And when the excursionists were cheering the hero of Hawarden, Thomas Hardy was writing The Woodlanders. Between Hardy and Hawarden there was certainly a great gulf fixed. I do not think that any poet ever wrote an elegy so affecting as the chapter on the slaying of the oak outside the house of the old man who died of the shock. But the scent of the woodland clings to the whole hook; I have read it once a year for more than a quarter of a century.
Tennyson never showed that he loved his garden as Mr. Hardy showed he loved his woodland. In the many beautiful lines suggesting his affection for his lawns and borders Tennyson makes a reader feel that his joy was purely Platonic—sometimes patronisingly Platonic. It is very far from approaching the passion of a lover for his mistress. One feels that he actually held that the garden was made for the poet not the poet for the garden, which, I need hardly say, we all hold to be a heresy. The union between the true garden-lover and the garden may be a mésalliance, but that is better than marriage de convenance.
But to return to the subject of Poets' Gardens, we agreed that the gardens of neither of the poet's dwelling-places were worth noticing; but they were miracles of design compared with that at the red brick villa where the white buses stopped at Putney—the house where the body of Algernon Charles Swinburne lay carefully embalmed by his friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton. Highly favoured visitors were occasionally admitted to inspect the result of the process by which the poet had his palpitations reduced to the discreet beats of the Putney metronome, and visitors shook their heads and said it was a marvellous reformation. So it was—a triumph of the science of embalming, not “with spices and savour of song,” but with the savourless salt of True Friendship. The reformed poet was now presentable, but he was no longer a live poet: the work of reformation had changed the man into a mummy—a most presentable mummy; and it was understood that the placid existence of a mummy is esteemed much more than the passionate rapture of an early morning lark, or of the nightingale that has a bad habit of staying out all night.
It is a most unhappy thing that the first operation of the professional embalmer is to extract the brains of his subject, and this was done through the medium of a quill—a very suitable implement in the case of a writer: he has begun the process himself long before he is stretched on the table of the operator. Almost equally important it is that the subject should be thoroughly dried. Mr. Swinburne's true friend knew his business: he kept him perpetually dry and with his brain atrophied.
The last time I saw the poet he was on view under the desiccating influence of a biscuit factory. He looked very miserable, and I know that I felt very miserable observing the triumph of the Watts-Dunton treatment, and remembering the day when the glory and glow of Songs before Sunrise enwrapt me until I felt that the whole world would awaken when such a poet set the trumpet to his lips to blow!
Mr. Watts-Dunton played the part of Vivien to that merle Merlin, and all the forest echoed “Fool!”
But it was really a wonderful reformation that he brought about.
I looked into the garden at that Putney reformatory many times. It was one of the genteelest places I ever saw and so handy for the buses. It was called, by one of those flashes of inspiration not unknown in the suburbs, “The Pines.” It might easily have been “The Cedars” or “The Hollies,” or even “Laburnum Villa.”
The poet was carefully shielded by his true friend. Few visitors were allowed to see him. The more pushing were, however, met half-way. They were permitted as a treat to handle the knob of Mr. Swinburne's walking-stick.
Was it, I wonder, a Transatlantic visitor who picked up from the linoleum of the hall beside the veneered mahogany hat-stand, and the cast-iron umbrella-holder, a scrap of paper in the poet's handwriting with the stanza of a projected lyric?—