HEAD OF CHARLES DICKENS(Taken after death.)From the pencil-drawing by SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A., in the possession of Mrs. Perugini.To face page 194.
HEAD OF CHARLES DICKENS(Taken after death.)From the pencil-drawing by SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A., in the possession of Mrs. Perugini.To face page 194.
HEAD OF CHARLES DICKENS
(Taken after death.)
From the pencil-drawing by SirJ. E. Millais, Bart., P.R.A., in the possession of Mrs. Perugini.
To face page 194.
O love, they die in yon rich sky,They faint on hill or field or river:Our echoes roll from soul to soul,And grow for ever and for ever.Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
O love, they die in yon rich sky,They faint on hill or field or river:Our echoes roll from soul to soul,And grow for ever and for ever.Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
O love, they die in yon rich sky,They faint on hill or field or river:Our echoes roll from soul to soul,And grow for ever and for ever.Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
It is impossible to recapture by mere description the added beauty which he contrived to confer upon these lines as they came from his own lips, or even to suggest the strength and tenderness of feeling he could command as the tones of his great voice gradually sank and died at the close.
Many years later I heard him read again in his Surrey home, whither I had taken Mrs. Bernard Beere on the eve of the production of his play calledThe Promise of May.
He read it through to us himself, and here he adopted a more direct and dramatic style, giving admirable point to the humour of the rustic scenes. As we stood up to take our leave he put his hand on Mrs. Beere’s shoulder and said, “You are tall. I am tall too. Carlyle once said to me I ought to have been a grenadier.”
The Promise of Maywas not one of Tennyson’s successful essays in dramatic writing, and it may, I think, he doubted whether he possessed in any great degree the dramatic quality. And yet, on two occasions at the Lyceum Theatre, under the guidance of Irving, a deep impression was made upon the public. BothThe CupandBeckethave scenes that make a simple and dramatic appeal to the heart; and the latter, at any rate, served to supply the actor with the material for one of his greatest impersonations.
It was while Irving was rehearsingBecketthat he told me a story of Tennyson that has both a pathetic and humorous significance. In the earlier days, whenThe Cupwas in preparation, he had been to see Tennyson in the Isle of Wight to discuss his ideas for its presentation. After dinner, as he told me, the dessert and the wine were set out upon a separate table, and when they were seated the poet asked Irving if he would like a glass of port.
“Yes, I like a glass of port,” replied the actor.
Upon which Tennyson, taking him at his word, poured him out a glass of port, and all unconsciously finished the remainder of the bottle himself. At a later time, whenBecketwas to be presented, Tennyson was suffering from gout and was under a strictrégime. But the same graceful little ceremony was observed, and again his host inquired of Irving whether he would like a glass of port, but on this occasion, as Irving related to me, the positions were reversed, for poor Lord Tennyson was only permitted a single glass, and Irving finished the bottle.
Next morning the actor had to leave early, and had therefore taken leave of his host overnight. But he had scarcely awakened when he saw Lord Tennyson sitting at the foot of his bed.
“How are you this morning, Irving?” he inquired anxiously.
“Very well indeed,” was his guest’s reply.
“Are you?” came the response, with just a tinge of doubt in the tones of the voice. “You drank a lot of port last night.”
I think Tennyson’s was essentially a simple nature. Certainly in his own home he gave me that impression. His high qualities as a poet, and the unerring refinement of taste that is stamped on almost every line of his verse, seemed never to have disturbed or effaced a primitive strength of character that had its roots deep in the soil. And yet he was quickly sensitive to criticism, and would sometimes take no pains to hide his wounds.
At our last meeting he openly expressed his vexation at an unfavourable article that had then recently appeared. He questioned me closely as to what I thought could have been the motive of the writer, who for the rest was not of such a rank that his censure need have disturbed the poet’s equanimity. “What harm have I ever done to him?” he exclaimed, in tones that seemed to me at the time almost child-like in reproach. But it is, as I have come to think, a sure hall-mark of genius that its weakness is very often frankly avowed. It is a part of that inward candour that makes for greatness, the petty price that we have to pay for the larger and nobler revelation. Lesser spirits can often contrive to hide their littleness, but in the greatest it is nearly always carelessly confessed.
Tennyson’s simplicity would sometimes find vent in almost boyish frolic. One evening at Farringford he was suddenly seized with the idea that he would like to dress up one of Mrs. Cameron’s nieces in the garb of a man. He got one of his own long coats from the hall, and with a burnt cork himself disfigured her pretty face, daubing upon it a heavy black moustache and imperial, and then retreatingto the other side of the room to gaze with manifest delight upon the result of his own handiwork.
The primitive side of Tennyson’s nature was aptly mirrored in the person of his brother Horatio, who, by reason of certain well-considered peculiarities of dress, was often mistaken by visitors to Freshwater for the poet himself. The attention thus attracted to him he contrived to endure with complacency; indeed, I think he was partly conscious that he served in this way as a sort of buffer between his greater brother and the prying curiosity of the crowd which the poet himself deeply resented.
Horatio Tennyson would often accompany Harry Cameron and myself when we wandered over the downs with a gun in search of sea-gulls, or scoured the neighbouring farms for rabbits. His mind, I think, moved slowly, and there was sometimes a strong bucolic flavour in the stories he loved to relate.
Another constant companion on these rambling excursions was poor Lionel Tennyson, the poet’s younger son, who afterwards married Frederick Locker’s daughter. Locker himself I came to know later in the days of the Grosvenor Gallery. I think few men have been endowed with a surer and more delicate taste in all matters pertaining to Art. We met in sympathy over the drawings by the old masters, of which he possessed a few of the very choicest examples. It was, indeed, his unfailing characteristic as a collector that all he had was of the best. And his personality, very winning in its simplicity and refinement, responded aptly enough to the qualities of his mind.
In conversation he would sometimes leap with quaint abruptness of thought from the most abstract to the most concrete things, from the appreciation of a drawing by Leonardo to the sudden consideration of the price of coals. Du Maurier’s pen-and-ink drawing of him may be said to rank as the most perfect of portraits—an exact image of the man himself in form and feature.
At the time when I first met Tennyson, I think Robert Browning had won my larger admiration. I thought him then the greater poet of the two—I no longer think so now; and the very qualities which so strongly attracted me as a youth have since proved in themselves to be the source of my altered judgment. It seems like a paradox, but I believe it to be none the less true, that it is the intellectual quality in verse that first most strongly attracts the younger student of poetry. So at least it was in my case. The complexity of thought, even the obscurity of expression which marks so much of Browning’s work, had for me then the strongest fascination. That half-rebel note in his style, with its defiant scorn of all accepted models of musical form and rhythmical expression, was in itself an added allurement to the poet’s untiring intellectual agility of which the rugged verse was but the chosen garment. And although the spell he then exercised over my imagination still in some degree survives, I find myself now asking of poetry less and less for any ordered philosophy of life, and more and more for life itself. The most nobly directed gospel that seeks an altered world counts for little in a poet’s equipment beside the passionatevision of the world as it is with its unchanging heritage of joy and pain. So at least it seems to me now and, with my modified judgment as to what rightly constitutes the substantive part of poetry, has come an ever-growing delight in the formal beauty of its expression. The two elements are indeed indissolubly bound together. There is no high music in verse that is not linked with sense, no thought that is rightly a poet’s thought that may not find its fitting melody. And it is because Tennyson, despite his confessed limitations on the side of passion, more constantly than his fellows held fast to the true office of the poet, that he stands among them all as their undisputed master.
In every art the last word is simplicity. There is no phase of thought or feeling rightly admissible into the domain of poetry that the might of genius may not force to simple utterance. It is this which constitutes the final triumph of all the greatest wizards of our tongue, of Shakespeare as of Milton; of Wordsworth no less than of Keats. All of them found a way to wed the subtlest music with the simplest speech, striving with ever-increasing severity for that chastened perfection of form which stands as the last and the surest test of the presence of supreme poetic genius.
So much cannot be said of Browning. There is enough and to spare in the great body of his work to leave his position as a poet unassailed, but there is more to prove that, beside the purely poetic impulse, there were other forces working in his nature, which, in so far as they prevail, must tend to rob the result of that faultless music which alone
HollyerROBERT BROWNINGFrom the painting byG. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.To face page 201.
HollyerROBERT BROWNINGFrom the painting byG. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.To face page 201.
Hollyer
ROBERT BROWNING
From the painting byG. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.
To face page 201.
can give to verse its final right of survival. This is doubtless true also of Wordsworth, but in his case the good and the bad are easily separable, and the good at its best is flawless. But with Browning the conflicting elements of his genius are so closely locked together that the task of selection is not so easy, and the triumph, even when it has to be acknowledged, is not so secure.
And yet, for all who then came under his influence, the charm can never quite be broken. He spoke to those of us who first learned to know him in our youth with a quickened authority that nothing can quite destroy. The faults which time now thrusts forward were hardly then matter for pardon. For those who come after they may indeed serve to set his fame in peril, but the message he had for us was so overwhelming in its appeal that we forgot the crabbed hand in which it was transcribed.
In one respect, and in one respect only, Browning the poet found an echo in Browning as he was known to his friends. That brave optimism of spirit, with its constant nobility of outlook on the facts of life which so finely distinguishes his writing, was also, I think, characteristic of the man. It was always a spiritual refreshment to meet him. The fact that he was a poet was, indeed, a secret he took some pains to conceal. In this respect, except for rare lapses of noble enthusiasm, he preferred to preserve a kind of austere incognito; but at the same time he contrived to convey even in the simplest converse with the most ordinary people a sense of personal detachment that nevertheless left them free to feel at their ease. And yet, often as I have seen him apparently content with associates who were manifestly his inferiors in intellect, and even in spirit, I cannot recall a time when his own personality ever seemed to suffer by the contact.
I suppose no man of his generation responded so readily to the call of hospitality. He was to be met everywhere, and so keen was his zest in the ordinary traffic of social life that he seemed at times to be indifferent to his choice of associates. There was something in his own power of drawing entertainment from an evening passed in the society of friends that no measure of dulness in his surroundings seemed capable of abating.
He preserved in all companies a constant alertness of spirit, an undiminished sense of self-reliant enjoyment, that was surprising to the onlooker. And yet, despite his unfailing courtesy even to those whom in his secret heart he must often have set in the category of bores, he never left the slightest impression of insincerity. By means, hardly definable, he contrived to keep his converse, even with the most commonplace of his acquaintance, on a certain high spiritual level, and when he took his leave of any party it was impossible not to feel that a considerable personage had quitted the room.
And yet the personal impression made by Browning was not commanding. Vigorous and strenuous he always seemed, and those characteristics stamped him on the first encounter. But they might have belonged equally to a leader inany other walk of life—to a successful man of affairs, or to a politician in the fulness of his fame.
To those who knew him well there were, however, many little sidelights that showed the poet. Something deeper and more passionate, something more chivalrous and more tender, lurked beneath the social armour that he chose to wear; and it was easy to perceive that even in his ripe age there were smouldering fires of a more passionate experience that a word might waken into flame.
He came often to our house in the years between 1880 and 1885. In our smaller circle we saw him as an intimate friend, and he was a kind and a true friend. I think he was not indifferent to good living, but he was always content with our simple fare—more than content, certainly, if he was allowed his bottle of port wine, not to be sipped at dessert as others use it, but to be quaffed through dinner as an accompaniment to every course. His appreciation of wine, never immoderately indulged, must, I suppose, have been inherited, for he used to tell me a story of his father’s indignation on the occasion of his once asking for a glass of water.
“Water, Robert!” exclaimed the elder Browning in dismay. “For washing purposes it is, I believe, often employed, and for navigable canals I admit it to be indispensable, but for drinking, Robert, God never intended it.”
Browning’s unfailing courtesy towards women could sometimes display itself in a partly humorous fashion. One day when he was calling upon my wife, an authoress whose high estimate of herown work was never quite confirmed by the public, was suddenly announced. The visit was somewhat embarrassing, for the lady had sent my wife one of her novels, with a request that, when she had read it, it might be submitted to me with a view to its being adapted for the stage. The book had not been read, had in fact been mislaid, but as this was the second occasion upon which the lady had applied for my verdict, my wife basely resorted to prevarication, and embarked upon general phrases of eulogy in regard to the high merit of the work in question. This subterfuge, however, only resulted in deeper disaster, for the flattered authoress at once plunged into baffling details that lay beyond the reach of my wife’s improvised mendacity. It happened, however, that Browning had read the book, and, realising the situation, at once came to the rescue, and finally succeeded in persuading the unhappy authoress that the very merits of the novel were in themselves an insuperable obstacle to its production on the stage.
One thing remains vividly in my recollection of Browning, and that was his constant expression of loyal admiration for the genius of Tennyson. I have heard him bear witness to it again and again, and always with entire sincerity.
There was about him in his outlook on life, in his high courtesy and in his unflagging faith in the beauty of the world, a quality that I sometimes find lacking in gifted men of a younger generation. I can only express what I feel in this sense by reference to a splendid survivor of the great race—George Meredith. To those who do not instinctively feel it, my reference may mean nothing, but to me, to whom the whole achievement of the Victorian Era, in art as in literature, stands high, it means everything. It is not my purpose in these pages of personal recollections to dwell upon my intimate association with men who are still living, but in Mr. Meredith I feel I may make an exception. And Browning has reminded me of him because there is in both a kindred quality—the quality of a superb reverence for life, an undying faith in its ultimate beauty. As literature has fallen since under the conduct of later hands, I find that it seems in some sense shattered in subdivision. There are, on the one hand, writers who seek to be artists and no more, men who pet and polish their rhythmic phrases till they may be said to have reached perfection, and on the other hand there are pamphleteers, eager and sincere, but still pamphleteers, who are content if they can coerce their readers into the belief that their chosen gospel for the regeneration of humanity is a fair equivalent for the larger vision of life itself. No man who is richly human can escape that yearning towards a brighter social ideal. Browning and Tennyson, Thackeray and Dickens, all had their hopes for the bettering of the world as they found it; but with them all, whatever their original impulse, the beauty of the world, as it has been and as it is, outlived their humanitarian ambition, and left them at the last with an increasing sense of its enduring beauty and glory. And that is where George Meredith, still living, stands as a monument ofstrength, for worship as for example, to those who have still to come after him.
The hours that I have spent with George Meredith in and around his simple home at Box Hill count among the most delightful of my life. I met him first at the house of a dear friend of both, Frederick Jameson, in the year 1876, and it was, I think, about that time that I had published in theSaturday Reviewa criticism of his novel,Beauchamp’s Career, which I think must have pleased him, for I find a phrase of his in a letter written to me at that date in which he says, “Praise of yours comes from the right quarter.”
It was not long after that that we became intimate friends, and it was his hospitable custom to invite me to breakfast with him on the little lawn in front of his cottage, and then, after the repast, light and dainty after the fashion of the Frenchdejeuner, we would start for a long ramble over Box Hill, returning often but just in time for dinner, to continue or to renew the talk that had made the afternoon memorable. Meredith could talk and walk after a fashion that I have known in no one else. Sometimes he would occupy the whole of our ramble in a purely invented biography of some one of our common friends, passing in rather burlesque rhapsody from incident to incident of a purely hypothetical career, but always preserving, even in the most extravagant of his fancies, a proper relevancy to the character he was seeking to exhibit.
On one occasion I remember he traced with inimitable humour, and with inexhaustible invention,a supposed disaster in love encountered by an amiable gentleman we both knew well; and as he rambled on with an eloquence that never halted, he became so in love with his theme that I think he himself was hardly conscious where the record of sober fact had ended and where the innocent mendacity of the novelist had begun. And then, at the immediate summons of some beauty in the landscape around us that arrested his imagination, he would pause in the wild riot of the imagined portrait and pass, in a moment, to discourse, as eloquent but more serious, on some deeper problem of Life or Art. Not that he ever sought, either in the lighter or the deeper vein, to talk so as to absorb the conversation. In single companionship there was no better talker, as, indeed, there was no better listener; and in either mood he was singularly stirring and inspiring.
One evening I remember that, after such a ramble and when dinner was over, we ascended the slope of his garden to the little chalet on its height, and there he read me till far into the night hours the whole of that wonderful series of sonnets on Modern Love.
This is not the place or the time to assert his claims either as a poet or as a writer of fiction. I have cited his name here and now, because both as an author and as a man he seems to me to possess in the highest degree that superb optimism of spirit which also characterised Browning: an optimism born of no shallow or sentimental survey of life, and yet of strength sufficient to survive all shocks of experience in virtue of its deeper hold uponthose secrets of beauty that no personal disaster could efface or destroy.
Once when we were discussing the dramas of Ibsen he made, not in criticism but in comment, a remark that has always seemed to me memorable.
“There is no picture,” he said, “however overcast its subject, in which the painter, rightly endowed, cannot suggest that beyond the enclosing clouds there is room for a space of blue sky.”
He left the comment there without special application to this work or that of the author under discussion, but it dwells in my memory as highly and nobly characteristic of George Meredith the author and of George Meredith the man.
The later advent of Mr. Swinburne caused many of us in those days to reconsider the claims of Tennyson and Browning. It is difficult now to realise the sense almost of intoxication with which the new music of his verse was entertained. For a while it seemed to efface the simpler triumphs of Tennyson no less than Browning’s more impetuous but less ordered strains. Its overpowering wealth of rhythmic cadence struck a new note that it was impossible for the younger generation to resist.
But it was not Mr. Swinburne who first awakened in me a spirit of reaction against the elder masters of our generation. Before I readAtalanta in Calydonmy imagination had been deeply stirred by that first volume of Mr. William Morris’s verse, entitledThe Defence of Guinevere. I had found there, though in a form perhaps deliberately archaic, that deeper note of passion which Tennyson’s poetry, even at its best, confessedly lacks; and its appeal
WILLIAM MORRISFrom the painting byG. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.HollyerTo face page 209.
WILLIAM MORRISFrom the painting byG. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.HollyerTo face page 209.
WILLIAM MORRIS
From the painting byG. F. Watts, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.
Hollyer
To face page 209.
was the more urgent because Morris too was attracted by the charm of mediæval romance—romance which in Tennyson’s hands had lost something of its primitive dramatic quality, and became, as he developed the Arthurian story, more and more material for setting forth a systematised body of ethical teaching.
Morris at a single stroke seemed to restore the legend to its historical place, and to recapture a part of its passionate significance. I confess that no later work of his has ever affected me to the same degree, though there runs in them all that exquisite and ineffable charm of the born story-teller. In poetry as in fiction there are, and have always been, two competing schools of thought, the one moved by the love of the story to be told, and the other primarily attracted to the story by the opportunities it may offer for the presentment of an ethical idea, or the interpretation of individual character.
