them,
+for while he lived the island did not contain a nobler English gentleman
+than him they called the “Romany Rye.”
+
+Borrow’s descriptions of gipsy life are, no doubt, too deeply charged
+with the rich lights shed from his own personality entirely to satisfy a
+more matter-of-fact observer, and I am not going to say that he is
+anything like so photographic as F. H. Groome, for instance, or so
+trustworthy.  But then it should never be forgotten that Borrow was,
+before everything else, a poet.  If this statement should be challenged
+by “the present time,” let me tell the present time that by poet I do not
+mean merely a man who is skilled in writing lyrics and sonnets and that
+kind of thing, but primarily a man who has the poetic gift of seeing
+through “the shows of things” and knowing where he is—the gift of
+drinking deeply of the waters of life and of feeling grateful to Nature
+for so sweet a draught; a man who, while acutely feeling the ineffable
+pathos of human life, can also feel how sweet a thing it is to live,
+having so great and rich a queen as Nature for his mother, and for
+companions any number of such amusing creatures as men and women.  In
+this sense I cannot but set Borrow, with his love of nature and his love
+of adventure, very high among poets—as high, perhaps, as I place another
+dweller in tents, Sylvester Boswell himself, “the well-known and
+popalated gipsy of Codling Gap,” who, like Borrow, is famous for “his
+great knowledge in grammaring one of the ancientist langeges on record,”
+and whose touching preference of a gipsy tent to a roof, “on the accent
+of health, sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of
+Nature’s life,” is expressed with a poetical feeling such as Chaucer
+might have known had he not, as a court poet, been too genteel.
+“Enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life!”  That is what Borrow did; and
+how few there are that understand it.
+
+The self-consciousness which in the presence of man produces that kind of
+shyness which was Borrow’s characteristic left him at once when he was
+with Nature alone or in the company of an intimate friend.  At her, no
+man’s gaze was more frank and childlike than his.  Hence the charm of his
+books.  No man’s writing can take you into the country as Borrow’s can:
+it makes you feel the sunshine, see the meadows, smell the flowers, hear
+the skylark sing and the grasshopper chirrup.  Who else can do it?  I
+know of none.  And as to personal intercourse with him, if I were asked
+what was the chief delight of this, I should say that it was the delight
+of bracingness.  A walking tour with a self-conscious lover of the
+picturesque—an “interviewer” of Nature with a note-book—worrying you to
+admire _him_ for admiring Nature so much, is one of those occasional
+calamities of life which a gentleman and a Christian must sometimes
+heroically bear, but the very thought of which will paralyze with fear
+the sturdiest Nature-worshipper, whom no crevasse or avalanche or
+treacherous mist can appal.  But a walk and talk with Borrow as he strode
+through the bracken on an autumn morning had the exhilarating effect upon
+his companion of a draught of the brightest mountain air.  And this was
+the result not, assuredly, of any exuberance of animal spirits (Borrow,
+indeed, was subject to fits of serious depression), but rather of a
+feeling he induced that between himself and all nature, from the clouds
+floating lazily over head to the scented heather, crisp and purple, under
+foot, there was an entire fitness and harmony—a sort of mutual
+understanding, indeed.  There was, I say, something bracing in the very
+look of this silvery-haired giant as he strode along with a kind of easy
+sloping movement, like that of a St. Bernard dog (the most deceptive of
+all movements as regards pace), his beardless face (quite matchless for
+symmetrical beauty) beaded with the healthy perspiration drops of strong
+exercise, and glowing and rosy in the sun.
+
+As a vigorous old man Borrow never had an equal, I think.  There has been
+much talk of the vigour of Shelley’s friend, E. J. Trelawny.  I knew that
+splendid old corsair, and admired his agility of limb and brain; but at
+seventy Borrow could have walked off with Trelawny under his arm.  At
+seventy years of age, after breakfasting at eight o’clock in Hereford
+Square, he would walk to Putney, meet one or more of us at Roehampton,
+roam about Wimbledon and Richmond Park with us, bathe in the Fen Ponds
+with a north-east wind cutting across the icy water like a razor, run
+about the grass afterwards like a boy to shake off some of the
+water-drops, stride about the park for hours, and then, after fasting for
+twelve hours, eat a dinner at Roehampton that would have done Sir Walter
+Scott’s eyes good to see.  Finally, he would walk back to Hereford
+Square, getting home late at night.
+
+And if the physique of the man was bracing, his conversation, unless he
+happened to be suffering from one of his occasional fits of depression,
+was still more so.  Its freshness, raciness, and eccentric whim no pen
+could describe.  There is a kind of humour the delight of which is that
+while you smile at the pictures it draws, you smile quite as much or more
+to think that there is a mind so whimsical, crotchety, and odd as to draw
+them.  This was the humour of Borrow.  His command of facial
+expression—though he seemed to exercise it almost involuntarily and
+unconsciously—had, no doubt, much to do with this charm.  Once, when he
+was talking to me about the men of Charles Lamb’s day—_The London
+Magazine_ set—I asked him what kind of a man was the notorious and
+infamous Griffiths Wainewright. {32}  In a moment Borrow’s face changed:
+his mouth broke into a Carker-like smile, his eyes became elongated to an
+expression that was at once fawning and sinister, as he said,
+“Wainewright!  He used to sit in an armchair close to the fire and
+_smile_ all the evening like _this_.”  He made me see Wainewright and
+hear his voice as plainly as though I had seen him and heard him in the
+publishers’ parlour.
+
+His vocabulary, rich in picturesque words of the high road and dingle,
+his quaint countrified phrases, might also have added to the effect of
+this kind of eccentric humour.  “A duncie book—of course it’s duncie—it’s
+only duncie books that sell nowadays,” he would shout when some new
+“immortal poem” or “greatest work of the age” was mentioned.  Tennyson, I
+fear, was the representative duncie poet of the time; but that was
+because nothing could ever make Borrow realize the fact that Tennyson was
+not the latest juvenile representative of a “duncie” age; for although,
+according to Leland, {33} the author of ‘Sordello’ is (as is natural,
+perhaps) the only bard known in the gipsy tent, it is doubtful whether
+even his name was more than a name to Borrow; indeed, I think that people
+who had no knowledge of Romany, Welsh, and Armenian were all more or less
+“duncie.”  As a trap to catch the “foaming vipers,” his critics, he in
+‘Lavengro’ purposely misspelt certain Armenian and Welsh words, just to
+have the triumph of saying in another volume that they who had attacked
+him on so many points had failed to discover that he had wrongly given
+“zhats” as the nominative of the Armenian noun for bread, while everybody
+in England, especially every critic, ought to know that “zhats” is the
+accusative form.
+
+I will try, however, to give the reader an idea of the whim of Borrow’s
+conversation, by giving it in something like a dramatic form.  Let the
+reader suppose himself on a summer’s evening at that delightful old
+roadside inn the Bald-Faced Stag, in the Roehampton Valley, near Richmond
+Park, where are sitting, over a “cup” (to use Borrow’s word) of foaming
+ale, Lavengro himself, one of his oldest friends, and a new acquaintance,
+a certain student of things in general lately introduced to Borrow and
+nearly, but not quite, admitted behind the hedge of Borrow’s shyness, as
+may be seen by the initiated from a certain rather constrained,
+half-resentful expression on his face.  Jerry Abershaw’s {34} sword (the
+chief trophy of mine host) has been introduced, and Borrow’s old friend
+has been craftily endeavouring to turn the conversation upon that ever
+fresh and fruitful topic, but in vain.  Suddenly the song of a
+nightingale, perched on a tree not far off, rings pleasantly through the
+open window and fills the room with a new atmosphere of poetry and
+romance.  “That nightingale has as fine a voice,” says Borrow, “as though
+he were born and bred in the Eastern Counties.”  Borrow is proud of being
+an East-Anglian, of which the student has already been made aware and
+which he now turns to good account in the important business he has set
+himself, of melting Lavengro’s frost and being admitted a member of the
+Open-Air Club.  “Ah!” says the wily-student, “I know the Eastern
+Counties; no nightingales like those, especially Norfolk nightingales.”
+Borrow’s face begins to brighten slightly, but still he does not direct
+his attention to the stranger, who proceeds to remark that although the
+southern counties are so much warmer than Norfolk, some of them, such as
+Cornwall and Devon, are without nightingales.  Borrow’s face begins to
+get brighter still, and he looks out of the window with a smile, as
+though he were being suddenly carried back to the green lanes of his
+beloved Norfolk.
+
+“From which well-known fact of ornithology,” continues the student, “I am
+driven to infer that in their choice of habitat nightingales are guided
+not so much by considerations of latitude as of good taste.”  Borrow’s
+anger is evidently melting away.  The talk runs still upon nightingales,
+and the student mentions the attempt to settle them in Scotland once made
+by Sir John Sinclair, who introduced nightingales’ eggs from England into
+robins’ nests in Scotland, in the hope that the young nightingales, after
+enjoying a Scotch summer, would return to the place of their birth, after
+the custom of English nightingales.  “And did they return?” says Borrow,
+with as much interest as if the honour of his country were involved in
+the question.  “Return to Scotland?” says the student quietly; “the
+entire animal kingdom are agreed, you know, in never returning to
+Scotland.  Besides, the nightingales’ eggs in question were laid in
+Norfolk.”  Conquered at last, Borrow extends the hand of brotherhood to
+the impudent student (whose own private opinion, no doubt, is that
+Norfolk is more successful in producing Nelsons than nightingales), and
+proceeds without more ado to tell how “poor Jerry Abershaw,” on being
+captured by the Bow Street runners, had left his good sword behind him as
+a memento of highway glories soon to be ended on the gallows tree.
+(By-the-bye, I wonder where that sword is now; it was bought by Mr.
+Adolphus Levy, of Alton Lodge, at the closing of the Bald-Faced Stag.)
+
+From Jerry Abershaw Borrow gets upon other equally interesting topics,
+such as the decadence of beer and pugilism, and the nobility of the now
+neglected British bruiser, as exampled especially in the case of the
+noble Pearce, who lost his life through rushing up a staircase and
+rescuing a woman from a burning house after having on a previous occasion
+rescued another woman by blacking the eyes of six gamekeepers, who had
+been set upon her by some noble lord or another.  Then, while the ale
+sparkles with a richer colour as the evening lights grow deeper, the talk
+gets naturally upon “lords” in general, gentility nonsense, and
+“hoity-toityism” as the canker at the heart of modern civilization.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Borrow could look at Nature without thinking of himself—a rare gift, for
+Nature, as I have said, has been disappointed in man.  Her great desire
+from the first has been to grow an organism so conscious that it can turn
+round and look at her with intelligent eyes.  She has done so at last,
+but the consciousness is so high as to be self-conscious, and man cannot
+for egotism look at his mother after all.  Borrow was a great exception.
+Thoreau’s self-consciousness showed itself in presence of Nature,
+Borrow’s in presence of man.  The very basis of Borrow’s nature was
+reverence.  His unswerving belief in the beneficence of God was most
+beautiful, most touching.  In his life Borrow had suffered much: a
+temperament such as his must needs suffer much—so shy it was, so proud,
+and yet yearning for a close sympathy such as no creature and only
+solitary communing with Nature can give.  Under any circumstances, I say,
+Borrow would have known how sharp and cruel are the flints along the
+road—how tender are a poet’s feet; but _his_ road at one time was rough
+indeed; not when he was with his gipsy friends (for a tent is freer than
+a roof, according to the grammarian of Codling Gap, and roast hedgehog is
+the daintiest of viands), but when he was toiling in London, his fine
+gifts unrecognized and useless—_that_ was when Borrow passed through the
+fire.  Yet every sorrow and every disaster of his life he traced to the
+kindly hand of a benevolent and wise Father, who sometimes will use a
+whip of scorpions, but only to chastise into a right and happy course the
+children he loves.
+
+Apart from the instinctive rectitude of his nature, it was with Borrow a
+deep-rooted conviction that sin never goes, and never can go, unpunished.
+His doctrine, indeed, was something like the Buddhist doctrine of
+Karma—it was based on an instinctive apprehension of the sacredness of
+“law” in the most universal acceptation of that word.  Sylvester
+Boswell’s definition of a free man, in that fine, self-respective
+certificate of his, as one who is “free from all cares or fears of law
+that may come against him,” is, indeed, the gospel of every true
+nature-worshipper.  The moment Thoreau spurned the legal tax-gatherer the
+law locked the nature-worshipper in gaol.  To enjoy nature the soul
+_must_ be free—free not only from tax-gatherers, but from sin; for every
+wrongful act awakes, out of the mysterious bosom of Nature herself, its
+own peculiar serpent, having its own peculiar stare, but always hungry
+and bloody-fanged, which follows the delinquent’s feet whithersoever they
+go, gliding through the dewy grass on the brightest morning, dodging
+round the trees on the calmest eve, wriggling across the brook where the
+wrongdoer would fain linger on the stepping-stones to soothe his soul
+with the sight of the happy minnows shooting between the
+water-weeds—following him everywhere, in short, till at last, in sheer
+desperation, he must needs stop and turn, and bare his breast to the
+fangs; when, having yielded up to the thing its fill of atoning blood,
+Nature breaks into her old smile again, and he goes on his way in peace.
+
+All this Borrow understood better than any man I have ever met.  Yet even
+into his doctrine of Providence Borrow imported such an element of whim
+that it was impossible to listen to him sometimes without a smile.  For
+instance, having arrived at the conclusion that a certain lieutenant had
+been cruelly ill used by genteel magnates high in office, Borrow
+discovered that since that iniquity Providence had frowned on the British
+arms, and went on to trace the disastrous blunder of Balaklava to this
+cause.  Again, having decided that Sir Walter Scott’s worship of
+gentility and Jacobitism had been the main cause of the revival of
+flunkeyism and Popery in England, Borrow saw in the dreadful monetary
+disasters which overclouded Scott’s last days the hand of God, whose plan
+was to deprive him of the worldly position Scott worshipped at the very
+moment when his literary fame (which he misprized) was dazzling the
+world.
+
+And now as to the gipsy wanderings.  As I have said, no man has been more
+entirely misunderstood than Borrow.  That a man who certainly did (as F.
+H. Groome says) look like a “colossal clergyman” should have joined the
+gipsies, that he should have wandered over England and Europe, content
+often to have the grass for his bed and the sky for his hostry-roof, has
+astonished very much (and I believe scandalized very much) this age.  My
+explanation of the matter is this: Among the myriads of children born
+into a world of brick and mortar there appears now and then one who is
+meant for better things—one who exhibits unmistakable signs that he
+inherits the blood of those remote children of the open air who,
+according to the old Sabæan notion, on the plains of Asia lived with
+Nature, loved Nature and were loved by her, and from whom all men are
+descended.  George Borrow was one of those who show the olden strain.
+Now, for such a man, born in a country like England, where the modern
+fanaticism of house-worship has reached a condition which can only be
+called maniacal, what is there left but to try for a time the gipsy’s
+tent?  On the Continent house-worship is strong enough in all conscience;
+but in France, in Spain, in Italy, even in Germany, people do think of
+something beyond the house.  But here, where there are no romantic
+crimes, to get a genteel house, to keep (or “run”) a genteel house, or to
+pretend to keep (or “run”) a genteel house, is the great first cause of
+almost every British delinquency, from envy and malignant slander up to
+forgery, robbery, and murder.  And yet it is a fact, as Borrow discovered
+(when a mere lad in a solicitor’s office), that to men in health the
+house need not, and should not, be the all-absorbing consideration, but
+should be quite secondary to considerations of honesty and sweet air,
+pure water, clean linen, good manners, freedom to migrate at will, and,
+above all, freedom from “all cares or fears of law” that may come against
+a man in the shape of debts, duns, and tax-gatherers.
+
+Against this folly of softening our bodies by “snugness” and degrading
+our souls by “flunkeyism,” Borrow’s early life was a protest.  He saw
+that if it were really unwholesome for man to be shone upon by the sun,
+blown upon by the winds, and rained upon by the rain, like all the other
+animals, man would never have existed at all, for sun and wind and rain
+have produced him and everything that lives.  He saw that for the
+cultivation of health, honesty, and good behaviour every man born in the
+temperate zone ought, unless King Circumstance says “No,” to spend in the
+open air eight or nine hours at least out of the twenty-four, and ought
+to court rather than to shun Nature’s sweet shower-bath the rain, unless,
+of course, his chest is weak.
+
+The evanescence of literary fame is strikingly illustrated by recalling
+at this moment my first sight of Borrow.  I could not have been much more
+than a boy, for I and a friend had gone down to Yarmouth in March to
+enjoy the luxury of bathing in a Yarmouth sea, and it is certainly a
+“good while”—to use Borrow’s phrase—since I considered _that_ a luxury
+suitable to March.  On the morning after our arrival, having walked some
+distance out of Yarmouth, we threw down our clothes and towels upon the
+sand some few yards from another heap of clothes, which indicated, to our
+surprise, that we were not, after all, the only people in Yarmouth who
+could bathe in a biting wind; and soon we perceived, ducking in an
+immense billow that came curving and curling towards the shore, such a
+pair of shoulders as I had not seen for a long time, crowned by a head
+white and glistening as burnished silver.  (Borrow’s hair was white I
+believe, when he was quite a young man.)  When the wave had broken upon
+the sand, there was the bather wallowing on the top of the water like a
+Polar bear disporting in an Arctic sun.  In swimming Borrow clawed the
+water like a dog.  I had plunged into the surf and got very close to the
+swimmer, whom I perceived to be a man of almost gigantic proportions,
+when suddenly an instinct told me that it was Lavengro himself, who lived
+thereabouts, and the feeling that it was he so entirely stopped the
+action of my heart that I sank for a moment like a stone, soon to rise
+again, however, in glow of pleasure and excitement: so august a presence
+was Lavengro’s then!
+
+I ought to say, however, that Borrow was at that time my hero.  From my
+childhood I had taken the deepest interest in proscribed races such as
+the Cagots, but especially in the persecuted children of Roma.  I had
+read accounts of whole families being executed in past times for no other
+crime than that of their being born gipsies, and tears, childish and yet
+bitter, had I shed over their woes.  Now Borrow was the recognized
+champion of the gipsies—the friend companion, indeed, of the proscribed
+and persecuted races of the world.  Nor was this all: I saw in him more
+of the true Nature instinct than in any other writer—or so, at least, I
+imagined.  To walk out from a snug house at Rydal Mount for the purpose
+of making poetical sketches for publication seemed to me a very different
+thing from having no home but a tent in a dingle, or rather from Borrow’s
+fashion of making all Nature your home.  Although I would have given
+worlds to go up and speak to him as he was tossing his clothes upon his
+back, I could not do it.  Morning after morning did I see him undress,
+wallow in the sea, come out again, give me a somewhat sour look, dress,
+and then stride away inland at a tremendous pace, but never could I speak
+to him; and many years passed before I saw him again.  He was then half
+forgotten.
+
+For an introduction to him at last I was indebted to Dr. Gordon Hake, the
+poet, who had known Borrow for many years, and whose friendship Borrow
+cherished above most things—as was usual, indeed, with the friends of Dr.
+Hake.  This was done with some difficulty, for, in calling at Roehampton
+for a walk through Richmond Park and about the Common, Borrow’s first
+question was always, “Are you alone?” and no persuasion could induce him
+to stay unless it could be satisfactorily shown that he would not be
+“pestered by strangers.”  On a certain morning, however, he called, and
+suddenly coming upon me, there was no retreating, and we were introduced.
+He tried to be as civil as possible, but evidently he was much annoyed.
+Yet there was something in the very tone of his voice that drew my heart
+to him, for to me he was the Lavengro of my boyhood still.  My own
+shyness had been long before fingered off by the rough handling of the
+world, but his retained all the bloom of youth, and a terrible barrier it
+was, yet I attacked it manfully.  I knew that Borrow had read but little
+except in his own out-of-the-way directions; but then unfortunately, like
+all specialists, he considered that in these his own special directions
+lay all the knowledge that was of any value.  Accordingly, what appeared
+to Borrow as the most striking characteristic of the present age was its
+ignorance.
+
+Unfortunately, too, I knew that for strangers to talk of his own
+published books or of gipsies appeared to him to be “prying,” though
+there I should have been quite at home.  I knew, however, that in the
+obscure English pamphlet literature of the last century, recording the
+sayings and doings of eccentric people and strange adventurers, Borrow
+was very learned, and I too chanced to be far from ignorant in that
+direction.  I touched on Bamfylde Moore Carew, but without effect.
+Borrow evidently considered that every properly educated man was familiar
+with the story of Bamfylde Moore Carew in its every detail.  Then I
+touched upon beer, the British bruiser, “gentility-nonsense,” the
+“trumpery great”; then upon etymology, traced hoity-toityism to _toit_, a
+roof,—but only to have my shallow philology dismissed with a withering
+smile.  I tried other subjects in the same direction, but with small
+success, till in a lucky moment I bethought myself of Ambrose Gwinett.
+There is a very scarce eighteenth-century pamphlet narrating the story of
+Ambrose Gwinett, the man who, after having been hanged and gibbeted for
+murdering a traveller with whom he had shared a double-bedded room at a
+seaside inn, revived in the night, escaped from the gibbet irons, went to
+sea as a common sailor, and afterwards met on a British man-of-war the
+very man he had been hanged for murdering.  The truth was that Gwinett’s
+supposed victim, having been attacked on the night in question by a
+violent bleeding at the nose, had risen and left the house for a few
+minutes’ walk in the sea-breeze, when the press-gang captured him and
+bore him off to sea, where he had been in service ever since.  The story
+is true, and the pamphlet, Borrow afterwards told me (I know not on what
+authority), was written by Goldsmith from Gwinett’s dictation for a
+platter of cowheel.
+
+To the bewilderment of Dr. Hake, I introduced the subject of Ambrose
+Gwinett in the same manner as I might have introduced the story of
+“Achilles’ wrath,” and appealed to Dr. Hake (who, of course, had never
+heard of the book or the man) as to whether a certain incident in the
+pamphlet had gained or lost by the dramatist who, at one of the minor
+theatres, had many years ago dramatized the story.  Borrow was caught at
+last.  “What?” said he, “you know that pamphlet about Ambrose Gwinett?”
+“Know it?” said I, in a hurt tone, as though he had asked me if I knew
+‘Macbeth’; “of course I know Ambrose Gwinett, Mr. Borrow, don’t you?”
+“And you know the play?” said he.  “Of course I do, Mr. Borrow?” I said,
+in a tone that was now a little angry at such an insinuation of crass
+ignorance.  “Why,” said he, “it’s years and years since it was acted; I
+never was much of a theatre man, but I did go to see _that_.”  “Well, I
+should rather think you _did_, Mr. Borrow,” said I.  “But,” said he,
+staring hard at me, “_you_—you were not born!”  “And I was not born,”
+said I, “when the ‘Agamemnon’ was produced, and yet one reads the
+‘Agamemnon,’ Mr. Borrow.  I have read the drama of ‘Ambrose Gwinett.’  I
+have it bound in morocco with some more of Douglas Jerrold’s early
+transpontine plays, and some Æschylean dramas by Mr. Fitzball.  I will
+lend it to you, Mr. Borrow, if you like.”  He was completely conquered.
+“Hake!” he cried, in a loud voice, regardless of my presence.  “Hake!
+your friend knows everything.”  Then he murmured to himself, “Wonderful
+man!  Knows Ambrose Gwinett!”
+
+It is such delightful reminiscences as these that will cause me to have
+as long as I live a very warm place in my heart for the memory of George
+Borrow.
+
+From that time I used to see Borrow often at Roehampton, sometimes at
+Putney, and sometimes, but not often, in London.  I could have seen much
+more of him than I did had not the whirlpool of London, into which I
+plunged for a time, borne me away from this most original of men; and
+this is what I so greatly lament now: for of Borrow it may be said, as it
+was said of a greater man still, that “after Nature made _him_ she
+forthwith broke the mould.”  The last time I ever saw him was shortly
+before he left London to live in the country.  It was, I remember well,
+on Waterloo Bridge, where I had stopped to gaze at a sunset of singular
+and striking splendour, whose gorgeous clouds and ruddy mists were
+reeling and boiling over the West-End.  Borrow came up and stood leaning
+over the parapet, entranced by the sight, as well he might be.  Like most
+people born in flat districts, he had a passion for sunsets.  Turner
+could not have painted that one, I think, and certainly my pen could not
+describe it; for the London smoke was flushed by the sinking sun and had
+lost its dunness, and, reddening every moment as it rose above the roofs,
+steeples, and towers, it went curling round the sinking sun in a rosy
+vapour, leaving, however, just a segment of a golden rim, which gleamed
+as dazzlingly as in the thinnest and clearest air—a peculiar effect which
+struck Borrow deeply.  I never saw such a sunset before or since, not
+even on Waterloo Bridge; and from its association with “the last of
+Borrow” I shall never forget it.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Students of Borrow will be as much surprised as pleased to find what a
+large collection of documents Dr. Knapp has been able to use in compiling
+this long-expected biography. {50}  Indeed, the collection might have
+been larger and richer still.  For instance, in the original manuscript
+of ‘Zincali’ (in the possession of the present writer) there are some
+variations from the printed text; but, what is of very much more
+importance, the whole—or nearly the whole—of Borrow’s letters to the
+Bible Society, which Dr. Knapp believed to be lost, have been discovered
+in the crypt of the Bible House in which the records of the Society are
+stored.  But even without these materials two massive volumes crammed
+with documents throwing light upon the life and career of a man like
+George Borrow must needs be interesting to the student of English
+literature.  For among all the remarkable characters that during the
+middle of the present century figured in the world of letters, the most
+eccentric, the most whimsical, and in every way the most extraordinary
+was surely the man whom Dr. Knapp calls, appropriately enough, his
+“hero.”
+
+It is no exaggeration to say that there was not a single point in which
+Borrow resembled any other writing man of his time; indeed, we cannot, at
+the moment, recall any really important writer of any period whose
+eccentricity of character can be compared with his.  At the basis of the
+artistic temperament is generally that “sweet reasonableness” the lack of
+which we excuse in Borrow and in almost no one else.  As to literary
+whim, it must not be supposed that this quality is necessarily and always
+the outcome of temperament.  There are some authors of whom it may be
+said that the moment they take pen in hand they pass into their “literary
+mood,” a mood that in their cases does not seem to be born of
+temperament, but to spring from some fantastic movement of the intellect.
+Sterne, for instance, the greatest of all masters of whim (not excluding
+Rabelais), passed when in the act of writing into a literary mood which,
+as “Yorick,” he tried to live up to in his private life—tried in vain.
+With regard to Charles Lamb, his temperament, no doubt, was whimsical
+enough, and yet how many rich and rare passages in his writings are
+informed by a whim of a purely intellectual kind—a whim which could only
+have sprung from that delicious literary mood of his, engendered by much
+study of quaint old writers, into which he passed when at his desk!  But
+whatsoever is whimsical, whatsoever is eccentric and angular, in Borrow’s
+writings is the natural, the inevitable growth of a nature more
+whimsical, more eccentric, more angular still.
+
+That such a man should have had an extraordinary life-experience was to
+be expected.  And an extraordinary life-experience Borrow’s was, to be
+sure!  This alone would lend an especial interest to Borrow’s
+biography—the fact, we mean, of his life having been extraordinary.  For
+in these days no lives, as a rule, are less adventurous, none, as a rule,
+less tinged with romance, than the lives of those who attain eminence in
+the world of letters.  No doubt they nowadays move about from place to
+place a good deal; not a few of them may even be called travellers, or at
+least globe-trotters; but, alas! in globe-trotting who shall hope to meet
+with adventures of a more romantic kind than those connected with a
+railway collision or a storm at sea?  And this was so in days that
+preceded ours.  It was so with Scott, it was so with Dickens, it was so
+with even Dumas, who, chained to his desk for months and months at a
+stretch, could only be seen by his friends during the intervals of work.
+Nay, even with regard to the writing men of the far past, the more time a
+man gave to literary production the less time he had to drink the rich
+wine of life, to see the world, to study nature and nature’s enigma man.
+
+Perhaps one reason why we have almost no record of what the greatest of
+all writing men was doing in the world is that while his friends were
+elbowing the tide of life in the streets of London, or fighting in the
+Low Countries, or carousing at the Mermaid Tavern, or at the Apollo
+Saloon, he was filling every moment with work—work which enabled him,
+before he reached his fifty-second year, to build up that literary
+monument of his, that edifice which made the monuments of the others, his
+contemporaries, seem like the handiwork of pigmies.  But as regards
+Borrow, student though he was, it is not as an author that we think of
+him; it is as the adventurer, it is as the great Romany Rye, who
+discovered the most interesting people in Europe, and as a brother
+vagabond lived with them—lived with them “on the accont of health,
+sweetness of the air, and for enjoying the pleasure of Nature’s life,” to
+quote the “testimonial” of the prose-poet Sylvester Boswell.
+
+Even by his personal appearance Borrow was marked off from his
+fellow-men.  As a gipsy girl once remarked, “Nobody as ever see’d the
+white-headed Romany Rye ever forgot him.”  Standing considerably above
+six feet in height, he was built as perfectly as a Greek statue, and his
+practice of athletic exercises gave his every movement the easy
+elasticity of an athlete under training.  As to his countenance, “noble”
+is the only word that can be used to describe it.  The silvery whiteness
+of the thick crop of hair seemed to add in a remarkable way to the beauty
+of the hairless face, but also it gave a strangeness to it, and this
+strangeness was intensified by a certain incongruity between the features
+(perfect Roman-Greek in type) and the Scandinavian complexion, luminous
+and sometimes rosy as an English girl’s.  An increased intensity was lent
+by the fair skin to the dark lustre of the eyes.  What struck the
+observer, therefore, was not the beauty but the strangeness of the man’s
+appearance.  It was not this feature or that which struck the eye, it was
+the expression of the face as a whole.  If it were possible to describe
+this expression in a word or two, it might, perhaps, be called a shy
+self-consciousness.
+
+How did it come about, then, that a man shy, self-conscious, and
+sensitive to the last degree, became the Ulysses of the writing
+fraternity, wandering among strangers all over Europe, and consorting on
+intimate terms with that race who, more than all others, are repelled by
+shy self-consciousness—the gipsies?  This, perhaps, is how the puzzle may
+be explained.  When Borrow was talking to people in his own class of life
+there was always in his bearing a kind of shy, defiant egotism.  What
+Carlyle calls the “armed neutrality” of social intercourse oppressed him.
+He felt himself to be in the enemy’s camp.  In his eyes there was always
+a kind of watchfulness, as if he were taking stock of his interlocutor
+and weighing him against himself.  He seemed to be observing what effect
+his words were having, and this attitude repelled people at first.  But
+the moment he approached a gipsy on the heath, or a poor Jew in
+Houndsditch, or a homeless wanderer by the wayside, he became another
+man.  He threw off the burden of restraint.  The feeling of the “armed
+neutrality” was left behind, and he seemed to be at last enjoying the
+only social intercourse that could give him pleasure.  This it was that
+enabled him to make friends so entirely with the gipsies.
+Notwithstanding what is called “Romany guile” (which is the growth of
+ages of oppression), the basis of the Romany character is a joyous
+frankness.  Once let the isolating wall which shuts off the Romany from
+the “Gorgio” be broken through, and the communicativeness of the Romany
+temperament begins to show itself.  The gipsies are extremely close
+observers; they were very quick to notice how different was Borrow’s
+bearing towards themselves from his bearing towards people of his own
+race, and Borrow used to say that “old Mrs. Herne and Leonora were the
+only gipsies who suspected and disliked him.”
+
+Thus it came about that the gipsies and the wanderers generally were
+almost the only people in any country who saw the winsome side of Borrow.
+A truly winsome side he had.  Yes, notwithstanding all that has been said
+about him to the contrary, Borrow was a most interesting and charming
+companion.  We all have our angularities; we all have unpleasant facets
+of character when occasion offers for showing them.  But there are some
+unfortunate people whose angularities are for ever chafing and irritating
+their friends.  Borrow was one of these.  It is very rarely indeed that
+one meets a friend or an acquaintance of Borrow’s who speaks of him with
+the kindness he deserved.  When a friend or an acquaintance relates an
+anecdote of him the asperity with which he does so is really remarkable
+and quite painful.  It was—it must have been—far from Dr. Gordon Hake’s
+wish to speak unkindly of his old friend who remained to the last deeply
+attached to him.  And yet few things have done more to prejudice the
+public against Borrow than the Doctor’s tale of Lavengro’s outrage at
+Rougham Rookery, the residence of the banker Bevan, one of the kindest
+and most benevolent men in Suffolk.
+
+This story, often told by Hake, appeared at last in print in his memoirs.
+Invited to dinner by Mr. Bevan, Borrow accepted the invitation and,
+according to the anecdote, thus behaved: During dinner Mrs. Bevan,
+thinking to please him, said, “Oh, Mr. Borrow, I have read your books
+with so much pleasure!”  On which Borrow exclaimed, “Pray what books do
+you mean, ma’am—do you mean my account books?”  Then, rising from the
+table, he walked up and down among the servants during the whole dinner,
+and afterwards wandered about the rooms and passages till the carriage
+could be ordered for his return home.  A monstrous proceeding truly, and
+not to be condoned by any circumstances.  Yet some part of its violence
+may, perhaps, thus be explained.  Borrow’s loyalty to a friend was
+proverbial—until he and the friend quarrelled.  A man who dared say an
+ungenerous word against a friend of Borrow’s ran the risk of being
+knocked down.  Borrow on this occasion had been driven half mad with
+rage—unreasoning, ignorant rage—against the Bury banking-house, because
+it had “struck the docket” against a friend of Borrow’s, the heir to a
+considerable estate, who had got into difficulties.  What Borrow yearned
+to do was, as he told the present writer, to cane the banker.  He had, as
+far as his own reputation went, far better have done this and taken the
+consequences than have insulted the banker’s wife—one of the most gentle,
+amiable, and unassuming ladies in Suffolk.  Dr. Knapp speaks very sharply
+of Miss Cobb’s remarks upon Borrow, and certainly these remarks are made
+with a great deal too much acidity.  But if the Borrovian is to lose
+temper with every one who girds at Borrow he will lead a not very
+comfortable life.
+
+Dr. Knapp has no doubt whatever that ‘Lavengro’ is in the main an
+autobiography.  We have none.  The only question is how much _Dichtung_
+is mingled with the _Wahrheit_.  Had it not been for the amazingly clumsy
+pieces of fiction which he threw into the narrative—such incidents as
+that of his meeting on the road the sailor son of the old apple-woman of
+London Bridge, and the exaggerated description of the man sent to sleep
+by reading Wordsworth—few readers would have doubted the autobiographical
+nature of ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye.’  Such incidents as these shed
+an air of unreality over the whole.
+
+All writers upon Borrow fall into the mistake of considering him to have
+been an East Anglian.  They might as well call Charlotte Brontë a
+Yorkshirewoman as call Borrow an East Anglian.  He was, of course, no
+more an East Anglian than an Irishman born in London is an Englishman.
+He had at bottom no East Anglian characteristics.  He inherited nothing
+from Norfolk save his accent and his love of “leg of mutton and turnips.”
+Yet he is a striking illustration of the way in which the locality that
+has given birth to a man influences him throughout his life.  The fact of
+Borrow’s having been born in East Anglia was the result of accident.  His
+father, a Cornishman of a good middle-class family, had been obliged,
+owing to a youthful escapade, to leave his native place and enlist as a
+common soldier.  Afterwards he became a recruiting officer, and moved
+about from one part of Great Britain and Ireland to another.  It so
+chanced that while staying at East Dereham, in Norfolk, he met and fell
+in love with a lady of French extraction.  Not one drop of East Anglian
+blood was in the veins of Borrow’s father, and very little in the veins
+of his mother.  Borrow’s ancestry was pure Cornish on one side, and on
+the other mainly French.  But such was the sublime egotism of
+Borrow—perhaps we should have said such is the sublime egotism of human
+nature—that the fact of his having been born in East Anglia made him look
+upon that part of the world as the very hub of the universe.
+
+There is, it must be confessed, something to us very agreeable in Dr.
+Knapp’s single-minded hero-worship.  A scholar and a philologist himself,
+he seems to have devoted a large portion of his life to the study of
+Borrow—following in Lavengro’s footsteps from one country to another with
+unflagging enthusiasm.  Now and again, undoubtedly, this hero-worship
+runs to excess: the faults of style and of method in Borrow’s writings
+are condoned or are passed by unobserved by Dr. Knapp, while the most
+unanswerable strictures upon them by others are resented.  For instance,
+at the end of the following extract from the report of the gentleman who
+read ‘Zincali’ for Mr. Murray, he appends a note of exclamation, as
+though he considers the admirable advice given to be eccentric or bad:—
+
+    “The Dialogues are amongst the best parts of the book; but in several
+    of them the tone of the speakers, of those especially who are in
+    humble life, is too correct and elevated, and therefore out of
+    character.  This takes away from their effect.  I think it would be
+    very advisable that Mr. Borrow should go over them with reference to
+    this point, simplifying a few of the terms of expression and
+    introducing a few contractions—_don’ts_, _can’ts_, &c.  This would
+    improve them greatly.”
+
+Now the truth is that Mr. Murray’s reader, whoever he was, {60} pointed
+out the one great blemish in _all_ Borrow’s dramatic pictures of gipsy
+life, wheresoever the scene may be laid.  Take his pictures of English
+gipsies.  The reader has only to compare the dialogue between gipsies
+given in that photographic study of Romany life ‘In Gipsy Tents’ with the
+dialogues in ‘Lavengro’ to see how the illusion in Borrow’s narrative is
+disturbed by the uncolloquial vocabulary of the speakers.  After all
+allowance is made for the Romany’s love of high-sounding words, it
+considerably weakens our belief in Mr. and Mrs. Petulengro, Ursula, and
+the rest, to find them using complex sentences and bookish words which,
+even among English people, are rarely heard in conversation.
+
+Dr. Knapp says emphatically that Borrow never created a character, and
+that the originals are easily recognizable to one who thoroughly knows
+the times and Borrow’s writings.  This is true, no doubt, as regards
+people with whom he was brought into contact at Norwich, and, indeed,
+generally before the period of his gipsy wanderings.  It must not be
+supposed, however, that such characters as the man who “touched” to avert
+the evil chance and the man who taught himself Chinese are in any sense
+portraits.  They have so many of Borrow’s own peculiarities that they
+might rather be called portraits of himself.  There was nothing that
+Borrow strove against with more energy than the curious impulse, which he
+seems to have shared with Dr. Johnson, to touch the objects along his
+path in order to save himself from the evil chance.  He never conquered
+the superstition.  In walking through Richmond Park he would step out of
+his way constantly to touch a tree, and he was offended if the friend he
+was with seemed to observe it.  Many of the peculiarities of the man who
+taught himself Chinese were also Borrow’s own.
+
+“But what about Isopel Berners?” the reader will ask.  “How much of truth
+and how much of fiction went to the presentation of this most interesting
+character?”  Seeing that Dr. Knapp has at his command such an immense
+amount of material in manuscript, the reader will feel some
+disappointment at discovering that the book tells us nothing new about
+her.  The character he names Isopel Berners was just the sort of girl in
+every way to attract Borrow, and if he had had the feeblest spark of the
+love-passion in his constitution one could almost imagine his falling in
+love with her.  Yet even the portrait of Isopel is marred by Borrow’s
+impulse towards exaggeration.  He must needs describe her as being taller
+than himself, and as he certainly stood six feet three Isopel would have
+been far better suited to sit by the side of Borrow’s friend the “Norfolk
+giant,” Hales, in the little London public-house where he latterly
+resided, than to become famous as a fighting woman who could conquer the
+Flaming Tinman.  Few indeed have been the women who could stand up for
+long before a trained boxer, and these must needs be not too tall, and
+moreover they must have their breasts padded after the manner of a
+well-known gipsy girl who excelled in this once fashionable
+accomplishment.  Even then a woman’s instinct impels her to guard her
+chest more carefully than she guards her face, and this leads to
+disaster.  Altogether Borrow, by his wilful exaggeration, makes the
+reader a little sceptical about Isopel, who was really an East Anglian
+road-girl of the finest type, known to the Boswells, and remembered not
+many years ago.  All that Dr. Knapp has derived from the documents in his
+possession concerning her is the following extraordinary passage from the
+original manuscript, which Borrow struck out of ‘Lavengro.’  He says:—
+
+    “As to the remarkable character introduced into ‘Lavengro’ and
+    ‘Romany Rye’ under the name of Isopel Berners, I have no light from
+    the MSS. of George Borrow, save the following fragment, which perhaps
+    I ought to have suppressed.  I am sorry if it dispel any illusions:—
+
+    “(_Loquitur Petulengro_) ‘My mind at present rather inclines towards
+    two wives.  I have heard that King Pharaoh had two, if not more.
+    Now, I think myself as good a man as he; and if he had more wives
+    than one, why should not I, whose name is Petulengro?’
+
+    “‘But what would Mrs. Petulengro say?’
+
+    “‘Why, to tell you the truth, brother, it was she who first put the
+    thought into my mind.  She has always, you know, had strange notions
+    in her head, gorgiko notions, I suppose we may call them, about
+    gentility and the like, and reading and writing.  Now, though she can
+    neither read nor write herself, she thinks that she is lost among our
+    people and that they are no society for her.  So says she to me one
+    day, “Pharaoh,” says she, “I wish you would take another wife, that I
+    might have a little pleasant company.  As for these here, I am their
+    betters.”  “I have no objection,” said I; “who shall it be?  Shall it
+    be a Cooper or a Stanley?”  “A Cooper or a Stanley!” said she, with a
+    toss of her head, “I might as well keep my present company as theirs;
+    none of your rubbish; let it be a _gorgie_, one that I can speak an
+    idea with”—that was her word, I think.  Now I am thinking that this
+    here Bess of yours would be just the kind of person both for my wife
+    and myself.  My wife wants something gorgiko, something genteel.  Now
+    Bess is of blood gorgious; if you doubt it, look in her face, all
+    full of _pawno ratter_, white blood, brother; and as for gentility,
+    nobody can make exceptions to Bess’s gentility, seeing she was born
+    in the workhouse of Melford the Short, where she learned to read and
+    write.  She is no Irish woman, brother, but English pure, and her
+    father was a farmer.
+
+    “‘So much as far as my wife is concerned.  As for myself, I tell you
+    what, brother, I want a strapper; one who can give and take.  The
+    Flying Tinker is abroad, vowing vengeance against us all.  I know
+    what the Flying Tinker is, so does Tawno.  The Flying Tinker came to
+    our camp.  “Damn you all,” says he, “I’ll fight the best of you for
+    nothing.”—“Done!” says Tawno, “I’ll be ready for you in a minute.”
+    So Tawno went into his tent and came out naked.  “Here’s at you,”
+    says Tawno.  Brother, Tawno fought for two hours with the Flying
+    Tinker, for two whole hours, and it’s hard to say which had the best
+    of it or the worst.  I tell you what, brother, I think Tawno had the
+    worst of it.  Night came on.  Tawno went into his tent to dress
+    himself and the Flying Tinker went his way.
+
+    “‘Now suppose, brother, the Flying Tinker comes upon us when Tawno is
+    away.  Who is to fight the Flying Tinker when he says: “D---n you, I
+    will fight the best of you”?  Brother, I will fight the Flying Tinker
+    for five pounds; but I couldn’t for less.  The Flying Tinker is a big
+    man, and though he hasn’t my science, he weighs five stone heavier.
+    It wouldn’t do for me to fight a man like that for nothing.  But
+    there’s Bess, who can afford to fight the Flying Tinker at any time
+    for what he’s got, and that’s three ha’pence.  She can beat him,
+    brother; I bet five pounds that Bess can beat the Flying Tinker.
+    Now, if I marry Bess, I’m quite easy on his score.  He comes to our
+    camp and says his say.  “I won’t dirty my hands with you,” says I,
+    “at least not under five pounds; but here’s Bess who’ll fight you for
+    nothing.”  I tell you what, brother, when he knows that Bess is Mrs.
+    Pharaoh, he’ll fight shy of our camp; he won’t come near it, brother.
+    He knows Bess don’t like him, and what’s more, that she can lick him.
+    He’ll let us alone; at least I think so.  If he does come, I’ll smoke
+    my pipe whilst Bess is beating the Flying Tinker.  Brother, I’m dry,
+    and will now take a cup of ale.’”
+
+Why did Borrow reject this passage?  Was it owing to his dread of
+respectability’s frowns?—or was it not rather because he felt that here
+his exaggeration, his departure from the true in quest of the striking,
+did not recommend itself to his cooler judgment?  For those who know
+anything of the gipsies would say at once that it would have been
+impossible for Mrs. Petulengro to make this suggestion; and that, even if
+she had made it, Mr. Petulengro would not have dared to broach it to any
+English road-girl, least of all to a girl like Isopel Berners.  The
+passage, however, is the most interesting document that Dr. Knapp has
+published.
+
+What may be called the Isopel Berners chapter of Borrow’s life was soon
+to be followed by the “veiled period”—that is to say, the period between
+the point where ends ‘The Romany Rye’ and the point where the Bible
+Society engages Borrow.
+
+Dr. Knapp’s mind seems a good deal exercised concerning this period.
+Borrow having chosen to draw the veil over that period, no one has any
+right to raise it—or, rather, perhaps no one would have had any right to
+do so had not Borrow himself thrown such a needless mystery around it.
+In considering any matter in connexion with Borrow it is always necessary
+to take into account the secretiveness of his disposition, and also his
+passion for posing.  He had a child’s fondness for the wonderful.  It is
+through his own love of mystification that students like Dr. Knapp must
+needs pry into these matters—must needs ask why Borrow drew the veil over
+seven years—must needs ask whether during the “veiled period” he led a
+life of squalid misery, compared with which his sojourn with Isopel
+Berners in Mumpers’ Dingle was luxury, or whether he was really
+travelling, as he pretended to have been, over the world.
+
+By yielding to his instinct as a born showman he excites a curiosity
+which would otherwise be unjustifiable.  Even if Dr. Knapp had been able
+to approach Borrow’s stepdaughter—which he seems not to have been able to
+do—it is pretty certain that she could have told him nothing of that
+mysterious seven years.  For about this subject the people to whom Borrow
+seems to have been most reticent were his wife and her daughter.  Indeed,
+it was not until after his wife’s death that he would allude to this
+period even to his most intimate friends.  One of the very few people to
+whom he did latterly talk with anything like frankness about this period
+in his life—Dr. Gordon Hake—is dead; and perhaps there is not more than
+about one other person now living who had anything of his confidence.
+
+With regard to this veiled period, people who read the idyllic pictures
+in ‘Lavengro’ and ‘The Romany Rye’ of the life of a gipsy gentleman
+working as a hedge-smith in the dingle or by the roadside seem to forget
+that Borrow was then working not for amusement, but for bread, and they
+forget how scant the bread must have been that could be bought for the
+odd sixpence or the few coppers that he was able to earn.  To those,
+however, who do not forget this it needs no revelation from documents,
+and none from any surviving friend, to come to the conclusion that as
+Borrow was mainly living in England during these seven years (continuing
+for a considerable time his life of a wanderer, and afterwards living as
+an obscure literary struggler in Norwich), his life was during this
+period one of privation, disappointment, and gloom.  It was for him to
+decide what he would give to the public and what he would withhold.
+
+The concluding chapter of Dr. Knapp’s book is not only pathetic—it is
+painful.  In the summer of 1874 Borrow left London, bade adieu to Mr.
+Murray and a few friends, and returned to Oulton—to die.  On the 26th of
+July, 1881, he was found dead in his home at Oulton, in his seventy-ninth
+year.
+
+
+
+
+II.  DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI,
+1828–1882.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+At Birchington-on-Sea one of the most rarely gifted men of our time has
+just died [April 9th, 1882] after a lingering illness.  During the time
+that his ‘Ballads and Sonnets’ was passing through the press last autumn
+his health began to give way, and he left London for Cumberland.  A stay
+of a few weeks in the Vale of St. John, however, did nothing to improve
+his health, and he returned much shattered.  After a time a numbness in
+the left arm excited fear of paralysis, and he became dangerously ill.
+It is probable, indeed, that nothing but the skill and unwearied
+attention of Mr. John Marshall saved his life then, as it had done upon
+several previous occasions.  Such of his friends as were then in
+London—W. B. Scott, Burne Jones, Leyland, F. Shields, Mr. Dunn, and
+others—feeling the greatest alarm, showed him every affectionate
+attention, and spared no effort to preserve a life so precious and so
+beloved.  Mr. Seddon having placed at his disposal West Cliff Bungalow,
+Birchington-on-Sea, he went thither, accompanied by his mother and sister
+and Mr. Hall Caine, about nine weeks since, but received no benefit from
+the change, and, gradually sinking from a complication of disorders, he
+died on Sunday last at 10 P.M.
+
+    [Picture: Dante Gabriel Rosette.  From a crayon-drawing by himself
+        reproduced by the kind permission of Mrs. W. M. Rossetti]
+
+Were I even competent to enter upon the discussion of Rossetti’s gifts as
+a poet and as a painter, it would not be possible to do so here and at
+this moment.  That the quality of romantic imagination informs with more
+vitality his work than it can be said to inform the work of any of his
+contemporaries was recognized at first by the few, and is now (judging
+from the great popularity of his last volume of poetry) being recognized
+by the many.  And the same, I think, may be said of his painting.  Those
+who had the privilege of a personal acquaintance with him knew how “of
+imagination all compact” he was.  Imagination, indeed, was at once his
+blessing and his bane.  To see too vividly—to love too intensely—to
+suffer and enjoy too acutely—is the doom, no doubt, of all those “lost
+wanderers from Arden” who, according to the Rosicrucian story, sing the
+world’s songs; and to Rossetti this applies more, perhaps, than to most
+poets.  And when we consider that the one quality in all poetry which
+really gives it an endurance outlasting the generation of its birth is
+neither music nor colour, nor even intellectual substance, but the
+clearness of the seeing; the living breath of imagination—the very
+qualities, in short, for which such poems as ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘Rose
+Mary’ are so conspicuous—we are driven to the conclusion that Rossetti’s
+poetry has a long and enduring future before it.
+
+A life more devoted to literature and art than his it is impossible to
+imagine.  Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti was born at 38, Charlotte
+Street, Portland Place, London, on the 12th of May, 1828.  He was the
+first son and second child of Gabriele Rossetti, the patriotic poet, who,
+born at Vasto in the Abruzzi, settled in Naples, and took an active part
+in extorting from the Neapolitan king Ferdinand I. the constitution
+granted in 1820, which constitution being traitorously cancelled by the
+king in 1821, Rossetti had to escape for his life to Malta with various
+other persecuted constitutionalists.  From Malta Gabriele Rossetti went
+to England about 1823, where he married in 1826 Frances Polidori,
+daughter of Alfieri’s secretary and sister of Byron’s Dr. Polidori.  He
+became Professor of Italian in King’s College, London, became also
+prominent as a commentator on Dante, and died in April, 1854.  His
+children, four in number—Maria Francesca, Dante Gabriel, William Michael,
+and Christina Georgina—all turned to literature or to art, or to both,
+and all became famous.  There can, indeed, be no doubt that the Rossetti
+family will hold a position quite unique in the literary and artistic
+annals of our time.
+
+Young Rossetti was first sent to the private school of the Rev. Mr. Paul
+in Foley Street, Portland Place, where he remained, however, for only
+three quarters of a year, from the autumn of 1835 to the summer of 1836.
+He next went to King’s College School in the autumn of 1836, where he
+remained till the summer of 1843, having reached the fourth class, then
+conducted by the Rev. Mr. Framley.
+
+Having from early childhood shown a strong propensity for drawing and
+painting, which had thus been always regarded as his future profession,
+he now left school for ever and received no more school learning.  In
+Latin he was already fairly proficient for his age; French he knew well;
+he had spoken Italian from childhood, and had some German lessons about
+1844–5.  On leaving school he went at once to the Art Academy of Cary
+(previously called Sass’s) near Bedford Square, and thence obtained
+admission to the Royal Academy Antique School in 1844 or 1845.  To the
+Royal Academy Life School he never went, and he was a somewhat negligent
+art student, but always regarded as one who had a future before him.
+
+In 1849 Rossetti exhibited ‘The Girlhood of the Virgin’ in the so-called
+Free Exhibition or Portland Gallery.  The artist who had perhaps the
+strongest influence upon Rossetti’s early tastes was Ford Madox Brown,
+who, however, refused from the first to join the Pre-Raphaelite
+Brotherhood on the ground that coteries had in modern art no proper
+function.  Rossetti was deeply impressed with the power and designing
+faculty displayed by Madox Brown’s cartoons exhibited in Westminster
+Hall.  When Rossetti began serious work as a painter he thought of Madox
+Brown as the one man from whom he would willingly receive practical
+guidance, and wrote to him at random.  From this time Madox Brown became
+his intimate friend and artistic monitor.
+
+In painting, however, Rossetti was during this time exercising only half
+his genius.  From his childhood it became evident that he was a poet.  At
+the age of five he wrote a sort of play called ‘The Slave,’ which, as may
+be imagined, showed no noteworthy characteristic save precocity.  This
+was followed by the poem called ‘Sir Hugh Heron,’ which was written about
+1844, and some translations of German poetry.  ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and
+‘Sister Helen’ were produced in their original form so early as 1846 or
+1847.  The latter of these has undergone more modifications than any
+other first-class poem of our time.  To take even the new edition of the
+‘Poems’ which appeared last year [1881], the stanzas introducing the wife
+of the luckless hero appealing to the sorceress for mercy are so
+important in the glamour they shed back over the stanzas that have gone
+before, that their introduction may almost be characterized as a
+rewriting of every previous line.
+
+The translations from the early Italian poets also began as far back as
+1845 or 1846, and may have been mainly completed by 1849.  Rossetti’s
+gifts as a translator were, no doubt, of the highest.  And this arose
+from his deep sympathy with literature as a medium of human expression:
+he could enter into the temperaments of other writers, and by sympathy
+criticize the literary form from the author’s own inner standpoint,
+supposing always that there was a certain racial kinship with the author.
+Many who write well themselves have less sympathy with the expressional
+forms adopted by other writers than is displayed by men who have neither
+the impulse nor the power to write themselves.  But this sympathy
+betrayed him sometimes into a free rendering of locutions such as a
+translator should be chary of indulging in.  Materials for a volume
+accumulated slowly, but all the important portions of the ‘Poems’
+published in 1870 had been in existence some years before that date.  The
+prose story of ‘Hand and Soul’ was also written as early as 1848 or 1849.
+
+In the spring of 1860 he married Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, who being
+very beautiful was constantly painted and drawn by him.  She had one
+still-born child in 1861, and died in February, 1862.  He felt her death
+very acutely, and for a time ceased to write or to take any interest in
+his own poetry.  Like Prospero, indeed, he literally buried his wand, but
+for a time only.  From this time to his death he continued to produce
+pictures, all of them showing, as far as technical skill goes, an
+unfaltering advance in his art.
+
+Yet wonderful as was Rossetti as an artist and poet, he was still more
+wonderful, I think, as a man.  The chief characteristic of his
+conversation was an incisiveness so perfect and clear as to have often
+the pleasurable surprise of wit.  It is so well known that Rossetti has
+been for a long time the most retired man of genius of our day, and so
+many absurd causes for this retirement have been spoken of, that there is
+nothing indecorous in the true cause of it being made public by one who
+of late years has known more of him, perhaps, than has any other person.
+About 1868 the curse of the artistic and poetic
+temperament—insomnia—attacked him, and one of the most distressing
+effects of insomnia is a nervous shrinking from personal contact with any
+save a few intimate friends.  This peculiar kind of nervousness may be
+aggravated by the use of sleeping draughts, and in his case was thus
+aggravated.
+
+But, although Rossetti lived thus secluded, he did not lose the
+affectionate regard of the illustrious men with whom he started in his
+artistic life.  Nor, assuredly, did he deserve to lose it, for no man
+ever lived, I think, who was so generous as he in sympathizing with other
+men’s work, save only when the cruel fumes of chloral turned him against
+everything.  And his sympathy was as wide as generous.  It was only
+necessary to mention the name of Leighton or Millais or Madox Brown or
+Burne Jones or G. F. Watts, or, indeed, of any contemporary painter, to
+get from him a glowing disquisition upon the merits of each—a
+disquisition full of the subtlest distinctions, and illuminated by the
+brilliant lights of his matchless fancy.  And it was the same in poetry.
+
+But those who loved Rossetti (that is to say, those who knew him) can
+realize how difficult it is for me, a friend, to pursue just now such
+reminiscences as these.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+In his preface Mr. W. M. Rossetti says:—
+
+    “I have not attempted to write a biographical account of my brother,
+    nor to estimate the range or value of his powers and performances in
+    fine art and in literature.  I agree with those who think that a
+    brother is not the proper person to undertake a work of this sort.
+    An outsider can do it dispassionately, though with imperfect
+    knowledge of the facts; a friend can do it with mastery, and without
+    much undue bias; but a brother, however equitably he may address
+    himself to the task, cannot perform it so as to secure the prompt and
+    cordial assent of his readers.”
+
+These words will serve as a good example of the dignified modesty which
+is a characteristic of Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s, and is one of the best
+features of this volume. {77}  In these days of empty pretence it is
+always refreshing to come upon a page written in the spirit of scholarly
+self-suppression which informs every line this patient and admirable
+critic writes.  And as to the interesting question glanced at in the
+passage above quoted, though the contents of this volume will, no doubt,
+form valuable material for the future biography of Rossetti, we wonder
+whether the time is even yet at hand when that biography, whether written
+by brother, by friend, or by outsider, is needed.  That mysterious entity
+“the public,” would, no doubt, like to get one; but we have always shared
+Rossetti’s own opinion that a man of genius is no more the property of
+the “public” than is any private gentleman; and we have always felt with
+him that the prevalence in our time of the opposite opinion has fashioned
+so intolerable a yoke for the neck of any one who has had the misfortune
+to pass from the sweet paradise of obscurity into the vulgar purgatory of
+Fame, that it almost behoves a man of genius to avoid, if he can, passing
+into that purgatory at all.
+
+Can any biography, by whomsoever written, be other than inchoate and
+illusory—nay, can it fail to be fraught with danger to the memory of the
+dead, with danger to the peace of the living, until years have fully
+calmed the air around the dead man’s grave?  So long as the man to be
+portrayed cannot be separated from his surroundings, so long as his
+portrait cannot be fully and honestly limned without peril to the peace
+of those among whom he moved—in a word, so long as there remains any
+throb of vitality in those delicate filaments of social life by which he
+was enlinked to those with whom he played his part—that brother, or that
+friend, or that outsider who shall attempt the portraiture must feel what
+heavy responsibilities are his—must not forget that with him to trip is
+to sin against the head.  And how shall he decide when the time has at
+last come for making the attempt?  Before the incidents of a man’s life
+can be exploited without any risk of mischief, how much time should
+elapse?  “A month,” say the publishers, each one of whom runs his own
+special “biographical series,” and keeps his own special bevy of
+recording angels writing against time and against each other.  “Thirty
+years,” said one whose life-wisdom was so perfect as to be in a world
+like ours almost an adequate substitute for the morality he
+lacked—Talleyrand.
+
+Of all forms of literary art biography demands from the artist not only
+the greatest courage, but also the happiest combination of the highest
+gifts.  To succeed in painting the portrait of Achilles or of Priam, of
+Hamlet or of Othello, may be difficult, but is it as difficult as to
+succeed in painting the portrait of Browning or Rossetti?  Surely not.
+In the one case an intense dramatic imagination is needed, and nothing
+more.  If Homer’s Achaian and Trojan heroes were falsely limned, not
+they, but Homer’s art, would suffer the injury.  If for the purposes of
+art the poet unduly exalted this one or unduly abased that—if he misread
+one incident in the mythical life of Achilles, and another in the
+mythical life of Hector—he did wrong to his art undoubtedly, but none to
+the memory of a dead man, and none to the peace of a living one.  But
+with him who would paint the portrait of Browning or Rossetti how
+different is the case!  Although he requires the poet’s vision before he
+can paint a living picture of his subject, the task he has set himself to
+do is something more than artistic: before everything else it is
+fiduciary.
+
+A trustee whose trust fund is biographical truth, he has, after
+collecting and marshalling all the facts that come to his hand, to decide
+what is truth as indicated by those generalized facts.  But having done
+this, he has to decide what is the proper time for giving the world the
+truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—what is the proper
+time?  In the biographer’s relation to the dead man on the one-hand and
+to the public on the other should he be so unhappy as to forget that time
+is of the very “essence of the contract”—should he forget that so inwoven
+is human life that truth spoken at the wrong moment may be a greater
+mischief-worker than error—he may, if conscientious, have to remember
+that forgetfulness of his during the remainder of his days.  He who
+thinks that truth may not be sometimes as mischievous as a pestilence
+knows but little of this mysterious and wonderful net of human life.  But
+if this is so with regard to truth, how much more is it so with regard to
+mere matter of fact?  Fact-worship, document-worship, is at once the
+crowning folly and the crowning vice of our time.  To mistake a fact for
+a truth, and to give the world that; to throw facts about and documents
+about heedless of the mischief they may work—wronging the dead and
+wronging the living—this is actually paraded as a virtue in these days.
+
+Here is a case in point.  Down to the very last moment of his life
+Rossetti’s feeling towards his great contemporary Tennyson was that of
+the deepest admiration, and yet what says the documentary evidence as
+given to the world by Rossetti’s brother?  It shows that Rossetti used an
+extremely unpleasant phrase concerning a letter from Tennyson
+acknowledging the receipt of Rossetti’s first volume of poems in 1870.
+Those who have heard Tennyson speak of Rossetti know that to use this
+phrase in relation to any letter of his dealing with Rossetti’s poetry
+was to misunderstand it.  Yet here are the unpleasant words of a hasty
+mood, “rather shabby,” in print.  And why?  Because the public has become
+so demoralized that its feast of facts, its feast of documents it must
+have, come what will.  But even supposing that the public had any rights
+whatsoever in regard to a man of genius, which we deny, what are letters
+as indications of a man’s character?  Of all modes of expression is not
+the epistolary mode that in which man’s instinct for using language “to
+disguise his thought” is most likely to exercise itself?  There is likely
+to be far more deep sincerity in a sonnet than in a letter.  It is no
+exaggeration to say that the common courtesies of life demand a certain
+amount of what is called “blarney” in a letter—especially in an eminent
+man’s letter—which would ruin a sonnet.  And this must be steadily borne
+in mind at a time like ours, when private letters are bought and sold
+like any other article of merchandise, not only immediately after a man’s
+death, but during his lifetime.
+
+With regard to literary men, their letters in former times were simply
+artistic compositions; hence as indications of character they must be
+judged by the same canons as literary essays would be judged.  In both
+cases the writer had full space and full time to qualify his statements
+of opinion; in both cases he was without excuse for throwing out anything
+heedlessly.  Not only in Walpole’s case and Gray’s, but also in Charles
+Lamb’s, we apply the same rules of criticism to the letters as we apply
+to the published utterances that appeared in the writer’s lifetime.  But
+now, when letters are just the hurried expression of the moment, when
+ill-considered things—often rash things—are said which either in literary
+compositions or in conversation would have been, if said at all, greatly
+qualified—the greatest injustice that can be done to a writer is to print
+his letters indiscriminately.  Especially is this the case with Rossetti.
+All who knew him speak of him as being a superb critic, and a superb
+critic he was.  But his printed letters show nothing of the kind.  On
+literary subjects they are often full of over-statement and of biased
+judgment.  Here is the explanation: in conversation he had a way of
+perpetrating a brilliant critical paradox for the very purpose of
+qualifying it, turning it about, colouring it by the lights of his
+wonderful fancy, until at last it became something quite different from
+the original paradox, and full of truth and wisdom.  But when such a
+paradox went off in a letter, there it remained unqualified; and they
+who, not having known him, scoff at his friends who claim for him the
+honours of a great critic, seem to scoff with reason.
+
+No one was more conscious of the treachery of letters than was Rossetti
+himself.  Comparatively late in his life he realized what all eminent men
+would do well to realize, that owing to the degradation of public taste,
+which cries out for more personal gossip and still more every day, the
+time has fully come when every man of mark must consider the rights of
+his friends—when it behoves every man who has had the misfortune to pass
+into fame to burn all letters; and he began the holocaust that duty to
+friendship demanded of him.  But the work of reading through such a
+correspondence as his in order to see what letters must be preserved from
+the burning took more time and more patience than he had contemplated,
+and the destruction did not progress further than to include the letters
+of the early sixties.  Business letters it was, of course, necessary to
+preserve, and very properly it is from these that Mr. W. M. Rossetti has
+mainly quoted.
+
+The volume is divided into two parts: first, documents relating to the
+production of certain of Rossetti’s pictures and poems; and second, a
+prose paraphrase of ‘The House of Life.’
+
+The documents consist of abstracts of and extracts from such portions of
+Rossetti’s correspondence as have fallen into his brother’s hands as
+executor.  Dealing as they necessarily do with those complications of
+prices and those involved commissions for which Rossetti’s artistic
+career was remarkable, there is a commercial air about the first portion
+of the book which some will think out of harmony with their conception of
+the painter, about whom there used to be such a mysterious interest until
+much writing about him had brought him into the light of common day.  In
+future years a summary so accurate and so judicious as this will seem
+better worth making than it, perhaps, seems at the present moment; for
+Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s love of facts is accompanied by an equally strong
+love of making an honest statement of facts—a tabulated statement, if
+possible; and no one writing of Rossetti need hesitate about following
+his brother to the last letter and to the last figure.
+
+To be precise and perspicuous is, he hints in his preface, better than to
+be graphic and entertaining; and we entirely agree with him, especially
+when the subject discussed is Rossetti, about whom so many fancies that
+are neither precise nor perspicuous are current.  Still, to read about
+this picture being offered to one buyer and that to another, and rejected
+or accepted at a greatly reduced price after much chaffering, is not, we
+will confess, exhilarating reading to those to whom Rossetti’s pictures
+are also poems.  It does not conduce to the happiness of his admirers to
+think of such works being produced under such prosaic conditions.  One
+buyer—a most worthy man, to be sure, and a true friend of Rossetti’s, but
+full of that British superstition about the saving grace of clothes which
+is so wonderful a revelation to the pensive foreigner—had to be humoured
+in his craze against the nude.  After having painted a beautiful
+partly-draped Gretchen (which, we may remark in passing, had no relation,
+as Mr. W. M. Rossetti supposes, to the Marguerite alluded to in a letter
+to Mr. Graham in 1870) from a new model whose characteristics were a
+superb bosom and arms, he, Rossetti, was obliged to consent to conceal
+the best portions of the picture under drapery.
+
+That this was a matter of great and peculiar vexation to him may be
+supposed when it is remembered that unequalled as had been his good
+fortune in finding fine face-models (ladies of position and culture, and
+often of extraordinary beauty), he had in the matter of figure-models
+been most unlucky.  And this, added to his slight knowledge of anatomy,
+made all his nude pictures undesirable save those few painted from the
+beautiful girl who stood for ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow’ and ‘Forced
+Music.’  What his work from the nude suffered from this is incalculable,
+as may be seen in the crayon called ‘Ligeia Siren,’ a naked siren playing
+on a kind of lute, which Rossetti described as “certainly one of his best
+things.”  The beauty and value of a crayon which for weird
+poetry—especially in the eyes—must be among Rossetti’s masterpieces are
+ruined by the drawing of the breasts.
+
+The most interesting feature of the book, however, is not that which
+deals with the prices Rossetti got for his pictures, but that which tells
+the reader the place where and the conditions under which they were
+painted; and no portion of the book is more interesting than that which
+relates to the work done at Kelmscott:—
+
+    “At the beginning of this year 1874 Rossetti was again occupied with
+    the picture which he had commenced in the preceding spring, entitled,
+    ‘The Bower Maiden’—a girl in a room with a pot of marigolds and a
+    black cat.  It was painted from ‘little Annie’ (a cottage-girl and
+    house assistant at Kelmscott), and it ‘goes on’ (to quote the words
+    of one of his letters) ‘like a house on fire.  This is the only kind
+    of picture one ought to do—just copying the materials, and no more:
+    all others are too much trouble.’  It is not difficult to understand
+    that the painter of a ‘Proserpine’ and a ‘Ghirlandata’ would
+    occasionally feel the luxury of a mood intellectually lazy, and would
+    be minded to give voice to it—as in this instance—in terms wilfully
+    extreme; keeping his mental eye none the less steadily directed to a
+    ‘Roman Widow’ or a ‘Blessed Damozel’ in the near future.  As a matter
+    of fact, my brother painted very few things, at any stage of his
+    career, as mere representations of reality, unimbued by some
+    inventive or ideal meaning: in the rare instances when he did so, he
+    naturally felt an indolent comfort, and made no scruple of putting
+    the feeling into words—highly suitable for being taken _cum grano
+    salis_.  Nothing was more alien from his nature or habit than ‘tall
+    talk’ of any kind about his aims, aspirations, or performances.  It
+    was into his work—not into his utterances about his work—that he
+    infused the higher and deeper elements of his spirit.  ‘The Bower
+    Maiden’ was finished early in February, and sold to Mr. Graham for
+    682_l._, after it had been offered to Mr. Leyland at a rather higher
+    figure, and declined.  It has also passed under the names of ‘Fleurs
+    de Marie,’ ‘Marigolds,’ and ‘The Gardener’s Daughter.’  After ‘The
+    Bower Maiden’ had been disposed of, other work was taken up—more
+    especially ‘The Roman Widow,’ bearing the alternative title of ‘Dîs
+    Manibus,’ which was in an advanced stage by the month of May, and was
+    completed in June or July.  It was finished with little or no
+    glazing.  The Roman widow is a lady still youthful, in a grey
+    fawn-tinted drapery, with a musical instrument in each hand; she is
+    in the sepulchral chamber of her husband, whose stone urn appears in
+    the background.  I possess the antique urn which my brother procured,
+    and which he used for the painting.  For graceful simplicity, and for
+    depth of earnest but not strained sentiment, he never, I think,
+    exceeded ‘The Roman Widow.’  The two instruments seem to repeat the
+    two mottoes on the urn, ‘Ave Domine—Vale Domine.’  The head was
+    painted from Miss Wilding, already mentioned; but it seems to me
+    partly associated with the type of Mrs. Stillman’s face as well.
+    There are many roses in this picture—both wild and garden roses; they
+    kept the artist waiting a little after the work was otherwise
+    finished.  ‘I really think it looks well,’ he wrote on one occasion;
+    ‘its fair luminous colour seems to melt into the gold frame (which
+    has only just come) like a part of it.’  He feared that the picture
+    might be ‘too severe and tragic’ for some tastes; but could add (not,
+    perhaps, with undue confidence), ‘I don’t think Géricault or Régnault
+    would have quite scorned it.’”
+
+The magnificent design here alluded to, ‘Dîs Manibus,’ entirely suggested
+by the urn, which had somewhat come into his possession (probably through
+Howell), and also ‘The Bower Maiden,’ suggested by his accidentally
+seeing a pretty cottage-child lifting some marigolds to a shelf, formed
+part of the superb work produced by Rossetti during his long retirement
+at Kelmscott Manor—that period never before recorded, which has at this
+very moment been brought into prominence by his friend Dr. Hake’s
+sonnet-sequence ‘The New Day,’ just published.  As far as literary and
+artistic work goes, it was, perhaps, the richest period of his life; and
+that it was also one of the happiest is clear not only from his own
+words, but also from the following testimony of Dr. Hake, who saw much of
+him there:—
+
+    O, happy days with him who once so loved us!
+       We loved as brothers, with a single heart,
+    The man whose iris-woven pictures moved us
+       From nature to her blazoned shadow—Art.
+    How often did we trace the nestling Thames
+       From humblest waters on his course of might,
+    Down where the weir the bursting current stems—
+       There sat till evening grew to balmy night,
+    Veiling the weir whose roar recalled the Strand
+       Where we had listened to the wave-lipped sea,
+    That seemed to utter plaudits while we planned
+       Triumphal labours of the day to be.
+
+It was at Kelmscott, in the famous tapestried room, that besides painting
+the ‘Proserpine,’ ‘The Roman Widow,’ &c., he wrote many of his later
+poems, including ‘Rose Mary.’
+
+Considering how deep is Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s affection for his brother’s
+memory, and how great is his admiration for his brother’s work, it is
+remarkable how judicial is his mind when writing about him.  This is what
+he says about the much discussed ‘Venus Astarte’:—
+
+    “Into the ‘Venus Astarte’ he had put his utmost intensity of
+    thinking, feeling, and method—he had aimed to make it equally strong
+    in abstract sentiment and in physical grandeur—an ideal of the
+    mystery of beauty, offering a sort of combined quintessence of what
+    he had endeavoured in earlier years to embody in the two several
+    types of ‘Sibylla Palmifera’ and ‘Lilith,’ or (as he ultimately named
+    them in the respective sonnets) ‘Soul’s Beauty’ and ‘Body’s Beauty.’
+    It may be well to remark that, by the time when he completed the
+    ‘Venus Astarte,’ or ‘Astarte Syriaca,’ he had got into a more austere
+    feeling than of old with regard to colour and chiaroscuro; and the
+    charm of the picture has, I am aware, been less, to many critics and
+    spectators of the work, than he would have deemed to be its due, as
+    compared with some of his other performances of more obvious and
+    ostensible attraction.”
+
+Though Mr. W. M. Rossetti is right in saying that it was not till the
+beginning of 1877 that this remarkable picture was brought to a
+conclusion, the main portions were done during that long sojourn at
+Bognor in 1876–7, which those who have written about Rossetti have
+hitherto left unrecorded.  Having fallen into ill health after his return
+to London from Kelmscott, he was advised to go to the seaside, and a
+large house at Bognor was finally selected.  No doubt one reason why the
+preference was given to Bognor was the fact that Blake’s cottage at
+Felpham was close by, for businesslike and unbusiness-like qualities were
+strangely mingled in Rossetti’s temperament, and it was generally some
+sentiment or unpractical fancy of this kind that brought about Rossetti’s
+final decision upon anything.  Blake’s name was with him still a word to
+charm with, and he was surprised to find, on the first pilgrimage of
+himself and his friends to the cottage, that scarcely a person in the
+neighbourhood knew what Blake it was that “the Londoners” were inquiring
+about.
+
+To the secluded house at Bognor—a house so surrounded by trees and shrubs
+that the murmur of the waves mingling with the whispers of the leaves
+seemed at one moment the sea’s voice, and at another the voice of the
+earth—Rossetti took not only the cartoon of the ‘Astarte Syriaca,’ but
+also the most peculiar of all his pictures, ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ which
+had long lain in an incomplete state.  But it was not much painting that
+he did at Bognor.  From a cause he tried in vain to understand, and tried
+in vain to conquer, his thoughts ran upon poetry, and refused to fix
+themselves upon art.  Partly this might have been owing to the fact that
+now, comparatively late in life, he to whom, as his brother well says,
+“such words as _sea_, _ship_, and _boat_ were generic terms admitting of
+little specific and still less of any individual and detailed
+distinction,” awoke to the fascination that the sea sooner or later
+exercises upon all truly romantic souls.  For deep as is the poetry of
+the inland woods, the Spirit of Romance, if there at all, is there in
+hiding.  In order for that Spirit to come forth and take captive the soul
+something else is wanted; howsoever thick and green the trees—howsoever
+bright and winding the streams—a magical glimmer of sea-light far or near
+must shine through the branches as they wave.
+
+That this should be a new experience to so fine a poet as Rossetti was no
+doubt strange, but so it chanced to be.  He whose talk at Kelmscott had
+been of ‘Blessed Damozels’ and ‘Roman Widows’ and the like, talked now of
+the wanderings of Ulysses, of ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ of ‘Sir Patrick
+Spens,’ and even of ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’ and ‘Allan Gordon.’  And on
+hearing a friend recite some tentative verses on a great naval battle, he
+looked about for sea subjects too; and it was now, and not later, as is
+generally supposed, that he really thought of the subject of ‘The White
+Ship,’ a subject apparently so alien from his genius.  Every evening he
+used to take walks on the beach for miles and miles, delighted with a
+beauty that before had had no charms for him.  Still, the ‘Astarte
+Syriaca’ did progress, though slowly, and became the masterpiece that Mr.
+W. M. Rossetti sets so high among his brother’s work.
+
+    “From Bognor my brother returned to his house in Cheyne Walk; and in
+    the summer he paid a visit to two of his kindest and most considerate
+    friends, Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, at their seat of Broadlands in
+    Hampshire.  He executed there a portrait in chalks of Lady
+    Mount-Temple.  He went on also with the picture of ‘The Blessed
+    Damozel.’  For the head of an infant angel which appears in the front
+    of this picture he made drawings from two children—one being the baby
+    of the Rev. H. C. Hawtrey, and the other a workhouse infant.  The
+    former sketch was presented to the parents of the child and the
+    latter to Lady Mount-Temple; and the head with its wings, was painted
+    on to the canvas at Broadlands.”
+
+Mr. W. M. Rossetti omits to mention that the landscape which forms the
+predella to ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ a river winding in a peculiarly
+tortuous course through the cedars and other wide-spread trees of an
+English park, was taken from the scenery of Broadlands—that fairyland of
+soft beauty which lived in his memory as it must needs live in the memory
+of every one who has once known it.  But the wonder is that such a mass
+of solid material has been compressed into so small a space.
+
+Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s paraphrase of ‘The House of Life’—done with so much
+admiration of his brother’s genius and affection for his memory—touches
+upon a question relating to poetic art which has been raised
+before—raised in connexion with prose renderings of Homer, Sophocles, and
+Dante: Are poetry and prose so closely related in method that one can
+ever be adequately turned into the other?  Schiller no doubt wrote his
+dramas in prose and then turned them into rhetorical verse; but then
+there are those who affirm that Schiller’s rhetorical verse is scarcely
+poetry.  The importance of the question will be seen when we call to mind
+that if such a transmutation of form were possible, translations of
+poetry would be possible; for though, owing to the tyrannous demands of
+form, the verse of one language can never be translated into the verse of
+another, it can always be rendered in the prose of another, only it then
+ceases to be poetry.
+
+That the intellectual, and even to some extent the emotional, substance
+of a poem can be seized and covered by a prose translation is seen in
+Prof. Jebb’s rendering of the ‘Œdipus Rex’; but, as we have before
+remarked, the fundamental difference between imaginative prose and poetry
+is that, while the one must be informed with intellectual life and
+emotional life, the other has to be informed with both these kinds of
+life, and with another life beyond these—rhythmic life.  Now, if we
+wished to show that rhythmic life is in poetry the most important of all,
+our example would, we think, be Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s prose paraphrase of
+his brother’s sonnets.  The obstacles against the adequate turning of
+poetry into prose can be best understood by considering the obstacles
+against the adequate turning of prose into poetry.  Prose notes tracing
+out the course of the future poem may, no doubt, be made, and usefully
+made, by the poet (as Wordsworth said in an admirable letter to Gillies),
+unless, indeed, the notes form too elaborate an attempt at a full prose
+expression of the subject-matter, in which case, so soon as the poet
+tries to rise on his winged words, his wingless words are likely to act
+as a dead weight.  For this reason, when Wordsworth said that the prose
+notes should be brief, he might almost as well have gone on to say that
+in expression they should be slovenly.  This at least may be said, that
+the moment the language of the prose note is so “adequate” and rich that
+it seems to be what Wordsworth would call the natural “incarnation of the
+thought,” the poet’s imagination, if it escapes at all from the chains of
+the prose expression, escapes with great difficulty.  An instance of this
+occurred in Rossetti’s own experience.
+
+During one of those seaside rambles alluded to above, while he was
+watching with some friends the billows tumbling in beneath the wintry
+moon, some one, perhaps Rossetti himself, directed attention to the
+peculiar effect of the moon’s disc reflected in the white surf, and
+compared it to fire in snow.  Rossetti, struck with the picturesqueness
+of the comparison, made there and then an elaborate prose note of it in
+one of the diminutive pocket-books that he was in the habit of carrying
+in the capacious pocket of his waistcoat.  Years afterwards—shortly
+before his death, in fact—when he came to write ‘The King’s Tragedy,’
+remembering this note, he thought he could find an excellent place for it
+in the scene where the king meets the Spae wife on the seashore and
+listens to her prophecies of doom.  But he was at once confronted by this
+obstacle: so elaborately had the image of the moon reflected in the surf
+been rendered in the prose note—so entirely did the prose matter seem to
+be the inevitable and the final incarnation of the thought—that it
+appeared impossible to escape from it into the movement and the diction
+proper to poetry.  It was only after much labour—a labour greater than he
+had given to all the previous stanzas combined—that he succeeded in
+freeing himself from the fetters of the prose, and in painting the
+picture in these words:—
+
+    That eve was clenched for a boding storm
+       ’Neath a toilsome moon half seen;
+    The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high;
+    And where there was a line of sky,
+       Wild wings loomed dark between.
+
+                                   * * * *
+
+    ’Twas then the moon sailed clear of the rack
+       On high on her hollow dome;
+    And still as aloft with hoary crest
+       Each clamorous wave rang home,
+    Like fire in snow the moonlight blazed
+       Amid the champing foam.
+
+And the remark was then made to him with regard to Coleridge’s
+‘Wanderings of Cain,’ that it is not unlikely the matchless fragment
+given in Coleridge’s poems might have passed nearer towards completion,
+or at least towards the completion of the first part, had it not been for
+those elaborate and beautiful prose notes which he has left behind.
+
+And if the attempt to turn prose into poetry is hopeless, the attempt to
+turn poetry into prose is no less so, and for a like reason—that of the
+immense difficulty of passing from the movement natural to one mood into
+the movement natural to another.  And this criticism applies especially
+to the poetry of Rossetti, which produces so many of its best effects by
+means not of logical statement, but of the music and suggestive richness
+of rhythmical language.  That Rossetti did on some occasions, when told
+that his sonnets were unintelligible, talk about making such a paraphrase
+himself is indisputable, because Mr. Fairfax Murray say that he heard him
+say so.  But indisputable also is many another saying of Rossetti’s,
+equally ill-considered and equally impracticable.  That he ever seriously
+thought of doing so is most unlikely.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+In his memoir of his brother, Mr. William Michael Rossetti thus makes
+mention of a ballad left by the poet which still remains unpublished:—
+
+    “It [the ballad] is most fully worthy of publication, but has not
+    been included in Rossetti’s ‘Collected Works,’ because he gave the
+    MS. to his devoted friend Mr. Theodore Watts, with whom alone now
+    rests the decision of presenting it or not to the public.”
+
+And he afterwards mentions certain sonnets on the Sphinx, also in my
+possession.
+
+With the most generous intentions my dear and loyal friend William
+Rossetti has here brought me into trouble.
+
+Naturally such an announcement as the above has excited great curiosity
+among admirers of Rossetti, and I am frequently receiving letters—some of
+them cordial enough, but others far from cordial—asking, or rather
+demanding, to know the reason why important poems of Rossetti’s have for
+so long a period been withheld from the public.  In order to explain the
+delay I must first give two extracts from Mr. Hall Caine’s picturesque
+‘Recollections of Rossetti,’ published in 1882:—
+
+    “The end was drawing near, and we all knew the fact.  Rossetti had
+    actually taken to poetical composition afresh, and had written a
+    facetious ballad (conceived years before), of the length of ‘The
+    White Ship,’ called ‘Jan Van Hunks,’ embodying an eccentric story of
+    a Dutchman’s wager to smoke against the devil.  This was to appear in
+    a miscellany of stories and poems by himself and Mr. Theodore Watts,
+    a project which had been a favourite one of his for some years, and
+    in which he now, in his last moments, took a revived interest,
+    strange and strong.”
+
+    “On Wednesday morning, April 5th, I went into the bedroom to which he
+    had for some days been confined, and wrote out to his dictation two
+    sonnets which he had composed on a design of his called ‘The Sphinx,’
+    and which he wished to give, together with the drawing and the ballad
+    before described, to Mr. Watts for publication in the volume just
+    mentioned.  On the Thursday morning I found his utterance thick, and
+    his speech from that cause hardly intelligible.”
+
+As the facts in connexion with this project exhibit, with a force that
+not all the words of all his detractors can withstand, the splendid
+generosity of the poet’s nature, I only wish that I had made them public
+years ago, Rossetti (whose power of taking interest in a friend’s work
+Mr. Joseph Knight has commented upon) had for years been urging me to
+publish certain writings of mine with which he was familiar, and for
+years I had declined to do so—declined for two simple reasons: first,
+though I liked writing for its own sake—indulged in it, indeed, as a
+delightful luxury—to enter formally the literary arena, and to go through
+that struggle which, as he himself used to say, “had never yet brought
+comfort to any poet, but only sorrow,” had never been an ambition of
+mine; and, secondly, I was only too conscious how biased must the
+judgment be of a man whose affections were so strong as his when brought
+to bear upon the work of a friend.
+
+In order at last to achieve an end upon which he had set his heart, he
+proposed that he and I should jointly produce the volume to which Mr.
+Hall Caine refers, and that he should enrich it with reproductions of
+certain drawings of his, including the ‘Sphinx’ (now or lately in the
+possession of Mr. William Rossetti) and crayons and pencil drawings in my
+own possession illustrating poems of mine—those drawings, I mean, from
+that new model chosen by me whose head Leighton said must be the
+loveliest ever drawn, who sat for ‘The Spirit of the Rainbow,’ and that
+other design which William Sharp christened ‘Forced Music.’
+
+In order to conquer my most natural reluctance to see a name so unknown
+as mine upon a title-page side by side with a name so illustrious as his,
+he (or else it was his generous sister Christina, I forget which)
+italianized the words Walter Theodore Watts into “Gualtiero Teodoro
+Gualtieri”—a name, I may add in passing, which appears as an inscription
+on one at least of the valuable Christmas presents he made me, a rare old
+Venetian Boccaccio.  My portion of the book was already in existence, but
+that which was to have been the main feature of the volume, a ballad of
+Rossetti’s to be called ‘Michael Scott’s Wooing’ (which had no relation
+to early designs of his bearing that name), hung fire for this reason:
+the story upon which the ballad was to have been based was discovered to
+be not an old legend adapted and varied by the Romanies, as I had
+supposed when I gave it to him, but simply the Ettrick Shepherd’s
+novelette ‘Mary Burnet’; and the project then rested in abeyance until
+that last illness at Birchington painted so graphically and pathetically
+by Mr. Hall Caine.
+
+For some reason quite inscrutable to the late John Marshall, who attended
+him, and to all of us, this old idea seized upon his brain; so much so,
+indeed, that Marshall hailed it as a good omen, and advised us to foster
+it, which we did with excellent results, as will be seen by referring to
+the very last entry in his mother’s touching diary as lately printed by
+Mr. W. M. Rossetti: “March 28, Tuesday.  Mr. Watts came down.  Gabriel
+rallied marvellously.”
+
+Though the ballad, in Rossetti’s own writing, has ever since remained in
+my possession, as have also the two sonnets in the MS. of another friend
+who has since, I am delighted to know, achieved fame for himself, no one
+who enjoyed the intimate friendship of Rossetti need be told that his
+death took from me all heart to publish.
+
+Time, however, is the suzerain before whom every king, even Sorrow
+himself, bows at last.  The rights of Rossetti’s admirers can no longer
+be set at nought, and I am making arrangements to publish within the
+present year ‘Jan Van Hunks’ and the ‘Sphinx Sonnets,’ the former of
+which will show a new and, I think, unexpected side of Rossetti’s genius.
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+It is a sweet and comforting thought for every poet that, whether or not
+the public cares during his life to read his verses, it will after his
+death care very much to read his letters to his mistress, to his wife, to
+his relatives, to his friends, to his butcher, and to his baker.  And
+some letters are by that same public held to be more precious than
+others.  If, for instance, it has chanced that during the poet’s life he,
+like Rossetti, had to borrow thirty shillings from a friend, that is a
+circumstance of especial piquancy.  The public likes—or rather it
+demands—to know all about that borrowed cash.  Hence it behoves the
+properly equipped editor who understands his duty to see that not one
+allusion to it in the poet’s correspondence is omitted.  If he can also
+show what caused the poet to borrow those thirty shillings—if he can by
+learned annotations show whether the friend in question lent the sum
+willingly or unwillingly, conveniently or inconveniently—if he can show
+whether the loan was ever repaid, and if repaid when—he will be a happy
+editor indeed.  Then he will find a large and a grateful public to whom
+the mood in which the poet sat down to write ‘The Blessed Damosel’ is of
+far less interest than the mood in which he borrowed thirty shillings.
+
+We do not charge the editor of this volume {104} with exhibiting unusual
+want of taste.  On the whole, he is less irritating to the poetical
+student than those who have laboured in kindred “fields of literature.”
+Indeed, we do not so much blame the editors of such books as we blame the
+public, whose coarse and vulgar mouth is always agape for such pabulum.
+The writer of this review possesses an old circulating-library copy of a
+book containing some letters of Coleridge.  One page, and one only, is
+greatly disfigured by thumb marks.  It is the page on which appears, not
+some precious hint as to the conclusion of ‘Christabel,’ but a domestic
+missive of Coleridge’s ordering broad beans for dinner.
+
+If, then, the name of those readers who take an interest in broad beans
+is legion compared with the name of those who take an interest in ‘Kubla
+Khan,’ is not the wise editor he who gives all due attention to the
+poet’s favourite vegetable?  Those who will read with avidity Rossetti’s
+allusion to his wife’s confinement in the letter in which he tells
+Allingham that “the child had been dead for two or three weeks” will
+laugh to scorn the above remarks, and as they are in the majority the
+laugh is with them.
+
+The editor of this volume laments that Allingham’s letters to Rossetti
+are beyond all editorial reach.  But who has any right to ask for
+Allingham’s private letters?  Rossetti, who was strongly against the
+printing of private letters, had the wholesome practice of burning all
+his correspondence.  This he did at periodical holocausts—memorable
+occasions when the coruscations of the poet’s wit made the sparks from
+the burning paper seem pale and dull.  He died away from home, or not a
+scrap of correspondence would have been left for the publishers.
+Although the “public” acknowledges no duties towards the man of literary
+or artistic genius, but would shrug up its shoulders or look with dismay
+at being asked to give five pounds in order to keep a poet from the
+workhouse, the moment a man of genius becomes famous the public becomes
+aware of certain rights in relation to him.  Strangely enough, these
+rights are recognized more fully in the literary arena than anywhere
+else, and among them the chief appears to be that of reading an author’s
+private letters.  One advantage—and surely it is a very great one—that
+the “writing man” has over the man of action is this: that, while the
+portrait of the man of action has to be painted, if painted at all, by
+the biographer, the writing man paints his own portrait for himself.
+
+And as, in a deep sense, every biographer is an inventor like the
+novelist—as from the few facts that he is able to collect he infers a
+character—the man of action, after he is dead, is at the mercy of every
+man who writes his life.  Is not Alexander the Great no less a figment of
+another man’s brain than Achilles, or Macbeth, or Mr. Pickwick?  But a
+poet, howsoever artistic, howsoever dramatic, the form of his work may
+be, is occupied during his entire life in painting his own portrait.  And
+if it were not for the intervention of the biographer, the reminiscence
+writer, or the collector of letters for publication, our conception of
+every poet would be true and vital according to the intelligence with
+which we read his work.
+
+This is why, of all English poets, Shakespeare is the only one whom we do
+thoroughly know—unless perhaps we should except his two great
+contemporaries Webster and Marlowe.  Steevens did not exaggerate when he
+said that all we know of Shakespeare’s outer life is that he was born at
+Stratford-on-Avon, married, went to London, wrote plays, returned to
+Stratford, and died.  Owing to this circumstance (and a blessed one it
+is) we can commune with the greatest of our poets undisturbed.  We know
+how Shakespeare confronted every circumstance of this mysterious life—we
+know how he confronted the universe, seen and unseen—we know to what
+degree and in what way he felt every human passion.  There is no careless
+letter of his, thank God! to give us a wrong impression of him.  There is
+no record of his talk at the Mermaid, the Falcon, or the Apollo saloon to
+make readers doubtful whether his printed utterances truly represent him.
+Would that the will had been destroyed! then there would have been no
+talk about the “second-best bed” and the like insane gabble.  Suppose, by
+ill chance, a batch of his letters to Anna Hathaway had been preserved.
+Is it not a moral certainty that they would have been as uninteresting as
+the letters of Coleridge, of Scott, of Dickens, of Rossetti, and of
+Rossetti’s sister?
+
+Why are the letters of literary men apt to be so much less interesting
+than those of other people?  Is it not because, the desire to express
+oneself in written language being universal, this desire with people
+outside the literary class has to be of necessity exercised in
+letter-writing?  Is it not because, where there is no other means of
+written expression than that of letter-writing, the best efforts of the
+letter-writer are put into the composition, as the best writing of the
+essayist is put into his essays?  However this might have been in
+Shakespeare’s time, the half-conscious, graphic power of the non-literary
+letter-writer of to-day is often so great that if all the letters written
+in English by non-literary people, especially letters written from abroad
+to friends at home in the year 1897, {108} were collected, and the cream
+of them extracted and printed, the book would be the most precious
+literary production that the year has to show.  If, on the other hand,
+the letters of contemporary English authors were collected in the same
+way, the poverty of the book would be amazing as compared with the
+published writings of the authors.  With regard to Dickens’s letters,
+indeed, the contrast between their commonplace, colourless style and the
+pregnancy of his printed utterances makes the writing in his books seem
+forced, artificial, unnatural.
+
+The same may in some degree be said of such letters of Rossetti as have
+hitherto been published.  The charming family letters printed by his
+brother come, of course, under a different category.  With the exception
+of these, perhaps the letters in the volume before us are the most
+interesting Rossetti letters that have been printed.  Yet it is
+astonishing how feeble they are in giving the reader an idea of Rossetti
+himself.  And this gives birth to the question: Do we not live at a time
+when the unfairness of printing an author’s letters is greater than it
+ever was before?  To go no further back than the early years of the
+present century, the facilities of locomotion were then few, friends were
+necessarily separated from each other by long intervals of time, and
+letters were a very important part of intercommunication, consequently it
+might be expected that even among authors a good deal of a man’s
+individuality would be expressed in his letters.  But even at that period
+it was only a quite exceptional nature like that of Charles Lamb which
+adequately expressed itself in epistolary form.  Keats’s letters, no
+doubt, are full of good sense and good criticism, but taking them as a
+body, including the letters to Fanny Brawne, we think it were better if
+they had been totally destroyed.  As to Byron’s letters, they, of course,
+are admirable in style and full of literary life, but their very
+excellence shows that his natural mode of expression was brilliant,
+slashing prose.  But if it was unfair to publish the letters of Coleridge
+and Keats, what shall we say of the publication of letters written by the
+authors of our own day, when, owing to an entire change in the conditions
+of life, no one dreams of putting into his letters anything of literary
+interest?
+
+When Rossetti died he was, as regards the public, owing to his
+exclusiveness, much in the same position as Shakespeare has always been.
+The picture of Rossetti that lived in the public mind was that of a poet
+and painter of extraordinary imaginative intensity and magic, whose
+personality, as romantic as his work, influenced all who came in contact
+with him.  He was, indeed, the only romantic figure in the imagination of
+the literary and art world of his time.  It seemed as if in his very name
+there was an unaccountable music.  The present writer well remembers
+being at a dinner-party many years ago when the late Lord Leighton was
+talking in his usual delightful way.  His conversation was specially
+attended to only by his interlocutor, until the name of Rossetti fell
+from his lips.  Then the general murmur of tongues ceased.  Everybody
+wanted to hear what was being said about the mysterious poet-painter.
+Thus matters stood when Rossetti died.  Within forty-eight hours of his
+death the many-headed beast clamoured for its rights.  Within forty-eight
+hours of his death there was a leading article in an important newspaper
+on the subject of his suspiciousness as the result of chloral-drinking.
+And from that moment the romance has been rubbed off the picture as
+effectually by many of those who have written about him as the bloom is
+fingered off of a clumsily gathered peach.
+
+But the reader will say, “Truth is great, and must prevail.  The picture
+of Rossetti that now exists in the public mind is the true one.  The
+former picture was a lie.”  But here the reader will be much mistaken.
+The romantic picture which existed in the public mind during Rossetti’s
+life was the true one; the picture that now exists of him is false.
+
+Does any one want to know what kind of a man was the painter of ‘Dante’s
+Dream’ and the poet of ‘The Blessed Damosel,’ let him wipe out of his
+mind most of what has been written about him, let him forget if he can
+most of the Rossetti letters that have been published, and let him read
+the poet’s poems and study the painter’s pictures, and he will know
+Rossetti—not, indeed, so thoroughly as we know Shakespeare and Æschylus
+and Sophocles, but as intimately as it is possible to know any man whose
+biography is written only in his works.
+
+It must be admitted, however, that for those who had a personal knowledge
+of Rossetti some of the letters in this volume will have an interest,
+owing to the evidence they afford of that authorial generosity which was
+one of his most beautiful characteristics.  His disinterested
+appreciation of the work of his contemporaries sets him apart from all
+the other poets of his time and perhaps of any other time.  To wax
+eloquent in praise of this and that illustrious name, and thus to claim a
+kind of kinship with it, is a very different thing from Rossetti’s noble
+championship of a name, whether that of a friend or otherwise, which has
+never emerged from obscurity.  It is perhaps inevitable and in the nature
+of things that most poets are too much absorbed in their own work to have
+time to interest themselves in the doings of their fellow-workers.
+
+But, with regard to Rossetti, he could feel, and often did feel, as deep
+an interest in the work of another man as in his own.  There was no
+trouble he would not take to aid a friend in gaining recognition.  This
+it was more than anything else which endeared him to all his friends, and
+made them condone those faults of his which ever since his death have
+been so freely discussed.  The editor of this volume quotes this sentence
+from Skelton’s ‘Table-Talk of Shirley’:—
+
+    “I have preserved a number of Rossetti’s letters, and there is barely
+    one, I think, which is not mainly devoted to warm commendation of
+    obscure poets and painters—obscure at the time of writing, but of
+    whom more than one has since become famous.”
+
+Nor was his interest in other men’s work confined to that of his personal
+friends.  His discovery of Browning’s ‘Pauline,’ of Charles Wells, and of
+the poems of Ebenezer Jones may be cited as instances of this.  Moreover,
+he was always looking out in magazines—some of them of the most obscure
+kind—for good work.  And if he was rewarded, as he sometimes was, by
+coming upon precious things that might otherwise have been lost, his
+heart was rejoiced.
+
+One day, having turned into a coffee-house in Chancery Lane to get a cup
+of coffee, he came upon a number of _Reynolds’s Miscellany_, and finding
+there a poem called ‘A Lover’s Pastime,’ he saw at once its extraordinary
+beauty, and enclosed it in a letter to Allingham.  In this case, however,
+he unfortunately did not make his usual efforts to discover the
+authorship of a poem that pleased him; and a pity it is, for the poem is
+one of the loveliest lyrics that have been written in modern times.  We
+hope it will find a place in the next anthology of lyrical poetry.
+
+Though his criticisms were not always sure and impeccable, he was of all
+critics the most independent of authority.  Had he chanced to find in the
+poets’ corner of _The Eatanswill Gazette_ a lyric equal to the best of
+Shelley’s, he would have recognized its merits at once and proclaimed
+them; and had he come across a lyric of Shelley’s that had received
+unmerited applause, he would have recognized its demerits for himself,
+and proclaimed them with equal candour and fearlessness.
+
+Again, certain passages in these letters will surprise the reader by
+throwing light upon a side of Rossetti’s life and character which was
+only known to his intimate friends.  Recluse as Rossetti came to be, he
+knew more of “London life” in the true sense of the word than did many of
+those who were supposed to know it well—diners-out like Browning, for
+instance, and Richard Doyle.  That the author of ‘The House of Life’ knew
+London on the side that Dickens knew it better than any other poet of his
+time will no doubt surprise many a reader.  His visits to Jamrach’s mart
+for wild animals led him to explore the wonderful world, that so few
+people ever dream of, which lies around Ratcliffe Highway.  He observed
+with the greatest zest the movements of the East-End swarm.  Moreover,
+his passion for picking up “curios” and antique furniture made him
+familiar with quarters of London that he would otherwise have never
+known.  And not Dickens himself had more of what may be called the
+“Haroun al Raschid passion” for wandering through a city’s streets at
+night.  It was this that kept him in touch on one side with men so unlike
+him as Brough and Sala.
+
+In this volume there is a charming anecdote of his generosity to Brough’s
+family, and Sala always spoke of him as “dear Dante Rossetti.”  The
+transpontine theatre, even the penny gaff of the New Cut, was not quite
+unfamiliar with the face of the poet-painter.  Hence no man was a better
+judge than he of the low-life pictures of a writer like F. W. Robinson,
+whose descriptions of the street arab in ‘Owen, a Waif,’ &c., he would
+read aloud with a dramatic power astonishing to those who associated him
+exclusively with Dante, Beatrice, and mystical passion.
+
+Frequently in these letters an allusion will puzzle the reader who does
+not know of Rossetti’s love of nocturnal rambling, an allusion, however,
+which those who knew him will fully understand.  Here is a sentence of
+the kind:—
+
+    “As I haven’t been outside my door for months in the daytime, I
+    should not have had much opportunity of enjoying pastime and
+    pleasaunces.”
+
+The editor quotes some graphic and interesting words from Mr. W. M.
+Rossetti which explain this passage.
+
+In summer, as in winter, he rose very late in the day and made a
+breakfast, as he used to say, which was to keep him in fuel for something
+under twelve hours.  He would then begin to paint, and scarcely leave his
+work till the daylight waned.  Then he would dine, and afterwards start
+off for a walk through the London streets, which to him, as he used to
+say, put on a magical robe with the lighting of the gas lamps.  After
+walking for miles through the streets, either with a friend or alone,
+loitering at the windows of such shops as still were open, he would turn
+into an oyster shop or late restaurant for supper.  Here his frankness of
+bearing was quite irresistible with strangers whenever it pleased him to
+approach them, as he sometimes did.  The most singular and bizarre
+incidents of his life occurred to him on these occasions—incidents which
+he would relate with a dramatic power that set him at the head of the
+_raconteurs_ of his time.  One of these _rencontres_ in the Haymarket was
+of a quite extraordinary character.
+
+In the latter years of his life, when he lived at Cheyne Walk, he would
+often not begin his perambulations until an hour before midnight.  It
+will be a pity if some one who accompanied him in his nocturnal
+rambles—the most remarkable man of our time—does not furnish the world
+with reminiscences of them.
+
+Another point of interest upon which these letters will throw light is
+that connected with his method of work.  He himself, like Tennyson, used
+to say that those who are the most curious as to the way in which a poem
+was written are precisely those who have the least appreciation of the
+beauties of the poem itself.  If this is true, the time in which we live
+is not remarkable, perhaps, for its appreciation of poetry.  These
+letters, at any rate, will be appreciated, for the light that some of
+them throw upon Rossetti at work is remarkable.  When a subject for a
+poem struck him, it was his way to make a prose note of it, then to
+cartoon it, then to leave it for a time, then to take it up again and
+read it to his friends, and then to finish it.  In a letter to Allingham,
+dated July 18th, 1854, enclosing the first form of the sonnet called
+‘Lost on Both Sides’—which sonnet did not appear in print till
+1881—Rossetti says: “My sonnets are not generally finished till I see
+them again after forgetting them; and this is only two days old.  When
+between the first form of a sonnet and the second an interval of
+twenty-seven years elapses, no student of poetry can fail to compare one
+form with the other.
+
+And so with regard to that poem which is, on the whole, Rossetti’s
+masterpiece—‘Sister Helen’—sent as early as 1854 to Mrs. Howitt for the
+German publication the _Düsseldorf Annual_; the changes in it are
+extremely interesting.  Never did it appear in print without suffering
+some important variation.  Sometimes, indeed, the change of a word or two
+in a line would entirely transfigure the stanza.  As to the new stanzas
+added to the ballad just before Rossetti’s death, these turned the ballad
+from a fine poem into a great one.
+
+Equally striking are the changes in ‘The Blessed Damosel.’  But the most
+notable example of the surety of his hand in revising is seen in regard
+to a poem several times mentioned in this volume, called originally
+‘Bride’s Chamber Talk.’  It was begun as early as ‘Jenny,’ read by
+Allingham in 1860, but not printed till more than a quarter of a century
+later.  The earliest form is still in existence in MS., and although some
+of the lines struck out are as poetry most lovely, the poem on the whole
+is better without them.  It was a theory of Rossetti’s, indeed, that the
+very riches of the English language made it necessary for the poet who
+would achieve excellence to revise and manipulate his lines.  And in
+support of this he would contrast the amazing passion for revision
+disclosed by Dr. Garnett’s ‘Relics of Shelley,’ in which sometimes
+scarcely half a dozen of the original words are left on a page, with
+Scott’s metrical narratives, which were sent to the printer in cantos as
+they were written, like one of the contemporary novels thrown off for the
+serials.  The fact seems to be, however, that the poet’s power of
+reaching, as Scott reached, his own ideal expression _per saltum_, or
+reaching it slowly and tentatively, is simply a matter of temperament.
+For whose verses are more loose-jointed than Byron’s? whose diction is
+more commonplace than his?  And yet this is what the greatest of Byron
+specialists, Mr John Murray, says in his extremely interesting remarks
+upon Byron’s autograph:—
+
+    “If we except Byron’s dramatic pieces and ‘Don Juan,’ the first draft
+    of Byron’s longer poems formed but a nucleus of the work as it was
+    printed.  For example, ‘English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ grew out
+    of the ‘British Bards,’ while ‘The Giaour,’ by constant additions to
+    the manuscript, the proofs, and even to the work after publication,
+    was expanded to nearly twice its original size. . . . When the
+    inspiration was on him, the printer had to be kept at work the
+    greater part of the night, and fresh ‘copy’ and fresh revises were
+    crossing one another hour by hour.”
+
+The conclusion is that poets cannot be classified according to their
+methods of work, but only in relation to the result of those methods, and
+that our two great elaborators, Byron and Rossetti, may still be more
+unlike each other in essentials than are any other two nineteenth-century
+poets.
+
+On the whole, we cannot help closing this book with kindly feelings
+towards the editor, inasmuch as it aids in the good work of restoring the
+true portrait of the man who has suffered more than any other from the
+mischievous malignity of foes and the more mischievous indiscretion of
+certain of his friends.
+
+
+
+
+III.  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.
+1809–1892.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+Charles Lamb was so paralyzed, it is said, by Coleridge’s death, that for
+weeks after that event, he was heard murmuring often to himself,
+“Coleridge is dead, Coleridge is dead.”  In such a mental condition at
+this moment is an entire country, I think.  “Tennyson is dead!  Tennyson
+is dead!”  It will be some time before England’s loss can really be
+expressed by any words so powerful in pathos and in sorrow as these.  And
+if this is so with regard to English people generally, what of those few
+who knew the man, and knowing him, must needs love him—must needs love
+him above all others?—those, I mean, who, when speaking of him, used to
+talk not so much about the poetry as about the man who wrote it—those who
+now are saying, with a tremor of the voice, and a moistening of the eye:—
+
+    There was none like him—none.
+
+ [Picture: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, æt. 80.  From a photography reproduced
+                 by the kind permission of Lord Tennyson]
+
+To say wherein lies the secret of the charm of anything that lives is
+mostly difficult.  Especially is it so with regard to a man of poetic
+genius.  All are agreed, for instance, that D. G. Rossetti possessed an
+immense charm.  So he did, indeed.  But who has been able to define that
+charm?  I, too, knew Rossetti well, and loved him well.  Sometimes,
+indeed, the egotism of a sorrowing memory makes me think that outside his
+own most affectionate and noble-tempered family, including that old
+friend in art at whose feet he sat as a boy, no man loved Rossetti so
+deeply and so lastingly as I did; unless, perhaps, it was the poor blind
+poet, Philip Marston, who, being so deeply stricken, needed to love and
+to be loved more sorely than I, to whom Fate has been kind.  And yet I
+should find it difficult to say wherein lay the charm of Rossetti’s
+chameleon-like personality.  So with other men and women I could name.
+This is not so in regard to the great man now lying dead at Aldworth.
+Nothing is easier than to define the charm of Tennyson.
+
+It lay in a great veracity of soul—in a simple-mindedness so childlike
+that, unless you had known him to be the undoubted author of his
+exquisitely artistic poems, you would have supposed that even the
+subtleties of poetic art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of all
+subtlety as his.  “Homer,” you would have said, “might have been such a
+man as this, for Homer worked in a language which is Poetry’s very voice.
+But Tennyson works in a language which has to be moulded into harmony by
+a myriad subtleties of art.  How can this great inspired child, who yet
+has the simple wisdom of Bragi, the poetry-smith of the Northern Olympus,
+be the delicate-fingered artist of ‘The Princess,’ ‘The Palace of Art,’
+‘The Day-Dream,’ and ‘The Dream of Fair Women’?”
+
+As deeply as some men feel that language was given to men to disguise
+their thoughts did Tennyson feel that language was given to _him_ to
+declare his thoughts without disguise.  He knew of but one justification
+for the thing he said, viz., that it was the thing he thought.  _Arrière
+pensée_ was with him impossible.  But, it may be asked, when a man
+carries out-speaking to such a pass as this, is he not apt to become a
+somewhat troublesome and discordant thread in the complex web of modern
+society?  No doubt any other man than Tennyson would have been so.  But
+the honest ring in the voice—which, by-the-by, was strengthened and
+deepened by the old-fashioned Lincolnshire accent—softened and, to a
+great degree, neutralized the effect of the bluntness.  Moreover, behind
+this uncompromising directness was apparent a noble and a splendid
+courtesy; for, above all things, Tennyson was a great and forthright
+English gentleman.  As he stood at the porch at Aldworth, meeting a guest
+or bidding him good-bye—as he stood there, tall, far beyond the height of
+average men, his naturally fair skin showing dark and tanned by the sun
+and wind—as he stood there no one could mistake him for anything but a
+great gentleman, who was also much more.  Up to the last a man of
+extraordinary presence, he showed, I think, the beauty of old age to a
+degree rarely seen.
+
+A friend of his who, visiting him on his birthday, discovered him thus
+standing at the door to welcome him, has described his unique appearance
+in words which are literally accurate at least:—
+
+    A poet should be limned in youth, they say,
+       Or else in prime, with eyes and forehead beaming
+       Of manhood’s noon—the very body seeming
+    To lend the spirit wings to win the bay;
+    But here stands he whose noontide blooms for aye,
+       Whose eyes, where past and future both are gleaming
+       With lore beyond all youthful poets’ dreaming,
+    Seem lit from shores of some far-glittering day.
+
+    Our master’s prime is now—is ever now;
+       Our star that wastes not in the wastes of night
+       Holds Nature’s dower undimmed in Time’s despite;
+    Those eyes seem Wisdom’s own beneath that brow,
+    Where every furrow Time hath dared to plough
+       Shines a new bar of still diviner light.
+
+This, then, was the secret of Tennyson’s personal charm.  And if the
+reader is sceptical as to its magnetic effect upon his friends, let me
+remind him of the amazing rarity of these great and guileless natures;
+let me remind him also that this world is comprised of two classes of
+people—the bores, whose name is legion, and the interesting people, whose
+name is _not_ legion—the former being those whose natural instinct of
+self-protective mimicry impels them to move about among their fellows
+hiding their features behind a mask of convention, the latter being those
+who move about with uncovered faces just as Nature fashioned them.  If
+guilelessness lends interest to a dullard, it is still more so with the
+really luminous souls.  So infinite is the creative power of nature that
+she makes no two individuals alike.  If we only had the power of
+inquiring into the matter, we should find not only that each individual
+creature that once inhabited one of the minute shells that go to the
+building of England’s fortress walls of chalk was absolutely unlike all
+the others, but that even the poor microbe himself, who in these days is
+so maligned, is also very intensely an individual.
+
+Some time ago the old discussion was revived in _The Athenæum_ as to
+whether the nightingale’s song was joyful or melancholy.  And, perhaps,
+if the poems of the late James Thomson and the poems of Mr. Austin Dobson
+were recited by their authors to a congregation of nightingales, the
+question would at once be debated amongst them, “Is the note of the human
+songster joyful or melancholy?”  The truth is that the humidity or the
+dryness of the atmosphere in the various habitats of the nightingale
+modifies so greatly the _timbre_ of the voice that, while a nightingale
+chorus at Fiesole may seem joyous, a nightingale chorus in the moist
+thickets along the banks of the Ouse may seem melancholy.  Nay, more, as
+I once told Tennyson at Aldworth, I, when a truant boy wandering along
+the banks of the Ouse (where six nightingales’ nests have been found in
+the hedge of a single meadow), got so used to these matters that I had my
+own favourite individuals, and could easily distinguish one from another.
+That rich climacteric swell which is reached just before the “jug, jug,
+jug,” varies amazingly, if the listener will only give the matter
+attention.  And if this infinite variety of individualism is thus seen in
+the lower animals, what must it be in man?
+
+There is, however, in the entire human race, a fatal instinct for marring
+itself.  To break down the exterior signs of this variety of
+individualism in the race by mutual imitation, by all sorts of
+affectations, is the object not only of the civilization of the Western
+world, but of the very negroes on the Gaboon River.  No wonder, then,
+that whensoever we meet, as at rarest interval we do meet, an individual
+who is able to preserve his personality as Nature meant it to live, we
+feel an attraction towards him such as is irresistible.  Now I would
+challenge those who knew him to say whether they ever knew any other man
+so free from this great human infirmity as Tennyson.  The way in which
+his simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances,
+most remarkable.  Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism of
+the artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemed
+impossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took among
+contemporary writers all over the world.  “Poets,” he once said to me,
+“have not had the advantage of being _born_ to the purple.”  Up to the
+last he felt himself to be a poet at struggle more or less with the
+Wilsons and the Crokers who, in his youth, assailed him.  I, and a very
+dear friend of his, a family connexion, tried in vain to make him see
+that when a poet had reached a position such as he had won, no criticism
+could injure him or benefit him one jot.
+
+What has been called his exclusiveness is entirely mythical.  He was the
+most hospitable of men.  It was very rare, indeed, for him to part from a
+friend at his hall door, or at the railway station without urging him to
+return as soon as possible, and generally with the words, “Come whenever
+you like.”  The fact is, however, that for many years the strangest
+notions seem to have got abroad as to the claims of the public upon men
+of genius.  There seems now to be scarcely any one who does not look upon
+every man who has passed into the purgatory of fame as his or her common
+property.  The unlucky victim is to be pestered by letters upon every
+sort of foolish subject, and to be hunted down in his walks and insulted
+by senseless adulation.  Tennyson resented this, and so did Rossetti, and
+so ought every man who has reached eminence and respects his own genius.
+Neither fame nor life itself is worth having on such terms as these.
+
+One day, Tennyson when walking round his garden at Farringford, saw
+perched up in the trees that surrounded it, two men who had been refused
+admittance at the gate—two men dressed like gentlemen.  He very wisely
+gave the public to understand that his fame was not to be taken as an
+abrogation of his rights as a private English gentleman.  For my part,
+whenever I hear any one railing against a man of eminence with whom he
+cannot possibly have been brought into contact, I know at once what it
+means: the railer has been writing an idle letter to the eminent one and
+received no reply.
+
+Tennyson’s knowledge of nature—nature in every aspect—was very great.
+His passion for “star-gazing” has often been commented upon by readers of
+his poetry.  Since Dante no poet in any land has so loved the stars.  He
+had an equal delight in watching the lightning; and I remember being at
+Aldworth once during a thunderstorm, when I was alarmed at the temerity
+with which he persisted, in spite of all remonstrances, in gazing at the
+blinding lightning.  For moonlight effects he had a passion equally
+strong, and it is especially pathetic to those who know this to remember
+that he passed away in the light he so loved—in a room where there was no
+artificial light—nothing to quicken the darkness but the light of the
+full moon (which somehow seems to shine more brightly at Aldworth than
+anywhere else in England); and that on the face of the poet, as he passed
+away, fell that radiance in which he so loved to bathe it when alive.
+
+If it is as easy to describe the personal attraction of Tennyson as it is
+difficult to describe that of any one of his great contemporaries, we do
+not find the same relations existing between him and them as regards his
+place in the firmament of English poetry.  In a country with a composite
+language such as ours, it may be affirmed with special emphasis, that
+there are two kinds of poetry; one appealing to the uncultivated masses,
+whose vocabulary is of the narrowest; the other appealing to the few who,
+partly by temperament, and partly by education, are sensitive to the true
+beauties of poetic art.  While in the one case the appeal is made through
+a free and popular use of words, partly commonplace and partly steeped in
+that literary sentimentalism which in certain stages of an artificial
+society takes the place of the simple utterances of simple passion of
+earlier and simpler times; in the other case the appeal is made very
+largely through what Dante calls the “use of the sieve for noble words.”
+
+Of the one perhaps Byron is the type, the exemplars being such poets as
+those of the Mrs. Hemans school in England, and of the Longfellow school
+in America.  Of the other class of poets, the class typified by Milton,
+the most notable exemplars are Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge.  Wordsworth
+partakes of the qualities of both classes.  The methods of the first of
+these two groups are so cheap—they are so based on the wide severance
+between the popular taste and the poetic temper (which, though in earlier
+times it inspired the people, is now confined to the few)—that one may
+say of the first group that their success in finding and holding an
+audience is almost damnatory to them as poets.  As compared with the
+poets of Greece, however, both groups may be said to have secured only a
+partial success in poetry; for not only Æschylus and Sophocles, but Homer
+too, are as satisfying in the matter of noble words as though they had
+never tried to win that popular success which was their goal.  In this
+respect—as being, I mean, the compeer of the great poets of
+Greece—Shakespeare takes his peculiar place in English poetry.  Of all
+poets he is the most popular, and yet in his use of the “sieve for noble
+words” his skill transcends that of even Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, and
+Keats.  His felicities of diction in the great passages seem little short
+of miraculous, and they are so many that it is easy to understand why he
+is so often spoken of as being a kind of inspired improvisatore.  That he
+was _not_ an improvisatore, however, any one can see who will take the
+trouble to compare the first edition of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with the
+received text, the first sketch of ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ with the
+play as we now have it, and the ‘Hamlet’ of 1603 with the ‘Hamlet’ of
+1604, and with the still further varied version of the play given by
+Heminge and Condell in the Folio of 1623.  If we take into account,
+moreover, that it is only by the lucky chapter of accidents that we now
+possess the earlier forms of the three plays mentioned above, and that
+most likely the other plays were once in a like condition, we shall come
+to the conclusion that there was no more vigilant worker with Dante’s
+sieve than Shakespeare.  Next to Shakespeare in this great power of
+combining the forces of the two great classes of English poets, appealing
+both to the commonplace sense of a commonplace public and to the artistic
+sense of the few, stands, perhaps, Chaucer; but since Shakespeare’s time
+no one has met with anything like Tennyson’s success in effecting a
+reconciliation between popular and artistic sympathy with poetry in
+England.
+
+The biography of such a poet, one who has had such an immense influence
+upon the literary history of the entire Victorian epoch—indeed, upon the
+nineteenth century, for his work covers two-thirds of the century—will be
+a work of incalculable importance.  There is but one man who is fully
+equipped for such an undertaking, and fortunately that is his own son—a
+man of great ability, of admirable critical acumen, and of quite
+exceptional accomplishments.  His son’s filial affection was so precious
+to Tennyson that, although the poet’s powers remained undimmed to the
+last day of his life, I do not believe that we should have had all the
+splendid work of the last ten years without his affectionate and
+unwearied aid.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+All emotion—that of communities as well as that of individuals—is largely
+governed by the laws of ebb and flow.  It is immediately after a national
+mourning for the loss of a great man that a wave of reaction generally
+sets in.  But the eagerness with which these volumes {132} have been
+awaited shows that Tennyson’s hold upon the British public is as strong
+at this moment as it was on the day of his death.  This very popularity
+of his, however, has sometimes been spoken of by critics as though it
+were an impeachment of him as a poet.  “The English public is
+commonplace,” they say, “and hence the commonplace in poetry suits it.”
+And no doubt this is true as a general saying, otherwise what would
+become of certain English poetasters who are such a joy to the many and
+such a source of laughter to the few?  But a hardy critic would he be who
+should characterize Tennyson’s poetry as commonplace—that very poetry
+which, before it became popular, was decried because it was merely
+“poetry for poets.”  Still that poetry so rich and so rare as his should
+find its way to the heart of a people like the English, who have “not
+sufficient poetic instinct in them to give birth to vernacular poetry,”
+is undoubtedly a striking fact.  With regard to the mass of his work, he
+belonged to those poets whose appeal is as much through their mastery
+over the more subtle beauties of poetic art as through the heat of the
+poetic fire; and such as these must expect to share the fate of
+Coleridge, Keats, and Shelley.  Every true poet must have an individual
+accent of his own—an accent which is, however, recognizable as another
+variation of that large utterance of the early gods common to all true
+poets in all tongues.  Is it not, then, in the nature of things that, in
+England at least, “the fit though few” comprise the audience of such a
+poet until the voice of recognized Authority proclaims him?  But
+Authority moves slowly in these matters; years have to pass before the
+music of the new voice can wind its way through the convolutions of the
+general ear—so many years, indeed, that unless the poet is blessed with
+the sublime self-esteem of Wordsworth he generally has to die in the
+belief that his is another name “written in water.”  And was it always
+so?  Yes, always.
+
+England having, as we have said, no vernacular song, her poetry is
+entirely artistic, even such poetry as ‘The May Queen,’ ‘The Northern
+Farmer,’ and the idyls of William Barnes.  And it would be strange indeed
+if, until Authority spoke out, the beauties of artistic poetry were ever
+apparent to the many.  Is it supposable, for instance, that even the
+voice of Chaucer—is it supposable that even the voice of Shakspeare—would
+have succeeded in winning the contemporary ear had it not been for that
+great mass of legendary and romantic material which each of these found
+ready to his hand, waiting to be moulded into poetic form?  The fate,
+however, of Moore’s poetical narratives (perhaps we might say of Byron’s
+too) shows that if any poetry is to last beyond the generation that
+produced it, there is needed not only the romantic material, but also the
+accent, new and true, of the old poetic voice.  And these volumes show
+why in these late days, when the poet’s inheritance of romantic material
+seemed to have been exhausted, there appeared one poet to whom the
+English public gave an acceptance as wide almost as if he had written in
+the vernacular like Burns or Béranger.
+
+It is long since any book has been so eagerly looked forward to as this.
+The main facts of Tennyson’s life have been matter of familiar knowledge
+for so many years that we do not propose to run over them here once more.
+Nor shall we fill the space at our command with the biographer’s
+interesting personal anecdotes.  So fierce a light had been beating upon
+Aldworth and Farringford that the relations of the present Lord Tennyson
+to his father were pretty generally known.  In the story of English
+poetry these relations held a place that was quite unique.  What the
+biographer says about the poet’s sagacity, judgment, and good
+sense—especially what he says about his insight into the characters of
+those with whom he was brought into contact—will be challenged by no one
+who knew him.  Still, the fact remains that Tennyson’s temperament was
+poetic entirely.  And the more attention the poet pays to his art, the
+more unfitted does he become to pay attention to anything else.  For in
+these days the mechanism of social life moves on grating wheels that need
+no little oiling if the poet is to bring out the very best that is within
+him.  Not that all poets are equally vexed by the special infirmity of
+the poetic temperament.  Poets like Wordsworth, for instance, are
+supported against the world by love of Nature and by that “divine
+arrogance” which is sometimes a characteristic of genius.  Tennyson’s
+case shows that not even love of Nature and intimate communings with her
+are of use in giving a man peace when he has not Wordsworth’s
+temperament.  No adverse criticism could disturb Wordsworth’s sublime
+self-complacency.
+
+“Your father,” writes Jowett, with his usual wisdom, to Lord Tennyson,
+“was very sensitive, and had an honest hatred of being gossiped about.
+He called the malignant critics and chatterers ‘mosquitos.’  He never
+felt any pleasure at praise (except from his friends), but he felt a
+great pain at the injustice of censure.  It never occurred to him that a
+new poet in the days of his youth was sure to provoke dangerous
+hostilities in the ‘genus irritabile vatum’ and in the old-fashioned
+public.”
+
+It might almost be said, indeed, that had it not been for the
+ministrations, first of his beloved wife, and then of his sons,
+Tennyson’s life would have been one long warfare between the attitude of
+his splendid intellect towards the universe and the response of his
+nervous system to human criticism.  From his very childhood he seems to
+have had that instinct for confronting the universe as a whole which,
+except in the case of Shakespeare, is not often seen among poets.
+Star-gazing and speculation as to the meaning of the stars and what was
+going on in them seem to have begun in his childhood.  In his first
+Cambridge letter to his aunt, Mrs. Russell, written from No. 12, Rose
+Crescent, he says, “I am sitting owl-like and solitary in my room,
+nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles.”  And his son
+tells us of a story current in the family that Frederick, when an Eton
+schoolboy, was shy of going to a neighbouring dinner-party to which he
+had been invited.  “Fred,” said his younger brother, “think of Herschel’s
+great star-patches, and you will soon get over all that.”  He had
+Wordsworth’s passion, too, for communing with Nature alone.  He was one
+of Nature’s elect who knew that even the company of a dear and intimate
+friend, howsoever close, is a disturbance of the delight that intercourse
+with her can afford to the true devotee.  In a letter to his future wife,
+written from Mablethorpe in 1839, he says:—
+
+    “I am not so able as in old years to commune _alone_ with Nature . . .
+    Dim mystic sympathies with tree and hill reaching far back into
+    childhood, a known landskip is to me an old friend, that continually
+    talks to me of my own youth and half-forgotten things, and indeed
+    does more for me than many an old friend that I know.  An old park is
+    my delight, and I could tumble about it for ever.”
+
+Moreover, he was always speculating upon the mystery and the wonder of
+the human story.  “The far future,” he says in a letter to Miss Sellwood,
+written from High Beech in Epping Forest, “has been my world always.”
+And yet so powerless is reason in that dire wrestle with temperament
+which most poets know, that with all these causes for despising criticism
+of his work, Tennyson was as sensitive to critical strictures as
+Wordsworth was indifferent.  “He fancied,” says his biographer, “that
+England was an unsympathetic atmosphere, and half resolved to live abroad
+in Jersey, in the South of France, or in Italy.  He was so far persuaded
+that the English people would never care for his poetry, that, had it not
+been for the intervention of his friends, he declared it not unlikely
+that after the death of Hallam he would not have continued to write.”
+And again, in reference to the completion of ‘The Sleeping Beauty,’ his
+son says, “He warmed to his work because there had been a favourable
+review of him lately published in far-off Calcutta.”
+
+We dwell upon this weakness of Tennyson’s—a weakness which, in view of
+his immense powers, was certainly a source of wonder to his friends—in
+order to show, once for all, that without the tender care of his son he
+could never in his later years have done the work he did.  This it was
+which caused the relations between Tennyson and the writer of this
+admirable memoir to be those of brother with brother rather than of
+father with son.  And those who have been eagerly looking forward to
+these volumes will not be disappointed.  In writing the life of any man
+there are scores and scores of facts and documents, great and small,
+which only some person closely acquainted with him, either as relative or
+as friend, can bring into their true light; and this it is which makes
+documents so deceptive.  Here is an instance of what we mean.  In writing
+to Thompson, Spedding says of Tennyson on a certain occasion: “I could
+not get Alfred to Rydal Mount.  He would and would not (sulky one!),
+although Wordsworth was hospitably minded towards him.”  This remark
+would inevitably have been construed into another instance of that
+churlishness which is so often said (though quite erroneously) to have
+been one of Tennyson’s infirmities.  But when we read the following
+foot-note by the biographer, “He said he did not wish to intrude himself
+on the great man at Rydal,” we accept the incident as another proof of
+that “humility” which the son alludes to in his preface as being one of
+his father’s characteristics.  And of such evidence that had not the
+poet’s son written his biography the loss to literature would have been
+incalculable the book is full.  Evidence of a fine intellect, a fine
+culture, and a sure judgment is afforded by every page—afforded as much
+by what is left unsaid as by what is said.
+
+The biographer has invited a few of the poet’s friends to furnish their
+impressions of him.  These could not fail to be interesting; it is
+pleasant to know what impression Tennyson made upon men of such diverse
+characters as the Duke of Argyll, Jowett, Tyndall, Froude, and others.
+But so far as a vital portrait of the man is concerned they were not
+needed, so vigorously does the man live in the portrait painted by him
+who knew the poet best of all.
+
+“For my own part,” says the biographer, “I feel strongly that no
+biographer could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own works;
+but this may be because, having lived my life with him, I see him in
+every word which he has written; and it is difficult for me so far to
+detach myself from the home circle as to pourtray him for others.  There
+is also the impossibility of fathoming a great man’s mind; his deeper
+thoughts are hardly ever revealed.  He himself disliked the notion of a
+long, formal biography, for
+
+    None can truly write his single day,
+    And none can write it for him upon earth.
+
+“However, he wished that, if I deemed it better, the incidents of his
+life should be given as shortly as might be without comment, but that my
+notes should be final and full enough to preclude the chance of further
+and unauthentic biographies.
+
+“For those who cared to know about his literary history he wrote ‘Merlin
+and the Gleam.’  From his boyhood he had felt the magic of Merlin—that
+spirit of poetry—which bade him know his power and follow throughout his
+work a pure and high ideal, with a simple and single devotedness and a
+desire to ennoble the life of the world, and which helped him through
+doubts and difficulties to ‘endure as seeing Him who is invisible.’
+
+    Great the Master,
+    And sweet the Magic,
+    When over the valley,
+    In early summers,
+    Over the mountain,
+    On human faces,
+    And all around me,
+    Moving to melody,
+    Floated the Gleam.
+
+“In his youth he sang of the brook flowing through his upland valley, of
+the ‘ridged wolds’ that rose above his home, of the mountain-glen and
+snowy summits of his early dreams, and of the beings, heroes and fairies,
+with which his imaginary world was peopled.  Then was heard the ‘croak of
+the raven,’ the harsh voice of those who were unsympathetic—
+
+    The light retreated,
+    The Landskip darken’d,
+    The melody deaden’d,
+    The Master whisper’d,
+    ‘Follow the Gleam.’
+
+“Still the inward voice told him not to be faint-hearted but to follow
+his ideal.  And by the delight in his own romantic fancy, and by the
+harmonies of nature, ‘the warble of water,’ and ‘cataract music of
+falling torrents,’ the inspiration of the poet was renewed.  His Eclogues
+and English Idyls followed, when he sang the songs of country life and
+the joys and griefs of country folk, which he knew through and through,
+
+    Innocent maidens,
+    Garrulous children,
+    Homestead and harvest,
+    Reaper and gleaner,
+    And rough-ruddy faces
+    Of lowly labour.
+
+“By degrees, having learnt somewhat of the real philosophy of life and of
+humanity from his own experience, he rose to a melody ‘stronger and
+statelier.’  He celebrated the glory of ‘human love and of human heroism’
+and of human thought, and began what he had already devised, his epic of
+King Arthur, ‘typifying above all things the life of man,’ wherein he had
+intended to represent some of the great religions of the world.  He had
+purposed that this was to be the chief work of his manhood.  Yet the
+death of his friend, Arthur Hallam, and the consequent darkening of the
+whole world for him made him almost fail in this purpose; nor any longer
+for a while did he rejoice in the splendour of his spiritual visions, nor
+in the Gleam that had ‘waned to a wintry glimmer.’
+
+    Clouds and darkness
+    Closed upon Camelot;
+    Arthur had vanish’d
+    I knew not whither,
+    The King who loved me,
+    And cannot die.
+
+“Here my father united the two Arthurs, the Arthur of the Idylls and the
+Arthur ‘the man he held as half divine.’  He himself had fought with
+death, and had come out victorious to find ‘a stronger faith his own,’
+and a hope for himself, for all those in sorrow and for universal human
+kind, that never forsook him through the future years.
+
+    And broader and brighter
+    The Gleam flying onward,
+    Wed to the melody,
+    Sang thro’ the world.
+
+    * * *
+
+    I saw, wherever
+    In passing it glanced upon
+    Hamlet or city,
+    That under the Crosses
+    The dead man’s garden,
+    The mortal hillock,
+    Would break into blossom;
+    And so to the land’s
+    Last limit I came.
+
+“Up to the end he faced death with the same earnest and unfailing courage
+that he had always shown, but with an added sense of the awe and the
+mystery of the Infinite.
+
+    I can no longer,
+    But die rejoicing,
+    For thro’ the Magic
+    Of Him the Mighty,
+    Who taught me in childhood,
+    There on the border
+    Of boundless Ocean,
+    And all but in Heaven
+    Hovers the Gleam.
+
+“That is the reading of the poet’s riddle as he gave it to me.  He
+thought that ‘Merlin and the Gleam’ would probably be enough of biography
+for those friends who urged him to write about himself.  However, this
+has not been their verdict, and I have tried to do what he said that I
+might do.”
+
+There are many specialists in Tennysonian bibliography who take a pride
+(and a worthy pride) in their knowledge of the master’s poems.  But the
+knowledge of all of these specialists put together is not equal to that
+of him who writes this book.  Not only is every line at his fingers’
+ends, but he knows, either from his own memory or from what his father
+has told him, where and when and why every line was written.  He,
+however, shares, it is evident that dislike—rather let us say that
+passionate hatred—which his father, like so many other poets, had of that
+well-intentioned but vexing being whom Rossetti anathematized as the
+“literary resurrection man.”  Rossetti used to say that “of all signs
+that a man was devoid of poetic instinct and poetic feeling the impulse
+of the literary resurrectionist was the surest.”  Without going so far as
+this we may at least affirm that all poets writing in a language
+requiring, as English does, much manipulation before it can be moulded
+into perfect form must needs revise in the brain before the line is set
+down, or in manuscript, as Shelley did, or partly in manuscript and
+partly in type, as Coleridge did.  But the rakers-up of the “chips of the
+workshop,” to use Tennyson’s own phrase, seem to have been specially
+irritating to him, because he belonged to those poets who cannot really
+revise and complete their work till they see it in type.  “Poetry,” he
+said, “looks better, more convincing in print.”
+
+“From the volume of 1832,” says his son, “he omitted several stanzas of
+‘The Palace of Art’ because he thought that the poem was too full.  ‘The
+artist is known by his self-limitation’ was a favourite adage of his.  He
+allowed me, however, to print some of them in my notes, otherwise I
+should have hesitated to quote without his leave lines that he had
+excised.  He ‘gave the people of his best,’ and he usually wished that
+his best should remain without variorum readings, ‘the chips of the
+workshop,’ as he called them.  The love of bibliomaniacs for first
+editions filled him with horror, for the first editions are obviously in
+many cases the worst editions, and once he said to me: ‘Why do they
+treasure the rubbish I shot from my full-finish’d cantos?’
+
+    νήπιοι ουδε ισασιν οσω πλέον ημισυ παντός.
+
+For himself many passages in Wordsworth and other poets have been
+entirely spoilt by the modern habit of giving every various reading along
+with the text.  Besides, in his case, very often what is published as the
+latest edition has been the original version in his first manuscript, so
+that there is no possibility of really tracing the history of what may
+seem to be a new word or a new passage.  ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘in
+“Maud” a line in the first edition was ‘I will bury myself in _my books_,
+and the Devil may pipe to his own,’ which was afterwards altered to ‘I
+will bury myself _in myself_, &c.’: this was highly commended by the
+critics as an improvement on the _original_ reading—but it was actually
+in the first MS. draft of the poem.”
+
+Again, it is important to get a statement by one entitled to speak with
+authority as to what Tennyson did and what he did not believe upon
+religious matters.  He had in ‘In Memoriam’ and other poems touched with
+a hand so strong and sometimes so daring upon the teaching of modern
+science, and yet he had spoken always so reverently of what modern
+civilization reverences, that the most opposite lessons were read from
+his utterances.  To one thinker it would seem that Tennyson had thrown
+himself boldly upon the very foremost wave of scientific thought.  To
+another it would seem that Wordsworth (although, living and writing when
+he did, before the birth of the new cosmogony, he believed himself to be
+still in trammels of the old) was by temperament far more in touch with
+the new cosmogony than was Tennyson, who studied evolution more ardently
+than any poet since Lucretius.  While Wordsworth, notwithstanding a
+conventional phrase here and there, had an apprehension of Nature without
+the ever-present idea of the Power behind her, Spinosa himself was not so
+“God-intoxicated” a man as Tennyson.  His son sets the question at rest
+in the following pregnant words:—
+
+“Assuredly Religion was no nebulous abstraction for him.  He consistently
+emphasized his own belief in what he called the Eternal Truths; in an
+Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-loving God, Who has revealed Himself
+through the human attribute of the highest self-sacrificing love; in the
+freedom of the human will; and in the immortality of the soul.  But he
+asserted that ‘Nothing worthy proving can be proven,’ and that even as to
+the great laws which are the basis of Science, ‘We have but faith, we
+cannot know.’  He dreaded the dogmatism of sects and rash definitions of
+God.  ‘I dare hardly name His Name,’ he would say, and accordingly he
+named Him in ‘The Ancient Sage’ the ‘Nameless.’  ‘But take away belief in
+the self-conscious personality of God,’ he said, ‘and you take away the
+backbone of the world.’  ‘On God and God-like men we build our trust.’  A
+week before his death I was sitting by him, and he talked long of the
+Personality and of the Love of God, ‘That God, Whose eyes consider the
+poor,’ ‘Who catereth, even for the sparrow.’  ‘I should,’ he said,
+‘infinitely rather feel myself the most miserable wretch on the face of
+the earth with a God above, than the highest type of man standing alone.’
+He would allow that God is unknowable in ‘his whole world-self, and
+all-in-all,’ and that, therefore, there was some force in the objection
+made by some people to the word ‘Personality’ as being ‘anthropomorphic,’
+and that, perhaps ‘Self-consciousness’ or ‘Mind’ might be clearer to
+them: but at the same time he insisted that, although ‘man is like a
+thing of nought’ in ‘the boundless plan,’ our highest view of God must be
+more or less anthropomorphic: and that ‘Personality,’ as far as our
+intelligence goes, is the widest definition and includes ‘Mind,’
+‘Self-consciousness,’ ‘Will,’ ‘Love,’ and other attributes of the Real,
+the Supreme, ‘the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth Eternity, Whose name
+is Holy.’”
+
+And then Lord Tennyson quotes a manuscript note of Jowett’s in which he
+says:—
+
+“Alfred Tennyson thinks it ridiculous to believe in a God and deny his
+consciousness, and was amused at some one who said of him that he had
+versified Hegelianism.”
+
+He notes also an anecdote of Edward Fitzgerald’s which speaks of a week
+with Tennyson, when the poet, picking up a daisy, and looking closely at
+its crimson-tipped leaves, said, “Does not this look like a thinking
+Artificer, one who wishes to ornament?”
+
+Here is a paragraph which will be read with the deepest interest, not
+only by every lover of poetry, but by every man whose heart has been rung
+by the most terrible of all bereavements—the loss of a beloved friend.
+Close as the tie of blood relationship undoubtedly is, it is based upon
+convention as much as upon nature.  It may exist and flourish vigorously
+when there is little or no community of taste or of thought:—
+
+“It may be as well to say here that all the letters from my father to
+Arthur Hallam were destroyed by his father after Arthur’s death: a great
+loss, as these particular letters probably revealed his inner self more
+truly than anything outside his poems.”
+
+We confess to belonging to those who always read with a twinge of remorse
+the private letters of a man in print.  But if there is a case where one
+must needs long to see the letters between two intimate friends, it is
+that of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam.  They would have been only second in
+interest to Shakespeare’s letters to that mysterious “Mr. W. H.” whose
+identity now can never be traced.  For, notwithstanding all that has
+recently been said, and ably said, to the contrary, the man to whom many
+of the sonnets were addressed was he whom “T. T.” addresses as “Mr. W.
+H.”
+
+But for an intimacy to be so strong as that which existed between
+Tennyson and Arthur H. Hallam there must be a kinship of soul so close
+and so rare that the tie of blood relationship seems weak beside it.  It
+is then that friendship may sometimes pass from a sentiment into a
+passion.  It did so in the case of Shakespeare and his mysterious friend,
+as the sonnets in question make manifest; but we are not aware that there
+is in English literature any other instance of friendship as a passion
+until we get to ‘In Memoriam.’  So profound was the effect of Hallam’s
+death upon Tennyson that it was the origin, his son tells us, of ‘The Two
+Voices; or, Thoughts of a Suicide.’  What was the secret of Hallam’s
+influence over Tennyson can never be guessed from anything that he has
+left behind either in prose or verse.  But besides the creative genius of
+the artist there is that genius of personality which is irresistible.
+With a very large gift of this kind of genius Arthur Hallam seems to have
+been endowed.
+
+“In the letters from Arthur Hallam’s friends,” says Lord Tennyson, “there
+was a rare unanimity of opinion about his worth.  Milnes, writing to his
+father, says that he had a ‘very deep respect’ for Hallam, and that
+Thirlwall, in after years the great bishop, for whom Hallam and my father
+had a profound affection, was ‘actually captivated by him.’  When at
+Cambridge with Hallam he had written: ‘He is the only man here of my own
+standing before whom I bow in conscious inferiority in everything.’
+Alford writes: ‘Hallam was a man of wonderful mind and knowledge on all
+subjects, hardly credible at his age. . . .  I long ago set him down for
+the most wonderful person I ever knew.  He was of the most tender,
+affectionate disposition.’”
+
+Lord Tennyson’s remarks upon the ‘Idylls of the King,’ and upon the
+enormous success of the book have a special interest, and serve to
+illustrate our opening remarks upon the popularity of his father’s works.
+Popular as Tennyson had become through ‘The Gardener’s Daughter,’ ‘The
+Miller’s Daughter,’ ‘The May Queen,’ ‘The Lord of Burleigh,’ and scores
+of other poems—endeared to every sorrowing heart as he had become through
+‘In Memoriam’—it was the ‘Idylls of the King’ that secured for him his
+unique place.  Many explanations of the phenomenon of a true poet
+securing the popular suffrages have been offered, one of them being his
+acceptance of the Laureateship.  But Wordsworth, a great poet, also
+accepted it; and he never was and never will be popular.  The wisdom of
+what Goethe says about the enormous importance of “subject” in poetic art
+is illustrated by the story of Tennyson and the ‘Idylls of the King.’
+
+For what was there in the ‘Idylls of the King’ that brought all England
+to Tennyson’s feet—made English people re-read with a new seeing in their
+eyes the poems which they once thought merely beautiful, but now thought
+half divine?  Beautiful these ‘Idylls’ are indeed, but they are not more
+beautiful than work of his that went before.  The rich Klondyke of Malory
+and Geoffrey of Monmouth had not escaped the eyes of previous
+prospectors.  All his life Milton had dreamed of the mines lying
+concealed in the “misty mid-region” of King Arthur and the Round Table,
+but, luckily for Tennyson, was led away from it into other paths.  With
+Milton’s immense power of sensuous expression—a power that impelled him,
+even when dealing with the spirit world, to flash upon our senses
+pictures of the very limbs of angels and fiends at fight—we may imagine
+what an epic of King Arthur he would have produced.  Dryden also
+contemplated working in this mine, but never did; and until Scott came
+with his Lyulph’s Tale in ‘The Bridal of Triermain,’ no one had taken up
+the subject but writers like Blackmore.  Then came Bulwer’s burlesque.
+Now no prospector on the banks of the Yukon has a keener eye for nuggets
+than Tennyson had for poetic ore, and besides ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and
+‘Launcelot and Guinevere,’ he had already printed the grandest of all his
+poems—the ‘Morte d’Arthur.’  It needed only the ‘Idylls of the King,’
+where episode after episode of the Arthurian cycle was rendered in poems
+which could be understood by all—it needed only this for all England to
+be set reading and re-reading all his poems, some of them more precious
+than any of these ‘Idylls’—poems whose familiar beauties shone out now
+with a new light.
+
+Ever since then Tennyson’s hold upon the British public seemed to grow
+stronger and stronger up to the day of his death, when Great Britain,
+and, indeed, the entire English-speaking race, went into mourning for
+him; nor, as we have said, has any weakening of that hold been
+perceptible during the five years that have elapsed since.
+
+The volumes are so crammed with interesting and important matter that to
+discuss them in one article is impossible.  But before concluding these
+remarks we must say that the good fortune which attended Tennyson during
+his life did not end with his death.  Fortunate, indeed, is the famous
+man who escapes the catchpenny biographer.  No man so illustrious as
+Tennyson ever before passed away without his death giving rise to a flood
+of books professing to tell the story of his life.  Yet it chanced that
+for a long time before his death a monograph on Tennyson by Mr. Arthur
+Waugh—which, though of course it is sometimes at fault, was carefully
+prepared and well considered—had been in preparation, as had also a
+second edition of another sketch of the poet’s life by Mr. Henry
+Jennings, written with equal reticence and judgment.  These two books,
+coming out, as far as we remember, in the very week of Tennyson’s
+funeral, did the good service of filling up the gap of five years until
+the appearance of this authorized biography by his son.  Otherwise there
+is no knowing what pseudo-biographies stuffed with what errors and
+nonsense might have flooded the market and vexed the souls of Tennysonian
+students.  For the future such pseudo-biographies will be impossible.
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+Notwithstanding the apparently fortunate circumstances by which Tennyson
+was surrounded, the record of his early life produces in the reader’s
+mind a sense of unhappiness.  Happiness is an affair of temperament, not
+of outward circumstances.  Happy, in the sense of enjoying the present as
+Wordsworth enjoyed it, Tennyson could never be.  Once, no doubt, Nature’s
+sweetest gift to all living things—the power of enjoying the present—was
+man’s inheritance too.  Some of the human family have not lost it even
+yet; but poets are rarely of these.  Give Wordsworth any pittance, enough
+to satisfy the simplest physical wants—enough to procure him plain living
+and leisure for “high thinking”—and he would be happier than Tennyson
+would have been, cracking the finest “walnuts” and sipping the richest
+“wine” amidst a circle of admiring and powerful friends.  As to opinion,
+as to criticism of his work—what was that to Wordsworth?  Had he not from
+the first the good opinion of her of whom he was the high priest elect.
+Natura Benigna herself?  Nay, had he not from the first the good opinions
+of Wordsworth himself and Dorothy?  Without this faculty of enjoying the
+present, how can a bard be happy?  For the present alone exists.  The
+past is a dream; the future is a dream; the present is the narrow plank
+thrown for an instant from the dream of the past to the dream of the
+future.  And yet it is the poet (who of all men should enjoy the raree
+show hurrying and scrambling along the plank)—it is he who refuses to
+enjoy himself on his own trembling little plank in order to “stare round”
+from side to side.
+
+Spedding, speaking in a letter to Thompson in 1835 of Tennyson’s visit to
+the Lake country, lets fall a few words that describe the poet in the
+period before his marriage more fully than could have been done by a
+volume of subtle analysis:—
+
+“I think he took in more pleasure and inspiration than any one would have
+supposed who did not know his own almost personal dislike of the present,
+whatever it might be.”
+
+This is what makes us say that by far the most important thing in
+Tennyson’s life was his marriage.  He began to enjoy the present: “The
+peace of God came into my life before the altar when I wedded her.”  No
+more beautiful words than these were ever uttered by any man concerning
+any woman.  And to say that the words were Tennyson’s is to say that they
+expressed the simple truth, for his definition of human speech as God
+meant it to be would have been “the breath that utters truth.”  It would
+have been wonderful, indeed, if he, whose capacity of loving a friend was
+so great had been without an equal capacity of loving a woman.
+
+“Although as a son,” says the biographer, “I cannot allow myself full
+utterance about her whom I loved as perfect mother and ‘very woman of
+very woman’—‘such a wife’ and true helpmate she proved herself.  It was
+she who became my father’s adviser in literary matters; ‘I am proud of
+her intellect,’ he wrote.  With her he always discussed what he was
+working at; she transcribed his poems: to her and to no one else he
+referred for a final criticism before publishing.  She, with her ‘tender,
+spiritual nature,’ {156} and instinctive nobility of thought, was always
+by his side, a ready, cheerful, courageous, wise, and sympathetic
+counsellor.  It was she who shielded his sensitive spirit from the
+annoyances and trials of life, answering (for example) the innumerable
+letters addressed to him from all parts of the world.  By her quiet sense
+of humour, by her selfless devotion, by ‘her faith as clear as the
+heights of the June-blue heaven,’ she helped him also to the utmost in
+the hours of his depression and of his sorrow.”
+
+There are some few people whose natures are so noble or so sweet that how
+rich soever may be their endowment of intellect, or even of genius, we
+seem to remember them mainly by what St. Gregory Nazianzen calls “the
+rhetoric of their lives.”  And surely the knowledge that this is so is
+encouraging to him who would fain believe in the high destiny of
+man—surely it is encouraging to know that, in spite of “the inhuman
+dearth of noble natures,” mankind can still so dearly love moral beauty
+as to hold it more precious than any other human force.  And certainly
+one of those whose intellectual endowments are outdazzled by the beauty
+of their qualities of heart and soul was the sweet lady whose death I am
+recording.
+
+Among those who had the privilege of knowing Lady Tennyson (and they were
+many, and these many were of the best), some are at this moment eloquent
+in talk about the perfect helpmate she was to the great poet, and the
+perfect mother she was to his children, and they quote those lovely lines
+of Tennyson which every one knows by heart:—
+
+    Dear, near and true—no truer Time himself
+    Can prove you, tho’ he make you evermore
+    Dearer and nearer, as the rapid of life
+    Shoots to the fall—take this and pray that he
+    Who wrote it, honouring your sweet faith to him,
+    May trust himself;—and after praise and scorn,
+    As one who feels the immeasurable world,
+    Attain the wise indifference of the wise;
+    And after autumn past—if left to pass
+    His autumn into seeming leafless days—
+    Draw toward the long frost and longest night,
+    Wearing his wisdom lightly, like the fruit
+    Which in our winter woodland looks a flower.
+
+Others dwell on the unique way in which those wistful blue eyes of hers
+and that beautiful face expressed the “tender spiritual nature” described
+by the poet—expressed it, indeed, more and more eloquently with the
+passage of years, and the bereavements the years had brought.  The
+present writer saw her within a few days of her death.  She did not seem
+to him then more fragile than ordinary.  For many years she whose fragile
+frame seemed to be kept alive by the love and sweet movements of the soul
+within had seemed as she lay upon her couch the same as she seemed when
+death was so near—intensely pale, save when a flush as slight as the pink
+on a wild rose told her watchful son that the subject of conversation was
+interesting her more than was well for her.  As a matter of fact,
+however, Lady Tennyson was no less remarkable as an intelligence than as
+the central heart of love and light that illumined one of the most
+beautiful households of our time.
+
+Though her special gift was no doubt music, she had, as Tennyson would
+say with affectionate pride, a “real insight into poetical effects”; and
+those who knew her best shared his opinion in this matter.  Whether, had
+her life not been devoted so entirely to others, she would have been a
+noticeable artistic producer it is hard to guess.  But there is no doubt
+that she was born to hold a high place as a conversationalist, brilliant
+and stimulating.  Notwithstanding the jealous watchfulness of her family
+lest the dinner talk should draw too heavily upon her small stock of
+physical power, the fascination of her conversation, both as to
+subject-matter and manner, was so irresistible that her friends were apt
+to forget how fragile she really was until warned by a sign from her son
+or, daughter-in-law, who adored her, that the conversation should be
+brought to a close.
+
+Her diary, upon which her son has drawn for certain biographical portions
+of his book shows how keen and how persistent was her interest in the
+poetry of her husband; it also shows how thorough was her insight into
+its principles.  As a rule, diaries, professing as they do to give
+portraitures of eminent men, are mostly very much worse than worthless.
+The points seized upon by the diarist are almost never physiognomic, and
+even if the diarist does give some glimpse of the character he professes
+to limn, the picture can only be partially true, inasmuch as it can never
+be toned down by other aspects of the character unseen by the diarist and
+unknown to him.
+
+Very different, however, is the record kept by Lady Tennyson.  As an
+instance of her power of selecting really luminous points for
+preservation in her diary, let me instance this.  Many a student of the
+‘Idylls of the King’ has been struck by a certain difference in the style
+between ‘The Coming of Arthur’ and ‘The Passing of Arthur’ and the other
+idylls.  Indeed, more than once this difference has been cited as showing
+Tennyson’s inability to fuse the different portions of a long poem.  This
+fact had not escaped the eye of the loving wife and critic, and two days
+before her death she said to her son, “He said ‘The Coming of Arthur’ and
+‘The Passing of Arthur’ are purposely simpler in style than the other
+idylls as dealing with the awfulness of birth and death,” and wished this
+remark of the poet’s to be put on record in the book.
+
+It is needless to comment on the value of these few words and the light
+they shed upon Tennyson’s method.
+
+Those who saw Lady Tennyson in middle life and in advanced age, and were
+struck by that spiritual beauty of hers which no painter could ever
+render, will not find it difficult to imagine what she was at seventeen,
+when Tennyson suddenly came upon her in the “Fairy Wood,” and exclaimed,
+“Are you an Oread or a Dryad wandering here?”  And yet her beauty was
+only a small part of a charm that was indescribable.  An important event
+for English literature was that meeting in the “Fairy Wood.”  For, from
+the moment of his engagement, “the current of his mind was no longer and
+constantly in the channel of mournful memories and melancholy
+forebodings,” says his son.  And speaking of the year, 1838, the son
+tells us that, on the whole, he was happy in his life.  “When I wrote
+‘The Two Voices,’” he used to say, “I was so utterly miserable, a burden
+to myself and my family, that I said, ‘Is life worth anything?’ and now
+that I am old, I fear that I shall only live a year or two, for I have
+work still to do.”
+
+The hostile manner in which ‘Maud’ was received vexed him, and would,
+before his marriage, have deeply disturbed him.  A right view of this
+fine poem seems to have been taken by George Brimley, an admirable
+critic, who in the ‘Cambridge Essays,’ had already pointed out with great
+acumen many of the more subtle beauties of Tennyson.
+
+There are few more pleasant pages in this book than those which record
+Tennyson’s relations with another poet who was blessed in his
+wife—Browning.  Although the two poets had previously met (notably in
+Paris in 1851), the intimacy between them would seem to have been
+cemented, if not begun, during one of Tennyson’s visits to his and
+Browning’s friends, Mr. and Mrs. Knowles at the Hollies, Clapham Common.
+Here Tennyson read to Browning the ‘Grail’ (which the latter pronounced
+to be Tennyson’s “best and highest”); and here Browning came and read his
+own new poem ‘The Ring and the Book,’ when Tennyson’s verdict on it was,
+“Full of strange vigour and remarkable in many ways, doubtful if it will
+ever be popular.”
+
+The record of his long intimacy with Coventry Patmore and Aubrey de Vere
+takes an important place in the biography, and the reminiscences of
+Tennyson by the latter poet form an interesting feature of the volumes.
+In George Meredith’s first little book Tennyson was delighted by the
+‘Love in a Valley,’ and he had a full appreciation of the great novelist
+all round.  With the three leading poets of a younger generation,
+Rossetti, William Morris, and Swinburne, he had slight acquaintance.
+Here, however, is an interesting memorandum by Tennyson recording his
+first meeting with Swinburne:
+
+“I may tell you, however, that young Swinburne called here the other day
+with a college friend of his, and we asked him to dinner, and I thought
+him a very modest and intelligent young fellow.  Moreover I read him what
+you vindicated [‘Maud’], but what I particularly admired in him was that
+he did not press upon me any verses of his own.”
+
+Of contemporary novels he seems to have been a voracious and
+indiscriminate reader.  In the long list here given of novelists whose
+books he read—good, bad, and indifferent—it is curious not to find the
+name of Mrs. Humphry Ward.  With Thackeray he was intimate; and he was in
+cordial relations with Dickens, Douglas Jerrold, and George Eliot.  Among
+the poets, besides Edward Fitzgerald and Coventry Patmore, he saw much of
+William Allingham.  Though he admired parts of ‘_Festus_’ greatly, we do
+not gather from these volumes that he met the author.  Dobell he saw much
+of at Malvern in 1846.  The letter-diary from Tennyson during his stay in
+Cornwall with Holman Hunt, Val. Prinsep, Woolner, and Palgrave, shows how
+exhilarated he could be by wind and sea.  The death of Lionel was a sad
+blow to him.  ‘Demeter, and other Poems,’ was dedicated to Lord Dufferin,
+“as a tribute,” says his son, “of affection and of gratitude; for words
+would fail me to tell the unremitting kindness shown by himself and Lady
+Dufferin to my brother Lionel during his fatal illness.”
+
+Tennyson’s critical insight could not fail to be good when exercised upon
+poetry.  Here are one or two of his sayings about Burns, which show in
+what spirit he would have read Henley’s recent utterances about that
+poet:—
+
+“Burns did for the old songs of Scotland almost what Shakespeare had done
+for the English drama that preceded him.”
+
+“Read the exquisite songs of Burns.  In shape each of them has the
+perfection of the berry, in light the radiance of the dew-drop: you
+forget for its sake those stupid things his serious poems.”
+
+Among the reminiscences and impressions of the poet which Lord Tennyson
+has appended to his second volume, it is only fair to specialize the
+admirable paper by F. T. Palgrave, which, long as it is, is not by one
+word too long.  That Jowett would write wisely and well was in the nature
+of things.  The only contribution, however, we can quote here is
+Froude’s, for it is as brief as it is emphatic:—
+
+    “I owe to your father the first serious reflexions upon life and the
+    nature of it which have followed me for more than fifty years.  The
+    same voice speaks to me now as I come near my own end, from beyond
+    the bar.  Of the early poems, ‘Love and Death’ had the deepest effect
+    upon me.  The same thought is in the last lines of the last poems
+    which we shall ever have from him.
+
+    “Your father in my estimate, stands, and will stand far away by the
+    side of Shakespeare above all other English Poets, with this relative
+    superiority even to Shakespeare, that he speaks the thoughts and
+    speaks _to_ the perplexities and misgivings of his own age.
+
+    “He was born at the fit time, before the world had grown inflated
+    with the vanity of Progress, and there was still an atmosphere in
+    which such a soul could grow.  There will be no such others for many
+    a long age.”
+
+                                                        “Yours gratefully,
+                                                           “J. A. FROUDE.”
+
+This letter is striking evidence of the influence Tennyson had upon his
+contemporaries.  Comparisons, however, between Shakespeare and other
+poets can hardly be satisfactory.  A kinship between him and any other
+poet can only be discovered in relation to one of the many sides of the
+“myriad-minded” man.  Where lies Tennyson’s kinship?  Is it on the
+dramatic side?  In a certain sense Tennyson possessed dramatic power
+undoubtedly; for he had a fine imagination of extraordinary vividness,
+and could, as in ‘Rizpah,’ make a character live in an imagined
+situation.  But to write a vital play requires more than this: it
+requires a knowledge—partly instinctive and partly acquired—of men as
+well as of man, and especially of the way in which one individual acts
+and reacts upon another in the complex web of human life.  To depict the
+workings of the soul of man in a given situation is one thing—to depict
+the impact of ego upon ego is another.  When we consider that the more
+poetical a poet is the more oblivious we expect him to be of the
+machinery of social life, it is no wonder that poetical dramatists are so
+rare.  In drama, even poetic drama, the poet must leave the “golden
+clime” in which he was born, must leave those “golden stars above” in
+order to learn this machinery, and not only learn it, but take a pleasure
+in learning it.
+
+In honest admiration of Tennyson’s dramatic work, where it is admirable,
+we yield to none, at the time when ‘The Foresters’ was somewhat coldly
+accepted by the press on account of its “lack of virility,” we considered
+that in the class to which it belonged, the scenic pastoral plays, it
+held a very worthy place.  That Tennyson’s admiration for Shakespeare was
+unbounded is evident enough.
+
+“There was no one,” says Jowett in his recollections of Tennyson, “to
+whom he was so absolutely devoted, no poet of whom he had a more intimate
+knowledge than Shakespeare.  He said to me, and probably to many others,
+that there was one intellectual process in the world of which he could
+not even entertain an apprehension—that was the plays of Shakespeare.  He
+thought that he could instinctively distinguish between the genuine and
+the spurious in them, _e.g._, between those parts of ‘King Henry VIII.,’
+which are generally admitted to be spurious, and those that are genuine.
+The same thought was partly working in his mind on another occasion, when
+he spoke of two things, which he conceived to be beyond the intelligence
+of man, and it was certainly not repeated by him from any irreverence;
+the one, the intellectual genius of Shakespeare—the other, the religious
+genius of Jesus Christ.”
+
+And in the pathetic account of Tennyson’s last moments we find it
+recorded that on the Tuesday before the Wednesday on which he died, he
+called out, “Where is my Shakespeare?  I must have my Shakespeare”; and
+again on the day of his death, when the breath was passing out of his
+body, he asked for his Shakespeare.  All this, however, makes it the more
+remarkable that of poets Shakespeare had the least influence upon
+Tennyson’s art.  There was a fundamental unlikeness between the genius of
+the two men.  The only point in common between them is that each in his
+own way captivated the suffrages both of the many and of the fit though
+few, notwithstanding the fact that their methods of dramatic approach in
+their plays are absolutely and fundamentally different.  Even their very
+methods of writing verse are entirely different.  Tennyson’s blank verse
+seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the
+Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a
+Shakespearean line.  Now and then such a line as
+
+    Authority forgets a dying king
+
+turns up, but very rarely.  We agree with all Professor Jebb says in
+praise of Tennyson’s blank verse.
+
+“He has known,” says he, “how to modulate it to every theme, and to
+elicit a music appropriate to each; attuning it in turn to a tender and
+homely grace, as in ‘The Gardener’s Daughter ‘; to the severe and ideal
+majesty of the antique, as in ‘Tithonus’; to meditative thought, as in
+‘The Ancient Sage,’ or ‘Akbar’s Dream’; to pathetic or tragic tales of
+contemporary life, as in ‘Aylmer’s Field,’ or ‘Enoch Arden’; or to
+sustained romance narrative, as in the ‘Idylls.’  No English poet has
+used blank verse with such flexible variety, or drawn from it so large a
+compass of tones; nor has any maintained it so equably on a high level of
+excellence.”
+
+But we fail to see where he touched Shakespeare on the dramatic side of
+Shakespeare’s immense genius.
+
+Tennyson had the yearning common to all English poets to write
+Shakespearean plays, and the filial piety with which his son tries to
+uphold his father’s claims as a dramatist is beautiful; indeed, it is
+pathetic.  But the greatest injustice that can be done to a great poet is
+to claim for him honours that do not belong to him.  In his own line
+Tennyson is supreme, and this book makes it necessary to ask once more
+what that line is.  Shakespeare’s stupendous fame has for centuries been
+the candle into which all the various coloured wings of later days have
+flown with more or less of disaster.  Though much was said in praise of
+‘Harold’ by one of the most accomplished critics and scholars of our
+time, Dr. Jebb, {168} the play could not keep the stage, nor does it live
+as a drama as any one of Tennyson’s lyrics can be said to live.
+‘Becket,’ to be sure, was a success on the stage.  A letter to Tennyson
+in 1884 from so competent a student of Shakespeare as Sir Henry Irving
+declares that ‘Becket’ is a finer play than ‘King John.’  Still, the
+‘Morte d’Arthur,’ ‘The Lotos-Eaters,’ ‘The Gardener’s Daughter,’ outweigh
+the five-act tragedy in the world of literary art.  Of acted drama
+Tennyson knew nothing at all.  To him, evidently, the word _act_ in a
+printed play meant _chapter_; the word _scene_ meant _section_.  In his
+early days he had gone occasionally to see a play, and in 1875 he went to
+see Irving in Hamlet and liked him better than Macready, whom he had seen
+in the part.  Still later he went to see Lady Archibald Campbell act when
+‘Becket’ was given “among the glades of oak and fern in the Canizzaro
+Wood at Wimbledon.”  But handicapped as he was by ignorance of drama as a
+stage product how could he write Shakespearean plays?
+
+But let us for a moment consider the difference between the two men as
+poets.  It is hard to imagine the master-dramatist of the world—it is
+hard to imagine the poet who, by setting his foot upon allegory, saved
+our poetry from drying up after the invasion of gongorism, euphuism, and
+allegory—it is, we say, hard to imagine Shakespeare, if he had conceived
+and written such lovely episodes as those of the ‘Idylls of the King,’ so
+full of concrete pictures, setting about to turn his flesh-and-blood
+characters into symbolic abstractions.  There is in these volumes a
+curious document, a memorandum of Tennyson’s presented to Mr. Knowles at
+Aldworth in 1869, in which an elaborate scheme for turning into abstract
+ideas the characters of the Arthurian story is sketched:—
+
+    K.A. Religious Faith.
+
+    King Arthur’s three Guineveres.
+
+    The Lady of the Lake.
+
+    Two Guineveres, ye first prim Christianity.  2d Roman Catholicism: ye
+    first is put away and dwells apart, 2d Guinevere flies.  Arthur takes
+    to the first again, but finds her changed by lapse of Time.
+
+    Modred, the sceptical understanding.  He pulls Guinevere, Arthur’s
+    latest wife, from the throne.
+
+    Merlin Emrys, the Enchanter.  Science.  Marries his daughter to
+    Modred.
+
+    Excalibur, War.
+
+    The Sea, the people / The Saxons, the people } the S. are a
+    sea-people and it is theirs and a type of them.
+
+    The Round Table: liberal institutions.
+
+    Battle of Camlan.
+
+    2d Guinevere with the enchanted book and cup.
+
+And Mr. Knowles in a letter to the biographer says:—
+
+“He encouraged me to write a short paper, in the form of a letter to _The
+Spectator_, on the inner meaning of the whole poem, which I did, simply
+upon the lines he himself indicated.  He often said, however, that an
+allegory should never be pressed too far.”  Are all the lovely passages
+of human passion and human pathos in these ‘Idylls’ allegorical—that is
+to say—make-believe?  The reason why allegorical poetry is always
+second-rate, even at its best, is that it flatters the reader’s intellect
+at the expense of his heart.  Fancy “the allegorical intent” behind the
+parting of Hector and Andromache, and behind the death of Desdemona!
+Thank Heaven, however, Tennyson’s allegorical intent was a destructive
+afterthought.  For, says the biographer, “the allegorical drift here
+marked out was fundamentally changed in the later schemes in the
+‘Idylls.’” According to that delicate critic, Canon Ainger, there is a
+symbolical intent underlying ‘The Lady of Shalott’:—
+
+“The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from
+whom she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of
+shadows into that of realities.”
+
+But what concerns us here is the fact that when Shakespeare wrote,
+although he yielded too much now and then to the passion for gongorism
+and euphuism which had spread all over Europe, it was against the nature
+of his genius to be influenced by the contemporary passion for allegory.
+That he had a natural dislike of allegorical treatment of a subject is
+evident, not only in his plays, but in his sonnets.  At a time when the
+sonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeare’s
+sonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate and
+personal kind—a fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about the
+Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, for what Bacon had was fancy,
+not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is the
+mother of Drama.  The moment that Bacon essayed imaginative work, he
+passed into allegory, as we see in the ‘New Atlantis.’
+
+It might, perhaps, be said that there are three kinds of poetical
+temperament which have never yet been found equally combined in any one
+poet—not even in Shakespeare himself.  There is the lyric temperament, as
+exemplified in writers like Sappho, Shelley, and others; there is the
+meditative temperament—sometimes speculative, but not always accompanied
+by metaphysical dreaming—as exemplified in Lucretius, Wordsworth, and
+others; and there is the dramatic temperament, as exemplified in Homer,
+Æschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare.  In a certain sense the Iliad is
+the most dramatic poem in the world, for the dramatic picture lives
+undisturbed by lyrism or meditation.  In Æschylus and Sophocles we find,
+besides the dramatic temperament, a large amount of the lyrical
+temperament, and a large amount of the meditative, but unaccompanied by
+metaphysical speculation.  In Shakespeare we find, besides the dramatic
+temperament, a large amount of the meditative accompanied by an
+irresistible impulse towards metaphysical speculation, but, on the whole,
+a moderate endowment of the lyrical temperament, judging by the few
+occasions on which he exercised it.  For fine as are such lyrics as
+“Hark, hark, the lark,” “Where the bee sucks,” &c., other poets have
+written lyrics as fine.
+
+In a certain sense no man can be a pure and perfect dramatist.  Every ego
+is a central sun found which the universe revolves, and it must needs
+assert itself.  This is why on a previous occasion, when speaking of the
+way in which thoughts are interjected into drama by the Greek dramatists,
+we said that really and truly no man can paint another, but only himself,
+and what we call character-painting is at the best but a poor mixing of
+painter and painted—a third something between these two, just as what we
+call colour and sound are born of the play of undulation upon organism.
+Very likely this is putting the case too strongly.  But be this as it
+may, it is impossible to open a play of Shakespeare’s without being
+struck with the way in which the meditative side of Shakespeare’s mind
+strove with and sometimes nearly strangled the dramatic.  If this were
+confined to ‘Hamlet,’ where the play seems meant to revolve on a
+philosophical pivot, it would not be so remarkable.  But so hindered with
+thoughts, reflections, meditations, and metaphysical speculations was
+Shakespeare that he tossed them indiscriminately into other plays,
+tragedies, comedies, and histories, regardless sometimes of the character
+who uttered them.  With regard to metaphysical speculation, indeed, even
+when he was at work on the busiest scenes of his dramas, it would seem—as
+was said on the occasion before alluded to—that Shakespeare’s instinct
+for actualizing and embodying in concrete form the dreams of the
+metaphysician often arose and baffled him.  It would seem that when
+writing a comedy he could not help putting into the mouth of a man like
+Claudio those words which seem as if they ought to have been spoken by a
+metaphysician of the Hamlet type, beginning,
+
+    Ay, but to die and go we know not where.
+
+It would seem that he could not help putting into the mouth of Macbeth
+those words which also seem as if they ought to have been spoken on the
+platform at Elsinore, beginning,
+
+    To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow.
+
+And if it be said that Macbeth was a philosopher as well as a murderer,
+and might have thought these thoughts in the terrible strait in which he
+then was, surely nothing but this marvellous peculiarity of Shakespeare’s
+temperament will explain his making Macbeth stop at Duncan’s bedroom
+door, dagger in hand, to say,
+
+    Now o’er the one half world Nature seems dead, &c.
+
+And again, though Prospero was very likely a philosopher too, even he
+steals from Hamlet’s mouth such words of the metaphysician as these:—
+
+          We are such stuff
+    As dreams are made on, and our little life
+    Is rounded with a sleep.
+
+That this is one of Shakespeare’s most striking characteristics will not
+be denied by any competent student of his works.  Nor will any such
+student deny that, exquisite as his lyrics are, they are too few and too
+unimportant in subject-matter to set beside his supreme wealth of
+dramatic picture, and his wide vision as a thinker and a metaphysical
+dreamer.
+
+Now on which of these sides of Shakespeare does Tennyson touch?  Is it on
+the lyrical side?  Shakespeare’s fine lyrics are so few that they would
+be lost if set beside the marvellous wealth of Tennyson’s lyrical work.
+On one side only of Shakespeare’s genius Tennyson touches, perhaps, more
+closely than any subsequent poet.  As a metaphysician none comes so near
+Shakespeare as he who wrote these lines:—
+
+       And more, my son! for more than once when I
+    Sat all alone, revolving in myself
+    The word that is the symbol of myself,
+    The mortal limit of the Self was loosed,
+    And passed into the Nameless, as a cloud
+    Melts into Heaven.  I touch’d my limbs, the limbs
+    Were strange not mine—and yet no shade of doubt,
+    But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self.
+    The gain of such large life as match’d with ours
+    Were Sun to spark—unshadowable in words,
+    Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world.
+
+Here, then, seems to be the truth of the matter: while Shakespeare had
+immense dramatic power, and immense meditative power with moderate lyric
+power, Tennyson had the lyric gift and the meditative gift without the
+dramatic.  His poems are more full of reflections, meditations, and
+generalizations upon human life than any poet’s since Shakespeare.  But
+then the moment that Shakespeare descended from those heights whether his
+metaphysical imagination had borne him, he became, not a lyrist, as
+Tennyson became, but a dramatist.  And this divides Shakespeare as far
+from Tennyson as it divides him from any other first-class writer.  We
+admirers of Tennyson must content ourselves with this thought, that,
+wonderful as it is for Shakespeare to have combined great metaphysical
+power with supreme power as a dramatist, it is scarcely less wonderful
+for Tennyson to have combined great metaphysical power with the power of
+a supreme lyrist.  Nay, is it not in a certain sense more wonderful for a
+lyrical impulse such as Tennyson’s to be found combined with a power of
+philosophical and metaphysical abstraction such as he shows in some of
+his poems?
+
+
+
+
+IV.  CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI.
+1830–1894.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+Although the noble poet and high-souled woman we have just lost had been
+ill and suffering from grievous pain for a long time, Death came at last
+with a soft hand which could but make him welcome.  Since early in
+August, when she took to her bed, she was so extremely weak and otherwise
+ill that one scarcely expected her (at any time) to live more than a
+month or so, and for the last six weeks or thereabouts—say from the 15th
+of November—one expected her to die almost from day to day.  My dear
+friend William Rossetti, who used to go to Torrington Square every
+afternoon, saw her on the afternoon of December 28th [1894].  He did not,
+he told me, much expect to find her alive in the afternoon of the 29th,
+and intended, therefore, to make his next call earlier.  She died at
+half-past seven in the morning of the 29th, in the presence only of her
+faithful nurse Mrs. Read.  It was through her sudden collapse that she
+missed at her side, when she passed away, that brother whose whole life
+has been one of devotion to his family, and whose tireless affection for
+the last of them was one of the few links that bound Christina’s sympathy
+to the earth.
+
+  [Picture: Christina Rossetti.  From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti
+         reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]
+
+Her illness was of a most complicated kind: two years and a half ago she
+was operated on for cancer: functional malady of the heart, accompanied
+by dropsy in the left arm and hand, followed.  Although on Friday the
+serious symptoms of her case became, as I have said, accentuated, she was
+throughout the day and night entirely conscious; and so peaceful and
+apparently so free from pain was she that neither the medical man nor the
+nurse supposed the end to be quite so near as it was.  During all this
+time, up to the moment of actual dissolution, her lips seemed to be
+moving in prayer, but, of course, this with her was no uncommon sign:
+duty and prayer ordered her life.  Her sufferings, I say, had been great,
+but they had been encountered by a fortitude that was greater still.
+Throughout all her life, indeed, she was the most notable example that
+our time has produced of the masterful power of man’s spiritual nature
+when at its highest to conquer in its warfare with earthly conditions, as
+her brother Gabriel’s life was the most notable example of the struggle
+of the spiritual nature with the bodily when the two are equally
+equipped.  It is the conviction of one whose high privilege it was to
+know her in many a passage of sorrow and trial that of all the poets who
+have lived and died within our time, Christina Rossetti must have had the
+noblest soul.
+
+A certain irritability of temper, which was, perhaps, natural to her,
+had, when I first became acquainted with her family (about 1872), been
+overcome, or at least greatly chastened, by religion (which with her was
+a passion) and by a large acquaintance with grief, resulting in a long
+meditation over the mystery of pain.  In wordly matters her generosity
+may be described as boundless; but perhaps it is not difficult for a poet
+to be generous in a worldly sense—to be free in parting with that which
+can be precious only to commonplace souls.  What, however, is not so easy
+is for one holding such strong religious convictions as Christina
+Rossetti held to cherish such generous thoughts and feelings as were hers
+about those to whom her shibboleths meant nothing.  This was what made
+her life so beautiful and such a blessing to all.  The indurating effects
+of a selfish religiosity never withered her soul nor narrowed it.  With
+her, indeed, religion was very love—
+
+    A largess universal like the sun.
+
+It is always futile to make guesses as to what might have been the
+development of a poet’s genius and character had the education of
+circumstances been different from what it was, and perhaps it is
+specially futile to guess what would have been the development under
+other circumstances of her, the poet of whom her friends used to speak
+with affection and reverence as “Christina.”
+
+On the death of her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (or as his friends
+used to call him Gabriel) in 1882, I gave that sketch of the family story
+which has formed the basis of most of the biographical notices of him and
+his family; it would, therefore, be superfluous to reiterate what I said
+and what is now matter of familiar knowledge.  It may, however, be as
+well to remind the reader that, owing to the peculiar position in London
+of the father Gabriele Rossetti, the family were during childhood and
+partly during youth as much isolated from the outer English world as were
+the family between whom and themselves there were many points of
+resemblance—the Brontës.  The two among them who were not in youth of a
+retiring disposition were he who afterwards became the most retiring of
+all, Gabriel, and Maria, the latter of whom was in one sense retiring,
+and in another expansive.  In her dark brown, or, as some called them,
+black eyes, there would suddenly come up and shine an enthusiasm, a
+capacity of poetic and romantic fire, to the quelling of which there must
+have gone an immensity of religious force.  As to Gabriel, during a large
+portion of his splendid youth he exhibited a genial breadth of front that
+affined him to Shakespeare and Walter Scott.  The English strain in the
+family found expression in him, and in him alone.  There was a something
+in the hearty ring of his voice that drew Englishmen to him as by a
+magnet.
+
+While it was but little that the others drew from the rich soil of merry
+England, he drew from it half at least of his radiant personality—half at
+least of his incomparable genius.  Though he was in every way part and
+parcel of that marvellous little family circle of children of genius in
+Charlotte Street, he had also the power of looking at it from the
+outside.  It would be strange, indeed, if this or any other power should
+be found lacking in him.  I have often heard Rossetti—by the red flicker
+of the studio fire, when the gas was turned down to save his
+eyesight—give the most graphic and fascinating descriptions of the little
+group and the way in which they grew up to be what they were under the
+tuition of a father whose career can only be called romantic, and a
+mother whose intellectual gifts were so remarkable that, had they not
+been in some great degree stifled by the exercise of an entire
+self-abnegation on behalf of her family, she, too, must have become an
+important figure in literature.
+
+    [Picture: Mrs. Rossetti.  From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti
+         reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. W. M. Rossetti]
+
+The father died in 1854, many years before I knew the family; but
+Gabriel’s description of him; his conversations with his brother-refugees
+and others who visited the house—conversations in which the dreamy and
+the matter-of-fact were oddly blent; his striking skill as an
+improvisatore of Italian poetry, and also as a master of pen-and-ink
+drawing; his great musical gift—a gift which none of his family seemed to
+have inherited; his fine tenor voice; his unflinching courage and
+independence of character (qualities which made him refuse, in a
+Protestant country, to make open abjuration of the creed in which the
+Rossettis had been reared, though he detested the Pope and all his works,
+and was, if not an actual freethinker, thoroughly
+latitudinarian)—Gabriel’s pictures of this poet and father of poets were
+so vivid—so amazingly and incredibly vivid—that I find it difficult to
+think I never met the father in the flesh: not unfrequently I find myself
+talking of him as if I had known him.  What higher tribute than this can
+be made to a narrator’s dramatic power?  Those who have seen the elder
+Rossetti’s pen-and-ink drawings (the work of a child) will agree with me
+that Gabriel did not over-estimate them in the least degree.  All the
+Rossettis inherited from their father voices so musical that they could
+be recognized among other voices in any gathering, and no doubt that
+clear-cut method of syllabification which was so marked a characteristic
+of Christina’s conversation, but which gave it a sort of foreign tone,
+was inherited from the father.  Her affinity to the other two members of
+the family was seen in that intense sense of duty of which Gabriel, with
+all his generosity, had but little.  There was no martyrdom she would not
+have undertaken if she thought that duty called upon her to undertake it,
+and this may be said of the other two.
+
+In most things, however, Christina Rossetti seemed to stand midway
+between Gabriel and the other two members of her family, and it was the
+same in physical matters.  She had Gabriel’s eyes, in which hazel and
+blue-grey were marvellously blent, one hue shifting into the other,
+answering to the movements of the thoughts—eyes like the mother’s.  And
+her brown hair, though less warm in colour than his during his boyhood,
+was still like it.  When a young girl, at the time that she sat for the
+Virgin in the picture now in the National Gallery, she was, as both her
+mother and Gabriel have told me, really lovely, with an extraordinary
+expression of pensive sweetness.  She used to have in the little back
+parlour a portrait of herself at eighteen by Gabriel, which gives all
+these qualities.  Even then, however, the fullness in the eyes was
+somewhat excessive.  Afterwards her ill health took a peculiar form, the
+effect of which was that the eyes were, in a manner of speaking, pushed
+forward, and although this protuberance was never disagreeable, it
+certainly took a good deal of beauty from her face.
+
+Dominant, however, as was the father’s personality among his friends, the
+mother’s influence upon the children was stronger than his; and no
+wonder, for I think there was no beautiful charm of woman that Mrs.
+Rossetti lacked.  She did not seem at all aware that she was a woman of
+exceptional gifts, yet her intellectual penetration and the curious
+exactitude of her knowledge were so remarkable that Gabriel accepted her
+dicta as oracles not to be challenged.  One of her specialities was the
+pronunciation of English words, in which she was an authority.  I cannot
+resist giving one little instance, as it illustrates a sweet feature of
+Gabriel’s character.  It occurred on a lovely summer’s day in the old
+Kelmscott manor house in 1873, when Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, and myself
+were watching Gabriel at work upon ‘Proserpine.’  I had pronounced the
+word _aspirant_ with the accent upon the middle syllable.  “Pardon me, my
+dear fellow,” said he, without looking from his work, “that word should
+be pronounced with the accent on the first syllable, as a purist like you
+ought to know.”  On my challenging this, he said, in a tone which was
+meant to show that he was saying the last word upon the subject, “My
+mother always says _áspirant_, and she is always right upon matters of
+pronunciation.”  “Then I shall always say _áspirant_,” I replied.  And I
+may add that I now do say _áspirant_, and, right or wrong, intend to say
+_áspirant_ so long as this breath of mine enables me to say _áspirant_ at
+all.  Afterwards Christina, as we were strolling by the weir, watching
+Gabriel and George Hake pounding across the meadows at the rate of five
+miles an hour, said to me, “I think you were right about _aspírant_.”
+“No,” I said, “it is a dear, old-fashioned way.  Your mother says
+_áspirant_; I now remember that my own mother said _áspirant_.  I shall
+stick to _áspirant_ till the end of the chapter.”  And Christina said,
+“Then so will I.”
+
+Among Mrs. Rossetti’s accomplishments was reading aloud, mainly from
+imaginative writers, and I cannot recall without a thrill of mingled
+emotions a delightful stay of mine at Kelmscott in the summer of ’73,
+when she, whose age then was seventy-three, used to read out to us all
+sorts of things.  And writing these words makes me hear those readings
+again—makes me hear, through the open casement of the quaint old house,
+the blackbirds from the home field trying in vain to rival the music of
+that half-Italian, half-English voice.  To have been admitted into such a
+charmed circle I look upon as one of the greatest privileges of my life.
+It is something for a man to have lived within touch of Christina
+Rossetti and her mother.  From her father, however, Christina took,
+either by the operation of some law of heredity or from early association
+with the author of ‘Il Mistero dell’ Amor Platonico del Medio Evo’ and
+‘La Beatrice di Dante,’ that passion for symbolism which is one of the
+chief features of her poetry.  There is, perhaps, no more striking
+instance of the inscrutable lines in which ancestral characteristics
+descend than the way in which the passion for symbolism was inherited by
+Christina and Gabriel Rossetti from their father.
+
+While Christina’s poetical work may be described as being all symbolical,
+she was not much given, like her brother, to read symbols into the
+every-day incidents of life.  Gabriel, on the contrary, though using
+symbolism in his poetry in only a moderate degree, allowed his instinct
+for symbolizing his own life to pass into positive superstition.  When a
+party of us—including Mrs. Rossetti, Christina, the two aunts, Dr. Hake,
+with four of his sons, and myself—were staying for Christmas with Gabriel
+near Bognor, a tree fell in the garden during a storm.  While Gabriel
+seemed inclined to take it as a sign of future disaster, Christina, whose
+poetry is so full of symbolism, would smile at such a notion.  Yet
+Gabriel could speak of his father’s symbolizing (as in ‘La Beatrice di
+Dante’) as being absolutely and hopelessly eccentric and worthless.  This
+is remarkable, for one would have thought that it was impossible to read
+those extraordinary works of the elder Rossetti’s without being impressed
+by the rare intellectual subtlety of the Italian scholar.
+
+Of course the opportunities of brother and sister of studying Nature were
+identical.  Both were born in London, and during childhood saw Nature
+only as a holiday scene.  Christina would talk with delight of her
+grandfather’s cottage retreat about thirty miles from London, to which
+she used to go for a holiday in a stage coach, and of the beauty of the
+country around.  But these expeditions were not numerous, and came to an
+end when she was a child of seven or eight, and it was very little that
+she saw outside London before girlhood was past.  I have myself heard her
+speak of what she has somewhere written about—the rapture of the sight of
+some primroses growing in a railway cutting.  It is, of course, a great
+disadvantage to any poet not to have been born in the country; learned in
+Nature the city-born poet can never be, as we see in the case of Milton,
+who loved Nature without knowing her.  It is here that Jean Ingelow has
+such an advantage over Christina Rossetti.  Her love of flowers, and
+birds, and trees, and all that makes the earth so beautiful, is not one
+whit stronger than Christina’s own, but it is a love born of an
+exhaustive detailed knowledge of Nature’s life.
+
+On a certain occasion when walking with a friend at Hunter’s Forestall,
+near Herne Bay, where she and her mother were nursing Gabriel through one
+of his illnesses, the talk ran upon Shelley’s ‘Skylark,’ a poem which she
+adored.  She was literally bewildered because the friend showed that he
+was able to tell, from a certain change of sound in the note of a skylark
+that had risen over the lane, the moment when the bird had made up its
+mind to cease singing and return to the earth.  It seemed to her an
+almost supernatural gift, and yet an ignorant ploughman will often be
+able to do the same thing.  This kind of intimacy with Nature she
+coveted.  With the lower animals, nevertheless, she had a strange kind of
+sympathy of her own.  Young creatures especially understood the playful
+humour of her approach.  A delightful fantastic whim was the bond between
+her and puppies and kittens and birds.  Her intimacy with Nature—of a
+different kind altogether from that of Wordsworth and Tennyson—was of the
+kind that I have described on a previous occasion as Sufeyistic: she
+loved the beauty of this world, but not entirely for itself; she loved it
+on account of its symbols of another world beyond.  And yet she was no
+slave to the ascetic side of Christianity.  No doubt there was mixed with
+her spiritualism, or perhaps underlying it, a rich sensuousness that
+under other circumstances of life would have made itself manifest, and
+also a rare potentiality of deep passion.  It is this, indeed, which
+makes the study of her great and noble nature so absorbing.
+
+Perhaps for strength both of subject and of treatment, Christina
+Rossetti’s masterpiece is ‘Amor Mundi.’  Here we get a lesson of human
+life expressed, not didactically, but in a concrete form of unsurpassable
+strength, harmony, and concision.  Indeed, it may be said of her work
+generally that her strength as an artist is seen not so much in mastery
+over the rhythm, or even over the verbal texture of poetry, as in the
+skill with which she expresses an allegorical intent by subtle suggestion
+instead of direct preachment.  Herein ‘An Apple Gathering’ is quite
+perfect.  It is, however, if I may venture to say so, a mistake to speak
+of Christina Rossetti as being a great poetic artist.  Exquisite as her
+best things are, no one had a more uncertain hand than she when at work.
+Here, as in so many things, she was like Blake, whose influence upon her
+was very great.
+
+Of self-criticism she had almost nothing.  On one occasion, many years
+ago now, she expressed a wish to have some of her verses printed in _The
+Athenæum_, and I suggested her sending them to 16, Cheyne Walk, her
+brother’s house, where I then used to spend much time in a study that I
+occupied there.  I said that her brother and I would read them together
+and submit them to the editor.  She sent several poems (I think about
+six), not one of which was in the least degree worthy of her.  This
+naturally embarrassed me, but Gabriel, who entirely shared my opinion of
+the poems, wrote at once to her and told her that the verses sent were,
+both in his own judgment and mine, unworthy of her, and that she “had
+better buckle to at once and write another poem.”  She did so, and the
+result was an exquisite lyric which appeared in _The Athenæum_.  Here is
+where she was wonderfully unlike Gabriel, whose power of self-criticism
+in poetry was almost as great as Tennyson’s own.  But in the matter of
+inspiration she was, I must think, above Gabriel—above almost everybody.
+
+If English rhymed metres had been as easy to work in as Italian rhymed
+metres, her imagination was so vivid, her poetic impulse was so strong,
+and, indeed, her poetic wealth so inexhaustible, that she would have
+stood in the front rank of English poets.  But the writer of English
+rhymed measures is in a very different position as regards
+improvisatorial efforts from the Italian who writes in rhymed measures.
+He has to grapple with the metrical structure—to seize the form by the
+throat, as it were, and force it to take in the enormous wealth at the
+English poet’s command.  Fine as is the ‘Prince’s Progress,’ for instance
+(and it would be hard to find its superior in regard to poetic material
+in the whole compass of Victorian poetry), the number of rugged lines the
+reader has to encounter weighs upon and distresses him until, indeed, the
+conclusion is reached: then the passion and the pathos of the subject
+cause the poem to rise upon billows of true rhythm.  On the other hand,
+however, it may be said that a special quality of her verse is a _curiosa
+felicitas_ which makes a metrical blemish tell as a kind of suggestive
+grace.  But I must stop; I must bear in mind that he who has walked and
+talked with Christina Rossetti, burdened with a wealth of remembered
+beauty from earth and heaven, runs the risk of becoming garrulous.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+In regard to unpublished manuscripts which a writer has left behind him,
+the responsibilities of his legal representatives are far more grave than
+seems to be generally supposed.  In deciding what posthumous writings an
+executor is justified in giving to the public it is important, of course,
+to take into account the character, the idiosyncrasy of the writer in
+regard to all his relations towards what may be called the mechanism of
+every-day life.  Some poets are so methodical that the mere fact of
+anything having been left by them in manuscript unaccompanied by
+directions as to its disposal is _primâ facie_ evidence that it was
+intended to be withheld from the public, either temporarily for revision
+or finally and absolutely.  And, of course, the representative,
+especially if he is also a relative or a friend, has to consider
+primarily the intentions of the dead.  If loyalty to living friends is a
+duty, what shall be said of loyalty to friends who are dead?  This,
+indeed, has a sanction of the deepest religious kind.
+
+No doubt, in the philosophical sense, the aspiration of the dead artist
+for perfect work and the honour it brings is a delusion, a sweet mockery
+of the fancy.  But then so is every other aspiration which soars above
+the warm circle of the human affections, and if this delusion of the dead
+artist was held worthy of respect during the artist’s life, it is worthy
+of respect—nay, it is worthy of reverence—after he is dead.  Now every
+true artist when at work has before him an ideal which he would fain
+reach, or at least approach, and if he does not himself know whether in
+any given exercise he has reached that ideal or neared it, we may be
+pretty sure that no one else does.  Hence, whenever there is apparent in
+the circumstances under which the MS. has been found the slightest
+indication that the writer did not wish it to be given to the public, the
+representative who ignores this indication sins against that reverence
+for the dead which in all forms of civilization declares itself to be one
+of the deepest instincts of man.
+
+That the instinct we are speaking of is really one of the primal
+instincts is the very first fact that archæology vouches for.  Of many
+lost races, such as the Aztecs and Toltecs, for instance, we have no
+historical traces save those which are furnished by testimonials of their
+reverence for the dead.  But that this fine instinct is now dying out in
+the Western world—that it will soon be eliminated from the human
+constitution of races that are generally considered to be the most
+advanced—is made manifest by the present attitude of England and America
+towards their illustrious dead.  In the literary arena of both countries,
+indeed, so entire is the abrogation of this most beautiful of all
+feelings—so recklessly and so shamefully are not only raw manuscripts,
+but private letters, put up to auction for publication—that at last the
+great writers of our time, confronted by this new terror, are wisely
+beginning to take care of themselves and their friends by a holocaust of
+every scrap of paper lying in their desks.
+
+So demoralized has the literary world become by the present craze for
+notoriety and for personal details of prominent men that an executor who
+in regard to the disposal of his testator’s money would act with the most
+rigid scrupulousness will, in regard to the MSS. he finds in his
+testator’s desk, commit, “for the benefit of the public,” an outrage that
+would have made the men of a less vulgar period shudder.  The “benefit of
+the public,” indeed!  Who is this “public,” and what are its rights as
+against the rights of the dead poet, whose heartstrings are woven into
+“copy” by the disloyal friend he trusted?  The inherent callousness of
+man’s nature is never so painfully seen as in the relation of this ogre,
+“the public,” to dead genius.  Without the smallest real reverence for
+genius—without the smallest capacity of distinguishing the poetaster it
+always adores from the true poet it always ignores—the public can still
+fall down before the pedestal upon which genius has been placed by the
+select few—fall down with its long ears wide open for gossip about
+genius, or anything else that is talked about.
+
+It was with such thoughts as these that we opened the present somewhat
+bulky volume {195}—not, however, with many misgivings; for Christina
+Rossetti, before she made her brother executor, knew what were his views
+as to the rights of the public as against the rights of genius.  And if
+he has printed here every poem he could lay hands upon, he may fairly be
+assumed to have done so with the consent of a sister whom he loved so
+dearly and by whom he was so dearly loved.  Fortunately there are not
+many of these relics that are devoid of a deep interest, some from the
+biographical point of view, some from the poetical.
+
+Again, what is to be said about such part of a dead author’s writing as,
+having appeared in print, has afterwards passed through the author’s
+crucible of artistic revision?  What about the executor’s duty here,
+where the case between the author and the public stands on a different
+footing?  At the present time, when newspapers and novels alone are read,
+it is not the poet’s verses which most people read, but paragraphs about
+what the author and his wife and children “eat and drink and avoid”: a
+time when, if the poet’s verses are read at all, it is the accidents
+rather than the essentials of the work that seem primarily to concern the
+public.  At such a time an editor is not entirely master of his actions.
+Doubtless, there is much reason in the wrath of Tennyson and other great
+poets against the “literary resurrection man,” who, though incapable of
+understanding the beauties of a beautiful work, can take a very great
+interest in poring over the various stages through which that work has
+passed on its way to perfection.  These poets, however, are apt to forget
+that, after a poem or line has once passed into print, its final
+suppression is impossible.  And perhaps there are other reasons why, in
+this matter, an editor should be allowed some indulgence.
+
+Here, for instance, is a puzzling case to be tried _in foro conscientiæ_.
+In the first edition of ‘Goblin Market,’ published in 1862, appeared
+three poems of more breadth of treatment than any of the others: ‘Cousin
+Kate,’ a ballad, ‘Sister Maude,’ a ballad, and ‘A Triad,’ a sonnet.  In
+subsequent issues of the book these were all omitted.  Mr. W. M.
+Rossetti, speaking of ‘Sister Maude,’ says: “I presume that my sister,
+with overstrained scrupulosity, considered its moral tone to be somewhat
+open to exception.  In such a view I by no means agree, and I therefore
+reproduce it.”  If Christina’s objection was valid when she raised it, it
+is, of course, valid now, when the beloved poet is in the “country beyond
+Orion,” and knows what sanctions are of man’s imagining, and what
+sanctions are more eternal than the movements of the stars.
+
+The question here is, What were Christina Rossetti’s wishes? not whether
+her brother “agrees” with them.  Hence, if it were not certain that some
+one would soon have restored them, would Mr. W. M. Rossetti have
+hesitated before doing so?  For they are among the most powerful things
+Christina Rossetti ever wrote, and it was a subject of deep regret to her
+friends that she suppressed them.  Yet she withdrew them from
+conscientious motives.  In ‘Sister Maude’ she showed how great was her
+power in the most difficult of all forms of poetic art—the romantic
+ballad.  Splendid as are Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Sister Helen’ and ‘Rose
+Mary,’ the literary _aura_ surrounding them prevents them from seeming—as
+the best of the Border ballads seem—Nature’s very voice muttering in her
+dreams of the pathos and the mystery of the human story.  It was not,
+perhaps, given even to Rossetti to get very near to that supreme old poet
+(not forgotten, because never known) who wrote “May Margaret’s” appeal to
+the ghost of her lover Clerk Saunders:—
+
+    Is there ony room at your head, Saunders?
+       Is there ony room at your feet?
+    Is there ony room at your side, Saunders,
+       Where fain, fain I wad sleep?
+
+where the very imperfections of the rhymes seem somehow to add to the
+pathos and the mystery of the chant.  But if, indeed, it has been given
+to any modern poet to get into this atmosphere, it has been given to
+Christina Rossetti.  And so with the ballad of simple human passion no
+modern writer has quite done what Christina Rossetti has done in one of
+the poems here restored:—
+
+
+SISTER MAUDE.
+
+
+    Who told my mother of my shame,
+       Who told my father of my dear?
+    Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude,
+       Who lurked to spy and peer.
+
+    Cold he lies, as cold as stone,
+       With his clotted curls about his face:
+    The comeliest corpse in all the world,
+       And worthy of a queen’s embrace.
+
+    You might have spared his soul, sister,
+       Have spared my soul, your own soul too:
+    Though I had not been born at all,
+       He’d never have looked at you.
+
+    My father may sleep in Paradise,
+       My mother at Heaven-gate:
+    But sister Maude shall get no sleep
+       Either early or late.
+
+    My father may wear a golden gown,
+       My mother a crown may win;
+    If my dear and I knocked at Heaven-gate
+       Perhaps they’d let us in:
+    But sister Maude, O sister Maude,
+       Bide _you_ with death and sin.
+
+But it is for the personal poems that this volume will be prized most
+dearly by certain readers.
