And Even Now
because of the way he carried himself, with his long neck strained
so tightly back that he all receded from the waist upwards. I noticed
afterwards that this deportment made the back of his jacket hang quite
far away from his legs; and so small and sloping were his shoulders that
the jacket seemed ever so likely to slip right off. I became aware, too,
that when he bowed he did not unbend his back, but only his neck--the
length of the neck accounting for the depth of the bow. His hands were
tiny, even for his size, and they fluttered helplessly, touchingly,
unceasingly.
Directly after my introduction, we sat down to the meal. Of course I had
never hoped to ‘get into touch with him’ reciprocally. Quite apart from
his deafness, I was too modest to suppose he could be interested in
anything I might say. But--for I knew he had once been as high and
copious a singer in talk as in verse--I had hoped to hear utterances
from him. And it did not seem that my hope was to be fulfilled.
Watts-Dunton sat at the head of the table, with a huge and very
Tupperesque joint of roast mutton in front of him, Swinburne and myself
close up to him on either side. He talked only to me. This was the more
tantalising because Swinburne seemed as though he were bubbling over
with all sorts of notions. Not that he looked at either of us. He smiled
only to himself, and to his plateful of meat, and to the small bottle of
Bass’s pale ale that stood before him--ultimate allowance of one who had
erst clashed cymbals in Naxos. This small bottle he eyed often and with
enthusiasm, seeming to waver between the rapture of broaching it now and
the grandeur of having it to look forward to. It made me unhappy to see
what trouble he had in managing his knife and fork. Watts-Dunton told
me on another occasion that this infirmity of the hands had been
lifelong--had begun before Eton days. The Swinburne family had been
alarmed by it and had consulted a specialist, who said that it resulted
from ‘an excess of electric vitality,’ and that any attempt to stop it
would be harmful. So they had let it be. I have known no man of genius
who had not to pay, in some affliction or defect either physical or
spiritual, for what the gods had given him. Here, in this fluttering of
his tiny hands, was a part of the price that Swinburne had to pay. No
doubt he had grown accustomed to it many lustres before I met him, and
I need not have felt at all unhappy at what I tried not to see. He,
evidently, was quite gay, in his silence--and in the world that was for
him silent. I had, however, the maddening suspicion that he would have
liked to talk. Why wouldn’t Watts-Dunton roar him an opportunity? I felt
I had been right perhaps in feeling that the lesser man was--no, not
jealous of the greater whom he had guarded so long and with such love,
but anxious that he himself should be as fully impressive to visitors as
his fine gifts warranted. Not, indeed, that he monopolised the talk.
He seemed to regard me as a source of information about all the
latest ‘movements,’ and I had to shout banalities while he munched his
mutton--banalities whose one saving grace for me was that they were
inaudible to Swinburne. Had I met Swinburne’s gaze, I should have
faltered. Now and again his shining light-grey eyes roved from the
table, darting this way and that--across the room, up at the ceiling,
out of the window; only never at us. Somehow this aloofness gave no hint
of indifference. It seemed to be, rather, a point in good manners--the
good manners of a child ‘sitting up to table,’ not ‘staring,’ not
‘asking questions,’ and reflecting great credit on its invaluable old
nurse. The child sat happy in the wealth of its inner life; the child
was content not to speak until it were spoken to; but, but, I felt it
did want to be spoken to. And, at length, it was.
So soon as the mutton had been replaced by the apple-pie, Watts-Dunton
leaned forward and ‘Well, Algernon,’ he roared, ‘how was it on the Heath
to-day?’ Swinburne, who had meekly inclined his ear to the question,
now threw back his head, uttering a sound that was like the cooing of a
dove, and forthwith, rapidly, ever so musically, he spoke to us of his
walk; spoke not in the strain of a man who had been taking his daily
exercise on Putney Heath, but rather in that of a Peri who had at long
last been suffered to pass through Paradise. And rather than that he
spoke would I say that he cooingly and flutingly sang of his experience.
The wonders of this morning’s wind and sun and clouds were expressed in
a flow of words so right and sentences so perfectly balanced that they
would have seemed pedantic had they not been clearly as spontaneous as
the wordless notes of a bird in song. The frail, sweet voice rose and
fell, lingered, quickened, in all manner of trills and roulades. That he
himself could not hear it, seemed to me the greatest loss his deafness
inflicted on him. One would have expected this disability to mar the
music; but it didn’t; save that now and again a note would come out
metallic and over-shrill, the tones were under good control. The whole
manner and method had certainly a strong element of oddness; but no one
incapable of condemning as unmanly the song of a lark would have called
it affected. I had met young men of whose enunciation Swinburne’s now
reminded me. In them the thing had always irritated me very much; and I
now became sure that it had been derived from people who had derived it
in old Balliol days from Swinburne himself. One of the points familiar
to me in such enunciation was the habit of stressing extremely, and
lackadaisically dwelling on, some particular syllable. In Swinburne
this trick was delightful--because it wasn’t a trick, but a need of his
heart. Well do I remember his ecstasy of emphasis and immensity of pause
when he described how he had seen in a perambulator on the Heath to-day
‘the most BEAUT--iful babbie ever beheld by mortal eyes.’ For babies,
as some of his later volumes testify, he had a sort of idolatry. After
Mazzini had followed Landor to Elysium, and Victor Hugo had followed
Mazzini, babies were what among live creatures most evoked Swinburne’s
genius for self-abasement. His rapture about this especial ‘babbie’ was
such as to shake within me my hitherto firm conviction that, whereas
the young of the brute creation are already beautiful at the age of five
minutes, the human young never begin to be so before the age of three
years. I suspect Watts-Dunton of having shared my lack of innate
enthusiasm. But it was one of Swinburne’s charms, as I was to find, that
he took for granted every one’s delight in what he himself so fervidly
delighted in. He could as soon have imagined a man not loving the very
sea as not doting on the aspect of babies and not reading at least one
play by an Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatist every day.
I forget whether it was at this my first meal or at another that he
described a storm in which, one night years ago, with Watts-Dunton,
he had crossed the Channel. The rhythm of his great phrases was as the
rhythm of those waves, and his head swayed in accordance to it like the
wave-rocked boat itself. He hymned in memory the surge and darkness,
the thunder and foam and phosphorescence--‘You remember, Theodore? You
remember the PHOS--phorescence?’--all so beautifully and vividly that I
almost felt stormbound and in peril of my life. To disentangle one from
another of the several occasions on which I heard him talk is difficult
because the procedure was so invariable: Watts-Dunton always dictating
when I arrived, Swinburne always appearing at the moment of the meal,
always the same simple and substantial fare, Swinburne never allowed
to talk before the meal was half over. As to this last point, I soon
realised that I had been quite unjust in suspecting Watts-Dunton of
selfishness. It was simply a sign of the care with which he watched over
his friend’s welfare. Had Swinburne been admitted earlier to the talk,
he would not have taken his proper quantity of roast mutton. So soon,
always, as he had taken that, the embargo was removed, the chance was
given him. And, swiftly though he embraced the chance, and much though
he made of it in the courses of apple-pie and of cheese, he seemed
touchingly ashamed of ‘holding forth.’ Often, before he had said
his really full say on the theme suggested by Watts-Dunton’s loud
interrogation, he would curb his speech and try to eliminate himself,
bowing his head over his plate; and then, when he had promptly been
brought in again, he would always try to atone for his inhibiting
deafness by much reference and deference to all that we might otherwise
have to say. ‘I hope,’ he would coo to me, ‘my friend Watts-Dunton,
who’--and here he would turn and make a little bow to Watts-Dunton--‘is
himself a scholar, will bear me out when I say’--or ‘I hardly know,’
he would flute to his old friend, ‘whether Mr. Beerbohm’--here a bow to
me--‘will agree with me in my opinion of’ some delicate point in Greek
prosody or some incident in an old French romance I had never heard of.
On one occasion, just before the removal of the mutton, Watts-Dunton
had been asking me about an English translation that had been made of M.
Rostand’s ‘Cyrano de Bergerac.’ He then took my information as the match
to ignite the Swinburnian tinder. ‘Well, Algernon, it seems that “Cyrano
de Bergerac”’--but this first spark was enough: instantly Swinburne
was praising the works of Cyrano de Bergerac. Of M. Rostand he may
have heard, but him he forgot. Indeed I never heard Swinburne mention a
single contemporary writer. His mind ranged and revelled always in the
illustrious or obscure past. To him the writings of Cyrano de Bergerac
were as fresh as paint--as fresh as to me, alas, was the news of their
survival. Of course, of course, you have read “L’Histoire Comique des
états et des Empires de la Lune”?’ I admitted, by gesture and facial
expression, that I had not. Whereupon he reeled out curious extracts
from that allegory--‘almost as good as “Gulliver”’--with a memorable
instance of the way in which the traveller to the moon was shocked by
the conversation of the natives, and the natives’ sense of propriety was
outraged by the conversation of the traveller.
In life, as in (that for him more truly actual thing) literature, it
was always the preterit that enthralled him. Of any passing events,
of anything the newspapers were full of, never a word from him; and I
should have been sorry if there had been. But I did, through the medium
of Watts-Dunton, sometimes start him on topics that might have led him
to talk of Rossetti and other old comrades. For me the names of those
men breathed the magic of the past, just as it was breathed for me by
Swinburne’s presence. For him, I suppose, they were but a bit of the
present, and the mere fact that they had dropped out of it was not
enough to hallow them. He never mentioned them. But I was glad to see
that he revelled as wistfully in the days just before his own as I in
the days just before mine. He recounted to us things he had been told
in his boyhood by an aged aunt, or great-aunt--‘one of the Ashburnhams’;
how, for example, she had been taken by her mother to a county ball,
a distance of many miles, and, on the way home through the frosty and
snowy night, the family-coach had suddenly stopped: there was a crowd of
dark figures in the way...at which point Swinburne stopped too, before
saying, with an ineffable smile and in a voice faint with appreciation,
‘They were burying a suicide at the crossroads.’
Vivid as this Hogarthian night-scene was to me, I saw beside it another
scene: a great panelled room, a grim old woman in a high-backed chair,
and, restless on a stool at her feet an extraordinary little nephew with