Austin Dobson, a man who has the mild and magnificent eye of Browning’s Lost Leader, the Horace of lighter English poetry, began life, like Gosse, as a Civil Servant, and, like Gosse, is as felicitous in his essays and his criticisms as in his poems. But, since he lived at Ealing and had five sons and five daughters, he was very little to be seen at literary gatherings in the days of which I speak.
It is natural to mention Andrew Lang with them. They were the three best lighter poets of their generation, but Lang had the advantage over the others of being one of the most brilliant scholars of his time—no man since the mighty Conington displayed such a mass of classical erudition, combined with a genius for popularising it, especially in the direction of translation. Lang’s prose translations can be compared with Conington’s rhymed versions of Virgil and Horace. He had also a passion for the occult, and was one of the best scholars in comparative occultology and mythology.
His tall, lean figure, mop of grey hair, and screwed-up scholar’s eyes, were as familiar among golfers and anglers as at the Savile Club, and other literary coteries, which he deigned to honour with his presence. He reduced rudeness to a fine art, and never showed his heart to any one old enough to understand it. But he was nearly a big man as well as a big scholar.
One cannot think of Lang without thinking also of Frederic W. H. Myers, whom I met far earlier. As a child he was remarkable; at thirteen, on entering Cheltenham College (where I was educated long afterwards), so precocious was his scholarship that he was placed with boys of seventeen and eighteen. I doubt if there ever has lived another English boy who learned the whole of Virgil by heart for his own pure delight, before he passed the school age. He won the senior classical scholarship in his first year at thirteen; besides gaining the first prize for Latin lyrics, he sent in two English poems in different metres, and both were the best and came out top!
At the university few men have won more honours. Myers was to Cambridge as Lang was to Oxford—and more also. He was greater in pure scholarship, and far greater as a poet, for he wrote “St. Paul,” almost the finest quatrain poem in the English language. His later volume of poems, entitled The Renewal of Youth, is perhaps less well known, but this was the poem that he himself cared for most, and its compressed force and intensity of feeling and wonderful beauty of expression have gained it a steadily increasing public.
In his later years he became more absorbed in psychical research. The success of his famous work, Human Personality, and its Survival of Bodily Death, is well known. The epilogue, pp. 341-352, has become almost a classic, and the book has now been translated into nearly all European languages. This would have surprised Frederic Myers enormously. He wrote to a friend in 1900, “I am occupied in writing a big book which I don’t expect any one to read, but I do it for the satisfaction of my own conscience.” He laboured in this field up to his death, with the same ardour and strenuousness that he threw into all his work.
He was a wonderful personality—no one who ever saw his unforgettable eyes, and beautiful majestic head, and heard his marvellously eloquent voice, could ever forget him. Myers is buried just where he should be buried—by the side of Shelley and John Addington Symonds in the new Protestant cemetery at Rome, under the ancient cypresses which top the city wall. Close by, this wall of Aurelian is pierced by the gate through which St. Paul was led to his martyrdom. The people who stood on the wall where the author of “St. Paul” lies buried, could have seen the Saint pass out.
Myers and H. M. Stanley married two sisters. I always though it so appropriate that Stanley’s brother-in-law, one of the greatest scholars Cambridge ever nursed, should have been so great an explorer in the Universe. A mutual friend told me that when Myers was on his deathbed, Henry Sidgwick, the philosopher, quoted to Mrs. Myers some lines in “The Renewal of Youth,” the poem which Myers himself, and many of his Cambridge friends, thought the best of all his work—
“Ah, welcome then that hour which bids thee lie
In anguish of thy last infirmity!