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Title: J. Comyns Carr: Stray Memories, by His Wife

Author: Alice Vansittart Strettel Carr

Release date: December 10, 2020 [eBook #64001]

Language: English

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J. COMYNS CARR




[Illustration]

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO

[Illustration]

J. COMYNS CARR

_Stray Memories_

BY
HIS WIFE

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




_COPYRIGHT_


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




TO
OUR GRANDSONS
RICHARD AND JOHN COMYNS CARR




FOREWORD


My husband wrote his own Reminiscences in his two books--_Some Eminent
Victorians_ and _Coasting Bohemia_, and it might justly be brought up
against me that I could have nothing to add to what he has said himself.

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

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




CONTENTS


                                             PAGE

    I. COURTSHIP 1

    II. THE HOME OF BOYHOOD 10

    III. MARRIAGE 16

    IV. HOME LIFE AND DRAMATIC CRITICISM 28

    V. JOURNALISM AND LETTERS 43

    VI. BOOKS AND TRAVEL 63

    VII. GROSVENOR AND NEW GALLERIES 76

    VIII. DRAMATIC WORK AND MANAGEMENT 83

    IX. SOCIAL OCCASIONS 115

    X. FOREIGN HOLIDAYS 129

    XI. FISHING HOLIDAYS 156

    XII. EARLY VERSE 175


_Frontispiece_

J. COMYNS CARR

From a photograph by the London Stereoscopic Co. Ltd.




CHAPTER I

COURTSHIP


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said, “Mayn’t I come in?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Joe always pooh-poohed the notion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER II

THE HOME OF BOYHOOD


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was in July, 1873.

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER III

MARRIAGE


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much have we changed since the Morris vogue!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Grapes she might have had--but English currants, they require
_watering_.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The little incident recalls another of later date.

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

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

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




CHAPTER IV

HOME LIFE AND DRAMATIC CRITICISM


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

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

And what chats they were!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  _Feb. 22, 1881._

  “DEAR CARR,

 I have heard that you do the _Saturday Review_ theatrical criticisms.
 Did you do that on _The Colonel_? if so I am anxious to know if
 you ever read _Un Mari à la Campagne_; also to ask where the puns
 are in my piece? I admit three, put in _carefully_ into the right
 peoples’ mouths--the right puns in the right places.

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

 I shouldn’t have taken the trouble to write if I hadn’t
 been told that you were the critic who in a friendly way
 pooh-pooh’d the notion of _The Colonel_ being a comedy. I
 am aware that Dr. Johnson set down _She stoops, etc._ as a farce,
 and farcical to a degree its plot is, but not its characters.
 _The Colonel_ I contend is comedy--farcical neither in plot _nor_
 characters.

  Yours truly,
  F. C. BURNAND (anxious to learn).”

  19, BLANDFORD SQUARE, N.W.,
  _February 24th, 1881_.

  “DEAR BURNAND,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


  GROSVENOR HOTEL,
  LONDON, S.W.,
  _June 11th, 1911_.

  “MY DEAR CARR,

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

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

  Yours most sincerely,
  F. C. BURNAND.”


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, many is the _bon mot_ to which I helped my husband.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




CHAPTER V

JOURNALISM AND LETTERS


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

I believe he got through a quite unusual amount of work in that
profession. Many an evening did I put back our little dinner while
he rushed off to Euston to give his copy of Art Criticism for the
_Manchester Guardian_ into the hands of the guard for early morning
delivery: he wrote on the same subject for the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and
the _Art Journal_, and what with criticism and social articles for the
_Saturday Review_ and _World_, he was never in bed till long after
midnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


  27, PERHAM ROAD,
  WEST KENSINGTON,
  _February 5th, 1909_.

  DEAR MR. COMYNS CARR,

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

  Your delighted
  HUGH THOMSON.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

  Yours ever,
  J. W. COMYNS CARR.”


In relation to the above I cannot refrain from quoting an appreciation
of my husband written some little while later by the late Theodore
Watts Dunton. He had asked for news of his old friend after his first
serious illness, and the following passage occurs in his acknowledgment
of the reply:

“Although he belongs to a later generation than mine, he and I
are as intimate as brothers and I deeply prize the intimacy. There is
no man on this earth whom I love more. Moreover I have always asserted
that he is a man of genius--a true poet, with wings clipped, for the
present, by the conditions of life.”

As his intimates know, Charles Dickens was one of the brightest stars
in my husband’s firmament. During all the years of our marriage, I
never remember him without a volume of Dickens and one of Boswell’s
_Life of Johnson_ beside his bed. Many a “night’s talk” with the
life-long friend to whom he wrote as above had been devoted to
ineffectual attempts to converting him to a real appreciation of
Dickens--attempts which, as the following letters show, were finally
successful.


  “MY DEAR,----

 I am very much interested in your letter about Dickens.... [This was
 in the early stage of conversion.] Curiously enough I have lately
 been reading the whole of Macready’s Diary and was immensely
 interested in it. His conceit of course is colossal, but the diary
 struck me as affording a revelation of a real and virile creature of
 great independence of character, gifted on occasion with striking
 insight and vision. I was noticing as I read that Dickens was the only
 one of all his friends of long date with whom he never quarrelled,
 and it struck me that there must have been something innately fine
 and magnanimous in Dickens’ nature to command this constancy of
 friendship from a man so vain and irascible as Macready.

 But Macready sometimes sees far and I think his understanding of
 Browning and his appreciation of the poet’s inherent limitations
 in the field of drama are very illuminating. Evidently the drama was
 the goal of Browning’s ambition and yet it has always seemed to
 me--as it appeared to Macready--that he was not in essence a dramatist
 at all.

 When you next come to London you should look in at the Grafton
 Gallery and take a glance at the Post Impressionists. I saw most
 of them in Paris, with something added of further extravagance and
 crude indecency; but the Parisian critics, with few exceptions, took
 small account of the matter. Here, on the contrary, nearly all the
 younger critics are at their feet. It seems to me to indicate a wave
 of disease, even of absolute madness; for the whole product seems to
 breathe not ineptitude merely but corruption--especially marked in
 a sort of combined endeavour to degrade and discredit all forms of
 feminine beauty.

  Yours ever,
  JOE.”


Later this was his great indictment of the Cubists also, well known to
his friends in the Club.

The following letter is to the same correspondent written during the
last year of his life and in much more satisfied mood on the subject of
his hero.


  HASTINGS, 1915.

  “MY DEAR,----

 It gave me delight to get your letter--the greater in that you talk to
 me of Dickens. I never tire of him nor of talking of him. But I was
 not unprepared for your enthusiasm. I remember only the last time we
 touched on the topic it was already brewing. I am struck above all by
 what you feel about the composer’s gift in him, that unconscious
 power of massing and moulding his material, the instructive adjustment
 of varying currents in the narrative, so that--as he traces the
 courses in which they run, we recognise in wonderment that they are
 confluent streams though often seeming for the time to flow so far
 asunder. Even the most modest of us are, I think, sometimes aware
 that there is a force outside ourselves which holds the reins of our
 fancy and that we must needs obey; but the exercise of that faculty in
 Dickens approaches the miraculous. At times it would almost seem as if
 he threw down the gauntlet to himself, directly challenging his own
 powers of artistic control by flinging at his own feet the unsifted
 harvest of the most prodigal invention with which man was ever endowed
 and defying the artist in him to reduce it to order and harmony.

 And yet the artist invariably wins and by a victory so complete as
 to cheat us into the belief that every obstacle he subdues was an
 integral feature of the original design. Inexhaustible invention and
 unfailing control, these are the things that always seem to me to set
 Dickens on an eminence which he shares with no one in his own time and
 with only a few in our creative literature of any time. Shakespeare
 stands there--as he stands everywhere, no matter what the quality to
 be appraised or what the arena in which it finds exercise, above all
 rivalry; and Walter Scott most surely and securely too; and ... well,
 I don’t feel able to be certain about any others!...

 I am not disposed to quarrel about _Bleak House_, I do not like it;
 but that story and _Little Dorrit_ have always been my stumbling
 blocks.

 On the other hand I heartily agree about _Our Mutual Friend_; I think
 it illustrates a giant’s way with Nature which becomes a fawning
 slave before the tyranny of genius.

  Yours ever,
  JOE.”




CHAPTER VI

BOOKS AND TRAVEL


Of work in volume form my husband left comparatively little, and all
the books of his earlier years were on Art. His criticisms on the
various exhibitions of Old Masters at Burlington House, chiefly written
at that time for the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the _Art Journal_, were
useful to him in a volume on _The Drawings of the Old Masters_ in the
British Museum, upon which subject he was a careful and enthusiastic
student; and at a somewhat later period--when he and Mr. C. E. Hallé
organized the famous exhibitions of those drawings at the Grosvenor
Gallery--a recognised connoisseur.

It is interesting to note that much of the matter written in those
early years upon a subject on which he was always a master was echoed
involuntarily in my husband’s swan-song upon the same subject,
i.e. _The Ideals of Painting_, posthumously published in 1917; for
although he naturally acquired a deeper knowledge of individual
pictures as the years went on, bringing him opportunities of visiting
the great collections of Europe, he very rarely changed his opinion
of the characteristics of each painter; and his loving appreciation of
the subtlest qualities in his favourites was such that I remember a
gifted connoisseur saying to him once respecting a fellow art critic:
“So-and-so could tell you whether a picture was authentic or
not with his back to it, provided he had got its pedigree at his
fingers ends; but you don’t depend on books; you know the man
and his method and study the painter in the light of them, and if your
verdict is sometimes at variance with the alleged pedigree, by Jove,
you’re generally right.”

So thoroughly had he steeped himself in the subject that when we went
on our belated honeymoon to the towns of Northern Italy, he always
knew exactly where every picture was that he wanted to see, and many
is the argument that I had in those less enlightened days with Italian
officials as to the existence of some particular work of Art which
they little knew was under their care, and many lovely things we found
in private places which, perhaps even now, are missed by the ordinary
tourist.

I recollect the weary trip he made from Milan that he might study
the wonderful Luini frescoes at Saronno. Now the little town is on a
railway, but in those days it was only reached in a horse-omnibus,
slowly jogging, as only the poor starved Italian horses of that day
_could_ jog, across the sun-baked Lombard plains. The beautiful lunar
frescoes, some of them in sepia, in the sacristy of the Church of San
Maurizio Maggiore at Milan, were among the things which we should
never have seen if he had not made me insist on the sacristan opening
that closed door that he might examine for himself. And a really funny
incident occurred at Mantova--a town lying off the regular route, but
so picturesque, with its lovely Palazzo del Të raised on arcades built
into the marshes--that it is strange it should not be oftener visited
by the tourist.

We lodged in a vast but dirty old Inn, waited on by a girl whose beauty
compensated, in _Joe’s_ eyes only, for slipshod methods; nothing but my
knowledge of the tongue would have procured us even the comfort of a
huge warming-pan with which I endeavoured to dry the damp sheets. After
a sleepless night and a tiring morning in the Castle looking at the
Mantegna portraits of grim Gonzagas and stooping to enter the “dwarf’s
apartments,” whence slits of windows peer upon the eerie marshland,
I was in no mood for an altercation. Yet an altercation was the only
means by which I finally succeeded in inducing the morose custodian of
a dark church in the town to do Joe’s will: he had come to Mantova to
see examples of Mantegna for some work that he was doing and he was not
going away without having unearthed this specially interesting one. He
led the way himself to the side-chapel where he believed the painting
to be, but lo! a hideous modern daub hung over the little altar and
his face fell. Then he had an inspiration: in spite of the man’s
remonstrances he went up the steps and peered behind the gaudy painting.

“Tell him I’ll pay him to help me get this thing
down,” he said: “I believe what I want is at the back of
it.”

Then my altercation began.

We were mad English, and one couldn’t behave in a Church as if it
were a shop.

But “mad English” or not we were also “rich
English” (in the custodian’s eyes), and a very little
English gold won the day: we saw the picture we wanted.

These were only a few instances of the “tonic of a young man’s
conceit and obstinacy”--to use Joe’s own chaff of himself--in that
never-to-be-forgotten journey through the highways and by-ways of
Northern Italy. Everything was grist that came to his mill in this as
in each separate field of his activities; but Florence was the real
goal of all his desires, and this first visit to it, close on the study
which had made him long to see for himself the Masters whom he loved
and the fairest of towns which was their home, had a glamour which
was never quite reached in later visits. I can see again the poor
_Trattorìa della Luna_ where we lodged and the handsome waiter whom we,
in the wild enthusiasm of the hour, persuaded to follow us to England.
That he ever arrived at all was the marvel. He might well have spent
the journey-money given him on pastimes suggested by his reproach to
me in London afterwards as to engaging a cook who remembered the birth
of Christ: that he arrived weeping in a November fog and bitterly
resenting having been left to come “by sea when we had come by land,”
was not wonderful. Joe was patient with him for my sake and many a
funny tale did he forge out of the Italian’s vagaries.

But when this unkempt Adonis had demoralized our maid, smashed our
pretty wedding gifts in fits of gloom, during which he would shake his
fist at the fog and say: “Goo’ nigh’,” and finally taunted us with not
providing sufficient wine at a humble entertainment to excuse one of
the guests for having left his hat behind, we felt it best he should
return to his native land--though not before he had inadvertently half
poisoned us with dried mushrooms sent by his relatives.

Well, badly as Mario behaved subsequently in Great Russell Street he
was one of the features of our happy Florence holiday and directed our
steps towards many out-of-the-way places which Joe thirsted to explore
in search of Art treasures unknown to guide-books.

My husband’s knowledge culled from many old books was of great
value to him, and with his bump of locality, joined to my knowledge of
the speech of the people, we penetrated into many lovely corners and
met with as many amusing adventures.

Strange food did we eat too on that weird trip, for here, as elsewhere,
Joe insisted on exploring.

“Tell him I’m a judge of the _cuisine_,” he would
say, “and only want the best.” And--with an instinct that
the rewarding tip would not be wanting--as it never was--cooks hastened
to concoct the spiciest of their national dishes for his criticism.

The publication of Joe’s first book was quickly followed by an
illustrated volume on the Abbey Church of St. Albans from articles
written for the _Art Journal_; plenty of study on architecture and
on monkish lore was done for this in the Reading Room of the British
Museum. Later in life Joe used to say that, after the period of
ravenous and enthusiastic boyhood, he might never have opened a serious
book again--so much more enthralling to him was the daily intercourse
for work or play with living men and women--had it not been for the
necessity of boiling the pot; and that all that he read for a special
purpose stuck to him as no desultory reading did and became stored in
his mind for use and pleasure for the rest of his life.

I can see myself how true this was in respect of the whole range of
Arthurian legend, on which subject he became an authority; he devoured
everything in English and French that he could find when he was writing
his plays of _King Arthur_ and _Tristram_, and never forgot any of it.

The _Abbey of St. Albans_ was too special a subject to make a popular
book, and the first volume of Joe’s work which attracted
attention was _Essays on Art_, gathered together in 1879.

I remember that, just as among his published work in verse he held
that his _Tristram and Iseult_ was his best, so he considered the
Essay--practically on Keats, who held, I think, the highest place with
him among the nineteenth century poets but entitled _The Artistic
Spirit in Modern English Poetry_, he judged to be among his most
satisfactory prose; with the exception of the _Essay on Macbeth_,
written as a pamphlet at the time of Henry Irving’s production of
the play, and now re-published under the title of _Sex in Tragedy_ in
his book _Coasting Bohemia_.

A letter which he wrote me later from France, when he was studying the
provincial museums there for a series of articles in the _Manchester
Guardian_, bears out pleasantly the criticism in the article on _Corot
and Millet_ in _Essays on Art_.


  LIMOGES,
  _August 1882_.

 “ ... The landscape of the Loire somewhat disappointed me,
 although the towns are full of interest. Very fruitful the country
 seems to be, overflowing with corn and vine but far stretching and
 unvaried with a vague sense of melancholy in it that is almost
 oppressive. It is impossible to catch even a passing view of such
 country as lies between Orléans and Nantes without turning in thought
 from the landscape to the people who dwell in it; and the picture that
 is left in the mind of the daily life of these peasants who labour
 all day in fields that have no break or limit save where patches of
 corn alternate with spaces of vine, is strangely touching and sad.
 It wanted a France such as France is on the borders of the Loire to
 produce the solemn and austere sentiment of Millet, and I hardly think
 one understands the stern reality of his work until one has passed
 through miles and miles of this fruitful and uneventful land.

 The later passages of to-day’s journey were a delightful change
 in the character of the scenery; a narrower river (The Vienne) but
 more sympathetic, with happy-looking green pastures and hilly banks.

 This place stands high and the air is delightfully fresh. It has an
 industrial museum which is important in connection with my work.

 I visited Chambord also Chenonceau. They are both much restored and
 inferior in interest to Blois, which is a most delightful place in
 every way.”

In respect of Blois he writes as follows in another letter: “This
town is more picturesque than any French town I have yet seen; most of
it, or the older part of it at any rate, is high up on a hill, and the
steps that mount up between the different streets are very beautifully
contrived.

Tell Phil I should like him to read the parts of his French history
connected with Blois, particularly about Henri III. and the Duke of
Guise, and I will tell him about the wonderful castle when I get
back.”

I remember he brought home some excellent photographs of that castle
and the lovely outer staircase of the tower.

Another letter written during this French journey brings in a more
humorous note: “Toulouse is a real city of the south, its market
place covered with big red umbrellas reminding one of Verona, and the
old hotel having a pleasant shady courtyard with pots of oleanders....
It is difficult to give you much news. I was thinking this morning
how funny it was how little I had spoken English since I left home,
once with the manager of a travelling English panorama at Limoges
and yesterday at Montauban where I met a Frenchman who insisted upon
speaking my native tongue to me. He declared that he knew English
‘au fond,’ but his mastery of the tongue was not complete.
‘Good voyage, have distraction,’ were his parting words to
me.”

These good wishes were not entirely fulfilled. The day after his
arrival at Toulouse Joe had been overcome by the August heat and
mosquito bites, and had been obliged to take to his bed for a day
in the fine old inn, where he was admirably nursed by the motherly
landlady; and, as he sat in the cool courtyard next day he was vastly
amused by the discomfiture of a fat commercial traveller, awaiting
his _déjeuner_ with napkin tucked in ready under his chin, when a
one-legged old stork, who perambulated the garden, suddenly uttered
its raucous note: “Quel cri épouvantable!” exclaimed the
poor gentleman, and jumping up he overturned the small table on which a
succulent Southern dish now steamed ready for his consumption, and wept
afresh at the sight of gravy and red wine trickling together down the
coarse clean tablecloth!

I think merriment must have hampered Joe’s offers of assistance,
and his French was not then as fluent as he made it in after years.

Anyhow the commercial traveller appears to have been less genial than
was a gentleman in the train later on who thought to flatter him by
comparing him to the then Prince of Wales: “Les mêmes traits, la
même barbe, le même âge!” said he pleasantly, not thinking that
he was speaking to a man years younger than Edward VII.

But if there was a momentary annoyance it was immediately forgotten by
Joe in a lively, if halting, conversation on the merits of a trout
stream which the train was skirting--Joe vehemently describing how
different was our view regarding poachers with the net, and mentally
despising his fellow-traveller for upholding the equal merits of perch,
gudgeon and trout.

When they reached Lourdes the traveller again afforded Joe a fresh
cause for wonder--unfamiliar as he then was with what later he called
“the Frenchman’s unfailing desire to place himself in a
category.”

The station was crammed with pilgrims to the Holy Wells, and Joe,
innocent of this, asked for what event the crowd was gathered;
whereupon the Frenchman, turning his head contemptuously from the
window, said loftily: “_Monsieur, dans ma qualité d’Athée
je ne connais rien de tout cela!_”

Even in those early days he loved the French; their joy of living
appealed to him as it did in all the Latin races, and their wit--more
subtle and polished than the Italian’s child-like though not childish
high spirits--was akin to his own, and it was often wonderful how
swiftly he would “get the hang of it” even when sometimes he would
appeal to me for translation of a word; while their shrewd and clear
common-sense found an echo somewhere on another side of him, perhaps in
his Border ancestry.

Yet I have heard him say that, in his opinion, the deeper courtesy of
an unspoiled Italian--were he peasant or peer--came out of a further
and finer civilization.

These travelling conversations, even in a foreign tongue, were entirely
in keeping with Joe’s intensely human temperament. He had
none of the aloofness of the Britisher of that day; and I remember
his amusement at the talk of a party of English shop-keepers in a
second-class railway carriage on the Paris-Calais route.

“To see them working men forced to sit and smoke their pipe in the
street for a breath of fresh air on a summer evening fairly flummoxed
me,” said one. “Why the poorest of _us_ ’ave got a bit of a
backyard.”

Though he was the most reserved of men as regards deep, personal
matters, he found that sort of sentiment was utterly ridiculous to his
Irish sense of humour.

I recollect hearing Joe whimsically tell a friend once that he would
far sooner confide his most intimate concerns to a man in a train than
to his nearest and dearest; and then he would recall (or invent?) the
most humorous conversations which he had overheard or in which he had
taken part, chiefly on the physical ills of life during long journeys
in dark railway carriages. I don’t suppose he went these lengths
in French; probably his vocabulary was not equal to it.

He said he missed my help on that Loire journey although I think he
liked learning for himself too. I certainly, sitting in a tiny cottage
near Witley with my sister and the two children, missed my opportunity
and sighed to be with him, especially when his letter home contained a
passage like this:

“Marseilles is a city with something of romantic suggestion
about it. One feels that it is one of the Avenues of the East, one
of the places also that connects the old world with the new. It was
terribly hot, but the sea tempered the sun and the sea-bath in the
evening was a delicious revenge for the heat of the day. The view
over the Mediterranean at sunset is delightful, with an atmosphere
that seems to be stained with rose colour floating over a sea of real
aquamarine.”

I had to solace myself with taking Phil to sit for his portrait to
Edward Burne-Jones--delightful occasions when that most lovable of
great men would talk of my husband and of their kindred enthusiasms,
chaffing me gently as well for the “wicked travesties” of
classic myths with which I tried to keep quiet the “worst of
little sitters,” who would innocently ask why his standing pose
was called “sitting.”

And at last Joe came home, only about a week before our son Arthur was
born.

These travelling memories are a digression induced by their bearing
on my husband’s first published volumes. As to his subsequent
contributions to permanent literature I may mention his _Papers on
Art_--a sequel to the _Essays on Art_--published in 1885.

After that, until the last years of his life, his many vocations so
entirely filled every hour of the day--and often of the night--that he
had no leisure for any more such ventures, excepting the publication of
his verse-plays as they appeared on the stage.

And it was not until 1908 that he once more came before the
book-reading public. Then he wrote his two separate volumes of personal
recollections under the titles of _Eminent Victorians_ and _Coasting
Bohemia_; but these are of recent enough date to need no comment of
mine, for they are still before the world, as is also his posthumously
published volume, _The Ideals of Painting_.




CHAPTER VII

THE GROSVENOR AND THE NEW GALLERIES


In the autumn of the year 1876 we were invited to Sir Coutts Lindsay’s
Scottish seat at Balcarres, where Joe’s collaboration with Mr. C. E.
Hallé as Director of the Grosvenor Gallery in Bond Street was fixed and
led later to the long co-operation of these two friends in their New
Gallery Exhibitions.

Sir Coutts’s venture was to start in the following May, and there was
much to discuss and settle at that shooting party; yet not so much as
to interfere with plenty of fun by the way.

It was on this visit that Prince Leopold was a guest at the house
and I vividly recall a series of _tableaux vivants_ got up for his
entertainment, in which Joe played a part he was often to fill
later--that of stage manager, combined on this occasion with the office
of _Dresser_, in which capacity he “corked” a moustache on
His Royal Highness’ face for an impersonation of Charles I.

There were anxious moments--such as when the Prince’s tights did
not arrive from Edinburgh, or when Sir Arthur Sullivan, after nobly
seconding Joe’s efforts with his incidental music, flatly refused to
abandon his cigar at a late hour to play waltzes; or again, on the
following Sunday morning when--the crimson cloth being laid ready
at the Episcopalian Church--a belated telegram arrived from Windsor
commanding H.R.H.’s attendance at Presbyterian worship. But I think
Joe’s unconventional and merry wit--even in those early days when he
might have felt strange in that kind of society--helped away many a
little ruction, and the fun that he made of himself as “one of the
lower middle class” little used to the ways of great houses was much
appreciated by Arthur Sullivan, “Dicky Doyle” and others claiming
kinship with the “Bohemians,” yet used to the habits at which he
pretended to be alarmed.

I can see the twinkle in the eye with which he stoutly declared that a
French Chef did not necessarily beget a sure taste in the hosts, and
the corroboration given to his statement by the sight of some twenty
docile people eating a salad that had been mixed with methylated spirit
in mistake for vinegar without turning a hair.

I think Arthur Sullivan--who was an _habitué_--expostulated with the
butler about it, when the cause of the “odd taste” was run
to earth and laid to the account of the kitchenmaid.

These Balcarres days began for us that series of social gatherings so
well known later as the Grosvenor Gallery Sunday afternoons, at which
Lady Lindsay presided over a company including all the most notable
people in Literature and Art, to say nothing of the “beaux
noms,” courtiers and politicians in her more exclusive set.

Those most entertaining parties and the Private Views both at the
Grosvenor Gallery and, later on, at the New Gallery in Regent Street,
were among the season’s features of that period, and invitations
to both of them were eagerly sought by all classes of Society.
Especially in the earlier years the vagaries in dress assumed by some
of the women of the “Artistic” and Theatrical Set were, and
I fear often justly, matters for merriment to those of the fashionable
world who fitly displayed the last modes from Paris; and I hear again
the softly sarcastic tones of a society lady commenting on the clinging
draperies of a pretty artist “finished by a pair of serviceable
boots.”

Yet there were those among the leaders of the _élite_ who chose to
wear garments following the simpler and more graceful patterns of some
bygone era; and I am bound to say that these were often among the most
beautiful toilettes present and those which Joe then most admired.

But much strenuous work preceded the days of the Private Views. Early
in the career of the Grosvenor Gallery, Joe, steeped in the work of the
Old Masters of which he had made such a special study, persuaded Sir
Coutts Lindsay to have an exhibition of their drawings--culled from the
great collections of England; and many a pleasant visit did he have to
fine country houses on this quest.

Once he arrived after a night journey at the seat of Lord Warwick just
as the men of the house-party were met in the hall for the day’s
“shoot,” and I can fancy the merry excuse with which he
surely fitted the occasion as he presented himself bare-headed, having
left his hat in the train when he sleepily changed carriages at the
junction; luckily he was well provided with natural covering.

Plenty of his Celtic persuasiveness must have come into play--both on
this occasion and on those when the fine shows of Paintings by Old
Masters were made--in cajoling the owners to lend their priceless
treasures, and I recollect one or two very anxious moments over
transport, etc.

But this first ambitious Exhibition of _Drawings_ exceeded, both in
bulk and excellence, anything previously attempted in London and
attracted the enthusiastic attention of all connoisseurs; the hanging
and cataloguing involved immense labour, and I was proud to be allowed
to take a small share in the last part of the work--an opportunity in
which I learnt much which I have never forgotten.

When, some few years later, my husband and Mr. Hallé started their
independent enterprise in Regent Street, their sole responsibility made
the work none the less arduous though naturally less hampered.

The first task--exciting as it was--was a Herculean one, for the New
Gallery was practically built upon the site of an old fruit-market, and
an anxious winter was that, lest it should not be completed in time
for an opening with the other May Exhibitions. But completed it was
and handsomely; though the last touch, the gilding of the rails of the
gallery which overhung the Central Court, was only finished through Joe
inducing the frame-gilders to work with the builders’ men--an
infringement of custom which, it seemed, only the affection which they
bore him induced them to overlook.

The effect of that Central Court with its fountain fringed with flowers
and its arcade panelled with fine, coloured marbles, was one of the
sensations of the day, and deserved the praise of a critic: “It
is an Aladdin’s Palace sprung up in the night.” Joe has
spoken of this first Exhibition in _Eminent Victorians_; suffice it,
therefore, to say that the Burne Jones and Watts’ pictures were
the distinguishing features, as they always were so long as these great
men survived.

As years went on, the collecting of works among the lesser artists for
the modern yearly Exhibition became more and more irksome to Joe, and
the rounds that he and Mr. Hallé used to make to the artists’
studios were something of a penance to him.

Not only were they physically fatiguing, but the difficulties of
choice, of obtaining what they desired and of refusing what they
didn’t desire without undue offence to the artist, taxed the
patience of both directors and, I think, Joe’s wit was often
needed to turn a dangerous corner.

“Good isn’t the word,” he once answered to a
sympathiser who asked him what he said when confronted with a
thoroughly bad picture; and, although this too transparent form of
salve may not really have been uttered, I am told that the kindly chaff
which he would sometimes expend upon the shameless offer of a poor
painting from a man who knew what he was doing but meant to send his
best work to take its chance elsewhere, was such as might not have
“gone down” from anyone else but Joe Carr.

Yet there were pleasant hours even on these days of weary rounds. In
each of the districts visited the directors were sure to count at
least one firm friend, anxious to lighten the road; in Kensington
it was Burne Jones, who, speaking of his young daughter, wrote on
one occasion: “In my wife’s absence, Margaret dispenses middle-class
hospitality with a tact and finish worthy of a higher sphere.” In
St. John’s Wood it was Alma Tadema--most hospitable of hosts--always
ready with a bottle of his best wine and some funny tale uttered in
his quaint English, and admirably seconded by his charming wife at the
long, narrow table loaded with old Dutch silver and lovely curios.

And upon the onerous occasions of the varnishing days when the
positions on the line were supposed to be the right of every exhibitor,
these and other leaders in the world of art would often “stand
by” even when some incensed young gentleman--these were usually
young gentlemen--would go the length of removing his picture in a
four-wheeler.

Many were the humorous incidents that used to be told to me! A
favourite and out-spoken assistant was once asked what he thought of
the position of a small picture which was being tried above a larger
one; to which his reply was: “If you ask me, Sir, I think
it looks like a tom-tit on a round of beef.” Apparently the
directors thought so too for the picture was removed and hung in a
corner, or perhaps in the balcony above the Central Court--a place even
less coveted by the ambitious.

Little however did _I_ know of these prickly passages, specially
at that momentous first opening, when a kind supporter of the new
enterprise presented me with a beautiful old brocade dress in which I
took my share of receiving the crowds of visitors at the entrance of
the Hall: and I don’t think that, when the varnishing day was
past, the two directors bothered their heads much about the prickly
passages or even about the Press opinions. Joe’s optimism was
always irrepressible and when his task at the New Gallery was over, he
would turn, on the following day--with something perhaps of relief--to
one of the many other sides of his full life.




CHAPTER VIII

DRAMATIC WORK AND MANAGEMENT


It must have been somewhere about this period that the first impetus
was, funnily enough, given to Joe’s dramatic career by a request
from our dear friend, Ellen Terry, that I should make an English
adaptation for her from the famous French play of _Frou-Frou_.

The thing was done, and played in Glasgow and other Northern towns
under the title of _Butterfly_, and great fun we had over our first
initiation into the mysteries of dress-rehearsals--not always perhaps
quite so funny in the more responsible circumstances of later years,
though it is a form of patient work electrified by the gambling spirit,
which never lost its attraction for Joe.

My altered version of the French play was a poor one, but it had, I
suppose, sufficient merit to obtain me a commission from Mme. Modjeska,
the noted Polish actress, for a free translation of the same play,
which she performed first in London with Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson
and afterwards throughout the United States.

The “youthful conceit” to which Joe was throughout his
life so lenient as even to consider a virtue, led me presently to try
my hand at a bigger task--no less than the dramatisation of Thomas
Hardy’s _Far from the Madding Crowd_. I was quite unequal to
the attempt, and I only mention it because it proved the beginning of
Joe’s dramatic work. He took the play in hand, refashioned the
plot, only keeping portions of the dialogue as I had adapted it to
stage necessity; and it was produced--with Marion Terry as the wilful
and charming Bathsheba--first in the provinces and then in London.

Owing to circumstances needless to recall, the venture was a financial
failure; but it served to start Joe on a new road; and it was not long
before he scored a big success. He came home one night from a railway
journey and gave me a little book which he had bought to read in the
train: it was _Called Back_ by Hugh Conway.

“See if you don’t think that an enthralling story?”
he said.

There could be no doubt of this and the British public gave its verdict
promptly. The book began to sell like “hot cakes” and Joe
went down to Clifton, saw its clever author--until then unknown to
literature--and arranged with him for its dramatisation.

The play was produced on May 20th, 1884, and I think there are still
people who remember its first success and that, in the rôle of the
Italian conspirator--Macari--Sir Herbert Tree scored one of his finest
early triumphs; the piece was revived several times in London and the
provinces and had the questionable compliment of being also pirated.
But I shall not easily forget the dress-rehearsal!

I was comparatively new to such things then and I can well recall the
chill of heart with which we got home to Blandford Square in the early
hours and my inner conviction that the scenery could not possibly be
finished nor, one at least, of the principal actors, know his part
by the next night! But nothing could ever quell Joe’s hopeful
spirit; he plied his somewhat less optimistic colleague with cold
tongue and whisky-and-soda and made merry work of the stupidity of
lime-light men and scene-shifters, to say nothing of others of higher
degree; and then went to sleep at 6 a.m. and got up and returned to the
theatre at 10 a.m. without turning a hair.

I wonder now if he was as strong as he seemed in those days or whether
it was only his gay and excitable Celtic temperament that carried him
through everything. Anyhow he enjoyed his life to the full and there
were never any dull moments, whether he was at work or at play.

The radiant vitality which lasted him so long and so well--and to which
there is such frequent testimony in letters from the various friends
with whom he laboured in his many walks of life--seems to have had the
power of so communicating itself to his fellow-workers that they would
share his optimistic hopes and, if these were disappointed, generally
be ashamed to utter reproach in the face of his urbane acceptance of
failure. But on this occasion there was only rejoicing.

In a letter of his, replying to Hugh Conway’s generous
recognition of help, I find these words:

“I want to tell you how much touched I have been by your letters.
I say ‘letters’ for my wife read me as much of your note as
she thought good for me. Rest assured that I am delighted to have done
what I have done--also that the result has been fortunate for us both.
I don’t think I could have got through so well with any other
man; with you I have never had a shadow of worry or annoyance and I
have been able at all points to do my best--as far as I knew how.”

This happy venture led to a friendship which had no let until the
untimely death of Hugh Conway in the very zenith of his fame; they
were, as dear old Sir Alma Tadema said in his quaint English:
“Very fat together--like two hands on one stomach.”

Yet they did much work together, for not only did Joe collaborate again
with Hugh Conway in the adaptation of _Dark Days_ for the stage, but
he also published that gifted, ghoulish tale _Paul Vargus_ during his
editorship of _The English Illustrated Magazine_, as well as the serial
entitled _A Family Affair_, a humorous and urbane story with a plot
so delicately suggesting possible immorality, however, that it drew
down upon the editor a sharp reproach from Mrs. Grundy, who declared
that, although she believed all would “come right” she could never
again allow the magazine to lie on her drawing-room table lest her
well-brought-up daughters might open its pages.

Does that Mrs. Grundy still live to-day?

_Dark Days_ was Joe’s last bit of work with his poor friend
but by no means the last of his adaptations for the stage, the chief
of which number _Madame Sans Gêne_ for Sir Henry Irving; _My Lady of
Rosedale_ for Sir Charles Wyndham; _Nerves_ which ran with success
for some time at the Comedy Theatre, and last, but not at all least,
his fine play fashioned on Charles Dickens’ _Oliver Twist_ and
followed by one on _Edwin Drood_.

The former, with Sir Herbert Tree as _Fagin_, Constance Collier as
_Nancy_ and Lyn Harding as _Sikes_, held the public for many months
both in London and the United States.

At the height of its London success, a flaw in the architecture of the
central proscenium arch of His Majesty’s Theatre necessitated the
temporary transference of the play to another house. Joe was naturally
in despair, but the untoward incident in no way interfered with the run
of the piece which--in the words of the stage manager--had been kicked
up and down the Strand and only gathered force as it rolled.

But although I have spoken first of his adaptations, it is of his
original plays that I hold the dearest memories; and first and
foremost of _King Arthur_ which contains some of the best of the
lyrics and blank verse for which Theodore Watts Dunton held him to be
a “true poet.” The _May Song_ and _Song of the Grail_ he
placed himself among his best verse and they were well appreciated.

As the book was published by Messrs. Macmillan, it belongs to the
public.

The production of _King Arthur_ was one of the most beautiful of Henry
Irving’s many Lyceum triumphs. Even in those far-removed days
Sir Edward Burne Jones’ exquisite designs for the armour and
dresses, as well as for the scenery, will be remembered by some, and
I am proud to think that I was allowed the privilege of carrying out
some of them in detail. It was a hard six months’ work but it was
well rewarded and I think Joe had no happier hours than those he spent
in the writing and in the producing of his two finest efforts--_King
Arthur_ and _Tristram and Iseult_.

I cannot leave this subject without mention of the tender and lovely
impersonation of _Guinevere_ by Ellen Terry, and the touching tribute
to her which Joe himself gives in the following dedication, written on
the fly-leaf of the copy he presented to her.

 “To Guinevere herself from one who, after years of closest
 friendship, looks to her now as always, for the vindication of what is
 highest and gentlest in womanhood; and who would count this not too
 poor a gift for her to take, could he but hope that some part of the
 grace and charm of her spirit had found its way into the portrait of
 Arthur’s Queen.”

Following on this it would seem incongruous in connection with anyone
else but Joe to quote a funny tale bearing on the above; but Joe loved
the tale himself and often told it merrily and so will I.

On his being presented to a newly-arrived prominent American at a
public dinner, this gentleman opened the conversation by saying that
he had been privileged, on the voyage with Sir Henry Irving and Ellen
Terry, to read _King Arthur_ in the lady’s own copy containing the
author’s charming dedication. A pause ensued, when Joe--thinking
himself on solid ground--said: “Well, sir, I hope you liked the play?”
What was his astonishment at the Yankee’s gentle reply! “Well, not very
much!” said he, “You see I had Lord Tennyson in my mind.”

Silence ensued but I think Joe explained with urbanity that he had
taken an entirely different view of the old legend, founded in a
measure on Sir Thomas Malory’s version.

_A propos_ of this old name, Joe has himself told of the arrival at
the theatre of a batch of press cuttings addressed to that knight of
the days of chivalry, the title tactfully supplemented by the affix of
“Bart.”

Perhaps scarcely less funny and more unpardonable was the question of
the Society lady who asked him, in the case of _Tristram and Iseult_,
how he had obtained Mme. Wagner’s consent to tamper with her
husband’s book.

A play--_The Lonely Queen_--on which he spent much care, still remains
to be performed when a suitable actress shall present herself for the
strong and sympathetic part of the girlish ruler over a wild land.

The piece opens on a hillside overlooking an Eastern city--a scene
shewn again later on in sinister circumstances; and with dance and
laughter, a group of girls crown their wayward young mistress with
a wreath of flowers in merry mimicry of the weightier diadem she
will soon be called to wear. And presently, in a lonely mood of
apprehension, she meets as a stranger, the patriot-poet who is to be
both her bane and her salvation in the future.

He enjoyed writing this play and was pleased with the following lyric,
which he read to me--as I am proud to think, he generally read anything
with which he was satisfied or on which he wanted such criticism as I
could give--on the very morning when he had written it.


THE POET TO A GIRL-QUEEN UNKNOWN.

    Oh Lady of the Lily Hand!
      Whose face unseen we long to greet,
    At whose command this desert land
      Springs into flower about thy feet.

    Fair maiden whom we know not yet,
      Yet know thy heart can know no fear,
    Queen, who shalt teach us to forget
      The wounds of many a wasted year.

    The curtains of the night are drawn,
      Its shadows all have fled away,
    For in thine eyes there dwells the dawn
      And in thy smile the new born day.

    A people’s love that waits thee now
      Is thine to take and thine to hold,
    Till God shall set upon thy brow
      A crown that is not forged of gold.

    Twixt Right and Wrong He yields thee choice,
      Heed not the worship of the weak,
    That in a maiden’s fearless voice
      The clarion voice of God may speak.

    Be swift to strike and strong to save,
      Steadfast in all! Till all the land
    Shall hail thee ‘Bravest of the Brave’
      Oh Lady of the Lily Hand.

It was a fair scene in which it was written--a hill-top under Monte
Rosa overlooking the lovely shores of Lugano--and, though he always
said that actual surroundings were never proper to be described in
the work of the moment but must be digested and crystallized in the
hidden corners of remembrance, I think that the spirit of a place did
influence him, so that the sun shone on the hillside of the first
Act of _The Lonely Queen_ as the lowering brow of the Black Mount,
at Rannoch, seemed to overshadow the halls of Camelot; he even said
himself that he could see the barge with Elaine’s body float
down the Hertfordshire stream where he was wont to fish after his
day’s labour.

His poetical work was always that which lay nearest his heart, though
his friends often deplored that he did not devote himself more to
comedy; but strange to say, his humour, which was so inexhaustible
in colloquial intercourse, did not strike home so surely in his
stage dialogue: he needed the stimulus of conversation. Possibly he
felt this, which made him shyer of comedy-writing than he would have
been; in _Nerves_ he was witty enough and there is a very deft comedy
scene for two old ladies in _Forgiveness_, produced at the “St.
James’” Theatre by Sir George Alexander. His first attempts
at dramatic work, made on the tiny stage of German Reed’s, were
entirely in quaint comedy.

I think a free rendering of a fancy of Hugh Conway’s on the
Blue-and-White China Craze was one of the first things he did for the
stage and it contained some charming lyrics after the Elizabethan
manner which won instant recognition.

I quote three of them, for they were never printed for the public.


From _The United Pair_.

DUET: SONG OF THE TWO CHINA-COLLECTORS.

SEXTUS.

    A love like mine is far above
    The thing that we are told is love,
      In Shakespeare or in Chaucer.
    For while they are content to praise
    The famous forms of classic days,
    I revel in the form and glaze,
      Of one unrivalled saucer.

VIRGINIA.

    Ah sir, I know the thought is vain,
    Yet if a man were porcelain,
      Then love would be the master;
    If only in a single night
    Your face could change to blue and white,
    I think at such a glorious sight
      My heart would beat the faster.

VIRGINIA AND SEXTUS.

    And such a love were far above
    The thing that we are told is love,
      In Shakespeare or in Chaucer;
    For while they are content to praise
    The famous forms of classic days,
    We revel in the form and glaze,
      Of every cup and saucer.

SEXTUS.

    Ah madam, if that dream were true,
    How easy would it be to woo,
      And never fear the winning;
    If woman also could be graced
    With all the silent charms of paste,
    Then love could never be misplaced,
      And hate have no beginning.

VIRGINIA.

    Then every vase would find its mate,
    Each dish would woo a neighbouring plate,
      Each bowl would wed a beaker;
    And if perchance, through pride or pique,
    Some youth or maid should fail to speak,
    Each bachelor would be unique,
      And each old maid uniquer.

VIRGINIA AND SEXTUS.

    And such a love were far above
    The thing that we are told is love,
      In Shakespeare or in Chaucer;
    For while they are content to praise
    The famous forms of classic days,
    We revel in the form and glaze,
      Of every cup and saucer.

The following duet bore a charming promise of the maturer work that was
to follow in wider spheres.

 From _The United Pair_.

 Played at Mr. and Mrs. German Reed’s about 1880.


 I.

 ADA.

  What Love was yesterday, we both could tell;

 JACK.

  What Love may be to-morrow, who can guess?

 ADA.

  What Love is now both Jack and I know well;

 JACK.

  But that’s a secret lovers ne’er confess.

 JACK AND ADA.

    But this we know, that Love is much maligned
    By those who call him deaf, and dumb, and blind.


II.

ADA.

    Yet Love was dumb: ’tis but an hour ago
      I spied him ’mid the daisies as I passed,
    Like a pale rose-leaf on new fallen snow
      He lay with drooping lids and lips shut fast.
    And though the birds sang, Love made no reply,
      He had no message for the whispering stream,
    He sent no echoing answer to the sky,
      That laughed with dancing shadows o’er his dream.
    Then kneeling down beside him where he lay,
      I wept aloud for grief that Love was dead;
    But when Jack came and kissed my tears away,
      Love spoke one word: we both heard what he said.

JACK AND ADA.

    Therefore we say that Love is much maligned,
    For he is neither deaf, nor dumb, nor blind.


III.

JACK.

    Yet Love was deaf: ’twas only yesterday
      I found him fishing down beside the brook,
    His rod a snowy branch of flowering may,
      Whose spiny thorn he fashioned for a hook.
    Small heed had he of any lover’s pain,
      Who would not hear the cuckoo’s ringing note,
    I cried to him, but cried alas in vain,
      He only laughed to watch the dancing float;
    And while I wept to see him laughing so,
      I heard a voice that whispered one sweet word
    Ah Ada, tell me was it “yes” or “no”?
      She answered “yes” and then I knew Love heard.

JACK AND ADA.

    Therefore we say that Love is much maligned,
    For he is neither deaf, nor dumb, nor blind.


IV.

JACK AND ADA.

    Yet Love was blind: for so he lost his way,
      And so we found him when the day was done,
    Within a wood where happy lovers stray,
      There he had wandered weeping and alone.
    Then wondering much, we thought to ask his name,
      But Love replied: “Ah, surely ye should know!”
    And as he spake, beneath his wings of flame
      We saw Love’s arrows and his glittering bow,
    “For you,” he cried, “the way is strewn with flowers,
      You’ve found the path that I shall never find.”
    Then looking up we saw Love’s eyes in ours,
      And then we knew why men do call him blind.

    Therefore we know that Love is much maligned,
    By all who call him deaf, and dumb, and blind.




From _The Naturalist_.

A SONG OF PROVERBS.

    I know that truth’s stranger than fiction,
      And I fancy I don’t stand alone,
    If I cling to an old predilection,
      For killing two birds with one stone;
    I never shed tears that are bitter
      Over milk that I know to be spilt,
    And whenever gold happens to glitter
      I make up my mind that its gilt;
    Yet the riddle of life grows no clearer,
      And still broken-hearted I yearn
    For the season that never draws nearer--
      When a worm may take courage and turn.

    And if for a moment I wander
      Into themes more profound and abstruse,
    To note that the sauce for a gander
      Is also the sauce for the goose;
    That one man is free to steal horses,
      While another is punished by fate,
    Who shuns all such virtuous courses,
      And dares to look over a gate,--
    It is but for the sake of forgetting
      What gives me far greater concern,
    It is but with a view of abetting
      A worm in its efforts to turn.

    I could live and not care in the slightest
      To know when a dog had his day,
    And though the sun shone at its brightest,
      I could let other people make hay.
    I could perish without ascertaining
      Why pearls should be cast before swine,
    I could die without ever complaining
      That one stitch will never save nine;
    And though I once had the ambition
      A candle at both ends to burn,
    The old craving might go to perdition
      If I knew that a worm had its turn.

These little pieces were admirably rendered by Mr. Alfred Reed and his
company, and they won instant success.

I can see Mr. Clement Scott’s delighted face just under my box on
the first night of _The United Pair_ and hear his burst of laughter at
the concluding line of the “Song of the China Collectors.”

But the one of the three comediettas upon which Joe spent the most
pleasant care was _The Friar_--a little thirteenth century fancy of
his own invention and for which he wrote the following verses, giving
charming expression to the pique of a high-born damsel towards her
proud lover and the sorrow of the shepherd swain who becomes the
favourite of an hour.




THE LADY ISOBEL’S SONG.

    Oh, if I be a lady fair,
      I’ll weep for no lord’s frown,
    And if my lord should ride away,
    I’ll put aside my silk array
      And take a russet gown.

    I’ll wear a gown of russet brown,
      And sleep on the grassy sward,
    And when I meet a shepherd swain,
    If he should sigh, I’ll sigh again,
      And choose him for my lord.

    I’ll choose a shepherd for my lord,
      Though I be a lady fair,
    And when the woods are golden brown,
    Of yellow leaves I’ll weave a crown,
      And bind his golden hair.

    Then my false lord shall cry and weep,
      And call his lady fair,
    But though for love his heart should bleed,
    His sighs and tears I will not heed,
      Nor hearken to his prayer.




THE SHEPHERD AND THE LADY.

ISOBEL.

    Shepherd, if thou wouldst learn to woo a maid
            In Love’s own way,
    Follow young Cupid to the hawthorn shade
            Some day in May,
              And bid him tell thee true
              What way were best to woo;
              What a poor swain should do
                When maids say nay.

HUBERT.

    Ah! could I find the bower where Love doth dwell
            Beneath the May,
    And could I plead to him, I know full well
            What Love would say.
              For he would bid me sigh,
              And weep, and moan and cry,
              And he would bid me die,
                For that’s Love’s way.

ISOBEL.

    Hast thou forgotten how in shepherd’s guise
            One day in May,
    Love taught a cruel maid with laughing eyes
            To feel Love’s sway,
              And when she thought to scorn
              This lover lowly born
              Love did not weep or mourn,
                But laughed and turned away,
            And singing when she sighed,
              Love wept not when she cried
              He cared not if she died
                For that’s Love’s way!

BOTH.

    O Love that came but yester eve,
      If thou wilt go before to-morrow,
    Then prithee go, but do not leave
      My saddened heart to die of sorrow.
    If thou wilt hide Love’s laughing eyes,
      If we must lose Love’s magic spell,
    Then take the burthen of our sighs,
      And we will say Farewell! Farewell!


THE SHEPHERD’S SONG.

    Ah wherefore should I try to sing
      Of Love that’s dead?
    Of Love that came before the Spring
      And ere Spring came had fled.
          ’Tis vain to seek in winter snows
          The fallen petals of the rose
          ’Tis vain to ask the year to bring
          The Love that went before the Spring.

    Our little world was fair to see
      Ere Love had come,
    Of earth and sky and flower and tree
      I sang while Love was dumb.
          But now the strings have all one tone,
          Love claims all beauty for his own.
          In vain! in vain! I can but sing
          The Love that went before the Spring.

    And as I sing, Love lives again;
      Where’er I go,
    His voice is in the summer rain,
      His footprints on the snow.
          And while October turns to gold,
          I dream that April buds unfold,
          Ah tell me will the Spring-time bring
          The Love that went before the Spring?

_The Shepherd’s Song_ I have heard him say he was as well pleased with
as with any of his later and more ambitious verse; but it is curious
to note that, quite unconsciously, he repeated the line “But now the
strings have all one tone” in the _Lute Song_, written nearly thirty
years after, for _The Beauty Stone_, an opera done in conjunction with
Sir Arthur Pinero to Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music.

       *       *       *       *       *

The book of _The Beauty Stone_ was published, but I quote the _Lute
Song_ for those who did not know it.


THE LUTE’S SONG.

I.

    Ah, why dost sigh and moan?
      Ah, why? ah, why?
    Queen of the laughing May
    Who wears thy crown to-day?
      Good-bye! good-bye!
    Yea, for all mirth hath flown;
    The strings have all one tone--
      Ah, why? ah, why?

II.

    It is the lute that sings,
      Not I! not I!
    Methinks some sleeping heart
    That once had felt Love’s smart
      Doth wake and cry!
    Nay, hark! ’tis love’s own wings
    That fan the trembling strings--
      Not I! Not I!

But dainty as is this little song, it does not to my mind equal in
charm the duet of the two old lovers in the same opera.


THE OLD LOVERS OFFERING ONE ANOTHER THE BEAUTY STONE.

SIMON.

    I would see a maid who dwells in Zolden--
      Her eyes are soft as moonlight on the mere;
    The spring hath fled, the ripened year turns golden--
      Shall I win her ere the waning of the year?
    The reaping-folk pass homeward by the fountain;
      What is it then that calls me from the dell,
    What bids me climb the path beside the mountain
      To the down beyond the sheepfold? Who can tell?

    Then take it, for this magic stone hath power
      To change thee to the fairest; yet to me
    Thou wert fairest as I knew thee in that hour
      When a maiden dwelt in Zolden! Ah, take it, ’tis for thee!

JOAN.

    I would see a youth who comes from Freyden--
      He is straighter than the mountain pine-trees grow;
    Gossips say he comes to woo a maiden,
      So the gossips say--but can they know?
    Three laughing maids are in the hollow,
      Yet none will set him straight upon his way;
    Nay! soft! for he hath found the path to follow--
      He is coming! little heart, what will he say?

    Then take it, for this magic stone hath power
      To change thee to the fairest, yet to me
    Thou wert fairest as I knew thee in that hour
      When a youth came up from Freyden! Ah, take it, ’tis for thee!

In the Beauty-Stone Joe was only responsible for the lyrics and parts of
the plot. But I know that his idea of the man’s true love being
first awakened after he became blind was dear to him, and he used it
again in his adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde for H. B. Irving; but there
it is the wife whose blindness hides from her all but the beautiful
side of her husband.

Such were the chief of Joe’s plays. Tireless energy was given to
the production of them all, for I think it was universally admitted
that no one bore the strain of rehearsals as cheerily and patiently
as Joe. But these attributes shone equally in his work upon the plays
of others produced during his many years of management at the Comedy
Theatre, at the Lyceum, after it was taken over by a company, at His
Majesty’s when producing plays for Sir Herbert Tree, and lastly
at Covent Garden, where he arranged the _mise en scène_ for _Parsifal_
at a time when he was already stricken by failing health.

Many strenuous hours were spent over each of these ventures in the
most arduous of professions; but what I prefer to recall are the gay
ones--the merry moments--the unfailing good humour, wit and pleasant
jest by which my husband lightened the weary waits with which all who
have laboured for the stage are familiar.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I can hear him
retort cheerfully to some impatient spectator who was grumbling at
the long waits during the last rehearsal of _Julius Cæsar_ at His
Majesty’s Theatre; and none was so ready as his friend the
actor-manager, with the appreciative laugh.

Lady Tree--Maud, to us--reminds me of his favourite attitude as he
would stand watching the effects of the lighting of his scenes from
the empty stalls with his stick passed through his arms behind his
back, and his cheery tones uttering the most fearful anathemas against
lime-light men and scene-shifters.

One day I said to him: “Don’t get so angry, Joe, it must
tire you out.”

To which he replied with his usual promptness, “Angry, my dear!
Why, I’m only using the language proper to lime-light men: they
understand no other.”

Once at a Christmas rehearsal, when the stage-hands were all rather
more tipsy than was generally allowable, he came from the stage, and
as he sat down beside me in the stalls he said with a whimsical smile:
“Poor old Burnaby! He keeps muttering, ‘Buried a wife o’ Toosday and
now, s’elp me, can’t lay my ’and on a hammer.’”

He was held in firm affection by his stage-hands just as he was by
his New Gallery staff, not forgetting the decorators, and those
superior frame-gilders who were only induced by regard for “the
boss” to work together in completing the balustrade of the
balcony during the strenuous last days before the opening of that
“Aladdin’s palace.”

I recollect one of the scene-shifters at His Majesty’s Theatre
putting his shoulder out at a rehearsal and Joe taking him to hospital
himself; I should never have known of it but that the man’s
quaint expression of gratitude--“Your gentlemanly conduct, sir,
I never shall forget”--so pleased Joe that he had to repeat it to
me.

The humours of these people always delighted him, and I can see his
mock-grave face as he told me of the head stage-carpenter’s refusal
to carry out an order because it was the day upon which: “We’re all
subservient to Mr. Telbin”--an excuse which Joe, knowing that irascible
scene-painter’s peculiarities--found sufficient.

No memories are pleasanter to me than those of presentations to us
by these working folk. I have a little Old English silver waiter, an
inscribed gift from the employés at the Comedy Theatre for our silver
wedding; and a ponderous marble clock, also touchingly inscribed, which
the foreman of the stage-hands in the Lyceum Company presented to Joe
in the library of our Kensington house. The man stood in the centre of
the room making a speech, but before it was ended nature prevailed and
he concluded hastily: “If I don’t set it down somewhere I
shall let it drop.”

Joe had given instructions to our maid to pay the donor’s cab,
and when he retired and found it gone, we were all in dismay upon
learning that he had left his overcoat in it.

Anecdotes of entertainments in the higher circles of the stage Joe
has told himself in his two books of Reminiscences, the most notable
of them being Henry Irving’s splendid reception to the Rajahs,
when the stage and stalls of the Lyceum were transformed into one vast
flower-garden in half an hour after the fall of the curtain. But I can
add my testimony as to memorable evenings spent at His Majesty’s
Theatre and at Sir Henry Irving’s supper-table in the “Old
Beefsteak Room” of the Lyceum Theatre, when I listened proudly to
Joe’s brilliant talk or speeches, and was sometimes privileged
to act as interpreter between the host and the many distinguished
foreigners who graced that board. Liszt, Joachim, Sarasate are names
which recur to me among them as musicians; but, of course, the guests
were chiefly actors and actresses, flattered, I think, at the fine
welcome from the foremost English Manager.

Booth, Mary Anderson, Mansfield were the foremost Americans, to
the latter of whom I remember Irving’s grim advice _à propos_ of
the fatigue of a ventriloquist-voice in a gruesome part: “If it’s
unwholesome I should do it some other way.” Jane Hading, Coquelin,
Réjane and, of course, the incomparable Sarah Bernhardt represented the
French; and I think Salvini was the only one from the stage of Italy.

Sarah and our dear Ellen Terry were always great friends, and I call
to mind a pretty little passage when they were sitting opposite to one
another and Sarah, leaning forward, cried, in response to some gracious
word of Nell’s: “My dearling, there are two peoples who
shall never be old--you and me.”

The words are still, happily, true at the hour when I write.

Relating to members of the German stage entertained by Sir Henry, the
most amusing incident is that related by Joe himself in detail: of
the great actor’s grim humour in calling upon him suddenly to
speak in praise of the Sax-Meiningen Company, when Joe had innocently
told him an hour before that he had been unable to go to any of their
performances. Ladies were not present on that occasion, but I was told
that Joe’s speech was one of the wittiest he ever delivered:
there was nothing that so sharpened his rapier as being apparently put
at a disadvantage.

I find no mention by himself of a similar occurrence on a different
issue. This time Irving had invited the Oxford and Cambridge crews to
supper and, being suddenly indisposed, was unable to propose their
health. Without even waiting to be asked Joe rose to his feet and,
anxious to divert the young men’s attention from their host,
surpassed himself in exuberant fun, keeping them in a roar of laughter
for a quarter of an hour over his alleged uncertainty as to which of
the two ’Varsities had secured the honours of the boat-race.

I am told that Joe again acquitted himself well at a dinner given to
Arthur Balfour, when Anthony Hope called upon him without notice from
the chair to return thanks for his proposed health. I don’t know why or
how the inspiration came, but “Love” was Joe’s topic, and it is easy to
imagine what a gracious and merry time he made with the various aspects
of this subject.

Of his meetings with Italian actors and actresses Joe does not speak
save in the instance of Madame Ristori, for whose genius he had an
unsurpassed veneration.

His _Eminent Victorians_ contains the tale of an afternoon at her house
when she had invited him and one or two of the dramatic critics to hear
her speak _Lady Macbeth’s_ sleep-walking scene in English with a
view to doing it before a British audience.

Her large and sonorous rendering of the line “All the perfumes
of Arâbia” delighted him, though he tried to teach her our
own insular pronunciation; he was loudly in favour of the public
performance in English, which she finally gave, and I shall never
forget the awe-inspiring effect of the slow and gentle snoring which
she kept running through the whole of the speech.

Joe never admired even Salvini as much, though he revelled in his great
voice on the resounding Roman tongue. He made us all laugh one day by
mimicking the mincing tones of a Cockney interpreter translating the
Italian tragedian’s sonorous language when returning thanks for
his London welcome at a public dinner.

Eleonora Duse, for whom our Nell had the most ardent admiration, was
rarely able, by reason of her frail health, to grace festive occasions
after her work; but Joe had one or two interesting meetings with her
during the season that she rented one of the theatres that he managed
and we were all present together at her pathetic performance of the
_Dame aux Camelias_; the next night we witnessed Sarah Bernhardt in the
same rôle, and Joe gives an able comparison of the two performances in
_Coasting Bohemia_. On the latter occasion a note came round to Nell
from the stage saying: “To-night I play for you.” And the
promise was well kept.

Speaking of Sarah Bernhardt, I recall a happening of the days before
Joe was entitled to the consideration due to a theatrical manager;
he had obtained a promise from the famous lady that she would lunch
with us in our quiet home and we bade to meet her not by any means our
“second-best” friends--to quote a huffed English actor regarding the
guests of another evening. We waited an hour with a patient party and
then Joe hastened with a cab to fetch the lady, only to be told that
she had forgotten the engagement and was in her bath preparing to keep
another. I need not perhaps record that Joe’s wit was equal to the
occasion in pacifying our outraged guests.

He and Sarah became firm friends later, and she had Joe’s _King
Arthur_ translated into French with a view to playing the part of
_Lancelot_; but this intention was never carried out.

So many and various are the memories which crowd upon me connected with
the stage that it is quite impossible for me to sift and record them
without undue risk of boring any readers I may have. Suffice it to say
that I think, of his many occupations, the theatre, whether in writing
for it or in labouring at productions upon it, was the one which most
entranced and held Joe. Not only did he love every detail of the work,
but it brought him in daily contact with all sorts and conditions of
men and women, taxed his powers as a leader of them and gave him hourly
opportunity for the exercise of his humanizing and inspiring gift:
that highest kind of humour which needs no preparation, but is evoked
by every little passing incident and has its real might in the love of
mankind.

Perhaps I may here quote a portion of an American interviewer’s
account of a talk with Henry Irving, sent to Joe by J. L. Toole during
one of his old friend’s long tours in the United States.


“THE WITTIEST MAN IN ENGLAND.”

“Whom do you consider the wittiest man in England to-day?”

“Well, in my opinion, the greatest of our wits is a man of whom
very little is known out here. He is Comyns Carr, who wrote _King
Arthur_ for me.”

“He is a theatrical manager in London, is he not?”

“Yes, at the present he is, but he is a distinguished man in
literature as well. A polished essayist and the most sparkling man I
have ever met. As an extemporaneous speaker he is delightful.”

“Is he an Irishman?”

“Perhaps he is, originally. Now you speak of it. Do you know
if Carr is an Irish name? Comyns is at any rate and then most of
our celebrated wits have been Irishmen--our Sheridans and our
Goldsmiths?”

With this pleasing tribute to my husband I may fitly close these
theatrical reminiscences, though I like to recall that Joe and Henry
Irving had appreciations of one another on a graver side to which
some pages in _Eminent Victorians_ testify, and many are the pleasant
holiday hours we spent as his guests both abroad and at home. He used
to visit the old-world village of Winchelsea by Rye, where we had a
cottage close to the ancient gateway of the town--afterwards sold to
Ellen Terry.

But the most notable of our joint trips was that to Nuremberg in search
of material for the production of _Faust_. This was the first occasion
on which I made a hit with my designing of Ellen Terry’s dresses,
which I afterwards did for nearly twenty years. Being the only one
of the party speaking German, I made many bargains in the shops and
on the old market-place chiefly under Joe’s direction but also
by request of Henry or Nell. She bought me a solid housewife’s
copper jug in the market, and Joe and I secured an old ivory casket
which she accepted from us and in which she kept the gew-gaws in the
“Jewel Scene.”

She and I had a delightful evening in the old Castle, I having
persuaded a little girl-custodian to let us in after hours so that we
saw the place in solemn loneliness with the sunset glow reddening the
red roofs of the city far below us.

I won the admission by a highly coloured description of the actress in
Shakespeare, which the child actually had seen in her own town; and
Nell promised her a signed photograph--punctually posted on our return.

This excursion was made while Joe and Henry were away at Rothenburg,
which my husband had insisted that Irving must see on account of its
unique preservation of untouched city-wall and battlements.

It was a memorable tour, of which Joe tells some interesting anecdotes
in _Coasting Bohemia_.

In speaking of the long drives which his host loved and so greatly
preferred to any kind of exercise, Joe does not confess, however, how
impossible he found it to keep himself awake. “We sit side by
side and sleep for hours!” he would tell me regretfully when he
came home. And I don’t suppose it occurred to any of us then that
it was the best rest that tired theatrical managers could have.




CHAPTER IX

ENTERTAINMENT


This is a topic upon which I touch timidly; not only because Joe has
talked of it himself in _Some Eminent Victorians_, but also because
I had, perhaps less than most of his friends, the opportunity to
appreciate his gifts as a public, or even a social, entertainer. In
the long list of his after-dinner speeches there were not more than
half a dozen that I was lucky enough to hear; and the little corner in
the Garrick Club where I know he was wont to sit, quickly attracting
thither the most appreciative spirits and keeping them all the evening
in a ripple of laughter, was obviously a forbidden spot to me.

I think his celebrity in this matter needs no mention of mine; but I
should like to quote one or two appreciations by distinguished literary
men.

The first is in a letter to myself, where Anthony Hope draws a
remarkable portrait of him: “He was a great arguer,” he writes; “for
while his temper was always serene, his good humour did not blunt the
edge of his tongue. Quite recently I have reread his last book with the
keenest appreciation; it shows a broad, appreciative mind, and yet one
quite clear for values and criterions.

“We have lost a man of rare gifts, a splendid companion, a
generous, kindly, gracious friend. One is happy in having known him,
happy too in feeling that life was to him a fine thing--a thing he
loved, appreciated and used to the utmost. And his name will live--I
think that will be proved true--in the memories of men and in their
written records of these times.

“He was a figure and a presence amongst us.”

Another appreciation is by W. J. Locke and appeared in one of the
leading papers:

“In a brief notice like the present it is impossible to dwell on
the career of one of the most versatile of our profession. Everything
he touched he adorned with his own peculiar sense of artistic
perfection. He was an eminent art critic, a theatrical manager with
high ideals, an editor of fine discernment, and a distinguished
playwright. He was one of the finest after-dinner speakers of his
generation, and one of the few men who earned, maintained, and deserved
the reputation of a wit. A writer in a recent newspaper article
wrongly charged him with being rather a monologuist in social talk
than a conversationalist. Far from this being the case, no one more
fully appreciated and practised the delicate art of conversation. It
may be said, perhaps, that he was one of the youngest--he died in
his sixty-eighth year--and one of the last of the great Victorians;
for though his keen intellect never lost touch with the events and
movements of recent years, yet his mental attitude was typically
that of the second half of the nineteenth century in its sturdy
radicalism, its search after essentials, its abhorrence of shams, and
its lusty enjoyment of what was real and good in life. The honest
workman with pen or brush always found at his hands generous praise or
encouragement; for the charlatan, or ‘Jack Pudding,’ as he
was fond of terming him, he had no mercy.

“Struggling against grievous physical disability, he died
practically in harness. His last book, a treatise on painting,
completed but a month or two ago, is said by those privileged to read
the proofs, to reveal a vigour unimpaired by illness and an enthusiasm
undimmed by age. An arresting and lovable figure has passed from us,
one that linked us with a generation of giants whose work was ending
when ours began. It is for us, with sadness, to say, _Vale_: but we
know that their honoured shades will greet with many an _ave_ the
advent of ‘Joe’ Carr on the banks of Acheron.”

Two more extracts from letters, I have the permission of the writers to
quote. One is from A. E. W. Mason:

“The traits and qualities which come back to me,” he
writes, are “his boyish spirit, his sense of fun, his swiftness
in dropping out of fun and suddenly touching upon great themes with the
surest possible touch, his knowledge of Shakespeare, his passion for
Dickens,” etc. And the other is in the letter of affectionate
sympathy written to me at the time of his death by one of the oldest
and most valued of his friends, Sir Frederick Macmillan:

“He was one of the most gifted and brilliant creatures I have
ever known, and had such a kindly nature that no one could come across
him without loving him.

“I am proud to think that it was my privilege to give him his
last literary commission, and that it has resulted in such a fine piece
of work in the region in which he had always been a master.”

This allusion is to _The Ideals of Painting_, published posthumously
and still before the public.

The following notice appeared in the _Manchester Guardian_:

“The remarkable thing about Mr. Joseph Comyns Carr was that,
while his reputation as a talker and after-dinner speaker was made in
the late Victorian days, his gift was so genuine and so deep-set in
human nature that even in these days when the whole poise of humour
is changed, people still spoke of him as our best man. I doubt if
anyone could stand the Victorian after-dinner speeches that established
reputations, or if Wilde himself would keep the table quiet, but, until
near the end, Carr was the person organisers of dinners first thought
of when they wanted a toast list that would attract guests. He had
a Johnsonian decisiveness and real brilliance of definition, with a
freakish fancy and playfulness that at times had much of Henley’s
saltness and ferocity.”

I am bound to say I never heard the ferocity, but then there were
ladies present when I was. His chaff was sometimes keen, it is true,
and at our friends’ houses I sometimes sat quaking for fear it
should give offence; but even I underrated the power of his personality
and the deep affection in which he was universally held, and I did not
guess till he was gone the wealth of friends who missed him.

“There should be a monument erected to him for having cheered
more folk and made more laughter than anyone did before him,”
said one; and so it was even in the less inspiring surroundings of his
own home.

My mind goes back to the first frugal little dinners of our early life,
given when we had moved from the rooms over the dispensary in Great
Russell Street to a proper house in Blandford Square, now the Great
Central Railway Station.

He always did his own carving, and later taught our daughter to be
nearly as expert as he was at it; no amount of pleading for the
“table decoration” from our handsome parlour-maid would
deter him, and she and I had cause to weep over splashed brocade
table-centres which were the fashion of the hour.

“What _is_ this bird, my dear?” he asked one
night about some moderate-priced game which I thought I had
“discovered.”

“Hazel-grouse, Joe,” faltered I, guessing that some reproof
was coming.

“Nasal-grouse, you mean,” said he; promptly adding for
my consolation, “She’s a bit of a foreigner, you see,
so they take her in about our English birds. Never mind, dear! This
bird’s muscles are less tough, at all events, than those of
your country fowl who walked from Devonshire last week.” And he
turned to his friends and added: “I can give you nothing but the
plainest of food, but I always take a pride in its being the best of
its kind.”

That was his unfailing word: “The best is good enough for
me!” he would say; and he would go himself to the butcher if the
Sunday beef had not been succulent, and say kindly: “You need not
trouble to send me anything but the best.”

That was why his friends set so much store by his gastronomic
opinion--he was a great judge of food, he had it both from his Irish
mother and his Cumberland father; he knew good meat when he saw it, as
that astute friend of his, the Hertfordshire butcher already mentioned,
would tell him; and no one appreciated this more than the late Lord
Burnham. They both agreed that plain fare was always the finest--_but_
it must be of the best. A cold sirloin must be served uncut, yet the
host of those memorable week-end parties at Hall Barn always knew
whether it would be “prime” _when_ cut and would beg Joe to
keep a good portion of his appetite for the tasting of it. Neither of
them gave the first place to made-dishes, though Joe could enjoy these
when perfect--as they were at that bountiful table.

The made-dishes of unknown cooks he always mistrusted, especially when
he had reason to fear that the dinner would be of what he called “the
green-grocer’s and pastry-cook’s” class; and I remember his wicked
assertion that his “inside was rattling like a pea in a canister” with
all the tinned food that he had eaten at one such entertainment.

Alas, that he should have been condemned to some of it, through war
necessities, at the end of his life!

He would take pains sometimes in instructing me and our own humble cook
in the concoction of some new dish from a good receipt; but nothing was
to be spared in the cost of the necessary ingredients: the soup, fish
or _entree_ must be made “of the best,” not forgetting that the “pig
and onion were the North and South poles of cookery;” and, I think, he
might have added also the oyster.

His Christmas turkey was almost always boiled, after his mother’s
Irish method, stuffed with oysters and served with fried pork
sausages and a lavish oyster sauce or a _vol-au-vent_ of the same;
latterly the oysters always came in a barrel from our kind friend
“Bertie” Sullivan.

Yes, his friends esteemed him highly as a food expert; there is a
letter from Edward Burne-Jones (quoted, I think, by Joe) in which he
begs him to order the dinner for some entertainment of his own. “Oh,
dear Carr, save my honour,” he writes, “I know no more what dinner to
order than the cat on the hearth--less, for she would promptly order
mice. Oh, Carr, order a nice dinner so that I may not be quoted as a
warning of meanness ... yet not ostentatious and presuming such as
would foolishly compete with the banquets of the affluent. O, Carr,
come to the rescue!”

This dear friend cared comparatively little for the pleasures of the
table, but Joe was even privileged to pass on one of his receipts to an
acknowledged _gourmet_: it was the simmering of a ham half the time in
stock and vegetables, and the remainder in champagne--or, failing that,
in any good white wine; and as for his salads, he was famed for them.

I can see the pretty little plate of chives and other chopped herbs,
with yoke and white of hard-boiled mashed egg, that our French
_bourgeoise_ cook would send up ready for his meticulous choice in the
mixing of either a Russian or a lettuce salad: “a niggard of
vinegar, a spendthrift of oil, and a maniac at mixing,” was the
old adage he went by.

Our cooks were always as proud as I was to try and follow out his
ideas, and we were invariably praised for success: I remember an
occasion when the confused damsel--partly because she happened to be
very pretty--was summoned to the dining-room to receive her meed; and
when it was blame, I caught the brunt of it and mitigated the dose
downstairs.

But as it was always in the form of fun I never minded; I was always
proud to be the butt of it. Sometimes I scored, as when the dessert
came at that first party, and he said, offering a dish of sweets to his
neighbour:

“Try a preserved fruit; they’ve stood the move from
Bloomsbury wonderfully well,” and I was able to produce the
freshly opened box, just arrived from a choice foreign firm, and prove
my hospitality to be less stinted.

I had my partisans in those days. Pellegrini, the _Vanity Fair_
caricaturist, was one of them. I hailed from his own country, and I can
hear him say:

“Never minder Joe! You and I we ’ave de sun in de
eyes.” And then we would discuss the proper condiment for
_maccaroni_, and next time he came he would bring it ready cooked in
a fireproof dish, tenderly carried on his lap in the hansom, which he
insisted upon placing on the proper spot of the kitchen stove to warm:
on such nights, he ate little of our British fare.

My husband and he were fast friends nevertheless. If Joe had not
“de sun in de eyes” he had it in the heart, and Pellegrini
adored him, even going so far once as to break his oath never to
sleep out of his own lodgings, that he might visit us at a cottage on
the Thames, where--although he allowed that the moon “she is a
beauty”--he used cold cream and kid gloves to counteract the
ill-effects of hard water, and sat up all night rather than retire to a
strange bed.

Several tales of this lovable and laughable character are told in
_Eminent Victorians_, most of them referring to those happy little
homely dinner parties where Joe shone so pleasantly, and which his
friends not only graced with their presence, but even sometimes
contributed to by little kindly presentations of delicacies.

Perhaps few have received as much kindness as Joe did, and though
always grateful, he was never overwhelmed. Of the pride which resents
gifts he had none. “I wouldn’t take a jot from any but a
friend,” he would say. “But if a friend, who has more than
I, likes to share it with me, why should I refuse? I would do the same
for him. I have no money, but I give him what I possess.”

And none who knew him--rich or poor--in any of his many spheres, but
would testify to this: he gave the young of his wise and tactful advice
in their careers, sparing no time or trouble to advance those who were
steadfast of purpose; he gave to his contemporaries of his untiring
sympathy--known only to those who received it; he gave of his cheerful
optimism to all: no form of envy ever crossed his mind.

“I can enjoy fine things just as well when they belong to
others as to me,” he would say. Of none are the words truer:
“Having nothing yet possessing all things.”

But this graver digression has led me far from that merry Christmas
party, when the parlour-maid, whose beauty was an attraction of our
first home, and whose charm and devotion for eleven years are one
of its sweetest memories, was forced to retire to the sideboard to
compose her face; which sort of thing did not only occur at our own
table, but at far smarter houses where decorous butlers would bow
their heads lower to conceal their smiles, the mistress of one of them
even declaring that her maggiordomo had not considered the company
that evening worthy of Joe, and had suggested a different choice for a
future party.

There was one over-cultured house to which we used to be bidden where
the learned hostess was mated to a meek alien, who never presumed to
understand her conversation. One evening, before the fish was removed,
she leant forward and called down the table to Joe: “Mr. Comyns
Carr, would you kindly inform us ‘what is style?’”

Joe scarcely paused before he replied with his sunniest smile,
“Not before the sweets, Madam.” And he turned pleasantly to
the amazed host and began complimenting him on the excellence of his
claret.

I think, although I am afraid I have heard him call that host a “Prince
of Duldoggery,” he preferred him that night to the lady of culture,
though she was too serious to be included in his pet aversions, the
“Lady Sarah Volatile’s” or “jumping-cats” of Society.

But even among such, how prompt he was to detect the tiniest spark of
genuine knowledge or enthusiasm, the most foolishly concealed quality
of true womanliness and devotion.

I remember a girl-friend of his daughter’s, boasting to him in
defiance of his counsel, that she would drive to Ascot alone in an
admirer’s car.

“No you won’t,” said Joe quietly.

And loudly as she persisted that night--she did _not_.

I could multiply these instances by the score, for even in middle
age he was the darling of all girls, though he always told them
home-truths, and many was the match he made or wisely marred in the
confidential corner of a drawing-room.

Whether in the quiet or the open, of course, he always talked the
better for his cigar, and to some the sight of the matches he wasted
while seeking the positively apt word was a joy in itself--or an
annoyance, as the case might be.

I know one dear friend who could not listen for irritation, and would
burst out at last: “Light your pipe, first, old man, do!”

Yet there were times when he had no pipe to light--in smart
drawing-rooms or theatre stalls, for instance. He was very naughty in
the latter, and kept me in a fever lest, being so well known, some one
should overhear him who could make mischief.

Once he was reproved by the management for making his party laugh
immoderately in the stage-box at a sorely dull farcical comedy.

“Pray present my compliments to the manager,” said Joe
suavely to the attendant who had brought the message, “and assure
him that we were not laughing at anything on the stage.”

The speech he was proud to make every 8th of January in honour of his
dear old friend, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s birthday, and the
good wishes which for many years he voiced for many friends at Sir
George and Lady Lewis’ New-Year parties, will not perhaps be
altogether forgotten, nor could I recall the topical interests of the
moment after so long.

But those who knew him best knew that the opportunities for witty
rejoinder and humorous invention were by no means limited to set
occasions; they were instantly seized on provocation which no one else
would have perceived, and as often in the simplicity of domestic life
as in the society of clever people who might have been supposed to
inspire him.

Who but Joe, when a picnic was spread beneath the trees in the woods
at Walton, and a combative young curate, claiming to have secured the
spot, swooped down upon us with his Sunday-school flock, would have
whispered merrily: “Never mind! We’ll cut him according to
his cloth!”

Or who, on being asked by a lady which was my “At Home”
day, would have replied: “Let me see! Sunday is the Lord’s
Day, and Monday is my wife’s day;” or, in the days of my
slenderness and his more opulent figure, would have declared that,
taking the average, we were the thinnest couple in London?

These trivial jokes will seem poor to the friends who have heard
his later and more brilliant _bon-mots_ and have listened to his
longer orations; but, as I have said, I know little of those public
speeches. The most notable of these at which I remember being present
was at a dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, when he spoke long and
with deep illumination on his beloved Charles Dickens; he always
spoke at the various commemorative entertainments given in the great
novelist’s honour, but never so brilliantly and so profoundly as
that time.

When the occasion was more formal--as when he took the chair at the
Actors’ Benevolent or the Dramatic and Musical Fund--he would
sometimes recite to me beforehand part of the speech which he intended
to deliver, but I believe he rarely stuck to his plan, and I have heard
him say that he preferred merely to prepare the “joints” of
his subject--_i.e._ each new departure--and to leave all the filling-in
to the inspiration of the moment as influenced by the foregoing speaker
or any unforeseen incident.

I recollect that the peroration of a speech for the Dramatic and
Musical Fund ended: “I plead not so much for the deserving as for
the undeserving,” and I believe that he added: “of whom I
am one.”

I know that he told me next day--half in glee, but much also in
pride--that the Toastmaster had told him that he had never stood behind
a chair and seen so much money raked in.

It was certainly to his mastery of the impromptu that he owed the
triumph of his oration before the U.S. Ambassador, Mr. Bayard,
at a moment when war seemed suddenly possible with our great
English-speaking neighbour; and I recollect that Ellen Terry, who was
then in New York, told me later that when Joe’s speech appeared
in the papers _en résumé_ (it never could be wholly reported owing to
his making no notes) there was a marked change in the tide of feeling.

He has related a part of this incident in his _Eminent Victorians_, but
he has not mentioned this last particular, neither has he told how his
triumph was won by his large appreciation of the love lavished upon
the giants of our English literature by our “friends across the
seas.”




CHAPTER X

HOLIDAYS


A happy chapter this: for though Joe always had so many irons in the
fire that lengthy holidays were not only very few with him but actually
avoided and disliked, he made merry so well by the wayside that many a
memory falls into a category scarcely enshrined in a longer period than
a summer afternoon, or at most, a week-end trip; he made holiday for
other folk all the time, and in so doing made it for himself.

Of week-end visits none were more joyous than those spent under
the hospitable roof of our friends Sir George and Lady Lewis at
Walton-on-Thames, where Sir Edward Burne-Jones was a constant visitor.
Neither of those friends were knighted or baroneted then, so that
perhaps we might all have been said to be--using Joe’s own
words--“of the lower middle class, to which I am proud to
belong.”

Oscar Wilde was often of the Walton party--fresh from Oxford then, and
considerably esteemed as a wit himself, though not, as Joe shows in his
Reminiscences, always above the suspicion of borrowing.

In this respect he somewhat resembled Whistler; but the latter was more
honest in his plagiarism.

One day Whistler accused Joe of making a joke at the expense of his
friend--a false accusation in reality, though sometimes lightly
true--to which Joe quickly answered: “Well, I can make a friend
most days, but I can only make a good joke now and then:”
assuredly only half a truth, too.

“Ha! ha!” laughed Whistler with his shrill cackle, “I
wish I had said that myself!”

“Never mind, Jimmy, you will,” retorted Joe.

And the cackle broke forth again whole-heartedly, whereas Wilde might
possibly have been offended.

But very few folk were ever offended at my husband’s fun.

One of the members said to him one day at the Garrick Club, in a
whimsical and deprecating manner: “These fellows tell me that I have
the reputation of a wit, my dear Carr.” To which Joe replied: “Don’t
worry! you’ll live that down in an afternoon.” And I am told that the
friend was wont to repeat this against himself. Again, the mother of a
pretty young girl, whom he was openly flattering, asked him, laughing,
whether his intentions were serious, to which he replied: “Serious, but
not honourable, madam.” But if this lady was not offended perhaps it
was because he had known her since the time when she was fourteen years
old herself.

An evening in Lady Lewis’ pretty drawing-room at the Walton
cottage comes vividly back to me. We were playing some geographical
game with the children, in the course of which Oscar Wilde--with a
view to grown-up applause--found occasion to ask: “Where is the
capital of the Rothschilds?”

The children looked blank.

“Why, in Behring Straits,” said Joe promptly, and I
remember old Sir George Lewis’ smile, for it was at the time of
the famous city crisis when, but for that capital, the great firm of
Baring might have stopped payment.

Even in that most precarious form of fun, the practical joke, Joe was
never known to hurt even the most thin-skinned.

One day he and Mr. Hallé, his co-director at the New Gallery--made
an excursion to Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ home--The Grange,
Kensington--and sent up a message to the artist asking if he would
receive two gentlemen who had called to ask whether he would take
shares in the _Great Wheel_. The maid must have been sore put to it to
keep her countenance, for the rage with which the painter viewed the
monstrosity that climbed the sky above his garden wall was well known
in his household.

He rushed downstairs, palette in hand, only to find “little
Carr,” as he affectionately called him, waiting demurely in the
hall on quite other business.

At the sweet Rottingdean home a similar joke was played: Burne-Jones’
loathing of the “interviewer” was a very open secret; so one summer
evening Joe crept up to the front door and sent in an audacious name,
purporting to be that of an American who hoped for a few words with the
distinguished artist.

From the shade of the porch he peeped into the dining-room window,
and had the satisfaction of seeing his friend creep under the
dinner-table, while the maid returned with the message that Sir Edward
Burne-Jones was not at home. I think Joe’s familiar back was
quickly recognised as he walked, in mock dignity, down the garden path,
and he was not sent empty away.

Of course, the practical jokes of which he shared the invention with
his good friend J. L. Toole--a master of the craft--were the most
cunningly devised. He has related the choicest in _Eminent Victorians_,
but I could tell of many a family laugh over them, and “One more
Tooler, father, before we go to bed,” was a common request.

One of the favourite stories was told of him when travelling down with
Joe to the beautiful old moated house at Ightham, which our American
friends, General and Mrs. Palmer, had made their English home. Stopping
at a wayside station above which a lordly mansion stood among the
trees, Toole beckoned a porter and, in the gibberish that he used so
glibly at these moments, pretended to utter the name of its owner.

“Oh, you mean Mr. So-and-So,” said the porter.

“Of course--I said so!” retorted the shameless comedian. “Well, here’s
half a crown. When the train’s off, run up to the house and say ‘we
shall be seven to dinner and the game will follow.’”

The whistle went as the porter, holding on to the door, enquired:
“Who shall I say, Sir?”

But the train moved on and Toole returned to the reading of his paper,
leaving a gaping man on the platform.

This same Ightham Mote was the scene of many of our happiest hours.
Its charming hostess was a dear friend whose rare gifts of sympathy
and true hospitality enabled her not only to attract to her house the
brightest of spirits, but also to draw from them their best. Children,
too, to whom she was a fairy godmother, were welcome as friends in
their own right. Our daughter and younger son were specially dear to
her in their different ways, and many was the grave, childish saying of
the latter that she would repeat to the proud father, though perhaps
the one he oftenest told himself was said to Alma Tadema when the
five-year-old boy remarked that he preferred a gas to a coal fire,
because the first went out when _you_ liked, and the latter when _it_
liked.

Joe was appreciated of all children and always won their favour easily;
but I remember one little lady administering a severe rebuff to him
when, after many lures, he said at last: “Well, I don’t
care whether you come or not!” to which she replied: “Oh,
yes, you do!”

But that was an exception; they were usually his slaves, and loved his
stories as much as their elders did. He treated them as his equals only
requiring that they should do the same; and when his first grandson
was born and some one alluded to him as a proud grandfather, he said:
“I like the child, but there’s to be no grandfather about
it. I’m to be Joe to him as to others.” And so he was to
the children of that dear lady in beautiful Ightham Mote.

Christmas was a real Yuletide in the fine old wainscoted hall and
library, where Joe was always ready for the revel, as he was for the
outdoor sports with his own children and those of the house. There
were games in the beautiful old quadrangle and fishing feats from the
bridges that lead across the moat to the bowling-green beyond; but the
latter must have been worse than a bad joke to an expert angler such
as my husband--consisting as they did in trying to lure the trout by
a bait tied on to a hairpin; luckily the fish swam away merrily and
perhaps enjoyed the fun too.

Frederick Jameson, that earliest friend of the days of our courtship,
led the carol and song, and played for children and grown-ups to dance;
Henry James sat in the ingle nook and told us ghost-stories of his
making wholly in keeping with the place; George Meredith watched and
made shrewd comments on the characteristics and possible careers of our
various children, and discoursed on every topic--always expecting the
homage due to him and reserving the conversation, even from Joe, by a
long-drawn “Ah--” until he was ready with his next paradox.

Yet there was a moment when Joe scored even off Meredith. I think he
tells the tale in _Coasting Bohemia_, but not of himself. Meredith
had been criticizing George Eliot, and in a brief pause, Joe put in:
“Yes! Panoplied in all the philosophies she swoops upon the
commonplace.” And Meredith, laughing, replied, “I wish I
had said that myself!”

One day we were busy amusing the children in the big Hall with
a game of Definitions; one wrote down a word for Subject, the
next man defined, and the third--the paper being turned over the
Subject--“recovered” it.

Thus: Subject, _Soap_; Definition, as made by Joe: _The Horror of the
East-end multitude_. Recovery, _Jack the Ripper_: the nickname of the
celebrated East-end murderer who was then the talk of the whole town.

Joe was leaving that day for London, and the man came to announce that
the trap was at the door.

He rose to go, but the children had begun another definition for his
“last.” _Woman_ was given as the word. _The Better Half_,
wrote the next person.

“Only just time to make the train, Sir,” said the footman.

The children wailed, and we all followed him out of the hall and saw
him off; but half an hour later a telegram was handed to our hostess.

“Recovery: _An Angel once removed_”; and nobody needed to
hear the signature.

The children were always the frame to the picture in that lovable
household, and our daughter--the apple of her father’s eye,
made in his mould, gifted with his humour and large with his urbane
and generous heart--had a very special place there. I remember his
pride when George Meredith watching her one day at his feet, said:
“Look at the bumps on that child’s head. Always let her
pursue whatever walk in life she chooses.”

His advice was followed; and she _knew_ what she would choose. I was
having her trained for a violinist (for her gifts were several) and her
master was proud of her at twelve years old. But at fourteen she came
to us one day and said: “Father, I hope you won’t mind:
I’ve sold my violin. I know now that I want to draw--and no one
can serve two masters so I’ve put away the temptation.”

Joe was generally the centre around whom the children mustered in those
good days, and many an extra ten minutes did he beg off their bedtime
in the summer twilight or by the big Christmas logs. He used to tell
them that he hated going to bed himself, and nothing was more true.

“If I didn’t know that your mother always gives me cotton sheets,” he
would say on a winter’s night, “I would never go. I’ve no fancy for a
country trip every time I turn round in bed.”

But indeed he needed no such excuse for sitting up late when he had a
congenial audience. He had a wonderful capacity for sound sleep when
the time came--a capacity equalled, as he expressed it, for “enjoying”
laziness; because, of exercise--save in the pursuit of bird or fish--he
would have none; but most of his life he sat up late and his most
welcome form of rest was always in talk.

In this relaxation he was even more than matched in argumentativeness
by the husband of another most hospitable hostess, to whom he addresses
the following letter after a long visit when she had housed us in a
homeless interval. I may add that our host was an etymologist, and
would confront Joe with a dictionary in support of his own view of
a disputed word; also that he was an eminent amateur musician and a
vehement Wagnerian.


  “MY DEAR----,

 It seems to me that you and your husband ought to be told that you are
 excellent hosts--and yet I don’t want the thing to get about.
 At first I thought that I would declare loudly to all whom I met how
 pleasant a thing it was to stay in your house; and then I thought I
 wouldn’t.

 When one has discovered a really charming place where one can live
 with exclusive regard to one’s own selfish indulgence, it is
 perhaps hardly wise to noise it abroad. Some of the snuggest corners
 in Europe have been ruined by such imprudent chatter; and I feel that
 I should never forgive myself if I were to be the means of making it
 generally known that your house is so delightful. But I think after
 all that I can trust you!

 You are not the sort of person to gossip about such a thing; and when
 I tell you that what I am going to say is confidential, I simply mean
 that I would not, for the present at any rate, mention the subject to
 your daughter; young people are fanciful, and she might misinterpret
 my meaning--besides why shouldn’t she find it out for herself?
 No, let this be for you and your husband’s ear alone! And even
 for you it must be in some sense a barren secret; you cannot stay with
 yourselves! If you could I should recommend nothing so strongly as a
 few weeks’ visit to your charming home. It would do your husband
 all the good in the world--get him out of himself, so to speak--while
 it would make you a different woman. Not that I think that in any way
 desirable; I simply avail myself of a phrase that is always applied to
 me when a change is recommended.

 Yes! If you could only stay at----!

 The family is small, but extremely intelligent, with minds well stored
 with the most varied kinds of knowledge.

 Your host is a type!

 Waking--with him--appears to be the momentary interruption of an
 animated conversation which has engaged the long hours others reserve
 for sleep.

 With them a new day seems to open a new volume with cover, title page
 and preface. Not so with him.

 The intervening night is simply a semi-colon in an uncompleted
 sentence--a Wagnerian clause in a melody that repudiates a close.
 This might seem to argue a too rigid adherence to a single theme with
 menace of monotony. Yet nothing could be less true.

 At the bidding of a single word the whole scene changes with the
 shifting magic of a dream, and you are surprised to find yourself
 suddenly plunged into quite another conversational sea.

 I have seen visitors at your house who would turn a deaf ear to these
 alert exercises of the dawn--moody men who became at once absorbed in
 the mere pleasures of the table; taking refuge in bacon from arguments
 to which they could find no auroral reply. They are cowards and I will
 have none of them! Rather would I emulate the tact of your hostess who
 finds, and welcomes, in these wide-ranging thoughts of morn, a bulwark
 that keeps the host from the kitchen boiler. For he is very apt to
 descend suddenly from his philosophic heights and pounce with unerring
 precision on some petty domestic error.

 It is here you may observe the sweet influence of the daughter of the
 house, whose finesse would almost deserve the name of cunning if its
 purpose were not so benign.

 In her skilful hands I have seen disaster averted by a dictionary and
 an impending storm transferred from a tea-cup to a disputed line of
 Tennyson.

 I am painting for you only the lighter moods of life at this charming
 house; of what else is delightful you must some day go and see for
 yourself. But I forget; of course you can’t and there is my
 difficulty staring me in the face. I wonder if it is mine alone?

 I find it so easy to trace a smile to its source: so difficult to
 define the lasting charm that lies behind it!

 And even when the definition is at hand my tongue halts at eulogy.
 Odd! I love to be praised and remembrance offers no instance when
 I have been in fear lest appreciation should sink to flattery. But
 when I try to praise others--even as they deserve--I am overtaken by
 a feeling of delicacy on their behalf which I have never felt for
 myself. And so I end dumb on the very threshold of my theme.

 I should like to say a great number of things of you and your husband,
 but somehow it doesn’t seem possible. Some day, when I meet
 a stranger in the train at one of those odd moments when by some
 irresistible impulse, I am driven to confide to a chance acquaintance
 secrets that through a long life I have hidden from my dearest
 friends--I shall say something about you and him that you might like
 to hear. But I can’t command the hour and meanwhile, you see, I
 am no further than when I began. All I can say is that, if ever you
 ask me to your house again, let nothing be changed from what it was,
 for it could not be changed for the better.

  Yours ever truly,
  J. W. COMYNS CARR.”


After this epistle it may not be thought partial on my part to state
that, from the days of our youthful visits to Balcarres to the end
of his life, my husband was a welcome guest at country houses; the
following, in reply to a request from Mrs. F. D. Millet of Broadway,
that he should relieve the strain of a spell of female society upon her
husband, seems to show this.


  “MY DEAR MRS. MILLET,

 I ought not, but I will! And lest I should falter in my bad
 resolution, I have already wired to you saying I should be down on
 Saturday.

 It is a strange thing about duty. I believe there is no one who sees
 what is facetiously called “the path of duty” more clearly
 than I do; but we are differently gifted, and I fancy I never was
 intended to walk in it. Like the criminal who acquires in the end an
 extensive knowledge of law by industriously incurring its penalties, I
 believe that if I could recall all the moral maxims I have neglected
 in practice, I might serve as a veritable storehouse of wisdom and
 good conduct. And so it happens that, though I see clearly I ought to
 stay in town and work, I am nevertheless determined to accept your
 kind invitation and come to you on Saturday next. Tell Frank to defer
 suicide till after that date.

 I can indeed well understand his melancholy. No man can dwell long in
 the exclusive society of women without being crushed by the sense of
 his own unworthiness. We are not fit for it. I often wish there were
 some bad women in the world, with whom we might associate in our baser
 moments, and sometimes, in a dreary mood, I am apt to wonder what
 women can have been like before the Fall, they are so perfect now.

 Perhaps in another world we shall be better and you will be worse; let
 us hope for the best.

 And in the meantime let not Frank despair. When I see him on Saturday
 I will do my best to detach his nose from the grindstone and tune his
 unaccustomed lips to words that were once familiar to us both.

  Yours ever truly,
  J. W. COMYNS CARR.”


In those earlier days he sometimes pretended that his wardrobe was
unfitted for such places, but I think even this was but a shallow piece
of mock modesty on his part, for he was well aware that he could shine
if he liked in any environment.

A letter to my sister, which I have just found, may illustrate this:

  19, BLANDFORD SQUARE,
  N.W.

 “MY DEAR ALMA,

 Many thanks for the brushes. When my hair is gone--“which will
 be short,” as Pellegrini says--I can use them for sweeping
 a crossing. In the meantime they make a most excellent parting.
 Seriously they are beautiful.

 I have never before had brushes in a case--it seems to lift
 one’s social status. Hitherto my brushes have lain in my
 portmanteau cheek by jowl with my boots, or have mingled their tears
 with my sponge.

 Now all is changed; I feel I could stay at a country house and
 meet the footman on equal terms. Of course, I don’t mean
 that seriously--no man could hope to be the equal of a footman. I
 am a democrat but no revolutionist, and I have always felt that so
 long as liveried servants keep their supremacy the throne is safe.
 Compared with this the land question is a trifle. “Dieu et
 mon drawers” is the loyal but terrified sentiment with which
 I always awake on a visit, and see the footman turning my tattered
 underclothing inside out. But now my brushes will save me.

  Yours,
  JOE.”

In the later years of his life, as his friends multiplied far and wide
and his social gifts became famous, he was pressed into circles unknown
to me, and our country-house visits together became fewer; so that
personally I remember his talk oftener at some sea-side place where we
had run down for a week-end, or on the verandah of some foreign hotel
where he would be immediately surrounded by a delighted audience--in
later years not by any means always composed of his own countrymen.
Though his associations with French artists and men of letters over
pictures for the New Gallery--and, more still, over his English
editorship of _L’Art_--had taught him enough of their tongue for
his business, he was not a finished French scholar; but he was never
afraid to make a shot at expressing his thought, and consequently he
improved enormously at the end of his life. I remember the astonished
comment of two Armenian lads and a charming Finnish lady whom we met at
a Swiss mountain resort: “_Mais c’est épatant! De faire des
calembours comme cela dans une langue étrangère._”

He only needed an audience; and he had it every hour of the day in
those two Armenian boys, who would stand for hours watching him throw
his line over the lake and coax the fish out--just, they used to say,
as he would coax the children to him in the roads or the visitors in
the lounge--“sans se donner de la peine.”

I am not sure of the justice of that last remark. Perhaps he never
purposely gave himself trouble, but he amused others because his love
of his own kind was such that he must always needs be in touch with
them, be they peasant or peer, and at the end of his life he preferred
to lounge in the road and chat with the convalescent soldiers in a
quiet village than to sit comfortably in the seclusion of a lovely
garden.

It was because he was always alive that he was not dull; but I must
admit he needed plenty of human interest to keep him so.

And I think, for this reason, that the life of a good hotel, preferably
a foreign one, afforded him the best opportunities for fun; he knew
just how much or how little the applause of such kaleidoscopic society
was worth; but it tickled his appetite for the moment and was the
required sauce to his holiday rest.

The following letters to his daughter variously illustrate this aspect
of him:

  EDEN HOTEL,
  MONTE CARLO.

  “MY DEAR DOLL,

  Our little hotel at Monte Carlo is a cosy place, containing among its
 visitors some odd and rather lonely females, both English and American.
 I overheard a conversation the other night between four of them--two
 English and two Americans--at which your mother would like to have
 assisted. They evidently did not know that we were English, and let
 themselves go on the subject of the male sex. The leader of the band,
 an American lady, whose hips described a circle about as big as the
 Round Pond in Kensington Gardens, was especially vehement in denouncing
 us, though I can hardly conceive she had ever received any other cause
 of resentment than neglect. To an English lady, who could not compete
 with her in size but fairly distanced her in ugliness, she held forth
 at great length on the superior advantages which women enjoyed in
 America. “Over there,” she said, “we’ve just got men like _that_,”
 and she placed an enormous thumb on a morsel of unresisting bread to
 indicate where men were. “If they do anything we don’t like, why,
 Madam, they hear from us pretty quick. And that’s where they ought to
 be,” she added, “for they are just nothing but savages!” At which the
 gruesome English woman said that that was what she had always held to;
 but that, in England, she never could find any woman with the courage
 to say so. Then the fat American gave her country away.

 “But see now,” she said, “we’ve still got to fight the law even in our
 country. I said to an American man, ‘do you love your wife?’ ‘Why, of
 course,’ he said. ‘Do you love your mother?’ I said. ‘Just don’t I,’ he
 replied. ‘Do you love your sister?’ ‘Why sure,’ he said. ‘Well then,’
 I said to him, ‘Do you know the American constitution declares that
 every living citizen should have a vote except children, criminals _and
 women_.’ And then she turned to the English woman and added: “Do you
 know, Madam, the thought of that American law just makes me blush all
 over when I go to bed at night.”

 I confess as I looked at her, I couldn’t think of the unrighteous law,
 for my mind was filled with the idea of what a wild and billowy tract
 of country that blush would have to traverse. Fancy the Round Pond
 turned into the Red Sea with a single blush.

  Yours,
  J. COMYNS CARR.”

  BELLAGIO,
  _May, 1903_.

 “MY DEAREST DOLL,

 We are in the midst of a thunderstorm that is tearing and raging
 round the mountains; for the moment it is like Mr. Chamberlain in the
 earlier part of his campaign--very loud and very near, but I think it
 is taking itself off to the Gotthard.

 I don’t think I have told you of the two little bits of American
 character I encountered at my hotel. One evening three ladies of
 that country were set beside me at table d’hote. They were not
 pre-possessing or young, but I noticed with just a momentary flush of
 flattery that there was an obvious struggle going on as to which of
 them should occupy the chair next to me; the struggle ended, and then
 the next but one turned to the victor and said, ‘Couldn’t
 you see, my dear, that I just wanted to protect you in case you might
 be addressed in a manner that might offend you.’ Poor dears!
 they didn’t know that God had protected them against any attack
 of mine.

  Later, two rather nice girls and their mother took the same places;
 and one evening after dinner, when the terrace was full of people, the
 mother looked up to where one of the girls was standing at the window
 of the room above, and called out: ‘Don’t let him kiss you, dear.’ We
 all turned to look up, and there stood the girl with a parrot on her
 shoulder. There was naturally an audible smile among the spectators,
 and the girl herself was in fits of laughter.

  Best love from your father,
  J. COMYNS CARR.”

  BORDIGHERA,
  _April 1909_.

  “MY DEAR DOLLY,

 We are very comfortable in our little hotel here, with two nice
 Italian brothers to cater for us. The Italian village children please
 me mightily, and I hobble about in their language with just enough
 understanding to enable me to amuse myself.

 We are an odd society: nearly all women, American and English. They
 are mostly nice people in their way, but not exciting, and of the
 place generally it may be said that whatever other attractions it may
 possess it does not seem to be a health resort for beauty. The air
 apparently is not recommended for pretty people. In the streets and
 on the hills the German is more or less in evidence, and sometimes as
 I pass them by I am inclined to side with Balfour and to demand that
 four more Dreadnoughts should be laid down at once. Their admiration
 of nature somehow always makes me feel shy, and I can almost see
 the landscape making an ugly face after their loudly proclaimed
 _Wunderschön_. However, they really don’t trouble us much--the
 neighbourhood is so genuinely beautiful.

  Yours,
  J. COMYNS CARR.”

He often touched on the beauties of nature as related to art when
writing to his artist daughter, and I find this keen little bit of
criticism in a letter to her from Bellagio.

“This place is beautiful, and makes one wonder little that
the Italians thought of landscape as a thing of design before the
Northerners found a new beauty in the empire of cloud and sky.
Certainly these mountains have great enchantment of form, and the
Southern light defines every detail.”

And this longer letter of varying interest also rings the same note.

  FROM WENGEN,
  BERNESE OBERLAND.

  “MY DEAR DOLL,

 Here is a line from me whom I daresay you thought hopeless in that
 matter. But such a little thing will sometimes provoke a sinner to
 virtue. Two strangely fashioned men share the room adjoining mine,
 divided from me only by a washed deal partition held together by
 French nails. They spend the day in moody silence and in grey frock
 coats which if they were well cut would suit the Cup Day at Ascot. But
 they return at nine and chatter unceasingly till 10.30. It is now only
 ten and it has occurred to me that instead of tossing about on the sea
 of their incoherent conversations I would write a line to you.

 This is a beautiful place which I should admire even more if nobody
 else admired it. But it is made too fair to go scot free of praise,
 and so I must fain clap my hands with the rest. You see we are
 exclusive in our emotions as the society of a country town and do not
 wish to share them with our inferiors. That is a part of it, but I
 think my reluctance to hear nature applauded has a better reason too,
 though it is hard to give it words. I know I always feel a better
 right to enjoy its beauty when I am otherwise engaged, in killing a
 bird perhaps, in fishing a stream or I suppose best of all in some
 sort of labour that the needs of the world demand.

 I went for an early walk the other day up to the Wengern Alp; all
 the mountain in shadow and the pines blacker than their own fallen
 image on the grass. I was alone and met no one on the path but the
 lads laden with their washed deal milk-pails as they came singing
 from every green hill. And as they passed I felt sort of shamefaced.
 I was out for beauty, a kind of dilettante wandering in search of
 impressions, and I knew deep down in me that they must one day and
 another have won impressions I could never gain. No one can be really
 intimate with a strange land, can ever really read the face of a
 hillside as it is read by those however simple who were born to see
 it coloured by the changing fortunes of their life from childhood to
 manhood. Nature is so shy, so reluctant to speak if she thinks she is
 overheard, but she will sing to herself when she thinks we are busy.

 For us who are not artists I think beauty is only really captured in
 that way. It is trapped unawares, stolen in the silences of night or
 dawn, or burnt into the brain by the fire of some passionate moment
 to which it remains as an unforgotten background. Of course the
 artist, the poet or the painter, has other rights and other penalties.
 ‘He that would save his life must lose it,’ and the artist
 is always giving up for himself what he re-fashions for the joy of
 others. He is like the cuckoo that sojourns in every nest and is
 itself but a homeless voice. Even the beauty that he pursues is never
 really possessed; it flutters for a moment in his hand and then takes
 wing for others to inherit. It is bought so dearly and then sold for a
 mere song.

 But this is a digression. We were talking of Switzerland, and I do
 believe this is one of the choicest spots in it, but of course we
 don’t discuss its merits all day. On the contrary, I think we
 talk most of the food, comparing the veal of yesterday with the mutton
 of to-day, wondering from what strange waters, remote or near, come
 those strange fish that masquerade under the titles of the dwellers in
 Northern seas. And then we pry into the lives of other lodgers, making
 up imaginary relationships among families that are as normally related
 as our own--taking a curious interest in characters in which we have
 really no concern, and exchanging cards warmly with parting guests,
 knowing that we shall see their faces again no more. And all the while
 the air is so good, when the weather is not so bad, that we feel well,
 which is a long way on the road to feeling happy, and we are sometimes
 pointed at as distinguished, and then vanity covers the rest of the
 road and we are very jolly.

  Yours ever,
  FATHER.”

His preference for a foreign holiday--unless one in his own country,
could be allied to fishing or shooting--did not, as will be understood
from stray remarks in his correspondence, extend to Germany. He always
disliked the race, and I can recollect a journey in our young days
during which we had made a halt at Munich with Beatty Kingston. I am
afraid Joe’s description of the place and the people included such
scathing epithets as “The Burial-place of the Peto-Baptists” and “The
Suburb of the World.” For his excuse I must note that it was the bad
season for the Opera, although we did once hear “The Flying Dutchman,”
which he particularly admired; also that the old Pinacotek, with its
riches in Paintings by Old Masters, was closed, as if to spite him;
naturally he could not be consoled by “the collection of middle-aged
articles” offered him as a salve--declaring that he saw plenty of these
in the streets of the town.

He was always just as hard on the German “frau” as on her husband, and
his description of them on the mountain paths at Gastein, with skirts
looped up like window blinds and waterproofs strapped across their
shoulders in case of a storm, could only be equalled by the whimsical
words he had for the red necks of the men bulging over their collars.

He was not a Central Europe man; the French or the Italians were always
first with him after his own people. _Romance_ for him lay in the
North; I have often heard him insist that those most deeply possess
it who dwell in the mist and dream of the sun, and he would cite
“The Wizard of the North” and the Scottish Land in proof of
his theory: yet the South stood for gaiety with him, and he sighed for
the sun even as I did who had been bred in it.

It is curious that Rome he only saw for the first time late in life,
upon being chosen to write the introduction to the British Section
of the International Exhibition there, and afterwards appointed
England’s representative on the Art Congress.

I shall quote a private appreciation of the written part of his
work from that acute and sympathetic critic, Edward Russell of the
_Liverpool Post_.

  NAPLES,
  _April 28th, 1911_.

  “DEAR COMYNS CARR,

 I cannot refrain from congratulating you on your Introduction to the
 Roman Catalogue of British Paintings, etc. Not only its literary
 felicity, but its fine and illuminating judgment; the choiceness of
 the language; and the apt biographical illustrations; the humane
 diplomacy of occasional gentle, but searching suggestions of censure;
 the insight of the aperçus; and the contribution of several original
 maxims to the sterling floating currency of criticism, make it one of
 the most memorable of such pieces.

  Yours,
  EDWARD RUSSELL.”

But Rome as a city he loved not, as he loved the Tuscan and Umbrian
towns; its vast antiquities oppressed him, its medieval structures he
disliked, and the race that had left its impress there bored him; even
in the natural surroundings he found too much melancholy--definitely
contrasted in his mind with that Northern sternness which breeds
Romance; but he shall speak for himself.

 “The archeological side of Rome I can only gape at as a tourist:
 I have no learning that way: though, of course, there are scenes
 of the old world which touch the imagination without the kind of
 knowledge that must, to those who possess it, make the place deeply
 interesting. The more modern Rome--the Rome of the Renaissance,
 scarcely makes a single appeal and creates no such satisfying
 atmosphere as Florence. The Sistine I must see again; the light was
 bad to-day and the effect at so great a height did not immediately
 leave the tremendous impression of Michael Angelo’s power that
 comes of the more intimate knowledge given by our photographs. The
 colour, however, yielded more than I had expected. Tell Fred if he is
 by you that I am wholly at one with him about the Stanze of Raphael.
 They gain in site, and although I knew the compositions well, I found
 them better than I knew with a charm of colour unexpected and superior
 to any of his easel pictures, except perhaps the Madonna at Dresden;
 truly a marvellous genius, using all the resources of style with the
 freedom and ease of a painter of genre--and here, which is not always
 so in his later work, absolutely free from rhetoric in gesture: I must
 go back to them again.

  “In the general style of Roman Renaissance building I have no
 delight--and never thought to have; but, of course, there are separate
 things to discover that I have as yet not had time to see. But St.
 Angelo makes a great barbaric pile that is mightily impressive. St.
 Peter’s seems to me much less noble in general effect than St. Paul’s,
 and its interior ornament, painting and sculpture, seemed, on a swift
 view, to be a wilderness of that kind of art I don’t love--all except
 Michael Angelo’s _Pietà_, which stood out in modest simplicity and
 intensity amid the garish surroundings.

  Yours,
  JOE.”

  “DEAREST,

 I lunched with Barrère again to-day, and afterwards we went in his
 motor to the lakes of Nemi and Albano. It was a very interesting
 drive, and the lakes are really beautiful, though in a grave and
 sombre way. Of course it was not bright sunlight, but in any case the
 landscape here has a peculiar character. It has an ancient and desert
 look, hardly joyous and not very fruitful, different entirely in this
 respect from the landscape around Florence. But it has character, and
 what one may call style: and the remains of ruined buildings, aqueduct
 or tomb, which cut the sky at every turn, seem to belong to these
 surroundings. The landscape is of their date, seems almost to have
 remained of their date, and not to have found the renewed youth which
 mocks antiquity in other kinds of scenery. A certain gravity is the
 prevailing sentiment--impressive but touched with sadness.

 I am seeing isolated bits of Rome little by little. If I were
 settled here for long I think the sculpture would attract me as a
 study--but like everything else in the way of art in Rome one has
 to be constantly sifting and sorting the good from the bad. Here
 as elsewhere there is a mass of indifferent achievement, a mass
 of work either poorly copied from the Greek or poorly conceived
 and lacking vitality. One feels more and more that the Romans
 were not artists--great collectors I have no doubt, and perhaps
 connoisseurs--but without the finest fire of the spirit. There are a
 few great things here that are superb, and others doubtless which I
 haven’t seen, but in many instances of even admired things there
 is not the saving quality of life that makes Phidias seem modern as
 well as great.

  Yours,
  JOE.”

Touching this last criticism he made us laugh when he got home by
saying that he longed to cry to the crowds who patiently paced the
Vatican galleries, guide-book in hand: “Go out into the sunshine,
dear people, and enjoy your lunch--this is all bosh.”

It was delightful to me the other day to find a perfect echo of these
sentiments in the letters of the late Mr. Stopford Brooke to his
daughters. But it is not the only instance in those enthralling volumes
where I noted a remarkable likeness in many of the views, and even in
the method of expressing them, of these two brilliant Irishmen.




CHAPTER XI

FISHING HOLIDAYS


I had not known my husband six months before I knew him for an
enthusiastic fisherman. He tells in his Reminiscences of the first
teaching he had from a reprobate old peasant in the Lake Country, and
the passion for it never left him; the happiest of his summer days
were spent in the pursuit of it and, from the time when I--set to
watch a float while he threw a line further down the stream--allowed
the fish to escape, to an evening towards the close of his life when
I helped his unsteady steps to the bank of the Windrush at Burford,
his characteristic grey felt hat stuck full of flies and the graceful
gesture with which his long line was flung back and forward and then
laid softly on the water of some quiet stream, are among the things
which I often recall.

I can see him now, on that first holiday, stumbling with his swaying
rod down the rocky bed of the Dove with the sunset behind him, while
I sat waiting on a grassy bank eager to know what sport he had had
as soon as he was within earshot. He was a most expert angler; and
that was the beginning of many happy fishing trips--in Derbyshire
and Westmoreland, on the Tweed at Peebles and the lochs and rivers of
Perthshire, Argyllshire and Sutherland; but most notably on the stretch
of a Hertfordshire stream which he rented for some years with other
friends, and where he could best exercise his skill with the dry fly.

A tiny cottage, just big enough for three men or for me and the
children, stood on the edge of the water, which was crossed by a plank
bridge. Sometimes, when there was no one else, I would be allowed--most
alarming of experiences!--to use the landing net, and I think any of
his angling comrades--A. E. W. Mason, Seymour Hicks, Sam Sothern and
others--would sympathise with my terror over the responsibility.

I think there were no happier days in my husband’s life than
those spent in that Hertfordshire cot, and there is no frame into which
his figure fits more familiarly than the sedgy bank of that sunlit
river, hemmed by boldly contrasting forget-me-not and marshmallow, with
the May-fly flitting over the sparkling ripples and the shaded pools.

And nothing so helped his periods of creative work as this rural
recreation.

It was on the shores of Loch Rannoch that he wrote the first Acts of
his _King Arthur_ for Henry Irving, and on the banks of the Lea that
he saw the barge bearing the body of the Fair Elaine. The Black Mount
at the foot of the loch may have stood for the rugged rocks around
Camelot, and the limpid stream dividing emerald meadows at eventide,
for the river that circled Arthur’s Halls.

He was wont whimsically to declare that the “gaslights of
Piccadilly” were more satisfying to him than a country life
unless enhanced by the pleasure of sport; but no one saw the beauties
of Nature in the intervals of sport more sympathetically than he did,
as he tells for himself in _Coasting Bohemia_:

 “I sometimes think,” he writes, “that those who
 haunt the country, without conscious sense of its many beauties,
 are apt to learn and love its beauties best. How often the memory
 of a day’s shooting is indissolubly linked with the pattern
 of a fading autumn sky, when we have stood at the edge of a stubble
 field wondering whether the growing twilight will suffice for the
 last drive. And if this is true of other forms of sport, it is
 everlastingly true of fishing. There is hardly a remembered day on a
 Scotch loch, or beside a southern stream, which has not stamped upon
 it some unfading image of landscape beauty. It was not for that we
 set forth in the morning, for then the changing lights in a dappled
 sky counted for no more than a promise of good sport; during those
 earlier hours there is no feeling but a feeling of impatience to be
 at work; and the splash of a rising trout, before the rod is joined
 and ready and the line run through its rings, is heard with a sense
 of half-resentment lest we should have missed the favourable moment
 of the day. But as the hours pass, the mind becomes more tranquilly
 attuned to its surroundings. The keenness of the pursuit is still
 there, but little by little the still spirit of the scene invades our
 thoughts, and as we tramp home at nightfall the landscape that was
 unregarded when we set forth upon our adventure now seems to wrap
 itself like a cloak around us with a spell that it is impossible to
 resist. A hundred such visions, born of an angler’s wanderings,
 come back to me across the space of many years. I can see the reeds
 etched against a sunset sky, as they spring out of a little loch in
 the hills above the inn at Tummel. And then, with a changing flash
 of memory, the broad waters of Rannoch are outspread, fringed by its
 purple hills. And then, again, in a homelier frame, I can see the
 willows that border the Lea, their yellow leaves turned to gold under
 the level rays of the evening sun; and I can hear the nightingale in
 the first notes of its song as I cross the plank bridge that leads me
 homeward to the cottage by the stream.”

By which it will also be seen that his “love of laziness”
did not hinder him in the pursuit of sport.

Exercise for its own sake he resolutely refused to take, and when my
Alpine-enthusiast father dragged him up a Piz--the last bit with his
eyes shut--he said: “I shall never climb anything again!”

But Seymour Hicks could tell a different tale of a memorable evening on
which he hooked a big trout in the dusk--Joe teasing him as to its poor
weight--and when they stayed so late beside a Scottish tarn to land
it that their friends below came up the mountain with lanterns to the
rescue.

In Peeblesshire, too, he had gay hours with a Captain Fearon, known to
our children as _Plum-bun_, because of a rhyme with which he teased
them.

This fine old sportsman--though he must have been sixty at the
time--walked twenty miles after a day’s sport so as to let Joe
have the only spare seat on a buggy that he might catch the night
express to town for work on the morrow. I can see the tall handsome old
man now on the moorside, gaily waving adieu to Joe with a champagne
bottle which he had seized from the picnic basket to cheer him on the
road.

Joe had many days with him on the Tweed; one of them, following such a
big spate that an old countryman wading in front of them was never seen
more after they had warned him against imprudently breasting the swirl
of the water where the river made an abrupt bend ahead.

The gloom of this incident was partly mitigated by their being told
that the man was a drunkard whose fate had often been so prophesied to
him; but they fished no more in a spate on the Tweed.

Fun was oftener their portion. I fancy it was to Fearon that Joe made
the _bon-mot_ current in the Garrick Club, where he represented himself
as lunching with Noah on the Ark.

“You must have good spate fishing here, Mr. Noah,” he
reports himself as saying while they sat smoking on the balcony
overlooking the Flood.

“It _would_ be good,” replied the host, “but
unluckily, you see, I have only two worms.”

He writes himself of his fishing on Loch Awe; and later, on Loch Etive,
as the guest of our charming friend Alec Stevenson, whose cheery voice
would ask of his keeper after breakfast: “Is it fishin’
or shutin’ the day, Duncan?” But there is no mention of
a happy six weeks in Sutherlandshire where we were chiefly fed by the
guests “killing” of the daily trout, proudly displayed at
even upon a large tray in the hall.

I think it was here that Joe had trudged for three hours up a
mountain with his fly-rod set up, to find--when he reached the tarn
at the top--that his top joint had fallen off on the road; as he was
alone only the midges heard his remarks, for he had not even his
fourteen-year old son with him--the happy companion of his later
angling days. It was into just such a tarn, that that boy fell off the
boat one day, when landing a trout, and was advised by his father to
run about in the natural state on the moor while his clothes dried on a
sun-baked rock.

A lovely place is Inchnadamph on blue Loch Assynt; the great mountain
that guards the valley towards Lochinver can be golden in the long,
northern twilight, when the water that has been as a sapphire before
the sunset, becomes purple in the gloaming; but oh! the midges!
Useless to tie our heads in bags and grease our faces: they penetrated
everywhere and “bit like dogs.” They _almost_ deterred Joe
from his evening hour on the water because of the landing afterwards,
when the pony would not stand for him to step into the cart.

But nothing really deterred Joe from fly-fishing--neither heat nor
cold nor rain nor wind; he only regarded the weather at those times
from the point of view of its influence on the sport. Even when it was
too bad for fishing he couldn’t keep away from the water. But he could
never keep away from water--he said it was the life of a landscape
as the blood is the life of the human body. In our early days, when
we were too poor for Highland trips, visits to friends on the Thames
afforded him his best access to it; and, though he was not perhaps a
perfect oarsman, as may be proved by a “stroke’s” petition that he
would not “go so deep,” to which he replied: “Ah, I never leave a stone
unturned!”--he loved the “noble river.” Though for perfect satisfaction
he chose more swiftly running waters.

I came across some passages in one of Stopford Brooke’s letters
which strangely call to mind Joe’s passion for a free stream.

“There is no companion like a quick stream,” writes the
older man; “full, but not too full, capable of shallows and
water-breaks, with deep pools when it likes and with a thousand shadows
acquainted with all the tales of the hills....”

And once more: “Running water surely is the dearest and best-bred
thing in the world. And a great workman and a great artist.... Nor is
there any Singer, any Poet, any Companion so near and dear as it is
when it shapes itself into a mountain stream in a quiet country.”

Often have I seen Joe beside such streams, and though it so chanced
that the last happy holiday we had together was spent beside lakes
rather than rivers, the sense of moving water remains associated in my
mind with him through all the earlier days of our life.

It was in Ireland--his motherland, though he had never seen it till
then--that we passed those last unforgetable weeks of autumn.

Even as we landed at Rosslare there seemed to fall upon him an
unnameable affinity with the country of his blood; as we travelled
slowly--very slowly--over her truly emerald bosom, he sat in a dream
watching the little black cattle, that we afterwards learnt to beware
of for “cross bastes,” as they cropped the sedgy meadows,
his eyes wandering from them to the tender Irish sky and then waking
into fun as he saw a peasant at a small station trip a boy up unawares
and cuff him soundly, laughing as he did it.

And when we reached Waterford--only a dirty town to me--he plunged at
once among his people and laughed joyously at the retort of a begging
urchin, whose pathetic plea of hunger he had pretended to rail at:
“That’s where ye’re wrong, yer honour,” the cheery little villain had
cried: “A man may be fat and hungry too.”

The horse races were going on, and the inn was in an uproar, which he
sat up most of the night to watch.

But the next day sleepy ways prevailed once more, and it took us a long
time to get off at the station, where I recollect his amusement at the
porter’s instruction: “This way to America.”

We reached Killarney without trunks, and the conveyance sent to meet us
broke down on the way to the hotel; but he would meet no _contretemps_
save with a smile, and it was borne in on me that it was because he
was an Irishman that Italian happy-go-luckiness had never ruffled him.
So we fell in with the leisurely ways of the land, and were fain to
“enjoy the soft rain” at that romantic spot and watch for
the beautiful shapes of the hills to appear out of the mists on the
lake.

Next morning, however, that unique green-blue sky, washed with rain and
dappled with wisps of cloud, smiled on us in faint sunshine, and from
that hour our journey was one passing from fair to fairer scenes.

In a short time our train was climbing, or burrowing, through perilous
cliffs of granite, crowned with lonely moors and, presently swooping
down on the glorious coast-line, that makes for Valencia Island.

This we left on one side, and at Lough Caragh we also did not halt,
tempting as it was; for our destination was Waterville, where we had
rooms booked at the charming Great Southern Hotel for the fishing
season; and after an hour or so more of leisurely travel we reached
Cahirciveen, where a ramshackle trap waited to carry us over the moors
to the village that lies twixt sea and lough.

The whole journey, and the last of it not least, was a revelation to
him of which I think he was proud to talk to me, and I certainly had
formed no notion of the beauties of _The Kingdom of Kerry_. The rough
road across the wild heather-moor was bordered almost continuously
with hedges of the small purple-red fuchsia in full bloom, and the
cabins--white or pink-washed, with thatched roofs--that we passed at
rare intervals, were shaded with it and covered with honeysuckle.

“You live in a fair country,” said Joe to an old man
standing one day at the door of his tiny hovel; and I--looking beyond
him to the dim range of the Macgillicuddy Reeks--added, “and
with beautiful hills.”

“The visitors say ’tis fair, but I’ve seen it _arl_
me life,” replied the proprietor, with a quaint smile. And then
to me--“but sure the Reeks are illigant in winter wi’ the
darlin’ snaws upon them.”

But that was later. That day we were silent with contented fatigue
till the muffled boom of the great Atlantic breakers began to fall as
distant thunder on our ears: then suddenly Ballinskelligs’ Bay
lay before us with the massive headlands of Bolus and Hog’s Head
guarding it from the Ocean.

The shore is wild and desolate with the sense of the vast Atlantic
ever present; but soon we turned inland again towards the mountains of
the “deep Glenmore,” and there, under the purple shadow of
Mount Knockaline, lay a long, grave Lough with a tiny deserted islet
in its midst upon which one of the ancient beehive cells stands under
the eaves of a ruined church. It is Lough Currane, and we drove under
overhanging fuchsias, to the Great Southern Hotel on its shore.

We had two more beautiful drives while we were in the _Kingdom of
Kerry_: one along the perilous Irish _Cornice_, known as the Coomakista
Pass, where one prayed one might not meet the coach, to Park-na-Silla;
the other from Kenmare over a rocky road to Glengariff.

The Cornice drive beggars description, and I never knew Joe to be so
enthusiastic over a view. Shallow little coves fringed with brilliant
golden seaweed--upon which herons stand feeding at times--indent the
shore itself; but the Sound is studded with numberless islets--some
clad with heather, others with semi-tropical shrubs, and faintly ringed
with the silver foam of a streaked and gentle sea. In an opal haze
beyond them, the opposite shore of County Cork lies as a dream; but
the two great guardian cliffs of Ballinskelligs’ Bay with their
outriders--the Bull and Cow Rocks--stand in firm and grand outline away
whence we came where the Sound joins the Ocean.

The coach driver draws up when he reaches the best point, and tells
us all about it, and points out the Great Skellig Rock--twelve miles
out to sea, and close at hand the bridle path by which O’Connell rode
over the mountains to his home at Darrynane. As we near that Bay and
its multitude of tiny islets, upon one of which stands the ruined
Monastery of St. Finnan, he shews us the “Liberator’s” very house and
then we turn inland again among undulating moors--our road fenced with
the fuchsia and every variety of fern, till of a sudden the beautiful
bridge and square church tower of Sneem village seem to beckon us into
the very heart of a fiery sunset.

Our second drive from Kenmare was again quite different and not without
incident. In the first place Irish unpunctuality caused us to start
two hours late, and in the second, when the carriage arrived at last,
the harness had to be tied up with cord before we could proceed, a
beginning which filled me with alarm though it reminded me of youthful
days in Italy: but to Joe it only afforded opportunity for pleasant
raillery with his compatriot, and I only wish I could remember all the
_bon-mots_ with which they capped one another.

The last part of the ascent was very wild, but when we emerged from
the tunnel that pierces the topmost granite cliff, the view that burst
upon us--though wild still in its freedom from the intrusion of human
interest, was soft and tender with all the glamour of the South. Range
upon range of finely-chiselled hills stood crossing and re-crossing one
another with gentle valleys between, and the glint of water here and
there made visible by the golden splash of sunset; and presently the
hills--so soft and so solemn upon the mellow evening sky--were cleft to
their base, and Bantry Bay lay spread in the distance beneath us.

The road went down in sharp turns and, the driver cheerfully remarking
that we should have to pass a motor-roller on the way, my heart
jumped into my mouth. But Joe administered a little salutary chaff
together with a cup of tea at the wayside inn, where we changed
drivers, and a pretty girl assured me that “Faith,” I had
“no need to fear, for the lad was the coolest whip on arl the
mountain-side.”

So he was, but he went a fine pace, and the waiter at the inn, who told
us he was the girl’s brother, told us also that that cool lad was
her lover, so perhaps he was eager to show his prowess.

At Glengariff our weather was hot and fine, and the water of that
land-locked end of the Bay was so calm that the pleasure boats round
the jetty, and indeed every tree on the shore and on the near island,
would lie reflected on its surface in the rosy dawns or the golden
sunsets as they do on the Italian lakes. But out beyond the island
the breeze would freshen, and thither Joe hied him with a friendly
fisherman every morning to lie in wait for the bass and the mackerel.

Our friends--Mr. and Mrs. Annan Bryce--owned the beautiful island at
the mouth of the bay, and there we spent happy afternoons wandering
over the heather and gazing afar from the old castle’s ruined
battlements; but Joe’s mornings were his own, and he would go
even further out to sea than the island, to where the seals sunned
themselves on the rocks, unscared by the approach of man, but scuttling
under water when the fishing-reel ran out, the old ones calling their
young to safety with an eerie cry.

Perhaps Glengariff was the most lovely spot that we saw, but the
hothouse atmosphere of it made a prolonged stay too trying, hence we
enjoyed Waterville and Lough Currane best, where the more invigorating
air of the open Atlantic in our wake kept even the moisture of the
valleys freshened with soft breezes.

Also it is here that Joe rejoiced in the only branch of angling that he
really loved; sunshine, mist or rain he was off on the lough with his
faithful gillie, his trout-rod set up, his old hat well-adorned with
every likely fly and, if necessary, his oilskins about him.

It took him all his time--easy as it usually was with him to make
friends--to make them with that gillie: a curiously sad and silent lad,
whose rage at the “lack of pride” in a besotted old poacher
who would hang about the landing-stage, knew no bounds.

But Joe would only laugh, and give the old beggar the
“tanner” that he begged “for the love of God,”
with a willing heart.

“Don’t be too hard on him,” he would say to the
young boatman. But the boy had been in America, and, as it presently
appeared, was ashamed of the lazy ways of his countrymen.

“Home Rule might be arl right,” he would say--adding
shrewdly--“if it don’t keep the visitors” (generally
meaning the English) “away. But, begorra, let us work for
it!”

Few held such wide views even in that day, and Joe could rarely get
any one to talk on that favourite topic of his; but he made various
pleasant little discoveries, one of which was that Catholic and
Protestant children worked together at school without trouble; but then
most of the latter were fathered by English experts working at the
Cable Station and were ranked as “visitors.”

His chief enjoyment when not fishing, was in the cabins--when he could
find excuse for entrance. There was a weaver of the frieze not far from
our inn, and there we went to buy a length for a gift. We were rewarded
for a wet walk. The weaver was out--but his wife sat by the peat-fire
with a new-born baby in her arms.

As we opened the door the cow that was in the yard thrust in a soft
nose to hold it ajar, and lo, we beheld a sow within, rise slowly up
and waddle out, followed by ten wee sucking pigs: then the cow stepped
over the threshold beside us.

The woman rose asking us our errand, while I edged away from the cow
and tried to get out again.

“She’ll not harm ye, lady,” said she with a smile, “It’s her milkin’
time, and sure she knows I’d not take the darlin’ babe out in the rain.”

But it was not often that Joe spared time from serious business for
calling and sight-seeing. Once we went to the Cable Station and
learned, in an amazing short time, from America, that the weather was
fine and dry; and on two occasions I went with him to Lough Coppul (The
Horse) away up in the “deep Glenmore”; but that was only
allowed so that I might see the sleepy beauty of that tiny, lonely
lake, where the water is peat-brown even in the sunlight; here I was
introduced to two lovely children with gold-red hair and deep eyes,
who dwelt in the schoolhouse of four districts, and were Joe’s
special friends. This treat was a great favour granted to me, nor was
I admitted into the boat even then, but had to roam about the shores
while work was done. Luckily it was fine and warm, and the midges are
not nearly so fierce in Ireland; and, with the children’s tales
of the plights of scholars coming over the mountains in winter and a
shy admission, warily coaxed out of them, as to the presence of fairy
horsemen there on All Hallowe’en, many an hour went by like a
dream, till the gloaming called us home.

But my lot was more often to sit reading or writing on the terrace of
the hotel watching for the boats to round the point of _Church Island_,
as they came in with their catch to meals.

Whether anglers are men or women--and most of the women in the Hotel
were anglers--they mind nothing but meals, and rarely the _hours_ of
those; so that I was mostly alone, but the excitement of the “basket”
was an event each time, and Joe’s was often the heaviest.

Through the gap in the fuchsia hedge, whose tassels lay blood-red
upon the lough’s blue background on a fine morning, I would first
distinguish his boat in the offing, and walk down to the landing-stage
to watch it nearing me between the shallows, where those coal-black
little “cross” bullocks stood knee-deep on the emerald marshland. I can
see him, skilfully throwing his line on the water to the last instant;
then turning towards me with the welcoming smile on his face always,
though I generally knew, before he had stepped ashore, whether he had
had good luck or not.

Yet the weather was not by any means always fine, and many a day I sat
in our little parlour, not even seeing the fuchsia hedge, and certainly
not the water.

One wet day comes specially to my mind. It had rained steadily, and out
of the soft, white mist that shrouded the lough, the sound of a tolling
bell had come eerily to me all the afternoon. I knew of no church
within two miles save the ruined one on the Island, and at last I asked
the chambermaid what it might mean.

“Sure, it’ll be a buryin’ on St. Finnan’s
Isle,” said she, crossing herself, after listening for a minute.
“The family will still have the right of it, and they keep a
bell in the broken tower. But the corpse will have come from far, poor
sowl!”

She went her way, and soon the bell ceased, and almost at the same
time the mist began to clear and the shapes of the black cattle to
appear again on the sedgy marshes, browsing as usual; then I saw black
boats--like phantom things--stealing away in the distance and--behind
them--a streak of gold struck across the wet mountain-side and all the
mist shrank away, and the purple ridge was set against that tender
blue-green Irish sky, crossed with bars of rosy light.

I went out and down the wet path to the landing-stage, and there was
Joe’s boat pulling towards the shore, and he standing up in it
with a smile upon his face.

       *       *       *       *       *

That was our last holiday.

We were often out of London again, and in lovely spots: in summer,
at Studland in Dorset, at Broadway and Burford in Oxon, at Ditchling
in Sussex; in winter, at Hastings and Bournemouth. But it was always
in search of health and to escape the nerve-racking air-raids of
War--never again in the boyish spirit of holiday.

Yet let it not be supposed that Joe was ever dismal. “Comyns
Carr is a good fellow and a boon fellow,” George Meredith wrote
of him to another old friend, and so he was to the last. Depressed now
and then, but hopeful again till near the end, and always thankful for
every bright moment and for every kindness received. “Grumbling
is so dull,” he would say; and when I was dismayed at the
_contretemps_ of travel lest they should affect his comfort, he would
beg me to “bridge it over”--as he did.

As we drove away from the house at Bournemouth on our last journey he
said to the landlady: “I’ve never been so comfortable in
any lodgings”; yet he had suffered much there, and had often
lacked luxuries unprocurable in war-time. Sometimes in those days,
after a long silence, I would ask him what he was thinking of, and he
would answer simply: “Nothing, dear!” By which I am sure he
meant nothing troublous--and truly to the wearying, harassing thoughts
which beset many of us he was a stranger--for he would sometimes add:
“I’ve plenty to remember.”

And then, to the last, he worked part of every day. His hand had not
been able to write for long, but he would dictate to a shorthand
typist; the whole of his _Ideals of Painting_, posthumously published,
was so written, and his precision never flagged, as he instructed
me over the correction of those proofs--whether in regard to the
letterpress or to the re-production of the illustrations; the
photogravure after Rembrandt’s _Mill_ had been delayed, and
on the last day of his life he asked me if it had come and if it
“looked well.”

Reading over his own words upon the waning of his old friend, Sir John
Millais’ life, they seem to me unconsciously, yet so fitly, to
describe himself, that I shall end this effort to preserve some sort of
a portrait of him by quoting them.

“I never heard from him,” he writes, “however
great the dejection of spirit he must have suffered, a single sour
word concerning life or nature. His outlook on the world was never
tainted by self-compassion, never clouded by any bitterness of personal
experience, and one came to recognise then--as his life and strength
gradually failed and waned--that the spirit of optimism ... was indeed
a beauty deeply resident in his character, which even the shadow of
coming death was powerless to cloud or darken.”

So I think of Joe as he stepped out of the boat on Currane, with the
smile upon his face.


I here add a few unpublished early lyrics and sonnets, never revised by
my husband for publication, which may give pleasure to his friends of
those days.


LOVE’S SUMMER.

     Away in our far Northern Land,
       Where blustering winds swept o’er the wold,
     Love came with Winter hand in hand
       Changing our leaden skies to gold,
           And as we raced across the Snow,
           Love set the frozen world aglow.

     Ah, give me back that frozen year,
       Those leaden skies, that wind swept wold!
     ’Twas summer then, ’tis winter here,
       Here where my dearest heart is cold,
           Where all the Earth and all the Sun,
           Tell only that Love’s race is run.

  J. C. C.
  1870.


A SONG.


I.

    What need of words, when lips that might have spoken
          Clung close to mine?
    And through the shadowed silence long unbroken,
          This hand in thine,
    There came from lowered lids such speech as lingers
          When Love grows dumb,
    And muted strings yield up to unseen fingers
          Sweet strains to come.


II.

    But now! Ah now! what love left half-unheeded
          Or half untold,
    Each little word those quivering lips conceded
          Has turned to gold.
    I hoard them all as misers hoard their treasure
          In secret store,
    Till once again Love finds that muted measure
          As once before.

  J. C. C.


FOR MUSIC.

    O winged Love! bear those red lips to mine,
      That at one draught together we may drain
    This Cup of Life that holds Love’s magic wine,
      Then turn with lip to lip and drink again,
                O Winged Love!

    Or waft me as a rose to where she lies
      And hide me with thy hands within her breast.
    That my bruised petals, wakened by her sighs,
      May live one hour, then cease, and sink to rest,
                O Winged Love!

  J. C. C.
  1873.


LINES WRITTEN ON A PAGE OF A YOUNG GIRL’S ALBUM

AT RAGATZ, AUGUST 1889.

    Just as a dream of music never heard
      May charm our spirit with its mystic spell,
    This little page without one written word
      Speaks more than words can tell:

    Fair as the unchanging fields of Alpine snow,
      That hide the buried and the unborn spring,
    Its silence guards all secrets that we know
      And all that time may bring:

    Bearing sweet memories of past hours held dear
      For all whose youth is flying, or has flown,
    And softly whispering in a maiden’s ear
      A name as yet unknown.

  J. C. C.


    My love is fair and yet not made so fair
      As though fed only with the sun and sky
    For now some viewless vision fills the air
      And laughing lips grow mute--she knows not why,
    And on her eyelids fallen unaware
      The shadow as of passing tears doth lie!
    Of tears unwept, born of an unknown care
      That dwells beyond the flight of memory.

    Ah, sweet, into thy beauty there could come
      No better thing: the earth that holds thy feet
    Must bring earth’s stain upon them where they meet
      The path not made for thee--and the wind’s breath
    That speaks not unto others but is dumb,
      Whispers to thee of Life and Love and Death.

  J. C. C.
  1875.


ON A PICTURE.

BY E. BURNE-JONES.

    Sad swift return of old love unforgot,
      And passion of sweet lips that may not meet,
      And trembling eyes that, like to weary feet,
    Press close unto the goal yet touch it not,
    Ah! Love, what hinders unto these the lot
      Of common lovers? Shall no hour complete
      This sweetness half-begun, no new day greet
    The old love freed of the old stain and blot?

    At this last hour, O Death, within thy heart
      Hast thou no pity? Shall the night be dumb
      Nor ever from thy lips the low words come,
      Giving once more the old sweet wanderings?
    Shall yearning lips for ever stand apart
      Shadowed beneath the darkness of thy wings?

  J. W. C. C.
  1872.


    There was a time, Love, when I strove to tell
      Our love but newly won: and tried to sing
      In broken verse that scarcely found a wing
    Some praise of all the beauty that doth dwell
    Beneath long lashes: But then came the spell
      Of love possessed, and I no more dared bring,--
      Thy hand in mine,--the old verse offering
    Lest any spoken word should sound ‘farewell.’

    Song at the best is but a cry for love
      Not love itself and ere our paths had met
        We cried to one another through the maze
    That men call life:--until the moon above--
      Our steadfast moon of love that’s not yet set--
        Had drawn our feet into the selfsame ways.

  J. C. C.
  _July, 1878._


    Ah! Love, I know thou hast no power to bring
      Those lips once more to my lips; those sweet eyes,
        Back to where once they dreamed so near to mine.--
    I know that not again on Earth shall cling
      Those fair white arms, and not till all Time dies
        Shall these hands in her loosened hair entwine.
    There is no might can give back to the Spring
      The lowliest flower dead under summer skies.

    Yet thou can’st tell me wandering by what stream
      And in what fields of night her white feet tread.
    Have I not wandered, Love, in many a dream?
      Has she not too in dreaming wanderèd?
      Then send her soul now to some garden fair
      That my soul too may meet and wander there.

  J. W. C. C.


    The moon that leans o’er yonder fleecy lawn
      Lights a white path where wandering souls may stray
      From earth as high as heaven: and when the day
    Shall pass night’s dusky curtains, newly-drawn,
    And swiftly with the footing of a fawn
      Leaps up, from cloud to cloud, till all the gray
      Burns crimson--then our feet may find a way
    From East to West led by the feet of dawn.

    Yet now how far apart stand North and South
      And that one face and mine! Ah, not so far!
      For at the call of one remembered word
      I hear again that voice which first I heard
    When day dawned in the smile about her mouth
      And in her eyes I saw the morning Star.

  J. C. C.
  1873.


    Death speaks one word and all Love’s speech is dumb
      And on Love’s parted lips that breathe farewell
      Death’s marble finger lays its mystic spell
    And bears the unuttered message to the tomb,
    From whose closed door no whispered echoes come
      To break the discord of the tolling bell
      That sounds through city lane and woodland dell
    With the sad burthen of Love’s martyrdom.

    And so Love dies. Ah no! it is not so!
      For locked in Death’s white arms Love lies secure
      In changeless sleep that knows no dream of change.
    ’Tis Life not Death that works Love’s overthrow,
      For while Life lasts what love is safe or sure
      When each day tells of passionate hearts grown strange?

  J. C. C.
  1890.


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


Transcriber’s Notes

  Note: In The Table of Contents, ‘IX Social Occasions p115’ is
    entitled ‘Entertainment’ in the body of the book.

  Page 12: changed, of his sisters’--shaken to of his sister’s--shaken
  Page 41: changed, me some grapes, to me some grapes,’
  Page 44: changed, surburban to suburban
  Page 73: changed, flummuxed to flummoxed
  Page 88: changed, ‘Wall Sir, I hope’ to ‘Well Sir, I hope’
  Page 126: changed, opportunites to opportunities
  Page 136: added the word ‘whom’-the centre around whom the children
  Page 136: changed, children, criminals _and women_.” to
      children, criminals _and women_.’
  Page 170: changed, horsesmen to horsemen




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