A Man of Parts
Letters from Graham Robertson. Edited with an Introduction by Kerrison Preston. (Hamish Hamilton. 30s.) IN 1931 the firm of Hamish Hamilton launched their first book, Time Was ; it was acclaimed on both sides of.the Atlantic and won rare superlatives from Max Beerbohm. Today, they give us a selection of the author's letters ; these were all addressed by Graham Robertson to Kerrison Preston, his close friend for forty years, and Mr. Preston introduces them with a brief memoir. Graham Robertson, as an amateur of the arts, showed an eighteenth- century love of perfection ; he had an eighteenth-century gusto for life. But he was born at the height of the great age, and Noel Coward rightly called him a Victorian. No one was less materialistic than Graham Robertson, and an impassable gulf divided him from the Forsytes ; but in the ease of his life at Sandh:lls, near Witley, untouched by financial problems, attended by servants, recalling Burne-Jones, corresponding with Mrs. Watts-Dunton, ha remained a Victorian well into the present century. There is a touch of Millais in his account of the three-year-old Lettice Mary : "One of her portraits is now in a show in Pall Mall and she went thither to the private view with her parents. When there, they lost her, and discovered her after an interval in front of the picture, which she was explaining to a large c,ircle of admiring strangers. When they came up she was remarking : 'Luckily I now have on the very same red socks. I will show you and then you will see how like the picture is '—and a fat leg was being gravely elevated for the benefit of the public."
Graham Robertson, as we judge him from these spontaneous and delightful letters, had no trouble in growing old. Perhaps that is one of the secrets of his charm. He was born in 1866, he died five years ago, but he somehow evades the limits of the calendar. I enjoyed, in these letters, the visions of the Great Lady and the vignettes of Lettice Mary, the light-hearted local gossip and the visit to May Morris at Kelmscott : " She took me aside up to the great attics where we sat on egg boxes and remembered old friends and old times .. . she even said : ' You always knew that Mother was fond of fun, didn't you ? ' " I shall remember particularly the dream that became Pinkie's dream, for it is one of the passages in which the letter-writer turns poet : " I thought that I lay very quietly under deep blue-green waters and I knew that this was the Sea of Sleep and that I was drowned in it. But presently I began to float upwards until I lay upon the surface of the sea, looking up into an evening sky with a great whitelmoon hanging over the water. And then a light breeze began to blow and a little puff took me (for I was light as a dandelion seed) and lifted me into the air and blew me gently inland, and all the land was poppies, and I drifted before the wind slowly, uphill, into the sunset, my bare feet just brushing the poppy heads which were wet with dew, until the beauty and happiness of it became so impossible that I awoke, crying."
It is the poetic approach of Graham Robertson, even in everyday life, and it is his strangely dateless charm, that make the most lasting impression. We may find his way of thought, his imaginative sense of beauty, in Pinkie and the Fairies and in these letters which I
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