Consolers of Genius
I have just added another famous dog to my list. It was a good list before, but it is now richer. It included Matthew Arnold’s Geist and Max and Kaiser, George Meredith’s Islet, Cowper’s Beau, Newton’s Diamond, Mrs. Browning’s Flush, Mr. Lehmann’s Rufus, all Dr. John Brown’s many friends, Scott’s deerhounds, Mortimer Collins’s St. Bernards, Pope’s spaniel. I remember only these as I write, but of course there are many others. And to this company enters now “Pomero.”
Landor’s “Pomero” came to him late in life—in the early ’forties—by which time the old man—he was then nearing seventy but had twenty fairly stormy years left—had settled again in England, his wife and family and most of his sympathies being far away in Italy. At Bath he then lived, making occasional visits to Gore House, and varying the composition of exquisite prose and tender felicitous verse with quarrels and tempests and tempests and reconciliations and tempests and lawsuits. Such then was the possessor of “Pomero”—or, as he would probably have called himself, the proud possession of “Pomero”—of whom such glimpses as I have had come to me in scraps of letters quoted by Forster in his Life of this noble, troubled, impossible, glorious creature.
Here is one, written by Landor at Warwick, when away from home, or what stood for home at that period—1844. Pomero had only just arrived from Fiesole; and it is worth remarking that had Landor lived to-day no such fortune would ever have been his, for never would he have survived such explosions of rage as the modern six months’ quarantine for imported dogs would have brought on him. (Think of him expressing his views to the custom-house officer at Dover!) “Daily,” he wrote, “do I think of Bath and Pomero. I fancy him lying on the narrow window-sill, and watching the good people go to church. He has not yet made up his mind between the Anglican and Roman Catholic; but I hope he will continue in the faith of his forefathers, if it will make him happier.”
Pomero, I should say, was a Pomeranian; but let me quote Sir Sidney Colvin’s charming sentences upon both man and dog. “With ‘Pomero’ Landor would prattle in English and Italian as affectionately as a mother with a child. Pomero was his darling, the wisest and most beautiful of his race; Pomero had the brightest eyes and the most wonderful yaller tail ever seen. Sometimes it was Landor’s humour to quote Pomero in speech and writing as a kind of sagacious elder brother whose opinion had to be consulted on all subjects before he would deliver his own. This creature accompanied his master wherever he went, barking ‘not fiercely but familiarly’ at friend and stranger, and when they came in would either station himself upon his master’s head to watch the people passing in the street, or else lie curled up in his basket until Landor, in talk with some visitor, began to laugh, and his laugh to grow and grow, when Pomero would spring up and leap upon and fume about him, barking and screaming for sympathy until the whole street resounded. The two together, master and dog, were for years to be encountered daily on their walks about Bath and its vicinity, and there are many who perfectly well remember them; the majestic old man, looking not a whit the less impressive for his rusty and dusty brown suit, his bulging boots, his rumpled linen, or his battered hat; and his noisy, soft-haired, quick-glancing, inseparable companion.”
Landseer, one feels, should have painted them: Dignity and Fidelity, Unreason and Understanding, Lion and Pomeranian. Since he did not, we must go to Forster’s extracts from the letters to fill in the picture. Another passage, also in 1844: “Pomero was on my knee when your letter came. He is now looking out of the window; a sad male gossip, as I often tell him. I dare not take him with me to London. He would most certainly be stolen, and I would rather lose Ipsley or Llanthony. The people of the house love him like a child, and declare he is as sensible as a Christian. He not only is as sensible, but much more Christian than some of those who have lately brought strife and contention into the Church.”
Again: “Pomero is sitting in a state of contemplation, with his nose before the fire. He twinkles his ears and his feathery tail at your salutation. He now licks his lips and turns round, which means ‘Return mine.’ The easterly wind has an evident effect upon his nerves. Last evening I took him to hear Luisina de Sodre play and sing. She is my friend the Countess de Molande’s granddaughter and daughter of De Sodre, Minister of Brazil to the Pope a few years ago. Pomero was deeply affected, and lay close to the pedal on her gown, singing in a great variety of tones, not always in time. It is unfortunate that he always will take a part where there is music, for he sings even worse than I do.”
So far the letters have been to Forster. Here is a passage from one to Landor’s sisters, also in 1844: “Let me congratulate you on the accident that deprives you of your carriage-horses. Next to servants, horses are the greatest trouble in life. Dogs are blessings, true blessings. Pomero, who sends his love, is the comfort of my solitude and the delight of my life. He is quite a public character here in Bath. Everybody knows him and salutes him. He barks aloud at all familiarly, not fiercely. He takes equal liberties with his fellow-creatures, if indeed dogs are more his fellow-creatures than I am. I think it was St. Francis de Sales who called birds and quadrupeds his sisters and brothers. Few saints have been so good-tempered, and not many so wise.”
For twelve years Pomero lived to make his master (his servant) happy or less unhappy, and then he died. That is the tragic thing—the brief life of these loyal devotees. It is not right, not fair, that so much love and energy should so quickly pass away. Many sensitive persons refuse for this reason to keep dogs at all. That, I think, is going too far, but I can understand it. Life at its longest for a human being is so brief and so fraught with disappointment and disillusion that, at least, one feels, the span of the most faithful and satisfying friends that man knows might have been made commensurate.... Pomero, as I have said, was Landor’s for twelve years, and then he died. Writing to Forster on the 10th of March, 1856, the old man—he was eighty-one—tells the news: “Pomero, dear Pomero, died this evening at about four o’clock. I have been able to think of nothing else....”
