I know that this judgment will not be accepted readily in England; the English would much rather blame a great man than take any shame to themselves for maltreating him. But one proof occurs to me: in the nineties, more than fifteen years after Thomson's death, H. D. Traill, one of the first journalists and men of letters of the time, wrote an article in the Nineteenth Century on English poets of the Victorian era. He gave a list of sixty-six who were able to speak 'the veritable and authentic language of the poet'; he puts Tennyson as the first, mentions even a Mrs. Graham Thomson; but omits James Thomson altogether. Yet, of the two, Tennyson and Thomson-the lord and the outcast-it was the outcast orphan alone that reached the heights.
There is no such handicap to genius as praise and money.
O wretched Earth! God sends thee age by age, In pity of thy wild perpetual moan, The saint, the bard, the hero, and the sage:
But still the lofty life is led alone,
The singer sings as in a tongue unknown, The sage's wisdom lamps his single urn;
Thou wilt not heed or imitate or learn.
CHAPTER IX
London in the nineties! How far away and long ago it all seems, and how shall I describe it? London, to me, is like a woman with wet, draggled dirty skirts (it's always raining in London), and at first you turn from her in disgust, but soon you discover that she has glorious eyes lighting up her pale, wet face. The historic houses, such as Marlborough House, Landsdowne House, Devonshire House and Cadogan House, and a hundred others, are her eyes; and they are simply wonderful treasure-houses of past centuries, with records of each age in gorgeous pictures and books, in tapestries and table silver-all the accessories of good taste and comfortable living. And if you admire her eyes and tell her so passionately one mid-summer evening, when the sunshine is a golden mist, she will give you her lips and take you to her heart; and you will find in her spirit depths undreamed of, passionate devotions, smiling self-sacrifice and loving, gentle attendance till your eyes dim at the sweet memory of her. And ever afterwards you, the alien and outcast and pariah of this all-hating world, will have a soft heart for London.
You will find magic and mystery in her fogs, as Whistler did; and in her gardens some June morning you will wake and find her temperate warmth of desire more enchanting than any tropic heat. London draws me more than any capital, and I have been in most of them, but the sameness of her squares, the destitution of her docks, and, above all, her wretched climate, appall me; and as I grow older I prefer Paris, Berlin or Vienna, where life's contrasts are not so hideous.
Marriage did not mean as much to me as other happenings in my life, and my wife was not, by any means, so important to me or to my mental growth as some of my friends, notably John Addington Symonds, Francis Adams, Grant Allen, and Harold Frederic. In the first ten years of my London life, friends meant more to me than any other influence, and notably such companions as these, who excited me intellectually.
I never could understand why these men did not do some great and evermemorable work. Symonds was a classic of the best, and master of an excellent prose; knew Italian and French, too, rarely well, and was a student born. He had no hindering English prejudices, regarded sex as lightly as Anatole France himself, and yet he did not write a single masterpiece. Why?
He was well-off, too, and gave himself to literature with single-hearted devotion, and yet never reached even Tennyson's place, or Swinburne's.
Grant Allen was in even closer sympathy with his age; learned, too, in science as in literature, and freer in mind than Symonds himself because born in Canada; and yet he could not get beyond The Woman Who Did. Why?
Again one asks, for it was a ridiculous book as a life's message. And Francis Adams was a larger man, perhaps, than either, though not so well equipped with learning; yet he, too, did nothing of enduring worth.
This fact made it gradually plain to me that intelligence and all round genial culture do not count for fame as much as some extraordinary endowment. It is, as Goethe said, 'the extraordinary alone that lives.' Swinburne was not comparable with Symonds in wisdom or understanding, or sweetness of character; and yet, because he had written ten pages of wonderful new verse music, he stands higher and is universally admired. The realization of this fact diminished for the first time in me that desire of fame which, so far, had been my driving power.
With these friends I was in constant touch for some important years without a shadow of misunderstanding or disagreement. Francis Adams was really my first good English friend: I met him in Hyde Park. I had been speaking there on socialism and the necessity of introducing some socialistic measures into English life when he came up and spoke to me, and we soon became friends.
Shortly afterwards, however, he went to Australia, and I did not see him again for some five years. When he came back our friendship was quickly renewed and I got him to write for me on the Fortnightly. He meant a great deal to me, though I was considerably his senior, for he was both frank and sympathetic.
When he came back from Australia he brought with him a wife, not particularly interesting, I thought, but he also brought back a certain weakness of lungs. I managed to help him to go to Egypt. I told him he should live in the desert above Assouan, or in some high place such as Davos Platz, but he did not take my advice and gradually grew worse. He came up the river with me one summer and in the winter stayed with me in London. I found that he was getting more and more hopeless. He spoke of suicide: I begged him not to let his thoughts wander in that direction, assured him that life would be greyer to me without him, and reminded him of his wife. He confessed to me he had tried to kill himself, but his courage had failed him. I told him that courage, like every other virtue, needed practice to become effective; and after he had left me that evening I wrote the little story, Eatin'
Crow, to show him what I meant. In the morning he read it in manuscript and said: 'You may do bigger things, Frank, but you'll never do anything more perfect.' He went back to his rooms at Margate, and suddenly I heard he had shot himself, after leaving me a message. His wife, too, wrote me that she had been arrested, so I went immediately to Margate and she told me the whole story.
He was going out for a drive with her when a hemorrhage came on. As he stepped into the carriage, he turned and came back to his room and told her that the blood was from his lungs and that he was dying. He gave her a message for me and then asked for his revolver. As the blood was pouring from his mouth she thought he was dying and bravely gave him the weapon.
He put it into his mouth and shot himself; the bullet went through his head into the ceiling. I saw the hole it had made.
In court Mrs. Adams told the whole truth, so the authorities thought she ought to be arrested as an accessory before the fact. But I pleaded with the magistrate, assured him that I knew of her great affection for her husband, and she was set free. I cannot tell here what I lost in Francis Adams-a sort of intellectual conscience and stimulus: the truest and wisest of friends.
Symonds came next in those early days. He had gone to Davos Platz with one lung destroyed and suffering from tuberculosis, but in the vivifying mountain air he quickly gained comparative health; and twice or thrice in summertime he came to London, and once stayed with me in my house in Kensington Gore for some memorable days. We were together every evening and talked the stars down the sky. In sex matters he viewed pederasty with the same tolerance as normal indulgence, and told me how surprised he had been by Whitman's passionate repudiation of abnormal desire.
He showed a certain sympathy with the vice which astonished me, and explained, if it did not justify, Swinburne's later gibe at him on account of his supposed liking for 'blue-breeched gondoliers.' But Symonds' sympathy was purely intellectual, and I always thought him one of the best of men- full of the milk of human kindness and far nearer ideal manhood than Swinburne or Tennyson.
Grant Allen I have already told about: his influence with me only began when I began to write stories, and lived with me for some time longer.
This is even truer of Harold Frederic, who was, if I remember rightly, the correspondent of the New York Times. I met Harold Frederic first at Sir Charles Dilke's and we soon became close friends. I met Sir Edward Grey about the same time in the same house. Frederic had already written several volumes but none yet which
