Figures of Several Centuries Part 14

Pater was working towards a second volume of _Imaginary Portraits_, of which _Hippolytus Veiled_ was to have been one. He had another subject in Moroni's _Portrait of a Tailor_ in the National Gallery, whom he was going to make a Burgomaster; and another was to have been a study of life in the time of the Albigensian persecution. There was also to be a modern study: could this have been _Emerald Uthwart_? No doubt _Apollo in Picardy_, published in 1893, would have gone into the volume. _The Child in the House_, which was printed as an _Imaginary Portrait_, in _Macmillans Magazine_ in 1878, was really meant to be the first chapter of a romance which was to show 'the poetry of modern life,' something, he said, as _Aurora Leigh_ does. There is much personal detail in it, the red hawthorn, for instance, and he used to talk to me of the old house at Tunbridge, where his great-aunt lived, and where he spent much of his time when a child. He remembered the gipsies there, and their caravans, when they came down for the hop-picking; and the old lady in her large cap going out on the lawn to do battle with the surveyors who had come to mark out a railway across it; and his terror of the train, and of 'the red flag, which meant _blood_.' It was because he always dreamed of going on with it that he did not reprint this imaginary portrait in the book of _Imaginary Portraits_; but he did not go on with it because, having begun the long labour of _Marius_, it was out of his mind for many years, and when, in 1889, he still spoke of finis.h.i.+ng it, he was conscious that he could never continue it in the same style, and that it would not be satisfactory to rewrite it in his severer, later manner. It remains, perhaps fortunately, a fragment, to which no continuation could ever add a more essential completeness.

Style, in Pater, varied more than is generally supposed, in the course of his development, and, though never thought of as a thing apart from what it expresses, was with him a constant preoccupation. Let writers, he said, 'make time to write English more as a learned language.' It has been said that Ruskin, De Quincey, and Flaubert were among the chief 'origins' of Pater's style; it is curiously significant that matter, in Pater, was developed before style, and that in the bare and angular outlines of the earliest fragment, _Diaphaneite_, there is already the substance which is to be clothed upon by beautiful and appropriate flesh in the _Studies in the Renaissance_. Ruskin, I never heard him mention, but I do not doubt that there, to the young man beginning to concern himself with beauty in art and literature, was at least a quickening influence. Of De Quincey he spoke with an admiration which I had difficulty in sharing, and I remember his showing me with pride a set of his works bound in half-parchment, with pale gold lettering on the white backs, and with the cinnamon edges which he was so fond of. Of Flaubert we rarely met without speaking. He thought _Julien l'Hospitalier_ as perfect as anything he had done. _L'Education Sentimentale_ was one of the books which he advised me to read; that, and _Le Rouge et le Noir_ of Stendhal; and he spoke with particular admiration of two episodes in the former, the sickness and the death of the child. Of the Goncourts he spoke with admiration tempered by dislike. Their books often repelled him, yet their way of doing things seemed to him just the way things should be done; and done before almost any one else. He often read _Madame Gervaisais_, and he spoke of _Cherie_ (for all its 'immodesty') as an admirable thing, and a model for all such studies.

Once, as we were walking in Oxford, he pointed to a window and said, with a slow smile: 'That is where I get my Zolas.' He was always a little on his guard in respect of books; and, just as he read Flaubert and Goncourt because they were intellectual neighbours, so he could read Zola for mere pastime, knowing that there would be nothing there to distract him. I remember telling him about _The Story of an African Farm_, and of the wonderful human quality in it. He said, repeating his favourite formula: 'No doubt you are quite right; but I do not suppose I shall ever read it.' And he explained to me that he was always writing something, and that while he was writing he did not allow himself to read anything which might possibly affect him too strongly, by bringing a new current of emotion to bear upon him. He was quite content that his mind should 'keep as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world'; it was that prisoner's dream of a world that it was his whole business as a writer to remember, to perpetuate.

1906.

FOOTNOTE:

[4] In this same year he intended to follow the _Appreciations_ by a volume of _Studies of Greek Remains_, in which he then meant to include the studies in Platonism, not yet written; and he had thought of putting together a volume of 'theory,' which was to include the essay on Style.

In two or three years' time, he thought, _Gastom de Latour_ would be finished.

