To define clearly the impression left upon one by intercourse with any man is difficult. In De Tableys case it is almost impossible. His remarkable modesty, or rather diffidence, was what, perhaps, struck me most. It was a genuine lack of faith in his own powers; it had nothing whatever to do with mock-modesty. I had a singular instance of this diffidence in the autumn of last year. Lord de Tabley, who was staying at Ryde, having learnt that I was staying with a friend near Niton Bay, wrote to me there saying that he somewhat specially wanted to see me, and proposed our lunching together at an hotel at Ventnor. I was delighted to accede to this, for, like all who fully knew Lord de Tabley, I was thoroughly and deeply attached to him. He was so genuine and so modest and so genialunsoured by the great and various sorrows of which he used sometimes to talk to me by the cosy study firenay, sweetened by them, as I often thoughtso grateful for the smallest service rendered in an arena where ingratitude sometimes seems to be the vis motrix of lifea truly lovable man, if ever there was one.

I drove over to Ventnor. As I chanced to reach the hotel somewhat before the appointed time, and he had not arrived, I drove on to Bonchurch along the Shanklin road. On my way back, I passed a four-wheel cab; but not dreaming that his love of the growler reached beyond London, I never thought of him in connexion with it until I saw the well-known face with its sweet thoughtful expression looking through the cab window. On this occasion it looked so specially thoughtful that I imagined something serious had occurred. At the hotel I found that he had secured a snug room and a luxurious luncheon. An ominous packet of writing-paper peering from his overcoat pocket convinced me that it was a manuscript brought for me to read, and feeling that I should prefer to get it over before luncheon, I asked him to show it to me. He then told me its history. Having sent by special invitation a poem to The Nineteenth Century, the editor had returned itreturned it with certain strictures upon portions of it. This incident he had at once subjected to the usual analysis, and had come to the conclusion that certain outside influences of an invidious kind had been brought to play upon the editor.

Time was when I should have shrunk with terror from so thankless a task as that of reading a manuscript with such a frightful history, but it is astonishing what a long experience in the literary world will do for a man in perplexities of this kind. I read the manuscript and the editors courteous but sagacious comments, and I found that the poet had undertaken a subject which was utterly and almost inconceivably alien to his genius. As I read I felt the wistful gaze fixed upon me while the waiter was moving in and out of the room, preparing the luncheon table. Well, said he, as I laid the manuscript down, what do you think? do you agree with the editor? Not entirely, I said. Not entirely! he exclaimed; then turning to the waiter, he said, You can leave the soup, and I will ring when we are ready. Not entirely, I repeated. With all the editors strictures I entirely agree, but he says that by working upon it you may make it into a worthy poem: there I disagree with him. I consider it absolutely hopeless. I regret now that we did not leave the matter until after luncheon, but we will not let it spoil our appetites.

I am afraid it did spoil our appetites nevertheless, for I felt that I had been compelled, for his own sake, to give him pain. He was much depressed, declared that the success of his late book was entirely factitious, and vowed that nothing should ever persuade him to write another line of verse, and that he would now devote his attention to a peers duties in the House of Lords. I was so disturbed myself at thus paining so lovable a friend that next day I wrote to him, trying to soften what I had said, and urged him to do as the editor of The Nineteenth Century had suggested, write another poema poem upon some classical subject, which he would deal with so admirably. The result of it all was that he found the editors strictures on the unlucky poem to be absolutely well grounded, and wrote for The Nineteenth Century Orpheus, one of the finest of his later poems.

I think these anecdotes of Lord de Tabley will show why we who knew him were so attached to him.



II.

Can it be claimed for Lord de Tabley that in the poetical firmament which hung over the days of his youthwhen the heavens were bright with such luminaries as Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Morrishe had a place of his own? We think it can. And in saying this we are fully conscious of the kind of praise we are awarding him. Whatever may be said for or against the artistic temper of the present hour, it must certainly be said of the time we are alluding to that it was great as regards its wealth of poetic genius, and as regards its artistic temper greater still. It was a time when the beauteous damsel Poesy, honourable and retired, whom Cervantes described, dared still roam the English Parnassus, a friend of solitude, disturbed by no clash of Notorietys brazen cymbals, where fountains entertained her, woods freed her from ennui, and flowers delighted herdelighted her for their own sakes. In order to write such verses as the following from the concluding poem of the volume before us {231} a man must really have passed into that true mood of the poet described by the great Spanish humourist:

How idle for a spurious fame To roll in thorn-beds of unrest; What matter whom the mob acclaim, If thou art master of thy breast?

If sick thy soul with fear and doubt, And weary with the rabble din, If thou wouldst scorn the herd without, First make the discord calm within.

If we are lords in our disdain, And rule our kingdoms of despair, As fools we shall not plough the main For halters made of syrens hair.

We need not traverse foreign earth To seek an alien Sorrows face. She sits within thy central hearth, And at thy table has her place.

So with this hour of push and pelf, Where nought unsordid seems to last, Vex not thy miserable self, But search the fallows of the past.

In Times rich track behind us lies A soil replete with root and seed; There harvest wheat repays the wise, While idiots find but charlock weed.

Between the writer of the above lines and those great poets who in his youth were his contemporaries there is this point of affinity: like them his actual achievements do not strike the reader so forcibly as the potentialities which those achievements reveal. In the same way that Achilles was suggested by his spear in the picture in the chamber of Lucrece, the poet who writes not for fame, but writes to please himself, suggests unconsciously his own portrait by every touch:

For much imaginary work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles image stood his spear Gripd in an armèd hand; himself behind Was left unseen save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, Stood for the whole to be imaginèd.

Poets, indeed, have always been divisible into those whose poetry gives the reader an impression that they are greater than their work, and those whose poetry gives the reader a contrary impression. There have always been poets who may say of themselves, like the Poet in Timon of Athens,

Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes From whence tis nourished: the fire i the flint Shows not till it be struck.

And there have always been poets whose verse, howsoever good it may be, shows that, although they have been able to mould into poetic forms the riches of the life around them, and also of the literature which has come to them as an inheritance, they are simply working for fame, or rather for notoriety, in the markets of the outer world. The former can give us an impression of personal greatness such as the latter cannot.

With regard to the originality of Lord de Tableys work, it is obvious that every poet must in some measure be influenced by the leading luminaries of his own period. But at no time would it have been fair to call Lord de Tabley an imitator; and in the new poems in this volume the accent is, perhaps, more individual than was the accent of any of his previous poetry. The general readers comparatively slight acquaintance with Greek poetry may become unfortunate for modern poets. Often and often it occurs that a poet is charged with imitating another poet of a more prominent position than his own when, as a matter of fact, both poets have been yielding to the magic influence of some poet of Greece. Such a yielding has been held to be legitimate in every literature of the modern world. Indeed, to be coloured by the great classics of Greek and Roman literature is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of all the best poetry of the modern world, as it is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of the far-off waters of the Nile to be enriched and toned by the far-off wealth of Ruwenzori and the great fertilizing lakes from which they have sprung. But in drawing from the eternal fountains of beauty Lord de Tableys processes were not those of his great contemporaries; they were very specially his own, as far removed from the severe method of Matthew Arnold on the one hand as from Tennysons method on the other.

His way of work was always to illustrate a story of Hellenic myth by symbols and analogies drawn not from the more complex economies of a later world, as was Tennysons way, but from that wide knowledge of the phenomena of nature which can be attained only by a poet whose knowledge is that of the naturalist. His devotion to certain departments of natural science has been running parallel with his devotion to poetry, and if learning is something wider than scholarship, he is the most learned poet of his time. While Tennysons knowledge of natural science, though wide, was gathered from books, Lord de Tableys knowledge, especially in the department of botany, is derived largely from original observation and inquiry. And this knowledge enables him to make his poetry alive with organic detail such as satisfies the naturalist as fully as the other qualities in his works satisfy the lover of poetry. The leading poem of the present volume, Orpheus in Hades, is full of a knowledge of the ways of nature beyond the reach of most poets, and yet this knowledge is kept well in governance by his artistic sense; it is never obtrudednever more than hinted at, indeed:

Soon, soon I saw the spectral vanguard come, Coasting along, as swallows, beating low Before a hint of rain. In buoyant air, Circling thy poise, and hardly move the wing, And rather float than fly. Then other spirits, Shrill and more fierce, came wailing down the gale; As plaintive plovers came with swoop and scream To lure our footsteps from their furrowy nest, So these, as lapwing guardians, sailed and swung To save the secrets of their gloomy lair.

* * * * *

I hate to watch the flower set up its face. I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea, Its heaving roods of intertangled weed And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit; The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn, The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones, The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves, Rotting the floors of Autumn.

