“Gin! Gin! a drop of Gin!What magnified monsters circle therein!Ragged, and stained with filth and mud,Some plague-spotted, and some with blood!Shapes of misery, shame, and sin!Figures that make us loathe and tremble,Creatures scarce human, that more resembleBroods of diabolical kin,Ghost and vampyre, demon and Jin!...”
“Gin! Gin! a drop of Gin!What magnified monsters circle therein!Ragged, and stained with filth and mud,Some plague-spotted, and some with blood!Shapes of misery, shame, and sin!Figures that make us loathe and tremble,Creatures scarce human, that more resembleBroods of diabolical kin,Ghost and vampyre, demon and Jin!...”
But a far greater poem than this,The Song of the Shirt, was also written at Elm Tree Road. “Now mind, Hood, mark my words,” said Mrs. Hood, when he was putting up the manuscript for the post, “this will tell wonderfully. It is one of the best things you ever did.” And the results justified her. The verses appeared in the Christmas Number ofPunchfor 1843, and not only trebled the circulation of that paper, but within a very short time had at least doubled Hood’s reputation, thoughEugene Aram,The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, andLycus the Centaur, had long preceded it. Probably no poem ever stirred the national conscience more deeply or created a profounder sensation. Shortly after its appearance Cowden Clarke met Hood, and has left a vivid description of his personal appearance in those last months of his life. His worn, pallid look, he says, “strangely belied the effect of jocularity and high spirits conveyed by his writings. He punned incessantly, but languidly, almost as if unable to think in any other way than in play upon words. His smile was attractively sweet; it bespoke the affectionate-natured man which his serious verses—those especially addressed to his wife or his children—show him to be, and it also revealed the depth of pathos in his soul that inspired hisBridge of Sighs,Song of the Shirt, andEugene Aram.”
THOMAS HOOD
There are many interesting points of resemblance between Hood and Lamb. Both were inveteratepunsters; each had known poverty, and had come through hard experiences that had left their marks upon them, yet had never soured them or warped their sympathies. You may use the same epithets for both: they were homely, kindly, gentle, given to freakish moods and whimsical jesting; the one was as unselfishly devoted to his sister as the other was to his wife and children; and in descriptions of Hood, as of Lamb, stress is laid on the peculiar wistfulness and sweetness of his smile. But after the East India Company had handsomely pensioned him off, Lamb had no further financial anxieties; whilst Hood had to suppress his finer gifts, and to the end of his days turn his hand to all manner of inferior but more popular work, that would enable him to keep the family pot boiling. And he was all the while fighting against disease as well as poverty. He could not afford to go into exile, like Stevenson, and lengthen his days and foster his wasting strength in a healthfuller climate. He was never rich enough to have any choice but to die in the place where he had to earn his living, and no man ever worked more manfully, or died at his post bravelier or with a more cheery philosophy.
Read the humorous preface he wrote for the volume ofHood’s Own, whilst he lay ill abed there in his St. John’s Wood house: it is the sort of humour that makes your heart ache, for you cannot forget that he was racked with pain and slowly dying whilst he wrote it. He jests about the aristocratic, ghastly slenderness of his fingers; his body, he says, may cry craven, but luckily his mind has no mind to give in. “‘Things may take a turn,’ as the pig said on the spit.... As to health? it’s the weather of the body—it rains, ithails, it blows, it snows at present, but it may clear up by-and-by”; and in conclusion he mentions that the doctor tells him, “anatomically my heart is lower hung than usual, but what of that?The more need to keep it up!” Raised up in bed, with an improvised desk across his knees, he was hard at work, writing prose and verse and knocking off grotesque little drawings, and remained, as he said, “a lively Hood to get a livelihood,” almost to his last hour. When, towards the end, his wife was trying to relieve his sufferings by putting a poultice on his emaciated body, he laughed up at her quizzically, and asked if she didn’t think “it seemed a deal of mustard for such a little meat.” He had moved into Devonshire Lodge, and was within sixteen months of his death when he wroteThe Haunted House, andThe Bridge of Sighs. “I fear that so far as I myself am concerned,” he writes to Thackeray in August 1844, “King Death will claim me ere many months elapse. However, there’s a good time coming, if not in this world, most assuredly in the next.” When he was invited next month to attend a soirée at the Manchester Athenæum, he had to decline, and added, “For me all long journeys are over save one”; but a couple of months later he had written theLay of the Labourer, for his magazine, and writing to Lord Lytton remarked that though the doctor had ordered him not to work he was compelled to do so, and “so it will be to the end. I must die in harness, like a hero—or a horse.”
CHARLES DIBDIN. 34 ARLINGTON ROAD.
His dying hours were made easy by the pension of a hundred pounds that Sir Robert Peel kindly and tactfully settled on Mrs. Hood, and one of the last things he wrote on his lingering deathbed was avalediction that breathed all of resignation and hope:
“Farewell, Life! My senses swimAnd the world is growing dim;Thronging shadows cloud the light,Like the advent of the night,—Colder, colder, colder stillUpwards steals a vapour chill—Strong the earthy odour grows—I smell the Mould above the Rose!Welcome, Life! The Spirit strives!Strength returns, and hope revives;Cloudy fears and shapes forlornFly like shadows at the morn,—O’er the earth there comes a bloom—Sunny light for sullen gloom,Warm perfume for vapour cold—I smell the Rose above the Mould!”