They may both reach the same goal, but there remains that contrast in the quality of the workmanship which is born of its different origin.
I remember Morris saying to me once that he did not much care for a story unless it was long, and although the statement perhaps was not intended to be taken literally, it bore witness to that element in his genius which led him to bury himself with unwearied delight in every smallest detail of the tale he had chosen to tell. Morris, I think, was not easy to know well. There was a certain rough shyness in his manner that kept him aloof from the initial advances of ordinary acquaintance, and it was only as an acquaintance that I knew him. But he musthave had deeply lovable qualities to have become so endeared, as he was, to Burne-Jones. It was their custom for years to spend every Sunday morning together in Burne-Jones’s studio; and on the many occasions when Burne-Jones has spoken to me of him, I can recall no word of abatement from the deep and lasting affection in which he held his life-long friend.
The influence wielded by Mr. Swinburne over the younger men of his generation was of a widely different kind. That new music of which I have spoken, already announced in theAtalanta, and presented with even greater variety and exuberance of expression in the Poems and Ballads, set us all thinking. It seemed at the first as though music in its fullest sense had never before entered into the arena of poetry, and his inexhaustible invention of new metre and rhythmic phrasing set the mind in wonder for a while as to whether all that had gone before was not the mere preface to this final achievement. The immediate effect of the fluent melodies he could command was for the time, at least, to put earlier masters upon their trial, and it was not until the overpowering glamour of these earlier poems had passed that it was possible to reckon at their true worth his lasting claims as a poet.
I have always thought that Mr. Swinburne’s handling of language as a musical instrument raises an interesting question in regard to the relation of the arts. Of them all, music alone claims an absolute and independent position. Its appeal does not rely upon association, and demands no definable intellectual foundation. It stands in this way, evenin its most primitive forms, as an example to all other arts, serving to remind them of what there is in each of the essential artistic quality; to remind them yet again of the inevitable danger that must be encountered when the artist adds to his natural burden the task of interpreting the changing ideals of life.
Of all the other arts literature, by reason of the intellectual material out of which it is moulded, stands at the farthest pole from music. Painting and sculpture have their own manifest laws and limitations, which may serve to remind their exponents of the peril which awaits their transgression, but literature, even in the supreme form of verse, must of necessity be exposed to dangers from which only the intuitive instinct of the artist can preserve it. Borrowing as by right from all the arts, and pressing into its service all that has been won in the region of form and colour to enforce its own message of the spirit, it is nevertheless inevitable that to music it must remain the heaviest debtor, for its chosen vehicle of rhythmic language approaches most nearly to the abstract instrument of the musician. And yet, I think, even in Mr. Swinburne’s highest triumphs in metrical expression, it is made manifest that the attempt directly to capture the kind of melody that in the last resort belongs to music alone, there lurks a peril that no artist, however gifted, can hope to escape.
It is not in any spirit of depreciation of Mr. Swinburne’s unchallenged gift, a gift which, in its kind, has perhaps never been surpassed in literature, that I have set down these stray thoughts upon the possible limits of music in verse. What I have said is rather intended to record an experience of changing taste in myself in the interval that has elapsed since the time when his earlier poems first captured my imagination. It has grown clearer to me as the years have passed that, even in poetry, only that music is enduring where the melody is subtly interwoven with passionate truth, and that the highest triumph of mere music, in so far as its effects are applicable to literature, must be won by constant cultivation of the simplest means of expression.
To the serious student of poetry such a conclusion may deservedly rank in the region of the accepted commonplace, but some of the utterances of our later-day critics yield at least an excuse for its recall. Not long ago I encountered in a seriously written review the astounding announcement that Oscar Wilde was the author of some of the most remarkable verse of the nineteenth century, and this is hardly an isolated instance of an endeavour that seems at the moment widely spread to make the pitiable disaster of poor Wilde’s career the occasion of the most deplorably exaggerated appreciation of his gifts as a writer.
I met Wilde very often in those earlier days, before he had begun to seek to win by personal eccentricity the attention which his literary talent had not secured, and I am bound to confess that, in the light of my later knowledge of the man and of his work, any attempt to set him in the front rank as a literary personality or a great literaryinfluence seems to me in the highest degree ludicrous and grotesque.
In view of the terrible fate that overtook him, no one could desire to deal harshly at this time with his qualities as a man. That he had a certain charm of manner is undoubted, and that he possessed a measure of wit, as often imitative as original, need not be denied. But there is always a tendency in certain literary circles that lean towards decadence, to exaggerate the genius of those who are morally condemned. A tragic fate such as his, even in one less gifted, naturally tends in such minds to exalt his claims to artistic consideration. It is, at least to my thinking, only on such an assumption that any serious student of poetry, having read the “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” could ever be induced to rank Wilde as a poetic genius, or to consider the body of his work as a man of letters, with whatever luxuries of habiliment it may be offered to the world, as constituting an enduring claim to rank him among the higher influences of his time.
Wilde’s best work was unquestionably, I think, done for the stage, and here it may be conceded he struck out a path of his own. He had the sense of the theatre, a genuine instinct for those moments in the conflict of character to which the proper resources of the theatre can grant both added force and added refinement. It is not an uncommon assumption, especially among writers of fiction, that the drama by comparison is an art of coarse fibre, incapable, by reason of its limitations, of presenting the more intimate realities of character, or the moredelicate shades of feeling. The truth is that each art has its own force, its own refinement, and cannot borrow them of another. What is perfectly achieved in one form remains incomparable, and for that very reason cannot in its completed form be appropriated by an art that has other triumphs and is subject to other laws and conditions. And it is here that the novelist so often breaks down in attempting to employ his own special methods in the service of the stage. Wilde made no such blunder. By constant study as well as by natural gift he knew well the arena in which he was working when he chose the vehicle of the drama. His wit has perhaps been over-praised; his epigrams so loudly acclaimed at the time bear the taint of modishness that seems to render them already old-fashioned. But his grip of the more serious situations in life, and his ability to exhibit and interpret them by means genuinely inherent in the resources at the disposal of the dramatist, are left beyond dispute.
Emery WalkerROBERT LOUIS STEVENSONFrom the painting by SirWilliam Richmond, K.C.B., R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.To face page 215.
Emery WalkerROBERT LOUIS STEVENSONFrom the painting by SirWilliam Richmond, K.C.B., R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.To face page 215.