THE GONCOURTS

My first visit to Edmond de Goncourt was in May 1892. I remember my immense curiosity about that 'House Beautiful,' at Auteuil, of which I had heard so much, and my excitement as I rang the bell, and was shown at once into the garden, where Goncourt was just saying good-bye to some friends. He was carelessly dressed, without a collar, and with the usual loosely knotted large white scarf rolled round his neck. He was wearing a straw hat, and it was only afterwards that I could see the fine sweep of the white hair, falling across the forehead. I thought him the most distinguished-looking man of letters I had ever seen; for he had at once the distinction of race, of fine breeding, and of that delicate artistic genius which, with him, was so intimately a part of things beautiful and distinguished. He had the eyes of an old eagle; a general air of dignified collectedness; a rare, and a rarely charming, smile, which came out, like a ray of suns.h.i.+ne, in the instinctive pleasure of having said a witty or graceful thing to which one's response had been immediate. When he took me indoors, into that house which was a museum, I noticed the delicacy of his hands, and the tenderness with which he handled his treasures, touching them as if he loved them, with little, unconscious murmurs: _Quel gout! quel gout!_ These rose-coloured rooms, with their embroidered ceilings, were filled with cabinets of beautiful things, j.a.panese carvings, and prints (the miraculous 'Plongeuses'!), always in perfect condition (_Je cherche le beau_); alb.u.ms had been made for him in j.a.pan, and in these he inserted prints, mounting others upon silver and gold paper, which formed a sort of frame. He showed me his eighteenth-century designs, among which I remember his pointing out one (a Chardin, I think) as the first he had ever bought; he had been sixteen at the time, and he bought it for twelve francs.

When we came to the study, the room in which he worked, he showed me all his own first editions, carefully bound, and first editions of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Gautier, with those, less interesting to me, of the men of later generations. He spoke of himself and his brother with a serene pride, which seemed to me perfectly dignified and appropriate; and I remember his speaking (with a parenthetic disdain of the _brouillard scandinave_, in which it seemed to him that France was trying to envelop herself; at the best it would be but _un mauvais brouillard_) of the endeavour which he and his brother had made to represent the only thing worth representing, _la vie vecue, la vraie verite_. As in painting, he said, all depends on the way of seeing, _l'optique_: out of twenty-four men who will describe what they have all seen, it is only the twenty-fourth who will find the right way of expressing it. 'There is a true thing I have said in my journal,' he went on. 'The thing is, to find a lorgnette' (and he put up his hands to his eyes, adjusting them carefully) 'through which to see things. My brother and I invented a lorgnette, and the young men have taken it from us.'

How true that is, and how significantly it states just what is most essential in the work of the Goncourts! It is a new way of seeing, literally a new way of seeing, which they have invented; and it is in the invention of this that they have invented that 'new language' of which purists have so long, so vainly, and so thanklessly complained.

You remember that saying of Ma.s.son, the mask of Gautier, in _Charles Demailly:_ 'I am a man for whom the visible world exists.' Well, that is true, also, of the Goncourts; but in a different way.

'The delicacies of fine literature,' that phrase of Pater always comes into my mind when I think of the Goncourts; and indeed Pater seems to me the only English writer who has ever handled language at all in their manner or spirit. I frequently heard Pater refer to certain of their books, to _Madame Gervaisais_, to _L'Art du XVIII Siecle_, to _Cherie_; with a pa.s.sing objection to what he called the 'immodesty' of this last book, and a strong emphasis in the a.s.sertion that 'that was how it seemed to him a book should be written.' I repeated this once to Goncourt, trying to give him some idea of what Pater's work was like; and he lamented that his ignorance of English prevented him from what he instinctively realised would be so intimate an enjoyment. Pater was of course far more scrupulous, more limited, in his choice of epithet, less feverish in his variations of cadence; and naturally so, for he dealt with another subject-matter and was careful of another kind of truth.

But with both there was that pa.s.sionately intent preoccupation with 'the delicacies of fine literature'; both achieved a style of the most personal sincerity: _tout grand ecrivain de tous les temps_, said Goncourt, _ne se reconnait absolument qu'a cela, c'est qu'il a une langue personnelle, une langue dont chaque page, chaque ligne, est signee, pour le lecteur lettre, comme si son nom etait au bas de cette page, de cette ligne_: and this style, in both, was accused, by the 'literary' criticism of its generation, of being insincere, artificial, and therefore reprehensible.

It is difficult, in speaking of Edmond de Goncourt, to avoid attributing to him the whole credit of the work which has so long borne his name alone. That is an error which he himself would never have pardoned.

_Mon frere et moi_ was the phrase constantly on his lips, and in his journal, his prefaces, he has done full justice to the vivid and admirable qualities of that talent which, all the same, would seem to have been the lesser, the more subservient, of the two. Jules, I think, had a more active sense of life, a more generally human curiosity; for the novels of Edmond, written since his brother's death, have, in even that excessively specialised world of their common observation, a yet more specialised choice and direction. But Edmond, there is no doubt, was in the strictest sense the writer; and it is above all for the qualities of its writing that the work of the Goncourts will live. It has been largely concerned with truth--truth to the minute details of human character, sensation, and circ.u.mstance, and also of the doc.u.ment, the exact words, of the past; but this devotion to fact, to the curiosities of fact, has been united with an even more persistent devotion to the curiosities of expression. They have invented a new language: that was the old reproach against them; let it be their distinction. Like all writers of an elaborate carefulness, they have been accused of sacrificing both truth and beauty to a deliberate eccentricity. Deliberate their style certainly was; eccentric it may, perhaps, sometimes have been; but deliberately eccentric, no. It was their belief that a writer should have a personal style, a style as peculiar to himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see in the handwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics of his style.

Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a certain elegant stiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the 'continual slight novelty' of its form to be quite clear at a glance: very personal, very distinguished writing.

It may be a.s.serted that the Goncourts are not merely men of genius, but are perhaps the typical men of letters of the close of our century. They have all the curiosities and the acquirements, the new weaknesses and the new powers, that belong to our age; and they sum up in themselves certain theories, aspirations, ways of looking at things, notions of literary duty and artistic conscience, which have only lately become at all actual, and some of which owe to them their very origin. To be not merely novelists (inventing a new kind of novel), but historians; not merely historians, but the historians of a particular century, and of what was intimate and what is unknown in it; to be also discriminating, indeed innovating, critics of art, but of a certain section of art, the eighteenth century, in France and in j.a.pan; to collect pictures and _bibelots_, beautiful things, always of the French and j.a.panese eighteenth century: these excursions in so many directions, with their audacities and their careful limitations, their bold novelty and their scrupulous exact.i.tude in detail, are characteristic of what is the finest in the modern, conception of culture and the modern ideal in art.

Look, for instance, at the Goncourts' view of history. _Quand les civilisations commencent, quand les peuples se forment, l'histoire est drame ou geste.... Les siecles qui ont precede notre siecle ne demandaient a l'historien que le personnage de l'homme, et le portrait de son genie.... Le XIX^e siecle demande l'homme qui etait cet homme d'etat, cet homme de guerre, ce poete, ce peintre, ce grand homme de science ou de metier. L'ame qui etait en cet acteur, le coeur qui a vecu derriere cet esprit, il les exige et les reclame; et s'il ne peut recueillir tout cet etre moral, toute la vie interieure, il commande du moins qu'on lui en apporte une trace, un jour, un lambeau, une relique._ From this theory, this conviction, came that marvellous series of studies in the eighteenth century in France (_La Femme au XVIII^e Siecle_, _Portraits intimes du XVIII^e Siecle_, _La du Barry_, and the others), made entirely out of doc.u.ments, autograph letters, sc.r.a.ps of costume, engravings, songs, the unconscious self-revelations of the time, forming, as they justly say, _l'histoire intime; c'est ce roman vrai que la posterite appellera peut-etre un jour l'histoire humaine_.

To be the bookworm and the magician; to give the actual doc.u.ments, but not to set barren fact by barren fact; to find a soul and a voice in doc.u.ments, to make them more living and more charming than the charm of life itself: that is what the Goncourts have done. And it is through this conception of history that they have found their way to that new conception of the novel which has revolutionised the entire art of fiction.

