Hethway Speaking

MAX BEERBOHM

IN 1895 I, who was then a very young man. made acquaintance with a far older one, Mr. Sylvester Hethway, He lived in a beautiful old house in Cheyne Walk. He was a man of keen literary and artistic taste, and in the eighteen-sixties and seventies had been a friend of many men whose names had magic for my young ears. Of them and of their characters he was very ready to talk to me, and I would afterwards write out, as exactly in his own words as I could remember them, what he had told me.

Some weeks ago, in a cupboard, I came across a few of these old reports; and it has been thought that you might be interested in some of them.

Here, then, is Hethway speaking of Swinburne as Swinburne had been at the time when George Meredith and he lodged in the house of Dante Gabriel Rossetti further along Cheyne Row.

“Ah, Swinburne, yes. Strange little creature. He had the prettiest, funniest ways. He was wonderfully endearing. Apart from his genius, he was the most childlike of little children. One did so want no harm to come to him. And he was so anxious to be good and obedient. But he hadn#8217;t will power enough for that. He caused us all the greatest anxiety. What could be done? It wasn’t that he drank much wine, but that so very little of it went to his head — and that he did always want a little. I fancy that somehow he needed it‚ too. It wasn’t good for his body; but then, you see, his body was such an infinitesimal part of him: the rest was all spirit, and the spirit perhaps required a special diet. It was all very odd. Everything about Swinburne was odd. Meredith used to call him Algernon the Incalculable. ‘It’s maddening,’he would say, ‘to find anyone making so much out of nothing. How does he do it? We other fellows have to go through a long process of doing and being, and then of thinking hard about what we’ve done and what we are. We have to go to and fro, gathering fagots for tinder; laboriously and cunningly we stack them — and then, as likely as not‚ they won’t burn. But Swinburne can always make a blaze without a speck of fuel. There’s nothing in him but inspiration. Our main difficulty is how to make a beginning: his only problem is how to leave off.’

“Another time Meredith said, ‘It’s all very well to say that Algernon gets his motive power from books, not from life. It’s true, but it’s not the whole truth. If all the books in the world were burned tomorrow, and nothing left of them but one charred corner of a page from an old French chronicle, Algernon would find enough in that to enable him to go on creating forever.’ ”

Hethway told me that Rossetti, the very sedentary Rossetti, found Meredith, with his great love of wind and weather, rather a trial. Rossetti had said one day dolefully, “He’s always coming in early in the afternoon, just as I’m beginning to paint well. ‘Glorious weather, Rossetti!’ he cries. ‘Come out for a stretch with me — do you all the good in the world!’ He always seems to be going to Hendon, and he always brings out the name as though it were a name to conjure with — something sacred, irresistible; Mecca; the Promised Land. I say to him, ‘Meredith, if you brought Hendon to me in your hand, I wouldn’t look at it.’ Or I say, ‘Look here, my dear fellow: this is an easel, this is a canvas, this is a palette, and this is me—just getting into my stride. Go and get into yours, by all means. I don’t ask you to sit down and help me paint this picture. Why should you want me to assist you in traipsing to Hendon? Once and for all, Meredith, Hendon be damned!’ For a moment he has a puzzled look; then he throws back his head, laughs that great laugh of his, and swings out of the studio, banging the door behind him. I never dare ask him not to bang the door, because then he’d tell me that if I took exercise I shouldn’t have nerves. And I should have to explain that I’d much rather jump an inch or two off my chair than walk ten miles or whatever the confounded distance to Hendon is.”

HETHWAY had seen a fair amount of Thomas Carlyle. He said: “One day, when I had been traveling abroad, I went in to see him. He told me he had been painted by a young Mr. James Whistler. It was an odd conjunction. I asked him how it had come about. He said it was through Madame Venturi. I dare say you’ve never heard of her. She had lived for many years in Chelsea. She was a great friend of dear Mrs. Carlyle. Both these ladies had an immense esteem for Mazzini, whom Carlyle thought a poor crittur — not because Mazzini was so, but because Carlyle was so unvarying in his judgment of men. Since Mrs. Carlyle’s death he had formed the habit of going often to Madame Venturi’s house. He may have thought her a poor crittur, but she loved Janie’s memory, and that sufficed. ‘And one day,’ he told me, ‘there was a wee young man with a mop of black ringlets and a quizzing-glass — a sor-rt of pocket Disraeli by the looks of him, but American in his talk, of which there was much. When he was gone, Mrs. Venturi asked me what I thought of him; and I told her without cir-r-cumlocution. Said she, “But he’s going to be a verra great painter, and he wants to paint you; and he’s verra poor,” she said, “and he’s verra guid to his mither-r.” She’s a most per-rtinacious crittur, is Mrs. Venturi, and next day I found myself with her at a house alongside the river, there to see this Mr. Whistler’s paintings. The Mither-r received us — a dainty-sad little auld silvery dame, gentle of speech and shy-authoritative. Presently in comes son, and we all go into his wor-rkroom, and there, propped up on a bit of wooden stand, is a picture of the Mither-r, with a frame to it. There she sat, side-face, a sad figure, all in black, lonesome and shy-authoritative, against a plain gray wall of parlor. I canna count how many sittings I gave that slow-working son. One day he said, “Finis,” and showed me his handiwork. There I sat, sideface, all in black, lonesome and meditative-gentle, against a pale gray wall of parlor. Painter stood by me sharp-expectant. “Well, young man,” I said at last, “ye’re verra filial, verra filial indeed.” ‘ ”

OF WILLIAM MORRIS at the time when he had founded with his friend Faulkner the famous firm of furnishers and decorators, Hethway gave me an interesting glimpse: “One morning Pringle, my butler, came up to my study and said that Mr. Faulkner and another gentleman were in the drawing room. He said, ‘I told Mr. Faulkner you were not at home, sir, but the other gentleman said that then they”d come in and wait.’ I asked Pringle who the other gentleman was. ‘I don’t know, sir,’ he said. ‘A seafaring gentleman, I think.’ I wondered what Morris could want with me.

“As I went downstairs I heard his voice raised in great enthusiasm about something; and as I entered, the sturdy and rosy fellow rushed at me and clapped me on the shoulders. ‘Splendid,’ he cried, stepping back, ‘grandiose, scrumptious.’

“ ‘What is?’ I asked.

“ ‘Why, this,’ he answered, spinning round on his heel, with his right arm extended, and radiantly facing me again.

“ ‘You like the room?’ I asked.

“ ‘Like it? Why, it’s the most beautiful room in London.’

“I turned to Faulkner (who was standing in the background — looking, I noticed, rather uncomfortable) and ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is praise indeed from Sir Hubert! I was afraid Morris wouldn’t approve of my taste at all. This sofa, for instance — very different from that famous wooden settle of his in Red Lion Square.’

“ ‘Sofa?' cried Morris. ‘Call that a sofa? Why it’s only a —a perch for canary birds. But the room — golly!' and he spun ecstatically round on his heel, upsetting this time a slim Sheraton stand on which was a silver vase with a rose in it. ‘Sorry,’ he exclaimed, picked up the stand, replaced the vase and the rose, and — he was always extraordinarily handy — sopped the wet floor dry with his huge handkerchief; all in an instant of time. ‘Sorry,’ he said again, ‘but it’s the gimcrack’s own fault, you know. And it clinches our scheme, by Jove, doesn’t it?’

“ ‘What scheme?’ I inquired.

“ ‘Oh, I forgot: you weren’t in the room. The scheme. To make a clean sweep of all these folderols and really furnish the room. Moment I came in, I swore we’d do this for you — didn’t I‚ Faulkner? We’d been round to sec Gabriel Rossetti‚ on business. As we came away Faulkner pointed out this house to me — told me you lived here. Confess I’d quite forgotten you, old chap. Liked the look of your house, though. Thought you might want some things. Besides, pleasure to see you again. Wasn’t prepared for this room though. Felt the challenge of it at once. I’ve got half the designs in my head already, and I’ll put ‘em in hand today. All you’ve got to do is to get your things carted off to Christie’s or somewhere and pocket what they fetch. I and Faulkner and Go. will do the rest.’

“I said, ‘Your idea is that I should sell all that I have and follow you?’

“‘Right — you’ve hit it!’ he cried. ‘And what’s more, we’ll let you have everything at 2 per cent above cost of production, by Jiminy, because we’re blooming beginners and you’re our friend. Hooray! I’ve got all the designs in my head now,’ and he struck his forehead a violent blow with his fist. ‘I see your whole blessed room for you, all clear before me. You shall have a great cedar chair there, in the middle, like Odin’s throne; and a settle — all along this wall — to seat a regiment. And Ned Burne-Jones will do the stained glass for your windows — Life of La Belle Iseult; and Ford Madox Brown shall do the panels of the settle — Boyhood of Chaucer; and’ — he strode up and down, brandishing his arms — ‘there’s a young chap named William De Morgan who’ll do the tiles for the hearth; and my wife shall embroider the edges of the window curtains — you know that green serge we’ve got, Faulkner — glorious. And by Jove we’ll —’ But here he slipped and sat with a terrific crash on the parquet. ‘That’s just what I was going to speak about,’ he continued, sitting. ‘This isn’t a floor, it’s a sheet of ice. It won’t do; we must have good honest rough oaken boards with bulrushes,’ he cried, bounding to his feet, ‘strewn bulrushes. And we’ll have a —’

“ ‘One moment, Morris,’ I begged. ‘When you say we, do you mean simply yourself and Faulkner and the Company, or do you include me? ‘

“ ‘But of course I include you,’ he said. ‘Why, hang it all, the room’s yours.’

“ ‘That’s just what I was beginning to doubt,’ I said.

“He stared hard at me, and I at him. Rather a dog-and-cat effect, I suppose. It lasted some seconds. Morris saw that I wouldn’t waver. One of his great qualities was that he never wasted time. He always concentrated his energies on things that could be done, he never repined over things that couldn’t. Here was a thing that couldn’t. He looked at his watch, whistled (he always whistled whenever he looked at his watch), snatched his hat — ‘Come along, Faulkner!’ he cried. ‘No offense, Hethway!’— and was gone.

“He was a queer fellow — a great character; quite apart. And as good as gold. But I hadn’t much in common with him.”

OF COURSE Hethway’s friends and acquaintances were not all members of the Rossettian and Chelsean circle. He had been privileged to know Tennyson, for instance, and had met repeatedly the very social Robert Browning. Here is a contrast he drew between those two:

“They were as unlike their own work as they were unlike each other. When I think of them I am tempted to say that a man’s work is rather the needful supplement to himself than the mere outcome of it — or at any rate that the smoothness of a man’s art is in inverse ratio to his own. The smoother Tennyson’s verse became, the more rugged and tangled was he to look at. The more tangled and rugged Browning made his poetry, the more surely would anyone meeting him for the first time have taken him for a banker or a fashionable physician. The greater the exactions he made, as he grew older, on the intellect and the patience of his readers, the easier was it to understand what he said — and even to foretell what he would say — at a dinner table. And Tennyson’s manners — ah, they were the very least of all adapted to courtly circles at the very time when he had finally purged his art of anything that might conceivably vex the ghost of the Prince Consort.”

And here finally is the report I made of what Hethway one day had to say about Walter Pater: “He would come and see me here sometimes. He had a house with his sisters in Earl’s Terrace — Kensington, you know. But he didn’t like Kensington very much. He used to say, ‘The High Street is so full of noise and stress.’ He liked Cheyne Walk. I remember his standing with me at a window here in this room, one day in spring, gazing out silently. A tug passed by, towing a couple of barges. ‘One might almost wish,’ he said in his gentle voice, ‘that the river could be exempt from traffic. It does, a little, mar your secular peace.’ I laughed outright, and I think Miss Pater, who had come with him, was rather shocked by my mirth, but not so Pater; he liked to be amiably rallied, to be teased a little, by his friends. I met him somewhere a few days later, and told him that his remark had been repeated by me to the river police, and that they, being men of some culture and great admirers of his prose style, had said to me, ‘When next Mr. Pater is coming to see you, sir, please let us know. We will stop the traffic.’

“For chaff of that kind he had a keen relish. I don’t know whether young men read him much. I believe that at Oxford in the seventies and eighties he had quite a following and was taken very seriously as a teacher. I myself have never been able to take teachers or preachers very seriously. Of course I have often admired the genius, the force or grace, of this one and that. But their actual ‘messages’ are — well, they’re so very characteristic of the messengers: the vain ones who want us to be just like themselves, and the modest ones who would have us be just what they are not. I have known many messengers, and all fall into one or the other of these two categories. Mr. Carlyle, with all his faults of temper, was one of the modest kind, and Mr. Ruskin — generous and usually angelic though he was — one of the vain. Mr. Carlyle, being eloquent, and a peasant, and always ailing, desiderated a race of strong silent aristocrats; and dear Mr. Ruskin despaired of a world in which not everybody admired Giotto and Turner and Miss Kate Greenaway so much as he. Great men, both of them; but great not in their messages, great in their delivery. Dear Matthew Arnold — Matt Arnold, as we called him — was not quite on their level, of course; but he had a great vogue, he was very much listened to in the seventies. His hope for the English upper and middle and lower classes was that they should all with one accord read Sophocles and Goethe. He was, I am afraid, pre-eminently one of the vain. Among the modest there was no more shining light than Walter Pater. He earnestly counseled the young to ‘be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy.’ And he himself could not stand Kensington High Street. He very solemnly warned the young that ‘to form habits is failure in life.’ I suggested to him one day that in the next edition of his book he ought to add a footnote: ‘In life, however, there are worse things than failure: for example, not having one’s cup of tea with a slice of thin bread and butter, at five o’clock punctually.’ He laughed gently and said, ‘That is a shrewd jest at me, Hethway; but not at the sincerity of my doctrine.’ And of course he was quite right there. No man was more sincere in his efforts to make people as unlike himself as possible. His one lapse from constancy was when he urged them ‘to burn always with a hard, gem-like flame.’ To burn like that, one must shut out all drafts, as he did. One must burn inside a small closed lantern, as he did ... as I do, I suppose, nowadays,” Hethway added with a smile. “But I don’t regard myself as a terrible example — nor as a good one. In fact, I’ve no message for the world.”

And, indeed, he had none. For he existed, let me now confess, only in my imagination and in the intention I had many years ago to write a book around him — a book to be entitled The Mirror of the Past, a mirror which, hanging in his drawing room, gradually ceased to reflect present things and began to reflect things long past. I had made many notes for such a book; and among them were those notes of Hethway’s conversation which I have just given to you. Please don’t be vexed with me for having let you suppose Sylvester was a real person. I thought that he as a real person would be likelier than I as a fabricator to impress and please you.