“Farewell, Life! My senses swimAnd the world is growing dim;Thronging shadows cloud the light,Like the advent of the night,—Colder, colder, colder stillUpwards steals a vapour chill—Strong the earthy odour grows—I smell the Mould above the Rose!Welcome, Life! The Spirit strives!Strength returns, and hope revives;Cloudy fears and shapes forlornFly like shadows at the morn,—O’er the earth there comes a bloom—Sunny light for sullen gloom,Warm perfume for vapour cold—I smell the Rose above the Mould!”
Herbert Spencer lived in St. John’s Wood for many years, at 7 Marlborough Gardens, 13 Loudon Road, and 64 Avenue Road successively. Within an easy walk of Avenue Road, at 34 Arlington Road, Camden Town, Charles Dibdin, whose memory survives inTom Bowling, passed the last years of his life. And, back in St. John’s Wood, at the Priory, 21 North Bank, in one of the numerous houses that were swept away when the Great Central Railway came to Marylebone, George Eliot lived from 1864 until 1880, when she removed to Chelsea. Before that, from 1860 till 1863, lived in a house in Blandford Square, which has also been demolished; but for nearly two years before going there she resided at Holly Lodge, which still survives, in the Wimbledon Park Road.
There is an entry in her Diary dated 6th February 1859: “Yesterday we went to take possession of Holly Lodge, which is to be our dwelling, we expect, for years to come. It was a deliciously fresh, bright day. I will accept the omen. A letter came from Blackwood telling me the result of the subscription toAdam Bede, which was published on the 1st: 730 copies, Mudie having taken 500 on the publisher’s terms—10 per cent. off the sale price. At first he had stood out for a larger reduction, and would only take 50, but at last he came round. In this letter Blackwood tells me the firstab extraopinion of the book, which happened to be precisely what I most desired. A cabinetmaker (brother to Blackwood’s managing clerk) had read the sheets, and declared the writer must have been brought up to the business, or at least had listened to the workmen in their workshop.” She wrote that month to Miss Sara Hennell, “We are tolerably settled now, except that we have only a temporary servant; and I shall not be quite at ease until I have a trustworthy woman who will manage without incessant dogging. Our home is very comfortable, with far more vulgar indulgences in it than I ever expected to have again; but you must not imagine it a snug place, just peeping above the holly bushes. Imagine it rather as a tall cake, with a low garnish of holly and laurel. As it is, we are very well off, with glorious breezy walks, and wide horizons, well-ventilated rooms, and abundant water. If I allowed myself to have any longings beyond what is given, they would be for a nook quite in the country, far away from palaces—Crystal or otherwise—with an orchard behind me full of old trees, and rough grassand hedgerow paths among the endless fields where you meet nobody. We talk of such things sometimes, along with old age and dim faculties, and a small independence to save us from writing drivel for dishonest money.”
GEORGE ELIOT. WIMBLEDON PARK.
The “we” in these entries means, of course, herself and George Henry Lewes; they formed an irregular union in 1854, and lived as husband and wife until his death in 1878. In George Eliot’s Journal and letters are a good many other references to her life at Holly Lodge, of which the most interesting are perhaps the following:
April 29th, 1859(from the Journal): “Finished a story,The Lifted Veil, which I began one morning at Richmond as a resource when my head was too stupid for more important work. Resumed my new novel” (this wasThe Mill on the Floss), “of which I am going to rewrite the two first chapters. I shall call it provisionallyThe Tullivers, or perhapsSt. Ogg’s on the Floss.”
May 6th(from a letter to Major Blackwood): “Yes Iamassured now thatAdam Bedewas worth writing—worth living through long years to write. But now it seems impossible to me that I shall ever write anything so good and true again. I have arrived at faith in the past but not faith in the future.”
May 19th(from Journal): “A letter from Blackwood, in which he proposes to give me another £400 at the end of the year, making in all £1200, as an acknowledgment ofAdam Bede’ssuccess.”
June 8th(from a letter to Mrs. Congreve): “I want to get rid of this house—cut cable and drift about. I dislike Wandsworth, and should think withunmitigated regret of our coming here if it were not for you.”
July 21st(from the Journal, on returning after a holiday in Switzerland): “Found a charming letter from Dickens, and pleasant letters from Blackwood—nothing to annoy us.”
November 10th(from the Journal): “Dickens dined with us to-day for the first time.”
December 15th(from the Journal): “Blackwood proposes to give me forThe Mill on the Floss, £2000 for 4000 copies of an edition at 31s. 6d., and afterwards the same rate for any more copies printed at the same price; £150 for 1000 at 12s.; and £60 for 1000 at 6s. I have accepted.”
January 3rd, 1860(from a letter to John Blackwood): “We are demurring about the title. Mr. Lewes is beginning to preferThe House of Tulliver, or Life on the Floss, to our old notion ofSister Maggie.The Tullivers, or Life on the Flosshas the advantage of slipping easily off the lazy English tongue, but it is after too common a fashion (The Newcomes,The Bertrams, &c., &c.). Then there isThe Tulliver Family, or Life on the Floss. Pray meditate and give us your opinion.”
January 16th, 1860(from the Journal): “Finished my second volume this morning, and am going to send off the MS. of the first volume to-morrow. We have decided that the title shall beThe Mill on the Floss.”
February 23rd(from a letter to John Blackwood): “Sir Edward Lytton called on us yesterday. The conversation lapsed chiefly into monologue, from the difficulty I found in making him hear, but under all disadvantages I had an agreeable impression of hiskindness and sincerity. He thinks the two defects ofAdam Bedeare the dialect and Adam’s marriage with Dinah, but of course I would have my teeth drawn rather than give up either.”