_Aujourd'hui_, they wrote, in 1864, in the preface to _Germinie Lacerteux_, _que le Roman s'elargit et grandit, qu'il commence a etre la grande forme serieuse, pa.s.sionnee, vivante, de l'etude litteraire et de l'enquete sociale, qu'il devient, par l'a.n.a.lyse et par la recherche psychologique, l'Histoire morale contemporaine, aujourd'hui que le Roman s'est impose les etudes et les devoirs de la science, il pent en revendiquer les libertes et les franchises_. _Le public aime les romans faux_, is another brave declaration in the same preface; _ce roman est un roman vrai_. But what, precisely, is it that the Goncourts understood by _un roman vrai_? The old notion of the novel was that it should be an entertaining record of incidents or adventures told for their own sake; a plain, straightforward narrative of facts, the aim being to produce as nearly as possible an effect of continuity, of nothing having been omitted, the statement, so to speak, of a witness on oath; in a word, it is the same as the old notion of history, _drame ou geste_. That is not how the Goncourts apprehend life, or how they conceive it should be rendered. As in the study of history they seek mainly the _inedit_, caring only to record that, so it is the _inedit_ of life that they conceive to be the main concern, the real 'inner history.' And for them the _inedit_ of life consists in the noting of the sensations; it is of the sensations that they have resolved to be the historians; not of action, nor of emotion, properly speaking, nor of moral conceptions, but of an inner life which is all made up of the perceptions of the senses.

It is scarcely too paradoxical to say that they are psychologists for whom the soul does not exist. One thing, they know, exists: the sensation flashed through the brain, the image on the mental retina.

Having found that, they bodily omit all the rest as of no importance, trusting to their instinct of selection, of retaining all that really matters. It is the painter's method, a selection made almost visually; the method of the painter who acc.u.mulates detail on detail, in his patient, many-sided observation of his subject, and then omits everything which is not an essential part of the _ensemble_ which he sees. Thus the new conception of what the real truth of things consists in has brought with it, inevitably, an entirely new form, a breaking-up of the plain, straightforward narrative into chapters, which are generally quite disconnected, and sometimes of less than a page in length. A very apt image for this new, curious manner of narrative has been found, somewhat maliciously, by M. Lemaitre. _Un homme qui marche a l'interieur d'une maison, si nous regardons du dehors, apparait successivement a chaque fenetre, et dans les intervalles nous echappe.

Ces fenetres, ce sont les chapitres de MM. de Goncourt. Encore_, he adds, _y a-t-il plusieurs de ces fenetres ou l'homme que nous attendions ne pa.s.se point_. That, certainly, is the danger of the method. No doubt the Goncourts, in their pa.s.sion for the _inedit_, leave out certain things because they are obvious, even if they are obviously true and obviously important; that is the defect of their quality. To represent life by a series of moments, and to choose these moments for a certain subtlety and rarity in them, is to challenge grave perils. Nor are these the only perils which the Goncourts have constantly before them. There are others, essential to their natures, to their preferences. And, first of all, as we may see on every page of that miraculous _Journal_, which will remain, doubtless, the truest, deepest, most poignant piece of human history that they have ever written, they are sick men, seeing life through the medium of diseased nerves. _Notre oeuvre entier_, writes Edmond de Goncourt, _repose sur la maladie nerveuse; les peintures de la maladie, nous les avons tirees de nous-memes, et, a force de nous dissequer, nous sommes arrives a une sensitivite supra-aigue que blessaient les infiniment pet.i.ts de la vie_. This unhealthy sensitiveness explains much, the singular merits as well as certain shortcomings or deviations, in their work. The Goncourts' vision of reality might almost be called an exaggerated sense of the truth of things; such a sense as diseased nerves inflict upon one, sharpening the acuteness of every sensation; or somewhat such a sense as one derives from haschisch, which simply intensifies, yet in a veiled and fragrant way, the charm or the disagreeableness of outward things, the notion of time, the notion of s.p.a.ce. What the Goncourts paint is the subtler poetry of reality, its unusual aspects, and they evoke it, fleetingly, like Whistler; they do not render it in hard outline, like Flaubert, like Manet. As in the world of Whistler, so in the world of the Goncourts, we see cities in which there are always fireworks at Cremorne, and fair women reflected beautifully and curiously in mirrors.

It is a world which is extraordinarily real; but there is choice, there is curiosity, in the aspect of reality which it presents.

Compare the descriptions, which form so large a part of the work of the Goncourts, with those of Theophile Gautier, who may reasonably be said to have introduced the practice of eloquent writing about places, and also the exact description of them. Gautier describes miraculously, but it is, after all, the ordinary observation carried to perfection, or, rather, the ordinary pictorial observation. The Goncourts only tell you the things that Gautier leaves out; they find new, fantastic points of view, discover secrets in things, curiosities of beauty, often acute, distressing, in the aspects of quite ordinary places. They see things as an artist, an ultra-subtle artist of the impressionist kind, might see them; seeing them indeed always very consciously with a deliberate attempt upon them, in just that partial, selecting, creative way in which an artist looks at things for the purpose of painting a picture.

In order to arrive at their effects, they shrink from no sacrifice, from no excess; slang, neologism, forced construction, archaism, barbarous epithet, nothing comes amiss to them, so long as it tends to render a sensation. Their unique care is that the phrase should live, should palpitate, should be alert, exactly expressive, super-subtle in expression; and they prefer indeed a certain perversity in their relations with language, which they would have not merely a pa.s.sionate and sensuous thing, but complex with all the curiosities of a delicately depraved instinct. It is the accusation of the severer sort of French critics that the Goncourts have invented a new language; that the language which they use is no longer the calm and faultless French of the past. It is true; it is their distinction; it is the most wonderful of all their inventions: in order to render new sensations, a new vision of things, they have invented a new language.

1894, 1896.

COVENTRY PATMORE

There are two portraits of Coventry Patmore by Mr. Sargent. One, in the National Portrait Gallery, gives us the man as he ordinarily was: the straggling hair, the drooping eyelid, the large, loose-lipped mouth, the long, thin, furrowed throat, the whole air of gentlemanly ferocity. But the other, a sketch of the head in profile, gives us more than that; gives us, in the lean, strong, aquiline head, startlingly, all that was abrupt, fiery, and essential in the genius of a rare and misunderstood poet. There never was a man less like the popular idea of him than the writer of _The Angel in the House_. Certainly an autocrat in the home, impatient, intolerant, full of bracing intellectual scorn, not always just, but always just in intention, a disdainful recluse, judging all human and divine affairs from a standpoint of imperturbable omniscience, Coventry Patmore charmed one by his whimsical energy, his intense sincerity, and, indeed, by the childlike egoism of an absolutely self-centred intelligence. Speaking of Patmore as he was in 1879, Mr.

Gosse says, in his admirable memoir:

Three things were in those days particularly noticeable in the head of Coventry Patmore: the vast convex brows, arched with vision; the bright, shrewd, bluish-grey eyes, the outer fold of one eyelid permanently and humorously drooping; and the wilful, sensuous mouth. These three seemed ever at war among themselves; they spoke three different tongues; they proclaimed a man of dreams, a canny man of business, a man of vehement determination. It was the harmony of these in apparently discordant contrast which made the face so fascinating; the dwellers under this strange mask were three, and the problem was how they contrived the common life.

That is a portrait which is also an interpretation, and many of the pages on this 'angular, vivid, discordant, and yet exquisitely fascinating person,' are full of a similar insight. They contain many of those anecdotes which indicate crises, a thing very different from the merely decorative anecdotes of the ordinary biographer. The book, written by one who has been a good friend to many poets, and to none a more valuable friend than to Patmore, gives us a more vivid sense of what Patmore was as a man than anything except Mr. Sargent's two portraits, and a remarkable article by Mr. Frederick Greenwood, published after the book, as a sort of appendix, which it completes on the spiritual side.

To these portraits of Patmore I have nothing of importance to add; and I have given my own estimate of Patmore as a poet in an essay published in 1897, in _Studies in Two Literatures_. But I should like to supplement these various studies by a few supplementary notes, and the discussion of a few points, chiefly technical, connected with his art as a poet. I knew Patmore only during the last ten years of his life, and never with any real intimacy; but as I have been turning over a little bundle of his letters, written with a quill on greyish-blue paper, in the fine, careless handwriting which had something of the distinction of the writer, it seems to me that there are things in them characteristic enough to be worth preserving.

The first letter in my bundle is not addressed to me, but to the friend through whom I was afterwards to meet him, the kindest and most helpful friend whom I or any man ever had, James d.y.k.es Campbell. Two years before, when I was twenty-one, I had written an _Introduction to the Study of Browning_. Campbell had been at my elbow all the time, encouraging and checking me; he would send back my proof-sheets in a network of criticisms and suggestions, with my most eloquent pa.s.sages rigorously shorn, my pet eccentricities of phrase severely straightened.

At the beginning of 1888 Campbell sent the book to Patmore. His opinion, when it came, seemed to me, at that time, crus.h.i.+ng; it enraged me, I know, not on my account, but on Browning's. I read it now with a clearer understanding of what he meant, and it is interesting, certainly, as a more outspoken and detailed opinion on Browning than Patmore ever printed.

MY DEAR MR. CAMPBELL,--I have read enough of Mr. Arthur Symons'

clever book on Browning to ent.i.tle me to judge of it as well as if I had read the whole. He does not seem to me to be quite qualified, as yet, for this kind of criticism. He does not seem to have attained to the point of view from which all great critics have judged poetry and art in general. He does not see that, in art, the style in which a thing is said or done is of more importance than the thing said or done. Indeed, he does not appear to know what style means. Browning has an immense deal of mannerism--which in art is always bad;--he has, in his few best pa.s.sages, manner, which as far as it goes is good; but of style--that indescribable reposeful 'breath of a pure and unique individuality'--I recognise no trace, though I find it distinctly enough in almost every other English poet who has obtained so distinguished a place as Browning has done in the estimation of the better cla.s.s of readers. I do not pretend to say absolutely that style does not exist in Browning's work; but, if so, its 'still small voice' is utterly overwhelmed, for me, by the din of the other elements. I think I can see, in Browning's poetry, all that Mr. Symons sees, though not perhaps all that he fancies he sees. But I also discern a want of which he appears to feel nothing; and those defects of manner which he acknowledges, but thinks little of, are to me most distressing, and fatal to all enjoyment of the many brilliant qualities they are mixed up with.--Yours very truly, COVENTRY PATMORE.

Campbell, I suppose, protested in his vigorous fas.h.i.+on against the criticism of Browning, and the answer to that letter, dated May 7, is printed on p. 264 of the second volume of Mr. Basil Champneys' _Life of Patmore_. It is a reiteration, with further explanations, such as that

When I said that manner was more important than matter in poetry, I really meant that the true matter of poetry could only be expressed by the manner. I find the brilliant thinking and the deep feeling in Browning, but no true individuality--though of course his manner is marked enough.

Another letter in the same year, to Campbell, after reading the proofs of my first book of verse, _Days and Nights_, contained a criticism which I thought, at the time, not less discouraging than the criticism of my _Browning_. It seems to me now to contain the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about that particular book, and to allow for whatever I may have done in verse since then. The first letter addressed to me is a polite note, dated March 16, 1889, thanking me for a copy of my book, and saying 'I send herewith a little volume of my own, which I hope may please you in some of your idle moments.' The book was a copy of _Florilegium Amantis_, a selection of his own poems, edited by Dr. Garnett. Up to that time I had read nothing of Patmore except fragments of _The Angel in the House_, which I had not had the patience to read through. I dipped into these pages, and as I read for the first time some of the odes of _The Unknown Eros_, I seemed to have made a great discovery: here was a whole glittering and peaceful tract of poetry which was like a new world to me. I wrote to him full of my enthusiasm; and, though I heard nothing then in reply, I find among my books a copy of _The Unknown Eros_ with this inscription: 'Arthur Symons, from Coventry Patmore, July 23, 1890.'

The date is the date of his sixty-seventh birthday, and the book was given to me after a birthday-dinner at his house at Hastings, when, I remember, a wreath of laurel had been woven in honour of the occasion, and he had laughingly, but with a quite nave gratification, worn it for a while at the end of dinner. He was one of the very few poets I have seen who could wear a laurel wreath and not look ridiculous.

In the summer of that year I undertook to look after the _Academy_ for a few weeks (a wholly new task to me) while Mr. Cotton, the editor, went for a holiday. The death of Cardinal Newman occurred just then, and I wrote to Patmore, asking him if he would do an obituary notice for me.

He replied, in a letter dated August 13, 1890:

I should have been very glad to have complied with your request, had I felt myself at all able to do the work effectively; but my acquaintance with Dr. Newman was very slight, and I have no sources of knowledge about his life, but such as are open to all. I have never taken much interest in contemporary Catholic history and politics. There are a hundred people who could do what you want better than I could, and I can never stir my lazy soul to take up the pen, unless I fancy that I have something to say which makes it a matter of conscience that I should say it.

Failing Patmore, I asked Dr. Greenhill, who was then living at Hastings, and Patmore wrote on August 16:

Dr. Greenhill will do your work far better than I could have done it. What an intellect we have lost in Newman--so delicately capable of adjustment that it could crush a Hume or crack a Kingsley! And what an example both in literature and in life. But that we have not lost.

Patmore's memory was retentive of good phrases which had once come up under his pen, as that witty phrase about crus.h.i.+ng and cracking had come up in the course of a brief note scribbled on a half-sheet of paper.

The phrase reappears five years afterwards, elaborated into an impressive sentence, in the preface to _The Rod, the Root, and the Flower_, dated Lymington, May 1895: