Chapter IV: The Good Man and Cupid 256 (2)

“1. A young girl weighing gold in a little casket. 155 florins.

“2. A milkwoman. 175 fls.

“3. The portrait of the painter, in a room. 45 fls.

“4. A young woman playing the guitar. 70 fls.

“5. A nobleman in his room. 95 fls.

“6. A young woman at the harpsichord, and a young gentleman listening. 30 fls.

“7. A young woman taking a letter from a servant. 70 fls.

“8. A drunken servant, sleeping at a table. 62 fls.

“9. A gay company in a room. 73 fls.

“10. A man and a young woman making music. 81 fls.

“11. A soldier with a young girl who is laughing. 44 fls.

“12. A young lace-maker. 28 fls.

“13. View of Delft. 200 fls.

“14. House at Delft. 72 fls.

“15. View of several houses. 48 fls.

“16. Young woman writing. 63 fls.

“17. Young woman adorning herself. 30 fls.

“18. Young woman at the harpsichord. 42 fls.

“19. A portrait in ancient costume. 36 fls.

“20. and 21. Two pendants. 34 fls.”

On the above catalogue M. Vanzype comments as follows:--

“The greater number of these pictures seem to have been recovered.

“The _Milkwoman_ [No. 2] is, in all probability, the one hanging for so long in the Six collection.

“The _Young woman playing the guitar_ [No. 4] is actually the picture belonging to Mr. Johnson, in Philadelphia. It has been in the Cremer collection at Brussels and in the H. Bischoffsheim collection in London.

“The _Young woman at a harpsichord with a gentleman listening_ [No. 6] is no doubt the much-admired picture at Windsor Castle, where it is one of the treasures and is called _The Music Lesson_. It was sold at Amsterdam at the Roos sale, in 1820, for 340 florins.

“The _Young woman taking a letter from a servant_ [No. 7] is at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, under the title _The Letter_. It was bought by the State, through the intervention of the Rembrandt Society and of M. Van Lennep, from M. Messcher Van Vollenhoven for 45,000 florins.

“The _Drunken servant sleeping at a table_ [No. 8] is, in all probability, the picture which until just lately belonged to the Kahn collection in Paris, and of the authenticity of which there is no doubt. [This was bought by Mr. Altman in 1910.] Bürger possessed another picture, a servant sleeping in a kitchen, and he believed that this was the work sold in 1696. In his picture the figure is not leaning on the table. It is now in the Widener collection and in it the characteristic qualities of Vermeer are not to be found.

“_A man and a young woman making music_ [No. 10] is probably the _Singing Lesson_ of the Frick collection at Pittsburg.

“_A soldier with a young girl who is laughing_ [No. 11] is Mrs. Joseph’s picture in London.

“_The young lace-maker_ [No. 12] is the little _chef-d’œuvre_ in the Louvre sold for 84 francs at the Muilman sale in 1813; 501 in 1817 at the Lapeyrière sale; 265 fls. at the Nagel sale in 1851, and in 1870 bought by M. Blockhuyzen, of Rotterdam, for 1270 frs.

“The _View of Delft_ [No. 13], if it has no replica, is the picture in the Museum at the Hague, for which 2900 fls. was paid at the Stinstra sale in 1822.

“The _House at Delft_ [No. 14] is the _Ruelle_ of the Six collection.

“The _Young woman writing_ [No. 16] is without doubt the picture in the Beit collection in London. This was in the Héris sale at Brussels in 1857.

“The _Young woman adorning herself_ [No. 17] is _The Pearl Necklace_ in the Berlin Museum.

“The _Young woman at the harpsichord_ [No. 18] is either the picture in the National Gallery or that in the Beit collection, or perhaps that in the Salting collection [now also at the National Gallery].

“It is believed that the portrait in ancient costume [No. 19] is the portrait of the young girl in the Museum at the Hague [my frontispiece].

“[Nos. 20 and 21.] Finally, since at the Hendrik Borgh sale in 1720 one _Astrologer_ and its pendant were sold for 160 fls.; and since two _Astrologers_ and a pendant were sold at the Neyman sale in 1797 for 270 and 132 fls., it may be deduced that the pendants of the 1696 sale are either the two _Geographers_ which belong at the present day to the Museum at Frankfort and to M. Du Bus de Gisegnies at Brussels; or one only of these and M. Alphonse de Rothschild’s _Astronomer_.”

To these remarks of M. Vanzype may be added that No. 1 is the picture recently exhibited in London and now in Mr. Widener’s collection, and No. 3 is probably the Czernin picture. No. 9 might be the Brunswick painting. This leaves us only with two of the Amsterdam sale pictures to discover--No. 5, _A nobleman in his room_, and No. 15, _View of several houses_. But, of course, certain others which M. Vanzype and I think we have traced may be wholly different. M. Vanzype furthermore remarks: “Other pictures have at certain times been heard of and have since disappeared, notably the ‘_Dévideuse_’ discussed in 1865 by Bürger and an English connoisseur, which was then in England, but of which no trace has since been found.”

