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YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

Robert Louis Stevenson
Collection
GIFT OF EDWIN J. BEINECKE
OF THE CLASS OF 1907
YALE COLLEGE

MEMORIES AND NOTES
OF
PERSONS AND PLACES

LONDON ED'WARD ARNOLD AtC9

MEMORIES & NOTES
OF
PERSONS & PLACES
1852-1912

BY
SIR SIDNEY COLVIN

SECOND EDITION

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1922

Printed in the United States of America

¦2/C

CONTENTS
chap. page
Dedicatory Letteb  7
I An East-Suefolk Boyhood and some Poets . 13
II John Ruskin  38
III Edward Burne -Jones ..... 48
IV Dante Gabriel Rossetti  60
V Robert Browning  76
VI The Priory and George Eliot .... 90
VII Little Holland House and G. F. Watts . . 93
vm 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
Xrv Edward John Trelawny  240
XV Victor Hugo  253
XVI Lf;oN Gambetta  274
XVII At the Land's End of France .... 286
Index  315

Portrait of the Author .... Frontispiece
5

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 ofEeriQg 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
uistance brought me aU 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 diflfer
ence, inasmuch as, foUowing 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

8 DEDICATORY LETTER
began to try my prentice hand at various forms of
critical writing — for of creative I knew myself incap
able — ia 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 hfe, and most of such Hterary 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 hfe 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 recoUections with a diflference : — it
was to be a record of the most lively impressions I
could definitely recaU 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 especiaUy in Hterature 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 pubhc service, in bringing
me leisure, did not bring me strength, and the wear-
and-tear of spirit we aU underwent during the war
came to add its eflfects 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 hke the
scale first proposed. All I could hope to do was to
throw together a certain number, enough between
them to fiU 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, fiU
far the larger number of pages. The space they sever
aUy occupy depends, let it be clearly understood, not
at aU on their relative human or historical importance
but solely on the much or httle 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 hfe 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 SheUey'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.
WhUe this volume was planning, I had meant that
among its contents there should be a fuU 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 weU as any of them in the classical
studies which were my choice, and of winning first a
scholarship and then a feUowship at Trinity, Then,
after a few years of work as journahst 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 FitzwiUiam 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 unreahty or claptrap.
At any rate, of the Cambridge famihar to me
both as an undergraduate and as a don I had meant
for the purposes of this book to try and caU up
what living memories I could. But for one thing
I discovered that some quite indelible impressions
of particular comers and features and aspects of the
place, which I had thought might be almost private
to myself, had been provokingly forestaUed more than
half a century ago by Edward FitzGerald (of whom
I have to make further mention later on) in that httle
masterpiece Ewphranor. 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 subj ect, 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, WheweU 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, — stUl 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 pubhc orator, W, G. Clark, the most frankly urbane
and straightforwardly courteous of men, and Jebb,
probably the most faultless Grecian of them aU, whom
you yourself remember weU, 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 Parhament —
But here I am, getting thoughts of Cambridge and
Cambridge friends in after aU 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 Phihp Bume- Jones and such other friends
as have given me leave to prmt letters of which they
hold the copyright.

CHAPTER I
AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS
The older one grows — ^I beheve the observation ia
trite, and in my case it is certainly true — the more
vividly does the mind become haunted by its earhest
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 comphant
father tenderly humoured her in aU things ; and so
the three of us, of whom I was by several years the
youngest, were brought up under tutors at home.
By aU that I could ever learn, there was nothing much
hkeable 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 httle
success to teach me dancing and generaUy put a pohsh
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 stroU 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 civU servants my people
on both sides of the house had been connected with
India for several generations. My mother's father,
WiUiam Butterworth Bayley, whom I remember as a
commanding and withal humorous grand gentleman
of the old school, wearing a high black stock and
swaUow-taU coat, had been acting governor-general
in the interval between Lord Amherst and Lord WUham
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 heutenant-governor of
the North-West provinces. When the mutiny came
and threatened ruin to our raj and aU connected with
it, I weU 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 stiU after these sixty and odd years
hear his agonized voice one day caUing them. Cruel
indeed they were, including besides the prospect of
pubhc calamity and private ruin the intensest personal
anxieties for beloved kinsfolk exposed to the horrors
of the time. Sometimes the strain would end in
rehef, 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 Enghsh and
fifty-odd faithful Sikhs, by a whole horde of Sepoy
mutineers weU 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 whUe the buUets spattered on the waU hke
haU." Rehef came to this smaU garrison almost at
the last gasp ; but more often the issue was tragic,
A briUiant young sister of my mother's, being with
chUd at the time, was forced to ride for her hfe the fifty
miles from Shahjehanpore to BareiUy, and never got
over it. Most harrowing of aU, my aforesaid uncle
John Colvin in his seat of govemment at Agra had
to bear more than almost any other among the great
civU 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 Colvia 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
hUl 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 smaU 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, generaUy
to some hired house in the outskirts of London, occa
sionally to Devonshire, I do not think either of my
parents at aU reahzed, readers though they were, the
hterary interests and associations which attached to
our neighbouring country and coast. Certainly I was
in youth never made to reahze 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
dehght in the imaginary world of which I was thus
early made free. It used to be a foohsh 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 vriser
even of the youngest, to be fully acknowledged for
what he was, that is easUy the second greatest creator

AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 17
in our language since Shakespeare, and for aU 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 recaU in them an odd mixture of the
civihzed and the barbarous. To the passion for Scott
there presently, before I was fifteen, succeeded a
passion for Spenser. Entirely for myself and vsdthout
direction, I had discovered the Faery Queene in my
father's hbrary, 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 httle 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 sUver-beUied eels : hnes barbarously
baited, for the prey would take no other lure, with the
* There is a masterly chapter " On the prose of Sir Walter
Scott " ia the Collected Essays of the late, too early lost. Professor
VerraU of Cambridge (Cambridge Umversity Press, 1903),

18 MEMORIES AND NOTES
unfledged young of hedgerow birds stolen from the
nest. A certain bandy-legged 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 httle Dandie Dinmont terrier bitch who
shared her affections equaUy between him and me.
In other and more avowable pastimes, I suppose a httle
later, I was equaUy keen, as in captaining a viUage
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 oi mihtia, who, fine
sportsman as he was and looked on his gaUant roan
Silverlocks, had a somewhat ungrateful task in what
was essentiaUy 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 vsdth
which in the same years (say from twelve to seventeen)
I used to devour my Scott and Shakespeare and
Faery Queene and Modern Painters and Stones of
Venice (for from my mother I had by this time fuUy
caught the Ruskin enthusiasm), and learn long screeds
of them, both verse and prose, by heart. These
relatively high-flown hterary tastes did not at aU
debar me from dehghting 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 weU on almost in the classics as picked lads from
the pubhc schools, and in modem languages much
better. WeU, 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 hohday sojourns or excursions during which I was
especiaUy on the look-out for such impressions, as
in visits to family friends among the GaUoway moors
or on the slopes of the Wicklow mountains, nor even
from carriage tours taken with my father over the
then untunneUed Simplon Pass or the length of the
French and Itahan Riviera from Nice to G«noa, — ^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 famihar and daUy 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 ATiews of moderate extent from the crown of
each rise (one rise being actuaUy dignified vrith the name
of Beacon HiU), and in each of the hoUows a brook
winding its way through water-meadows towards the
near estuary of the Deben, A local poet, Bernard
Barton, to whom I shaU 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 qiiiet bounty feeds
The alders that o'ersheide it with their boughs.
Gently it murmurs by
The viUage churchyard, with a plaintive tone
Of dirge-Uke 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 hoUday made light..
Looking back, I find it hard to discriminate which of
my dehghts 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 baUs and laburnum-lamps magicaUy golden ;
of the miraculous spray and sparkle of colour and fresh
ness in a certain wood, the floor aU carpeted with wUd
hyacinth and primrose, wood-sorrel and wood anemone,
the new-budded twigs aU sparkling with points of
yeUow or pale-green light ; of the swaying of alders
and feathery birch-boughs aU day long in summer
air, and the ruflling 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 stUe 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, whUe dusk and mist
were dimming the vaUey at my feet. Of the enchant
ment of winter frosts, vrith icicles fringeing the eaves,
and every bough and twig of the naked garden trees
ghttering transfigured in the tingling air. Or again
of Sunday afternoons at church in summer, where
through the open side-door facing our seats the famihar
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 viUage
cobbler. Or of poring caressingly on the deep-folded
splendour and opulent globed softness of the June
roses, vpith their colours ranging from the tenderest
blushing or saUow flesh-tint to reds that deepened
almost into black. Or of the dehcious half-transparency
of the yeUow 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-waU, — 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.
Tuming 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
hoUow included a few acres of reedy marsh knovm as
" the mere " : a name that stirred my imagination
mightUy, and I can weU 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
tragicaUy fraught vnth histories of enguKed armies.
In moods hke 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, untfl it was met by the outflow of our meadow
streams, — this knowledge helped to dUate the chUdish
spirit with a sense of ulterior mystery, and of the
possibUity of great world-voyages lying not remotely
beyond the horizon hnes. 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 pubhc house having for sign a
grotesque carved and scarlet-painted head and shoulders
of a red hon (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 beheve and am not ashamed

AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 23
to ovm, 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 hnes of predatory ancestors. That instinctive
tension of the nerves and tinghng of the pulses in
pursuit, or at the mere presence of wild creatures
smaU or great, disposes the faculties to a pecuharly
vivid reception and retention of aU accompanying
impressions. At the stage the world has reached, I
do not see that there is moraUy much to be said in
favour of men chasing and kUling dumb animals for
pleasure, or even for the sake of the exercise, which
some forms of chase involve, of the virtues of physical
courage, skiU, or endurance. PersonaUy, 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 vsdth them. It is aU very weU for a sentimen-
tahst hke Leigh Hunt to vsTite (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
hohday in the year. But take the case of Wordsworth,
and see with what gusto he recaUs 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 dehght 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
knovsTi 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, GUes was in
poetry one of the later and weaklier offshoots of the

AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 25
hterary school of Spenser. He had distinguished
himself while stiU a bachelor of arts at Trinity with
his poems Christ's 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
aUegory, 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 FuUer, " 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
FuUer have said if he could have foreseen how in the
whirligig of time opinion conceming the salubrity
of our seacoast chmate would spin round, and how
Felixstowe for instance (which is only five mfles across
the ferry at the Deben mouth from Alderton) would
change from the hamlet I can myself remember to some
mUe-and-a-half's length of smart and smiling vUla
frontage, and how guide-books would babble of its
" invariably invigorating air," and doctors send their
patients to it from far and wide ?
Coming dovsoi the best part of two centuries from
the days of the grumbler Giles 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 reahst 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 aU their
vigour and charm do not strike very deep, and that
his great creative work of the Waverley novels was
stfll to come. In his own day and way Crabbe was
an actual pioneer vsdthout rival in the delineation of
the scenes, characters, and passions of the humble
provincial world which he best knew. His life untU
he was near thirty was almost entirely spent at the
coast town of Aldborough, vsdthin a score of mfles
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 caUed to
them. Had it been so caUed, 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 hterature 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 fafled to hold

AN EAST-SUFFOLK BOYHOOD AND SOME POETS 27
his own. Squalid tragedy however intense, descriptive
detaU however exact and vivid, unflinchingly stern
or sarcasticaUy amused veracity and insight in human
portraiture however varied, have somehow ceased to
flnd 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 Ijric 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
occasionaUy that in the main body of his narrative
work he rises into real poetry ; oftenest in the indignant
vein ; seldomer in that of pathos or tenderness ; in
that of natural description more rarely stUl, for his
quahty as an observer of nature is essentially scientific ;
thus in deahng vsdth the flowers and vegetation of his
country-side he can never leave out the details that
shaU 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 aU, but of prose ; and prose does not
become poetry by the mere fact of being mechanically
chopped into lengths. Crabbe's true place in htera
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 haK-covered and half -dry ;
The sim-bumt tar that bUsters 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 modem 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
unprofltable 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 bUghted 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 sUmy 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 simflar 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, Tum 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 rufiSing day, and after looldng 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 Bemard
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 Bjo-on fever of the hour. Lamb
shared this view to the fuU, " 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 aU •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 fuU 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 shaUow 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 wiU furnish. The first is on
Landguard Fort, a sohtary, not inconsiderable fortffi-
cation of an old-fashioned kind buflt 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 raUway station and new viUa
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,
RecaUs 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 !
WeU, Derwent and Yarrow, we must once more admit,
have inspired more thriUing strains. Yet it is pleasant
to share the idyUic 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, whUe 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
Bemard Barton in the words of his younger friend
and biographer already mentioned, Edward Fitz
Gerald, That accomphshed Cambridge scholar — scholar alike
in classic and Oriental tongues — hved for the greater
part of his life in the retirement of this same country
side. His singular inteUectual temperament, in which
originaUty 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 supphed 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 PurceUs 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
mfles 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
fll off. But this was one of the actions of his life which
eamed for him his own name for himself, Ballyblunder.
It was soon foUowed by a separation, and he
resumed his former bachelor way of hving. He
lodged, we aU knew, over Berry's the gunmaker's on
the Market HUl 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 iU-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 famihar 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 BiddeU Airy for one, the inde
fatigable and world-famous Cambridge mathematician
and astronomer royal, who had buUt himself a little
holiday home in the neighbouring village of Playford,
to which his mother belonged (and where there had
lately hved 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
briUiant 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
Beahngs. But it never entered our thoughts that in
after life, when these scientific or phUanthropic 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 shaU
we rather say transmuting — into English, in a manner
aU his ovsm, many dramas from the Greek and Spanish,
and diverse obscure poems from Eastern tongues, and
how of aU 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 musicaUy, 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 Uttle talk awhile of Me 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 weU not have been printed at aU. 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 Khajryam
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 untfl towards 1890, some seven
years after his death, that the posthumous issues of
the poem began to get that hold upon the general
reading pubhc 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
recoUections 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
HiU. 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 yeUow boards all rubbed and
dingy, of her son's tale for children. The King of the
Golden River, with Richard Doyle's iUustrations, 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 RUSKIN 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,
vsdth a passion, almost a frenzy, of pent-up affection,
and was caressed vsdth 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, vsdth its curtain, wall-paper and furniture — aU
of them of a type which to the altered taste of the next
generation would have seemed too PhUistine 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 vsdth 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 mtensely sensitive both to the
magnetism of Ruskin's personality and to the power
and beauty of his vsritings. 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 thriU 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 weU 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 hsten in adoring
acquiescence. But what I loved better still was to
be aUowed, as occasionaUy 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 equaUy 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 Kfllarney 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 sflence said suddenly to him d 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 vidth an idea of foUowing 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 unwiUingly 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 unparaUeled
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 aU facts and considerations that might
teU against his theories, the same habihty to intermingle
passages of Uluminating vision and wisdom with others
of petulant, inconsistent, seU-contradictory error and
misjudgment. In short this demigod of my later boy-

JOHN RUSKIN 43
hood, though stiU 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 vsdth reserve and
critical after-thought.
These were not terms on which Ruskin much cared
to be accepted, especiaUy by one who had been brought
as a chfld to sit at his feet ; and after I had grown up
and begun to work at the criticism and history of art,
in my ovsm plodding and uninspired way, as faithfuUy
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 vsdth 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 famfly friendship, and I never found
that his personal presence, whether at pubhc gatherings
or in private intercourse, had lost its power to charm
and thriU, 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 aU those who remember him wiU agree
— ^his whole intensity of spiritual and imaginative being
— ^used to throw itseK into and enkindle his recitation

44 MEMORIES AND NOTES
of poetry. His voice had a rare plangent and pene
trating quahty of its own, not shriU or effeminate and
yet not whoUy 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 dutifuUy 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 iUuminating in praise of three
things in our host's coUection, an early Rossetti, an
early MiUais, 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 aU 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 hsten sflently 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 vsdth him the purchase
for the British Museum of a precious volume of early
Itahan dravsdngs of the history of the world, by means
of which I was by-and-by enabled to solve (at least
in my ovsm opinion) one of the obscurest problems of
fifteenth century art and to recreate the hitherto
semi-mythic personahty of the father of Itahan
engraving, Maso Finiguerra.
AU 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 deferentiaUy
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 modem *
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 tum 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-vsdU
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 dhest uttermost would Ruskin himself
assuredly have deemed his failm-e could he have hved
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 pfles
unmitigatedly absurd and garish, unstructural ground-
floor frontages afl 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 tofl, 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, whfle 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, wfll 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 thuik 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 personahty completed what love for
his painting had begun. As soon as I came to London
and took up journahsm — principaUy 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 coUec
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 signfficance 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
dafly things or a more active power of selection and
arrangement impose on them. The half-century from

50 MEMORIES AND NOTES
then tifl now has happily made a vital difference for the
better in the quahty of every-day art. Almost any
exhibition of to-day wifl 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 vsdth 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 wifl 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
specificaUy to and through the eye was, as I have said,
and paradox as the statement may sound, the painting
which caUed 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 " Ulus
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 ocidar sense a paraUel 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
aUy 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 faU, 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. FuU 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 and 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 ovsn
personal cast of imagination — ^just as, to take two
instances far removed in time as in kind, BotticeUi
and J, F. Mfllet 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 imsatis-

EDWARD BURNE-JONES 53
fied spiritual quest and hunger ? Such a strain of
innermost, stfll 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 prevafled, partly, perhaps, because he chose
that prevail they should. " Never at any time in
his hfe," vsrrites 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
hfe for every one,' — and partly to the cheerful effect
which companionship always had upon him," At aU
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 simphcity of language with which he brought them
to bear in conversation.
Bom 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 Wilham 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

64 MEMORIES AND NOTES
every day and almost all day, that he should have found
time for so much jeading 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 aU, not as dry learning, but as hving
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
vsdth 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
vsTote 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 Wflliam 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. Rottingdean.
My dear S. C. —
If I write red hot from your letter it will be best — else I know
what wUl 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 Ufe's dark verge
She scomed to die tiU she had simg their dirge.
' Dead are the eagles three of Culan's peaks ;
The Uons 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 wiU 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 fied in despair — there seemed to be float
ing islands and one very very far off was Skye — I know they are
beautiful, I know aU about them — I have traveUed everywhere —
seen aU places — but my home is Florence where Giotto Uved —
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 reaUy love and know aU 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 Ijuzzed and I can't wind it up again yet — ^I shah stay here
tiU 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
weU for aU that.
R. Dean is the noisiest city in the world — ^from 2 in the moming
when the earliest cock begins tiU 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 afE.
Ned.
Modem 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 Enghsh ;
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
gomg into the question of a possible iUustrated edition:

EDWARD BURNE-JONES 57
also recordmg 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. AU his fancies would be pretty and fuU 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 fuU to the brim — stiU I keep thinking
over the matter and stUl 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 exceUence, 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 Uttle trouble — but no one is
Uke 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 weU and Uke a buU and Uved here.
" Have you read Catriona ? " he exclaims, in a letter
vsrritten soon after the appearance of the book, some
eight years later, to another correspondent, —
You didn't teU me, and if you had you must have talked of
it, for it is a wonder, and every page gUtters, and I can't make
out why the Speaker doesn't read it to the House of an evening
— much better for them to Usten 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 beautifuUy 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 especiaUy 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-brovsm
beard depicted in Watts's weU-knovsm portrait, but later,
one grizzled or grizzling and shorter trimmed). And he
was very capable of original Dickens-like observations
and inventions of his ovsm. 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 pencfl, happy fun and laughter with his
chfldren 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 appaUing

EDWARD BURNE-JONES 59
query, " Did you ever see the Danites ? " AU 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
weU 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 aU, WUliam 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
vsrritings, 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 aheady 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, fi>rst published in the
volume of 1861, to be unmatched among feats of verse
translation for graceful, unforced fidehty 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 hke Burne-Jones and William Morris,
or earlier yet when along with Holman Hunt and
MiUais he was a leading spirit in the original Prse-
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
faUing 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 hfe so much
has been vsritten that I shafl 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 hghted
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, armadfllo,
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 ; aU 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
fufl, sensual underhp 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 finaUy, the round, John-BuUish, bluntly cordial
manner of speech, vsdth 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 quintessentiaUy, romanticaUy 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 earher water-colours, those of
the Dante cycle especiaUy, comparatively unambitious

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 63
in scale and technic as they were, seemed to me (and
stiU 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 ofl pictures on the scale of life. It was at
these latter that he had been principaUy working,
from Mrs. WiUiam Morris, Miss Marie Spartali, Miss
WUding, 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 SibyUa Palmifera, a Venus Verticordia — possessed
indeed a fine inventive gorgeousness of colour and an
impressive mystical voluptuousness, or voluptuous
mysticism, of their ovsm. 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 enthraUed me completely. The story is
weU-knovsm how, in a passion of grief and remorseful-
ness at the time of his vsdfe'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 HoweU. (A
digression concerning this briUiantly plausible, capable,
and entertaining, totally unscrupulous and untrust
worthy Anglo-Portuguese intriguer, the sateUite 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 fuUy 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
baUy 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 knovsm have had
* See Murray Marks and his Friends, by G.C .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 httle variation of pitch or inflection
to express a surprising range and richness of emotion.
His voice was magical in its meUow beauty of timbre
and quahty 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 vsdth which he used
to dweU 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 Uttle while a Uttle love
The hour yet bears for thee and me,
Who have not drawn the veil to see
If stfll our heaven be Ut 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
stfll 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 stfll
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 idyUs 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 aU
the more thriUed 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.
WiU it at aU 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 witb

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 reaUzation : this is consonant with the mystical
tendency, whUe on the other hand it is consonant with the pictorial
tendency to endow its concrete figures with a reaUty so vivid, and
attributes so visible, that the mind cannot avoid their complete
realization ; and hence, endeavouring to foUow them through aU
their vicissitudes, is apt to feel thrown out when these elude the
conditions of material possibiUty. This, we think, may be a
difificulty to arrest the reader at a sormet Uke that headed " He
and I "; or to make his fuU enjoyment of the wonderful four
headed " WiUowwood " a matter of time and famiUarity ; or to
leave something stiU wanting from the perfection of the foUowing,
caUed " StUlbom 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 Ufe was barren, on what shore
Bides it the breaking of Time's weary sea ?

68 MEMORIES AND NOTES
BondchUd 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 Ughts love home ?
Lo ! how the Uttle outcast hour has tumed
And leapt to them and Ln their faces yearned : —
" I am your child : 0 parents, ye have come ! "
Tum 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 loveUness 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 feeUng themselves too full and rich for
simple utterance ; phases which Ue between joy and grief, and
are more complex and involved than either ; in which feeUng does
not absorb or exclude thought, but informs and inflames it for
prospect and retrospect as weU as for the passion or the present
ations of the moment ; so that the buoyancy of deUght is clogged
with the recollection of its delay, the impetuosity of rapture checked
with the wistfulness of apprehension or chUled 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 possibiUty of the other.
. . . The fragmentary Ilouse of Life, besides its fifty sonnets,
contains also some highly -finished pieces of difEerent lyric form;
most of these too dealing with the fataUties or forebodings of
thwarted passion. The three melancholy and searching stanzas
of the song called " A Little Whfle," are quite admirable for their

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 69
careful concentration, as weU as for the reluctant andante of their
metrical movement ; whfle, by way of contrast, the succeeding
" Song of the Bower " storms with sonorous anapaests in full
charge, and teUs out the dire constraint of separation in tones only
a Uttle 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 notliing to do with love, but casting
into new articularteness 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 ofthe spirit, and lift it abroad into the
knowledge of some divine environment, some uncomprehended
unity of natm-al 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 soUtudes
ShaU have one sound aUke to thee ;
Hark, where the murmurs of thronged men
Surge and sink back and surge again —
Stfll the one voice of wave and tree.
Gather a sheU from the strown beach
And listen at its Ups : they sigh
The same desire and mystery.
The echo of the whole sea's speech.
And aU mankind is thus at heart
Not anything but what thou art :
And earth, sea, man, are aU in each.
. . . Tuming 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
caUed ' ' Jenny. ' ' A monologue suggested by the sight and presence
of a sleeping harlot was a thing from which the EngUsh 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
evfl 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, imder the circumstances. Such thoughts
would naturaUy be fuU, as these are fuU, with the burden of all
that evfl 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 evU. 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 wfll come home to every reader, as weU as the technical art
which has thrown into the eight-syUable 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 vfle text, are traced such things
As might make lady's cheek indeed
More than a Uving rose to read ;
So nought save fooUsh foulness may
Watch with hard eyes the sure decay ;
And so the Ufe-blood of this rose.
Puddled with shameful knowledge, flows
Through leaves no chaste hand may unclose :
Yet stiU 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 whfle Time crumbles on ;
Which sits there since the earth was curs'd
For man's transgression at the first ;
Which, Uving through aU 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, bUnd alone ; —
Aye, and shaU not be driven out
TiU 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 teU. But what Mr. Rossetti
in his own generation is may be put on record ; and that is, the
poet of personal passion — for aU 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 aU collateral elements of the
being — and the more modem, the more highly organized and
endowed the being, the more complex and manifold these elements
wiU be — re-awakening and iUuminating aU forms, all pressures
past, adding intensity to existence, charging and compUcating
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 undignffied pains to ensure
that reviews should be favourable, Swinburne of
course for one, and I for another, were absolutely
unsohcited volunteers in the cause. But when there
appeared the late Robert Buchanan's preposterous
attack upon him, at first pseudonymous and then
unveUed, 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 assaflant
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 vsriting they
showed themselves chiefly in the composition of
" Limericks " on the characters of his friends. He was,
at any rate whfle 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, essentiaUy
bon prince. But at the same time he had the shrewdest
eye for his friends' faults or faflings, 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 hospitahty seeming by and
by somewhat inclined to abuse it, Rossetti wrote, —
There's a troublesome feUow caUed Inchbold,
With whom you must be at a pinch bold.
Or you may as weU 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
technicaUy less than half-accomplished Scottish artist
and verse-writer, WiUiam BeU Scott, Scott, a man
by this time bald and ageing, was commonly known
among his friends as " Scotus " : —
There's a crabbed old feUow caUed Scott,
Who seems to have hair but has not ;
Did he seem to have sense
A stiU vainer pretence
Would be painfuUy 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 caUed Scotus,
A picior most justly ignotus ;
ShaU I caU him a poet ?
No, not if I know it,
A draggle-taUed bungler Uke 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 iU-naturedly, and at the same time more inaccur
ately, than by his treatment of Rossetti in his post
humously pubhshed Autobiographical Notes : a book,
I may allow myself to remark by the way, which I
have found almost unfaflingly 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 stiU. There is one
which I never heard much repeated, and which begins —
There's an eminent critic caUed 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 coUection of some
two dozen such included by the late WUham Michael
Rossetti in his encyclopaedic (and surely too pro
miscuous and ponderous ?) volume of his brother's
coUected works. On the other hand I find in

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI 75
that collection apiece of execution which is new to me,
performed on the above-mentioned Howell after his
dismissal : — There's a Portuguese person named HoweU
Who lays on his Ues with a trowel ;
Should he give over lying
'TwiU be when he's dying.
For Uving is lying with HowelL
I have said that the years 1868-1872 were critical
and fateful years in Rossetti's life. He had aheady
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 aheady morbidly tainted, A
few months later he underwent a complete breakdown,
ahnost assuming the form caUed in French manie des
persecutions. He harboured torturing suspicions of
mahce 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 knovsm.
I saw him relatively little during those last years,
and had little acquaintance with the new friends and
sateUites — some of them truly attached and helpful —
who gathered about him and from among whom have
come the fuUest 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 healthfly
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 Brov^ning during his last
twenty or twenty-five years. The contemporary vsrriter
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 Brovsming, 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-
gaUeries, dinner-parties, country houses, in a word
everywhere. My own acquaintance vsdth him began
in the latest sixties or earhest seventies in a certain
hospitable, historic castle on the Cumberland border,
than which no house is associated in my mind wdth more
grateful and cordial memories. This was Naworth,
near Brampton in Cumberland, one of the two famUy
seats of the Earls of Carlisle, romanticaUy 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, causticaUy tongued personality, Alphonse Legros.
Besides his painting George Howard cared for nearly
aU forms of culture. He had a range of manner varying
from the most captivatingly cordial and urbane to
the cynicaUy sceptical and ironic. He was a born
lover of Italy and things Italian, Nature had even
modified towards the Itahan 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 tovsm, " 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 aU friendliness as he, with a peculiar winning and
whimsical charm of looks and manner aU 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 aU-absorbing
development both of political ultra-radicalism and
mUitant 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 feflow-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 equaUy robust and confident facUity 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 hstened whfle
he and Brovsming lustfly kept up between them hour by
hour the bafl of anecdote and reminiscence and repartee.

ROBERT BROWNING 79
Loudness of voice and a vigorous geniality of bearing
were what, on the surface, chiefiy distmguished Brown-
mg from other Enghshmen 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 hfe, 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 httle 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, inteUectual feats ever achieved by
man, and instead of resting proceeded promptly to
f oUow it up by fresh volume after volume ; breaking
uito classic ground in a guise wholly his own with
Balaustion's Adventure ; indulging in the queerest
of contrasted freaks in Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau
and Fifine at the Fair ; going on vsdth Red Cotton

80 MEMORIES AND NOTES
Night Cap Country ; returning once more to Greek
themes and bidding us live vsdth 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
httle 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 vsdth 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 inteUectual resem
blance to his poetry. That is to say, it was not apt
to be specially profound or subtle ; stUl 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 auxihary parts of
speech, by stitching clause on to clause and packing

ROBERT BROWNING 81
parenthesis within parenthesis, tUl 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, heartUy
and agreeably voluble, ranging easUy from deep eamest
to joUy jest, rich and varied in matter but avoidmg
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 geniaUy 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 knovsm 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 Brovsming,
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 readUy on occasion. If the talk ran that way
he would quote passages from the English poets,
oftenest relatively unknovsm passages, with powerful
effect ; for his faUure of memory in regard to his own
works by no means extended itself to those of others.
His memory was weU stored with all kinds of eccentric
matter, and among the earlier English poets with
examples of those whose work most resembled his
ovsm 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 vsritten defying and
belittling the power of death, now, death having carried
off a virtuous and exceUent 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 miUions 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 wfll this earth serve him ; he sinks the deep
Where harmless fish monastic sflence keep ;
Who — were Death dead — by roes of Uving 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 Ughts astream ;
Glorious the song, when God's the theme ;
Glorious the thunder's roar :
Glorious hosanna from the den ;
Glorious the cathoUc 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 ovsm 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 ovsm verses
to adopt and sustain one key or another of chanting

84 MEMORIES AND NOTES
monotone. His voice, virUe above aU things, was
strong and inclining to the strident ; but in passages
which caUed 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 Pompiha
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 vsdth him.
Another reading almost equaUy moving was of Andrea
del Sarto ; which in one case he followed up by way
of contrast vsdth 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 knovsm 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
unchUded fatherhood and fallen majesty in despair.
Brovsming sat there between us, his face set firm and
white like marble, but before the end tears were coursing
dovsm 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 aUow myself to recaU
another scene which is scarce less freshly present to

ROBERT BROWNING 85
me, and which iUustrates 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
CoUege, Cambridge ; usuaUy 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 teUing 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 angrUy;
" say your real name in fuU." " 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 official, he said, thereupon broke
into fury, declared the answers had been a plot to
insult him, and insisted on knovsdng which of the
brothers had set the others on ; whereat they gasped
in chorus, each pointing trembhngly 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 wiU
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 cordiahty.
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 aU
things, and with a cordiality open and undisguised,
even demonstrative beyond what is usual in the inter
course of Enghshmen, 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 Jj]schylus 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 literahiess. " 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 supphes the elucidation
himseK : so I expect an intelligent reader to do,
because it seems part of my business to instruct him
that, for instance, the Greeks caUed •n-pd-n-iBe': what
we caU ' understanding.' But it is ungracious work
and I have done vnth it," A simUar 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 tafl of
Brovsming' 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 aU events, just as Rossetti's Early Italian Poets
is the best of aU 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,
especiaUy 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 Colvin, —
" 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 foUowed
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 shaU not neglect on any future
occasion. Thank you for aU favours, including the pardon which
I hope this apology wfll procure.
" I find that my assiduity in attending your Lectures has induced
somebody to beUeve the seed' sown must needs bear fruit : and
so I figure in the American Joumals as ' having a poem in the
press on the subject of AchiUes and Penthesilea.' There are leas
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 busfly
As th' Amazonian Dame Penthesfly '
— if I quote correctly — which I doubt. With no doubt at aU, my
dear Colvin, I am ever "Yours cordiaUy,
" 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 aU in a single salvo of
adjectives : — " 19, Warwick Crescent, W.
"July 12, '81.
" My dear Colvtn, — .
" 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 aU connected with it, I hardly hoped to see my
dear provoking admirable unwise leamed chUdish friend put in

ROBERT BROWNING 89
just the Ught which lets aU 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 Uke " gratitude "
to me — who am the grateful person under the circumstances —
such duties as mine ought to be ordinary with ' friends and feUow
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 vsdth Mrs. Procter, the cynically witty,
long-enduring, old-age-defjdng widow of the poet
Barry CornwaU ; and his intense paternal devotion to
his only son. When this adored " Pen" — for so by
his pet name he was always called — this chfld of two
mutuaUy devoted parents of genius, had grown to
manhood and began to show a certain talent, or at
least a certain facflity, in the twin arts of sciflpture
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 HoUand House.
The kinds of interest the two houses severaUy offered
differed greatly, the only point in common between
them being that both were homes of genius. The
Priory was a commonplace detached vflla 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 weU-timbered garden, had originaUy 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 Prioey
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 formaUy as
such. Perhaps, however, the secret was that she by
nature lacked the hghtness 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 weU-knovsm 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 recaU the beginnings of several conversations which
were thus broken before I had succeeded in getting
more from her than sympathetic enquiries about my
ovsm work and studies, or perhaps about the places I
had last been visiting in France or Italy, NaturaUy
I valued such enquiries, but was not at all seeking
them : what I wanted was not to be dravsm 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 geniaUy
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 vsdnning
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 vsdth a single one coming
or going ; but the subject was almost always con
nected in some way vsdth 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 gratffied 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 HoUand House, where Watts lived during
these same years, the atmosphere, although an atmo
sphere of genius, was of a totaUy different kind. The
Thoby Prinseps, his permanent hosts, or rather house
mates, were people of marked characters and inter
esting associations of their ovsm, Prinsep, by this
time advanced in years, had been a distinguished Indian
civil servant and one of the earhest members of the
new Indian Councfl 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 compeUed him to use a wheeled-chair
for movement in his garden and deafness had made
talk vsdth him difficult. His wife was one of the seven
daughters of James Pattle of the Indian Civfl Service,
aU 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 MEMORIES 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 vitaUy and
significantly theirs. With her untidy wisps of grizzling
hair and her fingers stained brovsm 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 aftemoon
gatherings at Little Holland House had already become
a feature in London life. Not only artists, but men
of letters, statesmen, politicians, travellers, were aU
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 obhgation.
It was understood that the main attraction at these
receptions, over and above the half rural pleasantness
of the scene and the hospitahty of the atmosphere,
was the fame and personahty 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 chiseUed features and brovsm
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 aU for
himself but singly and entirely for his art, was indeed
a very part of his simphcity. 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 waU-spaces of pubhc buildings with monu
mental compositions of high moral, historical, or allegor
ical signfficance. Ahke by natural instinct and by
strenuous technical study and experiment he was
quahfied, as very few artists in England have been,
as a painter on a monumental scale or decorator of
great waU-spaces, And fortunate it was that he was
so qualffied, 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 aUegoric 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 quahties of painting proper as are many of
his moral and aUegoric 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 quahties 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 famihar scene of his
activity was broken up. The ground on which the old
Little Holland House and its outbuUdings and gardens
had stood was sold, and Watts had to create a new

LITTLE HOLLAND HOUSE AND G. P. WATTS 97
home for himself. After an interval spent chiefiy 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 concemed, 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 imiversal 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 buflt for himself on the Hog's Back, near
Gufldf ord, and where a pick of his works is now set out
permanently on pubhc exhibition. But for the pur
pose of these present reminiscences it is naturaUy 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
recaUed, however briefly.

CHAPTER VIII
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
Readers and lovers of Stevenson, in my experience,
are generaUy 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
thrUl 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 ovsm
company and confidence. Readers of this latter class
would rather paddle with Stevenson in his canoe dovm
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 whfle
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 leam from Stevenson in the first person how his
Brownies, as he caUs 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 dehghted toil over the tale and of the
high hopes that he has buUt 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 exUe,
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
wfll concern the man himself rather than any phase
of his work, I shall dip a random bucket into the weU
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
invahd, describing him as " anaemic," and a third as

100 MEMORIES AND NOTES
" thin-blooded," Shadowy ! he was indeed aU 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 faUure 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 habituaUy
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 stfll farther. As a matter
of fact his face, forehead and aU, was throughout the
years when I knew him of an even, rather high, colour
varying little whether he was iU or weU ; and
his hair, of a lightish brown in youth, although the
brown grew darker with years, and darker stfll, 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 vsdthin 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 chfld, the ardent outlook and adventurous
day-dreams of a boy, the steadfast courage of manhood,
the quick sympathetic tenderness of a woman, and
aheady, as early as the mid-twenties of his life, an almost
uncanny share of the ripe life-wisdom of old age. He
was a feUow 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 fieshly fraflties, 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
hitn up in a weU-knovsm sonnet : —

102 MEMORIES AND NOTES
' Thin-legged, thin-chested, sUght unspeakably.
Neat-footed and weak-fingered : in his face —
Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race,
Bold-Upped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea.
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity —
There shines a briUiant and romantic grace,
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
Of passion and impudence and energy.
VaUant in velvet, Ught 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 aU,
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 hke
spfllikins, 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
svith 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 Churchfll
Babington, of amiable and learned memory ; the
hostess was his vsdfe, 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 reahzed in the course of that short walk how well I
had done to foUow 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
coifld 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 known 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
tiaUy by the hand about the garden or beside the moat ;
while between him and the boy's mother, Mrs. SitweU,
there had sprung up an instantaneous understanding.
Not only the lights and brUUancies 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 foUowed 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 vsdsdom, streamed
from him inexhaustibly as he kindled with delight at
the delight of his hearers.
Strange to say, this briUiant 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,
tfll afl 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 vsdth a
conjuror, whom you supplied with baUs of clay and
who took them and tumed them into gold and sent
them whirling and glowing about his head, making you
believe aU the whUe 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 naturaUy
fraU and already heavUy 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 vsdth me in a cottage I then in
habited in the southern hiU-suburb of Norwood. With
various types of genius and of the charm and power of
genius among my elders I had aheady, as indicated
in some of the earher pages of this book, had fortunate
opportunities of becoming famihar. In this brUhant
and troubled Scotch youth I could not fail to reahze
that here, among my juniors, was a genius who might
weU faU 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 aU 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 fll
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 peremptorfly ordered him a
period of rest in the soothing climate of the French
Riviera, out of reach of aU occasion or possibihty of
contention with those he loved at home.
The recoUections of him that remain vsdth 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 reconcUed
home. The points in his character these stray
recoUections chiefly fllustrate 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 aheady so stricken in health seemed patheticaUy
vain ; next, his inborn faculty — a very much rarer
gift — as an artist in letters, and the scrupulous seK-
training by which almost from boyhood he had been
privately disciplining it : then the intensely, quite
exceptionaUy, observing and loving interest he took
in young chUdren : 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 unfaihng 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 dishke 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 caUs 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
identffied wdth any special class or caste. Certainly
conventional and respectable attire, when by exception
he wore it, did not in those days sit him weU, Going
vsdth 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
PiccadiUy. 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
Bumed after them to the bottomless pit."
" Like Teneriffe or Atlas, unremoved — "

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 109
"AU 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, tho
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
foUowed 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 pohceman after
another tfll 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 aU saw through him, and refused to take him
seriously as a member of the criminal classes. Though
surprised at their penetration, and rather crestfaUen
at the faflure of his attempt, he had had his reward
in a number of friendly and entertaining conversations
with the members of the force, ending generaUy in
confidential disclosures as to their private affairs and
feelings. Foreign officials and police, not to speak of attaches

no 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 Pohce
at Chatillon-sur-Loing, which is one of the most '
delectable pieces of humorous narrative in Enghsh
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 Ul by futile anger at the
contumehous reception he met with in such places.
He lacked the power, which comes only too naturaUy
from most men sprung, as he was, from a stock accus
tomed to command, of putting dovsm insolence by
greater insolence. He could rage, indeed, but usuaUy
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
havuig 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 ;
sturdfly declined to leave the premises ; and insisted
that the pohce 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 aU 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 caUed it, and went off and at once
designed a medal — ^never, I believe, executed — in its
commemoration. But this story belongs to a later date ; and to go
back to my ovsm memories of the early days — ^I went
twice to see him during that invahd 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 speU 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
sunht 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 reveUed
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 detaU, 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, fataUy 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 instaUed
in fresh and comfortable quarters in the Hotel Mirabeau,
now defunct, at the eastern end of the toAvn, 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 hving in a viUa annexed to the
hotel, ladies some twenty years older than himself,
to whom and to their chUdren he had become quickly
and warmly attached. I say their chUdren, for we

114 MEMORIES AND NOTES
never could weU make out which child belonged to
which sister, or whether one of the two was not the
mother of them both. Both were briUiantly accom
plished and cultivated women, one having aU the
unblushing outspokenness of her race, its unchecked
vehemence and mutability in mirth and anger, in
scom, 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, whfle she
was walking vsdth 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 Nehtchka in his letters of the
time. Hardly any one has written of young chfldren
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 fllustrious 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 vsdth a sense of almost mechanical abundance and
redundance and iteration. The small objects of Steven
son's passionately dehghted 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
reconcUed her, and they became fast friends and play
mates ; but the name stuck, and for NeUie, throughout
those weeks when the chfld'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 dehghts — for Nellie, Stevenson was never
anything but Monsieur Berecchino, But of this more
anon. Another memory of the time iUustrates the hopeless
incompatibUity that existed between this young genius
and the more frozen types of bourgeois convention-
ahty. There was at our hotel a young or youngish,
weU-groomed Frenchman of this class, the quintessence
of respectable nviUity 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, Robinet 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 aU, more than
of a wooden dummy. R. L, S, was drawing more. or
less consciously from himself when he vsTote of one
of his characters, Dick Naseby in The Story of a
Lie — "He was a type-hunter among mankind. He
despised smaU game and insignfficant personahties,
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 smfle,
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 civflity I showed him, he confided
to me, vsdth 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 ovsm 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 fafled
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, journahst,
folk-lorist, humanist, and humorist ; and in the mind's
eye of many of us there stifl lives freshly the aspect of
the half-sUvered hair setting off the aU 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 aUowed 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 vsdth his ovsm
ideas which made his manner, to women especiaUy,
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 Enghsh in speech, with a recurring
falsetto note in the voice — ^that kind of falsetto that
bespeaks languor rather than vehemence ; fuU of
literature and pleasantry but on his guard, even to
affectation, against any show of emotion, and consist
ently dissembhng 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 eccentricaUy Ul-clad and long-haired nondescript,
with the rich LaUan accent on his tongue, the obvious
innate virility and spirit of adventure in him ever in
mutiny against the invahd habits imposed by Ul-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 meetmg 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 happUy
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 SavUe 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 hfe, 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
pupfl though he might be, and made a friend of him ;
and my Cambridge contemporary. Professor W. K.
Chfford, 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
chUdhke, upcast look of his light grey-blue eyes between
their dark lashes, the tripping and easy, again almost
chfldhke, simplicity of speech and manner with which
he would debate the profoundest problems, and the
quite childlike pleasure he took in aU 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, fafl to appreciate
the new-comer. On his visits to London he generaUy
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 reheved 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 wiU
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 vsdth 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 coim-
tenance and the thrUl 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 hfe 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 generaUy 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 enthusiasticaUy
read out to her some of the contents in evidence ; tifl
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
himseK out of the house in a paroxysm of disappoint-

ROBERT LOUIS STEVEiSTSON 1^3
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, wfll 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 vsdth
anticipation, " WeU, 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 dehber
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 Phflip
Gilbert Hamerton) for the foUowing 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 weU, 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 aU
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 stroU

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 125
through St, Paul's Cathedral, we found ourselves near
a httle ragged troop of such. With one of his char
acteristic smUes, fuU 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
hke to put it so — that had beamed upon their poor
httle souls from his looks. The small crowd of them
kept growing and stfll surrounding us. As it was
impossible for him at that place and moment practicaUy
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
mfle along the Thames Embankment ; and whfle I
sat with stiffened knees and nerves on the stretch,
expecting a smash, I could see that Stevenson actuaUy
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 generahzed
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 coUege
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 unreahty,
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, whfle
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 skiKul
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 taU, with finely

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 127
cut features, black sUky hair and neatly pointed beard,
and withal a pecuharly soft and sUken, dehberate
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 pohshed blandness, evoked and
ideahzed by Stevenson in his creation of the personage
of Attwater in that grimmest of island stories. The
Ebb Tide. In teUing 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 maimer of non-egotism, I remember,
came with speciaUy odd effect when one day he was
teUing us how an official at a raflway station had been
offensively rude to him, " What did you do ? " he
was asked, and rephed in a deprecating voice, " WeU,
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 thrfll
of out-door nature as magicaUy 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 weU
and frequented so much in these years, or even about
those excursions which he was busy turning to such
happy hterary account in An Inland Voyage and
Travels with a Donkey. Literature and human
hfe were ever his main themes ; including sometimes,
but of course vsdth his closest intimates only, the
problems of his ovsm life. By and by such intimates
became aware that these problems had taken on a
new and what might easfly 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 hfe 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 Californian, Mrs. Osbourne,
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 hght-o'-love — into the unbreak
able bond of a life-time. After a whfle the lady had to
retum to California, and there sought and was able to
obtain freedom by divorce, Stevenson had promptly
foUowed her, saying nothing of his intention to his
parents, who he knew would disapprove it, and trusting

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 129
whoUy 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
comphcated illnesses afterwards, and evidences withal
of his indomitable wUl 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. ReconcUed with his parents after
a whfle 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, especiaUy 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 detaUs of her early life, a picture of her on
the whole softer and less striking than that which I
personaUy 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 ovsm
and was ever ready to welcome. Deep and rich
capacities were in her, alike for tragedy and humour ;

130 MEMORIES AND NOTES
aU her moods, thoughts, and instincts were vividly
genuine and her ovm, 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
ahty 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 aU 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 buUd and character that somehow suggested
Napoleon, by the firm setting of the jaw and the beauti
fuUy precise and delicate modeUing of the nose and
lips : the eyes were f uU 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 smaU teeth
that there came the clear metallic accents of her in
tensely human and often quaintly individual speech.
The journey to Cahfornia, 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 retum in the late summer of 1880
it was under much more positively Lnvalid conditions
than before that his friends found themselves obhged
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 cripphng 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 aU 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 aUowed to talk at all. Occasionally,
and oftener as time went on, haemorrhages from the
lung, or the immediate threat of them, enforced upon
him periods of absolute sUence, 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
pfllows 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 wmters (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 vfllage of Davos-Platz,
clustered round its high-spired church, vsdth one central
group of German hotels in or close adjoining the vfllage,
and another smaller but more scattered group of English
hotels at a httle distance beside the open road in the
direction of the minor viUage 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 hUl at the back of the hotel. There
had only lately faUen enough snow to aUow the sport
of tobogganing to be started : there was a steep
zigzag run dovsm from a hut on the hiU to near the
hotel : he got me into the toboggan by moonlight, we
started down the run, capsized at a corner, roUed 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 vsdne between
Stevenson and John Addington Symonds, in whom
he had found a talker almost as charming as himseK,
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 Rencmsance in Italy, but nothing
like his match, I thought, in essential sanity of human
judgment or in the power of iUumination 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 hke 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 smUe 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 Aj 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 hved then ; it has been so fuU of innocent joUity
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 feU from his fantastic and yet intensely
human genius — ^the beautiful companionship of the
SheUey-like man, the eager, gifted wife, and the boy
for whom they both thought in aU 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 vdth 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 speciaUy con
trived and hideous kind of pig's-snout respirator for
the inhalation of pine-oU, as related in a well known
rhyming letter of the time to Henley. But from the
second Highland summer dates another vivid reeoUec
tion. While his wife remained with his parents at
Edinburgh, I spent two or three weeks of radiant
weather alone vsdth 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 haK stripped in the sun, nearly accord
ing to that manner of sun-bath since so much prescribed
by physicians in Germany, The bum 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 faUs 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 goKers, enemies to peace ; and even the approaches
to the burn from the village have, I understand, been
ruined by the erection of a great modem distiUery.
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-wiU,
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 aU 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 mUk-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 viUage,
and himself vsdth that of a sedate and friendly burgess
hard put to it to save me from the hands of the police.
The foUowing winter took the Stevensons to the
Provengal 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 Sohtude on the hfll 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 IKe there are well-known. For
instance, the foUowing 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 dweU aheady 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 daUying
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 dweU,
Pleased with the things we have, and pleased as weU
To wait in hope for those which we have not.
She bums in ardour for a horse to trot ;
I pledge my votive powers upon a yacht ;
Which shaU be first remembered, who can teU —
My wite or I ?
Harvests of fiowers o'er aU our garden-plot
She dreams ; and I to enrich a darker spot.
My unprovided ceUar ; both to sweU
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 physicaUy
corresponding to the adjective, namely myseK. 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, Ul-conducted and cajoling
httle thorough-bred rascal of his race, was tumed 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 Ahson 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 earher one where the problems
and characters would have been simUar 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 famUy as " tushery."
One day, looking from one of the hiU 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, MuU, 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 vsritten 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
wUl some day be, vsrritten. 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 beheve was a pure
coincidence, he received a proposal from a firm of
pubhshers that he should take a cruise in the Greek
archipelago with a view to a volume that should tefl
of his experiences in a manner something like that of
his former smaU 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
beheve, 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
Marseflles. 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 MarseiUes untU I could reimburse him from Paris,
and amused himseK with some stanzas in honour of the
place and the occasion : —

140 MEMORIES AND NOTES
* Long time I lay in Uttle ease
Where, paced by the Turanian,
MarseiUes, 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 tlirough aU the place
Unconquerably saUy ;
Incomparable women pace
The shadows of the aUey.
And high o'er dock and graving-yard
And where the sky is paler.
The Golden Virgin of the Guard
Shines, beckoning the saUor.
She hears the city roar on high,
Thief, prostitute, and banker :
She sees the masted vessels Ue
Immovably at anchor.
She sees the snowy islets dot
The sea's immortal azure.
And If, that casteUated 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 Uttle piece has
unluckfly been pubUshed 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 aUusions
concerning Dantes and the Chateau d'lf point, of course, to the
Monte Crista of the elder Dumas.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 141
Seven or eight months later a violent and all but
fatal retum of illness dashed the high hopes which
had been raised by the happy Proven§al spring and
summer. An epidemic of cholera foUowing made him
leave the Mediterranean shore for good and sent him
home to England, He arrived to aU appearance and
according to ahnost aU medical prognostics a confirmed
and even hopeless invahd. 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 IKe was spent on the sofa,
much in that kind of compulsory sUence which up
tUl 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 vrithin the gates
of the British Museum, His industry, maintained
against harder conditions than ever, showed itseK aU
the more indomitable and at last had its reward.
The success of Treasure Island pubhshed before he
left Hyeres, was by the time he settled at Bourne
mouth beginning to make his name a popular one.
Two and a haK years later Jekyll and Hyde raised
it suddenly into resounding fame, and was immedi
ately foUowed 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 pubhc 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 dovsm 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 vsdth
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 aU 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-pUlared
and the weU-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 BroAvning,
LoweU, Burne-Jones. With such visitors I usually
left him alone, and have at any rate no detailed notes
or memories bf 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 vsdth scared faces. He had had a worse
haemorrhage than usual, and lay propped on his piUows
in his red dressing-gown with pencfl in hand and
foolscap paper against his knees. He greeted me vsdth
finger on lip and a smile haK humorous haK ruefuUy
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 iUustrated wdth 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 vsrrite, he amused himseK 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 throvsm away.
My next vision of him is the last, and shows him
as he stood with his famfly looking down upon me
over the raU 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 untU his retum with his wife
from CalKornia 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 Pacffic — the Marquesas,
the Paumotus, the Society Islands, the Sandwich
group, Samoa, the GUberts again, the MarshaUs. The
lure of the South Seas and the renewed capacity for
out-door hfe and adventure he found in himseK during
these voyagings had gradually forced upon both
Stevenson and his wKe 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, teUing them at the
same time of the property he had bought in Samoa
and on which he proposed to buUd himseK a home.
Several earher 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 myseK
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
ovm 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 reproachfuUy, pleading against and
prophesying evU from his purpose. He and his wKe
both set themselves then and there to justKy their

146 MEMORIES AND NOTES
decision in letters of which, revertmg to them now
after thirty years, I find the terms infinitely touchmg
and too sacred "almost to quote. Ref errmg to one of
his recent cruises, Stevenson says : —
We had a very delightful voyage for some part ; it would have
been dehghtful to the end had my health held out. That it did
not, I attribute to savage hard work in a wfld cabin heated Uke
the Babylonian furnace, four pUes of blotting-paper under my wet
hand and the drops traiUng 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 shafl do my work untfl 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 aU 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 aU 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 aU that since my dear wfld
noble father died no head on earth is more precious to my thoughts
than yours. . . . But aU 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 iU, I must be sum
moned. I wfll 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 hfe 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 bodfly selves from out your custody.
but as you know it wiU be our vfle bodies only ; spirituaUy we are
yours and always shaU 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 reaUy weU to stay there. It really seems that
anywhere in the South Seas wiU 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 Uve upon black lava and trust
to rain for water. Besides I could not bear the white population.
AU 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 ff 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
Uves the Ufe of a man who is weU. I tremble when I think of a
return to England.
He never returned to England, and a third speU
of seven years in his life had just been completed when
on one gloomy, gusty, sodden December day in 1884,
I came down from lunching vsdth Sir Harry Johnston,

148 MEMORIES AND NOTES
the African traveller and administrator, in the upper
floor of a Govemment 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 Pacffic voyages and the island
iKe had, or seemed to have, effectuaUy 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 aU 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
fiU, 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 aU his other absorbing interests, and in
spite of his ever-growing passion and assiduity in
hterary work, he should never once have failed in
sending off to me his regular full budget of a monthly
letter, either written with his ovsm hand or dictated
to his step-daughter, would have been proof enough in
itseK of such steadfastness. On the side of his friends
at home, speaking at least for myseK, 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 Pacffic. 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 thrUl 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 tofl in setting out, in the volume A
Footnote to History, the detaUs of certain complicated,
very remote and petty recent affairs in which none
except perhaps a few international diplomatists could
weU 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 duU 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 aU his own and of which the quahty should
have fuUy re-assured one (the master-fragment Weir
of Hermiston was of course unknown to us tiU after

150 MEMORIES AND NOTES
his death). But thinking as I did, I said so in my letters
vsdth 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 life, 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 gKts 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
weU have met in IKe, only that the archipelago of Mr.
Conrad's chief experiences was the Malay, that of
Stevenson's the Polynesian, Could my dream be
fulfiUed, 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
Hfll," I know as a fact of arithmetic, but can in no
other sense reahze, that there has passed a speU of
no less than four-and-thirty years or the IKe-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 wKe. The names
of these two are not so famous as most of those to
which I have given a separate chapter in this book.
But alike by gKt and character they were a very
remarkable couple, each of them possessed of talents
which in their several ways feU 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 fuU biography of Jenkin, whom a chance blood-
poisoning carried off suddenly and prematurely, in
the mid exercise of imabated energies and the fuU
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 stUl 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 hfe in an
engineer's workshop. One result of this cosmopohtan
training on his exact and retentive mind was a IKe-
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 Wflliam
Thomson, at the manufacture, testing, and laying dovsm
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 practicaUy,
of living electrical engineers. In 1859 he had married
the daughter of Alfred Austin, Esq., C.B., a lady sharing
in fuU measure the gifts that have distinguished her
famUy. From 1861 to 1868 he carried on a business

FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 166
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 untU his death : energetic and success
ful in teaching, indefatigable in invention and in the
apphcation 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
hght freights. This system he called " Telpherage,"
and believed ardently in its practical usefulness and
future commercial importance. Presumably the effec
tual sagacity and foresight which had up tfll 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 leam, taken
root. The anxiety and overwork involved in connec
tion vsdth 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 Ulness 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
tn 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 irapepya — 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 naturaUy 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 hght. Attention was called
not long after his death to the circumstance that out
of four elaborate studies on subjects not especiaUy
his ovpn, which he contributed to the North British
Review, three were highly valued, and their conclusions
cordiaUy adopted, by the authors criticized, among
whom were such masters in divers fields as the great
naturahst 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 pubhshed criticisms on stage
craft and the actor's art. The classical student who
turns to his review of Brovsming's Agamemnon and
CampbeU's Trachinice in the Edinburgh Review for
1 878 * wiU certainly not close it vsdthout 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 weU 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 aU the spirit of classic grace and beauty, but was
sometimes taken in by its counterfeit. In imaginative
hterature 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 inteUectual
interests proceeded in truth from the keenness and
healthiness of his interest in IKe 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 weU aU 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 aU. His
manly and loyal nature was at all times equaUy ready
with a knock-dovsm argument and a tear of sympathy.
Chivalrous and tender-hearted in the extreme in aU
the real relations and probing circumstances of IKe,
he was too free himself from small or morbid suscep-
tibffities to be very sparing of them in others, and to
those who met and talked with him for the first time
might easUy 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 unflmching 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 vsdth a prompt
and wholesome contempt, his eye twinkling the while
between humour, kindness, and annoyance ; whfle on
others he would seize vsdth gusto, and tum them
appreciatively over and inside out until he had made
the most of them. In my ovsm 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
vsdth dislike of the ' progress ' and ' prosperity ' which
cause multitudes to teem in grimy aUeys 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 sentimentahst :
I would retort on him as a materialist and Phffistine.
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 faU back on his standing argument
that life, hfe under any even merely endurable condi
tions of health, freedom, and order, was weU worth

FLEEMING AND ANNE JENKIN 159
hving ; 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 K not unmixed, good.
Did not his charity and buoyancy of temper lead him
here to err in judging others by himseK ? If, indeed,
any large proportion of those multitudes could be like
him, in his untiring zest for hfe, 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 beheve 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 hving presences of the thinner-blooded and
weakher-souled majority of men.
His wKe, 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 famfly, the Austins of Creeting Mfll in Suffolk,
The eldest of the three distinguished Austin brothers,
John, gained world-wide fame as a philosophical
jurist, and with his wKe, one of the Norwich Taylors,
was for many years the centre of the most brflliant
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
briUiant group to which they belonged, after rapidly
making an unheard-of fortune at the Parhamentary
bar, retired early vsdth broken health to his native
county and lived there a hfe 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,
AKred 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 from
which she sprang. Her own special gKt was for acting
and recitation. It was only privately exercised, but
those of us who had the privilege of seeing and hearing
her wUl never forget the experience. Her features
were not beautKul, but had a signal range and thriUing
power of expression. In tragic and poetic parts,
especiaUy 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 gKt of dramatic gesture was not less striking.
RecaUing her, for instance, in the part of Clytemnestra,
I can vouch for having seen on no stage anjrthing 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 versatiUty of
her gKt 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 occasionaUy 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 untfl 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 himseK to carry out
the heavy task his friendship had undertaken in writing
her husband's hfe — aU these things are made manifest
both in that LKe itseK and in his pubhshed letters
written to her during his invahd years at Bournemouth.

CHAPTER X
BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH
Every Londoner knows Box Hill near Dorking, with
its open crest and vsdde prospects and steep chalky
declivities and gulhes 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
vsrite, been thrown into the market and is in danger
of being parcelled out for building. It is true that
of the ground now its ovsm the public sometimes makes
an irritating enough use, especially that portion of the
pubhc which regales itself on the open hiU 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 chiU autumnal day wandering alone
about those famUiar and haunted slopes. The weather
had just cleared after storm : above the steep shoulder
of the down a perfect haK-moon hung in a sky of faint
lilac melting into pure pearl-green : the darkened
vaUey woods were of a deep misty brown touched
here and there ahnost 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 chiU of the season, sent a thriU through
my blood and nerves intensKying the memories and
associations of the place almost into actual presences,
hauntings vsdth which the very air seemed to vibrate.
The earliest of such memories and associations per
sonal to myself had been from days of my ovsm later
boyhood, when I used often to visit a famUy of girl-
cousins who had their home in the vaUey 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 IKe 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 duUer person could
have committed, and who on the day of that picnic
made poor Jane Fairfax so dreadfully unhappy by her
flirtation with Frank ChurchiU ? Looking across the

164 MEMORIES AND NOTES
valley to the great park of Norbury or the more modest
grounds of CamUla 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 hfe
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 hnes of Endymion, was
drawn by the spell of moonlight (" ' you a' seen the
moon ? ' ") up the hill at evening, vsrrote the famous
" drear-nighted December " song, and poured out in
letters to his friends his half-formed, none the less
Uluminating 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 vsrites of it as a place where
Keats " did abide for a whfle, 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
earher 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 dovsm
or heather, aU 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 Fhnt 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 domg
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 vsdndows 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 vsrrote 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 HUl 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 hfe, literature and politics, his staunchness, and at
the same time sensitiveness, in friendship, his genial
yet fastidious conviviahty, 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, nee AUce 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
daUy for several weeks. One afternoon during those
weeks, having gone down to Box HUl 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 weU capable in those days, before his
journey to Califomia, but never afterwards, Steven
son was there again vsdth 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 vsdth 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 caUed
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 shaU 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 reahzed as to Queen's Ferry, but never as
to Burford Bridge. I imagine the attempt would
have been made in connection vsdth 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 tantahzing a fragment in his work. But to return
to his special relations with Meredith — of aU the elder
master's letters, none perhaps is more characteristic
than that which he vsrrote 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 fuU in Mr. W. Meredith's two-volume
edition of his father's correspondence.
' I have been fuUy pleased. The writing is of the rare kind
which is naturaUy simple yet picked and choice. It is hterature.
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
phflosophy interwrought with humour.
' My protest is against the Preface and the final page. The
Preface is keenly in Osric's vein — ' everything you wiU, dear worthy
pubhc, but we are exceedingly modest and doubt an you wiU 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 Uttle-
ness indeed and truly, my lord PubUc ! ' As for the closing page

170 MEMORIES AND NOTES
it is rank recreancy. ' Yes, Mr. Barlow,' said Tommy, ' I have
traveUed 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 deaUng with the reeds, whom you deprive of their beauty by
overinforming them with your sensations, I feel painfuUy to be
leveUed 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 hiU-side with friends,
would stop and lean back against his stick and faU
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, untU by and by his invention, taking wing,
would soar as it were in ascending spirals into a bur
lesque empyrean where it would sustain itseK 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,'
' Peto '), and Islet, on whom he vsTote his weU-knovsm
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
easfly believe, that the master was never more himself
than when he occasionally received on their Sunday
afternoon peregrinations the company of walkers
whom Leshe Stephen had organized under the name of
the Sunday Tramps, None but the youngest of my
readers wUl need teUing 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 caU him, for long

172 MEMORIES AND NOTES
he was alike of back, leg, and stride, of nose and of
beard (the flne 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 Enghsh 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 himseK, 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 ovsm walking powers began little by httle to
faU, For the first few years he would go a good part
of the day's walk with them, then graduaUy not for
more than a mUe 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 ovsm relations vsdth Meredith, I have
told how I shook hands vdth him across a stUe in 1878.
But my intimacy did not begin tiU 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 fuU 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 Crossways 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 ovsm 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 bodUy, though
not his inteUectual, vigour was beginning by gradual
degrees to flag. The reddish brovsm had quite faded
from his hair and given place to the shade between
grizzled and silvery that went so well with his habitual,
unvarjdng 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 modem English conversation
of lazfly mumbhng 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 gaUantly the hiU 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 BosweUize him. Remem
ber, moreover, that to make the one and only Boswell
it took the one and only Johnson : the talker of aU
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 IKe or conduct or
opinion, Meredith was fond, as aU his readers know, of
composing condensed oracular aphorisms such as those
of the Pilgrim's Scrip in Richard Feverel : but these
were literary products, the fruits of hard meditation
during solitary walks or in his study. Several vsriters
of recollections have set down memories of his talk
when he delivered himseK 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 ovsmed 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 brain. 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 IKe he would sometimes try to lift
the talk of a commonplace company to his ovsm 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 weU 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
himseK, and throw back his beautKul 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-
bffity 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 feUow-beings as good as myseK,
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 a very few: 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 himseK went to any old haunt of his
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 vsdldness 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 haK- 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 pubhshed letters
one to the Press against a proposed extension raflway
to Ambleside in the Lake Country ; and in this he
takes, not less effectively than decisively, exactly the
same line as I had found myseK 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 raUway would offer a paying invest
ment to the Shareholder ; it would fatten some pubUcan ; 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 Enghshmen will aUow their one recreative hohday ground of
high hiU and deep dale (I would add " consecrated by one of our
noblest poets," but that I am on my guard against treating the
subject emotionaUy) to be a place of no retreat. They must have
ceased to discern the quaUty of true utflity if they permit it.
Spiritual beauty serves us to the fuU as much as material force,
and it must have its homes of seclusion to Uve. 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 degeneratmg
too often into tiresome inteUectual 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 Rose
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-a-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 mUitary training
to be a thing desirable in every state, desirable for
the sake of the manhood, the seK-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,
bom of plethora, and submit to that disciphne, as
weU 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
vehemently opposed to thero. 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 FeneUan, 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 vsrritten 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 vsTites : "As to our country, if the people were
awake, they would submit to be driUed. . . . 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 ovsm 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 Ijo-ic and idyll in
one, as was ever written. Equally pre-eminent among
lyrics pohtical 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 myseK trying to foUow the odes
On Napoleon and On French History when he read
them to me, then fresh vsTitten, 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 comphcated in construction, so dense vsdth thought
and imagery as these, the fuU meaning of what he read
was naturaUy hard to seize. As a rule he courted no
criticism and aUowed 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 MEMORIES AND NOTES
He was patient, but simply could not see that they
were puzzles at aU, and closed the talk characteristic
aUy with a jolly laugh over the sluggishness of my
Saxon vnts. 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 EngUsh Association (No. 32,
1915), in which I tried to define and iUustrate 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 inteUect, ever chaUenging 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
Ught. Shakespeare is the greatest master in both modes. In the
work of poets Uke Donne, Browning, Meredith, the inteUectual
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 chaUenge to mental
effort in the reader.

BOX HILL AND GEORGE MEREDITH 183
Just before Christmas, 1889, 1 had the foUovsdn,g letter
from him : —
My dear Colvin, —
I don't Uke the account you give of yourself, and shaU be glad
to hear when you can take a day aud 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 sheU,
but suggesting Homer. Please teU your American that I am
rarely in town, but that it he wiU come to me any day this week,
he wfll 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 aU old men Juvenal's X is right
absolutely. Loss of friends gives us our pceva diu viventibus.
Yours ever,
Geoege Meeedith.
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
" GaUiambic " metre of CatuUus'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 naturaUy and straightforwardly
than most, partly by reason of the rousing and thriUing
sonority with which he declaimed them. From the
Iliad, Book XIV:—
Not the sea-wave so beUows 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 tenant thunders the stress of the gale in the
oak-trees'
FoUage-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 :
AU the end foreseeing, Phoebus to his oath irrevocable
Bowed obedient, deploring the insanity pitfless.
Then the flame-outsnorting horses were led forth : it was so
decreed.
They were yoked before the glad youth by his sister-anciUaries.
Swift the ripple ripples foUow'd, as of aureate HeUcon,
Down their flanks, whfle they impatient pawed desire of the
distances.
And the bit with fury champed. Oh ! unimaginable deUght !
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 umse.
Haec data poena diu viventibus, ut renovata
Semper clade domus multis in luctibus inque
Perpetuo moerore et nigra veste senescunt, etc., etc.
Thus dfluted by Johnson (whom one does not commonly think
of as a dfluter) in Unes of The Vanity of Human TVishes, some of
which have become proverbial : —
But grant, the virtues of a temp'rate prime
Bless with an age exempt from scom or crime ;
An age that melts with unperceiv'd decay,
And gUdes 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 shaU 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 retums,
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,
StiU drops some joy from with'ring Ufe away;
New forms arise, and diff'rent views engage.
Superfluous lags the vet'ran on the stage,
TUl 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 tragicaUy
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,
meUowing 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 inteUect 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 brUliant
and weU-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 foUowed 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 vsritten 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
feU 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 stfll. 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
hiU with him.
' He strode up the hiU whirUng 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 Uttle
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 ten thousand beeves at pasture.'
' Box HiU 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 hiU. He looked up and saw his
peers. They were aU young, Uke himself. He waved the staff in
greeting. One, a mere stripling, ' sUght unspeakably,' R. L. S.,
detached himself from the others, crying gloriously, ' Here's the
feUow I have been teUing you about ! ' and ran down the hiU to
be the first to take his Master's hand. In the meanwhUe 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
personahty, possessing in a singular degree that
heightened intensity of being, that mysterious quahty,
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 dehberative, 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 itseK independently of any behef 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 hstening 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 stiU unconverted opponent, but not a whit the less
thriUed and speU-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 skfll of the master
orator. The MUtonic quotation for caUing 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 piUar of state. Deep on his front engraven
Dehberation sat, and pubUc care " —
— " Sage he stood,
With Atlantean shoulders fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies ; his look
Drew audience and attention stiU 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 gKts. 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 pubhc speaking, it seemed as though
one could never have too much or even enough.
Quite apart from the conspicuousness of a pubhc
occasion, or the contagion of the coUective 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 itseK felt, it might be, some fifty yards
away through the press, before one had time to reahze
that this was Mr. G. coming along, — " Mr. G." was
the ordinary appeUation 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 ovpn
courtesy and kindness. The first time I met him was at
Naworth, the Border seat of the Carhsle Howards, the
same romantically placed, historically famous, and in
those days delightfuUy 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 RaUway, Hav
ing slept one night at Kingussie, he took train the next
day to Carhsle, and arrived at Naworth in the evening,
to aU 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 tovsm and country,
and occasionaUy in later days under his own roof in
London. Pohtics 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 fuUness of his experience
on the pohtical 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 hterary 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 generaUy 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 originaUty
of his matter than his fine maimer 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 itseK, 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 imder offer to the British Museum by the dealer
CasteUani. Any and every Greek subject that might
be broached led Mr, Gladstone's mind at once and
inevitably to Homer. NaturaUy I did not disclose
the fact that I was one of the reviewers who some time
earher, in deahng with his volume Juventus Mundi,
had expressed without compromise the opinion (shared
by practicaUy all trained scholars and archaeologists)
that no Homeric critic had ever shown, along vsdth so
minute and systematicaUy 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 detaU,
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 Ihad 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 himseK. 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 aU, Looking
upon Homer as the one responsible founder and
" maker " (his own word) of the Greek rehgion, 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 weU-
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 pubhc
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 actuaUy been con
cluded ten days before.

