Here, in this fluttering of his tiny hands, was a part of the price that Swinburne had to pay. No doubt he had grown accustomed to it many lustres before I met him, and I need not have felt at all unhappy at what I tried not to see. He, evidently, was quite gay, in his silence-and in the world that was for him silent. I had, however, the maddening suspicion that he would have liked to talk. Why wouldn’t WattsDunton roar him an opportunity? I felt I had been right perhaps in feeling that the lesser man was—no, not jealous of the greater whom he had guarded so long and with such love, but anxious that he himself should be as fully impressive to visitors as his fine gifts warranted. Not, indeed, that he monopolised the talk. He seemed to regard me as a source of information about all the latest `movements,’
and I had to shout banalities while he munched his mutton—banalities whose one saving grace for me was that they were inaudible to Swinburne. Had I met Swinburne’s gaze, I should have faltered. Now and again his shining light-grey eyes roved from the table, darting this way and that—across the room, up at the ceiling, out of the window; only never at us. Somehow this aloofness gave no hint of indifference.
It seemed to be, rather, a point in good manners—the good manners of a child `sitting up to table,’ not `staring,’ not `asking questions,’
and reflecting great credit on its invaluable old nurse. The child sat happy in the wealth of its inner life; the child was content not to speak until it were spoken to; but, but, I felt it did want to he spoken to. And, at length, it was.
So soon as the mutton had been replaced by the apple-pie, WattsDunton leaned forward and `Well, Algernon,’ he roared, `how was it on the Heath to-day?’ Swinburne, who had meekly inclined his ear to the question, now threw back his head, uttering a sound that was like the cooing of a dove, and forthwith, rapidly, ever so musically, he spoke to us of his walk; spoke not in the strain of a man who had been taking his daily exercise on Putney Heath, but rather in that of a Peri who had at long last been suffered to pass through Paradise. And rather than that he spoke would I say that he cooingly and flutingly sang of his experience. The wonders of this morning’s wind and sun and clouds were expressed in a flow of words so right and sentences so perfectly balanced that they would have seemed pedantic had they not been clearly as spontaneous as the wordless notes of a bird in song.
The frail, sweet voice rose and fell, lingered, quickened, in all manner of trills and roulades. That he himself could not hear it, seemed to me the greatest loss his deafness inflicted on him. One would have expected this disability to mar the music; but it didn’t; save that now and again a note would come out metallic and overshrill, the tones were under good control. The whole manner and method had certainly a strong element of oddness; but no one incapable of condemning as unmanly the song of a lark would have called it affected. I had met young men of whose enunciation Swinburne’s now reminded me. In them the thing had always irritated me very much; and I now became sure that it had been derived from people who had derived it in old Balliol days from Swinburne himself. One of the points familiar to me in such enunciation was the habit of stressing extremely, and lackadaisically dwelling on, some particular syllable.
In Swinburne this trick was delightful—because it wasn’t a trick, but a need of his heart. Well do I remember his ecstasy of emphasis and immensity of pause when he described how he had seen in a perambulator on the Heath to-day `the most BEAUT—iful babbie ever beheld by mortal eyes.’ For babies, as some of his later volumes testify, he had a sort of idolatry. After Mazzini had followed Landor to Elysium, and Victor Hugo had followed Mazzini, babies were what among live creatures most evoked Swinburne’s genius for self-abasement. His rapture about this especial `babbie’ was such as to shake within me my hitherto firm conviction that, whereas the young of the brute creation are already beautiful at the age of five minutes, the human young never begin to be so before the age of three years. I suspect WattsDunton of having shared my lack of innate enthusiasm. But it was one of Swinburne’s charms, as I was to find, that he took for granted every one’s delight in what he himself so fervidly delighted in. He could as soon have imagined a man not loving the very sea as not doting on the aspect of babies and not reading at least one play by an Elizabethan or Jacobean dramatist every day.
I forget whether it was at this my first meal or at another that he described a storm in which, one night years ago, with WattsDunton, he had crossed the Channel. The rhythm of his great phrases was as the rhythm of those waves, and his head swayed in accordance to it like the wave-rocked boat itself. He hymned in memory the surge and darkness, the thunder and foam and phosphorescence—`You remember, Theodore? You remember the PHOS—phorescence?’—all so beautifully and vividly that I almost felt stormbound and in peril of my life. To disentangle one from another of the several occasions on which I heard him talk is difficult because the procedure was so invariable: WattsDunton always dictating when I arrived, Swinburne always appearing at the moment of the meal, always the same simple and substantial fare, Swinburne never allowed to talk before the meal was half over. As to this last point, I soon realised that I had been quite unjust in suspecting WattsDunton of selfishness. It was simply a sign of the care with which he watched over his friend’s welfare. Had Swinburne been admitted earlier to the talk, he would not have taken his proper quantity of roast mutton. So soon, always, as he had taken that, the embargo was removed, the chance was given him. And, swiftly though he embraced the chance, and much though he made of it in the courses of apple-pie and of cheese, he seemed touchingly ashamed of `holding forth.’ Often, before he had said his really full say on the theme suggested by WattsDunton’s loud interrogation, he would curb his speech and try to eliminate himself, bowing his head over his plate; and then, when he had promptly been brought in again, he would always try to atone for his inhibiting deafness by much reference and deference to all that we might otherwise have to say. `I hope,’ he would coo to me, `my friend WattsDunton, who’—and here he would turn and make a little bow to WattsDunton—`is himself a scholar, will bear me out when I say’—or `I hardly know,’ he would flute to his old friend, `whether Mr. Beerbohm’—here a bow to me—`will agree with me in my opinion of’ some delicate point in Greek prosody or some incident in an old French romance I had never heard of.
On one occasion, just before the removal of the mutton, WattsDunton had been asking me about an English translation that had been made of M. Rostand’s `Cyrano de Bergerac.’ He then took my information as the match to ignite the Swinburnian tinder. `Well, Algernon, it seems that “Cyrano de Bergerac”’—but this first spark was enough: instantly Swinburne was praising the works of Cyrano de Bergerac. Of M. Rostand he may have heard, but him he forgot. Indeed I never heard Swinburne mention a single contemporary writer. His mind ranged and revelled always in the illustrious or obscure past. To him the writings of Cyrano de Bergerac were as fresh as paint—as fresh as to me, alas, was the news of their survival. Of course, of course, you have read “L’Histoire Comique des tats et des Empires de la Lune”?’ I admitted, by gesture and facial expression, that I had not. Whereupon he reeled out curious extracts from that allegory—`almost as good as “Gulliver”’—with a memorable instance of the way in which the traveller to the moon was shocked by the conversation of the natives, and the natives’ sense of propriety was outraged by the conversation of the traveller.