J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories, by His Wife

by Alice Vansittart Strettel Carr

THE LUTE’S SONG.

I.

Ah, why dost sigh and moan?

Ah, why? ah, why?

Queen of the laughing May

Who wears thy crown to-day?

Good-bye! good-bye!

Yea, for all mirth hath flown;

The strings have all one tone—

Ah, why? ah, why?

II.

It is the lute that sings,

Not I! not I!

Methinks some sleeping heart

That once had felt Love’s smart

Doth wake and cry!

Nay, hark! ’tis love’s own wings

That fan the trembling strings—

Not I! Not I!

But dainty as is this little song, it does not to my mind equal in charm the duet of the two old lovers in the same opera.

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THE OLD LOVERS OFFERING ONE ANOTHER THE BEAUTY STONE.

Simon.

I would see a maid who dwells in Zolden—

Her eyes are soft as moonlight on the mere;

The spring hath fled, the ripened year turns golden—

Shall I win her ere the waning of the year?

The reaping-folk pass homeward by the fountain;

What is it then that calls me from the dell,

What bids me climb the path beside the mountain

To the down beyond the sheepfold? Who can tell?

Then take it, for this magic stone hath power

To change thee to the fairest; yet to me

Thou wert fairest as I knew thee in that hour

When a maiden dwelt in Zolden! Ah, take it, ’tis for thee!

Joan.

I would see a youth who comes from Freyden—

He is straighter than the mountain pine-trees grow;

Gossips say he comes to woo a maiden,

So the gossips say—but can they know?

Three laughing maids are in the hollow,

Yet none will set him straight upon his way;

Nay! soft! for he hath found the path to follow—

He is coming! little heart, what will he say?

Then take it, for this magic stone hath power

To change thee to the fairest, yet to me

Thou wert fairest as I knew thee in that hour

When a youth came up from Freyden! Ah, take it, ’tis for thee!

In the Beauty-Stone Joe was only responsible for the lyrics and parts of the plot. But I know that his idea of the man’s true love being first awakened after he became blind was dear to him, and he used it again in his adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde for H. B. Irving; but there it is the wife whose blindness hides from her all but the beautiful side of her husband.

Such were the chief of Joe’s plays. Tireless energy was given to the production of them all, for I think it was universally admitted that no one bore the strain of rehearsals as cheerily and patiently as Joe. But these attributes shone equally in his work upon the plays of others produced during his many years of management at the Comedy Theatre, at the Lyceum, after it was taken over by a company, at His Majesty’s when producing plays for Sir Herbert Tree, and lastly at Covent Garden, where he arranged the mise en scène for Parsifal at a time when he was already stricken by failing health.

Many strenuous hours were spent over each of these ventures in the most arduous of professions; but what I prefer to recall are the gay ones—the merry moments—the unfailing good humour, wit and pleasant jest by which my husband lightened the weary waits with which all who have laboured for the stage are familiar.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I can hear him retort cheerfully to some impatient spectator who was grumbling at the long waits during the last rehearsal of Julius Cæsar at His Majesty’s Theatre; and none was so ready as his friend the actor-manager, with the appreciative laugh.

Lady Tree—Maud, to us—reminds me of his favourite attitude as he would stand watching the effects of the lighting of his scenes from the empty stalls with his stick passed through his arms behind his back, and his cheery tones uttering the most fearful anathemas against lime-light men and scene-shifters.

One day I said to him: “Don’t get so angry, Joe, it must tire you out.”

To which he replied with his usual promptness, “Angry, my dear! Why, I’m only using the language proper to lime-light men: they understand no other.”

Once at a Christmas rehearsal, when the stage-hands were all rather more tipsy than was generally allowable, he came from the stage, and as he sat down beside me in the stalls he said with a whimsical smile: “Poor old Burnaby! He keeps muttering, ‘Buried a wife o’ Toosday and now, s’elp me, can’t lay my ’and on a hammer.’”

He was held in firm affection by his stage-hands just as he was by his New Gallery staff, not forgetting the decorators, and those superior frame-gilders who were only induced by regard for “the boss” to work together in completing the balustrade of the balcony during the strenuous last days before the opening of that “Aladdin’s palace.”

I recollect one of the scene-shifters at His Majesty’s Theatre putting his shoulder out at a rehearsal and Joe taking him to hospital himself; I should never have known of it but that the man’s quaint expression of gratitude—“Your gentlemanly conduct, sir, I never shall forget”—so pleased Joe that he had to repeat it to me.

The humours of these people always delighted him, and I can see his mock-grave face as he told me of the head stage-carpenter’s refusal to carry out an order because it was the day upon which: “We’re all subservient to Mr. Telbin”—an excuse which Joe, knowing that irascible scene-painter’s peculiarities—found sufficient.

No memories are pleasanter to me than those of presentations to us by these working folk. I have a little Old English silver waiter, an inscribed gift from the employés at the Comedy Theatre for our silver wedding; and a ponderous marble clock, also touchingly inscribed, which the foreman of the stage-hands in the Lyceum Company presented to Joe in the library of our Kensington house. The man stood in the centre of the room making a speech, but before it was ended nature prevailed and he concluded hastily: “If I don’t set it down somewhere I shall let it drop.”

Joe had given instructions to our maid to pay the donor’s cab, and when he retired and found it gone, we were all in dismay upon learning that he had left his overcoat in it.

Anecdotes of entertainments in the higher circles of the stage Joe has told himself in his two books of Reminiscences, the most notable of them being Henry Irving’s splendid reception to the Rajahs, when the stage and stalls of the Lyceum were transformed into one vast flower-garden in half an hour after the fall of the curtain. But I can add my testimony as to memorable evenings spent at His Majesty’s Theatre and at Sir Henry Irving’s supper-table in the “Old Beefsteak Room” of the Lyceum Theatre, when I listened proudly to Joe’s brilliant talk or speeches, and was sometimes privileged to act as interpreter between the host and the many distinguished foreigners who graced that board. Liszt, Joachim, Sarasate are names which recur to me among them as musicians; but, of course, the guests were chiefly actors and actresses, flattered, I think, at the fine welcome from the foremost English Manager.

Booth, Mary Anderson, Mansfield were the foremost Americans, to the latter of whom I remember Irving’s grim advice à propos of the fatigue of a ventriloquist-voice in a gruesome part: “If it’s unwholesome I should do it some other way.” Jane Hading, Coquelin, Réjane and, of course, the incomparable Sarah Bernhardt represented the French; and I think Salvini was the only one from the stage of Italy.

Sarah and our dear Ellen Terry were always great friends, and I call to mind a pretty little passage when they were sitting opposite to one another and Sarah, leaning forward, cried, in response to some gracious word of Nell’s: “My dearling, there are two peoples who shall never be old—you and me.”

The words are still, happily, true at the hour when I write.

Relating to members of the German stage entertained by Sir Henry, the most amusing incident is that related by Joe himself in detail: of the great actor’s grim humour in calling upon him suddenly to speak in praise of the Sax-Meiningen Company, when Joe had innocently told him an hour before that he had been unable to go to any of their performances. Ladies were not present on that occasion, but I was told that Joe’s speech was one of the wittiest he ever delivered: there was nothing that so sharpened his rapier as being apparently put at a disadvantage.

I find no mention by himself of a similar occurrence on a different issue. This time Irving had invited the Oxford and Cambridge crews to supper and, being suddenly indisposed, was unable to propose their health. Without even waiting to be asked Joe rose to his feet and, anxious to divert the young men’s attention from their host, surpassed himself in exuberant fun, keeping them in a roar of laughter for a quarter of an hour over his alleged uncertainty as to which of the two ’Varsities had secured the honours of the boat-race.

I am told that Joe again acquitted himself well at a dinner given to Arthur Balfour, when Anthony Hope called upon him without notice from the chair to return thanks for his proposed health. I don’t know why or how the inspiration came, but “Love” was Joe’s topic, and it is easy to imagine what a gracious and merry time he made with the various aspects of this subject.

Of his meetings with Italian actors and actresses Joe does not speak save in the instance of Madame Ristori, for whose genius he had an unsurpassed veneration.

His Eminent Victorians contains the tale of an afternoon at her house when she had invited him and one or two of the dramatic critics to hear her speak Lady Macbeth’s sleep-walking scene in English with a view to doing it before a British audience.

Her large and sonorous rendering of the line “All the perfumes of Arâbia” delighted him, though he tried to teach her our own insular pronunciation; he was loudly in favour of the public performance in English, which she finally gave, and I shall never forget the awe-inspiring effect of the slow and gentle snoring which she kept running through the whole of the speech.

Joe never admired even Salvini as much, though he revelled in his great voice on the resounding Roman tongue. He made us all laugh one day by mimicking the mincing tones of a Cockney interpreter translating the Italian tragedian’s sonorous language when returning thanks for his London welcome at a public dinner.

Eleonora Duse, for whom our Nell had the most ardent admiration, was rarely able, by reason of her frail health, to grace festive occasions after her work; but Joe had one or two interesting meetings with her during the season that she rented one of the theatres that he managed and we were all present together at her pathetic performance of the Dame aux Camelias; the next night we witnessed Sarah Bernhardt in the same rôle, and Joe gives an able comparison of the two performances in Coasting Bohemia. On the latter occasion a note came round to Nell from the stage saying: “To-night I play for you.” And the promise was well kept.

Speaking of Sarah Bernhardt, I recall a happening of the days before Joe was entitled to the consideration due to a theatrical manager; he had obtained a promise from the famous lady that she would lunch with us in our quiet home and we bade to meet her not by any means our “second-best” friends—to quote a huffed English actor regarding the guests of another evening. We waited an hour with a patient party and then Joe hastened with a cab to fetch the lady, only to be told that she had forgotten the engagement and was in her bath preparing to keep another. I need not perhaps record that Joe’s wit was equal to the occasion in pacifying our outraged guests.

He and Sarah became firm friends later, and she had Joe’s King Arthur translated into French with a view to playing the part of Lancelot; but this intention was never carried out.

So many and various are the memories which crowd upon me connected with the stage that it is quite impossible for me to sift and record them without undue risk of boring any readers I may have. Suffice it to say that I think, of his many occupations, the theatre, whether in writing for it or in labouring at productions upon it, was the one which most entranced and held Joe. Not only did he love every detail of the work, but it brought him in daily contact with all sorts and conditions of men and women, taxed his powers as a leader of them and gave him hourly opportunity for the exercise of his humanizing and inspiring gift: that highest kind of humour which needs no preparation, but is evoked by every little passing incident and has its real might in the love of mankind.

Perhaps I may here quote a portion of an American interviewer’s account of a talk with Henry Irving, sent to Joe by J. L. Toole during one of his old friend’s long tours in the United States.

“The Wittiest Man in England.”

“Whom do you consider the wittiest man in England to-day?”

“Well, in my opinion, the greatest of our wits is a man of whom very little is known out here. He is Comyns Carr, who wrote King Arthur for me.”

“He is a theatrical manager in London, is he not?”

“Yes, at the present he is, but he is a distinguished man in literature as well. A polished essayist and the most sparkling man I have ever met. As an extemporaneous speaker he is delightful.”