GEORGE ELIOT’S HOUSE. CHELSEA.
July 1st(from a letter to Madame Bodichon, on returning to Holly Lodge after a two months’ holiday in Italy): “We are preparing to renounce the delights of roving, and to settle down quietly, as old folks should do.... We have let our present house.”
One interesting memorial of the life at Holly Lodge is the MS. ofThe Mill on the Floss, on which is inscribed in George Eliot’s handwriting: “To my beloved husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this MS. of my third book, written in the sixth year of our life together, at Holly Lodge, South Field, Wandsworth, and finished 21st March 1860.”
The publication ofThe Mill on the Floss, and, in the three succeeding years, ofSilas MarnerandRomola, carried George Eliot to the height of her fame, and by the time she was living in North Bank, St. John’s Wood, she had her little circle of adoring worshippers, who, like George Henry Lewes, took her very seriously indeed. That sort of hero-worship was customary in those days, unless the worshipped one had too strong a sense of humour to put up with it. There is a passage in the Autobiography of Mr. Alfred Austin giving a brief account of a visit he paid to George Eliot. “We took the first opportunity,” he says, “of going to call on her at her request in St. John’s Wood. But there I found pervading her house an attitude of adoration, not to say an atmosphere almost of awe, thoroughly alien to my idea that persons of genius, save in their works, should resemble otherpeople as much as possible, and not allow any special fuss to be made about them. I do not say the fault lay with her.” But you find the same circumstance spoken to elsewhere, and the general notion you gather is that George Eliot rather enjoyed this being pedestalled, and accepted the incense of her reverent little circle with a good deal of complacency.
In 1878 Lewes died, and in March 1880 George Eliot was married to John Cross. They left St. John’s Wood on the 3rd of the following December and went to 4 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where George Eliot died on the 22nd of the same month.
CHELSEA MEMORIES
Coming to close quarters with it, I am not sure that, after all, Chelsea has not more to offer the literary pilgrim than even Hampstead has. Addison, Locke, Smollett, Horace Walpole, are among the illustrious names whose local habitations were once there but are no longer to be seen. Charles and Henry Kingsley spent their boyhood at their father’s rectory in Sidney Street; Daniel Maclise lived for ten years at 4 Cheyne Walk, where George Eliot died; and “Queen’s House,” No. 16 Cheyne Walk, is the house that, in 1862, Rossetti, Swinburne, William Michael Rossetti, and Meredith took as joint-tenants. Meredith soon paid a quarter’s rent in lieu of notice and withdrew from the arrangement, but Swinburne and Rossetti lived on there together for some years, and did much of their greatest work there. Swinburne was next to go, and he presently set up house with Mr. Watts-Dunton at “The Pines,” near the foot of Putney Hill, where he lived till his death in 1909. In the early seventies Mr. W. M. Rossetti married and removed elsewhere, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti stayed on in the Chelsea house alone.
Later, in the gloomy days before he went away to Birchington to die, Rossetti suffered terribly from insomnia, was ill and depressed, and a prey to morbidimaginings, but in the earlier years of his tenancy of 16 Cheyne Walk he was absorbed in his art, his house was lively with many visitors, and in his lazy, sociable fashion he seems to have been almost as happy as a man of his sensitive temperament could be. “Here,” writes Mr. Joseph Knight, “were held those meetings, prolonged often until the early hours of the morning, which to those privileged to be present were veritable nights and feasts of gods. Here in the dimly-lighted studio, around the blazing fire, used to assemble the men of distinction or promise in literature and art whom the magnetism of Rossetti’s individuality collected around him. Here Rossetti himself used, though rarely, to read aloud, with his voice of indescribable power and clearness, and with a bell-like utterance that still dwells in the mind, passages from the poems he admired; and here, more frequently, some young poet, encouraged by his sympathy, which to all earnest effort in art was overflowing and inexhaustible, would recite his latest sonnet.” He crowded his rooms with quaintly-carved oak furniture, and beautiful ornaments; he had a wonderful collection of blue china that he sometimes put on the table and recklessly used at his dinner-parties. In his garden he had “a motley collection of animals, peacocks, armadilloes, the wombat, woodchuck, or Canadian marmot, and other outlandish creatures, including the famous zebu.” This zebu was kept fastened to a tree, and Rossetti loved to exhibit it and point out its beauties with his maulstick. Mr. Knight goes on to repeat the story that was told concerning this animal by Whistler, who was at that time living at what is now 101 Cheyne Walk, and was then 7 LindseyRow. According to Whistler, one day when he and Rossetti were alone in the garden, “and Rossetti was contemplating once more the admired possession, and pointing out with the objectionable stick the points of special beauty, resentment blazed into indignation. By a super-bovine exertion the zebu tore up the roots of the tree to which it was attached, and chased its tormentor round the garden, which was extensive enough to admit of an exciting chase round the trees.” The zebu was fortunately hampered by the uprooted tree, and Rossetti made good his escape, but he would harbour the animal no longer, and as nobody would buy it he gave it away.
QUEEN’S HOUSE. CHEYNE WALK.
