This postscript reminds me of the fact that Mr. Pater, Mr. Alfred Austin, and Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton met together one evening at our house. I especially remember the occasion because of an incident that occurred, which indicated to us a temperamental characteristic of Walter Pater. During dinner a guest asked to see a necklace I was wearing. It was in the form of a serpent made of silver wire deftly interwoven to resemble scales and to make it sinuous and supple. I unfastened the serpent and as I handed it to Mr. Pater who was nearest me, it writhed in a lifelike manner, and he drew back his hands with a slight movement of dislike. In a flash I remembered the passage in Marius the Epicurean in which the hero’s dislike to serpents is so vividly described, and I realised the description to be autobiographic. Later I had occasion to note the same effect. My husband and I in the early summer went down to Oxford so that I might meet the Misses Pater at their brother’s house. In the morning I had seen Mr. Pater’s study at Brasenose, and was as charmed with the beauty and austerity of the decoration, as with the sense of quiet and repose. In the afternoon it was proposed that I should be shown the Ifley Woods. My husband, always glad to handle the oars, had, however, to consent to being rowed by one of the boat attendants, for Mr. Pater with the timidity of a recluse declined to trust himself to the unknown capabilities of one whom he regarded rather as a townsman. As Mr. Pater and I strolled through the wood I suddenly noticed that my companion gave a little start and directed my attention to what seemed of small interest. When, however, we rejoined our companions Miss Pater asked her brother if he had seen the dead adder lying on one side of the path. “Oh, yes,” he answered, turning his head on one side with a gesture of aversion; “but I did not wish Mrs. Sharp to see it.”
If The Sonnets of this Century gained us pleasant friendships it also brought upon us a heavy penalty. For, within the next year or two we were inundated with letters and appeals from budding poets, from ambitious and wholly ignorant would-be sonneteers, who sent sheafs of sonnets not only for criticism and advice but now and again with the request to find a publisher for them! A large packet arrived one day, I remember, with a letter from an unknown in South Africa. The writer explained his poetical ambitions, and stated that he forwarded for consideration a hundred sonnets. On examining the packet we found one hundred poems varying in length from twelve to twenty lines, but not a solitary sonnet among them!
CHAPTER VII
THE SPORT OF CHANCE
Shelley
In the summer of 1885 we went to Scotland and looked forward to an idyllic month on West Loch Tarbert. While staying with Mr. Pater in Oxford my husband had seen the advertisement of a desirable cottage to be let furnished, with service, and garden stocked with vegetables. He knew the neighbourhood to be lovely, the attraction was great, so we took the cottage for August, and in due time carried our various MSS. and work to the idyllic spot. Beautiful the surroundings were indeed:—An upland moor sloping to the loch, with its opposite hilly shore thickly wooded. The cottage was simplicity itself in its appointments, but—the garden was merely a bit of railed-in grass field destitute of plants; the vegetables consisted of a sack of winter potatoes quite uneatable, and the only service that the old woman owner would give was to light the fires and wash up the dishes and black our boots. Everything else devolved on me, for help I could get nowhere and though my husband’s intentions and efforts in that direction were admirable, their practical qualities ended there! Yet to all the drawbacks we found compensation in the loveliness of the moorland, the peace of the solitude, and in the magnificent sunsets. One sunset I remember specially. We had gone for a wander westward. The sun was setting behind the brown horizon-line of the moor, and the sky was aflame with its glow. Suddenly we heard the sound of the pipes, sighing a Lament. We stopped to listen. The sound came nearer, and we saw walking over the brow of the upland an old man with bag-pipes and streamers outlined against the orange sky. We drew aside into a little hollow. As he neared we saw he was gray haired, his bonnet and clothes were old and weatherworn. But in his face was a rapt expression as he played to himself and tramped across the moor, out of the sunset toward the fishing village that lay yonder in the cold evening light.
The summer was a wet one, and shortly after our return to town the poet developed disquieting rheumatic symptoms. Nevertheless we were both hard at work with the reviewing of pictures and books, and among other things he was projecting a monograph on Shelley. It was about this time I think that he decided to compete for a prize of £100 offered by the Editor of The People’s Friend for a novel suited to the requirements of that weekly, and these requirements of course dictated the sensational style of story. It was my husband’s one attempt to write a novel in three volumes. He did not gain the prize but the story ran serially through The People’s Friend, and was afterward published in 1887 by Messrs. Hurst and Blackett. The scene is laid in Scotland and in Australia, with a Prologue dealing with Cornwall, where he had once spent a few days in order to act as best man to one of his fellow-passengers on the sailing ship that brought him back from Australia.
The following Review from The Morning Post and letter from our poet-friend Mathilde Blind will give an idea of the style and defects of the novel: