with all the literary men of repute.
Verschoyle told me that Phillip Marston had had the most unhappy life. He had been engaged to a very pretty girl, Mary Nesbit (sister of E. Nesbit, afterwards Mrs. Hubert Bland,) and one morning going to her room to wake her he found her dead. The shock nearly killed him.
A couple of years later, his dearest friend Oliver Maddox Brown, f died almost as suddenly. Three or four years later his sister, Cicely, who had been quite well the day before, was found dead in her bed in the morning. His other sister, Eleanor, died in the following year, 1879; and his most intimate friend and fellow-poet, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, some two years afterwards.
And in 1882 James Thomson,} the author of The City of Dreadful Night, was taken with a seizure in Phillip's rooms and carried out to a hospital to die; and in the same year, his hero and friend Rossetti died at Birchington. It looked as if fate had picked him out for punishment, and so fear came to me that misfortune often dogs gifted mortals, whereas fortune flees them. Phillip Marston was good-looking with a fine forehead and auburn hair; his eyes seemed quite natural and very expressive. I don't know why, but I agreed almost at once with Verschoyle's estimate that Phil Marston was one of the sweetest and most unselfish of men. We spent the whole afternoon together and before we left Phillip asked me to return when I liked. In a day or two I called again and had some hours with him: he took to me, he said, because I was almost as hopeless as he was. 'Verschoyle,' he went on 'puzzles me with his Christian belief. I have no belief, none, cannot conceive how any one can cherish any faith in the future, however faint, and I feel that you agree with me.' 'Yes, indeed,' I replied, and quoted, Only a sleep eternal In an eternal night!
He bowed his head and said with inexpressible sadness, ''Dead! All's done with,' as Browning says. There's no hope for the survivors, either, none.'
'I am not so sure,' I interrupted. 'It seems to me that the wisest of men are always the most kindly, and from that fact I draw the hope that in the future, bit by bit, we mortals may get to loving-kindness for each and every man born, and so make this earthly pilgrimage a scented way of inexpressible delights.'
'The sweeter you make it,' he cried, 'the worse it will be to leave it.'
'Is that true?' I asked. 'Surely, when we have drunk deep of love and life, we shall be able to go to death as one now leaves a table-satisfied.'
It was dear Amy Levy, whom I got to know about this tune, who gave perfect expression to my thought, though she herself was as hopeless as Marston:
The secret of our being, who can tell?
To praise the gods, and Fate is not my part;
Evil I see and pain; within my heart There is no voice that whispers: 'All is well.'
Yet fair are days in summer and more fair The growths of human goodness here and there.
'Beautiful, beautiful,' he repeated when I had finished reciting the sextet,
'and true; but it does not take us far, does it?'
Phillip Marston was beyond any consolation-pain clothed him as with a garment-but his pity for others and his sympathy with human sorrow was inexhaustible.
A little later he gave me a volume of his poems. 'I've written, too, on the eternity of sleep,' he said, and in the book I found this sonnet he had written to his love, Mary Nesbit. To me, it seems one of the sincerest and noblest of English elegies, though steeped in sadness.
It must have been for one of us, my own, To drink this cup and eat this bitter bread.
Had not my tears upon thy face been shed, Thy tears had dropped on mine; if I alone Did not walk now, thy spirit would have known My loneliness; and did my feet not tread This weary path and steep, thy feet had bled For mine, and thy mouth had for mine made moan.
And so it comforts me, yea, not in vain, To think of thine eternity of sleep;
To know thine eyes are tearless though mine weep;
And when this cup's last bitterness I drain, One thought shall still its primal sweetness keep- Thou had'st the peace, and I, the undying pain.
About this time, too, I came to know Miss Mary Robinson and her sister, but for some reason or other we did not get on very well. She laughed at me once over something I had said and chilled me. I was perhaps too young to realize her value, and soon she married a French professor and went to Paris to live and I lost sight of her; but now and again since I have had glimpses of a fine mind and regretted that I had not learned to know her. I think it was Francis Adams, the poet of The Army of the Night, who introduced me to the Robinsons. I shall have much to tell of him later, but now I need only say Verschoyle and the Marstons, Amy Levy, Miss Robinson and Francis Adams made me aware of the fact that London at that time, and indeed at all times, thanks to the eternal goodness, is a nest of singing birds, crowded, indeed, with men and women of talent and distinction, who moreover are usually devoted to poetry as the noblest of all the arts.
My chief fault in life and as a critic, as Shaw has felt, is that I have always been an admirer of great men and never cared greatly for those who fell short of the highest. Marston interested me as Amy Levy interested me, by the sheer pathos of their unhappy fate and immitigable suffering, but it was only later that I came to see that their poetic achievement, too, if not of the very highest, was of real value and had extraordinary importance.
After his untimely death on the fourteenth of February, 1887, people talked of poor Marston's drinking habits and how he would sit up at night till all hours and-the cackle of stupidity! The fools could not even forgive the blind for trying to turn night into day! If drinking drowned sad, lonely thoughts, why not drink? I thank dear Phil Marston for hours of sweet companionship and an exquisite, all-embracing sympathy, and England can never forget his noble poetry.
About this time I got a letter one morning that surprised me. My name on the envelope was written in such tiny characters that I could scarcely read it, but when I opened the cover two proofs fell out, Spectator proofs at last and a letter in Hutton's tiny script!
'You were right,' he began, 'your reviews justify you. The one on Freeman is a gem and the Russian one provokes thought and may lead to discussion. I send you proofs of both and should be delighted if you'd call with them when corrected. I want more of your work. Yours truly, R. H. Button.'
At last the door was forced. I sat as in a charmed trance for some little time, then I opened the proofs and tried to read them as if a stranger had written them. The Russian one was certainly the better of the two, but it was the review of Freeman, aimed at Hutton's head and heart, that had won the prize.
Food for thought in that. I began then to say to myself that no one can see above his own head.
As I read the articles I noticed little roughnesses of swing and measure and set myself to correct them on another paper: I wanted to show Verschoyle the virginal proofs and get his opinion. While working in this way the noon post brought me a letter from Froude excusing his long silence, but he wished the dinner in my honour to be a great success and he had to wait till certain people had returned to town. Now, however, he'd be glad to see me on such and such a night and he'd keep my remarkable poems till then. 'They have proved to me,' he concluded, 'that Carlyle's estimate of you was justified.'
Nothing could be more flattering, but my discussions with Verschoyle and the reading of his and Marston's poetry had shaken my belief in my qualifications as a lyric poet; still, I had recently written a sonnet or two that I liked greatly and-conceit does not die of one blow.
That afternoon I took the Spectator proofs to Verschoyle who, strange to say, agreed with Hutton that the Freeman paper was the better of the two, and he only suggested a single emendation, which I had already jotted down.
Clearly his critical gift in prose was not as sure as in verse, or he was not so interested, for I had made some forty corrections.
Next day I took the proofs most scrupulously corrected to Hutton and had a delightful talk with him. 'Write on anything you like,' he said, 'only let me know beforehand what subject you've chosen so that we shan't clash. Let me know always by Monday morning, will you? I like your English, simple, yet rhythmic, but it's your knowledge that's extraordinary. You'll make a name for yourself; I wonder you're not known already. These are not days to hide one's light under a bushel,' and he laughed genially.
'On the contrary,' I cried, 'we put it with large reflectors behind it in front of the tent and pay a barker to praise our illuminating power.'
'A barker!' repeated Hutton. 'What's that?' and I explained the racy term to him to his delight.
'You Americans!' he repeated. 'A barker! What a painting word!'
