“Look for the truth in everything and follow it, and you will then be living justly before God. Let nothing flout your sense of a Supreme Being, and be certain that your understanding wavers whenever you chance to doubt that he leads to good. We grow to good as surely as the plant grows to the light. The school has only to look through history for a scientific assurance of it. And do not lose the habit of praying to the unseen Divinity. Prayer for worldly goods is worse than fruitless, but prayer for strength of soul is that passion of the soul which catches the gift it seeks.”
To an acquaintance he writes protesting against the charge of cynicism:
“None of my writings can be said to show a want of faith in humanity, or of sympathy with the weaker, or that I do not read the right meaning of strength. And it is not only women of the flesh, but also women in the soul whom I esteem, believe in, and would aid to development”
I once pressed him for his views of women and found him as wise as Goethe: “We learn the best from those we love,” he said. “We have doubled Seraglio Point, but have not yet rounded Cape Turkthe Turkish idea is very strong in the male breast.”
Personally I must always speak of Meredith as the most interesting of companions. We agreed in almost everything, but the flashes of his humor made his conversation entrancing. I still regard him with Russel Wallace as the wisest men I've ever met. But Wallace's belief in another and larger life after death shut him away from me while Meredith's love of nature and his delight in nature studies all appealed to me. I remember how I met him for the last time in his little pony-chaise on Box Hill shortly before his death.
“People talk about me as if I were an old man. I don't feel old in the least. On the contrary,” he went on in his humorous sardonic fashion, “I do not believe in growing old, and I do not see any reason why we should ever die. I take as keen an interest in the movement of life as ever. I enter into the intrigues of parties with the same keen interest as of old. I have seen the illusion of it all, but it does not dull the zest with which I enter into it and I hold more firmly than ever my faith in the constant advancement of the race. My eyes are as good as ever they were, only for small print I need to use spectacles. It is only in my legs that I feel weaker. I can no longer walk vigorously, which is a great privation to me. I used to be a keen walker; I preferred walking to riding; it sent the blood coursing to the brain, and besides, when I walked I could go through woods and footpaths which I could not have done if I had ridden. Now I can only walk about my own garden. It is a question of nerves. If I touch anything, however slightly, I am afraid that I shall fall; that is my only loss. My walking days are over.”
He did not need to go beyond his garden to be in the midst of the Garden of the Gods. As a young man he wrote:
When the westering sun is leaving the valley in gloom
Lovely are the curves of the white owl sweeping
Wavy in the dusk lit by one large star
Lone on the fir-branch, his rattle note unvaried.
Brooding o'er the gloom, spins the brown eve-jar.
Darker grows the valley, more and more forgetting:
So were it with me if forgetting could be willed.
There in the midst of all living, singing, flowering things, he lived alone and marveled that people thought him lonely. His wife had been dead for many years. His daughter was married and lived between Box Hill and Leatherhead. His son, who was in London, came to see him every fortnight.
“I do not feel in the least lonely,” he told me. “I have my books and my thoughts, and besides, I am never lonely, with Nature and the birds and beasts and insects, and the woods and the trees, in which I find a constant companionship.”
And on this occasion he went deeper than ever before:
“I see,” he said, “the revelation of God to man in the history of the world, and in the individual experience of each of us in the progressive triumph of God, and the working of the law by which wrong works out its own destruction. I cannot resist the conviction that there is something more in the world than Nature. Nature is blind. Her law works without regard to individuals. She cares only for the type. To her, life and death are the same. Ceaselessly she works, pressing ever for the improvement of the type. If man should fail her, she will create some other being; but that she has failed with man I am loath to admit, or do I see any evidence of it. It would be good for us,” he added thoughtfully, “if we were to take a lesson from Nature in this respect, and cease to be so wrapped up in individuals, to allow our interests to go out to the race. We should all attain more happiness, especially if we ceased to care so exclusively for the individual I. Happiness is usually a negative thing. Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.”
In this passage I think Meredith reaches the highest: “There is something more (and higher) in the world than Nature.” I put on record the farthest reaches of Meredith's faith which I share. To me this life is all that man knows or can reckon upon, but it is surely in love and spirit-growth a gift incomparable and higher than what we know as Nature. It is the Wallaces and the Merediths who have made it divine to me and perchance in my time, I have made it more worthwhile to certain of my younger companions.
Of the two, I have always felt myself nearer to Meredith than to any other man I have known personally.
I have written little about the greatest English and French actresses of my time; little about Ellen Terry whom I love, and little about Sarah Bernhardt, who for twenty years was the idol of civilized Europe. No two women could be more dissimilar. Whatever height Ellen Terry reached as an actress, she was before and above everything a woman, whereas Sarah was always an actress pure and simple, even when she was most a woman. I knew both women pretty intimately, though Sarah was far nearer to me than Ellen.
Ellen Terry was the best actress in half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays that I have ever seen. She even made Ophelia interesting.
Very early in her career I noticed that she talked on the stage, now giving directions to some other actress, now criticizing even Irving. She was the acme of naturalness even on the stage, or rather the stage was the true scene of her life and triumphs. Now she is eighty-odd years old and just as charming and attractive as ever.
Her first marriage with the great painter, Watts, took place when she was sixteen. Watts was thirty years older. She sat for him in a dozen characters and he painted her magnificently, but what caused the rupture between them he never told. She was almost as reticent, though once she admitted that she “never loved Watts,” which perhaps was confession enough. “He was charming,” she said, “and I loved the pictures he made of me, but I never cared for him.”
The first time I saw Sarah was in 1878, I think, in the Comedie-Francaise. After the play I went backstage with Marguerite Durand and she introduced me to Sarah. Sarah treated me with very mild interest, but it was destined that I should know her better, though that need not concern us here. I mention it by way of explaining ensuing events.
I had met the Damalas in Athens; they were all staying at the Hotel d'Athenes just opposite the Royal Palace where I also had a room. The son was in the Corps des Pages; his sister had married a Scot and, deserted by him, was living with her mother. They had all come from Marseilles and were as good-looking a trio as one could meet in a day's walk. The unhappy events surrounding the sister had happy results for me. We came to know each other intimately. I can't forget our first private meeting. She was so eager to feel the hardness of a man between her thighs due to the deprivation she'd recently suffered.
She came to my room one afternoon while I sat on the balcony admiring the view of the distant Acropolis. It was sunny and hot and I had discarded my shirt. The girl, Ariane, had knocked and entered unbidden, and stood before me wordlessly. She was a beautytall and willowy with dark hair that fell to her shoulders, rounded hips, and lush breasts that thrust against the thin cloth of her dress. I was anxious to see what she would do next as she swayed in front of me, and she didn't disappoint. She slipped the straps of her garment over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor. She was naked underneath. I stiffened instantly. Her breasts were full and pale and capped expansively with dark nipples that sprang erect under my smoldering gaze. Her thin waist flared into the swell of enticing hips and the sweeping lines of luscious thighs. Between her legs nestled a mossy treasure that I wished to