WILLLAM 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 WUliam 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 j ob 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-
Mfltonic 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 ovsm. 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, favsming preferment-hunter." And he went
on to denounce the groveUing flattery of Young's
misceUaneous 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 supphant
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
dweUing on the betterment of the times, which would
make such proceedings on the part of such a man
now equaUy needless and impossible.
The best talk about literature in which I can remem
ber Mr. Gladstone taking a leading part tumed 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

WILLLm EWART GLADSTONE 197
in his judgment no theme was either more tragic in
itseK 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 reconcihng 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 ahnost incomparable,
almost fuUy 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 thriUing 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 sUghting estimate of the Bride of Lammermoor given
by Dr. T. F. Henderson in the Cambridge History of Literature
(vol. adi, 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 conventionaUy
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 weU 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 daughter of one of his staunchest political
aUies, Lord HalKax. He was suffering from an attack
of lumbago, and walked with his back bent and his
hand held to the place where the pam was. Having
once or twice tried to straighten himseK up and found

WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE 199
the effort hurt him, he turned to me, still stooping vsdth
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 concihation or coercion." A few
days later followed the great speech at Leeds de
nouncing the policy of Mr. ParneU 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, iu 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 iUness (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 vsdth his hosts, I went to caU 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 beautKul
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 hving at and working for the British Museum
there naturaUy lingers in my mind a varied medley
of memories. But how attempt to sKt and sort them ?
How single out this or that group for inclusion in a
budget, such as this is meant to be, of recoUections of
special places and individual persons ? To caU 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 civUiza
tion of the world. No single imagination could frame
or grasp an adequate conception of what is contained
under that dome and in those gaUeries at Bloomsbury.
The name Bloomsbury has in itself somehow a trivial
sound and bourgeois associations. What name could
be too august, too rich vdth 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 quahty 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 gaUeries together, even since the natural history
coUections 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 fiU one's days with pride and to exalt the
gait of one's ingoings and outgoings —
WeU, well, I suppose no one, however privileged his
or her vocation, has the sense of such privilege always
consciously in mind. Daily duties are daUy 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 reaUy humdrum and duU, 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 aU the more for
cibly to sensibilities unduUed by habit. Speaking
for myself, I cannot pretend that I was habituaUy
conscious of any special pride or privUege 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 faQade on my way to my daUy 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 duU 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 f amUiar-
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
BotticeUi 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 privfleged 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 dweUing-house and one's work was apt
at any casual moment to rouse one to a sudden thrflling
pitch of delight in human achievement and of activity
in the imaginative reconstruction of past glories.
During aU 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 aU achievements of
human art, seeing them close at hand by every kind
of light or haK-light which an enclosed and roofed
gaUery and the varying dimness of the London atmo
sphere could afford, one took their glory for granted
perhaps a hundred times against once or tvsdce 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-sheUs 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
whfle 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 coUector 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 generaUy 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 hfe, which his sale vsdU arouse among othei"
amateurs and coUectors, folk of his ovsm kidney, after
he is gone. The third offers the reward of the perman
ent recognition which vriU await his name as that of an
enlightened amateur and national or civic benefactor.
It is the value and exceUence of this last reward which
those public guardians of such things whom he may
count among his friends are bound vsdth all their power
to impress upon him.
Apart from such practical ends, a study interesting
ia itseK might doubtless be made of the comparative
psychology of coUectors, 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 coUecting passion
is incarnate except that famous one of Cousin Pons

206 MEMORIES AND NOTES
in Balzac's Les Parents Pauvres. In IKe, 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 Malcohn of PoltaUoch and
WUliam 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 inbom 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 haK 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 originaUy
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
mediaeval, 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 practicaUy all his days in the sale-rooms of London
g,nd the income of a great fortune, the capital of which

BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 207
he had himseK 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 coUector should,
among the various museums of London. Malcohn of
PoltaUoch on his part was a great highland laird,
whose passion as a coUector — to a large extent stimu
lated as weU as directed by an inseparable fidus Achates
in the person of a bachelor friend of education (and
I believe origin) partly German, WiUiam Mitchell —
was for drawings and prints of all schools. The
purchase of his treasures for the British Museum
after his death ahnost doubled the importance of the
department I had the honour to serve.
Neither is it among coUectors 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 coUeagues no less. Since appoint
ments of officials have come to be entirely by the
routine mode of competitive civU 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 itseK 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 Reading
Room 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 m
spite of his stained teeth and bristling russet stubble
of a beard, he was not, I suppose, a trained bibhographer
in the full modem 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 himseK 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 Enghsh 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 himseK a master expert in one of these studies
after another, and in the end patrioticaUy 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 weU 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 Nevsdion. This
is not a name known far and wide, like most of those
I am recaUing in the present pages ; nor was its bearer
in the fuU 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 Enghsh, nay, of general Western culture,
and in the absence of any fuU 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
myseK enjoyed the honour of his regard and the
advantage of his teaching. He was my senior by
aU 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 f oUovsdng,
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 ahnost 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 Enghsh scholarship to lack, a strong and
weU instructed love for the extant remains of Greek

BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 211
art ; whUe the records of Greek pubhc and private hfe
and usage preserved in lapidary inscriptions at aU
times interested him and exercised his faculties even
more than those handed dovsm 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 buUdings of the Turkish town of
Budrum : the two noble colossal portrait figures,
shattered but restorable, of Mausolos himself and his
wKe Artemisia ; a headless rider on the fragment of a
great rearing horse ; the unbroken head and forehand
of another and huger horse standing vsdth the bronze
bit intact in its mouth ; many mutilated great guardian
lions ; many exquisite frieze-fragments, some almost
perfectly preserved, of fighting Amazon and Centaur
and racing charioteer ; beautKuUy 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 vsdth 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, Nevsdion was a master abreast of the
foreniost. 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
Sicfly and Cyprus : and concurrently with these gains
a parsimonious Treasury was induced to provide funds
for the purchase, one after another, of nearly aU the
chief coUections formed by continental amateurs and

BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 213
dealers ; the Blacas collection for one ; from the
great Itahan dealer CasteUani 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, aU 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
thmgs ; 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 vsdth strangers which might
easfly have been mistaken for cynicism. He had two
smfles, 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 vsdth a somewhat shuffling or
flinching gait (for his feet did not in later years carry
hun very weU) among the noble damaged marbles at
the British Museum, the kinship between him and
them seemed to strike obviously upon the eye. True,
his taU 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 faU; 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 aU 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 rethed
Vidth a face of thunder, threatening " Very weU, I shaU
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 whUe 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 herseK an artist of truly sensitive hand and
eye, and by aU 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-
fuUy into aU his interests and studies, and devoting
her talent to the Ulustration of his books and lectures,
untfl six years later she was suddenly carried away by
an illness of a peculiarly painful and tragic character.
As she lay unweU one day in her room she saw a
workman kiUed 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 himseK 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
generaUy foUowed 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 spohation — 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 Prench 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 soU, I have tried to
convey in another place something of the thrUl —
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 shaU here only recaU 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
Ul 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 ahd 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 feU 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 actuaUy 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, telhng
how he once surprised a Greek servant in the act of
robbing him : —
I have not seen so Uvid and hideous a complexion sinoe the
day when Timoleon Pericles Vlasto was detected steaUng coins
from the British Museum. This man came to me from Smyrna
with an exceUent character. He had most engaging manners,
and was always thanking me for my goodness to him, and teUing
me that I was better than a father to him. I have Uttle 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 generaUy cantankerous ; but they forget that an EngUshman
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 har."
The very air we breathe in Turkey is impregnated with Ues.
It turned out not difficult, however, to talk him
out of this momentary mood. We pursued our joumey,
were landed at Katacolo, the port of Pyrgos, rode to
the village of Druva, where the German scientffic
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 hfll 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 waUed 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 iimumerable 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 itseK, 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 marshaUing themselves beside the river-
mouth, as when the sons of Hellas were wont to assemble
in their gaUeys 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 faUen
outward ; the sculptured figures, one after another
and aU 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 exceUence 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, vsdth their combination
of grandly monumental decorative design and an
almost gem-hke 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 quahty almost unaccom
panied by any fineness of detail, NaturaUy Newton
had in his guarded way much to say and to suggest
on these antiquarian problems as each presented
itseK to us, and naturaUy 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 indehbly fixed
there is a trffiing httle scene which occurred on our
way back to Athens. Instead of taking boat again
from Katacolo we drove from Pyrgos across the plain
of Ehs, by such a rough, less than haK-made apology
for a road as then existed, as far as Patras, the chief
port of Northern Peloponnese, About haK-way we
stopped for a meal at a httle hostelry in the vUlage of
Ah Tchelebi, near the lakelet of the same name, then
beautKuUy frmged with flowering oleander scrub.

BRITISH MUSEUM AND SIR CHARLES NEWTON 221
As we sat out after the meal we noticed a great hairy
caterpfllar near five inches long crawling perseveringly
across the yard on some errand of its own. We
were watching its progress with a mfld 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,
disiUusioned worldly wisdom he feU to moralizing
upon it as a symbol of the predatory scheme of hfe
in general and human hfe 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 recaU between us that has helped to
keep it printed so ineffaceably on my mind's eye.
But I wfll 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
deshe, which I had begun to cherish even as an under
graduate and which had been almost the guiding motive
of Newton's hfe, 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 hterature. In
the years (1876-1884) when I had charge of the Fitz
wiUiam Museum at Cambridge, my main endeavour
had been not so much to enrich its coUection of miscel
laneous original objects of art as to save out of its
revenue a fund for providing the first and indispensable
apparatus for archseological 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 AprU 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 haK
slipping off his back, more aptly and graciously even
than usual, Jebb, classicaUy 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 dehvery, 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 ovm 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 IKe, 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 httle figure of Proserpine I myseK
discovered at Cnidos, I was reminded of her avoSo';
when she came back from the darkness of Hades into
the hght of the upper world, and the thought came
to me that this was the avoSo^ of archaeology, so long
buried in England."
There followed for Newton a time of gradually
declining strength, during which his services having
tardfly 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 vsdthout 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 hkely to
become absorbed in his special study than at Athens.
But in letting himseK 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 haK the good of travelhng hes. At home, among
famihar scenes, to see much in httle things is the
privUege either of egoism, whose shghtest experiences
are of importance to itself, or of genius. The rest of
us are less impressionable, and let the thousand smaU
circumstances of to-day go by us all but unawares.
But abroad, we aU notice and remember httle 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 duU 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 weU 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 naturaUy one of the great moments of IKe. 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 whUe 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
CyUene on the left, and Parnassus on the right, look
down on the Corinthian guK, These landlocked waters
are treacherous and subject to hurricanes. What
happened to ApoUo 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 chff, and there she lay straining and tossing
at her moorings for two hours, whfle the awakened
passengers bemoaned themselves. When we came
on deck at davsm, as the boat neared the port of Corinth,
the sky was low and grey, and the cold gale was stUl
* This is Chapman's spirited line for the Homeric, —

226 MEMORIES AND NOTES
driving the ripple strongly upon the beach ; most of
us were stfll 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 satisfled, one was ready
to take in again the glory of the world. It is a three-
hours' run dovsm the Saronic guK from Kalamaki
to the Piraeus, and aU the whUe 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 feUow-
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
afl, and make your way forward, where the deck is
strewn with third-class passengers vsrrapped in their
sheepskins, and picking your steps, clamber up beside,
the bowsprit, where you can be alone. The island of
Mgiaa, has by this time separated itseK from the other
mountain groups, and lies in front and to the right ;
on the left, you cannot at aU 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 wiU come next. You watch and watch, with
snatches of Greek and snatches of Enghsh poetry
ringing in your brain —
\nrapal Kal loare^avoi Ka\ aoiSifioi —
The fruitful immortal anointed adored
Dear city of men without master or lord —
and presently you swaUow 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 mfles 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 Acropohs ;
those buUdings are the Parthenon, from thence flashed
of yore the spear and helmet of Athene. There is

228 MEMORIES AND NOTES
another haK 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 buUdings ; the water quivers vsdth 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 Xa/iTr/joTaro? aldT)p of
Euripides, not aU that poets have sung or traveUers
told, have fully prepared you for the reahty. 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 vsdthin reach almost, in
unknovsm, nearer, brighter multitudes, till the spirit
has thoroughly dilated itself in the new medium, stiU
you find that habit has not made you insensible to
this magic quahty of the air. It is forced upon your
attention by fresh sights and impressions that occur
continuaUy. The old market at the lower end of the
tovsm is a great place for one kind of suoh 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-staUs and market people in
counterchange of intense shadow and hght, heaps of
glowing oranges, pUes of silk stuffs, figures in the scarlet
fez and white or blue jacket and white fustaneUa,
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 dayhght 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 ghtter 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 aU that
lies vsdthin the shadow with a soft and exquisite clear
ness. Every projection is throvsm into intense rehef,
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 briUiancy to various features of the modem
town — to the shapes and shadows of cornice, capital,
and balcony, or the attire of market-people grouped
about their many-coloured wares, stiU 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, Pentehcus closing in the
landward view north-east, and Parnes north-west;
vsdth 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 haK of Salamis.
At first you do not think of these hUls as either distant
or lofty. The clearness with which you can distinguish

ON SOME ASPECTS OF ATHENS 231
every detaU of their appearance makes them seem near,
and the sense of ample horizon and unhemmed openness
in which you breathe makes you feel as K, 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 hoUows 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 usuaUy 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 quahty, 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 hoUows 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 sterUe 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 chnging of
some thin leafage spreads a bloom, the stain is of
gold and the bloom of silver. And whenever, in the
general sterihty, 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 ohve-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
vsdth red or white anemones, seem to you wonders,
and most of aU the anemones, which flash upon you
as the reddest and the whitest in the world. The affinity
of Greek nature vsdth Greek art, its power of producing,
in the same way, effects of surpassing richness vsdth
means of extreme simphcity and severity, is the thing
which the Athenian landscape brings continuaUy 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 stiU talking of
Athens ; for the tovsm 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 tovni is
to our consciousness a world without limits, and we
can hardly reahze that even from a baUoon, or in the
survey of a traveUing bird, it would be possible to see
aU round it, and take it in as the inhabited centre of
an open champaign. From vsdthin, 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 smaUer, 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 aheady 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 tovsm 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 aU 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 beheve, 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 aU 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 Boifle — the
University and the House of Parliament — of an Athens
rejuvenate and complacent. The German scholastic
architects, who planned the new tovsm 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 quahty, 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 tfles

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 vrith pepper-trees, the
modem Athens seems a place not unstately nor un
refined — ^untU, 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 vrish that, in this place at least, there
were no present to thrust itself between you and the
past, and feel as K, about the foot of the Acropolis,
sohtude 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-vsdtted 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 weU as gratitude, aver that you have a right to
bufld your new city — a Munich, yes, a Paris of your
own, between the Acropohs and the groves of Academe
— and to be busy with your parhamentary 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 aU the same forget, and
continuaUy f aU 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 seK-wiUed, 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 triviahties 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, famUiarly, caU up to our mind's
eye the ancient Greek as he lived, laboured, bartered,
laughed, quarreUed, 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 IKe 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 chUd and pat its elbow, A man
in ripe years, haK turning to go, grasps the hand of
his seated wKe ; 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, whUe friends behind the chair look on sorrow-
fuUy. Hegeso the daughter of Proxenos, so named
in the inscription on her tomb, sits placidly, whUe
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 hfe the Greek will show
us, but denuded of aU flutter and circumstance ; he
wiU 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 retum at evening. Images decorous, indeed, and
serene, but none the less moving ; for in these simple
scenes of fareweU 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
famfliarity — with so simple a spectacle thus to move
and solemnize us — ^to show us nothing but the usual,
and at the same time hft 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, K,
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 importunities 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 .^Egean blue. Nearly straight
over the Acropolis, the island of ^gina, softened
and darkened vsdth distance, lifts a lovely mountain
outline, and dimly behind ^gina another island, Poros,
heaves a grand shoulder that we can but half distin
guish from the many-folded ranges of the Argive
mainland. The guK, 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
ahnost, 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 vsdth sunlight on aU 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 CyUene,
AU of the hving 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 caUing
of cavalry bugles, and one high clear note most con
tinuous of aU, the ring of the masons' hammers upon
the marble they are fashioning — all these sounds,
through that magic air, ascend to you fused and
musicaUy 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 M^hUe 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 hfe 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
24Q

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 vsdth
the Turk and with the provisional native Government
at Athens, and was made the victim of an attempted
assassination whfle 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 IKe was that of a man of
leisure and letters at Florence, the most confidential
friend of SheUey's vsddow ; bent for a whUe himself
upon writuig SheUey's life, and when he was foiled in
that hope, tuming to weave the story of his own wild
early days into a thriUing, 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 wflder 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 ovsm
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 scom 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 ovsm memorable age he had become almost
the last survivor, and an object of curiosity and pU
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 vfllage of Sompting where
Trelawny had then long been living. Our host, a
brother Dflettante of Nevsd;on'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, chivahous, 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 hved 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 smaU,
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
stiU 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
seK 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 himseK 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 iri 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 modeUed 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 MiUais' s
weU-known likeness of him as an old seaman in his

244 MEMORIES AND NOTES
picture " The North-West Passage " — a hkeness with
which the sitter himseK was much dissatisfied.
The talk ran at first on commonplace matters and
mutual acquaintances. In its course the downright
old man denounced as " hes " 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 itseK in a certain
bluntness and bluffness 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 famUiarly 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 himseK, 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 pohtics. 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 Enghsh
would be beaten. " If I were a younger man," he
shouted in a strong crescendo, " I would go and fight
for the Boers — ffight 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 Berhn
which handed over to her the provinces of Thessaly
and Epirus. Turkish diplomacy had resisted by aU
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 hberation had been won in guerUla
fighting : the Turkish squadrons used to march in
column along the plains, when the Greek sharpshooters
would line the hUls 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 pa-ssed 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, principaUy cavalry, had been stopped, in the previous autumn,
by barricades of rocks and trees, and slaughtered Uke droves of
cattle by the wfld 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 accUvities, stfll 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 stiU holding the hair ropes attached
to the skuUs of their camels — death Uke sleep is a strange posture-
master. There were grouped in a narrow space five thousand or
more skeletons of men, horses, camels, and mifles ; 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, K 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
accomphce Whitcombe had been lured to their act of
treachery. But granting that those hoards stiU re
mained untouched, and that Trelavsmy 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 hfe 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 K it had not been in the back, which
as a matter of fact it was ; whereupon Trelavsmy,
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 shovsdng us the scar where he had
bumed his hand in plucking the poet's heart out of
the ashes, detaUed at length his reasons for believing
thatthe sinking of SheUey'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 himseK pre
vented from putting out in company with his friends
in Byron's schooner "The Bolivar" by warnings ofthe
quarantine to which he would thereby make himself
hable, 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 behef 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 aU
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
seK, Knowing that it was by a hint of Trelawny's that
Brovsm 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 unpubhshed,
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 actuaUy living together at Florence, I knew,
at the time when Landor had made of Trelawny's
advKitures during the Greek War of Independence the
subject of one of the most highly vsTought 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
himseK, 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 chUdhood, and had brought
her with him when he left Greece to settle for a whUe 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 pubhshed
letters do him, it should be said, nothing but credit, t
* The best and UveUest material at present extant is to be found
in the memoir prefixed by the late Sir Charles DUke to the coUected
papers of his grandfather {Papers of a Critic, vol. i, pp. 3-17).
t 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
conceming his deaUngs in this matter to which pubUcity was given
in W. W. Sharp's Life of Severn,, pp. 264-5.

