London in the nineties! How far away and long ago it all seems, and how shall I describe it? London, to me, is like a woman with wet, draggled dirty skirts (it's always raining in London), and at first you turn from her in disgust, but soon you discover that she has glorious eyes lighting up her pale, wet face. The historic houses, such as Marlborough House, Landsdowne House, Devonshire House and Cadogan House, and a hundred others, are her eyes; and they are simply wonderful treasure-houses of past centuries, with records of each age in gorgeous pictures and books, in tapestries and table silver-all the accessories of good taste and comfortable living. And if you admire her eyes and tell her so passionately one mid-summer evening, when the sunshine is a golden mist, she will give you her lips and take you to her heart; and you will find in her spirit depths undreamed of, passionate devotions, smiling self-sacrifice and loving, gentle attendance till your eyes dim at the sweet memory of her. And ever afterwards you, the alien and outcast and pariah of this all-hating world, will have a soft heart for London.
You will find magic and mystery in her fogs, as Whistler did; and in her gardens some June morning you will wake and find her temperate warmth of desire more enchanting than any tropic heat. London draws me more than any capital, and I have been in most of them, but the sameness of her squares, the destitution of her docks, and, above all, her wretched climate, appall me; and as I grow older I prefer Paris, Berlin or Vienna, where life's contrasts are not so hideous.
Marriage did not mean as much to me as other happenings in my life, and my wife was not, by any means, so important to me or to my mental growth as some of my friends, notably John Addington Symonds, Francis Adams, Grant Allen, and Harold Frederic. In the first ten years of my London life, friends meant more to me than any other influence, and notably such companions as these, who excited me intellectually.
I never could understand why these men did not do some great and evermemorable work. Symonds was a classic of the best, and master of an excellent prose; knew Italian and French, too, rarely well, and was a student born. He had no hindering English prejudices, regarded sex as lightly as Anatole France himself, and yet he did not write a single masterpiece. Why?
He was well-off, too, and gave himself to literature with single-hearted devotion, and yet never reached even Tennyson's place, or Swinburne's.
Grant Allen was in even closer sympathy with his age; learned, too, in science as in literature, and freer in mind than Symonds himself because born in Canada; and yet he could not get beyond The Woman Who Did. Why?
Again one asks, for it was a ridiculous book as a life's message. And Francis Adams was a larger man, perhaps, than either, though not so well equipped with learning; yet he, too, did nothing of enduring worth.
This fact made it gradually plain to me that intelligence and all round genial culture do not count for fame as much as some extraordinary endowment. It is, as Goethe said, "the extraordinary alone that lives." Swinburne was not comparable with Symonds in wisdom or understanding, or sweetness of character; and yet, because he had written ten pages of wonderful new verse music, he stands higher and is universally admired. The realization of this fact diminished for the first time in me that desire of fame which, so far, had been my driving power.
With these friends I was in constant touch for some important years without a shadow of misunderstanding or disagreement. Francis Adams was really my first good English friend: I met him in Hyde Park. I had been speaking there on socialism and the necessity of introducing some socialistic measures into English life when he came up and spoke to me, and we soon became friends.
Shortly afterwards, however, he went to Australia, and I did not see him again for some five years. When he came back our friendship was quickly renewed and I got him to write for me on the Fortnightly. He meant a great deal to me, though I was considerably his senior, for he was both frank and sympathetic.
When he came back from Australia he brought with him a wife, not particularly interesting, I thought, but he also brought back a certain weakness of lungs. I managed to help him to go to Egypt. I told him he should live in the desert above Assouan, or in some high place such as Davos Platz, but he did not take my advice and gradually grew worse. He came up the river with me one summer and in the winter stayed with me in London. I found that he was getting more and more hopeless. He spoke of suicide: I begged him not to let his thoughts wander in that direction, assured him that life would be greyer to me without him, and reminded him of his wife. He confessed to me he had tried to kill himself, but his courage had failed him. I told him that courage, like every other virtue, needed practice to become effective; and after he had left me that evening I wrote the little story, Eatin'
Crow, to show him what I meant. In the morning he read it in manuscript and said: "You may do bigger things, Frank, but you'll never do anything more perfect." He went back to his rooms at Margate, and suddenly I heard he had shot himself, after leaving me a message. His wife, too, wrote me that she had been arrested, so I went immediately to Margate and she told me the whole story.
He was going out for a drive with her when a hemorrhage came on. As he stepped into the carriage, he turned and came back to his room and told her that the blood was from his lungs and that he was dying. He gave her a message for me and then asked for his revolver. As the blood was pouring from his mouth she thought he was dying and bravely gave him the weapon.