+
+Mr. W. M. Rossetti speaks of “the very wide and exceedingly strong
+outburst of eulogy” of his sister which appeared in the public press
+after her death.  Yet that outburst was far from giving adequate
+expression to what was felt by some of her readers—those between whom and
+herself there was a bond of sympathy so sacred and so deep as to be
+something like a religion.  It is not merely that she was the
+acknowledged queen in that world (outside the arena called “the literary
+world”) where poetry is “its own exceeding great reward,” but to other
+readers of a different kind altogether—readers who, drawing the deepest
+delight from such poetry as specially appeals to them, never read any
+other, and have but small knowledge of poetry as a fine art—her verse
+was, perhaps, more precious still.  They feel that at every page of her
+writing the beautiful poetry is only the outcome of a life whose almost
+unexampled beauty fascinates them.
+
+Although Christina Rossetti had more of what is called the
+unconsciousness of poetic inspiration than any other poet of her time,
+the writing of poetry was not by any means the chief business of her
+life.  She was too thorough a poet for that.  No one felt so deeply as
+she that poetic art is only at the best the imperfect body in which
+dwells the poetic soul.  No one felt so deeply as she that as the notes
+of the nightingale are but the involuntary expression of the bird’s
+emotion, and, again, as the perfume of the violet is but the flower’s
+natural breath, so it is and must be with the song of the very poet, and
+that, therefore, to write beautifully is in a deep and true sense to live
+beautifully.  In the volume before us, as in all her previously published
+writings, we see at its best what Christianity is as the motive power of
+poetry.  The Christian idea is essentially feminine, and of this feminine
+quality Christina Rossetti’s poetry is full.
+
+In motive power the difference between classic and Christian poetry must
+needs be very great.  But whatever may be said in favour of one as
+against the other, this at least cannot be controverted, that the history
+of literature shows no human development so beautiful as the ideal
+Christian woman of our own day.  She is unique, indeed.  Men of science
+tell us that among all the fossilized plants we find none of the lovely
+family of the rose, and in the same way we should search in vain through
+the entire human record for anything so beautiful as that kind of
+Christian lady to whom self-abnegation is not only the first of duties,
+but the first of joys.  Yet, no doubt, the Christian idea must needs be
+more or less flavoured by each personality through which it is expressed.
+With regard to Christina Rossetti, while upon herself Christian dogma
+imposed infinite obligations—obligations which could never be evaded by
+her without the risk of all the penalties fulminated by all
+believers—there was in the order of things a sort of ether of universal
+charity for all others.  She would lament, of course, the lapses of every
+soul, but for these there was a forgiveness which her own lapses could
+never claim.  There was, to be sure, a sweet egotism in this.  It was
+very fascinating, however.  This feeling explains what seems somewhat to
+puzzle the editor, especially in the poem called ‘The End of the First
+Part,’ written April 18th, 1849, of which he says, “‘Tears for guilt’ is
+in reference to Christina a very exaggerated phrase”:—
+
+
+THE END OF THE FIRST PART.
+
+
+    My happy dream is finished with,
+       My dream in which alone I lived so long.
+    My heart slept—woe is me, it wakeneth;
+       Was weak—I thought it strong.
+
+    Oh, weary wakening from a life-true dream!
+       Oh pleasant dream from which I wake in pain!
+    I rested all my trust on things that seem,
+       And all my trust is vain.
+
+    I must pull down my palace that I built,
+       Dig up the pleasure-gardens of my soul;
+    Must change my laughter to sad tears for guilt,
+       My freedom to control.
+
+    Now all the cherished secrets of my heart,
+       Now all my hidden hopes, are turned to sin.
+    Part of my life is dead, part sick, and part
+       Is all on fire within.
+
+    The fruitless thought of what I might have been,
+       Haunting me ever, will not let me rest.
+    A cold North wind has withered all my green,
+       My sun is in the West.
+
+    But, where my palace stood, with the same stone
+       I will uprear a shady hermitage;
+    And there my spirit shall keep house alone,
+       Accomplishing its age.
+
+    There other garden beds shall lie around,
+       Full of sweet-briar and incense-bearing thyme:
+    There I will sit, and listen for the sound
+       Of the last lingering chime.
+
+It was the beauty of her life that made her personal influence so great,
+and upon no one was that influence exercised with more strength than upon
+her illustrious brother Gabriel, who in many ways was so much unlike her.
+In spite of his deep religious instinct and his intense sympathy with
+mysticism, Gabriel remained what is called a free thinker in the true
+meaning of that much-abused phrase.  In religion as in politics he
+thought for himself, and yet when Mr. W. M. Rossetti affirms that the
+poet was never drawn towards free thinking women, he says what is
+perfectly true.  And this arose from the extraordinary influence,
+scarcely recognized by himself, that the beauty of Christina’s life and
+her religious system had upon him.
+
+This, of course, is not the place in which to say much about him; nor
+need much at any time and in any place be said, for has he not written
+his own biography—depicted himself more faithfully than Lockhart could
+depict Walter Scott, more faithfully than Boswell could depict Dr.
+Johnson?  Has he not done this in the immortal sonnet-sequence called
+‘The House of Life’?  What poet of the nineteenth century do we know so
+intimately as we know the author of ‘The House of Life’?
+
+Christina Rossetti’s peculiar form of the Christian sentiment she
+inherited from her mother, the sweetness of whose nature was never
+disturbed by that exercise of the egoism of the artist in which Christina
+indulged and without whose influence it is difficult to imagine what the
+Rossetti family would have been.  The father was a poet and a mystic of
+the cryptographic kind, and it is by no means unlikely that had he
+studied Shakespeare as he studied Dante he would in these days have been
+a disciple of the Baconians, and, of course, his influence on the family
+in the matter of literary activity and of mysticism must have been very
+great.  And yet all that is noblest in Christina’s poetry, an
+ever-present sense of the beauty and power of goodness, must surely have
+come from the mother, from whom also came that other charm of
+Christina’s, to which Gabriel was peculiarly sensitive, her youthfulness
+of temperament.
+
+Among the many differences which exist between the sexes this might,
+perhaps, be mentioned, that while it is beautiful for a man to grow
+old—grow old with the passage of years—a woman to retain her charm must
+always remain young.  In a deep sense woman may be said to have but one
+paramount charm, youth, and when this is gone all is gone.  The
+youthfulness of the body, of course, soon vanishes, but with any woman
+who can really win and retain the love of man this is not nearly so
+important as at first it seems.  It is the youthfulness of the soul that,
+in the truly adorable woman, is invulnerable.  It is one of the deep
+misfortunes of the very poor of cities that as a rule the terrible
+struggle with the wolf at the door is apt to sour the nature of women and
+turn them into crones at the age when in the more fortunate classes the
+true beauty of woman often begins; and even where the environment is not
+that of poverty, but of straitened means, it is as a rule impossible for
+a woman to retain this youthfulness.
+
+In the case of the Rossettis, in the early period they were in a position
+of straitened means.  Nor was this all: the children, Gabriel alone
+excepted, felt themselves to be by nationality aliens.  Christina, though
+she made only one visit to Italy, felt herself to be an Italian, and
+would smile when any one talked to her of the John Bullism of her brother
+Gabriel, and yet, with these powerful causes working against their
+natural elasticity of temperament, both mother and daughter retained that
+juvenility which Gabriel Rossetti felt to be so refreshing.  So strong
+was it in the mother that it had a strange effect upon the mere physique,
+and at eighty the expression in the eyes, and, indeed, on the face
+throughout, retained so much of the winsomeness of youth that she was
+more beautiful than most young women:—
+
+
+1882.
+
+
+    My blessed mother dozing in her chair
+       On Christmas Day seemed an embodied Love,
+    A comfortable Love with soft brown hair
+       Softened and silvered to a tint of dove;
+    A better sort of Venus with an air
+       Angelical from thoughts that dwell above;
+    A wiser Pallas in whose body fair
+       Enshrined a blessed soul looks out thereof.
+    Winter brought holly then, now Spring has brought
+       Paler and frailer snowdrops shivering;
+    And I have brought a simple humble thought—
+       I her devoted duteous Valentine—
+    A lifelong thought which thrills this song I sing,
+       A lifelong love to this dear saint of mine.
+
+Although this was not so with Christina, upon whose face ill-health
+worked its ravages, her temperament, as we say, remained as young as
+ever.  The lovely relations—sometimes staid and sometimes playful—between
+mother and daughter, are seen throughout the book before us.  But
+especially are they seen in one little group of poems—“The Valentines to
+her Mother”—in regard to which Christina left the following pencilled
+note:—
+
+“These Valentines had their origin from my dearest mother’s remarking
+that she had never received one.  I, her C. G. R., ever after supplied
+one on the day; and (so far as I recollect) it was a surprise every time,
+she having forgotten all about it in the interim.”
+
+Mrs. Rossetti’s first valentine was received when she was nearly
+seventy-six years of age, and she continued every year to receive a
+valentine until 1886, when she died.  Surely there is not in the history
+of English poetry anything more fascinating than these valentines.
+
+It is pleasing to see the book open with the following dedication by Mr.
+W. M. Rossetti:—
+
+“To Algernon Charles Swinburne, a generous eulogist of Christina
+Rossetti, who hailed his genius and prized himself the greatest of living
+British poets, my old and constant friend, I dedicate this book.”
+
+
+
+
+V.  DR. GORDON HAKE.
+1809–1895.
+
+
+I little thought when I recently quoted from Dr. Hake’s account of that
+Christmas gathering of the Rossettis at Bognor in 1875—a gathering which
+he has made historic—that to-day I should be writing an obituary notice
+of the “parable-poet” himself.  It is true that, having fractured a leg
+in a lamentable accident which befell him, he had for the last few years
+been imprisoned in one room and compelled during most of the time to lie
+in a horizontal position.  But notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding
+his great age, his mental faculties remained so unimpaired that it was
+hard to believe his death could be so near.
+
+   [Picture: Dr. Gordon Hake.  From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti
+          reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. Thomas Hake]
+
+Although, owing to his intimacy with George Borrow, Hake was associated
+in the public mind with the Eastern Counties, he was not an East Anglian.
+It was at Leeds (in 1809) that he first saw the light.  His mother was a
+Gordon of the Huntly stock, and came of “the Park branch” of that house.
+The famous General Gordon was his first cousin, and it was owing to this
+fact that Hake’s son, Mr. Egmont Hake, was entrusted with the material
+for writing his authoritative books upon the heroic Christian soldier.
+Between Hake’s eldest son, Mr. T. St. E. Hake, a rising novelist, and the
+General the likeness was curiously strong.  Nominated by one of his
+uncles to Christ’s Hospital, Hake entered that famous school.  He gives
+in his ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ a very vivid picture of it and also a
+really vital portrait of himself.  From his very childhood he was haunted
+by a literary ambition which can only be called an insatiable passion.
+It lasted till the very hour of his death.  When eleven years of age he
+became acquainted with that one poet whose immensity of fame has for more
+than three centuries been the flame into which the myriad Shakespeare
+moths of English literature have been flying.  The Shakespearean of
+eleven summers did not, like so many Shakespeare enthusiasts from
+Davenant down to those latest Shakespeares, Homers, and Miltons of our
+contemporary paragraphists, get himself up to look like the Stratford
+bust.  The only man who ever really looked like that bust was the late
+Dion Boucicault, who did so without trying.  But Shakespeare’s wonderful
+work acted on the imagination of the child of eleven in an equally
+humorous way.  “Shakespeare’s perfection,” he says in his memoirs, “not
+only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but it depressed me in
+turn with the feeling that I could never equal it howsoever long I might
+live.”
+
+Yet although this passion never passed away, but waxed with his years, it
+must not be supposed that Hake suffered from what in the “new criticism”
+is sweetly and appropriately called “modernity”—in other words, that
+vulgar greed for notoriety that in these days, when literature to be
+listened to must be puffed like quack medicine and patent soap, has made
+the atmosphere of the literary arena somewhat stifling in the nostrils of
+those who turn from “modernity” to poetic art.  Nor was Hake’s feeling
+akin to that fine despair
+
+    Before the foreheads of the gods of song
+
+which true poets, great or small, know—that fine despair which, while it
+will sometimes stop the breath of one of the true sons of Apollo, as it
+actually did strike mute Charles Wells, and as at one time it threatened
+to stop the breath of Rossetti, will lead others to write, and write, and
+write.  It is, however, life’s illusions that in most cases make life
+tolerable.  When in old age calamity came upon Hake, and he was shut out
+from life as by a prison wall, his one solace, the one thing that really
+bound him to life, was this ambitious dream which came upon the Bluecoat
+boy of eleven.
+
+His mother was in easy circumstances, and when a youth Hake travelled a
+good deal on the Continent, where his success in the “great world” of
+that time was swift and complete.  If this success was owing as much to
+his exceptionally striking personal appearance and natural endowment of
+style as to his intellectual equipments—high as these were—that is not
+surprising to those who knew him.  Of course he was well advanced in
+years before I was old enough to call him my friend; but even then he was
+so extremely handsome a man that I can well believe the stories I have
+got from his family connexions (such as his wife’s sisters) of his
+appearance in youth.  With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the
+most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen.  And circumstances put to
+the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period
+of his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England.
+I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a man’s life is
+passed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what used
+to be called “the great world.”  To be, or to seem to be, unconscious of
+one’s own bearing towards the world, and unconscious of the world’s
+bearing towards oneself, is, I fancy, impossible to a man—even though he
+have the genius and intellectual endowment of a Browning—who is for the
+first time brought into touch with society after the plastic period is
+passed.
+
+I have told elsewhere the whimsical story of Hake and Rossetti, of
+Rossetti’s delightful account of his reading as a boy, in a coffee-house
+in Chancery Lane, Hake’s remarkable romance ‘Vates,’ afterwards called
+‘Valdarno,’ in a magazine; his writing a letter about it to the unknown
+author, and getting no reply until many years had passed.  Hake’s
+relations towards Rossetti were of the deepest and most sacred kind.
+Rossetti had the highest opinion of Hake’s poetical genius, and also felt
+towards him the greatest love and gratitude for services of an
+inestimable kind rendered to him in the direst crisis of his life.  To
+enter upon these matters, however, is obviously impossible in a brief and
+hurried obituary notice; and equally impossible is it for me to enter
+into the poetic principles of a writer whose very originality has been a
+barrier to his winning a wide recognition.
+
+Hake’s best work is that, I think, contained in the volume called ‘New
+Symbols,’ in which there is disclosed an extraordinary variety of poetic
+power.  In execution, too, he is at his best in that volume.  Christina
+Rossetti has often told me that ‘Ecce Homo’ impressed her more profoundly
+than did any other poem of her own time.  Also its daring startled her.
+It was, however, the previous volume, ‘Madeline, and other Poems,’ which
+brought him into contact with Rossetti—the great event of his literary
+life.
+
+If the man ever lived who could take as much interest in another man’s
+work as his own, Dr. Hake in finding Rossetti found that man.  Although
+at that time Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and
+Swinburne were running abreast of each other, there was no poet in
+England who would not have felt honoured by having his work reviewed by
+Rossetti.  But Dr. Hake, whose name was absolutely unknown, had made his
+way into Rossetti’s affections—as, indeed, he made his way into the
+affections of all who knew him—and this was quite enough to induce
+Rossetti to ask Dr. Appleton for leave to review ‘Madeline’ in ’71 in
+_The Academy_—a request which Appleton, of course, was delighted to
+grant.  And again, when in 1873 ‘Parables and Tales’ appeared, Mr. John
+Morley, we may be sure, was something more than willing to let Rossetti
+review the book in _The Fortnightly Review_; and, again, when ‘New
+Symbols’ appeared, there was some talk about Rossetti’s reviewing it in
+_The Fortnightly Review_; but this, for certain reasons which Rossetti
+explained to me—reasons which have been misunderstood, but which were
+entirely adequate—was abandoned.  Down to the period when Dr. Hake went
+to live in Germany he and his son Mr. Gordon Hake were among the most
+intimate friends of the great poet-painter.  Mr. Gordon Hake, indeed, a
+man of admirable culture and abilities, lived with Rossetti, who
+certainly benefited much by contact with his bright and lively companion.
+The portrait of Dr. Hake prefixed to Mrs. Meynell’s selections from his
+works is one of Rossetti’s finest crayons.  It is, however, too heavy in
+expression for Hake.
+
+Full of fine qualities as is his best poetry, full of intellectual
+subtlety, imagination, and a rare combination of subjective with
+objective power, there is apparently in it a certain _je ne sais quoi_
+which has prevented him at present from winning his true meed of fame.
+His hand, no doubt, is uncertain; but so is the hand of many a successful
+poet—that of Christina Rossetti, for instance.  For sheer originality of
+conception and of treatment what recent poems surpass or even equal ‘Old
+Souls’ and the ‘Serpent Charmer’?  Then take the remarkable mastery over
+colour exhibited by ‘Ortrud’s Vision.’  His volume of pantheistic sonnets
+in the Shakespearean form, ‘The New Day,’ written in his eighty-first
+year, is on the whole, however, his most remarkable work.  The kind of
+Sufeyistic nature ecstasy displayed therein by a man of so advanced an
+age is nothing less than wonderful.  And as to knowledge of nature, not
+even Wordsworth or Tennyson knew nature so completely as did Hake, for he
+had a thorough training as a naturalist.  In looking at a flower he could
+enjoy not only its beauty, but also the delight of picturing to himself
+the flower’s inherited beauty and the ancestors from which the flower got
+its inheritance.  And as regards the lyrical flow imported into so
+monumental a form as the sonnet, every student of this form must needs
+study the book with the greatest interest.  His very latest work,
+however, is in prose.  I find it extremely difficult to write about
+‘Memoirs of Eighty Years.’  It is full of remarkable qualities: wit,
+humour, an ebullience of animal spirits that is Rabelaisian.  What it
+lacks (and in some portions of it greatly lacks) is delicacy, refinement
+of tone.  And surely this is remarkable when we realize the kind of man
+he was who wrote it.
+
+It has been my privilege to go about with him not only in London, but
+also in Rome, in Paris, in Venice, in Florence, Pisa, &c.; and no matter
+what might be the quality of the society with which he was brought into
+contact, it always seemed to me that he was distinguished by his very
+lack of that accentuated movement which the _littérateur_ generally
+displays.  I merely dwell upon this to show how inscrutable are the
+mental processes in the crowning puzzle of the great humourist Nature,
+the writing man.  Just as the most angular and _gauche_ man in a literary
+gathering may possibly turn out to be the poet whose lyrics have been
+compared to Shelley, or the prose writer whose mellifluous periods have
+been compared to those of Plato, so the most dignified man in the room
+may turn out to be the writer of a book whose defect is a noticeable lack
+of dignified style.  It was hard, indeed, for those who knew Hake in the
+flesh to believe that the ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ was written by him.
+I suppose I shall be expected to say a word about the famous intimacy
+between Hake and Borrow.  After Hake went to live in Germany, Borrow told
+me a good deal about this intimacy and also about his own early life; for
+reticent as he naturally was, he and I got to be confidential and
+intimate.  His friendship with Hake began when Hake was practising as a
+physician in Norfolk.  It lasted during the greater part of Borrow’s
+later life.  When Borrow was living in London, his great delight was to
+walk over on Sundays from Hereford Square to Coombe End, call upon Hake,
+and take a stroll with him over Richmond Park.  They both had a passion
+for herons and for deer.  At that time Hake was a very intimate friend of
+my own, and having had the good fortune to be introduced by him to
+Borrow, I used to join the two in their walks.  Afterwards, when Hake
+went to live in Germany, I used to take these walks with Borrow alone.
+Two more interesting men it would be impossible to meet.  The remarkable
+thing was that there was between them no sort of intellectual sympathy.
+In style, in education, in experience, whatever Hake was Borrow was not.
+Borrow knew almost nothing of Hake’s writings, either in prose or in
+verse.  His ideal poet was Pope, and when he read, or rather looked into,
+Hake’s ‘World’s Epitaph,’ he thought he did Hake the greatest honour by
+saying, “There are lines here and there that are nigh as good as Pope’s.”
+On the other hand, Hake’s acquaintance with Borrow’s works was far behind
+that of some Borrovians who did not know Lavengro in the flesh, such as
+Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Birrell.
+
+Borrow was shy, eccentric, angular, rustic in accent and in locution, but
+with a charm for me, at least, that was irresistible.  Hake was polished,
+easy, and urbane in everything, and, although not without prejudice and
+bias, ready to shine gracefully in any society.  As far as Hake was
+concerned, the sole link between them was that of reminiscence of earlier
+days and adventures in Borrow’s beloved East Anglia.  Among many proofs
+that I could adduce of this, I will give one.  I am the possessor of the
+manuscript of Borrow’s ‘Gypsies in Spain,’ written partly in a Spanish
+note-book as he moved about Spain in his colporteur days.  It was my wish
+that Hake would leave behind him some memorial of Borrow more worthy of
+himself and his friend than those brief reminiscences contained in
+‘Memoirs of Eighty Years.’  I took to Hake this precious relic of one of
+the most wonderful men of the nineteenth century in order to discuss with
+him differences between the MS. and the printed text.  Hake was sitting
+in his invalid chair, writing verses.  “What does it all matter?” he
+said.  “I do not think you understand Lavengro,” said I.  Hake replied,
+“And yet Lavengro had an advantage over me, for _he_ understood _nobody_.
+Every individuality with which he was brought into contact had, as no one
+knows better than you, to be tinged with colours of his own before he
+could see it at all.”
+
+This, of course, was true enough; and Hake’s asperities when speaking of
+Borrow in ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’—asperities which have vexed a good
+many Borrovians—simply arose from the fact that it was impossible for two
+such men to understand each other.  When I told him of Andrew Lang’s
+angry onslaught upon Borrow, in his notes to the “Waverley Novels,” on
+account of his attacks upon Scott, he said, “Well, and does he not
+deserve it?”  When I told him of Miss Cobbe’s description of Borrow as a
+_poseur_, he said to me, “I told you the same scores of times.  But I saw
+that Borrow had bewitched you during that first walk under the rainbow in
+Richmond Park.  It was that rainbow, I think, that befooled you.”
+Borrow’s affection for Hake, however, was both strong and deep, as I saw
+after Hake had gone to Germany and in a way dropped out of Borrow’s ken.
+Yet Hake was as good a man as ever Borrow was, and for certain others
+with whom he was brought in contact as full of a genuine affection as
+Borrow was himself.
+
+
+
+
+JOHN LEICESTER WARREN, LORD DE TABLEY.
+1835–1895.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+In the death of Lord de Tabley, the English world of letters has lost a
+true poet and a scholar of very varied accomplishments.  His friends have
+lost much more.  Since his last attack of influenza, those who knew him
+and loved him had been much concerned about him.  The pallor of his
+complexion had greatly increased; so had his feebleness.  As long ago as
+May last, when I called upon him at the Athenæum Club in order to join
+him at a luncheon he was giving at the Café Royal, I found that he had
+engaged a four-wheeled cab to take us over those few yards.  The
+expression in his kind and wistful blue-grey eyes showed that he had
+noted the start of surprise I gave on seeing the cab waiting for us.
+“You know my love of a growler,” he said; “this is just to save us the
+bother of getting across the Piccadilly cataracts.”  I thought to myself,
+“I wish it were only the bother of crossing the cataracts which accounts
+for the growler.”
+
+Another sign that the physical part of him was in the grip of the demon
+of decay was that, instead of coming to the Pines to luncheon, as had
+been his wont, he preferred of late to come to afternoon tea, and return
+to Elm Park before dinner.  And on the occasion when he last came in this
+way it seemed to us here that he had aged still more; yet his
+intellectual forces had lost nothing of their power.  And as a companion
+he was as winsome as ever.  That fine quality with which he was so richly
+endowed, the quality which used to be called “urbanity,” was as fresh
+when I saw him last as when I first knew him.  That sweet sagacity,
+mellowed and softened by a peculiarly quiet humour, shone from his face
+at intervals as he talked of the pleasant old days when he was my
+colleague on _The Athenæum_, and when I used to call upon him so
+frequently on my way to Rossetti in Cheyne Walk to chat over “the walnuts
+and the wine” about poetry.
+
+My own friendship with him began at my first meeting him, and this was
+long ago.  Being at that time a less-known man of letters than I am now,
+supposing that to be possible, I was astonished one day when my friend
+Edmund Gosse told me that his friend Leicester Warren had expressed a
+wish to meet me on account of certain things of mine which he had read in
+_The Examiner_ and _The Athenæum_.  I accepted with alacrity Mr. Gosse’s
+invitation to one of those charming _salons_ of his on the banks of
+Westbournia’s Grand Canal which have become historic.  I was surprised to
+find Warren, who was then scarcely above forty, looking so old, not to
+say so old-fashioned.  At that time he did not wear the moustache and
+beard which afterwards lent a picturesqueness to his face.  There was a
+kind of rural appearance about him which had for me a charm of its own;
+it suited so well with his gentle ways, I thought.  This being the
+impression he made upon me, it may be imagined how delighted I was
+shortly afterwards to see him come to the door of Ivy Lodge, Putney,
+where I was then living alone.  Nor was I less surprised than delighted
+to see him.  On realizing at Gosse’s _salon_ that my new acquaintance was
+a botanist, I had fraternized with him on this point, and had described
+to him an extremely rare and lovely little tree growing in the centre of
+my garden, which some unknown lover of trees had imported.  I had given
+Warren a kind of general invitation to come some day and see it.  So
+early a call as this I had not hoped to get.  Perhaps I thought so
+reclusive a man as he even then appeared would never come at all.
+
+After having duly admired the tree he turned to the Rossetti crayons on
+the walls of the rooms; but although he talked much about ‘The Spirit of
+the Rainbow’ and the design from the same beautiful model which William
+Sharp has christened ‘Forced Music,’ the loveliness of which attracted
+him not a little, I perceived that he had something else that he wanted
+to talk about, and allowed him to lead the conversation up to it.  To my
+surprise I found that, so far from having perceived how much he had
+interested me, he had imagined that my attitude towards him was
+constrained, and had explained it to his own discomfort after the
+following fashion: “Watts has an intimate friend of whose poetry I am a
+deep admirer—so deep indeed that some people, and not without reason,
+have said that my own poetry is unduly influenced by it.  But an article
+by me in _The Fortnightly_ goes out of its way to dub as a ‘minor poet’
+the very writer to whose influence I have succumbed.  It is the
+incongruity between my dubbing my idol a ‘minor poet’ and my real and
+most obvious admiration of his work that makes Watts, in spite of an
+external civility, feel unfriendly towards me.  Yet there is no real
+incongruity, for it was the editor, G. H. Lewes, who, after my proof had
+been returned for press, interpolated the objectionable words about the
+minor poet.”
+
+This was how he had been reasoning.  When I laughed and told him to
+recast his syllogism—told him that I had never seen the article in
+question, and doubted whether my friend had—matters became very bright
+between us.  He stayed to luncheon; we walked on the Common; I showed him
+our Wimbledon sun-dews; in a word, I felt that I had discovered a richer
+gold mine than the richest in the world, a new friend.  Had I then known
+him as well as I afterwards did, I should have been aware that he had a
+strong dash of the sensitive, not to say the morbid, in his nature.  He
+had a habit of submitting almost every incident of his life to such an
+analysis as that I have been describing.
+
+On another occasion, when years later he had a difference with a friend,
+I reminded him of the incident recorded above, and made him laugh by
+saying, “My dear Warren, you are so afraid of treading on people’s corns
+that you tread upon them.”
+
+On first visiting him, as on many a subsequent occasion, I was struck by
+the variety of his intellectual interests, and the thoroughness with
+which he pursued them all.  I have lately said in print what I fully
+believe—that he was the most learned of English poets, if learning means
+something more than mere scholarship.  He was a skilled numismatist, and
+in 1862 published, through the Numismatic Society, ‘An Essay on Greek
+Federal Coinage,’ and an essay ‘On Some Coins of Lycia under Rhodian
+Domination and of the Lycian League.’  He even took an interest in
+book-plates, and actually, in 1880, published ‘A Guide to the Study of
+Book-Plates.’  I should not have been at all surprised to learn that he
+was also writing a guide for the collectors of postage stamps.
+
+At this time he had published a good deal of verse; for instance,
+‘Eclogues and Monodramas’ in 1865; ‘Studies in Verse’ in 1866; ‘Orestes’
+in 1867; a collection of poems called ‘Rehearsals’ in 1873; another
+collection, called ‘The Searching Net,’ in 1876.  From this time, during
+many years, I saw him frequently, although, for a reason which it is not
+necessary to discuss here, he became seized with a deep dislike of the
+literary world and its doings, and I am not aware that he saw any
+literary man save myself and the late W. B. Scott, the bond between whom
+and himself was “book-plates”!  Then he took to residing in the country.
+As a poet he seemed to be quite forgotten, save by students of poetry,
+until his name was revived by means of Mr. Miles’s colossal anthology
+‘The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century,’ Mr. Miles, it
+seems, was a great admirer of Lord de Tabley’s poetry, and managed to
+reach the hermit in his cell.  In the sixth volume of his work Mr. Miles
+gave a judicious selection from Lord de Tabley’s poems and an admirable
+essay upon them.  The selection attracted a good deal of attention.
+
+On finding that the public would listen to him, I urged him to bring out
+a volume of selected pieces from all his works, an idea which for some
+time he contested with his usual pessimistic vigour.  Having, however,
+set my heart upon it, I spoke upon the subject to Mr. John Lane, who at
+once saw his way to bring out such a volume at his own risk.  To the
+poet’s astonishment the book was a success, and it at once passed into a
+second edition.  In the spring of this year he was emboldened to bring
+out another volume of new poems, and his name became firmly
+re-established as a poet.  It was after the success of the first book
+that he consulted me upon a question which was then upon his mind: Should
+he devote his future energies to literature or to making himself a
+position as a speaker in the Lords?  He had lately had occasion to speak
+both in the country and in the Lords upon some local matter of
+importance, and his success had in some slight degree revived an old
+aspiration to plunge into the world of politics.  He was a Liberal, and
+in 1868 he had contested—but unsuccessfully—Mid-Cheshire.  This was on
+the first election for that division after the Reform Act of 1867.  His
+support in a county so Conservative as Cheshire had really been very
+strong, but he never made another effort to get into Parliament.  “You
+know my way,” he used to say.  “I can make one spring—perhaps a pretty
+good spring—but not more than one.”
+
+On the whole, he leaned towards the idea of going into politics.  The way
+in which he put the case to me was thoroughly characteristic of him:
+“Even if my verse were strong and vital, which I fear it is not, there is
+almost no chance for men of my generation receiving more than a slight
+attention at the present day.  Things have altogether changed since the
+sixties and seventies, when I published my most important work—at a time
+when the prominent names were Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold,
+Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne.  The old critical oracles are now dumb;
+the reviewers are all young men whose knowledge of poetry does not go
+back so far as the sixties.  Those who reviewed the selection from my
+work in Miles’s book showed themselves to be entirely unconscious of the
+name of Leicester Warren, and treated the poems there selected as being
+the work of a new writer; and even when the poems published by Lane came
+out, no one seemed to be aware that they were by a writer who was very
+much to the fore a quarter of a century ago.  That book has had a flutter
+of success, but in how large a degree was the success owing to the
+curiosity excited by the book of a man of my generation being brought out
+now, and by the publisher of the men of this?  With all my sympathy with
+the work of the younger men and my admiration of some of it, things, I
+say, have changed since those days.”
+
+I did not share these pessimistic views.  Moreover, knowing as I did how
+extremely sensitive he was, I knew that his figuring in Parliament would
+result in the greatest pain to him, and if I gave a somewhat exaggerated
+expression with regard to my hopes of him in the literary world, it was a
+kindly feeling towards himself that impelled me to do so.  He took my
+advice and proceeded to gather material for another volume.
+
+To define clearly the impression left upon one by intercourse with any
+man is difficult.  In De Tabley’s case it is almost impossible.  His
+remarkable modesty, or rather diffidence, was what, perhaps, struck me
+most.  It was a genuine lack of faith in his own powers; it had nothing
+whatever to do with “mock-modesty.”  I had a singular instance of this
+diffidence in the autumn of last year.  Lord de Tabley, who was staying
+at Ryde, having learnt that I was staying with a friend near Niton Bay,
+wrote to me there saying that he somewhat specially wanted to see me, and
+proposed our lunching together at an hotel at Ventnor.  I was delighted
+to accede to this, for, like all who fully knew Lord de Tabley, I was
+thoroughly and deeply attached to him.  He was so genuine and so modest
+and so genial—unsoured by the great and various sorrows of which he used
+sometimes to talk to me by the cosy study fire—nay, sweetened by them, as
+I often thought—so grateful for the smallest service rendered in an arena
+where ingratitude sometimes seems to be the _vis motrix_ of life—a truly
+lovable man, if ever there was one.
+
+I drove over to Ventnor.  As I chanced to reach the hotel somewhat before
+the appointed time, and he had not arrived, I drove on to Bonchurch along
+the Shanklin road.  On my way back, I passed a four-wheel cab; but not
+dreaming that his love of the “growler” reached beyond London, I never
+thought of him in connexion with it until I saw the well-known face with
+its sweet thoughtful expression looking through the cab window.  On this
+occasion it looked so specially thoughtful that I imagined something
+serious had occurred.  At the hotel I found that he had secured a snug
+room and a luxurious luncheon.  An ominous packet of writing-paper
+peering from his overcoat pocket convinced me that it was a manuscript
+brought for me to read, and feeling that I should prefer to get it over
+before luncheon, I asked him to show it to me.  He then told me its
+history.  Having sent by special invitation a poem to _The Nineteenth
+Century_, the editor had returned it—returned it with certain strictures
+upon portions of it.  This incident he had at once subjected to the usual
+analysis, and had come to the conclusion that certain outside influences
+of an invidious kind had been brought to play upon the editor.
+
+Time was when I should have shrunk with terror from so thankless a task
+as that of reading a manuscript with such a frightful history, but it is
+astonishing what a long experience in the literary world will do for a
+man in perplexities of this kind.  I read the manuscript and the editor’s
+courteous but sagacious comments, and I found that the poet had
+undertaken a subject which was utterly and almost inconceivably alien to
+his genius.  As I read I felt the wistful gaze fixed upon me while the
+waiter was moving in and out of the room, preparing the luncheon table.
+“Well,” said he, as I laid the manuscript down, “what do you think? do
+you agree with the editor?”  “Not entirely,” I said.  “Not entirely!” he
+exclaimed; then turning to the waiter, he said, “You can leave the soup,
+and I will ring when we are ready.”  “Not entirely,” I repeated.  “With
+all the editor’s strictures I entirely agree, but he says that by working
+upon it you may make it into a worthy poem: there I disagree with him.  I
+consider it absolutely hopeless.  I regret now that we did not leave the
+matter until after luncheon, but we will not let it spoil our appetites.”
+
+I am afraid it did spoil our appetites nevertheless, for I felt that I
+had been compelled, for his own sake, to give him pain.  He was much
+depressed, declared that the success of his late book was entirely
+factitious, and vowed that nothing should ever persuade him to write
+another line of verse, and that he would now devote his attention to a
+peer’s duties in the House of Lords.  I was so disturbed myself at thus
+paining so lovable a friend that next day I wrote to him, trying to
+soften what I had said, and urged him to do as the editor of _The
+Nineteenth Century_ had suggested, write another poem—a poem upon some
+classical subject, which he would deal with so admirably.  The result of
+it all was that he found the editor’s strictures on the unlucky poem to
+be absolutely well grounded, and wrote for _The Nineteenth Century_
+‘Orpheus,’ one of the finest of his later poems.
+
+I think these anecdotes of Lord de Tabley will show why we who knew him
+were so attached to him.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Can it be claimed for Lord de Tabley that in the poetical firmament which
+hung over the days of his youth—when the heavens were bright with such
+luminaries as Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne,
+and Morris—he had a place of his own?  We think it can.  And in saying
+this we are fully conscious of the kind of praise we are awarding him.
+Whatever may be said for or against the artistic temper of the present
+hour, it must certainly be said of the time we are alluding to that it
+was great as regards its wealth of poetic genius, and as regards its
+artistic temper greater still.  It was a time when “the beauteous damsel
+Poesy, honourable and retired,” whom Cervantes described, dared still
+roam the English Parnassus, “a friend of solitude,” disturbed by no clash
+of Notoriety’s brazen cymbals, “where fountains entertained her, woods
+freed her from _ennui_, and flowers delighted her”—delighted her for
+their own sakes.  In order to write such verses as the following from the
+concluding poem of the volume before us {231} a man must really have
+passed into that true mood of the poet described by the great Spanish
+humourist:—
+
+    How idle for a spurious fame
+       To roll in thorn-beds of unrest;
+    What matter whom the mob acclaim,
+       If thou art master of thy breast?
+
+    If sick thy soul with fear and doubt,
+       And weary with the rabble din,—
+    If thou wouldst scorn the herd without,
+       First make the discord calm within.
+
+    If we are lords in our disdain,
+       And rule our kingdoms of despair,
+    As fools we shall not plough the main
+       For halters made of syren’s hair.
+
+    We need not traverse foreign earth
+       To seek an alien Sorrow’s face.
+    She sits within thy central hearth,
+       And at thy table has her place.
+
+    So with this hour of push and pelf,
+       Where nought unsordid seems to last,
+    Vex not thy miserable self,
+       But search the fallows of the past.
+
+    In Time’s rich track behind us lies
+       A soil replete with root and seed;
+    There harvest wheat repays the wise,
+       While idiots find but charlock weed.
+
+Between the writer of the above lines and those great poets who in his
+youth were his contemporaries there is this point of affinity: like them
+his actual achievements do not strike the reader so forcibly as the
+potentialities which those achievements reveal.  In the same way that
+Achilles was suggested by his “spear” in the picture in the chamber of
+Lucrece, the poet who writes not for fame, but writes to please himself,
+suggests unconsciously his own portrait by every touch:—
+
+    For much imaginary work was there;
+    Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind,
+    That for Achilles’ image stood his spear
+    Grip’d in an armèd hand; himself behind
+    Was left unseen save to the eye of mind:
+    A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head,
+    Stood for the whole to be imaginèd.
+
+Poets, indeed, have always been divisible into those whose poetry gives
+the reader an impression that they are greater than their work, and those
+whose poetry gives the reader a contrary impression.  There have always
+been poets who may say of themselves, like the “Poet” in ‘Timon of
+Athens,’
+
+    Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes
+    From whence ’tis nourished: the fire i’ the flint
+    Shows not till it be struck.
+
+And there have always been poets whose verse, howsoever good it may be,
+shows that, although they have been able to mould into poetic forms the
+riches of the life around them, and also of the literature which has come
+to them as an inheritance, they are simply working for fame, or rather
+for notoriety, in the markets of the outer world.  The former can give us
+an impression of personal greatness such as the latter cannot.
+
+With regard to the originality of Lord de Tabley’s work, it is obvious
+that every poet must in some measure be influenced by the leading
+luminaries of his own period.  But at no time would it have been fair to
+call Lord de Tabley an imitator; and in the new poems in this volume the
+accent is, perhaps, more individual than was the accent of any of his
+previous poetry.  The general reader’s comparatively slight acquaintance
+with Greek poetry may become unfortunate for modern poets.  Often and
+often it occurs that a poet is charged with imitating another poet of a
+more prominent position than his own when, as a matter of fact, both
+poets have been yielding to the magic influence of some poet of Greece.
+Such a yielding has been held to be legitimate in every literature of the
+modern world.  Indeed, to be coloured by the great classics of Greek and
+Roman literature is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of all
+the best poetry of the modern world, as it is the inevitable destiny and
+the special glory of the far-off waters of the Nile to be enriched and
+toned by the far-off wealth of Ruwenzori and the great fertilizing lakes
+from which they have sprung.  But in drawing from the eternal fountains
+of beauty Lord de Tabley’s processes were not those of his great
+contemporaries; they were very specially his own, as far removed from the
+severe method of Matthew Arnold on the one hand as from Tennyson’s method
+on the other.
