IN GOOD COMPANY

IN GOOD COMPANY
SOME PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF
SWINBURNE, LORD ROBERTS
WATTS-DUNTON, OSCAR WILDE
EDWARD WHYMPER, S. J. STONE
STEPHEN PHILLIPS
BY COULSON KERNAHAN

LONDON: JOHN LANE, THE BODLEY HEAD
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY MCMXVII

SECOND EDITION

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH, ENGLAND

TO
THE HON. MRS. ARTHUR HENNIKER

My Dear Mrs. Henniker,

It is many years since we first met at the house of one whom we both loved, whose memory we both cherish. It was that friend’s hope that you and I should become, and should remain friends; and that the hope has been realised has given me many happy hours—sometimes in your company as my gracious hostess, sometimes, scarcely less closely in your company, as a reader of your delightful and beautiful stories. Were your gallant General—I remember how proud he was of those stories—alive to-day, I should have asked to be allowed to dedicate this book to the two of you. Now that—alas for the England that he so faithfully loved, so nobly served—he is with us no more, may I inscribe it to yourself and to his honoured memory?

Yours ever sincerely,
Coulson Kernahan.

FOREWORD

One of the subjects of these studies said in my hearing, that “Recollections” are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memory, or have never, themselves, done anything in life worth remembering.

To the second indictment I plead guilty, but my best excuse for the publication of this volume is that I write while the first indictment fails. My memory is still good, and the one thing which seems most worth remembering in my life is my undeservedly fortunate friendships.

In writing of my friends and of those with whom I was associated, I am, therefore, I believe, giving of my best. I ought to add that these papers were penned for inclusion in a volume of frankly personal and intimate “Recollections.” A work of that sort is the one book of his life in which an author is allowed some freedom from convention. That is why I hope to be pardoned should any passage, letter, or incident in these pages seem too intimate or too personal.

The reason why the studies are printed separately is that the ship in which I hope to carry the bulk of my threatened “Recollections” (if ever that ship come to port) will be so heavily weighted a vessel, that I am lightening it by unloading a portion of the cargo at the friendly harbour of The Bodley Head.

To drop figurative language and to speak plainly, I may add that, though there is some attempt at a more or less finished portrait in some of my pen-pictures, that of Lord Roberts is no portrait, but merely a chronicle. His personality, at least, is too well known and loved to need either analysis or description.

The paper When Stephen Phillips Read, mere snapshot as it is of one aspect of his personality, was not written for the present volume, with which, indeed, it is hardly in keeping. I include it by the wish of Mr. John Lane who, years hence, will be remembered as the faithful friend, as well as the generous and discriminating admirer, of the distinguished poet, of whose work it is his pride also to be the publisher.

Mr. Lane was anxious—knowing that my friendship with the poet was long and close—that I should write of Stephen Phillips as fully as I have here written of some others; but it is only under impulse that I seek to picture the inner self and personality of my friends, and I cannot do so while the sense of loss is comparatively new. In the case of two of whom I have thus written, many years had elapsed before I put pen to paper.

At his best—as the three friends who made such unexampled and such self-sacrificing efforts on his behalf, Sir Sidney and Lady Colvin and Mr. Stephen Gwynn, will, I think, agree—there was something approaching the godlike in Stephen Phillips. Of what was weak, and worse, in him I need not here speak, since, because he so loathed hypocrisy, he hid it from none.

One day I hope to show Stephen Phillips as he really was, and as not many knew him. I have heard him described as a man of brooding and morbid aloofness. There is truth in the description, but it is equally true to say that, at times, he could be as healthily jovial and unconstrained, as high-spirited as a happy schoolboy. His exquisite and extraordinary sense of humour was—I had almost written his “salvation,” and that not only under success which, coming early in life, might well have turned the head of a smaller man, but also in adversity which, when it came, was as crushing as his success had been complete. When this adversity, when tragic unhappiness, overtook him, he bore them with courage, and reproached no one except himself.

If as a poet he was at first overpraised, it is equally true that, towards the end, and since his death, the splendour, beauty and power of his poetry have often been underestimated. Time will set that right, and will rank him, I believe, as a true and, within his limits, a great poet.

That Stephen Phillips, the man, gave no cause for sorrow and concern to those of us who loved him, I do not maintain, nor would he wish me to do so, for no one was more ready to acknowledge his weaknesses—deeply and almost despairingly as he deplored them—and none suffered intenser agony of remorse for ill-doing than he.

Knowing him as I did, I unhesitatingly aver that his ideals and his longings were noble, and that the soul of the man was good. That all is well with him, and that he is at rest, I have no doubt. Never have I seen such fulness of peace and such beauty on the face of the newly dead, as when I knelt—to commend his passing soul to his Maker—by the bed on which lay what was mortal of Stephen Phillips. All that was weak and unworthy seemed to have fallen away as something which never was, which never could be, a part of his true self. In death, even his youth returned to him. As he lay there, white-robed, and with his hair tossed boyishly over his forehead, he looked so young that one might have thought him to be a happy and sleeping boy-chorister, dreaming of the poet-mother whom he so loved, and to join whom in Paradise may not his soul even then have been hastening?

C. K.

Savage Club, London.

CONTENTS

IN GOOD COMPANY

A. C. SWINBURNE

Had some old Pagan slept a thousand years,
To wake to-day, and stretching to the stars
Gaunt arms of longing, called on Venus, Mars,
June and Jove, Apollo and his peers;
And heard, for answer, echoing from the spheres,
“Thy gods are gone: the gods of old are dead.
It is by Christ thou shalt be comforted,
The pitying God who wipes away all tears.”

Such answer had there come, deaf ears, in scorn
Had turned the Pagan, and deaf ears turn we
To other voices, on this April morn,
Since he who sang the sunrise and the sea
Shall sing no more. Deaf are we and forlorn,
The gods are dead, and dead is Poetry.

April 10, 1909.

I

Swinburne was furious.

I had lunched with him and Watts-Dunton at The Pines, and after I had smoked a cigarette with the latter, the author of Atalanta in Calydon had invited me upstairs to his sanctum, that he might show me the latest acquisition to his library—a big parchment-bound book tied with ribbons—the Kelmscott reprint of one of Caxton’s books. He waxed enthusiastic, I remember, over the Rape of Danae. Then he took up the proofs of an article on John Day which he was contributing to the Nineteenth Century that he might read some passages from it. To verify a quotation, he walked to his shelves in search of a book, talking volubly meanwhile, and turning, as was his custom, to look directly at the person whom he was addressing. Unlike Watts-Dunton, whose library was a witness to the catholicity of the owner’s interests and of his tastes, Swinburne’s library was comparatively small and select, for he was as exclusive in regard to the books he admitted to his shelves as he was in regard to the men and women he admitted to his friendship. Knowing exactly, I suppose, where the required volume was to be found, his hand went as confidently towards it—even though his face was turned away from it, and towards me—as the fingers of a musician go towards the keys of a piano at which he does not look. For once Swinburne’s instincts played him false. Taking down the book without glancing at it, and still pouring out a torrent of words, he opened it, his eyes on my face, and shaking the forefinger of his right hand at me, said:

“Here it is! Listen!” and dropped his eyes upon the page.

To my astonishment his face suddenly crimsoned, the eyes that might once have been bright blue, but were now faded, and, in fading, seemed to have caught and retained something of the colour of the great seas and of the grassy fields upon which they have so often and so lovingly lingered, glowed with green fire like that we see in the eyes of an angry cat, and he flung the book away from him in a tornado of wrath. He had taken down the wrong volume, an anthology, and opened at a page on which was printed a poem by the particular writer who, like the wearer of a red coat intruding thoughtlessly upon the domain of an angry bull, happened at that particular moment to be the subject of a poet’s capricious wrath—for on occasion I have heard Swinburne speak with kindly, if contemptuous toleration, of a writer whose damnation in this world and the next he seemed at another time ardently to desire.

“Of all my imitators,” he shrilled, literally quivering with the tempestuousness of his passion, “this fellow (mentioning a poet whose name I suppress) is the most intolerable. I claim—and you, I know, will admit the justice of the claim—that perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of my work in poetry is that I have taken old and hackneyed metres, and have tried to transform them from a mere jingle, and a mere jig-jig, into music. This pestilent ape has vulgarised what I have done by servile imitations of my manner and of my methods; but, what I had transformed into music, he has transformed back into the vilest and most jigging of jingles.”

When a poet of Swinburne’s eminence thus turns the searchlight of criticism upon himself, and seeks to lay bare, in a few pregnant sentences, what he considers the secret of his art and of his success, one must necessarily be interested and even fascinated. On this occasion, however, I was more concerned about the singular state of nervous excitability into which my host had worked himself than curious to draw him out by further discussion.

Sir James Barrie says somewhere that “Temper is a weapon which we handle by the blade,” a tragic instance of the truth of which I had in mind at that moment. A certain distinguished writer, now dead, who like Swinburne was a good hater, and scarcely less excitable than he, had made, or imagined that he had made (the vagaries of the artistic temperament are many), a deadly enemy of a fellow craftsman and critic. Every adverse review of his work, or unfriendly reference to himself, which appeared in the public Press, he insisted on attributing, directly or indirectly, to the malignity of this supposed enemy. A not ungenerous man at heart, in spite of—possibly because of—his blaze of a temper and quickness to take offence, the distinguished writer in question had shown much interest in a struggling young author of his own nationality, and had not only assisted him financially, but had been at great pains to find a publisher for the lad’s first book, and had importuned his friends on the Press to review the work favourably and at length. The first notice to appear was adverse in the extreme, and the distinguished writer instantly declared that he saw in it the hand of his enemy, who had sought to stab at him by damning the work of a young fellow known to be his friend and protégé.

Flinging the paper containing the review upon the ground, he stamped upon it, and about the room, working himself up finally into so furious a passion that it brought on a seizure from which he never entirely recovered, and that practically ended his career.

“Temper is a weapon which we handle by the blade.”

This story I had only recently heard, and had good reason for believing. Seeing my host literally trembling and quivering in every limb with the intensity of the excitement, and of the anger into which he had worked himself, my one anxiety was to distract the attention of this representative of the proverbially irritable race of geniuses from the disturbing subject, and to soothe him back to his normal calm. Unfortunately for me, his deafness made my task difficult, but I chanced to hit upon a topic in which he was keenly interested, and, little by little, he quieted down, until I could see that he had talked himself out and was ready for the afternoon nap in which it was his custom to indulge.

Remembering that incident, and others like it within my knowledge, I ask myself how it is possible to judge men and women of genius—men and women to whose great brains the live blood rushes at a thought or at a word; whose passions are like a laid fuse, ready to take fire and to explode the mine at a touch—by the same standard which we apply to the cold-blooded, sluggish-brained, lethargic and perhaps more fortunate mortals to whom impulse is unknown, upon whom passion has no sway, and who rarely commit themselves to any expression or to any action, noble or mean, wise or indiscreet, without first of all carefully weighing the results and counting up the costs.

“It is apparently too often a congenial task,” says George Eliot in her Essay on Heine, “to write severe words about the transgressions of men of genius; especially when the censor has the advantage of being himself a man of no genius, so that those transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; he, forsooth, never lacerated anyone by his wit or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion; and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that lies in transcendent power.”

II

Of all controversialists (and he dearly loved a verbal encounter) to whom I have ever listened, Swinburne was incomparably the most crushing. He fought with scrupulous and knightly fairness, never stooping to take a mean advantage of an adversary, and listening patiently, punctiliously even, while the other side was making its points. But, when his turn came, he carried everything before him. Vesuvius in eruption could not more effectually overwhelm or consume the rubble around its crater than Swinburne could scarify or sweep away, by a lava-torrent of burning words, the most weighty arguments of his opponents.

So, too, with his conversation. When he was moved by his subject, when he talked in dead earnest, he did nothing else. He forgot everything. In the middle, or even at the beginning of a meal, he would lay down knife and fork, and turn to face his listener, quite oblivious of, or indifferent to the fact that his dinner or lunch was spoiling.

On one occasion I happened, half-way through lunch, to mention that I had in my pocket a copy of Christina Rossetti’s latest poem, written in memory of the Duke of Clarence, and entitled The Death of a First-born.

Down went knife and fork as he half rose from his chair to stretch a hand across the table for the manuscript.

“She is as a god to mortals when compared to most other living women poets,” he exclaimed in a burst of Swinburnian hyperbole.

Then in his thin, high-pitched but exquisitely modulated and musical voice he half read, half chanted two verses of the poem in question:

One young life lost, two happy young lives blighted
With earthward eyes we see:
With eyes uplifted, keener, farther-sighted
We look, O Lord, to Thee.

Grief hears a funeral knell: Hope hears the ringing
Of birthday bells on high.
Faith, Hope and Love make answer with soft singing,
Half carol and half cry.

Then he stopped abruptly.

“I won’t read the third and last verse,” he said. “One glance at it is sufficient to show that it is unequal, and that the poem would be stronger and finer by its omission. But for the happy folk who are able to think as she thinks, who believe as she believes on religious matters, the poem is of its kind perfect. Let me read that second verse again,” and with glowing eyes, with hand marking time to the music, he read once more:

Grief hears a funeral knell: Hope hears the ringing
Of birthday bells on high.
Faith, Hope and Love make answer with soft singing,
Half carol and half cry.

The last line, “Half carol and half cry,” he repeated three times, lowering his voice with each repetition, until at last it was little more than a whisper, and so died away, like the undistinguishable ceasing of far-off music.

Laying the manuscript reverently beside him, he sat perfectly still for a space and with brooding beautiful eyes. Then rising without a word he stole silently, softly, almost ghost-like, but with short, swift steps out of the room.

III

Though it was my privilege to count among my friends several personal friends of Swinburne—notably the late Theodore Watts-Dunton, Philip Bourke Marston, and the dearest and closest of all my friends, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton—it was not until the first weeks of 1892 that I met him personally.

I was invited to lunch at The Pines, and the first thing that struck me as I entered the dining-room and took the extended hand, which was soft and limp, and had no sturdiness in the grasp, was the singular charm and even courtliness of his bearing. Unmistakably an aristocrat, and with all the ease and polish which one associates with high breeding, there was, even in the cordiality with which he rose and came forward to welcome me, a suspicion of the shy nervousness of the introspective man and of the recluse on first facing a stranger. It had passed in a few minutes, and I saw no trace of it at any of our subsequent meetings, but to the last his courtliness remained. I have seen him angry, I have heard him furiously dissent from and even denounce the views put forward by others, but never once was what, for want of a better word, I must call his personal deference to those others relaxed. With him the proverbial familiarity which is said to breed contempt, bred only more consistent and insistent courtesy. To no one would he defer quite so graciously and readily, to no one was he so scrupulously courtly in his bearing, as to those who constituted the household in which he lived. On the occasion of this first meeting with him he talked with extraordinary animation, sitting up erectly in his chair and moving his body or limbs stiffly and jerkily. He had not long returned from his forenoon walk, and, if I may be pardoned so far-fetched a comparison, he was like a newly-opened bottle of champagne, bubbling and brimming over with the buoyant, beady, joyous and joy-giving wine of morning. Watts-Dunton, always generously ready to interest himself, and to endeavour to interest others, in the work of a young writer of ability, was anxious to talk about my friend, Richard Le Gallienne. He might as well, by making a stopper of his open hand, have tried permanently to prevent the overflow of the champagne bottle which I have used for the purpose of a fanciful comparison. The moment he withdrew his hand, the instant he ceased to speak of Le Gallienne, Swinburne, as represented by the newly-opened bottle, was bubbling over again about his walk. The wine of it was in his veins and seemed to have intoxicated him.

“There is no time like the morning for a walk!” he declared, turning to me with enthusiasm. “The sparkle, the exhilaration of it! I walk every morning of my life, no matter what the weather, pelting along all the time as fast as I can go; and it is entirely to my daily walk that I attribute my perfect health.”

On hearing that I, too, was a great, as well as a fast walker, Swinburne looked me up and down challengingly, and said with a smile that was almost like a merry boy’s:

“Yes! but I think I could outwalk you, and get there first, for all your six feet!” Then, turning to Watts-Dunton, he apologised playfully for having monopolised the talk, and said, “Now tell me about your young poet. His is certainly the most beautiful poet-face since Shelley’s.”

Watts-Dunton replied by reading some extracts from a “Note on Swinburne” which Le Gallienne had contributed to Literary Opinion, Swinburne listening with downbent head meanwhile. When Watts-Dunton had made an end of it, and Swinburne had expressed his appreciation, the latter inquired how I first came to know Le Gallienne, and learning that when I was acting as the Editor of the English edition of Lippincott’s Magazine I had, in that capacity or incapacity, accepted one of Le Gallienne’s first published articles, The Nature Poems of George Meredith, he asked if I knew Sir J. M. Barrie, who he considered had been much influenced by the author of The Ordeal of Richard Feverel.

“Only slightly,” I answered. “I suggested, in fact organised a dinner to dear old F. W. Robinson, in whose magazine Home Chimes much of the early work of Barrie, Jerome K. Jerome, Zangwill, Eden Phillpotts, G. B. Burgin, and many others, who have since come into their own, appeared. Jerome took the chair and Barrie the vice-chair, and the dinner was something of a record in the list of distinguished men present, and was, I believe, one of the few functions of the sort of which an account appeared in the Athenæum. It was there I first met Barrie.”

“Robinson of Grandmother’s Money,” cried Swinburne in an ecstasy of enthusiasm. “You have mentioned the name of one of the very salt of the earth, and one of the dearest friends of both of us here. We contributed to the first number of Home Chimes. Watts-Dunton wrote a noble Sonnet of Greeting, and I printed my Sonnet Near Cromer there. His novels, I grant, though eminently readable, as the reviewers say, are not great. Unlike Dr. Gilbert’s, they do not dovetail. Finishing one chapter, you are not restless and uneasy till you have read the next, and that is a fatal defect in a novelist.”

Speaking of Robinson and Home Chimes reminded Swinburne of the fact that it was in that unfortunately named and defunct magazine that he had seen some of the best work of Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet, concerning whom I had contributed an article to the current number of the Fortnightly Review. This article Swinburne had read and wished to discuss, for, whereas my friendship with Philip Marston was not of long standing, he had known the blind poet since the latter was a lad of fourteen, and on the day after Philip’s death had written a memorial sonnet which was subsequently printed in the Athenæum.

Swinburne’s remarks upon the subject of my article—though I need hardly say I have forgotten no word of what he said—I pass over, but what I must not pass over is the witness these remarks bore to his extraordinary memory and to his equally extraordinary method of reading. Reading, in fact, is not the word. Had he parsed the article, schoolboy wise, sentence by sentence, he could not more effectually have mastered it; had he dissected it, part by part, surgeon-like, he could not more completely have torn the heart out of the matter.

Obviously Swinburne could only have read the thing once, yet had I, the writer, been called upon, even while it was fresh in my memory, to pass an examination on this very article, I doubt whether I should have known half as much of it as he. Hearing him thus deliver himself upon a casual contribution to a periodical, which, by reason of his love and friendship for the blind poet with whom the article dealt, had chanced to interest him, I could understand how his single brain had been able to deal illuminatingly with so vast a volume of literature as he had from time to time passed under review. His power of concentration, and of pouncing, hawk-like, upon what seemed to him to be memorable or salient, as well as his ability to recollect all he had read, must have been extraordinary.

A more exhaustive summing up—not, I admit, of the evidence on both sides, but of the evidence which appealed to his individual judgment, his individual imagination, and his individual taste—I have never heard. Prejudiced as he was, however, in favour of Marston, he would not go so far as Rossetti, for his last word on the subject was:

“When Gabriel spoke of Philip’s poem, The Rose and the Wind, as ‘worthy of Shakespeare in his subtlest lyrical mood,’ he let his personal affection run away with his critical judgment, and his verdict must always be discounted by the fact that Philip was the aptest pupil in the School of Poetry in which Rossetti was the acknowledged master. Watts-Dunton is a much surer guide, and when he said that ‘So perfect a lyric as The Rose and the Wind should entitle Marston to a place of his own, and that no inconsiderable one,’ he said the true word, the deserved word, and the word which I do not think anyone will have the hardihood to dispute.”

IV

When next I met Swinburne, nearly twelve months had gone by, and, in spite of the eager way in which at our first meeting he had talked of the men and women and things within his own mental horizon, I should not have been in the least surprised to find that he had practically forgotten me. I do not say this in any spirit of mock modesty, but because I remembered that, at that first meeting, I had mentioned, in the course of conversation, a book by a certain author who to my knowledge had been a visitor to The Pines on several occasions, and so must personally have been well known to Swinburne.

“Oh, really!” he said. “Yes, now that you mention it, I believe that someone of that name has been so good as to come and see us. I seem to recall him. And I seem to remember hearing someone say that he had written something, though I don’t remember exactly what. So he has published a book upon the subject of which we are talking. Really? I did not know.”

This was said with perfect courtesy, and without the remotest intention of administering a snub either to me or to the literary reputation of the writer in question. It meant no more than that Swinburne lived so apart from the rest of the world, had such power of detachment, and kept so habitually the company only of his books and of his peers, that the personality of the rest of us left no impression on him.

On this occasion, only Watts-Dunton, Miss Teresa Watts, his sister, Swinburne, and myself were present, and the talk turned at first upon William Rossetti, with whom, in his home at St. Edmund’s Terrace, Regent’s Park, I had spent an hour or two on the previous afternoon. Both Swinburne and Watts-Dunton were interested to hear news of their old friend whom both regretted seeing so seldom. They plied me with innumerable questions in regard to his health, his plans, even in regard to trivial details about his home life, not omitting mention of his sister Christina’s beloved cat “Muff,” and the red plush sofa on which Shelley was supposed to have slept, the night before his death, and that now stands in the library. Both my hearers were touched when I spoke of Rossetti’s affectionate words about William Morris, for whom, though “Topsy” (as he called Morris) and he had not met five times in twenty years, Rossetti to the last entertained the old affection. Rossetti’s vivid recollection of the day of the funeral of Watts-Dunton’s mother, some fifteen years before, when there was so terrible a blizzard that he could get no conveyance to Endsleigh Gardens—where he was then living—and had to fight his way home on foot in a blinding snowstorm, was naturally of special interest to Watts-Dunton. Much more was said, and many other questions were asked, upon which I do not propose here to linger, passing on, instead, to speak of the sudden flaming up of Swinburne at the mention by Rossetti of William Bell Scott as having once been a drawing master.

“Perfectly true! Perfectly true!” interpolated Swinburne angrily, “and a drawing master he remained to his life’s end.”

For the remainder of my stay he talked vivaciously, and here I should like to say that in all that has been written about his personality—his eccentricities, excitability and exclusiveness; his passionate love of the sea and of little children; the changes that his political views underwent; his chivalrous championship of his friends against all comers, and the savage onslaught upon Robert Buchanan; his sturdy patriotism, and his historic friendships—very little has been said of the lighter side of his nature. That he could wield in controversy the lash of satire and irony, and wield it mercilessly, more than one combatant has had cause to know, and there are alive to-day ancient enemies of his whose backs must still tingle at memory of some of his onslaughts. But of his wit and humour in daily life and the sunny playfulness of his banter in conversation with his friends, one seldom hears. I have known him keep the table alive for an hour at a time by whimsical and deliciously humorous and caustic comments on the topics—political, literary, or artistic—of the day.

On this particular morning he was anxious to show me a review of Kriegspiel, that most remarkable novel by the late Francis Hinde Groome, son of the famous archdeacon, the intimate of Edward FitzGerald, with whom Frank Groome had himself been well acquainted as a boy.

With Groome—who, as my readers know, was, like Watts-Dunton and the late Charles Godfrey Leland, an accomplished student of Gipsy Life, Gipsy Language, and Gipsy Lore—I was myself on terms of friendship, and indeed had been of some small service to him in regard to the publication of Kriegspiel, knowing which, Swinburne was anxious to hear whether I thought the review could be used to assist the sale of the book, and so elected to go upstairs to his room to get it.

He returned with a face like that of a schoolboy intent upon mischief, and with a rolled up journal in his hand. After I had read the review of Kriegspiel, and proposed sending it on to the publisher, Watts-Dunton inquired, pointing to the roll which Swinburne was still holding:

“What have you got there?”

“To-day’s Graphic,” was the reply. “I noticed it sticking out of the pocket of your greatcoat, hanging in the hall, and peeping inside saw that there was an illustrated supplement, Poets of the Day, so I wouldn’t even look to see whether you and I are included, but brought it here that we might all go through it together. What heart-burning and hair-tearing there will be in the poetical dovecotes, in regard to who is in, and who is out! Why didn’t you tell me of it before?”

“Because I didn’t know anything about it,” was the reply. “It was from Kernahan’s coat, not mine, that you took it. We all pick each other’s brains in Grub Street, but picking pockets is quite another matter.”

Swinburne apologised, but held on to the Graphic tenaciously. Then he opened it, smoothed out the page, and ran through the pictured poets, cataloguing them, complimenting them or chaffing them upon their appearance or their poetry, even improvising suitable epitaphs for their obsequies in Westminster Abbey, or composing, on the spur of the moment, Nonsense Verses and Limericks that hit off with delicious humour or mordant irony the personal or poetical peculiarities of the different “bards,” as he called them.

Now that he, and so many of these “bards” are, alas, gone, I hesitate to repeat in cold blood, and so long after, what was said on the spur of the moment, and among friends. But, tantalising as it may be to the reader, especially if that reader be a poet, and so possibly an interested party, to be told merely of witty sayings of which no specimen is forthcoming, I must hold my hand, as I have been compelled to hold it in other pages of these Recollections. We have it on the authority of Mr. Clement Shorter that one must be indiscreet to be entertaining, and I agree with him so far as to admit that, in Recollections, the best must always be that which remains unwritten.

After Swinburne had exhausted the Graphic, I produced, from the pocket of the pirated greatcoat, yet another journal, to which a certain critic had contributed a somewhat feeble article upon the work and poetry of Swinburne himself. I read it aloud, to the accompaniment of ironic laughter on the part of Watts-Dunton, Miss Watts and myself, but Swinburne, though he had hugely enjoyed it, and had interpolated sly comments of exaggerated gratitude, said, when I had made an end and with a wave of dismissal:

“It is meant kindly, and when the intention is so obviously kind one must not be too ungenerously critical.”

Thereafter we talked of Ireland, Swinburne having only recently learned or recently realised that I hailed from that land of poets turned politicians. I suspect that the fact of my nationality was responsible for much of his kindness to me, for, laugh at us as many Englishmen may and do, in their hearts they have a sneaking liking for men and women of Irish birth. I had said that I should be leaving soon after lunch, and after he had bidden me good-bye, and had retired for his afternoon sleep, he returned, not once, but two or three times, and with an impulsiveness which was almost Irish, to speak again and yet again of Ireland and especially of Irish poetry.

It had been my good fortune the night before to take in Mrs. Lynn Linton to dinner at the beautiful and hospitable home of Sir Bruce and Lady Seton at Chelsea, and Mrs. Lynn Linton and I had talked much of Ireland. Mentioning this to Swinburne, he said that he had once written to Mrs. Lynn Linton remonstrating violently with her about an article of hers on Ireland, and he had reason to believe that his words had not been without effect, as, since then, Mrs. Lynn Linton had come to think as he had on that question, and was of opinion that Gladstone, Morley and Harcourt ought to have been impeached for high treason. Reverting to books, he said that nothing so beautiful about Ireland had been written as the Hon. Emily Lawless’s novel Grania, then fresh from the press. He had bought a number of copies to send to his own friends, as well as some to send to his aunt, Lady Mary Gordon, for distribution in her circle. He went on to say that his old friend, Dr. Whitley Stokes, had shown him some of the Irish songs which were sung to the tunes to which Tom Moore afterwards wrote his “mawkish and sentimental songs.” One of these, Swinburne said, had since been reprinted in the Academy.

“And as poetry I can only compare it to the Book of Job—and what more superlatively splendid praise can I offer than that?”

Here Watts-Dunton put in a word for Wales and incidentally for Scotland, which reminds me that I ought to say that Watts-Dunton’s share in this, and in other conversations, was no less interesting, though less erratic and more considered than Swinburne’s.

Switched off thus from Ireland to Scotland, Swinburne launched out into enthusiastic praise of the islands of Rum and Eig, the nomenclature of which, he said, was phonetically and fatally suggestive of a nourishing, if nauseous drink, not to be despised, he understood, after an early morning swim, and declared that the one thing which made him regret he was not a man of wealth was that he could not afford to yield to the desire of his heart, and spend half his time cruising in a yacht around the western islands of Scotland.

V

Perhaps the most treasured possession on my bookshelves is a volume in which Swinburne has inscribed my name and his own. The volume in question is his Studies in Prose and Poetry, and as, among the contents, there is an article devoted entirely to a consideration of the merits and defects of Lyra Elegantiarum, in the editorial work of the last edition of which it was my honour and privilege to collaborate with the original compiler, the late Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson, I may perhaps be pardoned for referring to it here.

The fact that Swinburne was making Lyra Elegantiarum the subject of an important article (it appeared first in the Forum) was told to me when I was lunching one day at The Pines, and naturally I carried the news of the compliment which his book was to receive to Mr. Locker-Lampson.

“Compliment!” he exclaimed. “Yes, it will be a compliment. Any editors might well be proud that the result of their labours should be the subject of an article by Swinburne. But pray heaven he be merciful, for I fear our expected compliment is like to turn out to be something of a castigation.”

Mr. Locker-Lampson was not far wrong, for, when the article appeared, we found that Swinburne had as roundly rated the editors as he had generously praised.

I sent Swinburne a copy of the édition de luxe, a gift with which he was delighted, and indeed procured other copies to give to friends and relations, one in a binding of his own designing being, I think, for his mother. When next I was at The Pines, he inquired whether Mr. Locker-Lampson and I were pleased with his review.

“How could we be otherwise than pleased by any article upon the book by the author of Atalanta in Calydon?” I replied.

“But you were pleased with what I said?”

“Of course, but you must forgive me if I say that it was very much as if a schoolmaster had called up a boy out of the class, and, after lavishing undeserved praise upon him for good behaviour, had then taken him across his knee and thrashed him soundly for abominably bad conduct.”

He dived among the litter of papers, reviews, letters and manuscripts upon the floor, for a copy of his article, and then read aloud:

“‘There is no better or completer anthology in the language. I doubt indeed if there be any so good or so complete. No objection or suggestion that can reasonably be offered, can in any way diminish our obligation, either to the original editor, or to his evidently able assistant Mr. Kernahan.’

“Doesn’t that please you?” he enquired.

“Immeasurably,” I said.

“And there is more of it,” he went on, reading detached passages aloud. “‘The editors to their lasting honour ... the instinctive good sense, the manly and natural delicacy of the present editors ... this radiant and harmonious gallery of song.’ And so on and so on.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is the so ons that I’m thinking of. Suppose we dip into them.” Then I took the article from his hand and read as follows: “‘If elegance is the aim or the condition of this anthology, how comes it to admit such an unsurpassably horrible example as the line—I refrain from quoting it—which refers to the “settling” of “Gibson’s hash”?... The worst positive blemish—and a most fearful blemish it is ... will unluckily be found, and cannot be overlooked, on the fourth page. Sixth on the list of selected poems, is a copy of verses attributed to Shakespeare—of all men on earth!—by the infamous pirate, liar, and thief, who published a worthless little volume of stolen and mutilated poetry, patched up and padded out with dreary and dirty doggrel, under the preposterous title of The Passionate Pilgrim.... Happily there is here no second instance—but naturally there could not have been a second—of such amazing depravity of taste.’

“In fact,” I said, “your review of the book recalls to my mind the familiar lines by Bickerstaff, which are to be found in this very volume:

When late I attempted your pity to move
What made you so deaf to my prayers?
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But why did you kick me downstairs?

You remember Jeffery Prowse’s lines about someone being ‘problematically sober, but indubitably drunk’?” I went on. “The ‘dissembling’ of ‘your love’ in the opening sentences of your article may be ‘problematical,’ but the ‘kicking’ of us ‘downstairs,’ and out of the door later on, is as ‘indubitable’ as is the fact that the book is profoundly honoured by being reviewed by Algernon Charles Swinburne at all.”

With that parting shot, at which he laughed heartily, I bade him good-bye and came away, to find on returning to my home, a letter from Mr. Locker-Lampson which, as it has no word that can be considered private, and deals with matters of general literary interest, as well as with some of the strictures by Swinburne that have been quoted above, I venture to append:

Newhaven Court, Cromer,
17th Oct.

Dear Kernahan,

I have just been reading the Forum for October, and I think that altogether we may be satisfied with A. C. S.’s article.

I venture to think that he rather overrates Landor and underrates Calverley.

We should not have inserted ‘Youth and Art’ [the lines by Browning referring to ‘Gibson’s hash’ to which Mr. Swinburne took such objection] or ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ or Croker’s ‘Miss Peel.’ We ought to have put in Pope’s ‘I know a thing.’

I remember talking to Tennyson about Dirce, and he said it was too classical for English taste. I do not think many people would care for it, but perhaps it might be added. Stygean Set is not a cultivated expression, not better than lot, and if Dirce was a shade it did not matter whether Charon forgot himself or not.

I really feel much obliged to Mr. Swinburne for whom I have sincere regard. Perhaps if you see him you will tell him of my obligation.

His article strengthens my decided opinion that the book is a very difficult one to edit. All the experts have different ideas about it. Lang, Swinburne, Gosse, Dobson, and Palgrave are all opposed.

I hope you are quite well.

Always truly,
F. L. L.

VI

In all my conversations with Swinburne, I cannot recall one instance of his interrupting a speaker. He would, it is true, go off at a conversational tangent, as when, talking of Francis Hinde Groome and Suffolk, he interpolated apparently irrelevant remarks upon the curious names of some Yorkshire villages, having presumably only discovered that morning that one of these villages bore the delightful name of “Beggar my Neighbour.” But, though one could see by his flashing eye that the hounds of utterance were chafing and fretting to fling themselves upon the quarry, he invariably waited till the other speaker had made an end of it before letting go the leash. To everything that Watts-Dunton said, then or at any time, he listened almost as a disciple might listen to a master, and again and again he urged me to use any influence I had with the author of Aylwin to induce him to give that then unpublished work to the world, and to allow his Athenæum essays to be collected and issued in book form.

“Only,” said Swinburne at a white heat of enthusiastic admiration, “if every page, on which they were printed, represented a hundred pound bank-note; if the back and the sides of the cover were of the finest beaten gold—that would not be too costly a raiment for the noblest critical work, dealing with first principles, that has ever been given to the world.”

That this was Swinburne’s deliberate opinion of the value of his brother poet’s and brother friend’s work, and was not the expression of a moment’s enthusiasm, I have reason to know, for he used similar expressions in my presence on many occasions. I observe, too, that Mr. James Douglas, in his book Theodore Watts-Dunton, Poet, Novelist, and Critic, quotes Swinburne as describing Watts-Dunton as “the first critic of his time, perhaps the largest minded and surest sighted of any age”—a judgment which, as Mr. Douglas reminds us, Rossetti endorsed.

Watts-Dunton, rumpling up his hair with one hand, tried to turn the conversation into other channels, but Swinburne was obdurate.

“You, who know Walter’s magnificent, magician-like power of concentrating into the fourteen lines of a sonnet what no other poet could have said with equal power and felicity in forty, will agree with me when I tell you what perhaps you do not know, for he never speaks of it himself. When he was a young man, he lost a manuscript book of poems of which he had no copy. By these lost poems the world is, I believe, as poor as if Gabriel Rossetti’s early poems had never been recovered from his wife’s coffin. It was an incomparable loss to literature, a loss which can never be replaced.”

I did not know of these lost poems, for, intimate as I had been with Watts-Dunton for many years, he had never even hinted at their existence, or rather at their non-existence. But, except to admit the loss and to make light of it, he refused to be drawn either by Swinburne or by myself, and turned the conversation upon the former’s Ode to Music, written, I think, for the opening of the Chicago Exhibition. But of this Swinburne, in his turn, refused to talk, averring that he had clean forgotten it—that a task like that, once completed, he never thought of again, and that his mind was full at the moment of his Tennyson Threnody.

On this occasion I saw yet another side of him. I had brought with me two bunches of exquisite flowers—arum lilies, lilies of the valley, snowdrops and some exotics—one for Miss Teresa Watts, one for Swinburne. A flower was to him as it had been to Philip Marston, the one unchanging and perfect thing in a changing and decaying world, as fair, as fresh and as immortal as in the days of our youth. In an ecstasy of delight, he took the flowers from my outstretched hand as reverently as the communicant takes into his hands the consecrated bread of the sacrament, as tenderly as a young mother takes into her arms her new-born child. He bent his head over them in a rapture that was almost like a prayer, his eyes when he looked up to thank me for the gift alight and brimming over with thoughts that were not far from tears. For many minutes he sat holding them, turning them this way and that, too rapt in his worship to speak or to think of anything else.

Then he turned to Miss Watts with his courtly bow.

“As you have been as equally honoured as I, you will not think me robbing you if I carry my bunch away with me to put them in water and to place them in my own room. I want to find them there when I wake in the morning.”

He rose in his quiet way, the flowers in his hand, bowed again to Miss Watts and myself and left the room. In a few minutes the door reopened, but only wide enough to let him slip through, and he stole, rather than walked, to the chair, where he seated himself among us again, almost as noiselessly as a card is shuffled back to its place in the pack.

VII

“Watts-Dunton writes poetry because he loves writing it,” said Swinburne to me once. “I write poetry, I suppose, to escape from boredom.”

There is truth in the statement, but there is more behind the statement than appears at the first glance.

New and incoming tides of poetry lapped at his feet each morning, and the incoming of each new tide of poetry was to him as fresh, pure, crystalline-sweet, and free, as is the tide that rolls in upon the shore each day from the vastnesses and the sweetnesses of the central sea.

Hence he gave himself up to it, plunged in it, sported in it, with the zeal and rapture of a boy. Had the call to think poetry, dream poetry, write poetry, plunge himself into poetry, come to him as part of a set task, had he been compelled, in the mood or out of the mood, to take up poetry as an occupation, he would have turned from it as the sea-loving swimmer turns from a stagnant pool. It would have been to him the “boredom” of which he had spoken, not the “escape from boredom.”

I have said that the impression I formed of him after my first visit was that of a man who lived in a world of his own—a world which, so far as his body was concerned, was, with the exception of his experiences on and by the sea, bounded, for the greater part of his later life, by the four walls of his home, and by the limits of his daily walk, but which, in the imaginative and mental sense, was illimitable. Human and normal in passion, and in every other respect, as I believe him to have been (so far, that is to say, as genius, which by overbalancing one side of a man’s nature, inevitably necessitates some underbalancing on the other, ever can be said to be normal), he had seemed to me, on the occasion of that first visit, a creature of other flesh and blood than ours, an elusive ethereal poetic essence, rather than a man of like passions to our own.

It had seemed to me as if the busy world, in which other men made love and married, begot children, bought and sold, laboured and schemed—though it lay outside his very door—was a million miles away from the monastic quiet of the book-lined room in which he lived and dreamed and wrote.

I do not say that it was so. All I say is that it had seemed so to me on that first meeting, but I am not sure that the impression I then formed was accurate.

I came away feeling as if I had been in the company of a creature living in an unreal world, whereas now I think that, to the man whom I had left behind in that book-lined room, life was infinitely more real than it is to us. I had left behind me, given over to ecstatic abandonment to the mood of the moment, and believing intensely in the reality and actuality of all which that mood called forth, or created, a child at play with his toys, for in spite of the magnificence and the maturity of his intellect (may I not say because of the magnificence and the maturity of his intellect?) the child lived on and was alive to the last in Algernon Charles Swinburne as it lives in few others.

What he had meant when he spoke of writing poetry “to escape from boredom” was that he was a tired child turning for comfort, self-forgetfulness and consolation to his toys; and to him (happy man!) even his life-work, even Poetry itself, was, in a sense, a toy. That was why to the last he turned to it—an old man in years, though I could never bring myself to think of him as old—with such eager and childlike anticipation. The child heart, which could exult and build up dreams around his toys, remained; but his toys were changed—that was all. That was why he so loved and was so loved by children. They recognised him, bearded man as he was, as one of themselves. That was why he was so instantly at home with them, and they with him. That, too, was why he so revelled in Mr. Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age—not with the mild reminiscent and ruminant interest and pleasure of a staid grown-up, chewing the cud of childhood, but with a boy of ten’s actual and intense identification with, and abandonment of himself to the part he was acting, and with all a boy of ten’s natural and innate love of fun and of mischief. I have seen him literally dance and caper and whistle (yes, whistle) with all an eager boy’s rapture, over some new toy treasure-trove, in the shape of a poem, by himself or by a friend, a “find” in the shape of a picture, a print, or a coveted first edition, picked up, during his rambles, at a stall.

“Eccentricity of genius,” you say?

Not at all. It meant merely that his boyhood was as immortal as his genius, as ineradicable as his intellectual greatness.

Warm as was my regard for Algernon Charles Swinburne the man, profound as is my admiration of him as a poet, I am not sure that to this child-side of him must not be attributed much that was noblest and most lovable in his noble and lovable personality, as well as much that was loftiest and most enduring in his work.

Of him we must say, as Mr. William Watson has so finely said of Tennyson, that he

Is heard for ever, and is seen no more;

but in seeking, for the purpose of these Recollections, to conjure the living man before me, in striving to recall my conversations with him, and in remembering, as I always do and shall remember, his great-heartedness, I am reminded of what Watts-Dunton once said to me in a letter.

“You will recall,” he wrote, “what Swinburne was remarking to you the other day, when we were discussing the envy, hatred and malice of a certain but very small section of the literary craft. ‘Yes,’ said Swinburne, ‘but these are the intellectually-little writing fellows who do not matter and who do not count. The biggest men, intellectually, are always the biggest-natured. Great hearts go generally with great brains.’”

And I think—I am sure—that the saying is true.

LORD ROBERTS

“ORDERED OUT”

In Memoriam: Roberts, F.M., V.C.

Died on Service, 1914

“When I was ordered out——”

Lord Roberts, in a letter to the writer.

Prouder to serve than to command was he:
“When I was ordered”—thus a soldier’s soul
Answered, as from the ranks, the muster roll,
When came the call: “England hath need of thee.”

At Duty’s bidding, not by Glory lured,
For peace, not war, he strove; and peace was his—
Not the base peace which more disastrous is
Than war, but peace abiding and assured.

Thereafter followed long, untroubled years,
Wherein some said: “See rise the star of peace,
The morn of Arbitration. Wars must cease.
Away with sword and shield—Millennium nears!”

“Keep shield to breast, keep bright your sword, and drawn!”
Rang out his answer. “On the horizon’s rim
I see great armies gather, and the dim,
Grey mists of Armageddon’s bloody dawn!”

Few heeded, many scoffed, some merry grew,
And “Dotard!” cried, because, for England’s sake
For whom his son lay dead, he bade her wake,
And a great soldier spoke of what he knew.

Yet spoke—distasteful task!—against his will;
Death he had dared, but dared not silent be—
That were to England blackest treachery—
Wherefore he spoke: his voice is sounding still!

Even the while he spoke, the while they mocked
(With silent dignity their taunts were borne),
Europe, that laughing rose, as ’twere at morn,
At night, distraught, and in delirium rocked.

As the hung avalanche is suddenly hurled
Down the abyss, though but a pebble stirred,
So a crowned monster’s will, a Kaiser’s word,
Plunged into Armageddon half a world,

And Chaos was again. Crashed the blue skies
Above, as if to splinters. Was God dead?
Or deaf? or dumb? or reigned there, in His stead,
Only a devil in a God’s disguise?

Staggered and stunned, our England backward reeled
A moment. Then, magnificent, erect,
Flashed forth her sword, her ally to protect,
And over prostrate Belgium cast her shield.

Above the babel of voices, mists of doubt,
Rang forth his stern “To arms!” England to nerve;
Too old to fight, but not too old to serve,
Again he hears the call—is “ordered out.”

“Roberts!” the voice was Duty’s, arm’d and helm’d,
“To France! where India, greatly loyal, lands
Her stalwarts, and the bestial horde withstands
That raped and ravaged, burned and overwhelmed

“Heroic Belgium. Roberts, ’gainst the foe
No voice like thine can the swart Indians fire
To valour, and to loyalty inspire;
Roberts! to France!” Came answer calm: “I go.”

Nor once reproached: “I warned. You gave no heed,”
Nor pleaded fourscore years—“Ah, that I could!”
He who had England saved, an England would,
Only of England thought, in England’s need.

Then, where, on high, God captains legions bright
(On earth is Armageddon, and in hell—
May it not be?—Satan leads forth his fell
And fallen hosts, the heavens to storm and smite?)

Yea, from on high, from heaven’s supreme redoubt,
Came the last call of all, far-sounding, clear;
God spoke his name; he answered: “I am here.”
Stood to salute; again was “ordered out.”

From Camp to Camp he passed—beyond the sun’s
Red track, to where the immortal armies are,
Honoured of God, Hero of peace and war,
Amid the thunder-requiem of the guns.

C. K.

I

It was a score or more years ago, and at the Old Vagabond Club (now merged into the Playgoers) that I first met Lord Roberts. When he became the President of the Club, we celebrated the event by a dinner at which he was the guest of honour and Jerome K. Jerome was the Chairman. As one of the original members of the Club and as a member of the Executive Committee, I was introduced to the great soldier. All I expected was a bow, a handshake, and a “How-do-you-do,” but Lord Roberts was as good as to be more gracious and cordial than any great soldier, even if an Irishman, ever was before—so at least it seemed to me—to a scribbler of sorts, whom he was meeting for the first time. He was, in fact, so very kind that I was emboldened to ask a favour. Among the guests was a young officer in what was then the Artillery Volunteers. I knew it would immensely gratify him to meet the Field-Marshal, so towards the close of the conversation I ventured to say:

“It has been a very great honour and pleasure Lord Roberts, to me to meet you and to have this talk. I wonder whether you’ll think me trespassing on your kindness if I ask to be allowed to present an acquaintance of mine? He is a Volunteer Officer, a junior subaltern in the Artillery, and to meet you would, I am sure, be a red-letter day in his life. Would you allow me to present him?”

“Why of course. I shall be delighted. Bring him along by all means,” was the reply.

The young man was accordingly presented. The reader will hardly believe me when I say that this Volunteer Subaltern of Artillery thought well to instruct the Master Gunner in the science of gunnery, and in fact to tell the Field-Marshal what in his, the Volunteer Subaltern’s, opinion was wrong with the British Army.

Had Lord Roberts replied civilly but curtly, as some in his place would have done: “You think so, do you? Oh indeed! Very interesting, I’m sure. Good evening,” and walked away, one could hardly have wondered. But no, he heard the other out with perfect courtesy, if with resignation, and in his own mind, no doubt, with amusement.

I reminded Lord Roberts of the incident when I came to know him better, and he replied with a laugh:

“I recall the matter perfectly, for I like to think I have a retentive memory. Of course I was, as you say, amused at the young man’s assurance and confidence in his own military knowledge. Many very young men are prone either to too great diffidence or to too great assurance. I think, on the whole, I incline to envy the young man with plenty of assurance, especially as I was disposed to be diffident myself at his age, as many of us Irishmen, for all our seeming confidence, are. But in any case I owed it to you, who had introduced him, as well as to myself, to treat him outwardly at least with courtesy and consideration.”

That was Lord Roberts’ charming and kind way of putting it; but to me, a young man myself when the incident happened, it was a lesson in fine breeding and in fine manners on the part of a great soldier and great gentleman.

I heard afterwards that the Volunteer Subaltern of Artillery, in speaking at a Distribution of Prizes to members of his corps, the very evening following upon his one and only meeting with the Field-Marshal, made frequent use of such phrases as “When I was talking to Lord Roberts about the matter,” “What I told Lord Roberts ought to be done,” and so on, no doubt to his own satisfaction and possibly with the result that the members of the audience were for the first time made to realise what a very important figure he was in the military world. Later on, however, some one who knew the facts wrote to him suggesting that the book for which the world was literally panting was a work from his pen entitled My Recollections of Lord Roberts, and when the Boer War broke out, a telegram, purporting to come from Lord Roberts, urging the Volunteer Artilleryman to take supreme command in South Africa, was dispatched to him by a playful friend. I have no doubt the young man, who will now be getting elderly, would be the first to laugh at his own youthful self-confidence, and that if this paper should by any chance meet his eye, he will pardon me for thus, and for the first time, telling the tale in print.

Here is an instance of Lord Roberts’ kindness to and interest in younger men. A Territorial Captain—his brother, an officer in the Regular Army, told me the story—was taking part in a Field Day with his battalion in Berkshire. His instructions were that he was to hold a certain line of country at all costs. It so happened that the attack developed in a direction which made it necessary for him hurriedly to advance his men to a flank and away from his reserves, whom he had posted where they were under cover and out of sight of the enemy. The young officer (he was a junior subaltern recently joined) in command of the reserves evidently had very mistaken ideas in regard to discipline. His idea appeared to be that discipline consists in staying where you were originally told to stay, like the “boy on the burning deck” in the poem of Casabianca, until receiving orders to another effect. Needless to say, the very reverse is true. Soldiers to-day are taught clearly to observe events and to act on their own initiative should unexpected developments arise. Seeing that the tide of war was drifting the Firing Line and its supports away from the reserves, the duty of the officer commanding the reserves was, not to remain stodgily where he had originally been placed (to do that would be less obedience to discipline than a breach of discipline), but while keeping the reserves directly in signalling communication with the Firing Line, as well as under cover and out of sight of the enemy, so to alter his own dispositions as to be ready to reinforce and to reinforce quickly when called upon to do so.

This, however, he failed to do, and when his superior officer, finding himself hard pressed, signalled for the reserves, there was no reply.

Unfortunately there was neither a galloper nor a cyclist at hand to carry a message. “If I don’t get my reserves here in half an hour,” he said, “I shall lose the position, and the loss of this position may mean, probably will mean, victory for the enemy all along the line. It shan’t be so if I can help it. Now what can I do?”

Hurriedly but keenly he scanned the rolling Berkshire down around him. Towards the north, on the whity-brown high road that curved outward in a huge half-circle from the point where he was standing, he saw a cloud of dust. “A motor! and coming this way!” he exclaimed. “Follow me, Brown.” (This to a non-commissioned officer.) Stooping low, so as not to offer a target to the enemy, he sprinted northwards in a line which intersected the high road, at the nearest point which the oncoming car must pass.

The motor was almost on him as he reached the road, and leaping into the centre held up his hand. “I beg your pardon, sir,” he said to the occupant, “but I’m in command of troops holding this position. We’re attacked in force, and my reserves are some distance away along the road in the direction you have come, near a copse. I’ve signalled for reinforcements, but they have not kept up their communications. I have neither a galloper nor a cyclist. If I get my reinforcements here in half an hour, I can hold the position. If I don’t, I lose it, and losing it means everything to the enemy. I wonder whether you’d be so very good as to lend me your car for a few minutes to carry a message!” “With the greatest pleasure,” said the occupant. Turning to the chauffeur he said, “You are entirely at this officer’s disposal. I shall walk on, and you can pick me up when he has done with you.” As he spoke he got out of the car, and as he lifted his cap, in response to the young officer’s salute and hasty word of thanks, the latter recognised Field-Marshal Lord Roberts.

A day or two later, the great soldier was celebrating his eightieth birthday, and received a letter from the officer in question. It was to remind Lord Roberts of the incident, to apologise for the liberty the young officer had taken in stopping the car, to thank him warmly for his kindness, and to mention that the reserves had been brought up at the double and in time to save the position. The officer concluded by asking to be allowed to congratulate the Field-Marshal on attaining his eightieth year and to express the hope that the great soldier might be spared to celebrate many similar anniversaries.

A reply came almost by return of post.

Dear Captain ——,

Many thanks for your letter and kind congratulations on my 80th birthday. I was delighted to be of assistance, and am even more delighted to learn the successful result of that assistance. You did the right and only thing in stopping my car. If ever you are this way and disengaged, I hope you will call and give me the pleasure of making the further acquaintance of so good and resourceful a soldier.

Yours truly,
Roberts.

After my first meeting with Lord Roberts at the Vagabond Club, I saw no more of him—except for a mere handshake and “How-do-you-do?” at a military function—for many years. Then I chanced, in April, 1910, to contribute to the London Quarterly Review an article on National Defence. It was addressed specially to Nonconformists, one of the opening paragraphs being as follows:

I do not for a moment believe that Nonconformists are one whit less patriotic than any other great religious body, but I fear there is some misconception on their part—due no doubt to the intolerance and the exaggeration of some of us who champion the cause of National Defence—in regard to our aims and our purposes. It is in the hope of removing some of these misconceptions that I pen the present paper.

The article I did not send to Lord Roberts, nor did I draw the attention of anyone connected with the National Service League of which he was President to it. I did nothing directly or indirectly to bring it under anyone’s notice. Yet a few days after the Review appeared, I received the following letter from him. The Rev. R. Allen of whom he speaks, I may say, was, and still is, an entire stranger to me, and I to him:

Englemere, Ascot, Berks,
April 4, 1910.

Dear Sir,

The Rev. R. Allen, a friend of many years’ standing, has been good enough to send me a copy of the London Quarterly Review for this month, and to draw my attention to the first article, written by you on “How to Defend England.”

I am delighted with the article itself, and with the very clear and convincing way in which you have put forward the advantages of military training and discipline for all our able-bodied young men as affecting not only the position of Great Britain as a World Power, but the individual moral and physical improvement of the men of the nation.

But I am still more delighted that such an article should be allowed to appear in a Journal published from the Wesleyan Book Room. I am quite at one with you in believing that Nonconformists are not one whit less patriotic than any other great religious body, but that there is some misconception on their part in regard to the aim and purpose of those who advocate universal military training for Home Defence.

My hope is that such misconception may be removed and that every Briton, whatever his position and whatever his sect, will realise the necessity for taking the defence of his country seriously.

Such articles as yours will do much to effect this, and to open the eyes of those who are now blind to England’s needs and England’s dangers before it is too late.

Yours truly,
Roberts.

Other men as greatly concerned in great matters as Lord Roberts was cannot always spare time to acknowledge and to show appreciation of work for a good cause, which is brought directly to their notice. Lord Roberts could find time, or perhaps I should say made time to write graciously about work the doer or the author of which had done nothing to bring that work under the Field-Marshal’s eye.

Thenceforward, no work of mine in the cause for National Defence was allowed to pass unrecognised, once it came under the notice of Lord Roberts—and not very much happened of which in some way or another he did not come to hear.

He followed the doings even of the rank and file under his command, and, like the great leader of men that he was, he thought none of them too humble to be honoured and heartened before going into battle, by a message from himself.

For instance, I was asked to give an address on National Defence to a great gathering of men—some 1500 or more as it turned out—at an Assault-at-Arms in the Kursaal at Worthing. Naturally I never trespassed upon such a busy man’s time by writing to him, unless in answer to a letter from himself, or unless I had something important of which to speak. So as I had not heard from Lord Roberts for some time, and had had no cause to write to him, I did not suppose he as much as knew of the Worthing meeting. Yet in opening the proceedings, the Mayor announced that he had just received a telegram from Lord Roberts to the effect that he was delighted I was to be the speaker that night, and warmly commending what I had to say to the attention of the audience.

Such a message and from such a quarter, did more to assure me—an entire stranger to my audience—a welcome and a friendly hearing than I could otherwise have hoped to receive.

One “Lost Chord” in the way of an unread message from Lord Roberts I often regret.

In the company of Mr. Neville P. Edwards, then an organising secretary of the National Service League, I went as an Honorary Helper of the League on three caravan tours in Kent and Sussex.

The last tour closed only a week or two before the outbreak of war, and Lord Roberts, who followed our progress with the keenest interest, sent us on several occasions by letter or by telegram a special message to deliver in his name to our audiences. These messages directly warned his fellow-countrymen of the imminence of war and of the necessity for preparation. Remembering that in the towns we often had an audience of one or two thousand, and even in the villages, of some hundreds, there must be many persons who now recall the weightiness and the gravity of the great soldier’s words. And I venture to add that no one whose privilege it was to hear them is likely ever to forget the equally grave, eloquent, and memorable words which fell from the lips of Mr. Rudyard Kipling—who by his single pen has done more to awaken the young manhood of the nation to England’s needs than any other writer living or dead—when he presided over one of our meetings. It seemed to me one of the ironies of fate that in the very caravan from which Lord Roberts’ message and Mr. Kipling’s words—both urgent warnings of imminent war—had been delivered, I should a few weeks later set forth as an Honorary Recruiting Officer in search of men to fight in the very war which Lord Roberts and Mr. Kipling had so faithfully foretold.

Before taking the chair and introducing Mr. Edwards and myself to our audience, Mr. Kipling said to me:

“I have just had a telegram from the Chief. He sent his thanks to me for presiding at the meeting, and asks that I convey his thanks to Edwards and to you. It is a very interesting and characteristic message, and I will read it when making my closing remarks to the meeting at the end.”

It so happened that the latter part of the meeting was a Lantern Slide Lecture by Mr. Edwards. His last slide was a portrait of the King, seeing which some one started “God Save the King,” and the audience, taking this as ending the meeting, broke up, and so we lost not only Lord Roberts’ telegram, but Mr. Kipling’s equally coveted closing words.

In nothing that I attempted for the cause that was so near to his heart, was Lord Roberts more keenly interested than in a controversy in the spring and summer of 1914 between an opponent of National Service, a very distinguished divine and scholar, and myself. My opponent’s article was headed, “Why we cannot accept conscription,” and mine “Why we support Lord Roberts.” To a reprint of the controversy in booklet form, published immediately after the outbreak of war, the Rev. John Telford, B.A., contributed an Editorial Foreword, in which he said:

“This discussion of the question of national armaments aroused extraordinary interest among a very wide circle of readers, as it appeared in The Magazine of the Wesleyan Methodist Church in March, April, May and June of this year. It also led to much correspondence in other journals. No one then dreamed of the terrible significance which events were to attach to the subject.... Here are Mr. Kernahan’s words, printed last March, before any shadow had fallen across the sun. He says: ‘I have studied the question at home and abroad with as much closeness as was possible, and the more closely I study it the more convinced I am that we are well within the possibility of one of the most awful disasters that ever befell a great nation.’ In the light of to-day that is a remarkably verified warning.”

This controversy, on account of the importance attached to the issues involved, Lord Roberts followed with exceptional interest. One passage of arms between my opponent and myself I may be permitted to quote, since it centres around Lord Roberts himself.

“Mr. Kernahan proves,” my critic wrote, “that his special hero, Lord Roberts, is a truly Christian man. I would not question it for a moment. And yet—so terrible a power has familiarity with war to blind men’s eyes to its satanic wickedness—it was Lord Roberts who uttered in our Free Trade Hall at Manchester the cynical sentence about Germany’s right to strike when her hour came, which shocked even convinced conscriptionists on his platform. I wonder whether Lord Roberts approved of the way Germany struck when her hour came in 1870! Strange indeed to hear a Christian man echoing the very sentiments of Bismarck, who was so proud of the cunning lie by which he tricked France into a disastrous war!”

My reply I venture to quote, since Lord Roberts was so good as to say it exactly interpreted his views and his position.

“Lord Roberts,” I wrote, “claimed no such ‘right’ for any nation wantonly and wickedly to force war upon another. He pointed out that when one nation has decided, for reasons of her own (possibly because she is ambitious and determined to play a great part in history), to force a war upon another nation, which possibly may decide to resist, if only because she is determined to hold to her own—the policy is that adopted by Germany. That policy—as a student of history as well as a soldier, Lord Roberts had to admit that it is often a winning policy—is to strike at what has been called the selected moment, or in other words, when she (Germany) is at her strongest, and the nation which she wishes to overthrow is weak. It was because Lord Roberts knew that this was and is Germany’s policy, and because he wellnigh despairs sometimes at the criminal apathy of his fellow-countrymen, and because he knows the consequences which must almost inevitably follow, that he felt compelled, under a terrible sense of responsibility, to speak out thus plainly. Had he, knowing what he does of Germany’s ambitions, intentions, and strength, and of England’s ignorance, weakness, and unpreparedness, elected to maintain a cowardly and traitorous silence—then, and not till then, would he be guilty of the ‘cynical’ and ‘satanic’ wickedness of which my opponent speaks.... For the latter cannot deny that Germany has not gone back in her ambition or in her strength since 1870. On the contrary, she has gone on, not only in piling up an army which, as Mr. Churchill warned the nation, is now four and a half millions in number, but also in the most strenuous effort to create a vast Navy, which she has said must be, shall be, greater than ours. With her huge army she needs no Navy for defence. It is, as has been said, a ‘luxury’ and is meant for attack, whereas to us a Navy is a matter of life and death. And my opponent knows that we have twice held out the hand of friendship to Germany with proposals to stay this insane race in armaments, and that her reply was more battleships, more soldiers, more guns.”

I do not print this passage here to reopen an old controversy, but because—though the details of Lord Roberts’ proposals will, in the light of recent events, require considerable modification—the main issues raised by him abide and must be reaffirmed. Here in England we have short memories. It is possible that in the bewildering happenings of the war and in the breathless interest with which, at its end, the shifting of frontiers and the striking of great balances will be watched, there is the danger, if only from reaction, that we slackly fall back into our previous national inertia and national apathy, and that the little puddles of party politics (dirty puddles for the most part) once again matter more to us than to hold sacred and inviolate the great Empire and these world-trusts which God has seen well to commit to Britain’s charge.

II

I have heard many noble tributes paid to Lord Roberts, but I remember none which touched him more than that of Sir William Robertson Nicoll at the Whitefriars’ Club. Lord Roberts was the club guest, that brilliant author and journalist Mr. John Foster Fraser being Chairman. I had the honour of being in the Vice-Chair.

The toast of Lord Roberts’ health was seconded by Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who was meeting the Field-Marshal for the first time. The Whitefriars’ dinner to Lord Roberts was merely a compliment to a great soldier. Not all of those present would have shared the views he entertained upon the question of National Service, and controversial issues were carefully excluded. Speaking, therefore, of Lord Roberts as a soldier, as a writer, and as a man, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, in one of the most graceful and generous tributes to which I have ever listened, assured him that by no class was our guest held in greater honour and affection than by the Nonconformists of this country and of every denomination. Lord Roberts knew that many Nonconformists differed from him in politics and upon the question of National Service, of which he was the acknowledged champion, and Sir William’s tribute so gracefully phrased, so obviously sincere in its expression of personal reverence and affection, touched and gratified him deeply.

That he felt a little sore, in regard to the misunderstanding of his views by some Nonconformists, is clear, I think, from a letter to me which lies before me as I write.

I happen to be a Churchman myself, but for the last eight or nine years before the war I devoted no inconsiderable portion of my time in trying to put the case for National Defence, as advocated by the Field-Marshal, before my many friends in the Nonconformist Churches, and I am glad and grateful to remember that, while not sharing my views, the editors of the great Nonconformist and Free Church organs gave me for the most part—there were exceptions—full opportunity to “state a case.” In April, 1913, a prominent Free Churchman of Hastings asked me to speak at the Brotherhood meeting in that town. I told him frankly that I dislike public speaking, but would do so if I were permitted to speak upon the subject of National Defence. My friend demurred, but it was finally arranged that I should first give a reading from a tiny booklet of my own, and after that I should speak for twenty minutes on the subject that lay so near my heart.

As this was the first occasion upon which an address upon National Defence was to be given at a Brotherhood meeting, Lord Roberts took deep interest in the matter. He was, indeed, so anxious to remove any misunderstanding which existed that he sent me a special message to deliver in his name to my audience. The message was in the form of a letter to myself, and as it puts his views very plainly, I print it here in full.

Englemere, Ascot,
Berks, 12.4.13.

Dear Mr. Kernahan,

I am very glad to learn that when asked to speak at the Brotherhood Meeting which is to take place in your own town on Sunday the 20th instant, you refused to do so unless you were allowed to deal with the question of National Service.

I know that there are many very well-meaning people who think that all military training is an abomination, and who are convinced that the life of youth in barracks is a continued round of vice and immorality of all kinds. I am prepared to admit that this certainly was true 200 years ago, and possibly it was true even at the beginning of the last century. During Marlborough’s wars we know from history that the ranks of the Regular Army were filled up by taking broken men of all kinds, and forcing them into the service.

Any man who was really on his last legs—broken debtors, tramps and vagabonds, condemned felons—these and such as these were forced into the ranks. Can it be wondered if the Army got a bad name? and, as we know, there is nothing so hard to live down as a really evil reputation. But all this is changed and has been changed for some years. Have we not heard that the Chief Constable of the county of Cambridge announced, after the Army manœuvres, that although 45,000 men had been turned loose in the area for which he was responsible, yet not a single accusation for wrongdoing had been brought against any of these soldiers? Have not the papers just recently told us that 10,000 men taken at random from the garrison at Aldershot have been billeted upon the inhabitants in the Hartley district, that these men were willingly received by the people of the district in their houses, and that again, in this instance, there has not been one complaint of misconduct? I must confess that I am pained, as well as surprised, when I find that those who profess, and profess very loudly, that they are followers of Christ, should still look upon the defenders of their country with such unchristian suspicion and dislike.

I should like you to read out to the meeting the following extract which occurs in an article on “Germany and the Germans,” by Mr. Price Collier. It can be found in the current issue of Scribner’s Magazine: “Military training makes youths better and stronger citizens and produces that self-respect, self-control and cosmopolitan sympathy which more than aught else lessen the chances of conflict. I can vouch for it that there are fewer personal jealousies, bickerings, quarrels, in the mess room or below decks of a warship, or in a soldiers’ camp, than in many Church and Sunday School assemblies, in many club smoking-rooms, in many ladies’ sewing and reading circles. Nothing does away more surely with quarrelsomeness than the training of men to get on together comfortably. Each giving way a little in the narrow lanes of life, so that each may pass without moral shoving. There are no such successful schools for the teaching of this fundamental diplomacy as the sister-services: the Army and the Navy.”

Here is another extract [Lord Roberts then goes on himself] from a New Zealand paper which was forwarded to me by a friend in that Dominion: “The Rev. W. Ready, the well-known Methodist Minister, took up a strong stand on the subject of military training at a meeting of the Society of Friends held in Auckland last week. Mr. Ready, who was present by invitation, was taken to task for some remarks he had made on the subject at the recent Methodist Conference. He thereupon explained to the meeting his attitude at the Conference. There was a time, he had told the Conference, when he held the opinion that camps were very immoral, and not places to which youths should be sent; but since he had had his sons attending camp as Territorials, he had been converted into believing that these camps were moral and were well-regulated. Every instinct of his moral nature went against compulsory training, but he had his sons in the Territorials. At this point there were cries of ‘Shame’ from the assembled members of the Society of Friends, but Mr. Ready stuck to his guns and declared that he was not going to advise his boys to break the law, merely because he objected on principle to military training. The Defence Act was now the law of the land, and he would no more advocate his sons breaking the law than he would support the English Suffragettes in their militant tactics. This is both sound ethics and common sense, and Mr. Ready has done the community a service in emphasising the duty of every man to obey the law. The change in his opinions on the subject of camps is interesting and gratifying, and should be noted by those who profess to be so concerned about their evil influences.”

I sincerely hope that your discourse at the Brotherhood Meeting will help to dissipate the suspicions against military life and all connected with it.

Yours very truly,
Roberts.

Lord Roberts made some appreciative remarks about my own work in the cause of National Defence. These I took the liberty of omitting when reading his letter at the Brotherhood Meeting, and I venture to follow a similar course in transcribing it here. Otherwise this very interesting letter is given exactly as he wrote it.

That the great soldier should, in his eighty-first year, have been at the pains to write so lengthy a letter for one of the rank and file, merely, of his supporters to read at a meeting held in a Nonconformist Church, bears witness not only to Lord Roberts’ unwearying energies, but also to his earnest desire, one might even say his anxiety, that the case for National Defence should be fully and fairly put before his fellow Britons of the Free Churches. Had he lived to see the magnificent response made by every denomination of the Free Churches—not even excepting some members of the Society of Friends—in sending the flower of its young manhood to the heroic task of subduing the monster of Prussian militarism, it would have added gladness and thankfulness to his “Nunc Dimittis,” when within sound of the guns the hero-soul of the great soldier, patriot and Christian, passed into the presence of his God.

Here I may perhaps be allowed to say a word about a prayer which has often been attributed to Lord Roberts, and was in fact, soon after his death, printed by a leading religious journal as “composed by the late Lord Roberts and presented by him to the soldiers serving under his command in the South African war.” The same prayer has repeatedly been attributed to Lord Roberts in magazines, books and newspapers; and, as the correspondence which I have permission to quote will show, I shall be following Lord Roberts’ own wishes in doing what I can, once and for all, to set the matter right.

Here is the prayer as given in the religious journal of which I have spoken:

Almighty Father, I have often sinned against Thee. Oh, wash me in the precious blood of the Lamb of God. Fill me with Thy Holy Spirit, that I may lead a new life. Spare me to see again those whom I love at home, or fit me for Thy presence in peace. Strengthen us to quit ourselves like men in our right and just cause. Keep us faithful unto death, calm in danger, patient in suffering, merciful as well as brave; true to our Queen, our country, and colours. If it be Thy will, enable us to win victory for England; but, above all, grant us a better victory over temptation and sin, over life and death, that we may be more than conquerors, through Him who loved us and laid down His life for us, Jesus our Saviour, the Captain of the Army of God. Amen.

The first appearance of the prayer as by Lord Roberts was, I believe, in a volume published some years ago at Kansas City, U.S.A., and edited by Dr. Stephen Abbott Northrop. It was entitled A Cloud of Witnesses, and I had from the first my suspicions about the prayer’s authenticity, for, though I never think or thought of Lord Roberts as other than a deeply religious man, I found it difficult to think of him as one who elected to write prayers for publication. Mentioning the matter to Lord Roberts himself one day, I found him very much mystified by what he heard. “I have not the slightest recollection of ever writing a prayer,” he protested, and, later on, when writing on another matter, he recurred to the subject, asking me if I could send him a copy of the prayer. I did so, and received the following letter:

Almond’s Hotel, Clifford Street,
London, W.

(The only undated letter I ever remember receiving from Lord Roberts.)

Dear Kernahan,

I am afraid I cannot claim the honour of writing the beautiful prayer you found in the Cloud of Witnesses—at least I think that is the name of the book you mentioned—but I am away from home and have not got your letter by me.

I thought it might have been the prayer General Colley wrote before “Majuba,” but it is not.

I should like to find out where the author of the book got the prayer, and why he gave me as the writer of it.

Yours very truly,
Roberts.

My reply was to send Lord Roberts the book to see for himself. He returned it, carefully packed and addressed in his own handwriting, with the letter which I here transcribe:

Almond’s Hotel, Clifford Street,
London, W., 1.2.14.

Dear Kernahan,

I return A Cloud of Witnesses with many thanks.

It is very curious about the prayer. I have no recollection of writing it, and I am wondering how Dr. Abbott Northrop got hold of it. What a fine collection of sentiments and opinions he has got together!

Yours sincerely,
Roberts.

There, so far as I was concerned, the matter dropped, but when next I saw Lord Roberts he again expressed his curiosity in regard to the mystery by which the prayer was attributed to him, and his desire to unravel it, asking me if I heard any more of it to let him know.

That I was of some service to him in the matter was due more to chance than to any mystery-unravelling merit of my own.

A friend who is interested in religious work among soldiers lent me a little book, with the request that I would look into it and return it at my leisure. I opened the volume somewhat indifferently, and the first thing to catch my eye was the very prayer which Lord Roberts and I had been discussing. The book stated that it had been written by the late Archbishop Alexander for the use of the troops in South Africa, and so exactly expressed the faith and feelings of Lord Roberts that he had it printed at his own cost and sent it to his various officers, asking them to distribute it to all ranks under their command.

That the prayer was ultimately attributed to the Field-Marshal instead of to the Archbishop I diagnose thus: Even though “Tommy” was specifically informed that it was composed by Archbishop Alexander—to “Tommy” that information meant little or nothing. But to “Tommy” the fact that it had been specially sent to him by his beloved “Bobs” would mean everything; and so, no doubt, it became known as “Lord Roberts’ prayer,” and as “Lord Roberts’ prayer” it came to the knowledge of the editor of A Cloud of Witnesses, and was printed in good faith by him over the Field-Marshal’s signature in that book, whence it was reproduced, equally in good faith, in other prints.

But to recur to the little book in which I found the prayer attributed, and rightly, to the Archbishop. With the owner’s permission I sent it to Lord Roberts to see for himself how, in my opinion—and he entirely agreed with me—the mistake originally arose. His reply has a characteristic touch, for though he went out to South Africa to take supreme command, his soldier-like way of putting it is “When I was ordered out.” Nor is the reference to failing memory without pathos to those whose smallest service to the cause he had so at heart—National Defence—was never forgotten by one of the greatest-hearted and most generous of men and of chiefs.

Almond’s Hotel, Clifford Street,
London, W., 15th Feb., 1914.

Dear Kernahan,

I cannot think how I could have forgotten about the prayer, for I myself asked the Primate to write it. I knew him well, and I was greatly struck by the few verses he wrote about “War” shortly after the trouble in South Africa had commenced.

When I was ordered out I wrote to the Primate and asked him to write out a short prayer. I had some thousand copies printed and distributed.

I am so glad you discovered who the author was, although your doing so proves and makes me sad to think that my memory is not so good as I thought it was.

I am returning your little book. I wish I could have kept it.

Yours sincerely,
Roberts.

My next meeting with Lord Roberts was twelve days later, and was at No. 10 Downing Street, Mr. Asquith’s official residence. Lord Roberts said, among other things, in the talk we had together on that occasion that he was very much indebted to me for the promptness with which I had unravelled the mystery about himself and the Archbishop, and went on gravely:

“I very much dislike having attributed to me a prayer which I did not write. It is not, as you know, that I do not believe in prayer. I have humbly asked God’s help and guidance in everything that I undertook all through my life, and never more so than now, when I am an old man, and His call may be very near. But——” he hesitated a moment, “offering up a brief prayer—it may only be the words ‘God help me!’—before going into action, or in some time of difficulty, is one thing; and sitting down to write, to print and publish a prayer for others is quite another thing—for a soldier, at least. That was why I asked my friend the Archbishop to compose the prayer. It was for him, God’s minister, a clergyman, not for me, a soldier, to do it.”

Lord Roberts then asked me to advise him how best to prevent a recurrence of the error by which the prayer was attributed to him. I replied that if he wished I would on his behalf write to the editor of A Cloud of Witnesses pointing out the mistake, and suggesting that an erratum slip, making the correction, be inserted in all copies of the book already printed, and that the Archbishop’s name replace that of Lord Roberts in any future edition.

“I shall be so much obliged if you will,” he said gratefully. “May I leave it to you, and will you let me know when you hear from him?”

I promised to do so, and carried the promise into effect, sending Lord Roberts, when I received it, the editor’s reply, in which, after expressing regret for the error, he undertook to do what was proposed. That Lord Roberts felt strongly about the matter, and was most anxious that the correction should be made, will be seen by the following letter which I received the morning after I had seen him at Downing Street:

Englemere, Ascot, Berks,
28th Feb., 1914.

Dear Kernahan,

Thanks for your letter of the 21st instant and for sending me the little book, which I wish I could have kept. Would it be possible to communicate with the author of the book you sent me in which the prayer of the Primate of Ireland appeared under my name? I should like to have this corrected, as it is quite wrong that I should have the credit of being the author of such a beautiful prayer when I was only the indirect means of it being written.

(Thus far Lord Roberts’ letter was typed. Then in his own strong, clear, firm hand the letter concluded as follows): This letter was dictated before I met you yesterday. I only send it as a reminder.

I may just add in conclusion that “the little book” which he twice, almost wistfully, said he wished he could have kept (if I remember rightly it told, among other things, of his son’s death in South Africa) was by the courtesy of the friend from whom I had borrowed it, reforwarded to Lord Roberts, and was by him gratefully and gladly acknowledged.

III

Even as an old man—though none of us who knew and loved him could ever bring ourselves to think of Lord Roberts as old—his energy was amazing, and the amount of work he got through was stupendous. His mere correspondence alone would have kept any other man going all day and with no moment to spare for the many great issues with which his name was connected. He accomplished so much because he practised in his own life the organisation, if not indeed the National Service which he preached to the nation—the organisation which, as he foresaw, would be so tremendous a driving power behind Germany when the time came for her to force a war upon this country, the war which he even more clearly foresaw.

As an instance of how Lord Roberts systematised his days, I may mention that a friend of mine and his, recently returned from Bulgaria, wished to see him to put certain military facts before him, and also, if I remember rightly, to present him with some interesting trophies of the war which he knew the Field-Marshal would prize. He wrote accordingly and asked for an appointment. Lord Roberts replied by return of post, from Almond’s Hotel, Clifford Street, W., to say that he was then in town but was returning to Ascot the following day. “If it will be saving you a railway journey—and I know what a busy man you are,” he wrote, “to see me here at the Hotel, instead of at Ascot, by all means let it be so. But I am afraid, if not too early for you, it must be at 8.30 in the morning, as the rest of my day is already mapped out.”

My friend smiled sadly in telling me the story. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “8.30, and even later, generally sees me tubbing, shaving, or at best breakfasting, but if 8.30 was not too early for a great soldier who had turned 80 to be up, and ready to receive visitors, I could hardly plead that 8.30 was too early for me,” and the appointment was made.

IV

Like most Irishmen, Lord Roberts had a keen sense of humour. At a public dinner at which I was present he had for a near neighbour, at the high table, Lord Willoughby de Broke, who in his after-dinner speech had occasion to refer to the Territorial Army.

“If I am asked,” he said, “whether a young man should join the Territorial Army, my answer is invariably ‘Yes,’ and for three reasons. The first reason is that he will, perhaps for the first time in his life, be coming under the salutary influence of Discipline, and I say confidently and without fear of contradiction, that there is no finer influence for a young fellow than that of Discipline.”

These were sentiments that appealed to a soldier, and of the many approving cries of “Hear! Hear!” which came from all parts of the room, none rang more whole-heartedly than those of Lord Roberts.

“My second reason,” went on the speaker, “is that the young man will thereby be discharging a patriotic duty. To-day we are all thinking too much of our rights, rarely of our responsibilities, and in my opinion every able-bodied young fellow, whether he be a duke’s son, a draper’s son, or the son of a costermonger, should be trained to defend his country against an invader in her hour of need.”

Once again Lord Willoughby de Broke was expressing the very sentiments with which Lord Roberts’ name was so closely associated, and again it was the great soldier’s “Hear! Hear!” which was most emphatic.

“And lastly,” concluded the speaker, “my reason for advising every young fellow to join the Territorial Army is that it gives him a chance of—getting away from his wife for a night or a week or a fortnight without putting him to the trouble of hashing up some silly excuse which she knows is as palpably a fake and a lie as he does himself.”

Thus far Lord Willoughby de Broke had spoken with such grave earnestness that we were all prepared as heartily to endorse his third reason as his previous ones. Lord Roberts had, in fact, raised his right hand above his left to applaud when the speaker sprang this surprise upon us, and especially upon those of us who were married, for the dinner was graced by the presence of Lady Willoughby de Broke and Lady Roberts, as well as by other ladies, the wives, daughters, and sisters of those present.

For one second the company, if I may so phrase it, “gaped” open-mouthed at the trap into which they had been led, and then there was a great roar of laughter, in which no one more heartily joined than did Lady Willoughby de Broke, Lady Roberts, and Lord Roberts himself.

I recall another and grimmer instance of Lord Roberts’ sense of humour. On February 27, 1914, he introduced to the Prime Minister a Deputation whose object was to plead the cause of National Service. When I say that it was a great occasion I am not expressing my own opinion, but that of a distinguished member of the Deputation who has since written and published in pamphlet form an official account of the proceedings.

“Those of us who look forward,” he writes, “to an early fruition of the hopes which we have cherished and the aims for which we have worked for so many years past, will ever look back upon Friday, the 27th of February, 1914, as a milestone, a red-letter day in the History of National Service.

“All the circumstances conspired to stamp a great occasion with the greatness which belonged to it. The importance of the Cause needs no illustration from the present writer. In Lord Roberts’ well-known words, ‘National Service means not only national safety; it means national health, national strength, national honour, and national prosperity.’

“The Deputation included some of the greatest and most distinguished men of the day, and—a most significant and important factor—the greatness was in nearly every case not inherited but achieved by conspicuous service in the fields of national and imperial endeavour. Three Field-Marshals, including our veteran leader who has carried our flag to victory with honour in Asia and Africa and served King and country for fifty-five years; two Admirals of the Fleet, one of whom was in command of the International Forces at Crete, and the other commanded the International Naval Forces in China at the time of the Boxer Rebellion; an ex-Viceroy of India, prominent representatives of the Church and of Nonconformity; the editor of one of the most influential weeklies, and representatives of literature, science, and industry.”

Of this Deputation I was, by Lord Roberts’ personal invitation and wish, a member, and as I arrived in good time I had an opportunity of some conversation with him in the ante-room before we passed into the Library in which Mr. Asquith was to receive us.

Seeing that one of his hands was swathed in bandages, I inquired the reason.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” he said smilingly. “I’ve often been accused of having too many irons in the fire, but this time it is a case of having a hand too much in the fire. Just before leaving my hotel this morning, my foot slipped on the marble paving of the hall, and in falling forward and trying to save myself, I thrust my hand between the bars of the fire, and so got a bit of a burn. But it’s a mere nothing, and of no consequence.”

So far from being, as Lord Roberts said, a mere nothing, I have since heard that the burn was, on the contrary, excessively painful, but all through the lengthy and trying ordeal of introducing the different members of the Deputation, listening to, and commenting upon what was said, as well as listening to and replying to the Prime Minister’s very important and brilliantly able speech, Lord Roberts was the alertest, cheeriest, and most watchful of those present. A burn that would have distressed and possibly have distracted the attention of a much younger man, and that must necessarily have caused constant and severe pain, the gallant old soldier, then nearing his 82nd year, treated as of no consequence and dismissed with a lightly uttered jest. To the last it was of others, never of himself, that he thought. On this particular occasion he was pleading (to use his own words) “as plainly as an old man has the right to speak, in the face of emergencies which would be far less terrible to him personally than to generations of Britons yet unborn.” That was not many months before his death, and though I saw and talked with Field-Marshal Earl Roberts, V.C., on other and later occasions, I shall to my life’s end picture him as I saw him then—his burned and bandaged hand throbbing with pain of which he showed no single sign, thrust behind him and out of sight, as eloquently, gravely, almost passionately, he warned his hearers of a possible national disaster, the consequences of which would be “far less terrible to him personally than to generations of Britons yet unborn.”

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON
AS THE “OGRE OF THE ‘ATHENÆUM’”

It was, I believe, George Meredith who, when the author of Aylwin changed his name from Theodore Watts to Theodore Watts-Dunton, spoke of him as “Theodore What’s-his-name,” and added that he supposed his friend had made the change lest posterity might confound Watts the poet with Watts the hymn writer.

Posterity, unlike Popularity—who plays the wanton at times and cohabits with unlawful mates—keeps chaste her house from generation to generation and needs no hint from us to assist her choice. Her task is to rescue reputations from the dust, no less than to “pour forgetfulness upon the dead,” and none of us alive to-day may predict what surprise of lost or rescued reputations Posterity may have in store.

Over one of these reputations it is surely possible to imagine Posterity—I will not disrespectfully say scratching a puzzled head, but at least wrinkling in perplexity her learned brows. She will discover when straightening out her dog’s-eared literary annals that the name of one writer, who at the beginning of the last decade of the nineteenth century had a great if somewhat esoteric reputation among his brother authors, was not then to be found in any publisher’s list, and for the somewhat curious and incontinent reason that at that time he had published no book. It was not until the publication of Aylwin that the name of Theodore Watts, or as he afterwards elected to be called Watts-Dunton, became widely known outside what are sometimes not very felicitously described as “literary circles.”

To-day the tremendous issues of the Great War have, as it were, at a besom stroke of the gods, brushed into one box, to set aside, upon a shelf, all the trappings, furniture and paraphernalia of non-industrial arts and the like. Authors, artists, actors, musicians, professors, as well as the mere politician, are, and rightly, relegated to the back of the stage of life, and it is the soldier and the sailor—not by their own seeking—who bulk biggest in the public eye. But in those days of little things—the last decade of the last century—and outside the so-called “literary circle” of which I have spoken, there were other and outer circles of men and women much more keenly interested in books and authors, especially in the personality of literary celebrities, than would be possible in these days of tragic and tremendous world-issues. In such circles many curious, interesting and even romantic associations were woven around the name of Theodore Watts.

He was known to be the personal friend of Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, James Russell Lowell, Browning, and William Morris. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and George Meredith had in the past made their home with him at Chelsea, and Swinburne had been his house mate for many years at Putney. Rossetti and Swinburne had written and spoken of him in terms which to outsiders seem extravagant, and both had dedicated some of their best work to him. It was also known that he had lived for some time with gipsies, was one of the three greatest living authorities on gipsy lore and the gipsy language, and had been the friend of George Borrow. This curiosity was stimulated by the fact that Watts-Dunton was then very rarely seen at literary dinners or functions, and was supposed more studiously even to avoid publicity than some of his craft who might be named were supposed to seek it. Cryptic allusions in the literary journals, reviews, and magazines to a long-completed novel, deliberately and cruelly withheld from publication, and tributes to his encyclopædic knowledge, did not a little to increase this curiosity.

Thus far the reputation which Theodore Watts had attained did not altogether belie him, but there was yet another “Theodore Watts”—“Watts of the Athenæum” he was sometimes called—who had no existence except in the imagination of certain small literary fry by whom he was popularly supposed to be something of a “Hun” of the pen, a shark of the literary seas, who preyed upon suckling poets. I remember a morning in the early nineties, when I was to lunch at Putney with Watts-Dunton and Swinburne. Being in the neighbourhood of Temple Bar about eleven, I turned in for a cup of coffee and a cigarette at a famous Coffee House, then much frequented by editors, journalists, poets, rising authors and members of the literary staff of the publishing houses and newspaper offices in or around Fleet Street, as well as by members of the legal profession from the Temple and the New Law Courts.

At the next table sat a young man with long hair, a velveteen jacket and a flowing tie. He was talking so loudly to a friend, that unless one stopped one’s ears there was no choice but to overhear the conversation.

“Seen this week’s Athenæum?” he asked his friend.

“Not yet. Anything particular in it?” was the reply.

“Only a review of my poems.”

“Good?”

“Bad as it can be—bad, that is, as four contemptuous lines of small print can make it. A book, which as you know represents the thought, the passion and soul-travail of years; a book written in my heart’s blood—and dismissed by the Athenæum in four contemptuous lines!”

There was a pause too brief, if not too deep for tears. Then: “Theodore Watts, of course!” he added between set teeth. “I expected it. Everyone knows he is so insanely jealous of us younger men that he watches the publishers’ lists for every book by a young poet of ability to pounce upon it, and to cut it up. What has he done, I should like to know, to give him the right to pronounce death sentences? Why, the fellow’s never even published a book of his own.

“Shall I tell you why? He daren’t. There is a novel called Aylwin written and ready to publish many years ago. Murray has offered him a small fortune in advance royalties, I hear.”

Again the young man paused dramatically and looked darkly around the room, not apparently from fear of his being overheard, but because he wished to invite attention to the inner and exclusive knowledge which he possessed. Then, in an ecstasy of anger that had a fine disregard for so trivial a matter as a confusion of metaphors, he thundered:

“Because that viper Theodore Watts has stabbed so many of us in the back anonymously in the Athenæum, he daren’t bring out his novel. He can never say anything bad enough about a ‘minor poet,’ as he scornfully calls us, but he knows that some of us do a little reviewing, and that we are waiting for him to publish his book that we may get a bit of our own back.”

It so happened that I had in my pocket that morning a letter from Watts-Dunton deprecating the slating in the Athenæum of a book of minor poetry by a friend of mine, and I remembered a sentence in the letter. “By minor poet, meaning apparently a new and unknown poet,” which prefaced a generous if discriminating and critical appreciation of my friend’s poems.

To intrude into a conversation between strangers was, of course, as much out of the question as to make known to others, without first obtaining the writer’s permission, the contents of a letter written to myself. Otherwise I could easily have convinced the aggrieved young poet, not only that it was not Theodore Watts who had cut up his book, but that so far from being a literary Herod and a slayer of the poetic innocent, he was, as a matter of fact, Herod’s literary antithesis. As the writer of the letter and those mentioned in it are no longer with us, no harm can be done by printing part of it here:

“Like the rest of us, our Philip was mortal, and, like all of us, he could be harsh. I got Maccoll to let him review the minor bards. He was so terribly severe upon most of them that I was miserable; and I fear that I had to ask Maccoll to be chary in sending them to him, or at least I got M. to remonstrate with him for his extreme and unaccountable harshness. My sympathies, as you know, are all with the younger men. I love to see a young poet, or for the matter of that any young writer, get recognition.

“Robinson is the only fogey-brother I boom. Please tell him when you see him that if I do not write to him much, it is not because of any cooling of love. Thirty years ago he knew me for the worst correspondent in the world. The first letter he ever wrote to me (in sending me his novel No Church) I answered at the end of six months. I wish I could help it, but I can’t. My friends have to take me with all my infirmities on my head.”

“Our Philip,” I may say, was Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet; “Robinson” was F. W. Robinson, the novelist—both friends of Watts-Dunton and mine—“Maccoll” was the then editor of the Athenæum.

Had I known Watts-Dunton better (it was in the early days of our long friendship that this Coffee House incident happened), I should studiously have refrained from mentioning the matter to him. But thinking it would do no more than amuse him, I was so unwise as to tell the story over the luncheon table. Swinburne was vastly amused, and rallied his friend gleefully for being what he described as “the ogre of suckling bardlings,” but Watts-Dunton was visibly distressed, and took it so much to heart that I had cause to regret my indiscretion. He brooded over it and rumbled menacingly over it, recurring to the matter again and again, until lunch was over, vowing that it mattered nothing to him what this or that “writing fellow” thought of him as a fellow writer, but that to be credited with cruelty, and with willingness to give pain, to the younger generation, with whom he was so entirely in sympathy, was monstrous, was unthinkable, and was cause for cursing the day he had ever consented to review for the Athenæum.

Here are some extracts from another letter in which he reverts to the matter, and also incidentally gives an interesting peep of Swinburne and himself on holiday:

“The crowning mistake of my life, a life that has been full of mistakes, I fear, was in drifting into the position of literary reviewer to a journal, and not drifting out for a quarter of a century. I not only squandered my efforts, but made unconsciously a thousand enemies in the literary world whom I can never hope now to appease until death comes to my aid. Swinburne sends you his kind regards. He and I are here staying at one of the lovely places in the Isle of Wight, belonging to his aunt, Lady Mary Gordon. It is a fairy place. Her late husband’s father took one of the most romantic spots of the Undercliff and turned the shelves of debris into the loveliest Italian garden reaching down to the sea. It is so shut in from the land that it can be seen only from the sea. It puts, as I always say, Edgar Poe’s Domain of Arnheim into the shade. I know of nothing in the world so lovely. I have been writing a few sonnets, but Swinburne does nothing but bathe.”

This reference to Swinburne idling reminds me of another letter I received from Watts-Dunton, in which he pictures yet another great poet, Tennyson, hard at work and at eighty-two. The letter has no bearing on the matter immediately under discussion, but by way of contrast I venture to include it here:

Aldworth, Haslemere, Surrey,
26th Sept., ’91.

My dear Kernahan,

My best thanks for your most kind letter which has been forwarded to me here where I am staying with Tennyson. When I get home I will write to suggest a day for us to meet at Putney. Tennyson, with whom I took a long walk of three miles this morning, is in marvellous health, every faculty (at 82) is as bright as it was when his years were 40. He is busy writing poetry as fine as anything he has ever written. He read out to me last night three poems which of themselves would suffice to make a poet’s fame. Really he is a miracle. This is a lovely place—I don’t know how many miles above the level of the sea—bracing to a wonderful degree.

Ever yours,
Theodore Watts.