Among the thirty-nine that are known, although there are many interiors such as the painter loved, there is, remember, only one woodland scene, only one pure landscape, only one religious subject, only one real portrait, only one street scene, only one kitchen scene, only one purely classical subject, only one family scene. The isolation of these examples fills one with a kind of fury. No painter, and especially no painter with such an interest in the difficulties of his art, such a painter’s painter, so to speak, as Vermeer, and moreover a man with eight children and a clamorous baker--no painter paints only one landscape, especially when the result is so commandingly successful as the “View of Delft.” Where are the others? (M. Vanzype has found a replica, but it is not generally accepted.) No painter is satisfied with one attempt at a beautiful façade. Where are the others? (We know there was one other.) No painter paints only one classical subject. Where are the others? (Mr. Paterson’s example is only half-classical: classical with a domestic flavour: a family scene in masquerade, to be exact.) No painter paints only one religious subject. Where are the others? No painter paints only one portrait pure and simple as distinguished from portrait and _genre_. M. Vanzype, it is true, claims to have found another; but that would make only two. How indeed would he be allowed to paint no others, when he was Vermeer of Delft and lived in an age of Dutch prosperity and Dutch interest in art? Where are the others? Do you see how one feels--how maddening it is that these bare forty are all, when one knows that there must have been many more?

Vermeer may, of course, have himself destroyed some, as Claude Monet recently destroyed a number of his. But I do not think so; he could not have afforded to, and he was not that kind. No: they still exist somewhere. And the question where are they brings us back to the wealth of Mr. Pierpont Morgan, for which I was wishing at the beginning of this essay. With it I would furnish expeditions not to discover the Poles north and south, because I care nothing for them; not to conquer the air, because I love too much to feel my feet on this green earth; not to break banks or to finance companies; not to kill the gentle giraffe for America’s museums; but simply to hunt among the byways of Northern Europe in the hope of coming upon another work by that exquisite Delft hand. That is how I would spend my money; and incidentally what charming adventures one would have, and what subsidiary treasure one would gather! That would be an expedition worth making, even if the prime object of the search always eluded us.

The Fool’s Paradise

There is an old picture-shop in the West-Central district of London, notable for the grime of its canvases, in the window of which there is to be seen at this moment--unless a confiding purchaser has just borne it off--a girl’s head and bust by some very indifferent Dutch hand, under which is printed on the frame the startling and courageous legend, “The Coral Necklace. By Jan Vermeer, of Delft.”

Of course the ascription is inaccurate. Were it accurate and the picture worthy of it, this little shop would be the Mecca of the first art experts of Europe and America, and the dealer would be in the way to affluence; nor does the picture’s present owner probably believe in it. But what of some previous possessor who did believe in it--some simple soul who was genuinely convinced that upon his wall hung a portrait by this rarest and most exquisite and radiant of Dutch masters? Do you not envy him his easy credence, his want of fastidious taste? I do.

A little while ago there was a lawsuit--indeed a series of lawsuits--all turning upon the collection of porcelain left by a wealthy Regent Street merchant, whose hobby was the acquisition of china. As a man in the prime of life he had been a good judge; but as he grew older and his brain weakened his sense of discrimination left him, and it was discovered that his later purchases, so far from being the priceless examples of Dresden and other ware which they were thought to be, were all-but worthless. This naturally was a grief and disappointment to the heirs who were to benefit from the sale; but for us to be sorry for him is as foolish a waste of sympathy as I know. For though there he sat, that old amateur of ceramics, surrounded by the mediocre, yet in that he believed it to be the choicest he was enviable. That belief is the heart of the case, since it is not what things really are, but what one thinks things to be, that is the important matter.

Truth has a slightly different expression for every one. To this aged connoisseur with his decaying faculties her expression was falseness itself, could he have scrutinised it with intelligence, but to his dim eyes it looked like the finest candour, and therefore it was the finest candour. He sunned himself in it, and passing his hands lovingly over the spurious shepherdesses was happy. The point is that he could not have been happier had the porcelain been truly of the rarest and most wonderful.

I hope it will never be my fortune to visit a picture collector whose walls are hung entirely with obvious copies which he believes to be original, and flagrant daubs which he thinks masterpieces--a collector in short who relies only on the posthumous activity of artists; yet if it is, I hope I shall know how to control myself when he displays his treasures. But of one thing I am certain: that no matter how I may suffer from the concealment of my true feelings as an art lover, I shall experience a genuine affection for my host, and a genuine delight in his transparent, credible nature. Surely the people who live in fool’s paradises are the salt of the earth. The man who says of a fine thing, “A fine thing and my own,” I can admire, but not necessarily with warmth; the man (he is very common) who says of a fine thing, “A poor thing, but my own,” I have very little use for; but the man who says of a poor thing, “A fine thing and my own,” him I admire cordially, and could almost embrace.

But about this Vermeer. I cannot get it out of my head, for Vermeer is a painter of whom, as you know, I have made some study, and the thought of any one really sitting down excitedly with this grotesquely misattributed picture in his room, reading the lying label without a qualm, even with pride, scanning the commonplace paint with no twinge of dubiety--it is this thought which beats me. The man who confidently had the legend printed on the frame must indeed have been a simpleton beyond appraisement--the very briniest salt of the soil. For consider: the copyists, the forgers, may do credible things with Corot, even with Raphael. Every day they are writing David Cox’s signature on old water-colours; false ascriptions are the life-blood of too many firms. That is true. But Vermeer--there is only one Vermeer! and yet some man could know enough about Vermeer to wish to have something by him on his wall (modest wish--there are not, as I have been saying, forty known Vermeer canvases in the world), and then be satisfied with this! If ever I longed to meet a freak it is he--not only to examine his bumps, but to abase myself before him. For there is a true philosopher, a really wise man, if you like.

Meanwhile I wish some dramatist with an eye to quaint character, if there be such a one left, would set upon the stage for us a paradisiacal fool such as this--a simple kind of enthusiast without a shred of critical faculty or a drop of guile, whom we might see amiably fondling his geese and deeming them swans. That would give me, for one, great pleasure. Lamb, in his Captain Jackson, approached and skirted the type, but Vermeer’s “Coral Necklace” would not have attracted that engaging creature. If Anatole France were a dramatist and would return to the gentle, smiling mood in which he thought out and built up his Sylvestre Bonnard, he might give us this collector. I can think of no one else; and even he would probably be a little too much inclined to whip something on his back, such a castigator and ridiculer as he is.

Consolers of Genius

I have just added another famous dog to my list. It was a good list before, but it is now richer. It included Matthew Arnold’s Geist and Max and Kaiser, George Meredith’s Islet, Cowper’s Beau, Newton’s Diamond, Mrs. Browning’s Flush, Mr. Lehmann’s Rufus, all Dr. John Brown’s many friends, Scott’s deerhounds, Mortimer Collins’s St. Bernards, Pope’s spaniel. I remember only these as I write, but of course there are many others. And to this company enters now “Pomero.”

Landor’s “Pomero” came to him late in life--in the early ’forties--by which time the old man--he was then nearing seventy but had twenty fairly stormy years left--had settled again in England, his wife and family and most of his sympathies being far away in Italy. At Bath he then lived, making occasional visits to Gore House, and varying the composition of exquisite prose and tender felicitous verse with quarrels and tempests and tempests and reconciliations and tempests and lawsuits. Such then was the possessor of “Pomero”--or, as he would probably have called himself, the proud possession of “Pomero”--of whom such glimpses as I have had come to me in scraps of letters quoted by Forster in his Life of this noble, troubled, impossible, glorious creature.

Here is one, written by Landor at Warwick, when away from home, or what stood for home at that period--1844. Pomero had only just arrived from Fiesole; and it is worth remarking that had Landor lived to-day no such fortune would ever have been his, for never would he have survived such explosions of rage as the modern six months’ quarantine for imported dogs would have brought on him. (Think of him expressing his views to the custom-house officer at Dover!) “Daily,” he wrote, “do I think of Bath and Pomero. I fancy him lying on the narrow window-sill, and watching the good people go to church. He has not yet made up his mind between the Anglican and Roman Catholic; but I hope he will continue in the faith of his forefathers, if it will make him happier.”

Pomero, I should say, was a Pomeranian; but let me quote Sir Sidney Colvin’s charming sentences upon both man and dog. “With ‘Pomero’ Landor would prattle in English and Italian as affectionately as a mother with a child. Pomero was his darling, the wisest and most beautiful of his race; Pomero had the brightest eyes and the most wonderful yaller tail ever seen. Sometimes it was Landor’s humour to quote Pomero in speech and writing as a kind of sagacious elder brother whose opinion had to be consulted on all subjects before he would deliver his own. This creature accompanied his master wherever he went, barking ‘not fiercely but familiarly’ at friend and stranger, and when they came in would either station himself upon his master’s head to watch the people passing in the street, or else lie curled up in his basket until Landor, in talk with some visitor, began to laugh, and his laugh to grow and grow, when Pomero would spring up and leap upon and fume about him, barking and screaming for sympathy until the whole street resounded. The two together, master and dog, were for years to be encountered daily on their walks about Bath and its vicinity, and there are many who perfectly well remember them; the majestic old man, looking not a whit the less impressive for his rusty and dusty brown suit, his bulging boots, his rumpled linen, or his battered hat; and his noisy, soft-haired, quick-glancing, inseparable companion.”

Landseer, one feels, should have painted them: Dignity and Fidelity, Unreason and Understanding, Lion and Pomeranian. Since he did not, we must go to Forster’s extracts from the letters to fill in the picture. Another passage, also in 1844: “Pomero was on my knee when your letter came. He is now looking out of the window; a sad male gossip, as I often tell him. I dare not take him with me to London. He would most certainly be stolen, and I would rather lose Ipsley or Llanthony. The people of the house love him like a child, and declare he is as sensible as a Christian. He not only is as sensible, but much more Christian than some of those who have lately brought strife and contention into the Church.”

Again: “Pomero is sitting in a state of contemplation, with his nose before the fire. He twinkles his ears and his feathery tail at your salutation. He now licks his lips and turns round, which means ‘Return mine.’ The easterly wind has an evident effect upon his nerves. Last evening I took him to hear Luisina de Sodre play and sing. She is my friend the Countess de Molande’s granddaughter and daughter of De Sodre, Minister of Brazil to the Pope a few years ago. Pomero was deeply affected, and lay close to the pedal on her gown, singing in a great variety of tones, not always in time. It is unfortunate that he always will take a part where there is music, for he sings even worse than I do.”

So far the letters have been to Forster. Here is a passage from one to Landor’s sisters, also in 1844: “Let me congratulate you on the accident that deprives you of your carriage-horses. Next to servants, horses are the greatest trouble in life. Dogs are blessings, true blessings. Pomero, who sends his love, is the comfort of my solitude and the delight of my life. He is quite a public character here in Bath. Everybody knows him and salutes him. He barks aloud at all familiarly, not fiercely. He takes equal liberties with his fellow-creatures, if indeed dogs are more his fellow-creatures than I am. I think it was St. Francis de Sales who called birds and quadrupeds his sisters and brothers. Few saints have been so good-tempered, and not many so wise.”

For twelve years Pomero lived to make his master (his servant) happy or less unhappy, and then he died. That is the tragic thing--the brief life of these loyal devotees. It is not right, not fair, that so much love and energy should so quickly pass away. Many sensitive persons refuse for this reason to keep dogs at all. That, I think, is going too far, but I can understand it. Life at its longest for a human being is so brief and so fraught with disappointment and disillusion that, at least, one feels, the span of the most faithful and satisfying friends that man knows might have been made commensurate.... Pomero, as I have said, was Landor’s for twelve years, and then he died. Writing to Forster on the 10th of March, 1856, the old man--he was eighty-one--tells the news: “Pomero, dear Pomero, died this evening at about four o’clock. I have been able to think of nothing else....”

A few days later he wrote again: “Everybody in this house grieves for Pomero. The cat lies day and night upon his grave, and I will not disturb the kind creature, though I want to plant some violets upon it, and to have his epitaph placed around his little urn:--

O urna! nunquam sis tuo eruta hortulo:
Cor intus est fidele, nam cor est canis.
Vale, hortule! aeternumque, Pomero! vale.
Sed, si datur, nostri memor.”

Eighty-one though he was, Landor had still nine years before him--years of trouble, and fury, and exile. Not till 1864 did he meet Pomero again.

Pomero had been Landor’s confidant and delight for five years when, in 1849, there came to one of the most illustrious of his contemporaries--and a critic of the world not less impatient than himself, but how different!--a similar companion. It was not, it is true, a Pomeranian, but a dog none the less.

The news was thus broken by one of the most remarkable women of all time to, as it happens, the same friend who had been first told of the arrival of Pomero. “O Lord!” she writes, wilfully, characteristically as ever, “O Lord! I forgot to tell you I have got a little dog, and Mr. C. has accepted it with an amiability! To be sure, when he comes down gloomy in the morning, or comes in wearied from his walk, the infatuated little beast dances round him on his hind legs as I ought to do and can’t; and he feels flattered and surprised by such unwonted capers to his honour and glory.” So wrote Jane Welsh Carlyle to John Forster, on the 11th of December, 1849.

Sixteen years later the writer of that letter died suddenly in her carriage in Hyde Park, and thus ended a life of heroic vivacity. Her husband, deprived for ever of the power of sustained work, difficult enough when he had her service and intelligence within call, spent a few months in his early bereavement in collecting and arranging and annotating her marvellous correspondence; and one does not envy him his feelings as he did it. Coming to the note to Forster which I have quoted, he thus introduced it: “Poor little Nero, the dog, must have come this winter, or ‘Fall’ (1849)? Railway guard (from Dilberoglue, Manchester) brought him in one evening late. A little Cuban (Maltese? and otherwise mongrel) shock, mostly white--a most affectionate, lively little dog, otherwise of small merit, and little or no training. Much innocent sport there arose out of him; much quizzical ingenuous preparation of me for admitting of him: ‘My dear, it’s borne in upon my mind that I’m to have a dog,’ etc., etc., and with such a look and style! We had many walks together, he and I, for the next ten years; a great deal of small traffic, poor little animal, so loyal, so loving, so naïve and true with what of dim intellect he had! Once, perhaps in his third year here, he came pattering upstairs to my garret; scratched duly, was let in, and brought me (literally) the ‘gift of a horse’ (which I had talked of needing)! Brought me, to wit, a letter hung to his neck, inclosing on a saddler’s card the picture of a horse, and adjoined to it a cheque for £50--full half of some poor legacy which had fallen to her! Can I ever forget such a thing? I was not slave enough to take the money; and got a horse next year, on the common terms--but all Potosi, and the diggings new and old, had not in them, as I now feel, so rich a gift!”

These three volumes of Mrs. Carlyle’s indomitably gay correspondence, laughing at her crosses, making light of her disappointments, extracting whatever of merriment or sunshine was possible, and never with any trace of self-commendation or consciousness of heroism: and a woman too who must have known that, given a fair chance, which she never had, she would have shone in her own way with hardly less brilliancy than her bear; who must have known she was worth petting, and considering, and adoring rightly--these three volumes of brilliant good-humour against odds, with the dour, intolerant, solitary widower re-living the irrecoverable past as he read them over and edited them, counting his lost opportunities on every page, are surely as tragic a work as literature knows. But Nero is pawing at the desk. The note continues: “Poor Nero’s last good days were with us at Aberdour, in 1859. Twice or thrice I flung him into the sea there, which he didn’t at all like; and in consequence of which he even ceased to follow me at bathing time, the very strongest measure he could take--or pretend to take. For two or three mornings accordingly I had seen nothing of Nero, but the third or fourth morning, on striking out to swim a few yards, I heard gradually a kind of swashing behind me; looking back, it was Nero out on voluntary humble partnership--ready to swim with me to Edinburgh, or to the world’s end, if I liked.”

Pomero, as I said, lived for twelve years with his whirlwind adorer. Nero had a shorter life with that strange Scotch couple only by a few months. This is the end of Carlyle’s note: “Fife had done his mistress, and still more him, a great deal of good. But, alas, in Cook’s grounds here, within a month or two a butcher’s cart (in her very sight) ran over him neck and lungs: all winter he wheezed and suffered; ‘Feb. 1st, 1860,’ he died (prussic acid, and the doctor obliged at last!). I could not have believed my grief then and since would have been the twentieth part of what it was--nay, that the want of him would have been to me other than a riddance. Our last midnight walk together (for he insisted on trying to come), Jan. 31st, is still painful to my thought. ‘Little dim, white speck, of Life, of Love, Fidelity, and Feeling, girdled by the Darkness as of Night Eternal!’ Her tears were passionate and bitter, but repressed themselves, as was fit, I think, the first day. Top of the garden, by her direction, Nero was put under ground. A small stone tablet with date she also got, which, broken by careless servants, is still there--a little protected now.”

It is there still, but few visitors to that gloomy Chelsea house, where two geniuses, a man and woman, failed sufficiently to subdue and blend their individualities for so many years, ever walk down the garden to see it. Underneath are the remains of one who could neither read nor write nor frame systems, but who lived the only successful life of the three.

An American Hero

Who was William Allen Richardson? I once asked. Since the publication of the volume of essays in which the problem was so tiresomely propounded many letters have reached me, each with its own solution. All are different; and their differences show how important it was that a warrior for truth should come forward and fling the question in the world’s face. For the growth of legend and myth that has been endangering the fame of this noble deviser of an orange-hearted rose was becoming too rampant. Let me, therefore, who asked the question, now answer it; for I know. By dint of careful pruning I have removed the apocryphal, and the truth remains. William Allen Richardson was--

But you must permit me first to narrate some of the experiences of an essayist who has the temerity to indulge in interrogation marks.

The first letter I received--almost immediately after the publication of the book--gave so lucid an account of William Allen Richardson that I began to think I had made too much of the mystery. “Do you really want to know about William Allen Richardson?” it began; and then this story was told: “William Allen Richardson and his wife loved roses, and the ambition of their lives was to raise an orange-coloured rose. At last they succeeded, and they called the treasure ‘William and Ellen Richardson,’ a rather cumbersome title, but meaning much to these two. Alas, the printer would have none of this sentiment--hence ‘William Allen Richardson.’”

I cannot say that this narrative satisfied me; but there was nothing in it to make one violently sceptical. Why should not William and Ellen have lived this idyllic rose-growing life? Why should not their names have been thus intertwined for ever, even if a little ungallantly? I had seen barges on the Thames called “William and Ellen,” I was sure; why not roses? I therefore went about saying that I now knew the whole history of William Allen Richardson, and the story was not doubted.

But then arrived an anonymous post card with the Paddington postmark: “I am of no importance and my brother is of no importance, but William Allen Richardson was the brother of my brother’s handy man. (At least he said so.)” What of William and Ellen after that? For the time, at any rate, the narrative of their fragrant union passed from my repertory.

That post card will give you an idea of the lightness with which this matter can be approached. I do not mean that the communication in itself is frivolous, for, though easy in tone, it yet states the case briefly and clearly; the lightness that I complain of is in the attitude of the writer’s brother towards this tremendous problem. Here he was, with his brother’s handy man claiming to be the own brother of the great William Allen Richardson, and yet doing no more (apparently) than treating it as a myth--never investigating--never, in short, really caring. Now if I had a brother whose handy man was---- But this is boasting, self-approval; and complacent people conscious of their own rectitude rarely get at the truth.

Other correspondents followed, all strangers to me, and each with a pet theory. One had it that William Allen Richardson had been gardener to a rose-loving duke. Another, that he was a Scotchman who had gone to France, to manage the Ducher nursery. Another, that he was the American editor of a horticultural journal. Then came another more circumstantial story, from a lady in Yorkshire. “I was taught by a dear old country vicar (himself an enthusiastic rose-grower and close friend of Dean Hole) that W. A. Richardson was one of the Quaker firm of Richardson, who had a place near Newry in the north of Ireland.” This so chimed in with my own Quakerish suspicions, as expressed in the original essay, that I was inclined to think we might really be at home at last; but meanwhile an American missive was on its way from Louisville, Kentucky, and when it arrived I saw at once that here was Veritas naked and unashamed.

A certain statesman who had taken much interest in the matter will be amused to read the Louisville communication. “I have often,” he wrote to me, “wondered, and occasionally asked, who W. A. R. was, and have been at times impatient that people should be content to live on without knowing. Now I would almost rather not know, having been disappointed for so long.” He went on to say that he suspected W. A. R. to be an American. Well, he was right. Sagacious and far-seeing as ever, he now has another opportunity of pointing to a fulfilled conjecture; for there is no doubt (since I have had corroboration from another transatlantic source) that the following letter is gospel.

The writer, Mr. W. R. Belknap, roundly states himself to be William Allen Richardson’s nephew. He continues: “William Allen Richardson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 20, 1819. When he was but two years old, his father moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where he resided until his death, in October, 1892. William Allen Richardson married Miss Mary Short, daughter of Charles Wilkins Short, the botanist, who pursued his favourite studies of botany and horticulture at his country place, Hayfield, some five miles south-west of Louisville. With this congenial companionship, Mr. W. A. Richardson established himself in an adjoining place, Ivywood, and became much interested in the cultivation and propagation of roses. He imported a good many, and in this way became acquainted by correspondence with Madame Ducher (or she may have been called Veuve Ducher), at Lyons, France, who was especially interested in a rose which he sent her of a pale yellow colour, and she wrote Mr. Richardson that she had a sport from this rose in her own garden, which, if successful in propagation, she would name for him; hence the name which has interested you as applying to the beautiful copperish-yellow rose.... Mr. Richardson lived until 1892 in his country home near here, and would have enjoyed, if he might have foreseen, the interest which his namesake has aroused....”

And now we know. The secret is out, and the rose will smell no less sweet for it, nor climb less carelessly, nor refresh the eye less graciously. But I adjure America to be more proud of this feather in her cap. I do not suggest that William Allen Richardson should have a monument, for he has one in every right garden more beautiful than marble and very likely more enduring than bronze; but his name should be so deeply cut upon the roll of honour that no one need ever have to ask my question again.

But what a blow to that foolish romantic anecdote about Ellen!

Mr. Hastings

Had it not been for the trenchant pen of his cousin, Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Lord Shaftesbury, we should know nothing of Mr. Hastings; but as it happens, a portrait of Mr. Hastings being painted, the Earl was amused to pit his pen against the brush of the artist and append the result to the picture. So that Mr. Hastings used to hang on the wall at Wimborne St. Giles’s, near Cranbourn, in Dorset (one of the Shaftesbury seats), doubly limned. Where he is to-day I know not; but the Earl’s words remain and are accessible. I take them in the form which follows from the “Connoisseur” for Thursday, 14 August, 1755, and I may in passing say that in turning over the leaves of this leisurely little breakfast-table companion it was not a little disquieting to think what good papers they had in London one hundred and fifty-six years ago, before the days of amalgamation.

As to the portrait of Mr. Hastings, I have seen an engraving of it in one of Hutchins’s Dorsetshire books, and it is a crude enough thing--a little odd old man, with a pointed beard, sharp eyes, and a long staff in his right hand--not so much a patriarch’s staff as a surveyor’s pole. Nothing in it to suggest that he loved spaniels, for example, or knew the best thing to do with a disused pulpit. Yet he did.

Now for the shrewd and cryptic statesman who first made the admirable remark (since given to others) that “Wise men are of but one religion,” adding to the lady who inquired what that was, “Wise men never tell.” He begins thus: “In the year 1638 lived Mr. Hastings; by his quality son, brother, and uncle to the Earls of Huntingdon. He was ... low, very strong, and very active; of a reddish flaxen hair. His clothes always green cloth, and never all worth (when new) five pounds. His house was perfectly of the old fashion, in the midst of a large Park well stocked with deer; and near the house rabbits to serve his kitchen; many fish-ponds; great store of wood and timber; a bowling-green in it, long but narrow, full of high ridges, it being never levell’d since it was plough’d. They used round sand bowls; and it had a banqueting house like a stand, built in a tree.”--The mansion no longer stands in its entirety. It was pulled down, with the exception of two wings, at the beginning of the last century. One of these wings, however, contains the kitchen, and gives ample evidence of the hospitality which, as we shall see, was practised there.

Mr. Hastings “kept all manner of sport hounds, that ran buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger. And hawks, long and short winged. He had all sorts of nets for fish. He had a walk in the New Forest, and the manor of Christ Church. This last supplied him with red deer, sea and river fish. And indeed all his neighbours’ grounds and royalties were free to him, who bestowed all his time on these sports, but what he borrowed to caress his neighbours’ wives and daughters; there being not a woman in all his walks, of the degree of a yeoman’s wife or under, and under the age of forty, but it was extremely her fault if he was not intimately acquainted with her. This made him very popular; always speaking kindly to the husband, father, or brother, who was, to boot, very welcome to his house whenever he came.” (“Popular” is a good word, so good, in this connexion, that one has to pause a little to savour it.) Thinking of him thus occupied, if ever, you would say, an old, whimsical bachelor was portrayed, he is portrayed here. But you would be wrong, for Mr. Hastings was married. It was his wife who brought him Woodlands, and she did not die till 1638, when he was eighty-seven. They had, moreover, a son. Lord Shaftesbury, who was something of a cynic, suppressed this detail. It amused him to eliminate Mrs. Hastings.

His lordship goes on to describe the free-and-easy (and, on the face of it, wifeless) character of Mr. Hastings’ house. “A house not so neatly kept as to shame him or his dirty shoes: the great hall strow’d with marrow bones, full of hawks’ perches, hounds, spaniels, and terriers; the upper side of the hall hung with foxskins of this and the last year’s killing; here and there a polecat intermixt; game-keepers’ and hunters’ poles in great abundance. The parlour was a large room as properly furnished. On a great hearth paved with brick lay some terriers, and the choicest hounds and spaniels. Seldom but two of the great chairs had litters of young cats in them, which were not to be disturbed, he having always three or four attending him at dinner, and a little white stick of fourteen inches lying by his trencher, that he might defend such meat as he had no mind to part with to them.” (One does not feel much room for a Mrs. Hastings here. She kept her own quarters, I imagine.)

I should like to see a picture of old Mr. Hastings at his meals--with all his animals about him and his hand holding his little white stick. Steinlen, who designed that fine poster for Nestlé’s milk--the cats clamouring for the little girl’s breakfast--could draw the animals; but for the little old gentleman, with his red hair and green clothes and great age, you would want a Dendy Sadler or Stacy Marks.

The description of the house continues: “The windows (which were very large) served for places to lay his arrows, cross-bows, stone-bows, and other such like accoutrements. The corners of the room full of the best-chose hunting and hawking poles. An oyster table at the lower end, which was of constant use twice a day all the year round, for he never failed to eat oysters, before dinner and supper, through all seasons; the neighbouring town of Poole supply’d him with them. The upper part of the room had two small tables and a desk, on the one side of which was a Church Bible, and on the other the Book of Martyrs. On the tables were hawks’ hoods, bells, and such like; two or three old green hats, with their crowns thrust in so as to hold ten or a dozen eggs, which were of a pheasant kind of poultry, he took much care of and fed himself. Tables, dice, cards, and boxes were not wanting. In the hole of the desk were store of tobacco-pipes that had been used.”--Mr. Hastings must have been one of the earliest of the smokers, since he was born as far back as 1551.

“On one side of this end of the room was the door of a closet wherein stood the strong beer and the wine, which never came thence but in single glasses, that being the rule of the house exactly observ’d. For he never exceeded in drink or permitted it.” In another account of Mr. Hastings his iron rule with regard to liquor was suggested to have caused much unhappiness to his guests. And I must admit that there seems to be something wrong in a house where you may not see the bottle, much less handle it. But, on the other hand, it is such unexpected whims and unreasonableness that are the life-blood of these old originals. Any dull creature can be reasonable.

Now comes a priceless touch: “On the other side was the door into an old chapel, not used for devotion. The pulpit, as the safest place, was never wanting of a cold chine of beef, venison pasty, gammon of bacon, or great apple pye, with thick crust, extremely baked.” “Never wanting” is splendid. One longs to know more of the service of this house--of the cook who fell in so complacently with such a master’s needs and ways. “Never wanting!”

Like Bishop Corbet’s fairies, Mr. Hastings was of the old profession. “His table cost him not much, though it was good to eat at. His sports supplied all but beef and mutton, except Fridays, when he had the best salt fish (as well as other fish) he could get; and was the day his neighbours of best quality most visited him. He never wanted a London pudding, and always sung it in with ‘My part lies therein-a.’” “He always sung it in.” Here lies an old custom indeed, dead, I suppose, as Mr. Hastings himself and all his spaniels and kittens. Who sings in a pudding to-day? And, indeed, what pudding is worth singing in? Not the rice which I had yesterday, at any rate.

And so we come to the end: “He was well-natured but soon angry.... He lived to be a hundred; never lost his eyesight, but always wrote and read without spectacles; and got on horseback without help. Until past four score he rode to the death of a stag as well as any.” He was buried in Horton church in 1650 at the age of ninety and nine, and England will never know anything like him again. Gone are such spacious days and ways; gone such idiosyncrasy and humour. Only, I imagine, on the bowling-greens are Mr. Hastings’ characteristics to be still observed; for our old devotees of that leisurely contest, that most pacific warfare, cannot in their attitudes, gestures and expressions differ much from the Squire of Woodlands. Just so did he, three hundred years ago, contort and twist his frame, as he watched his bowl’s career and bent every nerve and fibre to influence it to swerve at the last dying moment on the jack between his two rivals. These elemental anxieties do not change.

Thoughts on Tan

In my search for the curious, which I hope that nothing will ever satiate, I came recently upon this advertisement at the end of a not too respectable comic paper:--

HANDSOME MEN are slightly sun-burnt. “Sunbronze” gives this tint.
Harmless. Detection impossible. Makes men really handsome. Society
Lady writes:--“Sunbronze is wonderful, charming, and genuine.” 1s.
1½d., etc.

When I read it first I laughed. Then I cut it out. Then I began not to laugh; and I am not sure now that one ought not to weep....

We were considering earlier in this volume a certain kind of fool’s paradise--the paradise which surrounds the collector-fool who genuinely believes his geese to be swans. That amiable simpleton deceived no one; he was merely soothingly and caressingly self-deceived to the top of his bent through a heaven-sent want of true taste. Compared with him the man who deliberately rubs a mixture on his face in order to induce his friends to believe that he has been much in the sun when he has not is complex indeed--for he is deceiving every one else without for an instant deceiving himself at all. For that is my reading of that advertisement. I do not accept its face value; I do not believe that it is bought by men in order to render themselves more attractive to the fair. My reading is that it is bought by men (and perhaps by women too: you observe the testimony of the Society Lady?) in order that it may lend colour to their assertion that they have been fashionably or expensively holiday-making when they have not.

But why pretend? you say. Ah! you are perhaps well-to-do. Nothing keeps you at home; or even if it did, it would not cause you shame. But can you not believe that there are others?...

We feel that we are greater than we know

--as Wordsworth says. That is an exalted mood. A commoner experience would perhaps be expressed thus:--

We hope you’ll think us greater than we are.

That aspiration, at any rate, is at the bottom of the success of such a lotion as this; and it is prevalent.

A full inquiry into this foible of poor human nature would need a volume; nor could I carry it out. Something of the minute scientific method of Professor Sully would be needed, with a considerable infusion of Thackeray added, and a leaven of pity, too.

Pity indeed. For though sheer brazen impudence and a determined lady-killing may resort to this strange bottle, this phial of mockery, yet I seem to see it being smuggled into simpler homes too. The poor clerk, for example, who is forced by sheer poverty to spend his week or fortnight in his London home, and by sheer shame to spend it almost _perdu_; reading the paper in bed, smoking his pipe in his back yard, helping with the children, playing pool at night over his glass in the public-house at the corner--how would he feel when he returned to work at the end of the period and had to confess that he had been nowhere? That is the point to consider, for few of us are great, and he is very small indeed. Amid triumphant stories of Margate and Southend, Yarmouth and Southsea, Brighton and even Guernsey, where would he be if he told the truth? Nowhere. And what fun is it not to be anywhere? Don’t you see? And so do you blame him if he spends 1s. 1½d., and anoints his countenance with a little of this delusive fluid on the morning of his return, and, strong in its testimony, talks vaguely but sufficiently of Herne Bay? Do you blame him? You must be a devil of a fellow if you do.

In a way he is entirely justified, for there is no doubt that he is gaining self-respect by losing it: that is to say, he would feel almost too paltry if he had to confess to the real squalid economy of his fortnight. And it is not good to feel too paltry.

But the wish to be thought more fashionable than one is, is not confined to the respectable poor--the poor, that is, who are forced to make something of a show: surely the least enviable class of all; the poor, in other words, who have to forego all the privileges of being poor. There is another class--Major Pendennis was at the head of it--who must intrigue a little too, if they are not to be too miserable. I remember a little man who had a room in Jermyn Street and lived in his Club; it was his habit to disappear for a fortnight or so every 11th of August, and reappear very brown and very vocal of the moors. His colour was genuine--no 1s. 1½d. bottle, but the Lord of Light himself had conferred it; yet not by beams that fell in Yorkshire or Scotland, but on Brighton’s pier. How, then, did his narrative of triumph in the butts carry conviction? What was his particular “Sunbronze”? He wore in the ribbon of his hat a little row of grouse feathers.

And that possibly is what one has to remember--that “Sunbronze” takes many forms--more than I know, or you know, or ever shall know, however extensive our knowledge may be at this moment. For we all “Sunbronze” a little; at least if not quite all, nearly all. We nearly all hope you’ll think us greater than we are.

On Leaving One’s Beat

When I am going for a long railway journey I always buy a number of papers associated with walks of life as far as possible removed from my own. Then the time passes easily. The ordinary papers one reads too quickly; the exorbitant require attention--they open the door to new worlds. I do not mean to suggest that one could go so far as to find entertainment in the Financial Supplement to the “Times”--that is too much; but the organs of dog-fancying, yachting, cricket, prize-fighting, the police, estate agents, licensed victuallers--these are sufficiently unusual and concentrated to be entertaining if they are really studied. Their exclusiveness, their importance, I particularly like: the suggestion they throw out that in this world all is vanity save their own affairs (as indeed it is). Such self-centredness is very exhilarating.

But the best fun of all is to be found in the stage and variety-hall papers. Not only are they the most amusing, but also the most human, for the sock and buskin have a way of forcing the heart to the sleeve. Limelight does more than all the sun of the tropics to bring emotion to the surface without shame; and it thus comes about that the periodicals of the players are full of refreshment to the cabined and reserved. Reading one of them the other day, I found in the advertisement columns (which should never be neglected) the following rich feast of opportunity, on which I have been ruminating ever since:--

“THE ANGEL OF HIS DREAMS.”

Wanted, to rehearse April 19th, Summer Tour, Autumn if suitable,
Dashing Leading Lady; must have power, pathos, intensity, and
be capable of strong character work. Emotional Juvenile Lady,
with pathos and intensity (look 17 in first Act; state if sing).
Handsome wardrobe essential in both cases. Clever Emotional
Child Actress, over 14, look 9; own speciality. Tall, Robust,
Aristocratic Heavy Man; Aris. Old Man (Small Double and S.M.).
Young Char. Juv. Man (Small Double); Bright Low Comedian (short).

References, lowest summer terms, and photos essential.

--There is an advertisement if you like! Did you ever hear of so many strange wants? I certainly never did; nor ever did I hear of so many vacancies that I could not myself do anything towards filling. For, as a rule, one feels one could make some kind of a show in most capacities--one could maintain for a little while the illusion of being a gentleman’s butler, or even a gardener, a sleeping partner, an addresser of envelopes, a smart traveller, an election agent, a sub-editor, or any of the things that are so frequently advertised for, supposing one to have applied for the post and have been engaged. But how begin to be a “Young Char. Juv. Man (Small Double)”? That leaves me utterly at sea. And “S.M.,” what is that?

It was while pondering upon these matters that I realized what an excellent thing it would be for many of us whose imagination is weak, and whose sympathetic understanding is therefore apt to break down, if we could now and then completely change our beat. Many a hidebound, intolerant, self-satisfied Puritan do I know who, forced into such a touring company as this, compelled by sheer adversity to assume the habit of a “Small Double and S.M.,” or a “Bright Low Comedian,” would come out of the ordeal far sweeter and fitter to play his part in the human drama, however he may have disappointed the promoters of “The Angel of His Dreams.” We remain--it is largely the fault of the shortness of life and the need of pence--too much in our own grooves. We are too ignorant of what we can really do.