Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson Part 15

HENRY BRADSHAW

THOSE who on that grey February day, with its pitiless east wind, straggled sadly away from the shadow of the great church where they had laid all that was mortal of their friend, must have found it hard to believe that the familiar figure would never again be seen pacing down that very walk. Day by day it used to pa.s.s along the huge white front of the Fellows' buildings, with steps short but never hurried, the broad shoulders swaying almost imperceptibly, the great head set back, and the kindly humorous eye glancing over the great b.u.t.tresses that fronted him, as he clasped the well-worn note-book to his side. And the mourners felt the blank still more, because it was just on such occasions as that which they had been attending, that he knew how to render sympathy and comfort as no one else alive could do. They could some of them remember how in such moments of unutterable regret, he would come close to them with no easy words of healing, for a grief that words could not touch, but with love and sadness and mute inquiry in his eyes, would in tender demonstration take and retain a hand--and nothing more--only saying, perhaps, "I understand," and so pa.s.s on, knowing that by showing human fellows.h.i.+p, by suffering with you--for he made no pretence not to suffer--he had done far more than if he had pointed you to a help of which you knew already, and to a strength to which you could not yet aspire.

And thus it was that the grey-headed contemporaries of his undergraduate days wept at that vault with men young enough to have been his sons, all feeling that the earth was poorer--not only for all the learning that had descended almost unrecorded into the grave, not because of the works unfinished that no one else could dare to do, but because they had lost so much love. And not love of an ordinary kind: Henry Bradshaw loved both well and wisely--of the words and events of intercourse with him you never wished a single thing done or said otherwise. He was one of those on whom had fallen the true priestly nature. It came so naturally to him to bear others' burdens that it at last became natural for others to lay them on him; he knew that repentant recital of failures to one whom we revere is in itself a potent absolution--and he had the true priest's tact: he did not want to set right, to give advice, but to hear what his friend had to say: how it was said was nearly as important to him as what was said; the more detailed was the difficulty or the struggle or the misadventure, the better he was pleased. "Go on," he would say, if the inquirer feared he wearied him, "tell me every thing you can: it is so _interesting_." In that word lay the secret of his influence over the young men who talked so naturally to him of all their doings--the young men that many complain it is so hard to influence. The fact is, they do not want merely sympathy--_that_ they can get, and more than they want, in their home circle--where it is apt to be (they think) unintelligent sympathy--which floods but does not fill. No! what they want is to feel that their trials are _interesting_. It is the season of egoism--they are supremely interested in themselves, self-conscious. Any one who finds them interesting too will influence them.

No one is ever widely loved who has not mannerisms--those little ways and methods that stir such smiling affection, that are so eagerly consulted during life, and that wring the heart with pathos, and brim the eyes to recall, when all is over. Who that knew them well will ever forget those broad high rooms? They were on the first-floor, by the Hall, looking into the College Court in front with all its trim stillness, broken only by the drip of the falling fountain. The windows that looked that way were always bright with flowers, geranium and lobelia as I remember them. The room behind looked across a little gra.s.sy court, on the huddled high-roofed buildings of St. Catharine's, with their Flemish outline, on the left, and the huge glossy walnut in the inner court; straight in front it commanded Queen's Lane from end to end, and on the right there rose the battlemented brick towers and the quaint oaken _fleche_ seen over apple trees and orchard walls--and the whole view rounded off by the high garden-elms across the river.

In the window-boxes in that room--for many years his favourite sitting-room--grew stubbly smoke-dried evergreens, cypress and lignum vitae. On the left as you entered stood a huge serviceable deal press with innumerable drawers, on one side of which were pinned notices and invitations; to the left of the room, books, the larger at the top in a book-case, pa.s.sing over the door and embedding it--a family picture or two, and some dusky oil paintings. In one corner an untenanted frame, with the gla.s.s in it, showing the wall-paper through, which he would neither take down nor get refilled. A large telescope on a stand by one of the windows--and the broad table with its rough red cloth strewn with books and papers, in orderly confusion, at which his visitor would find him sitting, with his back to the fire, writing in that broad blunt readable hand, or handling affectionately some yellow ma.n.u.script or brown clasped quarto. "How nice of you," he would say as you entered and stepped on to the square bordered carpet laid on the bare boarded floor. "I suppose you mean that I ought to get it stained," he would add with a smile, interpreting a hardly momentary glance that you gave as you crossed the threshold.

In the outer room, rarely used except in the summer, were many books and a few pictures--an original sketch by Thackeray, a bold pen-and-ink drawing of the view from the back window of the rooms--six postcards ill.u.s.trated and sent him by some artistic friend on a tour, a grand piano, on which I never heard him or any one but Dr. Stanford presume to play. In this room were held the delightful Sunday evening a.s.semblies to which friends used to drop in uninvited for tea and talk, while he would sit caressing the hand of some more favoured intimate, or dropping those wonderfully humorous sentences, sometimes caustic, had it not been for the glance with which they were accompanied, shooting through with little shafts of criticism any affectation or prejudice, any little idiosyncrasy and personal peculiarity that displayed itself in those round him, and laughing every now and then with that delightful intimate laugh, that irradiated his face. "Oh I forgot," he would say (after mentioning the name of some other undergraduate) to the young friend sitting by him, reputed to be exclusive in his social estimates--"not b.s." (best set), or, by a little gesture with his finger he would indicate the "nasus aduncus"--or on the entrance of another he would playfully hide a little gold charm which he wore on his watch chain, because the newcomer was supposed to have an aversion to it--and if the delinquent pleaded that such an aversion had never been hinted or expressed, "Oh, I like you to dislike it," he would say, "it's so characteristic."

And one special gift he had, which is indeed rare. He could rebuke and yet not give offence--for he was never an instant out of season. He could, with a little barbed speech, pierce right to the heart of some weakness, probe some secret fault that, unconsciously to its possessor, was betraying itself to others, stab a pretence or an arrogance through and through at the right moment, and yet never make the auditor dislike him. As a rule, the critic and the censor are obeyed and hated. We recognise that we are the better for the stroke, but we hate the hand that directed it. But with Henry Bradshaw it was never so: one could not feel personal resentment, though the little wound rankled long. Even those whom he emphatically did not like, with whom he was most unsparing of criticism and direct derision, did not resent it: they were uneasy under it, but anxious for his good opinion, anxious to redeem themselves in his eyes.

The conversation with him, as I remember it, was never sustained or argumentative. He did not care to sift the problems of life and being, or to hear them sifted before him--that was not the way in which life presented itself to him. He was hereditarily endowed with much of the Quietist instinct: he had not (on the surface, at least) questionings of heart and searchings of spirit. He was what can be called a life-philosopher; that is to say, he was not for ever deducing a system from faith or experience, like some restless spirits, and modifying it from day to day; he was simply acting, when it became him to act, in the way that his pure high instincts led him, and growing wiser so. And thus voluble or flashy talkers, keen, disputative, absorbed spirits, conversational dogmatists, found little to satisfy them in him: they were even apt to despise him in his greatness; and he too was uneasy in such society, he sported his door against them, he gave them no encouragement--unless, indeed, he had been their father's friend; then everything was forgiven.

In his bedroom, which latterly became his sitting-room, he kept all the Irish pamphlets which he and his father had ama.s.sed--for he was of Irish descent. It was a very characteristic room--the walls were covered to the top with bookcases, painted white, and gradually sloping away inwards as they descended, so that he could have the larger books at the top, and the smaller at the bottom. These were filled with grey and white and blue paper volumes, many unbound and dusty, tied up in ma.s.ses with strings and paper of all colours; in one corner an immense heap standing high up on the floor. "I know they oughtn't to be here--they ought to be in the library," he would say, "but of course that has never been done." It was in this room, so he told us, that he used to be ceaselessly annoyed by a mouse, which began to perambulate about 2 A.M., night after night, for many weeks: night after night he would resolve, he said, to "humour it no longer"--but night after night he would at last get up and open the door for it to go into his other room, which it instantly did, returning by some secret way to renew its wanderings the next night. "There never was such a pampered mouse," he used to say.

The rooms all through were filled with little mementoes, of which he would sometimes give us the history, from the little pictures and ornaments on the ledges and chimney-pieces, to the incongruous-looking tea-set that he used, and that formed so integral a part of the picture in _tete-a-tete_ talks with him--every single piece of which was a memorial of some one. In former times he had a little toy, a model of the old Eton Long Chamber bedsteads that stood on his table. One evening a fantastic wild friend, who had been at Eton with him, was sitting with him--a man who had been miserable, hounded and persecuted through the whole of his school-life there--and, stung by a sudden thought, perhaps some barbarous a.s.sociation, seized this model with the tongs, and crushed it into the fire--the owner sate immovable till the holocaust was over, and then said gently, "Was that necessary?"

Nothing was more remarkable than the kind of men to be found in his rooms: any one engaged in arduous literary work of a nature involving special research we were sure to see there sooner or later. Many of the rising men in the University who knew greatness when they saw it--and not only these, but scapegraces to whom Bradshaw accorded an almost fatherly protection, "outsiders," so called, who for some venial social defect, some ungraciousness of manner, or want of refining influences, society in general had rigorously excluded--these were to be found expanding in his presence--and the strangest thing about these intimacies was a point to which many will bear testimony, that if they grew at all, they grew to include all the home circle of which his friend was a part. "All my brothers and sisters," said one who was much with him, "unknown to him before--he came to realise and love them all for themselves."

He was a wonderful instance of a man, unmethodical and dreamy by nature, made business-like by consideration for other people: his library-work was always exactly done. His own private work suffered by the rigorous self-sacrifice with which he devoted his time to the details of business: invitations and other social requirements did not come off so well. He was said frequently to neglect these. "I hardly ever go out,"

he used to say, though it was not for want of being asked: but it so soon got to be understood that such was his habit, and he was so welcome when he did come, though he had not announced his intention of so doing, that the delinquencies were accepted in the spirit in which they had been committed. Indeed, so great was his dislike of being forced to a decision, that it is related of him that a friend who had written to ask him to dinner, on receiving no answer, sent him two postcards, with "Yes" written on one, "No" on the other, and by return of post received them both.

When one speaks of Bradshaw's "work," it is hard to make the uninitiated quite understand either its extent, its importance, or its perfection.

He knew more about printed books than any man living--he could tell at a glance the date and country, generally the town, at which a book was published. And the enormous range of this subject cannot be explained without a technical knowledge of the same. He was one of the foremost of Chaucer scholars, a very efficient linguist in range (though for reading, not speaking purposes), as, for instance, in the case of the old Breton language, which he evolved from notes and glosses, scribbled between the lines and on margins of Ma.s.s books--and his joy at the discovery of a word that he had suspected but never encountered was delightful to see. He could acquire a language for practical purposes with great rapidity--as, for instance, Armenian, which he began on a Thursday morning at Venice, and could read, so as to decipher t.i.tles for cataloguing, on Sat.u.r.day night. He had a close and unrivalled knowledge of cathedral statutes and const.i.tutions. He was an advanced student in the origins of liturgies--especially Irish--and, indeed, in the whole of Irish literature and printing he was supreme--and, finally, he was by common consent the best palaeographist, or critic of the date of MSS. in the world.

The story of his adventure in the Parisian Library is worth recording here: a book had been lost for nearly a century; he went over to Paris to see if he could discover it. Search was fruitless, though there was a strong presumption as to the part of the library where it would be found. He stood in one of the cla.s.ses describing its probable appearance to the librarian, and to ill.u.s.trate it said, "About the height, thickness, and of similar binding to this," taking a book out of the shelves as he did so. It was the missing volume.

So too he would refer Oxford men by memory to the case and shelf of the Bodleian where they would find the book for which they had looked in vain--and most characteristic of him was the explanation which he once gave me of his enormous knowledge. "You know," he said, "I have never worked at anything for myself, except, perhaps, at Chaucer, all my life long: all the things that I do know I have stumbled across in investigating questions for other people." How much of this knowledge was merely held in solution in that amazing brain, how much was committed to paper, I do not know--of the latter, comparatively little.

He had a long series of miscellaneous note-books, but most of them so technical as to be unintelligible except to one as far advanced in such knowledge as himself. His published works are but a few pamphlets.

The way in which all this work was done, all this knowledge was acc.u.mulated, was, among the other peculiarities of his genius, the most amazing. No man ever seemed to have more leisure; he would talk with perfect readiness not only on any special matter that any friend wished to consult him on, but he enjoyed trivial, leisurely gossip, and never showed impatience to continue his work, or the least desire to return to it. The secret was that he never left off. Except for rare holidays, visits to relations or foreign tours, he never left Cambridge for years.