+
+His way of work was always to illustrate a story of Hellenic myth by
+symbols and analogies drawn not from the more complex economies of a
+later world, as was Tennyson’s way, but from that wide knowledge of the
+phenomena of nature which can be attained only by a poet whose knowledge
+is that of the naturalist.  His devotion to certain departments of
+natural science has been running parallel with his devotion to poetry,
+and if learning is something wider than scholarship, he is the most
+learned poet of his time.  While Tennyson’s knowledge of natural science,
+though wide, was gathered from books, Lord de Tabley’s knowledge,
+especially in the department of botany, is derived largely from original
+observation and inquiry.  And this knowledge enables him to make his
+poetry alive with organic detail such as satisfies the naturalist as
+fully as the other qualities in his works satisfy the lover of poetry.
+The leading poem of the present volume, ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ is full of a
+knowledge of the ways of nature beyond the reach of most poets, and yet
+this knowledge is kept well in governance by his artistic sense; it is
+never obtruded—never more than hinted at, indeed:—
+
+    Soon, soon I saw the spectral vanguard come,
+    Coasting along, as swallows, beating low
+    Before a hint of rain.  In buoyant air,
+    Circling thy poise, and hardly move the wing,
+    And rather float than fly.  Then other spirits,
+    Shrill and more fierce, came wailing down the gale;
+    As plaintive plovers came with swoop and scream
+    To lure our footsteps from their furrowy nest,
+    So these, as lapwing guardians, sailed and swung
+    To save the secrets of their gloomy lair.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+    I hate to watch the flower set up its face.
+    I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea,
+    Its heaving roods of intertangled weed
+    And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit;
+    The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn,
+    The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones,
+    The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves,
+    Rotting the floors of Autumn.
+
+‘The Death of Phaëthon’ is another poem in which Lord de Tabley succeeds
+in mingling a true poetic energy with that subtle dignity of utterance
+which can never really be divorced from true poetry, whether the poet’s
+subject be lofty or homely.
+
+The line
+
+    With sudden ray and music across the sea
+
+and the opening line of the poem,
+
+    Before him the immeasurable heaven,
+
+cause us to think that Lord de Tabley has paid but little attention to
+the question of elision in English poetry.  In the second of the lines
+above quoted elision is impossible, in the first elision is demanded.
+The reason why elision is sometimes demanded is that in certain lines, as
+in the one which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ the hiatus which occurs when a
+word ending with a vowel is followed by a vowel beginning the next word
+may be so great as to become intolerable.  The reason why elision is
+sometimes a merely allowable beauty is that when a word ends with _w_,
+_r_, or _l_, to elide the liquids is to secure a kind of billowy music of
+a peculiarly delightful kind.  Now elision is very specially demanded in
+a line like that which opens ‘Orpheus in Hades,’ where the pause of the
+line fall upon _the_.  To make the main pause of the line fall upon _the_
+is extremely and painfully bad, even when the next word begins with a
+consonant; but when the word following _the_ begins with a vowel, the
+line is absolutely immetrical; it has, indeed, no more to do with English
+prosody than with that prosody of Japan upon which Mr. Basil Chamberlain
+discourses so pleasantly.  On the other hand, the elision of the second
+syllable of the word _music_ in the other line quoted above is equally
+faulty in another direction.  But as we said when reviewing Mr. Bridges’s
+treatise on Milton’s prosody, nothing is more striking than the
+helplessness of most recent poets when confronted with the simple
+question of elision.
+
+In an ‘Ode to a Star’ there is great beauty and breadth of thought and
+expression.  Its only structural blemish, that of an opening stanza whose
+form is not distinctly followed, can be so easily put right that it need
+only be mentioned here in order to emphasize the canon that it is only in
+irregular odes that variation of stanza is permissible.  Keats, no doubt,
+in one at least of his unequalled odes, does depart from the scheme of
+structure indicated by the opening stanza, and without any apparent
+metrical need for so doing.  But the poem does not gain by the departure.
+Besides, Keats is now a classic, and has a freedom in regard to
+irregularities of metre which Lord de Tabley would be the last to claim
+for himself.  Another blemish of a minor kind in the ‘Ode to a Star’ is
+that of rhyming “meteor” with “wheatear.”
+
+If the poetry in Lord de Tabley’s volume answers as little to Milton’s
+famous list of the poetic requirements, “simple, sensuous, and
+passionate,” as does Milton’s own poetry, which answers to only the
+second of these demands, very high poetry might be cited which is neither
+sensuous nor passionate.  The so-called coldness displayed by ‘Lycidas’
+arises not, it may well be supposed, from any lack on Milton’s part of
+sorrow for his friend, but from his determination that simple he would
+not be, and yet his method is justified of its own beauty and glory.  Of
+course poetry may be too ornate, but in demanding a simplicity of
+utterance from the poet it is easy for the critic to forget how wide and
+how various are poetry’s domains.  For if in one mood poetry is the
+simple and unadorned expression of nature, in another it is the woof of
+art,
+
+    Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes
+    As are the tiger-moth’s deep-damasked wings.
+
+In the matter of poetic ornament, all that the reader has any right to
+demand is that the decoration should be poetical and not rhetorical.
+Now, as a matter of fact, there is no surer sign of the amount of the
+poetical endowment of any poet than the insight he shows into the nature
+of poetry as distinguished from rhetoric when working on ornate poetry.
+It is a serious impeachment of latter-day criticism that in very many
+cases, perhaps in most cases, the plaudits given to the last new “leading
+poet” of the hour are awarded to “felicitous lines,” every felicity of
+which is rhetorical and not poetical.
+
+
+
+
+VII.  WILLIAM MORRIS.
+1834–1896.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+The news of the grave turn suddenly taken by William Morris’s illness
+prepared the public for the still worse news that was to follow.
+
+The certificate of the immediate cause of death affirms it to have been
+phthisis, but one would suppose that almost every vital organ had become
+exhausted.  Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my
+inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever.  And a comforting thought
+this is to us all—that Morris suffered no pain.  To Death himself we may
+easily be reconciled—nay, we might even look upon him as Nature’s final
+beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he so
+often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission.  The thought that
+Morris’s life had ended in the tragedy of pain—the thought that he to
+whom work was sport and generosity the highest form of enjoyment,
+suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil—would have
+been intolerable almost.  For among the thousand and one charms of the
+man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with an
+enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circumstance, conspiring with
+Nature, said to him, “Enjoy.”
+
+                        [Picture: William Morris]
+
+Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of
+wealth—cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two
+daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to
+understand a genius such as his—surrounded by friends, some of whom were
+among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very salt
+of the earth—it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she touched him at
+all, never struck home.  If it is true, as Mérimée affirms, that men are
+hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature?  Who
+wanted him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remained
+till the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his brow, but
+left his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first opened on the world?
+Enough for us to think that the man must, indeed, be specially beloved by
+the gods who in his sixty-third year dies young.  Old age Morris could
+not have borne with patience.  Pain would not have developed him into a
+hero.  This beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his
+marvellous powers were at their best—and died without pain.  The scheme
+of life and death does not seem so much awry, after all.
+
+At the last interview but one that ever I had with him—it was in the
+little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned
+out—he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject he
+rarely chose to talk about—the mystery of life and death.  The
+conversation ended with these words of his: “I have enjoyed my life—few
+men more so—and death in any case is sure.”
+
+It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death was
+excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginative
+faculty.  When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such a
+life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea.  “Look at Gladstone,” he
+would say; “look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges.
+Don’t they live all the longer for work?  It is rust that kills men, not
+work.”  No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual efforts
+such as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the
+“dry light of intelligence,” a prodigious amount of work may be achieved
+without any sapping of the sources of life.  But is this so where that
+fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed?  I
+doubt it.  In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey
+pointed out many years ago, a movement not of “the thinking machine”
+only, but of the whole man—the whole “genial” nature of the worker—his
+imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocity
+from the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole,
+together with every emotion of the soul.  Hence when, as in the case of
+Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the
+emotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers,
+and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the
+true _vis vitæ_.
+
+We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced and its amount
+to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a
+strain.  Many are of opinion that ‘The Lovers of Gudrun’ is his finest
+poem; he worked at it from four o’clock in the morning till four in the
+afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines!
+Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like ‘Sigurd.’  Think of
+the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an
+imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the
+collaborating of the ‘Völsunga Saga’ with the ‘Nibelungenlied,’ the
+choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the
+later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat
+into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century.  Was there not work
+enough here for a considerable portion of a poet’s life?  And yet so
+great is the entire mass of his work that ‘Sigurd’ is positively
+overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared
+since his death in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in
+three words, and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt
+with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.
+
+Then, again, take his translation of the Odyssey.  Some competent critics
+are dissatisfied with this; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph.  The
+two specially Homeric qualities—those, indeed, which set Homer apart from
+all other poets—are eagerness and dignity.  Never again can they be fully
+combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexameters
+and by a Homer.  That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity
+his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows.
+Chapman’s translations show that the eagerness also can be caught.
+Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then,
+while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of
+the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which,
+though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely
+as Chapman’s free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as
+Buckley’s prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris’s side as he wrote.
+
+This, with his much less satisfactory translation of Virgil, where he
+gives us an almost word-for-word translation, and yet throws over the
+poem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the
+modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet.  But
+these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems,
+such as ‘The Defence of Guenevere,’ ‘Jason,’ ‘The Earthly Paradise,’
+‘Love is Enough,’ ‘Poems by the Way,’ &c.  And then come his translations
+from the Icelandic.  Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not
+such translation as that in the “Saga Library.”  Allowing for all the aid
+he got from Mr. Magnússon, what a work this is!  Think of the imaginative
+exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction
+so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem, for
+poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative
+substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem.
+
+And this brings me to those poems without metre which he invented for
+himself in the latter portion of his career.  There is in these
+delightful stories, leaving out of consideration the exquisite lyrics
+interspersed, enough poetic wealth adequately to endow a dozen poets.
+The last of all of them—the one of which the last two chapters, when he
+could no longer hold a pen, he dictated to his friend Mr. Cockerell, in
+the determination, as he said to me, that he would finish it before he
+died—will be found to be finer than any hitherto published.  It is called
+‘The Sundering Flood,’ and was written after the story ‘The Water of the
+Wondrous Isles.’  It (‘The Sundering Flood’) is as long as ‘The Wood
+beyond the World,’ but has lyrics interspersed.
+
+But evidently it is as an inventor in the fine arts that he is chiefly
+known to the general public.  “Had he written no poetry at all, he would
+have been as famous,” we are told, “as he is now.”  Anyhow, there is no
+household of any culture among the English-speaking races in which the
+name of William Morris does not at once call up that great revival in
+decorative art for which the latter part of the nineteenth century will
+be famous.  In his designs for tapestry and other textures, in his
+designs for wall-papers and furniture, there is an expenditure of
+imaginative force which alone might make the fame of an artist.  Then his
+artistic printing, in which he invented his own decorations, his own
+type, and his own paper—think of the energy he put into all that!  The
+moment that this new interest seized him he made a more thorough study of
+the various specimens of black-letter printing than had ever been made
+before save by specialists.  But even this could not “fatigue an
+appetite” for the joy of work “which was insatiable.”  He started as an
+apostle of Socialism.  He edited _The Commonweal_, and wrote largely in
+it, sank money in it week by week with the greatest glee, stumped the
+country as a Socialist orator, and into that cause alone put the energy
+of three men.  Is it any wonder, then, that those who loved him were
+appalled at this prodigious output?  Often and often have I tried to
+bring this matter before him.  It was all of no use.  “For me to rest
+from work,” he would say, “means to die.”
+
+When not absorbed in some occupation that he loved—and in no other would
+he move—his restlessness was that of a young animal.  In conversation he
+could rarely sit still for ten consecutive minutes, but must needs spring
+from his seat and walk round the room, as if every limb were eager to
+take part in the talk.  His boisterous restlessness was the first thing
+that struck strangers.  During the period when the famous partnership of
+Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was being dissolved I saw him very
+frequently at Queen’s Square, for I took a very active part in the
+arrangement of that matter, and after our interviews at Queen Square he
+and I used often to lunch together at the “Cock” in Fleet Street.  He
+liked a sanded floor and quaint old-fashioned settles.  Moreover, the
+chops were the finest to be had in London.
+
+On the day following our first forgathering at the “Cock,” I was lunching
+there with another poet—a friend of his—when the waiter, who knew me
+well, said, “That was a loudish gent a-lunching with you yesterday, sir.
+I thought once you was a-coming to blows.”  Morris had merely been
+declaiming against the Elizabethan dramatists, especially Cyril Tourneur.
+He shouted out, “You ought to know better than to claim any merit for
+such work as ‘The Atheist’s Tragedy’”; and wound up with the
+generalization that “the use of blank verse as a poetic medium ought to
+be stopped by Act of Parliament for at least two generations.”  On
+another occasion, when Middleton (another fine spirit, who “should have
+died hereafter”) and I were staying with him at Kelmscott Manor, the
+passionate emphasis with which he declared that the curse of mankind was
+civilization, and that Australia ought to have been left to the blacks,
+New Zealand to the Maoris, and South Africa to the Kaffirs, startled even
+Middleton, who knew him so well.
+
+It was this boisterous energy and infinite enjoyment of life which made
+it so difficult for people on meeting him for the first time to associate
+him with the sweet sadness of ‘The Earthly Paradise.’  How could a man of
+such exuberant animal spirits as Morris—so hearty, so noisy often, and
+often so humorous—have written those lovely poems, whose only fault was
+an occasional languor and a lack of humour often commented on when the
+critic compares him with Chaucer?  This subject of Chaucer’s humour and
+Morris’s lack of it demands, however, a special word even in so brief a
+notice as this.  No man of our time—not even Rossetti—had a finer
+appreciation of humour than Morris, as is well known to those who heard
+him read aloud the famous “Rainbow Scene” in ‘Silas Marner’ and certain
+passages in Charles Dickens’s novels.  These readings were as fine as
+Rossetti’s recitations of ‘Jim Bludso’ and other specimens of Yankee
+humour.  And yet it is a common remark, and one that cannot be gainsaid,
+that there is no spark of humour in the published poems of either of
+these two friends.  Did it never occur to any critic to ask whether the
+anomaly was not explicable by some theory of poetic art that they held in
+common?  It is no disparagement to say of Morris that when he began to
+write poetry the influence of Rossetti’s canons of criticism upon him was
+enormous, notwithstanding the influence upon him of Browning’s dramatic
+methods.  But while Rossetti’s admiration of Browning was very strong, it
+was a canon of his criticism that humour was, if not out of place in
+poetry, a disturbing element of it.
+
+What makes me think that Morris was greatly influenced by this canon is
+the fact that Morris could and did write humorous poetry, and then
+withheld it from publication.  For the splendid poem of ‘Sir Peter
+Harpdon’s End,’ printed in his first volume, Morris wrote a humorous
+scene of the highest order, in which the hero said to his faithful fellow
+captive and follower John Curzon that as their deaths were so near he
+felt a sudden interest in what had never interested him before—the story
+of John’s life before they had been brought so close to each other.  The
+heroic but dull-witted soldier acceded to his master’s request, and the
+incoherent, muddle-headed way in which he gave his autobiography was full
+of a dramatic and subtle humour—was almost worthy of him who in three or
+four words created the foolish fat scullion in ‘Tristram Shandy.’  This
+he refused to print, in deference, I suspect, to a theory of poetic art.
+
+In criticizing Morris, however, the critic is apt to forget that among
+poets there are those who, treating poetry simply as an art, do not press
+into their work any more of their own individual forces than the work
+artistically demands, while another class of poets are impelled to give
+full expression to themselves in every poem they write.  It is to the
+former class of poets that Morris belongs.
+
+Whatever chanced to be Morris’s goal of the moment was pursued by him
+with as much intensity as though the universe contained no other possible
+goal, and then, when the moment was passed, another goal received all his
+attention.  I was never more struck with this than on the memorable day
+when I first met him, and was blessed with a friendship that lasted
+without interruption for nearly a quarter of a century.  It was shortly
+after he and Rossetti entered upon the joint occupancy of Kelmscott Manor
+on the Thames, where I was staying as Rossetti’s guest.  On a certain
+morning when we were walking in the fields Rossetti told me that Morris
+was coming down for a day’s fishing with George Hake, and that “Mouse,”
+the Icelandic pony, was to be sent to the Lechlade railway station to
+meet them.  “You are now going to be introduced to my fellow partner,”
+Rossetti said.  At that time I only knew of the famous firm by name, and
+I asked Rossetti for an explanation, which he gave in his usual incisive
+way.
+
+“Well,” said he, “one evening a lot of us were together, and we got
+talking about the way in which artists did all kinds of things in olden
+times, designed every kind of decoration and most kinds of furniture, and
+some one suggested—as a joke more than anything else—that we should each
+put down five pounds and form a company.  Fivers were blossoms of a rare
+growth among us in those days, and I won’t swear that the table bristled
+with fivers.  Anyhow, the firm was formed, but of course there was no
+deed, or anything of that kind.  In fact, it was a mere playing at
+business, and Morris was elected manager, not because we ever dreamed he
+would turn out a man of business, but because he was the only one among
+us who had both time and money to spare.  We had no idea whatever of
+commercial success, but it succeeded almost in our own despite.  Here
+comes the manager.  You must mind your _p’s_ and _q’s_ with him; he is a
+wonderfully stand-off chap, and generally manages to take against
+people.”
+
+“What is he like?” I said.
+
+“You know the portraits of Francis I.  Well, take that portrait as the
+basis of what you would call in your metaphysical jargon your ‘mental
+image’ of the manager’s face, soften down the nose a bit, and give him
+the rose-bloom colour of an English farmer, and there you have him.”
+
+“What about Francis’s eyes?” I said.
+
+“Well, they are not quite so small, but not big—blue-grey, but full of
+genius.”
+
+And then I saw, coming towards us on a rough pony so diminutive that he
+well deserved the name of “Mouse,” the figure of a man in a wideawake—a
+figure so broad and square that the breeze at his back, soft and balmy as
+it was, seemed to be using him as a sail, and blowing both him and the
+pony towards us.
+
+When Rossetti introduced me, the manager greeted him with a “H’m! I
+thought you were alone.”  This did not seem promising.  Morris at that
+time was as proverbial for his exclusiveness as he afterwards became for
+his expansiveness.
+
+Rossetti, however, was irresistible to everybody, and especially to
+Morris, who saw that he was expected to be agreeable to me, and most
+agreeable he was, though for at least an hour I could still see the shy
+look in the corner of his eyes.  He invited me to join the fishing, which
+I did.  Finding every faculty of Morris’s mind and every nerve in his
+body occupied with one subject, fishing, I (coached by Rossetti, who
+warned me not to talk about ‘The Defence of Guenevere’) talked about
+nothing but the bream, roach, dace, and gudgeon I used to catch as a boy
+in the Ouse, and the baits that used to tempt the victims to their doom.
+Not one word passed Morris’s lips, as far as I remember at this distance
+of time, which had not some relation to fish and baits.  He had come from
+London for a few hours’ fishing, and all the other interests which as
+soon as he got back to Queen’s Square would be absorbing him were
+forgotten.  Instead of watching my float, I could not help watching his
+face with an amused interest at its absorbed expression, which after a
+while he began to notice, and the following little dialogue ensued, which
+I remember as though it took place yesterday:—
+
+“How old were you when you used to fish in the Ouse?”
+
+“Oh, all sorts of ages; it was at all sorts of times, you know.”
+
+“Well, how young then?”
+
+“Say ten or twelve.”
+
+“When you got a bite at ten or twelve, did you get as interested, as
+excited, as I get when I see my float bob?”
+
+“No.”
+
+The way in which he said, “I thought not,” conveyed a world of
+disparagement of me as a man who could care to gaze upon a brother angler
+instead of upon his own float.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+In whatsoever William Morris does or says the hand or the voice of the
+poet is seen or heard: in his house decorations no less than in his
+epics, in his illuminated manuscripts no less than in his tapestries, in
+his philippics against “restoration” no less than in his sage-greens, in
+his socialism no less than in his samplers.  And first a word as to his
+poetry.  Any critic who, having for contemporaries such writers as
+Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and William Morris, fails to see that he
+lives in a period of great poets may rest assured that he is a critic
+born—may rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans
+he would have joined the author of ‘The Returne from Parnassus’ in
+despising the unacademic author of ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Lear.’  Among this band
+of great contemporary poets what is the special position held by him who,
+having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the
+epic, has now, by way of recreation, or rather by way of opening a
+necessary safety-valve to ease his restless energies, invented a system
+of poetic socialism and expounded it in a brand-new kind of prose
+fiction?
+
+A special and peculiar position Morris holds among his peers—on that we
+are all agreed; but what is that position?  We must not talk too
+familiarly about the Olympian gods; but is it that, without being the
+greatest where all are great, Morris is the one who on all occasions
+produces pure poetry and nothing else?  Without affirming that it is so,
+we may at least ask the question.  If other poets of our time show more
+intellectual strength than he, are they, perchance, given sometimes to
+adulterating their poetry with ratiocination and didactic preachments
+such as were better left to the proseman?  Without affirming that it is
+so, we may at least ask the question.  If other poets of our time can
+reach a finer frenzy than he and give it voice with a more melodious
+throat, are they, perchance, apt to forget that “eloquence is heard while
+poetry is overheard”?  Without affirming that it is so, we may at least
+ask the question.  If others, again, are more picturesque than he (though
+these it might be difficult to find), are they, perchance, a little too
+self-conscious in their word-pictures, and are they, perchance, apt to
+pass into those flowery but uncertain ways that were first discovered by
+Euphues?  Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the
+question.
+
+But supposing that we really had to affirm all these things about the
+other Olympians, where then would be the position of him about whose work
+such questions could not even be asked?  Where would then be the place of
+him who never passes into ratiocination or rhetoric, never passes into
+excessive word-painting or into euphuism, never speaks so loud as to be
+heard rather than overheard, but, on the contrary, gives us always clear
+and simple pictures, and always in musical language?  Where would then be
+the place of him who is the very ideal, if not of the poet as _vates_,
+yet of the poet as “maker”—the poet who always looks out upon life
+through a poetic atmosphere which, if sometimes more attenuated than
+suits some readers, is as simple and as clear as the air of a May
+morning?  A question which would be variously answered according to the
+various temperaments of those who answer—of those who define poetry to be
+“making,” or those who define it to be “prophesying,” or those who define
+it to be “singing.”
+
+Exception has, no doubt, been taken to certain archaisms in which Morris
+indulges not only in the epic of ‘Sigurd,’ but also, and in a greater
+degree, in his translations, especially in that rendering of the Odyssey.
+It is not our business here to examine into the merits and demerits of
+Morris as a translator; but if it were, this is what we should say on his
+behalf.  While admitting that now and again his diction is a little too
+Scandinavian to be in colour, we should point to Matthew Arnold’s dictum
+that in a versified translation a poet is no longer recognizable, and
+then we should ask whether it is given to any man in any kind of diction
+to translate Homer.  One Homeric quality only can any one translator
+secure, it seems; and if he can secure one, is not his partial failure
+better than success in less ambitious efforts?  To Chapman it was given
+to secure in the Iliad a measure of the Homeric eagerness—but what else?
+To Tennyson (in one wonderful fragment) it was given to secure a measure
+of the Homeric dignity and also a measure of the Homeric picture—but what
+else?  There was still left one of the three supreme Homeric
+qualities—the very quality which no one ever supposed could be secured
+for our literature, or, indeed, for any other—Homer’s quality of _naïf_
+wonder.  There is no witchery of Homer so fascinating as this; and did
+any one suppose that it could ever be caught by any translator?  And
+could it ever have been caught had not Nature in one of her happiest
+moods bethought herself of evolving, in a late and empty day, the
+industrious tapestry weaver of Merton and idle singer of ‘Sigurd,’ ‘The
+Earthly Paradise,’ ‘Love is Enough,’ and ten thousand delightful verses
+besides?
+
+But can a writer be called _naïf_ who works in a diction belonging rather
+to a past age than to his own?  Morris has proved that he could.
+Imagination is the basis upon which all other human faculties rest.  In
+the deep sense, indeed, one possession only have we “fools of nature,”
+our imagination.  What we fondly take for substance is the very shadow;
+what we fondly take for shadow is the very substance.  And day by day is
+Science herself endorsing more emphatically than ever Hamlet’s dictum,
+that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  By
+the aid of imagination our souls confront the present, and, as a rule,
+the present only.  But Morris is an instance, and not a solitary one, of
+a modern writer’s inhaling so naturally the atmosphere of the particular
+past period his imagination delights in as to belong spiritually to that
+period rather than his own.  To deny sincerity of accent to Morris
+because of his love of the simple old Scandinavian note—the note which to
+him represents every other kind of primitive simplicity—would be as
+uncritical as to deny sincerity of accent to Charles Lamb because of his
+sympathy with Elizabethan and Jacobean times, or to Dante Rossetti
+because of his sympathy with the period of his great Italian namesake.
+
+So much for the poetry of our many-handed poet.  As to his house
+decorations, his illuminated manuscripts, his “anti-scrape” philippics,
+his sage-greens, his tapestries, his socialism, and his samplers: to deal
+with the infinite is far beyond the scope of an article so very finite as
+this, or we could easily show that in them all there is seen the same
+_naïf_ genius of the poet, the same rare instinct for beautiful
+expression, the same originality as in the epics and the translations.
+Let him who is rash enough to suppose that even the socialism of a great
+poet is like the socialism of common folk read ‘John Ball.’  Let him
+observe how like Titania floating and dancing and playing among the
+Athenian clowns seems the Morrisian genius floating and dancing and
+playing among the surroundings in which at present it pleases him to
+disport.  What makes the ordinary socialistic literature to many people
+unreadable is its sourness.  What the Socialists say may be true, but
+their way of saying it sets one’s teeth on edge.  They contrive to state
+their case with so much bitterness, with so much unfairness—so much lack
+of logic—that the listener says at once, “For me, _any_ galley but this!
+Things _are_ bad; but, for Heaven’s sake, let us go on as we are!”
+
+By the clever competition of organisms did Nature, long before socialism
+was thought of, contrive to build up a world—this makeshift world.  By
+the teeth of her very cats did she evolve her succulent clover.  But
+whether the Socialists are therefore wrong in their views of society and
+its ultimate goal is not a question we need discuss.  What they want is
+more knowledge and less zeal.  It is possible to see, and see clearly,
+that the social organism is far from being what it ought to be, and at
+the same time to remember that man is a creature of slow growth, and that
+even in reaching his present modest stage of development the time he
+required was long—long indeed unless we consider his history in relation
+to the history of the earth, and then he appears to have been very
+commendably expeditious.  If there is any truth in what the geologists
+tell us of the vast age of the earth, it seems only a few years ago that
+man succeeded, after much heroic sitting down, in wearing off an
+appendage which had done him good service in his early tree-climbing
+days, but which, with new environments and with trousers in prospect, had
+ceased to be useful or ornamental.  An anthropoid Socialist would have
+advised him to “cut it off,” and had he done so he would have bled to
+death.
+
+That among all her children Man is really Nature’s prime favourite seems
+pretty evident, though no one can say why.  It is to him that the Great
+Mother is ever pointing and saying, “A poor creature, but mine own.  I
+shall do something with him some day, but I must not try to force him.”
+Here, indeed, is the mistake of the Socialists.  They think they can
+force the very creature who above all others cannot be forced.  They
+think they can turn him into something rich and strange—turn him in a
+single generation—even as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what
+Nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with new
+rudder-tail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feeding
+him with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions.
+Competition, that evolved Shakespeare from an ascidian, may be a mistake
+of Nature’s—M. Arsène Houssaye declares that she never was so wise and
+artistically perfect as we take her to be—but her mistakes are too old to
+be rectified in a single generation.  A little more knowledge, we say,
+and a little less zeal would save the Socialist from being considered by
+the advanced thinker—who, studying the present by the light of the past,
+sees that all civilization is provisional—as the most serious obstructive
+whom he has to encounter.
+
+As to Morris, we have always felt that, take him all round, he is the
+richest and most varied in artistic endowments of any man of our time.
+On whichsoever of the fine arts he had chanced to concentrate his gifts
+and energies the result would have been the same as in poetry.  In the
+front rank he would always have been.  But it is not until we come to
+deal with his socialism that we see how entirely aestheticism is the
+primal source from which all his energies spring.  That he has a great
+and generous heart—a heart that must needs sympathize with every form of
+distress—no one can doubt who reads these two books, {263} and yet his
+socialism comes from an entirely æsthetic impulse.  It is the vulgarities
+of civilization, it is the ugliness of contemporary life—so unlike that
+Earthly Paradise of the poetic dream—that have driven him from his
+natural and proper work.  He cannot take offence at our saying this, for
+he has said it himself in ‘Signs of Change’:—
+
+    “As I strove to stir up people to this reform, I found that the
+    causes of the vulgarities of civilization lay deeper than I had
+    thought, and little by little I was driven to the conclusion that all
+    these uglinesses are but the outward expression of the innate moral
+    baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society, and
+    that it is futile to attempt to deal with them from the outside.
+    Whatever I have written, or spoken on the platform, on these social
+    subjects is the result of the truths of socialism meeting my earlier
+    impulse, and giving it a definite and much more serious aim; and I
+    can only hope, in conclusion, that any of my readers who have found
+    themselves hard-pressed by the sordidness of civilization, and have
+    not known where to turn to for encouragement, may receive the same
+    enlightenment as I have, and that even the rough pieces in this book
+    may help them to that end.”
+
+With these eloquent words no one can more fully agree than we do, so far
+as they relate to the unloveliness of Philistine rule.  But though the
+bad features of the present time {264} are peculiar to itself, when were
+those paradisal days of which Morris dreams? when did that merry England
+exist in which the general sum of human happiness and human misery was
+more equally distributed than now?
+
+Those “dark ages” beloved of the author of ‘John Ball’ may not have been
+quite so dark as Swinburne declares them to have been; but in this matter
+of the equalization of human happiness were they so very far in advance
+of the present time?  Those who have watched the progress of Morris’s
+socialism know that, so far from being out of keeping with the
+“anti-scrape” philippics and the tapestry weaving, it is in entire
+harmony with them.  Out of a noble anger against the “jerry builder” and
+his detestable doings sprang this the last of the Morrisian epics, as out
+of the wrath of Achilles sprang the Iliad.  That the picturesqueness of
+the John Ball period should lead captive the imagination of Morris was,
+of course, inevitable.  Society is at least picturesque wheresoever the
+classes are so sharply demarcated as they were in the dark ages, when the
+difference as to quality of flesh and blood between the lord and the
+thrall was greater than the difference between the thrall and the swine
+he tended.  But what about the condition of this same picturesque thrall
+who (as the law books have it) “clothed the soil”—whose every chance of
+happiness, whose every chance of comfort, depended upon the arbitrary
+will of some more or less brutal lord?  What was the condition of the
+English lower orders—the orders for whom many bitter social tears are now
+being shed?  What about the condition of the thralls in dark ages so dark
+that even an apostle of Wyclif’s (this same John Ball, Morris’s hero)
+preached the doctrine—unless he has been belied—that no child had a soul
+that could be saved who had been born out of wedlock?  The Persian
+aphorism that warns us to beware of poets, princes, and women must have
+had a satirical reference to the fact that their governance of the world
+is by means of picturesqueness.  Always it has been the picturesqueness
+of tyranny that has kept it up.  It was the picturesqueness of the _auto
+de fe_ that kept up the Spanish Inquisition, but we may rest assured that
+the most picturesque actors in that striking tableau would have preferred
+a colourless time of jerry builders to a picturesqueness like that.  To
+find a fourteenth-century pothouse parlour painted by a modern Socialist
+with a hand more loving than Walter Scott’s own is indeed touching:—
+
+    “I entered the door and started at first with my old astonishment,
+    with which I had woke up, so strange and beautiful did this interior
+    seem to me, though it was but a pothouse parlour.  A quaintly carved
+    sideboard held an array of bright pewter pots and dishes and wooden
+    and earthen bowls; a stout oak table went up and down the room, and a
+    carved oak chair stood by the chimney-corner, now filled by a very
+    old man dim-eyed and white-bearded.  That, except the rough stools
+    and benches on which the company sat, was all the furniture.  The
+    walls were panelled roughly enough with oak boards to about six feet
+    from the floor, and about three feet of plaster above that was
+    wrought in a pattern of a rose stem running all round the room,
+    freely and roughly done, but with (as it seemed to my unused eyes)
+    wonderful skill and spirit.  On the hood of the great chimney a huge
+    rose was wrought in the plaster and brightly painted in its proper
+    colours.  There were a dozen or more of the men I had seen coming
+    along the street sitting there, some eating and all drinking; their
+    cased bows leaned against the wall, their quivers hung on pegs in the
+    panelling, and in a corner of the room I saw half a dozen bill-hooks
+    that looked made more for war than for hedge-shearing, with ashen
+    handles some seven foot long.  Three or four children were running
+    about among the legs of the men, heeding them mighty little in their
+    bold play, and the men seemed little troubled by it, although they
+    were talking earnestly and seriously too.  A well-made comely girl
+    leaned up against the chimney close to the gaffer’s chair, and seemed
+    to be in waiting on the company: she was clad in a close-fitting gown
+    of bright blue cloth, with a broad silver girdle, daintily wrought,
+    round her loins, a rose wreath was on her head, and her hair hung
+    down unbound; the gaffer grumbled a few words to her from time to
+    time, so that I judged he was her grandfather.”
+
+“Morris’s ‘Earthly Paradise’!” the reader will exclaim.  Yes; and here we
+come upon that feature of originality which, as has been before said,
+distinguishes Morris’s socialism from the socialism of the prosaic
+reformer.
+
+Political opinions almost always spring from temperament.  The
+conservative temper of such a poet as Sir Walter Scott leads him to
+idealize the past, and to concern himself but little about the future.
+The rebellious temperament of such a poet as Shelley leads him to
+idealize the future, and concern himself but little about the past.  But
+by contriving to idealize both the past and the future, and mixing the
+two idealizations into one delicious amalgam, the poet of the ‘Earthly
+Paradise’ gives us the Morrisian socialism, the most charming, and in
+many respects the most marvellous product of “the poet’s mind” that has
+ever yet been presented to an admiring world.
+
+The plan of ‘John Ball’ is simplicity itself.  The poet in a dream
+becomes a spectator of the insurrection of the Kentish men at the time
+when Wat Tyler rebelled against the powers that were; and the hero, John
+Ball, who is mainly famous as having preached a sermon from the text
+
+    Wan Adam dalf and Eve span
+    Wo was thanne a gentilman?
+
+is made to listen to the poet-dreamer’s prophecy of the days of
+_bourgeois_ rule and the jerry builder.
+
+If we take into account the perfect truth and beauty of the literary form
+in which the story is presented, we do not believe that anything to
+surpass it could be found in historic fiction; indeed, we do not know
+that anything could be found to equal it.  The difficulty of the
+imaginative writer who attempts, whether in prose or verse, to vivify the
+past seems to be increasing, as we have before said, every day with the
+growth of the scientific temper and the reverence of the sacredness of
+mere documents.  The old-fashioned theory—the theory which obtained from
+Shakespeare’s time down to Scott’s and even down to Kingsley’s—that the
+facts of history could be manipulated for artistic purposes with the same
+freedom that the artist’s own inventions can be handled, gave the artist
+power to produce vital and flexible work at the expense of the historic
+conscience—a power which is being curtailed day by day.  The instinct for
+vivifying by imaginative treatment the records of the past is too
+universal and too deeply inwoven in the very texture of the human mind to
+be other than a true and healthy instinct.  But so oppressive has become
+the tyranny of documents, so fettered by what a humourist has called
+“factology” have become the wings of the romancer’s imagination, that one
+wonders at his courage in dealing with historic subjects at all.
+
+A bold writer would he be who in the present day should make Shakespeare
+figure among the Kenilworth festivities as a famous player (after the
+manner of Scott), or who should (after the manner of Kingsley) give
+Elizabeth credit for Winter’s device of using the fire-ships before
+Calais.  Even the poet—he who, dealing as he does with essential and
+elemental qualities only, is not so hampered as the proseman in these
+matters—is beginning also to feel the tyranny of documents, as we see
+notably in Swinburne’s ‘Bothwell,’ which consists very largely of
+documents transfigured into splendid verse.  But more than even this: the
+mere literary form has now to be as true to the time depicted as
+circumstances will allow.  If Scott’s romances have a fault it is that,
+as he had no command over, and perhaps but little sympathy with, the
+beautiful old English of which Morris is such a master, his stories lack
+one important element of dramatic illusion.  But it is in the literary
+form of his story that Morris is especially successful.  Where time has
+dealt most cruelly with our beloved language is in robbing it of that
+beautiful cadence which fell from our forefathers’ lips as sweetly and as
+unconsciously as melody falls from the throat of the mavis.  One of the
+many advantages that Morris has reaped from his peculiar line of study is
+that he can write like this—he, and he alone among living men:—
+
+    “‘Surely thou goest to thy death.’  He smiled very sweetly, yet
+    proudly, as he said: ‘Yea, the road is long, but the end cometh at
+    last.  Friend, many a day have I been dying; for my sister, with whom
+    I have played and been merry in the autumntide about the edges of the
+    stubble-fields; and we gathered the nuts and bramble-berries there,
+    and started thence the missel-thrush, and wondered at his voice and
+    thought him big; and the sparrow-hawk wheeled and turned over the
+    hedges, and the weasel ran across the path, and the sound of the
+    sheep-bells came to us from the downs as we sat happy on the grass;
+    and she is dead and gone from the earth, for she pined from famine
+    after the years of the great sickness; and my brother was slain in
+    the French wars, and none thanked him for dying save he that stripped
+    him of his gear; and my unwedded wife with whom I dwelt in love after
+    I had taken the tonsure, and all men said she was good and fair, and
+    true she was and lovely; she also is dead and gone from the earth;
+    and why should I abide save for the deeds of the flesh which must be
+    done?  Truly, friend, this is but an old tale that men must die; and
+    I will tell thee another, to wit, that they live: and I live now and
+    shall live.  Tell me then what shall befall.”
+
+Note the music of the cadence here—a music that plays about the heart
+more sweetly than any verse, save the very highest.  And here we touch
+upon an extremely interesting subject.
+
+Always in reading a prose story by a writer whose energies have been
+exercised in other departments of letters there is for the critic a
+special interest.  If this exercise has been in fields outside
+imaginative literature—in those fields of philosophical speculation where
+a logical method and a scientific modulation of sentences are
+required—the novelist, instead of presenting us with those concrete
+pictures of human life demanded in all imaginative art, is apt to give us
+disquisitions “about and about” human life.  Forgetting that it is not
+the function of any art to prove, he is apt to concern himself deeply in
+showing why his actors did and said this or that—apt to busy himself
+about proving his story either by subtle analyses or else by purely
+scientific generalizations, instead of attending to the true method of
+convincement that belongs to his art—the convincement that is effected by
+actual pictorial and dramatic illustration of how his actors really did
+the things and said the things vouched for by his own imagination.  That
+the quest of a scientific, or supposed scientific, basis for a novelist’s
+imaginative structure is fatal to true art is seen not only in George
+Eliot and the accomplished author of ‘Elsie Venner,’ but also in writers
+of another kind—writers whose hands cannot possibly have been stiffened
+by their knowledge of science.