You get an illuminating glimpse of Rossetti’s home life in these days from that useful literary chronicle, Allingham’s Diary (Monday, June 27, 1864): “Got down to Chelsea by half-past eight to D. G. R.’s. Breakfasted in a small, lofty room on first floor with window looking on the garden. Fanny in white. Then we went into the garden, and lay on the grass, eating strawberries and looking at the peacock. F. went to look at the ‘chicking,’ her plural of chicken. Then Swinburne came in and soon began to recite—a parody on Browning was one thing; and after him Whistler, who talked about his own pictures—Royal Academy—the Chinese painter girl, Millais, &c.”
Rossetti’s wife had died shortly before he went to Cheyne Walk, and it was during his residence here that her grave in Highgate Cemetery was opened, that the manuscript volume of poems he had buried with her might be recovered, and most of its contents included in his first published book of original work.
One time and another Whistler occupied fourdifferent houses in Cheyne Walk, and No. 101 was the first of these. He had been living in lodgings, or with his brother-in-law, since he came over from America, but in 1863 he took the Cheyne Walk house, and his mother went to live there with him. It is a three-storey house, and the back room on the first floor was his studio; the river lies before it, just across the road, and he could see from his front windows old Battersea Bridge, Battersea Church on the other side of the Thames, and at night the twinkling lights of boats and barges at anchor and the flare and many-coloured glitter of Cremorne Gardens in the distance. At the end of Cheyne Walk lived the boatbuilder Greaves. “He had worked in Chelsea for years,” write Mr. and Mrs. Pennell, in theirLife of Whistler. “He had rowed Turner about on the river, and his two sons were to row Whistler. One of the sons, Mr. Walter Greaves, has told us that Mrs. Booth, a big, hard, coarse Scotchwoman, was always with Turner when he came for a boat. Turner would ask Greaves what kind of a day it was going to be, and if Greaves answered ‘Fine,’ he would get Greaves to row them across to Battersea Church, or to the fields, now Battersea Park. If Greaves was doubtful, Turner would say, ‘Well, Mrs. Booth, we won’t go far’; and afterwards for the sons—boys at the time—Turner in their memory was overshadowed by her.” Whistler and the Greaves boys were up and down the river at all hours of the day and night and in all weathers, painting and sketching, they under his tuition, or gathering impressions and studying effects of light and shadow. He was frequently in at the Rossettis’ house, and they and their friends were as frequently visiting him.
In 1867 Whistler moved to what is now 96 Cheyne Walk, and had a housewarming on the 5th of February at which the two Rossettis were present. Describing the decoration of the walls here, Mr. and Mrs. Pennell say its beauty was its simplicity. “Rossetti’s house was a museum, an antiquity shop, in comparison. The simplicity seemed the more bewildering because it was the growth, not of weeks but of years. The drawing-room was not painted till the day of Whistler’s first dinner-party. In the morning he sent for the brothers Greaves to help him. ‘It will never be dry in time,’ they feared. ‘What matter?’ said Whistler; ‘it will be beautiful!’... and by evening the walls were flushed with flesh-colour, pale yellow and white spread over doors and woodwork, and we have heard that gowns and coats too were touched with flesh-colour and yellow before the evening was at an end. One Sunday morning Whistler, after he had taken his mother to Chelsea Church, as he always did, again sent for his pupils and painted a great ship with spreading sails in each of the two panels at the end of the hall; the ships are said to be still on the wall, covered up. His mother was not so pleased when, on her return, she saw the blue and white harmony, for she would have had him put away his brushes on Sunday as once she put away his toys.”
Solitude was irksome to him, and he welcomed the motley crowd of artists and students who came in at all hours to chat with him whilst he worked. The Pennells tell a capital story of a man named Barthe, of whom Whistler had bought tapestries, and who, not being able to get his account settled, called one evening for the money. He was told thatWhistler was not in; but there was a cab waiting at the door, and he could hear his debtor’s voice, so he pushed past the maid and, as he afterwards related, “Upstairs I find him, before a little picture, painting, and behind him ze bruzzers Greaves holding candles. And Vistlaire he say, ‘You ze very man I vant: hold a candle!’ And I hold a candle. And Vistlaire he paint, and he paint, and zen he take ze picture, and he go downstairs, and he get in ze cab, and he drive off, and we hold ze candle, and I see him no more. Mon Dieu, il est terrible, ce Vistlaire!”
His studio here was a back room on the second floor, and up to that studio, on many days of 1873, Carlyle climbed to give sittings for the portrait which ranks now with the greatest of Whistler’s works. The portrait of his mother had already been painted in that same small room, and hung on the wall there whilst Carlyle was coming to life on the canvas. Carlyle was not a patient sitter. Directly he sat down he urged Whistler to “fire away,” and was evidently anxious to get through with his part of the business as quickly as possible. “One day,” says Whistler, “he told me of others who had painted his portrait. There was Mr. Watts, a mon of note. And I went to his studio, and there was much meestification, and screens were drawn, and I was not allowed to see anything. And then, at last, the screens were put aside and there I was. And I looked. And Mr. Watts, a great mon, he said to me, ‘How do you like it?’ And then I turned to Mr. Watts, and I said, ‘Mon, I would have ye know I am in the hobit of wurin’ clean lunen!’” There is a note in Allingham’s Diary, dated July 29, 1873: “Carlyle tells me he is ‘sitting’to Whistler. If C. makes signs of changing his position W. screams out in an agonised tone, ‘For God’s sake, don’t move!’ C. afterwards said that all W.’s anxiety seemed to be to get thecoatpainted to ideal perfection; the face went for little. He had begun by asking two or three sittings, but managed to get a great many. At last C. flatly rebelled. He used to define W. as the most absurd creature on the face of the earth.”