250 MEMORIES AND NOTES
Tersitza herseK 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 vsrriting 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 totaUy
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 Brovsm 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 GUchrist'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 tuming to this dialogue for himself
should perhaps be warned that the charming part of it is only in
a few pages at the begirnirg, vhi'e the rest discusses the Greek
poUtics 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
whUe ; 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
seK " 'S'very weU, 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 unf riendly, on
his door-step. To have shaken the hand which
plucked SheUey'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 ovsm 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-vsTiter 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
exUe. 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 alhance with the
great financier-collector Cernuschi, first brought the
love and understanding of Japanese art, in aU its forms,
into fashion among Parisian amateurs and thence by
degrees among the general public. He was a man of
exquisite perceptions and sensibUities, 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 pohtical struggles which
foUowed 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 L' Annee 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 weU 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 wfld 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
teUs 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
I to him ; telling further how he, Victor Hugo, was on
the point of withdrawing again to Guernsey from the
too distracting caUs upon his time and strength in
Paris ; and ending with some interesting remarks on
the way in which during his brief retum 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 bim : —
"J'ai re9u votre etude sur L' Annee Terrible. Je I'ai lue avec
un reel interet, regrettant toujours que mon peu de pratique de
la langue anglaise me fasse evidemment passer sur des deUcatesses
de langue sans les apprecier. Mais je crois avoir saisi I'esprit du
fond qui est sain et genereux. Je I'ai porte hier soir h, M. Victor
Hugo et lui ai lu le dernier paragraphe et fl en a ete fort touche.
II quitte Paris tout prochainement, peut-etre demain. II ne peut
done vous remercier d'ici mais fl le fera aussitot arrive h, Guernsey,
il vous adressera la lettre au bureau meme du joumal. Je suis tres
heureux d'avoir ete I'instniment de votre rencontre. , . , Les
correspondances, les visites, les demandes de secours, I'accablent.
II a perdu tout son hiver, se couchant fort tard et ne pouvant plus ,
comme & Guernsey, jouir du grand travafl du matin. Je ne puis
que I'approuver, mais j'en suis bien attrist^. PersonneUement,
je crois qu'fl m'aimait. Mais surtout son gout se retrempait dans
I'atmosphere toute speciale de Paris. Son attitude poUtique 6tait

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 f oregroimd 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 confiict of Germany against
France, and that, universal and immeasurably more
inveterate stUl, of Have-not against Have. Wfll 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 mouming, battle, and affright, if there has gone
forth against my wiU 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
exceUente, enfin fl avait reconquis sur le groupe des jeunes poetes
de talent I'ascendant que durant son exfle avaient pris Baudelaire
et Leconte de Lisle, hommes d'une reeUe valeur, mais incapables
de vues aussi hautes, aussi f&ondes que ceUes de Hugo. La pr^
sence reeUe est un dogme dans la vie comme dans la cathoUcisme."
The master's own letter of acknowledgment foUowed, but is a
piece of merely poUte formaUty : — "Hauxville House,
8 Sept. 1872.
Cher MoNsiEtrR Sidnbt Colvtn, —
Vous avez voulu me laisser k votre passage le plus gracieux
souvenir. Vous avez 6cTit sur UAnrde Terrible une ^ande et
beUe page, d'une haute portee et d'une vraie elegance. Je vous
remercie par mon plus cordial serrement de main. ViCTOB Hpgo."

VICTOR HUGO 267
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 Ught, the travaUing 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 shafl 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 Ughts of tenderness and power as thrfll
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 beheve 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 aU rehgions, the
highest Right, the universal Law, the supreme Immovable, the
dazzling incomprehensible AU. And I beUeve 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 shaU survive, shafl mew her mighty youth ; creation shaU
not prove a mockery ; the pUlar of Ught shaU not be a gibbet of
shame ; there shaU not be poison in the fields, the woods, the
flowers ; history shaU not be a frantic and furious chaos of fataUties ;
the world shaU not be a dismal indictment against its Maker ;
comets shaU 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 sufier and am glad : I march on, knowing that nought of aU is
false, knowing that my hope is sure, and steadfast is the firmament.
And I bid ye hope with me, aU 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 Ughtning and dayhght and
the sky ; who floods space with the torrents of Ught, Ufe, 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-speU, 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
tum the resounding and heroical French verse into cool English
prose V . . .
The democratic philosopher, recurring to the last overwhelm
ing plebi3cito 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 fiashes ; but let
an evfl wind blow, and what then ? The people that surged about
Gracchus at the rostrum, that made the strength of Leonidas and
Winkehied (says the poet, plunging at large, as is his way, hither
and thither into history), of Washington, Bohvar, 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 aU 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 CoUgny 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 popvdace, the many-headed ; then it is bhnd and
maddened numbers ; then the tyrant AU is as bad as the tyrant
One. And though aU men vote for Csesar, the prophet wiU have
them wrong ; no majority shaU cow his conscience ; he wiU 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
Ufe rather than bear it with dishonour ; he wfll ask ces purs tre-

VICTOR HUGO 269
passes how long it is fit he should bear the load. Last comes the
fine image of the snow-storm : " What is it faUing round about
us in the darkness ? Oh, the miUions of snow-flakes, and miUions
again ! Oh, the blackness ! Oh, the snow ! — death to any that
falls asleep in it, dim leveUer 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 wiU all the
whiteness be, what wfll have become of the shroud, to-morrow,
once the sun shaU have risen an hour ? "
August, 1870, is the first month, and gives its name to the
first section, of the Terrible Tear 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 himseK that now is his time, whfle
the nations are blinking, to tum 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 tefl of another felo-de-se
Kke this ? — and once more we are off again over aU history and
geography for the answer. An Indian fakir letting the vermin
devour his body that his soul may go to Paradise ; a coral flsher
imperiUed among Liparsean reefs ; Green in his baUoon ; Alex
ander marching to Persia, and Trajan to Dacia — aU 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 faUing, a moimtebank 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 fulfiUed — ^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 itselt must receive his carcase with shame. . . . And so
we come to Sedan — we hear how in the fatal vaUey, amid the shock
of furious hosts, in the midst of thunder, in the heU of slaughter

260 MEMORIES AND NOTES
and the rain of iron, when aU were drunk with the smoke of blood
and no man thought but of battle, amid the beUowing of the human
hecatombs and the angry clangour of the trumpet, suddenly from
one voice broke the monstrous petition : " Let me Uve ! " Then
afl was over ; a bandit, a bandit had surrendered the sword of
Gaul and of France, of Brennus and of Clovis, had behed the mighty
memories of old, had disgraced " the haughty group of battles "
from Chalons and Tolbiac to Wagram and Eylau ; henceforth
Agincourt shafl smile, RamUies and Trafalgar shaU be pleasant
memories ; there shaU be solace in the thought of Blenheim or
Rossbach ; Sedan shaU 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 Ughtning
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 humihation.
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 caUed ; and the poet lets his thoughts range, as they might in
time of peace and amity, over the glories and exceUences 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 civUization. Germany wrought order out of the clash of a
hundred barbarous nationahties ; Germany has been the bulwark
of the world — has confronted Csesar with Arminius and the Papacy
with Luther ; German has had Vitikind as France has had Charle
magne — and even Charlemagne was a Uttle 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 tiie eagle's scream
and the trilling of the lark. Germany has her castled crags and
verdant meadows ; her blonde maidens are Uke 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 fufl of fairies by moonhght. " Germans,
your tombs are Uke trophies, your fields are fuU of mighty bones ;
Germans," cries the French poet, putting the climax to this cata
logue of renown, " be proud and Uft up your heads ; for Germany
is potent and superb." And then he turns to his country, and
cries — " My Mother ! " AU that praise and more to Germany ; to
France, the cry of her son — " 0 ma mere ! " That is a stroke of
rhetoric, of obvious Uterary artifice if you wiU, but stfll of the
artifice which is fuU of genius and passion : the Uke 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 aU reasoning, a thought from the core of things which
scatters with a breath aU accumulations of commonplace expostu
lation or conjecture round about them. At the latter end of the
poem a simflar turn is given, a simflar bridle put by the poet upon
his natural volubflity, in a passage referring to the burning of
buUdings by the hunted Parisians of the Commune. " You set
fire to the Library 1 " asks the poet. " Yes, I did," says the petroleur.
Then expostulation : " But it is a crime against yourself and your
own soul ; itis your own treasure and heritage you are consuming.
Books are the champions pf progress and the poor. What, turn
against your best friends ! fling a torch amid the Homers, the
Jobs, the Platos, the Dantes, the Moheres, the Mfltons, the Vol-
taires, the Beccarias ! waste the records of these arch enemies of
war, famine, and the scaffold, cruelty and prejudice, pride and
wrath, evfl 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 hght of the world, feudal barbarians bent with
a vindictive instinct on the suppression of the city of the Idea.
Berhn is incarnate evil, Paris is incarnate good ; Corporal WiUiam
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 assafl her. She is a pure virgin whose body
may fall into the hands of the ravisher, but whose spirit shaU repay
them with hatred inextinguishable. . . .
In the middle of aU these rhetorical and sometimes tedious
generaUties of denunciation on the one part and devotion on the
other, there come fine bursts in ahnost 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 simphcity wifl burst up every now and then
to let through, in language of quite another kind, that sense of
ulterior mystery and immensity, that famfliar presence of elemental
powers, which always seems hke a sea buoying up from beneath
the thought of Victor Hugo. How shafl one define the subtle
essence of poetry in this piece of contemplative reahsm written
''On seeing some dead Prussians fioating in the Seine," inwhich
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 vofl^ couches ;
Vous vofl^ caresses, portes, baises, penches,
Sur le souple oreiUer de I'eau moUe et profonde ;
Vous vofla dans les draps froids et mouiUes de I'onde ;
C'est bien vous, fils du Nord, nus sur le fiot dormant I
Vous fermez vos yeux bleus dans ce doux bercement.

VICTOR HUGO 263
Vous aviez dit : ' — AUons chez la prostitute.
Babylone, aux baisers du monde habituee.
Est Ik-bas ; eUe abonde en rires, en chansons ;
C'est 1^ que nous aurons du plaisir ; o Saxons,
0 Germains, vers le sud tournons notre ceil obhque.
Vite ! en France ! Paris, cette viUe pubUque,
Qui pour les etrangers se farde et s'embeUit,
Nous ouvrira ses bras . . .' — ^Et la Seine son Ut."
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 caUing him " atheist " ;
there is something Uke a precedent for it in Voltaire : but M.
Victor Hugo need fear no impeachment of his originahty, and
he has never hurled aU the resources of hterature 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 behever.
Close to this, again, comes the choicest passage of aU that
are written in another strain which runs through the poem, and
gives the sense of a pecuUar and touching charm as often as it
appears. The poet is a patriarch ; he has his two httle grand
chfldren, George and Jeanne. The play and prattle of these infants
about the ancestral knees, as they Uve 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 Uttle Jeanne on the SOth of September, her
birthday. She is a year old, and her grandfather teUs her how
she is Uke a Uttle caUow 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 whole 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 aU at strife ; how the city rings with the clang
of arms while she is murmuring Uke a bee in summer woods ; how
for him, when the humble voice hsps its song and the sweet hands
are stretched out, aU the tumult and terror seem to disappear,
and God seems to give the beleaguered city His blessing through
a httle child.
Next, it is New Year's Day, and grandpapa has been out to
buy the children playthings. They wfll teU you some day, he
says to George and Jeanne, how grandpapa was a kind old feUow,
who did his best in the world, and had a rough time, but was never
cross to the Uttle ones, and how he did not forget to go out and
buy them toys in the middle of the famous bombardment ; and it
wiU make you turn thoughtful as you sit under the trees. After
that, things have become too terrible for the Uttle 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 Uttle 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, bUnd 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
chfldren — innocents with hearts Uke the morning, who know nothing
of aU that is doing, and are quite content to warm themselves in
the sunhght, 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 FeuiUan-
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 hved for several years, and
gave shelter for a time to the proscribed General Lahorie. The
site has been greatly changed. Here Victor Hugo was Ungering
one day during the siege, when he was almost struck by a bomb-
sheU. First of aU he fires out into an amusing and characteristic
burst of invective against the bombsheU ; calls it aU the names
he can think of, and asks why it, the chfld of nether heU, 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 Uttle : he was watching an appari
tion of the past. That was where the FeuiUantines 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 sheU finishes, alack ! what the pavement had begun.
That is where the sparrows used to peck the mustard-flower, and
the httle birds picked quarrels with one another. The wood used
to be fufl of gleams that were supernatural ; such trees, such fresh
air amid the quivering sprays ! Then one was a httle flaxen-poU ;
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 vofl^,
Ce passant reve. Ici son ame s'envola
Chantante, et c'est ici qu'^ ses vagues pruneUes
Apparurent des fleurs qui semblaient etemeUes.
Ici la vie etait de la lumiere ; ici
Marchait, sous le feufllage en avrfl epaissi,
Sa mere qu'fl tenait par un pan de sa robe.

266 MEMORIES AND NOTES
Souvenirs ! comme tout brusquement se derobe !
L'aube ouvrant sa coroUe k ses regards k lui
Dans ce ciel ou flamboie en ce moment sur lui
L'epanouissement effroyable des bombes.
O 1 'ineffable aurore ou volaient les colombes ! "
It is in the latter months of the cycle, those which foUow the
extinction of the Commune, that Victor Hugo's eloquence reads,
I think, most hke 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 httle in common with practical sociahsm. 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 evfl, 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 demoUtion
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 Versaflles are pounding at the Arch of Triumph, is of aU others
the moment of his deepest despondency. He denounces the burn
ing of the palaces with aU 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-kiUed into pits
of quicklime, when young and old, women and chfldren, are being
whehned 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
reaUty, urging the foUy 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 tranqufl and irresistible evidence whioh he had
known how to give to those. An instinctive hterary art of the

VICTOR HUGO 267
highest kind tells the story of the hunted mother and her dead
chfld, 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 exfle in a day when the rest of the
world is gay in June : " Alas ! aU is not over and done because
they have dug a burial-pit in the street, because a captain points
to a waU 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 mitiiiUeuse as it may chance, shooting fathers or mothers, the
lunatic, the robber, and the sick together, and because they bum
in a hurry with hme the corpses of men stiU bleeding and chUdren
still warm."
Brooding over the present horror and the future inevitable
fetribution, the poet knows not where to fix the guilt. Least of
afl wifl he blame the misguided multitude who do evfl through
ignorance, and who must be very wretched or they would not take
death so Ughtly. He wiU not even greatly blame the party of
slaughter : — " Nobody means iU ; and yet what iU is done ! " It
ends in his throwing the blame on the hostUe forces of fate, " the
venomous swarm of impalpable causes," the " gulf," the " abyss,"
the " void," the elemental principles of evfl 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
seK-exfle 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 tumed his seventieth year, and his strength of
body and mind showed no sign of abatement ; whfle
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 tiU 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, vrith 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 vsdth 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, vsdth 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, aUowed,
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 politics of the hour ;
much with memories and anecdotes of his youth ;
some with generahzed encouragement and advice to
juniors ; more savoured of the same habitual blend
of grandiose ideahst 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 myseK it hap
pened that Madame Drouet was aUing 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, shppered and evidently
anxious, and with a manner of the kindest courtesy
gave me the best part of an hour to myseK. Now, I
each time asked myseK, shaU I have the good luck to
get into touch vrith any other than the semi-pubhc,
the expected and almost traditional Hugo with whom
I had so far become acquainted ? WeU, whether it
were my fault or not, the range of subjects and the
personahty 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 aU 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 Enghsh
people had with his party in French politics, and how
we were disposed to count the downfaU 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 fiU the pages of V Annee Terrible. The
name of Swinburne being mentioned, he showed
himseK informed concerning and gratified by the devout
homage rendered him, coupled with denunciations
of the faUen Empire as ferocious as his own, by that
then youngest and most dazzhng 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 hfelong fulminator
against kings and priests and conquerors and oppressors,
and aU the cruelties and tyrannies and treacheries

VICTOR HUGO 271
of the world, could have left many things that deserved
his anger stUl 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 mUitary defence of Paris. General
Trochu {Participe passe du verbe trop choir, as by a
ponderous enough pun he has somewhere caUed him)
came in for a fuU share of contempt : and then the poet
went on to dUate 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 baUoons from the beleaguered
city to the greatest height possible above the Prussian
Hnes, a height beyond the reach of their artUlery :
platforms should have been swung in the air from
between pairs or groups of such baUoons ; 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 bum 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 futUe enough ; yet his manner and
language in describing it combined, I remember, the
apocalyptic wdth the famihar 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 baUoon was to pass out of
date : how aircraft would within haK 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 dovsoi from them such a rain of
ghastly corrosives, twenty-fold more concentrated than
those of his dreams, as would instantaneously bhght
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 himseK
and the last great world-poet and sage before him,
Goethe, in the matter of patriotism. A feeling of
rivahy 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 V Annee Terrible above abridged
abundantly shows) a generous admiration, nor had his
furious and weU- justified hatred of nineteenth-century
Prussia and her rulers extinguished it. But for
Goethe, who in his view was a German vrithout 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 httle, of a German. Love of humanity,
Hugo vowed, which did not begin at home was worth

VICTOR HUGO 273
nothing, Cosmopohtan 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 d' Arc aurait regarde
Messaline." I have ever since carried with me the
memory of this typical Hugonian pronouncement,
and of the fuU, soft, authoritative and serenely un-
chaUengeable tone in which he uttered it.
The master hved and wrote for some fifteen years
after that date, and naturaUy 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 faUed to seek his
hospitahty again. I wonder whether his appeased
spirit may now be hovering over his beloved city,
confirmed in aU his transcendental faiths and fore
sights by the retribution, outdoing his own direst
imprecations and most exulting prophecies, which in
the fuUness 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
hkely owes its preservation to the fact that I gave it,
soon after it was vsrritten, to a friend for her coUec
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 vsriter 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-hiU fight for the estab
hshment of a sane and moderate repubhc in France.
It was in the winter of 1873-4 that I first met him,
going by appointment to caU on him at his modest
quarters in the Rue Montaigne. I had tUl then never
seen him either in the tribune or elsewhere. From
his reputation as the most impassioned of combatant
pohtical orators and leaders — or, as his enemies had
274

l:&on gambetta . 275
it, the wUdest of demagogues — I had expected to
find in him a typical, high-strung, restlessly excitable
and volatUe son of the South. It was therefore vrith
some surprise that I found, instead, a substantial
rubicund person, occupying sohdly the middle of a
broad settee, who welcomed me with quiet geniahty
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 Govemment in July. But in his own rooms
and to his Enghsh 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-pohtical 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 reahzing what I had not at aU known
when I went in, that here was a man who, intense
as might be the strain throvsoi on the energies and
resources of his being by the daily strife of pohtics,
had also outside of politics a richly furnished mind
and interests unusuaUy 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 tvrice I heard him speak in pubhc debate at
VersaiUes, once or twice at semi-private pohtical
gatherings of his supporters. More often, that is
perhaps four or five times, I saw him in the character
of host at his ovm breakfast-table, and about as many
times as chief guest at the evening parties of that
most zealous and cordial of pohtical entertainers,
Madame Edmond Adam.
At Versailles, looking dovni from the gallery on to
the floor of the Chamber and watching him shoulder
his way, geniaUy 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 vrith a different persuasiveness
or impressiveness or familiarity of gesture and accost,
I am not sure but that I have been more impressed
vrith 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 fuUy
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 aU enkindled and transformed,
how the great head and mane of hair would be flung
back, the hand be thrust forth in sweeping, dominatmg
gestures of denunciation or command, the voice roU
out rich and clear in thundering periods of prophecy