+
+Among the many instances that occur to us we need point to only one, that
+of a story recently published by one of our most successful living
+novelists, in which the writer endeavours to prove that animal magnetism
+is the acting cause of spiritualistic manifestations so called.  Setting
+out to show that a medium is nothing more than a powerful mesmerist, to
+whose manipulations all but two in a certain household are unconsciously
+succumbing, he soon ignores for plot purposes the nature of the dramatic
+situation by making those very two sceptics at a séance hear the same
+music, see the same spiritually conveyed newspaper, as the others hear
+and see.  That the writer should mistake, as he seems to do, the merely
+directive force of magnetism for a motive force does not concern the
+literary critic.  But when two sceptics, who are to expose a charlatan’s
+tricks by watching how the believers are succumbing to mesmeric
+hallucinations, are found succumbing to the same hallucinations
+themselves—succumbing because the story-teller needs them as witnesses of
+the phenomena—then the literary critic grows pensive, for he sees what
+havoc the scientific method will work in the flower-garden of art.
+
+On the other hand, should the story-teller be a poet—one who, like the
+writer of ‘John Ball,’ has been accustomed to write under the conditions
+of a form of literary art where the diction is always and necessarily
+concrete, figurative, and quintessential, and where the movement is
+metrical—his danger lies in a very different direction.  The critic’s
+interest then lies in watching how the poet will comport himself in
+another field of imaginative literature—a field where no such conditions
+as these exist—a field where quintessential and concrete diction, though
+meritorious, may yet be carried too far, and where those regular and
+expected bars of the metricist which are the first requisites of verse
+are not only without function, but are in the way—are fatal, indeed, to
+that kind of convincement which, and which alone, is the proper quest of
+prose art.  No doubt it is true, as we have before said, that literature
+being nothing but the reflex of the life of man, or else of the life of
+nature, the final quest of every form of literature is that special kind
+of convincement which is inherently suitable to the special form.  For
+the analogy between nature and true art is not a fanciful one, and the
+relation of function to organism is the same in both.  But what is the
+difference between the convincement achieved by poetic and the
+convincement achieved by prose art?  Is it that the convincement of him
+who works in poetic forms is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly
+achieved by a faithful record of the emotion aroused in his own soul by
+the impact upon his senses of the external world, while the convincement
+of the proseman is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved
+by a faithful record and picture of the external world itself?
+
+All such generalizations as this are, no doubt, to be taken with many and
+great qualifications; but, roughly speaking, would not this seem to be
+the fundamental difference between that kind of imaginative literature
+which expresses itself in metrical forms and that kind of imaginative
+literature in which metrical form is replaced by other qualities and
+other functions?  Not but that these two methods may meet in the same
+work, not but that they may meet and strengthen each other, as we have
+before said when glancing at the interesting question, How much, or how
+little, of realism can poetry capture from the world of prose and weave
+into her magic woof, and how much of music can prose steal from poetry?
+But in order to do all that can be done in the way of enriching poetry
+with prose material without missing the convincement of poetic art, the
+poet must be Homer himself; in order to do all that can be done in the
+way of vivifying prose fiction with poetic fire without missing the
+convincement of prose art, the story-teller must be Charlotte Brontë or
+Emily, her sister, in whose work we find for once the quintessential
+strength and the concrete and figurative diction of the poet—indeed, all
+the poetical requisites save metre alone.  Had ‘Jane Eyre,’ ‘Villette,’
+and ‘Wuthering Heights’ existed in Coleridge’s time he would, we may be
+sure, have taken these three prose poems as illustrations of the truth of
+his axiom that the true antithesis of poetry is not prose, but science.
+
+What the prose poet has to avoid is metrical movement on the one side and
+scientific modulation of sentences on the other.  And perhaps in no case
+can it be achieved save in the autobiographic form of fiction, where and
+where alone the work is so subjective that it may bear even the poetic
+glow of ‘Jane Eyre’ and ‘Villette.’  What makes us think this to be so is
+the fact that in ‘Shirley’—a story written in the epic method—the only
+passages of the poetic kind which really convince are those uttered by
+the characters in their own persons.  And as to ‘Wuthering Heights,’ a
+story which could not, of course, be told in one autobiography, the
+method of telling it by means of a group of autobiographies, though
+clumsy enough from the constructor’s point, was yet just as effective as
+a more artistic method.  And it was true instinct of genius that led
+Emily Brontë to adopt the autobiographic method even under these heavy
+conditions.
+
+Still the general truth remains that the primary function of the poet is
+to tell his story steeped in his own emotion, while the primary function
+of the prose fictionist is to tell his story in an objective way.  Hence
+it is that in a general way the difficulty of the poet who turns to prose
+fiction lies, like that of philosophical or scientific writers, in
+suppressing certain intellectual functions which he has been in the habit
+of exercising.  And the case of Scott, which at first sight might seem to
+show against this theory, may be adduced in support of it.  For Scott’s
+versified diction, though concrete, is never more quintessential than
+that of prose; and his method being always objective rather than
+subjective, when he turned to prose fiction he seemed at once to be
+writing with his right hand where formerly he had been writing with his
+left.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.  FRANCIS HINDES GROOME.
+(THE TARNO RYE.)
+1851–1902.
+
+
+I.
+
+
+I have been invited to write about my late friend and colleague Francis
+Hindes Groome, who died on the 24th ult., and was buried among his
+forefathers at Monk Soham in Suffolk.  I find the task extremely
+difficult.  Though he died at fifty, he, with the single exception of
+Borrow, had lived more than any other friend of mine, and perhaps
+suffered more.  Indeed, his was one of the most remarkable and romantic
+literary lives that, since Borrow’s, have been lived in my time.
+
+The son of an Archdeacon of Suffolk, he was born in 1851 at Monk Soham
+Rectory, where, I believe, his father and his grandfather were born, and
+where they certainly lived; for—as has been recorded in one of the
+invaluable registry books of my friend Mr. F. A. Crisp—he belonged to one
+of the oldest and most distinguished families in Suffolk.  He was sent
+early to Ipswich School, where he was a very popular boy, but never
+strong and never fond of athletic exercises.  His early taste for
+literature is shown by the fact that with his boy friend Henry Elliot
+Maiden he originated a school magazine called the _Elizabethan_.  Like
+many an organ originated in the outer world, the _Elizabethan_ failed
+because it would not, or could not, bring itself into harmony with the
+public taste.  The boys wanted news of cricket and other games: Groome
+and his assistant editor gave them literature as far as it was in their
+power to do so.
+
+                     [Picture: Francis Hindes Groome]
+
+The Ipswich School was a very good one for those who got into the sixth,
+as Groome did.  The head master, Dr. Holden, was a very fine scholar; and
+it is no wonder that Groome throughout his life showed a considerable
+knowledge of and interest in classical literature.  That he had a real
+insight into the structure of Latin verse is seen by a rendering of
+Tennyson’s ‘Tithonus,’ which Mr. Maiden has been so very good as to show
+me—a rendering for which he got a prize.  In 1869 he got prizes for
+classical literature, Latin prose, Latin elegiacs, and Latin hexameters.
+But if Dr. Holden exercised much influence over Groome’s taste, the
+assistant master, Mr. Sanderson, certainly exercised more, for Mr.
+Sanderson was an enthusiastic student of Romany.  The influence of the
+assistant master was soon seen after Groome went up to Oxford.  He was
+ploughed for his “Smalls,” and, remaining up for part of the “Long,” he
+went one night to a fair at Oxford at which many gipsies were present—an
+incident which forms an important part of his gipsy story ‘Kriegspiel.’
+Groome at once struck up an acquaintance with the gipsies at the fair.
+It occurred also that Mr. Sanderson, after Groome had left Ipswich
+School, used to go and stay at Monk Soham Rectory every summer for
+fishing; and this tended to focus Groome’s interest in Romany matters.
+At Göttingen, where he afterwards went, he found himself in a kind of
+Romany atmosphere, for, owing perhaps to Benfey’s having been a Göttingen
+man, Romany matters were still somewhat rife there in certain sets.
+
+The period from his leaving Göttingen to his appearance in Edinburgh in
+1876 as a working literary man of amazing activity, intelligence, and
+knowledge is the period that he spent among the gipsies.  And it is this
+very period of wild adventure and romance that it is impossible for me to
+dwell upon here.  But on some future occasion I hope to write something
+about his adventures as a Romany Rye.  His first work was on the ‘Globe
+Encyclopædia,’ edited by Dr. John Ross.  Even at that time he was very
+delicate and subject to long wearisome periods of illness.  During his
+work on the ‘Globe’ he fell seriously ill in the middle of the letter
+_S_.  Things were going very badly with him; but they would have gone
+much worse had it not been for the affection and generosity of his friend
+and colleague Prof. H. A. Webster, who, in order to get the work out in
+time, sat up night after night in Groome’s room, writing articles on
+Sterne, Voltaire, and other subjects.
+
+Webster’s kindness, and afterwards the kindness of Dr. Patrick, endeared
+Edinburgh and Scotland to the “Tarno Rye.”  As Webster was at that time
+on the staff of ‘The Encyclopædia Britannica,’ I think, but I do not
+know, that it was through him that Groome got the commission to write his
+article ‘Gypsies’ in that stupendous work.  I do not know whether it is
+the most important, but I do know that it is one of the most thorough and
+conscientious articles in the entire encyclopædia.  This was followed by
+his being engaged by Messrs. Jack to edit the ‘Ordnance Gazetteer of
+Scotland,’ a splendid work, which on its completion was made the subject
+of a long and elaborate article in _The Athenæum_—an article which was a
+great means of directing attention to him, as he always declared.
+Anyhow, people now began to inquire about Groome.  In 1880 he brought out
+‘In Gypsy Tents,’ which I shall describe further on.  In 1885 he was
+chosen to join the staff of Messrs. W. & R. Chambers.  It is curious to
+think of the “Tarno Rye,” perhaps the most variously equipped literary
+man in Europe, after such adventures as his, sitting from 10 to 4 every
+day on the sub-editorial stool.  He was perfectly content on that stool,
+however, owing to the genial kindness of his colleague.  As sub-editor
+under Dr. Patrick, and also as a very copious contributor, he took part
+in the preparation of the new edition of ‘Chambers’s Encyclopædia.’  He
+took a large part also in preparing ‘Chambers’s Gazetteer’ and
+‘Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary.’  Meanwhile he was writing articles
+in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography,’ articles in _Blackwood’s
+Magazine_ and _The Bookman_, and also reviews upon special subjects in
+_The Athenæum_.
+
+This was followed in 1887 by a short Border history, crammed with
+knowledge.  In 1895 his name became really familiar to the general reader
+by his delightful little volume ‘Two Suffolk Friends’—sketches of his
+father and his father’s friend Edward FitzGerald—full of humour and
+admirable character-drawing.
+
+In 1896 he published his Romany novel ‘Kriegspiel,’ which did not meet
+with anything like the success it deserved, although I must say he was
+himself in some degree answerable for its comparative failure.  The
+origin of the story was this.  Shortly after our intimacy I told him that
+I had written a gipsy story dealing with the East Anglian gipsies and the
+Welsh gipsies, but that it had been so dinned into me by Borrow that in
+England there was no interest in the gipsies that I had never found heart
+to publish it.  Groome urged me to let him read it, and he did read it,
+as far as it was then complete, and took an extremely kind view of it,
+and urged me to bring it out.  But now came another and a new cause for
+delay in my bringing out ‘Aylwin’: Groome himself, who at that time knew
+more about Romany matters than all other Romany students of my
+acquaintance put together, showed a remarkable gift as a _raconteur_, and
+I felt quite sure that he could, if he set to work, write a Romany
+story—_the_ Romany story of the English language.  He strongly resisted
+the idea for a long time—for two or three years at least—and he was only
+persuaded to undertake the task at last by my telling him that I would
+never bring out my story until he brought out one himself.  At last he
+yielded, told me of a plot, a capital one, and set to work upon it.  When
+it was finished he sent the manuscript to me, and I read it through with
+the greatest interest, and also the greatest care.  I found, as I
+expected to find, that the gipsy chapters were simply perfect, and that
+it was altogether an extremely clever romance; but I felt also that
+Groome had given no attention whatever to the structure of a story.
+Incidents of the most striking and original kind were introduced at the
+wrong places, and this made them interesting no longer.  So persuaded was
+I that the story only needed recasting to prove a real success that I
+devoted days, and even weeks, to going through the novel, and indicating
+where the transpositions should take place.  Groome, however, had got so
+entirely sick of his novel before he had completed it that he refused
+absolutely to put another hour’s work into it; for, as he said, “the
+writing of it had already been a loss to the pantry.”
+
+He sent it, as it was, to an eminent firm of publishers, who, knowing
+Groome and his abilities, would have willingly taken it if they had seen
+their way to do so.  But they could not, for the very reasons that had
+induced me to recast it, and they declined it.  The book was then sent
+round to publisher after publisher with the same result; and yet there
+was more fine substance in this novel than in five ordinary stories.  It
+was at last through the good offices of Mr. Coulson Kernahan that it was
+eventually taken by Messrs. Ward & Lock; and, although it won warm
+eulogies from such great writers as George Meredith, it never made its
+way.  Its failure distressed me far more than it distressed Groome, for I
+loved the man, and knew what its success would have been to him.  Amiable
+and charming as Groome was, there was in him a singular vein of dogged
+obstinacy after he had formed an opinion; and he not only refused to
+recast his story, but refused to abandon the absurd name of ‘Kriegspiel’
+for a volume of romantic gipsy adventure.  I suspect that a large
+proportion of people who asked for ‘Kriegspiel’ at Mudie’s and Smith’s
+consisted of officers who thought that it was a book on the German war
+game.
+
+I tried to persuade him to begin another gipsy novel, but found it quite
+impossible to do so.  But even then I waited before bringing out my own
+prose story.  I published instead my poem in which was told the story of
+Rhona Boswell, which, to my own surprise and Groome’s, had a success,
+notwithstanding its gipsy subject.  Then I brought out my gipsy story,
+and accepted its success rather ungratefully, remembering how the
+greatest gipsy scholar in the world had failed in this line.  In 1899 he
+published ‘Gypsy Folk-Tales,’ in which he got the aid of the first Romany
+scholar now living, Mr. John Sampson.  And this was followed in 1901 by
+his edition of ‘Lavengro,’ which, notwithstanding certain unnecessary
+carpings at Borrow—such, for instance, as the assertion that the word
+“dook” is never used in Anglo-Romany for “ghost”—is beyond any doubt the
+best edition of the book ever published.  The introduction gives sketches
+of all the Romany Ryes and students of Romany, from Andrew Boorde (_c._
+1490–1549) down to Mr. G. R. Sims and Mr. David MacRitchie.  During this
+time it was becoming painfully perceptible to me that his physical powers
+were waning, although for two years that decadence seemed to have no
+effect upon his mental powers.  But at last, while he was working on a
+book in which he took the deepest interest—the new edition of ‘Chambers’s
+Cyclopædia of English Literature’—it became manifest that the general
+physical depression was sapping the forces of the brain.
+
+But it is personal reminiscences of Groome that I have been invited to
+write, and I have not yet even begun upon these.  Our close friendship
+dated no further back than 1881—the year in which died the great Romany
+Rye.  Indeed, it was owing to Borrow’s death, coupled with Groome’s
+interest in that same Romany girl Sinfi Lovell, whom the eloquent Romany
+preacher “Gipsy Smith” has lately been expiating upon to immense
+audiences, that I first became acquainted with Groome.  Although he has
+himself in some magazine told the story, it seems necessary for me to
+retell it here, for I know of no better way of giving the readers of _The
+Athenæum_ a picture of Frank Groome as he lives in my mind.
+
+It was in 1881 that Borrow, who some seven years before went down to
+Oulton, as he told me, “to die,” achieved death.  And it devolved upon me
+as the chief friend of his latest years to write an obituary notice of
+him in _The Athenæum_.  Among the many interesting letters that it
+brought me from strangers was one from Groome, whose name was familiar to
+me as the author of the article ‘Gypsies’ in the ‘Encyclopædia
+Britannica.’  But besides this I had read ‘In Gypsy Tents,’ a picture of
+the very kind of gipsies I knew myself, those of East Anglia—a picture
+whose photographic truth had quite startled me.  Howsoever much of matter
+of fact may be worked into ‘Lavengro’ (and to no one did Borrow talk with
+so little reticence upon this delicate subject as to me during many a
+stroll about Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park), I am certain that his
+first-hand knowledge of gipsy life was quite superficial compared with
+Groome’s during the nine years or so that he was brought into contact
+with them in Great Britain and on the Continent.  Hence a book like ‘In
+Gypsy Tents’ has for a student of Romany subjects an interest altogether
+different from that which Borrow’s books command; for while Borrow, the
+man of genius, throws by the very necessities of his temperament the
+colours of romance around his gipsies, the characters of ‘In Gypsy
+Tents,’ depicted by a man of remarkable talent merely, are as realistic
+as though painted by Zola, while the wealth of gipsy lore at his command
+is simply overwhelming.
+
+At that time—with the exception of Borrow and the late Sir Richard
+Burton—the only man of letters with whom I had been brought into contact
+who knew anything about the gipsies was Tom Taylor, whose picture of
+Romany life in an anonymous story called ‘Gypsy Experiences,’ which
+appeared in _The Illustrated London News_ in 1851, and in his play ‘Sir
+Roger de Coverley,’ is not only fascinating, but on the whole true.
+By-the-by, this charming play might be revived now that there is a
+revived interest in Romany matters.  George Meredith’s wonderful ‘Kiomi’
+was a picture, I think, of the only Romany chi he knew; but genius such
+as his needs little straw for the making of bricks.  The letter I
+received from Groome enclosed a ragged and well-worn cutting from a
+forgotten anonymous _Athenæum_ article of mine, written as far back as
+1877, in which I showed acquaintance with gipsydom and described the
+ascent of Snowdon in the company of Sinfi Lovell, which was afterwards
+removed bodily to ‘Aylwin.’  Here is the cutting:—
+
+    “We had a striking instance of this some years ago, when crossing
+    Snowdon from Capel Curig, one morning, with a friend.  She was not
+    what is technically called a lady, yet she was both tall and, in her
+    way, handsome, and was far more clever than many of those who might
+    look down upon her; for her speculative and her practical abilities
+    were equally remarkable: besides being the first palmist of her time,
+    she had the reputation of being able to make more clothes-pegs in an
+    hour, and sell more, than any other woman in England.  The splendour
+    of that ‘Snowdon sunrise’ was such as we can say, from much
+    experience, can only be seen about once in a lifetime, and could
+    never be given by any pen or pencil.  ‘You don’t seem to enjoy it a
+    bit,’ was the irritated remark we could not help making to our
+    friend, who stood quite silent and apparently deaf to the rhapsodies
+    in which we had been indulging, as we both stood looking at the
+    peaks, or rather at the vast masses of billowy vapours enveloping
+    them, as they sometimes boiled and sometimes blazed, shaking,
+    whenever the sun struck one and then another, from amethyst to
+    vermilion, ‘shot’ now and then with gold.  ‘Don’t injiy it, don’t I?’
+    said she, removing her pipe.  ‘_You_ injiy talking about it, _I_
+    injiy lettin’ it soak in.’”
+
+Groome asked whether the gipsy mentioned in the cutting was not a certain
+Romany chi whom he named, and said that he had always wondered who the
+writer of that article was, and that now he wondered no longer, for he
+knew him to be the writer of the obituary notice of George Borrow.
+Interested as I was in his letter, it came at a moment when the illness
+of a very dear friend of mine threw most other things out of my mind, and
+it was a good while before I answered it, and told him what I had to tell
+about my Welsh gipsy experiences and the adventure on Snowdon.  I got
+another letter from him, and this was the beginning of a charming
+correspondence.  After a while I discovered that there were, besides
+Romany matters, other points of attraction between us.  Groome was the
+son of Edward FitzGerald’s intimate friend Robert Hindes Groome,
+Archdeacon of Suffolk.  Now long before the great vogue of Omar Khayyam,
+and, of course, long before the institution of the Omar Khayyam Club,
+there was a little group of Omarians of which I was a member.  I need not
+say here who were the others of that group, but it was to them I alluded
+in the ‘Toast to Omar Khayyam,’ which years afterwards I printed in _The
+Athenæum_, and have since reprinted in a volume of mine.
+
+After a while it was arranged that he was to come and visit us for a few
+days at The Pines.  When it got wind in the little household here that
+another Romany Rye, a successor to George Borrow, was to visit us, and
+when it further became known that he had travelled with Hungarian
+gipsies, Roumanian gipsies, Roumelian gipsies, &c., I don’t know what
+kind of wild and dishevelled visitor was not expected.  Instead of such a
+guest there appeared one of the neatest and most quiet young gentlemen
+who had ever presented themselves at the door.  No one could possibly
+have dared to associate Bohemia with him.  As a friend remarked who was
+afterwards invited to meet him at luncheon, “Clergyman’s son—suckling for
+the Church, was stamped upon him from head to foot.”  I will not deny
+that so respectable a looking Romany Rye rather disappointed The Pines at
+first.  At that time he was a little over thirty, but owing to his
+slender, graceful figure, and especially owing to his lithe movements and
+elastic walk, he seemed to be several years younger.
+
+The subject of Welsh gipsies, and especially of the Romany chi of
+Swindon, made us intimate friends in half an hour, and then there were
+East Anglia, Omar Khayyàm, and Edward FitzGerald to talk about!—a
+delightful new friend for a man who had so lately lost the only other
+Romany Rye in the world.  Owing to his youthful appearance, I christened
+him there and then the “Tarno Rye,” in remembrance of that other “Tarno
+Rye” whom Rhona Boswell loved.  I soon found that, great as was the
+physical contrast between the Tarno Rye and the original Romany Rye, the
+mental contrast was greater still.  Both were shy—very shy; but while
+Borrow’s shyness seemed to be born of wariness, the wariness of a man who
+felt that he was famous and had a part to play before an inquisitive
+world, Groome’s shyness arose from a modesty that was unique.
+
+As a philologist merely, to speak of nothing else, his equipment was ten
+times that of Borrow, whose temperament may be called anti-academic, and
+who really knew nothing thoroughly.  But while Borrow was for ever
+displaying his philology, and seemed always far prouder of it than of his
+fascinating powers as a writer of romantic adventures, Groome’s
+philological stores, like all his other intellectual riches, had to be
+drawn from him by his interlocutor if they were to be recognized at all.
+Whenever Borrow enunciated anything showing, as he thought, exceptional
+philological knowledge or exceptional acquaintance with matters Romany,
+it was his way always to bring it out with a sort of rustic twinkle of
+conscious superiority, which in its way, however, was very engaging.
+From Groome, on the contrary, philological lore would drop, when it did
+come, as unconsciously as drops of rain that fall.  It was the same with
+his knowledge of Romany matters, which was so vast.  Not once in all my
+close intercourse with him did he display his knowledge of this subject
+save in answer to some inquiry.  The same thing is to be noticed in
+‘Kriegspiel.’  Romany students alone are able by reading between the
+lines to discover how deep is the hidden knowledge of Romany matters, so
+full is the story of allusions which are lost upon the general
+reader—lost, indeed, upon all readers except the very few.  For instance,
+the gipsy villain of the story, Perun, when telling the tale of his crime
+against the father of the hero who married the Romany chi whom Perun had
+hoped to marry, makes allusion thus to the dead woman: “And then about
+her as I have named too often to-day.”  Had Borrow been alluding to the
+Romany taboo of the names of the dead, how differently would he have gone
+to work! how eager would he have been to display and explain his
+knowledge of this remarkable Romany superstition!  The same remark may be
+made upon the gipsy heroine’s sly allusion in ‘Kriegspiel’ to “Squire
+Lucas,” the Romany equivalent of Baron Munchausen, an allusion which none
+but a Romany student would understand.
+
+Before luncheon Groome and I took a walk over the common, and along the
+Portsmouth Road, through the Robin Hood Gate and across Richmond Park,
+where Borrow and I and Dr. Hake had so often strolled.  I wondered what
+the Gryengroes whom Borrow used to foregather with would have thought of
+my new friend.  In personal appearance the two Romany Ryes were as unlike
+as in every point of character they were unlike.  Borrow’s giant frame
+made him stand conspicuous wherever he went, Groome’s slender, slight
+body gave an impression of great agility; and the walk of the two great
+pedestrians was equally contrasted.  Borrow’s slope over the ground with
+the loose, long step of a hound I have, on a previous occasion,
+described; Groome’s walk was springy as a gipsy lad’s, and as noiseless
+as a cat’s.
+
+Of course, the talk during that walk ran very much upon Borrow, whom
+Groome had seen once or twice, but whom he did not in the least
+understand.  The two men were antipathetic to each other.  It was then
+that he told me how he had first been thrown across the gipsies, and it
+was then that he began to open up to me his wonderful record of
+experiences among them.  The talk during that first out of many most
+delightful strolls ran upon Benfey, and afterwards upon all kinds of
+Romany matters.  I remember how warm he waxed upon his pet aversion,
+“Smith of Coalville,” as he called him, who, he said, for the purposes of
+a professional philanthropist, had done infinite mischief to the gipsies
+by confounding them with all the wandering cockney raff from the slums of
+London.  On my repeating to him what, among other things, the Romany chi
+before mentioned said to me during the ascent of Snowdon from Capel
+Curig, that “to make _kairengroes_ (house-dwellers) of full-blooded
+Romanies was impossible, because they were the cuckoos of the human race,
+who had no desire to build nests, and were pricked on to move about from
+one place to another over the earth,” Groome’s tongue became loosened,
+and he launched out into a monologue on this subject full of learning and
+full, as it seemed to me, of original views upon the Romanies.
+
+As an instance of the cuckoo instincts of the true Romany, he told me
+that in North America—for which land, alas! so many of our best Romanies
+even in Borrow’s time were leaving Gypsey Dell and the grassy lanes of
+old England—the gipsies have contracted a habit, which is growing rather
+than waning, of migrating southward in autumn and northward again in
+spring.  He then launched out upon the subject of the wide dispersion of
+the Romanies not only in Europe—where they are found from almost the
+extreme north to the extreme south, and from the shores of the Bosphorus
+to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean—but also from north to south and from
+east to west in Asia, in Africa, from Egypt to the very south of the
+Soudan, and in America from Canada to the River Amazon.  And he then went
+on to show how intensely migratory they were over all these vast areas.
+
+So absorbing had been the gipsy talk that I am afraid the waiting
+luncheon was spoilt.  The little luncheon party was composed of fervent
+admirers of Sir Walter Scott—bigoted admirers, I fear, some of our
+present-day critics would have dubbed us; and it chanced that we all
+agreed in pronouncing ‘Guy Mannering’ to be the most fascinating of all
+the Wizard’s work.  Of course Meg Merrilies became at once the centre of
+the talk.  One contended that, great as Meg was as a woman, she was as a
+gipsy a failure; in short, that Scott’s idea of the Scottish gipsy woman
+was conventional—a fancy portrait in which are depicted some of the
+loftiest characteristics of the Highland woman rather than of the
+Scottish gipsy.  The true romany chi can be quite as noble as Meg
+Merrilies, said one, but great in a different way.  From Meg Merrilies
+the talk naturally turned upon Jane Gordon of Kirk Yetholm, Meg’s
+prototype, who, when an old woman, was ducked to death in the River Eden
+at Carlisle.  Then came the subject of Kirk Yetholm itself, the famous
+headquarters of the Scotch Romanies; and after this it naturally turned
+to Kirk Yetholm’s most famous inhabitant, old Will Faas, the gipsy king,
+whose corpse was escorted to Yetholm by three hundred and more donkeys.
+And upon all these subjects Groome’s knowledge was like an inexhaustible
+fountain; or rather it was like a tap, ready to supply any amount of lore
+when called upon to do so.
+
+But it was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points of
+sympathy at The Pines during that first luncheon; there was that other
+subject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyàm.  We, a
+handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps all the more
+intense in our cult because we believed it to be esoteric.  And here was
+a guest who had been brought into actual personal contact with the
+wonderful old Fitz.  As a child of eight he had seen him—talked with
+him—been patted on the head by him.  Groome’s father, the Archdeacon of
+Suffolk, was one of FitzGerald’s most intimate friends.  This was at once
+a delightful and a powerful link between Frank Groome and those at the
+luncheon table; and when he heard, as he soon did, the toast to “Omar
+Khayyàm,” none drank that toast with more gusto than he.  The fact is, as
+the Romanies say, that true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin
+at first sight.  But I must stop.  Frequently when the “Tarno Rye” came
+to England his headquarters were at The Pines.  Many and delightful were
+the strolls he and I had together.  One day we went to hear a gipsy band
+supposed to be composed of Roumelian gipsies.  After we had listened to
+several well-executed things Groome sauntered up to one of the performers
+and spoke to him in Roumelian Romany.  The man, although he did not
+understand Groome, knew that he was speaking Romany of some kind, and
+began speaking in Hungarian Romany, and was at once responded to by
+Groome in that variety of the Romany tongue.  Groome then turned to
+another of the performers, and was answered in English Romany.  At last
+he found one, and one only, in the band who was a Roumelian gipsy, and a
+conversation between them at once began.
+
+This incident affords an illustration of the width as well as the
+thoroughness of Groome’s knowledge of Romany matters.  I have affirmed in
+‘Aylwin’ that Sinfi Lovell—a born linguist who could neither read nor
+write—was the only gipsy who knew both English and Welsh Romany.  Groome
+was one of the few Englishmen who knew the most interesting of all
+varieties of the Romany tongue.  But latterly he talked a great deal of
+the vast knowledge of the Welsh gipsies, both as to language and
+folklore, possessed by Mr. John Sampson, University Librarian at
+Liverpool, the scholar who did so much to aid Groome in his last volume
+on Romany subjects, called ‘Gypsy Folk-Tales.’  It therefore gives me the
+greatest pleasure to end these very inadequate words of mine with a
+beautiful little poem in Welsh Romany by Mr. Sampson upon the death of
+the “Tarno Rye.”  In a very few years Welsh Romany will become absolutely
+extinct, and then this little gem, so full of the Romany feeling, will be
+greatly prized.  I wish I could have written the poem myself, but no man
+could have written it save Mr. Sampson:—
+
+
+STANYAKERÉSKI.
+
+
+    Romano ráia, prala, jinimángro,
+       Konyo chumeráva to chīkát,
+    Shukar java mangi, ta mukáva
+       Tut te ’jâ kamdóm me—kushki rat!
+
+    Kamli, savimáski, sas i sarla,
+       Baro zī sas tut, sar, tarno rom,
+    Lhatián i jivimáski patrin,
+       Ta līán o purikeno drom.
+
+    Boshadé i chiriklé veshténdi;
+       Sanilé ’pre tuti chal ta chai;
+    Mūri, pūv ta pāni tu kamésas
+       Dudyerás o sonakó lilaí.
+
+    Palla ’vena brishin, shil, la baval:
+       Sa’o divés tu murshkinés pīrdán:
+    Ako kino ’vesa, rat avéla,
+       Chēros sī te kesa tiro tan.
+
+    Parl o tamlo merimásko pāni
+       Dava tuki miro vast, ta so
+    Tu kamésas tire kokoréski
+       Mai kamáva—“Te sovés mīstō!”
+
+                              _Translation_.
+
+                        TO FRANCIS HINDES GROOME.
+
+    Scholar, Gypsy, Brother, Student,
+       Peacefully I kiss thy forehead,
+    Quietly I depart and leave
+       Thee whom I loved—“Good night.”
+
+    Sunny, smiling was the morning;
+       A light heart was thine, as, a youth,
+    Thou dids’t strike life’s trail
+       And take the ancient road.
+
+    The birds sang in the woods,
+       Man and maid laughed on thee,
+    The hills, field, and water thou didst love
+       The golden summer illuminated.
+
+    Then come the rain, cold, and wind,
+       All the day thou hast tramped bravely.
+    Now thou growest weary, night comes on.
+       It is time to make thy tent.
+
+    Across death’s dark stream
+       I give thee my hand; and what
+    Thou wouldst have desired for thyself
+       I wish thee—mayst thou sleep well.
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+Although novelists, dramatists, and poets are particularly fond of trying
+to paint the gipsies, it cannot be said that many of them have been
+successful in their delineations.  And this is because the inner and the
+outer life of a proscribed race must necessarily be unlike each other.
+Meg Merrilies is no more a gipsy than is Borrow’s delightful Isopel
+Berners.  Among the characteristic traits of the Romany woman, Meg does
+no doubt exhibit two: a wild poetic imagination and a fearlessness such
+as women rarely display.  But no one who had been brought into personal
+contact with gipsy women could ever have presented Meg Merrilies as one
+of them.  In the true Romany chi poetic imagination is combined with a
+homeliness and a positive love of respectability which are very curious.
+Not that Meg, noble as she is, is superior to the kind of heroic woman
+that the Romany race is capable of producing.  Indeed, the great
+speciality of the Romanies is the superiority of the women to the men—a
+superiority which extends to everything, unless, perhaps, we except that
+gift of music for which the gipsies are noticeable.  Even in Eastern
+Europe—Russia alone excepted—where gipsy music is so universal that,
+according to some writers, every Hungarian musician is of Romany
+extraction, it is the men and not, in general, the women who excel.
+This, however, may simply be the result of opportunity and training.
+
+It is not merely in intelligence, in imagination, in command over
+language, in breadth of view regarding the “Gorgio” world around them,
+that the Romany women, in Great Britain at least, leave the men far
+behind.  In character this superiority is equally noticeable.  To imagine
+a gipsy hero is not easy.  The male gipsy is not without a certain amount
+of courage, but it soon gives way, and in a physical conflict between a
+gipsy and an Englishman it always seems as though ages of oppression have
+damped its virility.  Although some of our most notable prizefighters
+have been gipsies, it used to be well known in times when the ring was
+fashionable that a gipsy could not be relied upon “to take punishment”
+with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly,
+perhaps, because his more highly strung nervous system makes him more
+sensitive to pain.  The courage of a gipsy woman, on the other hand, has
+passed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt her, and yet she will allow
+her husband, a cowardly ruffian himself, perhaps, to strike her without
+returning the blow.  Wife-beating, however, is not common among the
+gipsies.  It may possibly be the case that some of the fine qualities of
+the gipsy woman are the result of that very barrenness of fine qualities
+among the men of which we have been speaking.  The lack of masculine
+chivalry among the men may in some measure account for the irresistible
+impulse among the women for taking their own part without appealing to
+the men for aid.  Also this may account for the strong way in which a
+gipsy woman is often drawn to the “Tarno Rye,” the young English
+gentleman of whom Matthew Arnold was thinking when he wrote the
+‘Scholar-Gipsy,’ and her fidelity to whom is so striking.  It is often in
+such relations as these with the Tarno Rye that the instinct of monogamy
+in the Romany woman is seen.  The unconquerable virtue of the Romany chi
+was often commented upon by Borrow; and, indeed, every observer of gipsy
+life is struck by it.
+
+Seeing that the moment the Romanies are brought into contact with the
+Gorgio world they adopt a method of approach entirely different from the
+natural method—natural to them in intercourse with each other—it is
+perhaps no wonder that the popular notion of the gipsy girl, taken mainly
+from the tradition of the stage, is so fantastically wrong.  With regard
+to the stage, no characters in the least like gipsies ever appeared on
+the boards, save the characters in Tom Taylor’s ‘Sir Roger de Coverley.’
+In the eyes of the novelist, as well as in the eyes of the playwright,
+devilry seems to be the chief characteristic of the gipsy woman.  The
+fact is, however, that in the average gipsy woman as she really exists
+there is but little devilry.  “Romany guile,” which is well defined in
+the gipsy phrase as “the lie for the Gorgios,” does not prevent gipsy
+women from retaining some of the most marked characteristics of childhood
+throughout their lives.  This, indeed, is one of their special charms.
+In his desire to depict the supposed devilry of the Romany woman, Prosper
+Mérimée has perpetrated in ‘Carmen’ the greatest of all caricatures of
+the gipsy girl.  A mere incarnation of lust and bloodthirstiness is more
+likely to exist in any other race than in the Romanies, who have a great
+deal of love as a sentiment and comparatively very little of love as a
+movement of animal desire.
+
+In G. P. R. James’s ‘Gipsy’ (1835) there are touches which certainly show
+some original knowledge of Romany life and character.  The same may,
+perhaps, be said of Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Bird of Passage,’ but the
+pictures of gipsy life in these and in all other novels are the merest
+daubs compared with the Kiomi of George Meredith’s story ‘Harry
+Richmond.’  Not even Borrow and Groome, with all their intimate knowledge
+of gipsy life, ever painted a more vigorous picture of the Romany chi
+than this.  The original was well known in the art circles of London at
+one time, and was probably known to Meredith, but this does not in any
+way derogate from the splendour of the imaginative achievement of
+painting in a few touches a Romany girl who must, one would think, live
+for ever.
+
+Between some Englishmen and gipsy women there is an extraordinary
+attraction—an attraction, we may say in passing, which did not exist
+between Borrow and the gipsy women with whom he was brought into contact.
+Supposing Borrow to have been physically drawn to any woman, she would
+have been of the Scandinavian type; she would have been what he used to
+call a Brynhild.  It was tall blondes he really admired.  Hence,
+notwithstanding his love of the economies of gipsy life, his gipsy women
+are all mere “scenic characters”—they clothe and beautify the scene; they
+are not dramatic characters.  When he comes to delineate a heroine,
+Isopel Berners, she is physically the very opposite of the Romany chi—a
+Scandinavian Brynhild, in short.
+
+                                 THE END
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{15}  Mr. Coulson Kernahan.
+
+{17}  The writer is much indebted to Mr. Coulson Kernahan for this story
+and much other information of life at “The Pines.”
+
+{18}  ‘My Reminiscences,’ by Lord Ronald Gower.
+
+{25}  Of August 13, 1881.  By Mr. A. Egmont Hake.
+
+{32}  Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, art-critic, who poisoned a number of
+his relatives for their money, a contributor to _The London Magazine_ and
+exhibitor at the Royal Academy.  He died a convict in Tasmania in 1852.
+
+{33}  C. G. Leland (“Hans Breitmann”), on whom Borrow’s books had “an
+incredible influence,” and caused him to take up the study of things
+Romany.
+
+{34}  Louis Jeremiah Abershaw, better known as Jerry Abershaw,
+1773?-1795, a notorious highwayman, who was the terror of the roads from
+London to Wimbledon and Kingston.  Borrow with characteristic perversity
+persisted in regarding the redoubtable Jerry as a hero, in spite of the
+fact that he justly met his death on the gallows.
+
+{50}  ‘Life, Writings, and Correspondence of George Borrow.’  Derived
+from Official and other Authentic Sources.  By William I. Knapp, Ph.D.
+With Portrait and Illustrations.  2 vols.  (Murray.)
+
+{60}  The “reader” was Richard Ford, author of the ‘Handbook for
+Travellers in Spain,’ &c.  He subsequently became Burrow’s warm admirer
+and friend.
+
+{77}  ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as Designer and Writer.’  Notes by William
+Michael Rossetti.  (Cassell and Co.)
+
+{104}  ‘Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to William Allingham,
+1854–1870.’  By George Birkbeck Hill.  (Fisher Unwin.)
+
+{108}  The year of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
+
+{132}  ‘Alfred, Lord Tennyson: a Memoir.’  By his Son.  2 vols.
+(Macmillan).
+
+{156}  “My father’s words.”
+
+{168}  _The Times_, October 18, 1876.
+
+{195}  ‘New Poems.’  By Christina Rossetti.  Edited by William Michael
+Rossetti.  (Macmillan & Co.)
+
+{231}  ‘Poems, Dramatic and Lyrical.’  By Lord de Tabley.  Second Series.
+(Lane.)
+
+{263}  ‘A Dream of John Ball and a King’s Lesson.’  ‘Signs of Change.’
+
+{264}  Written in 1888.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLD FAMILIAR FACES***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 27025-0.txt or 27025-0.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/7/0/2/27025
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://www.gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+