WHISTLER. 96 CHEYNE WALK.
Whilst he was at 96 Cheyne Walk, Whistler brought his famous libel action against Ruskin, won it, but was awarded only a farthing damages, and had to pay his own costs. During the progress of the suit he was having the White House built for him in Tite Street, Chelsea, but the payment of his law costs so crippled him that he had to sell it before it was ready for occupation, and to sell off also the furniture and effects of his Cheyne Walk home.
None of these things seem, however, to have affected Whistler with worse than a temporary irritation. He wrote jestingly over his door: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it. E. W. Godwin, F.S.A., built this one;” turned his back upon the scenes of his recent disasters, and went to Venice. After rather more than a year of absence, he returned to London in the winter of 1880, stayed with his brother in Wimpole Street, put up at divers lodgings, had an exhibition in Bond Street, and in May 1881 took a studio at 13 Tite Street, Chelsea, and began to be the most talked-of man of the day. “He filled the papers with letters,” write Mr. and Mrs. Pennell. “London echoed with his laugh. His white lock stood up defiantly abovehis curls; his cane lengthened; a series of collars sprang from his long overcoat; his hat had a curlier brim, a lower tilt over his eyes; he invented amazing costumes.... He was known to pay calls with the long bamboo stick in his hand and pink bows on his shoes. He allowed no break in the gossip. The carriages brought crowds, but not sitters. Few would sit to him before the trial; after it there were fewer. In the seventies it needed courage to be painted by Whistler; now it was to risk notoriety and ridicule.” When Mr. Pennell first saw him at 13 Tite Street, in July 1884, “he was all in white, his waistcoat had long sleeves, and every minute it seemed as if he must begin to juggle with glasses. For, to be honest, my first impression was of a bar-keeper strayed from a Philadelphia saloon into a Chelsea studio. Never had I seen such thick, black, curling hair. But in the midst was the white lock, and keen, brilliant eyes flashed at me from under the thick, bushy eyebrows.”
From Tite Street, Whistler presently removed to 454 Fulham Road; thence to The Vale, Chelsea, a pleasant quarter which was a year or two ago wiped off the face of the earth; and in 1890 he was back again in Cheyne Walk, at No. 21. “I remember a striking remark of Whistler’s at a garden-party in his Chelsea house,” says M. Gerard Harry, who was one of Whistler’s guests at No. 21. “As he caught me observing some incompletely furnished rooms and questioning within myself whether he had occupied the house more than a fortnight or so: ‘You see,’ he said, with his short laugh, ‘I do not care for definitely settling down anywhere. Where there is no more space for improvement, or dreamingabout improvement, where mystery is in perfect shape, it isfinis—the end—death. There is no hope nor outlook left.’ I do not vouch for the words, but that was certainly the sense of a remark which struck me as offering a key to much of Whistler’s philosophy, and to one aspect of his original art.”
By 1892, in spite of himself and his fantastic and silly posings and posturings, the world had learned to take his art seriously instead of taking him so, and when he went away that year to live in Paris his greatness as a painter had become pretty generally recognised. In 1894 he came back to London with his wife, who was dying of cancer, and after her death in 1896 he lived with friends or in lodgings, and had no settled home, until in 1902 he once again took a house in Cheyne Walk, this time No. 74, a house which stands below the street level; its front windows overlook the Thames, and it had a large studio at the back. Here Mrs. and Miss Birnie Philip went to share house with him, for his health was breaking, and he was in need of companionship and attention. But there were good intervals, when he was able to work with all his old eagerness and energy. “We knew on seeing him when he was not so well,” say Mr. and Mrs. Pennell, “for his costume of invalid remained original. He clung to a fur-lined overcoat worn into shabbiness. In his younger years he had objected to a dressing-gown as an unmanly concession; apparently he had not outgrown the objection, and on his bad days this shabby, worn-out overcoat was its substitute. Nor did the studio seem the most comfortable place for a man so ill as he was. It was bare, with little furniture, as his studios always were, and he had not usedit enough to give it the air of a workshop. The whole house showed that illness was reigning there.” Trays and odds and ends of the sickroom lay about the hall; papers, books, and miscellaneous litter made the drawing-room and dining-room look disorderly. “When we saw Whistler in his big, shabby overcoat shuffling about the huge studio, he struck us as so old, so feeble and fragile, that we could imagine no sadder or more tragic figure. It was the more tragic because he had always been such a dandy, a word he would have been the first to use in reference to himself.... No one would have suspected the dandy in this forlorn little old man, wrapped in a worn overcoat, hardly able to walk.”
He lingered thus for about a year; then the end came suddenly. On the 14th July 1903, Mrs. Pennell found him dressed and in his studio. “He seemed better, though his face was sunken, and in his eyes was that terrible vagueness. Now he talked, and a touch of gallantry was in his greeting, ‘I wish I felt as well as you look.’ He asked about Henley, the news of whose death had come a day or two before.... There was a return of vigour in his voice when Miss Birnie Philip brought him a cup of chicken broth, and he cried, ‘Take the damned thing away,’ and his old charm was in the apology that followed, but, he said, if he ate every half-hour or so, as the doctor wanted, how could he be expected to have an appetite for dinner? He dozed a little, but woke up quickly with a show of interest in everything.” But on the evening of the 17th, he suddenly collapsed, and was dead before the doctor could be fetched to him.
