He was well-off, too, and gave himself to literature with single-hearted devotion, and yet never reached even Tennyson's place, or Swinburne's.
Grant Allen was in even closer sympathy with his age; learned, too, in science as in literature, and freer in mind than Symonds himself because born in Canada; and yet he could not get beyond The Woman Who Did. Why?
Again one asks, for it was a ridiculous book as a life's message. And Francis Adams was a larger man, perhaps, than either, though not so well equipped with learning; yet he, too, did nothing of enduring worth.
This fact made it gradually plain to me that intelligence and all round genial culture do not count for fame as much as some extraordinary endowment. It is, as Goethe said, "the extraordinary alone that lives." Swinburne was not comparable with Symonds in wisdom or understanding, or sweetness of character; and yet, because he had written ten pages of wonderful new verse music, he stands higher and is universally admired. The realization of this fact diminished for the first time in me that desire of fame which, so far, had been my driving power.
With these friends I was in constant touch for some important years without a shadow of misunderstanding or disagreement. Francis Adams was really my first good English friend: I met him in Hyde Park. I had been speaking there on socialism and the necessity of introducing some socialistic measures into English life when he came up and spoke to me, and we soon became friends.
Shortly afterwards, however, he went to Australia, and I did not see him again for some five years. When he came back our friendship was quickly renewed and I got him to write for me on the Fortnightly. He meant a great deal to me, though I was considerably his senior, for he was both frank and sympathetic.
When he came back from Australia he brought with him a wife, not particularly interesting, I thought, but he also brought back a certain weakness of lungs. I managed to help him to go to Egypt. I told him he should live in the desert above Assouan, or in some high place such as Davos Platz, but he did not take my advice and gradually grew worse. He came up the river with me one summer and in the winter stayed with me in London. I found that he was getting more and more hopeless. He spoke of suicide: I begged him not to let his thoughts wander in that direction, assured him that life would be greyer to me without him, and reminded him of his wife. He confessed to me he had tried to kill himself, but his courage had failed him. I told him that courage, like every other virtue, needed practice to become effective; and after he had left me that evening I wrote the little story, Eatin'
Crow, to show him what I meant. In the morning he read it in manuscript and said: "You may do bigger things, Frank, but you'll never do anything more perfect." He went back to his rooms at Margate, and suddenly I heard he had shot himself, after leaving me a message. His wife, too, wrote me that she had been arrested, so I went immediately to Margate and she told me the whole story.
He was going out for a drive with her when a hemorrhage came on. As he stepped into the carriage, he turned and came back to his room and told her that the blood was from his lungs and that he was dying. He gave her a message for me and then asked for his revolver. As the blood was pouring from his mouth she thought he was dying and bravely gave him the weapon.
He put it into his mouth and shot himself; the bullet went through his head into the ceiling. I saw the hole it had made.
In court Mrs. Adams told the whole truth, so the authorities thought she ought to be arrested as an accessory before the fact. But I pleaded with the magistrate, assured him that I knew of her great affection for her husband, and she was set free. I cannot tell here what I lost in Francis Adams-a sort of intellectual conscience and stimulus: the truest and wisest of friends.
Symonds came next in those early days. He had gone to Davos Platz with one lung destroyed and suffering from tuberculosis, but in the vivifying mountain air he quickly gained comparative health; and twice or thrice in summertime he came to London, and once stayed with me in my house in Kensington Gore for some memorable days. We were together every evening and talked the stars down the sky. In sex matters he viewed pederasty with the same tolerance as normal indulgence, and told me how surprised he had been by Whitman's passionate repudiation of abnormal desire.
He showed a certain sympathy with the vice which astonished me, and explained, if it did not justify, Swinburne's later gibe at him on account of his supposed liking for "blue-breeched gondoliers." But Symonds' sympathy was purely intellectual, and I always thought him one of the best of men- full of the milk of human kindness and far nearer ideal manhood than Swinburne or Tennyson.
Grant Allen I have already told about: his influence with me only began when I began to write stories, and lived with me for some time longer.
This is even truer of Harold Frederic, who was, if I remember rightly, the correspondent of the New York Times. I met Harold Frederic first at Sir Charles Dilke's and we soon became close friends. I met Sir Edward Grey about the same time in the same house. Frederic had already written several volumes but none yet which corresponded to his ability, none which allowed one to take his measure.
I shall never forget one curious incident that occurred early in our friendship.
It took place at a dinner at Dilke's when Harold Frederic sat beside Cecil Rhodes, at that time little known in England.
When most of the guests had departed, Dilke, Frederic and myself came together in our usual way to talk over things.
"Well, Dilke," Frederic began, "that was the first dull dinner I've ever been at in your house. Who was the bloody fool you put me next to? I talked to him on a dozen subjects but could get absolutely nothing out of him."
Both Dilke and I laughed, and on our way home I told Frederic enough about Rhodes to make him modify his condemnation; but he always refused to believe in Rhodes's brains, and in time I came to think that Frederic was probably nearer right in his contemptuous estimate than Dilke or I in our appreciation.
All these years in the nineties Frederic was growing rapidly, but it was primarily the American in him which appealed to me from the first-a power of judging events and persons on their merits, heedless of position or apparent importance.
This was clearly shown to me by his attitude towards the Venezuelan question. Frederic had taught me to respect President Grover Cleveland who, he thought, was the ablest of American presidents in nearly a hundred years.
But Richard Olney was Secretary of State for foreign affairs and stood with him over the question of the boundaries of Venezuela. I am quite willing to admit that the English government was right in the attitude it took up. Lord Salisbury was about to impose demands on Venezuela by force of arms and Mr. Richard Olney plainly informed him that any such action would be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Lord Salisbury had no difficulty in pointing out that this was giving an extension to the Monroe Doctrine that Monroe had never imagined. Mr. Olney retorted that the United States considered itself the best judge of the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine, and almost like a thunder clap on this came a statement from Grover Cleveland, backing up Mr. Olney and plainly stating that armed intervention by England would be regarded as "an unfriendly act" by the United States of America.
I was at that time owner and editor of the Saturday Review. I called on Harold Frederic and we both agreed that war was imminent. I wrote an article declaring that in case of war England would cease to exist as a power among the nations, and to run such a risk for a paltry boundary in Venezuela was so absurd as to be criminal stupidity. Lord Salisbury sent for me. He asked me to come and see him in Arlington Street, as he wanted to discuss the article with me. Of course I went next day, and found that he had protected himself by installing Lord Henry Manners, his secretary, almost between himself and me. He asked me how I had come to my belief in the enormous power of the United States in case of war.