My life and loves Vol. 2 Read online

  Meanwhile I was fitting another string to my bow; I had got to know A. R.

  Cluer, now a county court judge, on a railway journey, and almost at once we became friends by dint of similarity of taste and interests. He had rooms in the Temple and one day he asked me why I did not try to get work on the Spectator. He advised me to ask Escott to give me an introduction to the chief editor, Hutton. But I would not ask Escott for any favour, and so there and then Cluer went round with me to the Spectator office and saw me enter.

  When the clerk came, I said, "I want to see Mr. Hutton!"

  "Have you an appointment?"

  "No," I replied, and at the same time I took out a sovereign and laid it before him. "Tell me where Mr. Hutton is," I said, "and that pound is yours."

  "On the second floor," whispered the clerk hastily. "But you won't give me away, will you?"

  "No, no," I assured him. "I'll go up and you need never even have seen me." I went out of the shop at once, and up the stairs at the side.

  When I got to the second floor I knocked: no answer; a minute or two later I knocked again, and loudly. "Come in!" I heard and in I went. There was a big man seated at a table with his back to me, immersed in some proofs; he was evidently very near-sighted, because his nose was almost touching the manuscripts. I stood a few moments by his left side, quietly taking stock of the room with its bookcases opposite to me, then I coughed loudly. The big man dropped his glasses on the table and turned to me at once, evidently surprised out of politeness.

  "Goodness gracious!" he exclaimed, "who are you? How did you come in?"

  "My name won't help you much, Mr. Hutton," I replied, smiling, "and I don't want to bother you. I want work, think I can write-"

  "We have too many writers," he ejaculated. "Can't find work enough for those we know."

  "There's always room at the top," I countered. "Suppose I can do better than any you've got; it'll be to your interest to use me."

  "Goodness me!" he exclaimed. "Do you think you can write better than any of us?"

  "No, no," I corrected, "but there are some subjects I know better than any Englishman. You're a judge: the first ten lines of an article by me will tell you whether I am merely diseased with conceit or whether I'm really worth using."

  "That's true," he said, getting up and going over to the bookcase, "Do you know anything about Russia?"

  "I was with General Skobelef at Plevna."

  "Goodness me!" he ejaculated again. "Here's a book on Russia and the war that may interest you," and he handed me a volume.

  "Have you any special knowledge of the United States?" he went on, still peering at the books.

  "I've been through a western university," I replied, "am a member of the American bar, have practiced law."

  "Really?" he cried. "Well, here's a book of Freeman on America that may amuse you. Don't be afraid of telling the truth about it," he went on. "If you disagree with him, say so!"

  "Thanks ever so much," I replied. "I'm greatly obliged to you. The chance to show what I can do is all I want," and I went out at once, but not before I had caught a kindly glint in the peering eyes, which showed me that Richard Holt Hutton was really a gentleman who put on a hard abruptness of manner to mask or perhaps to protect his real sweetness of nature.

  When I got downstairs I showed the clerk the books as a proof he would not be blamed, and I took pains to thank him again before I rejoined Cluer.

  When Cluer saw the books and heard that I had talked with Hutton, he exclaimed, "I don't know how you managed it. I won a first class at Oxford and wrote to him, but could not even see him. How did you manage?"

  Under a promise of secrecy I told him, and then we talked of the books and what I'd write, but I didn't go straight home and begin the job at once, as Cluer advised.

  First of all I sat down and thought. Many days had passed since I returned to London and I had had as yet no hint of success, saw in fact no gleam even of hope. What was I to do? I must win soon!

  It struck me almost at once that I ought to know the mark I was aiming at. To win R. H. Hutton, I must know him first; accordingly, next morning I went to the British Museum and asked for all his books. I got a dozen or more ponderous tomes and spent the next two days reading them. At the end of that time I saw the soul of R. H. Hutton before me as a very small entity, a gentle-pious spirit, intensely religious. "He will enjoy a slating of Freeman," I said to myself, "for he knows Freeman to be rude, cocksure and aggressive. I'll give Hutton just what he wants."

