SPRING BOOK SUPPLEMENT
The World of Robert Ross
Robert Ross, Friend of Friends. Edited by Margery Ross. (Cape. 30s.) To those who were friends of Robbie Ross this book is tenuous and tantalising. The effect it produces is that of finding the names of a lot of persons one remembers thirty years ago, when one was twenty years old, scratched upon a window-pane. For I knew him at that time, and remember him with sincere affection. But most of the letters are slight in content. And I wonder how much they will 'Interest a public who did not know him.
It is the tragedy of a book such as this that it reflects but the shadow of a personality. Or, indeed, the shadows of many others who were famous in their day. My personal memories of Robbie Ross extend only to the last two years of his short life, for he was but forty-nine years old when he died, prematurely aged, owing to the worries attendant on his heroic loyalty to Wilde. I remember him, as in the photograph in this book, wearing the scarab ring which had been on Wilde's finger when he died, and which certainly brought ill fortune to whoever wore it. One of the curiosities of this book is the reproduction of a little-known painting, The Private View by W. P. Frith, the painter of Derby Day. It shows the summer opening of the Royal Academy in 1881. Wilde, who was conquering London with his wit and brilliance, is the central figure in the picture, talking to Mrs. Langtry and towering head and shoulders above all others. The Archbishop of York, Chief Justice Coleridge, Henry Irving, are minor figures in the background. What a fall into shame and disgrace in less than fifteen years from then ! But perhaps Beardsley says the last word on Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas when he writes, " Both of them are really very dreadful people."
How much the odd, funambulist touch of Beardsley emerges in his every line and word I On leaving London for the last time, in 1896 (he was but twenty-four years old), the dying youth writes, " I have become an agonised wreck of depression, a poor shadow of the gay rococo thing I was." We may think that Beardsley, more than Wilde, was the real talent of his age. Could anyone, dying slowly from the time he was a schoolboy, do more than Beardsley to leave a name behind him ! Toulouse-Lautrec, another nocturnal talent, and one dipped early into the lethal waters, is of course the genius of the night world ; but Beardsley, drawing in Indian ink, by candlelight behind drawn curtains, can never be forgotten. 1 recollect Robbie Ross telling me of Beardsley, at twenty years old, working ,as a clerk in an insurance office. He spoke with a strong Cockney accent, but within six months all sign of that had gone, and Beardsley had, it seemed, been reading French eighteenth-century literature for a lifetime. How often, during those two years we knew Robbie Ross,: did my brother and I spend the evening talking to him in his rooms in Half- Moon Street ! The enchantment was his friendship and his con- versation. He was a delightful talker, and one of the most un- selfishly kind persons I have ever met in my life. I remember how angry he was that I had not told him I was having my first book of poems published, in June, 1918, but a few months before he died. It was from Robbie Ross that I first heard of the drama of Madeleine Smith. He was a mine of information upon all sorts of curious subjects. He first told me of the mad painter Richard Dadd. The fine watercolour which hung in his rooms is now in the Print Room of the British Museum. He told me curious and strange stories of Swinburne, never printed, and unknown to the present generation. Fine proofs of Rossetti's woodcuts hung in his rooms ; and he had stories to tell of Rossetti and Miss Siddall, a ghostly enchantress who still fascinates and enthralls. 1 first heard from him of Edward Calvert, whose engravings can become a minor passion. He had much to say, too, of Simeon Solomon, another ill-fated genius ; but the mystery referred to in a letter from Sir Edmund Gosse on page 315 has not yet been explained. Another mystery, not yet solved to my knowledge, was his account of a certain scandalous painting by Caravaggio, in Rome. He had seen this, but I have never heard confirmation of his story. Perhaps the growing interest in Caravaggio will bring this mystery to light.
Robbie Ross will be remembered as the friend who, when Wilde was brought up from prison to be publicly examined in bankruptcy, waited in the long dreary corridor outside the Court-room in order that, in Wilde's words in De Profundis, " before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by." In so doing, he may be said to have written a noble epitaph for himself while still young. Those who knew him will remember him, away from these storms and troubles, as the gentlest, the most amusing and the kindest of all friends.
SACHEVERELL SITWELL.
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