He put it into his mouth and shot himself; the bullet went through his head into the ceiling. I saw the hole it had made.
In court Mrs. Adams told the whole truth, so the authorities thought she ought to be arrested as an accessory before the fact. But I pleaded with the magistrate, assured him that I knew of her great affection for her husband, and she was set free. I cannot tell here what I lost in Francis Adams-a sort of intellectual conscience and stimulus: the truest and wisest of friends.
Symonds came next in those early days. He had gone to Davos Platz with one lung destroyed and suffering from tuberculosis, but in the vivifying mountain air he quickly gained comparative health; and twice or thrice in summertime he came to London, and once stayed with me in my house in Kensington Gore for some memorable days. We were together every evening and talked the stars down the sky. In sex matters he viewed pederasty with the same tolerance as normal indulgence, and told me how surprised he had been by Whitman's passionate repudiation of abnormal desire.
He showed a certain sympathy with the vice which astonished me, and explained, if it did not justify, Swinburne's later gibe at him on account of his supposed liking for "blue-breeched gondoliers." But Symonds' sympathy was purely intellectual, and I always thought him one of the best of men- full of the milk of human kindness and far nearer ideal manhood than Swinburne or Tennyson.
Grant Allen I have already told about: his influence with me only began when I began to write stories, and lived with me for some time longer.
This is even truer of Harold Frederic, who was, if I remember rightly, the correspondent of the New York Times. I met Harold Frederic first at Sir Charles Dilke's and we soon became close friends. I met Sir Edward Grey about the same time in the same house. Frederic had already written several volumes but none yet which corresponded to his ability, none which allowed one to take his measure.
I shall never forget one curious incident that occurred early in our friendship.
It took place at a dinner at Dilke's when Harold Frederic sat beside Cecil Rhodes, at that time little known in England.
When most of the guests had departed, Dilke, Frederic and myself came together in our usual way to talk over things.
"Well, Dilke," Frederic began, "that was the first dull dinner I've ever been at in your house. Who was the bloody fool you put me next to? I talked to him on a dozen subjects but could get absolutely nothing out of him."
Both Dilke and I laughed, and on our way home I told Frederic enough about Rhodes to make him modify his condemnation; but he always refused to believe in Rhodes's brains, and in time I came to think that Frederic was probably nearer right in his contemptuous estimate than Dilke or I in our appreciation.
All these years in the nineties Frederic was growing rapidly, but it was primarily the American in him which appealed to me from the first-a power of judging events and persons on their merits, heedless of position or apparent importance.
This was clearly shown to me by his attitude towards the Venezuelan question. Frederic had taught me to respect President Grover Cleveland who, he thought, was the ablest of American presidents in nearly a hundred years.
But Richard Olney was Secretary of State for foreign affairs and stood with him over the question of the boundaries of Venezuela. I am quite willing to admit that the English government was right in the attitude it took up. Lord Salisbury was about to impose demands on Venezuela by force of arms and Mr. Richard Olney plainly informed him that any such action would be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Lord Salisbury had no difficulty in pointing out that this was giving an extension to the Monroe Doctrine that Monroe had never imagined. Mr. Olney retorted that the United States considered itself the best judge of the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine, and almost like a thunder clap on this came a statement from Grover Cleveland, backing up Mr. Olney and plainly stating that armed intervention by England would be regarded as "an unfriendly act" by the United States of America.
I was at that time owner and editor of the Saturday Review. I called on Harold Frederic and we both agreed that war was imminent. I wrote an article declaring that in case of war England would cease to exist as a power among the nations, and to run such a risk for a paltry boundary in Venezuela was so absurd as to be criminal stupidity. Lord Salisbury sent for me. He asked me to come and see him in Arlington Street, as he wanted to discuss the article with me. Of course I went next day, and found that he had protected himself by installing Lord Henry Manners, his secretary, almost between himself and me. He asked me how I had come to my belief in the enormous power of the United States in case of war.
"You don't seem to have a high opinion of Americans except as fighters," he said, "but you surely have an extravagant estimate of their fighting strength.
Our naval authorities think they could take Washington as they took it before and bombard New York into the bargain."
"Goodness!" I cried. "You frighten me for England when you talk like that."
"Explain yourself," he said. "Why do you feel so convinced of the power of America?"
"First of all," I said, "consider one thing. In the Civil War there were only about sixteen millions of people on the side of the South. Yet, in less than two years, the Southern Navy was wiped out of existence and the Northern Navy was stronger than all the navies of the world put together. In less than two years the Federals had invented every improvement in naval warfare which exists up to this moment. They used rams, big guns, heavy armor plating, and vessels cut down to the water edge so as to show no target and even torpedoes."
"Torpedoes!" exclaimed Lord Salisbury. "Surely you are mistaken."
"In '62 or '63," I replied, "a Southern battleship was blown up in Mobile harbor with a torpedo by Lieutenant Gushing. The Americans are crazy with the sense of the greatness of their country and the rapidity of its growth. In my opinion they would beat the world in arms today. They are the best organizers of labor in the world, and that is equivalent to being able to produce the best armies and navies."
"You talk persuasively," said Lord Salisbury. "Your view is quite original, but I see your reasons."
The talk went on for a little while, and he asked me when I could come down to Hatfield and have a longer conversation. The end of it was that I went to Hatfield and spoke with great frankness. I told him what I hoped for England was a close Union with her colonies, in order to pave the way for a confederation of all the English-speaking peoples, which might in the future, with the immense power of the United States, put an end to war. It seemed to me as easy to end war as to end dueling.
"A quarrel between England and America," I added, "is to me the worst thing that could be imagined, altogether horrible."
Suddenly I remembered that I had heard Lord Salisbury described as an earnest Christian, so I went on:
"How any Christian could think of the possibility of war between these two peoples is beyond my comprehension. It would be a sin against humanity, for which there would be no forgiveness."
Lord Salisbury suddenly turned away from me, put his hand under his desk, and drew out a sort of shelf, on which there was a glass, I think, of whiskey and soda, and took a drink. "Please forgive me!" he then exclaimed. "Would you like anything to drink?"
I laughed. "No, thank you!"
He looked at me and answered gravely:
"I think in the main you are right: it would be a crime against humanity, against our hopes for man. It is a little difficult," he added, after a pause, "to let Mr. Olney have it all his own way; he is somewhat peremptory and unreasonable."
"As the bigger man," I said, "I hope you will find reason enough in yourself far both." He smiled at me, nodding his head the while.
The whole talk made me realize, as nothing had made me realize before, that my sympathies were with America, even against reason. Lord Salisbury's argument was reasonable; Dick Olney was in the wrong, and yet I was on the side of Dick Olney. I could not make out why till I got Harold Frederic down to stay with me and confided to him one evening, under pledge of secrecy, all that had taken place with Lord Salisbury, and found that we agreed on every point.
From thirty to forty or so Frederic grew as I grew, but owed even less than I did to extraneous influences, for at first I had been greatly influenced by reading foreign languages and so-called scholarship. It was Frederic, indeed, who first showed me how little books and book-learning can add to one's stature, and though George Moore was always there to enforce the lesson, I couldn't honestly say I would willingly divest myself of any fragment of knowledge: Moore's familiarity with modern French literature helped him to a saner view of literary art than he would otherwise have possessed. Moore was always a pleasant acquaintance and interesting companion, rather than friend: I hardly know why.
Early in the nineties, too, I came to know Lionel Johnson and young Crackanthorpe. I was drawn to them both from the outset: to Crackanthorpe for his gift of story-writing, and especially to Johnson, whose scholarship was worthy of his poetic endowment. Very early in our acquaintance Lionel won my heart by showing that he knew James Thomson and his poetry and was able to appreciate that rare genius. He said to me one day that Thomson's poem on Shelley was the purest piece of Shelleyism in the language.
Thomson's prose work had escaped him, but he knew every line of his poetry and treasured it in his heart of hearts. Poor, dear Lionel Johnson, whose whole literary life was even shorter than Thomson's, for he had not long passed thirty when the end came. As in the case of Thomson, they talked of drink; but I have an idea that whenever a ship is highly powered, it should have a strong hull to boot or it cannot last long. Like Thomson, poor Lionel Johnson had a big heart, as well as a first-rate brain, and the little body was not strong enough to house such forces for many years.
Lonely unto the Lone I go
Divine to the Divinity.
Whenever I think of Lionel Johnson and Crackanthorpe, I am constrained to think of all the poets and men of genius I knew in my London life and the miserable fate of many of them. I have told of Burton, Thomson, Dowson, Davidson, and Middleton; but there were many others like Henry Harland, some deservedly famous, some inheritors of unfulfilled renown.
But the most startling appearance in these early nineties was certainly Aubrey Beardsley. I know no one in the whole history of art who made such an impression, took up such an independent and peculiar place so early in life.
I came to know him in the late eighties through his sister Mabel, a very charming and pretty girl. She told me that he had been a sort of childprodigy and had played Bach and Beethoven in public on the piano at ten or twelve.
Beardsley was of pleasant manners and intercourse: his appearance, too, was interesting; a little above average height, but very slight; perfectly selfpossessed, though strangely youthful; quite unaffected, but curiously derisive of affectation in others. While still in his teens he used to sneer at Oscar Wilde's poses to his face, though believing to a certain extent in his genius.
Of course Oscar was fifteen years his senior and was better read and had already won a high place.
After his success Oscar tried to patronize him, but Beardsley wouldn't have it.
"At noontide," he said contemptuously, "Oscar will know that the sun has risen!" Had Oscar's appreciation taken place a year or two earlier it would have made all the difference in their relation, for in a year or less Beardsley passed from pupildom to rare mastery. Today he was imitating Mantegna; six months later he was Beardsley-one of the great modern masters of design.
I introduced him to Whistler. At first Whistler seemed bored and turned over Beardsley's drawings carelessly. Suddenly he stopped and began to study them. A few moments later he looked up. "Wonderful," he said. "You are already a master."
Beardsley burst into tears: poor boy, even then he had hardly reached manhood.
But what is the word of his mystery, the "open sesame" to his heart? More than anyone I have ever known, Beardsley desired immediate fame, recognition of his genius, now, as if pricked on with the instinct that he had not long to live. And that demoniac, dominant desire made him sacrifice to sensation, force the note, so to speak, confident always that when he wished he could do great work as it ought to be done-soberly and with reverence.
Beardsley was a little lacking in reverence, that "angel of the world," as Shakespeare calls it in Cymbeline; but the explanation of his faults to me is always the intense desire of immediate recognition, of fame in the day and hour. I have told elsewhere how he came to mastery in writing in a month or so: it really seemed as if every mode of self-expression was easy to him. His sister Mabel always contended that he was more gifted as a musician than as a draughtsman, and it may well have been true. It was Beardsley's mastery of all forms of art that explained to me the extraordinary achievement of the Keatses and Rimbauds.
There are certain pictures of his that remain as part of my intellectual consciousness. Who can ever forget his Hamlet-the slight, boyish figure with the peering, eager, frightened eyes, trying to grope his way through the depths of a pathless wood; yet this was done in 1892. I can never think of Rejane save as she appeared to Beardsley, and his Tannhauser hastening eagerly, breathlessly back to the Venusberg-and these were the conceptions of an unlettered boy of twenty or so, resolved to read all life for himself. Only four years later, he gave us the Fruit Bearers, the ponderous satyr leading with his appalling female companion. And finally the Volpone series of his ripe maturity-unforgettable. Never was there a more astonishing growth or individuality of talent.
And Beardsley, wonderful as he was, was only one of a dozen. Think of Charles Conder as a colorist, or of Augustus John, that master draughtsman, or Walter Sickert, the painter, or Phil May as a caricaturist; to say nothing of Davidson and William Watson-both master-singers, and a dozen other writers. All these men of genius seemed to group themselves naturally round Oscar Wilde as a sort of standard-bearer: he stood for years as the representative of art in life which has now become to the intellectuals more important than religion: for no one can deny that the artist and man of letters in the new time has taken the place of the preacher and prophet.
I must confess that the chief influence in my life, in the first years of the nineties, was Oscar Wilde, and in the second rank, Whistler.
Whistler had come to grief before this. Ruskin had talked of one of his paintings as an impudent attempt to throw his paint-box in the face of the English public, and Whistler had brought an action against him, claiming heavy damages. He got one farthing, and the costs practically ruined him.
Bravely, cheerfully, he went abroad to Venice, paint-box in hand, to redeem his fallen fortunes, and did it after middle age with consummate brio.
Personally, I always rank Whistler with Rodin and Degas among the greatest artists of my time. I always coupled Degas in my mind with Whistler. Though no two talents could be more different, yet the likeness in some ways between them was most extraordinary. Both were witty and bitter-tongued, sparing neither friend nor foe; both made more money than they needed when money could no longer bring them happiness.
I have given in my sketch of him twenty instances of Whistler's poisonous tongue. Oscar spoke of him as a wasp with a sting in his tail, and Swinburne's verse lays emphasis on the same quality:
Fly away, butterfly, back to Japan,
Tempt not a pinch at the hand of a man,
And strive not to sting ere you die away.
So pert and so painted, so proud and so pretty, To brush the bright down from your wings were a pity- Fly away, butterfly, fly away!
Let me recall one or two stories of Degas. I was praising Puvis de Chavannest one day. I had just seen three or four of his great cartoons for some public building and was struck by the suave, idyllic beauty of the landscapes and the Arcadian innocence of the men and women, clothed only in grace.
"He's really another Rafael," I said, "born out of due time."
"There's some truth in that," replied Degas, with curling lip, "un Rafael du village" (a village Rafael). I could not help smiling, for the scalpel had touched the weakest spot. There is something provincial in Arcady-it is too far from the center of our struggle today, and our struggle is of intense interest. Degas with his racehorses and jockeys, ballet girls and opera singers, came nearer to us, being of our tune and hour.
I recall another story of Degas. He had gone to an exhibition of paintings and suddenly picked out one. "A poor Rembrandt!" he cried, and went over to examine it more nearly because of shortsightedness. "I'm mistaken," he said on getting nearer; "it's a first-rate Forain." Yet Forain the caricaturist had always been an admirer and even a disciple of his.
Toward the end of his life Degas was nearly blind and hardly worked at all.
He was a solitary and when he accepted an invitation it was always hedged about with conditions, one of which was that there must be no scent, for he hated odors of all kinds. He often said that "love was not a question of skin," as the French proverb has it, "but of smell."
Degas was a relentless skeptic. "I believe in that," he said one day, pointing to a painting on his easel, "and in nothing else"-a weird, unhappy temperament. He carried his bitterness into his work, whereas Whistler's work is always dedicated to pure beauty. Degas was a realist and supreme draughtsman; Whistler hated reality and was a master colorist. Oddly enough, one would have guessed that Degas, with his sense of line, would have been the great etcher; but it was Whistler who reigned here beyond comparison, save with Rembrandt.
From 1885 on to the catastrophe in 1895, I met Oscar Wilde pretty constantly. He used to lunch with me a couple of tunes every month, and whenever he brought out a new book, or when some article in the Fortnightly attracted him, we would dine together as well and talk half the night. He was, as I have said already, far and away the best talker I have ever met, with the most astounding gift of humor that irradiated all his other qualities. First of all, he was a born story-teller, a better story-teller, by word of mouth, even than Kipling, and with far higher themes, more suggestive, more poetic and symbolical. Often, after telling an exquisite little story, he would drift into portraiture of this or that man he had met: while giving a kindly picture of his subject, he would suddenly illumine it with some humorous, unforgettable word.
The defeat of Oscar Wilde came as a sort of result of the height to which he had climbed. He tasted real success for the first time when his first play was performed, Lady Windermere's Fan. It was admirably constructed, and it was just this quality that excited my curiosity. I asked him how he had won to such stagecraft, and he confessed to me quite frankly that he had gone away by himself for a fortnight and studied the construction of half a dozen of the best French and English plays, and from that study had gained the craft. But the parts of his play that won the public were the admirable aphorisms and witty sayings which he strewed about in every scene. I had heard them all before; they had come to him from time to time in conversation, but the effect on the stage to those who had never heard them was really overpowering.
I have pictured him so often, and with such particularity, that I could leave him now to the readers of my Life of him, but one is tempted again and again to recall the laughing eyes, the eloquent tenor voice, and the charming phrases.
Speaking of young Raffalovich, I said that he had come to London apparently to found a salon.
"And he very nearly succeeded," replied Oscar smiling, "he established a saloon."
On another occasion, apropos of some notice in a paper, I remarked, "It is curious to see how thinkers like Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer love to call on titled people, princesses and duchesses; how inappropriate it all is!"
"Inappropriate, Frank?" cried Oscar. "Surely it is to be expected: doctors must visit the dying."
No afterthought, no art can give any idea of the astounding richness of his verbal humor. One day, walking down by the Houses of Parliament, we came on a meeting of the unemployed who were reinforced by some bands of suffragettes. "Characteristic," I said, in my usual serious way, "one of these days the unemployed will make themselves heard here in Westminster. We are witnessing the beginnings of a social revolution."
"You call it 'characteristic'," said Oscar. "I think it characteristic, too, my dear Frank, to find the unenjoyed united in protest with the unemployed."
No one else ever possessed such humor, both of words and of thoughts. His magnificent gift had conquered even English dullness and he was becoming a social favorite when Nemesis overtook him. One day I heard that the Marquis of Queensbury had insulted him, and then Oscar called on me, as I have narrated in my Life of him, and the tragedy began.