TURNER’S HOUSE. CHEYNE WALK.
Turner’s last days in this same Cheyne Walk werealmost as sad, almost as piteous as Whistler’s, but there is a haze of mystery about them, as there is about some of his paintings, and he had no butterfly past of dandyism to contrast painfully with the squalor of his ending. Born over the barber’s shop kept by his father in Maiden Lane, Strand, he mounted to the seats of the immortals without acquiring by the way any taste for personal adornment, or for the elegancies or little prettinesses so beloved by little artists in his home surroundings. His soul was like a star, and could not make its heaven among the dainty chairs and tables and nice wall and mantelpiece ornaments of the drawing-room. On Stothard’s advice (Stothard being one of the customers at the shaving shop) Turner’s father made him an artist; he studied under Sir Joshua Reynolds, and later, Blake was one of his pupils. Growing in reputation, he lived by turns in Harley Street, at Hammersmith, at Twickenham, and is described in middle age as bluff and rough-mannered, and looking “the very moral of a master carpenter, with lobster-red face, twinkling staring grey eyes, white tie, blue coat with brass buttons, crab-shell turned-up boots, large fluffy hat, and enormous umbrella.” From about 1815 onwards, he had a house that is no longer standing at 47 Queen Anne Street, Harley Street, and here, in 1843, when Turner was sixty-eight, a Mr. Hammersley called on him and has described (I quote from Mr. Lewis Hind’sTurner’s Golden Visions) how he “heard the shambling, slippered footstep coming down the stairs, the cold, cheerless room, the gallery, even less tidy and more forlorn, all confusion, mouldiness, and wretched litter; most of the pictures covered with uncleanly sheets,and the man! his loose dress, his ragged hair, his indifferent quiet—all, indeed, that went to make his physique and some of his mind; but above all I saw, felt (and feel still) his penetrating grey eye.”
Somewhere between 1847 and 1848 Turner strangely disappeared from his customary haunts; his Queen Anne Street house was closed, the door kept locked, and his old housekeeper, Hannah Danby, could only assure anybody who came that he was not there, and that she simply did not know where he had gone. For the next four years or so, until he was dying, no one succeeded in discovering his hiding-place. Now and then, in the meantime, he would appear in a friend’s studio, or would be met with at one of the Galleries, but he offered no explanation of his curious behaviour, and allowed no one to obtain any clue to his whereabouts. He went in 1850 to a dinner given by David Roberts, and was in good spirits, and bubbling over with laborious jokes. “Turner afterwards, in Roberts’s absence, took the chair, and, at Stanfield’s request, proposed Roberts’s health, which he did, speaking hurriedly, but soon ran short of words and breath, and dropped down on his chair with a hearty laugh, starting up again and finishing with a ‘Hip, hip, hurrah!’... Turner was the last who left, and Roberts accompanied him along the street to hail a cab. When the cab drove up, he assisted Turner to his seat, shut the door, and asked where he should tell cabby to take him; but Turner was not to be caught, and, with a knowing wink, replied, ‘Tell him to drive to Oxford Street, and then I’ll direct him where to go.’”
The fact is he was living at Cremorne Cottage,119 Cheyne Walk. He was living there anonymously; a Mrs. Booth, whom he had known many years before when he stayed at her Margate boarding-house, was keeping house for him, and he was known in the neighbourhood as Admiral Booth, a rumour having got about that he was a retired naval officer fallen on evil days. This was the time of which the father of the Greaves boys had spoken to Whistler—the days when Mrs. Booth used to come with Turner to the waterside and he would row them over to Battersea. Though all his greatest work was finished, Turner painted several pictures here; he frequently rose at daybreak, and, wrapped in a blanket or a dressing-gown, stood out on the roof, leaning over the railing to watch the sunrise and the play of light on the river opposite. He used the room on the second floor as his studio, and in that room, on the 19th December 1851, he died. Some months before his death, he was seen at the Royal Academy’s private view; then, tardily responding to a letter of friendly reproach that David Roberts had addressed to him at Queen Anne Street, he came to Roberts’s studio in Fitzroy Square. He was “broken and ailing,” and had been touched by Roberts’s appeal, but as for disclosing his residence—“You must not ask me,” he said; “but whenever I come to town I will always come to see you.” When Roberts tried to cheer him, he laid his hand on his heart and murmured, “No, no! There is something here that is all wrong.”
His illness increasing on him, he wrote to Margate for Dr. Price, an old acquaintance of his and Mrs. Booth’s, and Price, coming up, examined him and told him there was no hope of his recovery. “Godownstairs,” he urged the doctor, “take a glass of sherry, and then look at me again.” But a second examination only confirmed Dr. Price in his opinion.
It must have been at this juncture that Turner’s hiding-place was discovered. His Queen Anne Street housekeeper, Hannah Danby, found a letter left in the pocket of one of his old coats, and this gave the Chelsea address. She went with another woman and made inquiries round about Cheyne Walk till it was clear enough to her that the Mr. Booth to whom that letter was directed was none other than Turner, and acting on her information Mr. Harpur, Turner’s executor, journeyed at once to Chelsea, and arrived at 119 Cheyne Walk to find Turner sinking fast. Towards sunset, on that wintry day of his dying, he asked Mrs. Booth to wheel him to the window, and so gazing out on the wonder of the darkening sky he passed quietly away with his head on her shoulder.
