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MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 OF 
 
 PERSONS AND PLACES 
 
LONDON- EDWAHD ARNOLD &.C9 
 
MEMORIES & NOTES 
 
 OF 
 
 PERSONS & PLACES 
 
 1852-1912 
 
 BY 
 
 SIR SIDNEY COLVIN 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 1921 
 

 vv 
 
 
 PRINTED AT 
 
 THE SCRIBNER PRESS 
 
 NEW YORK, U. S. A. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 chap. page 
 
 Dedicatory Letter 7 
 
 I An East-Suffolk Boyhood and some Poets • 13 
 
 II John Ruskin 38 
 
 III Edward Burne-Jones 48 
 
 IV Dante Gabriel Rossetti CO 
 
 V Robert Browning • . . 76 
 
 VI The Priory and George Eliot .... 90 
 
 VII Little Holland House and G. F. Watts . . 93 
 
 VIII Robert Louis Stevenson 98 
 
 IX Fleeming and Anne Jenkin .... 153 
 
 X Box Hill and George Meredith . . .162 
 
 XI William Ewart Gladstone . . . .189 
 
 XII The British Museum and Sir Charles Newton . 201 
 
 XIII On some Aspects of Athens .... 224 
 
 XIV Edward John Trelawny 240 
 
 XV Victor Hugo 253 
 
 XVI Leon Gambetta 274 
 
 XVII At the Land's End of France .... 286 
 Index .....•«.. 315 
 
 Portrait of the Author .... Frontispiece 
 
To 
 MY WIFE 
 
 DEAR, I have dedicated one book to you already, 
 and have been asking myself to whom I should dedi- 
 cate this, which considering my age and infirmities 
 is as good as bound to be my last. I thought at 
 first of offering it to one or other of those younger 
 friends whose attachment is the pride and comfort 
 of our declining years. But on reflection it came 
 home to me that a dedication to any one of these 
 would in truth only be at one remove a dedication 
 to you. For it is you who have, if not in the first 
 instance brought me all their friendships, as long ago 
 you brought me that of Stevenson, at any rate attached 
 them to the pair of us in far firmer bonds than I could 
 ever have forged by myself alone. And so I conclude 
 that the simplest way is to repeat my former offering 
 and lay this book also, for what it may be worth, 
 directly at your feet. But I shall do so with a differ- 
 ence, inasmuch as, following the old practice of the 
 Epistle Dedicatory, I shall proceed to remind you, 
 and in so doing inform the reader, how the volume has 
 come to be what it is. 
 
 Well, then, you know how from very early days I 
 
 7 
 
8 DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 began to try my prentice hand at various forms of 
 critical writing — for of creative I knew myself incap- 
 able — in order to define and if it might be to com- 
 municate the pleasures which were to me the salt of 
 life. You know also how circumstances drew me before 
 long to the special vocation of art critic — I hate the 
 label, but it cannot be shirked — and thence to that 
 of Slade Professor at Cambridge, and thence to that 
 of practical expert and museum keeper. These have 
 been my responsible occupations through some forty 
 years of my life, and most of such literary work as 
 I have found time for has been in connection with them. 
 But absorbing as such official duties may have been, 
 enjoyable as I may have found them, they were not 
 such as to deaden what other interests or faculties 
 may have been born or early awakened in me. And 
 throughout my museum years, whether at Cambridge 
 or in London, I always nursed the hope of one day 
 getting free to work no longer upon the productions, 
 however treasurable and fascinating, of man's hands, 
 but upon objects which had always interested me even 
 more deeply still, namely poetry and the scenes of 
 nature and the characters of men and women. 
 
 Accordingly soon after my retirement I set to work, 
 as you know, upon a task which seemed urgently to 
 call for the doing, namely a critical life of the poet 
 Keats in accordance with the present state of our 
 knowledge. At the same time, being over-sanguine 
 as to my own working powers, I entered into an 
 agreement to prepare a book in several volumes 
 which should in the main be one of personal recollec- 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 9 
 
 tions. But of recollections with a difference : — it 
 was to be a record of the most lively impressions I 
 could definitely recall as having been made upon 
 me since boyhood not only by persons but by scenes 
 and places, and not only by these but by events and 
 movements, more especially in literature and art ; 
 and was to include in some cases a comparison of those 
 impressions of the moment with such revised opinions 
 and judgments as I might entertain to-day. 
 
 But retirement from the public service, in bringing 
 me leisure, did not bring me strength, and the wear- 
 and-tear of spirit we all underwent during the war 
 came to add its effects to the normal sapping power 
 of age. Hence it came about that the Keats book 
 took a good deal longer to prepare than I had calcu- 
 lated. And it soon became clear that I should not be 
 able to carry out my other scheme on anything like the 
 scale first proposed. All I could hope to do was to 
 throw together a certain number, enough between 
 them to fill one volume, both of the personal memories 
 most vividly present to my mind and of impressions 
 of the external scenes which had most interested me. 
 The volume so designed is now in your hands. The 
 persons, as most readers would, I suppose, desire, fill 
 far the larger number of pages. The space they sever- 
 ally occupy depends, let it be clearly understood, not 
 at all on their relative human or historical importance 
 but solely on the much or little that I happen to re- 
 member of them. The places described are in a few 
 instances inseparably connected with them, but in 
 a few others are independent. 
 
10 DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 The figures I have tried to call up are for the most 
 part those of famous men with whom it was my good 
 fortune to come early in life into contact, close or casual 
 as the case might be. It was never my habit to 
 keep diaries or make notes of conversations, so that 
 the matters I have set down are strictly and solely 
 such as have chanced to stick in my memory ; the 
 single exception being in the case of Shelley's friend 
 Trelawny, of my one and only talk with whom I did, 
 as it happens, make notes the evening after it had 
 occurred. The impressions of places, on the other hand, 
 were in two or three instances (indicated in the text 
 by dates) recorded promptly after they were received. 
 
 While this volume was planning, I had meant that 
 among its contents there should be a full chapter 
 on Cambridge. I suppose no son of Cambridge has 
 cause to look on his university with more grateful 
 affection than I. Going up as a home-taught freshman 
 with the vaguest idea how I might stand in comparison 
 with school-trained lads of my age, I had the satisfac- 
 tion of doing nearly as well as any of them in the classical 
 studies which were my choice, and of winning first a 
 scholarship and then a fellowship at Trinity. Then, 
 after a few years of work as journalist in London, 
 promiscuous critical work in which the special study of 
 art and the history of art bore a chief place, I was 
 offered the opportunity first of going back to the uni- 
 versity as Slade Professor, and before long of coupling 
 with that pleasant office the other, then newly created, 
 of director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. So that 
 Cambridge has been in the fullest sense the alma 
 
DEDICATORY LETTER 11 
 
 mater or kind nursing mother to whom I owed alike 
 training and recognition and opportunity. How much 
 of sentiment, of haunting love and affection, is mingled 
 with the reasoned gratitude and loyalty I owe her is a 
 question which I often ask myself and do not find it 
 very easy to answer. It is one of the great virtues of 
 Cambridge that to false sentiment she is an enemy, 
 and that any true partaker of her spirit becomes 
 impatient of professions, even by himself to himself, 
 that have in them any taint of unreality or claptrap. 
 At any rate, of the Cambridge familiar to me 
 both as an undergraduate and as a don I had meant 
 for the purposes of this book to try and call up 
 what living memories I could. But for one thing 
 I discovered that some quite indelible impressions 
 of particular corners and features and aspects of the 
 place, which I had thought might be almost private 
 to myself, had been provokingly forestalled more than 
 half a century ago by Edward FitzGerald (of whom 
 I have to make further mention later on) in that little 
 masterpiece Euphranor. For another thing, dipping 
 into the volume in which everything that has been or 
 could be said or felt about Cambridge, in praise or dis- 
 praise or description or recollection in every mood or 
 manner for the last three centuries and more, was 
 collected with such ingenious industry a few years ago 
 by Mr. Sydney Waterlow, I found that I had not so 
 much refreshed my mind on the subject, which was what 
 I had hoped, as clogged and confused it. For a last 
 thing, I had the delight of reading the beautiful pages in 
 which Cambridge in general, with Trinity in particular, 
 
12 DEDICATORY LETTER 
 
 has lately been praised by one of the most learned 
 and famous of her living sons, my friend Sir James 
 Frazer. But in that delight I found also an effectual 
 warning against rivalry. And so it came about that 
 Cambridge has slipped out of my scheme. 
 
 With Cambridge have gone certain personalities that I 
 should have been glad to keep in, such as those two 
 successive masters and stately figure-heads of my own 
 college in my early days, Whewell and Thompson ; 
 such as the famous classical coach Shilleto, whom I 
 can still see in my mind's eye, at his table littered with 
 snuff-boxes and bandana handkerchiefs, — still hear 
 while he pounds into my sense the stiffest meanings of 
 Thucydides ; or such again as J. W. Clark, equally keen 
 and accomplished in the pursuits of natural history 
 and architectural history and amateur stage-craft ; or 
 those two fine contrasted types of classical scholar 
 and public orator, W. G. Clark, the most frankly urbane 
 and straightforwardly courteous of men, and Jebb, 
 probably the most faultless Grecian of them all, whom 
 you yourself remember well, and whose tensely 
 strung nature and ever-tingling nerves did not prevent 
 him from being a successful man of the world and fine 
 representative of his university in Parliament — 
 But here I am, getting thoughts of Cambridge and 
 Cambridge friends in after all by a side door, and 
 prolonging my dedication beyond your or the reader's 
 patience. So no more, — except one word of warm 
 thanks to Sir Philip Burne- Jones and such other friends 
 as have given me leave to print letters of which they 
 hold the copyright. 
 
CHAPTER I 
 
 AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 
 
 The older one grows — I believe the observation ia 
 trite, and in my case it is certainly true — the more 
 vividly does the mind become haunted by its earliest 
 experiences, by memories of what one suffered and 
 enjoyed and imagined and did or longed to do as a 
 child and boy. My mother had a horror of schools for 
 her sons, partly founded, I think, for she was a good 
 deal of a reader, on the notions she had gathered from 
 Cowper's Tirocinium. My dear lovable compliant 
 father tenderly humoured her in all things ; and so 
 the three of us, of whom I was by several years the 
 youngest, were brought up under tutors at home. 
 By all that I could ever learn, there was nothing much 
 likeable or promising about me whether as boy or 
 hobbledehoy ; certainly nothing in the eyes of the 
 girl-cousins (we had no sisters) who tried with little 
 success to teach me dancing and generally put a polish 
 on me. But at least I was dead keen always on what- 
 ever I was about, although extremely shy and secret 
 in regard to the things I most cared for. The home 
 was a country-house three miles from Woodbridge in 
 East Suffolk, with five hundred acres of land and more 
 of shooting attached. My father loved the place. 
 
 13 
 
14 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Most of his days were spent in the conduct of his 
 business as partner in a leading London firm of East 
 India merchants, but in the intervals he could spare 
 for home his chief refreshment was to stroll in his gar- 
 dens or over his acres, or ride on his big bay gelding, 
 Prince, about the country lanes or in and out of 
 Woodbridge on his duties as a magistrate. 
 
 Either as merchants or civil servants my people 
 on both sides of the house had been connected with 
 India for several generations. My mother's father, 
 William Butterworth Bayley, whom I remember as a 
 commanding and withal humorous grand gentleman 
 of the old school, wearing a high black stock and 
 swallow-tail coat, had been acting governor-general 
 in the interval between Lord Amherst and Lord William 
 Bentinck, and for many years after his return was 
 chairman of the board of directors of the old East 
 India Company. My father's next younger brother, 
 John, was in my boyish days lieutenant-governor of 
 the North- West provinces. When the mutiny came 
 and threatened ruin to our raj and all connected with 
 it, I well remember how my father's home and country 
 interests were the sole things which enabled the dear 
 man at moments to forget his cares — " my most cruel 
 cares," as I can still after these sixty and odd years 
 hear his agonized voice one day calling them. Cruel 
 indeed they were, including besides the prospect of 
 public calamity and private ruin the intensest personal 
 anxieties for beloved kinsfolk exposed to the horrors 
 of the time. Sometimes the strain would end in 
 relief, as in the case of my cousin James Colvin, cooped 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 15 
 
 up almost without stores in a hurriedly half-fortified 
 bungalow at Arrah, with seven or eight English and 
 fifty-odd faithful Sikhs, by a whole horde of Sepoy 
 mutineers well armed and provided. " There is much 
 in common," writes Sir George Trevelyan, " between 
 Leonidas dressing his hair before he went forth to 
 his last fight and young Colvin laughing over his rice 
 and salt while the bullets spattered on the wall like 
 hail." Relief came to this small garrison almost at 
 the last gasp ; but more often the issue was tragic. 
 A brilliant young sister of my mother's, being with 
 child at the time, was forced to ride for her fife the fifty 
 miles from Shahjehanpore to Bareilly, and never got 
 over it. Most harrowing of all, my aforesaid uncle 
 John Colvin in his seat of government at Agra had 
 to bear more than almost any other among the great 
 civil servants of the stress and burden of the time, 
 and died of his task before the final issue was made 
 sure.* He and my father had been brought up at 
 St. Andrew's together and were devotedly attached ; 
 John was the younger but much the stronger of the 
 two, and again I can hear my father calling to mind 
 aloud in his grief how if any other youngster was bad 
 to him " John would always knock him down — always 
 knock him down." 
 
 * See J. W. Kaye, A History of the Sepoy War in India, vol. iii, 
 p. 416, " John Russell Colvin died on September 9, 1857, and 
 History rejoices to accord him a place in the front rank of those 
 who died for their country during that tremendous epoch, more 
 painfully and not less gloriously than those who died on the battle- 
 field." His life has been written by his son, the late Sir Auckland 
 Colvin. 
 
16 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 My father's love of our country home was not shared 
 by my mother. She had imbibed from the writings 
 of Ruskin, whom she knew and idolized, an idea that 
 hill or mountain majesty was a necessary feature of 
 landscape beauty, and a consequent contempt for 
 such quiet lowland scenery as that about our home. 
 To make up for what she held its poverty she lavished 
 care and money on the beautifying of the grounds 
 and gardens, matters which appealed also to my 
 father, so that for their relatively small scale they 
 came to be among the most admired in that country- 
 side. She insisted also on a three or four months' 
 annual change for the whole household, generally 
 to some hired house in the outskirts of London, occa- 
 sionally to Devonshire. I do not think either of my 
 parents at all realized, readers though they were, the 
 literary interests and associations which attached to 
 our neighbouring country and coast. Certainly I was 
 in youth never made to realize them. To my mother 
 I cannot be grateful enough for one thing : she set 
 me reading Rob Roy aloud to her when I was eight 
 years old ; the other Waverleys followed ; and subse- 
 quent years have only deepened and confirmed my 
 delight in the imaginary world of which I was thus 
 early made free. It used to be a foolish habit among 
 superfine and ultra-modern critics, during part of 
 my life, to pooh-pooh Walter Scott as no artist, and 
 admiration of him as an obsolete fashion. It is a joy 
 in my old age to see him coming, among the wiser 
 even of the youngest, to be fully acknowledged for 
 what he was, that is easily the second greatest creator 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 17 
 
 in our language since Shakespeare, and for all his 
 careless ways and long-winded openings an instinctive 
 artist in crucial scenes and moments unsurpassed.* 
 
 Going back upon my own boyish cares and pre- 
 occupations, I recall in them an odd mixture of the 
 civilized and the barbarous. To the passion for Scott 
 there presently, before I was fifteen, succeeded a 
 passion for Spenser. Entirely for myself and without 
 direction, I had discovered the Faery Queene in my 
 father's library, and insatiably devoured and set about 
 doing my best to imitate it. Not for the world would 
 I have let any one into the secret of my absurd attempts 
 and ambitions, but on summer mornings not long after 
 dawn must needs clamber down from my bedroom 
 window, and go off to the stable-shed beyond the 
 home paddocks, where a beloved little Arab mare was 
 housed, the gift to me of an old East-Indian general 
 my godfather, and in her company alone, nursing her 
 muzzle the while, sit and spin out of my head the 
 stanzas of my poem. The theme, if I remember 
 aright, was one of mythical ancient British history 
 taken from Spenser himself. But other and for aught 
 I can remember alternate mornings were spent not 
 less eagerly in visiting, long before the dew was off 
 the grass, the night-lines I had laid the evening before 
 in the pools of one or the other of our two near brooks 
 to catch the big silver-bellied eels : lines barbarously 
 baited, for the prey would take no other lure, with the 
 
 * There is a masterly chapter " On the prose of Sir Walter 
 Scott " in the Collected Essays of the late, too early lost, Professor 
 Verrall of Cambridge (Cambridge University, 1903). 
 
18 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 unfledged young of hedgerow birds stolen from the 
 nest. A certain bandy-leg gad stable-help, I remember, 
 was my confidant and instigator in these and divers 
 baser kinds of sport, among them rat-hunting with a 
 thorough-bred little Dandie Dinmont terrier bitch who 
 shared her affections equally between him and me. 
 In other and more avowable pastimes, I suppose a little 
 later, I was equally keen, as in captaining a village 
 team of cricketers, or tramping the turnips after part- 
 ridges, or standing waiting for rocketing pheasants 
 at the spinney corners, or riding with the harriers 
 kept by a neighbouring captain of militia, who, fine 
 sportsman as he was and looked on his gallant roan 
 Silverlocks, had a somewhat ungrateful task in what 
 was essentially not a hunting but a shooting country. 
 A clumsy horseman and an indifferent shot, nothing 
 could exceed the zest with which I pursued these 
 commonplace country sports, unless it were that with 
 which in the same years (say from twelve to seventeen) 
 I used to devour my Scott and Shakespeare and 
 Faery Queene and Modem Painters and Stones of 
 Venice (for from my mother I had by this time fully 
 caught the Ruskin enthusiasm), and learn long screeds 
 of them, both verse and prose, by heart. These 
 relatively high-flown literary tastes did not at all 
 debar me from delighting in Marryat and Mayne Reid 
 and Fenimore Cooper and planning for myself under 
 their inspiration futures of the wildest adventure. 
 
 In the same years I was getting some formal educa- 
 tion under an elderly tutor, who neither by years nor 
 disposition was any sort of friend or companion. 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 19 
 
 But he must have been as capable as he was remark- 
 able for his dyed whiskers and corpulent figure and 
 choleric temper ; seeing that when the time came for 
 going to Cambridge I found to my surprise that I was 
 as well on almost in the classics as picked lads from 
 the public schools, and in modern languages much 
 better. 
 
 Well, from this queerly brought-up boyhood I retain, 
 as I began by saying, impressions of nature and of 
 natural beauty more intense and abiding than any 
 that have been stamped upon me since. Not from 
 the holiday sojourns or excursions during which I was 
 especially on the look-out for such impressions, as 
 in visits to family friends among the Galloway moors 
 or on the slopes of the Wicklow mountains, nor even 
 from carriage tours taken with my father over the 
 then untunnelled Simplon Pass or the length of the 
 French and Italian Riviera from Nice to Genoa, —it 
 is not from these, anticipate and enjoy them as intensely 
 as I might, that the sense of natural beauty sank into 
 my soul, but from the unpretentious scenery of home, 
 the familiar and daily haunts of my childhood and 
 boyhood. Our immediate countryside was not abso- 
 lutely level like some parts adjacent, but broken into 
 gentle undulations of some eighty to a hundred feet, 
 with views of moderate extent from the crown of 
 each rise (one rise being actually dignified with the name 
 of Beacon Hill), and in each of the hollows a brook 
 winding its way through water-meadows towards the 
 near estuary of the Deben. A local poet, Bernard 
 Barton, to whom I shall presently return, describes 
 
20 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 faithfully enough the course of one of these brooks 
 which he best knew: — 
 
 It flows through flowery meads, 
 Gladdening the herds that on its margin browse ; 
 
 Its quiet bounty feeds 
 The alders that o'ershade it with their boughs. 
 
 Gently it murmurs by 
 The village churchyard, with a plaintive tone 
 
 Of dirge-like melody, 
 For worth and beauty modest as its own. 
 
 More gaily now it sweeps 
 By the small school-house, in the sunshine bright, 
 
 And o'er the pebbles leaps, 
 like happy hearts by holiday made /light. 
 
 Looking back, I find it hard to discriminate which of 
 my delights remembered from those days were due 
 to pure pleasure of the visual faculties, and which, 
 or how much of each, to an admixture of other elements, 
 sensuous imaginative or active. Among ocular im- 
 pressions pure and simple, some that I retain the most 
 vividly are of hawthorn trees in flush and snowy guel- 
 der-rose balls and laburnum-lamps magically golden ; 
 of the miraculous spray and sparkle of colour and fresh- 
 ness in a certain wood, the floor all carpeted with wild 
 hyacinth and primrose, wood-sorrel and wood anemone, 
 the new-budded twigs all sparkling with points of 
 yellow or pale-green light ; of the swaying of alders 
 and feathery birch-boughs all day long in summer 
 air, and the ruffling of the seas of sorrel-reddened 
 meadow-grass beneath them. Of the joy of poring 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 21 
 
 hour after hour over the half-translucent amber 
 depths and flickering green reflections of the brook, 
 where its pools lay shaded under sweeping chestnut 
 boughs. Of crossing a stile at evening into a certain 
 favourite high field open to the north and west, whence 
 the spirit could go voyaging among the encrimsoned 
 archipelagoes of the sunset sky, while dusk and mist 
 were dimming the valley at my feet. Of the enchant- 
 ment of winter frosts, with icicles fringeing the eaves, 
 and every bough and twig of the naked garden trees 
 glittering transfigured in the tingling air. Or again 
 of Sunday afternoons at church in summer, where 
 through the open side-door facing our seats the familiar 
 landscape of cottages and meadows and wooded slopes 
 lay coursed over by the shadows of travelling clouds, 
 while the cawing of the rooks and crooning of the stock- 
 doves floated in from the tree-tops to temper the discord 
 of the rustic psalmody led by our humpbacked village 
 cobbler. Or of poring caressingly on the deep-folded 
 splendour and opulent globed softness of the June 
 roses, with their colours ranging from the tenderest 
 blushing or sallow flesh-tint to reds that deepeued 
 almost into black. Or of the delicious half -transparency 
 of the yellow and red raspberries with the morning 
 dew on them, and the size and succulence of the purple- 
 black bursting figs and blushing peaches waiting to 
 be gathered warm on the garden-wall, — but here, for 
 I did not content myself with looking at them, the 
 pleasures of sight merge themselves in memory into 
 those of a more carnal sense. 
 
 Turning to joys enhanced by the elements of roused 
 
22 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 imagination, how often have I sat musing among the 
 spreading boughs of a great old Spanish chestnut-tree 
 (somehow associated in my boyish mind with the 
 Armada), whence the view of the pleasant Playford 
 hollow included a few acres of reedy marsh known as 
 " the mere " : a name that stirred my imagination 
 mightily, and I can well remember how I tried in 
 vain — for this mere had no open water — to make it 
 serve me for King Arthur's death-scene, or how anon, 
 having had the idea thrust upon me that its mud was 
 " bottomless," I would convert it into a morass 
 tragically fraught with histories of engulfed armies. 
 
 In moods like this the knowledge of the sea's neigh- 
 bourhood to our home, and of its sending twice a day 
 its marginal waters inland, flooding the mud-banks of 
 the estuaries, and lifting and stroking back their water- 
 weeds, until it was met by the outflow of our meadow 
 streams, — this knowledge helped to dilate the childish 
 spirit with a sense of ulterior mystery, and of the 
 possibility of great world-voyages lying not remotely 
 beyond the horizon lines. I remember this sense 
 receiving a queer special point and significance from 
 the fact that not far from the place where our two 
 brooks, the Lark and the Fynn, having run together 
 into one, broaden out to form a tidal creek of the 
 Deben, there stood a public house having for sign a 
 grotesque carved and scarlet-painted head and shoulders 
 of a red lion (the Red Lion of Martlesham) which had 
 served, we knew, in old time as the figure-head of an 
 ocean-going ship. 
 
 But more, I honestly believe and am not ashamed 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 23 
 
 to own, more than the direct disinterested pleasures 
 of the sense of sight, more even than the stirrings of 
 an awakened world-imagination, there was a third 
 cause which helped in those growing years to stamp 
 images of nature upon my memory, and that was the 
 excitement of the chasing or sporting instincts which 
 went along with them, and which we owe, I suppose, 
 to long lines of predatory ancestors. That instinctive 
 tension of the nerves and tingling of the pulses in 
 pursuit, or at the mere presence of wild creatures 
 small or great, disposes the faculties to a peculiarly 
 vivid reception and retention of all accompanying 
 impressions. At the stage the world has reached, I 
 do not see that there is morally much to be said in 
 favour of men chasing and killing dumb animals for 
 pleasure, or even for the sake of the exercise, which 
 some forms of chase involve, of the virtues of physical 
 courage, skill, or endurance. Personally, therefore, I 
 have long been a convinced if reluctant convert from 
 field sports ; yet I cannot but fear that much of our 
 truest, deepest and even most poetical love of nature 
 may go with them. It is all very well for a sentimen- 
 talist like Leigh Hunt to write (as he did more effec- 
 tively perhaps than any one since) against the pleasures 
 that " strew the brakes with agonies of feathered 
 wounds." Hunt was brought up within the precincts 
 of Christ's Hospital, with only three weeks' country 
 holiday in the year. But take the case of Wordsworth, 
 and see with what gusto he recalls his boyish delights 
 of bird's-nesting and woodcock-snaring, and how fully 
 he acknowledges the share which these excitements 
 
24 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 had along with others in forging the links that bound 
 his soul to nature. For my own insignificant part, I 
 know that I should never have felt as I do the charm 
 of dew-silvered morning meadows or translucent 
 sleeping water-pools if I had not been used as a boy 
 to visit them at dawn intent on nothing but seeing 
 whether my night-lines were stretched or slack. Nor 
 should I cherish half such visions, " felt in the blood 
 and felt along the heart," of the red and pale gold 
 woods of autumn quivering in bright November air, 
 but for the hours I have stood expectant beside them 
 with* the gun; nor take half such delight in the soft 
 undulations and tender colouring and atmospheric 
 mystery of the winter fields, if I had not galloped 
 over them with quickened pulses in many a hare-hunt. 
 But enough — it is not of myself that I set out to speak, 
 but of the country-side where I was brought up and 
 of some poets of whom it has been at one time or 
 another the home. 
 
 These are perhaps as many and as distinguished 
 as any other area of equal extent in England can 
 boast, always excepting the strongly contrasted Lake 
 Country. It is interesting to note with what different 
 feelings they have regarded the country of their birth 
 or adoption. Perhaps it is hardly fair to bring in the 
 earliest of them, Giles Fletcher (brother to the better 
 known Phineas), who in the days of James I held 
 the living of Alderton, one of our characteristic coast- 
 ward parishes of half-reclaimed heath-land bordering 
 upon the marshes of a river mouth. Giles was in 
 poetry one of the later and weaklier offshoots of the 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 25 
 
 literary school of Spenser. He had distinguished 
 himself while still a bachelor of arts at Trinity with 
 his poems Chris fs Victory and Christ's Triumph, and 
 had also been an admired preacher of university ser- 
 mons in the same spirit of devout and dulcet Christian 
 allegory. He was ardently attached to his college 
 and university, and languished in his rural preferment, 
 finding the people savage and the place unhealthy. 
 " He was settled," writes Thomas Fuller, " in Suffolk, 
 which hath the best and worst aire in England ; best 
 about Bury, and worst on the Sea-Side, where Master 
 Fletcher was beneficed. His clownish and low-parted 
 parishioners (having nothing but their shoes high about 
 them) valued not their Pastour according to his worth ; 
 which disposed him to melancholy and hastened his 
 dissolution." The worst and best air in England 
 indeed! What would the sententious and sagacious 
 Fuller have said if he could have foreseen how in the 
 whirligig of time opinion concerning the salubrity 
 of our seacoast climate would spin round, and how 
 Felixstowe for instance (which is only five miles across 
 the ferry at the Deben mouth from Alderton) would 
 change from the hamlet I can myself remember to some 
 mile-and-a-half's length of smart and smiling villa 
 frontage, and how guide-books would babble of its 
 " invariably invigorating air," and doctors send their 
 patients to it from far and wide ? 
 
 Coming down the best part of two centuries from 
 the days of the grumbler Phineas Fletcher, we find the 
 chief of our East-Suffolk poets, Crabbe, inclined to take 
 a view of the local scenes and characters not much 
 
26 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 less disparaging than his. Our countryside must be 
 content to have produced in Crabbe not a lover or 
 eulogist, but a son who by natural gift might have 
 been almost as pre-eminent in the realist family of 
 creative writers as Scott (who always generously insisted 
 on seeing in him an equal) in the romantic. Remember 
 that when Crabbe had long done his best work Scott 
 had only written his poems, things that for all their 
 vigour and charm do not strike very deep, and that 
 his great creative work of the Waverley novels was 
 still to come. In his own day and way Crabbe was 
 an actual pioneer without rival in the delineation of 
 the scenes, characters, and passions of the humble 
 provincial world which he best knew. His life until 
 he was near thirty was almost entirely spent at the 
 coast town of Aldborough, within a score of miles 
 of my home, and from it is drawn the main part of 
 the inspiration of the most living of his works, The 
 Borough. His volumes were of course in my father's 
 book-shelves, but my attention was never called to 
 them. Had it been so called, I wonder whether I 
 should in some half-conscious way have been put off 
 by that prevailing discord between his matter and 
 his manner which is, as I think, the great bar to 
 Crabbe' s holding the place in our literature he might 
 otherwise have deserved. For in spite of the recorded 
 high admiration of his work by the finest spirits of 
 his own and of a later day — as Scott, Charles James 
 Fox, Wordsworth, Byron, Newman, Tennyson, Fitz- 
 Gerald — in spite of this, it must be acknowledged that 
 with lovers of poetry in general he has failed to hold 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 27 
 
 his own. Squalid tragedy however intense, descriptive 
 detail however exact and vivid, unflinchingly stern 
 or sarcastically amused veracity and insight in human 
 portraiture however varied, have somehow ceased to 
 find their way to our .acceptance through a literary 
 medium artificial and outworn as was the ten-syllable 
 couplet in the mode in which Crabbe employed it. 
 When to-day we think of him as a real poet holding 
 rank among other poets, it is not the staple of his 
 work that we have in mind, but exceptional intensely 
 imagined passages such as occur, for instance, in that 
 fine dramatic lyric Sir Eustace Grey ; and then we 
 cannot but remember how to stir up Crabbe's poetic 
 faculty to this pitch it took a severe illness followed 
 by a strong remedial course of opium. It is but 
 occasionally that in the main body of his narrative 
 work he rises into real poetry ; of tenest in the indignant 
 vein ; seldomer in that of pathos or tenderness ; in 
 that of natural description more rarely still, for his 
 quality as an observer of nature is essentially scientific ; 
 thus in dealing with the flowers and vegetation of his 
 country-side he can never leave out the details that 
 shall remind us of his being a fully trained botanist. 
 His use of the traditional medium, the heroic couplet, 
 sometimes tempts him to make obvious rhetorical 
 or epigrammatical points where such points are out of 
 place ; sometimes also to employ a stilted or senten- 
 tious or abstract phrase where a plain phrase would 
 have conveyed his meaning better. But in the main 
 he uses the style and language natural to his own 
 temperament, and these are not the style and language 
 
28 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 of poetry at all, but of prose ; and prose does not 
 become poetry by the mere fact of being mechanically 
 chopped into lengths. Crabbe's true place in litera- 
 ture, one often feels, had not the Popeian tradition 
 of his day set him on a mistaken track, should have 
 been that of a great, in his own day unprecedented, 
 master of humble human narrative and detailed 
 natural description, but in prose rather than in verse. 
 Not that the passion for descriptive detail in Crabbe's 
 work implies in him much share of the modern senti- 
 ment of nature or delight in nature for nature's sake. 
 On the contrary, more exclusively even than other 
 and older poets of his age, he judges nature not by 
 her power of pleasing the contemplative and disinter- 
 ested part of man, but by her aptitude to serve or 
 thwart him in his practical necessities. Accordingly 
 he condemns and satirizes the scenery, as he does 
 the manners, of the Aldborough coast, which had been 
 intensely stamped upon his observation and imagina- 
 tion from childhood. Not merely does he make it 
 a part of the penalty of the abhorred and cruel Peter 
 Grimes — 
 
 At the same time the same dull views to see, 
 The bounding marsh-bank and the blighted tree ; 
 The water only, when the tides were high, 
 When low, the mud half -covered and half -dry ; 
 The sun-burnt tar that blisters on the planks, 
 And bank-side stakes in their uneven ranks : — 
 
 not merely does he punish his criminal with sights 
 which might interest pleasurably a modern painter 
 or lover of the picturesque, but speaking in his own 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 29 
 
 person, he thus resents the colour and variety of the 
 unprofitable vegetation of the coast: — 
 
 Lo ! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er, 
 Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor. 
 From thence a length of burning sand appears, 
 Where the thin harvest waves its wither 'd ears ; 
 Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, 
 Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye : 
 There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, 
 And to the ragged infant threaten war ; 
 There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil ; 
 There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil ; 
 Hardy and high, above the slender sheaf, 
 The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf ; 
 O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade, 
 And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade ; 
 With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, 
 And a sad splendour vainly shines around. 
 
 These are examples of Crabbe's descriptive work 
 near its best. But a similar or even more minute 
 cataloguing method serves him less well when not the 
 stationary but the shifting, and less yet when the sudden 
 and stormy, phenomena of nature are concerned. 
 These need a broader sweep of vision and words more 
 concentrated to express them. Turn for instance to 
 those contrasted effects of calm and storm at sea 
 from the opening of the same poem, The Borough, 
 which drew when they were first published the enthusi- 
 astic praise of Gifford. The observations recorded in 
 the fourteen lines of the storm passage are minutely 
 accurate : the last three or four show a true knowledge 
 of geological cause and effect ; but I remember to 
 
30 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 have heard a more effective piece of sea-description 
 in half a dozen words from the lips of an inland-bred 
 serving woman of that peasant race he knew so well. 
 She had been brought to the coast for the first time 
 in her life on a ruffling day, and after looking at the 
 sea for a few moments said in her Suffolk accents 
 and in a tone not of approval, " Wha', do it alluz 
 goo muddlin' about like that ? " 
 
 The chief market town and inland centre of this 
 region so familiar to my boyhood is Woodbridge, on 
 the Deben. Crabbe himself lived there for three of 
 his early years, and later it was the home of two very 
 unlike and unequally gifted men of letters, both of 
 whom held the place and its neighbourhood in great 
 affection. These were Bernard Barton and Edward 
 FitzGerald, the one belonging to the generation of 
 Southey and Lamb, the other to that of Tennyson 
 and Thackeray. Bernard Barton, no East Anglian 
 by blood but a Cumbrian, served nearly all his manhood 
 as clerk in a Quaker bank at Woodbridge. Himself 
 a Quaker, he was the embodiment of all that was 
 amiable and cultured in that sect, and withal a person- 
 age of a singularly fine manly presence and genial 
 conversation. He and Charles Lamb had met once or 
 twice at the table of Taylor and Hessey the publishers, 
 and from those meetings ensued a friendship carried 
 on almost entirely by correspondence. It is as the 
 " B.B. " of Lamb's letters (one of them including his 
 immortal rhapsody on a cold in the head) that Bernard 
 Barton is now almost exclusively known to the general 
 reader. But his volumes in their day ran through 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 31 
 
 several editions. For one selected and collected edition 
 practically all the gentry in the county subscribed, 
 and I find my father's name among the rest. But 
 his work was valued far beyond local circles both for 
 its own qualities of metrical fluency and simple, pious 
 benignity of temper, and also as a mild and palatable 
 antidote against the Byron fever of the hour. Lamb 
 shared this view to the full. " I like them," he writes, 
 "for what they are, and for what they are not. I 
 have sickened on the modern rhodomontade and 
 Byronism, and your plain Quakerish beauty has cap- 
 tivated me. It is all wholesome cates ; aye, and 
 toothsome too : and withal Quakerish." But else- 
 where we find Lamb warning his friend candidly and 
 shrewdly against some besetting foibles of his muse. 
 " Religion is sometimes lugged in, as if it did not 
 come naturally. You have also too much of singing 
 metre, such as requires no deep ear to make ; lilting 
 measure ; strike at less superficial melodies." These 
 simple words of Lamb's leave little more that is to 
 the purpose for criticism to say. 
 
 Bernard Barton's view and handling of the East- 
 Suffolk countryside is as unlike Crabbe's as possible. 
 His poetry is full of praises of the scenery of Wood- 
 bridge and its neighbouring villages. His descriptions, 
 we may confess, are uncertain in colour and touch, 
 and his verses are apt to weary the reader of to-day 
 by their shallow fluency alike of thought and sound. 
 I have already quoted one set,' descriptive of the water- 
 brook, the Lark, at Great Bealings. Here are two 
 examples closely pertinent to our theme, and perhaps 
 
32 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 as pleasant as his work will furnish. The first is on 
 Landguard Fort, a solitary, not inconsiderable fortifi- 
 cation of an old-fashioned kind built on the extremity 
 of a shingle-spit at the mouth of the Ipswich river 
 opposite Harwich. It was a haunt of Gainsborough's 
 and the subject of his brush in early days, but the 
 sentiment of the scene has been marred of late by 
 the proximity of the railway station and new villa 
 extensions of Felixstowe : — 
 
 Along the sands, and by the sound 
 Of ocean, moaning night and day, 
 It stands : its lonely burial-ground 
 Scattered with low stones, moss'd and grey, 
 Whose brief inscriptions fade away 
 Beneath the ocean-breeze's spell ; 
 And there, beneath the moon's pale ray, 
 Still walks the nightly centinel. 
 
 The above little piece has a real charm of conciseness 
 and melody : next let us hear our poet when he 
 apostrophizes his beloved river Deben: — 
 
 No stately villas on thy side, 
 May be reflected in thy tide ; 
 
 No ruin'd abbey grey with years 
 Upon thy marge its pile uprears ; 
 Nor crumbling castle, valour's hold, 
 Recalls the feudal days of old, 
 Nor dost thou need that such should be 
 To make thee, Deben, dear to me ; 
 Thou hast thy own befitting charms 
 Of quiet heath and fertile farms, 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 33 
 
 With here and there a copse to fling 
 Its welcome shade, where wild birds sing ; 
 Thy meads for flocks and herds to graze ; 
 Thy quays and docks, where seamen raise 
 Their anchor, and unfurl their sail 
 To woo and win the favouring gale. 
 And above all for me thou hast 
 Endearing memories of the past ! 
 
 Well, Derwent and Yarrow, we must once more admit, 
 have inspired more thrilling strains. Yet it is pleasant 
 to share the idyllic meditations of our lettered Quaker, 
 and to read of his genial ways and conversation, of his 
 enjoyment and power of making others enjoy, "on 
 some summer afternoon, perhaps at the little inn on the 
 heath, or by the river-side, or when, after a pleasant 
 picnic on the sea-shore, we drifted homeward up the 
 river, while the breeze died away at sunset, and the 
 heron, at last startled by our gliding boat, slowly rose 
 from the ooze over which the tide was momentarily 
 encroaching " — it is pleasant to read these things of 
 Bernard Barton in the words of his younger friend 
 and biographer already mentioned, Edward Fitz- 
 Gerald. 
 
 That accomplished Cambridge scholar — scholar alike 
 in classic and Oriental tongues — lived for the greater 
 part of his life in the retirement of this same country- 
 side. His singular intellectual temperament, in which 
 originality and culture bore equal parts, found its best 
 expression in verse translations which were in truth 
 not so much translations as free and finished variations 
 on the themes supplied by his text. By blood and 
 
34 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 descent he was no Eastern Counties man, and indeed 
 no Englishman, but pure Irish, his father having been 
 a John Purcell married into a family of FitzGeralds 
 whose name and arms he took after his father-in-law's 
 death. These Purcells had owned large landed estates 
 in various English counties, and through an unlucky 
 mining speculation had lost them all except one at 
 Boulge in East Suffolk. In my early days the head 
 of the house was settled at Boulge Hall, some four 
 miles from my home. Among other eccentricities this 
 FitzGerald was a ranting evangelical out-of-door 
 preacher, and in ways and dress and behaviour in 
 general so abnormal as to pass among the neigh- 
 bouring squires almost for a lunatic. Scarcely less 
 eccentric was supposed to be his younger brother 
 Edward. I have spoken of him as Barton's friend and 
 biographer, not seeking to recall the nearer formal 
 relationship in which they stood. After Barton's 
 death Edward FitzGerald married his daughter, it is 
 supposed from motives of generosity, as she was left 
 ill off. But this was one of the actions of his life which 
 earned for him his own name for himself, Ballyblunder. 
 It was soon followed by a separation, and he 
 resumed his former bachelor way of living. He 
 lodged, we all knew, over Berry's the gunmaker's on 
 the Market Hill in Woodbridge. By report we 
 youngsters knew also, not without envy, of the sailing 
 yacht he kept upon our neighbouring river the Deben. 
 But of his being a writer and the friend and intimate 
 correspondent of the most famous writers of his time, 
 Carlyle, Tennyson, Thackeray, and the rest, we never 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 35 
 
 heard or dreamed. All we saw in him was an odd, tall, 
 sad-faced, middle-aged or elderly gentleman wandering, 
 say rather drifting, abstractedly about the country 
 roads in an ill-fitting suit with a shabby hat pushed 
 back on his head, blue spectacles on nose and an old 
 cape cast anyhow about his shoulders. Few figures 
 were more familiar to me by sight, few less regarded ; 
 and many a time must my pony's hoofs have bespat- 
 tered this forlorn-looking figure as we cantered past him 
 in the neighbouring lanes. Other distinguished per- 
 sonages belonging to or frequenting our country-side 
 we had been duly taught to recognize and respect. 
 There was Sir George Biddell Airy for one, the inde- 
 fatigable and world-famous Cambridge mathematician 
 and astronomer royal, who had built himself a little 
 holiday home in the neighbouring village of Playford, 
 to which his mother belonged (and where there had 
 lately lived and died another no less celebrity of a 
 different kind, Thomas Clarkson, the devoted leader 
 of the campaign for the abolition of negro slavery). 
 There was Sir William Page Wood for another, the 
 brilliant lawyer, afterwards Lord Chancellor under the 
 title of Lord Hatherley, who had spent his childhood 
 in his grandfather's house at Woodbridge and was a 
 constant visitor to a brother-in-law (beautiful old 
 gentlemen to look at I justly thought them both) who 
 held the living of the parish next our own, Great 
 Bealings. But it never entered our thoughts that in 
 after life, when these scientific or philanthropic or legal 
 distinctions should have faded save in the memory of 
 specialists, the brother of the crazy preaching squire 
 
36 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 of Boulge would be famous with a growing fame 
 through all the English-speaking world. All that world 
 now knows how he spent his time translating — or shall 
 we rather say transmuting — into English, in a manner 
 all his own, many dramas from the Greek and Spanish, 
 and diverse obscure poems from Eastern tongues, and 
 how of all these versions there is one, his rendering 
 of certain meditative staves of an old Persian astron- 
 omer-poet, which has been found to express most 
 vitally and musically, most intimately, most haunt- 
 ingly, that which is the ruling mood of our generation 
 in face of the mystery of things and of their causes, 
 the unsolved problems of human origin and destiny : — 
 
 *Up from Earth's Centre to the Seventh Gate 
 I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate, 
 And many a Knot unravelled by the Road, 
 But not the Master-Knot of Human Fate. 
 
 There was the Door to which I found no Key ; 
 There was the Veil through which I might not see ; 
 Some little talk awhile of Mb and Thee 
 There was — and then no more of Thee and Me.' 
 
 Needless to say, it is no matter of reproach to our 
 parents or teachers that they did not open our eyes 
 to the fact of this unrecognized genius living almost 
 at our doors ; for in those days (I speak of about 
 1855-1865) FitzGerald had either not printed his 
 translations, or printed them anonymously and so 
 furtively that for all except his intimates they might 
 as well not have been printed at all. The admiration 
 of a select few, among them Rossetti and his group, 
 
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 37 
 
 for his version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 
 caused that one translation to be reprinted several 
 times, each time with fresh and arbitrary variations, 
 by the translator during his life but still without his 
 name. It was not until towards 1890, some seven 
 years after his death, that the posthumous issues of 
 the poem began to get that hold upon the general 
 reading public both in England and America which 
 has since caused it to be reprinted in edition after 
 edition too numerous to count, editions ranging from 
 the simplest and cheapest to the most gorgeous, and 
 has earned for its author the honour of at least two 
 full-dress biographies, the last honour that he would 
 have dreamed of or desired. What would he have 
 said could he have lived to see that stage spectacle 
 founded on his text which is the latest and surely the 
 most fantastic development of the cult ? 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN 
 
 Some of the most vivid of my childish and boyish 
 recollections are of John Ruskin, whose parents were 
 friends of my parents and for whom my mother 
 entertained an adoring regard, coupled, I think, with 
 the ambition that I, her youngest, should grow up to 
 be as nearly as might be such another. From very 
 tender years I used to be taken from time to time to 
 visit the Ruskins in their family abode on Denmark 
 Hill. But from these earliest days I retain less recol- 
 lection of the great man himself than of his mother. 
 Stern old Calvinist as she was, and more than Spartan 
 as had been her upbringing of her own son, she chose 
 to make something of a pet of me. I have now before 
 me a copy, with its shiny yellow boards all rubbed and 
 dingy, of her son's tale for children, The King of the 
 Golden River, with Richard Doyle's illustrations, which 
 she gave me in 1852, when I was just short of seven 
 years old, and which my governess helped me to adorn 
 on the back of the frontispiece with a grateful inscrip- 
 tion, set in an ornamental border of crimson lake and 
 cobalt. A little later, I remember — at least I hope 
 it was a little later — she used to regale me on each visit 
 with a glass of fine sherry (the house of Ruskin, Telfer 
 
 38 
 
JOHN RUSK1N 39 
 
 and Domecq were great sherry merchants) and a slice 
 of plum cake. It was not until my ninth year that I 
 was taken with my two elder brothers expressly to 
 see the great man himself and be admitted to his own 
 room. He received us raw boys with extraordinary 
 kindness, and one thing, I remember, instantaneously 
 delighted us. This was a scene between him and his 
 white Spitz terrier Wisie (I think there is mention of 
 Wisie somewhere in Praeterita). The dog burst into 
 the drawing-room just after we had arrived, and not 
 having seen his master for some time leapt and capered 
 and yelped and fumed about and over him as he sat, 
 with a passion, almost a frenzy, of pent-up affection, 
 and was caressed with little less eagerness in return. 
 Ruskin then took us up to his working-room, and by 
 way of giving us a practical drawing-lesson made before 
 our eyes a sketch in body-colours of one corner of the 
 room, with its curtain, wall-paper and furniture — all 
 of them of a type which to the altered taste of the next 
 generation would have seemed too Philistine and early 
 Victorian to be endured. For very many years I had 
 that sketch by me, but fear that in one or another of 
 my various changes of domicile it has now got lost 
 beyond recovery. During the next few years such 
 visits and lessons were several times repeated. But 
 the Turners on the walls and their owner's kind 
 endeavours to interest me in them used still, I fear, 
 to make less impression upon me than the slice of cake 
 and glass of sherry with which the old lady never 
 failed to regale me. 
 
 This for the first four or five years ; but before I was 
 
40 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 fifteen I had become intensely sensitive both to the 
 magnetism of Ruskin's personality and to the power 
 and beauty of his writings. No man had about him 
 more— few can ever have had so much — of the atmo- 
 sphere and effluence of genius, and when he came into 
 the room I used consciously to thrill to his presence. 
 In those years, a little before and after the fortieth 
 of his age, he was elegant after the fashion of his time 
 as well as impressive in a fashion all his own. There 
 remains with me quite unfaded the image of his 
 slender, slightly stooping figure clad in the invariable 
 dark blue frock coat and bright blue neck-tie ; of his 
 small head with its strongly marked features, its sweep 
 of thick brown hair and closely trimmed side-whis- 
 kers ; above all, of the singular bitter-sweet expres- 
 sion of his mouth (due partly, as I have always under- 
 stood, to the vestiges of a scar left on the upper lip by 
 a dog's bite in boyhood) and of the intense weight and 
 penetration of his glance as he fixed his deep blue 
 eyes upon yours from under the thick bushy prominence 
 of his eyebrows (these were an inheritance from his 
 father, who had them shaggier and longer than I 
 have seen on any other man). The warmth and 
 almost caressing courtesy of his welcome were as 
 captivating as its manner was personal : in shaking 
 hands he would raise the forearm from the elbow, 
 which he kept close to his side, and bringing the hand 
 down with a full sweep upon yours would hold you 
 firmly clasped until greetings were over and talk, 
 which generally turned immediately to teaching, 
 began. 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 41 
 
 To such teaching, when it was addressed to myself, 
 I could naturally, at my age, only listen in adoring 
 acquiescence. But what I loved better still was to 
 be allowed, as occasionally happened, to sit by while he 
 let himself go in the company of some friend who could 
 meet and draw him out on equal terms. It was not 
 very often that I saw him, since my people spent the 
 greater part of each year in our country home in Suffolk ; 
 but for two or three years he was hardly ever out of 
 my thoughts except during the hours when they were 
 quite engrossed by those rough outdoor sports of hare- 
 hunting, pheasant-shooting, village cricket and the like, 
 of which I have already spoken. The fifth volume 
 of Modern Painters, which appeared when I was in 
 my sixteenth year, was a gospel which for a while I 
 pored over incessantly and held incomparable for 
 insight and wisdom and eloquence ; and by it I was 
 led to an equally passionate study of the Seven Lamps, 
 the Stones of Venice, and the rest of the early works on 
 art. A queer freak of memory comes convincingly 
 to remind me how strong must have been the prepos- 
 session. On a holiday trip in Ireland I remember 
 walking after dinner in the moonlight on the shore of 
 one of the Killarney Lakes in company with a grown- 
 up guest at the same hotel, a middle-aged Admiralty 
 clerk if I recollect aright ; and to break a long and 
 awkward silence said suddenly to him a propos of 
 nothing, by way of a conversational opening which 
 was bound to impress, " I know Ruskin." 
 
 But the phase of absolute devotion and unquestion- 
 ing subservience did not last long. Being taken by 
 
42 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 my father (again I think with an idea of following in 
 Ruskinian footsteps) for several carriage tours on the 
 Continent in the course of the next two or three years, 
 I found myself, rather to my own dissatisfaction, 
 beginning to see famous scenes and cities, buildings and 
 pictures, no longer purely through the master's eyes 
 but through my own. Later again, during my Cam- 
 bridge years and afterwards, I seemed unwillingly to 
 find, in those parts of his writings which I was able 
 to check by my own studies, much misinterpretation 
 of history, a habit of headlong and unquestioning but 
 often quite unwarranted inference from the creations 
 of art to the social conditions lying behind them, with 
 much impassioned misreading of the relations of art 
 in general to nature and to human life ; everywhere 
 the fire of genius, everywhere the same lovingly, pierc- 
 ingly intense observation of natural fact ; everywhere 
 the same nobleness of purpose and burning zeal for 
 human welfare, the same beautiful felicity and persuas- 
 iveness of expression, the same almost unparalleled 
 combination of utter sincerity with infinite rhetorical 
 and dialectical adroitness and resource ; but every- 
 where also the same dogmatic and prophetic con- 
 viction of being able to set the world right by his own 
 individual insight and judgment on whatever matters 
 might occupy his mind and heart, the same intolerant 
 blindness to all facts and considerations that might 
 tell against his theories, the same liability to intermingle 
 passages of illuminating vision and wisdom with others 
 of petulant, inconsistent, self-contradictory error and 
 mis judgment. In short this demigod of my later boy- 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 43 
 
 hood, though still remaining an object of admiring 
 affection and an inestimable source of stimulation and 
 suggestion, came to count for me no longer as a leader 
 and teacher to be followed except with reserve and 
 critical after-thought. 
 
 These were not terms on which Ruskin much cared 
 
 to be accepted, especially by one who had been brought 
 
 as a child to sit at his feet ; and after I had grown up 
 
 and begun to work at the criticism and history of art, 
 
 in my own plodding and uninspired way, as faithfully 
 
 as I could, our meetings were rare and correspondence 
 
 only occasional. Once, I remember, he was gravely 
 
 hurt by some opinions I had expressed in one of the 
 
 quarterly reviews in controversy with his own on the 
 
 relation of art to morals. And when at twenty-eight 
 
 I was appointed Slade Professor at Cambridge he again 
 
 wrote expressing the hope that at any rate I should 
 
 not make my tenure of the chair an opportunity for 
 
 inculcating views in opposition to his teaching from 
 
 the same chair at Oxford. Our terms of intercourse, 
 
 when intercourse occurred, continued nevertheless to 
 
 be those of old family friendship, and I never found 
 
 that his personal presence, whether at public gatherings 
 
 or in private intercourse, had lost its power to charm 
 
 and thrill. One of the instances, I remember, when 
 
 its effect was strongest upon me was at a lecture of 
 
 his at the Royal Institution in which he had occasion 
 
 to recite Scott's ballad of Rosabelle. The whole genius 
 
 of the man, as all those who remember him will agree 
 
 — his whole intensity of spiritual and imaginative being 
 
 — used to throw itself into and enkindle his recitation 
 
44 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 of poetry. His voice had a rare plangent and pene- 
 trating quality of its own, not shrill or effeminate and 
 yet not wholly virile, which singularly enhanced the 
 effect ; that evening he was at his very best, and for 
 those who heard him the " wondrous blaze " never, I 
 am sure, gleamed on Roslin's castled rock and the 
 groves of caverned Hawthornden so magically before 
 or since. 
 
 There was perhaps somewhat less of genius and more 
 of perversity in his behaviour one afternoon about the 
 same time, when we were both staying at the Scotch 
 country-house of a much-cherished and picture-loving 
 mutual friend. A tea-picnic having been arranged 
 at a special spot as the object of the party's afternoon 
 walk, the master broke up the plan by tacitly but 
 firmly insisting on walking off and casting about on a 
 quest of his own in a different direction. A daughter of 
 the house who dutifully attended him remembers 
 that the object of his search was an old stone-breaker 
 at work beside the road. He was always fond of 
 getting into talks with stone-breakers and watching 
 their work on the chance of its yielding some inter- 
 esting mineral find. To this particular old stone- 
 breaker he promised, after several talks, to send a 
 book on stones and minerals, and when the old man 
 answered that it would be no use because he could not 
 read, Ruskin took him at once into warmer favour 
 than ever. During the same visit, I remember, his talk 
 was at its best and most illuminating in praise of three 
 things in our host's collection, an early Rossetti, an 
 early Millais, and a drawing by Burne- Jones ; and the 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 45 
 
 substance of the said talk, being afterwards set down, 
 turned into the essay on The Three Colours of Prae- 
 Raphaelitism. One of the happiest later encounters 
 that I remember was at the house of the same Burne- 
 Jones, his all but equal in genius and charm. This 
 was during one of the not infrequent intervals when he 
 used to be at the height of his powers again between 
 two of the fits of mental breakdown to which he had 
 become subject after 1879. When two such men were 
 pouring out for each other the riches of their minds 
 and hearts, any third who had the luck to be of the 
 company could do nothing but listen silently and be 
 grateful. Later again, at the beginning of 1888, when 
 he was an aged and bearded, changed and saddened 
 man, I found him simply courteous and businesslike, 
 though on the eve, as it turned out, of one of his longest 
 and most grievous mental disturbances, when I had 
 the opportunity of arranging with him the purchase 
 for the British Museum of a precious volume of early 
 Italian drawings of the history of the world, by means 
 of which I was by-and-by enabled to solve (at least 
 in my own opinion) one of the obscurest problems of 
 fifteenth century art and to recreate the hitherto 
 semi-mythic personality of the father of Italian 
 engraving, Maso Finiguerra. 
 
 All the world knows how by degrees and with advanc- 
 ing years the passion in Ruskin for opening the eyes 
 and awakening the consciences of his fellow-creatures 
 not only grew more intense, but extended itself to 
 every sphere of human conduct and activity, of ex- 
 istence both social and individual ; and how he, in 
 
46 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 private intercourse the sweetest and most deferentially 
 courteous, the most playfully engaging and lovable 
 of men, became in public an Ezekiel not to be appeased 
 or silenced, an embittered denouncer of all the institu- 
 tions, all the practices and traditions, of industry and 
 commerce, of exchange, distribution and class organ- 
 ization on which the social fabric has in every modern 
 community been founded ; and not only of these, but 
 of almost all the methods of study and research by 
 which the modern mind has striven to investigate the 
 truths of nature and turn to account the material laws 
 of things. Of the truth and value of these tremendous 
 prophetic and denunciatory labours I felt myself no 
 more able to judge than any average person who 
 accepts because he must the social order under which 
 he lives, and holds that the general lot of man can 
 only be gradually amended by the collective good- will 
 and long-sustained efforts of many generations. The 
 path of any solitary world-reformer, however impres- 
 sively, however gloriously, gifted, who would suddenly 
 refashion the inherited social complex and transform 
 the customs, standards, and desires of man by the 
 efforts of his single genius must lead, it would seem, 
 inevitably to madness, and his efforts to tragic failure. 
 Tragic to the direst uttermost would Ruskin himself 
 assuredly have deemed his failure could he have lived 
 to see the events and tendencies of the last few years : 
 the mutual rage of slaughter and destruction between 
 nations, the devastated fields and defaced cathedrals of 
 his beloved France ; the cleavage, estrangement, and 
 suspicion subsisting unabated between rich and poor ; 
 
JOHN RUSKIN 47 
 
 and in the sphere of art, to name one symptom only, 
 the fury of civic vulgarization which in our would-be 
 grandest thoroughfares has sacrificed all sense and 
 style and fitness to the demon of advertisement, 
 giving to the most massive of architectural piles 
 unmitigatedly absurd and garish, unstructural ground- 
 floor frontages all of glass, the most fragile of things. 
 But sad as was in his latter years the personal destiny 
 of Ruskin, and futile the apparent temporary issue 
 of his toil, the English-speaking race has just been 
 unanimously remembering the hundredth anniversary 
 of his birth as though it had been that of an acknow- 
 ledged world-benefactor. And for the time being it 
 looks as though his labours toward social regeneration 
 were coming to be regarded by many as the true 
 benefaction, while his views on the fine arts and the 
 relations of art to life and nature have lost much of the 
 influence they had. Posterity alone, and that not an 
 early posterity, will have had experience enough to 
 assess the relative values of his multifarious endeavours. 
 For myself, I can but bear my insignificant witness to 
 the debt I owe both to his personality and his genius, 
 and to the spell which in early youth they exercised 
 upon me. Better than to be taught how to see, and 
 what to think and feel, is to be so aroused that one is 
 forced to see, think, and feel for oneself : and that 
 is what the work of Ruskin did for thousands of us who 
 would never label ourselves his disciples. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 EDWARD BURNE-JONES 
 
 The next great admiration of my life after Ruskin 
 was for Burne-Jones, and this (seeing that he was 
 only twelve years my senior) was not of the same 
 distantly adoring strain as my boyish cult of Ruskin 
 had been, but of a kind much more equal and com- 
 panionable. Enthusiasm for his work had made me 
 seek his acquaintance even before I had taken my 
 degree at Cambridge, that is some time in 1886-7, and 
 the charm of his personality completed what love for 
 his painting had begun. As soon as I came to London 
 and took up journalism — principally as art critic on 
 the Pall Mall Gazette in its early days under the fighting 
 editorship of Frederick Greenwood — I began to lay 
 about me on his behalf against the dunder-headed 
 majority of critics, for such I held them, who belittled 
 or derided his gift. He himself was from the first 
 too much absorbed in his creative tasks to concern 
 himself much about criticism whether hostile or 
 friendly ; and fortunately he had from the first had 
 friends and backers whose appreciation saved him 
 from any serious danger of the wolf at the door: 
 Rossetti foremost, then fellow-artists and craftsmen 
 like Morris, Birket Foster, Arthur Hughes ; very soon 
 
 48 
 
EDWARD BURNE-JONES 49 
 
 afterwards Ruskin ; and before long, wealthy collec- 
 tors like Mr. W. Graham and Mr. Leyland. But 
 in my own early life both the zest of public battle on 
 his behalf, and the pleasure of being often with him 
 in such spare hours as he could afford his friends 
 of an evening or on Sunday, counted for very 
 much. 
 
 In the then state of English painting, the appeal, 
 which is the special business of that art, to the sense 
 of visible beauty or significance in things, to that 
 faculty which perceives and insists on the harmonious, 
 the suggestive and striking relations and combina- 
 tions of forms and colours in the world, was made 
 almost exclusively in the representation of remote 
 or romantic subjects. There were one or two excep- 
 tional and finely gifted men, like George Mason and 
 Frederick Walker, who brought the instinct of design 
 and the paramount aim at pictorial value and effect 
 into their treatment of scenes of actual life and nature. 
 But from the average popular art depicting scenes 
 and figures of ordinary life the attempt to appeal to 
 such sense had almost entirely passed away, and people 
 had got used to looking at pictures not for any truly 
 pictorial value they might possess, but simply for the 
 sake of the story they more or less expressively told 
 or the scenery they more or less accurately reproduced. 
 The result was a kind of shallow reflection of obvious 
 aspects of life and nature, leaving out all the characters 
 which more finely attuned senses could discern in 
 daily things or a more active power of selection and 
 arrangement impose on them. The half -century from 
 
50 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 then till now has happily made a vital difference for the 
 better in the quality of every-day art. Almost any 
 exhibition of to-day will show plenty of work bringing 
 out and turning to true, unforced pictorial account 
 the latent impressiveness and suggestiveness for the 
 eye residing in every common sight that nature or 
 man's toil provides, were it only the chimneys of a 
 group of factories against the sky, or the iron framework 
 of some new building with its cranes and girders, or 
 the clashing chaos of coloured advertisements on a 
 street hoarding. So also in portraiture, instead of 
 the arbitrary imposition on a sitter of some accepted 
 and more or less abstract type of feature or expression, 
 any current exhibition will show a search for and 
 insistence on something characteristic which is really 
 there, and which by sensitiveness of seeing and render- 
 ing can be made to yield a result human and pictorial 
 in one. 
 
