SIR SIDNEY COLVIN'S REMISCENCES.* Ix his preface Sir Sidney Colvin

hints that this book will be his last., but we sincerely hope that he may be wrong. Ho had planned to write his reminiscences in several volumes, but his admirable work upon Keats took more out of him than he had expected, and he now feels that the volume which we have before us is about as much in the way of memoir-writing as ho can expect to achieve. The man who enormously increased the regard of the public for'Landor, who indefatigably forwarded the interests of R. L. Stevenson, and who is unmatched for his scholarly exposition of Keats, would, of course, write a book of literary gossip with distinction and taste. But Sir Sidney Colvin has done more than that. This book is a model of what such books should be ; it is well bred, balanced, informing, and yet it is light and readable all through.

The change, or, as we should prefer to say, the development, in the tastes of cultivated people from one generation to another is well brought out by Sir Sidney Colvin's description of his early life in Suffolk. His parents were considerable readers, and their country home was in one of the most characteristic parts of undulating Suffolk. Yet they do not seem to have thought Suffolk beautiful, and their reading did not tile in tho literary worthies of their own district. Among those worthies were Phineas Fletcher, Crabbe, Bernard Barton and FitzGerald. This double blindness, however, does not very much matter beside the fact that Sir Sidney Colvin was as a child introduced to the Waverley novels. He revelled in them, and his love and admiration for Scott, discriminating though it became of course in later years, has never left bins. The same thing cannot be said about his estimate of Ruskin, who was a. great friend of the Colvin family. But we shall conic to Ruskin presently ; let us say first that Sir Sidney Colvin, out of his own instincts and his own observation, appreciated intensely the beauty of the broken marshlands of East Anglia, whore the

tide creeps up through the flats and at high water inundates great tracts. Even at low water beauty does not desert these creeks and marshes—though some people have a habit of saying that it does—because the mud has the quality of water awl glistens like the backs of the porpoises which sport along the channels. Sir Sidney Colvin says :— " The knowledge of the sea's neighbourhood to our home, and of it.-5 sending twice a day its marginal waters inland, flooding the mud-banks of the estuaries, and lifting and stroking back their water-weeds, until it was met by the outflow of our meadow streams,—this knowledge helped to dilate the childish spirit with a sense of ulterior mystery, and of the possibility of great world-voyages lying not remotely beyond the horizon lines. I remember this sense receiving a queer special point and significance from the fact that not far from tho place where our two brooks, the Lark and the Fynn, having run together into one, broaden out to form a tidal creek of the Deben, there stood a public-house having for sign is grotesque carved and scarlet-painted head and shoulders of a red lion (the Red Lion of Martleshain) which had served, we knew, in old time as the figure-head of an ocean-going ship."

Sir Sidney had full opportunities of drinking in this ulterior mystery because he was never sent to school ; his mother had derived a too acute dread of the miseries and dangers of school life from her reading of Cowper.

Sir Sidney Colvin's acquaintance with Ruskin opened with a phase of absolute devotion and unquestioning subservience. But this did not last long :—

" I found myself, rather to my own dissatisfaction, beginning to see famous scenes and cities, buildings and pictures, no longer purely through the master's eyes but through my own. Later again, during may Cambridge years and afterwards, I seemed unwillingly to find, in those parts of his writings which I was able to check by my own studies, snuck misinterpretation of history, a habit of headlong and unquestioning but often quite' unwarranted inference from the creations of art to the social conditions lying behind them, with much impassioned misreading of the relations of art in general to nature and to human life ; everywhere the fire of genius; everywhere the same lovingly, • 3letnorits and Noses of Pawns and Places, 1852-1912. By Sir Sidney Colvin., London : Edward Arnold. [18s. net.l

piercingly intense observation of natural fact ; everywhere the same nobleness of purpose and burning zeal for human welfare, the same beautiful felicity and persuasiveness of expres- sion, the same almost unparalleled combination of utter sincerity with infinite rhetorical and dialectical adroitness and resource ; but everywhere also the same dogmatic and prophetic conviction of being able to set the world right by his own individual insight and judgment on whatever matters might occupy his mind and heart, the same intolerant blindness to all facts and considera- tions that might tell against his theories, the same liability to intermingle passages of illuminating vision and wisdom with others of petulant, inconsistent, self-contradictory error and misjudgment. In short, this demigod of my later boyhood, though still remaining an object of admiring affection and an inestimable source of stimulation and suggestion, came to count for me no longer as a leader and teacher to be followed except with reserve and critical after-thought."

How many other disciples of Ruskin have not similarly felt their

allegiance weakening, have not tried to recapture the original glamour, have not read and reread the passages which had entranced them, for all their heavy weight of epithets, and then had reluctantly to confess that, after all, Ruskin, the guide in art and philosophy, could not be separated from Ruskin the magician of words, and that as a guide Ruskin was no longer to be accepted as a true prophet for these days ? Ruskin had something of intolerance or arrogance in his mental composition, but we can remember no more remarkable instance of it than the strange request he made to Sir Sidney Colvin. When Sir Sidney Colvin, at the age of twenty-eight, was appointed Slade Professor at Cambridge, Ruskin wrote to him begging him that his lectures should not inculcate any opinions which were not being taught by Ruskin himself from the same chair at Oxford.

Sir Sidney Colvin says that among the golden memories of his life are the readings of poetry by Rossetti.

" Rossetti's way was not dramatic in any ordinary sense of'the word. It was rather a chant, a monotone ; but some- how he was able with little variation of pitch or inflection to express a surprising range and richness of emotion. His voice was magical in its mellow beauty of timbre and quality and in its power to convey the sense of a whole world of brooding passion and mystery, both human and elemental, behind the words. A kind of sustained musical drone or hum with which he used to dwell on and stress and prolong the rhyme-words and sound-echoes had a profound effect in stirring the senses and souls of his hearers."

Browning, with his loudness of voice and vigorous geniality, was, of course, different from all the other poets whom the author know.

" Browning's talk had not much intellectual resemblance to his poetry. That is to say, it was not apt to bo specially profound or subtle ; still less was it ever entangled or obscure. Probably the act of speech did not allow his brain time to perform those prodigies of activity by which it was wont, when he had the pen in hand, to discover a thousand complications and impli- cations and side-issues beneath the surface of the simplest- seeming matters ; complications which often he could only express by defying the rules of grammar and discarding half the auxiliary parts of speech, by stitching clause on to clause and packing parenthesis within parenthesis, till the drift of his sentences became dark and their conclusion undiscoverablo. (Tho mere act of writing seemed to have a peculiar effect on him, for I have known him manage to be obscure even in a telegram.) Rather his style in talk was straightforward, plain, emphatic, heartily and agreeably voluble, ranging easily from deep earnest to jolly jest, rich and varied in matter but avoiding rather than courting the abstruse whether in speculation or controversy, and often condescending freely to ordinary human gossip on a level with the rest of us."

We are told that when Browning read his poetry aloud his utterance was flexible and dramatic; quite unlike that of Tennyson

and Ruskin, who preferred to sustain one key or another of chanting monotone.

We must pass over the chapter on Stevenson, though we can well believe that Sir Sidney Colvin wrote it with more affection than any of the others, because we have been told so much about Stevenson by Sir Sidney Colvin on other occasions. We will note only that Sir Sidney deplored, for literary reasons, Stevenson's migration to Samoa.- We fancy that many good' Stevensonians will not agree with that judgment, because they place high in the catalogue of Stevenson's work the stories and diaries which were directly inspired by the South Seas.

To us the freshest of all the reminiscences are those of Edward John Trelawny, the friend of Byron and Shelley, who took part in the Greek War of Independence. Trelawny's own descriptions of his experiences when he served under the Greek chieftain, Odysseus, have, of course, long been established among the best books of what may be called thoughtful adven- ture. It was Trelawny who, when the body of Shelley was being burned on the funeral pyie, snatched away the poet's heart—an act which left the marks of burning on him to the end of his life. When Sir Sidney Colvin visited him Trelawny was already an old man.

" The talk ran at first on commonplace matters and mutual acquaintances. In its course the downright old man denounced as lies ' the ordinary formulas of social politeness and solicitude. His voice was at first weak and muffled ; at the same time his scorn of conventions seemed to declare itself in a certain blunt. ness and bluffness of utterance, and in tricks of pronunciation such as saying strewth ' for strength ' and sounding put ' with the vowel short as in shut.' Was this ruggedness of speech and manner, I could not help asking myself, quite genuine and natural in a gentleman born, who, rough as had been his early experiences, had nevertheless lived .familiarly among equals whenever he chose ; or had it been at first wilfully adopted and become by degrees a second nature ? By and by ho began to rouse himself, and then his conversation became, at least at intervals, curiously impressive. His moral and social recklessness, his defiance of current opinions, his turbulent energy, his sure eye for character and his no less sure instinct for literature, all made themselves felt, along with the extra- ordinary interest of his experiences. From time to time ho would rise, almost bound, up in his chair, with his eyes fastened on yours like a vice, and in tones of incredible power would roar what he had to say into your face. I never heard in human conversation a voice so energetic as that which burst from the old man in these explosions ; explosions which subsided quickly, and in the intervals of which his accents were quiet and muffled as before. When the personal preliminaries were over we talked of current politics. It was the hour when the long negotiations between the British generals and administrators and the Boer leaders had failed, and the operations of the Transvaal War (of 1881) were in full swing. Trelawny defiantly declared his hope that the English would bo beaten. ' If I were a younger man,' he shouted in a strong crescendo, ' I would go and fight for the Boers—fight for the Boers—fight for the Boers.' " The last incident of this visit was the best. Sir Sidney's com- panion, who was putting on his greatcoat in readiness to depart, no doubt thought it proper to wind up with a compliment, and congratulated Trelawny on looking so well for his age. Where-

upon, writes Sir Sidney,

" I could hear the old man, standing behind him, and con- scious, no doubt, of his own fast declining health, growl to himself, "S'very well, 's'very well' : that's the kind o' lies I was talking of : lies, lies, lies.' "