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.”