 In the days of which I speak, half a century or more 
 ago, almost the only kind of painting in England which 
 possessed true pictorial quality and made its appeal 
 specifically to and through the eye was, as I have said, 
 and paradox as the statement may sound, the painting 
 which called up and visualized not every-day appear- 
 ances of life and nature but themes of poetry and 
 imagination. The stimulus of such themes moved 
 a certain class of artists to the effort, not to " illus- 
 trate " them in any commonplace sense of the word, 
 but to create a corresponding world of forms and 
 colours, " visions and dreams and symbols," making 
 to the ocular sense a parallel appeal to that which the 
 
EDWARD BURNE-JONES 51 
 
 themes themselves made to the literary sense and 
 imagination. To this kind of painting it was the 
 masterful spirit of Rossetti which gave the dominant 
 impulse, although of the two arts which he himself 
 practised he was more really accomplished in verse 
 than with the brush. It was Rossetti who had ordered 
 Burne- Jones (his advice to his friends was always virtu- 
 ally an order) to attack at twenty-two the practice of 
 imaginative and poetic painting without any of the 
 usual preliminary training of hand and eye. From 
 this first impulsion, or compulsion, and from study of 
 the earlier painters of Italy together, Burne-Jones 
 drew the impetus which, working in his own intense 
 and intensely personal artistic temperament, carried 
 him on, after a few trying years of derision and neglect, 
 through a full career of passionately strenuous labour 
 to ultimate recognized success. I have neither the 
 space nor the purpose here to discuss the quality of 
 his life's rich output of imaginative and decorative 
 work : hardly even to glance at the kind of attack 
 nowadays sometimes directed against it from a new 
 point of view, by those who declare that painting 
 must appeal to the eye and the visual emotions only 
 and stop there — that any sign of mind or meaning 
 behind the visual effect is a positive blot on a picture 
 and makes of it " literature in two dimensions " and 
 the like. Stuff and nonsense ! Of course— and it 
 should need no saying — the primary and essential 
 appeal of every picture must needs be to the eye, by its 
 harmonies and rhythms of line and colour, its balancings 
 and massings and proportions and contrasts of light 
 
52 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and shade, and by their direct effect upon the visual 
 emotions. If such appeal and such effect are not 
 forthcoming, or if they fail, the picture is naught ; 
 but if they succeed and the picture is a picture indeed, 
 then the more of mind that can be felt behind it, the 
 richer the associations and suggestions it conveys, the 
 better. 
 
 Full as are the gifts of mind to be discerned behind 
 Burne-Jones' work, rich as are the imaginative associa- 
 tions it calls up, it represents only a part of the wealth 
 and colour of his being. For one thing, notwithstand- 
 ing all its beauty, its felicity and inexhaustible original 
 invention in colour a nd linear design, as far as concerns 
 the human types it depicts it is in the main of a melan- 
 choly cast. Hostile critics used to be continually 
 harping on the fact that to nearly all his figures, 
 whether designed singly or in groups, in repose or in 
 action, he was prone to give looks of wistful, unsatis- 
 fied longing, sad eyes and mouths, a pining droop 
 or yearning out-thrust of the head from the shoulders. 
 Let it be granted : such was in truth the prevailing 
 instinctive and involuntary cast of his imagination. 
 And why not ? Must not every artist whose work 
 comes from any depth of soul be governed by his own 
 personal cast of imagination — just as, to take two 
 instances far removed in time as in kind, Botticelli 
 and J. F. Millet were governed respectively by theirs ? 
 And is the world we live in, and is the heart of man, 
 so made that in the depths of any great man's soul 
 there is not likely to reside an instinct of yearning and 
 craving, not likely to be harboured a passion of unsatis- 
 
EDWARD BTJRNE-JONES 63 
 
 fied spiritual quest and hunger ? Such a strain of 
 innermost, still hankering soul-hunger, such a vital 
 habit of the being, truly lay deep in Burne-Jones's 
 nature and could not help expressing itself in his work. 
 But in his human and social relations other strains 
 in him prevailed, partly, perhaps, because he chose 
 that prevail they should. " Never at any time in 
 his life," writes with perfect truth his widow, " did 
 his ordinary manner betray to others the sadness to 
 which, in common with all sensitive natures, he was 
 subject. This was, I believe, owing to a principle 
 which I find formulated in one of his letters : ' I hold 
 it a point of honour with every gentleman to conceal 
 himself, and make a fair show before people, to ease 
 life for every one,' — and partly to the cheerful effect 
 which companionship always had upon him." At all 
 events in company he charmed no less by a rich 
 laughter-loving gaiety than by his surprising range 
 of knowledge and attainment and the ease and beauty 
 and simplicity of language with which he brought them 
 to bear in conversation. 
 
 Born amidst relatively straitened surroundings at 
 Birmingham, Burne-Jones had from boyhood found 
 means to be a devourer of books, and at Oxford and 
 afterwards had received from the brotherly companion- 
 ship of William Morris a continually renewed stimulus 
 and sympathy in the studies they both loved. His 
 mind was in one sense the fullest — and that was in its 
 range over and grasp of the imaginative literatures of 
 the world — that I have known. Vast as was his life's 
 output in his own art, and tied as he was to the easel 
 
54 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 every day and almost all day, that he should have found 
 time for so much .reading seemed a miracle. Ancient 
 classic literature, the whole range of mediaeval legend 
 sacred and profane, Celtic legend and poetry, Scandin- 
 avian legend and poetry, the poetry and romance of 
 Persia and the East, the history and fabled or recorded 
 aspect of all the storied cities of the world, he seemed 
 to possess them all, not as dry learning, but as living 
 matter of brooding thought and delighted imagination. 
 Whatever new thing one might have chanced to learn 
 within this range of such subjects, one always found 
 that he had known it long ago and better. According 
 to the occasion he could expatiate on any such matter 
 in an abounding vein of eloquence, always classically 
 pure and simple, or sum up the gist of what he had to 
 say in two or three pithy words. Among his letters 
 to me I find one hitherto unpublished which will give 
 the reader a more vivid impression of his mind and 
 manner in relation to such studies than any words of 
 mine could give. I had little knowledge of Celtic 
 legendary lore or of its sources, and had been reading 
 as something new to me the great national Irish legend 
 of Deirdre and Cuchulain (" The Sons of Usnach ") 
 as turned into modern poetry in Aubrey de Vere's 
 volume of 1882. I had some personal acquaintance 
 with that very lovable and accomplished, then ageing 
 Irish gentleman and poet, who in his youth had enjoyed 
 the friendship of Wordsworth and was the life-long 
 intimate of John Henry Newman, Henry Taylor, and 
 the Cambridge group which included Tennyson and 
 Monckton Milnes. There was truly more of culture 
 
EDWARD BURNE-JONES 55 
 
 and charm than of fire and inspiration in his verse.* 
 Nevertheless I had greatly enjoyed the reading, and 
 wrote as much to Burne-Jones from a house in the 
 Isle of Skye, overlooking the Sound of Sleat, where I 
 was staying with his friends and mine the William Gra- 
 hams. This is his answer, written from the summer 
 quarters at Rottingdean which he had lately secured 
 for himself and his family : the date is some time in 
 1882 or 1883. 
 
 ROTTINGDEAIT. 
 
 My dear S. C. — 
 
 If I write red hot from your letter it will be best— else I know 
 what will happen — I was so glad to hear from you and about 
 
 * Here are three stanzas by way of specimen for those who do 
 not know his work. 
 
 But Deirdre at the grave-head stood alone, 
 The surging crowd held back by holy dread ; 
 
 Her face was white as monumental stone ; 
 
 Her hands, her garb, from throat to foot were red 
 
 With blood — their blood. Standing on life's dark verge 
 
 She scorned to die till she had sung their dirge. 
 
 * Dead are the eagles three of Culan's peaks ; 
 
 The lions three of Uladh's forest glades ; 
 The wonders three of Alba's lakes and creeks ; 
 
 The loved ones three of Etive's fair young maids : 
 The crownless sons of Erin's Throne are sped : 
 The glories of the Red Branch Order dead. 
 
 * Is there who dreams that, now my Naisi's breath 
 
 Is stilled, his wife will tarry from his side ? 
 Thou man that mak'st far down yon cave of death, 
 
 Be sure thou dig it deep, and dig it wide ! 
 There lie the Brothers Three ! 'Tis just, 'tis meet 
 Their Sister take her place before their feet.' 
 
56 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 friends too — who are out somewhere on the map. I once looked 
 on the map for them, but fled in despair — there seemed to be float- 
 ing islands and one very very far off was Skye — I know they are 
 beautiful, I know all about them — I have travelled everywhere — 
 seen all places — but my home is Florence where Giotto lived — 
 nothing can lure me or charm me away. 
 
 Aubrey de Vere sent me his book (woe is me I haven't acknow- 
 ledged it) he does love the stories but I can't read them except 
 in their first barbaric shape — they can't be done by any one — 
 but he does really love and know all about them and is a bard 
 with a harp, but not the harp that once . . . 
 
 I do nothing — I can't — the clockwork in my head went wrong 
 and buzzed and I can't wind it up again yet — I shall stay here 
 till the end of the month at least. I am brown and spotted and 
 red and fat and bald and drowsy— drowsy always — but not sleeping 
 well for all that. 
 
 R. Dean is the noisiest city in the world — from 2 in the morning 
 when the earliest cock begins till 10 at night when the last yelling 
 baby is put to bed it is one pandemonium of noise — but out on 
 the downs it is peace like at the beginning of time. 
 
 Your aff. 
 
 Ned. 
 
 Modern imaginative literature of the best kind 
 Burne-Jones possessed in a scarcely less degree than 
 ancient, at least so much of it as is to be read in English ; 
 his two chief favourites being (as they are the favourites 
 of every wise reader) Walter Scott and Dickens. As 
 the books of Louis Stevenson came out successively 
 he gave them a place in his affection next almost 
 to these. 
 
 I find the following letter written soon after the first 
 publication of the Child's Garden of Verses in 1885 and 
 going into the question of a possible illustrated edition : 
 
EDWARD BURNE-JONES 67 
 
 also recording his first and I think only personal 
 meeting with R. L. S. : — 
 
 The Grange, 
 
 West Kensington, W. 
 My dear S. C, — 
 
 I can't think who should be The one. Crane only occurs to 
 me. All his fancies would be pretty and full of a hundred inven- 
 tions. I wish I had time to have a try at it — but it is no use to 
 think of that, for my days are full to the brim — still I keep thinking 
 over the matter and still Crane comes uppermost in my mind, his 
 Grimm was lovely, and he is now so experienced in making them 
 colour his designs properly that it seems a pity not to apply there, 
 where at least there is certainty of excellence, and a chance of 
 something better — it is a heavenly book — we haven't a Richter, 
 never have had one and it's a pity. 
 
 Would it be useless to ask Leighton ? He draws babies with 
 real rapture and it would cost him little trouble — but no one is 
 like Crane for designing borders and making ornaments, and he 
 would festoon the book divinely if he were in a good mood. 
 
 Your aff. Ned. 
 
 It was a lovely evening with L. S. and I loved him. I wish 
 he was fat and well and like a bull and lived here. 
 
 " Ha ve y ou read Catriona ? " he exclaims, in a letter 
 written soon after the appearance of the book, some 
 eight years later, — 
 
 You didn't tell me, and if you had you must have talked of 
 it, for it is a wonder, and every page glittere, and I can't make 
 out why the Speaker doesn't read it to the House of an evening 
 — much better for them to listen to it than to each other's nonsense. 
 I am right glad he has made a woman at last, and why did he 
 delay ? this one is so beautifully made. Oh, he's a miracle of a 
 lad, that boy out there in the Cannibal Islands ; I wish he would 
 come back and write only about the Borderland. 
 
58 MEMORIES. AND NOTES 
 
 In Dickens what Burne-Jones loved especially were 
 the parts most riotously comic. I can see and hear 
 him now shouting with laughter as he echoed the 
 choicer utterances of Sam Weller or Micawber or Mrs. 
 Gamp, his head flung back and beard in the air (in 
 early days it was the fine forked and flowing red-brown 
 beard depicted in Watts's well-known portrait, but later, 
 one grizzled or grizzling and shorter trimmed). And he 
 was very capable of original Dickens-like observations 
 and inventions of his own. No one had a quicker or 
 more healthily amused sense, without sting or ill-nature, 
 of the grotesque and the absurd in ordinary life. No 
 one loved better to make or had a better gift for making, 
 by speech or pencil, happy fun and laughter with his 
 children and grand-children. In these last he took 
 in his later years an especial delight, and loved not 
 only to draw but to show off to his friends the sturdiness 
 and dimpled fatness of their infant limbs. Let those 
 who desire to form a just idea of him begin by realizing, 
 if they can, not only his constant and most winning 
 sweetness and affectionateness of accost, and a certain 
 indefinable note of innate distinction — something more 
 finely bred than can be imparted by mere breeding 
 — in all that he did and said and was, but also the 
 love of and capacity for jolly mirth and caricature 
 which subsisted along with the more wistful, brooding 
 and craving elements in his nature. He could be 
 delighted on occasion with any extravagance of melo- 
 drama, and it was a sight to see him hunch his shoul- 
 ders up to his ears and glower as he repeated in hollow 
 tones from a once popular stage-play the appalling 
 
EDWARD BURNE-JONES 59 
 
 query, " Did you ever see the Danites ? " All these 
 attractive and attaching personal qualities naturally 
 drew in his later years a widening circle about him, 
 and he became a celebrity socially sought after and 
 well known. But he never allowed social calls to 
 bring about a day's relaxation of his industry or the 
 smallest abandonment of his ideals. To none of his 
 old friends, of course, did the slightest change ensue 
 from the honours which were almost thrust upon him 
 and which both for his art's and for his children's sake 
 he thought it right to accept. When his oldest and 
 closest friend of all, William Morris, with whom he 
 had worked and thought and felt all their lives in the 
 closest brotherly association, threw himself headlong 
 into the cause of socialism, Burne- Jones would not follow 
 him, holding that an artist's first and paramount duty 
 was to his art, and knowing that in his own case at 
 least the artist's life and the politician's or agitator's 
 were physically as well as morally incompatible. But 
 this partial sundering of their ways did not bring 
 about the least jar or breach of friendship between 
 the two. For myself, I retain no memories of him 
 that are not entirely endearing. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 
 
 Looking back lately through volumes of the West- 
 minster Review some half a century old, I found under 
 the date January 1871 an essay near thirty pages 
 long enthusiastically quoting and praising the poetical 
 writings, both translated and original, of Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti. Recognizing the essay for my own, 
 I was freshly reminded of the fascinated admiration 
 which possessed me in those days, youngster as I was, 
 for the poet-painter and his work. By the time I 
 left Cambridge I already took intense pleasure in 
 some of his early paintings which I knew in the houses 
 of friends ; and I held (as I still hold) his renderings 
 from the early Italian poets, first published in the 
 volume of 1861, to be unmatched among feats of verse 
 translation for graceful, unforced fidelity to the spirit 
 and even in most cases to the letter of the originals. 
 Drawn moreover by the glamour which invested 
 Rossetti's personality as the main inspiring focus 
 and source of impulse whence had sprung all I most 
 cared for — that is whatever is most imaginative and 
 impassioned — in the English art of the time, I asked 
 Burne- Jones to take me to him ; was kindly received ; 
 and saw much of him throughout the years 1868-1872, 
 
 60 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 61 
 
 which were somewhat critical and fateful years of 
 his life. 
 
 I had come into his circle of course too late, and 
 with the Cambridge stamp and direction too definitely- 
 impressed upon me, to undergo the full dominating 
 force of his influence such as it had been exercised 
 some dozen years earlier, when he suddenly determined 
 the careers of men like Burne- Jones and William Morris, 
 or earlier yet when along with Holman Hunt and 
 Millais he was a leading spirit in the original Prae- 
 Raphaelite movement. The best days of his life 
 were indeed already over. Since the tragic death of 
 his wife his passionately craving and brooding nature 
 had been gradually losing command over itself. He 
 had let himself live with growing recklessness, and 
 having begun to suffer from habitual insomnia, was 
 falling into the chloral habit by way of remedy. 
 Everything was preparing in him for a constitutional 
 breakdown : but even to intimates such preparation 
 was as yet scarcely apparent, and to a newcomer 
 such as I was alike the man himself and his surround- 
 ings and way of life were irresistibly, if somewhat 
 weirdly, impressive. 
 
 About the surroundings and the way of life so much 
 has been written that I shall pass them over quickly. 
 The handsome old red-brick house in a row looking 
 on the Chelsea reach of the Thames ; the combined 
 gloom and richness of its decorations, the sombre 
 hangings, the doors and panellings painted in sombre 
 dark-green sparsely picked out with red and lighted 
 here and there by a round convex mirror ; the shelves 
 
62 MEMORIES . AND NOTES 
 
 and cupboards laden with brassware and old blue 
 Nankin china (in the passion for collecting which 
 Rossetti was, if I remember rightly, an absolute pioneer); 
 the long green and shady garden at the back, with its 
 uncanny menagerie of wombat, raccoon, armadillo, 
 kangaroo, or whatever might be the special pet or pets 
 of the moment ; the wilful, unconventional, unhealthy 
 habits and hours ; the rare and reluctant admission 
 of strangers ; all these things have already been made 
 familiar by repeated descriptions to such readers as 
 are curious about them. So have the aspect and 
 bearing of the man himself ; his sturdy, almost burly 
 figure clad in a dark cloth suit with the square jacket 
 cut extra long and deep-pocketed ; his rich brown 
 hair and lighter brown, shortish, square-trimmed 
 beard, the olive complexion betraying Italian blood ; 
 the handsome features between spare and fleshy, with 
 full, sensual underlip and thoughtful, commanding 
 forehead in which some of his friends found a likeness 
 to Shakespeare ; the deep bar above the nose and 
 fine blue-grey colour of the eyes behind their spectacles ; 
 and finally, the round, John-Bullish, bluntly cordial 
 manner of speech, with a preference for brief and 
 bluff slang words and phrases which seemed scarce 
 in keeping with the fame and character of the man 
 as the most quintessentially, romantically poetic of 
 painters and writers. 
 
 During the years of our intercourse it was Rossetti's 
 poetry more than his painting that interested and 
 impressed me. His earlier water-colours, those of 
 the Dante cycle especially, comparatively unambitious 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 63 
 
 in scale and technic as they were, seemed to me (and 
 still seem) to give by their fine new inventive colour- 
 harmonies, their passionate intensities of expression 
 and their rare originality and often, though not always, 
 their beauty of group-composition and pattern, a more 
 satisfying idea of his genius for painting than his 
 ambitious oil pictures on the scale of life. It was at 
 these latter that he had been principally working, 
 from Mrs. William Morris, Miss Marie Spartali, Miss 
 Wilding, and one or two other favourite sitters, for 
 some time before I knew him. Single figures among 
 them, looking straight out of the frame — a Pandora, 
 a Sibylla Palmifera, a Venus Verticordia — possessed 
 indeed a fine inventive gorgeousness of colour and an 
 impressive mystical voluptuousness, or voluptuous 
 mysticism, of their own. But for figures on the life 
 scale in less simple attitudes, or for combinations of 
 them, his powers of design and execution seemed never 
 fully adequate, and a certain unpleasant streakiness in 
 the handling of the oil medium, with certain exaggera- 
 tions and mannerisms in the drawing of lips, throats, 
 and other features made that long and sumptuous 
 series of his later embodiments of the eternal feminine 
 to my mind less and less admirable as time went on. 
 But Rossetti's poetry, both by its own power and 
 by the manner in which I learned to know it, for the 
 time being enthralled me completely. The story is 
 well-known how, in a passion of grief and remorseful- 
 ness at the time of his wife's death, he had buried 
 the original bundle of his manuscript poems with her, 
 laying it in her coffin among the rich strands of her 
 
64 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 red-gold hair. Of a few of these buried poems he had 
 drafts or copies by him, and would sometimes, when I 
 first knew him, read out from them to a small circle 
 of his intimates. With one consent these used to urge 
 him to have the whole packet of the poems exhumed 
 for publication, and I on my part joined eagerly 
 in the plea. At last he yielded, and the necessary 
 legal permission having been obtained the exhumation 
 was carried out under the eye of Rossetti' s friend and 
 factotum of the hour, Charles Augustus Howell. (A 
 digression concerning this brilliantly plausible, capable, 
 and entertaining, totally unscrupulous and untrust- 
 worthy Anglo-Portuguese intriguer, the satellite in 
 these years first of Ruskin and afterwards of Rossetti, 
 would in this place be tempting but must be forborne ; 
 the more so as his history, far liker fiction than real 
 life as it was, has been fully set out by another hand.)* 
 
 The manuscript poems having been rescued, and 
 the question of their publication having next to be 
 considered, Rossetti used on many evenings to read 
 out from them to a few invited guests after dinner. 
 He was good enough to care, or seem to care, somewhat 
 specially for my opinion, and consulted me, both ver- 
 bally and in many letters which I have lately re-read, 
 about the revision of the poems and the order in which 
 they should stand in the proposed volume, in the end 
 adopting most of my suggestions. 
 
 But the readings themselves were among the marking 
 events, and remain among the golden memories, of 
 my life. Most of the poets I have known have had 
 * See Murray Marks and his Friends, by 0. 0. Williamson (John Lane) . 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 65 
 
 their own special way of reading, and it was generally 
 interesting or impressive to hear. Rossetti's way was 
 not dramatic in any ordinary sense of the word. It 
 was rather a chant, a monotone ; but somehow he 
 was able with little variation of pitch or inflection 
 to express a surprising range and richness of emotion. 
 His voice was magical in its mellow beauty of timbre 
 and quality and in its power to convey the sense of a 
 whole world of brooding passion and mystery, both 
 human and elemental, behind the words. A kind of 
 sustained musical drone or hum with which he used 
 to dwell on and stress and prolong the rhyme-words 
 and sound-echoes had a profound effect in stirring the 
 senses and souls of his hearers. There are certain 
 poems or passages of poems, the fierce visionary and 
 imprecatory stanzas of Sister Helen — the " rose 
 shut in a book " couplets from Jenny — above all, 
 perhaps the sad, slow-trailing cadences of the lyric, 
 A Little While — 
 
 A little while a little love 
 
 The hour yet bears for thee and me, 
 Who have not drawn the veil to see 
 
 If still our heaven be lit above. 
 
 Thou merely, at the day's last sigh, 
 Hast felt thy soul prolong the tone ; 
 
 And I have heard the night-wind cry, 
 And deemed its speech mine own, — 
 
 there are poems and passages, I say, like these which 
 still haunt my ear, and will haunt it to the end, exactly 
 as they were sounded from the poet's lips on those 
 evenings half a century ago. Heard and judged for 
 
66 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 the first time under these conditions, the poetry of 
 Rossetti naturally impressed me profoundly, and 
 moved me to a higher pitch of critical admiration 
 than I should have felt — though the pitch would still 
 have been high — had I known them for the first time 
 in print. 
 
 Moreover it was an hour when lovers of poetry were 
 rather specially hungry and thirsty for something that 
 should satisfy their appetite for poetic passion and 
 romance. Tennyson, at the height of his fame and 
 power, had just published the first volume of his 
 Idylls of the King. After In Memoriam and Maud 
 these Arthurian idylls had been to many of us a grievous 
 disappointment. In spite of their sustained and subtle 
 filagree finish of execution and many exquisite passages, 
 we felt that they were but tame drawing-room versions 
 of the great Arthur legends, versions into which the 
 taint of the Victorian age and of Victorian ethics and 
 ideals and constraints and politenesses had passed 
 with paralysing effect. And we found ourselves all 
 the more thrilled and satisfied by the full-blooded 
 splendour and passionate colouring and imagery of 
 Rossetti' s work. On the appearance of the volume 
 Swinburne instantly wrote glorifying it in his most 
 excited vein of critical panegyric. And for what my 
 own help might be worth, I rushed to review and 
 praise it in as many quarters as were open to me. 
 Will it at all interest the reader of to-day to see, by 
 some specimens from my Westminster Review article 
 aforesaid, the kind of welcome which Rossetti's poems 
 got from a raw but sincere youngster familiar with 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 67 
 
 his translations from the Italian and in love with the 
 kind of imagery which came natural to him as painter 
 and poet in one ? After trying to make clear the way 
 in which his special strain of imagination resembled 
 that of the early Italian poets in that it instinctively 
 invests with human and personified shape every passion 
 and experience of the soul, and how in this kind of 
 poetry the mystical and the pictorial tendencies work 
 together : — 
 
 The subtle passages of overburdened consciousness (I go 
 on to say), the inner and fugitive experiences of the spirit, to be 
 expressed, as here, in terms of material imagery, demand that the 
 figures of that imagery should undergo conditions, movements, 
 transformations of too fleeting and too vague a kind to bear com- 
 plete mental realization : this is consonant with the mystical 
 tendency, while on the other hand it is consonant with the pictorial 
 tendency to endow its concrete figures with a reality so vivid, and 
 attributes so visible, that the mind cannot avoid their complete 
 realization ; and hence, endeavouring to follow them through all 
 their vicissitudes, is apt to feel thrown out when these elude the 
 conditions of material possibility. This, we think, may be a 
 difficulty to arrest the reader at a sonnet like that headed " He 
 and I "; or to make his full enjoyment of the wonderful four 
 headed " Willowwood " a matter of time and familiarity ; or to 
 leave something still wanting from the perfection of the following, 
 called " Stillborn Love," so admirable in its structure and diction? 
 so striking for its heat and volume of passion, so pregnant and 
 pathetic with its suggestion of immortal amends for the frustration 
 of to-day : — 
 
 The hour which might have been but could not be, 
 Which man's and woman's heart conceived and bore, 
 Yet whereof life was barren, on what shore 
 
 Bides it the breaking of Time's weary sea ? 
 
68 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Bondchild of all consummate joys set free, 
 
 It somewhere sighs and serves, and mute before 
 The house of Love, hears thro' the echoing door 
 His hours elect in choral consonancy. 
 
 But lo ! what wedded souls now hand in hand 
 Together tread at last the immortal strand 
 
 With eyes where burning memory lights love home ? 
 Lo ! how the little outcast hour has turned 
 And leapt to them and in their faces yearned : — 
 
 " I am your child : O parents, ye have come ! " 
 
 Turn to the pair of sonnets called, " Newborn Death," in which 
 the embodied personages of Life, Love, Art, Death, Song, float 
 before us in lineaments of such new and moving loveliness as belong 
 to the very rarest region of the imagination ; or to any of the 
 love-sonnets, such as those headed " Lovesight," " Winged Hours," 
 " Life-in-Love," "Parted Love," "Broken Music," "The One 
 Hope," which in the fulness and richness of their imagery seem 
 to give the most fitting and harmonious as well as the most adorned 
 expression to phases of feeling themselves too full and rich for 
 simple utterance ; phases which lie between joy and grief, and 
 are more complex and involved than either ; in which feeling does 
 not absorb or exclude thought, but informs and inflames it for 
 prospect and retrospect as well as for the passion or the present- 
 ations of the moment ; so that the buoyancy of delight is clogged 
 with the recollection of its delay, the impetuosity of rapture checked 
 with the wistfulness of apprehension or chilled with the shadow 
 of foreboding ; the bitterness of loss involved with the reminiscence 
 of triumph or the augury of reparation ; pain and pleasure for 
 ever interwoven, and each shot through with the consciousness, 
 the presentiment, the possibility of the other. 
 
 . . . The fragmentary House of Life, besides its fifty sonnets, 
 contains also some highly -finished pieces of different lyric form; 
 most of these too dealing with the fatalities or forebodings of 
 thwarted passion. The three melancholy and searching stanzas 
 of the song called " A Little While," are quite admirable for their 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 69 
 
 careful concentration, as well as for the reluctant andante of their 
 metrical movement ; while, by way of contrast, the succeeding 
 " Song of the Bower " storms with sonorous anapaests in full 
 charge, and tells out the dire constraint of separation in tones only 
 a little weakened (as it seems to us) by something of commonplace 
 in the imagery and language of verses two and three. But there 
 is no poem of this division better done, or more answering to inward 
 experiences, than one having nothing to do with love, but casting 
 into new articulateness a phase of that vague commerce with eternal 
 things of which from time to time a man is conscious, when one or 
 another of the large dealings of nature laying hold upon him seems 
 to loosen the sensuous bands of the spirit, and lift it abroad into the 
 knowledge of some divine environment, some uncomprehended 
 unity of natural with human and spiritual with bodily things. The 
 suggestion comes in this case through the avenue of hearing : — 
 
 Listen alone beside the sea, 
 
 Listen alone among the woods ; 
 
 Those voices of twin solitudes 
 Shall have one sound alike to thee ; 
 
 Hark, where the murmurs of thronged men 
 
 Surge and sink back and surge again — 
 Still the one voice of wave and tree. 
 
 Gather a shell from the strown beach 
 
 And listen at its lips : they sigh 
 
 The same desire and mystery, 
 The echo of the whole sea's speech. 
 
 And all mankind is thus at heart 
 
 Not anything but what thou art : 
 And earth, sea, man, are all in each. 
 
 . . . Turning to those contents of the volume which do not 
 belong to the House of Life, a poem of things near at hand and 
 of yesterday — and of to-day and (alas !) to-morrow also — is that 
 called " Jenny." A monologue suggested by the sight and presence 
 of a sleeping harlot was a thing from which the English muse might 
 have been held bound to shrink. But the manner of its treatment 
 
70 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 here is such as to have given offence, so far as we know, to no 
 reader or critic — a manner perfectly direct, but perfectly free from 
 evil enjoyment. What the poem does is to set forth, with poetical 
 intensity and ornament, such a chain of thoughts as might present 
 itself to any man of scholarship and imagination, and of a certain 
 vivacity of the conscience, under the circumstances. Such thoughts 
 would naturally be full, as these are full, with the burden of all 
 that evil which presses itself upon some minds as a thing that 
 cannot be cured, upon others, as one that must not be endured — 
 of the curses and contrasts of civilization, and the mysterious 
 confines of good and evil. The fairest thing to do is to quote at 
 length that portion of the poem which contains its two leading 
 and most elaborate images, the imaginative beauty and force of 
 which will come home to every reader, as well as the technical art 
 which has thrown into the eight-syllable metre so much of varied 
 and involved sweetness, and led up to the concluding passage in 
 such culminant and portentous thunder : — 
 
 ... If but a woman's heart might see 
 
 Such erring heart unerringly 
 
 For once ! But that can never be. 
 
 Like a rose shut in a book, 
 In which pure women may not look ; 
 For its base pages claim control 
 To crush the flower within the soul ; 
 Where through each dead rose-leaf that clings, 
 Pale as transparent Psyche- wings, 
 To the vile text, are traced such things 
 As might make lady's cheek indeed 
 More than a living rose to read ; 
 So nought save foolish foulness may 
 Watch with hard eyes the sure decay ; 
 And so the life-blood of this rose, 
 Puddled with shameful knowledge, flows 
 Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose : 
 Yet still it keeps such faded show 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 71 
 
 Of when 'twas gathered long ago, 
 That the crushed petals' lovely grain, 
 The sweetness of the sanguine stain, 
 Seen of a woman's eyes, must make 
 Her pitiful heart, so prone to ache, 
 Love roses better for its sake : — 
 Only that this can never be : — ■ 
 Even so unto her sex is she. 
 . . . Like a toad within a stone 
 Seated while Time crumbles on ; 
 Which sits there since the earth was curs'd 
 For man's transgression at the first ; 
 Which, living through all centuries, 
 Not once has seen the sun arise ; 
 Whose life, to its cold circle charmed, 
 The earth's whole summers have not warmed; 
 Which always — whitherso the stone 
 Be flung— sits there, deaf, blind alone ; — 
 Aye, and shall not be driven out 
 Till that which shuts him around about 
 Break at the very master's stroke, 
 And the dust thereof vanish as smoke, 
 And the seed of man vanish as dust : — 
 Even so within this world is Lust. 
 . . . What any poet is going to be for another generation, it is 
 not given to his contemporaries to tell. But what Mr. Rossetti 
 in his own generation is may be put on record ; and that is, the 
 poet of personal passion — for all such as know or can sympathize 
 with personal passion in a shape in which, being most paramount 
 and engrossing, it is yet not most direct or most alone, but in which 
 it takes up and carries along with it all collateral elements of the 
 being — and the more modern, the more highly organized and 
 endowed the being, the more complex and manifold these elements 
 ^vill be — re-awakening and illuminating all forms, all pressures 
 past, adding intensity to existence, charging and complicating 
 the consciousness with images from far and near. 
 
72 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Rossetti had little or none of Burne-Jones's fine self- 
 sufficient indifference to criticism. It is not true, as 
 has been said, that he took undignified pains to ensure 
 that reviews should be favourable. Swinburne of 
 course for one, and I for another, were absolutely 
 unsolicited volunteers in the cause. But when there 
 appeared the late Robert Buchanan's preposterous 
 attack upon him, at first pseudonymous and then 
 unveiled, in the pamphlet called The Fleshly School of 
 Poetry, he was both agitated and angered beyond 
 measure. In this matter again I did my best, together 
 with a group of other ardent friends and admirers, 
 and this time by the master's desire and request, to 
 stand by him and make things as hot for his assailant 
 as we could. At the same time I succeeded in dissuad- 
 ing him — I had forgotten the fact, but am reminded 
 of it by his brother's biography — from printing a satiric 
 effort of his own against the enemy which struck us 
 as neither dignified nor effective. 
 
 I have scarcely left space to speak of the humorous, 
 burlesque-loving elements which subsisted in Rossetti' s 
 nature alongside of the darkly passionate and mystical 
 elements. They were somewhat singular in their kind 
 and were often exercised frankly and light-heartedly 
 at the expense of those about him. In writing they 
 showed themselves chiefly in the composition of 
 " Limericks " on the characters of his friends. He was, 
 at any rate while his days of tolerable health lasted, 
 in practice a model of good friendship, somewhat 
 masterful and domineering, it is true, among those of 
 his inner circle, but infinitely generous withal both in 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 73 
 
 word and act, loving to praise whatever he saw worthy 
 of praise in any one's work, prompt and eager to help 
 any one in difficulties with money or whatever form of 
 service might be most needed — in a word, essentially 
 bon prince. But at the same time he had the shrewdest 
 eye for his friends' faults or failings, and the neatest 
 possible knack in exposing such faults or failings in 
 rhymes which he was apt to troll out with gusto in 
 their hearing and never expected them to resent. For 
 instance, he had gladly and often taken in and housed a 
 certain prae-Raphaelite landscape-painter called Inch- 
 bold. The recipient of this hospitality seeming by and 
 by somewhat inclined to abuse it, Rossetti wrote, — 
 
 There's a troublesome fellow called Inchbold, 
 With whom you must be at a pinch bold, 
 
 Or you may as well score 
 
 The brass plate on your door 
 With the name of J. W. Inchbold. 
 
 Sometimes the rhymes would take off, quite harm- 
 lessly and pardonably, some physical trait of their 
 subject, as this concerning a senior member of the 
 circle, the shrewd, thoughtful, and interesting but 
 technically less than half-accomplished Scottish artist 
 and verse-writer, William Bell Scott. Scott, a man 
 by this time bald and ageing, was commonly known 
 among his friends as " Scotus " : — 
 
 There's a crabbed old fellow called Scott, 
 Who seems to have hair but has not; 
 
 Did he seem to have sense 
 
 A still vainer pretence 
 Would be painfully obvious in Scott. 
 
74 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 That is all very well ; but could the same friend be 
 expected to take it kindly when the essential weak- 
 nesses of his talent were faithfully and scathingly hit 
 off as follows ? — 
 
 There's a queer kind of painter called Scotus, 
 A pictor most justly ignotus ; 
 
 Shall I call him a poet ? 
 
 No, not if I know it, 
 A draggle-tailed bungler like Scotus. 
 
 Scott may in truth very likely never have heard 
 the second of these staves : but had he heard and 
 resented it he could scarcely have paid off the score 
 more ill-naturedly, and at the same time more inaccur- 
 ately, than by his treatment of Rossetti in his post- 
 humously published Autobiographical Notes : a book, 
 I may allow myself to remark by the way, which I 
 have found almost unfailingly inexact in every one of 
 its statements that I have had means or occasion to 
 check. In the floating memories and traditions con- 
 cerning Rossetti, many of these compositions were 
 long current and some are current still. There is one 
 which I never heard much repeated, and which begins — 
 
 There's an eminent critic called Colvin, 
 Whose writings the mind may revolve in, — 
 
 but wild horses would not drag from me the sequel; 
 neither does the stave appear in the collection of some 
 two dozen such included by the late William Michael 
 Rossetti in his encyclopaedic (and surely too pro- 
 miscuous and ponderous ?) volume of his brother's 
 collected works. On the other hand I find in 
 
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 75 
 
 that collection a piece of execution which is new to me, 
 performed on the above-mentioned Howell after his 
 dismissal : — 
 
 There's a Portuguese person named Howell 
 Who lays on his lies with a trowel ; 
 
 Should he give over lying 
 
 'Twill be when he's dying, 
 For living is lying with Howell. 
 
 I have said that the years 1868-1872 were critical 
 and fateful years in Rossetti's life. He had already 
 begun to take chloral as a resource against sleeplessness, 
 and the habit grew upon him with disastrous effects. 
 His extreme perturbation under the " Fleshly School " 
 attack showed a mind already morbidly tainted. A 
 few months later he underwent a complete breakdown, 
 almost assuming the form called in French manie des 
 persecutions. He harboured torturing suspicions of 
 malice and treachery even against his best-tried friends ; 
 and though making for a while a fairly complete re- 
 covery, and continuing to paint and write with variable 
 power, but as busily as ever, for near ten years more, 
 was never again quite the man that we had known. 
 I saw him relatively little during those last years, 
 and had little acquaintance with the new friends and 
 satellites — some of them truly attached and helpful — 
 who gathered about him and from among whom have 
 come the fullest accounts written of him after his 
 death. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 No greater contrast in character and mode of life 
 could well exist than between Rossetti and Browning : 
 the one living apart in a seclusion that had about it 
 truly something — though not so much as has been 
 represented — of the morbid and mystical ; the other, 
 having once determined to face daylight and the 
 world again after the great tragedy of his wife's death, 
 carrying out his determination resolutely and healthily 
 to the full. Probably there is no instance on record 
 of a great poet leading at once so strenuous a poetical 
 and so busy a social life as Browning during his last 
 twenty or twenty-five years. The contemporary writer 
 par excellence of social verse, Frederick Locker, later 
 Locker-Lampson, had at one time seen a good deal 
 of the world, but for the most part of a very distin- 
 guished and selected world, and in later life was 
 relatively a recluse, continuing to carve and polish his 
 exquisite poetical cameos at a distance from the 
 crowd. But Browning, hardly ever pausing to let 
 the energies of his intellect and imagination rest 
 from exploration in all manner of fields of human inter- 
 est remote or near, was at the same time spending 
 himself lavishly in social relations of the most active 
 
 76 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 77 
 
 and varied kind. To meet him during those years 
 was for many of us, though always a lively pleasure, 
 not an event but a matter of course, seeing that one 
 was apt to meet him at concerts, theatres, picture- 
 galleries, dinner-parties, country houses, in a word 
 everywhere. My own acquaintance with him began 
 in the latest sixties or earliest seventies in a certain 
 hospitable, historic castle on the Cumberland border, 
 than which no house is associated in my mind with more 
 grateful and cordial memories. This was Naworth, 
 near Brampton in Cumberland, one of the two family 
 seats of the Earls of Carlisle, romantically placed on 
 the steep side of a glen overhanging a beck which 
 runs down to meet the Irthing near Lanercost Abbey. 
 It was the country home at that date of George Howard, 
 afterwards ninth earl, and of his wife Rosalind, by 
 birth a Stanley of Alderley. No more exceptional or 
 attractive young couple gathered about them in those 
 days a more varied company of talents and distinctions 
 whether in art, literature, or politics. George Howard 
 had married fresh from Cambridge, where he was a 
 couple of years my senior. His ambition was to be a 
 painter, and he worked sedulously at the art under 
 the teaching of that fine austere craftsman and vigor- 
 ous, caustically tongued personality, Alphonse Legros. 
 Besides his painting George Howard cared for nearly 
 all forms of culture. He had a range of manner varying 
 from the most captivatingly cordial and urbane to 
 the cynically sceptical and ironic. He was a born 
 lover of Italy and things Italian. Nature had even 
 modified towards the Italian his strongly marked 
 
78 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 hereditary Howard type of countenance, and in Tus- 
 cany, where the features of the people generally are 
 apt to bear a special stamp of race and finish, I have 
 often enough observed to myself in driving through 
 some provincial market town, " Why, here is a whole 
 population of George Howards." His wife was in 
 those early days as keen in many interests and as warm 
 in all friendliness as he, with a peculiar winning and 
 whimsical charm of looks and manner all her own and 
 extremely attaching. Changes of view and develop- 
 ments of character came to both in later life, including 
 on the lady's part an extreme and all-absorbing 
 development both of political ultra-radicalism and 
 militant temperance zeal. But for some years from 
 the time of which I speak their homes both on the 
 Northumberland border and in London were centres 
 of a delightful hospitality, and to the opportunities their 
 friendship afforded me my life owes much, which it would 
 be ungrateful not to record. The American sculptor 
 and author William Wetmore Story was a fellow-guest 
 with Browning and myself at Naworth at the time of 
 which I write. They two had long been intimate in 
 Italy. Story was a man exuberantly alive and of talents 
 the readiest and most versatile, acquitting himself with 
 an equally robust and confident facility in monumental 
 and portrait sculpture and in the arts of prose, verse, 
 and conversation. He was half Italianate in vivacity 
 of gesture and manner, and I remember with what 
 amused interest the rest of us sat by and listened while 
 he and Browning lustily kept up between them hour by 
 hour the ball of anecdote and reminiscence and repartee. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 79 
 
 Loudness of voice and a vigorous geniality of bearing 
 were what, on the surface, chiefly distinguished Brown- 
 ing from other Englishmen in social life throughout 
 these years. Needless to say, the veriest oaf could 
 not have mistaken them for vulgarity. The poet's 
 biographer and most confidential friend, the late 
 Mrs. Sutherland Orr, used to say that they were origin- 
 ally the mask of a real shyness and diffidence on first 
 confronting, in advanced middle life, the ordeal of 
 mixed general society. I should rather have supposed 
 that they were the natural symptoms of an inborn 
 vital energy surpassing by fivefold those of other men. 
 Certainly the poet's shortish robust figure, held always 
 firmly upright with the powerful grey-haired and 
 bearded head a little thrown back, his cordial greetings 
 and vigorous confidential and affectionate gestures, 
 would have conveyed the impression of such vitality, 
 even had the same impression not been forced upon 
 those of us who were readers by the surprising prodigal- 
 ity in these years (I speak of the early seventies) of 
 his work in literature. He had but lately brought to 
 a conclusion the vast and varied dramatic and psycho- 
 logic complex of The Ring and the Book, surely one 
 of the most strenuous, and as might have been sup- 
 posed fatiguing, intellectual feats ever achieved by 
 man, and instead of resting proceeded promptly to 
 follow it up by fresh volume after volume ; breaking 
 into classic ground in a guise wholly his own with 
 Balaustiori 's Adventure ; indulging in the queerest 
 of contrasted freaks in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau 
 and FifLne at the Fair ; going on with Red Cotton 
 
80 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Night Gap Country ; returning once more to Greek 
 themes and bidding us live with the Athenian dramatists 
 in Aristophanes'' s Apology ; and so on, with seldom 
 so much as a year or two's pause in the output. It 
 is a curious fact that in spite of the intensity of intel- 
 lectual and emotional effort to which for the most 
 part they bear witness, Browning's poetical labours, — 
 excepting, no doubt, those he was accustomed to 
 read aloud among his friends, — were wont to leave 
 little trace or echo in his own memory. Was, this 
 perhaps because of their very rapidity and abun- 
 dance ? Such was at any rate the case ; and I remem- 
 ber with what amused gusto he related one day how 
 a lady friend had been reading him out certain verses, 
 and how he had slapped his thigh (a very characteristic 
 action, by the way) and said, " By Jove, that's fine " ; 
 how then she had asked him who wrote them and he 
 could not say ; and how surprised he was when she 
 had told him they were his own. 
 
 Browning's talk had not much intellectual resem- 
 blance to his poetry. That is to say, it was not apt 
 to be specially profound or subtle ; still less was it ever 
 entangled or obscure. Probably the act of speech 
 did not allow his brain time to perform those prodigies 
 of activity by which it was wont, when he had the 
 pen in hand, to discover a thousand complications and 
 implications and side-issues beneath the surface of 
 the simplest-seeming matters ; complications which 
 often he could only express by defying the rules of 
 grammar and discarding half the auxiliary parts of 
 speech, by stitching clause on to clause and packing 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 81 
 
 parenthesis within parenthesis, till the drift of his 
 sentences became dark and their conclusion undiscover- 
 able. (The mere act of writing seemed to have a 
 peculiar effect on him, for I have known him manage 
 to be obscure even in a telegram.) Rather his style 
 in talk was straightforward, plain, emphatic, heartily 
 and agreeably voluble, ranging easily from deep earnest 
 to jolly jest, rich and varied in matter but avoiding 
 rather than courting the abstruse whether in specula- 
 tion or controversy, and often condescending freely to 
 ordinary human gossip on a level with the rest of 
 us. Its general tone was genially kind, encouraging 
 and fortifying ; but no one was more promptly moved 
 to indignation, indignation to which he never hesi- 
 tated to give effect, by any tale or instance of cruelty 
 or calumny or injustice : nor could any one be more 
 tenderly or chivalrously sympathetic with the victim 
 of such offences. Not to quote instances known to 
 me of a more private and personal kind, I remember 
 his strong and re-iterated expressions of anger against 
 Froude for having, as he thought, misrepresented the 
 character of Carlyle. Instead of being the hard man 
 figured in Froude's pages — inconsiderate in relations 
 with his wife, unkind, in one instance at least, in his 
 treatment of a horse — Carlyle, maintained Browning, 
 was the most intensely, sensitively tender-hearted of 
 men : and he went on to tell how, as he walked one day 
 in Chelsea with Carlyle' s arm in his, a butcher-boy drove 
 by savagely flogging his horse and he felt the sage shake 
 from head to foot in a spasm of righteous indignation. 
 Browning, living in the world the everyday life he 
 
82 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 did, refused with perfect unaffectedness to accept 
 incense or to assume poses or privileges as a poet. 
 At the same time the poet was never far to seek in 
 him, and with equal unaffectedness would come to 
 the front readily on occasion. If the talk ran that way- 
 he would quote passages from the English poets, 
 oftenest relatively unknown passages, with powerful 
 effect ; for his failure of memory in regard to his own 
 works by no means extended itself to those of others. 
 His memory was well stored with all kinds of eccentric 
 matter, and among the earlier English poets with 
 examples of those whose work most resembled his 
 own by quaintness and toughness of thought. Thus 
 I recollect his coming out once with a long, crabbedly 
 fine screed from John Donne, and declaring he had not 
 read nor called it to mind for thirty years. It was the 
 screed in which Donne, who had written defying and 
 belittling the power of death, now, death having carried 
 off a virtuous and excellent lady of his acquaintance, 
 recants and declares — 
 
 Spiritual treason, atheism 'tis to say 
 That any can thy summons disobey. 
 Th' earth's face is but thy table ; there are set 
 Plants, cattle, men, dishes for death to eat. 
 In a rude hunger now he millions draws 
 Into his bloody, or plaguy, or starved jaws. 
 Now wantonly he spoils, and eats us not, 
 But breaks off friends, and lets us piecemeal rot. 
 Nor will this earth serve him ; he sinks the deep 
 Where harmless fish monastic silence keep ; 
 Who — were Death dead — by roes of living sand 
 Might sponge that element, and make it land. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 83 
 
 I remember also particularly the rich effect with 
 which, though only for my private ear, he recited 
 one evening, on a sofa in a corner after a dinner party, 
 the thundering final stanzas from the Song of David 
 of Christopher Smart : — 
 
 Glorious the sun in mid career ; 
 Glorious th' assembed fires appear ; 
 
 Glorious the comet's train : 
 Glorious the trumpet and alarm ; 
 Glorious th' Almighty's stretched-out arm ; 
 
 Glorious th' enraptured main : 
 
 Glorious the northern lights astream ; 
 Glorious the song, when God's the theme ; 
 
 Glorious the thunder's roar : 
 Glorious hosanna from the den ; 
 Glorious the catholic amen ; 
 
 Glorious the martyr's gore. 
 
 This unfortunate eighteenth-century poet, stale and 
 flat except for that one inspired hour during his 
 insanity when he became equal to the greatest, was 
 at that date unknown to most of us, but had always 
 a special interest for Browning, and is the subject of 
 one of the Parleyings in his almost latest volume of 
 verse. 
 
 When asked to read poetry of his own in any house 
 or in any company where he could count on intelligent 
 sympathy, Browning was always ready to do so. His 
 utterance was flexible and dramatic, very different 
 from that of Tennyson or Rossetti and such other 
 poets as have preferred in reading their own verses 
 to adopt and sustain one key or another of chanting 
 
84 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 monotone. His voice, virile above all things, was 
 strong and inclining to the strident ; but in passages 
 which called for it had accents of the most moving 
 tenderness. One reading in especial which I remember 
 as bringing out such tenderness was that of the Pompilia 
 section of The Ring and the Book, at certain points in 
 which he could control neither his voice nor his tears, 
 and had nearly all his audience in tears with him. 
 Another reading almost equally moving was of Andrea 
 del Sarto ; which in one case he followed up by way 
 of contrast with the long tramping measures, duly 
 stressed by his foot stamping vigorously in time, of 
 his Greek battle-poem, Echetlos. Neither were such 
 readings the only occasions when I have known this 
 strong man weep. One of my vividest recollections 
 is of an evening when he made one of a party of three 
 to see the great Italian tragedian Salvini play King 
 Lear. Every one had seen Salvini play Othello, his 
 most usual Shakespearean part ; but this performance 
 of Lear was new to us all. It turned out to be over- 
 whelming, an absolute, ideal incarnation of ruined 
 age and outcast greatness and shattered reason and 
 unchilded fatherhood and fallen majesty in despair. 
 Browning sat there between us, his face set firm and 
 white like marble, but before the end tears were coursing 
 down it quite unchecked. He seemed unconscious 
 of them, and as we came out could only murmur with 
 a kind of awe, " It makes one wonder which is the 
 greater, the poet or the actor." 
 
 Shall I by way of contrast allow myself to recall 
 another scene which is scarce less freshly present to 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 85 
 
 me, and which illustrates the opposite scale of the 
 poet's being, his partiality for any kind of fun or 
 foolery of which the notion tickled him ? In the 
 later seventies he was several times a visitor at Trinity 
 College, Cambridge ; usually as the guest of the 
 Master, Dr. Montagu Butler, once, at least, as mine. I 
 asked a party of undergraduates to meet him at break- 
 fast, and he charmed them by his geniality and rich 
 talk, some of it as serious and high-pitched as the 
 most earnest of his admirers could desire. By-and- 
 by there came up the subject of Christian names and 
 their abbreviations, and Browning began telling us 
 how there once came three brothers to be matriculated 
 together at an American University. The registrar 
 asked the first brother his name. " Sam," answered 
 the lad. " That is no name," declared the don 
 with severity, " give me your full name properly." 
 " Samuel, sir," came the reply. To a like question 
 the next brother answered " My name is Lem, sir." 
 "Nonsense," cried the registrar, this time angrily; 
 " say your real name in full." " Lemuel, sir," faltered 
 the culprit. The third brother, being roughly asked 
 the same question, lost his head and twittered : 
 " Jimuel, sir." I am sure the story ought to end here, 
 but in sheer high spirits, and to keep up the laugh 
 among the lads round the table, the poet went on to 
 add a climax. The oflicial, he said, thereupon broke 
 into fury, declared the answers had been a plot to 
 insult him, and insisted on knowing which of the 
 brothers had set the others on ; whereat they gasped 
 in chorus, each pointing tremblingly at the other, 
 
86 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 " himuel, sir." Is the little tale, I wonder, one fresh 
 to American readers, or stale ? If stale, I hope that, 
 considering from whose mouth I heard it, they will 
 pardon me for here repeating it. 
 
 In thinking of this poet as he lived and moved, 
 there is one quality he had which thrusts itself inevit- 
 ably first upon one's mind, and that is cordiality. 
 Cordial in his thoughts and feelings — unless he had 
 the most cogent grounds to the contrary — cordial 
 in his ways and words, that is what he was above all 
 things, and with a cordiality open and undisguised, 
 even demonstrative beyond what is usual in the inter- 
 course of Englishmen, but at the same time free from 
 any possible suspicion of insincerity. The same quality 
 was conspicuous in his correspondence. I have by 
 me dozens of letters or rather notes from him, proposals 
 for appointments or answers to invitations, and in 
 them all this is the one predominant tone. Among 
 the rest I find two or three which are real, though 
 brief enough, letters, and being unprinted may perhaps 
 interest the reader. When his translation of the 
 Agamemnon of iEschylus appeared in 1877, 1 protested, 
 publicly if I remember aright and at any rate in private, 
 against what I held to be its uncouthly, impermissibly, 
 un-Englishly strained and crabbed literalness. " My 
 dear Colvin," answers the poet, " I am probably 
 more of your mind than you suppose, about the sort 
 of translation I should like for myself and for you: 
 but I only undertook to " transcribe " — esteeming it 
 sufficient success if I put anybody ignorant of Greek 
 in something like the position of one acquainted with it. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 87 
 
 This latter person recognizes under a given word the 
 corresponding modern sense ; but he sees the — perhaps 
 grotesque — word first, and supplies the elucidation 
 himself: so I expect an intelligent reader to do, 
 because it seems part of my business to instruct him 
 that, for instance, the Greeks called TrpdinSes what 
 we call ' understanding.' But it is ungracious work 
 and I have done with it." A similar defence of his 
 treatment is worked out more fully in the preface ; 
 but looking back to-day at the matter of our discussion, 
 I find that in point of fact to make head or tail of 
 Browning's version I have to help myself by the 
 Greek text as being much the more perspicuous of 
 the two, and am more than ever convinced that, for 
 me at all events, just as Rossetti's Early Italian Poets 
 is the best of all verse translations, Browning's Agamem- 
 non is the worst and most perverse. Fortunately he 
 kept to his purpose declared in the words last quoted, 
 and printed no more translations from the Greek. 
 
 Concerning the next letter, I hardly know what 
 can have been the " parcel " to which it refers, unless 
 it were the printed proofs of some lectures which I 
 had lately given in London, and which the poet had 
 done me the honour to attend, on the Amazons, 
 especially the story of Achilles and Penthesilea, as 
 figured in Greek literature and art. The couplet 
 quoted is of course from Hudibras : — 
 
 " 19, Warwick Crescent, W. 
 
 "April 23, '81. 
 " My dear Colvtnt, — 
 
 " I blame myself seriously for not having apprised you at once 
 that your parcel had arrived duly and safely ; I hardly know, 
 
88 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 indeed, how I omitted doing so : your letter, which was followed 
 immediately by the papers it promised, — and the notion that 
 yourself would not be long behind — these, I suppose, made me 
 forgetful of a plain duty, — which I shall not neglect on any future 
 occasion. Thank you for all favours, including the pardon which 
 I hope this apology will procure. 
 
 " I find that my assiduity in attending your Lectures has induced 
 somebody to believe the seed sown must needs bear fruit : and 
 so I figure in the American Journals as ' having a poem in the 
 press on the subject of Achilles and Penthesilea.' There are less 
 suggestive subjects, — and I wish that it could be truly said of me 
 — as by Butler of his heroine — 
 
 ' He laid about their heads as busily 
 As th' Amazonian Dame Penthesily ' 
 — if I quote correctly — which I doubt. With no doubt at all, my 
 dear Colvin, I am ever 
 
 "Yours cordially, 
 
 " Robert Browning." 
 
 The last, although modesty should perhaps prevent 
 my printing it, is the most interesting, as showing 
 what kind help I had from the master in preparing 
 my volume on Walter Savage Landor for the English 
 Men of Letters series, and as summing up the character 
 of his old friend for good and all in a single salvo of 
 adjectives : — 
 
 " 19, Warwick Crescent, W. 
 
 " July 12, '81. 
 " My dear Colvin, — 
 
 " The remaining ' proofs ' were duly sent me — and I was able 
 to observe how completely you had set the insignificant matters 
 right which were not altogether so before — in the last part, I mean. 
 I have not received the Book itself and though I should be very 
 grateful for it, and all connected with it, I hardly hoped to see my 
 dear provoking admirable unwise learned childish friend put in 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 89 
 
 just the light which lets all the facets of the jewel do justice to the 
 diamond they diversify. I have heard only one opinion of the 
 exceeding merit of the work. I say this, to dispense you from any 
 suspicion that you are burthened with anything like " gratitude " 
 to me— who am the grateful person under the circumstances — 
 such duties as mine ought to be ordinary with ' friends and fellow 
 students.' 
 
 " You must be having wonderful weather where you are : here 
 the heat and glare (not to blaspheme) are extraordinary. 
 
 " Ever truly yours, 
 
 " Robert Browning." 
 
 Any last word in memory of this great poet and 
 many-sided, intensely human spirit should touch on 
 two of his most conspicuous and lovable virtues, which 
 I had ample opportunity of observing ; his admirable 
 constancy to old friends and assiduous attention to 
 them in their declining years, as evidenced, for instance, 
 by his relations with Mrs. Procter, the cynically witty, 
 long-enduring, old-age-defying widow of the poet 
 Barry Cornwall ; and his intense paternal devotion to 
 his only son. When this adored " Pen " — for so by 
 his pet name he was always called — this child of two 
 mutually devoted parents of genius, had grown to 
 manhood and began to show a certain talent, or at 
 least a certain facility, in the twin arts of sculpture 
 and painting, the eager, deferential solicitude with 
 which his famous father would seek the opinions on 
 the young man's work of those who were supposed to 
 have some intelligence of such matters was a thing 
 infinitely, and considering the mediocrity of the result, 
 almost tragically, touching. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE PRIORY AND GEORGE ELIOT 
 
 From the later sixties down to the mid seventies 
 of the last century, there were for some of us in London 
 two specially attractive resorts for Sunday afternoons. 
 These were The Priory and Little Holland House. 
 The kinds of interest the two houses severally offered 
 differed greatly, the only point in common between 
 them being that both were homes of genius. The 
 Priory was a commonplace detached villa in a fair- 
 sized garden plot in St. John's Wood, the home of 
 George Eliot and G. H. Lewes. Little Holland House 
 in Kensington, a rambling old-fashioned abode in a 
 beautiful well-timbered garden, had originally been a 
 dower-house adjunct to and dependent on the great 
 Holland House and its park ; in the years of which I 
 speak it was the joint home of the painter George 
 Frederic Watts and the old friends, the Thoby 
 Prinseps, with whom he was domesticated. 
 
 The Priory 
 The Sunday afternoon receptions at The Priory were 
 not always quite free from stiffness, the presiding 
 genius allowing herself — so at least some of us thought 
 — to be treated a little too markedly and formally as 
 such. Perhaps, however, the secret was that she by 
 nature lacked the lightness of human touch by which 
 
 90 
 
THE PRIORY AND GEORGE ELIOT 91 
 
 a hostess can diffuse among a mixed company of guests 
 an atmosphere of social ease. Humour in abundance 
 she had, but not of the light, glancing kind : it was a 
 rich, deliberate humour springing from deep sources and 
 corresponding with the general depth and power of her 
 being. The signs of such depth and power were 
 strongly impressed upon her countenance. I have 
 known scarce any one in life whose looks in their own 
 way more strongly drew and held one. She had of 
 course no regular beauty (who was it that asked the 
 question, " Have you seen a horse, sir ? Then you 
 have seen George Eliot " ?) : but the expression of 
 her long, strong, deeply ploughed features, was one 
 not only of habitual brooding thought and intellectual 
 travail but of intense and yearning human sympathy 
 and tenderness. There could hardly be a truer record 
 of her looks than that conveyed in the well-known etch- 
 ing by Raj on after the life-sized drawing by F. W. 
 Burton. If it had been her nature to seek equality 
 of regard and companionship from those visitors who 
 came about her, Lewes, I think, would have hardly 
 made it possible. His own attitude was always that 
 of the tenderest, most solicitous adoration ; and 
 adoration, homage, was what he seemed to expect for 
 her from all who came about them. He never encour- 
 aged the conversation among the Sunday guests in the 
 room to become equal or general, or allowed one of 
 them to absorb her attention for very long, but would 
 bring up one after another to have his or her share of 
 it in turn, so that if any of us began to feel that talk 
 with her was taking an easier and closer turn than usual, 
 
92 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 the next thing was that it was sure to be interrupted. 
 I recall the beginnings of several conversations which 
 were thus broken before I had succeeded in getting 
 more from her than sympathetic enquiries about my 
 own work and studies, or perhaps about the places I 
 had last been visiting in France or Italy. Naturally 
 I valued such enquiries, but was not at all seeking 
 them : what I wanted was not to be drawn out myself 
 but to draw out my hostess and feel her powers playing 
 — the spell of her mind and character acting — upon me 
 and upon the company generally. 
 
 Lewes, when he had cut into the talk and carried 
 one off as I have said, would entertain one genially 
 and kindly in his own way in another part of the room, 
 among some group of guests either fresh from or await- 
 ing similar treatment. If George Eliot's countenance 
 was of the equine type, his was not less distinctly of the 
 simian, but having its ugliness redeemed by winning 
 smiles both of humour and affection. Besides enter- 
 taining the day's guests, or helping them to entertain 
 each other, in groups, Lewes liked sometimes to get 
 a few minutes' chat apart with a single one coming 
 or going ; but the subject was almost always con- 
 nected in some way with George Eliot's work and fame. 
 During the serial publication of Middlemarch I parti- 
 cularly remember his taking me apart one day as I 
 came in, and holding me by the button as he announced 
 to me in confidence concerning one of its chief charac- 
 ters, " Celia is going to have a baby ! " This with an 
 air at once gratified and mysterious, like that of some 
 female gossip of a young bride in real life. 
 