The Death of Phaëthon is another poem in which Lord de Tabley succeeds in mingling a true poetic energy with that subtle dignity of utterance which can never really be divorced from true poetry, whether the poets subject be lofty or homely.

The line

With sudden ray and music across the sea

and the opening line of the poem,

Before him the immeasurable heaven,

cause us to think that Lord de Tabley has paid but little attention to the question of elision in English poetry. In the second of the lines above quoted elision is impossible, in the first elision is demanded. The reason why elision is sometimes demanded is that in certain lines, as in the one which opens Orpheus in Hades, the hiatus which occurs when a word ending with a vowel is followed by a vowel beginning the next word may be so great as to become intolerable. The reason why elision is sometimes a merely allowable beauty is that when a word ends with w, r, or l, to elide the liquids is to secure a kind of billowy music of a peculiarly delightful kind. Now elision is very specially demanded in a line like that which opens Orpheus in Hades, where the pause of the line fall upon the. To make the main pause of the line fall upon the is extremely and painfully bad, even when the next word begins with a consonant; but when the word following the begins with a vowel, the line is absolutely immetrical; it has, indeed, no more to do with English prosody than with that prosody of Japan upon which Mr. Basil Chamberlain discourses so pleasantly. On the other hand, the elision of the second syllable of the word music in the other line quoted above is equally faulty in another direction. But as we said when reviewing Mr. Bridgess treatise on Miltons prosody, nothing is more striking than the helplessness of most recent poets when confronted with the simple question of elision.

In an Ode to a Star there is great beauty and breadth of thought and expression. Its only structural blemish, that of an opening stanza whose form is not distinctly followed, can be so easily put right that it need only be mentioned here in order to emphasize the canon that it is only in irregular odes that variation of stanza is permissible. Keats, no doubt, in one at least of his unequalled odes, does depart from the scheme of structure indicated by the opening stanza, and without any apparent metrical need for so doing. But the poem does not gain by the departure. Besides, Keats is now a classic, and has a freedom in regard to irregularities of metre which Lord de Tabley would be the last to claim for himself. Another blemish of a minor kind in the Ode to a Star is that of rhyming meteor with wheatear.

If the poetry in Lord de Tableys volume answers as little to Miltons famous list of the poetic requirements, simple, sensuous, and passionate, as does Miltons own poetry, which answers to only the second of these demands, very high poetry might be cited which is neither sensuous nor passionate. The so-called coldness displayed by Lycidas arises not, it may well be supposed, from any lack on Miltons part of sorrow for his friend, but from his determination that simple he would not be, and yet his method is justified of its own beauty and glory. Of course poetry may be too ornate, but in demanding a simplicity of utterance from the poet it is easy for the critic to forget how wide and how various are poetrys domains. For if in one mood poetry is the simple and unadorned expression of nature, in another it is the woof of art,

Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moths deep-damasked wings.

In the matter of poetic ornament, all that the reader has any right to demand is that the decoration should be poetical and not rhetorical. Now, as a matter of fact, there is no surer sign of the amount of the poetical endowment of any poet than the insight he shows into the nature of poetry as distinguished from rhetoric when working on ornate poetry. It is a serious impeachment of latter-day criticism that in very many cases, perhaps in most cases, the plaudits given to the last new leading poet of the hour are awarded to felicitous lines, every felicity of which is rhetorical and not poetical.



VII. WILLIAM MORRIS. 18341896.

I.

The news of the grave turn suddenly taken by William Morriss illness prepared the public for the still worse news that was to follow.

The certificate of the immediate cause of death affirms it to have been phthisis, but one would suppose that almost every vital organ had become exhausted. Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought this is to us allthat Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may easily be reconcilednay, we might even look upon him as Natures final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The thought that Morriss life had ended in the tragedy of painthe thought that he to whom work was sport and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coilwould have been intolerable almost. For among the thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circumstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, Enjoy.

[Picture: William Morris]

Born in easy circumstances, though not to the degrading trouble of wealthcherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to understand a genius such as hissurrounded by friends, some of whom were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very salt of the earthit may be said of him that Misfortune, if she touched him at all, never struck home. If it is true, as Mérimée affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature? Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first opened on the world? Enough for us to think that the man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the gods who in his sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris could not have borne with patience. Pain would not have developed him into a hero. This beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous powers were at their bestand died without pain. The scheme of life and death does not seem so much awry, after all.

At the last interview but one that ever I had with himit was in the little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned outhe himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject he rarely chose to talk aboutthe mystery of life and death. The conversation ended with these words of his: I have enjoyed my lifefew men more soand death in any case is sure.

It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginative faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. Look at Gladstone, he would say; look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges. Dont they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, not work. No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the dry light of intelligence, a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I doubt it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey pointed out many years ago, a movement not of the thinking machine only, but of the whole manthe whole genial nature of the workerhis imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles Dickens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the true vis vitæ.

We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced and its amount to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a strain. Many are of opinion that The Lovers of Gudrun is his finest poem; he worked at it from four oclock in the morning till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines! Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like Sigurd. Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpassed in our time; think, I say, of the collaborating of the Völsunga Saga with the Nibelungenlied, the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a considerable portion of a poets life? And yet so great is the entire mass of his work that Sigurd is positively overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared since his death in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three words, and this simply because the mass of other matter to be dealt with fills up all the available space of a newspaper.

Then, again, take his translation of the Odyssey. Some competent critics are dissatisfied with this; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The two specially Homeric qualitiesthose, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other poetsare eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexameters and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows. Chapmans translations show that the eagerness also can be caught. Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely as Chapmans free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as Buckleys prose crib, which lay frankly by Morriss side as he wrote.

This, with his much less satisfactory translation of Virgil, where he gives us an almost word-for-word translation, and yet throws over the poem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as The Defence of Guenevere, Jason, The Earthly Paradise, Love is Enough, Poems by the Way, &c. And then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the Saga Library. Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnússon, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem, for poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem.

And this brings me to those poems without metre which he invented for himself in the latter portion of his career. There is in these delightful stories, leaving out of consideration the exquisite lyrics interspersed, enough poetic wealth adequately to endow a dozen poets. The last of all of themthe one of which the last two chapters, when he could no longer hold a pen, he dictated to his friend Mr. Cockerell, in the determination, as he said to me, that he would finish it before he diedwill be found to be finer than any hitherto published. It is called The Sundering Flood, and was written after the story The Water of the Wondrous Isles. It (The Sundering Flood) is as long as The Wood beyond the World, but has lyrics interspersed.

But evidently it is as an inventor in the fine arts that he is chiefly known to the general public. Had he written no poetry at all, he would have been as famous, we are told, as he is now. Anyhow, there is no household of any culture among the English-speaking races in which the name of William Morris does not at once call up that great revival in decorative art for which the latter part of the nineteenth century will be famous. In his designs for tapestry and other textures, in his designs for wall-papers and furniture, there is an expenditure of imaginative force which alone might make the fame of an artist. Then his artistic printing, in which he invented his own decorations, his own type, and his own paperthink of the energy he put into all that! The moment that this new interest seized him he made a more thorough study of the various specimens of black-letter printing than had ever been made before save by specialists. But even this could not fatigue an appetite for the joy of work which was insatiable. He started as an apostle of Socialism. He edited The Commonweal, and wrote largely in it, sank money in it week by week with the greatest glee, stumped the country as a Socialist orator, and into that cause alone put the energy of three men. Is it any wonder, then, that those who loved him were appalled at this prodigious output? Often and often have I tried to bring this matter before him. It was all of no use. For me to rest from work, he would say, means to die.

When not absorbed in some occupation that he lovedand in no other would he movehis restlessness was that of a young animal. In conversation he could rarely sit still for ten consecutive minutes, but must needs spring from his seat and walk round the room, as if every limb were eager to take part in the talk. His boisterous restlessness was the first thing that struck strangers. During the period when the famous partnership of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was being dissolved I saw him very frequently at Queens Square, for I took a very active part in the arrangement of that matter, and after our interviews at Queen Square he and I used often to lunch together at the Cock in Fleet Street. He liked a sanded floor and quaint old-fashioned settles. Moreover, the chops were the finest to be had in London.

On the day following our first forgathering at the Cock, I was lunching there with another poeta friend of hiswhen the waiter, who knew me well, said, That was a loudish gent a-lunching with you yesterday, sir. I thought once you was a-coming to blows. Morris had merely been declaiming against the Elizabethan dramatists, especially Cyril Tourneur. He shouted out, You ought to know better than to claim any merit for such work as The Atheists Tragedy; and wound up with the generalization that the use of blank verse as a poetic medium ought to be stopped by Act of Parliament for at least two generations. On another occasion, when Middleton (another fine spirit, who should have died hereafter) and I were staying with him at Kelmscott Manor, the passionate emphasis with which he declared that the curse of mankind was civilization, and that Australia ought to have been left to the blacks, New Zealand to the Maoris, and South Africa to the Kaffirs, startled even Middleton, who knew him so well.

It was this boisterous energy and infinite enjoyment of life which made it so difficult for people on meeting him for the first time to associate him with the sweet sadness of The Earthly Paradise. How could a man of such exuberant animal spirits as Morrisso hearty, so noisy often, and often so humoroushave written those lovely poems, whose only fault was an occasional languor and a lack of humour often commented on when the critic compares him with Chaucer? This subject of Chaucers humour and Morriss lack of it demands, however, a special word even in so brief a notice as this. No man of our timenot even Rossettihad a finer appreciation of humour than Morris, as is well known to those who heard him read aloud the famous Rainbow Scene in Silas Marner and certain passages in Charles Dickenss novels. These readings were as fine as Rossettis recitations of Jim Bludso and other specimens of Yankee humour. And yet it is a common remark, and one that cannot be gainsaid, that there is no spark of humour in the published poems of either of these two friends. Did it never occur to any critic to ask whether the anomaly was not explicable by some theory of poetic art that they held in common? It is no disparagement to say of Morris that when he began to write poetry the influence of Rossettis canons of criticism upon him was enormous, notwithstanding the influence upon him of Brownings dramatic methods. But while Rossettis admiration of Browning was very strong, it was a canon of his criticism that humour was, if not out of place in poetry, a disturbing element of it.

What makes me think that Morris was greatly influenced by this canon is the fact that Morris could and did write humorous poetry, and then withheld it from publication. For the splendid poem of Sir Peter Harpdons End, printed in his first volume, Morris wrote a humorous scene of the highest order, in which the hero said to his faithful fellow captive and follower John Curzon that as their deaths were so near he felt a sudden interest in what had never interested him beforethe story of Johns life before they had been brought so close to each other. The heroic but dull-witted soldier acceded to his masters request, and the incoherent, muddle-headed way in which he gave his autobiography was full of a dramatic and subtle humourwas almost worthy of him who in three or four words created the foolish fat scullion in Tristram Shandy. This he refused to print, in deference, I suspect, to a theory of poetic art.

In criticizing Morris, however, the critic is apt to forget that among poets there are those who, treating poetry simply as an art, do not press into their work any more of their own individual forces than the work artistically demands, while another class of poets are impelled to give full expression to themselves in every poem they write. It is to the former class of poets that Morris belongs.

Whatever chanced to be Morriss goal of the moment was pursued by him with as much intensity as though the universe contained no other possible goal, and then, when the moment was passed, another goal received all his attention. I was never more struck with this than on the memorable day when I first met him, and was blessed with a friendship that lasted without interruption for nearly a quarter of a century. It was shortly after he and Rossetti entered upon the joint occupancy of Kelmscott Manor on the Thames, where I was staying as Rossettis guest. On a certain morning when we were walking in the fields Rossetti told me that Morris was coming down for a days fishing with George Hake, and that Mouse, the Icelandic pony, was to be sent to the Lechlade railway station to meet them. You are now going to be introduced to my fellow partner, Rossetti said. At that time I only knew of the famous firm by name, and I asked Rossetti for an explanation, which he gave in his usual incisive way.

Well, said he, one evening a lot of us were together, and we got talking about the way in which artists did all kinds of things in olden times, designed every kind of decoration and most kinds of furniture, and some one suggestedas a joke more than anything elsethat we should each put down five pounds and form a company. Fivers were blossoms of a rare growth among us in those days, and I wont swear that the table bristled with fivers. Anyhow, the firm was formed, but of course there was no deed, or anything of that kind. In fact, it was a mere playing at business, and Morris was elected manager, not because we ever dreamed he would turn out a man of business, but because he was the only one among us who had both time and money to spare. We had no idea whatever of commercial success, but it succeeded almost in our own despite. Here comes the manager. You must mind your ps and qs with him; he is a wonderfully stand-off chap, and generally manages to take against people.

What is he like? I said.

You know the portraits of Francis I. Well, take that portrait as the basis of what you would call in your metaphysical jargon your mental image of the managers face, soften down the nose a bit, and give him the rose-bloom colour of an English farmer, and there you have him.

What about Franciss eyes? I said.

Well, they are not quite so small, but not bigblue-grey, but full of genius.

And then I saw, coming towards us on a rough pony so diminutive that he well deserved the name of Mouse, the figure of a man in a wideawakea figure so broad and square that the breeze at his back, soft and balmy as it was, seemed to be using him as a sail, and blowing both him and the pony towards us.

When Rossetti introduced me, the manager greeted him with a Hm! I thought you were alone. This did not seem promising. Morris at that time was as proverbial for his exclusiveness as he afterwards became for his expansiveness.

Rossetti, however, was irresistible to everybody, and especially to Morris, who saw that he was expected to be agreeable to me, and most agreeable he was, though for at least an hour I could still see the shy look in the corner of his eyes. He invited me to join the fishing, which I did. Finding every faculty of Morriss mind and every nerve in his body occupied with one subject, fishing, I (coached by Rossetti, who warned me not to talk about The Defence of Guenevere) talked about nothing but the bream, roach, dace, and gudgeon I used to catch as a boy in the Ouse, and the baits that used to tempt the victims to their doom. Not one word passed Morriss lips, as far as I remember at this distance of time, which had not some relation to fish and baits. He had come from London for a few hours fishing, and all the other interests which as soon as he got back to Queens Square would be absorbing him were forgotten. Instead of watching my float, I could not help watching his face with an amused interest at its absorbed expression, which after a while he began to notice, and the following little dialogue ensued, which I remember as though it took place yesterday:

How old were you when you used to fish in the Ouse?

Oh, all sorts of ages; it was at all sorts of times, you know.

Well, how young then?

Say ten or twelve.

When you got a bite at ten or twelve, did you get as interested, as excited, as I get when I see my float bob?

No.

The way in which he said, I thought not, conveyed a world of disparagement of me as a man who could care to gaze upon a brother angler instead of upon his own float.



II.

In whatsoever William Morris does or says the hand or the voice of the poet is seen or heard: in his house decorations no less than in his epics, in his illuminated manuscripts no less than in his tapestries, in his philippics against restoration no less than in his sage-greens, in his socialism no less than in his samplers. And first a word as to his poetry. Any critic who, having for contemporaries such writers as Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and William Morris, fails to see that he lives in a period of great poets may rest assured that he is a critic bornmay rest assured that had he lived in the days of the Elizabethans he would have joined the author of The Returne from Parnassus in despising the unacademic author of Hamlet and Lear. Among this band of great contemporary poets what is the special position held by him who, having set his triumphant hand to everything from the sampler up to the epic, has now, by way of recreation, or rather by way of opening a necessary safety-valve to ease his restless energies, invented a system of poetic socialism and expounded it in a brand-new kind of prose fiction?

A special and peculiar position Morris holds among his peerson that we are all agreed; but what is that position? We must not talk too familiarly about the Olympian gods; but is it that, without being the greatest where all are great, Morris is the one who on all occasions produces pure poetry and nothing else? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time show more intellectual strength than he, are they, perchance, given sometimes to adulterating their poetry with ratiocination and didactic preachments such as were better left to the proseman? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If other poets of our time can reach a finer frenzy than he and give it voice with a more melodious throat, are they, perchance, apt to forget that eloquence is heard while poetry is overheard? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question. If others, again, are more picturesque than he (though these it might be difficult to find), are they, perchance, a little too self-conscious in their word-pictures, and are they, perchance, apt to pass into those flowery but uncertain ways that were first discovered by Euphues? Without affirming that it is so, we may at least ask the question.

But supposing that we really had to affirm all these things about the other Olympians, where then would be the position of him about whose work such questions could not even be asked? Where would then be the place of him who never passes into ratiocination or rhetoric, never passes into excessive word-painting or into euphuism, never speaks so loud as to be heard rather than overheard, but, on the contrary, gives us always clear and simple pictures, and always in musical language? Where would then be the place of him who is the very ideal, if not of the poet as vates, yet of the poet as makerthe poet who always looks out upon life through a poetic atmosphere which, if sometimes more attenuated than suits some readers, is as simple and as clear as the air of a May morning? A question which would be variously answered according to the various temperaments of those who answerof those who define poetry to be making, or those who define it to be prophesying, or those who define it to be singing.

Exception has, no doubt, been taken to certain archaisms in which Morris indulges not only in the epic of Sigurd, but also, and in a greater degree, in his translations, especially in that rendering of the Odyssey. It is not our business here to examine into the merits and demerits of Morris as a translator; but if it were, this is what we should say on his behalf. While admitting that now and again his diction is a little too Scandinavian to be in colour, we should point to Matthew Arnolds dictum that in a versified translation a poet is no longer recognizable, and then we should ask whether it is given to any man in any kind of diction to translate Homer. One Homeric quality only can any one translator secure, it seems; and if he can secure one, is not his partial failure better than success in less ambitious efforts? To Chapman it was given to secure in the Iliad a measure of the Homeric eagernessbut what else? To Tennyson (in one wonderful fragment) it was given to secure a measure of the Homeric dignity and also a measure of the Homeric picturebut what else? There was still left one of the three supreme Homeric qualitiesthe very quality which no one ever supposed could be secured for our literature, or, indeed, for any otherHomers quality of naïf wonder. There is no witchery of Homer so fascinating as this; and did any one suppose that it could ever be caught by any translator? And could it ever have been caught had not Nature in one of her happiest moods bethought herself of evolving, in a late and empty day, the industrious tapestry weaver of Merton and idle singer of Sigurd, The Earthly Paradise, Love is Enough, and ten thousand delightful verses besides?

But can a writer be called naïf who works in a diction belonging rather to a past age than to his own? Morris has proved that he could. Imagination is the basis upon which all other human faculties rest. In the deep sense, indeed, one possession only have we fools of nature, our imagination. What we fondly take for substance is the very shadow; what we fondly take for shadow is the very substance. And day by day is Science herself endorsing more emphatically than ever Hamlets dictum, that there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. By the aid of imagination our souls confront the present, and, as a rule, the present only. But Morris is an instance, and not a solitary one, of a modern writers inhaling so naturally the atmosphere of the particular past period his imagination delights in as to belong spiritually to that period rather than his own. To deny sincerity of accent to Morris because of his love of the simple old Scandinavian notethe note which to him represents every other kind of primitive simplicitywould be as uncritical as to deny sincerity of accent to Charles Lamb because of his sympathy with Elizabethan and Jacobean times, or to Dante Rossetti because of his sympathy with the period of his great Italian namesake.

So much for the poetry of our many-handed poet. As to his house decorations, his illuminated manuscripts, his anti-scrape philippics, his sage-greens, his tapestries, his socialism, and his samplers: to deal with the infinite is far beyond the scope of an article so very finite as this, or we could easily show that in them all there is seen the same naïf genius of the poet, the same rare instinct for beautiful expression, the same originality as in the epics and the translations. Let him who is rash enough to suppose that even the socialism of a great poet is like the socialism of common folk read John Ball. Let him observe how like Titania floating and dancing and playing among the Athenian clowns seems the Morrisian genius floating and dancing and playing among the surroundings in which at present it pleases him to disport. What makes the ordinary socialistic literature to many people unreadable is its sourness. What the Socialists say may be true, but their way of saying it sets ones teeth on edge. They contrive to state their case with so much bitterness, with so much unfairnessso much lack of logicthat the listener says at once, For me, any galley but this! Things are bad; but, for Heavens sake, let us go on as we are!

By the clever competition of organisms did Nature, long before socialism was thought of, contrive to build up a worldthis makeshift world. By the teeth of her very cats did she evolve her succulent clover. But whether the Socialists are therefore wrong in their views of society and its ultimate goal is not a question we need discuss. What they want is more knowledge and less zeal. It is possible to see, and see clearly, that the social organism is far from being what it ought to be, and at the same time to remember that man is a creature of slow growth, and that even in reaching his present modest stage of development the time he required was longlong indeed unless we consider his history in relation to the history of the earth, and then he appears to have been very commendably expeditious. If there is any truth in what the geologists tell us of the vast age of the earth, it seems only a few years ago that man succeeded, after much heroic sitting down, in wearing off an appendage which had done him good service in his early tree-climbing days, but which, with new environments and with trousers in prospect, had ceased to be useful or ornamental. An anthropoid Socialist would have advised him to cut it off, and had he done so he would have bled to death.

That among all her children Man is really Natures prime favourite seems pretty evident, though no one can say why. It is to him that the Great Mother is ever pointing and saying, A poor creature, but mine own. I shall do something with him some day, but I must not try to force him. Here, indeed, is the mistake of the Socialists. They think they can force the very creature who above all others cannot be forced. They think they can turn him into something rich and strangeturn him in a single generationeven as certain ingenious experimentalists turned what Nature meant for a land-salamander into a water-salamander, with new rudder-tail and gills instead of lungs and feet suppressed, by feeding him with water animals in oxygenated water and cajoling his functions. Competition, that evolved Shakespeare from an ascidian, may be a mistake of NaturesM. Arsène Houssaye declares that she never was so wise and artistically perfect as we take her to bebut her mistakes are too old to be rectified in a single generation. A little more knowledge, we say, and a little less zeal would save the Socialist from being considered by the advanced thinkerwho, studying the present by the light of the past, sees that all civilization is provisionalas the most serious obstructive whom he has to encounter.

As to Morris, we have always felt that, take him all round, he is the richest and most varied in artistic endowments of any man of our time. On whichsoever of the fine arts he had chanced to concentrate his gifts and energies the result would have been the same as in poetry. In the front rank he would always have been. But it is not until we come to deal with his socialism that we see how entirely aestheticism is the primal source from which all his energies spring. That he has a great and generous hearta heart that must needs sympathize with every form of distressno one can doubt who reads these two books, {263} and yet his socialism comes from an entirely æsthetic impulse. It is the vulgarities of civilization, it is the ugliness of contemporary lifeso unlike that Earthly Paradise of the poetic dreamthat have driven him from his natural and proper work. He cannot take offence at our saying this, for he has said it himself in Signs of Change:

As I strove to stir up people to this reform, I found that the causes of the vulgarities of civilization lay deeper than I had thought, and little by little I was driven to the conclusion that all these uglinesses are but the outward expression of the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by our present form of society, and that it is futile to attempt to deal with them from the outside. Whatever I have written, or spoken on the platform, on these social subjects is the result of the truths of socialism meeting my earlier impulse, and giving it a definite and much more serious aim; and I can only hope, in conclusion, that any of my readers who have found themselves hard-pressed by the sordidness of civilization, and have not known where to turn to for encouragement, may receive the same enlightenment as I have, and that even the rough pieces in this book may help them to that end.

With these eloquent words no one can more fully agree than we do, so far as they relate to the unloveliness of Philistine rule. But though the bad features of the present time {264} are peculiar to itself, when were those paradisal days of which Morris dreams? when did that merry England exist in which the general sum of human happiness and human misery was more equally distributed than now?

Those dark ages beloved of the author of John Ball may not have been quite so dark as Swinburne declares them to have been; but in this matter of the equalization of human happiness were they so very far in advance of the present time? Those who have watched the progress of Morriss socialism know that, so far from being out of keeping with the anti-scrape philippics and the tapestry weaving, it is in entire harmony with them. Out of a noble anger against the jerry builder and his detestable doings sprang this the last of the Morrisian epics, as out of the wrath of Achilles sprang the Iliad. That the picturesqueness of the John Ball period should lead captive the imagination of Morris was, of course, inevitable. Society is at least picturesque wheresoever the classes are so sharply demarcated as they were in the dark ages, when the difference as to quality of flesh and blood between the lord and the thrall was greater than the difference between the thrall and the swine he tended. But what about the condition of this same picturesque thrall who (as the law books have it) clothed the soilwhose every chance of happiness, whose every chance of comfort, depended upon the arbitrary will of some more or less brutal lord? What was the condition of the English lower ordersthe orders for whom many bitter social tears are now being shed? What about the condition of the thralls in dark ages so dark that even an apostle of Wyclifs (this same John Ball, Morriss hero) preached the doctrineunless he has been beliedthat no child had a soul that could be saved who had been born out of wedlock? The Persian aphorism that warns us to beware of poets, princes, and women must have had a satirical reference to the fact that their governance of the world is by means of picturesqueness. Always it has been the picturesqueness of tyranny that has kept it up. It was the picturesqueness of the auto de fe that kept up the Spanish Inquisition, but we may rest assured that the most picturesque actors in that striking tableau would have preferred a colourless time of jerry builders to a picturesqueness like that. To find a fourteenth-century pothouse parlour painted by a modern Socialist with a hand more loving than Walter Scotts own is indeed touching:

I entered the door and started at first with my old astonishment, with which I had woke up, so strange and beautiful did this interior seem to me, though it was but a pothouse parlour. A quaintly carved sideboard held an array of bright pewter pots and dishes and wooden and earthen bowls; a stout oak table went up and down the room, and a carved oak chair stood by the chimney-corner, now filled by a very old man dim-eyed and white-bearded. That, except the rough stools and benches on which the company sat, was all the furniture. The walls were panelled roughly enough with oak boards to about six feet from the floor, and about three feet of plaster above that was wrought in a pattern of a rose stem running all round the room, freely and roughly done, but with (as it seemed to my unused eyes) wonderful skill and spirit. On the hood of the great chimney a huge rose was wrought in the plaster and brightly painted in its proper colours. There were a dozen or more of the men I had seen coming along the street sitting there, some eating and all drinking; their cased bows leaned against the wall, their quivers hung on pegs in the panelling, and in a corner of the room I saw half a dozen bill-hooks that looked made more for war than for hedge-shearing, with ashen handles some seven foot long. Three or four children were running about among the legs of the men, heeding them mighty little in their bold play, and the men seemed little troubled by it, although they were talking earnestly and seriously too. A well-made comely girl leaned up against the chimney close to the gaffers chair, and seemed to be in waiting on the company: she was clad in a close-fitting gown of bright blue cloth, with a broad silver girdle, daintily wrought, round her loins, a rose wreath was on her head, and her hair hung down unbound; the gaffer grumbled a few words to her from time to time, so that I judged he was her grandfather.

Morriss Earthly Paradise! the reader will exclaim. Yes; and here we come upon that feature of originality which, as has been before said, distinguishes Morriss socialism from the socialism of the prosaic reformer.

Political opinions almost always spring from temperament. The conservative temper of such a poet as Sir Walter Scott leads him to idealize the past, and to concern himself but little about the future. The rebellious temperament of such a poet as Shelley leads him to idealize the future, and concern himself but little about the past. But by contriving to idealize both the past and the future, and mixing the two idealizations into one delicious amalgam, the poet of the Earthly Paradise gives us the Morrisian socialism, the most charming, and in many respects the most marvellous product of the poets mind that has ever yet been presented to an admiring world.

The plan of John Ball is simplicity itself. The poet in a dream becomes a spectator of the insurrection of the Kentish men at the time when Wat Tyler rebelled against the powers that were; and the hero, John Ball, who is mainly famous as having preached a sermon from the text

Wan Adam dalf and Eve span Wo was thanne a gentilman?

is made to listen to the poet-dreamers prophecy of the days of bourgeois rule and the jerry builder.

If we take into account the perfect truth and beauty of the literary form in which the story is presented, we do not believe that anything to surpass it could be found in historic fiction; indeed, we do not know that anything could be found to equal it. The difficulty of the imaginative writer who attempts, whether in prose or verse, to vivify the past seems to be increasing, as we have before said, every day with the growth of the scientific temper and the reverence of the sacredness of mere documents. The old-fashioned theorythe theory which obtained from Shakespeares time down to Scotts and even down to Kingsleysthat the facts of history could be manipulated for artistic purposes with the same freedom that the artists own inventions can be handled, gave the artist power to produce vital and flexible work at the expense of the historic consciencea power which is being curtailed day by day. The instinct for vivifying by imaginative treatment the records of the past is too universal and too deeply inwoven in the very texture of the human mind to be other than a true and healthy instinct. But so oppressive has become the tyranny of documents, so fettered by what a humourist has called factology have become the wings of the romancers imagination, that one wonders at his courage in dealing with historic subjects at all.

A bold writer would he be who in the present day should make Shakespeare figure among the Kenilworth festivities as a famous player (after the manner of Scott), or who should (after the manner of Kingsley) give Elizabeth credit for Winters device of using the fire-ships before Calais. Even the poethe who, dealing as he does with essential and elemental qualities only, is not so hampered as the proseman in these mattersis beginning also to feel the tyranny of documents, as we see notably in Swinburnes Bothwell, which consists very largely of documents transfigured into splendid verse. But more than even this: the mere literary form has now to be as true to the time depicted as circumstances will allow. If Scotts romances have a fault it is that, as he had no command over, and perhaps but little sympathy with, the beautiful old English of which Morris is such a master, his stories lack one important element of dramatic illusion. But it is in the literary form of his story that Morris is especially successful. Where time has dealt most cruelly with our beloved language is in robbing it of that beautiful cadence which fell from our forefathers lips as sweetly and as unconsciously as melody falls from the throat of the mavis. One of the many advantages that Morris has reaped from his peculiar line of study is that he can write like thishe, and he alone among living men:

Surely thou goest to thy death. He smiled very sweetly, yet proudly, as he said: Yea, the road is long, but the end cometh at last. Friend, many a day have I been dying; for my sister, with whom I have played and been merry in the autumntide about the edges of the stubble-fields; and we gathered the nuts and bramble-berries there, and started thence the missel-thrush, and wondered at his voice and thought him big; and the sparrow-hawk wheeled and turned over the hedges, and the weasel ran across the path, and the sound of the sheep-bells came to us from the downs as we sat happy on the grass; and she is dead and gone from the earth, for she pined from famine after the years of the great sickness; and my brother was slain in the French wars, and none thanked him for dying save he that stripped him of his gear; and my unwedded wife with whom I dwelt in love after I had taken the tonsure, and all men said she was good and fair, and true she was and lovely; she also is dead and gone from the earth; and why should I abide save for the deeds of the flesh which must be done? Truly, friend, this is but an old tale that men must die; and I will tell thee another, to wit, that they live: and I live now and shall live. Tell me then what shall befall.

Note the music of the cadence herea music that plays about the heart more sweetly than any verse, save the very highest. And here we touch upon an extremely interesting subject.

Always in reading a prose story by a writer whose energies have been exercised in other departments of letters there is for the critic a special interest. If this exercise has been in fields outside imaginative literaturein those fields of philosophical speculation where a logical method and a scientific modulation of sentences are requiredthe novelist, instead of presenting us with those concrete pictures of human life demanded in all imaginative art, is apt to give us disquisitions about and about human life. Forgetting that it is not the function of any art to prove, he is apt to concern himself deeply in showing why his actors did and said this or thatapt to busy himself about proving his story either by subtle analyses or else by purely scientific generalizations, instead of attending to the true method of convincement that belongs to his artthe convincement that is effected by actual pictorial and dramatic illustration of how his actors really did the things and said the things vouched for by his own imagination. That the quest of a scientific, or supposed scientific, basis for a novelists imaginative structure is fatal to true art is seen not only in George Eliot and the accomplished author of Elsie Venner, but also in writers of another kindwriters whose hands cannot possibly have been stiffened by their knowledge of science.

Among the many instances that occur to us we need point to only one, that of a story recently published by one of our most successful living novelists, in which the writer endeavours to prove that animal magnetism is the acting cause of spiritualistic manifestations so called. Setting out to show that a medium is nothing more than a powerful mesmerist, to whose manipulations all but two in a certain household are unconsciously succumbing, he soon ignores for plot purposes the nature of the dramatic situation by making those very two sceptics at a séance hear the same music, see the same spiritually conveyed newspaper, as the others hear and see. That the writer should mistake, as he seems to do, the merely directive force of magnetism for a motive force does not concern the literary critic. But when two sceptics, who are to expose a charlatans tricks by watching how the believers are succumbing to mesmeric hallucinations, are found succumbing to the same hallucinations themselvessuccumbing because the story-teller needs them as witnesses of the phenomenathen the literary critic grows pensive, for he sees what havoc the scientific method will work in the flower-garden of art.

On the other hand, should the story-teller be a poetone who, like the writer of John Ball, has been accustomed to write under the conditions of a form of literary art where the diction is always and necessarily concrete, figurative, and quintessential, and where the movement is metricalhis danger lies in a very different direction. The critics interest then lies in watching how the poet will comport himself in another field of imaginative literaturea field where no such conditions as these exista field where quintessential and concrete diction, though meritorious, may yet be carried too far, and where those regular and expected bars of the metricist which are the first requisites of verse are not only without function, but are in the wayare fatal, indeed, to that kind of convincement which, and which alone, is the proper quest of prose art. No doubt it is true, as we have before said, that literature being nothing but the reflex of the life of man, or else of the life of nature, the final quest of every form of literature is that special kind of convincement which is inherently suitable to the special form. For the analogy between nature and true art is not a fanciful one, and the relation of function to organism is the same in both. But what is the difference between the convincement achieved by poetic and the convincement achieved by prose art? Is it that the convincement of him who works in poetic forms is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved by a faithful record of the emotion aroused in his own soul by the impact upon his senses of the external world, while the convincement of the proseman is, though not necessarily, yet most perfectly achieved by a faithful record and picture of the external world itself?

All such generalizations as this are, no doubt, to be taken with many and great qualifications; but, roughly speaking, would not this seem to be the fundamental difference between that kind of imaginative literature which expresses itself in metrical forms and that kind of imaginative literature in which metrical form is replaced by other qualities and other functions? Not but that these two methods may meet in the same work, not but that they may meet and strengthen each other, as we have before said when glancing at the interesting question, How much, or how little, of realism can poetry capture from the world of prose and weave into her magic woof, and how much of music can prose steal from poetry? But in order to do all that can be done in the way of enriching poetry with prose material without missing the convincement of poetic art, the poet must be Homer himself; in order to do all that can be done in the way of vivifying prose fiction with poetic fire without missing the convincement of prose art, the story-teller must be Charlotte Brontë or Emily, her sister, in whose work we find for once the quintessential strength and the concrete and figurative diction of the poetindeed, all the poetical requisites save metre alone. Had Jane Eyre, Villette, and Wuthering Heights existed in Coleridges time he would, we may be sure, have taken these three prose poems as illustrations of the truth of his axiom that the true antithesis of poetry is not prose, but science.

What the prose poet has to avoid is metrical movement on the one side and scientific modulation of sentences on the other. And perhaps in no case can it be achieved save in the autobiographic form of fiction, where and where alone the work is so subjective that it may bear even the poetic glow of Jane Eyre and Villette. What makes us think this to be so is the fact that in Shirleya story written in the epic methodthe only passages of the poetic kind which really convince are those uttered by the characters in their own persons. And as to Wuthering Heights, a story which could not, of course, be told in one autobiography, the method of telling it by means of a group of autobiographies, though clumsy enough from the constructors point, was yet just as effective as a more artistic method. And it was true instinct of genius that led Emily Brontë to adopt the autobiographic method even under these heavy conditions.

Still the general truth remains that the primary function of the poet is to tell his story steeped in his own emotion, while the primary function of the prose fictionist is to tell his story in an objective way. Hence it is that in a general way the difficulty of the poet who turns to prose fiction lies, like that of philosophical or scientific writers, in suppressing certain intellectual functions which he has been in the habit of exercising. And the case of Scott, which at first sight might seem to show against this theory, may be adduced in support of it. For Scotts versified diction, though concrete, is never more quintessential than that of prose; and his method being always objective rather than subjective, when he turned to prose fiction he seemed at once to be writing with his right hand where formerly he had been writing with his left.



VIII. FRANCIS HINDES GROOME. (THE TARNO RYE.) 18511902.

I.

I have been invited to write about my late friend and colleague Francis Hindes Groome, who died on the 24th ult., and was buried among his forefathers at Monk Soham in Suffolk. I find the task extremely difficult. Though he died at fifty, he, with the single exception of Borrow, had lived more than any other friend of mine, and perhaps suffered more. Indeed, his was one of the most remarkable and romantic literary lives that, since Borrows, have been lived in my time.

The son of an Archdeacon of Suffolk, he was born in 1851 at Monk Soham Rectory, where, I believe, his father and his grandfather were born, and where they certainly lived; foras has been recorded in one of the invaluable registry books of my friend Mr. F. A. Crisphe belonged to one of the oldest and most distinguished families in Suffolk. He was sent early to Ipswich School, where he was a very popular boy, but never strong and never fond of athletic exercises. His early taste for literature is shown by the fact that with his boy friend Henry Elliot Maiden he originated a school magazine called the Elizabethan. Like many an organ originated in the outer world, the Elizabethan failed because it would not, or could not, bring itself into harmony with the public taste. The boys wanted news of cricket and other games: Groome and his assistant editor gave them literature as far as it was in their power to do so.

[Picture: Francis Hindes Groome]

The Ipswich School was a very good one for those who got into the sixth, as Groome did. The head master, Dr. Holden, was a very fine scholar; and it is no wonder that Groome throughout his life showed a considerable knowledge of and interest in classical literature. That he had a real insight into the structure of Latin verse is seen by a rendering of Tennysons Tithonus, which Mr. Maiden has been so very good as to show mea rendering for which he got a prize. In 1869 he got prizes for classical literature, Latin prose, Latin elegiacs, and Latin hexameters. But if Dr. Holden exercised much influence over Groomes taste, the assistant master, Mr. Sanderson, certainly exercised more, for Mr. Sanderson was an enthusiastic student of Romany. The influence of the assistant master was soon seen after Groome went up to Oxford. He was ploughed for his Smalls, and, remaining up for part of the Long, he went one night to a fair at Oxford at which many gipsies were presentan incident which forms an important part of his gipsy story Kriegspiel. Groome at once struck up an acquaintance with the gipsies at the fair. It occurred also that Mr. Sanderson, after Groome had left Ipswich School, used to go and stay at Monk Soham Rectory every summer for fishing; and this tended to focus Groomes interest in Romany matters. At Göttingen, where he afterwards went, he found himself in a kind of Romany atmosphere, for, owing perhaps to Benfeys having been a Göttingen man, Romany matters were still somewhat rife there in certain sets.

The period from his leaving Göttingen to his appearance in Edinburgh in 1876 as a working literary man of amazing activity, intelligence, and knowledge is the period that he spent among the gipsies. And it is this very period of wild adventure and romance that it is impossible for me to dwell upon here. But on some future occasion I hope to write something about his adventures as a Romany Rye. His first work was on the Globe Encyclopædia, edited by Dr. John Ross. Even at that time he was very delicate and subject to long wearisome periods of illness. During his work on the Globe he fell seriously ill in the middle of the letter S. Things were going very badly with him; but they would have gone much worse had it not been for the affection and generosity of his friend and colleague Prof. H. A. Webster, who, in order to get the work out in time, sat up night after night in Groomes room, writing articles on Sterne, Voltaire, and other subjects.

Websters kindness, and afterwards the kindness of Dr. Patrick, endeared Edinburgh and Scotland to the Tarno Rye. As Webster was at that time on the staff of The Encyclopædia Britannica, I think, but I do not know, that it was through him that Groome got the commission to write his article Gypsies in that stupendous work. I do not know whether it is the most important, but I do know that it is one of the most thorough and conscientious articles in the entire encyclopædia. This was followed by his being engaged by Messrs. Jack to edit the Ordnance Gazetteer of Scotland, a splendid work, which on its completion was made the subject of a long and elaborate article in The Athenæuman article which was a great means of directing attention to him, as he always declared. Anyhow, people now began to inquire about Groome. In 1880 he brought out In Gypsy Tents, which I shall describe further on. In 1885 he was chosen to join the staff of Messrs. W. & R. Chambers. It is curious to think of the Tarno Rye, perhaps the most variously equipped literary man in Europe, after such adventures as his, sitting from 10 to 4 every day on the sub-editorial stool. He was perfectly content on that stool, however, owing to the genial kindness of his colleague. As sub-editor under Dr. Patrick, and also as a very copious contributor, he took part in the preparation of the new edition of Chamberss Encyclopædia. He took a large part also in preparing Chamberss Gazetteer and Chamberss Biographical Dictionary. Meanwhile he was writing articles in the Dictionary of National Biography, articles in Blackwoods Magazine and The Bookman, and also reviews upon special subjects in The Athenæum.

This was followed in 1887 by a short Border history, crammed with knowledge. In 1895 his name became really familiar to the general reader by his delightful little volume Two Suffolk Friendssketches of his father and his fathers friend Edward FitzGeraldfull of humour and admirable character-drawing.

In 1896 he published his Romany novel Kriegspiel, which did not meet with anything like the success it deserved, although I must say he was himself in some degree answerable for its comparative failure. The origin of the story was this. Shortly after our intimacy I told him that I had written a gipsy story dealing with the East Anglian gipsies and the Welsh gipsies, but that it had been so dinned into me by Borrow that in England there was no interest in the gipsies that I had never found heart to publish it. Groome urged me to let him read it, and he did read it, as far as it was then complete, and took an extremely kind view of it, and urged me to bring it out. But now came another and a new cause for delay in my bringing out Aylwin: Groome himself, who at that time knew more about Romany matters than all other Romany students of my acquaintance put together, showed a remarkable gift as a raconteur, and I felt quite sure that he could, if he set to work, write a Romany storythe Romany story of the English language. He strongly resisted the idea for a long timefor two or three years at leastand he was only persuaded to undertake the task at last by my telling him that I would never bring out my story until he brought out one himself. At last he yielded, told me of a plot, a capital one, and set to work upon it. When it was finished he sent the manuscript to me, and I read it through with the greatest interest, and also the greatest care. I found, as I expected to find, that the gipsy chapters were simply perfect, and that it was altogether an extremely clever romance; but I felt also that Groome had given no attention whatever to the structure of a story. Incidents of the most striking and original kind were introduced at the wrong places, and this made them interesting no longer. So persuaded was I that the story only needed recasting to prove a real success that I devoted days, and even weeks, to going through the novel, and indicating where the transpositions should take place. Groome, however, had got so entirely sick of his novel before he had completed it that he refused absolutely to put another hours work into it; for, as he said, the writing of it had already been a loss to the pantry.

He sent it, as it was, to an eminent firm of publishers, who, knowing Groome and his abilities, would have willingly taken it if they had seen their way to do so. But they could not, for the very reasons that had induced me to recast it, and they declined it. The book was then sent round to publisher after publisher with the same result; and yet there was more fine substance in this novel than in five ordinary stories. It was at last through the good offices of Mr. Coulson Kernahan that it was eventually taken by Messrs. Ward & Lock; and, although it won warm eulogies from such great writers as George Meredith, it never made its way. Its failure distressed me far more than it distressed Groome, for I loved the man, and knew what its success would have been to him. Amiable and charming as Groome was, there was in him a singular vein of dogged obstinacy after he had formed an opinion; and he not only refused to recast his story, but refused to abandon the absurd name of Kriegspiel for a volume of romantic gipsy adventure. I suspect that a large proportion of people who asked for Kriegspiel at Mudies and Smiths consisted of officers who thought that it was a book on the German war game.

I tried to persuade him to begin another gipsy novel, but found it quite impossible to do so. But even then I waited before bringing out my own prose story. I published instead my poem in which was told the story of Rhona Boswell, which, to my own surprise and Groomes, had a success, notwithstanding its gipsy subject. Then I brought out my gipsy story, and accepted its success rather ungratefully, remembering how the greatest gipsy scholar in the world had failed in this line. In 1899 he published Gypsy Folk-Tales, in which he got the aid of the first Romany scholar now living, Mr. John Sampson. And this was followed in 1901 by his edition of Lavengro, which, notwithstanding certain unnecessary carpings at Borrowsuch, for instance, as the assertion that the word dook is never used in Anglo-Romany for ghostis beyond any doubt the best edition of the book ever published. The introduction gives sketches of all the Romany Ryes and students of Romany, from Andrew Boorde (c. 14901549) down to Mr. G. R. Sims and Mr. David MacRitchie. During this time it was becoming painfully perceptible to me that his physical powers were waning, although for two years that decadence seemed to have no effect upon his mental powers. But at last, while he was working on a book in which he took the deepest interestthe new edition of Chamberss Cyclopædia of English Literatureit became manifest that the general physical depression was sapping the forces of the brain.

But it is personal reminiscences of Groome that I have been invited to write, and I have not yet even begun upon these. Our close friendship dated no further back than 1881the year in which died the great Romany Rye. Indeed, it was owing to Borrows death, coupled with Groomes interest in that same Romany girl Sinfi Lovell, whom the eloquent Romany preacher Gipsy Smith has lately been expiating upon to immense audiences, that I first became acquainted with Groome. Although he has himself in some magazine told the story, it seems necessary for me to retell it here, for I know of no better way of giving the readers of The Athenæum a picture of Frank Groome as he lives in my mind.

It was in 1881 that Borrow, who some seven years before went down to Oulton, as he told me, to die, achieved death. And it devolved upon me as the chief friend of his latest years to write an obituary notice of him in The Athenæum. Among the many interesting letters that it brought me from strangers was one from Groome, whose name was familiar to me as the author of the article Gypsies in the Encyclopædia Britannica. But besides this I had read In Gypsy Tents, a picture of the very kind of gipsies I knew myself, those of East Angliaa picture whose photographic truth had quite startled me. Howsoever much of matter of fact may be worked into Lavengro (and to no one did Borrow talk with so little reticence upon this delicate subject as to me during many a stroll about Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park), I am certain that his first-hand knowledge of gipsy life was quite superficial compared with Groomes during the nine years or so that he was brought into contact with them in Great Britain and on the Continent. Hence a book like In Gypsy Tents has for a student of Romany subjects an interest altogether different from that which Borrows books command; for while Borrow, the man of genius, throws by the very necessities of his temperament the colours of romance around his gipsies, the characters of In Gypsy Tents, depicted by a man of remarkable talent merely, are as realistic as though painted by Zola, while the wealth of gipsy lore at his command is simply overwhelming.

At that timewith the exception of Borrow and the late Sir Richard Burtonthe only man of letters with whom I had been brought into contact who knew anything about the gipsies was Tom Taylor, whose picture of Romany life in an anonymous story called Gypsy Experiences, which appeared in The Illustrated London News in 1851, and in his play Sir Roger de Coverley, is not only fascinating, but on the whole true. By-the-by, this charming play might be revived now that there is a revived interest in Romany matters. George Merediths wonderful Kiomi was a picture, I think, of the only Romany chi he knew; but genius such as his needs little straw for the making of bricks. The letter I received from Groome enclosed a ragged and well-worn cutting from a forgotten anonymous Athenæum article of mine, written as far back as 1877, in which I showed acquaintance with gipsydom and described the ascent of Snowdon in the company of Sinfi Lovell, which was afterwards removed bodily to Aylwin. Here is the cutting:

We had a striking instance of this some years ago, when crossing Snowdon from Capel Curig, one morning, with a friend. She was not what is technically called a lady, yet she was both tall and, in her way, handsome, and was far more clever than many of those who might look down upon her; for her speculative and her practical abilities were equally remarkable: besides being the first palmist of her time, she had the reputation of being able to make more clothes-pegs in an hour, and sell more, than any other woman in England. The splendour of that Snowdon sunrise was such as we can say, from much experience, can only be seen about once in a lifetime, and could never be given by any pen or pencil. You dont seem to enjoy it a bit, was the irritated remark we could not help making to our friend, who stood quite silent and apparently deaf to the rhapsodies in which we had been indulging, as we both stood looking at the peaks, or rather at the vast masses of billowy vapours enveloping them, as they sometimes boiled and sometimes blazed, shaking, whenever the sun struck one and then another, from amethyst to vermilion, shot now and then with gold. Dont injiy it, dont I? said she, removing her pipe. You injiy talking about it, I injiy lettin it soak in.

Groome asked whether the gipsy mentioned in the cutting was not a certain Romany chi whom he named, and said that he had always wondered who the writer of that article was, and that now he wondered no longer, for he knew him to be the writer of the obituary notice of George Borrow. Interested as I was in his letter, it came at a moment when the illness of a very dear friend of mine threw most other things out of my mind, and it was a good while before I answered it, and told him what I had to tell about my Welsh gipsy experiences and the adventure on Snowdon. I got another letter from him, and this was the beginning of a charming correspondence. After a while I discovered that there were, besides Romany matters, other points of attraction between us. Groome was the son of Edward FitzGeralds intimate friend Robert Hindes Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk. Now long before the great vogue of Omar Khayyam, and, of course, long before the institution of the Omar Khayyam Club, there was a little group of Omarians of which I was a member. I need not say here who were the others of that group, but it was to them I alluded in the Toast to Omar Khayyam, which years afterwards I printed in The Athenæum, and have since reprinted in a volume of mine.

After a while it was arranged that he was to come and visit us for a few days at The Pines. When it got wind in the little household here that another Romany Rye, a successor to George Borrow, was to visit us, and when it further became known that he had travelled with Hungarian gipsies, Roumanian gipsies, Roumelian gipsies, &c., I dont know what kind of wild and dishevelled visitor was not expected. Instead of such a guest there appeared one of the neatest and most quiet young gentlemen who had ever presented themselves at the door. No one could possibly have dared to associate Bohemia with him. As a friend remarked who was afterwards invited to meet him at luncheon, Clergymans sonsuckling for the Church, was stamped upon him from head to foot. I will not deny that so respectable a looking Romany Rye rather disappointed The Pines at first. At that time he was a little over thirty, but owing to his slender, graceful figure, and especially owing to his lithe movements and elastic walk, he seemed to be several years younger.

The subject of Welsh gipsies, and especially of the Romany chi of Swindon, made us intimate friends in half an hour, and then there were East Anglia, Omar Khayyàm, and Edward FitzGerald to talk about!a delightful new friend for a man who had so lately lost the only other Romany Rye in the world. Owing to his youthful appearance, I christened him there and then the Tarno Rye, in remembrance of that other Tarno Rye whom Rhona Boswell loved. I soon found that, great as was the physical contrast between the Tarno Rye and the original Romany Rye, the mental contrast was greater still. Both were shyvery shy; but while Borrows shyness seemed to be born of wariness, the wariness of a man who felt that he was famous and had a part to play before an inquisitive world, Groomes shyness arose from a modesty that was unique.

As a philologist merely, to speak of nothing else, his equipment was ten times that of Borrow, whose temperament may be called anti-academic, and who really knew nothing thoroughly. But while Borrow was for ever displaying his philology, and seemed always far prouder of it than of his fascinating powers as a writer of romantic adventures, Groomes philological stores, like all his other intellectual riches, had to be drawn from him by his interlocutor if they were to be recognized at all. Whenever Borrow enunciated anything showing, as he thought, exceptional philological knowledge or exceptional acquaintance with matters Romany, it was his way always to bring it out with a sort of rustic twinkle of conscious superiority, which in its way, however, was very engaging. From Groome, on the contrary, philological lore would drop, when it did come, as unconsciously as drops of rain that fall. It was the same with his knowledge of Romany matters, which was so vast. Not once in all my close intercourse with him did he display his knowledge of this subject save in answer to some inquiry. The same thing is to be noticed in Kriegspiel. Romany students alone are able by reading between the lines to discover how deep is the hidden knowledge of Romany matters, so full is the story of allusions which are lost upon the general readerlost, indeed, upon all readers except the very few. For instance, the gipsy villain of the story, Perun, when telling the tale of his crime against the father of the hero who married the Romany chi whom Perun had hoped to marry, makes allusion thus to the dead woman: And then about her as I have named too often to-day. Had Borrow been alluding to the Romany taboo of the names of the dead, how differently would he have gone to work! how eager would he have been to display and explain his knowledge of this remarkable Romany superstition! The same remark may be made upon the gipsy heroines sly allusion in Kriegspiel to Squire Lucas, the Romany equivalent of Baron Munchausen, an allusion which none but a Romany student would understand.

Before luncheon Groome and I took a walk over the common, and along the Portsmouth Road, through the Robin Hood Gate and across Richmond Park, where Borrow and I and Dr. Hake had so often strolled. I wondered what the Gryengroes whom Borrow used to foregather with would have thought of my new friend. In personal appearance the two Romany Ryes were as unlike as in every point of character they were unlike. Borrows giant frame made him stand conspicuous wherever he went, Groomes slender, slight body gave an impression of great agility; and the walk of the two great pedestrians was equally contrasted. Borrows slope over the ground with the loose, long step of a hound I have, on a previous occasion, described; Groomes walk was springy as a gipsy lads, and as noiseless as a cats.

Of course, the talk during that walk ran very much upon Borrow, whom Groome had seen once or twice, but whom he did not in the least understand. The two men were antipathetic to each other. It was then that he told me how he had first been thrown across the gipsies, and it was then that he began to open up to me his wonderful record of experiences among them. The talk during that first out of many most delightful strolls ran upon Benfey, and afterwards upon all kinds of Romany matters. I remember how warm he waxed upon his pet aversion, Smith of Coalville, as he called him, who, he said, for the purposes of a professional philanthropist, had done infinite mischief to the gipsies by confounding them with all the wandering cockney raff from the slums of London. On my repeating to him what, among other things, the Romany chi before mentioned said to me during the ascent of Snowdon from Capel Curig, that to make kairengroes (house-dwellers) of full-blooded Romanies was impossible, because they were the cuckoos of the human race, who had no desire to build nests, and were pricked on to move about from one place to another over the earth, Groomes tongue became loosened, and he launched out into a monologue on this subject full of learning and full, as it seemed to me, of original views upon the Romanies.

As an instance of the cuckoo instincts of the true Romany, he told me that in North Americafor which land, alas! so many of our best Romanies even in Borrows time were leaving Gypsey Dell and the grassy lanes of old Englandthe gipsies have contracted a habit, which is growing rather than waning, of migrating southward in autumn and northward again in spring. He then launched out upon the subject of the wide dispersion of the Romanies not only in Europewhere they are found from almost the extreme north to the extreme south, and from the shores of the Bosphorus to the shores of the Atlantic Oceanbut also from north to south and from east to west in Asia, in Africa, from Egypt to the very south of the Soudan, and in America from Canada to the River Amazon. And he then went on to show how intensely migratory they were over all these vast areas.

So absorbing had been the gipsy talk that I am afraid the waiting luncheon was spoilt. The little luncheon party was composed of fervent admirers of Sir Walter Scottbigoted admirers, I fear, some of our present-day critics would have dubbed us; and it chanced that we all agreed in pronouncing Guy Mannering to be the most fascinating of all the Wizards work. Of course Meg Merrilies became at once the centre of the talk. One contended that, great as Meg was as a woman, she was as a gipsy a failure; in short, that Scotts idea of the Scottish gipsy woman was conventionala fancy portrait in which are depicted some of the loftiest characteristics of the Highland woman rather than of the Scottish gipsy. The true romany chi can be quite as noble as Meg Merrilies, said one, but great in a different way. From Meg Merrilies the talk naturally turned upon Jane Gordon of Kirk Yetholm, Megs prototype, who, when an old woman, was ducked to death in the River Eden at Carlisle. Then came the subject of Kirk Yetholm itself, the famous headquarters of the Scotch Romanies; and after this it naturally turned to Kirk Yetholms most famous inhabitant, old Will Faas, the gipsy king, whose corpse was escorted to Yetholm by three hundred and more donkeys. And upon all these subjects Groomes knowledge was like an inexhaustible fountain; or rather it was like a tap, ready to supply any amount of lore when called upon to do so.

But it was not merely upon Romany subjects that Groome found points of sympathy at The Pines during that first luncheon; there was that other subject before mentioned, Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyàm. We, a handful of Omarians of those antediluvian days, were perhaps all the more intense in our cult because we believed it to be esoteric. And here was a guest who had been brought into actual personal contact with the wonderful old Fitz. As a child of eight he had seen himtalked with himbeen patted on the head by him. Groomes father, the Archdeacon of Suffolk, was one of FitzGeralds most intimate friends. This was at once a delightful and a powerful link between Frank Groome and those at the luncheon table; and when he heard, as he soon did, the toast to Omar Khayyàm, none drank that toast with more gusto than he. The fact is, as the Romanies say, that true friendship, like true love, is apt to begin at first sight. But I must stop. Frequently when the Tarno Rye came to England his headquarters were at The Pines. Many and delightful were the strolls he and I had together. One day we went to hear a gipsy band supposed to be composed of Roumelian gipsies. After we had listened to several well-executed things Groome sauntered up to one of the performers and spoke to him in Roumelian Romany. The man, although he did not understand Groome, knew that he was speaking Romany of some kind, and began speaking in Hungarian Romany, and was at once responded to by Groome in that variety of the Romany tongue. Groome then turned to another of the performers, and was answered in English Romany. At last he found one, and one only, in the band who was a Roumelian gipsy, and a conversation between them at once began.

This incident affords an illustration of the width as well as the thoroughness of Groomes knowledge of Romany matters. I have affirmed in Aylwin that Sinfi Lovella born linguist who could neither read nor writewas the only gipsy who knew both English and Welsh Romany. Groome was one of the few Englishmen who knew the most interesting of all varieties of the Romany tongue. But latterly he talked a great deal of the vast knowledge of the Welsh gipsies, both as to language and folklore, possessed by Mr. John Sampson, University Librarian at Liverpool, the scholar who did so much to aid Groome in his last volume on Romany subjects, called Gypsy Folk-Tales. It therefore gives me the greatest pleasure to end these very inadequate words of mine with a beautiful little poem in Welsh Romany by Mr. Sampson upon the death of the Tarno Rye. In a very few years Welsh Romany will become absolutely extinct, and then this little gem, so full of the Romany feeling, will be greatly prized. I wish I could have written the poem myself, but no man could have written it save Mr. Sampson:

STANYAKERÉSKI.

Romano ráia, prala, jinimángro, Konyo chumeráva to chkát, Shukar java mangi, ta mukáva Tut te jâ kamdóm mekushki rat!

Kamli, savimáski, sas i sarla, Baro z sas tut, sar, tarno rom, Lhatián i jivimáski patrin, Ta lán o purikeno drom.

Boshadé i chiriklé veshténdi; Sanilé pre tuti chal ta chai; Mri, pv ta pni tu kamésas Dudyerás o sonakó lilaí.

Palla vena brishin, shil, la baval: Sao divés tu murshkinés prdán: Ako kino vesa, rat avéla, Chros s te kesa tiro tan.

Parl o tamlo merimásko pni Dava tuki miro vast, ta so Tu kamésas tire kokoréski Mai kamávaTe sovés mst!

Translation.

TO FRANCIS HINDES GROOME.

Scholar, Gypsy, Brother, Student, Peacefully I kiss thy forehead, Quietly I depart and leave Thee whom I lovedGood night.

Sunny, smiling was the morning; A light heart was thine, as, a youth, Thou didst strike lifes trail And take the ancient road.

The birds sang in the woods, Man and maid laughed on thee, The hills, field, and water thou didst love The golden summer illuminated.

Then come the rain, cold, and wind, All the day thou hast tramped bravely. Now thou growest weary, night comes on. It is time to make thy tent.