“Is he an Irishman?”

“Perhaps he is, originally. Now you speak of it. Do you know if Carr is an Irish name? Comyns is at any rate and then most of our celebrated wits have been Irishmen—our Sheridans and our Goldsmiths?”

With this pleasing tribute to my husband I may fitly close these theatrical reminiscences, though I like to recall that Joe and Henry Irving had appreciations of one another on a graver side to which some pages in Eminent Victorians testify, and many are the pleasant holiday hours we spent as his guests both abroad and at home. He used to visit the old-world village of Winchelsea by Rye, where we had a cottage close to the ancient gateway of the town—afterwards sold to Ellen Terry.

But the most notable of our joint trips was that to Nuremberg in search of material for the production of Faust. This was the first occasion on which I made a hit with my designing of Ellen Terry’s dresses, which I afterwards did for nearly twenty years. Being the only one of the party speaking German, I made many bargains in the shops and on the old market-place chiefly under Joe’s direction but also by request of Henry or Nell. She bought me a solid housewife’s copper jug in the market, and Joe and I secured an old ivory casket which she accepted from us and in which she kept the gew-gaws in the “Jewel Scene.”

She and I had a delightful evening in the old Castle, I having persuaded a little girl-custodian to let us in after hours so that we saw the place in solemn loneliness with the sunset glow reddening the red roofs of the city far below us.

I won the admission by a highly coloured description of the actress in Shakespeare, which the child actually had seen in her own town; and Nell promised her a signed photograph—punctually posted on our return.

This excursion was made while Joe and Henry were away at Rothenburg, which my husband had insisted that Irving must see on account of its unique preservation of untouched city-wall and battlements.

It was a memorable tour, of which Joe tells some interesting anecdotes in Coasting Bohemia.

In speaking of the long drives which his host loved and so greatly preferred to any kind of exercise, Joe does not confess, however, how impossible he found it to keep himself awake. “We sit side by side and sleep for hours!” he would tell me regretfully when he came home. And I don’t suppose it occurred to any of us then that it was the best rest that tired theatrical managers could have.

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CHAPTER IX

ENTERTAINMENT

This is a topic upon which I touch timidly; not only because Joe has talked of it himself in Some Eminent Victorians, but also because I had, perhaps less than most of his friends, the opportunity to appreciate his gifts as a public, or even a social, entertainer. In the long list of his after-dinner speeches there were not more than half a dozen that I was lucky enough to hear; and the little corner in the Garrick Club where I know he was wont to sit, quickly attracting thither the most appreciative spirits and keeping them all the evening in a ripple of laughter, was obviously a forbidden spot to me.

I think his celebrity in this matter needs no mention of mine; but I should like to quote one or two appreciations by distinguished literary men.

The first is in a letter to myself, where Anthony Hope draws a remarkable portrait of him: “He was a great arguer,” he writes; “for while his temper was always serene, his good humour did not blunt the edge of his tongue. Quite recently I have reread his last book with the keenest appreciation; it shows a broad, appreciative mind, and yet one quite clear for values and criterions.

“We have lost a man of rare gifts, a splendid companion, a generous, kindly, gracious friend. One is happy in having known him, happy too in feeling that life was to him a fine thing—a thing he loved, appreciated and used to the utmost. And his name will live—I think that will be proved true—in the memories of men and in their written records of these times.

“He was a figure and a presence amongst us.”

Another appreciation is by W. J. Locke and appeared in one of the leading papers:

“In a brief notice like the present it is impossible to dwell on the career of one of the most versatile of our profession. Everything he touched he adorned with his own peculiar sense of artistic perfection. He was an eminent art critic, a theatrical manager with high ideals, an editor of fine discernment, and a distinguished playwright. He was one of the finest after-dinner speakers of his generation, and one of the few men who earned, maintained, and deserved the reputation of a wit. A writer in a recent newspaper article wrongly charged him with being rather a monologuist in social talk than a conversationalist. Far from this being the case, no one more fully appreciated and practised the delicate art of conversation. It may be said, perhaps, that he was one of the youngest—he died in his sixty-eighth year—and one of the last of the great Victorians; for though his keen intellect never lost touch with the events and movements of recent years, yet his mental attitude was typically that of the second half of the nineteenth century in its sturdy radicalism, its search after essentials, its abhorrence of shams, and its lusty enjoyment of what was real and good in life. The honest workman with pen or brush always found at his hands generous praise or encouragement; for the charlatan, or ‘Jack Pudding,’ as he was fond of terming him, he had no mercy.

“Struggling against grievous physical disability, he died practically in harness. His last book, a treatise on painting, completed but a month or two ago, is said by those privileged to read the proofs, to reveal a vigour unimpaired by illness and an enthusiasm undimmed by age. An arresting and lovable figure has passed from us, one that linked us with a generation of giants whose work was ending when ours began. It is for us, with sadness, to say, Vale: but we know that their honoured shades will greet with many an ave the advent of ‘Joe’ Carr on the banks of Acheron.”

Two more extracts from letters, I have the permission of the writers to quote. One is from A. E. W. Mason:

“The traits and qualities which come back to me,” he writes, are “his boyish spirit, his sense of fun, his swiftness in dropping out of fun and suddenly touching upon great themes with the surest possible touch, his knowledge of Shakespeare, his passion for Dickens,” etc. And the other is in the letter of affectionate sympathy written to me at the time of his death by one of the oldest and most valued of his friends, Sir Frederick Macmillan:

“He was one of the most gifted and brilliant creatures I have ever known, and had such a kindly nature that no one could come across him without loving him.

“I am proud to think that it was my privilege to give him his last literary commission, and that it has resulted in such a fine piece of work in the region in which he had always been a master.”

This allusion is to The Ideals of Painting, published posthumously and still before the public.

The following notice appeared in the Manchester Guardian:

“The remarkable thing about Mr. Joseph Comyns Carr was that, while his reputation as a talker and after-dinner speaker was made in the late Victorian days, his gift was so genuine and so deep-set in human nature that even in these days when the whole poise of humour is changed, people still spoke of him as our best man. I doubt if anyone could stand the Victorian after-dinner speeches that established reputations, or if Wilde himself would keep the table quiet, but, until near the end, Carr was the person organisers of dinners first thought of when they wanted a toast list that would attract guests. He had a Johnsonian decisiveness and real brilliance of definition, with a freakish fancy and playfulness that at times had much of Henley’s saltness and ferocity.”

I am bound to say I never heard the ferocity, but then there were ladies present when I was. His chaff was sometimes keen, it is true, and at our friends’ houses I sometimes sat quaking for fear it should give offence; but even I underrated the power of his personality and the deep affection in which he was universally held, and I did not guess till he was gone the wealth of friends who missed him.

“There should be a monument erected to him for having cheered more folk and made more laughter than anyone did before him,” said one; and so it was even in the less inspiring surroundings of his own home.

My mind goes back to the first frugal little dinners of our early life, given when we had moved from the rooms over the dispensary in Great Russell Street to a proper house in Blandford Square, now the Great Central Railway Station.

He always did his own carving, and later taught our daughter to be nearly as expert as he was at it; no amount of pleading for the “table decoration” from our handsome parlour-maid would deter him, and she and I had cause to weep over splashed brocade table-centres which were the fashion of the hour.

“What is this bird, my dear?” he asked one night about some moderate-priced game which I thought I had “discovered.”

“Hazel-grouse, Joe,” faltered I, guessing that some reproof was coming.

“Nasal-grouse, you mean,” said he; promptly adding for my consolation, “She’s a bit of a foreigner, you see, so they take her in about our English birds. Never mind, dear! This bird’s muscles are less tough, at all events, than those of your country fowl who walked from Devonshire last week.” And he turned to his friends and added: “I can give you nothing but the plainest of food, but I always take a pride in its being the best of its kind.”

That was his unfailing word: “The best is good enough for me!” he would say; and he would go himself to the butcher if the Sunday beef had not been succulent, and say kindly: “You need not trouble to send me anything but the best.”

That was why his friends set so much store by his gastronomic opinion—he was a great judge of food, he had it both from his Irish mother and his Cumberland father; he knew good meat when he saw it, as that astute friend of his, the Hertfordshire butcher already mentioned, would tell him; and no one appreciated this more than the late Lord Burnham. They both agreed that plain fare was always the finest—but it must be of the best. A cold sirloin must be served uncut, yet the host of those memorable week-end parties at Hall Barn always knew whether it would be “prime” when cut and would beg Joe to keep a good portion of his appetite for the tasting of it. Neither of them gave the first place to made-dishes, though Joe could enjoy these when perfect—as they were at that bountiful table.

The made-dishes of unknown cooks he always mistrusted, especially when he had reason to fear that the dinner would be of what he called “the green-grocer’s and pastry-cook’s” class; and I remember his wicked assertion that his “inside was rattling like a pea in a canister” with all the tinned food that he had eaten at one such entertainment.

Alas, that he should have been condemned to some of it, through war necessities, at the end of his life!

He would take pains sometimes in instructing me and our own humble cook in the concoction of some new dish from a good receipt; but nothing was to be spared in the cost of the necessary ingredients: the soup, fish or entree must be made “of the best,” not forgetting that the “pig and onion were the North and South poles of cookery;” and, I think, he might have added also the oyster.

His Christmas turkey was almost always boiled, after his mother’s Irish method, stuffed with oysters and served with fried pork sausages and a lavish oyster sauce or a vol-au-vent of the same; latterly the oysters always came in a barrel from our kind friend “Bertie” Sullivan.

Yes, his friends esteemed him highly as a food expert; there is a letter from Edward Burne-Jones (quoted, I think, by Joe) in which he begs him to order the dinner for some entertainment of his own. “Oh, dear Carr, save my honour,” he writes, “I know no more what dinner to order than the cat on the hearth—less, for she would promptly order mice. Oh, Carr, order a nice dinner so that I may not be quoted as a warning of meanness ... yet not ostentatious and presuming such as would foolishly compete with the banquets of the affluent. O, Carr, come to the rescue!”

This dear friend cared comparatively little for the pleasures of the table, but Joe was even privileged to pass on one of his receipts to an acknowledged gourmet: it was the simmering of a ham half the time in stock and vegetables, and the remainder in champagne—or, failing that, in any good white wine; and as for his salads, he was famed for them.

I can see the pretty little plate of chives and other chopped herbs, with yoke and white of hard-boiled mashed egg, that our French bourgeoise cook would send up ready for his meticulous choice in the mixing of either a Russian or a lettuce salad: “a niggard of vinegar, a spendthrift of oil, and a maniac at mixing,” was the old adage he went by.

Our cooks were always as proud as I was to try and follow out his ideas, and we were invariably praised for success: I remember an occasion when the confused damsel—partly because she happened to be very pretty—was summoned to the dining-room to receive her meed; and when it was blame, I caught the brunt of it and mitigated the dose downstairs.

But as it was always in the form of fun I never minded; I was always proud to be the butt of it. Sometimes I scored, as when the dessert came at that first party, and he said, offering a dish of sweets to his neighbour:

“Try a preserved fruit; they’ve stood the move from Bloomsbury wonderfully well,” and I was able to produce the freshly opened box, just arrived from a choice foreign firm, and prove my hospitality to be less stinted.

I had my partisans in those days. Pellegrini, the Vanity Fair caricaturist, was one of them. I hailed from his own country, and I can hear him say:

“Never minder Joe! You and I we ’ave de sun in de eyes.” And then we would discuss the proper condiment for maccaroni, and next time he came he would bring it ready cooked in a fireproof dish, tenderly carried on his lap in the hansom, which he insisted upon placing on the proper spot of the kitchen stove to warm: on such nights, he ate little of our British fare.

My husband and he were fast friends nevertheless. If Joe had not “de sun in de eyes” he had it in the heart, and Pellegrini adored him, even going so far once as to break his oath never to sleep out of his own lodgings, that he might visit us at a cottage on the Thames, where—although he allowed that the moon “she is a beauty”—he used cold cream and kid gloves to counteract the ill-effects of hard water, and sat up all night rather than retire to a strange bed.

Several tales of this lovable and laughable character are told in Eminent Victorians, most of them referring to those happy little homely dinner parties where Joe shone so pleasantly, and which his friends not only graced with their presence, but even sometimes contributed to by little kindly presentations of delicacies.

Perhaps few have received as much kindness as Joe did, and though always grateful, he was never overwhelmed. Of the pride which resents gifts he had none. “I wouldn’t take a jot from any but a friend,” he would say. “But if a friend, who has more than I, likes to share it with me, why should I refuse? I would do the same for him. I have no money, but I give him what I possess.”

And none who knew him—rich or poor—in any of his many spheres, but would testify to this: he gave the young of his wise and tactful advice in their careers, sparing no time or trouble to advance those who were steadfast of purpose; he gave to his contemporaries of his untiring sympathy—known only to those who received it; he gave of his cheerful optimism to all: no form of envy ever crossed his mind.

“I can enjoy fine things just as well when they belong to others as to me,” he would say. Of none are the words truer: “Having nothing yet possessing all things.”

But this graver digression has led me far from that merry Christmas party, when the parlour-maid, whose beauty was an attraction of our first home, and whose charm and devotion for eleven years are one of its sweetest memories, was forced to retire to the sideboard to compose her face; which sort of thing did not only occur at our own table, but at far smarter houses where decorous butlers would bow their heads lower to conceal their smiles, the mistress of one of them even declaring that her maggiordomo had not considered the company that evening worthy of Joe, and had suggested a different choice for a future party.

There was one over-cultured house to which we used to be bidden where the learned hostess was mated to a meek alien, who never presumed to understand her conversation. One evening, before the fish was removed, she leant forward and called down the table to Joe: “Mr. Comyns Carr, would you kindly inform us ‘what is style?’”

Joe scarcely paused before he replied with his sunniest smile, “Not before the sweets, Madam.” And he turned pleasantly to the amazed host and began complimenting him on the excellence of his claret.

I think, although I am afraid I have heard him call that host a “Prince of Duldoggery,” he preferred him that night to the lady of culture, though she was too serious to be included in his pet aversions, the “Lady Sarah Volatile’s” or “jumping-cats” of Society.

But even among such, how prompt he was to detect the tiniest spark of genuine knowledge or enthusiasm, the most foolishly concealed quality of true womanliness and devotion.

I remember a girl-friend of his daughter’s, boasting to him in defiance of his counsel, that she would drive to Ascot alone in an admirer’s car.

“No you won’t,” said Joe quietly.

And loudly as she persisted that night—she did not.

I could multiply these instances by the score, for even in middle age he was the darling of all girls, though he always told them home-truths, and many was the match he made or wisely marred in the confidential corner of a drawing-room.

Whether in the quiet or the open, of course, he always talked the better for his cigar, and to some the sight of the matches he wasted while seeking the positively apt word was a joy in itself—or an annoyance, as the case might be.

I know one dear friend who could not listen for irritation, and would burst out at last: “Light your pipe, first, old man, do!”

Yet there were times when he had no pipe to light—in smart drawing-rooms or theatre stalls, for instance. He was very naughty in the latter, and kept me in a fever lest, being so well known, some one should overhear him who could make mischief.

Once he was reproved by the management for making his party laugh immoderately in the stage-box at a sorely dull farcical comedy.

“Pray present my compliments to the manager,” said Joe suavely to the attendant who had brought the message, “and assure him that we were not laughing at anything on the stage.”

The speech he was proud to make every 8th of January in honour of his dear old friend, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s birthday, and the good wishes which for many years he voiced for many friends at Sir George and Lady Lewis’ New-Year parties, will not perhaps be altogether forgotten, nor could I recall the topical interests of the moment after so long.

But those who knew him best knew that the opportunities for witty rejoinder and humorous invention were by no means limited to set occasions; they were instantly seized on provocation which no one else would have perceived, and as often in the simplicity of domestic life as in the society of clever people who might have been supposed to inspire him.

Who but Joe, when a picnic was spread beneath the trees in the woods at Walton, and a combative young curate, claiming to have secured the spot, swooped down upon us with his Sunday-school flock, would have whispered merrily: “Never mind! We’ll cut him according to his cloth!”

Or who, on being asked by a lady which was my “At Home” day, would have replied: “Let me see! Sunday is the Lord’s Day, and Monday is my wife’s day;” or, in the days of my slenderness and his more opulent figure, would have declared that, taking the average, we were the thinnest couple in London?

These trivial jokes will seem poor to the friends who have heard his later and more brilliant bon-mots and have listened to his longer orations; but, as I have said, I know little of those public speeches. The most notable of these at which I remember being present was at a dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, when he spoke long and with deep illumination on his beloved Charles Dickens; he always spoke at the various commemorative entertainments given in the great novelist’s honour, but never so brilliantly and so profoundly as that time.

When the occasion was more formal—as when he took the chair at the Actors’ Benevolent or the Dramatic and Musical Fund—he would sometimes recite to me beforehand part of the speech which he intended to deliver, but I believe he rarely stuck to his plan, and I have heard him say that he preferred merely to prepare the “joints” of his subject—i.e. each new departure—and to leave all the filling-in to the inspiration of the moment as influenced by the foregoing speaker or any unforeseen incident.

I recollect that the peroration of a speech for the Dramatic and Musical Fund ended: “I plead not so much for the deserving as for the undeserving,” and I believe that he added: “of whom I am one.”

I know that he told me next day—half in glee, but much also in pride—that the Toastmaster had told him that he had never stood behind a chair and seen so much money raked in.

It was certainly to his mastery of the impromptu that he owed the triumph of his oration before the U.S. Ambassador, Mr. Bayard, at a moment when war seemed suddenly possible with our great English-speaking neighbour; and I recollect that Ellen Terry, who was then in New York, told me later that when Joe’s speech appeared in the papers en résumé (it never could be wholly reported owing to his making no notes) there was a marked change in the tide of feeling.

He has related a part of this incident in his Eminent Victorians, but he has not mentioned this last particular, neither has he told how his triumph was won by his large appreciation of the love lavished upon the giants of our English literature by our “friends across the seas.”

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CHAPTER X

HOLIDAYS

A happy chapter this: for though Joe always had so many irons in the fire that lengthy holidays were not only very few with him but actually avoided and disliked, he made merry so well by the wayside that many a memory falls into a category scarcely enshrined in a longer period than a summer afternoon, or at most, a week-end trip; he made holiday for other folk all the time, and in so doing made it for himself.

Of week-end visits none were more joyous than those spent under the hospitable roof of our friends Sir George and Lady Lewis at Walton-on-Thames, where Sir Edward Burne-Jones was a constant visitor. Neither of those friends were knighted or baroneted then, so that perhaps we might all have been said to be—using Joe’s own words—“of the lower middle class, to which I am proud to belong.”

Oscar Wilde was often of the Walton party—fresh from Oxford then, and considerably esteemed as a wit himself, though not, as Joe shows in his Reminiscences, always above the suspicion of borrowing.

In this respect he somewhat resembled Whistler; but the latter was more honest in his plagiarism.

One day Whistler accused Joe of making a joke at the expense of his friend—a false accusation in reality, though sometimes lightly true—to which Joe quickly answered: “Well, I can make a friend most days, but I can only make a good joke now and then:” assuredly only half a truth, too.

“Ha! ha!” laughed Whistler with his shrill cackle, “I wish I had said that myself!”

“Never mind, Jimmy, you will,” retorted Joe.

And the cackle broke forth again whole-heartedly, whereas Wilde might possibly have been offended.

But very few folk were ever offended at my husband’s fun.

One of the members said to him one day at the Garrick Club, in a whimsical and deprecating manner: “These fellows tell me that I have the reputation of a wit, my dear Carr.” To which Joe replied: “Don’t worry! you’ll live that down in an afternoon.” And I am told that the friend was wont to repeat this against himself. Again, the mother of a pretty young girl, whom he was openly flattering, asked him, laughing, whether his intentions were serious, to which he replied: “Serious, but not honourable, madam.” But if this lady was not offended perhaps it was because he had known her since the time when she was fourteen years old herself.

An evening in Lady Lewis’ pretty drawing-room at the Walton cottage comes vividly back to me. We were playing some geographical game with the children, in the course of which Oscar Wilde—with a view to grown-up applause—found occasion to ask: “Where is the capital of the Rothschilds?”

The children looked blank.

“Why, in Behring Straits,” said Joe promptly, and I remember old Sir George Lewis’ smile, for it was at the time of the famous city crisis when, but for that capital, the great firm of Baring might have stopped payment.

Even in that most precarious form of fun, the practical joke, Joe was never known to hurt even the most thin-skinned.

One day he and Mr. Hallé, his co-director at the New Gallery—made an excursion to Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ home—The Grange, Kensington—and sent up a message to the artist asking if he would receive two gentlemen who had called to ask whether he would take shares in the Great Wheel. The maid must have been sore put to it to keep her countenance, for the rage with which the painter viewed the monstrosity that climbed the sky above his garden wall was well known in his household.

He rushed downstairs, palette in hand, only to find “little Carr,” as he affectionately called him, waiting demurely in the hall on quite other business.

At the sweet Rottingdean home a similar joke was played: Burne-Jones’ loathing of the “interviewer” was a very open secret; so one summer evening Joe crept up to the front door and sent in an audacious name, purporting to be that of an American who hoped for a few words with the distinguished artist.

From the shade of the porch he peeped into the dining-room window, and had the satisfaction of seeing his friend creep under the dinner-table, while the maid returned with the message that Sir Edward Burne-Jones was not at home. I think Joe’s familiar back was quickly recognised as he walked, in mock dignity, down the garden path, and he was not sent empty away.

Of course, the practical jokes of which he shared the invention with his good friend J. L. Toole—a master of the craft—were the most cunningly devised. He has related the choicest in Eminent Victorians, but I could tell of many a family laugh over them, and “One more Tooler, father, before we go to bed,” was a common request.

One of the favourite stories was told of him when travelling down with Joe to the beautiful old moated house at Ightham, which our American friends, General and Mrs. Palmer, had made their English home. Stopping at a wayside station above which a lordly mansion stood among the trees, Toole beckoned a porter and, in the gibberish that he used so glibly at these moments, pretended to utter the name of its owner.

“Oh, you mean Mr. So-and-So,” said the porter.

“Of course—I said so!” retorted the shameless comedian. “Well, here’s half a crown. When the train’s off, run up to the house and say ‘we shall be seven to dinner and the game will follow.’”

The whistle went as the porter, holding on to the door, enquired: “Who shall I say, Sir?”

But the train moved on and Toole returned to the reading of his paper, leaving a gaping man on the platform.

This same Ightham Mote was the scene of many of our happiest hours. Its charming hostess was a dear friend whose rare gifts of sympathy and true hospitality enabled her not only to attract to her house the brightest of spirits, but also to draw from them their best. Children, too, to whom she was a fairy godmother, were welcome as friends in their own right. Our daughter and younger son were specially dear to her in their different ways, and many was the grave, childish saying of the latter that she would repeat to the proud father, though perhaps the one he oftenest told himself was said to Alma Tadema when the five-year-old boy remarked that he preferred a gas to a coal fire, because the first went out when you liked, and the latter when it liked.

Joe was appreciated of all children and always won their favour easily; but I remember one little lady administering a severe rebuff to him when, after many lures, he said at last: “Well, I don’t care whether you come or not!” to which she replied: “Oh, yes, you do!”

But that was an exception; they were usually his slaves, and loved his stories as much as their elders did. He treated them as his equals only requiring that they should do the same; and when his first grandson was born and some one alluded to him as a proud grandfather, he said: “I like the child, but there’s to be no grandfather about it. I’m to be Joe to him as to others.” And so he was to the children of that dear lady in beautiful Ightham Mote.

Christmas was a real Yuletide in the fine old wainscoted hall and library, where Joe was always ready for the revel, as he was for the outdoor sports with his own children and those of the house. There were games in the beautiful old quadrangle and fishing feats from the bridges that lead across the moat to the bowling-green beyond; but the latter must have been worse than a bad joke to an expert angler such as my husband—consisting as they did in trying to lure the trout by a bait tied on to a hairpin; luckily the fish swam away merrily and perhaps enjoyed the fun too.

Frederick Jameson, that earliest friend of the days of our courtship, led the carol and song, and played for children and grown-ups to dance; Henry James sat in the ingle nook and told us ghost-stories of his making wholly in keeping with the place; George Meredith watched and made shrewd comments on the characteristics and possible careers of our various children, and discoursed on every topic—always expecting the homage due to him and reserving the conversation, even from Joe, by a long-drawn “Ah—” until he was ready with his next paradox.

Yet there was a moment when Joe scored even off Meredith. I think he tells the tale in Coasting Bohemia, but not of himself. Meredith had been criticizing George Eliot, and in a brief pause, Joe put in: “Yes! Panoplied in all the philosophies she swoops upon the commonplace.” And Meredith, laughing, replied, “I wish I had said that myself!”

One day we were busy amusing the children in the big Hall with a game of Definitions; one wrote down a word for Subject, the next man defined, and the third—the paper being turned over the Subject—“recovered” it.

Thus: Subject, Soap; Definition, as made by Joe: The Horror of the East-end multitude. Recovery, Jack the Ripper: the nickname of the celebrated East-end murderer who was then the talk of the whole town.

Joe was leaving that day for London, and the man came to announce that the trap was at the door.

He rose to go, but the children had begun another definition for his “last.” Woman was given as the word. The Better Half, wrote the next person.

“Only just time to make the train, Sir,” said the footman.

The children wailed, and we all followed him out of the hall and saw him off; but half an hour later a telegram was handed to our hostess.

“Recovery: An Angel once removed”; and nobody needed to hear the signature.

The children were always the frame to the picture in that lovable household, and our daughter—the apple of her father’s eye, made in his mould, gifted with his humour and large with his urbane and generous heart—had a very special place there. I remember his pride when George Meredith watching her one day at his feet, said: “Look at the bumps on that child’s head. Always let her pursue whatever walk in life she chooses.”

His advice was followed; and she knew what she would choose. I was having her trained for a violinist (for her gifts were several) and her master was proud of her at twelve years old. But at fourteen she came to us one day and said: “Father, I hope you won’t mind: I’ve sold my violin. I know now that I want to draw—and no one can serve two masters so I’ve put away the temptation.”

Joe was generally the centre around whom the children mustered in those good days, and many an extra ten minutes did he beg off their bedtime in the summer twilight or by the big Christmas logs. He used to tell them that he hated going to bed himself, and nothing was more true.

“If I didn’t know that your mother always gives me cotton sheets,” he would say on a winter’s night, “I would never go. I’ve no fancy for a country trip every time I turn round in bed.”

But indeed he needed no such excuse for sitting up late when he had a congenial audience. He had a wonderful capacity for sound sleep when the time came—a capacity equalled, as he expressed it, for “enjoying” laziness; because, of exercise—save in the pursuit of bird or fish—he would have none; but most of his life he sat up late and his most welcome form of rest was always in talk.

In this relaxation he was even more than matched in argumentativeness by the husband of another most hospitable hostess, to whom he addresses the following letter after a long visit when she had housed us in a homeless interval. I may add that our host was an etymologist, and would confront Joe with a dictionary in support of his own view of a disputed word; also that he was an eminent amateur musician and a vehement Wagnerian.

“My Dear ——,

It seems to me that you and your husband ought to be told that you are excellent hosts—and yet I don’t want the thing to get about. At first I thought that I would declare loudly to all whom I met how pleasant a thing it was to stay in your house; and then I thought I wouldn’t.

When one has discovered a really charming place where one can live with exclusive regard to one’s own selfish indulgence, it is perhaps hardly wise to noise it abroad. Some of the snuggest corners in Europe have been ruined by such imprudent chatter; and I feel that I should never forgive myself if I were to be the means of making it generally known that your house is so delightful. But I think after all that I can trust you!

You are not the sort of person to gossip about such a thing; and when I tell you that what I am going to say is confidential, I simply mean that I would not, for the present at any rate, mention the subject to your daughter; young people are fanciful, and she might misinterpret my meaning—besides why shouldn’t she find it out for herself? No, let this be for you and your husband’s ear alone! And even for you it must be in some sense a barren secret; you cannot stay with yourselves! If you could I should recommend nothing so strongly as a few weeks’ visit to your charming home. It would do your husband all the good in the world—get him out of himself, so to speak—while it would make you a different woman. Not that I think that in any way desirable; I simply avail myself of a phrase that is always applied to me when a change is recommended.

Yes! If you could only stay at——!

The family is small, but extremely intelligent, with minds well stored with the most varied kinds of knowledge.

Your host is a type!

Waking—with him—appears to be the momentary interruption of an animated conversation which has engaged the long hours others reserve for sleep.

With them a new day seems to open a new volume with cover, title page and preface. Not so with him.

The intervening night is simply a semi-colon in an uncompleted sentence—a Wagnerian clause in a melody that repudiates a close. This might seem to argue a too rigid adherence to a single theme with menace of monotony. Yet nothing could be less true.

At the bidding of a single word the whole scene changes with the shifting magic of a dream, and you are surprised to find yourself suddenly plunged into quite another conversational sea.

I have seen visitors at your house who would turn a deaf ear to these alert exercises of the dawn—moody men who became at once absorbed in the mere pleasures of the table; taking refuge in bacon from arguments to which they could find no auroral reply. They are cowards and I will have none of them! Rather would I emulate the tact of your hostess who finds, and welcomes, in these wide-ranging thoughts of morn, a bulwark that keeps the host from the kitchen boiler. For he is very apt to descend suddenly from his philosophic heights and pounce with unerring precision on some petty domestic error.

It is here you may observe the sweet influence of the daughter of the house, whose finesse would almost deserve the name of cunning if its purpose were not so benign.

In her skilful hands I have seen disaster averted by a dictionary and an impending storm transferred from a tea-cup to a disputed line of Tennyson.

I am painting for you only the lighter moods of life at this charming house; of what else is delightful you must some day go and see for yourself. But I forget; of course you can’t and there is my difficulty staring me in the face. I wonder if it is mine alone?

I find it so easy to trace a smile to its source: so difficult to define the lasting charm that lies behind it!

And even when the definition is at hand my tongue halts at eulogy. Odd! I love to be praised and remembrance offers no instance when I have been in fear lest appreciation should sink to flattery. But when I try to praise others—even as they deserve—I am overtaken by a feeling of delicacy on their behalf which I have never felt for myself. And so I end dumb on the very threshold of my theme.

I should like to say a great number of things of you and your husband, but somehow it doesn’t seem possible. Some day, when I meet a stranger in the train at one of those odd moments when by some irresistible impulse, I am driven to confide to a chance acquaintance secrets that through a long life I have hidden from my dearest friends—I shall say something about you and him that you might like to hear. But I can’t command the hour and meanwhile, you see, I am no further than when I began. All I can say is that, if ever you ask me to your house again, let nothing be changed from what it was, for it could not be changed for the better.

Yours ever truly,

J. W. Comyns Carr.”

After this epistle it may not be thought partial on my part to state that, from the days of our youthful visits to Balcarres to the end of his life, my husband was a welcome guest at country houses; the following, in reply to a request from Mrs. F. D. Millet of Broadway, that he should relieve the strain of a spell of female society upon her husband, seems to show this.

“My Dear Mrs. Millet,

I ought not, but I will! And lest I should falter in my bad resolution, I have already wired to you saying I should be down on Saturday.

It is a strange thing about duty. I believe there is no one who sees what is facetiously called “the path of duty” more clearly than I do; but we are differently gifted, and I fancy I never was intended to walk in it. Like the criminal who acquires in the end an extensive knowledge of law by industriously incurring its penalties, I believe that if I could recall all the moral maxims I have neglected in practice, I might serve as a veritable storehouse of wisdom and good conduct. And so it happens that, though I see clearly I ought to stay in town and work, I am nevertheless determined to accept your kind invitation and come to you on Saturday next. Tell Frank to defer suicide till after that date.

I can indeed well understand his melancholy. No man can dwell long in the exclusive society of women without being crushed by the sense of his own unworthiness. We are not fit for it. I often wish there were some bad women in the world, with whom we might associate in our baser moments, and sometimes, in a dreary mood, I am apt to wonder what women can have been like before the Fall, they are so perfect now.

Perhaps in another world we shall be better and you will be worse; let us hope for the best.

And in the meantime let not Frank despair. When I see him on Saturday I will do my best to detach his nose from the grindstone and tune his unaccustomed lips to words that were once familiar to us both.

Yours ever truly,

J. W. Comyns Carr.”

In those earlier days he sometimes pretended that his wardrobe was unfitted for such places, but I think even this was but a shallow piece of mock modesty on his part, for he was well aware that he could shine if he liked in any environment.

A letter to my sister, which I have just found, may illustrate this:

19, Blandford Square,

N.W.

“My Dear Alma,

Many thanks for the brushes. When my hair is gone—“which will be short,” as Pellegrini says—I can use them for sweeping a crossing. In the meantime they make a most excellent parting. Seriously they are beautiful.

I have never before had brushes in a case—it seems to lift one’s social status. Hitherto my brushes have lain in my portmanteau cheek by jowl with my boots, or have mingled their tears with my sponge.

