Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

Visetti was born a Dalmatian, but he has for thirty years been a British subject—and a very patriotic British subject. He had the celebrated composer, Arrigo Boito, for a fellow-student at the Conservatoire at Milan. An even greater composer, Auber, introduced him to the splendid court of the third Napoleon. Dumas père wrote a libretto for him. He was Adelina Patti’s musical adviser for five years, and wrote “La Diva” for her. He was admitted to the personal friendship of both the late King Edward and the late Duke of Edinburgh. He was the first professor appointed to the staff of the Royal College of Music. He has written lives of Palestrina and Verdi.

“Dolly Radford,” a writer of delicate and sympathetic verse, and her husband, Ernest Radford, used to come to us in those days. So, very occasionally, did two Irish poetesses, Mrs. Shorter and Katherine Tynan. The former, wife of the editor of the Sphere, has won herself an assured position by Celtic ballads of a highly imaginative order. She is Yeats’s closest rival.

I first met Mrs. Clement Shorter when she was staying with Miss Katherine Tynan (Mrs. Hinkson) at Ealing, where Shorter first met her. Mrs. Hinkson thus recalls Miss Dora Sigerson, as she was then, in her Reminiscences—

“I was the means of introducing Dora some years later to Mr. Clement Shorter, whom she married.

“We were all possessed with the common impulse towards literature. We were all making our poems and stories. Dora Sigerson, who was then a strikingly handsome girl, was painting as well, making statuettes and busts, doing all sorts of things, and looking like a young Muse. Dr. Sigerson was, as he is happily doing to-day, dispensing the most delightful hospitality. His Sunday-night dinners were, and are, a feature of literary life in Dublin, chiefly of the literary life which has the colour of the green. At the time there was no Irish Literary Society, as there is now, with Dr. Sigerson for its President. The best of the young intellect of Dublin was to be found at Dr. Sigerson’s board.”

Mrs. Shorter has written several volumes of poetry, one with an introduction by George Meredith, novels and short stories. She also still paints in oils, and models; her country garden at Great Missenden has many examples of her talent in this direction.

Mrs. Shorter’s poetry has an ample range. Some of her ballads are pitiful tragedies, told with a delicate sense of ballad simplicity, and an exquisite ear for the broken music which is so essential to ballads; and, at the other end of the gamut, she can also write songs in a lighter vein that deserve a composer like Bishop to set them to music—such songs as the poem called “The Spies” in her Madge Linsey volume.

Katherine Tynan, who had married H. A. Hinkson before we ever met personally, though years earlier she had given me introductions to Louise Imogen Guiney, the American poetess, and other valued friends among the writers in America, is the author of short lyrics, human and graceful, which ought to find a permanent place in our anthologies, as well as a popular novelist, and has lately written a charming volume of her Reminiscences.

I have left Sir Edwin Arnold, Thomas Hardy and W. E. Henley to the end of this chapter. Arnold, whom I used to see daily when we were both living in Tokyo, was too infirm to come to us much in Addison Mansions in his last days.

While he was in Japan, he lived in a native house in Azabu outside Treaty limits, receiving permission to do so under the legal fiction that he was tutor to the daughters of the wealthy Japanese who lent him the house under a similar fiction. It was just outside the Azabu Temple, a favourite resort for holiday-makers, and had delightful bamboo-brakes, which rustled rhythm to Arnold in his garden. The house had its proper paraphernalia of shifting wooden and paper shutters, thick padded mats of primrose straw, flat cushions to kneel on, flat quilts to sleep on, tobacco-stoves, finger-stoves and kakemonos. It was so native that you always had to take off your boots when you went to see him. Here he wrote the Light of the World, and he used to read it to me batch by batch as he finished it. His manuscript was most edifying; he wrote a beautiful scholarly hand, full of character, rather like the hand of Lanfranc, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of William the Conqueror. He did very little sight-seeing or bargaining. His time was taken up with receiving Buddhist abbots and the sages who, by extraordinary abstinence and striking concentrations of mind and will, had acquired supernatural powers, just as Hall Caine used to see the leading Mohammedan ulema in Egypt. They had a profound respect for him. I always fancy that Arnold had in his mind some magnum opus on those Eastern superhumans, which he never gave to the world. He wrote a good deal of poetry in those days besides the Light of the World, chiefly translations, adaptations and imitations of the Hokku and other Japanese forms of verse, in which he excelled. He not only had the natural charm, he could put his mind on an Eastern plane of thought. He looked quite Oriental when he was in Japanese dress; his dark skin, his Oriental type, the deep reserve which lay behind his affability, all suggested the child of the East.