CHAPTER Vn 
 
 LITTLE HOLLAND HOUSE AND G. F. WATTS 
 
 At Little Holland House, where Watts lived during 
 these same years, the atmosphere, although an atmo- 
 sphere of genius, was of a totally different kind. The 
 Thoby Prinseps, his permanent hosts, or rather house- 
 mates, were people of marked characters and inter- 
 esting associations of their own. Prinsep, by this 
 time advanced in years, had been a distinguished Indian 
 civil servant and one of the earliest members of the 
 new Indian Council created after the mutiny, when 
 the government of the dependency was taken out of 
 the hands of the old East India Company. He was 
 a man of attractive and imposing presence even after 
 infirmity had compelled him to use a wheeled-chair 
 for movement in his garden and deafness had made 
 talk with him difficult. His wife was one of the seven 
 daughters of James Pattle of the Indian Civil Service, 
 all remarkable women and several of them famous in 
 their day. The most beautiful of the sisters was 
 Virginia, Countess Somers. The most original in gift 
 and achievement was Julia, Mrs. Cameron. A close 
 and hearty friend of half the most distinguished men 
 of her time, she had in what were relatively the early 
 days of photography made for the purposes of por- 
 
 93 
 
94 MEMOKIES AND NOTES 
 
 traiture almost an original art of it, such were the 
 personal power and such the devices of lighting and 
 focusing by which she imposed upon her sitters the 
 characters and aspects she divined as most vitally and 
 significantly theirs. With her untidy wisps of grizzling 
 hair and her fingers stained brown with photographic 
 chemicals, this lady presented nothing very attractive 
 to the eye, but her resources of mind and character made 
 themselves felt not less strikingly in her talk than in 
 her work. Without the originality of Mrs. Cameron 
 or the beauty of Lady Somers and some of the other 
 sisters (one of whom was by marriage an aunt of my 
 own), Mrs. Prinsep possessed faculties as personal 
 and notable as any of them. Circumstance and 
 opportunity led her to employ the genial richness and 
 heartiness of her nature chiefly in playing the part 
 of hostess. For some years before I was grown up 
 and going about in the world, the Sunday afternoon 
 gatherings at Little Holland House had already become 
 a feature in London life. Not only artists, but men 
 of letters, statesmen, politicians, travellers, were all 
 to be met there, and all in the temper to enjoy and 
 admire : no atmosphere could be more unlike that of 
 one of the season's outdoor or indoor crushes, at which 
 a crowd assembles to jostle and swelter as a matter 
 of fashion or social obligation. 
 
 It was understood that the main attraction at these 
 receptions, over and above the half rural pleasantness 
 of the scene and the hospitality of the atmosphere, 
 was the fame and personality of the great artist Watts. 
 It has always seemed to me a note to the social credit 
 
LITTLE HOLLAND HOUSE AND G. F. WATTS 95 
 
 of that day that a man of Watts' s undistinguished 
 origin, (his father had been an unsuccessful musical 
 instrument-maker,) and of his extreme and perfectly 
 unaffected modesty and simplicity of character, should 
 have been honoured and sought after as he was. It 
 is true that both in looks and bearing he had a natural 
 distinction which must always and in any company 
 have been noticeable. Middle-sized and slightly 
 stooping, he had finely chiselled features and brown 
 eyes of a fine pensive expression, with hair and beard 
 which his friends saw slowly changing through the years 
 from rich brown to a grey that was almost white. 
 There was about him a total lack of, and indeed 
 incapacity for, any manner of pose or pretension. By 
 lack of pretension must by no means be understood lack 
 of ambition. His ambition, which was not at all for 
 himself but singly and entirely for his art, was indeed 
 a very part of his simplicity. Of the functions of art 
 in the life of a community no man has ever held a more 
 exalted conception. He was continually expending 
 his energies and his influence, sometimes successfully, 
 more often in vain, in the endeavour to be allowed to 
 decorate the wall-spaces of public buildings with monu- 
 mental compositions of high moral, historical, or allegor- 
 ical significance. Alike by natural instinct and by 
 strenuous technical study and experiment he was 
 qualified, as very few artists in England have been, 
 as a painter on a monumental scale or decorator of 
 great wall-spaces. And fortunate it was that he was 
 so qualified, seeing that the interest paramount in his 
 own mind in undertaking such work was never the 
 
96 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 truly and singly artistic, it was always the moral and 
 didactic interest. But he could not help being a fine 
 designer and born decorator, as it were in spite of him- 
 self. His passion for allegoric and didactic painting 
 made him unjust to and even contemptuous of his 
 own powers in that other branch of art — portraiture 
 to wit — by which he was compelled to live. Fine 
 and dignified as are the few monumental schemes 
 which he was given opportunity to carry out, beauti- 
 ful in the qualities of painting proper as are many of 
 his moral and allegoric compositions on a smaller scale, 
 posterity is unlikely to regret that the conditions of the 
 time made portrait-painting his chief resource and 
 means of livelihood. There was plenty of vulgarity 
 in the Victorian age, but in Watts' s record of that age 
 there is no breath or taint or shadow of it. This is 
 not due to any fudging or insincerity in the artist, but 
 partly to the fact that among his sitters were few 
 save the very pick of contemporary men and women ; 
 partly to those qualities in his own eye and hand which 
 could not but discern and instinctively reproduce 
 whatever in the types and characters of nineteenth- 
 century England was akin to those of the sixteenth- 
 century Venice which seemed as if it had been his 
 spiritual birth-place. 
 
 It was a sad and heartfelt loss to many of us when 
 about 1875, the painter being then a little short of his 
 sixty-eighth year, the loved and familiar scene of his 
 activity was broken up. The ground on which the old 
 Little Holland House and its outbuildings and gardens 
 had stood was sold, and Watts had to create a new 
 
LITTLE HOLLAND HOUSE AND G. F. WATTS 97 
 
 home for himself. After an interval spent chiefly in 
 the Isle of Wight, he built, as is well known, a new 
 Little Holland House in Melbury Road on a corner of 
 the ground which had been occupied by the old. But 
 this was a Little Holland House, so far as its external 
 aspects and surroundings were concerned, only in 
 name. The fine genius who dwelt in it was of course 
 quite unchanged : his beautiful simplicities of character 
 did but increase with age, his high ambitions both in 
 decorative painting and monumental sculpture con- 
 tinued with increase rather than abatement : by and by 
 there came into his life the new happiness of a wife 
 who proved faultlessly tactful in sympathy and wise 
 in tendence ; and those of us who had loved and 
 honoured the master in those earlier years had the joy 
 of seeing him live on to a patriarchal age with increase 
 rather than diminution of universal regard. In these 
 later years he spent the winters, and towards the end 
 the whole of his time, at anew home, " Limnerslease," 
 which he had built for himself on the Hog's Back, near 
 Guildford, and where a pick of his works is now set out 
 permanently on public exhibition. But for the pur- 
 pose of these present reminiscences it is naturally the 
 earlier years, and the special romance and charm 
 and impressiveness of the earlier, now long van- 
 ished surroundings, that rise up and insist on being 
 recalled, however briefly. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 Readers and lovers of Stevenson, in my experience, 
 are generally to be divided into two sorts or classes. 
 One sort care most for his stories, delighting in the 
 humorous or tragic vitality of his characters and the 
 thrill of the situations in which he puts them. The 
 other sort are more interested in the man himself, and 
 prefer the essays and letters, the books of travel and 
 reminiscence in which he takes you into his own 
 company and confidence. Readers of this latter class 
 would rather paddle with Stevenson in his canoe down 
 the Sambre and Oise, look out with him from the tower 
 of Noyon Cathedral, or join in his farewell greetings to 
 the three Graces of Origny — they would rather sleep 
 under the stars with him and the she-ass Modestine 
 in the woods of Gevaudan, or hear him moralize on 
 the life of the Trappist monks in the convent of Our 
 Lady of the Snows — than they would crouch in the 
 apple-barrel with Jim Hawkins on board the Hispaniola 
 and overhear the plotting of the mutineers, or lie sick 
 with David Balfour in the house of Robin Oig while 
 the host and Alan Breck challenge each other to their 
 match upon the pipes. It pleases such readers better 
 
 98 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 99 
 
 to learn from Stevenson in the first person how his 
 Brownies, as he calls them, furnished to him in dreams 
 the most shudderful incidents in the parable of Jekyll 
 and Hyde than to read these incidents themselves in 
 the pages of the book. The fortunes of Prince Otto 
 and Seraphina and Gondremark and Countess von 
 Rosen interest them, it may be, less in the tale itself 
 than in the letters in which Stevenson tells his corres- 
 pondents of his delighted toil over the tale and of the 
 high hopes that he has built upon it. They may be 
 less moved — though that I find it hard to conceive — 
 by the scene of the torn hymn-book and the birth of 
 passion between Archie Weir and Kirstie Eliot in the 
 little Pentland church than by the note of acute 
 personal emotion which a thought of the same 
 church arouses in Stevenson writing to a friend 
 from exile. 
 
 My own view is that both sides of him — the creative 
 artist and the human personality — are interesting and 
 admirable alike. But what I am now about to write 
 will concern the man himself rather than any phase 
 of his work. I shall dip a random bucket into the well 
 of memory, and try whether the yield, from our four- 
 teen years of close intimacy, may be such as to supple- 
 ment and complete to any purpose the image which 
 readers may otherwise have formed of him. And 
 first, to wipe away some false impressions which seem 
 to be current : — I lately found one writer, because 
 Stevenson was thin, speaking of him as having been 
 a " shadowy " figure ; another, because he was an 
 invalid, describing him as " anaemic," and a third as 
 
100 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 " thin-blooded." Shadowy ! he was indeed all his 
 life a bag of bones, a very lath for leanness ; as lean 
 as Shakespeare's Master Slender, or let us say as 
 Don Quixote. Nevertheless when he was in the room 
 it was the other people, and not he, who seemed the 
 shadows. The most robust of ordinary men seemed 
 to turn dim and null in presence of the vitality that 
 glowed in the steadfast, penetrating fire of the lean 
 man's eyes, the rich, compelling charm of his smile, 
 the lissom swiftness of his movements and lively 
 expressiveness of his gestures, above all in the irresist- 
 ible sympathetic play and abundance of his talk. 
 Anaemic ! thin-blooded ! the main physical fact about 
 him, according to those of his doctors whom I have 
 questioned, was that his heart was too big and its 
 blood supply too full for his body. There was failure of 
 nutrition, in the sense that he could never make flesh ; 
 there was weakness of the throat and lungs, weakness 
 above all of the arteries, never of the heart itself; 
 nor did his looks, even in mortal illness and exhaustion, 
 ever give the impression of bloodlessness. More than 
 one of his early friends, in describing him as habitually 
 pale, have let their memory be betrayed by knowledge 
 of what might have been expected in one so frail in 
 health. To add, as some have done, that his hair was 
 black is to misdescribe him still farther. As a matter 
 of fact his face, forehead and all, was throughout the 
 years when I knew him of an even, rather high, colour 
 varying little whether he was ill or well ; and 
 his hair, of a lightish brown in youth, although the 
 brown grew darker with years, and darker still, I 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 101 
 
 believe, in the tropics, can never have approached 
 black. 
 
 If you want to realize the kind of effect he made, at 
 least in the early years when I knew him best, imagine 
 this attenuated but extraordinarily vivid and vital 
 presence, with something about it that at first struck 
 you as freakish, rare, fantastic, a touch of the elfin and 
 unearthly, a sprite, an Ariel. And imagine that, as 
 you got to know him, this sprite, this visitant from 
 another sphere, turned out to differ from mankind in 
 general not by being less human but by being a great 
 deal more human than they ; richer-blooded, greater- 
 hearted ; more human in all senses of the word, for he 
 comprised within himself, and would flash on you in the 
 course of a single afternoon, all the different ages and 
 half the different characters of man, the unfaded fresh- 
 ness of a child, the ardent outlook and adventurous 
 day-dreams of a boy, the steadfast courage of manhood, 
 the quick sympathetic tenderness of a woman, and 
 already, as early as the mid- twenties of his life, an almost 
 uncanny share of the ripe life-wisdom of old age. He 
 was a fellow of infinite and unrestrained jest and yet 
 of infinite earnest, the one very often a mask for the 
 other ; a poet, an artist, an adventurer ; a man beset 
 with fleshly frailties, and despite his infirm health of 
 strong appetities and unchecked curiosities ; and yet 
 a profoundly sincere moralist and preacher and son 
 of the Covenanters after his fashion, deeply conscious 
 of the war within his members, and deeply bent on 
 acting up to the best he knew. Henley tried to sum 
 him up in a well-known sonnet : — 
 
102 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 "Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably, 
 Neat-footed and weak-fingered : in his face — 
 Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race, 
 Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea, 
 The brown eyes radiant with vivacity — 
 There shines a brilliant and romantic grace, 
 A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace 
 Of passion and impudence and energy. 
 Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck, 
 Most vain, most generous, sternly critical, 
 Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist : 
 A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck, 
 Much Anthony, of Hamlet most of all, 
 And something of the Shorter-Catechist." 
 
 In that sonnet Henley has drawn up a lively and 
 showy — or shall we not rather say flashy ? — enough 
 catalogue of the diverse qualities and contradictory 
 aspects which he recognized in his friend. But the 
 pity is that as there described those qualities lie like 
 spillikins, unrelated and disconnected. Henley has 
 missed what gave its unity to the character and what 
 every other among his nearer friends soon discovered 
 to be the one essential, never failing and ever endearing 
 thing under all that play and diversity of being. This 
 was the infinitely kind and tender, devotedly generous, 
 brave and loving heart of the man. 
 
 I first saw him at the beginning of August, 1873, 
 that is all but forty-eight years ago, when he was 
 twenty-three and I twenty-eight. I had landed from 
 a Great-Eastern train at a little country station in 
 Suffolk, and was met on the platform by a stripling 
 in a velvet jacket and straw hat, who walked up 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 103 
 
 with me to the country rectory where he was staying 
 and where I had come to stay. I had lately been 
 appointed Slade Professor at Cambridge ; the rectory 
 was that of Cockfield, near Bury St. Edmunds ; the 
 host was my much older colleague Professor Churchill 
 Babington, of amiable and learned memory ; the 
 hostess was his wife, a grand-daughter of the Rev. 
 Lewis Balfour of Colinton, Midlothian ; the youth was 
 her young first cousin by the mother's side, Louis 
 Stevenson from Edinburgh. The first shyness over 
 I realized in the course of that short walk how well I 
 had done to follow the advice of a fellow-guest who 
 had preceded me in the house — to wit Mrs. Sitwell, 
 my wife as she came later on to be. She had written 
 to me about this youth, declaring that I should find 
 him a real young genius and urging me to come if I 
 could before he went away. I could not wonder at 
 what I presently learnt — how within an hour of his 
 first appearance at the rectory, knapsack on back, a 
 few days earlier, he had captivated the whole house- 
 hold. To his cousin the hostess, a woman of a fine 
 sympathetic nature and quick, humorous intelligence, 
 he was of course well kncwn beforehand, though she 
 had never seen him in so charming a light as now. 
 With her husband the Professor, a clergyman of solid 
 antiquarian and ecclesiastical knowledge and an almost 
 Pickwickian simplicity of character corresponding to 
 his lovable rotund visage and innocently beaming 
 spectacles — with the Professor, " Stiwy," as he called 
 his wife's young cousin, was already something of a 
 favourite. Of their guests, I found one, a boy of ten, 
 
104 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 watching for every moment when he could monopolize 
 the newcomer's attention, either to show off to him the 
 scenes of his toy theatre or to conduct him confiden- 
 tially by the hand about the garden or beside the moat ; 
 while between him and the boy's mother, Mrs. Sitwell, 
 there had sprung up an instantaneous understanding. 
 Not only the lights and brilliancies of his nature, but 
 the strengths and glooms that underlay them, were 
 from the first apparent to her, so that in the trying 
 season of his life which followed he was moved to 
 throw himself upon her sympathies with the unlimited 
 confidence and devotion to which his letters of the 
 time bear witness. He sped those summer nights and 
 days for us all as I have scarce known any sped before 
 or since. He seemed, this youngster, already to have 
 lived and seen and felt and dreamed and laughed and 
 longed more than others do in a lifetime. He showed 
 himself moreover full of reading, at least in English 
 and French — for his Latin was shaky and Greek he 
 only got at through translations. Over wide ranges 
 of life and letters his mind and speech ran like the 
 fingers of a musician over the keyboard of an instru- 
 ment. Pure poetic eloquence (coloured always, be it 
 remembered, by a strong Scottish accent), grave argu- 
 ment and criticism, riotous freaks of fancy, flashes of 
 nonsense more illuminating * than wisdom, streamed 
 from him inexhaustibly as he kindled with delight at 
 the delight of his hearers. 
 
 Strange to say, this brilliant creature, though he had 
 made one or two close and appreciative intimates of 
 his own age and sex, had not been thought good 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 105 
 
 enough for the polite society of his native Edinburgh. 
 In most of the few houses which he frequented he seems 
 to have been taken for an eccentric and affected kind 
 of Bohemian poseur, to be treated at best with tolera- 
 tion. In a book, or if I remember rightly in more 
 than one book, on his early Edinburgh days, a member 
 of one of those houses, and sister of one of his special 
 friends, has since his death written of him in a fine 
 superior tone of retrospective condescension. In new 
 and more sympathetic company his social genius 
 immediately expanded and glowed as I have said, 
 till all of us seemed to catch something of his own 
 gift and inspiration. This power of inspiring others 
 has been noted by many of those who knew Stevenson 
 later as an especial and distinguishing mark of his 
 conversation. As long as he was there you kept 
 discovering with delight unexpected powers in your- 
 self. You felt as if you had taken service with a 
 conjuror, whom you supplied with balls of clay and 
 who took them and turned them into gold and sent 
 them whirling and glowing about his head, making you 
 believe all the while that they were still truly yours. 
 
 But on further acquaintance it soon became clear 
 that under all this captivating, this contagious gaiety 
 and charm there lay a troubled spirit, in grave risk 
 from the perils of youth, from a constitution naturally 
 frail and already heavily over-strained, from self- 
 distrust and uncertainty as to his own powers and 
 purposes, and above all from the misery of bitter, heart- 
 and soul-rending disagreements with a father to whom 
 he was devotedly attached. It was only when, after 
 
106 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 a brief return to Edinburgh from Cockfield, he came 
 south again in the next month that we discovered so 
 much concerning him. He spent his time partly in 
 London and partly with me in a cottage I then in- 
 habited in the southern hill-suburb of Norwood. With 
 various types of genius and of the charm and power of 
 genius among my elders I had already, as indicated 
 in some of the earlier pages of this book, had fortunate 
 opportunities of becoming familiar. In this brilliant 
 and troubled Scotch youth I could not fail to realize 
 that here, among my juniors, was a genius who might 
 well fail on the threshold of life, but who, if he could 
 only win through, had it in him to take as shining a 
 place as any of them. No wonder if we, his new 
 friends, were keen to do all we could for him in the way 
 of help and sympathy. It was no surprise to us 
 when towards mid-October, after a second return to 
 Edinburgh, his letters brought news of threatening ill- 
 ness, nor when, having again come south to be exam- 
 ined, as had been agreed with his father, for admis- 
 sion into one of the London Inns of Court, he had per- 
 force to change his purpose and undergo a different 
 kind of examination at the hands of Sir Andrew Clark. 
 That wise physician peremptorily ordered him a 
 period of rest in the soothing climate of the French 
 Riviera, out of reach of all occasion or possibility of 
 contention with those he loved at home. 
 
 The recollections of him that remain with me from 
 the next few years are partly of two visits I paid him 
 in the course of that first winter (1873-1874) on the 
 Riviera ; partly of visits he paid me in the Norwood 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 107 
 
 cottage, or in another cottage I rented a little later 
 at Hampstead, or later again in college rooms which 
 I occupied as a professor at Cambridge ; partly from 
 his various descents upon or passages through London, 
 made sometimes from Edinburgh and sometimes from 
 France, after his return in 1874 to his now reconciled 
 home. The points in his character these stray 
 recollections chiefly illustrate are, first, the longing 
 for a life of action and adventure, which in an ordinary 
 youth might have passed as a matter of course but 
 in one already so stricken in health seemed pathetically 
 vain ; next, his inborn faculty — a very much rarer 
 gift — as an artist in letters, and the scrupulous self- 
 training by which almost from boyhood he had been 
 privately disciplining it : then the intensely, quite 
 exceptionally, observing and loving interest he took 
 in young children : and above all, that magical power 
 he had of winning the delighted affection, the immediate 
 confidence, of men and women of the most various 
 sorts and conditions, always excepting those hide- 
 bound in starched propriety or conventional official- 
 dom, whom he had a scarce less unfailing power of 
 putting against him at first sight. 
 
 At the Suffolk rectory he had been neatly enough 
 clad : most of the images of him that rise next before 
 me present him in the slovenly, nondescript Bohemian 
 garments and untrimmed hair which it was in those 
 days his custom to wear. I could somehow never feel 
 this to be an affectation in Stevenson, or dislike it as 
 I should have been apt to dislike and perhaps despise 
 it in anybody else. We agree to give the name of affec- 
 
108 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 tation to anything markedly different from common 
 usage in little, every-day outward things — unconcerning 
 things, as the poet Donne calls them. But affectation 
 is affectation indeed only when a person does or says that 
 which is false to his or her nature. And given a nature 
 differing sufficiently from the average, perhaps the 
 real affectation would be that it should force itself to 
 preserve an average outside to the world. Steven- 
 son's uncut hair came originally from the fear of 
 catching cold. His shabby clothes came partly from 
 lack of cash, partly from lack of care, partly, as I 
 think I have said elsewhere, from a hankering after 
 social experiment and adventure, and a dislike of being 
 identified with any special class or caste. Certainly 
 conventional and respectable attire, when by exception 
 he wore it, did not in those days sit him well. Going 
 with me one day from Hampstead to the Royal 
 Academy Exhibition, he thought such attire would be 
 expected of him, and looked out a black frock coat and 
 tall hat which he had once worn at a wedding. I can 
 see now the odd figure he made as he walked with me 
 in that unwonted garb down Regent Street and along 
 Piccadilly. True, he carried his tall hat not on his 
 head, but in his hand because it chafed him. Also, 
 being fresh from an enthusiastic study of the prosody 
 of Milton, he kept declaiming to me with rapturous 
 comments as we walked the lines and cadences which 
 chiefly haunted him : — 
 
 " His wrath 
 Burned after them to the bottomless pit." 
 "Like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved — " 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 109 
 
 "All night the dreadless angel, unpursued — " 
 " Oh ! how comely it is and how reviving 
 To the spirits of just men long opprest ! " 
 
 It was while he declaimed these last two lines, the 
 opening of a famous chorus in Samson Agonistes, that 
 the gates of Burlington House, I remember, enfolded 
 us. 
 
 More characteristic of his ordinary ways was his 
 appearance one very early morning from London at 
 the Norwood cottage. He presented himself to my 
 astonished servant, on her opening the shutters, 
 wearing a worn-out sleeved waistcoat over a black 
 flannel shirt, and weary and dirty from a night's walking 
 followed by a couple of hours' slumber in a garden 
 outhouse he had found open. He had spent the night 
 on the pad through the southern slums and suburbs, 
 trying to arouse the suspicions of one policeman after 
 another till he should succeed in getting taken up as 
 a rogue and vagabond and thereby gaining proof 
 for his fixed belief that justice, at least in the hands 
 of its subordinate officers, has one pair of scales for 
 the ragged and another for the respectable. But one 
 and all saw through him, and refused to take him 
 seriously as a member of the criminal classes. Though 
 surprised at their penetration, and rather crestfallen 
 at the failure of his attempt, he had had his reward 
 in a number of friendly and entertaining conversations 
 with the members of the force, ending generally in 
 confidential disclosures as to their private affairs and 
 feelings. 
 
 Foreign officials and police, not to speak of attaches 
 
110 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and bank clerks and managers, were not so clear-sighted, 
 and he sometimes came in for worse treatment than 
 he bargained for. Readers remember, I dare say, his 
 account of his expulsion by the hostess of La Fere in 
 the Inland Voyage, still more that of his arrest and 
 temporary imprisonment by the Commissary of Police 
 at Chatillon-sur-Loing, which is one of the most 
 delectable pieces of humorous narrative in English 
 literature. Troubles of this kind had their consolation 
 in that they gave him matter for the entertainment of 
 his readers. Not so the rebuffs he sometimes under- 
 went when he visited embassies or banks on business, 
 concerned with passports or letters of credit. I have 
 known him made actually ill by futile anger at the 
 contumelious reception he met with in such places. 
 He lacked the power, which comes only too naturally 
 from most men sprung, as he was, from a stock accus- 
 tomed to command, of putting down insolence by 
 greater insolence. He could rage, indeed, but usually 
 his rage was ineffectual and only brought a dangerous 
 rush of blood to his head and eyes. Once, however, 
 he had his revenge and his hour of triumph, of which 
 to my deep regret I was not myself a witness. On 
 the way from Nice to Royat he had stopped at Cler- 
 mont-Ferrand, the old provincial capital of Auvergne. 
 He went to a bank to cash some circular notes of the 
 British Linen Company in Edinburgh. His appear- 
 ance had the usual, almost magical, effect of arousing 
 in the business mind suspicions, amounting to conviction, 
 of his dishonesty. The men in office roundly told 
 him that there was no such firm among their corre- 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 111 
 
 spondents ; that they more than suspected him of 
 having come with intent to defraud, but as an act 
 of kindness would give him five minutes to make 
 himself scarce before they sent for the police. For 
 once he kept his head and temper, outwardly at least ; 
 sturdily declined to leave the premises ; and insisted 
 that the police should be sent for immediately. Pre- 
 sently his eye was caught by a rack of pigeon-holes 
 containing letters and documents which by some intui- 
 tion he saw or divined to be from foreign correspondents 
 of the firm ; dashed at it despite all remonstrances ; 
 rummaged the papers before the eyes of the astonished 
 clerks ; drew forth in triumph a bundle containing 
 correspondence from the British Linen Company, 
 including the letter of credit for himself ; demanded 
 that the partners and men in authority should be 
 brought down, and when they appeared, exposed to 
 them with a torrent of scornful eloquence their mis- 
 conduct of their business, and drew a terrifying picture 
 of the ruin that they must inevitably reap from such 
 treatment of distinguished foreign clients. His triumph 
 was complete : the whole house, partners and clerks, 
 abased themselves in regrets and apologies, and es- 
 corted him to the door with fawning demonstrations 
 of respect. This was his day of victory ; strages 
 bankerorum he called it, and went off and at once 
 designed a medal — never, I believe, executed — in its 
 c ommemorat ion. 
 
 But this story belongs to a later date ; and to go 
 back to my own memories of the early days — I went 
 twice to see him during that invalid winter on the 
 
112 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Riviera. He had been staying at Mentone (I should 
 properly say Menton, but those of us who remember 
 the place before the annexation of Savoy and Nice 
 to France cannot bring ourselves to spell or pronounce 
 it except in the more euphonious Italian manner). 
 I proposed that he should move to meet me as far 
 (some six miles) as Monaco ; the aspect of that tiny 
 capital, with the exquisite capricious charm of its 
 situation on a high peninsular rock between the harbour 
 and the outer sea, having strongly caught my fancy 
 as a boy in driving along the Corniche road with my 
 father, and made me desire to explore it from within. 
 There we accordingly spent four or five days, and 
 then four or five more in one of the quieter hotels at 
 Monte Carlo. My memories of the time have merged 
 for the most part into a generalized impression of 
 sunlit hours spent basking in a row-boat about the 
 bay, and sped by endless talk which ran forward 
 beyond the present days of illness to ardent schemes 
 both of literature and adventure, the one as vividly 
 imagined and worded as the other. Stevenson has 
 brought home to the senses of his readers, by a magical 
 phrase or two, the pungently delicious mingled scent 
 of pine and juniper and myrtle and rosemary which 
 in sunny weather comes wafted from the Cap Martin 
 over the shoreward waters of that sea : he revelled 
 in this scent, and I believe it was already carrying him 
 in imagination on voyages to far-off spice-islands of 
 the East. Of the literary projects broached between 
 us the only one I remember was a spectacle-play on 
 that transcendent type of human vanity, Herostratus, 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 113 
 
 who to keep his name from being forgotten kindled 
 the fire that burned down the temple of Ephesus. 
 Psychology and scenic effects as Stevenson descanted 
 on them come up together in my memory even yet, 
 not in any exactness of detail, but only in a kind of 
 vague dazzle and flamboyance. 
 
 There was one sort of excitement and one form of 
 risk which at no time had any lure for Louis and which 
 he hated alike by instinct and principle, and that was 
 gambling for money ; and into that famous and 
 fascinating cosmopolitan hell, the Casino of Monte 
 Carlo, he never entered. Once or twice I looked in 
 by myself to watch the play ; and the last time, hearing 
 a sudden sharp " ping " from near the wall of the 
 room over my right shoulder, I turned and saw that 
 a loser having left the table lay writhing on the floor. 
 He had shot himself, fatally as I afterwards learnt, 
 in the stomach. The attendants promptly came 
 forward, lifted him on to an armchair, and carried 
 him out of the room with an air of grave disapproval 
 and shocked decorum. When I told Louis of the 
 scene he took a disgust at the place, and we left it 
 together for Mentone. After I had seen him installed 
 in fresh and comfortable quarters in the Hotel Mirabeau, 
 now defunct, at the eastern end of the town, I left for 
 Paris, where I had a few weeks' work to do. Returning 
 in January, I found him enjoying the company of 
 two Russian sisters living in a villa annexed to the 
 hotel, ladies some twenty years older than himself, 
 to whom and to their children he had become quickly 
 and warmly attached. I say their children, for we 
 
114 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 never could well make out which child belonged to 
 which sister, or whether one of the two was not the 
 mother of them both. Both were brilliantly accom- 
 plished and cultivated women, one having all the 
 unblushing outspokenness of her race, its unchecked 
 vehemence and mutability in mirth and anger, in 
 scorn, attachment, or aversion ; the other much of 
 an invalid, consistently gentle and sympathetic, and 
 withal an exquisite musician. For Stevenson this 
 sister conceived a great quasi-maternal tenderness, 
 and one of the odd tricks my memory has played me 
 is that my nerves retain even now the sense of her 
 sharp twitch of pain as I spoke one day, while she 
 was walking with her arm in mine, of the fears enter- 
 tained by his friends for his health and future. It 
 was the younger of the two children who figures so 
 much under her name Nelitchka in his letters of the 
 time. Hardly any one has written of young children 
 with such yearning inwardness of love combined with 
 so much analytic intentness and subtlety of observation 
 as he. But how, the reader may interrupt, how about 
 the illustrious Victor Hugo with his L-Art d'etre 
 grand-pere and his Les Enfants ? The comparison 
 indeed sounds crushing ; but perhaps Hugo's work 
 in this kind, full of genius as it is, full of insight 
 and tenderness, would impress more if there were 
 not so overwhelmingly much of it, if it did not burden 
 us with a sense of almost mechanical abundance and 
 redundance and iteration. The small objects of Steven- 
 son's passionately delighted study were not always 
 at first won or attracted by him. Rather they were 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 115 
 
 apt to feel discomposed under the intensity of the 
 beaming gaze he fastened upon them; and it was 
 with a touch of womanly affront at feeling herself 
 too hard stared at that the baby Nelitchka (aged 
 two and a half) addressed him by a word for "rogue" 
 or " naughty man " she had lately picked up in Italy, 
 " Berecchino ! " Parental interposition presently 
 reconciled her, and they became fast friends and play- 
 mates ; but the name stuck, and for Nellie, throughout 
 those weeks when the child's company and the watching 
 of her indefatigable tottering efforts to dance, and 
 dance, and dance to her mother's music were among 
 his chief delights — for Nellie, Stevenson was never 
 anything but Monsieur Berecchino. But of this more 
 anon. 
 
 Another memory of the time illustrates the hopeless 
 incompatibility that existed between this young genius 
 and the more frozen types of bourgeois convention- 
 ality. There was at our hotel a young or youngish, 
 well-groomed Frenchman of this class, the quintessence 
 of respectable nullity and complacent correctness, 
 who sat at the same long table with us for some weeks. 
 At our end of the table, besides Stevenson and myself 
 with the Russian ladies and their children, there sat 
 also a bearded French landscape painter, Kobinet by 
 name, in opinions a violent clerical and reactionary, 
 but an artist and the best of genial good fellows. Day 
 after day Stevenson kept this little company in an 
 enchanted atmosphere of mirth and mutual delight 
 with one another and with him. But the glow which 
 enkindled the rest of us stopped dead short of the 
 
116 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 correct Frenchman, who sat a little apart, icily isolated, 
 annoyed, envying, disapproving. Stevenson, I think, 
 was hardly aware of his existence at all, more than 
 of a wooden dummy. R. L. S. was drawing more or 
 less consciously from himself when he wrote of one 
 of his characters, Dick Naseby in The Story of a 
 Lie — He was a type-hunter among mankind. He 
 despised small game and insignificant personalities, 
 whether in the shape of dukes or bagmen, letting them 
 go by like seaweed ; but show him a refined or powerful 
 face, let him hear a plangent or a penetrating voice, 
 fish for him with a living look in some one's eye, a 
 passionate gesture, a meaning or ambiguous smile, 
 and his mind was instantaneously awakened. Finding 
 himself thus left out in the cold, not rudely or on 
 purpose, for Stevenson was incapable of a conscious 
 rudeness, but nevertheless left out, from a company 
 which included obviously attractive ladies, my French- 
 man could not bear it. One day, on the occasion of 
 some commonplace civility I showed him, he confided 
 to me, with no breach of correct manners, the extreme 
 distaste and resentment he had conceived against my 
 friend, and even indicated that he would like to call 
 him out if he could find an excuse. There was nothing 
 to be done, no possible point of mutual contact or 
 understanding between them. I could but affably 
 suggest that he would be likely to find more sympathetic 
 company at another hotel ; and he took the hint. 
 
 The warm regard which sprang up in these Mentone 
 days between Stevenson and those two Russian sisters 
 led to a promise that in the next summer he should 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 117 
 
 pay them a visit in their own country. But circum- 
 stances made it impossible for him to fulfil the pro- 
 mise ; the intimacy of those winter months on the 
 Riviera had no sequel save a correspondence which 
 flagged after a few months and by and by failed 
 altogether ; and neither he nor I ever saw or heard 
 of either sister again. 
 
 To the same winter months on the French Riviera 
 belongs the first meeting of Stevenson with another 
 gifted Scotsman of letters, Andrew Lang, in those days 
 also threatened with lung trouble, who became his 
 friend and long outlived him. It seems indeed but 
 the other day that we had to mourn the loss from 
 among us of that kind, learned, whimsical, many- 
 faceted character — scholar, critic, poet, journalist, 
 f olk-lorist, humanist, and humorist ; and in the mind's 
 eye of many of us there still lives freshly the aspect of 
 the half-silvered hair setting off the all but black eye- 
 brows and gipsy eyes ; of the chiselled features, the 
 smiling languid face and grace behind which there 
 lurked intellectual energies so keen and varied, accom- 
 plishments so high, so insatiable a spirit of curiosity 
 and research under a guise so airy and playful. A 
 fault, or flaw, or perversity in Lang, no doubt, was the 
 trick of flippancy which he allowed to spoil some of 
 his work and which masked altogether from some 
 eyes the fine substance and quality of the man. An- 
 other was the habitual preoccupation with his own 
 ideas which made his manner, to women especially, 
 often seem careless and abstracted, or even rude, when 
 rudeness was farthest from his intention. But towards 
 
118 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 his friends there was no man steadier in kindness or 
 more generous in appreciation, as I for one can testify 
 from more than forty years' experience, and as Steven- 
 son had full occasion to know. It was not without 
 some trepidation that I first brought them together 
 in those Mentone days, for I suppose no two young 
 Scots, especially no two sharing so many literary tastes, 
 were ever more unlike by temperament and training. 
 On the one hand the young Oxford don, a successful 
 and typical scholar on the regular academic lines, 
 picturesque by the gift of nature but fastidiously correct 
 and reserved, purely English in speech, with a recurring 
 falsetto note in the voice — that kind of falsetto that 
 bespeaks languor rather than vehemence ; full of 
 literature and pleasantry but on his guard, even to 
 affectation, against any show of emotion, and consist- 
 ently dissembling the perfervidum ingenium of his 
 race, if he had it, under a cloak of indifference and 
 light banter. On the other hand the brilliant, irregu- 
 larly educated lad from Edinburgh, to the conventional 
 eye an eccentrically ill-clad and long-haired nondescript, 
 with the rich Lallan accent on his tongue, the obvious 
 innate virility and spirit of adventure in him ever in 
 mutiny against the invalid habits imposed by ill-health, 
 the vivid, demonstrative ways, every impulse of his 
 heart and mind flashing out in the play of eye, feature, 
 and gesture no less than in the humorous riot and poeti- 
 cal abundance of his talk. There were symptoms 
 during, and even after, the first meeting of the two 
 which seemed as though the kind of misunderstanding 
 might spring up between them which I had feared; 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 119 
 
 but such an immediate result having been happily 
 averted they learned quickly to appreciate each other's 
 gifts and company, and remained fast friends to the 
 end. There are few finer tributes by one man of letters 
 to another, his contemporary, than that of Lang to 
 Stevenson in the introduction to the Swanston edition. 
 After his return from the Riviera in 1874 Stevenson 
 was elected to the Savile club, then quartered in the 
 house in Savile Row from which it takes its name 
 and which it afterwards outgrew. (It had pre- 
 viously led for a few years a precarious kind of chrysalis 
 existence, under the title of the New Club, in Spring 
 Gardens off Charing Cross.) This little society had 
 been founded on a principle aimed against the stand- 
 offishness customary in English club life, and all 
 members were expected to hold themselves predisposed 
 to talk and liable to accost without introduction. 
 Stevenson's earliest friends in the club besides myself 
 were Fleeming Jenkin, the most versatile and vivacious, 
 most pugnaciously minded and friendliest-hearted of 
 men, the single one among his Edinburgh seniors and 
 teachers who had seen what the lad was worth, truant 
 pupil though he might be, and made a friend of him ; 
 and my Cambridge contemporary, Professor W. K. 
 Clifford, that short-lived genius unequalled and unap- 
 proached, as those aver who can follow him, in the 
 rarefied region of speculation where the higher mathe- 
 matics and metaphysics merge into one. In spheres 
 of thought and study more accessible to the rest of us, 
 Clifford had a beautiful lucidity of mind and mastery 
 of style, and in ordinary human intercourse was 
 
120 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 extremely striking and attractive, with his powerful 
 head and blunt Socratic features, the candid, almost 
 childlike, upcast look of his light grey-blue eyes between 
 their dark lashes, the tripping and easy, again almost 
 childlike, simplicity of speech and manner with which 
 he would debate the profoundest problems, and the 
 quite childlike pleasure he took in all manner of 
 fun and nonsense and surprises and fairy-tales (I leave 
 out his freaks of prowess and daring as an athlete and 
 a dozen of his other claims to regard and admiration). 
 That such a man, having met Stevenson once or twice 
 in my company, should be keen to back him for the 
 club was a matter of course. Nor did the members 
 in general, being for the most part young men drawn 
 from the professions of science or learning, of art, 
 literature, journalism, or the stage, fail to appreciate 
 the new-comer. On his visits to London he generally 
 lunched there, and at the meal and afterwards came to 
 be accepted and habitually surrounded as a radiating 
 centre of good talk, a kind of ideal incarnation of the 
 spirit of the society. Comparatively rare as they were, 
 I believe that both his presences in those days and 
 his tradition subsequently contributed as much as 
 anything towards the success and prosperity of the 
 club. Mr. Edmund Gosse, who joined us a couple of 
 years later, has given a pleasantly vivid picture of the 
 days when an introduction at the Savile, renewing the 
 memory of a chance meeting on a Highland pleasure- 
 steamer six years before, laid the foundations of his 
 and Stevenson's friendship. One signal case of failure 
 remains indeed in some of our memories. A certain 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 121 
 
 newly elected member of some social and literary stand- 
 ing, but unacquainted with the spirit of the place, sat 
 lunching alone. Stevenson, desiring to welcome him 
 and make him feel at home, went over and opened talk 
 in his most gracious manner. His advance was received 
 with a cold rebuff and the implied intimation that 
 the stranger desired no company but his own. Steven- 
 son came away furious, and presently relieved his 
 wrath with the lampoon which is included in his pub- 
 lished works and begins (the offender being made to 
 speak in the first person) : — 
 
 " I am a kind of farthing dip 
 Unfriendly to the nose and eyes." 
 
 But to turn from such social memories, which will 
 be shared by a dwindling band of survivors from the 
 middle and later seventies, to those private to myself : 
 — it was in the early summer of 1874, soon after the 
 appearance of his second published paper, Ordered 
 South, that he spent a fortnight with me in my quarters 
 on Hampstead Hill. One morning, while I was 
 attending to my own affairs, I was aware of Stevenson 
 craning intently out of a side window and watching 
 something. Presently he turned with a radiant coun- 
 tenance and the thrill of happiness in his voice to 
 bid me come and watch too. A group of girl children 
 were playing with the skipping-rope a few yards down 
 the lane. " Was there ever such heavenly sport ? 
 Had I ever seen anything so beautiful ? Kids and a 
 skipping-rope — most of all that blessed youngest kid 
 with the broken nose who didn't know how to skip 
 
122 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 — nothing in the whole wide world had ever made 
 him half so happy in his life before." Scarce any one 
 else would have given a second look or thought to 
 the little scene ; but while it lasted it held him thus 
 entranced in the eagerness of observation, and exclaim- 
 ing through all the gamut of superlatives. From such 
 superlatives, corresponding to the ardour and intensity 
 of his being, his talk at all times derived much of its 
 colour. During ill-health, had he a day or an hour 
 of respite, he would gleefully proclaim himself a balmy 
 being and a bird of Paradise. Did anything in life 
 or literature please him, it was for the moment inimit- 
 ably and incomparably the most splendid and wonder- 
 ful thing in the whole world, and he must absolutely 
 have you think so too — unless, indeed, you chose to 
 direct his sense of humour against his own exaggera- 
 tions, in which case he would generally receive your 
 criticism with ready assenting laughter. But not 
 quite always, if the current of feeling was too strong. 
 My wife reminds me of an incident in point, from the 
 youthful time when he used to make her the chief 
 confidante of his troubles and touchstone of his tastes. 
 One day he came to her with an early, I think the 
 earliest, volume of poems by Mr. Robert Bridges, the 
 present poet-laureate, in his hand ; declared here was 
 the most wonderful new genius, and enthusiastically 
 read out to her some of the contents in evidence ; till 
 becoming aware that they were being coolly received, 
 he leapt up crying, " My God ! I believe you don't 
 like them," and flung the book across the room and 
 himself out of the house in a paroxysm of disappoint- 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 123 
 
 ment — to return a few hours later and beg pardon 
 humbly for his misbehaviour. But for some time 
 afterwards, whenever he desired her judgment on 
 work of his own or others, he would begin by bargain- 
 ing : " You won't Bridges me this time, will you ? " 
 Sometimes, indeed, when he meant something stronger 
 even than usual, he would himself disarm the critic, 
 and at the same time heighten his effect, by employing a 
 figure not of exaggeration but of humorous diminution, 
 and would cover the intensity of his feeling by express- 
 ing it in some perfectly colourless, flat hack phrase. 
 You would propose something you knew he was red- 
 hot to do, and he would reply, his eyes flashing with 
 anticipation, " Well, yes, he could bring himself to 
 do that without a pang " : or he would describe the 
 horrors of a visit to the dentist or of a formal tea-party 
 (to one or two of which he was about this time lured), 
 by admitting that it hadn't been quite all his fancy 
 painted it ; which you knew meant a degree of tribula- 
 tion beyond superlatives. 
 
 Nothing proved to my mind Stevenson's true voca- 
 tion to literature, or encouraged me more to push him 
 under the notice of editors, than the way in which 
 he exercised from the first a firm artistic control over 
 his own temperament, suppressing his tendency to 
 exaggerations and superlatives and practising a deliber- 
 ate moderation of statement and lenity of style. This 
 was very apparent when the little scene outside our 
 lodging-house window, mingling in memory with the 
 pleasure he had lately experienced at Mentone in 
 watching the staggering evolutions of his Russian 
 
124 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 baby friend Nelitchka, suggested to him the essay, 
 " Notes on the Movements of Young Children," which 
 was printed in the Portfolio (then edited by Philip 
 Gilbert Hamerton) for the following August. The 
 little paper, which he did not think worth reprinting 
 in his life-time but is to be found in the posthumous 
 editions, seemed to me an extraordinarily promising 
 effort at analytic description half-humorous, half- 
 tender — and promising above all in as far as it proved 
 how well, while finding brilliantly effective expression 
 for the subtlety of vital observation which was one 
 part of his birthright, he could hold in check the 
 tendency to emotional stress and vehemence which 
 was another. This was in itself a kind of distinction 
 in an age when so many of our prose-writers, and those 
 the most attractive and impressive to youth, as Carlyle, 
 Macaulay, Ruskin, Dickens, were men who, for all 
 their genius, lacked or did not seek the special virtues 
 of restraint and lenity of style, but were given, each 
 after his manner, to strenuous emphasis, to splendid 
 over-colouring and over-heightening : dealers in the 
 purple patch and the insistent phrase, the vehement 
 and contentious assertion. 
 
 The next scene which comes up with a special vivid- 
 ness in my memory dates, I think, from a year or 
 two later. Of very young children his love was not, 
 as I have said, always at once returned by them ; 
 but over growing boys of whatever class or breeding 
 his spell was apt to be instantaneous. City arabs 
 felt it just as much as any others. One day, as he 
 and I had just come out from a meditative stroll 
 
KOBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 125 
 
 through St. Paul's Cathedral, we found ourselves near 
 a little ragged troop of such. With one of his char- 
 acteristic smiles, full of love and mischief, he imme- 
 diately, at a first glance, seemed to establish a roguish 
 understanding with them. They grinned back and 
 closed about him and clung to him as we walked, fasten- 
 ing eager looks on his, held and drawn by they knew 
 not what expectation : no, not by the hope of coppers, 
 but by something more human — more divine, if you 
 like to put it so — that had beamed upon their poor 
 little souls from his looks. The small crowd of them 
 kept growing and still surrounding us. As it was 
 impossible for him at that place and moment practically 
 to provide adventure or entertainment for them, it 
 became a little difficult to know what to do. At last 
 I solved the situation tamely, by calling a hansom 
 cab and carrying my friend off in it. More by token, 
 that same hansom horse, I remember, presently got 
 the bit between his teeth and bolted for some half a 
 mile along the Thames Embankment ; and while I 
 sat with stiffened knees and nerves on the stretch, 
 expecting a smash, I could see that Stevenson actually 
 enjoyed it. Few of us, chiefly because the build of 
 the vehicle kept the driver's hands and hold upon the 
 reins out of sight, were ever truly happy in a bolting 
 hansom ; but Stevenson was so made that any kind 
 of danger was a positive physical exhilaration to him. 
 Of the visits which he paid to me at Cambridge 
 in these years, the retrospect has again generalized 
 itself for the most part into vagueness, a mere abstract 
 sense of forgotten talk ranging from the most red- 
 
126 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 blooded human to the airiest elfin. One impression 
 which was always strong upon him there, and I think 
 is recorded somewhere in his letters, is the profound 
 difference between these English universities, with their 
 beauty and dignity of aspect, their venerable college 
 buildings and fair avenues and gardens, and anything 
 which exists in Scotland, where residential colleges 
 form no part of university life. Such surroundings 
 used to affect him with a sense almost of unreality, 
 as something romantically pleasurable but hardly 
 credible ; and this sense came most strongly upon 
 him when I left him alone for some days in occupation 
 of my rooms, with gyps and porters at his beck, while 
 I went off on business elsewhere. Of personal rela- 
 tions which he formed there the only one I specially 
 remember was with that interesting character, the 
 late A. G. Dew-Smith. Dew-Smith, or Dew, as his 
 friends called him for short, was a man of fine tastes 
 and of means to gratify them. As a resident master of 
 arts he helped the natural science departments by 
 starting and superintending a workshop for manufac- 
 turing instruments of research of the most perfect 
 make and finish ; and he was one of the most skilful 
 of photographers, alike in the scientific and artistic uses 
 of the craft — a certain large-scale carbon print he took 
 of Stevenson to my mind comes nearer to the original 
 in richness of character and expression than any other 
 portrait. He was a collector of rare prints and other 
 treasures, including precious stones, of which in their 
 uncut state he would sometimes pull a handful out 
 of his pocket to show us. He was tall, with finely 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 127 
 
 cut features, black silky hair and neatly pointed beard, 
 and withal a peculiarly soft and silken, deliberate 
 manner of speech. Considerable were our surprise and 
 amusement when some dozen years later we found his 
 outward looks and bearing, and particularly his 
 characteristic turns of speech, with something of 
 dangerous power which his presence suggested as 
 lying behind so much polished blandness, evoked and 
 idealized by Stevenson in his creation of the personage 
 of Attwater in that grimmest of island stories, The 
 Ebb Tide. In telling anything of special interest 
 that had happened to himself, Dew-Smith had a trick 
 of avoiding the first person singular, and instead of 
 saying " I did " or "I felt " so and so would say 
 abstractly in the third, " one did " or " one felt." 
 This scrupulous manner of non-egotism, I remember, 
 came with specially odd effect when one day he was 
 telling us how an official at a railway station had been 
 offensively rude to him. " What did you do ? " he 
 was asked, and replied in a deprecating voice, " Well, 
 you know, one had to put him through the door- 
 panels." It is this aspect of Dew-Smith's character 
 which no doubt suggested, although it did not really 
 much resemble, the ruthless task-master, the man of 
 stern Calvinistic doctrine and iron fatalism, who is 
 the other half of Stevenson's Attwater. 
 
 Stevenson has interpreted the aspects and the thrill 
 of out-door nature as magically as anyone in written 
 words, but was not prone to talk about them. " No 
 human being ever spoke of scenery for above two 
 minutes at a time," he declares in his essay on Talk 
 
128 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and Talkers ; and I cannot remember that he used 
 ever to say much about the forest of Fontainebleau 
 or the other scenes in France which he loved so well 
 and frequented so much in these years, or even about 
 those excursions which he was busy turning to such 
 happy literary account in An Inland Voyage and 
 Travels with a Donkey. Literature and human 
 life were ever his main themes ; including sometimes, 
 but of course with his closest intimates only, the 
 problems of his own life. By and by such intimates 
 became aware that these problems had taken on a 
 new and what might easily have turned into a tragical 
 complexity. He had been for some time in the habit 
 of frequenting the artist haunts of the Fontainebleau 
 forest in the company of his cousin Bob Stevenson, 
 for the sake of health and ease of mind and of the 
 open-air life and congenial irresponsible company he 
 found there. In those haunts it presently became 
 apparent he had met his fate. To escape from hope- 
 less conjugal troubles, a Mrs. Strong from California, 
 we learnt, had come and for the time being settled 
 there with her daughter and young son. She was 
 some dozen years older than Stevenson, but fate had 
 destined them for each other, and their momentary 
 mutual attraction soon settled — for each was as far as 
 possible from being a light-o'-love — into the unbreak- 
 able bond of a life-time. After a while the lady had to 
 return to California, and there sought and was able to 
 obtain freedom by divorce. Stevenson had promptly 
 followed her, saying nothing of his intention to his 
 parents, who he knew would disapprove it, and trusting 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 129 
 
 wholly to the meagre resources he was in those days 
 able to command by his pen. Then followed for those 
 of us who loved him and were in the secret a period of 
 sore anxiety. There reached us from time to time 
 scanty news of his discomforts undergone in the 
 emigrant ship and train, and of his dangerous and 
 complicated illnesses afterwards, and evidences withal 
 of his indomitable will and courage in the shape of 
 new tales and essays composed for his livelihood in 
 circumstances under which any less resolute spirit 
 must have sunk. Reconciled with his parents after 
 a while by the fact of his marriage, he brought his 
 wife home to them in the late summer of 1880. She 
 made an immediate conquest of them, especially of 
 that character so richly compounded between the 
 stubborn and the tender, the humorous and the grim, 
 his father. Thenceforth there was always at Louis's 
 side a wife for his friends to hold only second in affec- 
 tion to himself. A separate biography of her by her 
 sister has lately appeared, giving, along with many 
 interesting details of her early life, a picture of her on 
 the whole softer and less striking than that which I 
 personally retain. Strength and staunchness were, as 
 I saw her, her ruling qualities ; strength and staunch- 
 ness not indeed masculine in their kind, but truly 
 womanly. Against those of his friends who might 
 forget or ignore the precautions which his health de- 
 manded she could be a dragon indeed ; but the more 
 considerate among them she made warmly her own 
 and was ever ready to welcome. Deep and rich 
 capacities were in her, alike for tragedy and humour ; 
 
130 MEMORIES A1STD NOTES 
 
 all her moods, thoughts, and instincts were vividly- 
 genuine and her own, and her daily talk, like her 
 letters, was admirable both for play of character and 
 feeling and for choice and colour of words. On those 
 who knew the pair first after their marriage her person- 
 ality impressed itself almost as vividly as his ; and 
 in my own mind his image lives scarce more indelibly 
 than that of the small, dark-complexioned, eager, 
 devoted woman his mate. In spite of her squareish 
 build she was supple and elastic in all her movements ; 
 her hands and feet were small and beautifully modelled, 
 though not meant for, or used to, idleness ; the head, 
 under its crop of close-waving thick black hair, was 
 of a build and character that somehow suggested 
 Napoleon, by the firm setting of the jaw and the beauti- 
 fully precise and delicate modelling of the nose and 
 lips : the eyes were full of sex and mystery as they 
 changed from fire or fun to gloom or tenderness; 
 and it was from between a fine pearly set of small teeth 
 that there came the clear metallic accents of her in- 
 tensely human and often quaintly individual speech. 
 The journey to California, with its risks and hard- 
 ships, had had results as damaging to Stevenson's 
 health as they were needful and fruitful for his happi- 
 ness. After his return in the late summer of 1880 
 it was under much more positively invalid conditions 
 than before that his friends found themselves obliged 
 to seek his company. My chief special recollections 
 of him during the next few years date almost entirely 
 from places where he had gone in hopes of recovery or 
 respite from his complicated and crippling troubles 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 131 
 
 of nerve, artery and lung. Just as little as the restric- 
 tions of the sick-room, galling to him above all men, 
 had power to hinder his industry and success as a 
 writer, so little did they impair his charm as a talker 
 when he was allowed to talk at all. Occasionally, 
 and oftener as time went on, hemorrhages from the 
 lung, or the immediate threat of them, enforced upon 
 him periods of absolute silence, during which he could 
 only communicate on paper with those about him, 
 writing with blotting-pad against his knees as he lay 
 in his red flannel dressing-gown propped against 
 pillows in his bed. But in the intervals of respite his 
 friends had the happiness of finding life and letters 
 and art, experience and the possibilities of experience, 
 once more irradiated for them as vividly as before, or 
 even more vividly yet, in the glow and magic of his 
 conversation. 
 
 For the first two years after his return Stevenson 
 spent the winters (1880-81, 1881-82) at the Swiss 
 mountain station of Davos, which had just begun to 
 come into repute as a place of cure, and the summers at 
 one resort or another in the bracing climate of the 
 Scottish Highlands. The Davos of 1880, approached 
 by a laborious seven hours' sledge-drive and vastly 
 different from the luxurious and expanded Davos of 
 to-day, consisted of the old Swiss village of Davos-Platz, 
 clustered round its high-spired church, with one central 
 group of German hotels in or close adjoining the village, 
 and another smaller but more scattered group of English 
 hotels at a little distance beside the open road in the 
 direction of the minor village of Davos-Dorf. The 
 
132 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Stevenson quarters for this first winter were at the 
 Hotel Belvedere, then a mere miniature nucleus of its 
 latter-day self. I shall never forget his first reception 
 of me there. It was about Christmas, 1880 ; I arrived 
 late ; and the moment dinner was over he had me 
 out and up a short hill at the back of the hotel. There 
 had only lately fallen enough snow to allow the sport 
 of tobogganing to be started : there was a steep 
 zigzag run down from a hut on the hill to near the 
 hotel : he got me into the toboggan by moonlight, we 
 started down the run, capsized at a corner, rolled over 
 and over with our mouths and pockets full of snow, 
 and walked home in tearing spirits. Nothing could 
 have been more like him, and nothing (of course) 
 much worse for him. My impression of the next few 
 weeks at Davos is one of high tension of the soul and 
 body in that tingling mountain air, under the iron 
 moonlit frosts or the mid-day dazzle of the snow- 
 fields ; of the haunting sense of tragedy (of one tragedy 
 in especial which touched us both to the heart) among 
 that company, for the most part doomed or stricken, 
 with faces tanned by sun and frost into masks belying 
 their real plight : of endless bouts of eager, ever courte- 
 ous give-and-take over the dark Valtellina wine between 
 Stevenson and John Addington Symonds, in whom 
 he had found a talker almost as charming as himself, 
 exceeding him by far in range and accuracy of know- 
 ledge and culture, as was to be expected in the author 
 of the History of the Renaissance in Italy, but nothing 
 like his match, I thought, in essential sanity of human 
 judgment or in the power of illumination by unfore- 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 133 
 
 seeable caprices of humour and fantasy. The reader 
 can if he pleases turn to Stevenson's own impression 
 of these conversations, whether as generalized after- 
 ward in the essay Talk and Talkers, where Symonds 
 figures as Opalstein, or as set down in a letter at the 
 time : — " I like Symonds very well, though he is much, 
 I think, of an invalid in mind and character. But his 
 mind is interesting, with many beautiful corners, and 
 his consumptive smile very winning to see. We have 
 had some good talks ; one went over Zola, Balzac, 
 Flaubert, Whitman, Christ, Handel, Milton, Sir Thomas 
 Browne ; do you see the liaison ? — in another, I, the 
 Bohnist, the un-Grecian, was the means of his conversion 
 in the matter of the A j ax. " It is interesting to compare 
 with these words Symonds's own retrospect on the 
 same days and talks written six years after Stevenson's 
 death : "I have never lived in Davos a better time 
 than I lived then ; it has been so full of innocent jollity 
 and beautiful Bohemianism, so sweetened by the 
 strong clear spirit of that unique sprite whom all the 
 world claims for its own now — R. L. Stevenson. . . . 
 So gracious and so pure a light has never fallen upon 
 my path as fell from his fantastic and yet intensely 
 human genius — the beautiful companionship of the 
 Shelley-like man, the eager, gifted wife, and the boy 
 for whom they both thought in all their ways and 
 hours." 
 
 Neither from the first of the two Highland summers 
 nor the second Alpine winter do I retain any impres- 
 sions as strong and definite as those I have last set 
 down, though I was with him for a part of both, and 
 
134 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 though the August and September weeks of 1881 at 
 Braemar were marked by the excitement of the first 
 conception and discussion of the tale of The Sea- 
 Cook, which afterward developed into Treasure Island. 
 They were remarkable also for the disgust of the 
 patient at being condemned to wear a specially con- 
 trived and hideous kind of pig's-snout respirator for 
 the inhalation of pine-oil, as related in a well known 
 rhyming letter of the time to Henley. But from the 
 second Highland summer dates another vivid recollec- 
 tion. While his wife remained with his parents at 
 Edinburgh, I spent two or three weeks of radiant 
 weather alone with him in the old hotel at Kingussie 
 in Inverness-shire. He had little strength either for 
 work or exercise but managed to draft the tale The 
 Treasure of Franchard, and rejoiced in lying out for 
 hours at a time half stripped in the sun, nearly accord- 
 ing to that manner of sun-bath since so much prescribed 
 by physicians in Germany. The burn or mountain 
 streamlet at the back of Kingussie village is for about 
 a mile of its course after it leaves the moor one of the 
 most varied and beautiful in Scotland, racing with a 
 hundred little falls and lynns beside the margin of an 
 enchanting fir-belted, green and dingled oval glade. 
 The glade, alas, has long ago been invaded and annexed 
 by golfers, enemies to peace ; and even the approaches 
 to the burn from the village have, I understand, been 
 ruined by the erection of a great modern distillery. 
 But in the year 1882 we had these haunts to ourselves. 
 Stevenson used to spend hours exploring the recesses 
 of the burn's course, musing, sometimes with and 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 135 
 
 sometimes without speech, on its endless chances and 
 caprices of eddy and ripple and back-set, its branchings 
 and reunitings, alternations of race and pool, bustle 
 and pause, and on the images of human life, free-will, 
 and destiny presented by the careers of the sticks 
 and leaves he found or launched upon its course. 
 One result of these musings occurs in a dramatic scene 
 familiar to all who have read his fragment, The 
 Great North Road. Of other talk what I remember 
 best is the entertainment with which he read for the 
 first time Leigh Hunt's milk-and-water dilution of 
 Dante in his poem Francesca da Rimini (or Nimini- 
 pimini as Byron re-christened it), and of the laughing 
 parodies which bubbled over from him on those passages 
 of tea-party sentiment and cockney bathos that disfigure 
 it. Some kind of play, too, I remember which he 
 insisted on starting and keeping up, and wherein he 
 invested his companion (that was me) with the imagin- 
 ary character of a roystering blade in a white greatcoat 
 and knobstick making scandal in the Highland village, 
 and himself with that of a sedate and friendly burgess 
 hard put to it to save me from the hands of the police. 
 The following winter took the Stevensons to the 
 Provencal coast, but to haunts there at some distance 
 from those he had known ten years ago. After some 
 unsuccessful attempts to settle near Marseilles (Steven- 
 son always loved the colour and character of that 
 mighty Mediterranean and cosmopolitan trading-port), 
 they were established by March, 1884, in the Chalet 
 la Solitude on the hill behind Hyeres ; and on that 
 charming site he enjoyed the best months of health 
 
136 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and happiness he ever knew, at least on the European 
 continent. His various expressions in prose and verse 
 of pleasure in his life there are well-known. For 
 instance, the following from a letter to Mr. Gosse : — 
 " This spot, our garden and our view, are sub-celestial. 
 I sing daily with my Bunyan, that great bard, 
 
 ' I dwell already the next door to Heaven ! ' 
 
 If you could see my roses, and my aloes, and my fig- 
 marigolds, and my olives, and my view over a plain, 
 and my view of certain mountains as graceful as Apollo, 
 as severe as Zeus, you would not think the phrase 
 exaggerated." One or two sets of verses dallying 
 with the notion that here might be his permanent home 
 and anchorage have only lately been published. I 
 give another set written in a somewhat homelier strain, 
 which I think has not yet found its way into print : — 
 
 My wife and I, in our romantic cot, 
 
 The world forgetting, by the world forgot, 
 
 High as the gods upon Olympus dwell, 
 
 Pleased with the things we have, and pleased as well 
 
 To wait in hope for those which we have not. 
 
