And Even Now
courtly compliments to Whistler as a painter, but joined issue with his
theories. Straightway there appeared in the World a little letter from
Whistler, deriding ‘one Algernon Swinburne--outsider--Putney.’ It was
not in itself a very pretty or amusing letter; and still less so did it
seem in the light of the facts which Watts-Dunton told me in some such
words as these: After he’d published that lecture of his, Jimmy Whistler
had me to dine with him at Kettner’s or somewhere. He said “Now,
Theodore, I want you to do me a favour.” He wanted to get me to get
Swinburne to write an article about his lecture. I said “No, Jimmy
Whistler, I can’t ask Algernon to do that. He’s got a great deal of work
on hand just now--a great deal of work. And besides, this sort of thing
wouldn’t be at all in his line.” But Jimmy Whistler went on appealing to
me. He said it would do him no end of good if Swinburne wrote about him.
And--well, I half gave in: I said perhaps I would mention the matter to
Algernon. And next day I did. I could see Algernon didn’t want to do it
at all. But--well, there, he said he’d do it to please me. And he
did it. And then Jimmy Whistler published that letter. A very shabby
trick--very shabby indeed.’ Of course I do not vouch for the exact words
in which Watts-Dunton told me this tale; but this was exactly the tale
he told me. I expressed my astonishment. He added that of course he
‘never wanted to see the fellow again after that, and never did.’ But
presently, after a long gaze into the coals, he emitted a chuckle, as
for earlier memories of ‘such a funny fellow.’ One quite recent memory
he had, too. ‘When I took on the name of Dunton, I had a note from him.
Just this, with his butterfly signature: Theodore! What’s Dunton? That
was very good--very good.... But, of course,’ he added gravely, ‘I took
no notice.’ And no doubt, quite apart from the difficulty of finding
an answer in the same vein, he did well in not replying. Loyalty to
Swinburne forbade. But I see a certain pathos in the unanswered message.
It was a message from the hand of an old jester, but also, I think,
from the heart of an old man--a signal waved jauntily, but in truth
wistfully, across the gulf of years and estrangement; and one could wish
it had not been ignored.
Some time after Whistler died I wrote for one of the magazines an
appreciation of his curious skill in the art of writing. Watts-Dunton
told me he had heard of this from Swinburne. ‘I myself,’ he said, ‘very
seldom read the magazines. But Algernon always has a look at them.’
There was something to me very droll, and cheery too, in this picture of
the illustrious recluse snatching at the current issues of our twaddle.
And I was immensely pleased at hearing that my article had ‘interested
him very much.’ I inwardly promised myself that as soon as I reached
home I would read the article, to see just how it might have struck
Swinburne. When in due course I did this, I regretted the tone of the
opening sentences, in which I declared myself ‘no book-lover’ and avowed
a preference for ‘an uninterrupted view of my fellow-creatures.’ I felt
that had I known my article would meet the eye of Swinburne I should
have cut out that overture. I dimly remembered a fine passage in one of
his books of criticism--something (I preferred not to verify it) about
‘the dotage of duncedom which cannot perceive, or the impudence of
insignificance so presumptuous as to doubt, that the elements of life
and literature are indivisibly mingled one in another, and that he to
whom books are less real than life will assuredly find in men and women
as little reality as in his accursed crassness he deserves to discover.’
I quailed, I quailed. But mine is a resilient nature, and I promptly
reminded myself that Swinburne’s was a very impersonal one: he would not
think the less highly of me, for he never had thought about me in any
way whatsoever. All was well. I knew I could revisit The Pines, when
next Watts-Dunton should invite me, without misgiving. And to this day
I am rather proud of having been mentioned, though not by name, and not
consciously, and unfavourably, by Swinburne.
I wonder that I cannot recall more than I do recall of those hours at
The Pines. It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how
few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and
how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured... I am
middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one third
of these, for one mustn’t count sleep as life. The residual number is
still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was unimportant to me
in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course; but even boredom is a
positive state: one chafes at it and hates it; strange that one
should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that of one’s actual
happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a remnant clings
about one! Of those hours at The Pines, of that past within a past,
there was not a minute nor a second that I did not spend with pleasure.
Memory is a great artist, we are told; she selects and rejects and
shapes and so on. No doubt. Elderly persons would be utterly intolerable
if they remembered everything. Everything, nevertheless, is just what
they themselves would like to remember, and just what they would like
to tell to everybody. Be sure that the Ancient Mariner, though he
remembered quite as much as his audience wanted to hear, and rather
more, about the albatross and the ghastly crew, was inwardly raging at
the sketchiness of his own mind; and believe me that his stopping only
one of three was the merest oversight. I should like to impose on the
world many tomes about The Pines.
But, scant though my memories are of the moments there, very full and
warm in me is the whole fused memory of the two dear old men that lived
there. I wish I had Watts-Dunton’s sure faith in meetings beyond the
grave. I am glad I do not disbelieve that people may so meet. I like to
think that some day in Elysium I shall--not without diffidence--approach
those two and reintroduce myself. I can see just how courteously
Swinburne will bow over my hand, not at all remembering who I am.
Watts-Dunton will remember me after a moment: ‘Oh, to be sure, yes
indeed! I’ve a great deal of work on hand just now--a great deal of
work, but’ we shall sit down together on the asphodel, and I cannot but
think we shall have whisky-toddy even there. He will not have changed.
He will still be shaggy and old and chubby, and will wear the same
frock-coat, with the same creases in it. Swinburne, on the other hand,
will be quite, quite young, with a full mane of flaming auburn locks,
and no clothes to hinder him from plunging back at any moment into the
shining Elysian waters from which he will have just emerged. I see him
skim lightly away into that element. On the strand is sitting a man of
noble and furrowed brow. It is Mazzini, still thinking of Liberty. And
anon the tiny young English amphibian comes ashore to fling himself
dripping at the feet of the patriot and to carol the Republican ode he
has composed in the course of his swim. ‘He’s wonderfully active--active
in mind and body,’ Watts-Dunton says to me. ‘I come to the shore now
and then, just to see how he’s getting on. But I spend most of my time
inland. I find I’ve so much to talk over with Gabriel. Not that he’s
quite the fellow he was. He always had rather a cult for Dante, you
know, and now he’s more than ever under the Florentine influence. He
lives in a sort of monastery that Dante has here; and there he sits
painting imaginary portraits of Beatrice, and giving them all to Dante.
But he still has his great moments, and there’s no one quite like
him--no one. Algernon won’t ever come and see him, because that fellow
Mazzini’s as Anti-Clerical as ever and makes a principle of having
nothing to do with Dante. Look!--there’s Algernon going into the water
again! He’ll tire himself out, he’ll catch cold, he’ll--’ and here the
old man rises and hurries down to the sea’s edge. ‘Now, Algernon,’ he
roars, ‘I don’t want to interfere with you, but I do think, my dear old
friend,’--and then, with a guffaw, he breaks off, remembering that his
friend is not deaf now nor old, and that here in Elysium, where no ills
are, good advice is not needed.
A LETTER THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN 1914.
One morning lately I saw in my newspaper an announcement that enraged
me. It was made in the driest, most casual way, as though nobody would
care a rap; and this did but whet the wrath I had in knowing that Adam
Street, Adelphi, was to be undone. The Tivoli Music Hall, about to be
demolished and built anew, was to have a frontage of thirty feet, if you
please, in Adam Street. Why? Because the London County Council, with its
fixed idea that the happiness of mankind depends on the widening of the
Strand, had decreed that the Tivoli’s new frontage thereon should be
thirty feet further back, and had granted as consolation to the Tivoli
the right to spread itself around the corner and wreck the work of the
Brothers Adam. Could not this outrage be averted? There sprang from
my lips that fiery formula which has sprung from the lips of so many
choleric old gentlemen in the course of the past hundred years and more:
‘I shall write to The Times.’
If Adam Street were a thing apart I should have been stricken enough,
heaven knows, at thought of its beauty going, its dear tradition being
lost. But not as an unrelated masterpiece was Adam Street built by the
Brothers whose name it bears. An integral part it is in their
noble design of the Adelphi. It is the very key to the Adelphi, the
well-ordained initiation for us into that small, matchless quarter of
London, where peace and dignity do still reign--peace the more beatific,
and dignity the finer, by instant contrast with the chaos of hideous
sounds and sights hard by. What man so gross that, passing out of the
Strand into Adam Street, down the mild slope to the river, he has not
cursed the age he was born into--or blessed it because the Adelphi
cannot in earlier days have had for any one this fullness of peculiar
magic? Adam Street is not so beautiful as the serene Terrace it goes
down to, nor so curiously grand as crook-backed John Street. But the
Brothers did not mean it to be so. They meant it just as an harmonious
‘lead’ to those inner glories of their scheme. Ruin that approach, and
how much else do you ruin of a thing which--done perfectly by masters,
and done by them here as nowhere else could they have done it--ought
to be guarded by us very jealously! How to raise on this irregular and
‘barbarous’ ground a quarter that should be ‘polite’, congruous in tone
with the smooth river beyond it--this was the irresistible problem the
Brothers set themselves and slowly, coolly, perfectly solved. So long
as the Adelphi remains to us, a microcosm of the eighteenth century is
ours. If there is any meaning in the word sacrilege--
That, I remember, was the beginning of one of the sentences I composed
while I paced my room, thinking out my letter to The Times. I rejected
that sentence. I rejected scores of others. They were all too vehement.
Though my facility for indignation is not (I hope) less than that of my
fellows, I never had written to The Times. And now, though I flattered
myself I knew how the thing ought to be done, I was unsure that I could
do it. Was I beginning too late? Restraint was the prime effect to
be aimed at. If you are intemperate, you don’t convince. I wanted to
convince the readers of The Times that the violation of the Adelphi was
a thing to be prevented at all costs. Soberness of statement, a simple,
direct, civic style, with only an underthrob of personal emotion, were