Genius at the Turn of the Century

I

HUDSON and Conrad I think of especially in connection with our house in Church Row. Hudson I had met many years before, at Mrs. Bontine’s; but it was not until 1903 that we became intimate with him. His writings were now familiar. I associated them — why, I don’t quite know — with Conrad’s; perhaps because both writers were friends of Robert CunninghameGraham, who spoke of them constantly.

Hudson would walk in with his strange, rather crab-like walk; very tall he was, a little awkward as he sat himself down and disposed of his long limbs, folding his large, beautifully formed hands across his knees. He had haunting eyes, brown with yellow lights, eyes that scarcely moved in their orbits, but remained level, fixed on no particular point, held rather by memories of things past than by what was before them. His cheek bones were wide and prominent (once he said he had Indian blood in his veins), and his jaw seemed narrow by comparison, a narrowness emphasized by the shape of his beard. His fine, slightly narrowing brow was deeply furrowed, and his nose was that of a predatory bird. Yes, he put me in mind of those sad, caged eagles at the Zoo, whose motionless eyes look out beyond the bars of their cages as they sit, desolate prisoners, their wings unused and drooping, through the long dull days.

One could listen to Hudson for hours. He could describe, and make absorbingly interesting, things, people, animals; incidents he had observed, whether lately or long ago made no difference to the vividness of his account. The things he noticed were perhaps common things such as others pass by, though he would talk, too, of less usual adventures, especially when he spoke of his early days in the pampas. Once he told us, I remember, that he had known an old woman who as a girl had been carried off by Indians, with whom she had lived for many years as a squaw, at which Augustus John exclaimed: ‘Lucky woman!’

I never tired of drawing Hudson. He was a willing sitter, though he disliked my drawings, thinking I made him look too old and worn. He could n’t bear the idea of growing old, and concealed his age. He was very fond of Morley Roberts, Edward Thomas, Edward Garnett, and George Gissing. One day I got a letter from Hudson: —

No doubt you have by now seen poor G. Gissing’s death in your paper. At Xmas his brother wrote to me that he had better news of his health. Wells went to France to see him, and on Sunday wired to Morley Roberts to go at once. He went that night, but whether he was in time to see his friend alive or not, I have not yet heard. I was one of Gissing’s half a dozen closest friends, and feel very badly about it.

Later Wells told me about Gissing’s sad end; he died just as he had found happiness with the woman who understood and loved him. This was like Wells, to go straightway to the South of France directly he heard Gissing was seriously ill. Sargent too, when Robert Brough, a young painter he admired, was terribly injured in a railway accident, went up to Scotland to comfort him. I had thought once that most men would act thus, but now I know this is not so.

I had drawn Gissing some six years before, and his brother Algernon now came to see me to say how much he valued my portrait. Sometimes too, when others have died, their relatives have said how they wished I had drawn them while there was still time. Yet how few have ever asked me to make drawings — not fifty, I should say, during forty years. It has nearly always been I who have asked people to sit.

Ford Madox Hueffer, coming in one day while I was drawing Hudson, suggested I should draw Conrad; and seeing Conrad shortly afterward, — for Conrad was living at The Pent, the farmhouse where Crane had stayed, which now belonged to Hueffer, — he spoke to him about sitting. Whereupon Conrad asked me down for a week-end. The Pent was a small farmhouse, with farm buildings round it. It provided modest quarters for Conrad, his wife and little boy, and a room where he could put up a friend. The walls were hung with drawings and cartoons by Madox Brown.

One sees more of a man by staying with him for a week-end than by meeting him a dozen times at London parties. Conrad had met few painters and was curious about the painter’s outlook on life. With his piercing eyes and keen, deeply lined bearded face, in some ways he looked like the sea captain, but his nervous manner, his rapid, excited speech, his restlessness, his high shoulders, did n’t suggest the sailor. I accepted him at once as an artist; never, I thought, had I met anyone with a quicker apprehension, with such warmth of intellectual sympathy, sympathy which came halfway to meet everything one said. This warmth, not uncommon between young artists, was rare in a man so much my senior as Conrad was; but as a practising artist I was, Conrad pointed out, his senior, for I had begun to paint before he had thought of writing.