LllON GAMBETTA 277
or argument or appeal or menace, tfll the ranks of
his enemies would seem visibly to quiver before the
storm hke 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 pohtical or Press gathering (can it have been
of the staff of the Republique FranQaise ?). 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 repubhque universeUe ? 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 ovm republic firmly, and in so doing
to avoid above aU things bringing fresh dangers on
themselves by interfering vrith the politics of their
neighbours. To enforce these two joint contentions
had become, vrith 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 hve on
terms of peace and respect with aU her neighbours,
her late despoiler included, untU such time as she

278 MEMORIES AND NOTES
should be herseK again. The wisdom and statesman
ship as weU 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,
pohtics were of course always in the air, and from
time to time one of his special heutenants, de Freycinet
or SpuUer or ChaUemel-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
pohtical. 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 modem literature he loved both
the great classics and the great romantics, but had
little appetite for the then new and aggressive school
of reahsts. 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 himseK, who struck me as hitting the nail
precisely on the head when he declared that Zola
was under a mere delusion in imagining himseK a
reahst ; 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 squahd 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 reeoUection 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
m Mohere'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 brflhantly
inteUigent to boot, could be very imperf ectly 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 frangaise.
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
aUy suspicious groups which it included, were seconded
to admiration by the sagacious and single-minded
goodwiU of the host, and stUl more by the social
charm and tact of his vrife, a woman as cultivated as
she was handsome and gracious. There too the
atmosphere, though mainly political, was hterary and
artistic as weU. My own chief original passport to
the lady's notice and hospitahty had been my interest
in Greek art and hterature. 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 fossflized
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 aU
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 OAvn 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 whfle 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, K
not amity, vrith 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 pohcy as " Bismarckism," and not only their
pohtical 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 hterary enterprise of her own, the Nouvelle Revue.
Here is a document, hitherto unpublished, which
may serve to iUustrate that attitude of Gambetta

LfiON 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, stfll young
diplomatist who had been untU 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 maU-boats proceeding round Cape Malea to
Trieste. An invitation to dinner for both of us at
the Enghsh 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 maU-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 coUision
with an English cargo ship at three o'clock in the
morning and gone down hke a stone vrith absolutely
every soul on board. Thus we two had had as narrow

282 MEMORIES AND NOTES
an escape for our hves 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 hfe, and made much of me accordingly when I
went to carry out some studies at Berlin the next
year. Talking incidentaUy 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 vsrrote 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 aU his confidence in the good
sense of his fellow-countrymien to keep him from
trembUng 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 CHEE MONSIETJB CoLVHT, 
Je vous suis extremement reconnaissant de la lettre si interes-
sante que vous avez bien voulu m'ecrire. J'avais depuis deji
longtemps le pressentiment tres vif qu'au deli des Vosges on savait

LfiON GAMBETTA 283
In writing to Gambetta as I did I had not at aU
realized the extent to which he was making it his
own duty and business to inform himseK at first hand
of the state of pohtical and mUitary affairs in Germany.
In his reply he naturaUy does not give me the least
hint of the fact, which has since come out, that he had
actuaUy himseK, barely a month before the date of
my letter, spent a fortnight incognito in the enemy's
country observing and studying these matters for
himseK. 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 I'ombre, qu'fl
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 fl sera donne aux hommes de bonne volonte,
animes de sages idees hberales et progressives, de donner k tous
ceux qui au deli 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, Veufllez croire k mes sentiments devoues,
' LfioN Gambetta,
' 35, Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin,
' Paris, 11 October, 1877.'
t The circumstances of this tour are fuUy related by Gambetta
in a letter to Madame Adam dated September 20 and pubhshed
in the sixth volume of her Souvenirs (Nos Amities Politiques
avant I'abandon de la Revanche, Paris, 1908, pp. 388-393). In
the course of the next year, 1878, pourparlers for a formal and
pubhc 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 mihtary coup d'etat and attempt at mon
archical restoration which had been generally expected
to foUow. 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 Repubhcan
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
aU 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 behaK of the

L:&0N GAMBETTA 285
domestic and foreign policies he thought wise. Mean-
whfle 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
hospitahty 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 aU except the very nearest of his intimates
— ^the existence of the tie which had been through aU
those strenuous years the governing fact and secret
inspiration of his hfe. Since one of his friends * has
made pubhc the story of his relations with Made-
moiseUe Leonie Leon, and the determined seK-abnega-
tion which kept that devoted woman from consenting,
untfl ahnost the very end, openly to share the hfe
which aU 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 Coeur de Gambetta, 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 unKorm and
level kind pleasantly famUiar 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 traveUer of moderate powers :
not on that grander scale where every inlet amounts
to a bight and every projection to a promontory.
My interlocutor agreed vrith me to the fuU, 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
fuU of contrast, of discovery, of aUurement. 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 OP FRANCE

287

ment you find in its surprises, the more poetry in its
secrets. Your eye delights to hnger 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 f oUow out the
exploration on foot, and then that even-seeming dis
tance breaks up and complicates itseK 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 K

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 hne and learn aU its branchings.
Do you want peace ? — in the recesses of the bays you
shaU 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
wiU 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 whoUy 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 f uUer note, and changed
into the sound of waves close at hand. At night, K
you have chmbed to some windmfll or high place to
take the freshness and the moonhght, a streak of
sflver far off over the darkness of the country may
teU 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 most enchanted sea. My friend
suggested that I should be weU rewarded K I tried
the coast of the French CornwaU — Cornouailles, Cornu
GaUiae, 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 foUovring 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 httle 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 hohday
ground, and receives its contingent of tourists as
regularly as Switzerland or the Rhine, stifl curiosity
or convenience so guides the main body of these that,
whfle 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 aU 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 raUway 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 aU.
To see the Pointe du Raz, you must travel some thirty
miles due west of Quimper, over a heathy region with
the sea not far off on either hand, and take up your
quarters at the httle 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 perUous, 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 hUl ; a mile of weU-built jetty or sea-waU 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-waU 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 saUs, 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 Ul 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 himseK 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 aU 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 vrife, K you wUl let her, vriU 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 hfe, and after you
pass from among the innumerable stone waUs 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 hke 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 strildng in the forms of
some chffs 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
hchen-stained granite, in the crevices of which only a
few sea-pinks and tufts of samphire find soU 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 dovpn 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 gramte taking wilder

AT THE LAND'S END OF FRANCE 293
and wflder forms, the ridge with its chaos of heaped
rocks narrowing and narrowing, until at last you
squeeze your way between two boulders, and find
yourseK at the end of aU 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
hne of bay that ends in the long spit of Penmarc'h.
To the north, K 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 hne 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
wiU be struck by what hes 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 itseK again and again.
One, two, three, great fortresses of black and battered
rock appear in hne out to sea at intervals of haK a
mfle 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 hghthouse, lying upon the sea about five mfles
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 enguKed, stretches out for near six leagues west.
The low island with the hghthouse is caUed 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 soU rises httle
more than ten feet above the sea, and not a tree
grows on it. The island has a smaU 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 aU their money away, and are haK
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 thrKtless, 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 hfe, and aU 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 hghthouses, but nothing can prevent
the deadly Chaussee des Seins, as they caU 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 fuU of fish, so that smacks pass to and fro con
tinuaUy 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 httle
and the sea so great ! " And he has proverbs which
say, " No man passes the Raz vrithout 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 vrild weather that the place is most itseK and
should be seen. Then the whole weight of the Atlantic
comes crashing against the granite juts and buttresses ;
then the caves re-beUow, and the seas storm the cliffs,
and dense foam drives over the plateau, and a man
cannot hear himseK nor stand. This I have never
seen, but only how the Raz looked on a summer's
day when the air was stUl, with a sense of distant
thunder, and the quick hzards came peeping and
shpping 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 vrith the force of a
cataract, but smoothly untfl it met the current, when
it broke into a sudden race vrith 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 vrith leap and fling;
cormorants vrith their necks out flew their straight
low flights ; the sea-guUs wheeled and caUed, Pre
sently the swing of the tide grew slacker ; there was
a haK hour when the sea ebbed confusedly aU 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 stfll
air ; but the sight had a thrill in it, and made one think
of aU 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 avpfulness of the coast, the perU 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 fufl
of bulrushes in a gloomy vaUey. The bay is caUed
La Baie des T repasses. 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 teU 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 behef, as it is said to exist among the people to
this hour, is very hke what we find recorded by Pro
copius thirteen hundred years ago. Hear Procopius,
m Holcroft's spirited Enghsh : — " 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 viUages 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 feUowe conductor, and at
midnighte they finde the door opened, and hear a softly
Voice caUing 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 vrith 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 rovring
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 SaUes but rovring only. And they instantly
land their Fare, and are gone away vrith their Boats
suddenly grown hght, and svrimming with the current,
and having aU 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 heU 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 sUent host by his hbation of blood : there is
heard the waihng clamour of shades that flit with a
thin cry." When Claudian writes thus of the mouth
of heU, it seems almost as if he too had heard of such
traditions as linger stiU 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 identffy
these places with other allusions of ancient writers.
Suffice it that here, even in the stUlest summer, we
find a speU that works upon us strangely — how much
more then upon the storm-beaten imaginations of
those who live and die, vrith awe handed down from
generation to generation, amid the sights and soimds
of the place.
A stiU stronger experience of gloom and desolateness
is in store for one at another point of the coast. If
the reader wfll look at the httle map farther back, he
wfll see that the Bay of Audierne is terminated at
the south-east by a point caUed 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 aU 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 gulhes 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 mUes 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 coifld 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 JeweUers' Street, her almost
mdependent 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 hghthouse, three or four squahd
fisher-hamlets of a dozen houses each, the remains of
haK a dozen churches, a few fragments of tower and
crenelation, the gables of a few faUen houses, and
many teU-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 dovsmfaU so close within
man's memory. The first blow to the prosperity
of Penmarc'h was struck by the Enghsh, who descended
here ia 1404 under Admiral WiKord, 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 simUar chances the citizens tried fortifying
private houses and churches ; nevertheless they were
continuaUy 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
knovm. 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 himseK
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 finaUy trafled
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
mmgling 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 himseK just out of reach
of the waves. It was no very great gale, but the painter
caUed out to them to mind or the spray would wet them.
The words were scarcely out of his mouth when from
a guUy 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 knovm. 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 narrovring towards either horizon —
clouds — ^films — how shall one caU those luminous
fleeces spanning the firmament, that magic of amber
flame and thin-dravni 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
vrith 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
hghts, 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 svrift
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 deathhness upon the place. On the
thinnest of the sand the narcotic thorn-apple {Datura
stramonium) put forth its long bells, pure white and
fantastically flve-folded, from among its thick grovd)h
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 chffs, and places —
Where beyond the extreme sea-waU, and between the remote sea-
gates.
Waste water washes, and taU 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
eUe chose for his fortress, and whither he trailed his
tliree hundred boatloads of plunder from Penmarc'h,
For five years he was master of the town and island.
Prom those five years, which saw the ruin of so many
neighbouring places, the prosperity of Douarnenez
seems to have begun. It has graduaUy 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 itseK. 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 sohdly buflt of stone, vrithout a thought
of the picturesque ; their rows of plain square piercings
make them look hke chfld's houses. One long street
streams dovsm a hiU 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 smaUer 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
smaU artificial harbour buUt in the innermost nook of
the bay. " It is difficult," vsrrote 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 iU kept than
Douarnenez, despite the prosperity and rich trade of
its inhabitants. The want of pohce, the want of order,
allows rotten sardines and decomposing brine to be
flung into the street ; it is impossible, even in winter,
to smeU fouler smeUs 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 OP FRANCE 305
ways, innocent and offensive. AU the grov^n 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 aU the
young girls are employed in the factories, on the various
processes of preparing, cleaning, preserving, and
packing the fish. The patient mothers Avith 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
chfldren. 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 vrith their rings of dark or yeUow hair
escaping from under the layers of close caps that are
put on them. Girls and boys ahke, the monkeys, wiU
stretch out their hands to you with a peremptory
"Donnez-moi un sou;" not that they much expect
one, and vriU send you on your way vrith a cheery
guttural " Bon- jour " whether they get it or no, and
then faU 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 demorahzed race. Husbandmen who have
tumed fishers, Bretons who have ceased to be primitive

306 MEMORIES AND NOTES
without becoming civUized, traders newly enriched,
they have no stedfast character or traditions, and
care chiefiy to make money out of the stranger whfle
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 smaU harm in that — but waste brine from the
salting, waste ofl from the pickhng, spoiled bait from
the fishing, and aU 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 aU these drawbacks wiU be nothing to the
traveUer 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 hUl-ranges to the
bay, the country slopes dovsm with alternations of
character the most singular. Barren moorlands, often
partitioned vrith great banks and hedges, yet growing
nothing vrithin these divisions but gorse, fern, and
heather, are terminated above the sea by black precipi
tous chffs. Between these tongues of moorland, and
dividing them, come vaUeys the greenest that you
ever saw, with meadows of lush grass and gahngale,
and osier-beds and fields of grain and hemp, and
burdened orchards, and homesteads hidden among
great clumps of ehns ; and at the sea such vaUeys are
terminated by level lengths of sand, in which you wiU
find not the tenderest sheU once broken. And so the
whole shore of the bay is a succession of wUd chffs
alternating with perfect sands, the length of each

AT THE LAND'S END OP FRANCE 307
extending generaUy for a mfle or two at a stretch.
In some places the richest inland verdure comes dovsTi to
the very sea itseK, 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 itseK, Farther on, the richest jungle of brambles,
sloes, hazels, and honeysuckles hangs upon the face of
the chff. You may sit vrith the shadow of this verdure
about your head and yom: 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, vrith its far-spread
gfldings and marbhngs 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 aU weathers. But K 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
highroads, 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 hoUow 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 windmfll
to cottage, from field to wood, nay, oftenest of aU
from nowhere to nowhere. Not one of them but will
lead you to pleasant sights, and out of one character
of soil — and vrith soil, of chmate — to another. The
stiU, marshy hoUows 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 aU, 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 hchens are of a redder gold
or a softer silver than elsewhere. The honeysuckle has
larger flowers and more briUiant berries. The black
berries are as large and rich as mulberries with us. There
are places where ferns and loosestrKe 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 aU 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, reheved by the white
of their caps and perhaps a touch of chocolate in their
aprons and of rose or yeUow in their kerchiefs. So,
too, of the men ; the peasants of these parishes wear
on holidays some three or four sleeveless embroidered
jackets, comicaUy 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 wiU none of it.
But I have spoken only of the natural sights of this
neighbourhood, and they are only haK 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 Camac ; but lesser stone monuments of the same
order are plentiful on the desolate levels of the landes,
here as in aU the rest of Brittany, and are often not very
easy to distinguish from the blocks which nature her
seK has piled and jumbled. And there are remains
to be sought for of Gaiflish oppida, and Roman camps
and feudal castles. And there are the httle 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 aU 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 aU 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 stUl 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 buUt on high
ground, and vrith their steeples of open work, in
which you can see the beUs 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 caUed
a system of imaginary revenges. One finds them
inventing a heroic past that never was ; consoling
themselves for the failures of their destiny by beautKul
fancies, and throwing a grace over their hard unhopeful
lives with romantic dreams, traditions, usages. These
extremities of the Breton CornwaU, above almost aU

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 stiU
lives, either in memory or custom, among the people,
whose ways are changing fast; but what has been
coUected in books is enough to make the whole ground
ahve to one. There is one great myth common to the
Celtic race in many places, the myth which teUs 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 itseK, 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 tovsTi 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 partiaUy 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 smaU principality in the Black Moun
tains in the sixth or seventh century. * With these data,
* I waive of necessity aU notice of the discussions which have
raged in this matter between inquirers of dififerent 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 smaU Count Gradlon who Uved
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 OP PRANCE 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 Kmg Gradlon
leapt upon his horse and rode for IKe ; 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 feU and was drovsTied, and the
waters were stayed ; and the place where she feU is
caUed 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 stiU haunts the bay,
and may be seen sitting on the rocks in the form of a
siren, a presage of Ul-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 vsTOught 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, caUed 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 ofi
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 CornwaU. 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 Airthur and his
knights that ride abroad, and take it for a sign of
coming war.

