Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

It is pleasant, however, to reflect that an editor’s duties yield many happier experiences, and bring him into contact with men and women whom otherwise it might not be his good fortune to know. It was in this way that I made the acquaintance of poor Richard Jefferies, whose delightful articles, under the heading of “The Game-keeper at Home,” had been already published in the Pall Mall Gazette. Jefferies’s appearance, even at our first meeting, gave me the unhappy impression that he was not destined for a long life. But despite his nervous temperament that was evidently in a large measure dependent upon the frailty of his physical constitution, he was a man of great simplicity and charm of manner.

The love that he had for the things of outward nature was clearly a passionate possession that absorbed his life. Of the teeming life of the country, from the waving ears of corn down to the minutest flower or the smallest insect that inhabited the shadowed world at their feet, he was a loving and constant observer whose eyes never wearied in their task. With Jefferies the enjoyment begotten of this watchful brooding over the things of the country was, I think, all-sufficing. He seemed never desirous to link it in association with any more directly human impulse or emotion, and in this way his writings, as it seems to me, make a separate claim, distinct from that of any other author, whether in poetry or in prose, who have confessed a like passion for the beauty of the outward world.

I was fortunate in securing several very beautiful contributions from his pen, some of which gained an added interest from the delightful illustrations of Mr. Alfred Parsons, who found himself in full sympathy with Jefferies’s purposes and design. At a later date Jefferies was associated in the same way with my friend Mr. North, whose delicate drawings showed a quick sympathy with the mood of the writer; and I know that Jefferies highly appreciated the gentle hospitality which Mr. North afforded him in the later days of his declining health.

Another figure which comes back to me among the vivid memories of those editorial days is that of Mr. Lawrence Oliphant—surely one of the strangest, most gifted, and fascinating characters of the time in which his chequered career was passed. No one who met Oliphant could be insensible to his charms, and yet, as one sat in the man’s presence, it was always with a feeling of wonder and amazement at the many vicissitudes of his life.

I knew him personally only towards the close of his career, when he offered to me for publication a series of articles on “The Lake of Tiberias,” which were to be illustrated by his wife. This was during one of his brief visits to England from the Holy Land, where he had made his home, and he would sometimes lunch with me at the Garrick Club, holding me enthralled, while the passing hours sped by unnoticed, as he unfolded his views of life, drawn from the deep fund of a rich experience won in many changing occupations.

Brilliant and witty, earnest and often eloquent in his most serious moods, there was scarcely more than a hint in his conversation of those shifting impulses, now so passionately held and again so swiftly abandoned, that had made of his career something of a wonder to the world. Unhappily the task which he and his wife had jointly undertaken for the Magazine, led to her untimely death, from sudden fever, upon the very shores of the lake where she was engaged upon the illustrations for his article.

One of the things which gave me most pleasure in my record as an editor was the encouragement that I was enabled to afford to that gifted young draughtsman Hugh Thomson, on the threshold of his career.

I remember very well the day he first entered my office. He was wholly unknown to me, and without any introduction save that which he presented himself in the form of a number of drawings enclosed in a portfolio that he bore in his hand. With the face of a mere boy, and most emphatically an Irish boy, it seemed to me, as I looked at him, scarcely possible that the drawings that he showed me were from his own hand.

They comprised, I remember, a series of illustrations to Vanity Fair, and despite the confessed immaturity of their execution, they exhibited, as I thought, such fineness of perception, and such an intuitive sense of humour, that I was at once anxious to learn from him what he had already published.

His reply, perhaps made with a little reluctance, was that he had published nothing, and again the suspicion recurred to me that this nervous youth, who stood in such evident anxiety before me, must somehow have become possessed of these drawings which he was trying to palm off as his own. He was, as I found on questioning him, engaged in making drawings for trade advertisements in the firm of Maclure, Macdonald and Macgregor, confessedly not a very promising experience upon which to base his claim to be engaged on the staff of an established magazine.