Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (656 page)

Possibly at the suggestion of Schopenhauer or possibly because his own lively disposition made parts of Germany too hot to hold him, Dr. Hueffer came to England. He had letters of introduction to various men of letters in England, for, for time out of mind, in the city of Münster the Hueffer family have belonged to the class that battens upon authors. They have been, that is to say, printers and publishers. Following his intention of spreading the light of Schopenhauer in England, that country for which Schopenhauer had so immense a respect, Dr. Hueffer founded a periodical called the
New Quarterly Review,
which caused him to lose a great deal of money and to make cordial enemies amongst the poets and literary men to whom he gave friendly lifts. I fancy that the only traces of the
New Quarterly Review
are contained in the limerick by Rossetti which runs as follows:

“There was a young German called Huffer,

A hypochondriacal buffer;

To shout Schopenhauer

From the top of a tower

Was the highest enjoyment of Huffer.”

In London Dr. Hueffer lived first in Chelsea, halfway between Rossetti and Carlyle, who were both, I believe, very much attached to him for various reasons. Indeed, one of the first things that I can remember, or seem to remember, for the memory is probably inaccurate, is that I lay in my cradle amongst proof-sheets of Rossetti’s poems which my father was amiably occupied in reading for the press.

In their day Rossetti’s limericks were celebrated. I do not know whether they have ever been collected. I certainly seem to remember having heard that some one was, or is, engaged in collecting them. In that case I may here make him a present of one more which was written on the fly-leaf of a volume of “Lear’s Nonsense Verses” presented by the poet to Oliver Madox Brown:

“There was a young rascal called Nolly,

Whose habits though dirty were jolly,

And when this book comes To be marked with his thumbs,

You may know that its owner is Nolly.”

This engaging trait may perhaps be capped by an anecdote related of another poet, a descendant of many Pre-Raphaelites, of whom it was related that whilst reading his friend’s valuable books at that friend’s breakfast table he was in the habit of marking his place with a slice of bacon.

This excellent and touching anecdote I know to be untrue, but it is to this day being related of one living poet by the wife of a living painter of distinction, she herself being to some extent of Pre-Raphaelite connection. Such as it is, it goes to show that the habit of anecdote, incisive however wanting in veracity, is still remaining to the surviving connections of this Old Circle. For whatever may have been the value of the poetic gifts of these poets there cannot be any doubt that in their private conversations they had singular powers of picturesque narration. And certainly picturesque things were in the habit of happening to them — odd, irresponsible, and partaking perhaps a little of nightmares. I remember as a boy being set somewhat inconsiderately the task of convoying home a very distinguished artist, practising, however, an art other than that of poetry. We had been at a musical evening in the neighbourhood of Swiss Cottage and arrived at the Underground Station just before the last train came in. My enormously distinguished temporary ward was in the habit of filling one of his trouser pockets with chocolate creams and the other with large, unset diamonds. With the chocolate creams he was accustomed to solace his sense of taste whilst he sat in the artistes’ room waiting for his turn to play. With the diamonds on similar occasions he solaced his sense of touch, plunging his hand amongst them and moving them about luxuriously. He would have sometimes as many as twenty or thirty large and valuable stones. On this occasion M. — , always an excitable person, was in a state of extreme rage. For at the party where he had played M. Saint-Saëns the composer had also been invited to play the piano. As far as I can remember Saint-Saëns was not a very good pianist; he had the extremely hard touch of the organist, and M. considered that to have invited him to sit down on the same piano-stool was an insult almost beyond bearing.

The platform of the Underground Railway was more than usually gloomy, since, the last down train having gone, the lamps upon the other platform had been extinguished. M. — volleyed and thundered, and at last, just as the train came in, he thrust both his hands into his trouser pockets and then waved them wildly above his head in execration of my insufficient responsiveness. There flew from the one pocket a shower of chocolate creams, from the other a shower of large diamonds. M. gave a final scream upon a very high note and plunged into a railway carriage. I was left divided as to whether my duty were towards the maestro or his jewels. I suppose it was undue materialism in myself, but I stayed to look after the diamonds. It was a long and agonizing search. The station-master, who imagined that I was as mad as the vanished musician, insisted that there were no diamonds and extinguished the station lamps. A friendly porter, however, assisted me with a hand-lantern and eventually we recovered about five diamonds, each perhaps as large as my little finger-nail. Whether any more remained upon the platform I never knew, for M. also never knew how many jewels he possessed or carried about with him. It was a night certainly of nightmare, for being so young a boy I had not sufficient money to take a cab and the last train into Town had gone.

I had, therefore, to walk to Claridge’s Hotel, a distance of perhaps four miles, and arriving there I could not discover that the porter had seen anything of M. I therefore thought it wise to arouse his wife. Mme. — was accustomed to being awakened at all hours of the night. Her distinguished husband, was in the habit of dragging her impetuously out of bed to listen to his latest rendering of a passage of Chopin; and indeed upon this account, she subsequently divorced the master, such actions being held by the French courts to constitute incompatibility of temperament. She did not, however, take my arousing her with any the greater equanimity, and when I produced the diamonds she upbraided me violently for having lost the master. There ensued a more agonizing period of driving about in cabs before we discovered M. detained at the police station nearest Baker Street. He had in his vocabulary no English at all except some very startling specimens of profanity. Upon arriving at Baker Street Station he had spent a considerable amount of time and energy in attempting to explain to the ticket collector in French that he had lost a sacred charge, a weakly little boy incapable of taking care of himself; and as he did not even know the name of his hotel the police had taken charge of him and were attempting kindly to keep him soothed by singing popular songs to him in the charge-room where we found him quite contented and happy, beating time with his feet to the melody of “Two Lovely Black Eyes.” I think this was upon the whole the unhappiest night I ever spent.

