Looking back over my life, I realize with dismay that there are many people and places of which I have not had the opportunity to speak. In this volume therefore there was from the beginning a kind of dual purpose. In the first place, I wished to continue the true story of my life and loves and, in the second, to make up for the unfortunate omissions in the earlier volumes I'd written. Thus, formally speaking, this last, and in a sense, most final of my expressions, will doubtless lack the purposeful continuity of the earlier. In a summing up, that is only to be expected. I make no apologies for it. I should be untrue to my purpose were I to do otherwise than I am doing. For the truth is that I am not satisfied with what I have written; I might have done it better. I am obsessed by the desire to make each chapter of this volume memorable by some new thought.
The greatest omission as I see it has been amongst some of the great names with whom I was off and on acquainted throughout my colorful life. Without hesitation, therefore, and despising a mechanical chronology, I move now into the consideration of some of the men who have inspired me and whom, not seldom, I have numbered among my friends.
I was more interested in Meredith than in any other man of my time. I thought him one of the greatest of men, worthy to stand with Shakespeare and Wordsworth. He was one of the handsomest of men, just above middle height, slight and strong of figure with a superb head and face, the head all outlined in graying hair, but excellently shaped and the face noblestraight nose, incomparable blue eyes, now laughing, now pathetic, excellent mouth and chinin sum a very good-looking man, sane and strong. When Grant Allen sent him one of my earliest stories, “Montes the Matador,” he praised it as better than the “Carmen” of Merimee because, he explained, I had given even the bulls individuality. He ended his praise with the words: “If there is any hand in England that can do better, I don't know it.” As I have said somewhere, I regarded that judgment as my knighting. No contempt touched me afterwards; Meredith to me already stood among the greatest.
Born in 1828, he brought out his first book of Poems in 1851 and I think he was always more of a poet than a prose writer. But good as his best poetry iseven “Love in the Valley” has stanzas I can never forget and Modern Loves with the entrancing “Margaret's Bridal Eve” is greater still; yet neither in poetry nor in prose has Meredith reached the highest or given his full measure.
The reason always escaped me. When I knew him first about 1885 he was the reader for Chapman and Hall and made his?500 or?600 a year out of this easily enough while his books added perhaps as much more to his income. He had a house on Box Hill in Surrey, and lived like a modest country gentleman. Nothing in his circumstances hindered him from reaching Cervantes or Shakespeare.
His conversation was astonishing. He touched everything that came up from the highest standpoint; he praised the Irish as if he had been bred in Ireland and the Welsh as if from the highest of the Celtic stock. Once indeed he went so far as to suggest merrily that the English should invade France in order to get some French women to enlarge their matter of fact narrowness of mind. He was in favor of the Boers too, and a passionate advocate of women's suffrage; he wanted feminine influence in government as in the home. Once he went so far as to advocate the making of Britain into one state of the American Union, “the Eastern Star in the Banner of the Republic,” as he said, for he was profoundly convinced that the British were dropping back, were indeed no longer leaders of the world. “Their fatal lack of imagination,” he said, “dwarfs them.” In every question he was an unprejudiced and most interesting guide.
Every man he mentioned lived unforgettably in his judgment. Who can ever forget his criticism of Tennyson's “dandiacal flutingthe great length of his mild fluency, the yards of linen drapery for the delight of women.” And then “the praises of the book shut me away from my fellows,” and the superb return: “To be sure, there is the magnificent Lucretius.” Then he sees Irving as Romeo: “No loveplay but a pageant with a quaint figure ranting about.” His judgment of Gladstone: “This valiant, prodigiously gifted, in many respects admirable old man is, I fear me, very much an actor.”
And finally he touches the height in a letter to his son:
“Don't think that the obscenities mentioned in the Bible do harm to children. The Bible is outspoken upon facts, and rightly. It is because the world is pruriently and stupidly shamefaced that it cannot come in contact with the Bible without convulsions.
“Look for the truth in everything and follow it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding wavers whenever you chance to doubt that he leads to good. We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. The school has only to look through history for a scientific assurance of it. And do not lose the habit of praying to the unseen Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks.”