 She burns in ardour for a horse to trot ; 
 I pledge my votive powers upon a yacht ; 
 Which shall be first remembered, who can tell — 
 My wife or I ? 
 
 Harvests of flowers o'er all our garden-plot 
 She dreams ; and I to enrich a darker spot, 
 My unprovided cellar ; both to swell 
 Our narrow cottage huge as a hotel, 
 That portly friends may come and share our lot — 
 My wife and I. 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 137 
 
 The first friend to come was one not physically 
 corresponding to the adjective, namely myself. It 
 was the moment when the Southern spring was in its 
 first flush and freshness, and the days and evenings 
 sped gloriously. Everything, down to the deche or 
 money pinch to which recent expenses had reduced 
 him, or the misdeeds of the black Skye-terrier Woggs, 
 the most engaging, petted, ill-conducted and cajoling 
 little thorough-bred rascal of his race, was turned by 
 Stevenson into a matter of abounding delight or diver- 
 sion. No schemes of work could for the time being 
 seem too many or too arduous. A flow of verse, more 
 continuous and varied than ever before, had set in 
 from him. Besides many occasional pieces expressing 
 intimate moods of the moment with little care or finish, 
 and never intended for any eye but his own, those of 
 the special Child's Garden series were nearly com- 
 pleted ; and they and their dedication, as in duty 
 bound, to his old nurse Alison Cunningham had to 
 be canvassed between us. So had a much more arduous 
 matter, the scheme and style of Prince Otto, its 
 general idea having gradually, under much discussion, 
 been evolved from an earlier one where the problems 
 and characters would have been similar but the setting 
 and date Oriental and remote. So had a scheme to 
 be put in hand next after that, namely, a new tale 
 for boys ; this time a historical tale, which duly took 
 shape as The Black Arrow, to be slighted later on, 
 quite unjustly as I have always thought, by its author 
 and his family as " tushery." 
 
 One day, looking from one of the hill terraces from 
 
138 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 near his house at the group of islets (the isles of Hyeres) 
 in the offing, we had let our talk wander to famous 
 and more distant archipelagoes of the same inland 
 sea. I spoke of the likeness in unlikeness which 
 strikes the traveller between the noble outlines and 
 colours of the Ionian group, as they rise facing the 
 coasts of Acarnania, Elis, and Epirus, and those of 
 the group of the Inner Hebrides over against the shores 
 of Ross and Argyleshire. We ran over the blunt 
 monosyllabic names of some of the Hebridean group — 
 Coll, Mull, Eigg, Rum, Muck, and Skye — and contrasted 
 them with the euphonious Greek sounds, Leucadia, 
 Cephalonia, Ithaca, Zante or Zacynthos (" Jam medio 
 apparet fluctu nemorosa Zacynthos " had for some 
 unaccountable reason been Stevenson's favourite line 
 of Virgil from boyhood, and he goes out of his way to 
 make occasion for one of his characters to quote it 
 in almost the latest of his sea-tales, The Ebb Tide). 
 And we speculated on a book to be written that should 
 try to strike the several notes of these two island regions, 
 of their scenery, inhabitants, and traditions, of Greek 
 and Gaelic lay and legend, and the elements of Homeric 
 and Ossianic poetry. I think the idea was no bad 
 one, and that perhaps such a book has still to be, and 
 will some day be, written. But Stevenson, with his 
 lack of Greek and of the Greek scholar's special 
 enthusiasm, and the unlikelihood of his being able to 
 work much in libraries, would perhaps hardly have 
 been the man to attempt it. Nevertheless, having 
 frequented the Hebrides group and drunk in its romance 
 from youth in the lighthouse yacht, and again on a 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 139 
 
 special excursion with Sir Walter Simpson in 1874, 
 he was much attracted by the scheme. And when 
 some eight months later, by what I believe was a pure 
 coincidence, he received a proposal from a firm of 
 publishers that he should take a cruise in the Greek 
 archipelago with a view to a volume that should tell 
 of his experiences in a manner something like that of 
 his former small volumes of travel in France, our talk 
 of the spring, recurring to him, made him take warmly 
 to the notion. He wrote to me at once on the question 
 of introductions, and went to Nice, partly to make 
 inquiries about Mediterranean steam-packets and 
 partly to ask medical advice. The latter confirmed, I 
 believe, what was the judgment of his wife that the 
 risks of the trip would be too great ; and the idea was 
 dropped. 
 
 In my next glimpse of him there were elements of 
 comedy. I had gone for a few weeks' travel in Southern 
 Italy, and meaning to return by sea and across France 
 from Naples, with a very short time to spare before 
 I was due back in London, had asked the Stevensons 
 if they would come and meet me for a day or so at 
 Marseilles. They came, and it was a happy meeting. 
 But I discovered that I had miscalculated travelling 
 expenses and had not enough cash in hand to finish 
 my homeward journey. He found himself in the proud 
 position of being able to help me, but only at the cost 
 of leaving his own pockets empty. He had to remain 
 in Marseilles until I could reimburse him from Paris, 
 and amused himself with some stanzas in honour of the 
 place and the occasion : — 
 
140 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 "Long time I lay in little ease 
 Where, paced by the Turanian, 
 Marseilles, the many-masted, sees 
 The blue Mediterranean. 
 
 Now songful in the hour of sport, 
 
 Now riotous for wages, 
 She camps around her ancient port, 
 
 An ancient of the ages. 
 
 Algerian airs through all the place 
 
 Unconquerably sally ; 
 Incomparable women pace 
 
 The shadows of the alley. 
 
 And high o'er dock and graving-yard 
 
 And where the sky is paler, 
 The Golden Virgin of the Guard 
 
 Shines, beckoning the sailor. 
 
 She hears the city roar on high, 
 Thief, prostitute, and banker : 
 
 She sees the masted vessels he 
 Immovably at anchor. 
 
 She sees the snowy islets dot 
 
 The sea's immortal azure, 
 And If, that castellated spot, 
 
 Tower, turret and embrazure. 
 
 Here Dantes pined ; and here to-day 
 
 Behold me his successor : 
 For here imprisoned long I lay 
 
 In pledge for a professor ! " * 
 
 * In the recent volume, " New Poems," this little piece has 
 unluckily been published with the misprints " placed " for " paced " 
 in the first stanza, " as " for " an " in the second, and " dark " 
 for " dock " in the fourth ; the last stanza, which gives the whole 
 its only point and raison d'etre, being left out. The allusions 
 concerning Dantes and the Chateau d'lf point, of course, to the 
 Monte Cristo of the elder Dumas. 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 141 
 
 Seven or eight months later a violent and all but 
 fatal return of illness dashed the high hopes which 
 had been raised by the happy Provencal spring and 
 summer. An epidemic of cholera following made him 
 leave the Mediterranean shore for good and sent him 
 home to England. He arrived to all appearance and 
 according to almost all medical prognostics a confirmed 
 and even hopeless invalid. His home for the next 
 three years was at Bournemouth. He was subject to 
 frequent haemorrhages from the lung, any of which 
 might have proved fatal and which had to be treated 
 with styptic remedies of the strongest and most nerve- 
 shaking kind. Much of his life was spent on the sofa, 
 much in that kind of compulsory silence which up 
 till now had at worst been only occasional. Now 
 and again a few weeks of respite enabled him to make 
 cautious excursions, once as far as Paris, once to 
 Matlock, once or more on my invitation to Cambridge, 
 but oftenest to London. Here his resort was not 
 to hotels, but as an ever-welcome guest to the official 
 house I had lately come to inhabit within the gates 
 of the British Museum. His industry, maintained 
 against harder conditions than ever, showed itself all 
 the more indomitable and at last had its reward. 
 The success of Treasure Island published before he 
 left Hyeres, was by the time he settled at Bourne- 
 mouth beginning to make his name a popular one. 
 Two and a half years later Jelcyll and Hyde raised 
 it suddenly into resounding fame, and was immedi- 
 ately followed by Kidnapped which was by common 
 consent acclaimed as the best Scotch tale since the 
 
142 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Waverleys. For part of the Bournemouth time he 
 was also much engaged in joint work with Henley 
 on the plays Admiral Guinea, Beau Austin, and 
 Macaire: and upon this, the lustiest and not always 
 the most considerate of guests and collaborators, Mrs. 
 Stevenson found herself compelled in the interest of 
 her husband's health to lay restrictions which were 
 resented, and sowed the first seeds, I think, of that 
 estrangement at heart of Henley from his friend so 
 lamentably proclaimed by him in public after Steven- 
 son's death. 
 
 Ill as he was in these years, Stevenson was able to 
 bind to himself in close friendship not a few new-comers, 
 including two eminent Americans, Henry James and 
 the painter J. S. Sargent. I went down myself from 
 time to time, and enjoyed his company not less, only 
 with more of anxiety and misgiving, than of old. 
 Sargent's little picture showing him indescribably 
 lean in his velvet jacket as he paces to and fro twirling 
 his moustache with one hand and holding his cigarette 
 in the other as he talks — St. Gaudens's bronze relief 
 of him propped on pillows on the sofa (the latter a 
 work done two or three years later in America) — these 
 tally pretty closely in their different ways with the 
 images I carry in my mind of his customary looks and 
 attitudes in those Bournemouth days. Always except 
 once I found him as cheerful as ever, and as vivid a 
 focus of cheerfulness. The sole exception remains 
 deeply printed on my memory. I had followed him 
 from the house into the garden ; he was leaning with 
 his back to me looking out from the garden gate ; as he 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 143 
 
 heard me approach, he turned round upon me a face 
 such as I never saw on him save that once — a face of 
 utter despondency, nay tragedy, upon which seemed 
 stamped for one concentrated moment the expression 
 of all he had ever had, or might yet have, in life to 
 suffer or to renounce. Such a countenance was not 
 to be accosted, and I left him. During his visits to 
 my house at the British Museum — " the many-pillared 
 and the well-beloved," as he calls it in the well-known 
 set of verses, as though the keepers' houses stood 
 within the great front colonnade of the museum, which 
 they do not, but project in advance of it on either flank 
 — during such visits he never showed anything but 
 the old charm and high courage and patience. He 
 was able to enjoy something of the company of famous 
 seniors who came seeking his acquaintance, as Browning, 
 Lowell, Burne-Jones. With such visitors I usually 
 left him alone, and have at any rate no detailed notes 
 or memories of conversations held by him with them 
 in my presence. What I remember most vividly was 
 how one day I came in from my work and found 
 the servants, who were devoted to him, waiting for 
 me in the hall with scared faces. He had had a worse 
 haemorrhage than usual, and lay propped on his pillows 
 in his red dressing-gown with pencil in hand and 
 foolscap paper against his knees. He greeted me with 
 finger on lip and a smile half humorous half ruefully 
 deprecating, as though in apology for being so trouble- 
 some a guest ; handing me at the same time a sheet 
 on which he had written the words from Falstaff, 
 " 'Tis my vocation, Hal." Then, with a changed 
 
144 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 look of expectant curiosity and adventure, he wrote, 
 "Do you think it will faucher me this time ? " (French 
 faucher, to mow down, to kill, make an end of.) I 
 forget how the conversation, spoken on my side, 
 written on his, went on. With his intimates and those 
 of his household he held many such, and it would have 
 been interesting to keep the sheets on which his side 
 of the talk, often illustrated with comic sketches, was 
 set down. So would it have been interesting to keep 
 another record of the same illness, namely the little 
 lumps or pats of modellers' wax which he asked me 
 to get for him and with which, when he could not talk, 
 read or write, he amused himself moulding tiny scenes 
 with figures and landscapes in relief. These were 
 technically childish, of course, but had always, like 
 the woodcuts done to amuse his stepson at Davos, a 
 touch of lively expressiveness and character. Some 
 dozens of them, I remember, he finished, but no vestige 
 of them remains. They were put into a drawer, dried, 
 cracked, and were thrown away. 
 
 My next vision of him is the last, and shows him 
 as he stood with his family looking down upon me 
 over the rail of the outward-bound steamship Lud- 
 gate Hill while I waved a parting hand to him from 
 a boat in the Thames by Tilbury Dock. From our 
 first meeting in Suffolk until his return with his wife 
 from California in 1880 had been one spell of seven 
 years. From that return until his fresh departure 
 in 1887 had been another. Now followed the winter 
 spent at Saranac Lake in the Adirondack mountains ; 
 the two years and odd months of cruising among the 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 145 
 
 various archipelagoes of the Pacific — the Marquesas, 
 the Paumotus, the Society Islands, the Sandwich 
 group, Samoa, the Gilberts again, the Marshalls. The 
 lure of the South Seas and the renewed capacity for 
 out-door life and adventure he found in himself during 
 these voyagings had gradually forced upon both 
 Stevenson and his wife the conclusion that there was 
 but one thing for him to do, and that was to settle 
 somewhere in the Pacific for good. He had written 
 as much to his friends in England, telling them at the 
 same time of the property he had bought in Samoa 
 and on which he proposed to build himself a home. 
 Several earlier letters which would have prepared us 
 for this news had miscarried, so that when the announce- 
 ment came it was a rude shock to those who loved 
 him and were looking forward eagerly to his return. 
 At Sydney, in August, 1890, he received our replies. 
 Mine was of a tenor which cut the warm hearts of 
 both the pair to the quick, although not serving to 
 deflect their purpose. In spite of the fine work he 
 had done during his voyages, I persuaded myself 
 that from living permanently in that outlandish 
 world and far from cultivated society both he and his 
 writing must deteriorate, and wrote warning him as 
 much in plain terms. Translating unconsciously my 
 own need and desire for his company into a persuasion 
 that mine was needed, as of old, for criticism and 
 suggestion to him in his work, and that he no longer 
 valued it, I wrote reproachfully, pleading against and 
 prophesying evil from his purpose. He and his wife 
 both set themselves then and there to justify their 
 
146 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 decision in letters of which, reverting to them now 
 after thirty years, I find the terms infinitely touching 
 and too sacred almost to quote. Referring to one of 
 his recent cruises, Stevenson says : — 
 
 We had a very delightful voyage for some part ; it would have 
 been delightful to the end had my health held out. That it did 
 not, I attribute to savage hard work in a wild cabin heated like 
 the Babylonian furnace, four plies of blotting-paper under my wet 
 hand and the drops trailing from my brow. For God's sake don't 
 start in to blame Fanny : often enough she besought me not to 
 go on : but I did my work while I was a bedridden worm in England, 
 and please God I shall do my work until I burst. I do not know 
 any other virtue that I possess ; and indeed there are few others 
 I prize alongside of it. Only, one other I have : I love my friends, 
 and I don't like to hear the most beloved of all casting doubt on 
 that affection. Did you not get the verses I sent you from Ape- 
 mama ? I guess they were not Al verses, but they expressed 
 something you surely could not doubt.* But perhaps all my 
 letters have miscarried ? A sorrow on correspondence ! If this 
 miscarry too ? See here : if by any chance this should come to 
 your hand, understand once and for all that since my dear wild 
 noble father died no head on earth is more precious to my thoughts 
 than yours. . . . But all this talk is useless. Know this, I love 
 you, and since I am speaking plainly for once, I bind it upon you 
 as a sacred duty, should you be dangerously ill, I must be sum- 
 moned. I will never forgive you if I am not. So long as there 
 is no danger, I do well, do I not ? — to consider conditions necessary 
 to my work and health. I have a charge of souls ; I keep many 
 eating and drinking ; my continued life has a value of its own ; 
 and I cannot but feel it. But I have to see you again. That is 
 sure. And — how strangely we are made ! — I see no harm in my 
 
 * These are the verses "To S. C." afterwards printed as No. 
 XXXVI in the volume Songs of Travel. In point of fact the 
 package containing them had for the time being failed to reach me. 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 147 
 
 dying like a burst pig upon some outlandish island, but if you 
 died, without due notice and a chance for me to see you, I should 
 count it a disloyalty. 
 
 Here Stevenson's hand has failed and his wife takes 
 up the letter, and in many urgent, not less affectionate 
 phrases continues to enforce his plea : — 
 
 Dear Custodian, — 
 
 I hardly dare use that word with the knowledge in my heart 
 that we intend to remove our bodily selves from out your custody> 
 but as you know it will be our vile bodies only ; spiritually we are 
 yours and always shall be. Neither time nor space can change us 
 in that. You told me when we left England if we found a place 
 where Louis was really well to stay there. It really seems that 
 anywhere in the South Seas will do. Ever since we have been here 
 we have been on the outlook for a spot that combines the most 
 advantages. In some way I preferred the Marquesas, the climate 
 being perfect and the natives people that I admired and loved. 
 The only suitable place on the Sandwich islands is at the foot of 
 a volcano where we should have to live upon black lava and trust 
 to rain for water. Besides I could not bear the white population. 
 All things considered, Samoa took our fancy the most ; there are 
 three opportunities each month to communicate with England by 
 telegraph from Auckland, Auckland being from seven to eight 
 days' steam distance from us. You could hardly believe your 
 own eyes if you could see Louis in his present state of almost rude 
 health, no cough, no haemorrhage, no night sweats. He rides 
 and walks as much as he likes without any fatigue, and in fact 
 lives the life of a man who is well. I tremble when I think of a 
 return to England. 
 
 He never returned to England, and a third spell 
 of seven years in his life had just been completed when 
 on one gloomy, gusty, sodden December day in 1894, 
 I came down from lunching with Sir Harry Johnston, 
 
148 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 the African traveller and administrator, in the upper 
 floor of a Government office in Westminster, and saw 
 newspaper posters flapping dankly in the street corners, 
 with the words " Death of R. L. Stevenson " printed 
 large upon them. The Pacific voyages and the island 
 life had, or seemed to have, effectually healed his 
 troubles of nerve, throat, and lung ; but the old 
 arterial weakness remained, and after so many years 
 of unsparing mental toil the bursting of a blood-vessel 
 in his brain had laid him low at the critical moment of 
 his fully ripening power. 
 
 During that third and last period the day-dreams 
 of the Mentone days had after all and in spite of all 
 and against all likelihood been realized for him. Fame 
 as a writer even beyond his aspirations had come to be 
 his. Of voyagings in far-off oceans, of happy out-door 
 activities and busy beneficent responsibilities in roman- 
 tic circumstances and outlandish scenes, he had had his 
 fill. Withal his love of his old friends had amid his 
 new experiences and successes never weakened. Of 
 this no one had ampler or more solid proofs than I. 
 That amidst all his other absorbing interests, and in 
 spite of his ever-growing passion and assiduity in 
 literary work, he should never once have failed in 
 sending off to me his regular full budget of a monthly 
 letter, either written with his own hand or dictated 
 to his step-daughter, would have been proof enough in 
 itself of such steadfastness. On the side of his friends 
 at home, speaking at least for myself, I fear that our 
 joy in the news of his returning strength and activity 
 had been tempered by something of latent jealousy 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 149 
 
 that so much good could befall him without help of 
 ours and at a distance of half the world away from us. 
 I know that I was inclined to be hypercritical about 
 the quality and value of some of the work sent home 
 from the Pacific. I thought the series of papers 
 afterwards arranged into the volume In the South 
 Seas overloaded with information and the results of 
 study, and disappointingly lacking in the thrill and 
 romance one expected of him in relating experiences 
 which had realized the dream of his youth. (I ought 
 to mention that a far better qualified judge, Mr. Joseph 
 Conrad, differs from me in this, and even prefers In 
 the South Seas to Treasure Island, principally for 
 the sake of what he regards as a very masterpiece 
 of native portraiture in the character of Tembinok, 
 King of Apemama.) 
 
 Again, I thought it a pity that Stevenson should 
 spend so much toil in setting out, in the volume A 
 Footnote to History, the details of certain complicated, 
 very remote and petty recent affairs in which none 
 except perhaps a few international diplomatists could 
 well be expected to take interest. Of his work in 
 fiction dealing with the islands, I thought most of 
 The Wrecker below his mark, and The Ebb Tide, 
 at least the first half of it, a comparatively dull and 
 rather brutal piece of realism. True, these were col- 
 laboration pieces ; and of island stories there was 
 The Beach of Falesd, and of Scottish tales Catriona, 
 which were all his own and of which the quality should 
 have fully re-assured one (the master-fragment Weir 
 of Hermiston was of course unknown to us till after 
 
150 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 his death). But thinking as I did, I said so in my letters 
 with the old frankness, causing him for once a shade 
 of displeasure : for he wrote to me that I was being 
 a little too Cockney with him, and to a common 
 friend that I was getting to be something of an auld 
 wife with my criticisms. Well, well, perhaps I was, 
 perhaps not. But at any rate I have proof in full 
 measure that his affection for and memory of me sur- 
 vived and underwent no change. One such proof, scarce 
 less surprising than endearing, came to me but the 
 other day, long after his death, in the shape of a bulky 
 packet sent to me by his representatives in America. 
 On opening the packet I found that it contained 
 almost the whole mass of my letters written to him 
 from the beginning of our friendship to the end. Con- 
 sidering the vagrant habits of his youth, his long dislike 
 of and detachment from all the ordinary impedimenta 
 of lif e, his frequent changes of abode even after marriage 
 and success had made of him a comparatively settled 
 and propertied man — considering these things, that 
 he should have cumbered himself by the preservation 
 of so bulky a correspondence was a thing to me natur- 
 ally undreamed of and when discovered infinitely 
 touching. As concerns my regard and regret for him, 
 — there has been hardly a day in the thirty and odd 
 years since he left us on which I, like others who loved 
 him, have not missed him. His cousin Bob Stevenson, 
 in some gifts and brilliancies almost his match, used 
 to vow that the chief interest of anything which 
 happened was to hear what Louis would say about it. 
 World-events in war and politics and mankind's 
 
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 151 
 
 material experiments and physical conquests in the 
 last few years have been too tremendous in themselves 
 for so much to be said of any man without absurdity. 
 But want him and long for him one does, to hear him 
 talk both of them and of a thousand lesser things : 
 most of all perhaps of those writers who have stepped 
 into fame since his time. If we could have him back 
 among us, as one sometimes has him in day-dreams, 
 how we, his old friends and comrades in letters — but 
 alas ! with what gaps among us, Henry James gone, 
 Andrew Lang gone, and so many others — how would 
 we make haste to gather about him : and when we 
 had had our turn, how eagerly would he look round for 
 the younger fellow-craftsmen, Sir James Barrie, Mr. 
 Kipling — not now indeed so young — whose promise 
 he had recognized and with whom in his last years he 
 had exchanged greetings across the ocean. Of those 
 who had not begun to publish before he died the man 
 I imagine him calling for first of all is the above- 
 mentioned Mr. Conrad. Some time about 1880-90 
 these two seafarers, the Polish gentleman turned 
 British merchant-skipper and the ocean-loving author 
 cruising far and wide in search of health, might quite 
 well have met in life, only that the archipelago of Mr. 
 Conrad's chief experiences was the Malay, that of 
 Stevenson's the Polynesian. Could my dream be 
 fulfilled, how they would delight in meeting now. 
 What endless ocean and island yarns the two would 
 exchange ; how happily they would debate the methods 
 and achievements of their common art ; and how 
 difficult it would be to part them ! As I let myself 
 
152 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 imagine such meeting, I know not which of the two 
 presences is the more real and near to me, yours, my 
 good friend Conrad, whom I hope and mean to greet 
 in the flesh to-morrow or the next day or the next, or 
 that of Stevenson, since my last sight of whom, as he 
 waved good-bye to me from the deck of the " Ludgate 
 Hill," I know as a fact of arithmetic, but can in no 
 other sense realize, that there has passed a spell of 
 no less than four-and-thirty years or the life-time of 
 a whole generation. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 
 
 Among the very few seniors of note or standing in 
 Edinburgh who had seen the promise that lay under 
 Stevenson's questionable, to some eyes merely rakish, 
 outside in youth were Fleeming Jenkin, the professor 
 of mechanical engineering, and his wife. The names 
 of these two are not so famous as most of those to 
 which I have a separate chapter in the present book. 
 But alike by gift and character they were a very 
 remarkable couple, each of them possessed of talents 
 which in their several ways fell barely short of genius. 
 Stevenson lived to repay the debt his youth had owed 
 to the kindness and insight of these friends by writing 
 a full biography of Jenkin, whom a chance blood- 
 poisoning carried off suddenly and prematurely, in 
 the mid exercise of unabated energies and the full 
 glow of anticipated achievement. His widow survived 
 him six and thirty years, dying but the other day and 
 reducing almost below computation the number of 
 those still living who can remember Stevenson in his 
 youth. 
 
 The story of Fleeming Jenkin's life may be quickly 
 told. He was born in 1833. By his father's side he 
 
 153 
 
154 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 came of a Welsh stock settled in Kent ; his mother, 
 born in Jamaica of Scottish parentage, was a lady of 
 talent and spirit, the author of novels which had a 
 reputation in their day, — Cousin Stella, Who Breaks 
 Pays, Two French Marriages, etc. Both these parents, 
 dying at an unusual old age within a few hours of 
 each other, our friend Fleeming had, when death 
 overtook him, but lately carried to their graves. 
 The experiences of his youth had been both varied 
 and vivid. He was at school first at Jedburgh, then 
 at Frankfort-on-the-Main, then in Paris, where he 
 was an eager witness of the scenes of revolution in 
 1848. Thence he went to the University of Genoa, 
 where he took a degree in 1850, and immediately 
 afterwards began the practical business of his life in an 
 engineer's workshop. One result of this cosmopolitan 
 training on his exact and retentive mind was a life- 
 long mastery, more thorough than that of most profess- 
 ing linguists, of the three chief European languages. 
 Returning to England at eighteen, Jenkin worked for 
 the next six years under several firms successively, 
 chiefly at railway enterprises in England and abroad ; 
 next for several years, in connection with Sir William 
 Thomson, at the manufacture, testing, and laying down 
 of several of the great submarine telegraph lines. There- 
 after he held, in English and European repute, a place 
 as one of the first, both theoretically and practically, 
 of living electrical engineers. In 1859 he had married 
 the daughter of Alfred Austin, Esq., C.B., a lady sharing 
 in full measure the gifts that have distinguished her 
 family. From 1861 to 1868 he carried on a business 
 
FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 155 
 
 of his own in London, and in the latter year was called 
 to the professorship of engineering at Edinburgh, 
 having for two years already filled a corresponding 
 chair at University College. At Edinburgh he con- 
 tinued to reside until his death : energetic and success- 
 ful in teaching, indefatigable in invention and in the 
 application of science to human necessities. For the 
 last two years a large part — unhappily too large — of 
 his energies was thrown into the working out of a 
 system he had invented of cheap electrical transport, 
 adapted especially for short distances and relatively 
 light freights. This system be called " Telpherage," 
 and believed ardently in its practical usefulness and 
 future commercial importance. Presumably the effec- 
 tual sagacity and foresight which had up till then 
 distinguished his professional career had in this instance 
 failed him, seeing that his invention, at least in the 
 form in which he conceived it, has not, I learn, taken 
 root. The anxiety and overwork involved in connec- 
 tion with it had somewhat shaken the ordinary robust- 
 ness of his health ; but he seemed to have quite recov- 
 ered, when a slight operation, for the remedy of a 
 mischief not alarming, brought on the illness which 
 snatched him suddenly from among us. 
 
 Of the main business of Jenkin's career as above 
 stated, as well as of his vigorous and fruitful initiative 
 in the matters of technical education, of the organiza- 
 tion of sanitary inspection and reform, and the like, 
 I speak with little understanding. But it was the 
 secondary labours — the -rrdpepya — of his life that 
 impressed those of his friends who, like myself, could 
 
156 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 only take other people's judgments on his main work, 
 with so strong a sense of the extraordinary vigour 
 and variety of his powers. You were always making 
 the discovery of some new attainment or proficiency 
 in him of which he would show no sign until the occasion 
 for it naturally arose. There was no discussion in 
 which he would not join, and no subject in which he 
 did not take an interest ; and such were his natural 
 keenness of apprehension, and integrity and acuteness 
 of judgment, that there seemed almost none on which 
 he was not able to throw light. Attention was called 
 not long after his death to the circumstance that out 
 of four elaborate studies on subjects not especially 
 his own, which he contributed to the North British 
 Review, three were highly valued, and their conclusions 
 cordially adopted, by the authors criticized, among 
 whom were such masters in divers fields as the great 
 naturalist Darwin and the great Latinist H. A. J. 
 Munro. Sir Henry Irving, I always understood, was 
 forward during Jenkin's lifetime to acknowledge the 
 value of his private and published criticisms on stage- 
 craft and the actor's art. The classical student who 
 turns to his review of Browning's Agamemnon and 
 Campbell's Trachinice in the Edinburgh Review for 
 1878 * will certainly not close it without a sense of added 
 insight into the spirit and conduct of the Greek drama. 
 On questions of art and literature this man of science 
 and of inventions was singularly well worth hearing, 
 though often one-sided and dogmatic. In art he valued 
 
 * Reprinted in Papers of Fleeming Jenkin (Longmans, 1887), 
 p. 3. 
 
FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 157 
 
 above all the spirit of classic grace and beauty, but was 
 sometimes taken in by its counterfeit. In imaginative 
 literature he cared first for the force and reality of 
 the human emotions expressed, next for the structure 
 and evolution of the fable, and little, comparatively, 
 for matters of form and style apart from these. 
 
 The variety and genuineness of Jenkin's intellectual 
 interests proceeded in truth from the keenness and 
 healthiness of his interest in life itself. Such keenness 
 shone visibly from his looks, which were not handsome 
 but in the highest degree animated, sparkling, and 
 engaging, the very warts on his countenance seeming 
 to heighten the vivacity of its expression. The 
 amount of his vital energy was extraordinary, and no 
 man ever took his own experience with more zest or 
 entered with a readier sympathy into that of others. 
 An honest blow he was always prepared to take, and 
 every honest pleasure he relished with delight. He 
 loved to do well all he did, and to take not only a part, 
 but a lead, in bodily and other pastimes, as shooting, 
 fishing, mountaineering, yachting, skating, dancing, 
 acting and the rest. But in conversation and human 
 intercourse lay perhaps his chief pleasure of all. His 
 manly and loyal nature was at all times equally ready 
 with a knock-down argument and a tear of sympathy. 
 Chivalrous and tender-hearted in the extreme in all 
 the real relations and probing circumstances of life, 
 he was too free himself from small or morbid suscep- 
 tibilities to be very sparing of them in others, and to 
 those who met and talked with him for the first time 
 might easily seem too trenchant in reply and too pertina- 
 
158 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 cious in discussion. But you soon found out that if 
 he was the most unflinching of critics and disputants, 
 he was also the most unfailing and ever serviceable 
 of friends. Moreover, to what pleased him in your 
 company or conversation he was instantly and attrac- 
 tively responsive. He would eagerly watch for and 
 pounce upon your remarks, and the futile or half- 
 sincere among them he would toss aside with a prompt 
 and wholesome contempt, his eye twinkling the while 
 between humour, kindness, and annoyance ; while on 
 others he would seize with gusto, and turn them 
 appreciatively over and inside out until he had made 
 the most of them. In my own intercourse with him, 
 no subject was more frequently discussed between 
 us than the social advantages and disadvantages of 
 scientific and mechanical discovery. I used to speak 
 with dislike of the ' progress ' and ' prosperity ' which 
 cause multitudes to teem in grimy alleys where before 
 a few had been scattered over wholesome fields, and 
 with apprehension of the possible results of his own 
 last invention on population and on scenery. He 
 would thereupon assail me as a puling sentimentalist : 
 I would retort on him as a materialist and Philistine. 
 In the course of discussion he would be forced to admit 
 that the multiplication and dissemination of the com- 
 moda vitce in the modern world was attended by the 
 loss of much in life and nature that appealed to the 
 imagination and the sense of beauty and romance. 
 But he would always fall back on his standing argument 
 that life, life under any even merely endurable condi- 
 tions of health, freedom, and order, was well worth 
 
FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 159 
 
 living ; and that the mere increase of human beings 
 capable of enjoying the rudimentary pleasures and 
 fulfilling the rudimentary duties of existence was 
 therefore a real and solid, even if not unmixed, good. 
 Did not his charity and buoyancy of temper lead him 
 here to err in judging others by himself ? If, indeed, 
 any large proportion of those multitudes could be like 
 him, in his untiring zest for life, for work, for truth, 
 for experience, for the exercise of all family and 
 human duties and benevolences, then indeed we could 
 with him agree and believe that all was for the best. 
 Be that as it may, his memory, as it abides with us 
 after there has passed away a whole generation since 
 his death, is more vivid and more inspiriting than are 
 the living presences of the thinner-blooded and 
 weaklier-souled majority of men. 
 
 His wife, as I have said, survived him until but 
 the other day. His intense, assiduous devotion to 
 her had been one of the qualities which had most 
 endeared him to his friends. She came of a notable 
 legal family, the Austins of Creeting Mill in Suffolk. 
 The eldest of the three distinguished Austin brothers, 
 John, gained world-wide fame as a philosophical 
 jurist, and with his wife, one of the Norwich Taylors, 
 was for many years the centre of the most brilliant 
 legal society in London : that enchanting character, 
 Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, was their only child. After 
 his early youth Suffolk knew John Austin no more. 
 Charles, on the other hand, the second brother, who 
 had been a contemporary at Cambridge of Macaulay 
 and Cockburn, and one of the most dazzling of the 
 
160 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 brilliant group to which they belonged, after rapidly 
 making an unheard-of fortune at the Parliamentary 
 bar, retired early with broken health to his native 
 county and lived there a life of lettered leisure, under- 
 taking no duty except that of chairman of quarter 
 sessions : my father knew him in that capacity as a 
 matter of course, but not intimately, and taught me 
 to recognize him, but no more, when we met him 
 driving about the countryside. The third brother, 
 Alfred Austin, also a lawyer, was a man of less shining 
 but nevertheless quite effectual gifts, and after a 
 succession of public services became permanent Secre- 
 tary of the Office of Works. His wife belonged to the 
 highly cultivated Norwich stock of the Barrons. 
 Mrs. Fleeming Jenkin was the daughter of this couple, 
 and in mind as in character inherited both the powers 
 and the standards of the distinguished breeds front 
 which she sprang. Her own special gift was for acting 
 and recitation. It was only privately exercised, but 
 those of us who had the privilege of seeing and hearing 
 her will never forget the experience. Her features 
 were not beautiful, but had a signal range and thrilling 
 power of expression. In tragic and poetic parts, 
 especially in those translated or adapted from the 
 Greek, she showed what, as I have already hinted, 
 must needs, had it been publicly displayed, have been 
 recognized as genius. To hear her declaim dramatic 
 verse was to enjoy that art in its very perfection. And 
 her gift of dramatic gesture was not less striking. 
 Recalling her, for instance, in the part of Cly temnestra, 
 I can vouch for having seen on no stage anything of 
 
FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 161 
 
 greater — on the English stage nothing of equal — power 
 and distinction. Besides these and other figures of 
 Greek tragedy, Mrs. Jenkin showed the versatility of 
 her gift by playing with power and success such 
 contrasted Shakespeare parts as Cleopatra, Katherine 
 the shrew, Viola, Mrs. Ford, as well as, in other fields 
 of drama, Griselda, Peg Woffigton, and Mrs. Mala- 
 prop. Needless to say that Jenkin, who delighted 
 both passionately and critically in everything his wife 
 did and was, took especial pride and joy in these 
 performances, and in getting them up was the most 
 energetic and capable of stage managers, whether in 
 the private theatre which he and his friends established 
 for a while in Edinburgh (and in which the young 
 Louis Stevenson occasionally bore a part), or on the 
 rarer occasions when she was able to appear in London. 
 Of the wise and warm and perfectly unassuming 
 private virtues of this admirable woman, her tactful 
 human kindnesses and assiduities, constant and unfail- 
 ing until the end, among her friends and descendants, 
 the present is no place to speak. The affection with 
 which Stevenson never ceased to regard her, the value 
 he set upon her practical wisdom and advice as well 
 as the zeal with which he bent himself to carry out 
 the heavy task his friendship had undertaken in writing 
 her husband's life — all these things are made manifest 
 both in that Life itself and in his published letters 
 written to her during his invalid years at Bournemouth. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 
 
 Every Londoner knows Box Hill near Dorking, with 
 its open crest and wide prospects and steep chalky 
 declivities and gullies thicketed with juniper and box- 
 wood. Through a fine act of private generosity, the 
 crest, with its slopes and approaches from the high 
 road and from the south-west, has now become the 
 property of the National Trust and so been saved to 
 the public in perpetuity, while some of the adjacent 
 and no less attractive open country has, even as I 
 write, been thrown into the market and is in danger 
 of being parcelled out for building. It is true that 
 of the ground now its own the public sometimes makes 
 an irritating enough use, especially that portion of the 
 public which regales itself on the open hill instead of 
 at the inn below, and litters all the slopes and hollows 
 with the wrappings and relics of its provender. 
 Fortunately, no amount of Cockney frequentation 
 can cancel or much disturb the inveterate associa- 
 tions of the scene with classical works and classical 
 figures of English literature. Moreover, there are 
 plenty of hours when those associations can still be 
 conjured up and those memories enjoyed in quiet. It 
 is six years and more since I chanced to spend the 
 
 162 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 163 
 
 evening of a chill autumnal day wandering alone 
 about those familiar and haunted slopes. The weather 
 had just cleared after storm : above the steep shoulder 
 of the down a perfect half -moon hung in a sky of faint 
 lilac melting into pure pearl-green : the darkened 
 valley woods were of a deep misty brown touched 
 here and there almost into crimson by the last lingering 
 flames of autumn : the hills closing the valley south- 
 westward stood purple and translucent like amethyst. 
 The rich, solemnly glowing colours of the scene, with 
 the tingling chill of the season, sent a thrill through 
 my blood and nerves intensifying the memories and 
 associations of the place almost into actual presences, 
 hauntings with which the very air seemed to vibrate. 
 The earliest of such memories and associations per- 
 sonal to myself had been from days of my own later 
 boyhood, when I used often to visit a family of girl- 
 cousins who had their home in the valley a mile or 
 two away towards Leatherhead, and for one of whom 
 I cherished a mute and cubbish adoration. Other 
 images, from fiction and from real life alternately, the 
 one not less vivid than the other, rose and thrust them- 
 selves crowdingly upon my mind's eye. Had not 
 Jane Austen made a certain imagined picnic on the 
 site for ever memorable by the misbehaviour of her 
 dear, her fascinating and fastidious, too-confident and 
 too-managing Emma Woodhouse, whose cleverness 
 led her into more blunders than a duller person could 
 have committed, and who on the day of that picnic 
 made poor Jane Fairfax so dreadfully unhappy by her 
 flirtation with Frank Churchill ? Looking across the 
 
164 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 valley to the great park of Norbury or the more modest 
 grounds of Camilla Lacey, did not the figure of the real 
 and charming Fanny Burney, with her novels and her 
 diaries and her friends, her marriage and married life 
 with the most irreproachably correct of French noble- 
 men in exile, rise up to occupy and animate the scene ? 
 For a crisis of human interest in a contrasted kind, 
 a crowning moment in a red-blooded historic tale of 
 passion and heroism and beauty, was it not here that 
 Nelson and Emma Hamilton met and parted for the 
 last time ? Was it not here again that Keats, living 
 for some late autumn weeks at the Burford Bridge Inn, 
 finished the last five hundred lines of Endymion, was 
 drawn by the spell of moonlight (" ' you a' seen the 
 moon ? ' ") up the hill at evening, wrote the famous 
 " drear-nighted December " song, and poured out in 
 letters to his friends his half-formed, none the less 
 illuminating guesses on the relations of imagination 
 to ultimate truth ? 
 
 It was in the late autumn of 1867, almost exactly 
 half a century after Keats' s stay at Burford Bridge, that 
 George Meredith fixed his home at Flint Cottage a 
 quarter of a mile away. The association with Keats, 
 it may be noted, was one of the attractions the place 
 presented to him. In the first letter I had from him 
 inviting me there, he writes of it as a place where 
 Keats " did abide for a while, between one poem and 
 another, conceiving, as I have fancied, a spot ' where 
 damp moisture breeds The pipy hemlock to strange 
 over-growth.' " This is a mistake. Beside the banks 
 of that sluggish, eccentric river the Mole, with its 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 165 
 
 habit of diving and disappearing altogether at certain 
 places in the summer heats, there may for aught I 
 know be plashy places fitted to suggest these lines to 
 Keats. But as a matter of fact the hymn to Pan, 
 where they occur, had been written before ever he came 
 to those parts, in Thanet or perhaps at Canterbury. 
 My own conviction is that he had conceived the lines 
 earlier yet, and that they had been suggested by one 
 of the Hampstead ponds which he had to pass on his 
 walks between Leigh Hunt's lodgings in the Vale of 
 Health and his brothers' quarters in the Poultry. 
 Even now, when the ponds are much better kept and 
 the ground about them better drained than is recorded 
 to have been then the case, this one is partly fringed, 
 as the others are not, with a belt of rushes among 
 which great plants of hemlock may be seen bearing 
 their blooms in early summer. 
 
 But to return to Meredith — before settling at Flint 
 Cottage he knew the neighbourhood well. He had 
 lived for some years of his early youth near Weybridge, 
 later for several more years near Esher, and mighty 
 walker as he was, had in tramps at all hours of the day 
 and night — by predilection round about the hour of 
 dawn — come to know all the stretches of chalk down 
 or heather, all the valleys and water-meadows and 
 steep woodlands, the roads and farm tracks and foot- 
 ways, of mid-Surrey, and the men and creatures fre- 
 quenting them, with a familiarity such as scarcely 
 any other man has possessed, a poet's intimacy at once 
 ardently imaginative and minutely observant. Within 
 a month or two after his settling into Flint Cottage he 
 
166 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 writes to a friend : " Who could help flourishing here ? 
 I am every morning on the top of Box Hill — as its 
 flower, its bird, its prophet. I drop down the moon 
 on one side, I draw up the sun on t'other. I breathe 
 fine air. I shout ha ha to the gates of the world. 
 Then I descend, and know myself a donkey for doing 
 it." It was here, either in the cottage itself or in the 
 two-roomed chalet which he afterwards built in an 
 upper corner of his garden, and from the windows of 
 which, as he has told us, he loved to welcome the 
 thrushes when they came in February to flute their 
 prelude to the nightingales of April — it was here that 
 he wrote the whole succession of his middle and later 
 novels : Harry Richmond and Beauchamp's Career 
 and The Egoist and Diana of the Crossways and 
 One of our Conquerors and Lord Ormont and The 
 Amazing Marriage ; here also all his middle and 
 later poetry : Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth, 
 Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life, A Reading of 
 Earth, A Reading of Life, and the rest. More in- 
 cessant and strenuous labour of brain and heart 
 together than those titles signify is hardly recorded 
 of any man. During the first fifteen or more of this 
 period of forty years neither his novels nor his poetry 
 had any success with the public. Outside a narrow 
 circle of friends and admirers he had few readers and 
 none but harsh critics, and frugal as he was, had to 
 live not by the exercise of his genius but by hack-work 
 as a journalist and publisher's reader. But the 
 friends were staunch and the admirers keen : and the 
 cottage at Box Hill was well frequented by an intim- 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 167 
 
 ate circle of those who appreciated both the man and 
 his work. Some men are repelled, others attracted, 
 by a personality more powerful and shining than their 
 own. To those whom such a personality attracts, 
 Meredith's physical activity, strength, and beauty, the 
 exuberance and authority of his talk, with its singular 
 blend of elaborate high courtesy and unsparing raillery, 
 its brusque transitions from grave wisdom to riotous 
 hyperbolical laughter, his eager interest in all phases 
 of life, literature and politics, his staunchness, and at 
 the same time sensitiveness, in friendship, his genial 
 yet fastidious conviviality, made him the most im- 
 pressive and stimulating of companions. 
 
 It was not until 1878 that I first met him, and then 
 only to shake hands on the introduction of Louis 
 Stevenson. Stevenson was staying at the Burford 
 Bridge Inn with his parents, busy upon the early part 
 of his New Arabian Nights (the Suicide Club chapters), 
 and finding himself thus almost at Meredith's door, had 
 sought leave, sensitively and shyly, not without fear 
 of a rebuff, to pay him the homage of a beginner to a 
 master. The two had common friends in a young 
 couple then living at Pixholme close by, the Jim 
 Gordons,* and in their garden Meredith and Stevenson 
 were invited to meet. Stevenson, who could be as 
 engaging in deference as he was brilliant and stimu- 
 lating in challenge, soon completely won the affection 
 of his senior, and their meetings were renewed almost 
 
 * Mrs. Gordon, wee Alice Brandreth, is now the wife of Sir John 
 George Butcher, Bart., M.P. for the City of York. See her volume, 
 Memories of George Meredith, O.M. : Constable & Co., 1919. 
 
168 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 daily for several weeks. One afternoon during those 
 weeks, having gone down to Box Hill to see Stevenson 
 and the Gordons, I remember being introduced to 
 Meredith across a stile or field gate to which he had 
 come up in company with the two Stevensons, Louis 
 and Bob, at the end of a twelve-mile walk ; a thing of 
 which Louis was well capable in those days, before his 
 journey to California, but never afterwards. Steven- 
 son was there again with his wife in 1881 and 1882, and 
 for the last time in August 1886, a year before he left 
 England never to return. When Meredith first planned 
 his novel, The Amazing Marriage, he meant to make 
 one of his characters, Gower Woodseer, in some measure 
 a portrait of R. L. S., but changed his purpose in the 
 execution, and scarce a trace of likeness remains. 
 
 There was something about Burford Bridge and its 
 neighbourhood, apart from the attraction of Meredith's 
 company, which drew Stevenson for its own sake and 
 set his imagination working. His " Suicide Club " 
 stories, though written there, had of course nothing 
 to do with the sentiment of the scene : they had been 
 conceived in nocturnal prowls about London. But 
 some years later Stevenson coupled the Burford Bridge 
 Inn with the Hawes Inn at Queen's Ferry on the Forth 
 as a place made for adventure and thrilling with 
 suggestions of potential romance. His words are 
 well known : — " I have lived both at the Hawes and 
 Burford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it seemed, 
 of some adventure that should justify the place ; but 
 though the feeling had me to bed at night and called 
 me again at morning in one unbroken round of pleasure 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 169 
 
 and suspense, nothing befell me in either worth remark. 
 The man or the hour had not yet come ; but some 
 day, I think, a boat shall put off from the Queen's Ferry, 
 fraught with a dear cargo, and some frosty night 
 a horseman, on a tragic errand, rattle with his whip 
 upon the green shutters of the inn at Burford." The 
 hope was realized as to Queen's Ferry, but never as 
 to Burford Bridge. I imagine the attempt would 
 have been made in connection with his projected tale, 
 Jerry Abershaw, at one time eagerly planned but 
 never brought even so far into being as that other 
 highway story, The Great North Road, which remains 
 so tantalizing a fragment in his work. But to return 
 to his special relations with Meredith — of all the elder 
 master's letters, none perhaps is more characteristic 
 than that which he wrote to R. L. S. on the publication 
 of his first book, The Inland Voyage. I give only the 
 critical paragraphs of the letter, which has been 
 printed in full in Mr. W. Meredith's two-volume 
 edition of his father's correspondence. 
 
 " I have been fully pleased. The writing is of the rare kind 
 which is naturally simple yet picked and choice. It is literature. 
 The eye on land and people embraces both, and does not take 
 them up in bits. I have returned to the reading and shall again. 
 The reflections wisely tickle, they are in the right good tone of 
 philosophy interwrought with humour. 
 
 "My protest is against the Preface and the final page. The 
 Preface is keenly in Osric's vein — ' everything you will, dear worthy 
 public, but we are exceedingly modest and doubt an you will read 
 us, though exquisitely silken-calved we are, and could say a word 
 of ourselves, yet on seeing our book, were we amazed at our little- 
 ness indeed and truly, my lord Public ! ' As for the closing page 
 
170 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 it is rank recreancy. ' Yes, Mr. Barlow,' said Tommy, * I have 
 travelled abroad, under various mishaps, to learn in the end that 
 the rarest adventures are those one does not go forth to seek.' 
 ' My very words to him,' said Mr. Barlow to himself, at the same 
 time presenting Tommy with a guinea piece. — This last page is 
 quite out of tone with the spirit of the book. 
 
 " I remember ' On the Oise,' you speak of the river hurrying 
 on, ' never pausing to take breath.' This, and a touch of excess 
 in dealing with the reeds, whom you deprive of their beauty by 
 overinforming them with your sensations, I feel painfully to be 
 levelled at the Saxon head. It is in the style of Dickens." 
 
 Coming from a ripe to a budding genius, from a man 
 of fifty to one of twenty-eight, could praise and admoni- 
 tion, encouragement and a touch of satire, be blended 
 more wisely and adroitly ? Or could any words bear 
 more sharply the characteristic Meredithian mint- 
 mark ? To us who knew him the second paragraph 
 in particular carries a quintessential flavour of the 
 man. Those bits of parody in the styles of Osric and 
 of Sandford and Merton — how many afternoons of 
 rich hour-long talk do they recall, when the master, 
 walking in the garden or on the hill-side with friends, 
 would stop and lean back against his stick and fall 
 to teasing one or the other of us by imputing to him 
 all manner of absurd adventures and parts in imagin- 
 ary conversations. He would begin quietly and 
 plausibly, until by and by his invention, taking wing, 
 would soar as it were in ascending spirals into a bur- 
 lesque empyrean where it would sustain itself unflag- 
 gingly, not without a penetrating shaft aimed from 
 time to time at the true character and weaknesses of 
 the person parodied. The most characteristic strain 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 171 
 
 in his ordinary manner was this blend of the most 
 scrupulous courtesy with the frankest raillery, both 
 somewhat elaborate in their kind. He would take 
 and keep the same tone with servants, whom it mysti- 
 fied beyond measure but none the less delighted, and 
 who adored him. (I am thinking naturally and in 
 especial of the invaluable man-of -all- work, Cole.) He 
 would even take it with his pet dogs. I have noticed 
 that the dogs of men of genius love them more passion- 
 ately and devotedly than they love ordinary masters, 
 I suppose feeling in them some extra glow and intensity 
 of the emotional faculties calling for a response in 
 kind. To the succession of black and tan or pure tan 
 dachshunds given to Meredith by various friends, 
 Koby and Bruny and Pete (for * Kobold,' ' Bruno,' 
 1 Peto '), and Islet, on whom he wrote his well-known 
 elegy — to these it was a delight to hear him talking 
 eagerly by the half hour together in terms now of caress- 
 ing endearment, now of irony, or sometimes, when 
 the poaching instinct had proved too strong in any of 
 them, of pained parental reproof. 
 
 Divers common friends have assured me, and I can 
 easily believe, that the master was never more himself 
 than when he occasionally received on their Sunday 
 afternoon peregrinations the company of walkers 
 whom Leslie Stephen had organized under the name of 
 the Sunday Tramps. None but the youngest of my 
 readers will need telling how Stephen excelled no less 
 as an athletic walker and mountaineer than as a 
 masterly critic, editor, and biographer : " long Leslie 
 Stephen," as we used commonly to call him, for long 
 
172 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 he was alike of back, leg, and stride, of nose and of 
 beard (the fine forked and flowing auburn beard 
 depicted in Watts's well-known portrait). He had no 
 small talk, and to strangers or ordinary acquaintances 
 was apt to seem a character even sardonically dry and 
 shy. But no man had a greater power of winning 
 the love of those to whom he felt himself drawn. He 
 had for wife first one of the most delightful of women, 
 and after her death another who was also one of the 
 most beautiful, and for devoted men-friends a pick of 
 the choicest spirits of his time, both English and 
 American. Of these friends Meredith was one of the 
 closest, and in the character of Vernon Whitford in 
 The Egoist has turned the intimacy to living literary 
 account. He was never one of Stephen's troop of 
 Tramps himself, but his cottage was pretty often made 
 a starting-point or resting-point for their outings.* 
 Not long after the society was founded, which was in 
 1879, his own walking powers began little by little to 
 fail. For the first few years he would go a good part 
 of the day's walk with them, then gradually not for 
 more than a mile or two ; but as long as their little 
 society lasted he used to receive them into his cottage 
 and hold forth among them, I am told, at his best. 
 
 As regards my own relations with Meredith, I have 
 told how I shook hands with him across a stile in 1878. 
 But my intimacy did not begin till after the death of 
 his second wife in 1885 and my own removal from my 
 previous headquarters at Cambridge to take up work 
 
 * For a full account of the Tramps, see F. W. Maitland, The 
 Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, Duckworth, 1907. 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 173 
 
 at the British Museum. The days of his neglect were 
 then passing away. After the publication of The 
 Egoist and Diana of the Grossways critics like Stevenson 
 and Henley, with their zeal and energy and power 
 of making themselves heard, had forced Meredith 
 afresh upon the attention both of his own contem- 
 poraries and theirs. A still younger generation needed 
 no convincing ; American appreciation quickly fol- 
 lowed ; and so by degrees the enthusiasm of the few 
 succeeded in making admiration for him a fashion 
 with the many. At the same time his bodily, though 
 not his intellectual, vigour was beginning by gradual 
 degrees to flag. The reddish brown had quite faded 
 from his hair and given place to the shade between 
 grizzled and silvery that went so well with his habitual, 
 unvarying suit of warm light-grey set off by a bright 
 scarlet tie. But both of hair and beard the crop was 
 as rich and wavy as ever ; and the features retained 
 unimpaired alike their fine cutting and their firm 
 resolute air. His voice had not at all lost — indeed it 
 never lost — its strong virile timbre, nor his utterance 
 its authoritative rotundity and fulness ; for his speech 
 was ever clear-cut and complete, and the fashion, 
 growing, I fear, in our modern English conversation 
 of lazily mumbling and muttering at one another from 
 behind our teeth slurred, half-articulate sounds instead 
 of formed words, had no countenance from him. The 
 range of his walks was beginning to be much narrowed, 
 but he could still breast gallantly the hill that rises 
 from just outside his garden gate, and it was only by 
 slow degrees that the symptoms developed themselves 
 
174 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 of that malady which was to cripple his lower limbs 
 entirely some years before the end. 
 
 From the twenty years of his later life during which 
 Meredith used to make me welcome whenever I liked 
 to come, what have I chiefly to recall ? Well, I never 
 attempted, even mentally, to Boswellize him. Remem- 
 ber, moreover, that to make the one and only Boswell 
 it took the one and only Johnson : the talker of all 
 talkers most accustomed to deliver himself in brief, 
 conclusive, as it were portable sentences, each remem- 
 berably laying down — say rather hammering down— 
 the law on this or that question of life or conduct or 
 opinion. Meredith was fond, as all his readers know, of 
 composing condensed oracular aphorisms such as those 
 of the Pilgrim's Scrip in Richard Fever el : but these 
 were literary products, the fruits of hard meditation 
 during solitary walks or in his study. Several writers 
 of recollections have set down memories of his talk 
 when he delivered himself more or less in the same 
 vein orally. But to my mind he was never in that vein 
 his best self. His best and most characteristic talk 
 was above all things spontaneous, abundant, inventive, 
 leaping and flinging itself from idea to idea and from 
 clause to clause. The more overpowering of his 
 monologues sprang sometimes from the mere overflow 
 of animal and intellectual spirits. Sometimes, before 
 a mixed company which included strangers, I fear 
 it must be owned that they gave an impression of pro- 
 ceeding from a desire to show off and play fireworks. 
 I do not think that impression was quite just. The 
 truth is that Meredith cherished an ideal of what the 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 175 
 
 brilliance of everyday social intercourse ought to be 
 which corresponded not at all to the capacities of 
 ordinary persons but to the quite abnormal and super- 
 athletic activities of his own brains. He never fully real- 
 ized the difference between his own intellect and those 
 of average people. In his novels he will often make 
 characters described as ordinary talk like himself, and 
 they, being his creations, can only do as he bids them. 
 But when in real life he would sometimes try to lift 
 the talk of a commonplace company to his own plane, 
 the result was apt to be that he would be left discours- 
 ing alone to auditors silent and gaping, disconcerted 
 or perhaps even annoyed. Among those who knew 
 him well and could play up to him a similar strain of 
 talk went better. I have told how one of his favourite 
 diversions, when there were three or four friends, men 
 or women, or both, gathered about him, was to begin 
 bantering one of them for the entertainment of the 
 rest. Vanity might suffer under the play : indeed 
 vanity was never much at ease in Meredith's company. 
 To give any sign of pique or resentment was fatal. 
 Little mercy would then be shown you : the only 
 safe course was to go all the way with him, to enter 
 into the spirit of his inventions and if possible burlesque 
 his burlesque, when he would be delighted with you and 
 himself, and throw back his beautiful head, and crow 
 with his great manly laugh, and prolong the talk in 
 high good humour, descending by easy degrees into 
 the vein of genial and equal companionship. 
 
 He loved argument, and would sometimes challenge 
 and dispute for the mere sake of disputation and 
 
176 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 mental exercise. I remember one rather specially 
 striking case in point from my own intercourse with 
 him. I had broken out vehemently on the impossi- 
 bility of enjoying wild scenery in the company of a 
 miscellaneous crowd of tourists. He at once fell upon 
 me fiercely for the sin of selfish exclusiveness and 
 fancied superiority to fellow-beings as good as myself. 
 I stood my ground and pushed him with questions : 
 whether in point of fact the spiritual and imaginative 
 effect of a certain class of scenes did not depend essen- 
 tially on their being visited in solitude or in the chosen 
 company of one or two : whether, for instance, the 
 shores of a remote Highland loch could speak to one, 
 when a rackety packetful of MacBrayne's trippers 
 had just been dumped upon them from an excursion 
 steamer, as they spoke to one when one was alone : 
 whether, if he himself went to one of his old haunts 
 in Switzerland or Tyrol and found a huge new block 
 of hotel building disfiguring the scene at its most 
 sensitive point, and pouring forth its crowd of cosmo- 
 politan chatterers and loungers, he would not turn 
 away in disappointment : whether, in fine, it was not 
 one of the standing contrarieties of things, proving 
 no good to be without its evil, that the modern poetic 
 and romantic love of — or let us say rather fashion for 
 — wild scenes and solitudes should have had, oftener 
 than not, now that it has been turned to profitable 
 account by hotel speculators and advertisers, the prac- 
 tical effect of robbing the scenes of their wildness and 
 the solitudes of their power upon the soul. In such 
 discussions he would not usually be overbearing or 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 177 
 
 unreasonable, or use his resources merely to crush or 
 bemock one, and I remember that on this occasion I 
 got him to something almost like a half-way agreement. 
 It has been borne in upon me since that he must 
 have been from the beginning arguing chiefly for 
 argument's sake, for I find among his published letters 
 one to the Press against a proposed extension railway 
 to Ambleside in the Lake Country ; and in this he 
 takes, not less effectively than decisively, exactly the 
 same line as I had found myself taking against him 
 in talk as above related : — 
 
 Where there is dissension between rich and poor, I do not 
 commonly side with the former. I am against the project because 
 it does not promise to be of good use to the people. . . . We have 
 here one of the few instances of Sentimentalists pleading for the 
 general interests, Conservatives upholding the cause of Democrats. 
 I suppose that an Ambleside railway would offer a paying invest- 
 ment to the Shareholder ; it would fatten some publican ; and 
 it would spare the excursionist that exercise of his legs and chest 
 which it is beneficial for him to take. ... It cannot be thought 
 that Englishmen will allow their one recreative holiday ground of 
 high hill and deep dale (I would add " consecrated by one of our 
 noblest poets," but that I am on my guard against treating the 
 subject emotionally) to be a place of no retreat. They must have 
 ceased to discern the quality of true utility if they permit it. 
 Spiritual beauty serves us to the full as much as material force, 
 and it must have its homes of seclusion to live. We must guard 
 it to keep it. 
 
 It must not be supposed from what I have said that 
 either badinage and satire, or disputation for disputa- 
 tion's sake, were at all times elements in Meredith's 
 conversation. No reader of his novels but must have 
 
178 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 been impressed by the contrast between the incessant 
 elaborate fireworks of wit (wit surely degenerating 
 too often into tiresome intellectual foppery and show- 
 off ?) in which his characters are made to indulge in 
 their lighter moments and the straightforward intensity 
 of feeling and utterance — utterance lucid however 
 packed and pregnant — commonly assigned to them in 
 crucial moments of passion. A somewhat similar 
 contrast marked, in my experience, their author's 
 show conversation in mixed company and his intimate 
 talk in the privacy of friendship. No man could be 
 more gravely or more sagaciously sympathetic when 
 the appeal for sympathy was made, or could put more 
 of bracing life- wisdom into advice on matters of con- 
 duct when his advice was sought. To women (at 
 least to the right kind of women, for with sentimental- 
 ists or self -flatterers of either sex he had small patience) 
 he could be the most chivalrous-hearted and tenderly 
 understanding and honourably helpful of men, as 
 beseemed the creator of Lucy Feverel and Hose 
 Jocelyn and Renee and Clara Middleton, of Rhoda 
 and Dahlia and Diana and the rest : his temper and 
 discourse in these respects being in life and in literature 
 entirely and admirably the same. In tete-d-tete inter- 
 course he rarely, in my experience, mounted the high 
 intellectual or fantastic stilts, but would enter simply, 
 with the power and incisiveness of a master but on 
 perfectly free and equal terms, on almost any subject 
 of human or historical or literary discussion. 
 
