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I here add a few unpublished early lyrics and sonnets, never revised by my husband for publication, which may give pleasure to his friends of those days.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