account of his reading as a boy, in a coffee-house in Chancery Lane, Hake’s remarkable romance ‘Vates,’ afterwards called ‘Valdarno,’ in a magazine; his writing a letter about it to the unknown author, and getting no reply until many years had passed. Hake’s relations towards Rossetti were of the deepest and most sacred kind. Rossetti had the highest opinion of Hake’s poetical genius, and also felt towards him the greatest love and gratitude for services of an inestimable kind rendered to him in the direst crisis of his life. To enter upon these matters, however, is obviously impossible in a brief and hurried obituary notice; and equally impossible is it for me to enter into the poetic principles of a writer whose very originality has been a barrier to his winning a wide recognition.
Hake’s best work is that, I think, contained in the volume called ‘New Symbols,’ in which there is disclosed an extraordinary variety of poetic power. In execution, too, he is at his best in that volume. Christina Rossetti has often told me that ‘Ecce Homo’ impressed her more profoundly than did any other poem of her own time. Also its daring startled her. It was, however, the previous volume, ‘Madeline, and other Poems,’ which brought him into contact with Rossetti—the great event of his literary life.
If the man ever lived who could take as much
interest in another man’s work as his own, Dr. Hake in finding Rossetti found that man. Although at that time Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and Swinburne were running abreast of each other, there was no poet in England who would not have felt honoured by having his work reviewed by Rossetti. But Dr. Hake, whose name was absolutely unknown, had made his way into Rossetti’s affections—as, indeed, he made his way into the affections of all who knew him—and this was quite enough to induce Rossetti to ask Dr. Appleton for leave to review ‘Madeline’ in ’71 in The Academy—a request which Appleton, of course, was delighted to grant. And again, when in 1873 ‘Parables and Tales’ appeared, Mr. John Morley, we may be sure, was something more than willing to let Rossetti review the book in The Fortnightly Review; and, again, when ‘New Symbols’ appeared, there was some talk about Rossetti’s reviewing it in The Fortnightly Review; but this, for certain reasons which Rossetti explained to me—reasons which have been misunderstood, but which were entirely adequate—was abandoned. Down to the period when Dr. Hake went to live in Germany he and his son Mr. Gordon Hake were among the most intimate friends of the great poet-painter. Mr. Gordon Hake, indeed, a man of admirable culture and abilities, lived with Rossetti, who certainly benefited much by
contact with his bright and lively companion. The portrait of Dr. Hake prefixed to Mrs. Meynell’s selections from his works is one of Rossetti’s finest crayons. It is, however, too heavy in expression for Hake.
Full of fine qualities as is his best poetry, full of intellectual subtlety, imagination, and a rare combination of subjective with objective power, there is apparently in it a certain je ne sais quoi which has prevented him at present from winning his true meed of fame. His hand, no doubt, is uncertain; but so is the hand of many a successful poet—that of Christina Rossetti, for instance. For sheer originality of conception and of treatment what recent poems surpass or even equal ‘Old Souls’ and the ‘Serpent Charmer’? Then take the remarkable mastery over colour exhibited by ‘Ortrud’s Vision.’ His volume of pantheistic sonnets in the Shakespearean form, ‘The New Day,’ written in his eighty-first year, is on the whole, however, his most remarkable work. The kind of Sufeyistic nature ecstasy displayed therein by a man of so advanced an age is nothing less than wonderful. And as to knowledge of nature, not even Wordsworth or Tennyson knew nature so completely as did Hake, for he had a thorough training as a naturalist. In looking at a flower he could enjoy not only its beauty, but also the delight of picturing to himself the flower’s inherited
beauty and the ancestors from which the flower got its inheritance. And as regards the lyrical flow imported into so monumental a form as the sonnet, every student of this form must needs study the book with the greatest interest. His very latest work, however, is in prose. I find it extremely difficult to write about ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years.’ It is full of remarkable qualities: wit, humour, an ebullience of animal spirits that is Rabelaisian. What it lacks (and in some portions of it greatly lacks) is delicacy, refinement of tone. And surely this is remarkable when we realize the kind of man he was who wrote it.
It has been my privilege to go about with him not only in London, but also in Rome, in Paris, in Venice, in Florence, Pisa, &c.; and no matter what might be the quality of the society with which he was brought into contact, it always seemed to me that he was distinguished by his very lack of that accentuated movement which the littérateur generally displays. I merely dwell upon this to show how inscrutable are the mental processes in the crowning puzzle of the great humourist Nature, the writing man. Just as the most angular and gauche man in a literary gathering may possibly turn out to be the poet whose lyrics have been compared to Shelley, or the prose writer whose mellifluous periods have been compared to those of Plato, so the most dignified man in
the room may turn out to be the writer of a book whose defect is a noticeable lack of dignified style. It was hard, indeed, for those who knew Hake in the flesh to believe that the ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ was written by him. I suppose I shall be expected to say a word about the famous intimacy between Hake and Borrow. After Hake went to live in Germany, Borrow told me a good deal about this intimacy and also about his own early life; for reticent as he naturally was, he and I got to be confidential and intimate. His friendship with Hake began when Hake was practising as a physician in Norfolk. It lasted during the greater part of Borrow’s later life. When Borrow was living in London, his great delight was to walk over on Sundays from Hereford Square to Coombe End, call upon Hake, and take a stroll with him over Richmond Park. They both had a passion for herons and for deer. At that time Hake was a very intimate friend of my own, and having had the good fortune to be introduced by him to Borrow, I used to join the two in their walks. Afterwards, when Hake went to live in Germany, I used to take these walks with Borrow alone. Two more interesting men it would be impossible to meet. The remarkable thing was that there was between them no sort of intellectual sympathy. In style, in education, in experience, whatever Hake was Borrow was
not. Borrow knew almost nothing of Hake’s writings, either in prose or in verse. His ideal poet was Pope, and when he read, or rather looked into, Hake’s ‘World’s Epitaph,’ he thought he did Hake the greatest honour by saying, “There are lines here and there that are nigh as good as Pope’s.” On the other hand, Hake’s acquaintance with Borrow’s works was far behind that of some Borrovians who did not know Lavengro in the flesh, such as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Birrell.