 A very frequent subject of talk between us was on 
 the duty and necessity for England of the obligation 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 179 
 
 to national service. He conceived military training 
 to be a thing desirable in every state, desirable for 
 the sake of the manhood, the self-respect, the physical 
 and moral health of its citizens, and desirable for our- 
 selves above all peoples. He held that if our popula- 
 tion would not shake off its carelessness and sloth, 
 born of plethora, and submit to that discipline, as 
 well as to other wholesome disciplines of mind and 
 body, our day was done. He believed that a more 
 sternly trained race like the Germans would surely 
 win against us and deserve to win. These convictions 
 at the same time did not shake his attachment to the 
 Liberal/party in the state, which almost to a man was 
 fanatically opposed to them. When I urged that he 
 should strive to convert his political friends and should 
 in writing declare his mind on the question in terms 
 more calculated to strike home than the cryptic utter- 
 ances which he puts into the mouths of a Colney 
 Durance or a Simeon Fenellan, he was apt to answer 
 as though the matter were one which concerned him 
 not as one of ourselves, but only as a critic and onlooker. 
 In discussions on England and her character and 
 destinies he would always separate himself from his 
 countrymen and say " You English." This attitude 
 seemed to me to be due partly to a cherished conscious- 
 ness of, or at all events belief in, his own purely Celtic 
 blood (his father having been Welsh and his mother 
 Irish), partly to the sense of alienation from the sym- 
 pathies of his countrymen which had been forced on 
 his proud and sensitive nature by their long neglect 
 of his work. Dearly as he loved, and deeply beyond all 
 
180 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 men as he knew, the English soil, he would sometimes 
 inveigh against defects of the English mind and char- 
 acter in the tone not only of a detached stranger but 
 almost of an enemy. This from such a man, by that 
 time at any rate recognized as one of the glories of our 
 age and country, was a thing that I used sometimes to 
 find hard to bear. The true key to his mind in the 
 matter is perhaps to be found in his words written in 
 1870 : "I am neither German nor French, nor, 
 unless the nation is attacked, English. I am European 
 and Cosmopolitan — for humanity ! The nation which 
 shows most worth is the nation I love and reverence." 
 Nearly thirty years later, in one of his very last letters, 
 he writes : "As to our country, if the people were 
 awake, they would submit to be drilled. . . . The 
 fear of imposing drill for at least a year seems to me a 
 forecast of the national tragedy." Conceive what 
 would have been his scorn for those who shrieked 
 against the duty of imposing national service even 
 after the outbreak of the world war, during those 
 months of deadly peril to all that England stands for 
 and holds dear. But what I like better to conceive is 
 the conversion he must needs have undergone had he 
 lived to see his own critical and contemptuous mis- 
 givings on England's account belied when the day of 
 trial came — to see her thrust her own currish coun- 
 sellors aside and shoulder valiantly and in the end 
 victoriously the tremendous duties of the time. 
 
 Most of Meredith's friends and admirers cared much 
 more, at least during his life-time, for his novels than 
 for his poems. I think one of the things which made 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 181 
 
 him tolerate my company was the interest, puzzled 
 and fretted interest though it often was, which I took 
 in his poetry. Very much of this had always repelled 
 me by its obscurity : but among the rest, the things 
 relatively clear, there were some that seemed to me 
 in various kinds unsurpassed, as in the simple lyric 
 kind The Sweet o' the Year and Autumn Even Song; 
 in more strenuous and ambitious kinds Melampus ; 
 Earth and a Wedded Woman ; Love in the Valley, surely 
 as rich and original a love-lyric, or lyric and idyll in 
 one, as was ever written. Equally pre-eminent among 
 lyrics political seemed to me the ode On France written 
 after her overthrow in 1870 and foretelling for her 
 much such a resurrection as we afterwards witnessed. 
 I was proportionately disappointed at the difficulty 
 with which I found myself trying to follow the odes 
 On Napoleon and On French History when he read 
 them to me, then fresh written, in 1898. His tones in 
 reading were resonant and masterful as I have said, 
 but withal level and not much modulated or varied so 
 as to help the sense ; and in poems so close-packed 
 and complicated in construction, so dense with thought 
 and imagery as these, the full meaning of what he read 
 was naturally hard to seize. As a rule he courted no 
 criticism and allowed for no difficulty ; but one day 
 I remember that he was more indulgent than usual. 
 He paused to say how he knew some people found his 
 poetry obscure, and to ask whether I did, and where, 
 and why ? I tried to point out some puzzles in his 
 printed poems which I had quite failed to solve, even 
 with the page before me and full leisure to study it. 
 
182 MEMOEIES AND NOTES 
 
 He was patient, but simply could not see that they 
 were puzzles at all, and closed the talk characteristic- 
 ally with a jolly laugh over the sluggishness of my 
 Saxon wits. In the course of it, defining his own aims 
 and ideals in verse, he repeated several times with 
 insistence, " Concentration and suggestion, Colvin, 
 concentration and suggestion, those are the things I 
 care for and am always trying for in poetry." It 
 was a misfortune, I think, for his art, and probably 
 for his hold of posterity, that theory should thus have 
 come to reinforce and exaggerate habits of thought 
 and style to which he was only too prone by instinct.* 
 But my frank admission of not being always able to 
 follow him did not disgust him with me as a hearer. 
 
 * I borrowed this phrase of the master's for the title of a lecture, 
 since printed as a pamphlet of the English Association (No. 32, 
 1915), in which I tried to define and illustrate various special modes 
 of concentration and suggestion characteristic of some of our chief 
 poets. And I indicated the higher rank to be assigned, as I think, 
 to that mode in which not intellect but imagination plays the chief 
 part ; not intellect, ever challenging the mind to a wrestle among 
 the problems and complexities of things, but imagination, which 
 strikes into the heart of things an effortless and instantaneous 
 light. Shakespeare is the greatest master in both modes. In the 
 work of poets like Donne, Browning, Meredith, the intellectual 
 mode of concentration and suggestion predominates : in that of 
 Meredith to a degree which repels many readers and annoys them. 
 But it is clear that what repels and annoys one class of mind attracts 
 and stimulates another ; witness Mr. G. M. Trevelyan's interesting 
 volume, The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith, in which 
 he seems to show that what has chiefly drawn him to the author's 
 work is its continual athletic play of wit and challenge to mental 
 effort in the reader. 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 183 
 
 Just before Christmas, 1889, I had the following letter 
 from him : — 
 
 My dear Colvin, — 
 
 I don't like the account you give of yourself, and shall be glad 
 to hear when you can take a day and night here with me. I will 
 read you some hexameters — a version of the passages of the Iliad 
 best known — sounding to me somewhat of the sea, a poor shell, 
 but suggesting Homer. Please tell your American that I am 
 rarely in town, but that if he will come to me any day this week, 
 he will find me here, happy to entertain him at dinner. Say it, 
 using the phrases. He has but to write to me, naming his day. — 
 Browning's death grieved and disconcerted me. I placed reliance 
 on his active strength. — But, as to all old men Juvenal's X is right 
 absolutely. Loss of friends gives us our poena diu viventibus. 
 
 Yours ever, 
 
 George Meredith. 
 
 I went and can remember as though it were yesterday 
 his reading, with his strong, masculine, authoritative 
 voice and rotund, precise enunciation : on the other 
 hand, I have quite forgotten to what visitor from 
 America his message of courtesy was directed. He 
 read that day not only from his recent translations in 
 the Homeric hexameter, but from a much earlier 
 attempt at original writing in the more complicated 
 " Galliambic " metre of Catullus's Atys. Once granted 
 (a large concession) that the English accentual stress is 
 in any true sense a metrical equivalent for the Greek 
 or Latin quantity, I think Meredith's experiments in 
 the classical metres are as successful as anyone's, 
 though often, it must be admitted, at the cost of 
 strained style and wretched construction. Here are 
 
184 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 two of the passages from that day's reading which I 
 find sticking closest to me in memory, partly I suppose 
 because they ran more naturally and straightforwardly 
 than most, partly by reason of the rousing and thrilling 
 sonority with which he declaimed them. From the 
 Iliad, Book XIV:— 
 
 Not the sea-wave so bellows abroad when it bursts upon shingle, 
 Whipped from the sea's deeps up by the terrible blast of the 
 
 Northwind ; 
 Nay, nor is ever the roar of the fierce fire's rush so arousing, 
 Down along mountain-glades, when it surges to kindle a 
 
 woodland ; 
 Nay, nor so tonant thunders the stress of the gale in the 
 
 oak-trees' 
 Foliage-tresses high, when it rages to raveing its utmost ; 
 As rose then stupendous the Trojans' cry and Achaians', 
 Dread upshouting as one when together they clashed in the 
 
 conflict. 
 
 From his own Phaeton : 
 
 All the end foreseeing, Phoebus to his oath irrevocable 
 
 Bowed obedient, deploring the insanity pitiless. 
 
 Then the flame-outsnorting horses were led forth : it was so 
 
 decreed. 
 They were yoked before the glad youth by his sister-ancillaries. 
 Swift the ripple ripples follow'd, as of aureate Helicon, 
 Down their flanks, while they impatient pawed desire of the 
 
 distances, 
 And the bit with fury champed. Oh ! unimaginable delight ! 
 Unimagined speed and splendour in the circle of upper air ! 
 Glory grander than the armed host upon earth singing victory ! 
 
 The Juvenal reference in the letter above quoted is 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 185 
 
 of course to the famous passage in the tenth satire,* on 
 The Vanity of Human Wishes (to adopt Johnson's 
 title for it), where in reciting the penalties of prolonged 
 age the satirist rises for the nonce into a strain of 
 sombre magnificence second only, if second, to certain 
 
 * Ut vigeant sensus animi, ducenda tamen sunt 
 Funera natorum, rogus aspiciendus amatse 
 Conjugis et fratris plenseque sororibus urnaB. 
 Hsec data poena diu viventibus, ut renovata 
 Semper clade domus multis in luctibus inque 
 Perpetuo mcerore et nigra veste senescunt, etc., etc. 
 Thus diluted by Johnson (whom one does not commonly think 
 of as a diluter) in lines of The Vanity of Human Wishes, some of 
 which have become proverbial : — 
 
 But grant, the virtues of a temp'rate prime 
 Bless with an age exempt from scorn or crime ; 
 An age that melts with unperceiv'd decay, 
 And glides in modest innocence away ; 
 Whose peaceful day Benevolence endears, 
 Whose night congratulating Conscience cheers ; 
 The gen'ral fav'rite as the gen'ral friend : 
 Such age there is, and who shall wish its end ? 
 
 Yet ev'n on this her load Misfortune flings, 
 To press the weary minutes' flagging wings ; 
 New sorrow rises as the day returns, 
 A sister sickens, or a daughter mourns. 
 Now kindred Merit fills the sable bier, 
 Now lacerated Friendship claims a tear ; 
 Year chases year, decay pursues decay, 
 Still drops some joy from with 'ring life away; 
 New forms arise, and diff'rent views engage, 
 Superfluous lags the vet 'ran on the stage, 
 Till pitying Nature signs the last release, 
 And bids afflicted worth retire to peace. 
 
186 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 kindred passages in Lucretius. The mood here ex- 
 pressed was in Meredith quite exceptional. He had 
 his dark hours, but was the last man to think tragically 
 or indignantly of the common processes and ordinances 
 of nature, as Juvenal makes us feel that he thought 
 of them even while he exhorts men to submission and 
 moderation of inordinate desires. Meredith's com- 
 plaint is never against nature, but against the spirit in 
 man which misreads her laws and murmurs at them. 
 Acquiescence, unembittered acquiescence, was his 
 doctrine ; it was also, both by instinct and discipline, 
 his practice. He lived after this for twenty honoured 
 years, and suffered more than his share of physical 
 pain and infirmity. As disabilities grew on him, (it is 
 true they hardly at all impaired the energies of his 
 mind,) he bore them with constancy and cheerfulness, 
 mellowing and growing the while in gentleness and in 
 power of sympathy with other and younger minds. 
 
 For some years before the end he had become quite 
 incapable of walking and received his friends as a 
 prisoner and a fixture to his armchair. He grew deaf 
 and gradually deafer, so that to contribute any share 
 of one's own to the talk became an effort, and one had 
 more and more to be content with trying to convey 
 to his hearing some suggestion that should stimulate 
 him to monologue. But the intellect remained quite 
 undimmed, the spirit quite unquenchable : his thirst 
 for reading, and especially for French historical and 
 biographical reading, abated not a jot : his interest in 
 politics and literature and persons, the work of his 
 contemporaries and the promise of his juniors, remained 
 
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 187 
 
 as keen as ever. When one succeeded in drawing a 
 monologue it would sometimes be almost as brilliant 
 and well-sustained as those of earlier days. For two 
 years I had for one reason or another failed to see 
 him, when one day in the mid-spring of 1909 came the 
 news of his serious illness, and almost immediately 
 afterwards of his death. It was on a radiant May 
 day, a day of summer rather than spring, that a little 
 company of us, his friends, assembled by his cottage 
 gate and followed his remains to the grave chosen 
 for them in Dorking churchyard. That at least is the 
 material account and external semblance of what 
 happened. What truly, to the inward and spiritual 
 sense, happened on that day has been told by the most 
 devoted of his younger friends, Sir James Barrie, in 
 words perhaps as moving as were ever written by 
 one man of letters about another. When the coaches 
 were gone, the cottage, to the unsealed vision, was 
 according to Barrie not deserted. There still sat in his 
 chair, as of yore, an old man, but presently his old age 
 fell away from him (" for this is what is meant by 
 Death to such as he "). He rose and went through the 
 door into the garden, where he found all the men and 
 women of his creation drawn up to salute and do him 
 reverence : thence up the garden walks— 
 
 " to the chalet where he worked, and good and brave men will 
 for ever bow proudly before it, but good and brave women will 
 bow more proudly still. He went there only because he had gone 
 so often, and this time the door was locked ; he did not know why 
 nor care. He came swinging down the path, singing lustily, and 
 calling to his dogs, his dogs of the present and the past ; and they 
 
188 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 yelped with joy, for they knew they were once again to breast the 
 hill with him. 
 
 " He strode up the hill whirling his staff, for which he had no 
 longer any other use. His hearing was again so acute that from 
 far away on the Dorking road he could hear the rumbling of a 
 coach. It had been disputed whether he should be buried in 
 Westminster Abbey or in a quiet churchyard, and there came to 
 him somehow a knowledge (it was the last he ever knew of little 
 things) that people had been at variance as to whether a casket 
 of dust should be laid away in one hole or in another, and he flung 
 back his head with the old glorious action, and laughed a laugh 
 ' broad as a thousand beeves at pasture.' 
 
 " Box Hill was no longer deserted. When a great man dies — 
 and this was one of the greatest since Shakespeare — the immortals 
 await him at the top of the nearest hill. He looked up and saw his 
 peers. They were all young, like himself. He waved the staff in 
 greeting. One, a mere stripling, ' slight unspeakably,' R. L. S., 
 detached himself from the others, crying gloriously, ' Here's the 
 fellow I have been telling you about ! ' and ran down the hill to 
 be the first to take his Master's hand. In the meanwhile an empty 
 coach was rolling on to Dorking." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 
 
 Probably there never lived in any community an 
 individual man the sense of whose existence was more 
 constantly and forcibly present to the general mind 
 than was that of Mr. Gladstone to the English mind 
 during the prolonged plenitude of his powers. It 
 was not merely the energies he displayed and the 
 victories he achieved in legislative and administrative 
 spheres that thus occupied the public consciousness. 
 It was the sense of his being a great and pre-eminent 
 personality, possessing in a singular degree that 
 heightened intensity of being, that mysterious quality, 
 as undefinable as it is unmistakable, to which we give 
 the name of genius. To give instances of the com- 
 mand he exercised over assemblies whether popular 
 or deliberative, would be to waste words ; the history 
 of his time and country, the memories of the surviving 
 thousands of those who heard him, are full of them. 
 Acknowledgment of his personal pre-eminence and 
 magnetism, of the effluence from him of forces both 
 spiritual and physical exceeding those of other men, 
 imposed itself independently of any belief in the wisdom 
 of his words or in the righteousness of the causes 
 which he pleaded, although his own always fervent 
 
 189 
 
190 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 conviction of such wisdom and righteousness no doubt 
 contributed to the impression made. It was possible 
 to come away from listening to any of his great efforts 
 on the affairs of the Near East or of Ireland, or on 
 domestic reform or any disputable matter whatever, 
 a still unconverted opponent, but not a whit the less 
 thrilled and spell-bound. The spare, erect, com- 
 manding figure, the grandly modelled and deeply 
 furrowed features, the vivid, almost luminous, alabaster- 
 like pallor of the skin, with the pure tint, even in 
 extreme age, of the rare flush when it came, the for- 
 midable roll and far-reaching flash of the eye, like that 
 which I have seen an old condor in captivity cast upon 
 the crowd from his rock-perch in the public garden, 
 made his mere platform presence impressive beyond 
 all others, even before there came into play the com- 
 manding sonorities of the voice and every natural 
 resource as well as every practised skill of the master 
 orator. The Miltonic quotation for calling up his as- 
 pect and presence in public debate is hackneyed, but 
 fits so perfectly that I cannot forbear to repeat it : — 
 
 — " with grave 
 Aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed 
 A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven 
 Deliberation sat, and public care " — 
 
 — " Sage he stood, 
 With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear 
 The weight of mightiest monarchies ; his look 
 Drew audience and attention still as night 
 Or summer's noontide air." 
 
 In saying that he possessed every skill and every re- 
 
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 191 
 
 source of the practised orator I should have made one 
 reservation. Epigrammatic pith and point, the power 
 of launching phrases that lit up the subject in a flash 
 or confounded opponents with one thrust, were not 
 among his gifts. Amplitude and plenitude, rhetorical 
 abundance and iteration, were rather his weapons. 
 As a writer most readers feel him to be distinctly, 
 sometimes even distressingly, wordy. But of words 
 when they were delivered with such intensity of con- 
 viction, and in tones of such persuasion and command, 
 as were his in public speaking, it seemed as though 
 one could never have too much or even enough. 
 
 Quite apart from the conspicuousness of a public 
 occasion, or the contagion of the collective enthusi- 
 asm of an audience, one was apt at any time, so long 
 as he remained among us, to become suddenly aware 
 in the street of the approach of a magnetic personality, 
 one that made itself felt, it might be, some fifty yards 
 away through the press, before one had time to realize 
 that this was Mr. G. coming along, — " Mr. G." was 
 the ordinary appellation in use among secretaries and 
 other associates and intimates of his circle. An 
 intimate frequenter of that circle I never was, though 
 several of its members were my friends, and though 
 I came in, at longish intervals through nearly thirty 
 years, for an occasional share of the great man's own 
 courtesy and kindness. The first time I met him was at 
 Naworth, the Border seat of the Carlisle Howards, the 
 same romantically placed, historically famous, and in 
 those days delightfully hospitable house where I had 
 first met Robert Browning a few years before. This 
 
192 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 was at the beginning of September, 1873, when Mr. 
 Gladstone was in his fourth year of office as Prime 
 Minister and the sixty-fourth of his age. He had been 
 on an official visit to the Queen at Balmoral, and the 
 route by which he had chosen to leave was a long 
 day's walk, over some of the roughest tracks and 
 through some of the wildest scenery in the Grampians, 
 to Kingussie Station on the Highland Railway. Hav- 
 ing slept one night at Kingussie, he took train the next 
 day to Carlisle, and arrived at Na worth in the evening, 
 to all appearance perfectly fresh and unfatigued by 
 his long tramp of the day before. My occasional 
 after-meetings with him used to be either again at 
 the same house, or at one or another of several houses 
 of his friends or connections in town and country, 
 and occasionally in later days under his own roof in 
 London. 
 
 Politics were never a main interest of mine, except 
 so far as they must be more or less the interest of every 
 citizen ; and however much I might enjoy hearing 
 Mr. Gladstone dilate out of the fullness of his experience 
 on the political history of his own time (and in this he 
 was ever at his best), to challenge him to a conversation 
 on politics I should have thought an impertinence. 
 His second dominant study and preoccupation, theo- 
 logy, was for me also ruled out by my lack of compe- 
 tence. But there were few other subjects of historical 
 or literary interest on which he was not ready and 
 equipped to talk ; and there were two in particular, 
 Homer and Dante, which he had studied with as much 
 zeal and persistency as any professed specialist in 
 
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 193 
 
 either field. Always strongly impressed while con- 
 versation with him lasted, it generally happened to 
 me, on thinking it over afterwards, to realize that 
 what had impressed me had been less what he said 
 than the way he said it, less the pertinence or originality 
 of his matter than his fine manner and potent tempera- 
 ment in discourse. In those first days at Naworth, 
 I remember, I came in for a sample of what struck 
 me as not being by any means his best. An oppor- 
 tunity presenting itself, I strove hard to make him, 
 with the photograph before us, share my enthusiasm 
 for a certain splendid and almost uninjured Greek 
 fourth-century head of a goddess, in all probability 
 Aphrodite, discovered not long before in Armenia and 
 then under offer to the British Museum by the dealer 
 Castellani. Any and every Greek subject that might 
 be broached led Mr. Gladstone's mind at once and 
 inevitably to Homer. Naturally I did not disclose 
 the fact that I was one of the reviewers who some time 
 earlier, in dealing with his volume Juventus Mundi, 
 had expressed without compromise the opinion (shared 
 by practically all trained scholars and archaeologists) 
 that no Homeric critic had ever shown, along with so 
 minute and systematically tabulated a knowledge of 
 the text, such ingenious perversity as he in comment 
 and interpretation. For one thing Mr. Gladstone held, 
 and worked out with insistent affirmation and detail, 
 the theory that the Iliad and Odyssey were indis- 
 putably the work of a single individual poet ; that so 
 far as concerns the war of Troy in its human aspects 
 the Iliad is strictly historical, and that as to the gods 
 
194 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and goddesses who play so large a part in the story, 
 they and their several characters and the Olympian 
 system to which they belong are the actual creation 
 of Homer himself. I found that these rooted con- 
 victions concerning Homer stood in the way of his 
 being much interested in my Aphrodite head, or even 
 admitting that it could be Aphrodite at all. Looking 
 upon Homer as the one responsible founder and 
 " maker " (his own word) of the Greek religion, and 
 regulator of the functions and precedence of the 
 Greek gods — as it were a kind of Lord Chamberlain 
 of Olympus — he had decided, from the more or less 
 humiliating predicaments in which the poet puts her 
 both in the Iliad and Odyssey, that Homer had for 
 moral reasons deliberately made Aphrodite ridiculous. 
 Ridiculous, or at least trivial, she must accordingly 
 remain ; therefore the divinity represented in this 
 grand head could not be she. On this theme he dilated 
 with unquestioning energy and conviction. It was 
 no use quoting the " Venus of Milo " and other well- 
 known existing types of a noble and dignified Aphrodite. 
 Of ideas running counter to his preconceptions his 
 mind was not receptive, and his quite unfounded 
 negative assurance on this point could not be shaken. 
 I was half inclined at the time to suppose that his cold- 
 ness in response to my enthusiasm must arise from 
 caution lest I should have designs upon the public 
 purse in connection with the purchase of this head. 
 If so, his caution was belated, for the purchase, though 
 I did not know it at the time, had actually been con- 
 cluded ten days before. 
 
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 195 
 
 But his mind, as I had occasion more than once to 
 observe, seemed always in an alert attitude of self- 
 defence against any suggestion that seemed to point to 
 an increased expenditure from the public purse. Con- 
 versation having one day turned on public salaries and 
 the relative scales of pay for this or that kind of 
 service, Mr. Gladstone said to me, " I for one would 
 never be a party to increasing the salaries of you 
 gentlemen of the British Museum, for a more delightful 
 occupation I cannot conceive." I forbore to ask the 
 great man whether he would push this view to its logical 
 conclusion : whether, for instance, he would reduce the 
 salary of a Prime Minister in proportion to the pleasure 
 he might take in his work, or whether he would go the 
 whole length with the late William Morris, who held, if 
 I remember aright, that the most unpleasant kinds of 
 labour ought to be the best paid, and that the coal- 
 heaver, the dustman, and the scavenger ought to be con- 
 soled for the nature of their job by being given only about 
 two hours' work a day and allowed during the rest of 
 their time to spark about in velvet and sables. I merely 
 agreed with his opinion of the Museum life and work. 
 
 Other talks which I specially well remember were 
 marked, not by any such kind of critical perversity 
 as those about Homer, but rather by the vehement 
 affirmation of something commonplace and generally 
 acknowledged. Young's Night Thoughts were men- 
 tioned, and Mr. Gladstone quoted some lines of the 
 poem (I cannot remember which), lines of a gloomy and 
 grand enough pomposity in their imitative sub- 
 Miltonic manner ; and went on to speak of the work 
 
196 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 in general with respectful admiration, in the tone which 
 had been habitual to an earlier generation than mine, 
 or even, I should have supposed, than his own. He 
 further reminded his hearers of the extraordinarily- 
 high place — equal to or higher than that of Paradise 
 Lost itself — which the Night Thoughts had held for 
 several generations in the esteem of continental readers, 
 especially in France and Germany. " But," he then 
 burst out, bringing his fist down with something of 
 the flash and thunder of righteous indignation which 
 so often signalized his public utterances, " but the 
 man was a lickspittle and a sycophant ; he was a 
 shameless, fawning preferment-hunter." And he went 
 on to denounce the grovelling flattery of Young's 
 miscellaneous dedications to every kind of nobleman 
 and place-holder, no matter how disreputable, his greed 
 and baseness in hanging on in early life as a suppliant 
 for patronage to the infamous Duke of Wharton, and 
 later in disgracing his cloth by subservience to the 
 King's mistress, Lady Yarmouth. He wound up by 
 dwelling on the betterment of the times, which would 
 make such proceedings on the part of such a man 
 now equally needless and impossible. 
 
 The best talk about literature in which I can remem- 
 ber Mr. Gladstone taking a leading part turned on the 
 nature and elements of tragedy, and on the difference 
 between themes inherently tragic and those which 
 owed their tragic character mainly to their treatment. 
 Some examples from Greek and Elizabethan drama 
 having been discussed, Mr. Gladstone presently, in 
 his most earnest and arresting manner, affirmed that 
 
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 197 
 
 in his judgment no theme was either more tragic in 
 itself or more heightened in effect by its treatment 
 than that of Scott's Bride of Lammermoor. He in- 
 sisted on the circumstances of the deadly hereditary 
 hate, fresher and better grounded than that of Mon- 
 tagues and Capulets, between the houses of Ravens- 
 wood and Ashton, and on the sense of such fixed 
 implacable hate foredooming to disaster what might 
 under other stars have been the reconciling loves of 
 Edgar and Lucy. He dwelt on the heightening of all 
 the actions and passions by the romantic gloom of 
 the scenery amid which the tale unfolds itself, and by 
 the grim staves of legendary prophecy represented as 
 current in the minds of the common people and 
 creating from the first an atmosphere of dire expectancy 
 and awe. He reminded us how such prophetic saws and 
 staves are not only ever on the lips of the hateful 
 warlock, Elsie Gourlay, but how they darken with 
 tragic foreknowledge even that almost incomparable, 
 almost fully Shakespearean, comic and pathetic crea- 
 tion of the old steward Caleb Balderstone ; and he 
 dilated on the terrible intensity of the scene of the mad 
 bride-murderess on her wedding night, and on the 
 foretold but not less thrilling climax of the disappear- 
 ance of the last heir of Ravenswood in the Kelpie's 
 Flow. None of those present was disposed to contest 
 on general grounds the claim thus made for Scott's 
 masterpiece, I least of all ; * and the further talk, to 
 
 * Let me take this opportunity of expressing my extreme dissent 
 from the slighting estimate of the Bride of Lammermoor given 
 by Dr. T. F. Henderson in the Cambridge History of Literature 
 (toI. xii, p. 22). 
 
198 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 which Mr. Gladstone listened attentively but did not, 
 if I remember aright, contribute much, turned on 
 certain doubts and reservations to be made in regard 
 to it ; as for instance, whether some of the incidents, 
 such as those of the wild bull and the crash of lightning 
 on Wolfe's Crag in the opening chapters, did not push 
 romantic coincidence to the point of melodrama, and 
 whether the Master himself is not a character par- 
 taking as much of the externally and conventionally 
 melodramatic as of the truly tragic. And how, we 
 all agreed in wondering, could the magician in his 
 carelessness possibly have allowed himself to introduce, 
 as he does, the finely conceived incident of the appari- 
 tion to the Master beside the Mermaid's well of the 
 spirit of old Alice at the moment of her death with 
 an apology to the rationalist and sceptical which robs 
 it of half its effect ? 
 
 Another particularly vivid memory of Mr. Gladstone 
 remaining with me is of an utterance humorously 
 verging on the political. (As a rule I ventured to think 
 him not at his best in humorous moments, and even 
 that his countenance at such moments lost something 
 of its paramount distinction, his smile of fun having 
 in it rather more of slyness than of sweetness.) In 
 the early autumn of 1881 he and I were walking side 
 by side along a garden path at Hoar Cross, the country 
 house of the sister of one of his great lifelong political 
 allies, Lord Halifax. He was suffering from an attack 
 of lumbago, and walked with his back bent and his 
 hand held to the place where the pain was. Having 
 once or twice tried to straighten himself up and found 
 
WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 199 
 
 the effort hurt him, he turned to me, still stooping with 
 his hand to his back, and fastening his eyes on mine, 
 said with a manner half jocular half distressful, but 
 impressive as always, " I don't know whether to treat 
 it by the method of conciliation or coercion." A few 
 days later followed the great speech at Leeds de- 
 nouncing the policy of Mr. Parnell and his associates 
 as one of " marching through rapine to dismember- 
 ment," and a little later again the administrative act 
 of consigning the Irish leader to Kilmainham jail. 
 " Conciliation versus coercion" — the phrase very soon 
 became a regular, habitual and threadbare one in 
 the course of the Home Rule controversies which 
 followed. But as spoken at such a moment in the 
 Hoar Cross garden it struck freshly and significantly 
 upon my ear. 
 
 It was at Cannes, in January, 1898, that I last had 
 sight and speech of the great man. He was there as 
 the guest of Lord and Lady Rendel, hoping to find 
 from the climate some alleviation of the extremely 
 painful illness (I believe internal cancer in the face 
 near the eye) which had laid hold upon him. I hap- 
 pened to be also there, as a visitor in another house. 
 Being well acquainted with his hosts, I went to call on 
 them as a matter of course, without dreaming that I 
 should be able to see their suffering guest, upon whose 
 attention, under such circumstances, I had no claim 
 whatever either of intimacy or of special allegiance. 
 But they said they were sure he would like to shake 
 hands with me, and took it upon themselves to send 
 him word that I was there. To my surprise he sent 
 
200 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 for me, just as he was getting into the carriage for his 
 customary invalid drive, and with a manner of beautiful 
 grace and courtesy, though evidently in severe pain, 
 said that he was glad to have the opportunity of 
 speaking with me, that he wished it were in his power to 
 speak more and better, and bade me a grave, almost 
 solemn good-bye, as though he felt that the end was 
 drawing near. A kindlier, even a more touching, 
 last memory of the illustrious veteran I could scarcely 
 have had to carry away. He died in his own home 
 some four months later. 
 
CHAPTER Xn 
 THE BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 
 
 From the thirty or all but thirty years which I 
 spent living at and working for the British Museum 
 there naturally lingers in my mind a varied medley 
 of memories. But how attempt to sift and sort them ? 
 How single out this or that group for inclusion in a 
 budget, such as this is meant to be, of recollections of 
 special places and individual persons ? To call the 
 British Museum a place would seem a misnomer. 
 Regarded as an area in the heart of London it is incon- 
 siderable. Regarded as an architectural monument 
 it is certainly less impressive than its designers intended 
 it to be. Regarded for its contents and purposes it 
 is neither more nor less than an epitome of the civiliza- 
 tion of the world. No single imagination could frame 
 or grasp an adequate conception of what is contained 
 under that dome and in those galleries at Bloomsbury. 
 The name Bloomsbury has in itself somehow a trivial 
 sound and bourgeois associations. What name could 
 be too august, too rich with connotations at once of 
 learning and of romance, to be bestowed on that 
 treasure-house where are assembled, besides the richest 
 extant store of the written and printed products of 
 man's mind, a share so vast and in quality so incom- 
 
 201 
 
202 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 parable of the choicest examples of his handiwork ? 
 Though one of the latest of all the great museums of 
 the Old World in its date of foundation, it may be 
 counted the richest of them all in contents. Library 
 and galleries together, even since the natural history 
 collections were transferred to another part of the 
 town, the treasures sheltered behind that colonnade 
 and under those roofs are unmatchable. To have for 
 one's life-work a responsible share in their custody, 
 their management and augmentation, should surely 
 be a thing to fill one's days with pride and to exalt the 
 gait of one's ingoings and outgoings. 
 
 Well, well, I suppose no one, however privileged his 
 or her vocation, has the sense of such privilege always 
 consciously in mind. Daily duties are daily duties 
 whatever their nature, and one's tendency is to go 
 about them in an everyday, which is as much as to 
 say in a humdrum, spirit. It might even be contended 
 that those among us are the luckiest whose round of 
 bread-winning duties is really humdrum and dull, so 
 that the delights of art and literature, and of conver- 
 sance with things of beauty and the mind, being reserved 
 for the hours of leisure, may appeal all the more for- 
 cibly to sensibilities undulled by habit. Speaking 
 for myself, I cannot pretend that I was habitually 
 conscious of any special pride or privilege in living in 
 an official house behind the long railing in Great 
 Russell Street, and being saluted by liveried guardians, 
 and passing up the steps and under the portico of 
 the great facade on my way to my daily duties. The 
 duties themselves involved, no doubt, one special 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 203 
 
 and unmistakable kind of pleasure, namely that arising 
 from a consciousness of faculties necessarily, from the 
 very nature of their employment, sharpening by daily 
 exercise in the expert's work of technical knowledge 
 and discrimination. At the same time a large pro- 
 portion of the objects upon which such faculties had 
 to be employed, at any rate in the special department 
 of which I had charge, namely that of prints and 
 drawings, were dull enough in themselves, the tedious 
 uninspired output of scores and hundreds of mechanical 
 plodders of all schools. A minority, on the other hand, 
 were of a kind to awaken and keep awake whatever 
 capacity of delighted appreciation, technical, aesthetic, 
 and imaginative, one might possess. Use and familiar- 
 ity could not much or permanently dull the zest of 
 studying and handling and having charge of the most 
 inspired and intimately personal handiwork of a 
 Botticelli or a Raphael or a Michelangelo, a Diirer 
 or a Rembrandt, a Turner or a Constable or a Blake, 
 although on this or that day the sense of delighted 
 admiration for and privileged intimacy with such 
 spirits through their handiwork might and did strike 
 home more deeply and happily than on others. 
 
 Furthermore, the mere necessary going to and fro 
 between one's dwelling-house and one's work was apt 
 at any casual moment to rouse one to a sudden thrilling 
 pitch of delight in human achievement and of activity 
 in the imaginative reconstruction of past glories. 
 During all the earlier years of my service the approach 
 to my department was through the Elgin room. 
 Passing several times every day these fragments of 
 
204 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 the finest and most felicitous of all achievements of 
 human art, seeing them close at hand by every kind 
 of light or half-light which an enclosed and roofed 
 gallery and the varying dimness of the London atmo- 
 sphere could afford, one took their glory for granted 
 perhaps a hundred times against once or twice that 
 one paused to realize and respond to it anew. And 
 more rarely still one caught oneself in the endeavour 
 to restore in imagination the temple with its pedi- 
 mental groups, of which these were but the angle 
 figures spared when the Venetian bomb-shells cast 
 down and shattered the rest, and to give thanks that 
 against that special episode in the unceasing world- 
 tragedy of the Ruins of Time there is this one consola- 
 tion at least to be set off, that here in the Bloomsbury 
 gallery these fragments are placed near enough to 
 the eye for their perfections to be gauged and studied, 
 to be realized and taken in and absorbed, as could 
 never have been the case when they stood when the 
 building was intact, serving a merely decorative purpose 
 in their pedimental angles forty feet above the eye. 
 Of all random denunciations, Byron's tirade against 
 Lord Elgin, in the Curse of Minerva, for removing 
 these master works from their shattered pediments is 
 perhaps the most perverse and foolish. 
 
 But the occupation of a museum official is not con- 
 cerned only with the treasures of human handiwork 
 under his care or coming daily under his eye. He 
 needs also to be a student of human character, and 
 has plenty of scope for any faculty in that kind with 
 which nature or experience may have endowed him. 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 205 
 
 For one thing, it is a chief part of his duty to win the 
 regard and confidence of private collectors, to help 
 and stimulate them in their pursuits, putting his 
 knowledge at their disposal but making them feel the 
 while that their prime, their binding, duty is to acknow- 
 ledge such help by destining their collections in the 
 long run to enrich the institution which he serves. 
 It is open to a collector to do one of three things 
 with his treasures after his death : leave them intact 
 to his heirs : leave them to be dispersed by auction, 
 or leave them to enrich some public gallery or museum. 
 The first alternative generally attracts him least. 
 The second appeals to him by the thought of the excite- 
 ment and competition, such as have been the zest of 
 his own life, which his sale will arouse among other" 
 amateurs and collectors, folk of his own kidney, after 
 he is gone. The third offers the reward of the perman- 
 ent recognition which will await his name as that of an 
 enlightened amateur and national or civic benefactor. 
 It is the value and excellence of this last reward which 
 those public guardians of such things whom he may 
 count among his friends are bound with all their power 
 to impress upon him. 
 
 Apart from such practical ends, a study interesting 
 in itself might doubtless be made of the comparative 
 psychology of collectors, of persons in whom the love 
 of having and handling picked works of art and handi- 
 craft for their own is a passion innate or acquired. 
 In creative literature, I do not remember any special 
 instance of a character in whom the collecting passion 
 is incarnate except that famous one of Cousin Pons 
 
206 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 in Balzac's Les Parents Pauvres. In life, so far as I 
 have been able to observe, the passion is apt to lay- 
 hold on persons of the most diverse origin and tempera- 
 ment having nothing else in common between them. 
 Of those whose collections have in my time enriched 
 our national museum, including my own department, 
 some of the most notable have been Henry Vaughan, 
 George Salting, John Malcolm of Poltalloch and 
 William Mitchell. Vaughan was the son of a wholesale 
 hatmaker in Southwark, and a man of the most quiet 
 and retiring, devoutly beneficent and charitable dis- 
 position. Early travel and inborn instinct implanted 
 in him a love of art which made collecting one of his 
 two absorbing pursuits through all his length of days, 
 the other being charity and good works. To his gifts 
 and bequests half the public galleries in the kingdom, 
 and my own department at the British Museum in 
 particular, owe much of their wealth in the works of 
 Michelangelo, as well as of Turner, Flaxman, Constable 
 and the other English masters of that age. George 
 Salting was the Australian-born son of parents originally 
 Danish , who after an education for very brief terms each 
 at Eton and Oxford, but chiefly at Sydney University, 
 which seemed to promise aptitude for literature and 
 the classics, was diverted by a winter spent at Rome 
 to a passion for the visible and tangible treasures of 
 mediseval, Renaissance, and Oriental art and handi- 
 craft. Living the simplest of bachelor lives in cham- 
 bers at the Thatched House, St. James's, Salting 
 spent practically all his days in the sale-rooms of London 
 and the income of a great fortune, the capital of which 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 207 
 
 he had himself vastly increased, on the purchase of 
 treasures chiefly in the form of pottery, enamels, 
 bronzes, medals and engraved gems ; and in the end 
 he distributed them, as every good collector should, 
 among the various museums of London. Malcolm of 
 Poltalloch on his part was a great highland laird, 
 whose passion as a collector — to a large extent stimu- 
 lated as well as directed by an inseparable fidus Achates 
 in the person of a bachelor friend of education (and 
 I believe origin) partly German, William Mitchell — 
 was for drawings and prints of all schools. The 
 purchase of his treasures for the British Museum 
 after his death almost doubled the importance of the 
 department I had the honour to serve. 
 
 Neither is it among collectors and benefactors alone 
 that a museum official finds interesting human objects 
 of study. He finds them, if he has any eye for such 
 studies, among his colleagues no less. Since appoint- 
 ments of officials have come to be entirely by the 
 routine mode of competitive civil service examination, 
 perhaps there is less scope than there used to be for a 
 marked idiosyncrasy to guide a man in the choice 
 of a museum career or to develop itself during its 
 course. But among my contemporaries and seniors 
 there were certainly plenty of such picturesque and 
 salient characters. To name only one or two — who 
 that ever met Richard Garnett (and during the ten 
 years when he was superintendent of the Beading 
 Boom every one who frequented it met him as a 
 matter of course) can have forgotten him ? The most 
 genially quaint of erudite men, the most helpful, the 
 
208 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 most smiling and queerly attractive to look at in 
 spite of his stained teeth and bristling russet stubble 
 of a beard, he was not, I suppose, a trained bibliographer 
 in the full modern sense, but had a vast and varied 
 practical knowledge of books and the most indefatig- 
 ably obliging courtesy in helping all those who sought 
 his help in their studies. Sedulous as he was in every 
 museum duty, Garnett found time for a vast amount 
 of reading and much miscellaneous critical and bio- 
 graphical writing outside his official work, and has 
 left with all his colleagues a memory at which we cannot 
 forbear to smile, but which we affectionately esteem 
 and honour none the less. A colleague of the same 
 generation but of strongly contrasted type was Wool- 
 laston Franks, a man of fortune and of a Cambridge 
 education, who from the beginning, whilst he only 
 learned the necessary minimum of the regular Cam- 
 bridge studies, had ploughed out a path for himself in 
 the pursuit first of one and then of another branch of 
 archaeology, with a marked preference for the antiquities 
 of mediaeval England, and before long was appointed 
 head of the newly created department of British and 
 Mediaeval Antiquities and Ethnography. One after 
 another he took up new specialities like the study of 
 pottery and porcelain, first English and Continental, 
 then Chinese and Japanese, of Japanese sword-guards 
 and finger-rings, of drinking vessels ; of ancient 
 Bactrian and Indian gold ornaments ; of book-plates ; 
 making himself a master expert in one of these studies 
 after another, and in the end patriotically bequeathing 
 all his collections to the institution of which he was so 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 209 
 
 great a servant. Franks could if he had chosen have 
 been a great man of the world as well as a great anti- 
 quary and museum keeper ; but for general society he 
 cared little and was content with the hearty affection 
 and homage of all whom community of pursuits and 
 interests brought within his sphere. 
 
 Of such marked and interesting personalities among 
 my senior colleagues at Bloomsbury, the one with 
 whom I was on terms of closest intimacy and of whom 
 I retain the warmest recollection was the keeper of 
 Greek and Roman Antiquities, Charles Newton. This 
 is not a name known far and wide, like most of those 
 I am recalling in the present pages ; nor was its bearer 
 in the full sense of the word a man of genius. That 
 is to say he had not the intensity of being, the radiating 
 fire of the spirit, which gives to the personality of 
 genius its power to dominate or enthral. But he had 
 a character, and a very marked character, of his own : 
 his actual achievement was a considerable one in the 
 history of English, nay, of general Western culture, 
 and in the absence of any full or formal biography it 
 is right that some picture of him, as living as may be 
 however brief, should be attempted by one who like 
 myself enjoyed the honour of his regard and the 
 advantage of his teaching. He was my senior by 
 all but thirty years, and I first knew him when I came 
 to London fresh from my Cambridge degree in 1867-68 
 and threw myself — among other studies which I did 
 my best at the same time to master and to expound 
 in popular reviews and journals — into the special study 
 of classical archaeology. Newton had then already 
 
210 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 been for seven years Keeper of the Department of 
 Classical Antiquities at the British Museum. He had 
 served in a subordinate post in the same institution 
 for twelve years after his Oxford degree (1840-52), 
 and then for a spell of seven years had held consular 
 office in the Levant, first at Mytilene and then at 
 Rhodes, being charged at the same time with represent- 
 ing the interests of the British Museum in Asiatic 
 Turkey and the islands. The first great stimulus to 
 excavation by Englishmen on the sites of ancient 
 and buried civilizations had been given by the under- 
 takings carried out by Layard between 1842 and 1851, 
 originally on the personal impulse of Stratford Canning 
 (afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the " great 
 Eltchi ") and next on that of government for the 
 British Museum, at Kouyunjik andNimrud and other 
 centres of Assyrian and Babylonian empire. It was 
 again with the strong backing of the same all-powerful 
 ambassador that Newton had been enabled, during 
 the years of the Crimean war and those next following, 
 to carry out the most systematic and successful excava- 
 tions which had ever been undertaken in those parts 
 in search of Greek antiquities and inscriptions. He had 
 been fitted above other men for the task by a natural 
 instinct — a natural affinity, one might almost put it, 
 with the objects of his pursuit — as well as by the most 
 careful training and preparation. A fully equipped 
 Oxford scholar from Shrewsbury and Christchurch, he 
 possessed besides what it had been too much the habit 
 and defect of English scholarship to lack, a strong and 
 well instructed love for the extant remains of Greek 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 211 
 
 art ; while the records of Greek public and private life 
 and usage preserved in lapidary inscriptions at all 
 times interested him and exercised his faculties even 
 more than those handed down in books. 
 
 Both these classes of material were capable of 
 being augmented from hour to hour by investigation 
 on the sites of ancient cities and burial-places, and 
 it had been the passion of Newton's life so to aug- 
 ment them. The result of his labours during those 
 responsible years on the coasts and in the islands 
 of the Levant had been to rescue for the study and 
 admiration of the after world, and secure for the 
 enrichment of his museum, all those remains of the 
 renowned Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the master- 
 work of the second great school of Athenian sculptors 
 and architects in the fourth century B.C., which lay 
 buried under the buildings of the Turkish town of 
 Budrum : the two noble colossal portrait figures, 
 shattered but restorable, of Mausolos himself and his 
 wife Artemisia ; a headless rider on the fragment of a 
 great rearing horse ; the unbroken head and forehand 
 of another and huger horse standing with the bronze 
 bit intact in its mouth ; many mutilated great guardian 
 lions ; many exquisite frieze-fragments, some almost 
 perfectly preserved, of righting Amazon and Centaur 
 and racing charioteer ; beautifully wrought blocks of 
 column, cornice, architrave and capital — Newton's 
 work had been to rescue and secure these, besides such 
 a unique and moving masterpiece of the antique genius 
 as the seated statue of the sorrowing Demeter from 
 Cnidos, and the series of solemn semi-Egyptian seated 
 
212 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 figures from the great temple-avenue at Branchidse, 
 with many treasures more not here to be recounted. 
 
 These excavations of Newton's in the fifties, carried 
 out with public money and Government backing, were 
 much the most systematic and most fruitful that had 
 ever been attempted on Greek sites, and did more than 
 anything else to set the example and give the impulse 
 to the series of undertakings in the same kind, more 
 numerous than can be counted, which have been 
 carried out in later years by researchers of almost 
 every civilized nationality. Some of these have been 
 much more highly trained than he in the special and 
 technical study of architecture : but in another 
 speciality, that is in epigraphy or the science of 
 inscriptions, Newton was a master abreast of the 
 foremost. He had a rooted preference for this study, 
 as resting on firm and positive data, over that of the 
 archaeology of art, as developed, chiefly in Germany, 
 on speculative and deductive lines which he held to 
 be unsure and often fanciful. After his return from 
 his labours in Asia Minor and appointment as Keeper 
 at the British Museum, Newton by his authority and 
 influence, though no longer by explorations of his 
 own conducting, continued on a great scale the enrich- 
 ment of his department. Other explorers under his 
 impulse and suggestion discovered and sent home 
 precious remains from Ephesus, Priene, Cyrene, from 
 Sicily and Cyprus : and concurrently with these gains 
 a parsimonious Treasury was induced to provide funds 
 for the purchase, one after another, of nearly all the 
 chief collections formed by continental amateurs and 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 213 
 
 dealers ; the Blacas collection for one ; from the 
 great Italian dealer Castellani several collections in 
 succession, besides single acquisitions any one of which 
 was apt to be an event and an excitement in itself; 
 as for instance that magnificent, all but uninjured, 
 bronze colossal head of a goddess found in the farther 
 parts of Armenia, which has been conjectured to have 
 been broken from some famous work, or replica of a 
 work, by Praxiteles, and which stands scarcely rivalled 
 in its kind in any museum of the world. 
 
 I have said that Newton had the passion for these 
 things ; but in spite of his achievement the word 
 seems hardly suitable to a man of his temperament. 
 Staunch and even tender in kindness towards those he 
 cared for and had learned to trust, he was of a reserved 
 and rather austere habit in ordinary intercourse, and 
 by experience and training had acquired a degree of 
 caution and mistrustfulness with strangers which might 
 easily have been mistaken for cynicism. He had two 
 smiles, one, and I fear the more frequent, cold and 
 sceptical, but another, reserved for his tried friends and 
 for young children, very deeply and touchingly tender. 
 As he moved about with a somewhat shuffling or 
 flinching gait (for his feet did not in later years carry 
 him very well) among the noble damaged marbles at 
 the British Museum, the kinship between him and 
 them seemed to strike obviously upon the eye. True, 
 his tall figure was too spare for that of a rightly pro- 
 portioned Greek god or demigod or sage, but his head 
 was truly Olympian. The hair grew outward from 
 the parting in rich and waving grizzled masses, to 
 
214 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 which corresponded a square grizzled beard somewhat 
 roughly kempt : the brow was intent and deeply 
 corrugated, the features severely handsome save for a 
 broken nose, the result of a fall ; but this seemed 
 only to complete his facial likeness to a Greek Zeus 
 injured and imperfectly restored. A great scholar and 
 a great gentleman, he was in all companies a distin- 
 guished presence and in all the best was made welcome. 
 His style, in conversation as in writing and lecturing, 
 was marked by a certain old-fashioned dryness and 
 dignity scarcely less telling in its way than the richer 
 colouring of more expansive or more imaginative 
 talkers ; and in dealing with pretension whether social 
 or intellectual he had a vein of irony the more effective 
 for being kept scrupulously within the bounds of formal 
 courtesy. On occasion he could not only cuttingly 
 give but generously take a lesson. A much younger 
 colleague in the Museum, then assistant-keeper in the 
 department next to his, had cause once to stand up 
 against him and experience the result. Some re- 
 arrangements between the two neighbour departments 
 were in progress, and for a few days the assistant in 
 the department not Newton's was left in charge in the 
 absence of his chief. Newton came along and told 
 him, in the manner of one giving an order, to carry 
 out some of the removals which had been under 
 discussion. He declined : Newton repeated the instruc- 
 tion more peremptorily : he again declined : the same 
 thing happened a third time, and Newton retired 
 with a face of thunder, threatening " Very well, I shall 
 report your conduct to the Trustees." The assistant 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 215 
 
 waited for some days expecting trouble. But no 
 trouble came ; and the only result was that from that 
 day to the end Newton's manner to him became one 
 of friendly warmth and greatly increased regard. 
 Thinking the matter over, he had evidently decided 
 in his own mind that the junior had been quite right 
 in declining to take instructions affecting the depart- 
 ment for which he was for the time being responsible 
 from anyone excepting his own chief. 
 
 When I first knew him he was only lately beginning 
 to come into the world again after an overwhelming 
 sorrow which left its mark on all his after-life. At 
 the close of his labours in the Levant he had been 
 for a short while British consul at Rome, and had 
 there met Ann Mary Severn, the daughter of Joseph 
 Severn, the devoted painter-friend of Keats. This 
 lady was herself an artist of truly sensitive hand and 
 eye, and by all accounts a person of the utmost charm 
 and sweetness. She and Newton were married in 1860 
 and lived a life of perfect harmony, she entering help- 
 fully into all his interests and studies, and devoting 
 her talent to the illustration of his books and lectures, 
 until six years later she was suddenly carried away by 
 an illness of a peculiarly painful and tragic character. 
 As she lay unwell one day in her room she saw a 
 workman killed by a fall from a scaffolding reared 
 against an opposite house. The sight was more than 
 in her weakened state she could bear, and she fell 
 from that hour into a wild delirium, in which she 
 could not endure the presence of him she loved best, 
 and from which she was only released by death. He 
 
216 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 could never bring himself to speak of her afterwards, 
 but those who knew him best were conscious that his 
 innermost thoughts were always of his lost happiness. 
 Come into the world again, however, he did, and I 
 used to meet him at many places besides the scene 
 of his official duties in the museum ; among others 
 at the periodical dinners of the Dilettanti, an ancient 
 and distinguished convivial society dating from the year 
 1732, which had in its day combined the habit of high 
 carouse with much good work in antiquarian discovery 
 and publication, and still kept and keeps up its reputa- 
 tion in the latter kind and some of its quaint convivial 
 rites and usages, though not its excesses, in the former. 
 Newton's discoveries in the fifties and his position at 
 the museum afterwards had placed him first by common 
 consent among the working classical archaeologists of 
 his time in Europe. But that branch of study had 
 since the days of Winckelmann been much more 
 generally followed and understood among German 
 scholars than among English ; and after their triumph 
 and the establishment of their empire in 1870 the 
 Germans, keen, to their credit be it said, in the pursuit 
 and organization of every other science no less than 
 of the sciences of conquest and spoliation — were 
 determined to take a practical lead in archaeological 
 research on classic ground. Their first great under- 
 taking was the excavation, by arrangement with the 
 Greek Government, of the site of the ancient temple and 
 sacred enclosure of Zeus at Olympia, a scheme which 
 had been for a while ardently entertained, but never 
 put in hand, by Lord Elgin, and at which a few tenta- 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 217 
 
 tive scratchings had later been actually made by 
 the French under General Maison. By the winter 
 of 1874-75 this undertaking was in full swing. I was 
 eager to visit and watch it, and with some difficulty 
 persuaded Newton to meet me towards the end of 
 March at Athens in order that we might arrange to 
 travel thence to Olympia together. Some years had 
 gone by since he had last been in the Levant. It was 
 my own first visit to Greek soil. I have tried to 
 convey in another place something of the thrill — 
 for such it must be to every scholar not having a soul 
 of putty — of my first sight of Athens and first days 
 spent there, and shall here only recall a few traits of 
 my elder companion during our trip. Travel in Greece 
 was then very different from what it is now. The 
 isthmus of Corinth had not then been cut by a canal, 
 but had to be crossed by coach. There were no railways 
 in the Peloponnese, and all travel was either by coasting 
 steamer, or by carriage where there existed anything 
 like a road, or else on horseback. The town nearest 
 to the site of Olympia, from which the excavations 
 were approached and supplied, was Pyrgos. Thither 
 we had arranged to go by a coasting steamer from 
 Corinth. We were pacing the shingle of the isthmus 
 in readiness for the boat's early start when to my 
 discomfiture a cold fit fell suddenly upon the spirits 
 of my companion. He began conjuring up a vision 
 of imaginary troubles and treacheries awaiting us on 
 our projected trip, and actually proposed that we 
 should give it up and go back to Athens. I knew 
 him to have shown in the course of his career abundant 
 
218 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 coolness and resource in the presence of real danger, 
 and guessed that there had come upon him in the 
 morning chill a mood which is best explained by a 
 passage in his book of Travels and Discoveries, telling 
 how he once surprised a Greek servant in the act of 
 robbing him : — 
 
 I have not seen so livid and hideous a complexion since the 
 day when Timoleon Pericles Vlasto was detected stealing coins 
 from the British Museum. This man came to me from Smyrna 
 with an excellent character. He had most engaging manners, 
 and was always thanking me for my goodness to him, and telling 
 me that I was better than a father to him. I have little doubt 
 that he would have cut my throat with the same pleasant smile 
 on his face. People in England wonder how it is that, after a 
 long residence in the East, Europeans become so suspicious, jealous, 
 and generally cantankerous ; but they forget that an Englishman 
 in the Levant is doomed to pass his life surrounded by people who 
 may be described by the ever-recurring phrase applied by Darius 
 to his enemies in the Behistun inscription, " And he was a liar." 
 The very air we breathe in Turkey is impregnated with lies. 
 
 It turned out not difficult, however, to talk him 
 out of this momentary mood. We pursued our journey, 
 were landed at Katacolo, the port of Pyrgos, rode to 
 the village of Druva, where the German scientific 
 expedition was installed, were hospitably received, 
 and spent some days studying with intense interest 
 the results of the excavations so far as they had then 
 been carried. From the mere configuration of the 
 ground, with the brook Kladeos, its course marked 
 at that season by flowering Judas-trees, running at an 
 acute angle into the broad shingle-bed of the Alpheios 
 near the foot of the hill Kronion, it was easy enough 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 219 
 
 to recognize the general plan of the site, the great 
 common centre of ancient Greek Zeus-worship and of 
 athletic and poetic contests and glories. It was not 
 too difficult to reconstruct in the mind's eye the aspect 
 of the walled and consecrated precinct of the Altis, 
 dominant within whose boundaries had stood the great 
 temple of the god, besides his open-air altar and the 
 hundred other temples and altars of Olympia, together 
 with the innumerable multitude of votive and memorial 
 statues, a forest of bronze and marble, which had 
 crowded the intervening spaces. Nay, looking out 
 from the side of the hill Kronion over the windings of 
 the Alpheios, marked here by clouds of drifting dust 
 and here by the shimmer of water, away to the 
 gleaming level of the sea itself, it was hard not to break 
 in your mind's eye the solitude of that sea-line, and 
 to descry in imagination sails converging from the west, 
 and throngs marshalling themselves beside the river- 
 mouth, as when the sons of Hellas were wont to assemble 
 in their galleys for the great anniversary from every 
 state of the mainland and every colony overseas. . . . 
 But the immediate daily fruits of the excavation 
 were such as to leave little time for dreaming, and to 
 raise in trained minds a hundred absorbing problems. 
 Fragments of sculpture and architecture were coming 
 up as thick as potatoes under the spade: the flying 
 Victory of Paionios, duly identified by its inscribed 
 pedestal ; many drums of the columns of the great 
 temple lying regularly in rows as they had fallen 
 outward ; the sculptured figures, one after another 
 and all more or less shattered, of the east pediment 
 
220 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 of the same temple. Some of these finds seemed to 
 confirm, some very perplexingly to contradict, anticipa- 
 tions formed on the strength of ancient guide-books 
 and histories. The fragments of the east pediment 
 in particular, as then freshly unearthed, afforded one 
 obvious such puzzle. The standard of excellence in 
 pediment groups of the great period had been set in 
 our minds by the figures remaining from the pediments 
 of the Parthenon at Athens, those prime and crowning 
 treasures of the British Museum, with their combination 
 of grandly monumental decorative design and an 
 almost gem-like finish. But here were these Olympian 
 pediments, works of the same period and school, in 
 comparison but roughly blocked out and showing 
 the decorative purpose and quality almost unaccom- 
 panied by any fineness of detail. Naturally Newton 
 had in his guarded way much to say and to suggest 
 on these antiquarian problems as each presented 
 itself to us, and naturally his words were received 
 with respectful attention. But it is not these which 
 after the lapse of four-and-forty years remain in my 
 mind. What remains perversely and indelibly fixed 
 there is a trifling little scene which occurred on our 
 way back to Athens. Instead of taking boat again 
 from Katacolo we drove from Pyrgos across the plain 
 of Elis, by such a rough, less than half-made apology 
 for a road as then existed, as far as Patras, the chief 
 port of Northern Peloponnese. About half-way we 
 stopped for a meal at a little hostelry in the village of 
 Ali Tchelebi, near the lakelet of the same name, then 
 beautifully fringed with flowering oleander scrub. 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 221 
 
 As we sat out after the meal we noticed a great hairy 
 caterpillar near five inches long crawling perseveringly 
 across the yard on some errand of its own. We 
 were watching its progress with a mild interest when 
 suddenly from a shed at one side a lean, long-legged 
 hen came scurrying after it with outstretched neck, 
 and in another moment had with a greedy chuckle 
 gobbled it up. The event tickled the cynical fibres in 
 my old friend's nature, and in a rare vein of smiling, 
 disillusioned worldly wisdom he fell to moralizing 
 upon it as a symbol of the predatory scheme of life 
 in general and human life in particular. As such he 
 would often humorously return to it in talk during 
 after years in London, and it is perhaps this frequency 
 of its laughing recall between us that has helped to 
 keep it printed so ineffaceably on my mind's eye. 
 
 But I will end what I have to say about this old 
 friend with a memory of a different stamp. One of the 
 things which had most united us from the first was the 
 desire, which I had begun to cherish even as an under- 
 graduate and which had been almost the guiding motive 
 of Newton's life, to see the study of classical art and 
 archaeology, hitherto neglected in our universities, 
 take a regular and recognized place there beside the 
 study of the classical languages and literature. In 
 the years (1876-1884) when I had charge of the Fitz- 
 william Museum at Cambridge, my main endeavour 
 had been not so much to enrich its collection of miscel- 
 laneous original objects of art as to save out of its 
 revenue a fund for providing the first and indispensable 
 apparatus for archaeological study in the shape of a 
 
222 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 gallery of casts from antique sculpture. The new 
 gallery was built and stocked, and in April 1884 a 
 representative company came to the ceremony of its 
 formal opening. The Prince of Wales was present, and 
 among the speakers were such practised celebrities as 
 James Russell Lowell, then American minister in 
 London ; Lord Houghton ; Professor Jebb, who had 
 lately been public orator of the university ; and the 
 president of the Royal Academy, Sir Frederic Leighton. 
 I can see and hear them now. Lowell, with his square 
 and vigorous presence and his great square-cut tawny 
 beard already beginning to grizzle, spoke without 
 technical knowledge but with practised readiness and 
 genial good sense as he regretted the absence of a 
 brother diplomat who chanced to be a past master of 
 these subjects (that was the then French ambassador 
 in London, M. Waddington). Lord Houghton, on 
 public occasions always eloquent and elegant in spite 
 of a slipshod habit of dress and person, spoke, with 
 sweeping gestures of the arm and his scarlet gown half 
 slipping off his back, more aptly and graciously even 
 than usual. Jebb, classically pointed and polished 
 both in phrase and delivery, and Leighton, floridly 
 handsome and winning in person and in the use of 
 tongue and brush alike ever gracefully accomplished, 
 were both at their best. But far the most effective 
 speech of the day, despite its somewhat antiquated 
 style and stiff delivery, was Newton's. For many 
 years of his life he had laboured in vain to get his 
 beloved studies officially recognized and admitted into 
 the curriculum of his own university of Oxford. To 
 
BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 223 
 
 see the object achieved at Cambridge, with the certainty 
 that Oxford must soon follow, was to him like a view 
 from Pisgah. His fine, worn and furrowed, now ageing 
 face took a touching look of relief and happiness as 
 he defined and defended with a master's insight the 
 studies to which he had given his life, declaring as he 
 wound up, " I rejoice to have seen this day ; it is a 
 day I have waited for, and prayed for, and toiled for — 
 in many lands — and when I looked this morning at 
 the cast of the little figure of Proserpine I myself 
 discovered at Cnidos, I was reminded of her avoSo? 
 when she came back from the darkness of Hades into 
 the light of the upper world, and the thought came 
 to me that this was the apoSo? of archaeology, so long 
 buried in England." 
 
 There followed for Newton a time of gradually 
 declining strength, during which his services having 
 tardily received the reward of a public honour, he 
 continued for a while with usefulness and dignity 
 his work both as Keeper at the museum and lecturer 
 at the University of London. The last years before 
 his death were spent in retirement and much needed 
 rest ; not without solace from the grateful affection 
 of us who had known under his guarded exterior a 
 spirit the most zealous in research and teaching and 
 a heart the best to be trusted in friendship. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 
 
 (1875) 
 
 There is no place where a student is more likely to 
 become absorbed in his special study than at Athens. 
 But in letting himself be so absorbed, though he makes 
 sure of gathering one kind of fruit from his journey, 
 he is in danger of missing another kind. The mind too 
 anxiously bent upon improvement is apt to have no 
 attention left for chance impressions, and it is in the 
 distinctness and variety of chance impressions that 
 one half the good of travelling lies. At home, among 
 familiar scenes, to see much in little things is the 
 privilege either of egoism, whose slightest experiences 
 are of importance to itself, or of genius. The rest of 
 us are less impressionable, and let the thousand small 
 circumstances of to-day go by us all but unawares. 
 But abroad, we all notice and remember little things ; 
 there is a strangeness in common sights, sounds, and 
 scents, a vividness in our passing observations ; and 
 we carry away, if we are not too dull or too pre- 
 occupied, a treasure that we did not count on. 
 
 I have only been a fortnight in Athens, and in the 
 way of work, a fortnight could not well yield results 
 worth mentioning. Accordingly of special studies 
 I am not about to speak, only of some general aspects 
 
 224 
 
ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 225 
 
 of the place, and things that strike one there in by- 
 hours. To any one loving Greek literature and art 
 and tradition, the approach, the first sight of Athens, 
 is naturally one of the great moments of life. And 
 few things are better fitted to prepare and work one 
 up for such a moment than the voyage, if you choose 
 that route, from the Ionian islands by way of the 
 isthmus of Corinth. Starting from Zante in the 
 morning, you pass south of and presently leave astern 
 the island-mass of Cephalonia, majestic in the noon-day 
 haze ; you steam beneath the Acarnanian headlands, 
 and stop for a while under the mountain that towers, 
 crimson with sunset, above Patras ; at twilight you 
 enter between the guarded points of Rhion and Antir- 
 rhion, and pass along by night where the snows of 
 Cyllene on the left, and Parnassus on the right, look 
 down on the Corinthian gulf. These landlocked waters 
 are treacherous and subject to hurricanes. What 
 happened to Apollo and his crew on their voyage to 
 Crissa may happen to any one, and did to us. In 
 the middle of the night, after leaving Patras, 
 
 So frank a gale there flew out of the west,* 
 
 that our skipper was fain to bring his ship to under 
 the lea of a cliff, and there she lay straining and tossing 
 at her moorings for two hours, while the awakened 
 passengers bemoaned themselves. When we came 
 on deck at dawn, as the boat neared the port of Corinth, 
 the sky was low and grey, and the cold gale was still 
 * This is Chapman's spirited line for the Homeric, — 
 
 rj\.d' avc/xos Ze<f>vpos //.eyas *-K Atos aunjs 
 \aj3pu<; c^-aiyi^cov e£ attfepos. 
 
226 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 driving the ripple strongly upon the beach ; most of 
 us were still staggering from sea-sickness, the most 
 prosaically abject of human calamities ; the sense of 
 excitement, of enjoyment, of expectancy, was for the 
 moment utterly extinguished. But during the drive 
 across the isthmus to Kalamaki, the port where one 
 took steam again for Athens, the day grew bright, 
 the mountain distances revealed themselves, the air 
 blew fresh and ringing instead of chill ; the deadened 
 faculties began to waken. By the time we were re- 
 embarked, a Homeric hunger had succeeded to the 
 morning's faintness ; and this satisfied, one was ready 
 to take in again the glory of the world. It is a three- 
 hours' run down the Saronic gulf from Kalamaki 
 to the Piraeus, and all the while your heart is astir 
 within you. The sea which leaps from the prow, and 
 flashes under the following gale, is not sea but a sapphire 
 wine of fabulous colour and intensity. The mountains, 
 with their fainter azure, are mountains of enchant- 
 ment ; far off behind some of those foldings on the 
 right, you know, lie ruins of old fame, Tiryns and 
 Mycenae and Cleonae ; on the left, the arid precipices 
 of the Megarid descend in sunshine to the blue; in 
 front, the gulf is almost closed by a crowd of steep 
 and lovely coast and island forms which you have not 
 yet learnt to name or distinguish. You want to shout 
 schoolboy quotations to yourself ; you want to be 
 alone with your emotions, and cannot bear anything 
 which jars against or checks them. Your fellow- 
 passengers become odious to you. A Greek youth, 
 unctuous, familiar, inquisitive, accosts you for the 
 
ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 227 
 
 twentieth time with an eye to business ; a Glasgow 
 tourist prates about the beauties of the Clyde ; some- 
 body offers you a cigar ; you turn savagely from them 
 all, and make your way forward, where the deck is 
 strewn with third-class passengers wrapped in their 
 sheepskins, and picking your steps, clamber up beside 
 the bowsprit, where you can be alone. The island of 
 iEgina has by this time separated itself from the other 
 mountain groups, and lies in front and to the right ; 
 on the left, you cannot at all make out the projections 
 and complications of the coast, but you know that 
 the conical peak the boat is just rounding belongs to 
 the island of Salamis, and are in high suspense for 
 what will come next. You watch and watch, with 
 snatches of Greek and snatches of English poetry 
 ringing in your brain — 
 
 Xnrapal koI lo<rT€<j)avoi /cat aoiBifioi — 
 The fruitful immortal anointed adored 
 Dear city of men without master or lord — 
 
 and presently you swallow something in your throat, 
 and give a shake from head to foot, as the immortal 
 city wears in sight : that is to say, there appears a 
 few miles before you a place in the coast where the 
 higher mountains break back into a sort of amphi- 
 theatre, and you discern a little cluster of rocks stand- 
 ing clear in front of them. First you make out but 
 one sharp crag — that must be Lycabettus ; next a 
 lower one disengages itself, table-topped and with 
 buildings on it, and that must be — it is — the Acropolis ; 
 those buildings are the Parthenon, from thence flashed 
 of yore the spear and helmet of Athene. There is 
 
228 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 another half hour, of which you do not take any pre- 
 cise account, before the steamer comes to in the 
 harbour of the Piraeus and is surrounded by a shoal 
 of pinnaces bringing on board the health-officers and 
 hotel and custom-house agents. These Piraeus boats 
 are painted white, with gunwales striped red and 
 yellow ; the harbour is surrounded with white or 
 brightly- tinted buildings ; the water quivers with clear 
 colour and reflection ; a crystalline and dancing bright- 
 ness is in the air ; as you are rowed to shore, and start 
 to drive from the harbour to the town, you are pene- 
 trated with the sense of unaccustomed and radiant 
 day. 
 
 This lightness and clearness of the Athenian atmo- 
 sphere, as it is the thing which strikes you first 
 on landing, so is it that of which you remain most 
 continually sensible. Not the 'KainrpoTaTv? aWr^p of 
 Euripides, not all that poets have sung or travellers 
 told, have fully prepared you for the reality. When 
 day has followed day in which the world has lain 
 flooded with radiance, and on night after night the 
 stars have seemed to hang within reach almost, in 
 unknown, nearer, brighter multitudes, till the spirit 
 has thoroughly dilated itself in the new medium, still 
 you find that habit has not made you insensible to 
 this magic quality of the air. It is forced upon your 
 attention by fresh sights and impressions that occur 
 continually. The old market at the lower end of the 
 town is a great place for one kind of such impressions 
 which has nothing to do with ancient Athens or with 
 your studies, but strikes vividly in upon your passive 
 
ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 229 
 
 observation. Market-stalls and market people in 
 counterchange of intense shadow and light, heaps of 
 glowing oranges, piles of silk stuffs, figures in the scarlet 
 fez and white or blue jacket and white fustanella, 
 make pictures of intense Oriental colour, which you 
 are apt to come upon suddenly, framed in the openings 
 of the houses, as you descend from the Acropolis by 
 one of the many narrow lanes of that quarter. Some- 
 times, on the other hand, one of these sudden effects 
 of daylight contains a whole revelation on the nature 
 of ancient art. When, in one of the new buildings 
 upon which the masons are at work all over the town 
 — the University, the Academy, the Parliament- 
 house, the Sculpture museum — you chance to see a 
 piece of fresh-carved marble against the sky, it dazzles 
 you with its excessive glitter and whiteness ; you 
 understand at once why statues of pure untinted 
 marble would not do in this climate, and why the 
 ancient Greek, to make his groups of outdoor statues 
 tolerable to the eye, must needs have toned and 
 tinted them ; and how, further, it is probable that his 
 marble surfaces in general were faced with some 
 preparation which did for them then that which time, 
 subduing the white glitter to a hundred rich diversities 
 between ivory and amber, has done for them now. 
 There is another way in which the Athenian daylight 
 helps you to understand ancient art for the first time. 
 The moment you see shadows like these, strong, sharp, 
 and defined as by a needle's point, but nevertheless 
 full, in the shaded surface, of a blue and bloomy light, 
 you have gained a new revelation as to the powers 
 
230 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and effects both of sculpture and architecture. In 
 the West we know nothing of this daylight, which 
 at the same time cuts out every shadow into the sharp- 
 est definition and force of contrast, and floods all that 
 lies within the shadow with a soft and exquisite clear- 
 ness. Every projection is thrown into intense relief, 
 every play of surface is expressed with the subtlest 
 gradation ; the commonest mason's work looks striking 
 and beautiful. 
 
 And if the atmosphere of Athens gives such special 
 effect and brilliancy to various features of the modern 
 town — to the shapes and shadows of cornice, capital, 
 and balcony, or the attire of market-people grouped 
 about their many-coloured wares, still more does the 
 same atmosphere shed enchantment upon the landscape. 
 The aspect of all mountains obeys and changes with 
 the sky, but none that I have seen seem to owe so 
 much of their glory to sky and air as those of Attica. 
 Every one knows in some degree what is the configura- 
 tion of that noble theatre in the midst of which the 
 city stands. The rocks of Athens rise from a plain 
 which is encompassed on all but the seaward side by 
 the three ramparts of Hymettus, descending to the 
 shore on the south-east, Pentelicus closing in the 
 landward view north-east, and Parnes north-west ; 
 with the lower, nearer range of Aigealos or Daphni- 
 Vouni, cleft in two by the pass of Daphni, running 
 from Parnes to the sea beyond Piraeus on the west, and 
 cutting off the view of Eleusis and one half of Salamis. 
 At first you do not think of these hills as either distant 
 or lofty. The clearness with which you can distinguish 
 
ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 231 
 
 every detail of their appearance makes them seem near, 
 and the sense of ample horizon and unhemmed openness 
 in which you breathe makes you feel as if, being near, 
 they could not be high. Except on rare days of cloud, 
 or when the scirocco drives a dusty haze across the 
 world, you can discern every fold and facet of their 
 slopes, you can make out every cleft and watercourse, 
 almost every minute accident of colour and variety 
 of surface on the rock. Nevertheless, it is nearly 
 two hours' walk to the nearest of these ranges — to the 
 first hollows about the base of Hymettus, or to the 
 rise of Daphni in the opposite direction. The sum- 
 mits of Parnes are twenty miles away and nearly five 
 thousand feet high. In other climates, it is only in 
 particular states of the weather that the remote seems 
 so close, and then usually with an effect which is 
 sharp and hard as well as clear. Here the clearness 
 is soft ; nothing cuts or glitters, seen through that 
 magic distance ; the air has not only a new trans- 
 parency, so that you can see farther into it than 
 elsewhere, but a new quality, like some crystal of an 
 unknown water, so that to see into is greater glory. 
 Such a sky does wonders for the land beneath it. 
 The heights are barren and naked, as they always were, 
 and for ages now the barrenness and nakedness has 
 extended to the hollows and to a great part of the 
 plain, where the populous demes once clustered. Here 
 is nothing opulent ; here are none of the ornaments 
 of our northern mountains, no green of the meadows or 
 purple of the moors, nothing of what makes splendid 
 the headlands of Wales or Scotland. These ranges 
 
232 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and promontories of sterile limestone have another 
 distinction. Ridge beyond ridge they rear themselves, 
 extend, sink, part, or close, in forms the most admirably 
 harmonious. To watch their mere outlines is a delight 
 and lesson for the eye ; still more to study the model- 
 lings of their masses as they lie revealed in a thousand 
 fine gradations of light and pearly shadow. To draw 
 them is as difficult as to draw the Elgin marbles ; 
 and in truth the Athenian sculptor did but carve his 
 goddesses as his mountains had been carven for him 
 from of old time. The colours of them are as austere 
 and delicate as the forms. If here the scar of some 
 old quarry throws a stain, or there the clinging of 
 some thin leafage spreads a bloom, the stain is of 
 gold and the bloom of silver. And whenever, in the 
 general sterility, you find a little moderate verdure — 
 a little moist grass, a cluster of cypresses — or whenever 
 your eye lights upon the one wood of the district, the 
 long olive-grove of the Cephissus, you are struck with 
 a sudden sense of richness, and feel for the moment 
 as though the splendours of the tropics could be 
 nothing to this. So with the flowers ; a few thin 
 tufts of asphodel, the small purple grape-hyacinths, 
 the close-growing mountain-thyme, a knoll sprinkled 
 with red or white anemones, seem to you wonders, 
 and most of all the anemones, which flash upon you 
 as the reddest and the whitest in the world. The affinity 
 of Greek nature with Greek art, its power of producing, 
 in the same way, effects of surpassing richness with 
 means of extreme simplicity and severity, is the thing 
 which the Athenian landscape brings continually home 
 
ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 233 
 
 to you, in details as well as in the general aspect. 
 In talking of the landscape, one is still talking of 
 Athens ; for the town is not so large that it ever shuts 
 you out from the sense of the country. It is curious 
 to notice the different impressions one gets in different 
 cities of the relation of city and country. In London 
 that relation can hardly be said to exist ; the town is 
 to our consciousness a world without limits, and we 
 can hardly realize that even from a balloon, or in the 
 survey of a travelling bird, it would be possible to see 
 all round it, and take it in as the inhabited centre of 
 an open champaign. From within, it is but now and 
 then, when some clear wind is blowing, in some chance 
 street, or from some high attic window opening north 
 or south, that the heights of Hampstead or Norwood 
 catch one's eye, and remind one, not without surprise, 
 of the existence of a circumjacent world. Of great 
 cities, Vienna, with its double river, and the mountains 
 to be seen from its many open places, perhaps keeps 
 the sense of the circumjacent most agreeably present to 
 one's mind. Florence, however much smaller, is quite 
 capable, with her narrow streets and beetling palaces, 
 of making one forget for awhile her encompassing 
 Apennines. The new town of Athens is growing fast, 
 and already covers a great deal of ground, but by no 
 means so as to coop one from the outer world ; one 
 has not yet to resent a loss of view in consequence of 
 its growth. But one has this to resent, that the view 
 changes, in a certain fashion, as the town grows. The 
 people want stone for building, and they get it where 
 it can be got most conveniently — by blasting in the 
 
234 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 nearest heights. The nearest height of all is Lycabettus, 
 a conical peak which dominates the town immediately 
 behind the king's palace ; and the shape of Lycabettus, 
 as the Athenian mariner of old beheld it from the 
 gulf, has been really altered by modern quarrying. 
 It has been, I believe, decided not to quarry any more 
 on the conspicuous, the townward side of this particular 
 peak ; but further back, and on adjacent eminences, 
 the work goes on continuously. Boom, boom, one 
 hears all day, as mine after mine is sprung ; and the 
 fragments rattle down, and a scar is made, and those 
 forms are changed that should stand fast for ever. 
 Lycabettus, and other sacred rocks, are hewn, and 
 suffer transformation, and rise again as the brand-new 
 public building, the Panepistemion and the Boule — the 
 University and the House of Parliament — of an Athens 
 rejuvenate and complacent. The German scholastic 
 architects, who planned the new town after the War 
 of Liberation, have set an example of style which has 
 been followed in the main, though none of the subse- 
 quent buildings are either so vast or so pretentious 
 as the square barrack of a royal palace. What the 
 public buildings and great private houses most remind 
 one of is Munich — a Munich with an added touch of 
 the Oriental in the flat roofs and closed jalousies, 
 and with the advantage of better materials. For the 
 ornamental parts, Pentelicus is at hand with its marble 
 of incomparable quality, and the native masons seem 
 to have an hereditary art in fitting and working it. 
 The stuccoes used for facing most of the wall-surfaces 
 are of pleasant tints, and so, particularly, are the tiles 
 
ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 235 
 
 of the roofs ; so that when one looks down over the 
 town from some eminence its colour suits the scene. 
 And when one walks along the great new thoroughfare, 
 planted in boulevard fashion with pepper-trees, the 
 modern Athens seems a place not unstately nor un- 
 refined — until, perhaps, a cloud of hard white dust 
 comes drifting with the wind, and your eyes smart, 
 and your temper changes ; and then you may quickly 
 fall into that other mood, which often one cannot 
 resist, and may hate this prosperity and despise this 
 civilization, and wish that, in this place at least, there 
 were no present to thrust itself between you and the 
 past, and feel as if, about the foot of the Acropolis, 
 solitude and hyenas would be better than this crowd, 
 superlatively and offensively modern, for so it somehow 
 strikes you, which struts or saunters before the plate- 
 glass windows. 
 
 Quick-witted and hospitable people ! it ill becomes 
 one who has shared your kindness, and hopes to share 
 it again, to feel like this. And reason and humanity, 
 as well as gratitude, aver that you have a right to 
 build your new city — a Munich, yes, a Paris of your 
 own, between the Acropolis and the groves of Academe 
 — and to be busy with your parliamentary politics, 
 and more taken up with to-day and its passions than 
 with the past and its memories. But that which 
 reason bids us remember we all the same forget, and 
 continually fall into indignation, into petulance, against 
 this population and its ways. The sight of neo-Greek 
 words over the shop-doors, the sound of a neo-Greek 
 speech the sense of which our self-willed, insular way 
 
236 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 of pronunciation has not taught us to catch, the tavern 
 sign of the Nine Muses, the shopkeepers who write up 
 their names Solon and Epaminondas and Alcibiades, 
 the small boy who cries the comic paper ' Aristophanes ' 
 with a true twang of the railway platform — all these 
 things seem to us, at such moments, part of a conceited 
 and intolerable travesty of greatness. It cannot but 
 be so ; no living present with its trivialities could 
 well seem to us other than the ape and desecrator 
 of that past which has left us almost nothing trivial, 
 almost nothing not ideal. We cannot, try as we may, 
 we cannot really, familiarly, call up to our mind's 
 eye the ancient Greek as he lived, laboured, bartered, 
 laughed, quarrelled, and died; the accidents of 
 history have conspired with the national genius to 
 purge away from his visible record all marks of 
 commonness or vulgarity. We go to that street, laid 
 bare by the spade in recent years, by which the pro- 
 cession used to set out to Eleusis, and where there 
 are on each side the funeral monuments of dead Athen- 
 ians ; and we ask ourselves, what was the real character, 
 what the gestures, fashions, comings and goings, of 
 that domestic life which is commemorated in the 
 carvings of these tombs with such complete apparent 
 naturalness, yet with such serene and inviolate 
 decorum ? A mother sits in her chair, and stoops to 
 kiss her departing child and pat its elbow. A man 
 in ripe years, half turning to go, grasps the hand of 
 his seated wife ; another speaks to his dog, who leaps 
 up to crave for notice, as he goes out as if for the 
 usual day's labour. Again, a man and wife grasp 
 
ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 237 
 
 hands, while friends behind the chair look on sorrow- 
 fully. Hegeso the daughter of Proxenos, so named 
 in the inscription on her tomb, sits placidly, while 
 her maid brings her in a dressing-casket some piece 
 of attire such as a lady might wear when she walked 
 abroad. Thus much of his real life the Greek will show 
 us, but denuded of all nutter and circumstance ; he 
 will carve, with many grave and sweet variations, the 
 household good-byes of every day, in order to carry 
 our thoughts, not to every day, but to that one day 
 when those who say good-bye know that there will be 
 no return at evening. Images decorous, indeed, and 
 serene, but none the less moving ; for in these simple 
 scenes of farewell and departure there lurks a tender- 
 ness so poignant that one's heart is tightened and 
 the tears come into one's eyes as one looks at them. 
 Thus to express, in the familiar, everything but its 
 familiarity — with so simple a spectacle thus to move 
 and solemnize us — to show us nothing but the usual, 
 and at the same time lift and chasten us from usual 
 thoughts — what words can estimate, what musings 
 fathom, that art of arts ? 
 
 And should one be blamed for being impatient, if, 
 when one is absorbed in this mystery of the Hellenic 
 genius, shouts or chatter interrupt one's musings, and 
 boys come rioting and pelting each other among the 
 tombs, or trivial-seeming sons and daughters of 
 contemporary Hellas pass gossipingly ? There is at 
 least one place where one can be nearly sure of escaping 
 the opportunities of the present, and realizing, as the 
 religious seek to realize, that absorption which life 
 
238 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and traffic elsewhere interrupt ; that is the peak of 
 Lycabettus, just above the town. I used to sit every 
 morning under a rock near the top of Lycabettus, and 
 let the view engrave itself by repetition upon my 
 senses. You look down over Athens, down over 
 the Acropolis dominating Athens, and thence over a 
 space of basking plain to the gulf, and beyond the gulf, 
 to the long faint-blue barrier, many-peaked, of the 
 Argive mountains. The hither shore-line of the gulf, 
 about five miles away, stretches all across the view, 
 with moderate indentures and promontories on the 
 side nearest Salamis and the spires of Aigealos (and 
 on this side are the white buildings of the Piraeus 
 clustering at the sea's edge), and with a more even 
 sweep in the direction of Hymettus on the left. To- 
 wards the centre is one chief indenture, the Bay of 
 Phalerum ; of this the curve just coincides, in the 
 view, with the table line of the Acropolis, so as to 
 detach the Parthenon against a background of sea. 
 Solitary stands that pillared stateliness, glittering white 
 against the profound Mgesm blue. Nearly straight 
 over the Acropolis, the island of iEgina, softened 
 and darkened with distance, lifts a lovely mountain 
 outline, and dimly behind Mgina, another island, Poros, 
 heaves a grand shoulder that we can but half distin- 
 guish from the many-folded ranges of the Argive 
 mainland. The gulf, where it widens towards the 
 open Mediterranean, lies misty under the morning 
 sun, and passes thence through a long gradation 
 from east to west into a blueness which is blackness 
 almost, so profound, so intense is the colour, where 
 
ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 239 
 
 its last inlets lie branching beneath the sunlit preci- 
 pices of Salamis. Salamis, an island of many barren 
 peaks, is flooded with sunlight on all its southern and 
 eastern slopes. Beyond it stretch again the masses 
 of the Peloponnesian mountains, and farthest of all 
 one crest of pure and gleaming snow, the crest of 
 Arcadian Cyllene. 
 
 All of the living and the present which reaches you 
 here is the sound sent up from below. The sounds, 
 the cries of Athens, are discordant enough when you 
 are among them, and are not limited to the town. 
 Donkeys are much used in Attic husbandry, and the 
 Attic donkey is notorious for braying incessantly. 
 But the cries of the market and the news-vendors, 
 the braying of donkeys about the farms, the calling 
 of cavalry bugles, and one high clear note most con- 
 tinuous of all, the ring of the masons' hammers upon 
 the marble they are fashioning — all these sounds, 
 through that magic air, ascend to you fused and 
 musically softened, and make no jarring or inhar- 
 monious accompaniment to your most rapt reflections. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 
 
 It was in Newton's company, in the month of Febru- 
 ary, 1881, that I had my only meeting with this remark- 
 able survivor of the great days and great men of the 
 opening century. To us of a later generation, or 
 rather of several successive generations, Trelawny had 
 become a personage legendary while he yet lived. We 
 all knew thus much about him, that being the younger 
 son of an old Cornish stock, endowed by nature with 
 an ungovernable spirit and extraordinary bodily 
 strength and hardihood, he had in boyhood been first 
 expelled from school and then, at about twenty, a 
 runaway from the King's Navy : next for a year or 
 two a comrade and leader of privateers, scarcely to be 
 distinguished from pirates, in the Eastern seas (though 
 this phase of his career may perhaps be partly mythical) ; 
 and next, for a few more years, to quote his own words, 
 " a shackled, care-worn and spirit-broken man of the 
 civilized West." That next had come the chance, so 
 happy for his life and fame, which made him first the 
 associate of Shelley and Byron in Tuscany, and of 
 Shelley in especial the ardent admirer and friend — 
 the man who last spoke to the poet in life and who 
 snatched his heart out of the pyre which consumed 
 
 240 
 
EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 241 
 
 his remains — and then, when Shelley was gone, the 
 companion of Byron on his expedition in aid of Greek 
 liberty. Both before and after Byron's death, Tre- 
 lawny was the trusted lieutenant of the famous Greek 
 chieftain Odysseus, a partisan at war equally with 
 the Turk and with the provisional native Government 
 at Athens, and was made the victim of an attempted 
 assassination while left in charge of that chieftain's 
 treasure in his cavern fortress on Mount Olympus. 
 After his recovery and a few years spent in the Ionian 
 Islands, the next phase of his life was that of a man of 
 leisure and letters at Florence, the most confidential 
 friend of Shelley's widow ; bent for a while himself 
 upon writing Shelley's life, and when he was foiled in 
 that hope, turning to weave the story of his own wild 
 early days into a thrilling, inextricable, ultra-romantic 
 blend of fact and fiction in his book The Adventures of a 
 Younger Son. He reappears next as once more a 
 traveller performing feats of strength and endurance 
 in the wilder regions of America both North and South 
 — feats unrecorded or vaguely recorded except that 
 one feat of swimming across the rapids below Niagara, 
 which he has himself described in what in his own 
 energetic, untutored way of writing is perhaps his 
 masterpiece. For some seasons thereafter he played 
 his part as a conspicuous member of London society, 
 made much of by fashionable folk in spite — or perhaps 
 because — of his scorn of social rules and conventions. 
 Then for another period he lived in the London 
 suburbs as something of a recluse and in South Wales 
 as a country gentleman and hardworking practical 
 
242 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 farmer and gardener, but never for very long without 
 some scandal attending his name, for of all laws the 
 marriage laws were those he respected least. Then 
 he became for a second time an author, recounting his 
 relations with Shelley and Byron and his experiences 
 in Greece with a remarkable gift both of human 
 presentment and of narrative : and thereafter lived on 
 and on, for the most part in retirement in the country, 
 until of his own memorable age he had become almost 
 the last survivor, and an object of curiosity and pil- 
 grimage to successions of younger men and women 
 seeking in their minds or writings to reconstruct 
 it. 
 
 Naturally I had always had the wish to see this 
 veteran, and at the date I have mentioned the oppor- 
 tunity came. Newton and I were the guests for a 
 winter week-end of our friends Captain and Lady 
 Alice Gaisford in their Sussex home, distant about a 
 mile from the cottage in the village of Sompting where 
 Trelawny had then long been living. Our host, a 
 brother Dilettante of Newton's and mine, was a son 
 of the once famous Greek scholar and dean of Christ 
 Church, Thomas Gaisford, and was himself a fine type 
 of handsome, chivalrous, cultivated English gentleman. 
 He was on terms of friendly regard and intercourse — 
 under some degree of protest, if I remember aright, 
 from Lady Alice — with the old rebel his neighbour, and 
 by previous arrangement walked over with us and 
 introduced us. The house where Trelawny lived was 
 a large cottage painted red and set back a little way on 
 the left-hand side of the road, not far from the entrance 
 
EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 243 
 
 to the village. The veteran received us in a small, 
 old-fashioned room on the ground floor, where he sat 
 in an arm-chair with a couple of black-and-tan terriers 
 playing about his feet. I had been accustomed to 
 hear much of his extraordinary vigour. He had 
 always been of abstemious habits, and although past 
 eighty-eight, and a water-drinker, and although he had 
 still inside him one of the two bullets which had been 
 lodged there by the assassin Fenton during the Greek 
 war of liberation, he was nevertheless, it was said, so 
 strong that he had only lately given up the habit of 
 bathing in the sea in all seasons, and of warming him- 
 self on the coldest mornings, not at the fire, which 
 he refused to have lighted before noon, but by the 
 exercise of chopping wood. I was therefore somewhat 
 surprised to perceive in him at first sight all the appear- 
 ances of decrepitude. He scarcely moved himself in 
 his chair on our entrance, but sat in a shrunken atti- 
 tude, with his hands on his knees, speaking little, and 
 as if he could only fix his attention by an effort. He 
 wore an embroidered red cap, of the unbecoming shape 
 in use in Byron's day, with a stiff projecting peak. 
 His head thus appeared to no advantage ; nevertheless 
 in the ashen colour of the face, the rough grey hair and 
 beard and firmly modelled mouth set slightly awry, 
 in the hard, clear, handsome aquiline profile (for the 
 nose, though not long, was of marked aquiline shape), 
 and in the masterful, scowling grey eye, there were 
 traces of something both more distinguished and 
 more formidable than is seen in Sir John Millais's 
 well-known likeness of him as an old seaman in his 
 
244 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 picture " The North- West Passage " — a likeness with 
 which the sitter himself was much dissatisfied. 
 
 The talk ran at first on commonplace matters and 
 mutual acquaintances. In its course the downright 
 old man denounced as " lies " the ordinary formulas 
 of social politeness and solicitude. His voice was at 
 first weak and muffled ; at the same time his scorn 
 of conventions seemed to declare itself in a certain 
 bluntness and blufifness of utterance, and in tricks of 
 pronunciation such as saying " strenth " for " strength" 
 and sounding " put " with the vowel short as in " shut." 
 Was this ruggedness of speech and manner, I could 
 not help asking myself, quite genuine and natural in a 
 gentleman born, who, rough as had been his early 
 experiences, had nevertheless lived familiarly among 
 equals whenever he chose ; or had it been at first 
 wilfully adopted and become by degrees a second 
 nature ? By and by he began to rouse himself, and 
 then his conversation became, at least at intervals, 
 curiously impressive. His moral and social reckless- 
 ness, his defiance of current opinions, his turbulent 
 energy, his sure eye for character and his no less sure 
 instinct for literature, all made themselves felt, along 
 with the extraordinary interest of his experiences. 
 From time to time he would rise, almost bound, up in 
 his chair, with his eyes fastened on yours like a vice, 
 and in tones of incredible power would roar what he 
 had to say into your face. I never heard in human 
 conversation a voice so energetic as that which burst 
 from the old man in these explosions ; explosions 
 which subsided quickly, and in the intervals of which 
 
EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 245 
 
 his accents were quiet and muffled as before. When 
 the personal preliminaries were over we talked of 
 current politics. It was the hour when the long 
 negotiations between the British generals and adminis- 
 trators and the Boer leaders had failed, and the opera- 
 tions of the Transvaal war (of 1881) were in full swing. 
 Trelawny defiantly declared his hope that the English 
 would be beaten. " If I were a younger man," he 
 shouted in a strong crescendo, " I would go and fight 
 for the Boers — fight for the Boers — fight for the Boers." 
 There was seeming imminent at the same hour 
 another war nearer home, though not touching us so 
 deeply. Greece had been pressing for the fulfilment 
 by Turkey of those clauses of the Treaty of Berlin 
 which handed over to her the provinces of Thessaly 
 and Epirus. Turkish diplomacy had resisted by all 
 the devices of obstinacy and cunning known to it; 
 and the great Powers, each afraid of throwing Turkey 
 into the arms of the other, had failed to insist, and 
 striven, so far vainly, to effect a settlement by com- 
 promise. Greece was preparing for war — and if war 
 broke out, which side of the two, one of us asked, did 
 Trelawny think would win. Who could tell ? he 
 asked ; the Greeks had never, for two thousand years, 
 faced an enemy in the open field. All their successes 
 in the war of liberation had been won in guerilla 
 fighting : the Turkish squadrons used to march in 
 column along the plains, when the Greek sharpshooters 
 would line the hills and harass or destroy them without 
 exposing themselves. I had lately been re-reading 
 Trelawny 's Records of Shelley, Byron, etc., and this 
 
246 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 answer reminded me of one of its most striking pas- 
 sages, and showed me how entirely the old man was 
 thinking in the light of his own experiences during the 
 war of liberation some fifty-five years earlier. Here is 
 the passage in question : — 
 
 On our way to Corinth, we passed through the defiles of Der- 
 venakia ; our road was a mere mule-path for about two leagues > 
 winding along in the bed of a brook, flanked by rugged precipices. 
 In this gorge, and a more rugged path above it, a large Ottoman 
 force, principally cavalry, had been stopped, in the previous autumn, 
 by barricades of rocks and trees, and slaughtered like droves of 
 cattle by the wild and exasperated Greeks. It was a perfect 
 picture of the war, and told its own story ; the sagacity of the 
 nimble-footed Greeks, and the hopeless stupidity of the Turkish 
 commanders, were palpable : detached from the heaps of dead, 
 we saw the skeletons of some bold riders who had attempted to 
 scale the acclivities, still astride the skeletons of their horses, and 
 in the rear, as if in the attempt to back out of the fray, the bleached 
 bones of the negroes' hands still holding the hair ropes attached 
 to the skulls of their camels — death like sleep is a strange posture- 
 master. There were grouped in a narrow space five thousand or 
 more skeletons of men, horses, camels, and mules ; vultures had 
 eaten their flesh, and the sun had bleached their bones. 
 
 Continuing on the same subject, one of us asked, 
 would not Mr. Trelawny like to go and fight for Greece 
 now, as he had fought for her before ? No, if after 
 leaving Greece he had ever gone back there again he 
 would without doubt have been assassinated. Why ? 
 For the sake of plunder ; because he, and he alone, 
 knew the caves and hiding-places where the chief 
 Odysseus had deposited his treasure. Here again the 
 veteran was evidently thinking in terms of his bygone 
 
EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 247 
 
 experience. It was by the fabulous accounts of the 
 wealth accumulated by Odysseus in his cavern on 
 Mount Olympus that the Scotsman Fenton and his 
 accomplice Whitcombe had been lured to their act of 
 treachery. But granting that those hoards still re- 
 mained untouched, and that Trelawny was the only 
 man knowing the secret of their hiding-place, in what 
 way an assassin in later times could possibly have 
 profited by his death was not apparent ; neither did 
 we press the point. Speaking of the actual attempt 
 made on his life in 1825, Trelawny described how his 
 Hungarian servant, standing on guard at the mouth 
 of the cave, confronted and shot the would-be assassin 
 Fenton, who was attempting to escape from within 
 it under the pretext that what had just happened 
 there was a dreadful accident. One of us, referring 
 to the shot with which Fenton wounded Trelawny, 
 not to that with which the Hungarian servant killed 
 Fenton, asked if it had not been in the back, which 
 as a matter of fact it was ; whereupon Trelawny, 
 misunderstanding the question and still thinking of 
 the action of the Hungarian, rose with a shout and 
 a flash and called out, " No, in the face, in the 
 face." 
 
 Passing to the circumstances of Shelley's death in 
 1822, Trelawny, after showing us the scar where he had 
 burned his hand in plucking the poet's heart out of 
 the ashes, detailed at length his reasons for believing 
 that the sinking of Shelley's boat the " Don Juan " (re- 
 christened the " Ariel "), in the squall after she had left 
 Leghorn Harbour, was due to foul play. He repeated 
 
248 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 without variation the account of the matter given in 
 his published volume of Records, dwelling particularly 
 on the circumstance that he had been himself pre- 
 vented from putting out in company with his friends 
 in Byron's schooner " The Bolivar " by warnings of the 
 quarantine to which he would thereby make himself 
 liable, addressed to him from the pier by men affecting 
 to be custom-house officers but who turned out not to 
 be custom-house officers after all. And he insisted on 
 the fact that when the wreck of the " Ariel " was brought 
 to the surface her bows were found to be stoven in. 
 This belief that the " Ariel " had not gone down by 
 accident in the squall but been deliberately run down, 
 was one which had by degrees gained complete posses- 
 sion of Trelawny's mind, but is not shared by those 
 who have inquired most carefully into the evidences. 
 Being then, as always, especially interested in all 
 that concerns either Keats or Landor, I tried to lead 
 the old man's thoughts toward the days (about 1828-30) 
 when he was living at Florence in the intimacy both 
 of Keats' s friend Charles Brown and of Landor him- 
 self. Knowing that it was by a hint of Trelawny's that 
 Brown had been induced to adopt a second Christian 
 name, Armitage, so that he might be better distin- 
 guished from the general tribe of Browns, and that on 
 the other hand it was by Brown's suggestion and per- 
 mission that Trelawny had prefixed to many of the 
 chapters of his Adventures of a Younger Son mottoes 
 from Keats's poetry both published and unpublished, 
 I had hoped to get from the old man a more living 
 image of Brown's person and character than I had yet 
 
EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 249 
 
 been able to form.* I was very desirous also to hear 
 what Trelawny might have to say of that other stiff- 
 backed and strong-lunged type of haughty British 
 independence and self-will, Walter Savage Landor, 
 his senior by some two and twenty years. The two 
 had been actually living together at Florence, I knew, 
 at the time when Landor had made of Trelawny' s 
 adventures during the Greek War of Independence the 
 subject of one of the most highly wrought of his 
 Imaginary Conversations. The scene is laid in the forti- 
 fied cavern of the chief Odysseus on Mount Parnassus, 
 and the persons of the dialogue, besides the rebel chief 
 himself, are his mother Acrive, his young daughter 
 Tersitza, and Trelawny. In the course of the adven- 
 ture in the cavern Trelawny had married this girl 
 Tersitza, then barely past childhood, and had brought 
 her with him when he left Greece to settle for a while in 
 Italy. Subsequently, as was his way with wives real 
 or nominal, he cast her off, sending her back to her 
 own country, but keeping with him the daughter of 
 their union, Zella, who grew up under his care to 
 womanhood and married comfortably. The references 
 to this daughter in Trelawny' s posthumously published 
 letters do him, it should be said, nothing but credit, f 
 
 * The best and liveliest material at present extant is to be found 
 in the memoir prefixed by the late Sir Charles Dilke to the collected 
 papers of his grandfather (Papers of a Critic, vol. i, pp. 3-17). 
 
 f See Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman, 
 C.B., Oxford University Press, 1910. These letters prove, had 
 proof been needed, how absolutely groundless is the horrid slander 
 concerning his dealings in this matter to which publicity was given 
 in W. W. Sharp's Life of Severn, pp. 264-5. 
 
250 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Tersitza herself also married again some years after 
 Trelawny had discarded her. Whether she had been 
 still living with him in Italy at the date when Landor 
 wrote the Conversation in which the two bear part I 
 did not, and do not, know, and should much have liked 
 to learn. At any rate Landor, knowing his Trelawny 
 intimately and writing soon after the events, has chosen 
 to invest their loves with a character exquisitely 
 ingenuous and idyllically ideal, making of Trelawny as 
 lover a personage possibly true to the life, but totally 
 unlike anything one had otherwise ever heard or con- 
 ceived of him.* 
 
 But my fishing for talk from the old man either as 
 to Charles Brown or as to Landor was vain. Of Brown 
 he had nothing to say ; and concerning Landor — 
 " a remarkable man, a remarkable man," he repeated 
 several times, but would not be drawn into further 
 comment except in regard to the mistake Landor had 
 made in overrating Southey. Some general remarks on 
 poets and poetry ensuing, Trelawny declared his great 
 admiration for William Blake, whose work, unread 
 and ignored among the associates of his youth, had 
 only in later years become known to him through the 
 publication of Gilchrist's Life and Rossetti's reprints. 
 He proceeded to recite standing, with the full force of 
 his tremendous voice, some stanzas of Blake's poem 
 " London " from the Songs of Experience : — 
 
 * The reader who thinks of turning to this dialogue for himself 
 should perhaps be warned that the charming part of it is only in 
 a few pages at the^ beginning, while the rest discusses the Greek 
 politics of the hour in a strain superlatively tedious. 
 
EDWARD JOHN TRELAWNY 251 
 
 In every cry of every man, 
 
 In every infant's cry of fear, 
 In every voice, in every ban, 
 
 The mind-forged manacles I hear, — 
 
 and so forth. 
 
 By this time we had sat with our entertainer a long 
 while ; and I could see by the impatient demeanour 
 of the two terriers that we had outstayed the hour 
 at which they expected their master to take them out 
 walking. When we rose to go he accompanied us into 
 the hall. Newton, in shaking hands, congratulated 
 him on looking so very well considering his age, and then 
 turned to put on his coat : whereupon I could hear 
 the old man, standing behind him, and conscious no 
 doubt of his own fast declining health, growl to him- 
 self " 'S'very well, s'very well ' : that's the kind o' lies 
 I was talking of : lies, lies, lies." His last words to 
 us were nevertheless kindly. It did not need the notes, 
 which on this single exceptional occasion I took at 
 the time, to keep vivid in my mind the image of this 
 hard-bitten, keen-visaged, bull-voiced, rich-memoried 
 veteran as he stood grumbling, but not unfriendly, on 
 his door-step. To have shaken the hand which 
 plucked Shelley's heart out of the ashes was an 
 experience one was not likely to forget. Scarcely more 
 than six months later he died, and his remains were 
 removed to Rome to be buried in the grave he had long 
 ago secured for himself beside Shelley's. In like manner 
 Joseph Severn, dying at Rome some thirteen months 
 before, had after an interval of all but sixty years 
 been laid to rest beside his own poet-friend, Keats: 
 
252 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and with the deaths of these two, Trelawny and Severn, 
 the great romantic age seemed to many of us to have 
 receded out of living touch and reach into a past newly 
 intangible and remote. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 VICTOR HUGO 
 
 With this chief poet and romance-writer of his nation 
 and generation, this world-famous great master of 
 the sublime and tender and (for the word must out) 
 of the preposterous, it was my privilege to come into 
 personal touch soon after the calamities of the Franco- 
 Prussian war of 1870-1 and the poet's return from 
 exile. I used to be often in Paris in those days, and 
 among my friends there the most intimate was Philippe 
 Burty, a fine and subtle master in the same craft of art- 
 criticism as I was trying to ply at home. Burty 
 ought to hold a permanent place in the history of that 
 craft, if only as one of those who, in alliance with the 
 great financier-collector Cernuschi, first Brought the 
 love and understanding of Japanese art, in all its forms, 
 into fashion among Parisian amateurs and thence by 
 degrees among the general public. He was a man of 
 exquisite perceptions and sensibilities, with a purring 
 and coaxing softness of manner under which lay much 
 genuine affectionateness as well as an enthusiastic 
 and discriminating love of art : and not only these 
 but a staunch courage, proved throughout the horrors 
 of the siege and the fierce political struggles which 
 followed them. In the days of the re-actionary 
 
 253 
 
254 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Bordeaux Assembly and the republique militante he was 
 a warm adherent, unshaken by the ghastly interlude 
 of the Commune, of the liberal causes and of their 
 leaders, and was held in equal regard by the poet-seer 
 Hugo and the great parliamentary champion Gam- 
 betta. Hence his recommendation secured me a 
 welcome in the quarters where I most desired it. He 
 took me once or twice to see Victor Hugo during the 
 master's brief return to Paris immediately after the 
 signature of peace with Germany (February-March 
 1871). Then ensued the outbreaks of revolution and 
 re-action — the Commune and its bloody suppression 
 followed by the presidency of Marshal Macmahon — 
 during which Hugo could not make France his home 
 but had once more to withdraw, first to Brussels and 
 then for a while again to Guernsey. Meantime he 
 was busy upon his volume UAnnee Terrible, embody- 
 ing in every passionate and high-pitched mood of lyric, 
 elegy, narrative, invective and satire alternately the 
 emotions he had endured during the recent tragedies 
 of his country. The volume appeared early in the 
 summer of 1872. I reviewed it as well as I could in 
 an English magazine, and through our common friend 
 Burty sent a copy of the review to the master, holding 
 such offering to be due as an act of courtesy though 
 knowing well that he could not read my attempt ; 
 for his knowledge of English was as vague and wild as 
 is to be inferred, for instance, from his christening an 
 English character in one of his novels Tom-Jim-Jack 
 and from his imagining that the Firth of Forth means 
 La premiere de la quatrieme. Burty carried out my 
 
VICTOR HUGO 255 
 
 request, and I have before me the letter in which he 
 tells me so, expressing at the same time his wish that 
 he were himself a better English scholar ; assuring 
 me that the master had been much touched with some 
 words in my last paragraph when they were translated 
 to him ; telling further how he, Victor Hugo, was on 
 the point of withdrawing again to Guernsey from the 
 too distracting calls upon his time and strength in 
 Paris ; and ending with some interesting remarks on 
 the way in which during his brief return Hugo had 
 recovered the poetic ascendancy over younger minds 
 which in his absence had been usurped by newer 
 poets such as Baudelaire and Leconte de Lisle.* 
 
 * Burty's letter gives so close and clear a view of the phase which 
 French critical opinion was passing through at this juncture that 
 the reader may care to have the text of the relevant passages 
 before him : — 
 
 " J'ai recu votre etude sur V Annie, Terrible. Je l'ai lue avec 
 un reel interet, regrettant tou jours que mon peu de pratique de 
 la langue anglaise me fasse evidemment passer sur des delicatesses 
 de langue sans les apprecier. Mais je crois avoir saisi l'esprit du 
 fond qui est sain et genereux. Je l'ai porte hier soir a M. Victor 
 Hugo et lui ai lu le dernier paragraphe et il en a ete fort touche. 
 II quitte Paris tout prochainement, peut-etre demain. II ne peut 
 done vous remercier d'ici mais il le fera aussitot arrive a Guernsey, 
 il vous adressera la lettre au bureau meme du journal. Je suis tres 
 heureux d'avoir ete l'instrument de votre rencontre. . . . Les 
 correspondances, les visites, les demandes de secours, l'accablent. 
 II a perdu tout son hiver, se couchant fort tard et ne pouvant plus > 
 comme a Guernsey, jouir du grand travail du matin. Je ne puis 
 que l'approuver, mais j'en suis bien attriste. Personnellement, 
 je crois qu'il m'aimait. Mais surtout son gout se retrempait dans 
 l'atmosphere toute speciale de Paris. Son attitude politique etait 
 
256 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 The crisis through which, after the lapse of fifty 
 years, Western civilization is once more passing, has 
 inevitably thrust into the foreground of all our thoughts 
 many of the same grim world-problems as in those days 
 most exercised the poet, including that ancient, 
 tragical, inveterate historic conflict of Germany against 
 France, and that, universal and immeasurably more 
 inveterate still, of Have-not against Have. Will the 
 reader pardon me if, in order to revive for him the 
 special atmosphere of those days and the scope and 
 character of the work it inspired in Hugo, I reprint 
 here some paragraphs from my review? 
 
 In these leaves written with a proud spirit and with truth, 
 these pages of mourning, battle, and affright, if there has gone 
 forth against my will the voice of anguish, if I have cried with 
 the cry of torture, or so much as once denied my Hope, let that 
 voice of my sobbing be stifled and unheard ; I cancel the cry, I 
 
 excellent©, enfin il avait reconquis sur le groupe des jeunes poetes 
 de talent l'ascendant que durant son exile avaient pris Baudelaire 
 et Leconte de Lisle, hommes d'une reelle valeur, mais incapables 
 de vues aussi hautes, aussi fecondes que celles de Hugo. La pre- 
 sence reelle est un dogme dans la vie comme dans la catholicisme." 
 
 The master's own letter of acknowledgment followed, but is a 
 piece of merely polite formality : — 
 
 " Hautville House, 
 
 8 Sept. 1872. 
 
 Cher Monsieur Sidney Colven, — 
 
 Vou8 avez voulu me laisser a votre passage le plus gracieux 
 souvenir. Vous avez ecrit sur V Annie Terrible une grande et 
 belle page, d'une haute portee et d'une vraie elegance. Je vous 
 remercie par mon plus cordial serrement de main. 
 
 Victor Hugo." 
 
VICTOR HUGO 257 
 
 erase the word and unsay it.' That is the courageous way in which 
 M. Victor Hugo, towards the end of his new poem, takes up his 
 old sanguine prophecy of human and universal progress. " Paris 
 is the city of destiny and of the dawn, the seat of the future and 
 of light, the travailing mother of the To Be ; she has loved much 
 and suffered much ; envied be her calamities ; fair is her fate, 
 for she bleeds for mankind, and her crown of thorns shall turn in 
 the fulness of time to an undying aureole in the sight of the nations." 
 — And so on, and again and again. The same confession of faith 
 is amplified and re-iterated through page upon page of pompous 
 imagery and passionate declamation ; amid the mass of which 
 there come and go such lights of tenderness and power as thrill 
 the spirit from time to time with the sense of incandescent genius, 
 a revelation of the inmost sanctuary of poetry. The creed has 
 two articles. The poet says : "I believe in God the Spirit of 
 Justice, who is one with the Ideal, Conscience, Liberty ; who is 
 the Soul of our Soul, the vast Unknown behind all religions, the 
 highest Right, the universal Law, the supreme Immovable, the 
 dazzling incomprehensible All. And I believe in Paris, which is 
 the city of God, the champion of Justice, the seat of Conscience, 
 the martyr of Liberty, the lamp of Reason, the inextinguishable 
 hearth of the Soul. . . . When Paris founders, faith turns to 
 doubt ; zero is the sum of things ; the goal of our journeying is 
 naught. But once more — no ; the heart beats high again ; the 
 city shall survive, shall renew her mighty youth ; creation shall 
 not prove a mockery ; the pillar of light shall not be a gibbet of 
 shame ; there shall not be poison in the fields, the woods, the 
 flowers ; history shall not be a frantic and furious chaos of f atalities ; 
 the world shall not be a dismal indictment against its Maker ; 
 comets shall not need to wring their hair. / to doubt the issue ! 
 / to deny the human progress which is the pivot of the vast move- 
 ment of the welded universe ! /, the watcher for the dayspring, 
 to despond because the night is long ! Nay, I have done my duty : 
 I suffer and am glad : I march on, knowing that nought of all is 
 false, knowing that my hope is sure, and steadfast is the firmament. 
 And I bid ye hope with me, all ye that love and are cast down : 
 
258 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and I bear ye witness that the unknown Being who scatters abroad 
 splendours, flowers, universes, and takes no count ; who pours 
 forth stars, winds, and seasons as from ever-open granaries ; who 
 gives forth everlastingly to sky-piercing mountains and dyke- 
 devouring seas the gifts of azure and hghtning and daylight and 
 the sky ; who floods space with the torrents of light, life, and love 
 — I bear ye witness that He who dieth not and passeth not away, 
 who spread the book of the world which priests mis-spell, who 
 gave beauty for the vesture of the Absolute, who is real despite 
 of doubt and true despite of tales — I bear ye witness that He, the 
 Eternal, the Infinite, is not as a riddle having no key." But how 
 turn the resounding and heroical French verse into cool English 
 prose ? . . . 
 
 The democratic philosopher, recurring to the last overwhelm- 
 ing plebiscite of France in favour of the Empire, saves his faith 
 by going over the old tale of the difference between the People, 
 before whom he bows, and the Populace, whom he despises. From 
 the chaos of the multitude there can spring fine flashes ; but let 
 an evil wind blow, and what then ? The people that surged about 
 Gracchus at the rostrum, that made the strength of Leonidas and 
 Winkelried (says the poet, plunging at large, as is his way, hither 
 and thither into history), of Washington, Bolivar, and Manin, of 
 Garibaldi as he marched a Homeric hero among the Theocritean 
 hills, of the Convention when it held head against thirty kings, 
 and all Europe broke in froth against the pensive grenadiers of 
 Sambre-et-Meuse — hail once and again to that sovereign people ! 
 But when the priest-driven mob murders honour in Coligny and 
 reason in Ramus, insults the severed head of Charlotte Corday,' 
 spits upon Aristides, Jesus, Zeno, Bruno, Columbus, Joan of Arc 
 — then it is the populace, the many-headed ; then it is blind and 
 maddened numbers ; then the tyrant All is as bad as the tyrant 
 One. And though all men vote for Caesar, the prophet will have 
 them wrong ; no majority shall cow his conscience ; he will say 
 that the world goes ill, and wait until this tyranny be overpast. 
 He will bend his ear to the tombs of the just of old who threw off 
 Hfe rather than bear it with dishonour ; he will ask ces purs tre- 
 
VICTOR HUGO 259 
 
 passes how long it is fit he should bear the load. Last comes the 
 fine image of the snow-storm : " What is it falling round about 
 us in the darkness ? Oh, the millions of snow-flakes, and millions 
 again ! Oh, the blackness ! Oh, the snow ! — death to any that 
 falls asleep in it, dim leveller of things, covering the mountains, 
 covering the fields, covering the towns, whitening over the loath- 
 some sewer-mouth, filling heaven with avalanche ! How to find 
 the way where all is treachery ? " " Ah, but where will all the 
 whiteness be, what will have become of the shroud, to-morrow, 
 once the sun shall have risen an hour ? " 
 
 August, 1870, is the first month, and gives its name to the 
 first section, of the Terrible Year proper. We are admitted to 
 the meditations of Napoleon the Little, who, being a mole and 
 blind, imagines that he is working in the dark and that his minings 
 are concealed ; and says to himself that now is his time, while 
 the nations are blinking, to turn true Charlemagne instead of 
 gingerbread Buonaparte, to strike his blow for European suprem- 
 acy, and put everything upon the hazard of the die. Out upon 
 the suicide, fumbling blindly to his doom, and taking the proud 
 army of France with him, to lead her without stores, without 
 commanders, into the snare ! Do books tell of another felo-de-se 
 like this ? — and once more we are off again over all history and 
 geography for the answer. An Indian fakir letting the vermin 
 devour his body that his soul may go to Paradise ; a coral fisher 
 imperilled among Liparaean reefs ; Green in his balloon ; Alex- 
 ander marching to Persia, and Trajan to Dacia — all these, anybody 
 and everybody who ever ran a risk, ran it for a purpose ; but a 
 knave going out of his way to ruin, a Damocles breaking the thread 
 which kept the sword from falling, a mountebank emperor cutting 
 off his head to keep on his crown — whoever saw or heard of the 
 like ? It was in order that Destiny might be fulfilled — that this 
 man, being crime incarnate, being the prince of paltriness and the 
 pickpocket of potentates, might have such a fall as that the common 
 sewer itself must receive his carcase with shame. . . . And so 
 we come to Sedan — we hear how in the fatal valley, amid the shock 
 of furious hosts, in the midst of thunder, in the hell of slaughter 
 
260 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and the rain of iron, when all were drunk with the smoke of blood 
 and no man thought but of battle, amid the bellowing of the human 
 hecatombs and the angry clangour of the trumpet, suddenly from 
 one voice broke the monstrous petition : " Let me live ! " Then 
 all was over ; a bandit, a bandit had surrendered the sword of 
 Gaul and of France, of Brennus and of Clovis, had belied the mighty 
 memories of old, had disgraced " the haughty group of battles " 
 from Chalons and Tolbiac to Wagram and Eylau ; henceforth 
 Agincourt shall smile, Ramilies and Trafalgar shall be pleasant 
 memories ; there shall be solace in the thought of Blenheim or 
 Rossbach ; Sedan shall be the only word of shame. The poetry 
 runs very high throughout this passage of the battle, and culmin- 
 ates with an astonishing effect of rhetorical grandeur in the resonant 
 catalogue of proper names — the personified Battles with Hghtning 
 flashing from their brows and wings, the historic heroes from Heristal 
 to Napoleon — that are said to give up their sword upon this day 
 of humiliation. 
 
 The prospect of a siege, implying a death-struggle between 
 the two nations, opens the chapter of September with one of the 
 finest things in the book. " Choice between the Two Nations " it 
 is called ; and the poet lets his thoughts range, as they might in 
 time of peace and amity, over the glories and excellences of Ger- 
 many. There is no greater nation, he says ; the blue-eyed Teuton 
 is grand to think of among the confused commencements of Euro- 
 pean civilization. Germany wrought order out of the clash of a 
 hundred barbarous nationalities ; Germany has been the bulwark 
 of the world — has confronted Caesar with Arminius and the Papacy 
 with Luther ; German has had Vitikind as France has had Charle- 
 magne — and even Charlemagne was a little of a German (alas ! 
 alas ! professors English and Prussian, and zealots of historic fact ! 
 is that all you can get granted, and at this time of day ?) — Greece 
 has Homer ; Germany has Beethoven ; Germany has music for 
 her breath, and blends in her mighty symphonies the eagle's scream 
 and the trilling of the lark. Germany has her castled crags and 
 verdant meadows ; her blonde maidens are like angels as they 
 play on the zither at eventide. Her landscape is peopled with 
 
VICTOR HUGO 261 
 
 heroic legends ; the Hartz, the Taunus, the Black Forest, are 
 mystical with hauntings of prophet and demon ; the trees beside 
 the banks of Neckar are full of fairies by moonlight. " Germans, 
 your tombs are like trophies, your fields are full of mighty bones ; 
 Germans," cries the French poet, putting the climax to this cata- 
 logue of renown, " be proud and lift up your heads ; for Germany 
 is potent and superb." And then he turns to his country, and 
 cries — " My Mother ! " All that praise and more to Germany ; to 
 France, the cry of her son — " ma mere ! " That is a stroke of 
 rhetoric, of obvious literary artifice if you will, but still of the 
 artifice which is full of genius and passion : the like comes with 
 a like effect in the dramatic writing of this prince of modern play- 
 wrights. An immense accumulation of pleadings, of arguments, 
 of admissions, or whatever it may be, is balanced in a moment 
 with three sudden and pregnant words, a cry from the heart which 
 outweighs all reasoning, a thought from the core of things which 
 scatters with a breath all accumulations of commonplace expostu- 
 lation or conjecture round about them. At the latter end of the 
 poem a similar turn is given, a similar bridle put by the poet upon 
 his natural volubility, in a passage referring to the burning of 
 buildings by the hunted Parisians of the Commune. " You set 
 fire to the Library ? " asks the poet. " Yes, I did," says the petroleur. 
 Then expostulation : " But it is a crime against yourself and your 
 own soul ; it is your own treasure and heritage you are consuming. 
 Books are the champions of progress and the poor. What, turn 
 against your best friends ! fling a torch amid the Homers, the 
 Jobs, the Platos, the Dantes, the Molieres, the Miltons, the Vol- 
 taires, the Beccarias ! waste the records of these arch enemies of 
 war, famine, and the scaffold, cruelty and prejudice, pride and 
 wrath, evil and slavery, kings and emperors ! What, throw away 
 your own cure, your only hope and wealth ! " Then comes the 
 answer : " But I cannot read ! " The " Je ne sais pas lire " of the 
 incendiary outbalances, in its concentrated reproach against 
 society, the whole magazine of reproaches which society can bring 
 to bear against the incendiary. 
 
 The death-struggle once fairly engaged, the poet can see no 
 
262 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 longer any good or any justice among the enemies of his country. 
 They in their turn are bandits — powers of darkness leagued together 
 to extinguish the light of the world, feudal barbarians bent with 
 a vindictive instinct on the suppression of the city of the Idea. 
 Berlin is incarnate evil, Paris is incarnate good ; Corporal William 
 is as bad as pickpocket Louis. It has become a contest of night 
 and day ; it is a host of robbers, locusts, devourers in the dark, 
 that have come forth to prey upon the sacred place left defence- 
 less. History shall hold the marauders up to perpetual shame ; 
 " those princes " shall be names of everlasting reproach ; there is 
 nothing to take away from the city who girds herself to resistance 
 the whiteness of her fame, nothing to redeem the blackness of the 
 infamy of those who assail her. She is a pure virgin whose body 
 may fall into the hands of the ravisher, but whose spirit shall repay 
 them with hatred inextinguishable. . . . 
 
 In the middle of all these rhetorical and sometimes tedious 
 generalities of denunciation on the one part and devotion on the 
 other, there come fine bursts in almost every key of poetry. Traits 
 taken really and directly from the life of the siege, traits of actual 
 misery or actual heroism, are put before us, sometimes with tender- 
 ness, sometimes with ferocity, in descriptive language of which 
 the placid and reserved simplicity will burst up every now and then 
 to let through, in language of quite another kind, that sense of 
 ulterior mystery and immensity, that familiar presence of elemental 
 powers, which always seems like a sea buoying up from beneath 
 the thought of Victor Hugo. How shall one define the subtle 
 essence of poetry in this piece of contemplative realism written 
 ''On seeing some dead Prussians floating in the Seine," in which 
 the patriot's vindictiveness gives such a strange sting to the brood- 
 ing sweetness of the dreamer ? To translate is hopeless : — 
 
 " Oui, vous etes venus et vous voila couches ; 
 Vous voila caresses, portes, baises, penches, 
 Sur le souple oreiller de l'eau molle et profonde ; 
 Vous voila dans les draps froids et mouilles de l'onde ; 
 C'est bien vous, fils du Nord, nus sur le flot dormant ! 
 Vous fermez vos yeux bleus dans ce doux bercement. 
 
VICTOR HUGO 263 
 
 Vous aviez dit : ' — Allons chez la prostituee. 
 Babylone, aux baisers du monde habituee, 
 Est la-bas ; elle abonde en rires, en chansons ; 
 C'est la que nous aurons du plaisir ; o Saxons, 
 O Germains, vers le sud tournons notre ceil oblique. 
 Vite ! en France ! Paris, cette ville publique, 
 Qui pour les etrangers se farde et s'embellit, 
 Nous ouvrira ses bras . . .' — Et la Seine son lit." 
 
 It is close to this that there falls the passage which goes furthest 
 in setting forth the nature of that cosmic ideal, or sum of ideals 
 of which we have spoken as the god of the poet's worship. It is 
 an indignant outburst in reply to a priest calling him " atheist " ; 
 there is something like a precedent for it in Voltaire : but M. 
 Victor Hugo need fear no impeachment of his originality, and 
 he has never hurled all the resources of literature with greater 
 power against an enemy than here ; he has never been more crush- 
 ing than in his exposition and proof, how the real atheist is the 
 priest with his debased deity of superstition, and the poet with 
 his august deity of the ideal the real believer. 
 