His hours were most perplexing; he would generally work very late at night, sometimes till four or five in the morning, if there was much work on hand, go to the library about eleven, return for lunch, then back to the library again, with perhaps a visit to a Board or Syndicate till tea-time--for he took no exercise except spasmodically. Then he would go into Hall, or not, as the fancy took him, on the majority of days not doing so, and tasting nothing but tea and bread-and-b.u.t.ter in his rooms--and then from eight o'clock he would sit there, working if uninterrupted, but with his doors generally open to welcome all intruders, ceaselessly, patiently acquiring, ama.s.sing, disintegrating the enormous ma.s.s of delicate and subtle information which not only did he never forget, but all of which he seemed to carry on the surface, and carry so lightly and easily too--for he did not appear to be erudite--he never played the _role_ of the learned man, though with acquirements as ponderous and detailed, and to the generality of people as uninteresting, as the real or the fict.i.tious Casaubon.

Yet this knowledge was not only of things that lay inside his own subjects, but extended to all kinds of paths that could never have been suspected. I have never met a person so nearly omniscient. If you wanted to hear private and personal details about a man with whom you became connected in a business or official capacity, he could give them. He drew the man, or the family, or the place he lived in. I once travelled up to London with him and pointed out a great house that was gradually getting absorbed into the creeping metropolis but which still preserved its country characteristics, stately and smoke-dried. "Yes," he said, "it used to be much fresher; I used often to go there when I was a boy; it belonged to the----" and there came out a little string of old-world anecdotes and tales. Presently we pa.s.sed a church (near Barnet) with an ivied tower, which had been engulfed in the town. This also I showed him. "Yes," he said, "I was christened there."

The story is almost too well-known to require repet.i.tion, of Mommsen, who said, after half-an-hour's conversation with Bradshaw on some historical _specialite_: "If I had had a shorthand writer with me, I could have got in half-an-hour's talk enough materials to have made an interesting volume." And this fabric had been ceaselessly growing and expanding, fitting itself into order and connecting itself together, ever since the early days when in the school-yard at Eton, a boy who was possessed of some bibliographical treasures saw Henry Bradshaw issue out of college, carrying two curious volumes under his arms, stealing off to some secret haunt to study them, and greeted him with: "Hullo, Bradshaw, whose books have you got there?" The only answer, delivered without a sign of confusion, in the tones which even then were more expressive in their imperturbability than most men's, "Yours."

Professor Prothero, in his Life of Henry Bradshaw, gives a rationalistic explanation of this story that I can hardly credit. He says that the books were from the School Library, and that Bradshaw's reply was meant to indicate that the volumes belonged as much to one person as another.

As this explanation deprives the story of most of its point and all of its humour, I have preferred to retain it in its lighter, if more apocryphal, form--the form in which I heard it from one of Bradshaw's Eton friends. And we may here add the delightful touch with which he dismissed the claims of a celebrated forger of MSS. to have been the writer of the "Codex Sinaiticus." "I am sure if he had ever seen it, he could never have pretended to have written it," he said.

And in an instant the whole structure breaks and melts before our eyes: the knowledge gone, G.o.d knows whither: the centre of so many quiet activities, of so many dependent lives slipped from its place. However often we say to ourselves that nothing runs to waste, that h.o.a.rded experience--gathered painfully in life and seemingly only to be applied in life--thus vanis.h.i.+ng in an instant, is hidden not gone, the blank is there. As Bradshaw himself said to a friend after a great trial that he had told him of, which seemed to have in it no wholesome flavour, to be nothing either in prospect or in retrospect, but the very root of bitterness itself, "Everything is the result of something--whether it is our own fault or not, it means something: what we have to do is to try and interpret it."

And we feel that when such a life, acting as it did so directly on others and affecting them so visibly, is cut short, there is not a sheer waste of love. And though we may be called fanciful, we seem to trace a hopeful a.n.a.logy in the ease with which he renewed old intimacies, silent for a long interval--he took up the friends.h.i.+p where he had laid it down: there was no adjustment necessary--one became part of his life again at once, because one had never ceased to be so. Such an affection, when it has pa.s.sed the veil, seems to be waiting for us still--it seems emphatically to have but gone before.

1885.

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

FEW poetical writers lived more consistently in the shadow of death than Christina Rossetti. There was a certain taint of doom about her writings from the first, and something of the hollow-eyed listlessness of low vitality, that characterises the artistic work of the school to which she primarily belonged, is never absent for very long together from her writings. There is extant a portrait of her at about the age of thirty-six, by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which will be familiar to many of my readers. After subtracting from it the languorous mannerism of the artist, there remains in the wide, pathetic eyes, the wistful uplifting of the eyebrows and the depressed curves of the stately mouth something dreary and uncomforted about the whole aspect.

And a later photograph, which I have had the privilege of seeing, has the same regretful patience. For many years she had been an invalid, and lived a life of singular seclusion in Torrington Square, one of the dreariest and least romantic of London thoroughfares. Latterly she had been an acute sufferer from a wearing disease, borne with silent fort.i.tude. One after another, her mother, and the two aunts to whom she devoted her tenderest care, were taken from her; and her brother William Michael, the critic and editor of Sh.e.l.ley, was the only survivor of the brilliant circle in which her life began. Her fervent religious faith, inspired and matured by desolate experience, had nothing dreary or undecided about it; it issued in a sedulous dutifulness and a patient devotion that were the best proof of its sincerity.

Her artistic nature developed early, and before she was seventeen, a little volume ent.i.tled _Verses by Christina Rossetti_, dedicated to her mother, was printed by her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, at his private printing-press in Regent's Park. This is now one of the rarest of bibliographical treasures. Here her precise delineation of natural objects, and a certain delicate antique charm, are distinctly observable. But in 1850, under the _nom-de-plume_ of Ellen Alleyne, she contributed verses to the _Germ_, that fertile organ of the pre-Raphaelites, Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others. Of these lyrics we shall presently have occasion to quote one, "Dreamland," which shows how early her lyrical gift had matured.

And indeed it may be said that of the seven poems which she contributed to the _Germ_, at least five are among her best lyrics.

In 1862 appeared _Goblin Market and other Poems_; and in this, as is so often the case with the work of poets done before the thirty-fifth year--the year that has so often been fatal to genius--she reached the zenith of her poetical powers. Not that much of her later work was not excellent, and would have sufficed for a definite reputation; but it may be said that twenty or thirty of these earlier poems are those by which she will be best remembered.

Some writers have the power of creating a species of aerial landscape in the minds of their readers, often vague and shadowy, not obtruding itself strongly upon the consciousness, but forming a quiet background, like the scenery of portraits, in which the action of the lyric or the sonnet seems to lie. I am not now speaking of pictorial writing, which definitely aims at producing, with more or less vividness, a house, a park, a valley, but lyrics and poems of pure thought and feeling, which have none the less a haunting sense of locality in which the mood dreams itself out.

Christina Rossetti's _mise-en-scene_ is a place of gardens, orchards, wooded dingles, with a churchyard in the distance. The scene s.h.i.+fts a little, but the spirit never wanders far afield; and it is certainly singular that one who lived out almost the whole of her life in a city so majestic, sober, and inspiriting as London, should never bring the consciousness of streets and thoroughfares and populous murmur into her writings. She, whose heart was so with birds and fruits, cornfields and farmyard sounds, never even revolts against or despairs of the huge desolation, the laborious monotony of a great town. She does not sing as a caged bird, with exotic memories of freedom stirred by the flas.h.i.+ng water, the hanging groundsel of her wired prison, but with a wild voice, with visions only limited by the rustic conventionalities of toil and tillage. The dewy English woodland, the sharp silences of winter, the gloom of low-hung clouds, and the sigh of weeping rain are her backgrounds; and it is strange that one of Italian blood should write with no alien longings for warm and sun-dried lands. Robert Browning, who brings into sudden being by a word, the whole atmosphere of the fiery Italian summer, the terraced vines, the gnarled olive, the bulging plaster where the scorpion lies folded, still yearned for an English spring morning. But Christina Rossetti, unlike even her brother, had no leanings to the home of her race.

The critic of future ages, if he were confronted with the works of Mrs.

Browning and Miss Rossetti, and a history of their lives, would, it may be said, acting on internal evidence only, a.s.sign such poems as _Aurora Leigh_ and the _Casa-Guidi Windows_ to Miss Rossetti, and trace the natural heart-beats which still thrilled her for the home of her origin, and equally attribute the essentially English character of Miss Rossetti's feeling to the English poetess. It is said that Miss Rossetti never visited Italy, and had no wish to do so. It is a strange thing that the two greatest of English poetesses should have, so to speak, so pa.s.sionately adopted each other's country as their own.

The only point in which Christina Rossetti's imagery may be held to be tropical, is in the matters of fruit. In "Goblin Market," in the "Pageant of the Months," even in such a poem as the "Apple Gathering,"

and in many other poems she seems to revel in descriptions of fruit which the harsh apples and half-baked plums of English gardens can hardly have suggested. Keats is the only other English poet who had the same sensuous delight in the pulpy juiciness of summer fruit. It will be found, I think, that in the majority of English poets fruit is quite as often typical of immaturity and acidity as of cooling and delight. And even Stevenson couples the onion and the nectarine as the n.o.blest fruits of G.o.d's creation. But the

Plump unpecked cherries.

Bloom down-cheeked peaches, Wild free-born cranberries, Pineapples, strawberries, All ripe together In summer weather.

are hardly the produce of the rushy glen where the leering goblin merchants tramped and whisked up and down.

This leads me to speak of another region which Christina Rossetti trode with an eager familiarity--the land of dreams and visions. With the exception of Coleridge, who, in his three great poems, moved in that difficult and turbid air with so proud a freedom, it may be said that no English poet except Christina, her brother, and James Thomson, have ever successfully attempted such work. Mr. Yeats, it is true, of younger writers, has pa.s.sed beyond the threshold of that eerie and unsubstantial land; but with him it is the melancholy Celtic twilight, the home of old earth-spirits, neither high nor hopeful, but with a bewildered sadness, as of discrowned kings and discredited magicians. To a characteristically English poet such as Wordsworth, such a region, as he betrays in the memorable sonnet, "The world is too much with us," was a place of desperate soulless horror. But Christina Rossetti, in "Goblin Market,"

and the "Ballad of Boding," as her brother in "Rose Mary," and "Sister Helen," pa.s.sed successfully along the narrow road of allegory. In English hands such subjects are apt to pa.s.s with fatal swiftness into the ludicrous and the grotesque. Witness the merry horned demons of monkish MSS., and the cheerful oddities, so far aloof from fantastic horror, of our English gurgoyles and stall-work, the straddling and padding forms of Bunyan. What is needed is a sort of twilight of the soul, a simple directness such as children value, a sense of grave verisimilitude, hopelessly alien from the business-like Puritan mind.

Then, too, there is the singular creation of the modern ballad, initiated by Coleridge, and carried to supreme perfection by D. G.

Rossetti, and in a less degree by his sister; that vague, dream-laden writing which, using old forms of austere simplicity, charges them with a whole world of modern sicknesses and degenerate dreams. It was this that Matthew Arnold went so pa.s.sionately in search of in a poem like the "Scholar Gipsy," and yet could contrive no inner picture of the haunted wanderer's thoughts, but only touch in the external aspects of the phantom traveller, as seen unexpectedly by human toilers and pleasure-seekers engaged in homely exercises.

But Miss Rossetti, in such poems as "Brandons Both," and in a supreme degree in the exquisite ballad of "n.o.ble Sisters," which we will quote _in extenso_, laid a secure hand on the precise medium required:--

n.o.bLE SISTERS

"Now did you mark a falcon, Sister dear, sister dear, Flying toward my window In the morning cool and clear?

With jingling bells about her neck.

But what beneath her wing?

It may have been a ribbon, Or it may have been a ring."

"I marked a falcon swooping At the break of day; And for your love, my sister dove, I 'frayed the thief away."

"Or did you spy a ruddy hound, Sister fair and tall, Went snuffing round my garden bound, Or crouched by my bower wall.

With a silken leash about his neck; But in his mouth may be A chain of gold and silver links, Or a letter writ to me?"

"I heard a hound, highborn sister, Stood baying at the moon; I rose and drove him from your wall, Lest you should wake too soon."