Now all is changed; I feel I could stay at a country house and meet the footman on equal terms. Of course, I don’t mean that seriously—no man could hope to be the equal of a footman. I am a democrat but no revolutionist, and I have always felt that so long as liveried servants keep their supremacy the throne is safe. Compared with this the land question is a trifle. “Dieu et mon drawers” is the loyal but terrified sentiment with which I always awake on a visit, and see the footman turning my tattered underclothing inside out. But now my brushes will save me.

Yours,

Joe.”

In the later years of his life, as his friends multiplied far and wide and his social gifts became famous, he was pressed into circles unknown to me, and our country-house visits together became fewer; so that personally I remember his talk oftener at some sea-side place where we had run down for a week-end, or on the verandah of some foreign hotel where he would be immediately surrounded by a delighted audience—in later years not by any means always composed of his own countrymen. Though his associations with French artists and men of letters over pictures for the New Gallery—and, more still, over his English editorship of L’Art—had taught him enough of their tongue for his business, he was not a finished French scholar; but he was never afraid to make a shot at expressing his thought, and consequently he improved enormously at the end of his life. I remember the astonished comment of two Armenian lads and a charming Finnish lady whom we met at a Swiss mountain resort: “Mais c’est épatant! De faire des calembours comme cela dans une langue étrangère.”

He only needed an audience; and he had it every hour of the day in those two Armenian boys, who would stand for hours watching him throw his line over the lake and coax the fish out—just, they used to say, as he would coax the children to him in the roads or the visitors in the lounge—“sans se donner de la peine.”

I am not sure of the justice of that last remark. Perhaps he never purposely gave himself trouble, but he amused others because his love of his own kind was such that he must always needs be in touch with them, be they peasant or peer, and at the end of his life he preferred to lounge in the road and chat with the convalescent soldiers in a quiet village than to sit comfortably in the seclusion of a lovely garden.

It was because he was always alive that he was not dull; but I must admit he needed plenty of human interest to keep him so.

And I think, for this reason, that the life of a good hotel, preferably a foreign one, afforded him the best opportunities for fun; he knew just how much or how little the applause of such kaleidoscopic society was worth; but it tickled his appetite for the moment and was the required sauce to his holiday rest.

The following letters to his daughter variously illustrate this aspect of him:

Eden Hotel,

Monte Carlo.

“My dear Doll,

Our little hotel at Monte Carlo is a cosy place, containing among its visitors some odd and rather lonely females, both English and American. I overheard a conversation the other night between four of them—two English and two Americans—at which your mother would like to have assisted. They evidently did not know that we were English, and let themselves go on the subject of the male sex. The leader of the band, an American lady, whose hips described a circle about as big as the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, was especially vehement in denouncing us, though I can hardly conceive she had ever received any other cause of resentment than neglect. To an English lady, who could not compete with her in size but fairly distanced her in ugliness, she held forth at great length on the superior advantages which women enjoyed in America. “Over there,” she said, “we’ve just got men like that,” and she placed an enormous thumb on a morsel of unresisting bread to indicate where men were. “If they do anything we don’t like, why, Madam, they hear from us pretty quick. And that’s where they ought to be,” she added, “for they are just nothing but savages!” At which the gruesome English woman said that that was what she had always held to; but that, in England, she never could find any woman with the courage to say so. Then the fat American gave her country away.

“But see now,” she said, “we’ve still got to fight the law even in our country. I said to an American man, ‘do you love your wife?’ ‘Why, of course,’ he said. ‘Do you love your mother?’ I said. ‘Just don’t I,’ he replied. ‘Do you love your sister?’ ‘Why sure,’ he said. ‘Well then,’ I said to him, ‘Do you know the American constitution declares that every living citizen should have a vote except children, criminals and women.’ And then she turned to the English woman and added: “Do you know, Madam, the thought of that American law just makes me blush all over when I go to bed at night.”

I confess as I looked at her, I couldn’t think of the unrighteous law, for my mind was filled with the idea of what a wild and billowy tract of country that blush would have to traverse. Fancy the Round Pond turned into the Red Sea with a single blush.

Yours,

J. Comyns Carr.”

Bellagio,

May, 1903.

“My dearest Doll,

We are in the midst of a thunderstorm that is tearing and raging round the mountains; for the moment it is like Mr. Chamberlain in the earlier part of his campaign—very loud and very near, but I think it is taking itself off to the Gotthard.

I don’t think I have told you of the two little bits of American character I encountered at my hotel. One evening three ladies of that country were set beside me at table d’hote. They were not pre-possessing or young, but I noticed with just a momentary flush of flattery that there was an obvious struggle going on as to which of them should occupy the chair next to me; the struggle ended, and then the next but one turned to the victor and said, ‘Couldn’t you see, my dear, that I just wanted to protect you in case you might be addressed in a manner that might offend you.’ Poor dears! they didn’t know that God had protected them against any attack of mine.

Later, two rather nice girls and their mother took the same places; and one evening after dinner, when the terrace was full of people, the mother looked up to where one of the girls was standing at the window of the room above, and called out: ‘Don’t let him kiss you, dear.’ We all turned to look up, and there stood the girl with a parrot on her shoulder. There was naturally an audible smile among the spectators, and the girl herself was in fits of laughter.

Best love from your father,

J. Comyns Carr.”

Bordighera,

April 1909.

“My dear Dolly,

We are very comfortable in our little hotel here, with two nice Italian brothers to cater for us. The Italian village children please me mightily, and I hobble about in their language with just enough understanding to enable me to amuse myself.

We are an odd society: nearly all women, American and English. They are mostly nice people in their way, but not exciting, and of the place generally it may be said that whatever other attractions it may possess it does not seem to be a health resort for beauty. The air apparently is not recommended for pretty people. In the streets and on the hills the German is more or less in evidence, and sometimes as I pass them by I am inclined to side with Balfour and to demand that four more Dreadnoughts should be laid down at once. Their admiration of nature somehow always makes me feel shy, and I can almost see the landscape making an ugly face after their loudly proclaimed Wunderschön. However, they really don’t trouble us much—the neighbourhood is so genuinely beautiful.

Yours,

J. Comyns Carr.”

He often touched on the beauties of nature as related to art when writing to his artist daughter, and I find this keen little bit of criticism in a letter to her from Bellagio.

“This place is beautiful, and makes one wonder little that the Italians thought of landscape as a thing of design before the Northerners found a new beauty in the empire of cloud and sky. Certainly these mountains have great enchantment of form, and the Southern light defines every detail.”

And this longer letter of varying interest also rings the same note.

From Wengen,

Bernese Oberland.

“My dear Doll,

Here is a line from me whom I daresay you thought hopeless in that matter. But such a little thing will sometimes provoke a sinner to virtue. Two strangely fashioned men share the room adjoining mine, divided from me only by a washed deal partition held together by French nails. They spend the day in moody silence and in grey frock coats which if they were well cut would suit the Cup Day at Ascot. But they return at nine and chatter unceasingly till 10.30. It is now only ten and it has occurred to me that instead of tossing about on the sea of their incoherent conversations I would write a line to you.

This is a beautiful place which I should admire even more if nobody else admired it. But it is made too fair to go scot free of praise, and so I must fain clap my hands with the rest. You see we are exclusive in our emotions as the society of a country town and do not wish to share them with our inferiors. That is a part of it, but I think my reluctance to hear nature applauded has a better reason too, though it is hard to give it words. I know I always feel a better right to enjoy its beauty when I am otherwise engaged, in killing a bird perhaps, in fishing a stream or I suppose best of all in some sort of labour that the needs of the world demand.

I went for an early walk the other day up to the Wengern Alp; all the mountain in shadow and the pines blacker than their own fallen image on the grass. I was alone and met no one on the path but the lads laden with their washed deal milk-pails as they came singing from every green hill. And as they passed I felt sort of shamefaced. I was out for beauty, a kind of dilettante wandering in search of impressions, and I knew deep down in me that they must one day and another have won impressions I could never gain. No one can be really intimate with a strange land, can ever really read the face of a hillside as it is read by those however simple who were born to see it coloured by the changing fortunes of their life from childhood to manhood. Nature is so shy, so reluctant to speak if she thinks she is overheard, but she will sing to herself when she thinks we are busy.

For us who are not artists I think beauty is only really captured in that way. It is trapped unawares, stolen in the silences of night or dawn, or burnt into the brain by the fire of some passionate moment to which it remains as an unforgotten background. Of course the artist, the poet or the painter, has other rights and other penalties. ‘He that would save his life must lose it,’ and the artist is always giving up for himself what he re-fashions for the joy of others. He is like the cuckoo that sojourns in every nest and is itself but a homeless voice. Even the beauty that he pursues is never really possessed; it flutters for a moment in his hand and then takes wing for others to inherit. It is bought so dearly and then sold for a mere song.

But this is a digression. We were talking of Switzerland, and I do believe this is one of the choicest spots in it, but of course we don’t discuss its merits all day. On the contrary, I think we talk most of the food, comparing the veal of yesterday with the mutton of to-day, wondering from what strange waters, remote or near, come those strange fish that masquerade under the titles of the dwellers in Northern seas. And then we pry into the lives of other lodgers, making up imaginary relationships among families that are as normally related as our own—taking a curious interest in characters in which we have really no concern, and exchanging cards warmly with parting guests, knowing that we shall see their faces again no more. And all the while the air is so good, when the weather is not so bad, that we feel well, which is a long way on the road to feeling happy, and we are sometimes pointed at as distinguished, and then vanity covers the rest of the road and we are very jolly.

Yours ever,

Father.”

His preference for a foreign holiday—unless one in his own country, could be allied to fishing or shooting—did not, as will be understood from stray remarks in his correspondence, extend to Germany. He always disliked the race, and I can recollect a journey in our young days during which we had made a halt at Munich with Beatty Kingston. I am afraid Joe’s description of the place and the people included such scathing epithets as “The Burial-place of the Peto-Baptists” and “The Suburb of the World.” For his excuse I must note that it was the bad season for the Opera, although we did once hear “The Flying Dutchman,” which he particularly admired; also that the old Pinacotek, with its riches in Paintings by Old Masters, was closed, as if to spite him; naturally he could not be consoled by “the collection of middle-aged articles” offered him as a salve—declaring that he saw plenty of these in the streets of the town.

He was always just as hard on the German “frau” as on her husband, and his description of them on the mountain paths at Gastein, with skirts looped up like window blinds and waterproofs strapped across their shoulders in case of a storm, could only be equalled by the whimsical words he had for the red necks of the men bulging over their collars.

He was not a Central Europe man; the French or the Italians were always first with him after his own people. Romance for him lay in the North; I have often heard him insist that those most deeply possess it who dwell in the mist and dream of the sun, and he would cite “The Wizard of the North” and the Scottish Land in proof of his theory: yet the South stood for gaiety with him, and he sighed for the sun even as I did who had been bred in it.

It is curious that Rome he only saw for the first time late in life, upon being chosen to write the introduction to the British Section of the International Exhibition there, and afterwards appointed England’s representative on the Art Congress.

I shall quote a private appreciation of the written part of his work from that acute and sympathetic critic, Edward Russell of the Liverpool Post.

Naples,

April 28th, 1911.

“Dear Comyns Carr,

I cannot refrain from congratulating you on your Introduction to the Roman Catalogue of British Paintings, etc. Not only its literary felicity, but its fine and illuminating judgment; the choiceness of the language; and the apt biographical illustrations; the humane diplomacy of occasional gentle, but searching suggestions of censure; the insight of the aperçus; and the contribution of several original maxims to the sterling floating currency of criticism, make it one of the most memorable of such pieces.

Yours,

Edward Russell.”

But Rome as a city he loved not, as he loved the Tuscan and Umbrian towns; its vast antiquities oppressed him, its medieval structures he disliked, and the race that had left its impress there bored him; even in the natural surroundings he found too much melancholy—definitely contrasted in his mind with that Northern sternness which breeds Romance; but he shall speak for himself.

“The archeological side of Rome I can only gape at as a tourist: I have no learning that way: though, of course, there are scenes of the old world which touch the imagination without the kind of knowledge that must, to those who possess it, make the place deeply interesting. The more modern Rome—the Rome of the Renaissance, scarcely makes a single appeal and creates no such satisfying atmosphere as Florence. The Sistine I must see again; the light was bad to-day and the effect at so great a height did not immediately leave the tremendous impression of Michael Angelo’s power that comes of the more intimate knowledge given by our photographs. The colour, however, yielded more than I had expected. Tell Fred if he is by you that I am wholly at one with him about the Stanze of Raphael. They gain in site, and although I knew the compositions well, I found them better than I knew with a charm of colour unexpected and superior to any of his easel pictures, except perhaps the Madonna at Dresden; truly a marvellous genius, using all the resources of style with the freedom and ease of a painter of genre—and here, which is not always so in his later work, absolutely free from rhetoric in gesture: I must go back to them again.

“In the general style of Roman Renaissance building I have no delight—and never thought to have; but, of course, there are separate things to discover that I have as yet not had time to see. But St. Angelo makes a great barbaric pile that is mightily impressive. St. Peter’s seems to me much less noble in general effect than St. Paul’s, and its interior ornament, painting and sculpture, seemed, on a swift view, to be a wilderness of that kind of art I don’t love—all except Michael Angelo’s Pietà, which stood out in modest simplicity and intensity amid the garish surroundings.

Yours,

Joe.”

“Dearest,

I lunched with Barrère again to-day, and afterwards we went in his motor to the lakes of Nemi and Albano. It was a very interesting drive, and the lakes are really beautiful, though in a grave and sombre way. Of course it was not bright sunlight, but in any case the landscape here has a peculiar character. It has an ancient and desert look, hardly joyous and not very fruitful, different entirely in this respect from the landscape around Florence. But it has character, and what one may call style: and the remains of ruined buildings, aqueduct or tomb, which cut the sky at every turn, seem to belong to these surroundings. The landscape is of their date, seems almost to have remained of their date, and not to have found the renewed youth which mocks antiquity in other kinds of scenery. A certain gravity is the prevailing sentiment—impressive but touched with sadness.

I am seeing isolated bits of Rome little by little. If I were settled here for long I think the sculpture would attract me as a study—but like everything else in the way of art in Rome one has to be constantly sifting and sorting the good from the bad. Here as elsewhere there is a mass of indifferent achievement, a mass of work either poorly copied from the Greek or poorly conceived and lacking vitality. One feels more and more that the Romans were not artists—great collectors I have no doubt, and perhaps connoisseurs—but without the finest fire of the spirit. There are a few great things here that are superb, and others doubtless which I haven’t seen, but in many instances of even admired things there is not the saving quality of life that makes Phidias seem modern as well as great.

Yours,

Joe.”

Touching this last criticism he made us laugh when he got home by saying that he longed to cry to the crowds who patiently paced the Vatican galleries, guide-book in hand: “Go out into the sunshine, dear people, and enjoy your lunch—this is all bosh.”

It was delightful to me the other day to find a perfect echo of these sentiments in the letters of the late Mr. Stopford Brooke to his daughters. But it is not the only instance in those enthralling volumes where I noted a remarkable likeness in many of the views, and even in the method of expressing them, of these two brilliant Irishmen.

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CHAPTER XI

FISHING HOLIDAYS

I had not known my husband six months before I knew him for an enthusiastic fisherman. He tells in his Reminiscences of the first teaching he had from a reprobate old peasant in the Lake Country, and the passion for it never left him; the happiest of his summer days were spent in the pursuit of it and, from the time when I—set to watch a float while he threw a line further down the stream—allowed the fish to escape, to an evening towards the close of his life when I helped his unsteady steps to the bank of the Windrush at Burford, his characteristic grey felt hat stuck full of flies and the graceful gesture with which his long line was flung back and forward and then laid softly on the water of some quiet stream, are among the things which I often recall.

I can see him now, on that first holiday, stumbling with his swaying rod down the rocky bed of the Dove with the sunset behind him, while I sat waiting on a grassy bank eager to know what sport he had had as soon as he was within earshot. He was a most expert angler; and that was the beginning of many happy fishing trips—in Derbyshire and Westmoreland, on the Tweed at Peebles and the lochs and rivers of Perthshire, Argyllshire and Sutherland; but most notably on the stretch of a Hertfordshire stream which he rented for some years with other friends, and where he could best exercise his skill with the dry fly.

A tiny cottage, just big enough for three men or for me and the children, stood on the edge of the water, which was crossed by a plank bridge. Sometimes, when there was no one else, I would be allowed—most alarming of experiences!—to use the landing net, and I think any of his angling comrades—A. E. W. Mason, Seymour Hicks, Sam Sothern and others—would sympathise with my terror over the responsibility.

I think there were no happier days in my husband’s life than those spent in that Hertfordshire cot, and there is no frame into which his figure fits more familiarly than the sedgy bank of that sunlit river, hemmed by boldly contrasting forget-me-not and marshmallow, with the May-fly flitting over the sparkling ripples and the shaded pools.

And nothing so helped his periods of creative work as this rural recreation.

It was on the shores of Loch Rannoch that he wrote the first Acts of his King Arthur for Henry Irving, and on the banks of the Lea that he saw the barge bearing the body of the Fair Elaine. The Black Mount at the foot of the loch may have stood for the rugged rocks around Camelot, and the limpid stream dividing emerald meadows at eventide, for the river that circled Arthur’s Halls.

He was wont whimsically to declare that the “gaslights of Piccadilly” were more satisfying to him than a country life unless enhanced by the pleasure of sport; but no one saw the beauties of Nature in the intervals of sport more sympathetically than he did, as he tells for himself in Coasting Bohemia:

“I sometimes think,” he writes, “that those who haunt the country, without conscious sense of its many beauties, are apt to learn and love its beauties best. How often the memory of a day’s shooting is indissolubly linked with the pattern of a fading autumn sky, when we have stood at the edge of a stubble field wondering whether the growing twilight will suffice for the last drive. And if this is true of other forms of sport, it is everlastingly true of fishing. There is hardly a remembered day on a Scotch loch, or beside a southern stream, which has not stamped upon it some unfading image of landscape beauty. It was not for that we set forth in the morning, for then the changing lights in a dappled sky counted for no more than a promise of good sport; during those earlier hours there is no feeling but a feeling of impatience to be at work; and the splash of a rising trout, before the rod is joined and ready and the line run through its rings, is heard with a sense of half-resentment lest we should have missed the favourable moment of the day. But as the hours pass, the mind becomes more tranquilly attuned to its surroundings. The keenness of the pursuit is still there, but little by little the still spirit of the scene invades our thoughts, and as we tramp home at nightfall the landscape that was unregarded when we set forth upon our adventure now seems to wrap itself like a cloak around us with a spell that it is impossible to resist. A hundred such visions, born of an angler’s wanderings, come back to me across the space of many years. I can see the reeds etched against a sunset sky, as they spring out of a little loch in the hills above the inn at Tummel. And then, with a changing flash of memory, the broad waters of Rannoch are outspread, fringed by its purple hills. And then, again, in a homelier frame, I can see the willows that border the Lea, their yellow leaves turned to gold under the level rays of the evening sun; and I can hear the nightingale in the first notes of its song as I cross the plank bridge that leads me homeward to the cottage by the stream.”

By which it will also be seen that his “love of laziness” did not hinder him in the pursuit of sport.

Exercise for its own sake he resolutely refused to take, and when my Alpine-enthusiast father dragged him up a Piz—the last bit with his eyes shut—he said: “I shall never climb anything again!”

But Seymour Hicks could tell a different tale of a memorable evening on which he hooked a big trout in the dusk—Joe teasing him as to its poor weight—and when they stayed so late beside a Scottish tarn to land it that their friends below came up the mountain with lanterns to the rescue.

In Peeblesshire, too, he had gay hours with a Captain Fearon, known to our children as Plum-bun, because of a rhyme with which he teased them.

This fine old sportsman—though he must have been sixty at the time—walked twenty miles after a day’s sport so as to let Joe have the only spare seat on a buggy that he might catch the night express to town for work on the morrow. I can see the tall handsome old man now on the moorside, gaily waving adieu to Joe with a champagne bottle which he had seized from the picnic basket to cheer him on the road.

Joe had many days with him on the Tweed; one of them, following such a big spate that an old countryman wading in front of them was never seen more after they had warned him against imprudently breasting the swirl of the water where the river made an abrupt bend ahead.

The gloom of this incident was partly mitigated by their being told that the man was a drunkard whose fate had often been so prophesied to him; but they fished no more in a spate on the Tweed.

Fun was oftener their portion. I fancy it was to Fearon that Joe made the bon-mot current in the Garrick Club, where he represented himself as lunching with Noah on the Ark.

“You must have good spate fishing here, Mr. Noah,” he reports himself as saying while they sat smoking on the balcony overlooking the Flood.

“It would be good,” replied the host, “but unluckily, you see, I have only two worms.”

He writes himself of his fishing on Loch Awe; and later, on Loch Etive, as the guest of our charming friend Alec Stevenson, whose cheery voice would ask of his keeper after breakfast: “Is it fishin’ or shutin’ the day, Duncan?” But there is no mention of a happy six weeks in Sutherlandshire where we were chiefly fed by the guests “killing” of the daily trout, proudly displayed at even upon a large tray in the hall.

I think it was here that Joe had trudged for three hours up a mountain with his fly-rod set up, to find—when he reached the tarn at the top—that his top joint had fallen off on the road; as he was alone only the midges heard his remarks, for he had not even his fourteen-year old son with him—the happy companion of his later angling days. It was into just such a tarn, that that boy fell off the boat one day, when landing a trout, and was advised by his father to run about in the natural state on the moor while his clothes dried on a sun-baked rock.

A lovely place is Inchnadamph on blue Loch Assynt; the great mountain that guards the valley towards Lochinver can be golden in the long, northern twilight, when the water that has been as a sapphire before the sunset, becomes purple in the gloaming; but oh! the midges! Useless to tie our heads in bags and grease our faces: they penetrated everywhere and “bit like dogs.” They almost deterred Joe from his evening hour on the water because of the landing afterwards, when the pony would not stand for him to step into the cart.

But nothing really deterred Joe from fly-fishing—neither heat nor cold nor rain nor wind; he only regarded the weather at those times from the point of view of its influence on the sport. Even when it was too bad for fishing he couldn’t keep away from the water. But he could never keep away from water—he said it was the life of a landscape as the blood is the life of the human body. In our early days, when we were too poor for Highland trips, visits to friends on the Thames afforded him his best access to it; and, though he was not perhaps a perfect oarsman, as may be proved by a “stroke’s” petition that he would not “go so deep,” to which he replied: “Ah, I never leave a stone unturned!”—he loved the “noble river.” Though for perfect satisfaction he chose more swiftly running waters.

I came across some passages in one of Stopford Brooke’s letters which strangely call to mind Joe’s passion for a free stream.

“There is no companion like a quick stream,” writes the older man; “full, but not too full, capable of shallows and water-breaks, with deep pools when it likes and with a thousand shadows acquainted with all the tales of the hills....”

And once more: “Running water surely is the dearest and best-bred thing in the world. And a great workman and a great artist.... Nor is there any Singer, any Poet, any Companion so near and dear as it is when it shapes itself into a mountain stream in a quiet country.”

Often have I seen Joe beside such streams, and though it so chanced that the last happy holiday we had together was spent beside lakes rather than rivers, the sense of moving water remains associated in my mind with him through all the earlier days of our life.

It was in Ireland—his motherland, though he had never seen it till then—that we passed those last unforgetable weeks of autumn.

Even as we landed at Rosslare there seemed to fall upon him an unnameable affinity with the country of his blood; as we travelled slowly—very slowly—over her truly emerald bosom, he sat in a dream watching the little black cattle, that we afterwards learnt to beware of for “cross bastes,” as they cropped the sedgy meadows, his eyes wandering from them to the tender Irish sky and then waking into fun as he saw a peasant at a small station trip a boy up unawares and cuff him soundly, laughing as he did it.

And when we reached Waterford—only a dirty town to me—he plunged at once among his people and laughed joyously at the retort of a begging urchin, whose pathetic plea of hunger he had pretended to rail at: “That’s where ye’re wrong, yer honour,” the cheery little villain had cried: “A man may be fat and hungry too.”

The horse races were going on, and the inn was in an uproar, which he sat up most of the night to watch.

But the next day sleepy ways prevailed once more, and it took us a long time to get off at the station, where I recollect his amusement at the porter’s instruction: “This way to America.”

We reached Killarney without trunks, and the conveyance sent to meet us broke down on the way to the hotel; but he would meet no contretemps save with a smile, and it was borne in on me that it was because he was an Irishman that Italian happy-go-luckiness had never ruffled him. So we fell in with the leisurely ways of the land, and were fain to “enjoy the soft rain” at that romantic spot and watch for the beautiful shapes of the hills to appear out of the mists on the lake.

Next morning, however, that unique green-blue sky, washed with rain and dappled with wisps of cloud, smiled on us in faint sunshine, and from that hour our journey was one passing from fair to fairer scenes.

In a short time our train was climbing, or burrowing, through perilous cliffs of granite, crowned with lonely moors and, presently swooping down on the glorious coast-line, that makes for Valencia Island.

This we left on one side, and at Lough Caragh we also did not halt, tempting as it was; for our destination was Waterville, where we had rooms booked at the charming Great Southern Hotel for the fishing season; and after an hour or so more of leisurely travel we reached Cahirciveen, where a ramshackle trap waited to carry us over the moors to the village that lies twixt sea and lough.

The whole journey, and the last of it not least, was a revelation to him of which I think he was proud to talk to me, and I certainly had formed no notion of the beauties of The Kingdom of Kerry. The rough road across the wild heather-moor was bordered almost continuously with hedges of the small purple-red fuchsia in full bloom, and the cabins—white or pink-washed, with thatched roofs—that we passed at rare intervals, were shaded with it and covered with honeysuckle.

“You live in a fair country,” said Joe to an old man standing one day at the door of his tiny hovel; and I—looking beyond him to the dim range of the Macgillicuddy Reeks—added, “and with beautiful hills.”

“The visitors say ’tis fair, but I’ve seen it arl me life,” replied the proprietor, with a quaint smile. And then to me—“but sure the Reeks are illigant in winter wi’ the darlin’ snaws upon them.”

But that was later. That day we were silent with contented fatigue till the muffled boom of the great Atlantic breakers began to fall as distant thunder on our ears: then suddenly Ballinskelligs’ Bay lay before us with the massive headlands of Bolus and Hog’s Head guarding it from the Ocean.

The shore is wild and desolate with the sense of the vast Atlantic ever present; but soon we turned inland again towards the mountains of the “deep Glenmore,” and there, under the purple shadow of Mount Knockaline, lay a long, grave Lough with a tiny deserted islet in its midst upon which one of the ancient beehive cells stands under the eaves of a ruined church. It is Lough Currane, and we drove under overhanging fuchsias, to the Great Southern Hotel on its shore.

We had two more beautiful drives while we were in the Kingdom of Kerry: one along the perilous Irish Cornice, known as the Coomakista Pass, where one prayed one might not meet the coach, to Park-na-Silla; the other from Kenmare over a rocky road to Glengariff.

The Cornice drive beggars description, and I never knew Joe to be so enthusiastic over a view. Shallow little coves fringed with brilliant golden seaweed—upon which herons stand feeding at times—indent the shore itself; but the Sound is studded with numberless islets—some clad with heather, others with semi-tropical shrubs, and faintly ringed with the silver foam of a streaked and gentle sea. In an opal haze beyond them, the opposite shore of County Cork lies as a dream; but the two great guardian cliffs of Ballinskelligs’ Bay with their outriders—the Bull and Cow Rocks—stand in firm and grand outline away whence we came where the Sound joins the Ocean.

The coach driver draws up when he reaches the best point, and tells us all about it, and points out the Great Skellig Rock—twelve miles out to sea, and close at hand the bridle path by which O’Connell rode over the mountains to his home at Darrynane. As we near that Bay and its multitude of tiny islets, upon one of which stands the ruined Monastery of St. Finnan, he shews us the “Liberator’s” very house and then we turn inland again among undulating moors—our road fenced with the fuchsia and every variety of fern, till of a sudden the beautiful bridge and square church tower of Sneem village seem to beckon us into the very heart of a fiery sunset.

Our second drive from Kenmare was again quite different and not without incident. In the first place Irish unpunctuality caused us to start two hours late, and in the second, when the carriage arrived at last, the harness had to be tied up with cord before we could proceed, a beginning which filled me with alarm though it reminded me of youthful days in Italy: but to Joe it only afforded opportunity for pleasant raillery with his compatriot, and I only wish I could remember all the bon-mots with which they capped one another.

The last part of the ascent was very wild, but when we emerged from the tunnel that pierces the topmost granite cliff, the view that burst upon us—though wild still in its freedom from the intrusion of human interest, was soft and tender with all the glamour of the South. Range upon range of finely-chiselled hills stood crossing and re-crossing one another with gentle valleys between, and the glint of water here and there made visible by the golden splash of sunset; and presently the hills—so soft and so solemn upon the mellow evening sky—were cleft to their base, and Bantry Bay lay spread in the distance beneath us.

The road went down in sharp turns and, the driver cheerfully remarking that we should have to pass a motor-roller on the way, my heart jumped into my mouth. But Joe administered a little salutary chaff together with a cup of tea at the wayside inn, where we changed drivers, and a pretty girl assured me that “Faith,” I had “no need to fear, for the lad was the coolest whip on arl the mountain-side.”

So he was, but he went a fine pace, and the waiter at the inn, who told us he was the girl’s brother, told us also that that cool lad was her lover, so perhaps he was eager to show his prowess.

At Glengariff our weather was hot and fine, and the water of that land-locked end of the Bay was so calm that the pleasure boats round the jetty, and indeed every tree on the shore and on the near island, would lie reflected on its surface in the rosy dawns or the golden sunsets as they do on the Italian lakes. But out beyond the island the breeze would freshen, and thither Joe hied him with a friendly fisherman every morning to lie in wait for the bass and the mackerel.

Our friends—Mr. and Mrs. Annan Bryce—owned the beautiful island at the mouth of the bay, and there we spent happy afternoons wandering over the heather and gazing afar from the old castle’s ruined battlements; but Joe’s mornings were his own, and he would go even further out to sea than the island, to where the seals sunned themselves on the rocks, unscared by the approach of man, but scuttling under water when the fishing-reel ran out, the old ones calling their young to safety with an eerie cry.

Perhaps Glengariff was the most lovely spot that we saw, but the hothouse atmosphere of it made a prolonged stay too trying, hence we enjoyed Waterville and Lough Currane best, where the more invigorating air of the open Atlantic in our wake kept even the moisture of the valleys freshened with soft breezes.

Also it is here that Joe rejoiced in the only branch of angling that he really loved; sunshine, mist or rain he was off on the lough with his faithful gillie, his trout-rod set up, his old hat well-adorned with every likely fly and, if necessary, his oilskins about him.

It took him all his time—easy as it usually was with him to make friends—to make them with that gillie: a curiously sad and silent lad, whose rage at the “lack of pride” in a besotted old poacher who would hang about the landing-stage, knew no bounds.

But Joe would only laugh, and give the old beggar the “tanner” that he begged “for the love of God,” with a willing heart.

“Don’t be too hard on him,” he would say to the young boatman. But the boy had been in America, and, as it presently appeared, was ashamed of the lazy ways of his countrymen.

“Home Rule might be arl right,” he would say—adding shrewdly—“if it don’t keep the visitors” (generally meaning the English) “away. But, begorra, let us work for it!”

Few held such wide views even in that day, and Joe could rarely get any one to talk on that favourite topic of his; but he made various pleasant little discoveries, one of which was that Catholic and Protestant children worked together at school without trouble; but then most of the latter were fathered by English experts working at the Cable Station and were ranked as “visitors.”

His chief enjoyment when not fishing, was in the cabins—when he could find excuse for entrance. There was a weaver of the frieze not far from our inn, and there we went to buy a length for a gift. We were rewarded for a wet walk. The weaver was out—but his wife sat by the peat-fire with a new-born baby in her arms.

As we opened the door the cow that was in the yard thrust in a soft nose to hold it ajar, and lo, we beheld a sow within, rise slowly up and waddle out, followed by ten wee sucking pigs: then the cow stepped over the threshold beside us.

The woman rose asking us our errand, while I edged away from the cow and tried to get out again.

“She’ll not harm ye, lady,” said she with a smile, “It’s her milkin’ time, and sure she knows I’d not take the darlin’ babe out in the rain.”

But it was not often that Joe spared time from serious business for calling and sight-seeing. Once we went to the Cable Station and learned, in an amazing short time, from America, that the weather was fine and dry; and on two occasions I went with him to Lough Coppul (The Horse) away up in the “deep Glenmore”; but that was only allowed so that I might see the sleepy beauty of that tiny, lonely lake, where the water is peat-brown even in the sunlight; here I was introduced to two lovely children with gold-red hair and deep eyes, who dwelt in the schoolhouse of four districts, and were Joe’s special friends. This treat was a great favour granted to me, nor was I admitted into the boat even then, but had to roam about the shores while work was done. Luckily it was fine and warm, and the midges are not nearly so fierce in Ireland; and, with the children’s tales of the plights of scholars coming over the mountains in winter and a shy admission, warily coaxed out of them, as to the presence of fairy horsemen there on All Hallowe’en, many an hour went by like a dream, till the gloaming called us home.

But my lot was more often to sit reading or writing on the terrace of the hotel watching for the boats to round the point of Church Island, as they came in with their catch to meals.

Whether anglers are men or women—and most of the women in the Hotel were anglers—they mind nothing but meals, and rarely the hours of those; so that I was mostly alone, but the excitement of the “basket” was an event each time, and Joe’s was often the heaviest.

Through the gap in the fuchsia hedge, whose tassels lay blood-red upon the lough’s blue background on a fine morning, I would first distinguish his boat in the offing, and walk down to the landing-stage to watch it nearing me between the shallows, where those coal-black little “cross” bullocks stood knee-deep on the emerald marshland. I can see him, skilfully throwing his line on the water to the last instant; then turning towards me with the welcoming smile on his face always, though I generally knew, before he had stepped ashore, whether he had had good luck or not.

Yet the weather was not by any means always fine, and many a day I sat in our little parlour, not even seeing the fuchsia hedge, and certainly not the water.

One wet day comes specially to my mind. It had rained steadily, and out of the soft, white mist that shrouded the lough, the sound of a tolling bell had come eerily to me all the afternoon. I knew of no church within two miles save the ruined one on the Island, and at last I asked the chambermaid what it might mean.

“Sure, it’ll be a buryin’ on St. Finnan’s Isle,” said she, crossing herself, after listening for a minute. “The family will still have the right of it, and they keep a bell in the broken tower. But the corpse will have come from far, poor sowl!”

She went her way, and soon the bell ceased, and almost at the same time the mist began to clear and the shapes of the black cattle to appear again on the sedgy marshes, browsing as usual; then I saw black boats—like phantom things—stealing away in the distance and—behind them—a streak of gold struck across the wet mountain-side and all the mist shrank away, and the purple ridge was set against that tender blue-green Irish sky, crossed with bars of rosy light.

I went out and down the wet path to the landing-stage, and there was Joe’s boat pulling towards the shore, and he standing up in it with a smile upon his face.

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That was our last holiday.

We were often out of London again, and in lovely spots: in summer, at Studland in Dorset, at Broadway and Burford in Oxon, at Ditchling in Sussex; in winter, at Hastings and Bournemouth. But it was always in search of health and to escape the nerve-racking air-raids of War—never again in the boyish spirit of holiday.

Yet let it not be supposed that Joe was ever dismal. “Comyns Carr is a good fellow and a boon fellow,” George Meredith wrote of him to another old friend, and so he was to the last. Depressed now and then, but hopeful again till near the end, and always thankful for every bright moment and for every kindness received. “Grumbling is so dull,” he would say; and when I was dismayed at the contretemps of travel lest they should affect his comfort, he would beg me to “bridge it over”—as he did.

As we drove away from the house at Bournemouth on our last journey he said to the landlady: “I’ve never been so comfortable in any lodgings”; yet he had suffered much there, and had often lacked luxuries unprocurable in war-time. Sometimes in those days, after a long silence, I would ask him what he was thinking of, and he would answer simply: “Nothing, dear!” By which I am sure he meant nothing troublous—and truly to the wearying, harassing thoughts which beset many of us he was a stranger—for he would sometimes add: “I’ve plenty to remember.”

And then, to the last, he worked part of every day. His hand had not been able to write for long, but he would dictate to a shorthand typist; the whole of his Ideals of Painting, posthumously published, was so written, and his precision never flagged, as he instructed me over the correction of those proofs—whether in regard to the letterpress or to the re-production of the illustrations; the photogravure after Rembrandt’s Mill had been delayed, and on the last day of his life he asked me if it had come and if it “looked well.”

Reading over his own words upon the waning of his old friend, Sir John Millais’ life, they seem to me unconsciously, yet so fitly, to describe himself, that I shall end this effort to preserve some sort of a portrait of him by quoting them.

“I never heard from him,” he writes, “however great the dejection of spirit he must have suffered, a single sour word concerning life or nature. His outlook on the world was never tainted by self-compassion, never clouded by any bitterness of personal experience, and one came to recognise then—as his life and strength gradually failed and waned—that the spirit of optimism ... was indeed a beauty deeply resident in his character, which even the shadow of coming death was powerless to cloud or darken.”

So I think of Joe as he stepped out of the boat on Currane, with the smile upon his face.

---

I here add a few unpublished early lyrics and sonnets, never revised by my husband for publication, which may give pleasure to his friends of those days.

LOVE’S SUMMER.

Away in our far Northern Land,

Where blustering winds swept o’er the wold,

Love came with Winter hand in hand

Changing our leaden skies to gold,

And as we raced across the Snow,

Love set the frozen world aglow.

Ah, give me back that frozen year,

Those leaden skies, that wind swept wold!

’Twas summer then, ’tis winter here,

Here where my dearest heart is cold,

Where all the Earth and all the Sun,

Tell only that Love’s race is run.

J. C. C.

1870.

A SONG.

I.

What need of words, when lips that might have spoken

Clung close to mine?

And through the shadowed silence long unbroken,

This hand in thine,

There came from lowered lids such speech as lingers

When Love grows dumb,

And muted strings yield up to unseen fingers

Sweet strains to come.

II.

But now! Ah now! what love left half-unheeded

Or half untold,

Each little word those quivering lips conceded

Has turned to gold.

I hoard them all as misers hoard their treasure

In secret store,

Till once again Love finds that muted measure

As once before.

J. C. C.

FOR MUSIC.

O winged Love! bear those red lips to mine,

That at one draught together we may drain

This Cup of Life that holds Love’s magic wine,

Then turn with lip to lip and drink again,

O Winged Love!

Or waft me as a rose to where she lies

And hide me with thy hands within her breast.

That my bruised petals, wakened by her sighs,

May live one hour, then cease, and sink to rest,

O Winged Love!

J. C. C.

1873.

LINES WRITTEN ON A PAGE OF A YOUNG GIRL’S ALBUM

AT RAGATZ, AUGUST 1889.

Just as a dream of music never heard

May charm our spirit with its mystic spell,

This little page without one written word

Speaks more than words can tell:

Fair as the unchanging fields of Alpine snow,

That hide the buried and the unborn spring,

Its silence guards all secrets that we know

And all that time may bring:

Bearing sweet memories of past hours held dear

For all whose youth is flying, or has flown,

And softly whispering in a maiden’s ear

A name as yet unknown.

J. C. C.

My love is fair and yet not made so fair

As though fed only with the sun and sky

For now some viewless vision fills the air

And laughing lips grow mute—she knows not why,

And on her eyelids fallen unaware

The shadow as of passing tears doth lie!

Of tears unwept, born of an unknown care

That dwells beyond the flight of memory.

Ah, sweet, into thy beauty there could come

No better thing: the earth that holds thy feet

Must bring earth’s stain upon them where they meet

The path not made for thee—and the wind’s breath

That speaks not unto others but is dumb,

Whispers to thee of Life and Love and Death.

J. C. C.

1875.

ON A PICTURE.

BY E. BURNE-JONES.

Sad swift return of old love unforgot,

And passion of sweet lips that may not meet,

And trembling eyes that, like to weary feet,

Press close unto the goal yet touch it not,

Ah! Love, what hinders unto these the lot

Of common lovers? Shall no hour complete

This sweetness half-begun, no new day greet

The old love freed of the old stain and blot?

At this last hour, O Death, within thy heart

Hast thou no pity? Shall the night be dumb

Nor ever from thy lips the low words come,

Giving once more the old sweet wanderings?

Shall yearning lips for ever stand apart

Shadowed beneath the darkness of thy wings?

J. W. C. C.

1872.

There was a time, Love, when I strove to tell

Our love but newly won: and tried to sing

In broken verse that scarcely found a wing

Some praise of all the beauty that doth dwell

Beneath long lashes: But then came the spell

Of love possessed, and I no more dared bring,—

Thy hand in mine,—the old verse offering

Lest any spoken word should sound ‘farewell.’

Song at the best is but a cry for love

Not love itself and ere our paths had met

We cried to one another through the maze

That men call life:—until the moon above—

Our steadfast moon of love that’s not yet set—

Had drawn our feet into the selfsame ways.

J. C. C.

July, 1878.

Ah! Love, I know thou hast no power to bring

Those lips once more to my lips; those sweet eyes,

Back to where once they dreamed so near to mine.—

I know that not again on Earth shall cling

Those fair white arms, and not till all Time dies

Shall these hands in her loosened hair entwine.

There is no might can give back to the Spring

The lowliest flower dead under summer skies.

Yet thou can’st tell me wandering by what stream

And in what fields of night her white feet tread.

Have I not wandered, Love, in many a dream?

Has she not too in dreaming wanderèd?

Then send her soul now to some garden fair

That my soul too may meet and wander there.

J. W. C. C.

The moon that leans o’er yonder fleecy lawn

Lights a white path where wandering souls may stray

From earth as high as heaven: and when the day

Shall pass night’s dusky curtains, newly-drawn,

And swiftly with the footing of a fawn

Leaps up, from cloud to cloud, till all the gray

Burns crimson—then our feet may find a way

From East to West led by the feet of dawn.

Yet now how far apart stand North and South

And that one face and mine! Ah, not so far!

For at the call of one remembered word

I hear again that voice which first I heard

When day dawned in the smile about her mouth

And in her eyes I saw the morning Star.

J. C. C.

1873.

Death speaks one word and all Love’s speech is dumb

And on Love’s parted lips that breathe farewell

Death’s marble finger lays its mystic spell

And bears the unuttered message to the tomb,

From whose closed door no whispered echoes come

To break the discord of the tolling bell

That sounds through city lane and woodland dell

With the sad burthen of Love’s martyrdom.

And so Love dies. Ah no! it is not so!

For locked in Death’s white arms Love lies secure

In changeless sleep that knows no dream of change.

’Tis Life not Death that works Love’s overthrow,

For while Life lasts what love is safe or sure

When each day tells of passionate hearts grown strange?

J. C. C.

1890.

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.

Transcriber’s Notes

Note: In The Table of Contents, ‘IX Social Occasions p115’ is entitled ‘Entertainment’ in the body of the book.

[Page 12]: changed, of his sisters’—shaken to of his sister’s—shaken

[Page 41]: changed, me some grapes, to me some grapes,’

[Page 44]: changed, surburban to suburban

[Page 73]: changed, flummuxed to flummoxed

[Page 88]: changed, ‘Wall Sir, I hope’ to ‘Well Sir, I hope’

[Page 126]: changed, opportunites to opportunities

[Page 136]: added the word ‘whom’ - the centre around whom the children

[Page 145]: changed, children, criminals and women.” to children, criminals and women.’

[Page 170]: changed, horsesmen to horsemen