The mention of chocolate creams reminds me of another musician who was also a Pre-Raphaelite poet — Mr. Theo Marzials. Mr. Marzials was in his young days the handsomest, the wittiest, the most brilliant and the most charming of poets. He had a career tragic in the extreme and, as I believe, is now dead. But he shared with M. the habit of keeping chocolate creams loose in his pocket, and on the last occasion when I happened to catch sight of him looking into a case of stuffed birds at South Kensington Museum, he had eaten five large chocolates in the space of two minutes. As a musician he wrote some very charming songs of which I suppose the best known are “Twickenham Ferry” and the canon, “My True Love Hath my Heart.” He wrote, I believe, only one volume of poems called “A Gallery of Pigeons” but that contains verse of a lyrical and polished sort that, as far as my predilections serve, seems to me to be by far the most exquisite that were produced by any of the lesser Pre-Raphaelite poets. As the volume must probably be very rare, and is perhaps quite unknown nowadays, I venture to reproduce a couple of his miniature poems called “Tragedies.” They have lingered in my memory ever since I was a young child.

I.

“She was only a woman, famish’d for loving,

 
Mad for devotion, and such slight things;

And he was a very great musician,

 
And used to finger his fiddle-strings.

Her heart’s sweet gamut is cracking and breaking

 
For a look, for a touch, — for such slight things;

But he’s such a very great musician,

 
Grimacing and fing’ring his fiddle-strings.”

II.

“In the warm wax-light one lounged at the spinet,

 
And high in the window came peeping the moon;

At his side was a bowl of blue china, and in it

 
Were large blush-roses, and cream and maroon.

They crowded, and strain’d, and swoon’d to the music,

 
And some to the gilt board languor’d and lay;

They open’d and breathed, and trembled with pleasure,

 
And all the sweet while they were fading away.”

And here is a third little poem by Marzials which I quote because it is headed simply “Chelsea”:

“And life is like a pipe,

 
And love is the fusee;

The pipe draws well, but bar the light,

 
And what’s the use to me?

So light it up, and puff away

 
An empty morning through,

And when it’s out — why love is out,

 
And life’s as well out too!”

But I do not know whether this was suggested by Rossetti or Carlyle.

Another of these forgotten or not quite forgotten geniuses was Oliver Madox Brown, who, though he died at the age of eighteen, had proved himself at once a painter, a novelist and a poet. Before his death he had exhibited several pictures at the Royal Academy and had published with considerable success one novel, leaving two others to be produced after his death. He must, indeed, have been a very remarkable boy if we are to believe at all in the sincerity of the tributes to his memory left by the distinguished men of the Pre-Raphaelite group and Madox Brown remained passionately devoted to his memory until his dying day. Just before his death Oliver complained that his father smelt of tobacco, whereupon Madox Brown said: “Very well, my dear, I will never smoke again until you are better.” And he never again did smoke although before that time he had been a very heavy smoker. He had, indeed, one singular accomplishment that I have never noticed in any other man. With the palette fixed upon his left hand he was able to charge and roll a cigarette with his right, rubbing the paper against his trousers and doing it with quite extraordinary rapidity, so that the feat resembled a conjurer’s trick. Oliver Madox Brown died of blood poisoning in 1875 and it was not till many years after his death that it was discovered that beneath his study, which was at the bottom of the old house in Fitzroy Square, there was a subterranean stable whose open door was in the mews behind the house and which had neither drains nor ventilation of any kind. So that there cannot be any doubt that the emanations from this ancient place of horrors were responsible for Oliver’s death — so frail a thing is genius and so tenuous its hold upon existence.

As a boy I had a similar study at the back and bottom of another old house of Madox Brown’s. And one of the other most unpleasant memories of mine were the incursions made upon me by a Pre-Raphaelite poetess, Miss Mathilde Blind. Miss Blind was descended from a distinguished family of revolutionaries. Indeed, one of the brothers attempted to assassinate Bismarck, and disappeared, without any trace of him ever again being heard of, in the dungeons of a Prussian fortress. She was, moreover, a favourite pupil of Mazzini the liberator of Italy, and a person, in her earlier years, of extreme beauty and fire. Upon the death of their son and the marriage of their two daughters, the late Mrs. William Rossetti and Mrs. Francis Hueffer, the Madox Browns adopted Mathilde Blind who from thenceforward spent most of her time with them. As a boy — I wrote my first book when I was sixteen and its success alas! was more tremendous than any that I can ever again know — I would be sitting in my little study intent either upon my writing or my school tasks, when ominous sounds would be heard at the door. Miss Blind, with her magnificent aquiline features and fine grey hair, would enter, alarming slip proofs dangling from both her hands. “Fordie,” she would say, “I want a synonym for ‘dun.’” On page 152 of her then volume of poems she would have written of dun cows standing in green streams. She was then correcting the proofs of page 154 to find that she had spoken of the dun cows returning homewards over the leas. Some other adjective would have to be found for this useful quadruped. Then my bad quarter-of-an-hour would commence. I would suggest “strawberry-coloured” and she would say that that would not fit the metre. I would try “roan” but she would say that that would spoil the phonetic syzygy. I did not know what that was but I would next suggest “heifers,” whereupon she would say that heifers did not give milk and that, anyhow, the accentuation was wrong. I would be reduced to a miserable muteness; Miss Blind frightened me out of my life. And rising up and gathering her proof-sheets together, the poetess, with her Medusa head, would regard me with indignant and piercing brown eyes. “Fordie,” she would say with an awful scrutiny, “your grandfather says you are a genius, but I have never been able to discover in you any signs but those of your being as stupid as a donkey.” I never
could
escape from being likened to that other useful quadruped.