 Close to this, again, comes the choicest passage of all that 
 are written in another strain which runs through the poem, and 
 gives the sense of a peculiar and touching charm as often as it 
 appears. The poet is a patriarch ; he has his two little grand- 
 children, George and Jeanne. The play and prattle of these infants 
 about the ancestral knees, as they live bravely or piningly through 
 the hardships of the time, make themselves heard ever and anon 
 amid the roar of cannon and the terrors of the Apocalypse. First 
 it is an address to little Jeanne on the 30th of September, her 
 birthday. She is a year old, and her grandfather tells her how 
 she is like a little callow bird waking up to chirp vaguely in the 
 warmest of nests, and so pleased to feel its feathers begin to grow ; 
 how these are beautiful pictures in the picture-books grandpapa 
 lets her finger and fumble — yes, but not one of them half as beautiful 
 as Jeanne herself. How the wisest saws in books do not mean half 
 so much as can be read in her wondering angel's eyes ; how God 
 
264 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 is near when she is there ; what a big girl she is getting — a whoTe year 
 old ; how everybody is her slave ; and as for poor old grandpapa, 
 he only exists for her pleasure and benefit ; how, alas ! the world 
 she smiles upon is all at strife ; how the city rings with the clang 
 of arms while she is murmuring like a bee in summer woods ; how 
 for him, when the humble voice lisps its song and the sweet hands 
 are stretched out, all the tumult and terror seem to disappear, 
 and God seems to give the beleaguered city His blessing through 
 a little child. 
 
 Next, it is New Year's Day, and grandpapa has been out to 
 buy the children playthings. They will tell you some day, he 
 says to George and Jeanne, how grandpapa was a kind old fellow, 
 who did his best in the world, and had a rough time, but was never 
 cross to the little ones, and how he did not forget to go out and 
 buy them toys in the middle of the famous bombardment ; and it 
 will make you turn thoughtful as you sit under the trees. After 
 that, things have become too terrible for the little folks to be so 
 much thought about ; there has been starvation, despair, capitulation, 
 disgrace. " Stroke on stroke ! bolt on bolt ! " — in the midst of 
 his country's agony, the poet has his son struck down by sudden 
 death ; the little girl and boy are left orphans. That is at Bor- 
 deaux, at the time of the voting of the treaty of peace. Then 
 comes Paris again ; the Commune, and the redoubled agonies of 
 civil war, conflagration, blind and barbarous reprisals. The poet 
 has taken shelter at Brussels, has been driven thence by brutal 
 clamour ; has felt once more, and hurled at his calumniators, some 
 of the scorn of Dante ; has launched plea after plea in mitigation 
 of the promiscuous ferocity of the victorious soldiery. In the 
 middle of June and bloodshed, the poet has had a thought for the 
 children — innocents with hearts like the morning, who know nothing 
 of all that is doing, and are quite content to warm themselves in 
 the sunlight, though it streams upon them standing amid sham- 
 bles. . . . 
 
 There is one instance where an incident calls to Victor Hugo's 
 mind some passages of his own childhood ; and this draws from 
 him one of those irresistible jets of poetry, in which the blending 
 
VICTOR HUGO 265 
 
 of rapture and sadness, old enchantments and present sorrow 
 alternating to and fro within the pensive brain, is expressed with 
 incomparable art. There was a great old building and garden, 
 on the south side of the river, the disused convent of the Feuillan- 
 tines, where Victor Hugo's mother (she would never be content 
 without a garden) set up house when he was a child of seven with 
 his father away at the wars, where she lived for several years, and 
 gave shelter for a time to the proscribed General Lahorie. The 
 site has been greatly changed. JEere Victor Hugo was lingering 
 one day during the siege, when he was almost struck by a bomb- 
 shell. First of all he fires out into an amusing and characteristic 
 burst of invective against the bombshell ; calls it all the names 
 he can think of, and asks why it, the child of nether hell, should drop 
 forsooth out of the azure vault. Then : — " The man your tooth 
 just grazed " had sat down to think. His eyes were looking out on 
 a bright dream from amid the darkness ; he was musing : he had 
 played there when he was quite little : he was watching an appari- 
 tion of the past. That was where the Feuillantines used to be. 
 Your stupid thunder crashes to pieces a Paradise. How charming 
 it was ! how we used to laugh ! Growing old is watching a glow 
 that has faded. There used to be a green garden where this street 
 goes ; and the shell finishes, alack ! what the pavement had begun. 
 That is where the sparrows used to peck the mustard-flower, and 
 the little birds picked quarrels with one another. The wood used 
 to be full of gleams that were supernatural ; such trees, such fresh 
 air amid the quivering sprays ! Then one was a little flaxen-poll ; 
 now one is grey ; one was a hope, now one is a ghost ! Young ! 
 one was young in the shadow of the old dome ; now one seems as 
 old as it. 
 
 " Le voila, 
 Ce passant reve. Ici son ame s'envola 
 Chantante, et c'est ici qu'a ses vagues prunelles 
 Apparurent des fleurs qui semblaient eternelles. 
 Ici la vie etait de la lumiere ; ici 
 Marchait, sous le feuillage en avril epaissi, 
 Sa mere qu'il tenait par un pan de sa robe. 
 
266 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Souvenirs ! comme tout brusquement se derobe ! 
 L'aube ouvrant sa corolle a ses regards a lui 
 Dans ce ciel ou flamboie en ce moment sur lui 
 L'epanouissement effroyable des bombes. 
 O ] 'ineffable aurore ou volaient les colombes ! " 
 
 It is in the latter months of the cycle, those which follow the 
 extinction of the Commune, that Victor Hugo's eloquence reads, 
 I think, most like practical wisdom, and his vein of prophecy seems 
 to take the colours of real statesmanship. He had been no par- 
 tisan of the Commune or participator in it, and had earned plenty 
 of obloquy by holding aloof. But indeed his fervent ideal humani- 
 tarianism has little in common with practical socialism. He had 
 no faith in that movement in which so much that was devoted, 
 so much that was generous and heroic, was mixed up with so much 
 that was evil, lawless, and self-seeking, and the noble elements 
 and the base went to work in equal desperation. And the blood 
 boils within him, the spirit of his father rebels, at the demolition 
 of the emblems of the glory of French arms. He protests against 
 the destruction of the Vendome column : the moment when the 
 ropes of the Commune are hauling at that, and when the shells 
 of Versailles are pounding at the Arch of Triumph, is of all others 
 the moment of his deepest despondency. He denounces the burn- 
 ing of the palaces with all his might, and watches it with the bitter- 
 ness of despair. But when the troops are in and the massacre 
 begins, when the population is being pitched half-killed into pits 
 of quicklime, when young and old, women and children, are being 
 whelmed in wanton and hideous and clumsy slaughter, then he 
 turns round : "I who would not have been with you in victory 
 am with you in defeat " ; then he pours forth cry upon cry in behalf 
 of justice, mercy, reason, telling the story of the victims with fearful 
 reality, urging the folly of the butchers with admirable dignity 
 and weight. The poet gives to sights of terror, outdoing the 
 grimmest and most ghastly former offspring of his imagination, 
 the same sort of tranquil and irresistible evidence which he had 
 known how to give to those. An instinctive literary art of the 
 
VICTOR HUGO 267 
 
 highest kind tells the story of the hunted mother and her dead 
 child, of the batch of girls going to be shot, of the boy who keeps 
 his tryst with death, of the writhing slaughter- heaps and the horrid 
 burials, in words as simple as those which had told of his hold- 
 ing on to his mother long ago by a fold of her frock in the garden. 
 A right and high sense of the occasion dictates the sections "To 
 the Downtrodden," " Flux and Reflux," " At Vianden," in which it 
 is urged how all this is preparing an evil day to come, exasperating 
 the future, winding up in the way to make everything begin again, 
 calling frenzy wisdom — " for suffering is the sister of hatred, and 
 the oppressed of to-day make the oppressors of to-morrow." Again, 
 these are the thoughts of an exile in a day when the rest of the 
 world is gay in June : " Alas ! all is not over and done because 
 they have dug a burial-pit in the street, because a captain points 
 to a wall where a row of poor folk is to be drawn up for his squad 
 to practise at, because they keep shooting at random with musket 
 or mitrailleuse as it may chance, shooting fathers or mothers, the 
 lunatic, the robber, and the sick together, and because they burn 
 in a hurry with lime the corpses of men still bleeding and children 
 still warm." 
 
 Brooding over the present horror and the future inevitable 
 retribution, the poet knows not where to fix the guilt. Least of 
 all will he blame the misguided multitude who do evil through 
 ignorance, and who must be very wretched or they would not take 
 death so lightly. He will not even greatly blame the party of 
 slaughter : — " Nobody means ill ; and yet what ill is done ! " It 
 ends in his throwing the blame on the hostile forces of fate, " the 
 venomous swarm of impalpable causes," the " gulf," the " abyss," 
 the " void," the elemental principles of evil that are akin to the 
 elemental scourges of nature, the mysterious plagues and visitations 
 that attend upon man's estate. 
 
 The poet-prophet's purpose of permanent renewed 
 self-exile did not hold, and late in 1873 he returned 
 with his whole household from Guernsey to Paris. 
 After trying one or two experimental homes in the 
 
268 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 suburbs, they settled in two floors of a large house in 
 the rue de Clichy. I had a general invitation to 
 attend the evening receptions regularly held there, 
 and did so several times during visits to Paris about 
 1874-6. At these evening gatherings the ex-actress 
 and ex-beauty Madame Drouet, the housemate and 
 companion of all Hugo's later life even from before 
 his wife's death, used to do the honours. He had 
 just turned his seventieth year, and his strength of 
 body and mind showed no sign of abatement ; while 
 his aureole as poet and prophet home from exile was 
 still almost undimmed, the various phases of the 
 coming anti-romantic reaction, of which Zola and the 
 Goncourts were the chief initiators, not having gained 
 much effective impetus till later. 
 
 He had a gracious and not too self-conscious 
 patriarchal courtesy and cordiality in welcoming his 
 guests. His voice was mellow, subdued rather than 
 loud, and even when the matter of his utterance was 
 declamatory its delivery was serene. His sturdy 
 figure and abundant — though not wild or untrimmed — ■ 
 white hair and beard, with his firm, easy movements 
 and gestures, were full proofs of vigour. His bearing, 
 which was that of one conscious of authority and 
 tempering it not with condescension but with a be- 
 nignant old-fashioned grace, I thought became him 
 well. But I thought also that the demeanour of his 
 entourage was too submissive in homage, and that the 
 silence for which those nearest him gave sign when he 
 was about to speak was inconsistent with social ease. 
 " Chut, le maitre va parler " — surely it is no false trick 
 
VICTOR HUGO 269 
 
 of memory which makes me hear one of the group of 
 satellite friends, Paul Meurice or Vacquerie or Claretie 
 or Lockroy, thus whispering peremptorily to those 
 about him, with a corresponding gesture of the hand, 
 on one evening when the conversation threatened to 
 become general. At any rate to become such it was 
 never, in my experience, allowed. 
 
 Of the particular course of talk at any one such 
 evening reception I have no memory. Much of it had 
 each time to do with the actual polities of the hour ; 
 much with memories and anecdotes of his youth; 
 some with generalized encouragement and advice to 
 juniors ; more savoured of the same habitual blend 
 of grandiose idealist theism, patriotism, and optimism 
 together which permeates so much of his writing, and 
 had just seemed to reach its climax in the Year 
 Terrible. 
 
 On two occasions when I presented myself it hap- 
 pened that Madame Drouet was ailing and the usual 
 evening reception, I found, had been put off. But 
 for some reason or by some means, I know not what, 
 I was admitted, and on each occasion the poet came in 
 from the patient's bedside, slippered and evidently 
 anxious, and with a manner of the kindest courtesy 
 gave me the best part of an hour to myself. Now, I 
 each time asked myself, shall I have the good luck to 
 get into touch with any other than the semi-public, 
 the expected and almost traditional Hugo with whom 
 I had so far become acquainted ? Well, whether it 
 were my fault or not, the range of subjects and the 
 personality revealed in talking of them did not in these 
 
270 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 tete-a-tete conversations greatly change. The notion 
 I got was of a genius living within a range of ideas and 
 emotions vast indeed, but nevertheless fixed and habit- 
 ual and of little elasticity. He spoke affectionately of 
 his island home at Guernsey, and said how he hoped 
 the love of the sea and of all its powers and aspects 
 which he had learned there might win him special 
 sympathy from a maritime people like ourselves. 
 Sincerely I answered that, sea-folk although we were, 
 we had produced no poet of the sea as great or any- 
 thing like as great as he. When I said something 
 of the sympathy which a great majority of English 
 people had with his party in French politics, and how 
 we were disposed to count the downfall of the Third 
 Empire an event almost worth to France the price 
 paid for it, he expressed a gratified assent, and in 
 his always self-possessed and serene manner uttered 
 much the same kind of sentiments about Napoleon 
 the Little as fill the pages of VAnnee Terrible. The 
 name of Swinburne being mentioned, he showed 
 himself informed concerning and gratified by the devout 
 homage rendered him, coupled with denunciations 
 of the fallen Empire as ferocious as his own, by that 
 then youngest and most dazzling poetical genius of 
 our country. Speaking of pending work of his own, 
 he mentioned the proposed title (never in point of fact 
 used) for a new volume of poetry to come — Les Coleres 
 Justes. When I ventured to wonder whether the 
 author of Les Chdtiments, the lifelong fulminator 
 against kings and priests and conquerors and oppressors, 
 and all the cruelties and tyrannies and treacheries 
 
VICTOR HUGO 271 
 
 of the world, could have left many things that deserved 
 his anger still unscourged, he assured me yes, there 
 remained plenty, and descending to a lower scale 
 began to talk scathingly, first of the reactionary 
 Assembly of Bordeaux, and next of some of the errors 
 and blunders of the military defence of Paris. General 
 Trochu (Participe passe du verbe trop choir, as by a 
 ponderous enough pun he has somewhere called him) 
 came in for a full share of contempt : and then the poet 
 went on to dilate on a scheme of defence that should 
 and would have been tried had he had his way. What 
 should have been done, he declared, was to send up a 
 vast number of captive balloons from the beleaguered 
 city to the greatest height possible above the Prussian 
 lines, a height beyond the reach of their artillery : 
 platforms should have been swung in the air from 
 between pairs or groups of such balloons ; and from 
 those platforms the best scientific chemists of the city 
 should have poured down deadly corrosive compounds 
 upon the enemy's lines which should have caused his 
 hosts to burn up and shrivel and be no more. 
 
 The progress of lethal invention in the last fifty 
 years has so far outstripped the dream of the poet- 
 prophet as to make his imagined expedient sound 
 primitive and futile enough ; yet his manner and 
 language in describing it combined, I remember, the 
 apocalyptic with the f amiliar in a style which seemed 
 impressive enough to his hearer at the time. What 
 would he have said could he have foreseen how soon 
 the device of the captive balloon was to pass out of 
 date : how aircraft would within half a century be 
 
272 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 steering through the sky almost as confidently as sea- 
 ships over the waves, and more swiftly ; how it would 
 be practicable to pour down from them such a rain of 
 ghastly corrosives, twenty-fold more concentrated than 
 those of his dreams, as would instantaneously blight 
 and destroy whole cities and populations ; and how, 
 if indeed an end should come to wars among mankind, 
 it would not be from any growth of brotherhood and 
 amity among the nations, but rather from their mutual 
 terror of the catastrophes which science and invention 
 should have enabled them to inflict on one another. 
 Apart from these matters, on both evenings one special 
 subject was uppermost in his talk and evidently in 
 his mind, and that was the contrast between himself 
 and the last great world-poet and sage before him, 
 Goethe, in the matter of patriotism. A feeling of 
 rivalry against Goethe, a jealousy of Goethe's fame, 
 was never far — so I have since heard from those who 
 knew him best — from Victor Hugo's mind. For 
 much in the historic and romantic past of Germany 
 he had (as the section in VAnnee Terrible above abridged 
 abundantly shows) a generous admiration, nor had his 
 furious and well-justified hatred of nineteenth-century 
 Prussia and her rulers extinguished it. But for 
 Goethe, who in his view was a German without being 
 a German patriot, he had no toleration. Doubtless 
 a sense of poetic rivalry helped more or less uncon- 
 sciously to intensify this aversion ; but his avowed 
 quarrel with him was not for being too much, but 
 for being too little, of a German. Love of humanity, 
 Hugo vowed, which did not begin at home was worth 
 
VICTOR HUGO 273 
 
 nothing. Cosmopolitan good- will was a fine thing ; 
 no one had preached it more ardently than he ; but 
 to love one's own country first and best was the essen- 
 tial virtue of man. That while Germany lay trampled 
 under the heel of Napoleon Bonaparte, Goethe should 
 have gone as a guest to the camp of the conqueror 
 at Erfurt was for him a sin unpardonable. Dilating 
 on it and comparing his own frame of mind on such 
 matters, he wound up by saying, rising at the same 
 time from his chair with his hand at his heart, " Moi, 
 je regarde Goethe comme Jeanne cP Arc aurait regarde 
 Messaline." I have ever since carried with me the 
 memory of this typical Hugonian pronouncement, 
 and of the full, soft, authoritative and serenely un- 
 challengeable tone in which he uttered it. 
 
 The master lived and wrote for some fifteen years 
 after that date, and naturally I had from time to time 
 work to do and friends to see in Paris ; but for I know 
 not what reason, or for none, I failed to seek his 
 hospitality again. I wonder whether his appeased 
 spirit may now be hovering over his beloved city, 
 confirmed in all his transcendental faiths and fore- 
 sights by the retribution, outdoing his own direst 
 imprecations and most exulting prophecies, which in 
 the fullness of time has overtaken her victorious 
 enemies of the Year Terrible. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 LEON GAMBETTA 
 
 In old days I used to be careless about the 
 keeping of letters, even from the most interesting 
 correspondents, and the letter from the great French 
 patriot and statesman which I print below most 
 likely owes its preservation to the fact that I gave it, 
 soon after it was written, to a friend for her collec- 
 tion of autographs. A recent renewed sight of it 
 has brought back to my memory some incidents of 
 the acquaintance, not intimate but cordial and by 
 me much prized, which I had with the writer in the 
 mid seventies of the last century. Those were the 
 years, as every one knows, during which Gambetta 
 waged and won, against the two extremes of monar- 
 chical or imperialist reaction on the one side and 
 ultra-radical intransigeance on the other, his fiercely 
 arduous, long-fluctuating, up-hill fight for the estab- 
 lishment of a sane and moderate republic in France. 
 
 It was in the winter of 1873^4 that I first met him, 
 going by appointment to call on him at his modest 
 quarters in the Rue Montaigne. I had till then never 
 seen him either in the tribune or elsewhere. From 
 his reputation as the most impassioned of combatant 
 political orators and leaders — or, as his enemies had 
 
 274 
 
LEON GAMBETTA 275 
 
 it, the wildest of demagogues — I had expected to 
 find in him a typical, high-strung, restlessly excitable 
 and volatile son of the South. It was therefore with 
 some surprise that I found, instead, a substantial 
 rubicund person, occupying solidly the middle of a 
 broad settee, who welcomed me with quiet geniality 
 and proceeded at once to discuss gravely a question 
 which was then deeply agitating France, that of the 
 freedom of the Press. Within the previous six or 
 eight months Gambetta had fought two tremendous 
 battles in the Chamber on this subject, one after the 
 suppression of the Corsaire newspaper, the other after 
 a special gagging law introduced and passed by the 
 reactionary Government in July. But in his own rooms 
 and to his English visitor he talked of these matters 
 without heat or rhetoric, as though for the moment 
 his interest in them were historical and abstract. 
 He referred much and particularly to Milton's famous 
 Areopagitica (or Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
 Printing) as known to him in Chateaubriand's 
 translation. Thence the talk passed to divers mat- 
 ters of non-political literature and of art, including 
 the English school of painting as he had just been 
 studying it in a recent exhibition at Brussels ; and I 
 came away realizing what I had not at all known 
 when I went in, that here was a man who, intense 
 as might be the strain thrown on the energies and 
 resources of his being by the daily strife of politics, 
 had also outside of politics a richly furnished mind 
 and interests unusually keen and varied. For the 
 next four years or more I seldom passed any time in 
 
276 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 Paris without seeking opportunity to know him better. 
 Once or twice I heard him speak in public debate at 
 Versailles, once or twice at semi-private political 
 gatherings of his supporters. More often, that is 
 perhaps four or five times, I saw him in the character 
 of host at his own breakfast-table, and about as many 
 times as chief guest at the evening parties of that 
 most zealous and cordial of political entertainers, 
 Madame Edmond Adam. 
 
 At Versailles, looking down from the gallery on to 
 the floor of the Chamber and watching him shoulder 
 his way, genially and at the same time commandingly, 
 among the crowd of his supporters, taking one by 
 the arm, leaning upon the shoulder of the next, address- 
 ing one after another with a different persuasiveness 
 or impressiveness or familiarity of gesture and accost, 
 I am not sure but that I have been more impressed 
 with the sense of born, instinctive leadership in him 
 thus conveyed than even by the overwhelming power 
 shown by him in set orations from the tribune. For 
 the latter kind of exhibition report had pretty fully 
 prepared one. It was great, but it was not unexpected, 
 to observe how he would begin hoarsely and heavily ; 
 how the hostile majority would at first interrupt and 
 challenge and seek to silence him with bitter gibes 
 and taunts ; how presently that mass of a man would 
 take fire and seem to be all enkindled and transformed, 
 how the great head and mane of hair would be flung 
 back, the hand be thrust forth in sweeping, dominating 
 gestures of denunciation or command, the voice roll 
 out rich and clear in thundering periods of prophecy 
 
LEON GAMBETTA 277 
 
 or argument or appeal or menace, till the ranks of 
 his enemies would seem visibly to quiver before the 
 storm like a field of corn before the gale. 
 
 As to its actual matter, the speech of his which I 
 remember as striking me most was at some sort of 
 private political or Press gathering (can it have been 
 of the staff of the Republique Frangaise ?). When 
 toasts were in progress some one rose and volunteered 
 a proposal to drink to the Universal Republic. Gam- 
 betta would not have it at any price. He leapt to 
 his feet and shouted, " Qui done entends-je parler de 
 la republique universelle ? N'avons-nous pas assez 
 de peine a fonder notre republique a nous ? " And 
 he went on to insist how it was the paramount duty 
 and need of Frenchmen to sink their own differences, 
 to found their own republic firmly, and in so doing 
 to avoid above all things bringing fresh dangers on 
 themselves by interfering with the politics of their 
 neighbours. To enforce these two joint contentions 
 had become, with experience and responsibility, the 
 master motive of Gambetta's political life. History 
 provides scarcely a stronger instance of the way in 
 which time's teachings, to quote Shakespeare, 
 
 Divert strong minds to the course of altering things, 
 
 than the transformation of Gambetta within a couple 
 of years from a furiously impetuous preacher of revenge 
 against Germany into an inculcator, even more impas- 
 sioned and reiterant yet, of France's need to live on 
 terms of peace and respect with all her neighbours, 
 her late despoiler included, until such time as she 
 
278 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 should be herself again. The wisdom and statesman- 
 ship as well as the moral courage of this change of 
 course in Gambetta have come, in most minds, to 
 be beyond question now ; but at the time the change 
 was the cause of much calumnious bitterness on the 
 part of his enemies and of painful estrangement from 
 some of his friends. But of this more anon. 
 
 At Gambetta' s breakfasts in the Rue Montaigne, 
 and afterward in the Rue de la Chausee d'Antin, 
 politics were of course always in the air, and from 
 time to time one of his special lieutenants, de Freycinet 
 or Spuller or Challemel-Lacour or Ranc, might be 
 noticed going up to the head of the table for a confiden- 
 tial word aside with the chief. But the social atmo- 
 sphere was almost as much literary and artistic as 
 political. Both by taste and knowledge Gambetta 
 could hold his own well and eloquently upon such 
 subjects. He had in youth been both a greedy reader 
 and a careful note-taker, and his memory was vigorous 
 and well stored. In modern literature he loved both 
 the great classics and the great romantics, but had 
 little appetite for the then new and aggressive school 
 of realists. One of the best dissections of Zola and 
 his work I ever heard was at Gambetta' s table. It 
 was one of the guests, if I remember aright, and not 
 the chief himself, who struck me as hitting the nail 
 precisely on the head when he declared that Zola 
 was under a mere delusion in imagining himself a 
 realist ; that he was truly a perverted ultra-romantic, 
 the essential note of whose work was the lyrisme 
 effrene with which he emphasized and piled up and 
 
LfiON GAMBETTA 279 
 
 exaggerated the squalid and loathsome. Among the 
 habitual guests at these breakfasts, and one of the 
 host's most intimate and trusted friends, was the 
 famous actor Coquelin, whom I knew independently. 
 I have a lively recollection of a day when, after the 
 meal was over and cigarettes lighted, Coquelin, seated 
 straddlewise and talking- over the back of his chair, 
 held forth on the manner in which, if he had the 
 chance, he would wish to play the part of Alceste 
 in Moliere's Misanthrope. " On peut-etre distingue 
 quand on veut" he interjected of himself, with a 
 gesture meant to indicate as much : but the idea 
 that such a part could fit him only showed that an 
 artist incomparable within his range, and brilliantly 
 intelligent to boot, could be very imperfectly conscious 
 of his own physical limitations. He did, I believe, 
 attempt the part afterwards in England (did he also 
 in America ?) but never at the Comedie francaise. 
 
 At the salon of Madame Adam in the Boulevard 
 Poissoniere Gambetta's special gift and steadfast 
 purpose of closing cleavages in his party, of bringing 
 and keeping together the divers dissentient and mutu- 
 ally suspicious groups which it included, were seconded 
 to admiration by the sagacious and single-minded 
 goodwill of the host, and still more by the social 
 charm and tact of his wife, a woman as cultivated as 
 she was handsome and gracious. There too the 
 atmosphere, though mainly political, was literary and 
 artistic as well. My own chief original passport to 
 the lady's notice and hospitality had been my interest 
 in Greek art and literature. I was grateful to her 
 
280 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 for the opportunities her invitations gave me of watch- 
 ing her at her woman's work of putting one after 
 the other into good-humour, now some fossilized 
 doctrinaire of the Left Centre, now some fiery young 
 ultra-radical from the south, and now some moody 
 waverer between several camps, and so predisposing all 
 manner of discordant male tempers to yield to the 
 persuasions and arguments by which the chief should 
 induce them to sink differences and work together. 
 But she had her own unsubduable and passionately 
 impatient emotions of patriotism, and could not prevent 
 "La Revanche " from being the continual cry not only 
 of her heart but of her tongue. After a while Gambetta' s 
 policy of never letting the word be uttered, however 
 deeply the mind might cherish the purpose, wore out 
 and alienated this headstrong feminine spirit. His 
 reasoned conviction was that France was bound to 
 live on terms of respect and international courtesy, if 
 not amity, with Germany until time should bring her 
 strength and opportunity to stand up on equal terms 
 and demand restitution of the lost provinces or com- 
 pensation for them. She crudely and blindly denounced 
 this policy as " Bismarckism," and not only their 
 political co-operation but their friendship, despite loyal 
 efforts on both parts to preserve it, came to an end. 
 This happened within a year or two after her husband's 
 death in 1877 ; and by 1879 she was devoting her 
 whole energies to the foundation and conduct of a 
 great literary enterprise of her own, the Nouvelle Revue. 
 Here is a document, hitherto unpublished, which 
 may serve to illustrate that attitude of Gambetta 
 
LEON GAMBETTA 281 
 
 towards Germany and the Revanche which was one of 
 the chief causes of estrangement between this friend 
 and himself. To account for its existence I must 
 explain that when I was in Greece in 1876 the German 
 minister there was Herr von Radowitz (the "eminent 
 interlocuteur" of the letter), a brilliant, still young 
 diplomatist who had been until lately Bismarck's secre- 
 tary and stood very high in the great Chancellor's 
 favour. He and I saw much of each other at Athens, 
 and were companions on several excursions and for the 
 time being great friends. He having to depart for 
 Berlin and I for London about the same time, we had 
 agreed to come away together by one of the Austrian 
 Lloyd mail-boats proceeding round Cape Malea to 
 Trieste. An invitation to dinner for both of us at 
 the English Legation coming for the night on which 
 we should have started, we decided to change our plans, 
 stay for the dinner, which we knew was bound to be 
 pleasant, and travel from Athens by way of Corinth 
 and Patras, a short cut which would enable us to reach 
 Corfu before the arrival of the Austrian mail-boat 
 and be picked up there by her. Carrying out this 
 plan, we came to Corfu accordingly, and after a few 
 hours' rest went down to the harbour for the mail- 
 steamer at the hour when she was due. The hour 
 passed and she did not appear ; and then another 
 hour and another and another, until late in the after- 
 noon there came the news that she had been in collision 
 with an English cargo ship at three o'clock in the 
 morning and gone down like a stone with absolutely 
 every soul on board. Thus we two had had as narrow 
 
282 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 an escape for our lives as was possible to have without 
 the least touch or thrill of adventure in it. Inasmuch 
 as the change of plan which had brought it about was 
 of my proposal, Herr von Radowitz, and afterwards 
 his family, chose to look upon me as having saved 
 his life, and made much of me accordingly when I 
 went to carry out some studies at Berlin the next 
 year. Talking incidentally of Gambetta and of his 
 position and aims in France, von Radowitz said how 
 very highly his moderation and good sense were coming 
 to be appreciated in Germany. I have never been 
 a meddler in politics ; but this time, fancying from 
 my friend's manner that his words were meant to be 
 repeated, I wrote to Gambetta and quoted them. It 
 was one of the busiest and most trying moments of 
 Gambetta' s whole career, but he took the trouble to 
 answer me with his own hand, saying how much he 
 valued such an expression of opinion, how it confirmed 
 his hopes that French prudence and French sincerity 
 were justly recognized across the Rhine ; but how at 
 the same time it needed all his confidence in the good 
 sense of his fellow-countrymen to keep him from 
 trembling for the consequences of the reactionary 
 coup of May 16 : how nevertheless he was confident 
 that the coming elections would result in a victory 
 for the party of peace and moderation both in home 
 and foreign affairs.* 
 
 * " Mon cher Monsieur Colvtn - , — 
 
 Je vous suis extremement reconnaissant de la lettre si interes- 
 sante que vous avez bien voulu m'ecrire. J'avais depuis deja 
 longtemps le pressentiment tres vif qu'au dela des Vosges on savait 
 
LEON GAMBETTA 283 
 
 In writing to Gambetta as I did I had not at all 
 realized the extent to which he was making it his 
 own duty and business to inform himself at first hand 
 of the state of political and military affairs in Germany. 
 In his reply he naturally does not give me the least 
 hint of the fact, which has since come out, that he had 
 actually himself, barely a month before the date of 
 my letter, spent a fortnight incognito in the enemy's 
 country observing and studying these matters for 
 himself, f His reference in the second paragraph to 
 
 voir et juger sainement et notre conduite et notre sincerite. Mais 
 rien ne pouvait plus opportunement me confirmer dans mes espe- 
 rances et mes vues que les declarations si nettes et si fermes de 
 votre eminent interlocuteur. 
 
 " Toutefois je dois dire, pour ne rien laisser dans l'ombre, qu'il 
 me faut toute la confiance legitime que m' inspire le bon sens de 
 mon pays, pour ne pas trembler devant les consequences possibles 
 de la monstrueuse aventure du 16 Mai. Heureusement nous 
 vaincrons et alors il sera donne aux hommes de bonne volonte, 
 animes de sages idees liberales et progressives, de donner a tous 
 ceux qui au dela de nos frontieres observent revolution de la France, 
 des preuves et des gages de leur politique de paix et de moderation 
 au dedans et au dehors, Veuillez croire a mes sentiments devoues, 
 
 " Leon Gambetta, 
 " 35, Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin, 
 
 " Paris, 11 October, 1877." 
 
 f The circumstances of this tour are fully related by Gambetta 
 in a letter to Madame Adam dated September 20 and published 
 in the sixth volume of her Souvenirs (Nos Amities Politiques 
 avant V abandon de la Revanche, Paris, 1908, pp. 388-393). In 
 the course of the next year, 1878, pourparlers for a formal and 
 public meeting of Gambetta and Bismarck were set on foot, but 
 afterwards broken off by Gambetta lest such a meeting should be 
 misinterpreted. 
 
284 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 the pending crisis in France relates of course to the 
 consequences of Marshal MacMahon's action, on the 
 16th of the previous May, in arbitrarily dismissing 
 the ministry of Jules Simon and forming, in the teeth 
 of Republican majorities both in Chamber and Senate, 
 a ministry of violent reaction under de Broglie and 
 Fourtou. Differences among the various reactionary 
 parties, and perhaps some bed-rock strain of soldierly 
 honesty in the Marshal himself, had saved France 
 from the military coup d'etat and attempt at mon- 
 archical restoration which had been generally expected 
 to follow. The Chamber had been legally dissolved 
 and elections for a new Chamber held. The declara- 
 tion of the result, so decisive for the whole future 
 history of France, was due on October 14, only three 
 days after the date of Gambetta's letter to me printed 
 above. A large although diminished Republican 
 majority was in fact returned, confirming Gambetta's 
 prophetic threat that the Marshal would have either 
 to submit or resign (se soumettre ou se demettre). He 
 first submitted to the extent of appointing a ministry 
 from the Left Centre and Left, and about a year later 
 resigned. By this time Gambetta had become in 
 all men's eyes incontestably the chief personage in 
 France. But wisely or unwisely, he did not think 
 the time ripe for him to assume the office of Chief of 
 the State. First as president of the budget commission, 
 then for nearly two years as President of the Chamber, 
 then for a short while as Prime Minister, then as 
 president of the army commission, he continued to 
 be involved in incessant struggles on behalf of the 
 
LEON GAMBETTA 285 
 
 domestic and foreign policies he thought wise. Mean- 
 while every kind of rancorous jealousy and ingratitude 
 was unchained in endeavours by his enemies and false 
 friends to blacken him in the sight of France as a 
 would-be dictator ; and the worst of the obloquy 
 thus aroused was only beginning to pass away when 
 death overtook him (December 31, 1882). 
 
 During those last four years I was much less in France 
 than previously, and saw little of him. Indeed I cannot 
 remember that I ever spoke with him after he had 
 become President of the Chamber ; or shared his 
 hospitality under its new, more sumptuous and cere- 
 monious conditions at the Palais Bourbon. Certainly 
 I never saw nor suspected — but in this I was practically 
 at one with all except the very nearest of his intimates 
 — the existence of the tie which had been through all 
 those strenuous years the governing fact and secret 
 inspiration of his life. Since one of his friends * has 
 made public the story of his relations with Made- 
 moiselle Leonie Leon, and the determined self-abnega- 
 tion which kept that devoted woman from consenting, 
 until almost the very end, openly to share the life 
 which all the while she was secretly guiding and 
 inspiring, the new halo of a great romantic passion 
 has been added to Gambetta's ever-growing fame as a 
 statesman. 
 
 * Francis Laur, Le Ccewr de Gawhetta, Paris, 1907. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 
 
 [1876] 
 
 [It was in Gambetta's company and in talking to 
 one of his friends — the poet Heredia if I remember 
 aright — that I expressed a special interest in a certain 
 kind of coast scenery, not the relatively uniform and 
 level kind pleasantly familiar to my boyhood, but that 
 on the contrary which presents the sharpest alterna- 
 tion and most trenchant variety of character. Cape 
 constantly interchanging with bay, creek contiguous 
 to spit and every headland sheltering its adjacent 
 haven, this was the kind of coast scenery we found 
 that we cared for in common : but only when its 
 features are not too vast to be taken in and their 
 contrasts explored by a traveller of moderate powers : 
 not on that grander scale where every inlet amounts 
 to a bight and every projection to a promontory. 
 
 My interlocutor agreed with me to the full, and we 
 went on to cap and confirm each other in insisting how 
 no other kind of scenery is so various as this, none so 
 full of contrast, of discovery, of allurement. We 
 reminded each other how such a coast at once invites 
 you, at every cove and inlet, to quiet sojourn, and 
 beckons you, past every headland, to mysterious 
 beyonds. The better you know it, the more entertain- 
 
 286 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 
 
 287 
 
 ment you find in its surprises, the more poetry in its 
 secrets. Your eye delights to linger along the profile 
 of the land where it pushes out farthest on this hand 
 or on that, and seems as though it would never dip 
 
 into the sea-line. One day you start to follow out the 
 exploration on foot, and then that even-seeming dis- 
 tance breaks up and complicates itself before you, 
 with jutting of unsuspected nesses and disclosure of 
 hidden havens, into a succession of many headlands 
 instead of one. Another day you seek, and find if 
 
288 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 you are fortunate, some inland height from whence 
 you can look down, as it were upon the back of your 
 hand, upon the coast line and learn all its branchings. 
 Do you want peace ? — in the recesses of the bays you 
 shall find halcyon shelter. Do you want storm ? — 
 there is surf about the reefs and precipices of the 
 headlands. In your walks you never know what you 
 will come to next. You may think you have turned 
 your back upon the sea, but it pushes round farther 
 than you know ; as you traverse a moorland you may 
 catch the gleam of it unexpectedly in front of you, 
 or as you go down through a wood the blue of it may 
 strike suddenly up through openings between the 
 boughs. Or at a moment when you are wholly taken 
 up with inland sights and fancies, with orchards, 
 threshing-floors, or hedgerow-flowers, you may hold 
 your breath as you become aware all at once that the 
 sound of the trees has taken a fuller note, and changed 
 into the sound of waves close at hand. At night, if 
 you have climbed to some windmill or high place to 
 take the freshness and the moonlight, a streak of 
 silver far off over the darkness of the country may 
 tell you of inland waters of which you had not guessed. 
 I had spoken of a particular stretch of the west 
 coast of Scotland, from Gairloch to Loch Inver, as 
 the region within my knowledge where effects like 
 these are to be found touched with the northern gloom 
 and grandeur, yet on too great or ungraspable a scale ; 
 and on the other hand of the Esterel in the South of 
 France, from about Hyeres to Antibes, as the coast 
 where the daintiest of headlands adventure the most 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 289 
 
 capriciously into the mast-enchanted sea. My friend 
 suggested that I should be well rewarded if I tried 
 the coast of the French Cornwall — Cornouailles, Cornu 
 Galliae, Horn of Gaul, the most remote and least- 
 frequented part of the department of Finistere in 
 Brittany. In the company of some friends I took 
 his advice, and the following are my notes of the result. 
 I let them stand almost as they were written and printed 
 at the time (that is in 1876), understanding that in 
 the main the character of the scenes described and of 
 their inhabitants has undergone little change. The 
 railway has been carried on from Quimper to Douar- 
 nenez, and even as far as to Audierne, making access 
 easier for summer tourists, and considerably increasing 
 both their numbers and the accommodation provided 
 for them ; but not, I am told, so greatly as to vulgarize 
 the ground or much modernize the ways of the people. 
 Nature and legend, on their part, are in such scenes 
 perdurable and constant, the one almost as much as 
 the other.] 
 
 Although Brittany has of late years become holiday 
 ground, and receives its contingent of tourists as 
 regularly as Switzerland or the Rhine, still curiosity 
 or convenience so guides the main body of these that, 
 while they crowd both the northern and southern 
 seaboards of the country, few by comparison find 
 their way to its western extremity, to the land's end, 
 or land's ends, for there are several of them, with 
 which the Armorican peninsula confronts the Atlantic. 
 There is one point only, in all that diversified region to 
 the South of Brest, whither people have learnt to go 
 
290 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 in any numbers, and that is the Pointe du Raz, a 
 scene of which the guide-books have made much, so 
 that it has become something like a resort for tourists, 
 at least of the more enterprising class. 
 
 The nearest railway is at Quimper, the venerable 
 capital of the district and seat of its bishopric, a 
 pleasant river-side city of gables and fables, familiar 
 to every one who has been in Lower Brittany at all. 
 To see the Pointe du Raz, you must travel some thirty 
 miles due west of Quimper, over a healthy region with 
 the sea not far off on either hand, and take up your 
 quarters at the little fishing town of Audierne. Like 
 many towns on these coasts, Audierne was a great 
 place once, but towards the end of the sixteenth 
 century disasters came upon it, and it has gone on in 
 a dwindled impoverished way, from which it is only 
 beginning to revive in consequence of the modern 
 expansion of the sardine trade. The waters in which 
 its boats ply are very perilous, but among the most 
 abounding in the world, and yield, besides the staple 
 of sardines, immense numbers of lobsters, crayfish, 
 congers, bass, mullet, and mackerel. The town lies 
 near the mouth of a river, and consists of a number 
 of large stone houses scattered along a wharf under 
 a hill ; a mile of well-built jetty or sea-wall prolongs 
 the wharf out to the river's mouth, and carries at its 
 extremity a lighthouse to guide the fishermen into 
 port. It is solemn to walk upon this sea-wall at night, 
 and hear the boom of the iron-bound outer coasts, 
 and watch the lanterns of a belated boat or two, and 
 presently their dim shapes and sails, as they make 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 291 
 
 their way in past the reefs and come slipping before 
 a breeze or groaning under oars up the channel through 
 the dark. As for quarters, you are not too ill off at 
 Audierne. The ways of inns in this part of Brittany 
 are always primitive and careless enough, and their 
 prices not so admirably low as in some places of the 
 Leonnais, farther north. But beds are clean ; and 
 here at any rate you may be at ease about your food, 
 for your host himself dines at table in the old fashion, 
 and carves for his guests and talks to them. He is a 
 personage in these parts, le pere Batifoulier, and with 
 his comical name and prodigious girth furnishes a 
 kindly jest to all the country-side. He is not a native, 
 but came from Auvergne five-and-twenty years ago, 
 and must have shrewd stuff in him to have made his 
 way, as strangers seldom can, among Bretons in Brit- 
 tany. His corporation is so vast that a curve has had 
 to be scooped out of the head of the table to make 
 room for it, and his arms can only just reach out past 
 it as he sits, so that he may hold the gigot upright in 
 the dish with his left hand while he carves it with his 
 right. His bulk was not always as cumbersome as 
 it is now, and he has three medals for lives he has 
 saved in the harbour. It does you good to hear his 
 deep slow voice among the chatter of the table, and 
 to see the look of slow humour and kindness which 
 plays now and again over his immense swarthy 
 countenance. His wife, if you will let her, will pack 
 you a great basket with bread and wine, chicken and 
 lobster, when you start to spend the day at the 
 Pointe du Raz. 
 
292 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 It is a six miles drive or walk from Audierne to 
 the lighthouse which is at the summit of that famous 
 promontory. After you get clear of the frequent 
 hamlets, which make this desolate region seem more 
 desolate with the sense of a population living where 
 there are no apparent means of life, and after you 
 pass from among the innumerable stone walls with 
 which they fence off fields where nothing seems to 
 grow, you come out on a plateau with the Atlantic 
 close beneath you on either hand. At first you are 
 disappointed, for this is like any other heathery and 
 stony plateau above the sea ; the height, something 
 under two hundred and fifty feet, is not so formidable, 
 nor is there anything so very striking in the forms of 
 some cliffs that you discern across a narrow bay on 
 your right. It is only when you walk on past the light- 
 house and dip towards the extremity of the point that 
 the character of the place comes out. The plateau 
 narrows to a ridge, and you walk no longer among 
 stones and heather, but among jumbled masses of 
 lichen-stained granite, in the crevices of which only a 
 few sea-pinks and tufts of samphire find soil enough 
 to grow. Beneath your right hand are sheer granite 
 cliffs that become more shattered and fantastic as 
 you advance ; the path winds round the heads of 
 chasms ; you peer down sudden clefts into the darkness 
 of which the sea drives foaming. It echoes and 
 booms ; rock and sea tear at one another ; in one 
 place the sea has pierced a passage, a mere thread 
 wide, through the thickness of the point. But the 
 point juts on and on, the riven granite taking wilder 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 293 
 
 and wilder forms, the ridge with its chaos of heaped 
 rocks narrowing and narrowing, until at last you 
 squeeze your way between two boulders, and find 
 yourself at the end of all things. You are face to face 
 with an immeasurable vastness. Three-quarters of 
 the horizon is ocean. You have to turn about and 
 look south-east to descry in that quarter the far-off 
 line of bay that ends in the long spit of Penmarc'h. 
 To the north, if the day is clear, you can trace out an 
 endless succession of headlands, beginning with the 
 near Pointe de Van, going on with the many-branched 
 peninsula on the hither side of Brest, then passing 
 beyond the mouth of Brest harbour along a faint 
 interminable line that dips once, and then appears 
 again, fainter and further yet, where are the scarce 
 distinguishable islands of the archipelago of Ushant. 
 But more than the immensity of the sea, more than 
 the mysteriousness of those far-ranging coasts, you 
 will be struck by what lies immediately under and 
 before you. Here at your feet the precipice falls 
 away and the ocean-currents sweep ; the land ends 
 here ; but the battle is not over yet. From amid 
 the waves the granite rears itself again and again. 
 One, two, three, great fortresses of black and battered 
 rock appear in line out to sea at intervals of half a 
 mile or more, and between them lesser crests and ridges 
 top the waves by a few feet only. Carry your eye 
 along this line, and you come to a long flat island, 
 with a lighthouse, lying upon the sea about five miles 
 off, and over that, reefs and reefs again to the farthest 
 horizon. For this chain of rocks, some visible and 
 
294 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 some sunken, the remains of a mighty spur of mainland, 
 now engulfed, stretches out for near six leagues west. 
 The low island with the lighthouse is called the lie 
 des Seins, and is inhabited by a few hundred fisher- 
 men. It must be the most desolate home in the world. 
 It is often unapproachable from the mainland for 
 weeks together. The strip of barren soil rises little 
 more than ten feet above the sea, and not a tree 
 grows on it. The island has a small harbour with a 
 jetty, in which the fishing-boats anchor, and whither 
 English and other traders come to carry away the 
 produce of the fisheries. By their take of lobster 
 and crayfish the islanders make a good deal in the 
 season, but drink all their money away, and are half 
 starved for the rest of the year. Their only other 
 resource is the burning of sea- weed to make soda, and 
 what waifs and strays they gather from shipwrecks. 
 For nothing can persuade the people of these coasts 
 to keep their hands off flotsam and jetsam. They are 
 not wreckers, this thriftless, sodden, banished race of 
 the lie des Seins ; nay, they are daring seamen, 
 and often heroic in saving and kind in tending the 
 castaway ; but they do not think of property as they 
 do of fife, and all merchandize that comes upon the 
 coast they take for theirs. It is a coast of a terrible 
 name for shipwrecks. Much has been done and is 
 doing with lighthouses, but nothing can prevent 
 the deadly Chaussee des Seins, as they call the chain 
 of reefs beyond the island, and the perilous Bee du 
 Raz, which is the name of the channel between the 
 island and the point, from devouring their yearly 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 295 
 
 tale of lives. On either side of the point the waters 
 are full of fish, so that smacks pass to and fro con- 
 tinually in the Bee du Raz ; as do greater craft often, 
 to avoid the long circuit outside the Chaussee. 
 
 The Breton fisher has a prayer for the passage : ' ' Pray 
 God help me through the Raz ; my boat is so little 
 and the sea so great ! " And he has proverbs which 
 say, " No man passes the Raz without mischance or 
 the fear of it " ; and again, " Whoso steers not wisely 
 in the Raz is a dead man." The currents past the 
 point and among the reefs are such that it scarcely 
 needs wild weather to bid the seaman beware. But 
 it is in wild weather that the place is most itself and 
 should be seen. Then the whole weight of the Atlantic 
 comes crashing against the granite juts and buttresses ; 
 then the caves re-bellow, and the seas storm the cliffs, 
 and dense foam drives over the plateau, and a man 
 cannot hear himself nor stand. This I have never 
 seen, but only how the Raz looked on a summer's 
 day when the air was still, with a sense of distant 
 thunder, and the quick lizards came peeping and 
 slipping as lightly as leaves over the hot rocks about 
 me. The Atlantic was burning blue, and very calm — 
 but in that calm what a perfidy : the waves could not 
 keep from booming ; the tide swung against the point 
 and between the chain of rocks with the force of a 
 cataract, but smoothly until it met the current, when 
 it broke into a sudden race with the crossing of a 
 myriad shocks and the leaping of innumerable crests. 
 Against the adverse smoothness a fishing- crew laboured 
 with wind and oar in vain ; along the thickest of the 
 
296 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 race a shoal of porpoises passed with leap and fling; 
 cormorants with their necks out flew their straight 
 low flights ; the sea-gulls wheeled and called. Pre- 
 sently the swing of the tide grew slacker ; there was 
 a half hour when the sea ebbed confusedly all ways 
 instead of one, and then the race began again, only re- 
 versed. Meanwhile something strange had happened to 
 that forlorn island in the offing. It had disappeared, 
 and in its place there brooded over the sea a dense white 
 shroud, which presently came spreading thinly, and 
 with an ashen odour, to the land. It was only the 
 smoke of the burning kelp, which had been thicker 
 than usual that afternoon, and had hung in the still 
 air ; but the sight had a thrill in it, and made one think 
 of all the mysterious things that have been said and 
 believed about the place. 
 
 For the lie des Seins is a ghostly island, an island 
 of Souls, as in truth that afternoon it looked no less. 
 The awfulness of the coast, the peril of the seas, the 
 weirdness of that minute inhabited desert in the 
 midst of the seas, have possessed the imagination of 
 the people. Between the Pointe du Raz and the 
 Pointe de Van there is a narrow bay ending in a straight 
 shore of sand; and behind the sand a great mere full 
 of bulrushes in a gloomy valley. The bay is called 
 La Bale des Trepisses, Dead Men's Bay, partly no 
 doubt from the natural terror of the place, partly because 
 to these sands is washed the drowned body of many 
 a seaman, partly because of tales which tell how in 
 this place, between the sea-waves and the mere, the 
 spirits of the unburied dead assemble in the night-time, 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 297 
 
 and claim with moanings a passage to their home. 
 The belief, as it is said to exist among the people to 
 this hour, is very like what we find recorded by Pro- 
 copius thirteen hundred years ago. Hear Procopius, 
 in Holcroft's spirited English : — " Along the ocean 
 shore over against Brittia " — by Brittia Procopius 
 makes it clear that he means the island of Britain, 
 and by the parts over against it the peninsula we call 
 Brittany — " along the ocean shore over against Brit- 
 tia are many villages inhabited by fishermen, husband- 
 men, and boatmen, who traffique in the island. . . . 
 They have the employment of conducting Soules 
 departed imposed on them by turns ; when any 
 man's time comes, they goe home to bed towards 
 night, expecting their fellowe conductor, and at 
 midnighte they finde the door opened, and hear a softly 
 Voice calling them to the business ; instantly they 
 rise, and go down to the sea-side, finding themselves 
 constrained to goe on, but they perceive not by whom ; 
 Boats they find ready, with no men in them, and 
 aboard they goe and sit to their Oares. They perceive 
 the Boats loaded with passengers even to the deck, 
 and the place of their Oares not an inch from the 
 water ; they see nothing, but after an hour's rowing 
 come a land in Brittia, whereas in their own Boats 
 they have much ado to pass over in a Day and a Night, 
 having no Sailes but rowing only. And they instantly 
 land their Fare, and are gone away with their Boats 
 suddenly grown light, and swimming with the current, 
 and having all save the Keele above water : They 
 see no Men leaving the Boates, but they heare a Voice 
 
298 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 relating to some, who it seemes stayes there for them, 
 the names of the Passengers, with their Titles, and 
 additions of what Fathers they were ; and (if women) 
 what husbands." Procopius's story thus is that the 
 souls are ferried from Brittany to Britain, but others 
 say, to that mysterious island nearer home. Again 
 Claudian, in his invective against Rufinus, makes 
 Tisiphone emerge from the mouth of hell at a place in 
 Gaul : " there is a place where Gaul spreads forth 
 her farthest shore — beyond it stretch the waters of 
 the Ocean — where Ulysses is said to have drawn to 
 him the silent host by his libation of blood : there is 
 heard the wailing clamour of shades that flit with a 
 thin cry." When Claudian writes thus of the mouth 
 of hell, it seems almost as if he too had heard of such 
 traditions as linger still about the lie des Seins and 
 Dead Men's Bay. Much learning has been spent, 
 and some of it patently mis-spent, in trying to identify 
 these places with other allusions of ancient writers. 
 Suffice it that here, even in the stillest summer, we 
 find a spell that works upon us strangely — how much 
 more then upon the storm-beaten imaginations of 
 those who live and die, with awe handed down from 
 generation to generation, amid the sights and sounds 
 of the place. 
 
 A still stronger experience of gloom and desolateness 
 is in store for one at another point of the coast. If 
 the reader will look at the little map farther back, he 
 will see that the Bay of Audierne is terminated at 
 the south-east by a point called Penmarc'h. Instead 
 of the plateaux and precipices of the Pointe du Raz, 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 299 
 
 the land here juts out low and very flat. But it is 
 treacherous all the more. The whole coast is fringed 
 with a deep border of black rocks, not lofty or threaten- 
 ing, but lying piled in long shelves and tables between 
 sand and sea — here cleft with gullies up which the 
 waves hurry with stealth, there running out in long 
 spits and bars over which they foam savagely, and 
 again studding the blue for miles with detached points 
 and fragments. One would say it was a coast impos- 
 sible for seafaring. And yet on these deserted sands 
 stood a city that was once among the richest in the 
 Duchy. Penmarc'h in old days could equip her 
 three thousand men-at-arms, and shelter behind her 
 jetties her fleet of eight hundred craft. She had her 
 Drapers' Street and her Jewellers' Street, her almost 
 independent communal government, her burghers who 
 used, they say, to toss their wine only from golden 
 cups ; her goodly spires and towers ; her army of 
 stoled ecclesiastics. Upon the plain where the rich 
 city stood are now a lighthouse, three or four squalid 
 fisher-hamlets of a dozen houses each, the remains of 
 half a dozen churches, a few fragments of tower and 
 crenelation, the gables of a few fallen houses, and 
 many tell-tale mounds and uneven lines upon the 
 sand. A score or so of fishing-boats hang their nets 
 to dry in a scanty anchorage between two spits of 
 rock. Never has been such a downfall so close within 
 man's memory. The first blow to the prosperity 
 of Penmarc'h was struck by the English, who descended 
 here in 1404 under Admiral Wilford, and to whom 
 the place, being unfortified because of its extent and 
 
300 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 the nature of the ground, yielded easy plunder. 
 Against similar chances the citizens tried fortifying 
 private houses and churches ; nevertheless they were 
 continually harassed by pirates. The great source 
 of their wealth, besides a large trade with Spain, was 
 a bank of codfish off their coast, the richest then 
 known. Presently changes in the bars and currents 
 took this resource away, and later the cod fisheries of 
 Newfoundland superseded theirs. The changes of bar 
 and current by degrees also made their anchorage 
 more dangerous. And so the city was on the decline 
 already, when the great blow came to it thus, at the 
 end of the sixteenth century. The wars of the League 
 had brought upon Brittany a more cruel anarchy than 
 upon any other part of France. Marauding partisans 
 fortified themselves wherever they chose, and harried 
 the country. The most ferocious of these, the young 
 Guy Eder of Fontenelle, came one day, from his island 
 stronghold in a bay to the North, insinuated himself 
 into the good graces of the Penmarc'h burghers and 
 their wives, and then sprang upon them with his 
 cut-throats, burned, sacked, slew, and finally trailed 
 off to his island a booty that loaded three hundred 
 boats. That day made an end to Penmarc'h. The 
 best part of its surviving inhabitants scattered them- 
 selves among other better defended towns. The 
 descendants of the remainder are the scanty fisher 
 population whom you find to-day. 
 
 This, too, is a place where people go to see as a 
 sight the warfare of the elements. The thunder of 
 these reefs, the rush of the waves upon these ledges, 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 301 
 
 the storm of sand and spray along the plain, the 
 mingling of earth, heaven, and ocean, are in their way 
 not less impressive than the spectacle of the Raz. One 
 day five years ago * the sea dealt in this place a felon 
 stroke. Two ladies and three children had come to 
 watch a storm, and were standing in front of a cabin 
 which a painter had built for himself just out of reach 
 of the waves. It was no very great gale, but the painter 
 called out to them to mind or the spray would wet them. 
 The words were scarcely out of his mouth when from 
 a gully in the rocks beside them a sea leapt up, and 
 swept them in a moment to their deaths. A cross 
 clamped into the rock marks the place. The inhabit- 
 ants declare that no wave was ever known to break 
 so far before. The husband of one of the ladies 
 was serving in Paris at the time ; he wrote to her 
 as the besieged did write to their friends, by balloon, 
 for two months afterwards, and only learnt his loss 
 when upon the capitulation he made haste to these 
 coasts to find her. What I witnessed at Penmarc'h 
 was no scene of storm or peril, only the close of such 
 another summer's day as at the Raz. The sun sank 
 red and glorious upon a pearly sea, and facing it a 
 broad pale silver moon rose above the misty land. 
 From sun to moon there was drawn overhead a great 
 arch of clouds narrowing towards either horizon — 
 clouds — films — how shall one call those luminous 
 fleeces spanning the firmament, that magic of amber 
 flame and thin-drawn gold against the blue ? How 
 tell of the gradations of the sky from zenith to 
 
 * I.e. in 1871. 
 
302 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 horizon, the melting of sapphire into chrysoprase 
 and ruby and topaz ? In the shoreward water, barred 
 with rocks and broken into pools, the subtlety of 
 that transition was lost, and the reflections cast up 
 were like a dark-set mosaic of different coloured 
 lights, pearly and rose and blue. With all this 
 pageantry in sky and sea, what a sense of desolation, 
 of ruinousness and death. Thin fumes of burning 
 kelp hung over the plain, the hot air felt as if it had 
 contagion in it. As the twilight fell, and one stumbled 
 along the uneven bents between the great lighthouse 
 and a church built almost on the sands, where fisher- 
 men give thanks for safety, the ghostliness of the place 
 grew more and more. Flights of petrels flitted swift 
 and shrill among the rocks ; anon a hoarser curlew 
 whooped. On the land grew beds of the dry sea- 
 poppy, with its twisting pods and frail yellow blossoms ; 
 and presently came a bed of another flower and set 
 the last seal of deathliness upon the place. On the 
 thinnest of the sand the narcotic thorn-apple {Datura 
 stramonium) put forth its long bells, pure white and 
 fantastically five-folded, from among its thick growth 
 of leaves and spiky seed vessels and rank stems — an 
 ominous bloom, having, as Gerrard puts it, " a strong 
 ponticke savour, that offendeth the head when it is 
 smelled unto," and growing among waste places and 
 the haunts of human decay. Gathering a handful 
 of these beautiful ghostly flowers in the moonlight, 
 it felt time to hasten away under one knew not what 
 gathering fever and oppression of the spirits. 
 
 But the reader has had enough of desolation, whether 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 303 
 
 masked or manifest, enough of iron cliffs, and places — 
 
 Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea- 
 gates, 
 Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits. 
 
 There is monotony in this, and I began by vaunting 
 the variety of my favourite scenery. Well, to appre- 
 ciate that, there is no need to go farther than the bay 
 enclosed between two of our promontories, the Pointe 
 du Raz and the Cap de la Chevre. On its shores 
 there is abundant choice. To explore them properly, 
 you must make your headquarters at Douarnenez, 
 the town which stands at its innermost south-eastern 
 recess (the bay is about fifteen miles by ten) and from 
 which it takes its name. It was an island close to 
 Douarnenez, the lie Tristan, that the brigand Fonten- 
 elle chose for his fortress, and whither he trailed his 
 three hundred boatloads of plunder from Penmarc'h. 
 For five years he was master of the town and island. 
 From those five years, which saw the ruin of so many 
 neighbouring places, the prosperity of Douarnenez 
 seems to have begun. It has gradually taken the lead 
 of other fishing-places on the coast. The bay of 
 Audierne yields the heaviest takes, but can only be 
 fished in fine weather ; while except in great westerly 
 gales, the bay of Douarnenez is one vast roadstead, 
 with a perfect anchorage, and in all weathers there is 
 refuge in the double harbour of the port itself. The 
 great extension of the sardine trade took place soon 
 after 1860. Large fortunes were made ; the fisher 
 population was doubled and trebled by the influx of 
 
304 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 country folk anxious to share in the profits and high 
 wages of the fishery. (A similar circumstance is 
 recorded of Penmarc'h in the fourteenth century.) 
 
 A great part of the town is new, and the houses and 
 factories are solidly built of stone, without a thought 
 of the picturesque ; their rows of plain square piercings 
 make them look like child's houses. One long street 
 streams down a hill from the old parish church of 
 Ploare, and from the foot of this the town parts into 
 three, one part running straight down upon rocks 
 that project into the bay, a smaller part sloping to 
 some wharves and sardine factories beside an estuary 
 on the left, the largest part to some more wharves and 
 many more sardine factories on the right, beside a 
 small artificial harbour built in the innermost nook of 
 the bay. "It is difficult," wrote a commissioner 
 appointed near the end of the eighteenth century to 
 report on the moral, physical, and statistical aspects 
 of that then terra incognita, the department of Finistere 
 — '• it is difficult to see a town more ill kept than 
 Douarnenez, despite the prosperity and rich trade of 
 its inhabitants. The want of police, the want of order, 
 allows rotten sardines and decomposing brine to be 
 flung into the street ; it is impossible, even in winter, 
 to smell fouler smells than those that greet one on 
 approaching the town ; they are insupportable, in 
 summer, to any one not used to them from infancy." 
 Cambry's words are hardly too strong for the Douarne- 
 nez of to-day. The population, under fifteen hundred 
 in his time, is nearly nine thousand now. The sources 
 of the place's prosperity show themselves in a hundred 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 305 
 
 ways, innocent and offensive. All the grown men and 
 boys are drawn seaward, and man the fleet of four 
 hundred boats which is mustered between this port 
 and the dependency of Treboul. Almost all the 
 young girls are employed in the factories, on the various 
 processes of preparing, cleaning, preserving, and 
 packing the fish. The patient mothers with their clean 
 anxious faces, their heavy cloth petticoats and great 
 white caps of various fashion — these are left alone to 
 do the household work and mind the troups of brawling 
 children. One feels kindly to these women, for their 
 lot is hard, with their menkind engaged on a pre- 
 carious trade, and given to drink in good times and 
 despondency in bad ; and kindly to these children 
 too, when they do not brawl and scream too loud, 
 for they have merry open faces, and the tiny girls are 
 sweet to look at with their rings of dark or yellow hair 
 escaping from under the layers of close caps that are 
 put on them. Girls and boys alike, the monkeys, will 
 stretch out their hands to you with a peremptory 
 " Donnez-moi un sou ; " not that they much expect 
 one, and will send you on your way with a cheery 
 guttural " Bon- jour " whether they get it or no, and 
 then fall chattering and laughing among each other in 
 their own tongue, which, being beyond your learning, 
 somehow gives you a sense of superior attainment in 
 the creatures. But although some few of one's im- 
 pressions of the people may thus be touching or 
 bright enough, in the main one has to confess that 
 they seem a demoralized race. Husbandmen who have 
 turned fishers, Bretons who have ceased to be primitive 
 
306 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 without becoming civilized, traders newly enriched, 
 they have no stedfast character or traditions, and 
 care chiefly to make money out of the stranger while 
 they can. They are slovens and horribly unclean. 
 Not only do strips and shavings of waste tin, punched 
 for making the sardine-box of our breakfast-tables, 
 glitter in great heaps about the banks — there would 
 be small harm in that — but waste brine from the 
 salting, waste oil from the pickling, spoiled bait from 
 the fishing, and all the odious refuse of the factories runs 
 decaying in the gutters, and makes some parts of the 
 town intolerable ; nor are these the worst defilements. 
 But all these drawbacks will be nothing to the 
 traveller or the artist who has once stayed long enough 
 to become aware of the beauty of the neighbourhood, 
 which is a continual feast. From the hill-ranges to the 
 bay, the country slopes down with alternations of 
 character the most singular. Barren moorlands, often 
 partitioned with great banks and hedges, yet growing 
 nothing within these divisions but gorse, fern, and 
 heather, are terminated above the sea by black precipi- 
 tous cliffs. Between these tongues of moorland, and 
 dividing them, come valleys the greenest that you 
 ever saw, with meadows of lush grass and galingale, 
 and osier-beds and fields of grain and hemp, and 
 burdened orchards, and homesteads hidden among 
 great clumps of elms ; and at the sea such valleys are 
 terminated by level lengths of sand, in which you will 
 find not the tenderest shell once broken. And so the 
 whole shore of the bay is a succession of wild cliffs 
 alternating with perfect sands, the length of each 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 307 
 
 extending generally for a mile or two at a stretch. 
 In some places the richest inland verdure comes down to 
 the very sea itself, in a way that seems fabulous. One 
 such place is close north-eastward of the town. Foot- 
 paths lead you down, among great moist banks grown 
 with mossy beeches, elms, and sycamores, some of 
 them of noble size, upon a tiny emerald meadow which 
 is set, within great tangled hedges, upon the very 
 rock itself. Farther on, the richest jungle of brambles, 
 sloes, hazels, and honeysuckles hangs upon the face of 
 the cliff. You may sit with the shadow of this verdure 
 about your head and your feet dipping into deep 
 transparent sea, and watch the great green woodpecker 
 go from stem to stem of the trees, and the kingfisher 
 flash from point to point of rock. It is not easy to 
 be tired of this sea, with its deep pure colour and 
 splendour beneath a summer sky, with its far-spread 
 gildings and marblings when the sun plays through 
 clouds, with the ominous sudden darkness that hangs 
 over it when storms gather along the Black Mountain, 
 with the busy fisher fleets putting in or out that people 
 it in almost all weathers. But if any day you do feel 
 tired of the sea, it is easy to turn landward and ex- 
 change it for sights of scarcely less charm and variety. 
 This is not a good country to walk through, as a 
 tourist walks, because of the high banks and hedges 
 that shut out your view from the roads ; but to walk in, 
 as one walks who is staying in a country, it is perfect. 
 Do not keep to the high-roads, but find your way at 
 large. The Breton peasant does not himself love 
 high roads, but has a track of his own wherever he 
 
308 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 wants to go. Innumerable single tracks or lanes of 
 this kind, sometimes up between the brooms and 
 brambles on the top of a great bank, sometimes deep 
 down in a hollow between two banks, sometimes over 
 the open moor, lead secretly winding and doubling 
 from hamlet to hamlet, from farmstead to farmstead, 
 from one wayside sanctuary to another, from windmill 
 to cottage, from field to wood, nay, oftenest of all 
 from nowhere to nowhere. Not one of them but will 
 lead you to pleasant sights, and out of one character 
 of soil — and with soil, of climate — to another. The 
 still, marshy hollows have one atmosphere, the tinkling 
 brooksides beneath the trees another, the bleak landes, 
 and clumps of lonely pines upon the ridges, a third. 
 There is only one unity in it all, and that is in its 
 colour. Hardly anywhere have I seen the colours of 
 landscape so rich — so solemn and at the same time so 
 vivid. The greens even of Ireland as I remember 
 them are pale beside the intensity of these in moist 
 places. The heather is of a larger kind and a much 
 brighter purple than with us, and in dying takes a rich 
 lingering russet that gives a singular beauty to the 
 moorlands. The mosses and lichens are of a redder gold 
 or a softer silver than elsewhere. The honeysuckle has 
 larger flowers and more brilliant berries. The black- 
 berries are as large and rich as mulberries with us. There 
 are places where ferns and loosestrife become colossal, 
 
 and dank moisture feeds 
 The pipy hemlock to strange overgrowth. 
 
 The fields of buckwheat bloom with a creamier white, 
 and ripen with stalks of a richer and more transparent 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 309 
 
 amber and crimson than in other places. The sheep 
 are all black, or rather of a fine velvet brown. To 
 this rich colouring of nature the costume of the people 
 answers admirably. It is a picture to come, as one 
 constantly does, upon a group of women kneeling 
 at their washing round an open tank beneath the trees ; 
 their dresses are of various deep sound blues that only 
 improve by wear and washing, relieved by the white 
 of their caps and perhaps a touch of chocolate in their 
 aprons and of rose or yellow in their kerchiefs. So, 
 too, of the men ; the peasants of these parishes wear 
 on holidays some three or four sleeveless embroidered 
 jackets, comically short, over their sleeved waistcoats ; 
 and for jackets and waistcoat alike they must have fine 
 cloth from Montauban, of different shades of blue, but of 
 no false dye or new-fangled make, or they will none of it. 
 But I have spoken only of the natural sights of this 
 neighbourhood, and they are only half its charm. 
 It abounds also in interesting works of man's hands. 
 This is not a country where you find such obvious and 
 impressive monuments of ancient worship as the 
 famous single stone of Dol, or the league-long ranges 
 of Carnac ; but lesser stone monuments of the same 
 order are plentiful on the desolate levels of the landes, 
 here as in all the rest of Brittany, and are often not very 
 easy to distinguish from the blocks which nature her- 
 self has plied and jumbled. And there are remains 
 to be sought for of Gaulish oppida, and Roman camps 
 and feudal castles. And there are the little covered 
 sanctuaries dedicated to some saint or other, at every 
 spring of water ; and chapels in glades of the woods ; 
 
310 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and most abundant of all those crosses, Calvaries, in 
 grey stone, that stand wherever a few houses are 
 clustered together, and often in lonely places where you 
 see them by themselves against the sky. Sometimes 
 they are rich, these shrines of wayside prayer, and 
 have figures of all the twelve Apostles standing about 
 the foot of the cross ; more commonly the column 
 rises from a plain base of steps, and carries only at its 
 summit the weather-worn images of Christ and of his 
 mother. Both for these outdoor stone carvings, and 
 for wooden images in the churches, there is a local 
 style of much uncouthness, which continues still in 
 practice and which one must not take as necessary 
 evidence of antiquity. The churches themselves 
 in these parts, with a few notable exceptions, belong 
 to a belated provincial Gothic of the sixteenth or 
 seventeenth century ; they are always built on high 
 ground, and with their steeples of open work, in 
 which you can see the bells a-swing, form one of the 
 most characteristic features of the country. 
 
 Then, over and above the visible works of nature 
 and of man, every spot of soil or sea is full of legend 
 and poetry. Wherever one has to do with Celts, that 
 people of poets, one finds them atoning for all the 
 disasters of their history by what has been well called 
 a system of imaginary revenges. One finds them 
 inventing a heroic past that never was ; consoling 
 themselves for the failures of their destiny by beautiful 
 fancies, and throwing a grace over their hard unhopeful 
 lives with romantic dreams, traditions, usages. These 
 extremities of the Breton Cornwall, above almost all 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 311 
 
 other places, have been the haunt of the Celtic spirit 
 and its poetry. I do not know how much of it still 
 lives, either in memory or custom, among the people, 
 whose ways are changing fast; but what has been 
 collected in books is enough to make the whole ground 
 alive to one. There is one great myth common to the 
 Celtic race in many places, the myth which tells of a 
 mighty city submerged for the wickedness of its 
 inhabitants. In Ireland, the waters of Lough Neagh 
 are supposed to cover the vestiges of such a city ; 
 and in Wales, the bay of Cardigan. But the myth has 
 associated itself, in most detail and consistency, with 
 this bay of Douarnenez. As a matter of fact, traces 
 of Roman roads leading from inland to the bay, traces 
 of Roman buildings on the lie Tristan and at many 
 points of the shore near the town of Douarnenez, 
 point certainly to an important station which existed 
 at this point of Gaul, and on ground upon which the 
 sea has at least partially encroached. These remains, 
 in the days when legends grew, must have been far 
 more conspicuous than now. The popular imagina- 
 tion seems to have taken hold of them, and of the 
 reputation of a certain Gradlon, who, as far as real 
 history shows, seems to have had an historical existence 
 as count over a small principality in the Black Moun- 
 tains in the sixth or seventh century.* With these data, 
 
 * I waive of necessity all notice of the discussions which have 
 raged in this matter between inquirers of different schools, for 
 Gradlonism is a war-cry ; but the result seems to be that the great 
 King Gradlon of the fifth century seems to have been created by 
 the Breton imagination out of a small Count Gradlon who lived 
 in a later time. 
 
312 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 and with that national myth of a submerged city in 
 their brains, the people have fashioned a legend like 
 this : — 
 
 Gradlon the Great was King of all Cornwall, and 
 had his capital at Quimper. When he and his kingdom 
 were converted by Saint Corentin, he made over the 
 city of Quimper to the government of that saint, and 
 went to live and rule his dominions from another city 
 by the sea. This city was called Is, and was one of 
 the mightiest and goodliest in the world. But men 
 lived there too riotously. It was built on low ground 
 beside the sea ; and the waters were kept out by a pair 
 of great sluice-gates of which no man had the key — a 
 key of pure gold — but the king only. Now King 
 Gradlon had a daughter, the Princess Dahut, and loved 
 her dearly. But Dahut cared neither for God nor man, 
 and was first in all manner of riotousness ; and the 
 lovers that were brought to her nightly she was wont 
 to murder before dawn, and send their bodies to be 
 flung into a pit far within the country. So God was 
 angry against Dahut and against that city. And 
 one day King Gradlon met Saint Corentin (or as others 
 say his disciple Saint Guennole) in the forest of Nevet ; 
 and the saint said to him, " Beware ; for the wrath 
 of God is about to make itself felt against thee and 
 thine." But the king took no heed. And one night 
 after the feast was over, the foul fiend came in the guise 
 of a lover to Dahut, and caressed her, and asked her 
 for the golden key from about her father's neck. And 
 Dahut went to her father where he slept, and took the 
 key from about his neck, and gave it to her lover. 
 
AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 313 
 
 And the foul fiend vanished away, and took the key, 
 and turned it ; and the sluice-gates were opened, and 
 the waters went over the city. And King Gradlon 
 leapt upon his horse and rode for life ; and Dahut 
 begged with a great voice that he would take her up 
 behind him. And he took her up ; but the sea pursued 
 them ; and a voice cried, " Let go the accursed one 
 that rides behind thee," and Dahut's arms were 
 loosened, and she fell and was drowned, and the 
 waters were stayed ; and the place where she fell is 
 called Poul-Dahut to this day. 
 
 Poul-Dahut is the modern Poul-David, the estuary 
 that separates Douarnenez from Treboul. And there 
 are a hundred tales told how Dahut still haunts the bay, 
 and may be seen sitting on the rocks in the form of a 
 siren, a presage of ill-weather ; and how Gradlon's 
 horse still ranges the country at night with tramp and 
 neigh ; and how in calm weather the fishermen look 
 down through the blue, and see upon the sands of the 
 bay the ruins of the wicked city — 
 
 Old palaces and towers 
 Quivering beneath the wave's intenser day. 
 
 Nor is that the only cycle of legends that haunts this 
 region. The Celts of Brittany have a whole calendar 
 of their own saints, and in places round about you 
 shall be shown how Saint Corentin had his hermitage 
 here, and Saint Guennole or Saint Ronan wrought a 
 miracle there, and so on without end. And as usual, 
 emigrants from the island of Britain have not only 
 carried the great Arthur cycle with them to these 
 
314 MEMORIES AND NOTES 
 
 coasts, but their descendants have identified its scenes 
 with the places among which they themselves lived. 
 Thus the lie Tristan, anciently and properly, it would 
 seem, called Tutuarn after a saint of that name, has 
 got to be thought of in connection with Sir Tristram 
 of Lyonesse. And Plomarc'h, which is the name of 
 that point of richest verdure, of woodpeckers and 
 kingfishers by the rocks, is pointed out as the home of 
 King Mark, the uncle of Sir Tristram and husband 
 of Sir Tristram's mistress in the same legend ; whereas 
 in truth the whole tenor of the legend demands that. 
 Mark should have been king not of this but of our 
 island Cornwall. Marc'h, Mark, means a horse, and 
 it is curious to find the tale of Midas told of this King 
 Mark of the popular imagination. He had horse's 
 ears, and used to put all his barbers to death for fear, 
 they should tell of it. One day he suffered a friend, 
 sworn to secrecy, to do the barber's office and live 
 afterwards. The friend must needs go and whisper 
 the secret to the sands of the sea. In the place where 
 he whispered there sprang up three reeds ; certain 
 bards cut these reeds to make music with, and the 
 secret came along the music — Plomarc'h, Plomarc'h, 
 the King of Plomarc'h has horse's ears. Again, when 
 clouds roll in a dark procession, as one sees them some- 
 times, along the ridge of the Black Mountains and 
 over the Mene-Hom, they say it is Arthur and his 
 knights that ride abroach and take it for a sign of 
 coming war. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Acropolis, the, 227, 229 
 
 Seen from Lycabettus, 238 
 Adam, Edmond, 279 
 Mme. Edmond 
 
 Salon of, 275, 279-80 
 Souvenirs by, cited, 283n. 
 Tastes and Politics of, 280 
 Adventures, The, of a Younger Son 
 
 (Trelawny), 241 
 Advertisement, the demon of, 47 
 ^Egina, Island of, 227, 238 
 
 Seen from Lycabettus, 238 
 Agamemnon (iEschylus), Browning's 
 
 Translation, letter on, 86-7 
 Airy, Sir George Biddell, Astronomer 
 
 Royal, 35 
 Aldeburgh, Suffolk, Crabbe's poems 
 
 on, 26 ; extracts from, 28, 
 
 29 
 Alderton, Giles Fletcher at, 24-5 
 Amazing Marriage, The (Meredith), 
 
 166, 168 
 Andrea del Sarto (Browning), 
 
 Browning's reading of, 84 
 Annie, L\ Terrible (Hugo), 269, Col- 
 
 vin's review of, 254-5 db n., 
 
 extracts from review, 256 
 
 sqq. 
 Aphrodite, Head of, and Gladstone, 
 
 193, 194. 
 Archaeology, museum of, opened at 
 
 Cambridge, 221-3 
 and Excavations, 210 sqq. 
 Architecture, vulgarization of, in 
 
 modern London, 47 
 Areopagitica (Milton), referred to, by 
 
 Gambetta, 275. 
 " Ariel " (or " Don Juan "), Shelley's 
 
 boat, sinking of, Trelawny 
 
 on, 247-8 
 
 Aristophanes' 1 s Apology (Browning), 
 
 80 
 Art, V, d'etre Grand-pere (Hugo), 114 
 Art Criticism of 
 
 Burty, 253 
 
 Colvin, 8, 48, 253 
 
 Buskin, 41 sqq. 
 Athens, Aspects of (1873), 224 sqq. 
 
 Atmosphere of, qualities of, 228 
 sqq. 
 
 First sight of, 217, 225 sqq. 
 
 Funeral monuments in, 236-7 
 
 Hills surrounding, 230-1 
 Athenians, present-day, 229, 230, 233, 
 
 235-6, 237, 239 
 Attwater, in The Ebb-Tide, and Dew- 
 Smith, 127 
 Audierne, 289, 290-1, 292 
 
 Bay of, 298, 303 
 Austen, Jane, and Box Hill, 163 
 Austin, Alfred, C.B., 154, 160 
 
 Charles, 159-60 
 
 Family, gifts of, 154, 159 sqq. 
 
 John, 159 
 Autobiographical Notes (W. B. Scott), 
 on Rossetti, 74 
 
 Babington, Professor Churchill, his 
 wife, and R. L. S., 103 
 
 Balaustion's Adventure (Browning), 79 
 
 Balfour, Rev. Lewis, 103 
 
 Barrie, Sir James, 151 
 
 on the Death of Meredith, 187-8 
 
 " Barry Cornwall," 89 
 
 Barrons, the, of Norwich, 160 
 
 Barton, Bernard, Poems of, 19-20, 
 30 sqq. 
 Miss, marriage of, with Fitzgerald, 
 34 
 
 Batifoulier, \e plre, 291 
 
 315 
 
316 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Baudelaire, — , 255 
 Bayley, William Butterworth, 14 
 His daughter and the Indian 
 
 Mutiny, 15 
 Beach, The, of Walesa (Stevenson), 
 
 149 
 Biamarck, Prince, and Gambetta, 
 
 projected meeting between, 
 
 283». 
 Blacas Collection, the, 213 
 Black Arrow, The (Stevenson), 137 
 Bloomsbury, and the British Museum, 
 
 201 
 Black Mountain : Brittany, 307, 311 
 
 Legends of, 314 
 Blake, William, poems of, Trelawny 
 
 on, 250-1 
 Bolivar, the, Byron's Schooner, and 
 
 Trelawny, 248 
 Bordeaux Assembly, the, 254, 271 
 Borough, The (Crabbe), 27 ; quota- 
 tions from, 28-9 
 Boswell and Johnson, 174 
 Botticelli, Sandro, 52 
 Boulge Hall, and the FitzGeralds, 34, 
 
 36 
 Bournemouth, R. L. S. at, 141 sqq. 
 Box Hill, George Meredith at, 162 
 
 sqq. 
 Literary associations of, 162-4 
 Boys, response of, to R. L. S., 104, 
 
 124-5 
 Braemar, R. L. S. at, 134 
 Branchidse, figures from, 211-12 
 Brest, 289, 293 
 Bride of Lammermoor, The, Glad- 
 
 stone on, 197-8 
 Bridges, Robert, Poet - Laureate, 
 
 poems of, and R. L. S., 
 
 122-3 
 British Museum, the, associations of, 
 
 201 sqq. 
 Collectors' gifts to, 206-7 
 Colvin's life, home, work, and 
 
 contemporaries at, 8, 141, 
 
 143, 172-3, 201 sqq., 207 
 Brittany, Celtic Saints in, 312, 313 
 Rambles in, 289 sqq. 
 Ruins in, 309-10 
 Scenery &c. of, 286 sqq. 
 Brown, Charles (Armitage), and 
 
 Trelawny, 248, 249»., 250 
 
 Browning, Mrs. Barrett, death of, 76 
 " Pen," and his father, 89 
 Robert, American story told by, 85 
 Characteristics of, 78, 79, 80 
 
 sqq., 86, 89 
 Letters from, to Colvin, 86 sqq. 
 Memories of 76 sqq. 
 Meeting with, at Naworth, 191 
 Poems of, 79, 80 
 Readings by, of his own poetry, 
 
 83-4 
 and R. L. S., 143 
 Talk of, 78-9, 80 
 Buchanan, Robert, attack by, on 
 D. G. Rossetti {Fleshly 
 School of Poetry), 72, 75 
 Burford Bridge Inn, Keats's Stay at, 
 164 
 R. L. S.'s stay at, 167, 168-9 
 Burne-Jones, Edward, 44, 45 
 Characteristics of, 48, 52-3 sqq. 
 Friends and admirers of, 48-9, 53, 
 
 55 
 Letters from, to Colvin, on Aubrey 
 de Vere's Irish poems, and 
 on R. L. S., 55 sqq. 
 Paintings of, 48, 51 
 
 Artists' appreciation of, 48 
 Collectors' discovery of, 49 
 Colvin's enthusiasm for, and 
 
 friendship with, 48-9 
 Sadness in, 52-3 
 and R. L. S., 57, 143 
 Range of Reading of, 54 sqq. 
 and Rossetti, 60, 61 
 Watts's Portrait of, 58 
 Burney, Fanny, 164 
 Burton, F. W., drawing by, of George 
 
 Eliot, 91 
 Burty, Philippe, Art Critic, 253-4 
 Letter from, on Hugo, and Col- 
 vin's review of IS Annie 
 Terrible, 256 & n. 
 Butcher, Sir John George, Bt., M.P., 
 
 167n. 
 Butler, Dr. Montagu, 85 
 Byron, Lord, and Trelawny, 240, 
 241, 242 
 
 California, R. L. S.'s life in, 128-9, 
 130 
 
INDEX 
 
 317 
 
 Calvary Crosses, Brittany, 310 
 Cambridge Days and Memories, 8, 
 
 10-12, 19, 43, 60, 103, 172, 
 
 221-2. 
 Cameron, Mrs. (Julia), and her 
 
 Photographs, 93-4 
 Cardigan Bay, and the submerged 
 
 city myth, 311 
 Carlisle, Rosalind, Countess of (the 
 
 late), and her guests, 77-8, 
 
 193 
 Carlyle, Thomas, Browning on, 81 
 
 Literary Style of, 124 
 Carnac, 309 
 Casino, the, of Monte Carlo, A 
 
 suicide in, 113 
 Castellani, collections bought from, 
 
 for the British Museum, 
 
 213 
 Caterpillar and Hen, story of, 221 
 Catriona (Stevenson), 57, 149 
 Cernuschi, — , and Japanese Art, 
 
 253 
 Celtic Saints, in Brittany, 312, 313 
 
 Traditions, 310 sqq. 
 Challemel-Lacour, — , 278 
 Chdtiments, Les (Hugo), 270 
 Chaussee d'Antin, Rue de la, Gam- 
 
 betta's abode in, 278 
 Child's Garden of Verses (Stevenson), 
 
 57, 137 
 Children, little, attitude of, to 
 
 R. L. S., 115, 124 
 R. L. S.'s interest in, 107, 114 
 Churches in Brittany, 310 
 Claretie, Jules, 269 
 Clark, J. W., 12 
 
 Sir Andrew, and R. L. S., 106 
 W. G., 12 
 Clarkson, Thomas, at Playford, 35 
 Claudian, cited on a place like the 
 
 Baie des Trepasses, 298 
 Clermont-Ferrand, R. L. S.'s adven- 
 ture at, 110-11 
 Clichy, rue de, Hugo's home in, 268 
 Clifford, Professor W. K., 119, and 
 
 R.L.S., 120 
 Cockfield Rectory, R. L. S. at, 103 
 Codfishery of Penmarc'h, fate of, 300 
 Collections, purchased for the British 
 
 Museum, 212-13 
 Collectors, Psychology of, 205-6 
 
 Colvin Family, 13, 14-15 <fc n. 
 
 James, in the Indian Mutiny, 14-15 
 John Russell, and the Indian 
 
 Mutiny, 14-15 <fc re. 
 Sir Auckland, 15n. 
 Sir Sidney, adventure of, at Corfu, 
 281 
 
 Boyhood, 13 sqq. 
 
 Cambridge Days and Cambridge 
 Posts, 8, 10-12, 19, 43, 60, 
 103, 172, 221-2 
 
 Critique by, of Rossetti's poems, 
 60, extracts from, 66, 67 sqq. 
 
 Dissent by, from Henderson's 
 estimate of The Bride of 
 Lammermoor, 197 re. 
 
 Education 
 Early, 12, 18 
 Later, 10, 18-19, 48 
 
 Early Literary joys, 16 sqq. 
 
 Early travels, 19, 41 
 
 Journalist days, 8, 48 
 
 Letters to and from R. L. S. 
 and his wife, on settling 
 in Samoa, 146 sqq. 
 
 Life, home, work, and con- 
 temporaries of, at the Bri- 
 tish Museum, 8, 141, 143, 
 172-3, 201 sqq., 207 
 
 Life of Keats, by, 9 
 
 Love of, for Nature, 19 sqq. 
 
 Parents of, 13 sqq. 
 
 Review by, of Hugo's U Annie 
 Terrible, 254; Burty on, 
 254-5 & n. ; Hugo on, 255 ».; 
 Extracts from, 256 sqq. 
 
 Rossetti's " Limerick " on, 74 
 
 Rossetti, Critical praise of by, 
 60, 66, 72 
 
 Sporting tastes of, 17-18, 23-4 
 
 Travels of, in Greece, 217; 
 Olympus, 219 ; Athens, 
 217, 224 sqq. 
 
 Views of, on Juventus Mundi, 
 193 
 
 Visit of, to Finistere (1876), 
 289 sqq. 
 
 Work of, as Art Critic, 8, 48, 
 60, 66 sqq., 253 
 Colvin, Lady, Dedicatory Letter to, 
 
 7 sqq. 
 Commune, the, in Paris, 1871, 254 
 
318 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Concentration, Meredith's phrase on, 
 and Colvin's Lecture on, 
 182 & n. 
 
 " Conciliation or Coercion," 199 
 
 Conrad, Joseph, 152 
 
 Affinities of, with R. L. S., 151-2 
 on In the South Seas, by R. L. S., 
 149 
 
 Coquelin, Jean (cadet), 279 
 
 Corfu, adventure at, 281 
 
 Cornouailles, 289 
 
 Cosmopolitan views of Meredith, 180 
 
 Cowper, W., poem by, Tirocinium, 13 
 
 Crane, Walter, 57 
 
 Crabbe, George, Place of, in Litera- 
 ture, 26 sqq. 
 Poems of, and feeling of, for his 
 
 district, 25 sqq. 
 Style and Matter of, 26 sqq. 
 
 Greeting Mill, the Austins of, 159 
 
 Cunningham, Alison, 137 
 
 Dahut, Princess, legend of, 312-13 
 
 Darwin, Charles, 156 
 
 Datura stramonium at Penmarc'h, 
 
 302 
 Davos, in R. L. S.'s day, 131-3 
 Deben River and its tributaries, 22 
 Barton's verses on, 19-20, 32-3 
 de Freycinet, — ,278 
 de Goncourts, the, 268 
 Deirdre and Cuchulain, legend of, 54 
 Demeter, Statue of, from Cnidos, 211 
 de Vere, Aubrey, friends and poems 
 
 of, 54-5 & n., 56 
 Devil, the, and Dahut, legend of, 
 
 312-13 
 Dew-Smith, A. G., and R. L. S., 126-7 
 Diana of the Crossways (Meredith), 
 
 166, 173 
 Dick Naseby, in The Story of a Lie 
 
 (R. L. S.), prototype of, 116 
 Dickens, Charles, Literary style of, 
 
 124 
 Novels of, Burne-Jones's joy in, 
 56, 58 
 Dilke, Sir Charles, on Charles Brown, 
 
 249?i. 
 Dilettanti Society, the, 216 
 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 
 
 141 
 
 Dol, monolith of, 309 
 Donne, John, lines by, 82 
 Douarnenez, 289 
 
 Beauty of Surroundings, 306 
 sqq. 
 Colour in, 308 
 Sardine Trade at, 303 sqq. 
 Bay, 303 
 Doyle, Richard, 38 
 Drouet, Mme., and Hugo, 268, 269 
 Duff Gordon, Lucie, Lady {nee 
 Austin), 159 
 
 Early Italian Poets (Rossetti), 
 
 87 
 East Suffolk Poets, see Crabbe, Fitz- 
 
 Gerald, and Giles Fletcher 
 Ebb-Tide, The (Stevenson), 149; 
 
 character in, 127 
 Echetlos (Browning), Browning's 
 
 reading of, 84 
 Edinburgh society and R. L. S., 105 
 Edinburgh Review, Fleeming Jenkin's 
 
 articles in, 156 
 Egoist, The (Meredith), 166, 172, 173 
 Elgin, Earl of, 204, 216 
 Elgin Marbles, The, 203-4, 220, 232 
 Endymion (Keats), 164 
 Enfants, Les (V. Hugo), 114 
 England, Meredith's attitude to, 177- 
 
 80 
 English Accentual Stress, 183 
 
 Painting, State of, circa 1886-7, 
 
 49-50 
 Esterel Coast, beauties of, 288 
 Euphranor, by Edward FitzGerald, 1 1 
 
 Faery Queene, The, Colvin's 
 
 delight in, 17-18 
 Felixstowe, 25 
 Fenton, attempt of, on Trelawny, 
 
 243, 247 
 Feuillantines, Convent of, Lines on, 
 
 by Hugo, cited, 265-6 
 Fifine at the Fair (Browning), 79 
 Finiguerra, Maso, 45 
 Finistere, visit to (1876), described, 
 
 289 sqq. 
 FitzGerald, Edward, 30 
 Characteristics of, 33 sqq. 
 and his Euphranor, 11 
 
INDEX 
 
 319 
 
 Friends and friendships of, 33, 34 
 Poems of, 33 sqq. 
 John Purcell, father of Edward 
 
 and John, 34 
 John Purcell, brother of Edward, 
 34, 35-6 
 
 Fitzwilliam Museum, Colvin's Direc- 
 torship of, 8, 11, 221-2 
 Gallery at, of Casts from the 
 Antique, 221-2 ; Newton's 
 speech at opening of, 222-3 
 
 Fleshly School, The, of Poetry (Bu- 
 chanan), Rossetti's anger 
 at, 72, 75 
 
 Fletcher, Giles, 24-5 
 
 Florence, 233 
 
 Flying Victory, The, of Paionios, 219 
 
 Fontainebleau, and Fate for R. L. S., 
 128 
 
 Fontenelle, Guy Eder de, and the 
 sack of Penmarc'h, 300, 303 
 
 Footnote, A, to History (Stevenson), 
 149 
 
 Foster, Birket, 48 
 
 France, affairs in, in Gambetta's 
 day, 274-5 ; relations with 
 Germany after 1870, Gam- 
 betta's influence on, 277-8, 
 280 sqq. 
 the Land's End of, a visit to, 286 
 
 sqq. 
 War-devastated, 46 
 
 Francesco da Rimini (Leigh Hunt), 
 135 
 
 Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, 253 
 
 Franks, A. Wollaston, 208-9 
 
 Freedom of the Press in France, 
 struggle over, Gambetta's 
 share in, 275 
 
 French excavations at Olympia, 217 
 
 Froude, John Antony, and Carlyle, 
 81 
 
 Fuller, Thomas on Suffolk air, 25 
 
 Funeral Monuments in Athens, 236-7 
 
 Fynn, the brook, 22 
 
 Gainsborough, Thomas, and Land- 
 guard Fort, 32 
 Gaisford, Captain, 242 
 Lady Alice, 242 
 
 Thomas, Dean of Christ Church, 
 242 
 
 Gambetta, Leon, 254, 286 
 
 Aspects and characteristics of, 
 
 275 sqq. 
 Oratorical powers, inborn leader- 
 ship, 276-7 
 Attitude of, to French relations with 
 Germany, change in, 277-8, 
 280, 281, 282 
 Career of, 274-5 
 Conversational topics, 278-9 
 Death of, 285 
 
 Letters from, 274, 282 & n. 
 Love Story of, 285 
 Memories of, 274 sqq. 
 as Statesman, 274-5, 277-8, 280 
 sqq. 
 Garnett, Dr. Richard, 207-8 
 George Eliot, at the Priory, 90, 
 sqq. 
 Appearance and characteristics of, 
 90-1, 92 
 German Archaeologists, Excavations 
 
 by, 216 sqq. 
 Germany 
 
 Gambetta's attitude to, 277-8, 280, 
 
 281, 282 
 Gambetta's tour in (1877), 283 & n. 
 and the War, Meredith's foresight 
 on, 179 
 Gifford, W., praise by, of the Storm 
 lines in Cr abbe's Borough, 
 29 
 Gladstone, W. E., Characteristics of, 
 189 sqq. 
 Dominance of, over the English 
 
 mind, 189, 190, 191 
 Financial attitude of, 195 
 Humour of, 198-9 
 Juventus Mundi by, 193 
 Last meeting with, 199-200 
 Memories of, 189 sqq. 
 Oratory of, 189 sqq. 
 Topics preferred by, 192 
 Views of, on Homer, 192 sqq. 
 on Walter Scott, 197 
 Goethe, W. A., Hugo's denunciation 
 
 of, 273 
 Gordon, James, 167 
 
 Mrs. James (Lady Butcher), book 
 by, on Meredith, 167<fc n. 
 Gosse, Edmund, and R. L. S., 120, 
 136 
 
320 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Gower Woodseer in The Amazing 
 
 Marriage, and R. L. S., 168 
 Gradlon, King, legend of, 311 db n., 
 
 sqq. 
 Graham, W., and Burne- Jones, 49, 55 
 Great North Road, The (Stevenson), 
 
 135, 169 
 Greece, Colvin's Travels in, 217 ; 
 
 Olympus, 219 ; Athena, 
 
 217, 224 sqq. 
 and Turkey, affairs of (in 1881), 
 
 Trelawny on, 245 sqq. 
 Greek Landscape, affinity of, with 
 
 Greek Art, 232 
 Greek War of Liberation, Trelawny's 
 
 share in, and book on, 241, 
 
 243, 246, 247, 249 
 Greenwood, Frederick, 48 
 Guernsey, Hugo's residence in, 254, 
 
 255 db n., 267 
 
 Haufax, Viscount, 198 
 Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 124 
 Hampstead Hill, R. L. S.'s super- 
 latives on, 121-2 
 Ponds, lines by Keats, probably 
 
 suggested by, 165 
 Hatherley, Lord, 35 
 Hawes Inn, Queensferry, R. L. S.'s 
 
 use of, 168, 169 
 Hebrides, the, and R. L. S., 138-9 
 Henley, W. E., as critic, 173 
 
 Joint work of, with R. L. S., 
 
 142 
 Sonnet by, on R. L. S., 101-2 
 Heredia, Jose-Maria de, 286 
 Herostratus, R. L. S.'s projected 
 
 spectacle-play on, 112-13 
 History of the Renaissance in Italy 
 
 (Symonds), 132 
 Hoar Cross, 198, 199 
 Homeric Poems, Gladstone's interest 
 
 in and theory on, 192-4 
 Houghton, Lord (Monckton Milnes), 
 
 222 
 Howard, George (later 9th Earl of 
 
 Carlisle), his wife, tastes, 
 
 and guests, 77-8, 191 
 Howell, Charles Augustus, and R03- 
 
 setti, 64 
 Rossetti's " Limerick " on, 75 
 
 Eudibras, quoted by Browning, 87 f 
 
 88 
 Hughes, Arthur, 48 
 Hugo, Mme. Victor, 268 
 
 Victor, Characteristics of, 268 sqq. 
 Books and writings of, on Chil- 
 dren, 114, 263-4. 
 Letter from, 255n. 
 Lines by, on dead Prussians 
 floating in the Seine, cited, 
 262-3 
 on Les Feuillantines, cited, 
 265-6 
 Manner, voice and conversation 
 
 of, 268 sqq. 
 Memories of, 253 sqq. 
 Poems and Novels of {see also 
 Annee Terrible, V), 254 
 sqq., 270, 272 
 Hunt, Leigh, on Sport, 23 
 
 W. Holman, and the Pr©- 
 Raphaelites, 61 
 Hyeres, R. L. S. at, verses on his 
 
 abode there, 135-6 
 Hymettus, 230, 238 
 
 Idylls of The King (Tennyson), 
 66 
 
 Iliad, Meredith's Translations from, 
 183, 184 
 and Odyssey, Gladstone's theory 
 on, 193-4 
 
 Imaginary Conversations (Landor), 
 on an adventure of Tre- 
 lawny, 249 db »., 250 
 
 Imagination and the Artist, 50 sqq. 
 
 In a Drear-nighted December (Keats), 
 written on Box Hill, 164 
 
 In Memoriam (Tennyson), 66 
 
 In the South Seas (Stevenson), two 
 judgments on, 149 
 
 Inchbold, Rossetti's " Limerick "on, 
 73 
 
 India, the Colvin family connection 
 with, 14-15 db n. 
 
 Indian Mutiny, the, 14-15 
 
 Inland Voyage, The (Stevenson), 110, 
 128, 169 
 Meredith's letter on, 169-70 
 
 Ireland, visits to, 19, 41 
 
 Irving, Sir Henry, 156 
 
INDEX 
 
 321 
 
 Is, the submerged city of, 312-13 
 Italian poems, Rossetti's translations 
 of, 60 
 
 James, Henry, and R. L. S., 142 ; 
 
 death of, 151 
 Japanese Art, introducers of, to 
 
 Parisian amateurs, 253 
 Jebb, Professor, oratory of, 12, 222 
 Jenkin, Mrs. Fleeming (ne'e Austin), 
 154 
 Death of, 153 
 Dramatic powers of, 160—1 
 Family and Parents of, 154, 
 
 159-60 
 R. L. S.'s affection for, 161 
 Professor Fleeming, Characteris- 
 tics of, 156-9 
 Life- Story and Career of, 153 
 
 sqq. 
 Writings of, 156 & n. 
 andR. L. S., 119, 152 
 Jenny (Rossetti), 65 ; an apprecia- 
 tion of, 69-71 ; lines from, 
 70-1 
 " Jerry Abershaw," tale planned by 
 
 R. L. S., 169 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, and Bo swell 
 174 
 Lines by, from The Vanity of 
 Human Wishes, 185 & n. 
 Johnston, Sir H. H., 147 
 Juvenal, Meredith's reference to, 
 
 183, 185 & n., 186 
 Juventus Mundi (Gladstone), Col- 
 vin's criticism on, 193 
 
 Kaye, J. W., on J. R. Colvin in the 
 
 Mutiny, 15 n. 
 Keats, John, at Burford Bridge Inn, 
 164 
 Colvin's " Life of," 9 
 Poems of, localities associated with, 
 164-5 
 Trelawny's mottoes from, 218 
 and Severn, 215, 251 
 Kidnapped (Stevenson), 141-2 
 King, The, of the Golden River (Rus- 
 
 kin), 38 
 Kingussie, R. L. S. at, 134-5 
 
 Kipling, Rudyard, 151 
 Kouyunjik, excavations at, 210 
 
 Lamb, Charles, and Bernard Barton, 
 
 30, 31 
 Landes of Brittany, ruins on, 309 
 Landor, Walter Savage, Colvin's 
 
 volume on, Browning's help 
 
 in, letter on, 88-9 
 and Trelawny, 248, 249 & n., 250 
 Landguard Fort, as subject both to 
 
 Crabbe and Gainsborough, 
 
 32 
 Lang, Andrew, death of, 151 ; and 
 
 R. L. S., 117-19 
 Lark, the brook, Barton's verses on, 
 
 19-20, 31 
 Layard, Sir A., excavations by, 210 
 League, the, and Penmarc'h, 300 
 Leconte de Lisle, 255 
 Legros, Alphonse, 77 
 Leighton, Sir Frederick, P.R.A., 57, 
 
 222 
 Leon, Mile. Leonie, and Gambetta, 
 
 285 
 Leonnais, the, 291 
 Letters of Edward John Trelawny 
 
 (Buxton Forman, ed.), on 
 
 Tersitza and Trelawny, 
 
 249n. 
 Levant, the, Newton's labours in, 
 
 fruits of, 210 sqq. 
 Lewes, G. H., appearance of, 92 
 and George Eliot at The Priory, 
 
 90 sqq. 
 Leyland, Mr., and Burne- Jones, 49 
 Life, its value for itself, Fleeming 
 
 Jenkin on, 158-9 
 Life of Keats, by Colvin, 9 
 " Limericks," by Rossetti, 72 sqq. 
 Little Holland House, its inhabitants 
 
 and habitues, 90, 93 sqq. 
 Little While, A (Rossetti), Stanzas 
 
 from, 65 
 Locker-Lampson, Frederick, as poet, 
 
 76 
 Lockroy, Edouard, 269 
 London, immensity of, 233 
 London Police, the, and R. L. S., 109 
 Lough Neagh, and the submerged 
 
 city myth, 311 
 
322 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Lowell, J. K., 143 ; and R. L. S., 222 
 
 Lycabettus, mount, 227 
 Quarrying from, 234 
 View from, 238-9 
 
 Macaulay, Lord, literary style of, 
 
 124 
 MacMahon, Marshal, President of 
 the French, 254 ; and the 
 reactionary coup in May, 
 1877, 282 & n., 284 
 Maison, General, 217 
 Malcolm, John, of Poltalloch, Collec- 
 tions of, 206, 207 
 Mark, King, and the Midas story, 314 
 Marryat, Mayne Reid, and Feni- 
 more Cooper, Colvin's early 
 delight in, 18 
 Marseilles, associations with, of 
 
 R. L. S., 135, 139-40 
 Martlesham Red Lion, 22 
 Mason, George, 49 
 Maud (Tennyson), 66 
 Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the, 
 
 211 
 Mediterranean Islands, a talk on, 
 
 with R. L. S., 138 n. 
 Mene-Hom, legend of, 314 
 Melbury Road, Watts's later home 
 
 in, 97 
 
 Meredith, George, Appreciation of, 
 
 slow but emphatic, 173, 179 
 
 at Box Hill ; Memories of, 162 sqq. 
 
 Characteristics of, 165, 167, 186 
 
 Conversation of , 167, 170-1, 174-5, 
 
 186, 187 
 Dachshunds of, 171, 187 
 Death and Burial of, Barrie on, 
 
 187-8 
 Friends and friendships of, 167, 
 
 171, 172, 173, 188 
 Infirmities of, in age, 173, 174, 186 
 Letter from, to Colvin, 183 
 
 to R. L. S. on The Inland Voyage, 
 169-70 
 Literary style of, 175, 178, 181 
 Novels and Poems written by, on 
 
 Box ffill, 166 
 Personal appearance of, 167, 173 
 Poems of, 166, 180-2 
 Obscurities in, 181 
 Portrait of, by Watts, 172 
 
 Reading aloud of, 181 
 and R. L. S., 167, 169-70, 188 
 as a walker, 165, 168, 172, 173 
 Metres, Classical, Meredith's Experi- 
 ments in, 183, illustrations 
 of, 184 
 Meurice, Paul, 269 
 Midas, King, Story of, as told of 
 
 King Mark, 314 
 Middlemarch (George Eliot), 92 
 Millet, J. F., 52 
 
 Millais, Sir J. E., Paintings by, 45 ; 
 Trelawny's likeness in, 243—4 
 and the Prse-Raphaelites, 61 
 Milton, Areopagitica of, referred to 
 by Gambetta, 275 
 Lines from, applicable to Glad- 
 stone in Debate, 190 
 R. L. S.'s delight in, 108-9 
 Mitchell, William, Collections of, 
 
 206, 207 
 Modern Painters, (Ruskin), 18, 41 
 Monckton, Milnes (Lord Houghton), 
 
 54 
 " Monsieur Berecchino " (R. L. S.), 
 
 115 
 Montaigne, rue, Gambetta's quarters 
 
 in, 274, 278 
 Moor, Rev. Edward, of Great Beal- 
 
 ings, 35 
 Morris, Mrs. William, 63 
 
 William, and Burne-Jones, 48, 
 53, 59 
 on Payment for Disagreeable 
 kinds of Work, 195 
 and Rossetti, 61 
 Socialism of, 59 
 Munro, H. A. J., 156 
 Museum Officials, Occupations and 
 Privileges of, 202-4 
 
 Nankin China, Rossetti's passion for, 
 
 62 
 Napoleon Bonaparte and Goethe, 273 
 Napoleon the Little, 270 
 National Service, Meredith's views 
 
 on, 178-80 
 National Trust, the, and Box Hill, 
 
 162 
 Native Portraiture, in In the South 
 
 Seas, by R. L. S., 149 
 Nature, Colvin's Love of, 19 sqq. 
 
INDEX 
 
 323 
 
 Naworth, the Howards at, and their 
 
 company, 77-8, 191, 192 
 Nelitchka, the, of R. L. S.'a letters, 
 
 114, 115, 124 
 Nelson, Admiral Lord and Lady 
 
 Hamilton at Box Hill, 164 
 New Arabian Nights (Stevenson), 167 
 New Poems (Stevenson), 140 n. 
 Newfoundland Codfisheries and Pen- 
 
 marc'h, 300 
 Newman, Cardinal J. H., 54 
 Newton, Mrs. Charles (ne'e Severn), 
 
 tragedy of, 215 
 Newton, Sir Charles, appearance of, 
 
 213-14 
 Book by, on his travels, cited, 218 
 Characteristics of, 210 sqq. 
 Memories of, 209 sqq. 
 Speech by, on opening of Gallery 
 
 of Casts in Fitzwilliam 
 
 Museum, 222-3 
 and Trelawny, 240, 242 
 Visit of, to Olympia, 216 sqq. 
 Niagara, Falls of, Rapids below, 
 
 Trelawny'8 Swim across, 
 
 241 
 Night Thoughts (Young), 195-6 
 Nimrud, Excavations at, 210 
 North British Review, Jenkin's arti- 
 cles in, 156 
 "North-West Passage," The, Mil- 
 
 lais's likeness of Trelawny 
 
 in, 243-4 
 Norwich, the Barrons of, 160 ; 
 
 the Taylors of, 159 
 NouveUe Revue, La, and Mme. 
 
 Adam, 280 
 
 Odysseus, and Trelawny, 241, 249 
 Treasures of, 246-7 
 
 Olympia, German excavations at, 
 216 sqq. 
 
 Omar Khayyam, the Rubaiyat of, 
 FitzGerald's version of, 36- 
 7 
 
 Opalstein, in Talk and Talkers pro- 
 totype of, 133 
 
 Ordered South (Stevenson), 121 
 
 Orr, Mrs. Sutherland, on Browning's 
 manner, 79 
 
 Orwell, River, 32 
 
 Pall Mill Gazette, Colvin's Art 
 criticisms in, 48 
 
 Paris, V. Hugo in, 254, 267-8 sqq. ; 
 during the Siege, 263-9 
 
 Parnell, Charles Stewart, Gladstone's 
 famous phrases on, 199 
 
 Parthenon,the(see also Elgin Marbles), 
 first glimpse of, 227 
 Seen from Lycabettus, 238 
 
 Pattle, James, distinguished daugh- 
 ters of, 93-4 
 
 Penmarc'h, past and present, 298- 
 302 ; the elements in war- 
 fare at, 300-1 
 
 Pentelicus, 230 
 Marble of, 234 
 
 Playford, Notable dwellers at, 35 
 
 Playford mere, 22 
 
 Phaeton (Meredith), lines from, 184 
 
 Phalerum, Bay of, 238 
 
 Piraeus, the, 228 
 
 Plomarc'h, and King Mark, 314 
 
 Poissoniere, Boulevard, home of M. 
 and Mme. Edmond Adam, 
 279 
 
 Political Economy, Ruskin's teach- 
 ings on, 45-6 
 
 Portfolio, The, 124 
 
 Poul-Dahont (Poul-David), legend 
 of, 313 
 
 Prae-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the, 
 36, 44-5, 61 
 
 Praeterita (Ruskin), 39 
 
 Prinsep, Thoby, and his wife, 90, 
 93-4 ; relations of, with 
 Watts, ib. 
 
 Priory, The, and its habitues, 90 
 sqq. 
 
 Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (Brown- 
 ing), 79 
 
 Prince Otto (Stevenson), 137 
 
 Private Collectors and Museums, 205 
 
 Procopius, cited on the Baie dea 
 Trepasses, 297-8 
 
 Procter, Mrs., and Browning, 89 
 
 Public Buildings, Watts' s mural 
 decorations of, 95-6 
 
 Purcell family, the, 34 
 
 Quimper, 289, 290 
 Legend of, 312 
 
324 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Radowitz, Graf von, adventure 
 with, 281-2 ; on Gambetta's 
 attitude to Germany, 282 
 Raj on, 91 
 Ranc, 278 
 Raz, Bee du, 294, 295 
 
 Pointe du, 290, 296, 298, 303 
 Visit to, 291 sqq. 
 Eecords of Shelley, Byron, &c. (Tre- 
 
 lawny), 242, 245-6, 248 
 Red Cotton Night-cap Country 
 
 (Browning), 79-80 
 Red Lion, the, of Martlesham, 22 
 Rendel, Lord and Lady, 199 
 " Revanche, La," Mme. Adam'a 
 obsession with, 280 : Gam- 
 betta's policy on, 277-8, 280 
 Richard Feverel (Meredith), aphor- 
 isms in, 174 
 Ring, The, and The Book (Browning), 
 179 
 Browning's reading of, 84 
 Riviera, visited by 
 Colvin, 19 
 R. L. S., 106, 112 
 Rob Roy (Scott), 16 
 Robinet, 115-16 
 Roman ruins and roads in Brittany, 
 
 309, 311 
 Rosabelle, Scott's Ballad of, Ruskin's 
 
 recitation of, 43—4 
 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Appearance, 
 house, manners and habits 
 of, 61-2 
 and Burne-Jones, 48 
 Colvin's support of, 60, 66, 72 
 Suggestions to, on the ex- 
 humed poems, 64 
 " Limericks" by, 72 sqq. 
 Memories of, 60 sqq. 
 Paintings by, 44, 60, 62, 63 
 
 Favourite sitters of, 63 
 Poetry of, 60, 62, 63, 87 
 Readings by, of his own poems, 
 
 64 sqq. 
 and the Rubaiyat of Omar 
 
 Khayyam, 36-7 
 and Symbolism in Art, 51 
 Mrs. Dante Gabriel, death of, 61 ; 
 poema buried with, ex- 
 humed and published, 63-5 
 sqq. 
 
 Rossetti, William Michael, 74-5 
 Rottingdean, Burne-Jones at, 55, 56 
 Rubaiyat, The, of Omar Khayyam, 
 FitzGerald's version of, 36-7; 
 stanzas from, 36 
 Ruskin, John, Appearance of, 40 
 Art Criticism of, 16, 41 
 Books by, Colvin's delight in, 18 
 Characteristics and teachings of, 
 
 40 sqq. 
 Colvin's relations with, 40 sqq., 
 
 48 
 Literary style of, 40, 41, 124 
 Memories of, 38 sqq. 
 Political Writings of, 41, 44 ; 
 effects of, 47 
 Mrs. (mother of John), 38 
 
 St. Cobentin, 312, 313 
 
 St. Gaudens, Bronze Relief by, of 
 
 R. L. S., 142 
 St. Guennole, 312, 313 
 St. Ronan, 313 
 
 Salamis, Island of, 227, 230, 238, 239 
 Salting, George, collections of, 206-7 
 Salvini as " King Lear," 84 
 Samoa, Life and death in, of R. L. S., 
 
 145 sqq. 
 Samson Agonistes (Milton), lines 
 from, declaimed by R. L. S., 
 108-9 
 Sardine Trade, at Douarnenez, 303 
 
 sqq. 
 Sargent, J. S., portrait by, of R. L. S., 
 
 142 
 Savile Club, the, and R L. S., 119-21 
 Scottish West Coast, grandeur of, 288 
 Scott, Sir Walter, works of, 56 ; 
 artistry of, 16-17, 26; 
 Colvin's early delight in, 
 16-18 ; the Bride of Lammer- 
 moor by, 197 <Sc n. 
 Scott, William Bell, Rossetti's " Lim- 
 ericks " on, 73, 74; his in- 
 accuracies, 74 
 Scottish and English Universities, 
 
 contrasts between, 126 
 Sea-Cook, The (Stevenson), 134 
 Sea-description, an effective, 30 
 Sea-poppies at Penmarc'h, 302 
 Seins, Chaussee des, 294, 295 
 lie des, 294, 296 
 
INDEX 
 
 325 
 
 Seven Lamps of Architecture (Ruskin), 
 
 41 
 Severn, Ann Mary (Mrs. Charlea 
 
 Newton), 215 
 
 Joseph, friend of Keats, 215, 
 
 232 ; burial-place of, 251 
 Shadows, transparency of, in Athens, 
 
 229-30 
 Shakespeare, Colvin's early joy in, 18 
 Shelley, Mrs. (Mary Godwin), 241 
 Percy Bysshe, 10 
 Death of, 240-1, 247 
 
 Trelawny on, 247-8 
 Heart of, rescued by Trelawny, 
 
 240, 247, 251 
 Trelawny's friendship with, 240- 
 
 1, 242, 251 
 Shilleto, Richard, 12 
 Simon, Jules, and the coup of May, 
 
 1877, 284 
 Sir Eustace Grey (Crabbe), 27 
 Sister Helen (Rossetti), 65 
 Sitwell, Mrs. (later Lady Colvin), and 
 
 R. L. S., 7, 103, 104, 122-3 
 Skye, Isle of, visits to, 55 
 Slade Professorship of Colvin, 8, 11, 
 
 43, 103 
 Smart, Christopher, stanzas by, 83 
 Somers, Virginia, Countess (nee 
 
 Pattle), 93 
 Sompting, Trelawny's home at, 242 
 Song of David (Smart), stanzas from, 
 
 83 
 Songs of Experience (Blake), 250 ; 
 
 Stanzas from, 251 
 Songs of Travel (Stevenson), 146 & n. 
 Sons, The, of Usnach (de Vere), 54; 
 
 lines from, 55n. ; letter on, 
 
 from Burne-Jones, 55 
 Southey, Robert, 250 
 Souvenirs (Mme. Adam), 283n. 
 Spartali, Miss Mary, 63 
 Spenser's Faery Queene, Colvin's 
 
 delight in, 17-18 
 Spuller, 278 
 Sport, Colvin's early love of, 17-18, 
 
 23-4 
 Stephen, Mrs. Leslie 
 
 the first 172 ; the second, ib. 
 Stephen, Sir Leslie, 170, 171-2; 
 
 Character based on, by 
 
 Meredith, 172 
 
 Stevenson, Mrs. R. L., character of, 
 129, 130 ; letter from, 147 
 Stevenson, Thomas, 105, 129 
 
 Robert (Bob), 128, 168; on 
 
 R. L. S., 150 
 Robert Louis, attire of, 107 sqq. 
 
 Books by, Burne-Jones's love 
 for, and letters on, 56 sqq. 
 
 and Burne-Jones, 56-57 
 
 in California, 128-9, 130 
 
 Characteristics of, 102 sqq., 167 
 
 Collaboration of, with Henley, 
 142 
 
 Colvin's first meeting with, 7, 
 102-4 
 
 Colvin's letters preserved by, 
 150 
 
 as Critic, and Meredith's writ- 
 ings, 173 
 
 Death of, 148 
 
 Friends and Friendships of, 7, 
 102, 103 sqq., 107, 113 sqq., 
 119, 120, 122-3, 126, 132-3, 
 136, 142, 143, 152 sqq., 167, 
 188 
 
 Health of, 100, 101, 105, 106-7, 
 130 sqq. 
 
 Inspiring talk of, 105 
 
 Literary style of, 124 
 
 Marriage of, 128-9 
 
 Memories of, 98 sqq. 
 
 One moment of despondency, 
 143 
 
 Personal appearance of, 99 sqq. 
 107 
 Henley on, 102 
 
 and the Police at home and 
 abroad, 109 sqq. 
 
 Portrait and Relief of, 142 
 
 Roamings of, in search of 
 health, 131 sqq., further 
 wanderings, 144-5, life in 
 Samoa, 146, letters thence, 
 147-8, death, 148 
 
 and the Savile Club, 119-21 
 
 Spell of, over Boys, 104,124-5 
 
 Superlatives of, 121-3 
 
 Two aspects of, 98-9 
 
 Visits of, to Colvin's British 
 Museum home, 141, 143 
 Writings of 
 
 Dramatic (with Henley), 142 
 
326 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Stevenson Robert Louis (con- 
 tinued) — 
 Writings of 
 
 Prose, 98-9, 115, 121, 127-8, 
 133, 134, 135, 137, 141-2, 
 149 sqq., 167, 168, 169 
 Verse, 136, 137, 140 <fc n., 
 
 164 & n. 
 When in Samoa, Colvin's criti- 
 cisms, 149-50 
 Written conversations with, in ill- 
 ness, 143-4 
 Stone-breaker, the, and Ruskin, 44, 
 Story, William Wetmore, 78 
 Stones of Venice (Ruskin), 18, 41 
 Storm and Calm in Crabbe's 
 
 Borough, 29 
 Story, The, of a Lie (Stevenson), 
 
 autobiography in, 116 
 Stratford de Redcliffe, Lord, and 
 
 archaeology, 210 
 Submerged City, Celtic myth of, 
 
 34 sqq. 
 Suffolk, Air of, Fuller on, 25 
 
 Literary Interests and Associa- 
 tions, of, 16 
 Notable folk of, 24, 25 sqq., 30 sqq., 
 
 34, 35-7, 159-60. 
 Scenery of, 16, 19 sqq. 
 Worthies, feelings of for their 
 country, 24 sqq. 
 Suicide Club Stories by R. L. S., 166, 
 
 168 
 Sunday Afternoons at The Priory, 
 and at Little Holland House, 
 90 sqq. 
 Sunday Tramps, the, 171, 172 db n. 
 Swinburne, Algernon, Hugo on, 270 ; 
 and Rossetti's poems, 66,72 
 Symonds, John Addington, and 
 R. L. S., 132-3 
 
 Talk and Talkers (Stevenson), 
 127-8 ; a character in, 133 
 Taylor, Sir Henry, 54 
 Taylors, the, of Norwich, 159 
 Telpherage system of Fleeming Jen- 
 kin, 155 
 Tembinok, King of Apemama, 149 
 Tennyson, Alfiel, 1st Lord, 54 
 Arthurian poems of, 66 
 
 Tersitza, Zella, and Trelawny, 
 249 & n., 250 
 
 Teuton and Gaul, agelong strife of, 
 256 
 
 Thomson, Sir William (Lord Kelvin), 
 154 
 
 Thompson, W. A., Master of Trinity, 
 12 
 
 Three Colours, The, of Prce-Raphaelit- 
 ism (Ruskin), 44-5 
 
 Tinted Statues, reason for, 229 
 
 Tirocinium (Cowper), 13 
 
 To S. C. (Stevenson), 146 & n. 
 
 Tourists, 162 ; Meredith's two voices 
 on, 176-7 
 
 Turner Water-colours owned by 
 Ruskin, 39 
 
 Tragedy, Gladstone on, 196-8 
 
 Transvaal War (1881), Trelawny on, 
 245 
 
 Travels and Discoveries (Newton), 
 extract from, 218 
 
 Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes 
 (Stevenson), 128 
 
 Treasure, The, of Franchard (Steven- 
 son), 134 
 
 Treasure Island (Stevenson), 134, 141 
 
 Trees and flowers near Athens, 
 232 
 
 Trelawny, Edward John, 10 ; adven- 
 tures of, books by, and 
 later days of, 240-2, 247; 
 a meeting with, 240, 242 sqq: 
 Burial-place, 251 
 
 Conversation and voice of, 244 sqq. 
 Millais's likeness of, 243-4 
 Shelley's heart rescued by, 240, 
 247, 251 
 
 Trevelyan, G. M., book by, on Mere- 
 dith's Poetry and Philo- 
 sophy, 182 
 
 Trespasses, Baie des, 296 sqq. 
 
 Tristram of Lyonesse, and lie Tris- 
 tan, 314 
 
 Tristan, lie, Arthurian associations 
 of, 314 ; and Fontenelle, 
 303 
 
 Trochu, General, Hugo on, 271 
 
 UnivebsaIj Republic, toast to ; Gam- 
 
 betta's wrath, 277 
 Ushant, Islands of, 293 
 
INDEX 
 
 327 
 
 Vacquerie, Anguste, 269 
 
 Van, Pointe de, 293, 296 
 
 Vanity of Human Wishes (Johnson's 
 
 translation of Juvenal's 
 
 tenth satire), 185 & n. 
 Vaughan, Henry, and the British 
 
 Museum, 206 
 Vernon Whitford, in The Egoist, 
 
 model for, 172 
 Verrall, Professor, Essay by, On the 
 
 Prose of Sir Walter Scott, 
 
 17ra. 
 Versailles, Gambetta's speeches at, 
 
 276-7 
 Vienna, 233 
 
 WADD1NGTON, M., French Ambassa- 
 dor, 222 
 Wales, H.R.H. the Prince of (King 
 
 Edward VII), 222 
 Walker, Frederick, 49 
 Waterlow, Sydney, book by, on 
 
 Cambridge, 12 
 Watts, George Frederick, at Little 
 Holland House, 90, 93 sqq. 
 Appearance and Characteristics 
 
 of, 95 sqq. 
 Personality of, 94 sqq. 
 Paintings of, 95-6 
 Portraits, 58, 96, 172 
 Mrs. G. F., 97 
 Waverley Novels, the, 16, 26, 197 
 Weir of Hermiston (Stevenson), 149 
 Westminster Review (1871), Colvia's 
 Essay in, on D. G. Rossetti's 
 poems, 60, 66 ; extracts 
 from, 67 sqq. 
 
 Wharton, the Duke of, and th© 
 
 poet Young, 196 
 Whewell, William, Master of Trinity, 
 
 12 
 Whitcombe, and the attempted 
 
 assassination of Trelawny, 
 
 247 
 Wilding, Miss, 63 
 Wilford, Admiral, and Penmarc'h, 
 
 299-300 
 Winckelmann, and German ar- 
 
 chaelogy, 216 
 Wisie, Ruskin's dog, 39 
 Woggs, R. L. S.'s Skye-terrier, 137 
 Women, attitude to, of Meredith, 178 
 Women-characters in Meredith's 
 
 Novels, 178 
 Wood, Sir William Page (Lord 
 
 Hatherley), 35 
 Woodbridge, 13, 14 ; literary and 
 
 notable folk of, 30, 34, 35 
 Wordsworth, W., 54 
 
 on Sport, 23-4 
 World Reform, 46 
 Wrecker, The (Stevenson), 149 
 
 Yarmouth, Countess of, and Young • 
 
 196 
 Young, Edward, Night Thoughts by, 
 
 and Gladstone, 195-6 
 
 Zetts, temple of, at Olympia, excava- 
 tions at, visit to, 216 sqq. 
 
 Zola, Emile, 268 ; a French criticism 
 on, 278-9 
 
 H 
 
 153 79 
 
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