Emery Walker
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
From the painting by SirWilliam Richmond, K.C.B., R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery.
To face page 215.
During the ’seventies I got to know many of the younger men of letters whose fame had not yet completely asserted itself. My association with theSaturday Reviewbrought me into closer contact with my old friend, Walter Pollock, whom I had known from a boy, and it was as his guest that I constantly found myself at lunch-time at the Savile Club, a favourite haunt of Robert Louis Stevenson when he happened to be in London.
Those lunches at the Savile, with discussions carried late into the afternoon and sometimes prolonged to the dinner-hour, remain as a vivid and delightful recollection. It was there that I met Henley, a notable individuality, at that time almost without recognition in the world of literature; and Charles Brookfield, who would look in now and then to lighten our graver discussions with his keen and incisive wit; and among others, Richard Duffield, a strange yet not unattractive individuality who won instant recognition by reason of a fortuitous resemblance to Michael Angelo, due to a broken nose; but whose literary claims, as far as I can remember, rested chiefly upon a presumably exclusive knowledge of the work of Cervantes.
But of the figures of that little coterie to which I was so often and so hospitably bidden, the engaging personality of Robert Louis Stevenson stands out distinctly. He carried with him throughout all the period in which I had any knowledge of him the indestructible character of a boy. The conscious artistic quality which marks his literary work, yielding to it a perfection which made it even then a mark of envy for us all, had no place in his personal converse. As a talker he made no demand for consideration, and it was that perhaps which lent to his companionship such a singular charm. What he had to say, though it was often brilliantly said, left little sense of premeditation. The topic of the moment, however carelessly it might have been suggested, seemed in him for the moment to be all-absorbing. However trivial it might be, it was not too trivial for his acceptance; and however unpromising it might seem to others, his quick agile spirit contrived to draw from its discussion something that was notable and memorable.
I think of him now with his long straight hair carelessly flung backward, and the swift alert eyes, quick in expressive response to any point of humour that arose, as one of the most fascinating characters it has ever been my fortune to encounter in conversation. He said nothing that appeared to be considered, and little that was not illuminating, and yet through it all, though his talk could rise on occasion to heights of deep earnestness and enthusiasm, there remained the ever-present sense of the boy. Something of the spirit of boyishadventure inspired his presence, something, too, of boyish recklessness, so that it was not always easy to remember, in the perfect freedom of intercourse which his nature allowed, that he was before all things a man of letters, a man to whom no refinement of our tongue was unknown: above all things a student and a master of style, in his work constantly perfecting an instrument which we, who were his contemporaries, were very well aware that we used by comparison only as bunglers and beginners.
In this sense I used to feel that there was a striking contrast between the man and his writing. Personally, and as a talker, it was the carelessness of his attack of any subject that first impressed me. His interest seemed wholly centred and absorbed by the incident, the character, or the episode under discussion, and the means by which his thought and feeling concerning it might be expressed, were by contrast almost negligently employed. As a writer, great as is the rank he deservedly holds in the region of romance, his work yields to me exactly the opposite impression. His own faith in the story he has to tell is never, to my thinking, entirely convincing. Something too much of the conscious artist intrudes itself between the narrator and the reader, something that robs the result of the sense that the recorded fact is a fact indeed. It is impossible to forget, I think, even in Stevenson’s happiest work that he is an accomplished man of letters; and although there is no great writer who is not, the greatest and ablest allow us to forget it.
Certainly in contact with Stevenson the man, onehad no temptation to remember it. One was never haunted in those delightful hours of social intercourse by the suspicion that he was searching for a phrase, and yet often enough our conversation turned upon points of style; and I remember once in a selected line of a poet, where the fitness of a single word was under discussion, Stevenson swiftly checked our condemnation by a remark that seemed all the more apt because it came from his lips:
“My dear Carr, every word looks guilty when it is put into the dock.”
I suppose no one ever had a juster or more generous appreciation of the great leisurely genius of Sir Walter Scott than was possessed by Stevenson. No one by intention or design was more desirous to exclude from his own work the sense of modishness in style, and yet it remains with me as a final impression of Stevenson as a writer, that he occasionally laid himself open to the reproach that he would, as a critic, have been the first to detect in the work of another.
But I can think of him now only as I knew him then, an unconquerable boy with his heart set for adventure, lending to our talk as often as he came into it something of that daring outlook into worlds as yet undiscovered which characterised the adventurers of the seventeenth century.
It may have been something of this fighting quality in himself that attracted Stevenson to the combative spirit of Henley. Their first association, of course, bore an early date, and it may have been again something in poor Henley’s physical disability which provoked and sustained Stevenson’s affectionate regard. It is not altogether pleasant to reflect that such affection loyally rendered on Stevenson’s part was not at the close so loyally recognised by his comrade. Henley’s vehement personality rendered his presence on those particular afternoons at the Savile Club a constant factor of vitality. It was impossible for thought to slumber while Henley was awake. There was no opinion he would not question, no proposition, however confidently or however modestly put forward, he would not immediately set upon its trial. Those were his days of battle, and it was not easy then to guess that a few years later he would win to his standard quite a troop of young men eager to enforce the gospel he had to preach.
At the time of which I am thinking he was fighting for his own hand, and he fought strenuously; the mere love of the conflict was a dominating passion, and if there was, as I think sometimes there was, an underlying note of personal bitterness, may it not be set down in the hearts of those who knew him, and who survive him, as the inevitable price humanity has to pay for the long martyrdom of pain to which nature had doomed him?
And yet Henley, for all the valorous spirit that was in him, was not always proof against sudden attack. One night when we were gathered at the Savile after some public dinner where we had all been present, Irving was of the party. Irving had a trick of waiting for his foe, and on this particular occasion, as I recall it, he was chafing under a criticism which had been delivered by Henley upon his impersonation of Macbeth. Henley appearedto be well aware that the matter in difference between them would come under discussion before the evening was ended, and was obviously ready with all the destructive weapons that were arrayed in his critical armoury. But quick and vigilant as he was as a fighting force, he nevertheless proved himself unready for the kind of attack which Irving had designed. Very quietly and almost deferentially the actor came to his point. After much genial interchange of cordial sentiment on one side and the other, Irving suddenly pounced upon his man.
“I notice,” he said, speaking to Henley in that tone of reverie which with him always concealed an imminent blow, “that you do not approve of my conception of Macbeth. Tell me now, for I should be interested to hear it, how would you play Macbeth if you were called upon to present the character on the stage? What is your conception?”
Henley was hardly prepared for such an invitation, and as we sat in expectation of what he would have to say, it was easy to perceive that the critic’s destructive method, which at that time was uppermost in him, could not suddenly readjust itself to the task of offering any coherent appreciation of the character which Irving, according to his allegation, had misinterpreted.
Irving was notoriously skilful in this kind of combat. He was patient in the endurance of any slight which he conceived to be passed upon his work as an actor, but his patience was never forgetful, and when the hour came, however long it might have been delayed, when he thoughtthat he could claim his own, he was wont to strike mercilessly.
I remember an incident concerning myself, belonging to the earlier stages of our friendship. It was after the conclusion to a dinner of the Rabelais Club, when he invited several of us to adjourn to his rooms in Grafton Street for a final cigar. I was very cordially bidden to be of the company, little guessing that he had selected this particular occasion to single me out as the mark of his disapproval. When we were all comfortably seated round him, and he was reclining deep in his chair in an easy attitude that I afterwards learned to know was nearly always ominous, he threw out for our discussion a proposition in regard to which we could not fail to find ourselves unanimous.
“Now, talking among friends,” he said, “I suppose that you would all agree that criticism ought to be fair?”
With no possible exception we were all loudly enthusiastic in assent.
“Quite so,” replied Irving, in the same dispassionate and measured tones. “Well, then,” he continued, in a voice somewhat threateningly raised but still carefully controlled, “there is a criticism I have read in a magazine calledThe Theatreabout a play of mine. Very clever!” And then with sudden vehemence, pointing to me, he added, “You wrote it!”
“Do you mean,” I inquired, “the article onIolanthe?”—an adaptation by W. G. Wills ofKing Rene’s Daughterwhich had recently been presented at the Lyceum. “Yes, I wrote it!”
“Quite so,” returned Irving, his voice now rising in a tenser strain. “Well, nothing more unfair and more unjust has ever been written.”
I was young enough then not to be unmoved by this sudden and unexpected onslaught, but I summoned the courage to ask him, in reply, if the magazine was in the room. I saw as I spoke that it was lying on the table, and I asked him, as the article was short, if he would allow me to read it to those of my fellow-critics who were present, some of whom might fairly be supposed to be unaware of its import.
Irving could not, of course, but assent to my demand, but when I had concluded he appealed with even greater vehemence to those who were present in justification of what he had already said.
“You see! You see!” he cried. “Not one word about me!”
“It is quite true, Irving,” I answered. “And I will tell you why. I do not think any one has a higher appreciation of your genius as an actor than I have, and if I could have found the occasion to praise this particular performance I would gladly have seized it, but I thought it, rightly or wrongly, a bad performance, and, out of a spirit of loyalty to my larger admiration of your talent, I refrained from saying so. But I see now that I was wrong. In view of what you have said to-night I feel it would have been better to have said what I thought. You may however be assured, after what has occurred, that I shall not commit that blunder again.”
My defence was absolutely sincere, and I thinkIrving realised it. At any rate, I know that this little incident, which occurred upon the threshold of our friendship, did not hinder the formation of a close fellowship which endured and strengthened during the greater part of his career.
Bret Harte was an occasional visitor to the Savile, but I saw him more often and more intimately at the delightful meetings of the Kinsmen Club, a society that was designedly founded to bring together men of kindred interest in Art and Letters from both sides of the Atlantic. It has often been something of a puzzle to me that Bret Harte should not have ranked higher as an author among his own compatriots. In his own realm as a story-teller it seems to me hardly possible to rank him too high. That he owed much to Dickens he himself, I believe, would have been the first to acknowledge; but that his own individuality, both in humour and pathos, outstripped any reproach of imitation cannot, I think, be questioned by those to whom his work makes any strong appeal.
Socially he never made any endeavour to press for consideration of his literary claims. He was willing to speak of his work on the invitation of others, and always with modesty. In converse you would hardly have guessed he was a writer, nor did he often lead conversation on to the subject of literature, but I found in him, what I have always found in his writings, a certain reticent delicacy of perception, touched and fired now and again with a quick chivalry of feeling in all that concerned the relation of the sexes.
To his own countrymen I suppose he belongedto a past era in literary art, an era which preceded that elaborate analysis of the feminine temperament as distinguished from feminine character which to the mind of so many modern novelists appears to rank as the final victory of fiction.
My association with the theatre began somewhat disastrously. It was my father’s kindly thought, while we were still children, to afford us an annual visit to the pantomime, a visit that was accomplished for our large family by means of two hired flies, which transported us from our house at Barnes to the chosen place of amusement.
But my particular enjoyment of this long-desired entertainment was mitigated by circumstances both moral and physical. We had at that time a nurse who, though by nature endowed with most affectionate impulses, strongly disapproved of all dramatic entertainment, and who, for some weeks before this annually projected tampering with the forces of evil, tormented my spirit by a somewhat vivid picture of the eternal perils which I was destined to encounter.
On the first of these theatre parties that I can recollect, when she was coerced by my mother to form one of the party, in order that her numerous flock should have proper protection, her original antipathy to all things theatrical was strongly enforced and confirmed from the fact that, in the first piece which preceded the pantomime, one ofthe actors, shipwrecked upon a desert shore, gave utterance to a sentiment which to her mind seemed profoundly impious—that “what man could do he had done, and that God must do the rest.” As she explained to me the next evening, when I lay tucked up in bed, the mere mention of God within the four walls of a theatre was an act of profanity altogether unpardonable, and from that time forward she would never consent to take any part in these annual orgies.
But her manifest disapproval, as the recurring season of Christmas approached, set my spirit in terrible debate between the pleasure I longed for and the sin I knew I was about to commit. That internal struggle, fierce as it seemed to me at the time, must, I suppose, have been conducted with insufficient force on her side, for the issue left me always eager and ready for the adventure of sin. Indeed, so eager was our anticipation of the treat in store for us, that for many days beforehand we could think of nothing else; and so great our excitement as the appointed day approached, that the long-looked-for pleasure nearly always ended in disaster. Excitement in our family always revealed itself in an overmastering tendency to sickness, and from the age of five till the age of ten my vision of the splendours of the pantomime was intermittent, such glimpses of its glory as I derived being for the most part only obtained through the small lunette at the back of the dress-circle, the remainder of the evening being nearly always passed in a state of utter prostration in the ladies’ cloak-room. I neither claim nor profess any isolated distinction in this recurring malady, it was the abiding characteristicof our family; and I have often since, looking back on those days, reflected with admiration upon the dauntless courage of my father and mother to whom these occasions, repeated again and again, in spite of all example, must have been fraught with nothing short of misery.