To an acquaintance he writes protesting against the charge of cynicism:
“None of my writings can be said to show a want of faith in humanity, or of sympathy with the weaker, or that I do not read the right meaning of strength. And it is not only women of the flesh, but also women in the soul whom I esteem, believe in, and would aid to development”
I once pressed him for his views of women and found him as wise as Goethe: “We learn the best from those we love,” he said. “We have doubled Seraglio Point, but have not yet rounded Cape Turkthe Turkish idea is very strong in the male breast.”
Personally I must always speak of Meredith as the most interesting of companions. We agreed in almost everything, but the flashes of his humor made his conversation entrancing. I still regard him with Russel Wallace as the wisest men I've ever met. But Wallace's belief in another and larger life after death shut him away from me while Meredith's love of nature and his delight in nature studies all appealed to me. I remember how I met him for the last time in his little pony-chaise on Box Hill shortly before his death.
“People talk about me as if I were an old man. I don't feel old in the least. On the contrary,” he went on in his humorous sardonic fashion, “I do not believe in growing old, and I do not see any reason why we should ever die. I take as keen an interest in the movement of life as ever. I enter into the intrigues of parties with the same keen interest as of old. I have seen the illusion of it all, but it does not dull the zest with which I enter into it and I hold more firmly than ever my faith in the constant advancement of the race. My eyes are as good as ever they were, only for small print I need to use spectacles. It is only in my legs that I feel weaker. I can no longer walk vigorously, which is a great privation to me. I used to be a keen walker; I preferred walking to riding; it sent the blood coursing to the brain, and besides, when I walked I could go through woods and footpaths which I could not have done if I had ridden. Now I can only walk about my own garden. It is a question of nerves. If I touch anything, however slightly, I am afraid that I shall fall; that is my only loss. My walking days are over.”
He did not need to go beyond his garden to be in the midst of the Garden of the Gods. As a young man he wrote:
When the westering sun is leaving the valley in gloom
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle note unvaried.
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
There in the midst of all living, singing, flowering things, he lived alone and marveled that people thought him lonely. His wife had been dead for many years. His daughter was married and lived between Box Hill and Leatherhead. His son, who was in London, came to see him every fortnight.
“I do not feel in the least lonely,” he told me. “I have my books and my thoughts, and besides, I am never lonely, with Nature and the birds and beasts and insects, and the woods and the trees, in which I find a constant companionship.”
And on this occasion he went deeper than ever before:
“I see,” he said, “the revelation of God to man in the history of the world, and in the individual experience of each of us in the progressive triumph of God, and the working of the law by which wrong works out its own destruction. I cannot resist the conviction that there is something more in the world than Nature. Nature is blind. Her law works without regard to individuals. She cares only for the type. To her, life and death are the same. Ceaselessly she works, pressing ever for the improvement of the type. If man should fail her, she will create some other being; but that she has failed with man I am loath to admit, or do I see any evidence of it. It would be good for us,” he added thoughtfully, “if we were to take a lesson from Nature in this respect, and cease to be so wrapped up in individuals, to allow our interests to go out to the race. We should all attain more happiness, especially if we ceased to care so exclusively for the individual I. Happiness is usually a negative thing. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.”
In this passage I think Meredith reaches the highest: “There is something more (and higher) in the world than Nature.” I put on record the farthest reaches of Meredith's faith which I share. To me this life is all that man knows or can reckon upon, but it is surely in love and spirit-growth a gift incomparable and higher than what we know as Nature. It is the Wallaces and the Merediths who have made it divine to me and perchance in my time, I have made it more worthwhile to certain of my younger companions.
Of the two, I have always felt myself nearer to Meredith than to any other man I have known personally.
I have written little about the greatest English and French actresses of my time; little about Ellen Terry whom I love, and little about Sarah Bernhardt, who for twenty years was the idol of civilized Europe. No two women could be more dissimilar. Whatever height Ellen Terry reached as an actress, she was before and above everything a woman, whereas Sarah was always an actress pure and simple, even when she was most a woman. I knew both women pretty intimately, though Sarah was far nearer to me than Ellen.
Ellen Terry was the best actress in half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays that I have ever seen. She even made Ophelia interesting.
Very early in her career I noticed that she talked on the stage, now giving directions to some other actress, now criticizing even Irving. She was the acme of naturalness even on the stage, or rather the stage was the true scene of her life and triumphs. Now she is eighty-odd years old and just as charming and attractive as ever.
Her first marriage with the great painter, Watts, took place when she was sixteen. Watts was thirty years older. She sat for him in a dozen characters and he painted her magnificently, but what caused the rupture between them he never told. She was almost as reticent, though once she admitted that she “never loved Watts,” which perhaps was confession enough. “He was charming,” she said, “and I loved the pictures he made of me, but I never cared for him.”
The first time I saw Sarah was in 1878, I think, in the Comedie-Francaise. After the play I went backstage with Marguerite Durand and she introduced me to Sarah. Sarah treated me with very mild interest, but it was destined that I should know her better, though that need not concern us here. I mention it by way of explaining ensuing events.
I had met the Damalas in Athens; they were all staying at the Hotel d'Athenes just opposite the Royal Palace where I also had a room. The son was in the Corps des Pages; his sister had married a Scot and, deserted by him, was living with her mother. They had all come from Marseilles and were as good-looking a trio as one could meet in a day's walk. The unhappy events surrounding the sister had happy results for me. We came to know each other intimately. I can't forget our first private meeting. She was so eager to feel the hardness of a man between her thighs due to the deprivation she'd recently suffered.
She came to my room one afternoon while I sat on the balcony admiring the view of the distant Acropolis. It was sunny and hot and I had discarded my shirt. The girl, Ariane, had knocked and entered unbidden, and stood before me wordlessly. She was a beautytall and willowy with dark hair that fell to her shoulders, rounded hips, and lush breasts that thrust against the thin cloth of her dress. I was anxious to see what she would do next as she swayed in front of me, and she didn't disappoint. She slipped the straps of her garment over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. She was naked underneath. I stiffened instantly. Her breasts were full and pale and capped expansively with dark nipples that sprang erect under my smoldering gaze. Her thin waist flared into the swell of enticing hips and the sweeping lines of luscious thighs. Between her legs nestled a mossy treasure that I wished to explore.
I fell to my knees and dove at her tasty fruit, licking and sucking at it like a man dying of thirst in the desert. Ariane threw her head back as my tongue separated the lips of her pussy and probed her depths.
“I want you to fuck me,” she whispered heatedly.
Who was I to deny her that which she so eagerly sought? I pulled her to the floor of the terrace with one hand; with the other I loosened my trousers and let them fall. I shuffled forward, leaving them tangled in her dress, and moved between her opened legs. She was exquisite. Her pussy was a smile that was so enticing that I dispensed with further preparation and simply brought my cock to its target. I levered it down and put the head against the pouting lips. Then I thrust forward until that swollen cap was just inside her slit. She gasped and begged me to let her have more, more, more. I reared back and rammed into her, driving the entire length of my ramrod into her lovebox. She immediately clamped her legs around me as if afraid that I would leave her before the final act of our play.
I began to fuck her forcefully, driving all the way in and pulling nearly all the way out. My hands were clamped onto her heaving tits, crushing them and pinching the enormous nipples that I found so delectable. “Yes, yes,” she moaned, “fuck me like you mean it. Fuck me hard. Ohhh, I had almost forgotten”
I drove into her with a fury that surprised me. Every fiber of my body, every sense, seemed centered in my cock at that moment. I could feel the pressure building, and knew she was experiencing much the same thing if her writhings were a fair indication. Her breathing came in staccato gasps when she flooded my rod with her pearly nectar. At the same time I shot a copious amount of sperm into her thirsting pussy.
Sadly, I didn't see Ariane again once I left Athens, but it was not the end of my association with her family.
The son eventually threw up the page business and went to Paris. Six months later we met in that city, where he soon became the accredited admirer of Sarah Bernhardt. He was one of the handsomest men I have ever seen and Sarah fell for him to a degree that was almost incredible. She got him to act on her stage and took him on one of her journeys through Eastern Europe. In Trieste, I think it was, she noticed that he was deceiving her with a young actress in her company and at once accused him before the whole troop. Damalas heard her to the end in silence, and then said simply, “Madame, you will never again have the opportunity of calling me names.” His ideal was always the perfect gentleman. He left that same evening for Paris. Without him, she could not continue her tour and returned to Paris disconsolate and begged me to bring about a meeting with the only man she had ever loved. I did as she wished, but Damalas would not go back to her. “A great talent,” he said to me, “but a small nature and a foul tongue.”