INDEX

AoBOPOLis, the, 227, 229
Seen from Lycabettus, 238
Adam, Edmond, 279
Mme. Edmond
Salon of, 275, 279-80
Souvenirs by, cited, 283n.
Tastes and PoUtics of, 280
Adventures, The, of a 'Younger Son
(Trelawny), 241
Advertisement, the demon of, 47
i£gina. 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, Sufiolk, Crabbe's poema
on, 26 ; extracts from, 28,
29
Alderton, Giles Fletcher at, 24-5
Anuaing Marriage, The (Meredith),
166, 168
Andrea del Sarto (Browning),
Browning's reading of, 84
Annie, V, Terrible (Hugo), 269, Col-
vin's review of, 254-5 <fc n.,
extracts from review, 256
Aphrodite, Head of, and Gladstone,
193, 194.
AichsBology, museum of, opened at
Cambridge, 221-3
and Excavations, 210 sq<i.
Architecture, vulgarization of, in
modem Londou, 47
AreopagiUca (Milton), referred to, by
Gambetta, 276.
"Ariel " (or " Don Juan "), Shelley's
boat, sinking of, Trelawny
on, 247-8

Aristophanes' a Apology (Browning),
80
Art, U, d'etre Gfrand-pire (Hugo), 114
Art Criticism of
Burty, 253
Colvin, 8, 48, 253
Buskin, 41 sqq.
Athena, 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, Bev. Lewis, 103
Barrie, Sir James, 151
on the Death of Meredith, 187-8
" Barry CornwaU," 89
Barrons, the, of Norwich, 160
Barton, Bemard, Poems of, 19-20,
30 sqq.
Miss, marriage of, with Fitzgerald,
34
Batifoulier, Je pire, 291

315

316

INDEX

Baudelaire, — , 255
Bayley, William Butterworth, 14
His daughter and the Indian
Mutiny, 15
Beach, The, of Falesd, (Stevenson),
149
Bismarck, Prince, and Gambetta,
projected meeting between,
283n.
Blacas CoUection, the, 213
Blach Arrow, The (Stevenson), 137
Bloomsbury, and the British Museum,
201
Black Moimtain : 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
BotticeUi, Sandro, 52
Boulge HaU, and the FitzGeralds, 34,
36
Bournemouth, R. L. S. at, 141 sqq.
Box Hill, George Meredith at, 162
I sn-
' Literary associations of, 162-4
Boys, response of, to R. L. S., 104,
124-5
Braemar, R. L. S. at, 134
BranchidsB, 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.
CoUectors' 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?i., 250

Browning, Mrs. Barrett, death of, 76
" Pen," and his father, 89
Bobert, 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 ot, 78-9, 80
Buchanan, Bobert, 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
CoUectors' 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, 64 sqq.
and Rossetti, 60, 61
Watts's Portrait of, 58
Bumey, Fanny, 164
Bvirton, F. W., drawing by, of George
EUot, 91
Burty, Philippe, Art Critic, 253-4
Letter from, on Hugo, and Col
vin's review of L'Annie
Terrible, 256 <fc n.
Butcher, Sir John George, Bt., M.F.,
167m.
Butler, Dr. Montagu, 85
Byron, Lord, and Trelawny, 240,
241, 242

Calitobnia, 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
Camac, 309
Casino, the, of Monte Carlo, A
suicide in, 113
CasteUani, coUections bought from,
for the British Museum,
213
CaterpiUar and Hen, story of, 221
Catriona (Stevenson), 57, 149
Cernuschi, — , and Japanese Art,
253
Celtic Saints, in Brittany, 312, 313
Traditions, 310 sqq.
ChaUemel-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, Uttle, attitude of, to
R. L. S., 115,124
B. 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 ou a place Uke the
Baie des Trepasses, 298
Clermont-Ferrand, R. L. S.'s adven
ture at, 110-11
CUohy, rue de, Hugo's home in, 268
CUfiord, Professor W. K., 119, and
R.L.S., 120
Cockfield Rectory, R. L. S. at, 103
Codfishery of Penmarc'h, fate of, 300
CoUections, purchased for the British
Museran, 212-13
CoUectors, Psychology of, 205-6

Colvin Family, 13, 14-15 <fc n.
James, in the Indian Mutiny, 14^15
John RusseU, and the Indian
Mutiny, 14^15 da n.
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, QTsqq.
Dissent by, from Henderson's
estimate of The Bride of
Lammermoor, 197 n.
Education Early, 12, 18
Later, 10, 18-19, 48
Early Literary joys, 16 sqq.
Early travels, 19, 41
JoumaUst days, 8, 48
Letters to and from R. L. S.
and his wife, on settling
iu Samoa, 146 sqq.
Life, home, work, and con
temporaries of, at the Bri
tish Museum, 8, 141, 143,
172-3, 201 sqq., 207
lAfe of Keats, by, 9
Love of, for Nature, 19 sqq.
Parents of, 13 sqq.
Review by, of Hugo's L'Annee
Terrible, 254; Burty on,
254^5 <& n. ; Hugo on, 255 n.;
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 <fc n.
" ConciUation or Coercion," 199
Conrad, Joseph, 152
Affinities of, with B. L. S., 151-2
on In the South Seas, by R. L. S.,
149
Coquelin, Jean (cadet), 279
Corfu, adventure at, 281
CornouaiUes, 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.
Creeting MUl, 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 <fc n., 56
DevU, 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
(B. L. S.), prototype of, 116
Dickens, Charles, Literary style of,
124
Novels of, Bume-Jones's joy in,
56, 58
Dilke, Sir Charles, on Charles Brown,
249re.
DUettanti Society, the, 216
Dr. JekyU and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson),
141

Dol, monoUth 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 (ne'e '
Austin), 159
Early Italian Poets (Rossetti),
87
East Suffolk Poets, see Crabbe, Fitz
Gerald, and GUes 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
EngUsh Accentual Stress, 183
Painting, State of, circa 1886-7,
49-50
Esterel Coast, beauties of, 288
Euphranor, by Edward FitzGerald, 11
Faery Queene, The, Colvin's
deUght in, 17-18
FeUxstowe, 25
Fenton, attempt of, on Trelawny,
243, 247
FeuiUantines, 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, 38 sqq.
and his Eu/phranor, 11

INDEX

319

Friends and friendships of, 33, 34
Poems of, 33 sqq.
John PurceU, father of Edward
and John, 34
John PurceU, brother of Edward,
34, 35-6
Fitzwilliam Museum, Colvin's Direc
torship ot, 8, 11, 221-2
GaUery at, of Casts from the
Antique, 221-2 ; Newton's
speech at opening of, 222-3
FlfisUy School, The, of Poetry (Bu
chanan), Rossetti's anger
at, 72, 75
Fletcher, GUes, 24-5
Florence, 233
Flying Victory, The, of Paionios, 219
Fontainebleau, and Fate for R. L. S.,
128
FonteneUe, 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
Francesca da Rimini (Leigh Hunt),
135
Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1, 253
Franks, A. WoUaston, 208-9
Freedom ot the Press in France,
struggle over, Gambetta's
share in, 275
French excavations at Olympia, 217
Froude, John Antony, and Carlyle,
81
FuUer, Thomas on Suffolk air, 25
Funeral Monuments in Athens, 236-7
Fynn, the brook, 22
Gaiksbobouoh, Thomas, and Land-
guard Fort, 32
Gaisford, Captain, 242
Lady Alice, 242
Thomas, Dean of Christ Church,
242

Gambetta, LSon, 254, 286
Aspects and characteristioa 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 trom, 274, 282 dk n.
Love Story of, 285
Memories of, 274 sqq.
as Statesman, 274-5, 277-8, 280
sqq.
Gamett, Dr. Richard, 207-8
George EUot, 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 dh n.
and the War, Meredith's foresight
on, 179
Gifford, W., praise by, of the Storm
Unes in Crabbe's Borough,
29
Gladstone, W. E., Characteristics of,
189 sqq.
Dominance of, over the EngUsh
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, Edraund, and B. L. S., 120,
136

320

INDEX

Gower Woodseer in The Amazing
Marriage, and R. L. S., 168
Gradlon, King, legend of, 311 dk n.,
sqq.
Graham, W., and Bume- Jones, 49, 55
Great North Road, The (Stevenson),
135, 169
Greece, Colvin's Travels in, 217 ;
Olympus, 219 ; Athens,
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, 264,
255 <fc n., 267
Haufax, Viscount, 198
Hamerton, Philip GUbert, 124
Hampstead HiU, R. L. S.'s super
latives on, 121-2
Ponds, Unes by Keats, probably
suggested by, 165
Hatherley, Lord, 35
Hawes Inn, Queensterry, R. L. S.'a
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 B. 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
CarUsle), his wife, tastes,
and guests, 77-8, 191
HoweU, Charles Augustus, and Ros
setti, 64
Rossetti's " Limerick " on, 75

Hudibras, quoted by Browning, 87^
88
Hughes, Arthur, 48
Hugo, Mme. Victor, 268
Victor, Characteristics of, 268 sqq.
Books and writings of, on ChU
dren, 114, 263-4.
Letter from, 255ra.
Lines by, on dead Prussians
floating in the Seine, cited,
262-3
on Les FeuiUantines, cited,
265-6
Maimer, 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 Prse-
Raphaelites, 61
Hyeres, R. L. S. at, verses on his
abode there, 135-6
Hymettus, 230, 238
Idylls of The King (Tennyson),
66
Hiad, Meredith's Translations from,
183, 184
and Odyssey, Gladstone's theory
on, 193-4
Imaginary Conversations (Landor),
on an adventure of Tre
lawny, 249 dk n., 250
Imagination and the Artist, 50 sqq.
In a Drear-nighted December (Keats),
written on Box HUl, 164
In Memoriam (Tennyson), 66
In the South Seas (Stevenson), two
judgments on, 149
Inchbold, Rossetti's " Limerick " on,
73
India, the Colvin famUy connection
with, 14-15 <fe 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
ItaUan poems, Bossetti's translations
of, 60

Jambs, 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 {nee Austin),
154
Death of, 153
Dramatic powers of, 160-1
FamUy 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 <fc n.
and R. L. S., 119, 152
Jenny (Rossetti), 65 ; an apprecia
tion of, 69-71 ; Unes from,
70-1
"Jerry Abershaw," tale planned by
R. L. S., 169
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, and BosweU
174
Lines by, from The Vanity of
Human Wishes, 185 dk n.
Johnston, Sir H. H., 147
Juvenal, Meredith's reference to,
183, 185 dim., 186
Juventus Mundi (Gladstone), Col
vin's criticism on, 193

Kaye, J. W., on J. R. Colvin in the
Mutiny, 15 ra.
Keats, John, at Burford Bridge Inn,
164
Colvin's " Life of," 9
Poems of, locaUties 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

KipUng, 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 <fc 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, MUe. Leonie, and Gambetta,
285
Leonnais, the, 291
Letters of Edward John Trela/wny
(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 Bossetti, 72 sqq.
Little HoUand House, its inhabitants
and habitues, 90, 93 sqq.
Little While, A (Rossetti), Stanzas
from, 65
Locker-Lampson, Frederick, as poet,
76
Lockroy, i^douard, 269
London, immensity of, 233
London Police, the, and B. L. S., 109
Lough Neagh, and the submerged
city myth, 311

322

INDEX

LoweU, J. R., 143 ; and R. L. S., 222
Lycabettus, mount, 227
Quarrying from, 234
View from, 238-9
Macaulat, Lord, Uterary style of,
124
MacMahon, Marshal, President of
the French, 254 ; and the
reactionary coup in May,
1877, 282 dk n., 284
Maison, General, 217
Malcolm, John, of PoltaUoch, CoUec
tions of, 206, 207
Mark, King, and the Midas story, 314
Marryat, Mayne Reid, and Feni
more Cooper, Colvin's early
delight in, 18
MarseiUes, associations with, of
R. L. S., 135, 139-40
Martlesham Red Lion, 22
Mason, George, 49
Maud (Tennyson), 66
Mausoleum of HaUcarnassus, the,
211
Mediterranean Islands, a talk on,
with R. L. S., 138 n.
Men6-Hom, legend of, 314
Melbury Road, Watts's later home
in, 97
Meredith, George, Appreciation of,
slow but emphatic, 173, 179
at Box HiU ; Memories of, 162 sqq.
Characteristics of, 165, 167, 186
Conversation ot, 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 HUl, 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, iUustrations
of, 184
Meurice, Paul, 269
Midas, King, Story ot, aa told of
King Mark, 314
Middlemarch (George EUot), 92
MiUet, J. F., 52
MiUais, Sir J. E., Paintings by, 45 ;
Trelawny's Ukeness in, 243-4
and the Prae-Raphaelites, 61
MUton, Areopagitica of, referred to
by Gambetta, 275
Lines from, applicable to Glad
stone in Debate, 190
R. L. S.'s deUght in, 108-9
MitcheU, WiUiam, CoUections of,
206, 207
Modem Painters, (Ruskin), 18, 41
Monckton, MUnes (Lord Houghton),
54
" Monsieur Berecchino " (E. L. S.),
115
Montaigne, rue, Gambetta's quarters
in, 274, 278
Moor, Rev. Edward, of Great Beal
ings, 35
Morris, Mrs. WilUam, 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 Souih
Seas, by B. L. S., 149
Nature, Colvin's Love of, 19 sqq.

INDEX

323

Naworth, the Howards at, and their
company, 77-8, 191, 192
NeUtchka, the, of R. L. S.'s letters,
114, 115, 124
Nelson, Admiral Lord and Lady
Hamilton at Box HiU, 164
New Arabian Nights (Stevenson), 167
New Poema (Stevenson), 140 ra.
Newfoundland Codfisheries and Pen
marc'h, 300
Newman, Cardinal J. H., 54
Newton, Mrs. Charles {nee 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 Csists in FitzwiUiam
Museum, 222-3
and Trelawny, 240, 242
Visit of, to Olympia, 216 sqq.
Niagara, FaUs of. Rapids below,
Trelawny's Swim across,
241
Night Thoughts (Young), 195-6
Nimrud, Excavations at, 210
North British Eeview, Jenkin's arti
cles in, 156
"North-West Passage," The, MU-
lais's likeness ot 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 ot, 246-7
Olympia, German excavations at,
216 sqq.
Omar Khayyam, the Rubaiyat ot,
FitzGerald's version ot, 36-
7
Opalstein, in Talk and Talkers pro
totype of, 133
Ordered South (Stevenson), 121
Orr, Mrs. Sutherland, on Browning's
manner, 79
OrweU, River, 32

Pall Mall Gazette, Colvin's Art
criticisms in, 48
Paris, V. Hugo in, 254, 267-8 sqq. ;
during the Siege, 263-9
ParneU, Charles Stewart, Gladstone's
famous phrases on, 199
Parth6non,the(«ee also Elgin Marbles),
first glimpse of, 227
Seen trom 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
PenteUcus, 230
Marble ot, 234
Playford, Notable dweUers 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-RaphaeUte 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 ita habiiuis, 90
sqq.
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (Brown
ing), 79
Prince Otto (Stevenson), 137
Private CoUectors and Museums, 205
Procopius, cited on the Baie des
Tr^pass^s, 297-8
Procter, Mrs., and Browmng, 89
Public Buildings, Watts's mural
decorations of, 95-6
PurceU famUy, the, 34
QuiMPEE, 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.
Records of Shelley, Byron, dkc. (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's
obsession with, 280 : Gam
betta's policy on, 277-8, 280
Ricliard 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 BaUad ot, 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
Mra. Dante Gabriel, death of, 61 ;
poems buried with, ex
humed and published, 63-5
aqq.

Rossetti, WiUiam 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. Corentin, 312, 313
St. Gaudens, Bronze Relief by, of
R. L. S., 142
St. Gu^nnol6, 312, 313
St. Ronan, 313
Salamis, Island of, 227, 230, 238, 239
Salting, George, coUections of, 206-7
Salvini as " King Lear," 84
Samoa, Life and death in, of R. L. S.,
145 sqq.
Samson Agonistes (Milton), Unes
from, declaimed by R. L. S.,
108-9
Sardine Trade, at Douarnenez, 303
sgq.
Sargent, J. S., portrait by, of R. L. S.,
142
SavUe aub, the, and R L. S., 119-21
Scottish West Coast, grandeur of, 288
Scott, Sir Walter, works of, 66 ;
artistry of, 16-17, 26 ;
Colvin's early deUght in,
16—18 ; the Bride of Lammer
moor by, 197 dk ra.
Scott, WiUiam BeU, 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, Chaus3(5e des, 294, 295
lie des, 294, 296

INDEX

325

Seven Lampa of Architecture (Ruskin),
41
Severn, Ann Mary (Mrs. Charles
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
SheUey, 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
ShUleto, 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 ot Colvin, 8, 11,
43, 103
Smart, Christopher, stanzas by, 83
Somers, Virginia, Countess (race
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 dk n.
Sons, The, of Usnach (de Vere), 54;
lines from, 55ra. ; letter on,
trom Burne-Jones, 55
Southey, Robert, 250
Souvenirs (Mme. Adam), 283ra.
Spartali, Miss Mary, 63
Spenser's Faery Queene, Colvin's
delight in, 17-18
SpuUer, 278
Sport, Colvin's early love of, 17-18,
23-4
Stephen, Mrs. LesUe
the first 172 ; the second, ib.
Stephen, Sir LesUe, 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
CoUaboration 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 ot, 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 ot, 142
Roamings of, in search of
health, 131 sqq., further
wanderings, 144-5, lite in
Samoa, 146, letters thence,
147-8, death, 148
and the Savile Qub, 119-21
Spell ot, 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-

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 dk ra.
When in Samoa, Colvin's criti
cisms, 149-50
Written conversations with, in iU
ness, 143-4
Stone-breaker, the, and Ruskin, 44,
Story, WUliam 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 RedcUffe, Lord, and
archaeology, 210
Submerged City, Celtic myth of,
34 sqq.
Suffolk, Air of, FuUer on, 25
Literary Interests and Associa
tions, of, 16
Notable folk of, 24, 25 sqq., 30 sqq.,
34, 35-7, 159-60.
Scenery ot, 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 HoUand House,
90 sqq.
Sunday Tramps, the, 171, 172 dr ra.
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, Alfred, 1st Lord, 54
Arthurian poems of, 66

Tersitza, ZeUa, and Trelawny,
249 <fc «., 250
Teuton and Gaul, agelong strife of,
256
Thomson, Sir WUUam (Lord Kelvin),
154
Thompson, W. A., Master of Trinity,
12
Three Colours, The, of Prae-Raphaelit-
ism (Ruskin), 44-5
Tinted Statues, reason for, 229
Tirocinium (Cowper), 13
To S. C. (Stevenson), 146 dk 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 ot, books by, and
later days of, 240-2, 247;
a meeting with, 240, 242 sqq:
Burial-place, 251
Conversation and voice of, 244 sqq.
MUlais's Ukeness ot, 243-4
Shelley's heart rescued by, 240,
247, 251
Trevelyan, G. M., book by, on Mere
dith's Poetry and PhUo
sophy, 182
Tr^pass6s, Baie des, 296 sqq.
Tristram ot Lyonesse, and lie Tris
tan, 314
Tristan, lie, Arthurian associations
of, 314; and FonteneUe,
303
Trochu, General, Hugo on, 271
Univebsal Republic, toast to ; Gram-
betta's wrath, 277
Ushant, Islands ot, 293

INDEX

327

Vacquerie, Auguste, 269
Van, Pointe de, 293, 296
Vanity of Human Wishes (Johnson's
translation of Juvenal's
tenth satire), 185 cfc ra.
Vaughan, Henry, and the British
Museum, 206
Vemon Whitford, in The Egoist,
model tor, 172
VerraU, Professor, Essay by. On the
Prose of Sir Walter Scott,
17ra.
VersaiUes, Gambetta's speeches at,
276-7
Vienna, 233
Waddington, 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
HoUand House, 90, 93 sqq.
Appearance and Characteristics
of, 95 sqq.
PersonaUty 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), Colvin's
Essay in, on D. G. Rossetti's
poems, 60, 66 ; extracts
from, 67 sqq.

Wharton, the Duke of, and th^
poet Young, 196
WheweU, WUliam, Master of Trinity,
12
Whitcombe, and the attempted
assassination of Trelawny,
247
WUding, Miss, 63
Wilford, Admiral, and Penmarc'h,
299-300
Winckelmann, and German ar-
chaslogy, 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 WiUiam Page (Lord
Hatherley), 35
Woodbridge, 13, 14 ; Uterary 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

Zeus, temple of, at Olympia, excava
tions at, visit to, 216 sqq.
Zola, EmUe, 268 ; a French criticism
on, 278-9

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