J. COMYNS CARR

Transcriber’s Notes

Changes made are noted at the [end of the book.]

J. COMYNS CARR

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

J. COMYNS CARR

Stray Memories

BY
HIS WIFE

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1920

COPYRIGHT

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.

TO
OUR GRANDSONS
RICHARD AND JOHN COMYNS CARR

FOREWORD

My husband wrote his own Reminiscences in his two books—Some Eminent Victorians and Coasting Bohemia, and it might justly be brought up against me that I could have nothing to add to what he has said himself.

But a critic remarked at the time that there were few “Reminiscences” in which the pronoun “I” occurred so seldom; and it is upon this ground that I venture to take my stand.

His friends meant so much to him that his talk is all of them. But they also loved him, and the few who are left among those of whom he wrote, as well as the many more of the younger generation who testify to-day to the exhilaration of his presence and the tonic of his humour may, I hope, find in my effort something which may recall to them his urbane and inspiring personality.

CONTENTS

Frontispiece

J. COMYNS CARR

From a photograph by the London Stereoscopic Co. Ltd.

CHAPTER I

COURTSHIP

It was in June of the year 1873 that I first saw my husband.

Aimée Desclée was beginning a memorable season of French Plays at the Royalty Theatre, and it was in the capacity of dramatic critic to The Echo—a post to which he had recently been appointed—that “Joe Carr,” as his friends called him, sat awaiting the curtain to rise on that remarkable performance of Frou-Frou which set the cosmopolitan world of London aflame in its day.

He was twenty-four years of age; but he looked more, for though he had the complexion almost of a girl and that unruly twist in his fair, curling hair which belongs to early youth, he was broad-shouldered and had the strong build of the Cumberland statesmen from whom he was as proud to claim ancestry on his father’s side as he was of the Irish blood that came to him from his mother.

Not that I could have described him that evening: the stalls were too ill lit and my excitement over the play was too great.

I had but lately arrived from Italy—having cajoled my father, then English chaplain at Genoa, into letting me “see London” under the care of my brother, resident there; so that I had just been shot from the socially restricted life of a parson’s daughter in the small English colony of a small foreign town into the comparative Bohemianism of the artistic set in the London of that day best described by my husband himself in the introduction to his book Coasting Bohemia.

There was much that must have been, unconsciously to myself, of rare educational advantage in the lovely scenery and picturesque surroundings of my childhood’s life on the Riviera and in the Apennines; and my parents so loved both Nature and Art that they gave us constant change of opportunity in these directions. Yet I must confess that as I grew up, the chestnut groves of the Apennines and the shores of the blue Mediterranean became empty joys to me, and even the comparative excitement of wearing my own and criticizing my friends’ frocks in the Public Gardens of Genoa or the keener delight of an occasional dance in a stately palace, was insufficient to fill my cravings; and I longed for freedom and the attractions of the world—more especially in London, which I only knew through visits to relatives during the holidays of a short period of my life at a Brighton school. And it was from the house of specially strict relatives that I definitely escaped that evening, to come to the wicked French play with my brother and his friend and housemate, Mr. Frederick Jameson, an architect by profession, but incidentally a distinguished musician—in later years the translator of the Wagner libretti.

Mr. Comyns Carr, to whom they introduced me, sat behind us; and, though he often told me that he marked me down as I came in, and somehow associated me with the personality of Aimée Desclée herself, I took small heed of him then, and when, as we sought a cab at the close of the performance, he volunteered to go back and search for a valueless brooch which I had lost, I did not have the grace to insist on waiting for his return before we hurried off.

But I was not to be punished; that very incident furnished occasion for a next meeting.

Through my brother he tracked me to a Bloomsbury boarding-house, whereto insubordination to the deserved reproof of the conventional relatives had made me condemn myself.

Oh, that boarding-house—with the city clerk’s bon mot, “Why are you like the spoon resting in your tea?” And the spinster convinced that the Italian Stornelli I sang in the evening must be “improper!” Could I have endured it if Mr. Jameson and my brother had not started the glorious idea of theatricals in their rooms hard by in Great Russell Street? And if, on the second day of my sojourn, the lodging-house slavey had not burst into the wee bedroom looking out to the backyard where I was putting on my hat, with the news that a gentleman was asking for me at the front door?

I never guessed who it was, but, through the sunshine that struck into the dingy hall, I saw a strong figure on the door-step and, as I advanced out of the dimness, a mouth hidden in a fair beard—thick and long according to the fashion of the hour—parted in a smile; then I recognised the young man whom I had seen two nights ago at the play.

He had brought my lost brooch, but I don’t think the excuse was needed. I knew why he had come, though at the moment an unwonted shyness had fallen on me, and I think I did not know whether to be pleased or frightened.

He said, “Mayn’t I come in?”

And I recollect my vexation as I answered, “There’s nowhere to come to! The drawing-room is full of old ladies—the sort who tell one that a waterproof and an umbrella are the safe dress for a girl in London.”

How he laughed! the laugh that many knew and loved him for: and any who recollect the speckled-hen variety of the waterproof of the seventies will not wonder.

Then he said: “But you are going out. Which way are you going?”

My reply so well betrayed utter ignorance of London thoroughfares that his next remark was natural.

“Well, as I know you’re a stranger, I won’t say you’ve a small bump of locality!” he said. And how often did he say it again in after years! “But you had better let me take you along. I’m going that way.”

He told the lie unblushingly—and unblushing I did as he bade me and followed him into the street.

I had been brought up with the strictness not only of my father’s cloth but of Italian customs, and I felt I was doing a bold thing: in those days my whole English adventure was considered bold by Mrs. Grundy, and my poor father had already come over on a hasty visit from Italy to place me with those relatives from whom I had escaped; but on that occasion I was simply overborne. Long afterwards, at a crush where Royalty was present, my husband won a bet that he would sup in the Royal room merely by the way in which he bade the footman drop the dividing red rope, and by the same way of bidding a porter put his valise on a cab, he won another with J. L. Toole as to his luggage passing unexamined on a return from abroad. So it was by some kindred “way” that he led me forth that day—whither I knew not. And honestly, I forget where we went. I only knew that he took me a long way—in more senses than one—and showed me many things that were new and told me many that were more Greek to me than I chose to admit at the time.

I was an ignorant girl—the smattering of a brief boarding-school education counting probably far less than the companionship of refined parents in a land of beauty, and of the sort of cultivation in which Joe lived and revelled I knew absolutely nothing.

I don’t know that, at that stage in my career, I ever had so much desire to learn as I pretended—and I am not sure that Joe cared.

Yet he was in those days of his youth at the height of his enthusiasm on matters of Art; he had just written those articles on living painters—specially noting the so-called Pre-Raphaelites—which had drawn considerable notice to his pseudonym of “Ignotus,” and he was, at the moment, one of Rossetti’s favoured young admirers.

But I knew nothing of all this; nor of his having already begun his career of a “wit” as Junior of the Bar on the Northern Circuit. In fact, what I recall of him then is not his wit but his tenderness. He was the ardent pursuer, the first man I had met with whom I was afraid to flirt, because—in spite of some tremulousness in his eager insistence—there was something that said: “I mean to succeed.”

So I stood dreaming before the masterpieces of the National Gallery, and he, I am bound to say, was content with much silence as we sat in the large, cool rooms on that hot May day.

Later on, when he was showing me what to admire, I would teaze him by pointing to some atrocity in Art, and say: “That is what I really like.” But not that day.

And when the hour came for me to return to the boarding-house, I think his sole thought was upon the contriving of our next meeting. As we passed the British Museum—he looked up at the windows of my brother’s rooms facing it, and said: “Sheridan Knowles’ ‘Hunchback,’ you said.”

“Yes,” I replied. “And I do Julia and Mr. Jameson Master Walter. But it may all fall through because he can’t find a man for the lover. It is desolating.”

I can recall the slow look he gave me; but then he smiled and said: “Is that what you would say in your foreign tongues?”

I got cured of such expressions later on, but that day I think I was ashamed of my careless speech, for I knew better; and I shook hands with him with a sense of disappointment as the slavey opened the door into the dingy brown hall. Had I been too flippant and free to please such a clever man?

That evening, however, when I went to the rehearsal in Great Russell Street, Mr. Comyns Carr was there; of course he had offered himself to play that lover’s part. He was busy enough—though not so busy as he had been before I knew him, when reading for his Law Scholarship at the London University. He had, in fact, if I remember rightly, just returned from his first experience on the Northern Circuit and was beginning to supplement his earnings at the Bar by literary efforts. But he was not too busy for this adventure, and there followed three weeks of rehearsals under Mr. Jameson’s management, during which my assets for the stage were calmly discussed, Mr. Jameson declaring that they were good, and finally winning my brother’s consent to the bidding of his theatrical friends—John Hare among them—to decide the question.

But Joe always pooh-poohed the notion.

And when I said: “Well, I’m going to earn enough to keep me in London somehow. I’m not going back to that dead-alive life at home!” he only said cryptically, “There are other ways.”

I think I was a bit huffed at the time and crowed when a lightly spoken word of praise came to me presently from a very authoritative quarter.

For one day, as we sat resting from our labours in one of the window seats of the beautiful Adams room where Burne-Jones had once painted and that Whistler had not long left, a light rap fell on the door and a voice long loved by us all called out: “Anybody at home?” as the radiant face of Ellen Terry peeped merrily in upon us.

There was little work done that day; but our stage manager, whose old friend she was, bade me speak one of my speeches, and she said: “A good carrying voice, and she finishes her words.” No merit to me, who had been bred in a land where folk open their throats and where I had heard cultivated English only; but I was naturally flattered and, when “the night” came and I was awkward and terrified and John Hare smiled pleasant nothings and my kindly, ambitious stage-manager’s ardour was damped, I might have been sore cast down but that a new excitement and glamour had flashed into my life.

Joe Carr’s “way” was carving its straight course.

Many a time I had been caught wandering aimlessly up Gower Street pretending a shopping excursion and swearing that I had not seen him on the opposite pavement, and many a half-hour had we both pretended to enjoy the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, but in truth it was only three weeks after that theatrical performance when I put my key one day into the door of the Dispensary over which were those historic rooms and felt rather than saw a figure behind me, and knew that the great moment had come for me and that I was to be carried off my feet.

As once before he said: “May I come in?” And I answered nothing and left the key in the door (of which I never heard the end), and he followed me up to the big studio where we were to spend the first year of our wedded life.

I had come there that day for a singing lesson from Mr. Jameson and, when he returned presently, I am sure he guessed no more than we did that in four months he would be in America and would have rented his rooms to us for our first home.

CHAPTER II

THE HOME OF BOYHOOD

So from that day there was no more dingy boarding-house for me: my betrothed took me to his parents’ house at Clapham, where I well remember the courtly words: “I hear I have to congratulate my son Joe” with which I was received by his father.

Small blame would it have been to parents, ambitious for the advancement of their children, had they only seen in me a foreign adventuress without credentials coming to snatch one of the flowers of their flock; yet instead of that, most generously was I welcomed to a home of which I have never seen the like; and if sometimes bewildered and always non-plussed by the free-and-easy give and take and the wonderful argumentative capacity of that large and variously gifted family—I felt out of it—my lover was always unobtrusively protecting, and the artist-sister who had always shared his tastes and sympathized with his ambitions, often held out a kindly hand to help me up the steep places.

But they were few: the sunny places, full of real romance, of utter confidence in our future—rash as it might appear to prudent elders—bright with his radiant enthusiasms and his fine ambitions, are the things that cannot fade from my memory.

In those days much verse was written not then intended for publication, but some of which has seen the light since.

The typical gathering, of the large family, presided over by the wise father whose “Landmarks, boys”! from the head of the table generally calmed any storm, was most often one of obstinate argument and fierce word-fights, and stands out now as the proper school where the keen critical faculty and the gift of ready repartee for which many friends now remember Joe Carr, were first forged and perfected.

And, be it noted, that however sanguinary the fight, there was never any malice, never any after ill-will among the combatants: generous natures and a Celtic sense of humour prevented that—not a little helped by the complete freedom of arena left by the parents.

The mother ruled her household as Victorian mothers did, and spared neither pains nor expense for her son’s ambitions and her daughters’ proper advancement in the world; she welcomed their friends with courteous Irish welcome, however little many of their tastes might be in harmony with her own; but she let them talk unmolested and was content to keep her own counsel, while she ministered lavishly to their creature comforts; and the father—a man of few words but of strong character and clear insight—kept his own views undisturbed. He had nevertheless more deeply, though probably unconsciously, impressed them on his children, than his children then guessed. He was a broad Liberal, and it is interesting to note that, in days when we were even more insular than we are now, no fighter in the cause of freedom was forbidden his house because he was a foreigner. Under the auspices of Mr. Adam Gielgud—the son of a great Polish refugee—patriots from many lands who had sought our shelter, found their way to that hospitable roof. Pulski and Riciotti Garibaldi are the only other names that recur to me, but there were more and they were all welcome. Men of after note in the art world and in journalism came also as friends of Joe’s or of his sister’s—shaken together with charming Irish and hard-headed North country cousins.

Many were the times when dinner had been ordered for six, and sixteen would sit down at the long mahogany table, the polishing of which Mrs. Carr supervised daily, laden with homely but abundant fare.

But Joe made many other friends in town who never found time to visit Clapham. In spite of his recent appointment as dramatic critic to The Echo his new friends were less among actors than among painters—Burne-Jones and perhaps chiefest just then, Rossetti, whose friendship he describes himself in Some Eminent Victorians. Nevertheless he had met Henry Irving through the son of the Lyceum manager, Mr. Bateman, and had often passionately praised him.

To the girl fresh from the small English colony abroad it was all vastly entertaining, though I did not realize then how much of a figure my betrothed already was among the men of his time. Even the gayer part of my girlhood—the summers spent at S. Moritz, which my father had discovered, as a homely village in his yearly Alpine tramp—bore little resemblance to London excitements. I had but rarely seen the inside of a theatre and never a fine English actor, and my first vision of Henry Irving in “The Bells,” is a haunting memory still.

This was in July, 1873.

But this engrossing first season of mine had to be interrupted; for Joe, having at last obtained a commission from one of the dailies for holiday articles which would bring in a sum just sufficient to pay his expenses, was whirled off to the Engadine by my brother to be introduced to my parents as my suitor.

In some ways a strange meeting on both sides: to Joe the restrictions of a parson’s home—though greatly modified by the manner of a foreign life—must have seemed a contrast to the methodical yet easy-going Clapham household; to my parents the reckless courage of my lover’s plan of life, his bold enthusiasms and gay self-confidence must have been—to my father, at all events—somewhat startling. But my brother was a bit of an autocrat in the family circle and knew the position which Joe was likely to win in the London world of letters; my sister, a very young girl, kept the ball rolling merrily on the lighter side, while my mother quickly discovered deep points of sympathy with her would-be son-in-law, and the two would sit on the terrace of our mountain home, looking on the green lake with the snow-capped peaks cleaving an indigo sky, and quote Wordsworth contentedly. To the end of her life they understood one another; but even my father came to recognise the value of a fine character above creeds. Certain it is that Joe was as much pleased with the Italian cooking of the maid who sat on the sofa with the dish in her hands while waiting for him to ask for a second helping, as he was surprised at my brother advising him not to borrow a postage stamp when five minutes later my father proposed to settle a small yearly sum upon me which would enable us to marry as soon as Joe had any fixed income whatsoever.

As often later, his personality had won, his incurable optimism and self-confidence had inspired the confidence of my parents, and it was not misplaced. They made the speedy marriage which, he insisted, could alone lead him to success, just possible: economy and courage did the rest—the courage which never forsook him. For as I look over his letters—written to me in later years when some one of his many bold ventures had not succeeded like another—I find the cheerful phrase recurring: “Don’t be afraid; there’s a lot of fight left in me yet.”

Upon that—safest and most enduring of all incomes—we set sail without a vestige of misgiving upon the sea of life; and I’m thankful to say that I never was “afraid.”

But it was this early marriage that led Joe for a second time, as he tells in his Reminiscences, to change his profession, and gradually, and to the distress of his legal friends, to forsake the Bar for the more immediately remunerative work of literature. I well recollect his joyful announcement to me of his appointment as Art Critic to the Pall Mall Gazette—the beginning of a long period of many-sided association with Frederick Greenwood; and that slender certainty of income provided the condition imposed by my father: our wedding day was fixed.

CHAPTER III

MARRIAGE

We were married in Dresden, where my father had taken a temporary chaplaincy.

Joe had a merry journey out from England with Mr. Jameson and a gentle but less intellectual friend who was to act as best man.

I was told later of this friend’s innocent boast of conversion to free thought and of Joe’s quick reply: “Why, then, you’ll have plenty of time to think.” But this sterner remark was not in his usual vein, and much oftener I think he pleased his two friends by his immediate sympathy with free foreign manners, most especially those of the French, who always had the first place in his affections as contrasted with “bulgy-necked Germans whose poverty-stricken tongue” forced them to call a thimble a “finger hat” and a glove a “hand-shoe,” and decreed that three men must order their baths as “drei.” I must add in his defence that he never could speak or read the language; it was his mother wit that pulled him through difficulties. Once when alone in Dresden he was driven to ask his way in the words of a well-known song and, even at that time, was probably set down as an insolent Englishman for the intimate pronoun in his “Kennst du das Sidonien Strasse”?

What treatment would he receive now and how would he take it?

But his two friends were German scholars and good cicerones, and led him safely to the Hotel de Saxe on the morning of December 15th, 1873, where my father married us in the presence of a newly arrived British ambassador.

There was some obvious raillery, to which Joe nimbly responded, in consequence of that pleni-potentiary remarking, with grim humour, that he wondered if these marriages were really valid; but the gentleman took the best precautions available in requiring the legal part of the ceremony to take place on the “British ground” of his small, temporary hotel room, and there, both of us kneeling on two little sofa cushions, the ring was put upon my finger.

My father, however, naturally wanted to “finish us off” in the English Church, and I remember my shyness when I saw the uninvited crowd which had assembled there—I was told afterwards to see what a high-art wedding dress would be like!

Joe declared that they expected it to be scanty; if so they must have been disappointed that the folds of my soft brocade, fashioned after my artist sister-in-law’s design and approved by my husband, were much more ample than was the mode of the day.

How much have we changed since the Morris vogue!

I don’t think I minded then being the centre of observation, even though I may have guessed it was fraught with adverse criticism—not wholly, as I now think, undeserved.

But in the friendly little party that assembled in our modest home to wish us God-speed there was no adverse criticism, and we went off to Leipzig for our honeymoon en route for England and work, without any of the fatiguing excitement of a society assembly.

Joe’s graceful little speech in reply to congratulations was quite the merriest note of the simple festivities.

I daresay the wine at that table was not wholly worthy of the palate for which Joe had already acquired a reputation among his London friends; but when we reached Leipzig I remember his ordering a bottle of the celebrated Johannesberg for our wedding dinner. Possibly he may have told a sympathetic bon viveur of this afterwards; anyhow our first dinner invitation on our return to London was to the house of a wealthy bachelor who produced a bottle of the (ostensibly) same wine with the dessert. Unluckily, Joe, on being pressed to praise it, said with his usual candour: “Well, my dear fellow, you gave us such excellent claret during dinner that you have spoiled my palate for this!”

The laugh that followed compensated for an ominous frown on the brow of our rather peppery host, who was however placated by one of the guests recalling an occasion on which Joe had mortified the famous proprietor of a famous eating-house by forcing him to admit a mistake in serving, later in the dinner, an inferior brand of the wine supplied at first.

Two days of lazy sight-seeing in the fine old German town, and then on we travelled; and a cold journey we had of it! But Joe’s spirits were equal to every contretemps: even when we were turned out at a dreary frontier junction in the middle of the night to await a slow train, although we had paid first class fare and had been told there was no change.

There was but one other passenger in the train—a quiet, elderly German, and when I translated to Joe the bullying official’s assurance that this gentleman had agreed to waive his rights if we did the same, he made me ask our fellow-traveller if this was the case. Unwarily the gentleman admitted that he had been told the same thing of us, and although I was unable to put all the epithets which Joe applied to the lying official into colloquial German, I was buoyed up to persuade the traveller to use some of them, with the result that a special engine and first class carriage took us all three on to Paris by the morning. Perhaps our unknown companion was a person in power.

But in Paris fresh delays awaited us. When after two arduous but cheerful days of some sight-seeing and a good deal of aimless and delightful wandering and strange but equally pleasant meals in tiny restaurants—we came to the Gare du Nord on our last day, Joe found that he had not money enough to pay for tickets and luggage, and we were obliged to return ignominiously to the hotel and borrow from our best man—happily for us just arrived there on his own homeward route.

Somehow we minded little, but we reached Clapham one day late for the family Christmasing—arriving, indeed, when the turkey was already on the table, and I think it took all Joe’s tact to win his mother’s forgiveness.

So that was the end of our one week’s wedding trip; it was back to work and a busy time we had of it till our son Philip was about nine months old. Then, by dint of Joe’s unceasing work and my economy we found that we could allow ourselves a journey to Italy to stay with the various friends of my girlhood.

We called it our honeymoon—a belated one, like the gift of a portrait-bust of our boy at three years old, which Joe chaffed Miss Henrietta Montalba for presenting to us as a “wedding-present.” But none the less a honeymoon for that, though not of the conventional and luxurious type.

Many a funny experience attended Joe’s efforts to pursue in travel the economy which I had sternly sought to instil at home, and I am afraid that he never again fully resumed the good habit from which he then first broke away. Economy was not one of his virtues—was he not the son of an Irish-woman? But, then, generosity was. Burne-Jones once asked him why he took a cab to drive down the Strand, and he said it came cheaper, because if he walked he was sure to give half a crown to some former “stage-hand.” Yet when another day Burne-Jones himself was deceived by a plausible story and Joe cried in reproof: “Can’t you see that it’s only acting?” Burne-Jones replied: “Well, my dear, I’ve paid ten-and-six to see worse.”

But in the days of our first foreign trip my extravagant husband was still “trying to be good.”

I remember his taking the English prescription for a sedative to a small chemist on Lago Maggiore, whom he described as the alchymist in Romeo and Juliet; but when the dose, which at home represented about two tablespoonfuls, arrived in a straw covered quart “fiasco,” he preferred a night’s toothache to venturing on it.

As representing his sympathetic understanding of one side of the Italian character, I might cite our going into the quaintest of curiosity shops in an old town where we had to wait at a junction, and his tendering a cheque in payment of a trifling purchase. I am bound to say he confessed afterwards that he had only bought me the trinket in the faint hope of getting the change he needed and that he was as surprised as I was to see the ox-eyed little hunchback unearth a beautiful ancient casket and hand him from it the gold required.

Possibly the timid request having come from me in the man’s own dialect may have helped to confirm the impression of “good faith” given by Joe’s candid countenance; but he did naturally count on me; and on a different occasion when he was obstinately trying to drive a bargain with an unwisely grasping vetturino, his delight was great at the sudden drop of five francs in the demand of the astounded plunderer upon hearing his own vernacular from my indignant English lips.

There were many times when Joe would have none of my help. When we were staying on the Riviera he would go every day into the town in the rattling little omnibus that plied along the dusty road, succeeding by sheer kindred bonhomie in making friends with the drivers and rejoicing at the abusive epithet of “ugly microbe” suggested by some late epidemic, with which they used at the time merrily to bombard one another.

His best crony amongst the friends of my childhood was the old priest of our Apennine village who had taught me the piano when I was a little girl, in exchange—as he always averred—for my instruction in my own tongue.

I’m afraid his conversational English was little credit to me and not much better than Joe’s Italian, although the old man was a scholar and had taught himself enough, with occasional help from my father, to read Shakespeare in the original.

He pronounced the name with every vowel broad and separate, as in his Latin; this was easy in that case, but when he wanted to tell which were his “four favourite poets”—in which list he included musicians—he was sore put to it for the pronunciation of Byron, Beethoven and Bach.

But Joe taught him more than I had done at ten years old, for which the old man upbraided me again as he would have done in my baby days.

I can see him standing in his shabby cassock beneath his pergola with the sun filtering through the vines on to the hanging bunches of purple fruit, and shaking his finger at me with mock solemnity as of yore.

“When she was four years old she told me I spoke English like a Spanish cow,” said he, quoting a Genoese proverb. “But she taught me badly.”

And then he related—what I refused at first to translate—how he had had to whip me for stealing his currants.

“Grapes she might have had—but English currants, they require watering.”

And grapes we had too, as many as we could devour. In their natural form Joe could pluck and eat them gladly too; but when it came to the sour wine which the Prevosto had made from them and with which he served him at table, I am bound to confess that my husband risked disgracing me by spilling it on the brick floor when his host’s back was turned; and on one occasion he even went so far as to pour a whole half fiasco through the little window which separated the refectory from the church, where he bespattered the marble pavement behind the high altar.

But these delinquencies remained a secret, and “Giò” became the old man’s loved and patient instructor and friend.

“Tor bay or not tor bay,” I seem to hear him painfully enunciating: and then Joe finishing Hamlet’s familiar soliloquy in slow, even tones as they passed up the vineyards. Pleasant climbs they were through sweeping chestnut-woods and beside trickling trout-streams that grew to rushing torrents after a thunderstorm; climbs that ended perhaps at some mountain sanctuary whence the white cities of the plain could be seen beyond a sea of gently lowering ridges and crests; or sometimes only at some hamlet beside the stony bed of the wandering river, where the old man would bid him wait while he mumbled his “Office” or went in “to see an ill” in one of the thatched cottages adorned with hanging fringe of golden maize-cones that cluster around the village fountain. It was here that one evening, when I had been my husband’s companion, the village sempstress came forth to greet us—she who had made my own and my sister’s new cotton frocks on that great occasion when the Prevosto had begged for us, as the “cleanest children in the village,” to strew flowers before the Archbishop when he came for the Confirmation.

I reminded the old priest of it and he said: “Yes, yes! And the Archbishop asked if you were Protestants and I answered ‘Certainly! but their parents did not refuse because we are Catholics: we all pray to the same God.’”

The sempstress was old when Joe saw her and so stout that the great scissors that hung from her vast apron bobbed as she moved; but she was handsome still and gracious with the graciousness of a duchess; I well recollect Joe’s comment on it.

The laughing girls who clustered round us in wonder pinched his calves, perhaps to see if they were padded, though their excuse to old Teresa’s sharp and quick reprimand was that they only wanted to feel “the beautiful real English wool” of his shooting stockings.

Joe had not objected, but she was not placated, and bade the hussies be off while she invited us into her dwelling.

A girl sat at the hand-loom, rapidly moving her bare brown feet and flinging the shuttle to and fro for the weaving of the sheeting, a completed length of which lay beside her ready to be bleached on the stones by the river.

Joe wanted to hear about it from her, for her eyes were “like the fish pools of Heshbon”; but she jumped up at the mistress’s bidding and he lost interest in weaving; I think he would even have tasted the sour wine which she presently brought on a copper tray if I had not quickly invented a polite fiction to the effect that Englishmen never drink anything but tea in the afternoon.

A slice of chestnut cake we were forced to accept from the elder woman’s hospitable hand as she asked my husband’s name. I remember the charming bow with which she turned to him after she had heard it and said: “O che bel San Guiseppe!” and his equally charming recognition of her pretty compliment.

Irish and Italian—there was some subtle affinity always between them—the grave and the gay, the superstitious and the Pagan, as he said—and he was positively confused when she observed that his golden beard and fair, curling hair were just like the St. Joseph’s in the Church. It was a merry run we had down through the chestnut woods and a sweet walk by the river in the sunset, back to the Presbytery.

Graver but none the less satisfactory was the appreciation given to him by my old nurse, when we arrived presently in Genoa. She was of a different type—refined, sensitive, serious even to sadness—with the blight always on her of a foundling’s ignorance of parentage; but devoted beyond all words and of a rare intelligence: Joe was impressed with her and likened her to a female Dante.

Yet the brighter types were more in accordance with his holiday mood: when we were on a visit later at a mediaeval castle whose battlements stand sheer above the sea and whose olive groves slope to a transparent bay, he spent all the time not occupied by eating figs off the tree on the Castle keep to playing with half-naked brown urchins on the quay of the tiny fishing-port below.

His first acquaintance with one of them was at dead of night when we were alone in the weird old place and a hollow bell clanged suddenly through the hot air.

Joe got out of bed—his chief fear being lest the mosquitoes should take the chance to get in under the sheltering net—and made his way down a dark, vaulted passage to the outer gateway and what was once the portcullis. A ragged boy stood there with a telegram: it was an invitation which should have been delivered six hours before, but the boy had walked five miles along a cliff in the dark and Joe rewarded him so well that his fame was spread in the village and he never more walked peacefully abroad.

The little girls, however, were his chief pilferers: he could never refuse their appealing black eyes. And some of them were fine coquettes. I can see him now dancing a hornpipe on the quay with a half-clad little maiden who presently signed to him to take off his hat; the elaborate bow with which he did so, bidding me apologise to her for the omission, was worthy of the producer of many subsequent plays.

The little incident recalls another of later date.

Then it was in the Engadine that we were holiday-making. Mr. and Mrs. Bancroft—as they then were—had invited us to lunch at the Campfer Hotel and we had walked over from S. Moritz where we were lodged.

As we came up the path through the pine-wood beside the rushing stream we saw the famous little lady standing on the dusty road above to welcome us; and Joe—his hat in his hand this time—began advancing towards her executing his hornpipe step.

To the entranced amazement of a few loungers, she picked up her skirts in the prettiest way imaginable and immediately responded with a pas-seul of her own—her little feet nimble as ever, till the two met, laughing immoderately, in the middle of the highway just as the diligence hove in sight.

CHAPTER IV

HOME LIFE AND DRAMATIC CRITICISM

These latter incidents occurred some time after 1873. When we got back to England after our Dresden wedding we took up our abode almost immediately in the old Adams house in Great Russell Street. The two rooms which Mr. Jameson sub-let to us were all that we could at first obtain above the Dispensary, but they were large and quite sufficient for the Bohemian life which was all that we could then afford; anyway no subsequent home of ours was pleasanter and nothing was ever again so little burthensome.

At a long table by the door of the one large dwelling-room the old couple who had been our predecessor’s factotums served our meals; and around the handsome Adams chimney-piece at the other end, or in the panelled window-seats looking on the restful façade of the British Museum, we gathered Joe’s friends—they were all Joe’s friends—for a “pipe and a chat.”

And what chats they were!

James Sime, the historian, kindliest of men with his Teutonic philosophies and his deep Scottish sentiment and enthusiasm; Churton Collins richly capping his host’s poetical quotations and sometimes boldly challenged for an inaccuracy; W. Minto, afterwards Professor of Literature at Aberdeen, who was just starting his Editorship of The Examiner, and pressing Joe into the ranks of his contributors; Camille Barrère, now French Ambassador in Rome, but then a Communist refugee earning a living by London journalism, and of whose friendship and instruction in French Joe tells himself; Frederick Jameson and Beatty Kingston with their friends at piano and violin, to say nothing of the colleagues with whom my husband had just become associated in his work on The Globe and of whom he again tells in his Eminent Victorians.

Dare I recall the evening when my husband proudly named me to Minto as the writer of a little descriptive article which he had read in the Pall Mall Gazette and the consequent suggestion that I should do the series of Italian sketches for The Examiner which were afterwards reprinted in a volume with Randolph Caldecott’s illustrations.

Of course I should never have done even as much without their kindly encouragement, but to the end of his life I think a good review of any small effort of mine pleased Joe far more than one on his own serious work. But I must admit criticism affected him little—never when it was adverse and, in fact, only when it showed real insight.

In his own merry manner he would say: “People always mean blame when they talk of criticism. But I can blame myself; all I want from others is praise—fulsome praise.” And so it was! He had the need of it which came of the Celtic blend of self-confidence and apprehensiveness. Often have I heard him say of another of like blood: “He couldn’t swim across the stream if he hadn’t our native conceit.” And then add gravely: “Believe me, praise is the only sort of criticism that ever helped a man on his road.”

And in his own opportunities as critic and editor he always acted up to this belief.

In these rosy days of our early struggles and joys, the “first nights” at which Joe was due in his capacity of dramatic critic were red-letter days to me.

The occasion when Ellen Terry first played Portia under the Bancroft management of the famous little House in Tottenham Court Road was one of them; I can see her again in her china-blue and white brocade dress with one crimson rose at her bosom. Neither the fashion of the dress or of the coiffure were perhaps as correct to the period as the costumes which I designed for her later on for the better remembered run of The Merchant of Venice at the Lyceum; but how lovely she looked and how emphatically Joe picked her out as the evening’s star beside Coghlan’s Jew! Our hearts beat with pride at the laurels often gathered by our friend, even in those early days before her long list of triumphs with Henry Irving; and Joe, as we made our way home, took some credit to himself for the vehement advice as to her resuming her temporarily suspended career, which he had given her a short while before. There were never any first-nights quite like the Ellen Terry ones to us; but there were many pleasant and exciting evenings—notably the nights of Irving’s remarkable performances at a time when he was playing under the Bateman management in The Bells, The Two Roses, and many other of his early successes; also the famous runs of Robertson comedies at the little Prince of Wales theatre, where the charming Marie Bancroft was at the top of her long popularity and John Hare’s delicate impersonations vied with his manager’s carefully studied portraits of the dandy of the day. Mrs. Kendal was also then at the height of her brilliant career, and last but not least, the first performances of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas were nights when the privilege of seats was not easily won.

I can recall the first performance of Iolanthe, and the laughter that shook the house when the wild applause at the close of the chorus: “Oh! Captain Shaw, true type of love kept under,” at last brought the Head of the Fire Brigade to the front of his box for an instant.

Yet all our first nights were not “great nights,” when—as a fellow-critic once remarked to Joe—“Strong men shook hands with strangers.” Sometimes they were even dull; on one occasion so much so as to draw from one of the critics an unusually caustic bit of advice: “We are told that so-and-so is a promising young actor,” he wrote, “personally I don’t care how much he promises so long as he never again performs.”

For my part I confess that the theatre was still so new to me that I looked forward to any first night with pleasant palpitation, though my best frock was no doubt reserved for the choicest prospects. But to Joe, possibly the duty of writing the prescribed amount on a thoroughly poor piece grew irksome; and when, as on the occasion of the production of F. C. Burnand’s The Colonel, his friends and their serious work were the butt of boisterous hilarity, I know his loyalty found it difficult not to retort, as he apparently did in the article alluded to in the following correspondence.

It must have been written at the moment when the campaign against so-called “high art” was at its zenith, and had amused the public as it would probably not do to-day; I should not quote it, but for the urbane humour of Joe’s rejoinder to the (temporarily) incensed author.

Feb. 22, 1881.

“Dear Carr,

I have heard that you do the Saturday Review theatrical criticisms. Did you do that on The Colonel? if so I am anxious to know if you ever read Un Mari à la Campagne; also to ask where the puns are in my piece? I admit three, put in carefully into the right peoples’ mouths—the right puns in the right places.

Why is it a farce? Unless She stoops to Conquer is a farce. Where are the evidences of high animal spirits in my play? I don’t pretend to quote your article verbatim but this is my impression of its purport. Had I known at the time that it was your writing I should have tackled you at once; first because I think you are wrong, second because if you are not, I am, and I wish to be put right. I should like to hear your suggestions for the improvement of Act III. where you think I have bungled ‘into seriousness.’

I shouldn’t have taken the trouble to write if I hadn’t been told that you were the critic who in a friendly way pooh-pooh’d the notion of The Colonel being a comedy. I am aware that Dr. Johnson set down She stoops, etc. as a farce, and farcical to a degree its plot is, but not its characters. The Colonel I contend is comedy—farcical neither in plot nor characters.

Yours truly,

F. C. Burnand (anxious to learn).”

19, Blandford Square, N.W.,

February 24th, 1881.

“Dear Burnand,

I do not as a rule write the Dramatic Criticism for the Saturday Review, only when the regular critic is away; but you are right in supposing that I am the author of the article on The Colonel.

Your letter was a surprise to me. I liked The Colonel and thought I had said as much: but I liked it in my own way and I am not going to be bullied out of my admiration by the modesty of the author.

I thought it a brightly written farce with a rather weak last act. You tell me, and of course you ought to know, that it is not a farce but a comedy: but if I were to adopt your classification I should not like it at all, and I want to like it if you will let me—in my own way.

You ask where the puns are and in the same breath you tell me where they are. There are three of them you say, and they are all in the right places. But I never hinted, my dear fellow, that they were not in the right places. On the contrary it was your gravity not your humour I found to be in the wrong place. You ask me again where are the evidences of high animal spirits in your play; after your letter I shall begin to doubt my recollections, but I had certainly thought the interest of the play was mainly supported by its high spirits. To be able to keep a wildly extravagant notion alive for the space of three acts, demands I think an ample supply of animal spirits. But is it a crime to have high animal spirits? I thought it was only the gloomy apostle of high art who loathed hilarity.

I haven’t the faintest objection to your tackling me, as you call it, but you must give me leave to speak freely. When I hear you say that The Colonel is farcical neither in plot nor characters, I begin seriously to wonder whether your letter is not altogether a form of practical joke.

I will not let myself be diverted by your allusions to She Stoops to Conquer. The suggested resemblance had not, I confess, occurred to me; there seem to me many differences between the two works but this is rather a question for posterity.

If, however, you insist on taking Goldsmith into your skiff it will not be thought presumption on my part if I choose my place in Dr. Johnson’s heavier craft. I would prefer, however, to take your own account of your work. Not farcical in plot or character! Surely your career as a humourist has been fed by the rarest and most delightful experience, if it has brought you into contact with the kind of man who would be driven to the verge of immorality by a dado! No, I can’t think you serious!”

Here my copy—the rough one of the letter sent—comes to an end; and I have not F. C. Burnand’s further reply.

But it is good to remember that there was never any breach between the friends; I find a scenario by Burnand for a children’s Christmas play—evidently sent to Joe about the time when he produced Buchanan’s version of the Pied Piper of Hamlin at the Comedy Theatre with Lena Ashwell—still a student at the Royal Academy of Music—acting and singing the girl’s part.

And from a much later period I can quote the following further proof of unimpaired friendship in a letter written to thank Joe for having been largely instrumental in getting up the dinner given to Burnand on his withdrawal from the editorship of Punch.

Grosvenor Hotel,

London, S.W.,

June 11th, 1911.

“My Dear Carr,

I cannot thank you sufficiently for all you have done in this matter which would never have resulted in the great success it undoubtedly achieved but for the first generous impetus which set the ball in motion, and for the continued well directed shoves that kept it rolling.

Without your speech the entertainment would have been comparatively flat; but your speech opened a fresh bottle and infused a fresh life.

Yours most sincerely,

F. C. Burnand.”

Apropos of Lena Ashwell, I may say that Joe was then so much struck with her talent for acting that he persuaded her to leave the musical profession, for which she was being trained, and gave her the part of Elaine in his King Arthur, shortly afterwards produced by Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre.

I set down these trivial memories as they recur to me, sprinkled over many a year of work and of anxieties, but of much merriment and many joys. But, taking up the thread of the first year of our married life, I recall an amusing incident which bore some pleasant consequences.

Joe, as was often the case, had sat up writing his dramatic criticism after I, tired with the still thrilling excitement of some “first night,” had gone to bed.

He had posted his article and was sleeping the sleep of the just, when our hoary retainer mercilessly awakened him early next morning with the words: “Gentleman on business, Sir!”

He donned a dressing-gown and went down none too willingly, to find an unknown little Scot below, who briefly stated that he was empowered by the proprietors of some Encyclopaedia to offer him a goodly fee for a short life of—I think it was—Rossetti; but that owing to another writer having disappointed the Editor at the eleventh hour the copy must be delivered in three days.

Joe was full of work, but the sum was too princely to be refused by a man who knew that shortly he would have to feed an extra mouth; the impossible was achieved, there was not even time to see a proof—and I well remember Joe, when telling his tale to a friend, confessing his relief that he had never come across that volume, and could only hope that no one else ever had either.

The cheque, at all events, he did see, and with a part of it we went to Derbyshire for our first country holiday. And a wild, happy holiday it was!

We lodged in the roughest of cottages in a tiny village near the Isaac Walton Hotel, where Joe had contrived to get some fishing rights. With what enthusiasm did he show me the haunts of his boyish holidays, the scenes of fishing adventures and of great walks with early comrades!

But that cheque from the Scottish publishers contributed to other things besides a holiday. In the November of that year our son, Philip, was born. Strange now to think that he, who was in France throughout the Great War, should have had a German for his first nurse, and that before he could speak he could hum many a Volkslied—an accomplishment which his proud nurse and mother made him show off to our musical friend, Mr. Jameson, who indeed even insisted on testing his intonation on the piano.

Other distinguished folk gathered around his cradle in the big studio. I can see Ellen Terry nursing him in one of the wainscoted window-seats and so apparently carelessly in one arm while she made wide gestures with the other to emphasize some point she was discussing with my husband—that I, nervous young mother, was forced to cry out at last: “Oh, Nell! Take care of my baby.”

Upon which she, in a tone of commiserating reproof, replied: “Now, Alice, do you suppose I need teaching how to hold a child?”

Anyone who has seen her do it—even on the stage—knows very well that she did not.

So the discussion went on and I even remember the subject: for it was just when she was weighing the offer of a fresh engagement on the stage, upon which she had only then appeared in extreme youth. Joe gave his advice emphatically, though he had never seen her act then and did not know upon what a future that door would open.

The opportunity was to be the production of her old friend Charles Reade’s Wandering Heir. The caste was not strong, and it was not wonderful that “Nell” scored a success; but I think Joe saw more than most people in that first night at the Queen’s Theatre when he rushed out between the acts and returned with a rather damaged bouquet, the only one left in Covent Garden, which he presently threw at her feet.

It was the first of many a “first night” when he watched her—critical, as it was his business to be, but sympathetic and enthusiastic always. There was no limit to his praise, for instance, of her pathetic portrayal of Ophelia: nor of his immediate appreciation of that moment in her otherwise tender impersonation of Olivia in The Vicar of Wakefield when she strikes the young Squire on discovering his treachery. But these were only two out of many thrilling “first nights” of her earlier engagements when I sat beside him, my perfect enjoyment not even hampered, as in later years at the Lyceum, by my anxiety respecting the proper finishing and donning of the dresses which I had designed for her.

But that day in Great Russell Street, even Joe, always nervous about the children, thought more of our first born. To me her reproof had been convincing; I never again feared Ellen Terry as the safe and tender guardian of my children; indeed she first taught me much delicate observation of infants, but Joe—often terrified about them—believed in no advice save that of his mother, who had borne thirteen and reared eleven; yet upon one point my shrewd Irish mother-in-law, with her always wise but sometimes wittily caustic advice, and the more indulgent artist were agreed, viz. that—as our country butcher delighted Joe by saying about his live “meat”—babies, though disciplined, should be “humoured not druv.”

Although nervous in moments of crisis Joe was, however, always calm and competent; but he generally managed to relieve the situation with his own irrepressible spirits at the earliest possible moment, and many a comic tale hangs round the strange doings of an incapable old Gamp who tended me at the birth of my second child.

He would lure her with the seemingly innocent question: “Sweetened or unsweetened gin, Mrs. Peveril?” knowing well that the spirit was needed for friction and that “Peveril of the Peak” (otherwise hook-nosed) as he had named her, would “rise” every time and answer demurely: “I’m sure I don’t know, Sir. I never tasted neither.”

Luckily the old lady was neither sharp enough to see nor thin-skinned enough to mind; but who ever minded Joe’s wit? Though it was keen enough at times, the urbanity behind it shone through too well.

Even his wife was a willing target—and a good one. As Edward Burne-Jones used kindly to say when they had both tried me on their favourite theme and taken me in over a Dickens quotation: “There never was anybody who rose better than the dear lady.” Yet I maintain that it needs a profound student of the master to know that he has created an obscure character named “Pip,” other than the human boy in Great Expectations.

Well, many is the bon mot to which I helped my husband.

When I declared myself nervous over my part in private theatricals at my father’s house in Canterbury, I can hear him say: “You are surely not bothering your head about two half-pay officers and a rural dean?”

And one day at a picnic, commenting on a criticism of a sturdy Irish uncle as to “not wanting these slight figures at all, at all,” Joe gave me the sound advice not to sit upon a rock “lest diamond cut diamond.”

We were all young then and things that may seem truly foolish now made the company laugh; it is more remarkable that the radiant personality, the inexhaustible animal spirits and rare sense of humour should have survived years of hard work and still have shone forth after the prostration of illness.

When scarcely recovered from a serious attack, Joe told me one morning of a dream that he had had, which—as Mr. W. J. Locke has remarked—contained such a “lightning flash of characterization” that it is hard to believe it came to him in sleep.

“I dreamed,” he said, “that Squire Bancroft brought me some grapes,” and as he removed the paper from the basket he said, “White, Joe; when the case is serious I never bring black.”

All through his illness, when increasing weakness and the inconveniences arising from the Great War forced him to an uncongenial life at sea-side resorts, his wit still bubbled up unbidden, as the following letter testifies. The boarding-house in which it was written did not afford exactly sympathetic society, yet on the Christmas Day that we spent there he offered to give the company a little “talk” if they cared to listen; and from his armchair, he chatted for half an hour to a crowded lounge on the eminent men whom he had known, interspersed with many a flash of fun appropriate to the hour and received with bursts of laughter by the simple circle.

“... We are comfortable enough here,” he wrote to his daughter, “and there is entertainment furnished by some of the types, both in their physique and in their intellectual equipment. Some of the older females are designed and constructed with “dangerous salients in their lines,” everything occurring in unexpected places, and only dimly suggesting the original purpose of the Creator. One or two are of stupendous girth with hollows and protuberances that suggest some primeval landscape subjected to volcanic action.”

Thus with the same humorous and kindly eye on the world as when he had been the welcome entertainer of a more brilliant society, he lightened the days—very heavy to him—of national anxiety, and with a contentment rather wonderful in the typical Londoner, alternated the few possible hours of patient literary labour with a cheerful delight in the beauties of the place.

“I wonder if the present difficulty in getting out of England will make us appreciate it better,” he said as we stood one evening on the pier looking towards old Hastings. “If we were abroad we should say that medieval castle against the sunset was a wondrous fine sight.”

So did he still exemplify his life-long belief often expressed in the words: “How can people be dull when they’re alive?”

CHAPTER V

JOURNALISM AND LETTERS

My husband has given some account of his days at the Bar in his own Reminiscences. I shall, therefore, not touch on that part of his career, as it was practically ended before I knew him—the necessity of earning daily grist for the mill having carried him entirely into the ranks of journalism.

I believe he got through a quite unusual amount of work in that profession. Many an evening did I put back our little dinner while he rushed off to Euston to give his copy of Art Criticism for the Manchester Guardian into the hands of the guard for early morning delivery: he wrote on the same subject for the Pall Mall Gazette and the Art Journal, and what with criticism and social articles for the Saturday Review and World, he was never in bed till long after midnight.

It must have been about this time that he took me with him to Paris for a short so-called holiday while he wrote his criticism for the Pall Mall Gazette on the Salon of the year.

A gladsome time it was in that most smiling of cities in spring. There was a day on which a cry of dismay arose from our party—including his fellow-worker and old friend, Adam Gielgud with his wife—when a letter arrived from Edmund Yates refusing to let Joe off his weekly article in the series of Skits on the London newspapers which were then attracting attention in the World—I think the topic for that week was The Old Maid of Journalism (“The Spectator”) and perhaps that dignified lady received a more caustic drubbing than she would otherwise have had because of the distaste with which he set to his task.

Cheerful meals in the humblest of restaurants—whenever we could run to it, in the excellent Café Gaillon—now the fashionable Henry, but then of far simpler ambitions; merry meetings at the house of that good comrade of Joe’s of whom he tells the tale of exchanged French and English lessons at Kettner’s restaurant in London, and lastly a gorgeous feast in the suburban home of a fellow contributor to L’Art, to both of which festivities my sister, Mrs. Harrison—then Alma Strettell—was bidden as being of our party.

Both occasions were a pleasant peep into Parisian bourgeois life. Our first host was eager to show that he could give us a gigot of mutton as well roasted as in London, and sorely crestfallen was the poor man when the little joint came to table black as a cinder and blue when cut. Joe quickly made capital out of the catastrophe, however, by declaring that one didn’t come to Paris to eat home fare, and that it served his friend right for putting his cook to such an unworthy task.

Our second entertainment, though we did not meet such intellectual company as the distinguished writers on the Temps and the Débats, who so courteously helped Joe to express brilliant ideas in daringly lame French and paid such charming court to my sister and myself, was more typical of its class; for, although the young couple of the house were our entertainers, the old couple were our hosts, and it was wondrous and delightful to see the respectful attitude of the son and his wife to the parents and the undisputed supremacy which they held from their two ends of the long table set out under the trees of the flower-laden May.

A rushing week it was, into which my sister and I crammed much enthralling shopping. I can see now Joe’s reproachful face at the door of the café where we had kept him waiting half an hour for déjeuner after his hot and tiring morning’s work at the Salon. I made a shameless excuse to the effect that we had secured many “occasions” (bargains). And as I gave him a toothbrush which he had asked me to buy, he said: “Is this an ‘occasion’ too? I’d rather have a punctual meal than an occasional toothbrush!”

Merry hours but very far from idle ones, and he reaped an additional and unexpected reward for his labours when we got home.

We had been bidden to a cricket match at his old school the day after our return, where, in virtue of his old rank of Captain of the Eleven, he was to play as a visitor; and I seem to see the boyish blush of satisfaction with which he told his beloved master—Dr. Birkbeck Hill—that it was he and no leader-writer on the Times, as was rumoured, who was writing those humorous articles on the newspapers for the World.

My husband has told so much of the tale of his early journalistic days in his Eminent Victorians that I find little to add; but I remember a curious incident in the fine old room at Great Russell Street when George Hake—Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s secretary—came one day, ostensibly “on his own,” to have a talk with him on the series of papers on painters of the day, appearing above the signature of “Ignotus,” but of which the authorship had leaked out.

Joe has told, in Coasting Bohemia, of the rift in his friendship with Rossetti over these articles, and a sad tale it is. Mr. Hake fancied that Rossetti would like to see his friend’s bride, but, alas! he was taking too much on himself, for the visit never came off. But Rossetti was at that time already an invalid and was not to be counted upon.

It must have been some time after this that the French proprietors of that luxurious publication, L’Art, invited Joe to run a London office for its sale, in connection with which he afterwards started an English version—Art and Letters—edited and largely written by himself.

Many funny incidents group themselves around the person of the French proprietor, whose English, though insistently fluent, was of the lamest, and I think Joe sometimes led him on in the expectation of some pleasant malapropism.

“How are you now?” he would ask, when the poor gentleman had “suffered the sea.”

“Only ’alf and ’alf, my friend,” the Frenchman would reply. “But I must back tonight. I make my trunk at four.” And his apt mots on the super-sensitive lady-assistant who “always begin to tear for nothing” and “forgive never man that he ’ave not married her” afforded Joe continual delight.

But a courtlier host than that Frenchman never existed. He would entertain us royally at the old Maison Dorée when we went to Paris though he ate but little himself and always preferred the humbler Café Duval; so little, in fact, was he in accord with most men of his nation upon the food question that, when Joe gave him the usual fish dinner at Greenwich, he was naturally dismayed at the explanation, after several courses had been passed by, of “Mon ami, je ne mange jamais du poisson.”

Art and Letters, though an artistic was not a financial success, but it may have led to the one of his many adventures of which he was perhaps the most proud: the planning and editing, at the request of Messrs. Macmillan, of their beautiful magazine, the English Illustrated.

He has spoken so well himself of his pleasant intercourse with the men who worked for him—struggling men in those days but known to fame since—that there is little left for me to record, save to note that among the many tributes from his many friends I prize not least those of his collaborators of that time, with the oft-repeated testimony to his having helped them to the first-rung on the ladder of success.

Mr. Stanley Weyman, whose first book, The House of the Wolf, was published in those pages, comes first to my mind, and those who have read my husband’s Eminent Victorians will recollect the striking proof of the accuracy of his critical faculty in the incident of Mr. Weyman’s bringing him two letters—written with an interval of many years—in which he criticized a play of that brilliant novelist’s in almost identical words, although the first letter was written openly to the author and the second—in forgetfulness of the fact—to a theatrical agent who had not divulged the playwright’s name.

Robert Louis Stevenson was one of his cherished contributors, and I recall an angry rebuke from that great man to the Editor, who had dared to strike out a word in the title of one of his articles at the moment of going to press; it is pleasant to add that a placated and highly amused reply followed on Joe’s deft and short method of extricating himself from the position: “My dear Stevenson—You see, I knew that the extra word was a slip of the pen,” he wrote, “for I should as soon have expected you to talk of female bitches as of male dogs. Yours etc.”

Sir James Barrie wrote one of his early essays for the English Illustrated Magazine, and in a kindred branch of the adventure—that of illustration—Mr. Hugh Thomson was discovered by Joe—a poor Irish lad living on the scanty pay of advertisements for a business firm, and devoting all his leisure to flights of fancy in the most delicate realms of the humorous eighteenth century subjects in which he has always excelled. Joe confessed to me on the day when the boy sought an interview, with his portfolio under his arm, that he did not at first believe he had done the drawings himself. But he gave him a subject, and when he returned with it after a day or two his doubts were set at rest, and he offered him the post which he held for so long with distinction.

The relations between editor and artist were always affectionate and I have two letters from the latter—one to Joe and one to myself—full of a touching gratitude such as perhaps only an Irishman could have expressed. The one quoted below is of later date.

27, Perham Road,

West Kensington,

February 5th, 1909.

Dear Mr. Comyns Carr,

It is only now that we have contrived to get a reading of your delightful book “Some Eminent Victorians,” and it has literally staggered me (with delight) to find myself in such company. I so rarely see a soul that I was entirely ignorant, and never dreamt of it. We had of course read such reviews of the book as came our way and had rejoiced in the whole-hearted pleasure with which the notices were charged but we never suspected that in a corner of the book you had propped me up. My wife is more than ever confirmed in her opinion that you are the most delightful author that ever lived, and she is already looking forward, frugally, to the time when the libraries will be selling off their soiled copies of books when she hopes to secure Some Eminent Victorians and ME for her very own. Possibly you might think it forward in me if I told you what a genuine delight it is to read the book for the way it is written. Your pages on Bright and the orators are as eloquent as they. But it is all the most entertaining book we have read for ages. Below is a memory of the famous interview you had with the suspicious character from Ireland. I think I have caught the bannisters well, as also Lacour waiting outside.

Your delighted

Hugh Thomson.

So much for the affectionate reverence in which one held him who was starting life’s race when that “famous interview” took place. Joe was comparatively young himself then, but as the years went on there were many of greater disparity in age, who did not fail to pay him the same tribute; indeed, I don’t think there was ever any sense of difference in this respect between him and the many good comrades in many classes of society who rejoiced to work with him because he always lightened labour with kindness and good humour—who rejoiced to play with him because he was never afraid of, or at a loss for, the right word at the right moment, were it grave or gay, appreciative or pungent as the occasion required.

He was always the encourager, never the discourager, of sincere and patient effort: bombast and a pandering to mere popularity, he could censure with words of biting wit, but he never laughed at those who sent their arrows at the moon though he knew well enough that such might not achieve financial prosperity. His unfaltering advice was always that everyone should stick to what he best loved to do.

“My dear,” I remember his saying to me one day, when I had tried and signally failed to write a popular farce, “it takes a more competent fool than you to know just what kind of foolishness the public wants. Don’t you be put off what you can do because you fancy it is not what they want.”

And in a letter written perhaps in a more serious spirit to one often oppressed by a sense of failure I find the words: “There is no such thing as failure—excepting the failure to see and love the beauty of life.”

These are among the graver memories of him: his generation will remember him most readily for what Sir James Barrie, writing to me of him as “a man for whom I had a mighty admiration,” appreciatively describes as “his positive genius for conversation.” The latter word is so apt because it perceives that the Celtic gift of repartee was the most finely pointed of his arrows: he was generally at his best when some might have fancied that he was going to be non-plussed.

One day he told me of a dinner at which King Edward VII., then Prince of Wales, was the honoured guest. Someone had whispered to the Prince that my husband was a Radical, and he, turning to him, asked if such a thing could be true.

“I am a Radical, Sir,” replied Joe, and after a little pause added: “but I never mention it in respectable society.”

The table was silent for an instant, but the Prince led the way with a laugh and all was well.

A funny little incident, told me in the small hours when Joe came home, described the dire discomfiture of one of his greatest admirers when, having invited him to supper that he might silence “a conceited young ass” by his superior wit, the “conceited young ass” so fancied himself as to monopolize the whole conversation: this fiasco, though not to his own glorification, caused Joe infinite delight; but the disgusted host was only consoled after he had arranged a duel for my husband with Robert Marshall, the playwright, a recognised wit—the condition being that neither should think before speaking: I consider that here an unfair advantage was taken—any one who was a friend of Joe’s knowing full well that this was just the whip of which he loved the lash. Be it added that this tilt between the two knights cemented their friendship.

A host of these incidents took place in his well-loved Garrick Club, of which—by the testimony of many friends—he was the heart and soul and some add the good genius. I believe there were quarrels not a few that he averted or headed by his tact and kindly humour—quarrels that might sometimes have led to sorrowful decisions by the Club Committee to which he belonged. He told me one day of a humorous end to an earnest expostulation he had held with poor Harry Kemble—greatly beloved in spite of his known weakness: “Every word you say is true, my dear Joe,” the actor had replied with the tears streaming down his great cheeks—“but what if I like it?”

It is good to remember that that colossal figure—of which our daughter, seeing it on the stage when she was a child, asked tremulously, “Is it a human being?”—remained to the end an honoured institution of the Club.

Of Joe’s tactful capacity as a peacemaker I was a witness at the home of my mother’s family—the beautiful Gothic Abbey of Bisham near Marlow. We were staying with my cousin, George Vansittart, who was then the owner. He was the kindest of men, but had a peppery and ill-controlled temper, and nothing so inflamed it as the growing habit with trippers on the Thames of landing upon his grounds. His gardeners and keepers were sternly bidden to warn off these rash people, and he himself, if walking or shooting in Bisham woods—quite a mile from the Abbey—would angrily bid them begone.

One day he and Joe were sitting in his ground-floor library facing the river, when he espied a boat containing a lady and a man making across stream towards the big trees shading his lawns. He jumped up—his face flushed, and watched the man rise, a powerful figure, ship his sculls and push into shore. “By——, the insolent brute! Under my very nose!” shrieked the incensed squire. And, seizing a heavy stick he strode out of the French window—Joe following somewhat alarmed.

My cousin took no pains to soften the language with which he addressed “the insolent brute” before he was half-way across the lawn, and Joe hastened as he saw the big man step defiantly out of the boat while the woman wept and implored him unavailingly to return. Joe caught my cousin by the arm—he was getting on in years—for as he drew near he saw that the intruder was an actor—of no great refinement—known in the profession for a swaggering bully.

“There’s a lady in the boat, Mr. Vansittart,” said my husband. Instantly my cousin stopped, and the man, recognising Joe, greeted him surlily and presently turned back to his companion now fainting on the bank. Joe followed him, and George Vansittart, returning to the house, called out to his butler, who was hastening to the scene: “Take out some brandy and water for the lady and see she needs nothing.” Joe brought back a message of thanks from the poor thing, and was far too anxious lest the outbreak should affect my cousin’s health to mind his remark that he was to be congratulated upon his acquaintance.

Recurring to that appreciation of him by the young in his last years, which is one of the sweetest tributes to Joe’s memory, many alert and boyish faces rise up before me; eager over some animated discussion in which the give-and-take was always even between the older man and the younger, or alight with laughter at his quaint wit and merry censure of some foible of the day; for though he could laugh at its foibles he was never out of heart with the world, which was always to him a good world, even when he prophesied that, through some crucible, the crazes of the last twenty years would have to pass for elimination. “They have got to have this epidemic,” he would say of Cubist painter and eccentric poet, “but they’ll get over it, and meanwhile the good old world will go on quietly as usual and young folk will fall in love and want poets to sing for them and so the best things must come to the top in the end.”

Apart from this sort of, as he called it, “half-baked” thought, he was always ready to weigh and consider every new aspect of life; and if no passing mode could deceive him or put him out of heart, either with his life-long heroes or with his own methods of expression; yet to the last hour he was always keen—not only for fresh work himself, but to see the work of the world develop. In the words of Mr. Stopford Brooke, quoted in the Life by Prof. L. P. Jacks, he would have said: “Whether in this world or another we will pursue, we will overtake, we will divide the spoil.”

And so, whether he were hanging over the garden gate of our holiday home gathering information from the labourers who passed along the road, or discussing ethical problems with his sons and their friends, he was always “pursuing”—and the young were always at home with him, for he never wanted to lead only to express his opinion and listen to their reply.

One of these younger men—Mr. Hammond, by no means an “obscure” one—writes: “There have been few men whose companionship was so delightful to all who had the privilege of knowing him.... I always remember with gratitude that he allowed even young and obscure people to enjoy the pleasure of his best conversation—one of the rarest intellectual pleasures that I have ever known.”

And Mr. Hugh Sidgwick—killed in the prime of his own rare intellectual career—follows with what might be called an echo: “I can’t say how much I owe to him and to you for the many happy hours I spent at your house. He never let the barrier of the generations stand between him and us young men and we all of us looked on him as a real friend and the most delightful of companions. There are memories of many good talks and jovial discussions—with Mr. Carr always leading and contributing more than his share of life and vivacity to them. And it was inspiring to us—more perhaps than appeared—to meet one who was so young in heart, so full of life and so sensitive to all the beauties of all the arts.”

The words of W. A. Moore—blessed with his own Celtic temperament and eager fighting quality—sound the same note:

“It was a great thing to have known him,” he writes from Salonica, “I can never forget him for he was a most radiant personality.” It is a curious thing that a kindred epithet—“joyous personality”—was a favourite one of his own, and he would maintain that you could see two men in the Seven Dials—one lean, soured and scowling, his companion stout, merry, humorous and full of vitality, though both dwelt on the same gutter and wore the same threadbare garments.

It is, of course, quite impossible to give on paper any idea whatever of the charm and brilliancy which these and many more testimonies prove; to quote some words spoken by our friend Sir Arthur Pinero, “It is rather like trying to remember the summers of years ago!” and he left so few letters, possibly because he possessed that “genius of conversation,” that he has few words to say for himself; but it may not be inappropriate here to quote two which he wrote to an old friend who had affectionately watched his whole career and highly appraised his powers and judgment.

The first is in answer to an appeal as to whether it showed “symptoms of senile decay” not to be able to admire The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson, which had been hailed with a shout of praise from a section of the public. I quote it as showing Joe’s own confession of faith in regard to the poetry that endures.

“My dear—The Hound is a Mongrel. I know him of old and have more than once driven him from my door. Several friends have endeavoured to persuade me that he was of the true breed but I would have none of him and will not now. Upon the provocation of your letter I read the thing again and most gladly and willingly share your symptoms of senile decay. The fabric of it I take to be pure fustian. And there is not a line in it that does not debauch the language it employs; not a phrase in it that does not seem to me to vulgarize by its expression whatever innocent thought may underlie it.

The more I ponder over the great verse which time has left impregnable, the more I am impressed by the true poet’s unfailing reverence for the sanctity of words in their relation to sense and by his stern rejection of all melody that is not rooted there: the tinkling cadence of an obvious tune is not for him. His purpose might be taken to be no other than to express in final simplicity the thought that is in him. Why it is, or how it is, that in this process he achieves a result, in which the sense of beauty banishes all remembrance of intellectual origin—that is the poet’s secret: the mystery and the mastery of his craft.

But I am getting into depths that cannot be plumbed on this tiny sheet of paper. It is the old subject of many a long night’s talk with you and concerns matters in which I think you and I are of accord....

As to Electra (Richard Strauss’ opera) of course I have no right to plead before that tribunal; but the terms in which it is praised make me suspect it is not praiseworthy.