In Good Company. Coulson Kernahan
to most other living women poets,” he exclaimed in a burst of Swinburnian hyperbole.
Then in his thin, high-pitched but exquisitely modulated and musical voice he half read, half chanted two verses of the poem in question:
One young life lost, two happy young lives blighted
With earthward eyes we see:
With eyes uplifted, keener, farther-sighted
We look, O Lord, to Thee.
Grief hears a funeral knell: Hope hears the ringing
Of birthday bells on high.
Faith, Hope and Love make answer with soft singing,
Half carol and half cry.
Then he stopped abruptly.
“I won’t read the third and last verse,” he said. “One glance at it is sufficient to show that it is unequal, and that the poem would be stronger and finer by its omission. But for the happy folk who are able to think as she thinks, who believe as she believes on religious matters, the poem is of its kind perfect. Let me read that second verse again,” and with glowing eyes, with hand marking time to the music, he read once more:
Grief hears a funeral knell: Hope hears the ringing
Of birthday bells on high.
Faith, Hope and Love make answer with soft singing,
Half carol and half cry.
The last line, “Half carol and half cry,” he repeated three times, lowering his voice with each repetition, until at last it was little more than a whisper, and so died away, like the undistinguishable ceasing of far-off music.
Laying the manuscript reverently beside him, he sat perfectly still for a space and with brooding beautiful eyes. Then rising without a word he stole silently, softly, almost ghost-like, but with short, swift steps out of the room.
III
Though it was my privilege to count among my friends several personal friends of Swinburne—notably the late Theodore Watts-Dunton, Philip Bourke Marston, and the dearest and closest of all my friends, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton—it was not until the first weeks of 1892 that I met him personally.
I was invited to lunch at The Pines, and the first thing that struck me as I entered the dining-room and took the extended hand, which was soft and limp, and had no sturdiness in the grasp, was the singular charm and even courtliness of his bearing. Unmistakably an aristocrat, and with all the ease and polish which one associates with high breeding, there was, even in the cordiality with which he rose and came forward to welcome me, a suspicion of the shy nervousness of the introspective man and of the recluse on first facing a stranger. It had passed in a few minutes, and I saw no trace of it at any of our subsequent meetings, but to the last his courtliness remained. I have seen him angry, I have heard him furiously dissent from and even denounce the views put forward by others, but never once was what, for want of a better word, I must call his personal deference to those others relaxed. With him the proverbial familiarity which is said to breed contempt, bred only more consistent and insistent courtesy. To no one would he defer quite so graciously and readily, to no one was he so scrupulously courtly in his bearing, as to those who constituted the household in which he lived. On the occasion of this first meeting with him he talked with extraordinary animation, sitting up erectly in his chair and moving his body or limbs stiffly and jerkily. He had not long returned from his forenoon walk, and, if I may be pardoned so far-fetched a comparison, he was like a newly-opened bottle of champagne, bubbling and brimming over with the buoyant, beady, joyous and joy-giving wine of morning. Watts-Dunton, always generously ready to interest himself, and to endeavour to interest others, in the work of a young writer of ability, was anxious to talk about my friend, Richard Le Gallienne. He might as well, by making a stopper of his open hand, have tried permanently to prevent the overflow of the champagne bottle which I have used for the purpose of a fanciful comparison. The moment he withdrew his hand, the instant he ceased to speak of Le Gallienne, Swinburne, as represented by the newly-opened bottle, was bubbling over again about his walk. The wine of it was in his veins and seemed to have intoxicated him.
“There is no time like the morning for a walk!” he declared, turning to me with enthusiasm. “The sparkle, the exhilaration of it! I walk every morning of my life, no matter what the weather, pelting along all the time as fast as I can go; and it is entirely to my daily walk that I attribute my perfect health.”
On hearing that I, too, was a great, as well as a fast walker, Swinburne looked me up and down challengingly, and said with a smile that was almost like a merry boy’s:
“Yes! but I think I could outwalk you, and get there first, for all your six feet!” Then, turning to Watts-Dunton, he apologised playfully for having monopolised the talk, and said, “Now tell me about your young poet. His is certainly the most beautiful poet-face since Shelley’s.”
Watts-Dunton replied by reading some extracts from a “Note on Swinburne” which Le Gallienne had contributed to Literary Opinion, Swinburne listening with downbent head meanwhile. When Watts-Dunton had made an end of it, and Swinburne had expressed his appreciation, the latter inquired how I first came to know Le Gallienne, and learning that when I was acting as the Editor of the English edition of Lippincott’s Magazine I had, in that capacity or incapacity, accepted one of Le Gallienne’s first published articles, The Nature Poems of George Meredith, he asked if I knew Sir J. M. Barrie, who he considered had been much influenced by the author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.
“Only slightly,” I answered. “I suggested, in fact organised a dinner to dear old F. W. Robinson, in whose magazine Home Chimes much of the early work of Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, Zangwill, Eden Phillpotts, G. B. Burgin, and many others, who have since come into their own, appeared. Jerome took the chair and Barrie the vice-chair, and the dinner was something of a record in the list of distinguished men present, and was, I believe, one of the few functions of the sort of which an account appeared in the Athenæum. It was there I first met Barrie.”
“Robinson of Grandmother’s Money,” cried Swinburne in an ecstasy of enthusiasm. “You have mentioned the name of one of the very salt of the earth, and one of the dearest friends of both of us here. We contributed to the first number of Home Chimes. Watts-Dunton wrote a noble Sonnet of Greeting, and I printed my Sonnet Near Cromer there. His novels, I grant, though eminently readable, as the reviewers say, are not great. Unlike Dr. Gilbert’s, they do not dovetail. Finishing one chapter, you are not restless and uneasy till you have read the next, and that is a fatal defect in a novelist.”
Speaking of Robinson and Home Chimes reminded Swinburne of the fact that it was in that unfortunately named and defunct magazine that he had seen some of the best work of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet, concerning whom I had contributed an article to the current number of the Fortnightly Review. This article Swinburne had read and wished to discuss, for, whereas my friendship with Philip Marston was not of long standing, he had known the blind poet since the latter was a lad of fourteen, and on the day after Philip’s death had written a memorial sonnet which was subsequently printed in the Athenæum.
Swinburne’s remarks upon the subject of my article—though I need hardly say I have forgotten no word of what he said—I pass over, but what I must not pass over is the witness these remarks bore to his extraordinary memory and to his equally extraordinary method of reading. Reading, in fact, is not the word. Had he parsed the article, schoolboy wise, sentence by sentence, he could not more effectually have mastered it; had he dissected it, part by part, surgeon-like, he could not more completely have torn the heart out of the matter.
Obviously Swinburne could only have read the thing once, yet had I, the writer, been called upon, even while it was fresh in my memory, to pass an examination on this very article, I doubt whether I should have known half as much of it as he. Hearing him thus deliver himself upon a casual contribution to a periodical, which, by