In Good Company E-Book

Coulson Kernahan

• Herausgeber: Coulson Kernahan
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

In Good Company written by Coulson Kernahan who was an English novelist. This book was published in 1917. And now republish in ebook format. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy reading this book.

Leseprobe

In Good Company

Some personal recollections of Swinburne, Lord Roberts,

Watts-Dunton, Oscar Wilde Edward Whymper, S. J. Stone,

Stephen Phillips

By

Coulson Kernahan

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

A. C. SWINBURNE

LORD ROBERTS

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON AS THE “OGRE OF THE ‘ATHENÆUM’”

WHY THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON PUBLISHED ONLY TWO BOOKS

THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON AS AN AMATEUR IN AUTHORSHIP AND AS A GOOD FELLOW TWO SIDES OF HIS MANY-SIDEDNESS

ONE ASPECT OF THE MANY-SIDEDNESS OF THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

THE LAST DAYS OF THEODORE WATTS-DUNTON

WHEN STEPHEN PHILLIPS READ

EDWARD WHYMPER AS I KNEW HIM

OSCAR WILDE

S. J. STONE, THE HYMN-WRITER

TOTHE HON. MRS. ARTHUR HENNIKER

My Dear Mrs. Henniker,

It is many years since we first met at the house of one whom we both loved, whose memory we both cherish. It was that friend’s hope that you and I should become, and should remain friends; and that the hope has been realised has given me many happy hours—sometimes in your company as my gracious hostess, sometimes, scarcely less closely in your company, as a reader of your delightful and beautiful stories. Were your gallant General—I remember how proud he was of those stories—alive to-day, I should have asked to be allowed to dedicate this book to the two of you. Now that—alas for the England that he so faithfully loved, so nobly served—he is with us no more, may I inscribe it to yourself and to his honoured memory?

Yours ever sincerely,Coulson Kernahan.

FOREWORD

One of the subjects of these studies said in my hearing, that “Recollections” are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memory, or have never, themselves, done anything in life worth remembering.

To the second indictment I plead guilty, but my best excuse for the publication of this volume is that I write while the first indictment fails. My memory is still good, and the one thing which seems most worth remembering in my life is my undeservedly fortunate friendships.

In writing of my friends and of those with whom I was associated, I am, therefore, I believe, giving of my best. I ought to add that these papers were penned for inclusion in a volume of frankly personal and intimate “Recollections.” A work of that sort is the one book of his life in which an author is allowed some freedom from convention. That is why I hope to be pardoned should any passage, letter, or incident in these pages seem too intimate or too personal.

The reason why the studies are printed separately is that the ship in which I hope to carry the bulk of my threatened “Recollections” (if ever that ship come to port) will be so heavily weighted a vessel, that I am lightening it by unloading a portion of the cargo at the friendly harbour of The Bodley Head.

To drop figurative language and to speak plainly, I may add that, though there is some attempt at a more or less finished portrait in some of my pen-pictures, that of Lord Roberts is no portrait, but merely a chronicle. His personality, at least, is too well known and loved to need either analysis or description.

The paper When Stephen Phillips Read, mere snapshot as it is of one aspect of his personality, was not written for the present volume, with which, indeed, it is hardly in keeping. I include it by the wish of Mr. John Lane who, years hence, will be remembered as the faithful friend, as well as the generous and discriminating admirer, of the distinguished poet, of whose work it is his pride also to be the publisher.

Mr. Lane was anxious—knowing that my friendship with the poet was long and close—that I should write of Stephen Phillips as fully as I have here written of some others; but it is only under impulse that I seek to picture the inner self and personality of my friends, and I cannot do so while the sense of loss is comparatively new. In the case of two of whom I have thus written, many years had elapsed before I put pen to paper.

At his best—as the three friends who made such unexampled and such self-sacrificing efforts on his behalf, Sir Sidney and Lady Colvin and Mr. Stephen Gwynn, will, I think, agree—there was something approaching the godlike in Stephen Phillips. Of what was weak, and worse, in him I need not here speak, since, because he so loathed hypocrisy, he hid it from none.

One day I hope to show Stephen Phillips as he really was, and as not many knew him. I have heard him described as a man of brooding and morbid aloofness. There is truth in the description, but it is equally true to say that, at times, he could be as healthily jovial and unconstrained, as high-spirited as a happy schoolboy. His exquisite and extraordinary sense of humour was—I had almost written his “salvation,” and that not only under success which, coming early in life, might well have turned the head of a smaller man, but also in adversity which, when it came, was as crushing as his success had been complete. When this adversity, when tragic unhappiness, overtook him, he bore them with courage, and reproached no one except himself.

If as a poet he was at first overpraised, it is equally true that, towards the end, and since his death, the splendour, beauty and power of his poetry have often been underestimated. Time will set that right, and will rank him, I believe, as a true and, within his limits, a great poet.

That Stephen Phillips, the man, gave no cause for sorrow and concern to those of us who loved him, I do not maintain, nor would he wish me to do so, for no one was more ready to acknowledge his weaknesses—deeply and almost despairingly as he deplored them—and none suffered intenser agony of remorse for ill-doing than he.

Knowing him as I did, I unhesitatingly aver that his ideals and his longings were noble, and that the soul of the man was good. That all is well with him, and that he is at rest, I have no doubt. Never have I seen such fulness of peace and such beauty on the face of the newly dead, as when I knelt—to commend his passing soul to his Maker—by the bed on which lay what was mortal of Stephen Phillips. All that was weak and unworthy seemed to have fallen away as something which never was, which never could be, a part of his true self. In death, even his youth returned to him. As he lay there, white-robed, and with his hair tossed boyishly over his forehead, he looked so young that one might have thought him to be a happy and sleeping boy-chorister, dreaming of the poet-mother whom he so loved, and to join whom in Paradise may not his soul even then have been hastening?

C. K.

Savage Club, London.

A. C. SWINBURNE

Had some old Pagan slept a thousand years,

To wake to-day, and stretching to the stars

Gaunt arms of longing, called on Venus, Mars,

June and Jove, Apollo and his peers;

And heard, for answer, echoing from the spheres,

“Thy gods are gone: the gods of old are dead.

It is by Christ thou shalt be comforted,

The pitying God who wipes away all tears.”

Such answer had there come, deaf ears, in scorn

Had turned the Pagan, and deaf ears turn we

To other voices, on this April morn,

Since he who sang the sunrise and the sea

Shall sing no more. Deaf are we and forlorn,

The gods are dead, and dead is Poetry.

April 10, 1909.

I

Swinburne was furious.

I had lunched with him and Watts-Dunton at The Pines, and after I had smoked a cigarette with the latter, the author of Atalanta in Calydon had invited me upstairs to his sanctum, that he might show me the latest acquisition to his library—a big parchment-bound book tied with ribbons—the Kelmscott reprint of one of Caxton’s books. He waxed enthusiastic, I remember, over the Rape of Danae. Then he took up the proofs of an article on John Day which he was contributing to the Nineteenth Century that he might read some passages from it. To verify a quotation, he walked to his shelves in search of a book, talking volubly meanwhile, and turning, as was his custom, to look directly at the person whom he was addressing. Unlike Watts-Dunton, whose library was a witness to the catholicity of the owner’s interests and of his tastes, Swinburne’s library was comparatively small and select, for he was as exclusive in regard to the books he admitted to his shelves as he was in regard to the men and women he admitted to his friendship. Knowing exactly, I suppose, where the required volume was to be found, his hand went as confidently towards it—even though his face was turned away from it, and towards me—as the fingers of a musician go towards the keys of a piano at which he does not look. For once Swinburne’s instincts played him false. Taking down the book without glancing at it, and still pouring out a torrent of words, he opened it, his eyes on my face, and shaking the forefinger of his right hand at me, said: