Queens of old Spain

by Martin A. S. Hume

If though the name upon the tombstone strikes a chill to the heart, half of regret and half of fear—for what, when all is said and done, is your memento mori but blue funk?—when we pick up a dead friend’s book upon a stall, published at twelve-and-sixpence and ticketed a penny, we must reflect—that is, the most of us—that to that favour we shall come, and all the pages, that cost us so much thought in the writing, to be tied together with a piece of string and sold with the base trash of Smith and Jones and Brown, fellows who had no style, nor knew the difference betwixt invention and imagination, humour or wit, and did not know a colophon from an illuminated capital, and sold all in a lot.

Therefore I am glad that this edition of one of Hume’s best works is coming out, and I who saw him laid to rest in the dry, marly earth of that drear East End cemetery only a year ago—or was it ten, for when a man is dead time ceases for him and for ourselves in thinking of him—am writing these few lines to do my best to keep his memory green.

His ‘Queens of Spain’ was one of the books that he liked best.

Some say an author always likes his weakest book, but, even if he does, what does it matter? A mother not infrequently adores the least desirable of all her sons, but the world judges him; and she who bore him has to submit to all its judgments of her well-beloved, just as the author has to bow the head to what it says about his books.

Hume was a man who valued what the public said about his work. I used to fancy him, as a good gladiator, some Roman citizen who for his debts, or some cause or another, was forced to live by push of sword, and took it up in the same spirit in which my friend took up the pen, and set about to write.

Such a man, I fancy, fighting of course like Tybalt, by the book of arithmetic, would feel a pride in dying well. Just as he fell, despatched by some rude Dacian who in his life had never come within the walls of any fencing school, he would wrap his mantle round him decently, and murmur: ‘Civis Romanus sum,’ as he lay dying in the dust.

These kind of men are never vanquished. Even if they die, their death serves as an example to the world, and makes boys miserable at school who have to put it into Greek hexameters.

Hume was of these good gladiators and passed laborious days. How many reams of paper he must have filled; how many miles of writing he must have traced in his hard-working life, only himself could have been sure of, and perhaps not he, for who shall say if a silkworm measures the length of silk that comes from the cocoon.

When in a music hall I see a man do something easily which seems impossible, I always think upon the hours he must have passed—missing, remissing, perspiring, cursing, and at last see him successful, and then no matter how respectable my neighbours in the stalls appear, or tight my gloves are, clap with a will. Noise, after all, is the reward, perhaps the sole reward, that we accord success.

A modest modicum was all Hume had to show for a self-denying life spent—that is to say, for the last twenty years of it—in burrowing in archives and writing ceaselessly upon the facts he found.