A few days later he wrote again: “Everybody in this house grieves for Pomero. The cat lies day and night upon his grave, and I will not disturb the kind creature, though I want to plant some violets upon it, and to have his epitaph placed around his little urn:—
O urna! nunquam sis tuo eruta hortulo:
Cor intus est fidele, nam cor est canis.
Vale, hortule! aeternumque, Pomero! vale.
Sed, si datur, nostri memor.”
Eighty-one though he was, Landor had still nine years before him—years of trouble, and fury, and exile. Not till 1864 did he meet Pomero again.
Pomero had been Landor’s confidant and delight for five years when, in 1849, there came to one of the most illustrious of his contemporaries—and a critic of the world not less impatient than himself, but how different!—a similar companion. It was not, it is true, a Pomeranian, but a dog none the less.
The news was thus broken by one of the most remarkable women of all time to, as it happens, the same friend who had been first told of the arrival of Pomero. “O Lord!” she writes, wilfully, characteristically as ever, “O Lord! I forgot to tell you I have got a little dog, and Mr. C. has accepted it with an amiability! To be sure, when he comes down gloomy in the morning, or comes in wearied from his walk, the infatuated little beast dances round him on his hind legs as I ought to do and can’t; and he feels flattered and surprised by such unwonted capers to his honour and glory.” So wrote Jane Welsh Carlyle to John Forster, on the 11th of December, 1849.
Sixteen years later the writer of that letter died suddenly in her carriage in Hyde Park, and thus ended a life of heroic vivacity. Her husband, deprived for ever of the power of sustained work, difficult enough when he had her service and intelligence within call, spent a few months in his early bereavement in collecting and arranging and annotating her marvellous correspondence; and one does not envy him his feelings as he did it. Coming to the note to Forster which I have quoted, he thus introduced it: “Poor little Nero, the dog, must have come this winter, or ‘Fall’ (1849)? Railway guard (from Dilberoglue, Manchester) brought him in one evening late. A little Cuban (Maltese? and otherwise mongrel) shock, mostly white—a most affectionate, lively little dog, otherwise of small merit, and little or no training. Much innocent sport there arose out of him; much quizzical ingenuous preparation of me for admitting of him: ‘My dear, it’s borne in upon my mind that I’m to have a dog,’ etc., etc., and with such a look and style! We had many walks together, he and I, for the next ten years; a great deal of small traffic, poor little animal, so loyal, so loving, so naïve and true with what of dim intellect he had! Once, perhaps in his third year here, he came pattering upstairs to my garret; scratched duly, was let in, and brought me (literally) the ‘gift of a horse’ (which I had talked of needing)! Brought me, to wit, a letter hung to his neck, inclosing on a saddler’s card the picture of a horse, and adjoined to it a cheque for £50—full half of some poor legacy which had fallen to her! Can I ever forget such a thing? I was not slave enough to take the money; and got a horse next year, on the common terms—but all Potosi, and the diggings new and old, had not in them, as I now feel, so rich a gift!”
These three volumes of Mrs. Carlyle’s indomitably gay correspondence, laughing at her crosses, making light of her disappointments, extracting whatever of merriment or sunshine was possible, and never with any trace of self-commendation or consciousness of heroism: and a woman too who must have known that, given a fair chance, which she never had, she would have shone in her own way with hardly less brilliancy than her bear; who must have known she was worth petting, and considering, and adoring rightly—these three volumes of brilliant good-humour against odds, with the dour, intolerant, solitary widower re-living the irrecoverable past as he read them over and edited them, counting his lost opportunities on every page, are surely as tragic a work as literature knows. But Nero is pawing at the desk. The note continues: “Poor Nero’s last good days were with us at Aberdour, in 1859. Twice or thrice I flung him into the sea there, which he didn’t at all like; and in consequence of which he even ceased to follow me at bathing time, the very strongest measure he could take—or pretend to take. For two or three mornings accordingly I had seen nothing of Nero, but the third or fourth morning, on striking out to swim a few yards, I heard gradually a kind of swashing behind me; looking back, it was Nero out on voluntary humble partnership—ready to swim with me to Edinburgh, or to the world’s end, if I liked.”
Pomero, as I said, lived for twelve years with his whirlwind adorer. Nero had a shorter life with that strange Scotch couple only by a few months. This is the end of Carlyle’s note: “Fife had done his mistress, and still more him, a great deal of good. But, alas, in Cook’s grounds here, within a month or two a butcher’s cart (in her very sight) ran over him neck and lungs: all winter he wheezed and suffered; ‘Feb. 1st, 1860,’ he died (prussic acid, and the doctor obliged at last!). I could not have believed my grief then and since would have been the twentieth part of what it was—nay, that the want of him would have been to me other than a riddance. Our last midnight walk together (for he insisted on trying to come), Jan. 31st, is still painful to my thought. ‘Little dim, white speck, of Life, of Love, Fidelity, and Feeling, girdled by the Darkness as of Night Eternal!’ Her tears were passionate and bitter, but repressed themselves, as was fit, I think, the first day. Top of the garden, by her direction, Nero was put under ground. A small stone tablet with date she also got, which, broken by careless servants, is still there—a little protected now.”
It is there still, but few visitors to that gloomy Chelsea house, where two geniuses, a man and woman, failed sufficiently to subdue and blend their individualities for so many years, ever walk down the garden to see it. Underneath are the remains of one who could neither read nor write nor frame systems, but who lived the only successful life of the three.