in good company 3

in good company 3

Laying the manuscript reverently beside him, he sat perfectly still

for a space and with brooding beautiful eyes. Then rising without a

word he stole silently, softly, almost ghost-like, but with short,

swift steps out of the room.

 

 

III

 

Though it was my privilege to count among my friends several personal

friends of Swinburne--notably the late Theodore Watts-Dunton, Philip

Bourke Marston, and the dearest and closest of all my friends, Mrs.

Louise Chandler Moulton--it was not until the first weeks of 1892

that I met him personally.

 

I was invited to lunch at The Pines, and the first thing that struck

me as I entered the dining-room and took the extended hand, which

was soft and limp, and had no sturdiness in the grasp, was the

singular charm and even courtliness of his bearing. Unmistakably an

aristocrat, and with all the ease and polish which one associates

with high breeding, there was, even in the cordiality with which

he rose and came forward to welcome me, a suspicion of the shy

nervousness of the introspective man and of the recluse on first

facing a stranger. It had passed in a few minutes, and I saw no

trace of it at any of our subsequent meetings, but to the last

his courtliness remained. I have seen him angry, I have heard him

furiously dissent from and even denounce the views put forward by

others, but never once was what, for want of a better word, I must

call his personal deference to those others relaxed. With him the

proverbial familiarity which is said to breed contempt, bred only

more consistent and insistent courtesy. To no one would he defer

quite so graciously and readily, to no one was he so scrupulously

courtly in his bearing, as to those who constituted the household

in which he lived. On the occasion of this first meeting with him

he talked with extraordinary animation, sitting up erectly in his

chair and moving his body or limbs stiffly and jerkily. He had not

long returned from his forenoon walk, and, if I may be pardoned

so far-fetched a comparison, he was like a newly-opened bottle of

champagne, bubbling and brimming over with the buoyant, beady, joyous

and joy-giving wine of morning. Watts-Dunton, always generously

ready to interest himself, and to endeavour to interest others, in

the work of a young writer of ability, was anxious to talk about my

friend, Richard Le Gallienne. He might as well, by making a stopper

of his open hand, have tried permanently to prevent the overflow of

the champagne bottle which I have used for the purpose of a fanciful

comparison. The moment he withdrew his hand, the instant he ceased to

speak of Le Gallienne, Swinburne, as represented by the newly-opened

bottle, was bubbling over again about his walk. The wine of it was in

his veins and seemed to have intoxicated him.

 

“There is no time like the morning for a walk!” he declared, turning

to me with enthusiasm. “The sparkle, the exhilaration of it! I walk

every morning of my life, no matter what the weather, pelting along

all the time as fast as I can go; and it is entirely to my daily walk

that I attribute my perfect health.”

 

On hearing that I, too, was a great, as well as a fast walker,

Swinburne looked me up and down challengingly, and said with a smile

that was almost like a merry boy’s:

 

“Yes! but I think I could outwalk you, and get there first, for

all your six feet!” Then, turning to Watts-Dunton, he apologised

playfully for having monopolised the talk, and said, “Now tell me

about your young poet. His is certainly the most beautiful poet-face

since Shelley’s.”

 

Watts-Dunton replied by reading some extracts from a “Note on

Swinburne” which Le Gallienne had contributed to _Literary Opinion_,

Swinburne listening with downbent head meanwhile. When Watts-Dunton

had made an end of it, and Swinburne had expressed his appreciation,

the latter inquired how I first came to know Le Gallienne, and

learning that when I was acting as the Editor of the English edition

of _Lippincott’s Magazine_ I had, in that capacity or incapacity,

accepted one of Le Gallienne’s first published articles, _The Nature

Poems of George Meredith_, he asked if I knew Sir J. M. Barrie, who

he considered had been much influenced by the author of _The Ordeal

of Richard Feverel_.

 

“Only slightly,” I answered. “I suggested, in fact organised a

dinner to dear old F. W. Robinson, in whose magazine _Home Chimes_

much of the early work of Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, Zangwill, Eden

Phillpotts, G. B. Burgin, and many others, who have since come into

their own, appeared. Jerome took the chair and Barrie the vice-chair,

and the dinner was something of a record in the list of distinguished

men present, and was, I believe, one of the few functions of the sort

of which an account appeared in the _Athenæum_. It was there I first

met Barrie.”

 

“Robinson of _Grandmother’s Money_,” cried Swinburne in an ecstasy

of enthusiasm. “You have mentioned the name of one of the very salt

of the earth, and one of the dearest friends of both of us here.

We contributed to the first number of _Home Chimes_. Watts-Dunton

wrote a noble Sonnet of Greeting, and I printed my Sonnet _Near

Cromer_ there. His novels, I grant, though eminently readable, as

the reviewers say, are not great. Unlike Dr. Gilbert’s, they do not

dovetail. Finishing one chapter, you are not restless and uneasy till

you have read the next, and that is a fatal defect in a novelist.”

 

Speaking of Robinson and _Home Chimes_ reminded Swinburne of the fact

that it was in that unfortunately named and defunct magazine that he

had seen some of the best work of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind

poet, concerning whom I had contributed an article to the current

number of the _Fortnightly Review_. This article Swinburne had read

and wished to discuss, for, whereas my friendship with Philip Marston

was not of long standing, he had known the blind poet since the

latter was a lad of fourteen, and on the day after Philip’s death

had written a memorial sonnet which was subsequently printed in the

_Athenæum_.

 

Swinburne’s remarks upon the subject of my article--though I need

hardly say I have forgotten no word of what he said--I pass over,

but what I must not pass over is the witness these remarks bore to

his extraordinary memory and to his equally extraordinary method

of reading. Reading, in fact, is not the word. Had he parsed the

article, schoolboy wise, sentence by sentence, he could not more

effectually have mastered it; had he dissected it, part by part,

surgeon-like, he could not more completely have torn the heart out of

the matter.

 

Obviously Swinburne could only have read the thing once, yet had I,

the writer, been called upon, even while it was fresh in my memory,

to pass an examination on this very article, I doubt whether I

should have known half as much of it as he. Hearing him thus deliver

himself upon a casual contribution to a periodical, which, by reason

of his love and friendship for the blind poet with whom the article

dealt, had chanced to interest him, I could understand how his single

brain had been able to deal illuminatingly with so vast a volume of

literature as he had from time to time passed under review. His power

of concentration, and of pouncing, hawk-like, upon what seemed to him

to be memorable or salient, as well as his ability to recollect all

he had read, must have been extraordinary.

 

A more exhaustive summing up--not, I admit, of the evidence on both

sides, but of the evidence which appealed to his individual judgment,

his individual imagination, and his individual taste--I have never

heard. Prejudiced as he was, however, in favour of Marston, he would

not go so far as Rossetti, for his last word on the subject was:

 

“When Gabriel spoke of Philip’s poem, _The Rose and the Wind_, as

‘worthy of Shakespeare in his subtlest lyrical mood,’ he let his

personal affection run away with his critical judgment, and his

verdict must always be discounted by the fact that Philip was the

aptest pupil in the School of Poetry in which Rossetti was the

acknowledged master. Watts-Dunton is a much surer guide, and when

he said that ‘So perfect a lyric as _The Rose and the Wind_ should

entitle Marston to a place of his own, and that no inconsiderable

one,’ he said the true word, the deserved word, and the word which I

do not think anyone will have the hardihood to dispute.”

 

 

IV

 

When next I met Swinburne, nearly twelve months had gone by, and, in

spite of the eager way in which at our first meeting he had talked of

the men and women and things within his own mental horizon, I should

not have been in the least surprised to find that he had practically

forgotten me. I do not say this in any spirit of mock modesty, but

because I remembered that, at that first meeting, I had mentioned,

in the course of conversation, a book by a certain author who to my

knowledge had been a visitor to The Pines on several occasions, and

so must personally have been well known to Swinburne.

 

“Oh, really!” he said. “Yes, now that you mention it, I believe that

someone of that name has been so good as to come and see us. I seem

to recall him. And I seem to remember hearing someone say that he had

written something, though I don’t remember exactly what. So he has

published a book upon the subject of which we are talking. Really? I

did not know.”

 

This was said with perfect courtesy, and without the remotest

intention of administering a snub either to me or to the literary

reputation of the writer in question. It meant no more than that

Swinburne lived so apart from the rest of the world, had such power

of detachment, and kept so habitually the company only of his books

and of his peers, that the personality of the rest of us left no

impression on him.

 

On this occasion, only Watts-Dunton, Miss Teresa Watts, his sister,

Swinburne, and myself were present, and the talk turned at first upon

William Rossetti, with whom, in his home at St. Edmund’s Terrace,

Regent’s Park, I had spent an hour or two on the previous afternoon.

Both Swinburne and Watts-Dunton were interested to hear news of their

old friend whom both regretted seeing so seldom. They plied me with

innumerable questions in regard to his health, his plans, even in

regard to trivial details about his home life, not omitting mention

of his sister Christina’s beloved cat “Muff,” and the red plush

sofa on which Shelley was supposed to have slept, the night before

his death, and that now stands in the library. Both my hearers were

touched when I spoke of Rossetti’s affectionate words about William

Morris, for whom, though “Topsy” (as he called Morris) and he had