  I went home and wrote the best stuff I could write on the Russian book, and then, after reading Freeman with great care and finding that indeed he was the very type of an arrogant, pompous pedant who mistook learning for wisdom, I let myself go and wrote an honest but contemptuous review of his book; indeed, there was nothing in it for the soul. I ended my review with the remark that "as Malebranche saw all things in God, so Mr. Freeman sees all things in the stout, broad-bottomed, aggressive Teuton."

  I had made another friend in my first week in London who was now to stand me in good stead, the Reverend John Verschoyle, then a curate at Marylebone Church. I don't remember how I met him; but I soon discovered in him one of the most extraordinary literary talents of the time; in especial a gift for poetry almost comparable to that of Swinburne.

  Verschoyle was of good family and had migrated from Trinity College, Dublin to Cambridge, where at seventeen he had written the Greek verses for the year book issued by the university; his English verse, too, seemed to me miraculous-a lyric gift of the highest. Though only an inch or so taller than I was, he was fifty inches round the chest and prodigiously strong. I called him a line battle-ship cut down to a frigate. He was handsome, too, with a high forehead, good features and long, golden moustache. Of all the men I met in my life, the one that most people would have selected as likely to do great things, at least in literature; yet he brought it to nothing and died untimely in middle-age.

  He happened to call on me just when I had finished my two reviews and naturally I gave him them to read. He knew Hutton's works. "A high churchman," he called him, "who admires Newman prodigiously." At once he declared that Hutton would certainly take the article on Russia; it was so new that Russia should show signs of a revolutionary spirit, was so unexpected, and so forth.

  "I wanted your criticism," I insisted. "Please point out any faults: I'm more at home in German than in English."

  He smiled: "Here's a sentence that proves that, I think, and there's another."

  Soon we were at it hammer and tongs, but he quickly convinced me that my half-doubt was amply justified. After he had gone through the two articles, I had had the best lesson in English I ever got. From that day on for five years the Bible and Swift never left my bedside, and in those years I never opened a German book, not even my beloved Heine or Schopenhauer. It had taken me years to learn German, but it took me twice as long to cleanse my brain of every trace of the tongue. No writer should ever try to master two languages.

  I wrote or rewrote the little essays and then sent them off to Hutton.

  The next day I was back at my post at Chapman's, and when I told Chapman that I was on the Spectator he laughed and said he was delighted; and a day or two later he called me in and gave me a couple of books he wanted my opinion on. "Meredith is our reader," he said; "but it takes him weeks often to give an opinion and I'd like to know about these books as soon as possible."

  My chance had come. I thanked him, went straight home and sat down at once to read and re-read the books. They took me all day and I spent the best part of the night writing my opinion of them. Next morning I went round to Verschoyle with them, who told me the reviews were all right, showed indeed remarkable improvement in my English. "The short sentences strike the right note," he remarked, "but you mustn't let them become stereotyped; you must vary them very often."

  I thanked him and took the reviews to Chapman. He was greatly impressed.

  "I thought you'd keep 'em a week,"
he said. "I had no wish to hurry you so."

  "It's nothing," I replied, "but the one book you could publish with some changes; the other is puerile."

  "I agree with you," he said, "and if you take this to the cashier downstairs, he'll give you the two guineas for your opinion."

  "No, no," I exclaimed. "I'm heavily in your debt for letting me bother you as I've done. Please use me whenever you can; I'll be only too glad to be of any service." Chapman smiled at me most cordially and from that day on gave me books every week, and asked me my opinion on this or that literary matter almost every day. He must have praised me to Escott too, for one afternoon Escott asked me up to the Fortnightly office and gave me a German article he wanted me to read and write an opinion on.

  "Shall I translate it?" I asked.

  "Only if you find it astonishingly good," he replied. Next day he had my written opinion.

  A little later he gave me an Italian article to translate and shortly afterwards, complaining that his work on the World took up a lot of his time, he gave me half the Fortnightly to correct; and when he found I did this too with the utmost care and speed, he asked me to sit in his room and soon I was playing secretary and factotum there every afternoon.

  The importunity that in the Bible won God had been successful too in London.

  But though a month had passed since I came from Salcombe, I had heard nothing from Froude, and, stranger still, nothing from the Spectator. I could only possess my soul in patience.

  Meanwhile I saw Verschoyle nearly every day and one day had a little dispute with him which showed, I think, a difference of nature. We had been discussing a passage in a Fortnightly article of mine, when he said: "These prolusions of ours are very interesting but don't lead to any goal."

  "Self-improvement is the best of goals," I replied; "but I hate your word 'prolusions.' It's correct enough, but surely a trifle pedantic?"

  "The exact word is rarely pedantic," he asserted. "Why not 'prolusion,' rather than 'preparatory exercise?'"

  "I can't say," was my answer, "but I want to be understood by the people at once. I would not use 'prolusion' for anything." Verschoyle shrugged his broad shoulders in manifest disagreement.

  It was Verschoyle who first introduced me to modern English poetry and to a number of living English poets, notably to a Dr. Westland Marston and his blind son, Phillip.

  They lived in the Euston Road, and though now poor had apparently been well off formerly, and were friends with all the literary men of repute.

  Verschoyle told me that Phillip Marston had had the most unhappy life. He had been engaged to a very pretty girl, Mary Nesbit (sister of E. Nesbit, afterwards Mrs. Hubert Bland,) and one morning going to her room to wake her he found her dead. The shock nearly killed him.

  A couple of years later, his dearest friend Oliver Maddox Brown, f died almost as suddenly. Three or four years later his sister, Cicely, who had been quite well the day before, was found dead in her bed in the morning. His other sister, Eleanor, died in the following year, 1879; and his most intimate friend and fellow-poet, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, some two years afterwards.

  And in 1882 James Thomson,} the author of The City of Dreadful Night, was taken with a seizure in Phillip's rooms and carried out to a hospital to die; and in the same year, his hero and friend Rossetti died at Birchington. It looked as if fate had picked him out for punishment, and so fear came to me that misfortune often dogs gifted mortals, whereas fortune flees them. Phillip Marston was good-looking with a fine forehead and auburn hair; his eyes seemed quite natural and very expressive. I don't know why, but I agreed almost at once with Verschoyle's estimate that Phil Marston was one of the sweetest and most unselfish of men. We spent the whole afternoon together and before we left Phillip asked me to return when I liked. In a day or two I called again and had some hours with him: he took to me, he said, because I was almost as hopeless as he was. "Verschoyle," he went on "puzzles me with his Christian belief. I have no belief, none, cannot conceive how any one can cherish any faith in the future, however faint, and I feel that you agree with me." "Yes, indeed," I replied, and quoted, Only a sleep eternal In an eternal night!

  He bowed his head and said with inexpressible sadness, "'Dead! All's done with,' as Browning says. There's no hope for the survivors, either, none."

  "I am not so sure," I interrupted. "It seems to me that the wisest of men are always the most kindly, and from that fact I draw the hope that in the future, bit by bit, we mortals may get to loving-kindness for each and every man born, and so make this earthly pilgrimage a scented way of inexpressible delights."

  "The sweeter you make it," he cried, "the worse it will be to leave it."

  "Is that true?" I asked. "Surely, when we have drunk deep of love and life, we shall be able to go to death as one now leaves a table-satisfied."

  It was dear Amy Levy, whom I got to know about this tune, who gave perfect expression to my thought, though she herself was as hopeless as Marston:

  The secret of our being, who can tell?

  To praise the gods, and Fate is not my part;

  Evil I see and pain; within my heart There is no voice that whispers: "All is well."

  Yet fair are days in summer and more fair The growths of human goodness here and there.

  "Beautiful, beautiful," he repeated when I had finished reciting the sextet,

  "and true; but it does not take us far, does it?"

  Phillip Marston was beyond any consolation-pain clothed him as with a garment-but his pity for others and his sympathy with human sorrow was inexhaustible.

  A little later he gave me a volume of his poems. "I've written, too, on the eternity of sleep," he said, and in the book I found this sonnet he had written to his love, Mary Nesbit. To me, it seems one of the sincerest and noblest of English elegies, though steeped in sadness.

  It must have been for one of us, my own, To drink this cup and eat this bitter bread.

  Had not my tears upon thy face been shed, Thy tears had dropped on mine; if I alone Did not walk now, thy spirit would have known My loneliness; and did my feet not tread This weary path and steep, thy feet had bled For mine, and thy mouth had for mine made moan.

  And so it comforts me, yea, not in vain, To think of thine eternity of sleep;

  To know thine eyes are tearless though mine weep;

  And when this cup's last bitterness I drain, One thought shall still its primal sweetness keep- Thou had'st the peace, and I, the undying pain.

  About this time, too, I came to know Miss Mary Robinson and her sister, but for some reason or other we did not get on very well. She laughed at me once over something I had said and chilled me. I was perhaps too young to realize her value, and soon she married a French professor and went to Paris to live and I lost sight of her; but now and again since I have had glimpses of a fine mind and regretted that I had not learned to know her. I think it was Francis Adams, the poet of The Army of the Night, who introduced me to the Robinsons. I shall have much to tell of him later, but now I need only say Verschoyle and the Marstons, Amy Levy, Miss Robinson and Francis Adams made me aware of the fact that London at that time, and indeed at all times, thanks to the eternal goodness, is a nest of singing birds, crowded, indeed, with men and women of talent and distinction, who moreover are usually devoted to poetry as the noblest of all the arts.

  My chief fault in life and as a critic, as Shaw has felt, is that I have always been an admirer of great men and never cared greatly for those who fell short of the highest. Marston interested me as Amy Levy interested me, by the sheer pathos of their unhappy fate and immitigable suffering, but it was only later that I came to see that their poetic achievement, too, if not of the very highest, was of real value and had extraordinary importance.

  After his untimely death on the fourteenth of February, 1887, people talked of poor Marston's drinking habits and how he would sit up at night till all hours and-the cackle of stupidity! The fools could not even forgive the blind for trying to turn ni
ght into day! If drinking drowned sad, lonely thoughts, why not drink? I thank dear Phil Marston for hours of sweet companionship and an exquisite, all-embracing sympathy, and England can never forget his noble poetry.

  About this time I got a letter one morning that surprised me. My name on the envelope was written in such tiny characters that I could scarcely read it, but when I opened the cover two proofs fell out, Spectator proofs at last and a letter in Hutton's tiny script!

  "You were right," he began, "your reviews justify you. The one on Freeman is a gem and the Russian one provokes thought and may lead to discussion. I send you proofs of both and should be delighted if you'd call with them when corrected. I want more of your work. Yours truly, R. H. Button."

  At last the door was forced. I sat as in a charmed trance for some little time, then I opened the proofs and tried to read them as if a stranger had written them. The Russian one was certainly the better of the two, but it was the review of Freeman, aimed at Hutton's head and heart, that had won the prize.

  Food for thought in that. I began then to say to myself that no one can see above his own head.

  As I read the articles I noticed little roughnesses of swing and measure and set myself to correct them on another paper: I wanted to show Verschoyle the virginal proofs and get his opinion. While working in this way the noon post brought me a letter from Froude excusing his long silence, but he wished the dinner in my honour to be a great success and he had to wait till certain people had returned to town. Now, however, he'd be glad to see me on such and such a night and he'd keep my remarkable poems till then. "They have proved to me," he concluded, "that Carlyle's estimate of you was justified."

  Nothing could be more flattering, but my discussions with Verschoyle and the reading of his and Marston's poetry had shaken my belief in my qualifications as a lyric poet; still, I had recently written a sonnet or two that I liked greatly and-conceit does not die of one blow.

  That afternoon I took the Spectator proofs to Verschoyle who, strange to say, agreed with Hutton that the Freeman paper was the better of the two, and he only suggested a single emendation, which I had already jotted down.