I have been with him on several occasions when he has been finishing his books, and I have always found him in alternating moods of exhaustion and emotional excitement. Whatever else may be charged against him, it cannot with truth be said that he does not put his whole soul into his work.
. . . . . . . .
As a man he is the most loyal of friends and the most loyal of enemies. He can hate bitterly. I have heard him eloquent in his hate. I have heard him hate W. T. Stead and Frank Harris, and nothing could have exceeded his bitterness. But he does not nurse his hatred, and he is a man quick to forgive.
I cannot close this chapter without a word concerning his generosity. By “generosity” I do not mean only that he is free with money, but that he will give his time, the work of his brain, his advice and even himself for any good cause and for any man in need. To struggling authors he is the very soul of generosity. He struggled himself. Born on a coal barge in Runcorn, largely self-educated, having experienced the anxiety of straitened means and hope deferred, he has known intimately the hardships of life, and will do all in his power to shield others from them. On several occasions I have met people—mostly young men—who have come to him for help and advice in beginning a literary career. He is never extravagant in his praise of their work, but if he finds merit in it he is always warmly encouraging. Years before I met him face to face, when I was a boy of fourteen, I sent him a long poem I had written in the Spenserian stanza, and the first letters I received from him were careful and most helpful criticisms of this juvenile literary effort. I had written to him as an entire stranger and without any introduction whatever. In my youth [127] ]and egotism I had taken his replies as a matter of course; it was only later that I recognised the most kindly spirit that prompted a busy and often harassed man to give his time and energy to a boy whose work can have had very little to recommend it.
[128]
]CHAPTER XI
MORE WRITERS
Rev. T. E. Brown—A. R. Orage—Norman Angell—St John Ervine—Charles Marriott—Max Beerbohm—Israel Zangwill—Alphonse Courlander—Ivan Heald—Dixon Scott—Barry Pain—Cunninghame Graham
I wonder how many readers turn nowadays to the poetical works of Thomas Edward Brown, the Manx poet. Not a great number, I think. Indeed, I doubt if he ever had a large audience, though he had the power of exciting almost unlimited enthusiasm in the breasts of those whom he did attract. He was praised whole-heartedly by George Eliot, George Meredith, W. E. Henley and other famous writers, and the publication of his Letters a year or two after his death made a great stir.
In my boyhood’s days I was one of Brown’s most devoted disciples. He had a charming trick of infusing scholarship with the real “stuff” of humanity, that appealed to me irresistibly, and I liked the honest sensuality of his Roman Women and the pathos of such poems as Aber Stations and Epistola ad Dakyns. Perhaps I could not read his poems now, for, truth to tell, they “gush” almost indecently. However, he remains the most distinguished literary figure that the little Isle of Man has produced, and two or three of his lyrics will persist far into the future.
I met him at Greeba Castle, Mr Hall Caine’s Manx residence, when I was still a schoolboy. It was just a few months before Brown’s death, and a rather sad incident marked his visit to Hall Caine.
[129]
]We were at lunch when he arrived: a rather solemn lunch: a lunch at which the guests were ill assorted. A ponderous scholar from Scotland insisted upon discussing the authorship of Homer—a subject about which our host evidently knew little and cared less. In the middle of a rather painful silence, Brown was ushered into the dining-room; he was carrying a little book of Laurence Binyon’s that had just been published. His burly figure, his genial face, his ready tongue soon lifted us out of the atmosphere of black boredom that had settled upon us. In five minutes he had disposed of the Scottish scholar, had drunk a whisky and soda, and had combated Hall Caine’s opinion that Binyon “had entirely missed the point” in one of the poems he (Binyon) had written.