Old Familiar Faces

by Theodore Watts-Dunton

Although, owing to his intimacy with George Borrow, Hake was associated in the public mind with the Eastern Counties, he was not an East Anglian. It was at Leeds (in 1809) that he first saw the light. His mother was a Gordon of the Huntly stock, and came of “the Park branch” of that house. The famous General Gordon was his first cousin, and it was owing to this fact that Hake’s son, Mr. Egmont

Hake, was entrusted with the material for writing his authoritative books upon the heroic Christian soldier. Between Hake’s eldest son, Mr. T. St. E. Hake, a rising novelist, and the General the likeness was curiously strong. Nominated by one of his uncles to Christ’s Hospital, Hake entered that famous school. He gives in his ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ a very vivid picture of it and also a really vital portrait of himself. From his very childhood he was haunted by a literary ambition which can only be called an insatiable passion. It lasted till the very hour of his death. When eleven years of age he became acquainted with that one poet whose immensity of fame has for more than three centuries been the flame into which the myriad Shakespeare moths of English literature have been flying. The Shakespearean of eleven summers did not, like so many Shakespeare enthusiasts from Davenant down to those latest Shakespeares, Homers, and Miltons of our contemporary paragraphists, get himself up to look like the Stratford bust. The only man who ever really looked like that bust was the late Dion Boucicault, who did so without trying. But Shakespeare’s wonderful work acted on the imagination of the child of eleven in an equally humorous way. “Shakespeare’s perfection,” he says in his memoirs, “not only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but it depressed me in turn with the feeling that

I could never equal it howsoever long I might live.”

Yet although this passion never passed away, but waxed with his years, it must not be supposed that Hake suffered from what in the “new criticism” is sweetly and appropriately called “modernity”—in other words, that vulgar greed for notoriety that in these days, when literature to be listened to must be puffed like quack medicine and patent soap, has made the atmosphere of the literary arena somewhat stifling in the nostrils of those who turn from “modernity” to poetic art. Nor was Hake’s feeling akin to that fine despair

Before the foreheads of the gods of song

which true poets, great or small, know—that fine despair which, while it will sometimes stop the breath of one of the true sons of Apollo, as it actually did strike mute Charles Wells, and as at one time it threatened to stop the breath of Rossetti, will lead others to write, and write, and write. It is, however, life’s illusions that in most cases make life tolerable. When in old age calamity came upon Hake, and he was shut out from life as by a prison wall, his one solace, the one thing that really bound him to life, was this ambitious dream which came upon the Bluecoat boy of eleven.

His mother was in easy circumstances, and when a youth Hake travelled a good deal on the Continent, where his success in the “great

world” of that time was swift and complete. If this success was owing as much to his exceptionally striking personal appearance and natural endowment of style as to his intellectual equipments—high as these were—that is not surprising to those who knew him. Of course he was well advanced in years before I was old enough to call him my friend; but even then he was so extremely handsome a man that I can well believe the stories I have got from his family connexions (such as his wife’s sisters) of his appearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put to the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period of his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England. I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a man’s life is passed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what used to be called “the great world.” To be, or to seem to be, unconscious of one’s own bearing towards the world, and unconscious of the world’s bearing towards oneself, is, I fancy, impossible to a man—even though he have the genius and intellectual endowment of a Browning—who is for the first time brought into touch with society after the plastic period is passed.

I have told elsewhere the whimsical story of Hake and Rossetti, of Rossetti’s delightful