But to me personally there was this added penalty, that when I returned from each such woful debauch, like a stricken soldier from the field, I was compelled to endure without defence the reproachful glance of my nurse’s eye, which told me as clearly as though it were written upon the wall that I had but earned the appointed wages of sin. This nurse of mine was in many ways a remarkable character. Linked with a nature surely the most loving and affectionate that a child could desire, were the sternest principles of religion and morality ever implanted in the human breast—principles associated with so slender a store of intellectual endowment that even to my childish mind their vehement announcement was sometimes grotesque.
One of her most deeply rooted convictions was that the principle of life insurance was a direct defiance of the laws of God: a proposition which she sought to establish by a terrible tale of a butcher of Lewes, who, having flouted Providence by affecting an insurance upon his life, within half an hour after the conclusion of this prudent operation fell down dead as he descended the steps of the market-hall.
Her intellectual equipment was perhaps no scantier than that of many other women, but the fervour with which she employed it in the service of her religious principles might have made her adesolating influence upon the life of a child, if her loving and kindly nature had not constantly given the lie to the rigid creed she innocently believed was guiding her conduct through life.
It is undeniable, however, that such influences first exercised in childhood are long remembered, and it was many a day before I could quite free myself from the thought that the study of dramatic art was not in some degree associated with a sinful life. It is difficult to say whether this hovering sense of wrong-doing is not in its nature an added incentive to enjoyment. Certain it is that the pleasures of the play-house became a factor of increasing influence in my life. There was an old laundry attached to our house at Barnes which seemed to us singularly unfitted for its destined purpose, but which might, as we thought, be easily adapted as an arena for the performance of stage plays, and here, urged on by a wicked cousin who has since, as a fitting penalty for his youthful delinquencies, become a clergyman, I began my career as an amateur actor. We had at that time a distrust of all feminine help, and chose for our essays in histrionic art only those plays in Lacy’s list wherein the plot might be expounded by the exclusive support of male performers.
It chanced, while I was at Bruce Castle School, I had for one of my comrades poor Dick Bateman, son of Richard Bateman, who had about that time, or soon after, become Irving’s manager at the Lyceum. Together we became editors of a school magazine, and it was through him afterwards that I won my first introduction to the theatre.
He was remarkable as a schoolboy for a prodigious and extraordinary memory. I have spoken, in the earlier pages of this book, of the memory of Churton Collins, but in Dick Bateman’s case the faculty was differently exercised. It seemed in him to be purely mechanical, and we used to delight, as schoolboys, to set him the task, in which he rarely failed, of reading over a page of any author and then requiring of him that he should repeat it word for word. That special kind of memory which appeared to be detached from any personal interest in the matter recalled, it has not been my chance to see equalled in any other man I have known.
I have spoken of him as “poor” Dick Bateman because he met an early and tragic fate, for after a few years spent in London in occasional employment under his father he was sent upon some business adventure to the East, and was drowned in a shipwreck which occurred off the coast of Japan. But in our schooldays, and in the years immediately succeeding our schooldays, we were close comrades, and it was through him that I won my first knowledge of Irving, who had already appeared in several plays in which I had seen him, but who had then been recently engaged by Mr. Bateman as a leading actor to support his daughter, Isabella Bateman, in whose interests he had undertaken the management of the Lyceum Theatre. I had seen Irving before that time when he had played Bob Gassett inDearer than Lifeat the Queen’s Theatre, and I had seen him again inUncle Dick’s Darlingat the Gaiety, when he had appeared in company with Toole.
It was of the latter performance that Toole afterwards told me Charles Dickens had said, when he saw it, that he thought it admirable in the promise it gave of the young actor’s ability; though he had added: “I fancy that both he and the author have cast an eye over my character of Mr. Dombey—eh, Toole?” And to any one who saw the performance there could have been no doubt as to the justice of Dickens’s suggestion. It was at a little later date that Irving achieved his first great success with the public in the character of Digby Grant in Mr. Albery’s play ofThe Two Roses, and it was after that again that he became permanently engaged to Mr. Bateman.
But Mr. Bateman’s endeavour to force his younger daughter Isabella upon the acceptance of the public as a leading actress was not successful. The play ofFanchette, with which he opened his management, was a failure, and the part of the youthful hero, for which Irving was cast, was entirely unsuited to his special abilities. Other adventures followed, and they only had the effect of somewhat lowering the mark Irving had made inThe Two Roses, and there came a time in the steadily waning fortunes of the theatre when it seemed that Mr. Bateman’s management was destined to come to an inglorious end. It was at that time that Irving, who had had for some little while in his possession Leopold Lewis’s dramatised version of Erckmann-Chatrian’sPolish Jew, persuaded Mr. Bateman to allow him to put it on the stage of the Lyceum.
Irving has more than once told me the storyhimself, of how he and Bateman paced up and down the Adelphi terrace at midnight debating the possibilities of its success. Bateman, as he frankly avowed to the actor, had no faith in the popular appeal of the play, and it was, I suppose, only because he found himself at the end of his tether that he somewhat reluctantly consented to permit Irving to make the experiment. How hardly pressed the enterprising manager must have been at the time was proved by the fact that one evening, when I was walking with him down the Haymarket, he pointed to a corner public-house and said to me, “The owner of that house once held an umbrella over me in the rain when I most needed it, and I shall never forget it.”
Nor shall I ever forget the extraordinary impression made upon my own imagination by my first sight of Irving in his performance ofThe Bells. I have often recalled in recollection the sentence penned by Dutton Cook, who was then the dramatic critic of thePall Mall Gazette, wherein he said, “Acting at once so intelligent and so intense has not been seen upon the stage for years”; nor do I think any one who witnessed that performance, as it was rendered by Irving in the plenitude of his powers, would be disposed to question the verdict of the critic. To a youth I know it came as an astounding revelation—a revelation charged with such extraordinary concentration of personal feeling that the first vision of it as I recall it now seemed to have almost transgressed the limits of art, so poignant, even to the verge of pain, was the actor’s relentless portraiture of crime and remorse.
It was in Dick Bateman’s company that I first witnessed Irving’s performance ofThe Bells, and it was through Mr. Bateman’s introduction that I first learned to know the actor himself.
In order to realise the kind and the measure of effect which Irving’s intense individuality exercised over the public of that date, it is necessary to recall, if only for a moment, the condition of the stage at the time. Phelps’s career, in which he had so loyally and so honourably sustained the great tradition he had received from Macready, had practically, for all its influence upon the art, come to an end. He was still to be seen, as I saw him, in occasional engagements at Drury Lane, and later under the management of John Hollingshead at the Gaiety, and it was still possible to appreciate the great and sterling qualities of high training and accomplishment that he brought to the service of the theatre. But the magic which could win the attention of a new generation was no longer there. Its influence, perhaps, had been partly destroyed by the advent of Fechter’s more romantic method, which, even in his rendering of the classic drama, granted to his performance something of the charm and allurement of the conquering hero of a fairy story. And on the other side of the picture there was gradually arising a new school, though it seemed to be at the time exercised in only the tiniest arena, wherein a determined effort was being made to bring life as it was presented on the stage into closer alliance with the accepted realities of contemporary manners.
A revolution in little had been started in the theatre in Tottenham Court Road—a revolution duein the first instance to the talent of Robertson, which was destined to exercise a lasting influence over the theatre in England. Robertson’s new outlook, ably supported as it was by Marie Bancroft and her husband, who found and captured an ally of added strength in the person of John Hare, had the effect, for a while at least, of throwing classical drama into discredit, and it was therefore a matter of supreme difficulty for an actor equipped as Irving was, whose vision struck deeper and whose ambition took a wider range, to find a way to draw back the wandering attention of the public to the more passionate drama which for the time had fallen out of fashion. It was left to him almost unaided to forge a convention of his own, and it is perhaps the highest tribute to his innate gift as an actor that, although endowed by nature with few of the graces an actor might desire to claim, he was enabled from this first adventure inThe Bellsto win little by little, and with every step in his career fiercely disputed, a commanding position among the professors of his art.
I think at the first nobody was more surprised than Mr. Bateman at the success achieved by Irving’s experiment. In those days the favourite haunt of actors was the old Albion Tavern in Drury Lane. Clubs were comparatively few, and fewer still the actors who belonged to them. The licensing laws imposing the early closure upon the London taverns had not yet been passed, and it was the habit of those who were interested in the theatre to gather in the old-fashioned boxes of the Albion, and to remain in eager discussion over the things of thedrama till the small hours of the morning. It was on one evening during the first rendering ofThe Bellsthat I found myself seated there in company with a few genial spirits including Henry Montague, Toole, and Tom Thorne, when we noticed that Irving’s manager, Mr. Bateman, had entered and was gazing round the room as though in search of some one he had appointed to meet. It occurred at once to the mischievous spirit of Toole to turn the occasion to account. In a whispered sentence he made the rest of us co-conspirators in the little drama he had suddenly devised, and as Mr. Bateman, still scanning the visitors assembled, advanced from box to box, he and Montague, in tones designedly pitched so that all might hear, began an animated discussion as to Irving’s rightful claims to a larger salary than he was at that time receiving. I believe, in fact, that Irving’s remuneration was something like £15 a week, which represented a substantial advance upon the payment he had received during his engagement forThe Two Rosesat the Vaudeville Theatre; but Montague and Toole vied with one another like competing bidders at an auction in loud proclaim of his larger worth.
“£15 a week!” said Toole. “Why, he’s worth £20 at any rate!”
“£20!” retorted Montague. “Nonsense! He’s worth £30 if he’s worth a penny!”
And then Thorne, topping Montague, said he would be perfectly willing to give him £40 if he would return to the Vaudeville; and as the voices grew louder in the increasing estimate of Irving’s value, Bateman, attracted by the discussion, drewnearer and nearer to the box in which we sat, until at last, leaning with his elbows upon the mahogany partition, he leant forward with lowering brows no longer able to contain the indignation which these comments had provoked. And then at last Toole, always incorrigible in humorous mischief, topped all previous bidders by the emphatic announcement that Henry Irving was worth £50 a week if he was worth a shilling, to which Bateman, now incensed beyond measure, retorted, “Yes, and you are the scoundrels who would put him up to asking it.”
Another anecdote, at that time related to me by Irving himself, also belongs to those old days of the Albion. Seated one evening at supper after the play he found himself opposite to a little old gentleman, who was unable to conceal his remembered enjoyment of the performance he had just witnessed at the theatre. Irving, encouraged by his manifest geniality, inquired where he had been, to which the stranger replied that he had come from the Vaudeville, where he had seen the most delightful play,The Two Roses, wherein, of course, at the time Irving was acting. Nothing could exceed the old gentleman’s enthusiasm for the performers, as he recalled them one after another. Montague was superb! Thorne was excellent! and so on and so on in a liberal catalogue of the several performers, his appreciation rising with each added name.
Irving, at last a little nettled, as he confessed to me, at the exclusion of all reference to himself, ventured to inquire of his neighbour whether there was not in the play a character called Digby Grant.
“Ah yes! Ah yes!” assented the old gentleman, reflectively.
“Well, now,” said Irving, “what did you think of that performance?”
“Very good,” returned the old gentleman—“very good,” in tones which seemed to imply that he was only half-willingly conceding a point upon which he was not wholly convinced. “Ah yes, yes,” he added; “very good, but, by heavens,” he continued, “what a part Johnny Hare would have made of it!”
The progress made by Irving in those earlier times of his histrionic career was fiercely disputed at each step of the way. It could hardly have been foreseen then that he would ultimately win the larger fame that was accorded to him, and it must be conceded to those critics who blocked his path that there was much in the individuality of the man himself to account for the slow growth of his appeal to the public. I have often heard him say himself in later days that his success was achieved in spite of many natural disabilities. His figure at that time was accounted ungainly, his gestures were often reckoned grotesque, and the quality of his voice was such as naturally to repel those whom his individuality did not powerfully attract. But it was in virtue of that individuality, and by reason of those very attributes that barred his progress on the threshold of his career, that he at last reached the goal.
The peculiarities of his personality could not by their nature, on their first appeal, be widely accepted as forming a normal vehicle for the expression of poetic drama. For many years his career presented