In Good Company

In Good Company

In Good Company

Some personal recollections of Swinburne, Lord Roberts,

Watts-Dunton, Oscar Wilde Edward Whymper, S. J. Stone,

Stephen Phillips

 

Author: Coulson Kernahan

 

TO THE HON. MRS. ARTHUR HENNIKER

 

 

MY DEAR MRS. HENNIKER,

 

It is many years since we first met at the house of one whom we both

loved, whose memory we both cherish. It was that friend’s hope that

you and I should become, and should remain friends; and that the hope

has been realised has given me many happy hours--sometimes in your

company as my gracious hostess, sometimes, scarcely less closely in

your company, as a reader of your delightful and beautiful stories.

Were your gallant General--I remember how proud he was of those

stories--alive to-day, I should have asked to be allowed to dedicate

this book to the two of you. Now that--alas for the England that he

so faithfully loved, so nobly served--he is with us no more, may I

inscribe it to yourself and to his honoured memory?

 

Yours ever sincerely,

COULSON KERNAHAN.

 

 

 

 

FOREWORD

 

 

One of the subjects of these studies said in my hearing, that

“Recollections” are generally written by people who have either

entirely lost their memory, or have never, themselves, done anything

in life worth remembering.

 

To the second indictment I plead guilty, but my best excuse for the

publication of this volume is that I write while the first indictment

fails. My memory is still good, and the one thing which seems most

worth remembering in my life is my undeservedly fortunate friendships.

 

In writing of my friends and of those with whom I was associated,

I am, therefore, I believe, giving of my best. I ought to add that

these papers were penned for inclusion in a volume of frankly

personal and intimate “Recollections.” A work of that sort is the

one book of his life in which an author is allowed some freedom from

convention. That is why I hope to be pardoned should any passage,

letter, or incident in these pages seem too intimate or too personal.

 

The reason why the studies are printed separately is that the ship in

which I hope to carry the bulk of my threatened “Recollections” (if

ever that ship come to port) will be so heavily weighted a vessel,

that I am lightening it by unloading a portion of the cargo at the

friendly harbour of The Bodley Head.

 

To drop figurative language and to speak plainly, I may add that,

though there is some attempt at a more or less finished portrait in

some of my pen-pictures, that of Lord Roberts is no portrait, but

merely a chronicle. His personality, at least, is too well known and

loved to need either analysis or description.

 

The paper _When Stephen Phillips Read_, mere snapshot as it is of one

aspect of his personality, was not written for the present volume,

with which, indeed, it is hardly in keeping. I include it by the wish

of Mr. John Lane who, years hence, will be remembered as the faithful

friend, as well as the generous and discriminating admirer, of the

distinguished poet, of whose work it is his pride also to be the

publisher.

 

Mr. Lane was anxious--knowing that my friendship with the poet was

long and close--that I should write of Stephen Phillips as fully as

I have here written of some others; but it is only under impulse

that I seek to picture the inner self and personality of my friends,

and I cannot do so while the sense of loss is comparatively new. In

the case of two of whom I have thus written, many years had elapsed

before I put pen to paper.

 

At his best--as the three friends who made such unexampled and such

self-sacrificing efforts on his behalf, Sir Sidney and Lady Colvin

and Mr. Stephen Gwynn, will, I think, agree--there was something

approaching the godlike in Stephen Phillips. Of what was weak, and

worse, in him I need not here speak, since, because he so loathed

hypocrisy, he hid it from none.

 

One day I hope to show Stephen Phillips as he really was, and as

not many knew him. I have heard him described as a man of brooding

and morbid aloofness. There is truth in the description, but it

is equally true to say that, at times, he could be as healthily

jovial and unconstrained, as high-spirited as a happy schoolboy. His

exquisite and extraordinary sense of humour was--I had almost written

his “salvation,” and that not only under success which, coming early

in life, might well have turned the head of a smaller man, but also

in adversity which, when it came, was as crushing as his success had

been complete. When this adversity, when tragic unhappiness, overtook

him, he bore them with courage, and reproached no one except himself.

 

If as a poet he was at first overpraised, it is equally true that,

towards the end, and since his death, the splendour, beauty and

power of his poetry have often been underestimated. Time will set

that right, and will rank him, I believe, as a true and, within his

limits, a great poet.

 

That Stephen Phillips, the man, gave no cause for sorrow and

concern to those of us who loved him, I do not maintain, nor would

he wish me to do so, for no one was more ready to acknowledge his

weaknesses--deeply and almost despairingly as he deplored them--and

none suffered intenser agony of remorse for ill-doing than he.

 

Knowing him as I did, I unhesitatingly aver that his ideals and his

longings were noble, and that the soul of the man was good. That all

is well with him, and that he is at rest, I have no doubt. Never have

I seen such fulness of peace and such beauty on the face of the newly

dead, as when I knelt--to commend his passing soul to his Maker--by

the bed on which lay what was mortal of Stephen Phillips. All that

was weak and unworthy seemed to have fallen away as something which

never was, which never could be, a part of his true self. In death,

even his youth returned to him. As he lay there, white-robed, and

with his hair tossed boyishly over his forehead, he looked so

young that one might have thought him to be a happy and sleeping

boy-chorister, dreaming of the poet-mother whom he so loved, and to

join whom in Paradise may not his soul even then have been hastening?

 

C. K.

 

SAVAGE CLUB, LONDON.

 

 

 

 

CONTENTS

 

 

PAGE

 

A. C. SWINBURNE 1

 

LORD ROBERTS 32

 

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON AS THE “OGRE OF THE ‘ATHENÆUM’” 67

 

WHY THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON PUBLISHED ONLY TWO BOOKS 84

 

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON AS AN AMATEUR IN AUTHORSHIP AND AS A

GOOD FELLOW 102

 

ONE ASPECT OF THE MANY-SIDEDNESS OF THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 111

 

THE LAST DAYS OF THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON 126

 

WHEN STEPHEN PHILLIPS READ 139

 

EDWARD WHYMPER AS I KNEW HIM 149

 

OSCAR WILDE 189

 

S. J. STONE, THE HYMN-WRITER 236

 

 

 

 

IN GOOD COMPANY

 

 

 

 

A. C. SWINBURNE

 

Had some old Pagan slept a thousand years,

To wake to-day, and stretching to the stars

Gaunt arms of longing, called on Venus, Mars,

June and Jove, Apollo and his peers;

And heard, for answer, echoing from the spheres,

“Thy gods are gone: the gods of old are dead.

It is by Christ thou shalt be comforted,

The pitying God who wipes away all tears.”

 

Such answer had there come, deaf ears, in scorn

Had turned the Pagan, and deaf ears turn we

To other voices, on this April morn,

Since he who sang the sunrise and the sea

Shall sing no more. Deaf are we and forlorn,

The gods are dead, and dead is Poetry.

 

_April 10, 1909._