“Why, didn’t I say it?” he would answer. “It’s got a big swallow anyhow”; and then he would check himself suddenly, and, without further explanation, eye me, and begin to whistle.
Now I might recall the passage to which he referred (to wit, that every red blood corpuscle, being a seed peccancy, so to speak, made virtue an anæmia) and try to puzzle out a quite new significance in it. Suspecting that its author’s apparent naïveté was only assumed, I was respectfully guarded in my answers, and, when he was gone, would curiously ponder the perspicacious uses to which he would put them. He did not consult me, I felt, as an oracle; but rather drew upon me for the vulgar currency of thought, to which his exclusiveness was a stranger. He was very secret about his own affairs; though I understood that he was becoming quite an important “name” in the literary world. Ostensibly he was not, after that first essay, to be identified with the “Argonaut,” though any one, having an ounce of the proper appreciation, could scarcely fail to mark in the “Love-Letters” the right succession of qualities which had made the earlier story notable. Indeed, he suffered more than any man I knew from the penalties attaching to the popular author. The number of communications, both signed and anonymous, which he received from admirers was astonishing. Scarce a day passed but he brought me specimens of them to discuss and laugh over. I did not, I must admit, think his comments always in good taste; but then I was not personally subject to the flattering pursuit, and so may have been no more constituted to judge than a monk is of a worldling.
These testimonies to his fame were from every sort of individual—the soldier, the divine, the poet, the painter, the actor (and more especially the actress), the young person with views, the social butterfly, the gushling late of the schoolroom, the woman of sensibility late of the latest lifelong passion for art or religion, and finding, as usual, the taste of life sour on her lips after a recent debauch of sentiment. They all found something in the “Love-Letters” to meet their particular cases—some note of subtle sympathy, some first intimation to their misunderstood spirits of a kindred emotion which had felt, and could lay its finger with divine solace on the spot. No longer would they suffer a barren grievance—that hair-shirt which not a soul suspected but to giggle over. To take, for example, from the series a typical sentence which served so many for a text—
“To whom does the materialist cry his defiance—to whom but to God? He cannot rest from baiting a Deity whose existence he denies. He forgets that irony can wring no response from a vacuum.” A propos of which wrote the following:—
A Half-pay General.—Don’t tell me, Sir, but you’ve served, like me, a confounded ungrateful country, and learned your lesson! Memorialize the devil rather than the War Office. You’ve hit it off in your last sentence to a T.
A Chorus Girl.—Dear Sir,—You mean me to understand, I know, and you’re quite right. The British public has no more ears than a ass, or they’d reconise who ought to be playing Lotta in “The Belle of Battersea.” It’s such a comfort you can’t tell. Please forgive this presumptious letter from a stranger.—Yours very affectionately,
Dolly.
An Apostolic Fisherman.—I like your metaphor. I would suggest only “ground-baiting a Deity” as more subtly applicable to the tactics of a worldling. Note: “And Simon Peter said, ‘I go a-fishing.’ ”
Take, again, this excerpt: “Doctors’ advice to certain patients to occupy their minds recalls the Irishman’s receipt for making a cannon, ‘Take a hole and pour brass round it.’ ” Of which a “True Hibernian” wrote—
Sir,—I’ve always maintained that the genuine “bull,” fathered on my suffering country, came from the loins of the English lion. Murder, now! How could a patient occupy his doctor’s mind as well as his own, unless he was beside himself? And then he’d have no mind at all.
Or take, once more and to end, the sentence: “The Past is that paradoxical possession, a Shadow which we would not drop for the Substance”; which evoked the following from “One who has felt the Weariness, the Fever, and the Fret”—
How strangely and exquisitely phrased! It brings, I know not how, the memory of the Channel before me. I have only crossed it once; but, O! the recollection! the solemn moving waters to which my soul went out!
These are specimens, but a few, of the responses wrung by Sweeting from the human chords he touched. There were, in addition, prayers innumerable for autographs, requests for the reading of manuscripts, petitions for gratis copies of his works, to be sold for any and every charity but the betterment of impecunious authors. He fairly basked in the sunshine of a great reputation. There was only one flaw in his enormous self-satisfaction. By a singular perversity and most inexplicable coincidence, every one of these signed documents was without an address. But, after all, coincidence, which is only another name for the favouritism of Fate, must occasionally glut itself on an approved subject. Sweeting was in favour with the gods, and enjoyed “a high old time of it,” principally, perhaps, because he did not appear to be ambitious of impressing any “set” but that with which he was wont to forgather, and above which he made no affectation now of rising superior.