It was almost her epitaph: I never thought her as great an actress as Ellen Terry.
In these years in London between the beginning of the century and the Great War, there were many men of ability that one ought to write about. First and foremost of course, Sir Edward Grey, and then Abe Bailey and Barney Barnato, and J. B. Robinson. Grey, of course, was an English aristocrat, whereas the other three were South African millionaires. The first time I met Grey was at dinner at Sir Charles Dilke's. Dilke had a high opinion of him; Grey was good-looking, above medium height, slightly but well built, with a mind that seemed very receptive. In reality, he had no measure of those that talked to him. He accepted Dilke's opinions of South Africa as readily as mine, and when Harold Frederic talked to him of the United States, he accepted some things and rejected others according to his original conceptions. Consequently, he learned nothing valuable. He listened most pleasantly but I soon found out that he had learned nothing except an argument or two to defend his original view. Grey had one of the closed minds of the world and that is almost as bad as to have no mind at all. I rate him now below almost any of his contemporaries.
Abe Bailey was a Transvaal millionaire, and Barney Barnato had not only made one fortune in Kimberley, but another and larger one in Johannesburg. He lost a million or so bucking against Rhodes and Beit, and he finally threw himself overboard on the steamer returning to England and perished miserably. But Abe Bailey was better balanced, if not so rich; he resolved to make a second home in London, and now for more than 25 years has been an important figure there.
J. B. Robinson, too, pursued the same course, though for one reason or another he was disliked by most of his fellows. Since the beginning of the century he has been a resident in Park Lane, and is strong and well, though he was over fifty years of age in 1900, a slight weakness of hearing being his chief physical defect. Robinson, curiously enough, was the first man to find and buy diamonds in Kimberley and also was the first to discover and exploit the gold mines of the Rand. He can tell the romantic story of South Africa's wealth better than any other man.
None of these people impressed me like Henri Rochefort of Paris. He was really an extraordinary person, full of wit and venom. When he heard that Queen Victoria intended to pass the winter in Nice for her health, he wrote in his paper, “L'Intransigeant,” that she had better stay at home. She was not wanted in France, he said, “that old stagecoach that persists in calling itself Victoria.” He came to see me and spent a month or so with me in London. I found him kindly to those he knew, but he held nine out of ten men in disdain.
For fifty-odd years he had fought as a journalist in Paris; “the noblest profession,” he said, “when not the lowest.”
In 1912, for the first time, he had to rest. “I'll soon be at work again,” he said. “My old teeth can still bite.” But a little later, in his eighty-third year, he passed on.
Was his influence good or bad? Distinctly bad, I should say, but Paris forgave him everything because of his wit, as London has forgiven Kipling everything because of his patriotism.
Very few people now remember the noble letter in which George Russell, “AE,” scourged Kipling for what he had written about Ireland. Of course, the trouncing was well deserved. Kipling had written against the Irish just as he had written a dastardly story against the Russians whom he regarded as dangerous to England. When France in 1906 pushed forward at Fashoda into what was regarded as British Africa, Kipling wrote against the French furiously, and in the World War, he coolly declared that no German should be allowed to survive. Why he fell foul of Ireland, I cannot recall, but Russell's letter will witness forever against him in literature. It begins:
“I speak to you, brother, because you have spoken to me, or rather, you have spoken for me. I am a native of Ulster. So far back as I can trace the faith of my forefathers, they held the faith for whose free observance you are afraid.
“You have Irish blood in you. I have heard, indeed, Ireland is your mother's land, and you may, perhaps, have some knowledge of the Irish sentiment. You have offended against one of your noblest literary traditions in the manner in which you have published your thoughts.
“I would not reason with you but that I know there is something truly great and noble in you and there have been hours when the immortal in you secured your immortality in literature, when you ceased to see life with that hard cinematograph eye of yours and saw with the eyes of the spirit, and power and tenderness and insight were mixed in magical tales.
“Surely you were far from the innermost when, for the first time, I think, you wrote of your mother's land and my countrymen.
“I have lived all my life in Ireland holding a different faith from that held by the majority. I know Ireland as few Irishmen know it, county by county, far I traveled all over Ireland for years and, Ulster man as I am, and proud of the Ulster people, I resent the crowning of Ulster with all the virtues and the dismissal of other Irishmen as 'thieves and robbers.' I resent the cruelty with which you, a stranger, speak of the most lovable and kindly people I know.
“You are not even accurate in your history when you speak of Ulster's traditions and the blood our forefathers spilt. Over a century ago, Ulster was the strong and fast place of rebellion, and it was in Ulster that the Volunteers stood beside their cannon and wrung the gift of political freedom for the Irish parliament. You are blundering in your blame. You speak of Irish greed in I know not what connection, unless you speak of the war waged over the land; and yet you ought to know that both parties in England have by act after act confessed the absolute justice and rightness of that agitation. Unionist no less than Liberal, and both boast of their share in answering the Irish appeal. They are both proud today of what they did. They made inquiry into wrong and redressed it.
“But you, it seems, can only feel angry that intolerable conditions imposed by your laws were not borne in patience and silence. For what party do you speak? When an Irishman has a grievance, you smite him. How differently you would have written of Runnymede and the valiant men of England who rebelled whenever they thought fit. You would have made heroes out of them.
“Have you no soul left, after admiring the rebels in your own history, to sympathize with other rebels suffering deeper wrongs? Can you not see deeper into the motive for rebellion that the hireling reporter who is sent to make up a case for the paper of a party?
“The best in Ulster, the best Unionists in Ireland, will not be grateful to you for libeling their countrymen in your verse. For, let the truth be known, the mass of Irish Unionists are much more in love with Ireland than with England. They think Irish Nationalists are mistaken, and they fight with them, and they use harsh words, and all the time they believe Irishmen of any party are better in the sight of God than Englishmen. They think Ireland is the best country in the world, and they hate to hear Irish people spoken of as 'murderers and greedy scoundrels.'
“Murderers! Why, there is more murder done in any four English shires in a year than in the whole of the four provinces of Ireland. Greedy! The nation never accepted a bribe, or took it as an equivalent or payment for an ideal, and what bribe would not have been offered to Ireland if it had been willing to foreswear its traditions?
“I am a person whose whole being goes into a blaze at the thought of oppression of faith, and yet I think my Catholic countrymen infinitely more tolerant than those who hold the faith I was born in. I am a heretic judged by their standards, a heretic who has written and made public his heresies, and I have never suffered in friendship or found by my heresies an obstacle in life.
“I set my knowledge, the knowledge of a lifetime, against your ignorance, and I say you have used your genius to do Ireland and its people a wrong. You have intervened in a quarrel of which you do not know the merits, like any brawling bully who passes and only takes sides to use his strength. If there was a high court of poetry, and those in power jealous of the noble name of poet and that none should use it save those who are truly knights of the Holy Ghost, they would hack the golden spurs from your heels and turn you out of court.
“You had the ear of the world and you poisoned it with prejudice and ignorance. You had the power of song, and you have always used it on behalf of the strong against the weak. You have smitten with all your might at creatures who are frail on earth but mighty in the heavens, at generosity, at truth, at justice, and Heavens have withheld vision and power and beauty from you, for this your verse is only a shallow newspaper article made to rhyme.”
It was one of the noblest letters ever written, but it did not hinder Kipling from getting the Nobel Prize, though he had done more to stir up hate between the nations than any other living man. I met him casually, many years ago now, when he first returned from India, but this letter of “AE” is the final judgment on him.
I cannot resist the temptation to write of an even greater man, a noble Frenchman, Marcelin Berthelot, who, I think, touched the zenith of humanity. His father was described by Renan as an accomplished physician, and a man of admirable charity and devotion. “Living in a populous district, he treated most of his patients gratuitously, and lived and died poor.” At the close of a brilliant college career, Marcelin chose science. He soon became friends with Renan, and the friendship seems to have been ideal. His great contributions to human progress lay in chemical synthesis, thermo-chemistry and agricultural chemistry. His synthetic chemistry created acetylene and a whole series of hydrocarbons.
He never would consent to derive the slightest personal benefit from any of his discoveries, but always relinquished the profit to the community at large.
He was, nevertheless, constantly urged to fill his pockets. Owing to his first researches on carburette d'hydrogen, he discovered an improvement in the manufacture of gas for lighting purposes, which constituted for Paris alone a saving of several hundred millions of francs to the Gas Company. He immediately made his discovery public without deriving any personal advantage from it.
Important manufacturers, such as the millionaire Menier, often came to him with proposals of partnership, or tried to buy some of his processes for the synthetic manufacture of organic compounds. The brewers of northern France once offered him two million francs if he would give them the monopoly on one of his discoveries. Enormous fortunes have been made out of one single item of his scientific treatises. His researches on explosives led to smokeless powder and would have accumulated riches for him equal to those of Nobel.
Germany owes the greater part of her wonderful modern industrial development to the introduction to science of Berthelot's revolutionary synthetic method.
In the course of his long career, he never took out a single patent, and always relinquished to humanity the benefit of his discoveries. “The scientist,” he said, “ought to make the possession of truth his only riches.”
He wrote in 1895: “It is not half a century since I attained the age of manhood, and I have faithfully lived up to the ideal dream of justice and truth which dazzled my youthI have always had the will to achieve what I thought morally the best for myself, my country, and humanity.”
While perpetually engaged in his chemical researches, he still took part in public life. He became a Senator, a Minister of Public Instruction, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a pioneer to the “entente cordiale.”
His private life was just as beautiful. His wife was thus described at the time of her wedding by the brothers de Goncourt:
“A singular beauty, never to be forgotten; a beauty, intelligent, profound, magnetic, a beauty of soul and thought resembling one of Edgar Poe's creations of the other world. The hair parted, and standing away from the head, gave the appearance of a halo; a prominent calm foreheadlarge eyes full of light, encircled by a dark ring, and the musical voice of an ephebe.”
For forty-five years, husband and wife lived side by side. They were not separated for a day. In the closest union of heart and thought, their affection was never veiled by the slightest cloud.
The loss of her grandson in a railway accident was Madame Berthelot's death-blow. The first attack of heart disease she got over, but at the close of 1906, her husband saw that nothing could stop it. Then this old man of eighty was to be seen watching night and day at the bedside of his dear patient, measuring hour by hour the diminution of her vital forces, at the same time as he noted the deep inroads made in his own organism by the keen anguish which he suffered. The patient retained her admirable serenity until the last hour, and her ultimate words were said to her daughter: “What will become of him when I am gone?”
A few minutes later, one of his sons, who had followed him into the room, heard him heave a deep and harrowing sigh. He took his hand to say a few tender words of consolation to him, but the arm dropped inactive.
Through the sad blow, that great heart was broken.
Madame Berthelot was buried with her husband in the Pantheon, the first time that this supreme honor was rendered to a woman.
Had his life been spared, Berthelot would, a friend says, probably have astonished the world by his observations on trees as regulators of electricity, and as possible media of electrical communications, and on the worldwide disasters which the clearing off of forests to make paper is likely to occasion. His walks in the forests of Meudon opened to him new and original views on the harmonies of creation.
Berthelot was a charming lecturer, charming from every point of viewartistic expression, voice enunciation, and appearance.
There was often a rhythm in his sentences which caught the ear and helped the memory to retain them. His knowledge of Greek and Latin was deep, and he thought the classics an invaluable mental discipline.
His son, Philippe Berthelot, is now in the Foreign Office in Paris and many of us foreigners who live in France have reason to be grateful to him. He, too, lives quite simply, but is naturally proud of his father's extraordinary character and noble achievements. I often think of Marcelin Berthelot as an ideal. He is the first man of whom I have said this. We are apt to think of Frenchmen as resembling Rochefort; it is well to be reminded sometimes that there are Frenchmen such as Marcelin Berthelot.