A certain John Pye, a Chelsea engraver, afterwards interviewed the owner of No. 119, and learned from him that Turner and Mrs. Booth had, some four or five years before, called and taken the house of him, paying their rent in advance because they objected to giving any names or references. Pye also saw Mrs. Booth, and says she was a woman of fifty, illiterate, but “good-looking and kindly-mannered.” Turner had used to call her “old ’un,” she said, and she called him “dear”; and she explained that she had first got acquainted with him when, more than twenty years ago, “he became her lodger near the Custom House at Margate.” So small was the shabby little house in Cheyne Walk that the undertakers were unable to carry the coffin up the narrow staircase, andhad to carry the body down to it. Nowadays, the house has been enlarged; it and the house next door have been thrown into one, otherwise it has undergone little change since Turner knew it.
Whilst Turner was thus passing out of life in Cheyne Walk, Carlyle was dwelling near by at No. 24 (then No. 5) Cheyne Row, and had been resident there for seventeen years. On first coming to London in 1830, he and his wife lodged at 33 Ampton Street, Gray’s Inn Road. They spent, he says, “an interesting, cheery, and, in spite of poor arrangements, really pleasant winter” there; they had a “clean and decent pair of rooms,” and their landlord’s family consisted of “quiet, decent people.” He wrote his essay on Dr. Johnson whilst he was here, and was making a fruitless search for a publisher who would acceptSartor Resartus, which he had recently completed. Jeffrey called there several times to pass an afternoon with him, and John Stuart Mill was one other of the many visitors who found their way to the drab, unlovely, rather shabby street to chat with the dour, middle-aged Scotch philosopher, who was only just beginning to be heard of.
He fixed on the Cheyne Row house in 1834, and, except for occasional holidays, never left it until his death forty-seven years afterwards. As soon as he was settled here Carlyle wrote to Sir William Hamilton, giving him his new address: “Our upholsterers, with all their rubbish and clippings, are at length swept handsomely out of doors. I have got my little book-press set up, my table fixed firm in its place, and sit here awaiting what Time and I, in our questionable wrestle, shall make out between us.”In another letter of about the same date he writes of it: “The street is flag-paved, sunk-storied, iron-railed, all old-fashioned and tightly done up, looks out on a rank of sturdy old pollarded (that is, beheaded) lime trees standing there like giants in tawtie wigs (for the new boughs are still young); beyond this a high brick wall; backwards a garden, the size of our back one at Comely Bank, with trees, &c., in bad culture; beyond this green hayfields and tree avenues, once a bishop’s pleasure grounds, an unpicturesque but rather cheerful outlook. The house itself is eminent, antique, wainscoted to the very ceiling, and has been all new painted and repaired; broadish stair, with massive balustrade (in the old style), corniced and as thick as one’s thigh; floors thick as rock, wood of them here and there worm-eaten, yet capable of cleanliness, and still with thrice the strength of a modern floor. Chelsea is a singular heterogeneous kind of spot, very dirty and confused in some places, quite beautiful in others, abounding in antiquities and the traces of great men—Sir Thomas More, Steele, Smollett, &c. Our Row, which for the last three doors or so is a street and none of the noblest, runs out upon a Parade (perhaps they call it) running along the shore of the river, a broad highway with huge shady trees, boats lying moored, and a smell of shipping and tar.”
A note in Allingham’s Diary (1860) offers you a very clear little picture of Carlyle’s garden here, as he saw it: “In Carlyle’s garden, some twenty yards by six; ivy at the end. Three or four lilac bushes; an ash stands on your left; a little copper beech on your right gives just an umbrella to sit under when the sun ishot; a vine or two on one wall, neighboured by a jasmine—one pear tree.”
CARLYLE. AMPTON STREET.
In this Cheyne Row house Carlyle wrote all his books, exceptSartorand some of the miscellaneous essays; here he entertained, not always very willingly or very graciously, most of the great men of his day; quarrelled with his neighbours furiously over the crowing of their cocks; was pestered by uninvited, admiring callers from all over the world; and had his room on the top floor furnished with double-windows that were supposed to render it sound-proof, but did not. Charles Boner, visiting 24 Cheyne Row in 1862, disturbed Carlyle as he sat in his dressing-gown and slippers correcting the proofs of hisFrederick the Great, whilst Mrs. Carlyle remained in attendance, seated on a sofa by the fire.
In 1866 Mrs. Carlyle died suddenly of heart failure, and left him burdened with remorse that he had not been kinder to her and made her life happier; and after two years of lonely living without her, he writes: “I am very idle here, very solitary, which I find to be oftenest less miserable to me than the common society that offers. Except Froude almost alone, whom I see once a week, there is hardly anybody whose talk, always polite, clear, sharp, and sincere, does me any considerable good.... I am too weak, too languid, too sad of heart, too unfit for any work, in fact, to care sufficiently for any object left me in the world to think of grappling round it and coercing it by work. A most sorry dog-kennel it oftenest all seems to me, and wise words, if one ever had them, to be only thrown away on it. Basta-basta, I for most part say of it, and look with longings towards the still country whereat last we and our loved ones shall be together again.”
You will get no better or more intimate glimpses into Carlyle’s home life than Allingham gives in his Diary. Sometimes they are merely casual and scrappy notes, at others fairly full records of his walks and talks with him, such as this: “1873, April 28.—At Carlyle’s house about three. He spent about fifteen minutes in trying to clear the stem of a long clay pipe with a brass wire, and in the end did not succeed. The pipe was new, but somehow obstructed. At last he sent for another one and smoked, and we got out at last. (I never saw him smoke in public.) He said Emerson had called on him on Sunday, and he meant to visit E. to-day at his lodging in Down Street. We walked to Hyde Park by Queen’s Gate, and westward along the broad walk, next to the ride, with the Serpentine a field distant on the left hand. This was a favourite route of his. I was well content to have the expectation of seeing Emerson again, and, moreover, Emerson and Carlyle together. We spoke of Masson’sLife of Milton, a volume of which was on C.’s table. He said Masson’s praise of Milton was exaggerated. ‘Milton had a gift in poetry—of a particular kind.Paradise Lostis absurd; I never could take to it all—though now and again clouds of splendour rolled in upon the scene.’... At Hyde Park Corner, C. stopped and looked at the clock. ‘You are going to Down Street, sir?’ ‘No, it’s too late.’ ‘The place is close at hand.’ ‘No, no, it’s half-past five.’ So he headed for Knightsbridge, and soon after I helped him into a Chelsea omnibus, banning internally the clay pipe (value a halfpennyfarthing) through which this chance (perhaps the last, for Emerson is going away soon) was lost.”
THOMAS CARLYLE
There are numerous entries in the Diary of visits and conversations of this sort. On October 18, 1879, Allingham called at Cheyne Row with his little son, and they met Carlyle coming out of the door to his carriage. On December 4, of the same year: “Helen and I to Cheyne Row. Carlyle’s eighty-fourth birthday. Mrs. Lecky there. Browning and Ruskin are gone. C. on his sofa by the window, warm and quiet, wearing a new purple and gold cap. Gifts of flowers on the table....” Some of the swift little word-sketches of Carlyle at this date, when he was very old, very feeble, and apt to be oppressed with gloom, are piteous and pathetic enough. On his eighty-fifth birthday (December 4, 1880) Allingham found him easier and more himself; but on Friday, December 24, you read: “To Carlyle’s at two. He was lying on the sofa in the drawing-room. When I spoke to him he held out his hand and shook hands with me, but said nothing. I was not sure that he knew me. A stout Scotch servant girl and I lifted him to his feet to go to the carriage. In the hall his heavy sealskin coat was put on with difficulty, and he was got into the carriage. Alick and I with him. We drove twice round Hyde Park. The old man dozed much.”
Earlier that year, the two sons of Alexander Munro called at Cheyne Row, and in a letter home the elder of them gave a wonderfully poignant and living account of their visit. Munro, who was dead, had been one of Carlyle’s old friends, and the two boys were now at school at the Charterhouse. They were conductedupstairs, says the letter, to a well-lighted, cheerful apartment, and here “the maid went forward and said something to Carlyle, and left the room. He was sitting before a fire in an arm-chair, propped up with pillows, with his feet on a stool, and looked much older than I had expected. The lower part of his face was covered with a rather shaggy beard, almost quite white. His eyes were bright blue, but looked filmy from age. He had on a sort of coloured nightcap, and a long gown reaching to his ankles, and slippers on his feet. A rest attached to the arm of his chair supported a book before him. I could not quite see the name, but I think it was Channing’s works. Leaning against the fireplace was a long clay pipe, and there was a slight smell of tobacco in the room. We advanced and shook hands, and he invited us to sit down, and began, I think, by asking where we were living. He talked of our father affectionately, speaking in a low tone as if to himself, and stopping now and then for a moment and sighing.... He went on, ‘I am near the end of my course, and the sooner the better is my own feeling.’ He said he still reads a little, but has not many books he cares to read now, and is ‘continually disturbed by foolish interruptions from people who do not know the value of an old man’s leisure.’ His hands were very thin and wasted; he showed us how they shook and trembled unless he rested them on something, and said they were failing him from weakness.” And, at length, closing the interview, “‘Well, I’ll just bid you good-bye.’ We shook hands. He asked our names. He could not quite hear Henry’s at first. ‘I am a little deaf, but I can hear well enough talking,’ or words to that effect.‘I wish you God’s blessing; good-bye.’ We shook hands once more and went away. I was not at all shy. He seemed such a venerable old man, and so worn and old-looking, that I was very much affected. Our visit was on Tuesday, May 18, 1880, at about 2P.M.”
CARLYLE’S HOUSE. CHEYNE ROW.
He died in the following February; after lying motionless and seemingly unconscious for hours, he passed quietly soon after eight on the morning of February 5, 1881. His bed, says Allingham, had been brought down to the drawing-room (the front room on the first floor), and he rarely spoke in the last two or three weeks, not so much because he could not as because he did not seem to wish to say anything. Newspaper reporters were so continually ringing at the door, day and night, that bulletins had to be posted outside to prevent this. Now and then he appeared to wander in his mind, and when the Scotch maid, Mary, was attending upon him he would sometimes murmur, “Poor little woman,” as if he mistook her for his long-dead Jenny; and once, says Allingham, “he supposed the female hands that tended him, lifting his head, perhaps, to be those of his good old mother—‘Ah, mother, is it you?’ he murmured, or some such words. I think it was on the day before the last day that Mary heard him saying to himself, ‘So this is Death: well——’”
But the Cheyne Row house has many happy memories too, and I always think one of the happiest is that of how Leigh Hunt called once after a long absence, and brought with him word of some unexpected good news that so delighted Mrs. Carlyle that she impulsively ran to him and kissed him, andhe went away to write that charming little rondeau that bids fair to outlive all his more ambitious poetry: