"Shall I translate it?" I asked.
"Only if you find it astonishingly good," he replied. Next day he had my written opinion.
A little later he gave me an Italian article to translate and shortly afterwards, complaining that his work on the World took up a lot of his time, he gave me half the Fortnightly to correct; and when he found I did this too with the utmost care and speed, he asked me to sit in his room and soon I was playing secretary and factotum there every afternoon.
The importunity that in the Bible won God had been successful too in London.
But though a month had passed since I came from Salcombe, I had heard nothing from Froude, and, stranger still, nothing from the Spectator. I could only possess my soul in patience.
Meanwhile I saw Verschoyle nearly every day and one day had a little dispute with him which showed, I think, a difference of nature. We had been discussing a passage in a Fortnightly article of mine, when he said: "These prolusions of ours are very interesting but don't lead to any goal."
"Self-improvement is the best of goals," I replied; "but I hate your word 'prolusions.' It's correct enough, but surely a trifle pedantic?"
"The exact word is rarely pedantic," he asserted. "Why not 'prolusion,' rather than 'preparatory exercise?'"
"I can't say," was my answer, "but I want to be understood by the people at once. I would not use 'prolusion' for anything." Verschoyle shrugged his broad shoulders in manifest disagreement.
It was Verschoyle who first introduced me to modern English poetry and to a number of living English poets, notably to a Dr. Westland Marston and his blind son, Phillip.
They lived in the Euston Road, and though now poor had apparently been well off formerly, and were friends with all the literary men of repute.
Verschoyle told me that Phillip Marston had had the most unhappy life. He had been engaged to a very pretty girl, Mary Nesbit (sister of E. Nesbit, afterwards Mrs. Hubert Bland,) and one morning going to her room to wake her he found her dead. The shock nearly killed him.
A couple of years later, his dearest friend Oliver Maddox Brown, f died almost as suddenly. Three or four years later his sister, Cicely, who had been quite well the day before, was found dead in her bed in the morning. His other sister, Eleanor, died in the following year, 1879; and his most intimate friend and fellow-poet, Arthur O'Shaughnessy, some two years afterwards.
And in 1882 James Thomson,} the author of The City of Dreadful Night, was taken with a seizure in Phillip's rooms and carried out to a hospital to die; and in the same year, his hero and friend Rossetti died at Birchington. It looked as if fate had picked him out for punishment, and so fear came to me that misfortune often dogs gifted mortals, whereas fortune flees them. Phillip Marston was good-looking with a fine forehead and auburn hair; his eyes seemed quite natural and very expressive. I don't know why, but I agreed almost at once with Verschoyle's estimate that Phil Marston was one of the sweetest and most unselfish of men. We spent the whole afternoon together and before we left Phillip asked me to return when I liked. In a day or two I called again and had some hours with him: he took to me, he said, because I was almost as hopeless as he was. "Verschoyle," he went on "puzzles me with his Christian belief. I have no belief, none, cannot conceive how any one can cherish any faith in the future, however faint, and I feel that you agree with me." "Yes, indeed," I replied, and quoted, Only a sleep eternal In an eternal night!
He bowed his head and said with inexpressible sadness, "'Dead! All's done with,' as Browning says. There's no hope for the survivors, either, none."
"I am not so sure," I interrupted. "It seems to me that the wisest of men are always the most kindly, and from that fact I draw the hope that in the future, bit by bit, we mortals may get to loving-kindness for each and every man born, and so make this earthly pilgrimage a scented way of inexpressible delights."
"The sweeter you make it," he cried, "the worse it will be to leave it."
"Is that true?" I asked. "Surely, when we have drunk deep of love and life, we shall be able to go to death as one now leaves a table-satisfied."
It was dear Amy Levy, whom I got to know about this tune, who gave perfect expression to my thought, though she herself was as hopeless as Marston:
The secret of our being, who can tell?
To praise the gods, and Fate is not my part;
Evil I see and pain; within my heart There is no voice that whispers: "All is well."
Yet fair are days in summer and more fair The growths of human goodness here and there.
"Beautiful, beautiful," he repeated when I had finished reciting the sextet,
"and true; but it does not take us far, does it?"
Phillip Marston was beyond any consolation-pain clothed him as with a garment-but his pity for others and his sympathy with human sorrow was inexhaustible.
A little later he gave me a volume of his poems. "I've written, too, on the eternity of sleep," he said, and in the book I found this sonnet he had written to his love, Mary Nesbit. To me, it seems one of the sincerest and noblest of English elegies, though steeped in sadness.
It must have been for one of us, my own, To drink this cup and eat this bitter bread.
Had not my tears upon thy face been shed, Thy tears had dropped on mine; if I alone Did not walk now, thy spirit would have known My loneliness; and did my feet not tread This weary path and steep, thy feet had bled For mine, and thy mouth had for mine made moan.
And so it comforts me, yea, not in vain, To think of thine eternity of sleep;
To know thine eyes are tearless though mine weep;
And when this cup's last bitterness I drain, One thought shall still its primal sweetness keep- Thou had'st the peace, and I, the undying pain.
About this time, too, I came to know Miss Mary Robinson and her sister, but for some reason or other we did not get on very well. She laughed at me once over something I had said and chilled me. I was perhaps too young to realize her value, and soon she married a French professor and went to Paris to live and I lost sight of her; but now and again since I have had glimpses of a fine mind and regretted that I had not learned to know her. I think it was Francis Adams, the poet of The Army of the Night, who introduced me to the Robinsons. I shall have much to tell of him later, but now I need only say Verschoyle and the Marstons, Amy Levy, Miss Robinson and Francis Adams made me aware of the fact that London at that time, and indeed at all times, thanks to the eternal goodness, is a nest of singing birds, crowded, indeed, with men and women of talent and distinction, who moreover are usually devoted to poetry as the noblest of all the arts.
My chief fault in life and as a critic, as Shaw has felt, is that I have always been an admirer of great men and never cared greatly for those who fell short of the highest. Marston interested me as Amy Levy interested me, by the sheer pathos of their unhappy fate and immitigable suffering, but it was only later that I came to see that their poetic achievement, too, if not of the very highest, was of real value and had extraordinary importance.
After his untimely death on the fourteenth of February, 1887, people talked of poor Marston's drinking habits and how he would sit up at night till all hours and-the cackle of stupidity! The fools could not even forgive the blind for trying to turn night into day! If drinking drowned sad, lonely thoughts, why not drink? I thank dear Phil Marston for hours of sweet companionship and an exquisite, all-embracing sympathy, and England can never forget his noble poetry.
About this time I got a letter one morning that surprised me. My name on the envelope was written in such tiny characters that I could scarcely read it, but when I opened the cover two proofs fell out, Spectator proofs at last and a letter in Hutton's tiny script!