delightful dinners and receptions where one met all the celebrities, from the parliamentary leaders to the choice spirits in art and literature and life.
In the second year, too, I came to know her great rival as a hostess, Lady Shrewsbury, who was a little more exclusive. I have told in my life of him how I met Oscar Wilde at Mrs. Jeune's and the immense impression he made on me; there, too I met Russell Lowell and Thomas Hardy and a host of more or less distinguished writers and politicians, some of whom I have already described in my Contemporary Portraits. But here I shall write only of those who had great influence on me and my development; and among them I must always rank Pater and Matthew Arnold, especially Arnold, to whom I was drawn by that love of ideal humanity which explained all his strictures on English life and English manners.
Matthew Arnold was a delightful companion, full of quaint fancies and willing, usually, to laugh at himself. I remember telling him of Oscar's jibe at his niece's, Mrs. Humphrey Ward's, first novel. He said that 'You, Sir, supplied the 'Literature' and she was determined to contribute the 'Dogma.'' Arnold laughed like a schoolboy. 'She's very serious,' he said.
'I wonder why women are so much more serious than men?' On his return from lecturing in the United States, he told me with humorous enjoyment that most of his success was due to the fact that many people took him for Edwin Arnold. 'Yes, yes,' he laughed, 'it was The Light of Asia that became The Light of the World to me and illumined my path. Thyrsis was unknown, my poetry unconsidered there. Luckily the trip was successful and relieved me from monetary care; America was very kind to me, though occasionally it chastened my conceit. As you predicted, they invited me to study elocution!'
I heard him once make a speech on 'Schools' or 'Schooling' somewhere in Westminster: it was all good, but not inspiring, and out of pure mischief I wanted to get to the deepest in him, his shortcomings as a critic. He did not appear to understand French poetry at all deeply. When I praised La Legende des Siecles by Hugo to him or the Sagesse of Verlaine, he did not seem to care for them, so I talked of Emerson as a great poet like Whitman, but he would not have it. I began by quoting So take thy quest through Nature, It through thousand natures ply Ask on thou clothed Eternity Time is the false reply.
'But is that poetry?' Arnold doubted. 'I can't believe it somehow.' 'Think of his Humble Bee,' I cried, 'and deny him if you can,' and I quoted again, Aught unsavoury or unclean Hath my insect never seen But violets and bilberry bells Maple sap and daffodils Grass with green flag half-mast high;
Succory to match the sky,
Columbine with horn of honey
Scented fern and acrimony
Clover, catchfly, adder's tongue
And brier-roses dwelt among,
All besides was unknown waste
All was picture as he passed.
Wiser far than human seer
Yellow-breeched philosopher.
'That surely has the true note!'
'It has, it has indeed,' Arnold hesitated reluctantly, 'but we are all poets at odd moments.'
'Only at odd moments, I should say!' was my reply, for he was merely evading the issue, but he shook his head.
'I think the Humble Bee worthy to be ranked with the Skylark of Shelley,' I went on. 'Not for music, of course, but it has homely poetic virtues of its own, and some day it will be known and loved. I seldom praise Emerson,' I added,
'because he quarrelled with Whitman and stood for convention as against freedom of speech.'
'I'm afraid that I too am in favour of the conventions,' said Arnold. 'Speech can easily be too free, can't it?'
'I hate English prudery,' I replied, 'and English hypocrisy. Life in England is like life in an English Sunday school, with a maiden-lady as a teacher and an atmosphere of deadly dullness. Shall we never get to the larger freedom of Dante, if not that of Goethe?'
'Was Dante ever free in that sense?' asked Arnold.
'Surely,' I replied, 'some of his humour is the jolly humour of a naughty little boy who puts out his tongue at you and worse.'
'Really?' doubted Arnold. 'I remember nothing like that in Dante!'
'Here is one verse,' and I quoted from the end of the twenty-first canto of the Inferno:
Per l'argine sinistro volta dienno
Ma prima avea ciascun la lingua stretta
Co'denti verso lor duca, per cenno:
Ed egli avea de cul fatto trombetta.
'And he had made a trumpet of his behind!'
'How strange,' laughed Arnold. 'I never noticed it. I must have read over it!
Goethe of course was free, but Goethe put his worst things in Faust in asterisks instead of plain words.'
'Yet we know from Eckermann,' I said, 'that Goethe used the plain words and even wrote very naughty plays and poems.' Arnold was too English, I think, in feeling to take up the gauntlet.
I tried to get him to write for me for the Fortnightly Review and he sent me a poem, a threnody on a favorite dog that has its place in English poetry. He was indeed marvellously gifted, and I always resented the fact that the English had used one of their noblest spirits as an inspector of schools. If Arnold had been honoured from thirty to sixty, as he should have been, had men been willing to pay gold to hear him talk on any subject, he would have given us even more than he did. This is to be the chief mystery of life, why men accord so little love and honour to the real guides during their lifetime.
Arnold should have been put in a high place and listened to with reverence by the ablest politicians and men of letters, but he was simply disregarded, and how he kept his sunny good humour in the universal indifference was a puzzle to me.
I always felt him superior in range and Tightness of thought to any of his contemporaries. There was in him also a depth of melancholy; yet in the intercourse of life he was invariably optimistic. In this, as in many ways, he resembled Anatole France. He had perfect manners, too, like the great Frenchman-met everyone on the pure human level, preferred to talk on high themes, yet used banter charmingly with the barbarians.
He loved to find the best in everyone and gloss over faults, was the first to praise Oscar Wilde to me when everyone condemned him as an eccentric poseur. 'A fine intelligence and most wonderful talker,' he said. It was because Matthew Arnold seemed to me to reach ideal manhood, was indeed free of faults or mannerisms, that I was always probing to discover his shortcomings.
One day I could not help trying to get to the ultimate of his thought. I used his famous definition of the 'Something not ourselves that makes for righteousness' to draw him out. 'That 'not ourselves,'' I said, 'always seems to me wrong. The only thing in the world that makes for righteousness is the holy spirit of man.'
'What about sunsets and flowers and the song of birds?' he replied with a quaint half-smile, 'and the music of the spheres. Will you deny them all?'
He had caught me: I could only smile back at him; yet surely the soul of the Divinity is in us men and revealed most completely in our noblest. We cannot read the riddle of nature. Not on the walls of our cell shall the reconciling word be found, but in the heart of man grown tired of bearing:
The weary weight of this unintelligible world.
I had just come to think of Matthew Arnold as the most perfect man of letters I had ever met, when the shocking news came that like his father, he had died of heart failure. He sprang over a gate or fence, fell forward and never spoke again. What a tragedy is the untimely end of so great and sweet a nature.
As I came to know it, life in London grew richer and richer to me. Every dinner at Mrs. Jeune's or Lady Shrewsbury's became an event.
And when I mention Mrs. Jeune as hostess, I must not forget the Arthur Walters, who were more than kind to me from the beginning. Every summer from 1884 to 1895 I went to stay more than once at their country place at Finchampstead for weeks at a time. There I met Hurlbert and Sir Ernest Cassell and his daughter and other notorious people; and both Arthur and Mrs. Walter became dear to me out of their abounding human kindness.