On the Sunday, Wells, who was then living at Sandgate, was expected to lunch. We waited and waited, looking out across country; each time Conrad caught sight of a distant figure he would say, ‘Le voilàl’ But Wells never came. Well, I must meet him later, Conrad said, and must get to know his friend, Jack Galsworthy, too. ‘Of course you could n’t have heard of Jack. Our first meeting was when I ordered him out of the way; he was a passenger on my ship, you know. He is such a good friend; but insists on writing, poor fellow. Writing is a treadmill; he does n’t know it yet. I shall be coming up next week to see Pinker. Pinker is my agent; he believes in me — wants to pull me out of my difficulties — an idealist, you understand. You must meet Pinker, too. And may I bring Jessie? She would like to meet your dear wife.’ And before the visit was over we had become fast friends. We met again very soon. Conrad wrote me generously about the portrait I did of him during this visit.

PENT FARM
STANFORD, NEAR HYTIIE, KENT
13th Oct. 1903
MY DEAR ROTHENSTEIN —
You are exceedingly kind. My wife is delighted with her Hudson both as to work and the inscription. You have got the man there in a striking way. We are impressed, for as it happens we have both seen him in just that way; or, may be, the force of the rendering imposes your conception of the personality. Anyway it is triumphant.

Of myself in black and white (I mean without color) I do not speak. Hueffer prophesied to me how effective it would be — and it is.

I am so profoundly satisfied that I cannot help fearing you’ve flattered me — not in feature, vous concevez, but in the suggestion. At any rate I accept your vision of that head, eagerly. The contemplation of it m’a remonté le moral: for you must know I have been tormented by gout for three weeks and brought morally, intellectually, temperamentally to the lowest ebb.

P.S. Have you found that Pinker can be of any use to you? Or is he no good?

Through my painting, through my desire to wring all I could out of my subject, to aim at what was beyond me rather than to achieve an easier and more attractive result, I could sympathize with Conrad’s difficulties. For Conrad wore himself out in his struggle for le mot juste, for words that should glow with a white heat; he would often despair, and one needed all one’s energy to pump faith and hope into him. He was then writing Nostromo, and working himself into a fever. In addition, he suffered terribly from gout, and his wife, Jessie, had trouble with her knee. ’I can’t get anything out of myself quickly,’ he said; ‘it takes me a year of agony to make something like a book — generally longer. And, my dear fellow, when it is done there are not more than twenty people who understand pourquoi on se tue pour écrire quelques phrases pas trop mauvaises.’

There was always an element of strain in Conrad, an excitability which may have been individual or may have been Polish — I cannot say. Perhaps something of each. But I sympathized with him acutely in his desire to impress the passion of life on to his pages. This sympathy was, I think, the basis of our friendship; for Conrad seemed to understand what I too was aiming at in my painting. It was a fascinating friendship; Conrad’s charm, his mental energy, were inexhaustible. And Conrad understood everything; in him I had at last met a man of a passionate nature who yet understood that a sane view of life is not a matter of compromise, but as the mot juste, the phrase which shows neither weakness nor exaggeration, is the quest of the writer, so the sane opinion, the just action, arc the signs of the enlightened man.

I leaned more toward radicalism than Conrad, and he often brought me up sharply with a contemptuous remark. He was, by nature and by choice, an aristocrat; he believed that the object of life was the perfection of individual conduct — the education of man’s own spirit. For panaceas of human perfection he had neither patience nor respect. Social idealists, pacifists, and their like, roused his anger. Hence he could n’t abide Bernard Shaw. Conrad knew that Cunninghame-Graham was more cynic than idealist, that he was by nature an aristocrat, whose socialism was a symbol of his contempt for a feeble aristocracy and a blatant plutocracy.

While Conrad was extremely courteous and understanding by nature, his nerves sometimes made him aggressive, almost violent; and, like most sensitive men, he was strongly affected, either favorably or disagreeably, by others. Poor Conrad was always in difficulties over money. His books brought him insufficient for his needs — needs which were perhaps not quite so simple as he believed them to be. There was an extravagant side to Conrad, characteristic, I thought, of his former profession. He was like a sailor between two voyages, ready to spend on land what he could n’t aboard ship; and he had a wife in one port only, for whom nothing was too good. His gallantry to his Jessie was a true sailor’s chivalry. What others had, she should have, too.

II

Conrad’s letters sometimes made painful reading, so harassed he was by expenses — worse still, by old debts. When I returned to town, I spoke to various friends, and Hugh Hammcrsley, Henry Newbolt, W. P. Ker, Gilbert Murray, and others helped to relieve him of some of his pressing difficulties. Later Henry Newbolt and Edmund Gosse approached Mr. Balfour — was there no fund for such a man as Conrad? Balfour went off to Scotland, taking with him half a dozen of Conrad’s books, which so impressed him that he arranged for a substantial sum to be put at Conrad’s disposal. He appointed Gosse as a kind of trustee for the money, an arrangement which Conrad found somewhat irksome.

Conrad, as often happens in like cases, had underestimated the sum needed to pay off his debts, and was not therefore relieved from worry, as I had hoped. Indeed, he was for long obsessed by thoughts of money, and feared lest he should die and leave his wife and two children penniless. He was then finishing Nostromo, and wrote from the Pent Farm: —

3rd. Sept. 1904
MY DEAR ROTHENSTEIN &eemdash;
The book is finished; it has been finished for a couple of days now, but I have been too tired, too flat to write to you at once. The last month I worked practically night and day; going to bed at three and sitting down again at nine. All the time at it, with the tenacity of despair.
What the book is like I don’t know. I don’t suppose it’ll damage me; but I know that it is open to much intelligent criticism. For the other sort I don’t care. Personally I am not satisfied. It is something — but not the thing I tried for. There is no exultation, none of that temporary sense of achievement which is so soothing. Even the mere feeling of relief, at having done with it, is wanting. The strain has been too great; has lasted too long.
But I am ready for more. I don’t feel empty, exhausted. I am simply joyless — like most men of little faith. To see you would do me good. I count the days. I must take Jessie to London to see Watson Hood. I am sorry to say that her heart seems to be troubling her again of late. She is very cheery, however. Your dear wife’s letter has brightened her up.
Plans of work with ideas of getting away for the winter jostle in my head. I won’t say anything more now. Only our dear love to you four people with the hope of meeting soon for a day or so.
Ever yours
J. CONRAD

Hudson, too, was very poor, but he spent much time wandering about the countryside, and needed little. It was some time before we discovered that he was married. One day he spoke of his wife. ‘Married!’ said my wife. ‘And you never told us! How long have you been married?’ ‘As long as I can remember,’ was Hudson’s answer, the gloomiest verdict on married life I have ever heard. He had met, early in life, a singer, a friend of Adelina Patti, with a great career before her; in love with her and her voice, he induced her to marry him. Then something happened; she lost her voice, and was never to sing again, a tragedy for both of them.

Mrs. Hudson owned a large, dreary house at Westbourne Grove, of which she and Hudson occupied two floors; the rest of the house they let to lodgers. Poor Hudson, so fastidious as a writer, lived with the most forbidding furniture, the commonest pictures and china, the ugliest lace curtains and antimacassars. No wonder he chose such poor illustrations for his books! It irked me to see a man of a nature so elemental living in this lodging-house atmosphere. His peculiar, mysterious charm was indescribable; something about him tore at one’s heart, so lovable he was. Yet he never invited affection; he was a lonely man, with something of the animal about him, walking away and returning with the nonchalance of an animal, and then disappearing again.
I had from the first admired Hudson’s writings. His Naturalist in La Plata and Idle Days in Patagonia I thought wonderful; then came El Ombú, and, a little later, Green Mansions. I talked of these books, of the last especially, wherever I went. Many of my friends laughed at Green Mansions, but a few cared for it as I did. Hudson affected to disdain his own writing. He was really absorbed in literature, and cared for good books and liked to discuss them; but he would affect a contempt for the writer’s trade. Once, when I asked him to write on a friend, he answered: —

It grieves me not to be able to do what you want; but I can’t tell lies, and what you want is an appreciation, with books and not the man as the thing to be appreciated. And I dislike all books — excepting purely informative ones like Kelly’s Directory and the Almanac. Most of all my own. I do like them for as long as they remain unwritten, but the liking declines when I am writing them, and no sooner are they finished, printed, and published than my only feeling about them is a desire to kick them out of the house and forget all about them. Of course you will refuse to believe that; but I don’t mind, since no one who speaks the truth can expect to be believed. Nevertheless, it is the literal truth that I love my friends in spite of the books they write. Imagine, then, what my feelings are at this time when I have been compelled (in fulfillment of an old contract) to revise the proofs of a book — my first book on birds of S. America, first published thirty years ago!

I painted Hudson at Church Row, and drew him often. Wells also came to sit; and when, not being satisfied with what I did, I wanted to draw him again, he wrote: —

SPADE HOUSE, SANDGATE
9. XI. 04
My DEAR ROTHENSTEIN
There’s no need for you to be hardened this time. We both like the portrait enormously. You have penetrated the mere superficialities of my personal appearance and shown me how I should like to look. And my wife, who displays that very human resentment of wives when the camera with its facty emphasis brings home to them, with all the indisputableness and wrongness of statistics, what it is they have really centred their poor dear lives upon — my wife, I say, approves of it too.
Here, at any rate, it’s a success, and it will go far to efface the painful memories of Max Beerbohm’s little joke.
Yours ever
H. G. WELLS

I found Wells difficult to draw; his features were round and rather commonplace, I thought, and did n’t show his genius. But once when Shaw and Granville Barker came to fetch me to a meeting in the Hampstead Town Hall, and took me with them on to the platform, I caught sight of Wells in the body of the hall and noticed, for the first time, how striking were his eyes. I remember that meeting for another reason: Barker was to speak, while Shaw took the chair; but Shaw spoke so long and so brilliantly that he took the wind out of Barker’s sails. I thought this selfish, and unworthy of Shaw.

Wells had lately published Ann Veronica, closely followed by The New Machiavelli, and was not very popular in consequence. He had something on his mind that made him resentful at times, and he complained of old friends who had turned against him. But this was a passing mood only. He could always be gayly vituperative, but he was rarely bitter. There was something frank and unashamed in Wells, a vigorous enjoyment of life that disarmed criticism. He was perhaps a little greedy in his zest for life, I thought, as some are greedy over the pleasures of the table. Yes, Wells was greedy, but how much better appetite is than apathy! It was this lusty appetite for every phase of life, for work and for play as well, which I liked so much in him. And when he played, he played to win. Badminton was a favorite game of both of us, and Wells had tricky little strokes: he could n’t resist them — he could n’t bear not to win. Yet he was quite aware of his weakness, for in one of his books, I remember, he commented on this kind of play.

III

I had, one day, a letter from Henry Newbolt. He wanted my opinion on a book he was sending me. Why, he would tell me later. The book was called Henry Brocken, and in it the author had imagined the later lives of certain characters from fiction. A charming book; its author had obviously a beautiful nature. He was a young man, in the Standard Oil Company, Newbolt told me later, who could n’t bear office life. He had come to Newbolt for advice. Newbolt thought the work of high promise, but had hesitated to advise his friend to risk earning his living by his pen alone. Now he hesitated no longer, and the young writer decided to take the risk, to throw up his job, to devote himself to literature. For long he supported himself by reviewing, chiefly for the Westminster Gazette and the Times Literary Supplement, for poetry brings little pelf, though it brought steady recognition to Walter de la Mare.

De la Mare was endowed by the gods with such natural goodness and charm that all who knew him loved him. What matter the world’s goods when a man has personal magic? Natural charm is like radiant beauty — to him or to her that hath shall be given more. There is no more enviable quality. To Max Beerbohm this was given, and to Walter Sickert; Oscar Wilde had it, but wasted it. Max Beerbohm, Sickert, and Walter de la Mare have preserved their charm, and draw men and women to them with this potent magnet.

A strange thing is personality; there is also a counter-charm, a touch of aggressiveness, equally mysterious, which, be the heart never so kind and the altruism never so ready, antagonizes certain persons. Hudson, too, fascinated people; but, while no one could be more charming than Conrad when he wished, Conrad had an aggressive side, which his friends overlooked because of his obvious genius. Yet Conrad was nervous and sensitive, and he could be very irritable. For example, he was prejudiced against Masefield’s work; he was still more hostile to Shaw; and once when I told him that Max did n’t like Proust he burst out against Max, yet another time I heard him judge Proust harshly. But when he liked people he would admit no faults; indeed, he was inclined to flatter — perhaps this was a Polish trait — both in speaking and in writing.

Poor Conrad; he suffered much from gout, which racked his nerves and depressed his spirits. At times it took all one’s energy to pump life and hope into him; for he was cheered by his friends’ faith in his work. Not that he lacked faith in himself; measuring himself against his contemporaries, he knew his own power. But he strained after an unattainable standard of perfection, and the effort to reach it often exhausted him.

His letters show his anxiety regarding his future, and how much he had to struggle against ill health.

17 Dec. 1909 ALDINGTON, NR. HYTHE KENT
DEAREST WILL,
Don’t you think that if I could possibly spare the time I would n’t rather take a day and come and see you and yours to whom my heart goes out many times a week? Here I’ve been two years writing a novel which is not yet finished. Two years! of which surely one half has been illness complicated by a terrible moral stress. Imagine yourself painting with the Devil jogging your elbow all the time. But you who are one of the most intelligent men I know, or know of, and a stylist also (because you are — I’ve been looking at your Goya only the other day), you will know what a torture that sort of thing is when the effort and hindrance are mental. It is to make you realize how really unfit I am for what I call casual intercourse of mankind. And the truth also is, my dear Will, that we live here now in such conditions — crowded into four tiny rooms in half of a cottage — that I really don’t like to receive strangers, even the most admiring and the best disposed. You must not charge me with littleness of mind; we must take the world as it is; and indeed there is some concern for the dignity of letters in my reluctance.
I speak to you here as to a second self and thus I cannot conceive you taking it ill. Perhaps I am unreasonable. But to-day in the second week of my fifty-second year, a failure from the worldly point of view and knowing well that there can be no change — that this must go on usque ad finem — I may perhaps be allowed a little unreason. — Well, no more just now. I will only mention that I have n’t seen you for more than a year, Galsworthy for nine months, that I have been in town for about six hours in March last and not since. Voilà. And if you think that I am indulging in a capricious savagery of disposition you are mistaken. Our dear love to you all.
Yours ever
J. CONRAD

ALDINGTON, HYTHE, KENT 20 May. '10
DEAREST WILL —
I can just, just hobble over fifty yards or so of smooth ground, but am too tottery and generally shaky to venture on the pavements of Babylon. Also one wrist is dead lame.
The mind is not much better. Can’t concentrate for more than a half hour at a time. How to write long and short stories under this disability I don’t know. But they must be written and shall be. It’ll be, no doubt, very delightful.
I can’t go and see your pictures. It’s exasperating. I am keeping a tight hand on myself for fear my nerves go to pieces. I suppose I have been as ill as they tell me. At the time I was rather skeptical; now I begin to believe it.
To get away from this hole here is my ardent wish. We have found a house in the woods within 4½ miles. It is picturesque and roomy. I must have space and silence — silence! I shall get that last there if anywhere outside the grave — which has no space.
You must come and see and approve, as soon as we get in. I mean you two — for your approbation wdthout your dear wife’s would be worth nearly nothing.
Our dear love to all your house.
Ever yours
J. CONRAD

Hudson never worried about his work; he usually spoke with contempt of his own writing and for the writer’s craft. Yet no one cared for good literature or respected good writing more. It pleased Hudson to assume indifference, while he really loved to talk of books and writers. And he was fastidious about his own prose. But after a few months in London he longed for open spaces; and he would go off to Hampshire, Devonshire, or Cornwall, or to the East Coast.

We still spent our summers in France, and usually at Vaucottes, where the Chownes and Frank Darwin and his daughter would join us. We would walk down from the inn to bathe, the children rushing into the sea without any clothes on, greatly to the disgust of the French ladies sitting on the beach, who thought it shocking that little girls but three and four years old should bathe thus. How much more conventional the French people are in fact than ourselves! Who in England would be shocked at seeing little girls without bathing dresses? More than once we tried unsuccessfully to get Hudson to join us. He wrote: —

Many thanks for your kind letter and the invitation. It must be a fascinating place and the green grasshoppers are a luxury one can’t get anywhere. I wish I could go and visit you, but’t is impossible. We were at Deal awhile, and one day at Dover. I tried to drag Mrs. Hudson to Calais, but she would not. I’ve never been in France and am quite sure I never shall now. The only place out of England I wish to go to (and hope to go before long) is New England — Maine and New Hampshire and Vermont where my mother’s relations are. I’ve never seen any of them, nor her native place, and have a wish and desire — a kind of pious or superstitious feeling — to pay it a visit. It is the red man’s feeling and I am a red man, or at all events a wild man of the woods. We are glad to know you are in such a delightful place and are all so well. Mrs. Hudson is highly amused at your idea of being a strict vegetarian with rabbit and chicken on the table every day.

Yesterday I was at the Mont Blanc to lunch and Hammond and some of the staff were there, all with a slight shadow on them, for alas, the Speaker is now about to change hands and we shall know it no more. The new people are going to ’make it pay’— perhaps that means that it will cease to be an intellectual paper and be something different — God knows what. We were astonished at your news about the Conrads. No, I have not seen him nor heard anything about him. I met C. Graham in the park a while ago and he says his wife is still very ill. Our united love to you all.

‘I am a red man.’ This explains Hudson’s forlorn feeling when he had to remain in London. He and his wife were at home on Wednesday afternoons, where we would meet the faithful — the Ranee of Sarawak, Edward Thomas, Edward Garnett, Cunninghame-Graham, and sometimes Mrs. G. R. Green, but Hudson did n’t get on very well with Mrs. Green. ’I think Mrs. Green was not too well pleased with me for what I said about her wings, aigret, and bird of paradise plumes, but I say what I think and shall do so till I die, even if it results in alienating the last friend I have on earth.’ But what Hudson said alienated nobody; no man had more devoted friends.

Though an excellent host, Hudson felt out of place in London. ‘My outings since I last heard from you have been within the British Isles, no further away than Derbyshire, the Peak, and the West of England. My object in life is to look after birds.’ Watching birds was, of course, Hudson’s passion, but he cared deeply for the English villages, and his letters are full of his wanderings in Cornwall, Norfolk, and Derbyshire. It seemed he always chose villages with beautiful names. He wrote from the Lamb Inn, Hindon, near Salisbury: —

This is a nice village, and there are others better near here — Fonthill Bishop, East Knoyle, especially. I wonder if you will nurse the project of getting a place in the country? I’m inquiring here all the time, and yet I don’t like the idea of settling down anywhere in the shadows of these gigantic human beech trees that kill anything under them, the Fonthill Abbey and Clouds and Longleat magnates. They kill the souls of the people and therefore my soul abhors them and I curse them in a book in a proper way. Oddly enough, one likes these people well enough when you know them. It is not they but the system in which they were cradled. But why do I inflict all this on you? I wish I could see you instead of sending a wretched scrawl; however, I may be going up soon if I get round.

He would often write thus bitterly, but when he met some relations of the ‘Longleat magnates’ at our house he liked them. Indeed, he would say worse things about Bernard Shaw, and the socialists, whom he disliked, than about ‘magnates.’ There was a strange Spanish pride in Hudson, who was attracted by people of principle and character, whatever their birth, and sensitive to fine breeding. Were not Sir Edward Grey, CunninghameGraham, and the Ranee of Sarawak his chosen friends?

Again, he wrote from Silchester: —

I found your letter at the Winchester post office yesterday morning and am very grateful to you for writing as you do. I wish I deserved the praise you give my work. I am doing some work here and will finish in a very few days, so shall most probably return to London at the end of this week. I hope to see you at Hampstead one day very soon. I had not made the acquaintance of some of the most interesting spots in Hampshire before, and yesterday from Winchester went to one — Cheriton, a small old-world spot, a village that calls itself a town, but is composed of a very few old cottages and houses and an ancient church. Another still more interesting spot is Brandean, a village near — the battle of Cheriton in Cromwell’s wars was fought close to this village. One of its chief glories is Woodcot House, a very beautiful Elizabethan manor house in a park. Here lives Sir Seymour Haden, the veteran etcher; he is, I believe, getting near ninety, and does no art work now, but is occupied in collecting all his original work he can get hold of. The house is full of it. He took me all over the place and could manage to get up and down the stairs very well in spite of his years.

You have not (I hope) a copy of the Naturalist in La Plata, as I have one to take you w hen I go to see you. Dent has made a rather nice-looking book of it.

IV

Among Hudson’s closest friends were Edward Thomas and Edward Garnett. Thomas was shy and sensitive, but had a beautiful nature which made him loved by all who knew him; Hudson I know regarded him with deep affection. Garnett was the most selfless of men, and was among the first to recognize the genius of Conrad and Hudson. There was nothing he would not do for them, or for any man whom he admired. On this account he was unfairly treated, for he thought and did so much for others that his own claim to recognition as a discerning critic was overlooked. I think, too, that those who first befriend men who later become famous feel as did the servants in the parable — that the late comers in friendship get as much, nay, often more than those who give help and sympathy when they are most needed.

Galsworthy, too, was devoted to Hudson; indeed, Hudson came next after Conrad, I think, in his esteem. Galsworthy was becoming a figure in the literary world. Conrad had at first spoken of his writing rather apologetically, as though it were the man who was most worthy of our acquaintance. But, as often happens, it was not the master but the pupil to whom the greater success came. Not that Galsworthy was in fact a pupil of Conrad; but he regarded Conrad as a master, and was modest about his own gifts. Through his epic picture of upper middle class life he became a favorite with the public, both in England and abroad, before Conrad did. Tall, austere-looking, with a Roman profile and tightly closed lips, always correctly dressed, Galsworthy would not have looked out of place in Downing Street. His manners were as severely correct as his dress. Yet his calm patrician appearance was deceptive; he was by no means a friend to aristocrats. If there was a lame dog to be helped over a stile, one went straight to Galsworthy. ‘Jack’ was the name one heard most often during illness in the Conrad household. But fame was coming to Conrad, too. The little Pent Farm was given up for a pleasant place near Bedford; then a larger establishment was set up.

On Tuesdays Hudson often lunched at a little French restaurant in Frith Street, the Mont Blanc, where he would meet, besides the faithful Edward Garnett, Hilaire Belloc, H. W. Nevinson, Conrad, J. L. Hammond, and others who dropped in. Hammond was now, together with his wife, exploring the less known tracks of social history — little known to me, at least, for their first book, The Village Labourer, gave me a new insight into village life, I sent a copy to Thomas Hardy, thinking it would have a special interest for him, as indeed it had. He replied from Max Gate: —

I have read with much interest a good deal of the book you kindly sent me. With details of the last peasant revolt I have, of course, been familiar from childhood, though it occurred earlier than my actual recollection carries me. My father knew a man who was hanged for saying to a farmer, ‘It will be a light night’ (his ricks being set fire to before the morning). As a child I personally knew a boy who was starved to death in ’the hungry forties’ during my absence in London with my mother. He used to keep sheep near our house. However, those times are happily over, and things are a little the other way now, for the farm laborers are very comfortable, and better off than the London poor.

Whether Hardy spoke of Hudson’s books I do not remember; but Hudson admired Hardy’s, especially his Return of the Native. Hardy himself cherished The Well-Beloved, perhaps because it was less read than his other stories. Something I said made him refer to this book, and he spoke at length of the psychology of this unusual attraction of mother and daughter and granddaughter for the same man. How unassuming Hardy was! He had much in common with painters like John Crome; indeed, Egdon Heath put me in mind of a landscape by Crome, and Hardy himself retained something of local quality and character about his person, a quality which some would consider provincial, but which I prefer to call true ‘county.’

There was one man who did n’t admire Hudson; this was Edmund Gosse, who was seldom well disposed to writers whose merits he had not been among the first to recognize. Gosse was nervously anxious to be sympathetic to young people, but I was rarely at my ease with him. I went sometimes, in the nineties, to his Sunday afternoons, when he would look round and pick out guests whom he retained for supper. Sometimes, if there were no great guns present, he would include me, and, being vain, I somewhat resented being weighed in the balance. I would often meet Gosse at the Savile Club, but the slight discomfort of his bright, singsong manner remained. Later, I found myself more at my ease in his society, enjoying his wit, and his passion for literature; and we had in common a friendship for Conrad. I was amused, too, at Gosse’s pernickety ways. When, at the Leicester Gallery, I showed a drawing I had made of him and sent him a private view card, there came an indignant letter: —

DEAR W. ROTHENSTEIN,
I am told that your Exhibition is open, but I do not know where. I think you might have remembered your promise to send me a card of invitation to the Private View, or at least some intimation of the event.
I am much obliged to you for the interesting print of your portrait of Swinburne. You will forgive me if I say that I think the aspect of him which presented itself to you a very painful one. But of course it has a great interest.

If you had asked me to see your show, I should probably have wished to possess the portrait of Conrad. But most likely you have already parted with it to someone else.
Believe me, Very faithfully yours,
EDMUND GOSSE

This was followed, the day after, by another letter: —

MY DEAR W. ROTHENSTEIN,
The mystery is explained. Messrs. Brown and P’s card of invitation was delivered at my house last night! The envelope had an address so ingeniously and complicatedly false that the wonder is it ever reached me at all.
However, I went round to the Leicester Galleries yesterday, and was fortunate enough to secure the ‘Joseph Conrad’ It is a most magnificent drawing, and will be a great joy to me to possess. If I outlive Conrad, it is my intention to bequeath it to the National Portrait Gallery. I went through the exhibition very carefully. You will not resent my saying that I think you experience the universal fate of portraitists — that is to say, you do not always succeed. But your successes far outnumber your comparative failures. Unquestionable successes, and of a very high order, are two (at least) of the Hardys, Newbolt, Stopford Brooke, Conrad, myself, ‘A.E.,’ and A. E. Housman. All these are superlatively good. I do not mean that these alone, or nearly alone, are good, but these excel.
I feel it a great compliment to be included in your gallery, and the ‘Conrad’ will be one of my treasures.
Very sincerely yours,
EDMUND GOSSE

‘Very faithfully,’ ‘very sincerely’ — how like Gosse! And how quickly his natural generosity reasserts itself!

Later, my relations with Gosse became cordial; if a man has the talent to live beyond threescore and ten years, his other talents seem to mature, to acquire bouquet. Gosse’s nature ripened like a peach on a sunny wall, and during the last year of his life I saw much of him and enjoyed the generous affection he extended to me. He was pleased with my praise of his daughter’s painting, for at one time the modernity of her work had alarmed him. For Gosse, who responded so quickly to the work of young writers, remained a Pre-Raphaelite in his attitude toward painting.

Hence he was always delighted at my interest in the pictures on his walls; and, since I had known Swinburne and Watts-Dunton, he unburdened himself of some of his feeling toward them. Believing that Watts-Dunton had poisoned Swinburne’s mind against him, it was the pre-Pines poet for whom he reserved his enthusiasm. He was interested in what I had heard from Major Charvot, in the old Rat Mort days, about Maupassant’s meeting with Swinburne at Étretat; and a fantastic story of a monkey, incredible to me, had some meaning for Gosse, who had heard a more accurate account from others.

What credence should be given to tales one hears at second hand? Rodin once told me how, as a youth, he had known the old painter Gigoux. Gigoux, who in his day had been a great buck, and had associated freely with the great men of the thirties, told Rodin strange stories of his exploits. Had he ever known Balzac? Rodin asked him. Not known him exactly, and the old man sniggered; but he had seen him once — from behind a curtain in Madame de Hanska’s bedroom. If there is any truth in this story, the mysterious shadow across Balzac’s late marriage, hinted at in his letters, becomes plainer. Rodin told me, too, that on going to Victor Hugo for an early morning sitting he stumbled against someone lying outside the poet’s door — it was the faithful Juliette Drouet. Such stories strike the imagination, containing elements of something more dramatic than mere gossip.