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Full text of "George Wyndham, recognita"

LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
RIVERSIDE 



GEORGE WYNDHAM. 




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GEORGE WYNDHAM 

^^ 

RECOGNITA 



By CHARLES T. GATTY 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. 



LONDON 

JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W, 
1917 



[All rights reserved]. 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



GEORGE WYNDHAM FRONTISPIECE. 

" PERFOO " FACING PAGE 20 

" HEART'S DELIGHT " 24 

THE CHOISEUL-GOUFFIEUR APOLLO 76 

THE BIRTH OF APHRODITE M 78 

SAINT JUSTINA OF PADUA .. 80 

IVORY CROZIER 82 

PERCY WYNDHAM 165 



TO SIBELL, 
COUNTESS GROSVENOR 



' Welcome ever smiles 
And farewell goes out sighing," 

When you and I, dear Lady, were talking about George 
last August in the garden at Saighton, I gathered that it 
would be acceptable to you if I wrote something about him. 
But after I had considered this matter alone, a sort of shyness 
came over me. I could not make him the theme of a Magazine 
article, as a journalist concocts the obituary notice of a 
politician, having always been too near to George to get such 
a detached view of him. And then again, when our sacred 
intimacy was suddenly and tragically extinguished, I felt too 
bewildered to collect my thoughts, or print them. 

Since then time has gone on, and so have I. I have 
read over many of his delightful letters, and talked with you 
and Pamela and Benny and others about him, until I have 
grown to like the idea of recalling the happy hours we spent 
together, and to remember what he loved, and said and did. 
And so I have determined to print privately for you such 
thoughts about these things as come naturally into my mind. 

I feel to-day as if I should never live to know what George's 
death means to me. To describe what I have lost in losing 
him, would be painting a portrait that would come to life as 
often as one looked at it. But this is impossible. Only in 



2 GEORGE WYNDHAM 

the hands of the world's greatest masters do the dead rise 
again " on lips of living men," though we must allow that 
uneducated people in moments of great anguish use profound 
and almost inspired words. I cannot perform these miracles. 
I can only try to tell you, as simply as possible, what it is 
that I have lost in losing George 

The first thought that came to me when Philip Hanson 
told me he was gone was that I should never see him again, 
that he would never greet me again, that his overwhelming 
Welcome was gone for all my time on earth. No other welcome 
ever meant so much to me. He took hold of one's mind as 
he grasped one's hand. I felt that he unpacked my brain 
quite as soon as the footman unpacked my portmanteau. 
" Ah, you are working at the Vernacular, it's a splendid 
subject. I'll settle you down in the room below me in the 
tower, there are lots of books there, and we'll put in a fort- 
night's talk and work. There's a new book on the origin of 
the French Language, a perfect mine of stuff for you. And 
then, of course, you'll have to tackle Carmichael's Carmina 
Gadelica. I have a lot of problems for you about the sonnets, 
astronomical, heraldic and literary, we'll have a glorious 
time, and throw off all the cares of politics and plunge into 
literature." Or it might be, " I've got Chesterton here, or 
Belloc, or Hugh Cecil ; we'll have an orgie of discussion, and 
sound all possible and impossible problems." 

I have experienced many kinds of welcome in my life, 
inspired by various motives, but his greeting spoiled me for 
every other. I always seemed to arrive at the very moment 
I was wanted. My work was the one subject that interested 
him. His work had just got to the point where I might be 
of use. 

Sometimes the word of welcome, like a baited hook was 
posted beforehand. He wrote to me on Sep. 25, 1894 : My 
dear Charles, I count the days till ' Shakespeare ' and your 
visit. We get here the 8th of October from Temple-Newsome, 
and that evening is the historic " Conversazione." You 
might join in, as in '89. Let us have a lecture on ' William ' 
in the school shall we ? I am committing his sonnets to 



RECOGNITA. 3 

memory ready for your discourse each day, as I shave in the 
morning. Otherwise I am agonising over my essay on the 
French Poets all the morning, and talking nonsense to the 
children the rest of the day. 

Perf is prodigious. I walked him to the river and rowed 
him up to tea at Aldford yesterday. To wile away the ' weary ' 
not that it was so, one minute of it I embarked on the 
siege of Troy. When I wound up " and so Troy was taken 
and burnt." Perf : " What a pity after taking all that time 
to get it." I explained, rather knocked out " Ah, yes ; 
but they wanted Helen." " Yes," said Perf, " but they might 
have burnt her by mistake." When I got to Circe and said 
" she was an enchantress and turned all his companions into 
pigs." Perf: "Why, Why? I suppose she wanted some 
bacon." This not as a joke but a prosaic solution of her 
eccentric conduct. He thought Priam and Hecuba very 
funny names. Yours affectionately, George." 

The following letter welcomed me to the Crabbet Club, 
where, as you know, a group of subsequently illustrious persons 
enjoyed the hospitality of Wilfrid Blunt, and competed for 
supremacy in literature and lawn-tennis. 

House of Commons, 

2o/6/'go. 
My dear Charles, 

Do you remember my suggesting to you that you should 
spend Saturday to Monday, July 5-7, at Crabbet, my cousin, 
Wilfrid Blunt' s place ? The occasion is a man's party, barring 
the hostess, Lady Anne Blunt. They meet to play lawn tennis, 
the piano, the fool and other instruments of Gaiety. To write 
bouts rimes, sonnets, and make sham orations. The club is 
" intituled," as we say here, the " Crabbet Club," the rules 
of which are secret. I may, perhaps, be allowed to betray 
their character by alluding to one which lays down " that 
any one becoming a Cabinet Minister or a Bishop ceases 
ipso facto to be a member." You will find young Radicals 
and Tories, amateurs of poetry and manly sports. The 
President presides at dinner in the costume of an Arab Sheik, 
and produces sonnets and shrewd observations on man and 



4 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

nature. The woods grow up in virginal unconsciousness of 
the axe to the very door. On one side a wilderness sown 
with Desert plants, and dotted with wild-sown English bushes ; 
on the other a Sussex Paddock with Arab Brood-mares and 
their foals. Below in the hollow a pond full of trout on which 
the swans sleep and swim lazily through the day. The house 
is over-grown with June roses, and the lawns after dark are 
very silent and conducive to the complete and satisfactory 
solution of all problems, moral and aesthetic, by the active 
brains of young and uninstructed men pacing in the moon- 
light. 

I tried to find you to-day without success, but am writing 
to say I believe you will come, so please do. 

Yours always, 

GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

I went to Crabbet, and was crowned Poet Laureate of 
the Club in 1891. 

His welcome to Ireland after he was made Chief Secretary 
is dated lyth November, 1900. 

" My dear old Charles, I find that the Government of 
this country is carried on by continuous conversation. I 
have now been talking and listening for a week. That is why 
I am so late in thanking you for your congratulations. I am 
already intensely interested in my work here. You simply 
must come and stay with us in January. Nice house, Phoenix 
Park, divine view of Wicklow Hills, golden and green glamour 
over everything, Celtic twilight always on tap Religion, 
Comparative Mythology, Ethnology round the corner. 

Come, my dear, and do Celtic crosses, the Book of Kells, 
of what you like, provided you come. 

Yours affectionately, 

GEORGE WYNDHAM." 

I went, and I think that on and off I was with you most 
of the time you lived at the Chief Secretary's Lodge. Indeed 
I have been working in Ireland ever since. 

Five years later he baited the hook, thus : " Saighton 
Grange, Chester, 18 Aug., '05. My dear Charles, It was 
delightful to see your handwriting in a letter to Sibell, and 



RECOGNITA 5 

to know that I shall soon see you. But I insist on more than 
one day's visit that is absurd and I propose that you come 
on, or AS SOON after Sept. ist, as you can manage. Cuckoo 
comes on the first. Try and come ist or 2nd and stay a few 
days. I have invaded the upper-room in the Tower the 
' girls' school-room ' eheu fugaces ! There I feel like the 
Greek Tyrant who slept in the top storey and pulled the 
ladder up after him through a hole in the floor. The room 
is cleared and white-washed. I retain my own, old lower 
room also. I started to sort my books on the broad principle 
of Poetry, Literature, Books of Reference upstairs ; History, 
Politics, Philosophy, Science, downstairs. I found that 
nine-tenths of the books in each class were not in the storey 
of their ultimate destination, but in the other. So I spent 
2\ days on the turret stairs, perspiring freely, with 10 volumes 
on each journey clasped between my hands and chin. Now 
order reigns, and it is mighty pleasant. 

Hugh Cecil spent some 5 days with me. We discussed 
most of the centuries and continents ; read Poetry, mapped 
out the future of the Church, and assigned their provinces 
and ideals to novel combinations of parties in Home Politics. 
Also we attended day by day, the Polo Tournament organised 
by Bendor on a basis of n teams and 92 ponies. 

I wrote a lecture on Ronsard, and delivered it at Oxford 
in my Doctor's gown. Now I perpend to wait for the seven 
devils to occupy my swept and garnished life. 

I have two offers to write on Shakespeare ; an inclination 
to write a few essays on my own account, and a determination 
not to join this Government whatever happens 

I do hope that you will come as early as you can in Sep- 
tember, and stay for some days. Yours affectionately 
GEORGE W." 

Of all the welcomes he ever gave me the first is the most 
deeply planted in my memory. I really did not then know 
that such young men as he walked about this world. I had 
seen something of John Ruskin for a few years, and he gave 
me my first sense of intellectual independence, and a host of 
ideas but he was old enough to be my father, and mentally 



6 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

tired. George, on the contrary, was like a restive yearling, 
and nearly young enough to be my son. 

Edmund and Lady May had asked me to Derwent on 
purpose to meet you both. Introductions by design, like 
recommendations of books and plays, are often uncertain 
in the issue. I remember so well clambering down the bank 
of the river below the mediaeval pack-horse bridge, and 
emerging on to the high-road through a forest of docks, and 
coming face to face with an open carriage bringing you both 
to the Hall. A few minutes later we were at tea in Lady 
May's panelled sitting-room, talking as if we'd known each 
other for years ; indeed I thought we should never stop. By 
dinner time we had dropped the formality of ' Mr.,' and at 
two o'clock in the morning we were still exchanging ideas, 
calling each other by our Christian names, sitting on a low wall, 
up on the moorland, in dress clothes, staring at the stars ! 

These welcomes never failed for over twenty years, but 
towards the end they became tinged with a kind of sadness 
as his environment became more and more complicated. 
His vitality diminished for fresh paths and intellectual enter- 
prises, and he grew retrospective, and talked about old times 
and tracks. I was lodging close to you in Park Street in 1912, 
and he said to me one day at 35, " just come in to whatever 
meals you can, it is the only leisure, I have, life is flying past 
me like a dream, and I cling to old friends more and more." 

The last fly he threw over me was for the final Christmas 
he enjoyed on earth : " 35, Park Lane, W., 9, 12, '12. My 
dear Charles, I am counting on you for Christmas. What, 
you may well ask is Christmas to such as you ? I reply 
(a) I go to Clouds Friday next, i3th, and if I return to House 
of Commons on Monday, i6th, still (b) I return to Clouds 
again on Friday, 20th, and stay there till Monday, 30th. 
So much Asquith permits. Very well then : Come on the 
I3th and stay till the 30th, and if you will stay on to 
greet my next return on Friday, 3rd January, 1913, to Monday 
the 6th, and so on indefinitely. The ' fat ' of the business 
is between the 20th and 30th, the ' frill " before and after. 



RECOGNITA. 7 

It remains to ask and answer 2 questions, (i) Who will 
be there ? No one, but us, for certain, but I have a hope that 
the Edmund (Talbots), and Mark (Sykes), may come. They 
are nibbling. A neighbour at our gates has a Chapel of your 
Faith. And where else CAN they go for so short a time ? 
(2) What will be there ? Our old friends the Library, the 
Windmill, the Chapel, the Plantations, in short the ' Angulus 
ille ' (that nook) and ' interiore nota ' (choicest brand). "Nunc 
Veterum Libris, Nunc somno et inertibus horis," I invite 
you with me to " Ducere sollicitae jucunda oblivia vitae " ; 
to taste the Falernian, and pile up the logs on a hearth in a 
Home. It is very necessary you should do this. There will 
also be Perkins, and dogs, and close friendship. Yours 
affectionately, GEORGE W. 

P.S. You needn't ride the Horses." 

The Latin is from Horace, Satires Book 2/6/'62. The 
entire passage runs : " Oh country when shall I behold thee, 
and when will an old man be allowed to spend the time in sweet 
forgetfulness of busy life, now with books, and now with sleep 
and lazy hours." 

I think that the humorous inducement indicated in the 
postscript must have been prompted by Benny, having told 
him that my stiff carcase had been mounted at Mimizan on 
an active but somewhat obstinate steed, who pulled me, 
often quite unexpectedly, up and down the exceedingly steep 
and crumbling slopes of the huge sand-dunes of the Landes. 

Anyway we all met that Christmas as he arranged, re- 
newed the affectionate friendships and recollections of many 
years, made acquaintance with Mark's rising generation, and 
then met together no more until we stood round his open 
grave. 

These welcomes are gone, but surely there are others 
coming, and somehow, and somewhere, we shall again " pour 
out our trustful hearts unto each other," though for a while 
I challenge the night air in vain. 



GEORGE WYNDHAM 



" I have good cheer at home ; 
And I pray you all go with me." 

To earn these welcomes, to deserve and draw them, I 
did, indeed, always collect and keep for him every fragment 
of value that I found in literature, art, or the philosophy of 
life. And when I discovered a prize pearl I pictured myself 
always in that upper-room in the tower at Saighton, before a 
bright fire, with lamps burning, the latticed windows round 
us, opening through ivy-covered sandstone walls, on to the 
garden, bathed in moonlight ; and over all the canopied figure 
of the Blessed Mother, which has withstood " the wreckful 
siege of battering days." And we, too, all agog with talk ; 
George, leaping along from crag to crag, traversing all ages 
and countries, like Winwood Reade, and struggling to unify 
this overwhelming diversity into some intelligible and hopeful 
scheme of things. 

All I can say is that for me to be there was to be at home. 
That though I differed with him about religion, politics, and 
the future of the race, we never exchanged one wounding 
word. That for a quarter of a century he never wrote or said 
one syllable that hurt me in any tissue of my being. That 
if he wanted to change my views or alter my plans, he dealt 
with me so considerately, so gently, so sweetly, that I can 
never hope to meet the like on earth again. 

I can quite believe that far away up in lofty mountains 
there are points in the career of the mightiest river where a 
few blades of grass, or the angle of a rock, may determine 
whether that vast torrent shall pour itself Westward into the 
Pacific, or Eastward into the Atlantic. And far away back 
in the lives of us all there have been turning points of like 



RECOGNITA. g 

importance. Gentle influences, unnoted and unsuspected, 
guiding our early uncertain steps, and leading us to important 
issues. 

The poet says : " And what is home, and where, but 
with the loving ? " Which is quite true as long as the loving 
are the understanding ; but the nearest blood relationship 
does not guarantee they shall be, and the discovery that they 
sometimes are not, is too often a tragedy to the sensitive. 
But George had been loved and understood by the best of 
parents, and understanding love is life and sunshine to children. 

The hand that rocked George's cradle has lived to lay 
a wreath upon his grave ; and a heart still beats with love for 
him within the breast that fed him. I am on sacred ground, 
and I know it. It is good for us to be here, to be anywhere, 
with such a mother. His devotion to her was anchored far 
beyond the natural attachment of child and parent in a deep 
intellectual respect for her breadth of mind, her sympathy, 
her gifts, and her generous output. She had made a great 
home for them all, had furnished it with literature, art, and 
intellectual friends. Her useful hands had learned so many 
crafts, that wet days were brightened, and indisposed and 
rescourceless children beguiled by her wealth of contrivance. 
A few yards of stuff, a few sheets of cardboard and gilt paper, 
a canvass hanging, a paint-box, a large brush and a pint of 
water, evolved the theatrical equipment of the Princess, the 
Ogre, and Belted Knight of the Fairy Tale. Her brain had 
contrived it all, her hands had fashioned it all, her spirit had 
revealed to them all that there were giants to be slain, enemies 
to be overcome, and castles to be defended. She tied his 
first wooden sword around George's waist, and when he went 
forth to actual battle, her eager eyes scanned the telegrams 
from the Nile, and her faithful hands treasured for posterity 
the letters he sent home. 

Every path and bed and border of the garden at Clouds 
is fertile with her taste and knowledge, every room in the 
house is decorated by her touch. George loved to be sur- 
rounded by the drawings she had made of homes in which 
they had previously lived, and more than once quoted Ruskin's 



10 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

famous passage about the sanctity of home when he was 
looking at them : 

" There is a sanctity in a good man's house which can- 
not be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins ; 
and I believe that good men would generally feel this ; and 
that having spent their lives happily and honourably, they 
would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that the 
place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed 
almost to sympathise in, all their honour, their gladness, 
or their suffering that this, with all the record it bore of them, 
and of all material things that they had loved and ruled over, 
and set the stamp of themselves upon was to be swept 
away, as soon as there was room made for them in the grave ; 
that no respect was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, 
no good to be drawn from it by their children ; that though 
there was a monument in the Church, there was no warm 
monument in the hearth and house to them ; that all that 
they ever treasured was despised, and the places that had 
sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the 
dust. I say that a good man would fear this ; and that, far 
more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear doing it 
to his father's house." 

Do you remember how scrupulous he was about altera- 
tions at Clouds, always considering them with reference to 
what his father would have wished, or his mother might 
approve ? During the last two years he thought and talked 
a good deal about fresh developments on the Clouds estate. 
He and I often discussed intensive culture, co-operation, and 
the scientific treatment of poor English land ; and Mark 
and he had one or two good talks about the bettering of the 
Labourers' position. But in all this he was very cautious, 
because he felt that putting the Clouds estate on a business 
footing meant modifying the traditional and rather feudal 
lines upon which his father had moved. He disliked the 
transition from custom to contract and its influence on em- 
ployers and employed. 

He was a real old-fashioned Tory in his devotion to 
persons, and clung to all that that means in the mutual reia- 



RECOGNITA. n 

tions between master and servant, landlord and tenant. His 
father had bought the estate as a country home, not as a land 
speculation, and George loved the idea of the country gentle- 
man with private means owning and farming lands, and 
helping in county and parochial government, and preserving 
a cultured influence in the neighbourhood. At the same 
time he recognised that great hardships had fallen upon 
farmers and labourers on estates where owners had held on 
after their economic resources were exhausted. He also felt 
that full justice was not being done to the land by old methods 
of cultivation and distribution, and at the tenants' dinner 
that last Christmas, when I was present, he made a speech 
clearly showing that the idea of organising some sort of co- 
operative movement had taken a firm hold in his mind. 

He used to say to me " Let us go to Clouds, and farm, 
and write books, and dig up prehistoric man." Indeed it 
was all arranged with Detmar that we were to open trenches 
across the ancient British Village on the estate last summer. 
For the past two years I had been collecting neolithic imple- 
ments on his fields, and he insisted on my telling his tenants 
all about them at the Christmas dinner. 

There are places on this earth which seem burnt into 
one's memory because they have been the scenes of some 
particular enlightenment. Certain things said to me by John 
Ruskin at Brant wood, are inseparably associated with the 
room where he wrote, and the garden where we worked. 
Our vivid realization of such spots is no doubt owing to an 
intense consciousness at that time and place of a step for- 
ward in our spiritual career. It may be a vague emotion 
only, " a sunset touch," light in the west below a bank of 
dark cloud, or the sight of land at night after weeks at sea, but 
we are never quite the same after we have experienced a deep 
feeling of this kind, and the place where it happens is in- 
separably bound up with it. It was a light-house off the 
coast of Corsica that inspired " Lead kindly Light." George 
was most susceptible to emotions of this kind, and has left 
me a legacy of places glorified by such experiences. The 
end of the garden at Derwent where he read to me Patmora's 



12 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

Ode to the Blessed Virgin, " The Child's Purchase." The 
smoking-room at Derwent where he and Alfred Lyttelton 
and myself chose passages in turn from a Globe Shakespeare, 
and I read the Duke of Exeter's description to the King of 
the death of York and Suffolk on the field of Agincourt, and 
Alfred reminded me of it twenty years afterwards ; the 
mediaeval pack-horse bridge over the Derwent, from which 
we gazed into the peat-stained stream and tried to find the 
right epithets for its sound and colour ; the low wall up the 
moorlands looking down upon the Hall. The angle end of 
the garden wall at Saighton looking west over the Cheshire 
plain on to Moel Famma. The low seats below the rose 
garden by the two poplars which you and he planted near 
the round ring of farm-yard stones. The way across Hyde 
Park from 35 Park Lane to Kensington Gardens. The 
beech plantation above the house at Clouds, the Riviera walk 
along the western slope beyond the wind-mill, and the plain 
towards Pertwood where he came to find me flinting. It 
was here he said this, and there we talked of that, or sat silent, 
and let the spell work. These places are all sacred to his 
memory in my heart, and I hope to see them all again, and 
love them the better for the glory he has- given to them, al- 
though I frankly confess that it needs courage when I re- 
member that he will be there no more. Do you remember 
Ruskin on this ? 

" Morning breaks as I write, along those Coniston Fells, 
and the level mists, motionless and grey beneath the rose of 
the moorlands, veil the lower woods, and the sleeping village, 
and the long lawns by the lake shore. Oh, that some one 
had but told me, in my youth, when all my heart seemed to 
be set on these colours and clouds, that appear for a little 
while and then vanish away, how little my love of them would 
serve me, when the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of 
morning should be completed ; and all my thoughts should 
be of those whom, by neither I was to meet more." 

When one begins to think of your home at Saighton 
how many recollections crowd the memory ! Can we ever 
forget our expeditions to the splendid tomb of that mellowed 



RECOGNITA, 13 

mediaeval free-booting warrior, Sir Hugh de Calveley in Bun- 
bury Church, and George's enthusiasm over the Knight's 
recumbent figure in complete armour ? It stirred his imagina- 
tion to see and handle the alabaster effigy, touched with 
colour, of this sturdy old soldier, who had fought most of his 
days in France, had been Governor of Calais, was one of the 
witnesses, along with Chaucer, in the Scrope and Grosvenor 
trial about the right to bear the Bend Or, and then returned 
late in life to Cheshire, to establish a College, and end his 
days in peace and piety. 

And then Saighton itself, how George loved every old 
stone in the fabric and fortress walls, and delighted in all the 
many efforts you and England made to restore the ancient 
bastions, not only along the front drive, but away at the 
back down the lane which separates you from the farm. His 
taste as to flowers and plants was governed by association 
and refinement. The first burst of green spears out of the 
brown earth, the glistering celandine in the spring sunshine, 
these touched him to the quick. He delighted also in the 
many tribes of delicate and lovely rock-garden plants that 
crowded the walls and paved ways outside the drawing-room 
windows. 

In November, 1907, he wrote to me : " You will marvel 
at the excavations which Sibell and the gardener have made 
at the entrance here on the left after coming in by the gate. 
It was a bank thickly crowded with shrubs. But and here 
is the point the wall which you remember on the top of the 
rock along the road from Chester outside, turns sharp to the 
left at the gate and runs along the top of the live rock inside. 
Well, we have excavated and disclosed both, leaving three 
bastions, revelled with stone, to retain the best of the flowering 
trees, as lilac, cornel and maple. This enhances the ' rock 
and fortress ' note of the ancient Abbot's country seat. 

The work reminded me of old days along the ' Abbot's 
Walk,' and lends force to my insistance on a visit from you. 
I understand the weariness of your enterprise. So am I 
weary to death of my politics. All the more reason is there 
for re-affirming old days and old ways. One phrase of Walter 



14 GEORGE WYNDHAM 

Scott struck me hard. He is writing to one of a band of 
early companions, and speaks of the others as ' all now se- 
questered or squandered. So it is. Some go to the Empire's 
extremities and others toil in tunnels at home. 

And now I must toil. ' Man goeth forth to his labour.' 

Yours ever, 

GEORGE WYNDHAM." 

I know you always felt as I did that he was indeed'worthy 
of ' Saighton, and that is a high compliment as far as tower 
and window, and shrine are concerned. The fact is he had 
brought with him from Clouds his mother's unerring instinct 
about homes made with hands. He and I would often try 
to analyse the faculty in certain people that enables them to 
adorn the surface of this round earth with trees, and fields, 
and roads, and ponds, and gardens and houses, without doing 
violence to nature. If we knew what that faculty is, what 
a lot we should know ! I think it must be derived from a 
right understanding of nature. Animals don't go and destroy 
a landscape with vulgar residences. The " feathered people 
of the air " don't insult the woods, why should we ? The 
aborigines make no mistakes in colour till they work for us. 
What is wrong with our civilisation ? It is not the poor who 
have committed these atrocities. The needy peasantry of 
Ireland, Wales and Scotland fit themselves often enough 
into landscape without a jar Nor are these horrors confined 
to the commercial classes, some of the nobility are the greatest 
offenders. 

Whenever George and I talked about Clouds or Saighton, 
or Wilsford, or Mimizan, considerations such as these always 
turned up, and I think we generally drifted back into the 
same anchorage, (i) That a right understanding of nature 
is the root of the matter. (2) That nature is always just 
simply herself, becoming what she is, where she is, and not 
erecting marble Indian ball-rooms in Yorkshire. (3) That 
nature is organic, that is, has ' grow'd ' like Topsy, and that 
no growth is the same two inches running, but is always 
infinitely varied, so that cast bricks and tiles and symmetrical 
machine-made building gear, all and sundry, is the very 



RECOGNITA. 15 

dickens. (4) That all natural growth is purposeful, as pur- 
poseful as hands and feet, so that useless ornament, which 
serves neither beauty nor purpose is vulgar excrescence. 
" It's all in Ruskin," George used to say, " but why does'nt 
Detmar go round lecturing ? " 

Saighton was very dear to George as the real homestead 
of your married life, and of your children. I do not believe 
Bendor or Percy will ever feel so much at home anywhere as 
there. Though people are said to ' live on their property/ 
often enough, as far as children are concerned, their property 
lives on them, haunts them in dreams, floats through their 
imagination when they are tired, and is a dictionary to which 
they are always referring. What is more common than to 
hear them say, " That smell how well I remember it ! Of 
course, the apple-room over the coach-house at home." And 
then the smell of the potting-shed, who is going to forget 
that ? or the smell of the cow-house, or the scent of the 
wall-flower and the lavender. Who can forget the extra- 
ordinary cosyness of the saddle-room, or the very spot, near 
the heap of decaying leaf mould, and alongside the bundles 
of garden pea-sticks, where a few stray snow-drop bulbs 
pushed their green blades through the cold earth before their 
comrades in the garden beds ? And who can forget the 
coming of the crocus and one's overwhelming desire to talk 
to it ? Added to which you must remember that your children 
grew up at Saighton seeing it each year at a fresh level. We 
' grown ups ' who walk about the world with eyes and noses 
high in air, miss most of the fauna and flora of hedge bottoms,; 
see little of the minnows and stickle-backs among the stones 
of the murmuring streams ; are strangers to the old parrot- 
stands and portmanteaus that strew the floors of the attics ; 
and know nothing accurately about the bottles, boxes and 
jars on the lower shelves of the cupboards round the house- 
keeper's room ; these secrets are reserved for those who are 
on ' how-d'ye-do ' terms with the black retriever, whose noses 
are level with his. 

The fact is our native homestead is the scene of our first 
presentation to everything ; all that grows in gardens, and 



16 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

swims in streams and ponds ; all that flies and crawls, and 
jumps, and stings and bites, and nobody can ever forget their 
introductions to wasps and newts, tadpoles, or bull-heads. 
So don't let us talk about battue shooting of hundreds of 
indolent pheasants, pushed up into air by sticks and screams, 
when we can recall long late autumn afternoons with that 
dear old fox-terrier (God rest him), with the splendid sunset 
blazing on the big ponds of water in the big Cheshire grass 
fields, and the plop of the water rat, and the cry of the moor- 
hen, and the speck of white that revealed the retreating 
rabbit ; and the wonder of it all, each day a fresh voyage of 
discovery ; and George in from hunting when they got back, 
and the spike-tailed smell-dog lying before the fire coated with 
clay, but yapping in dreams where he pursues once more the 
elusive white speck. These children of yours may live to be 
a hundred, but they won't forget any of this, nor live to see 
any place as they saw Saighton, nor ever love any dogs like 
those at Saighton not even excepting that tangled skein of 
disorganised wool which I christened " The London and 
North- Western Waste." Nor will they ever forget how 
George entered into all their juvenile games with imaginative 
zest. How he played robbers with the girls and Bendor on 
horse-back, lit bonfires for Percy, and loved to build a snow- 
man in a seasonable winter. And then of course places are 
rendered still more sacred to us if they are the scenes of early 
tragedies. Master Percy must learn to ride, and then he must 
go out hunting, and then comes the tragedy. I was in Rome 
hymn-hunting in the Vatican, and the library of the Academia. 
Suddenly the news was burst upon me in the following letter 
from George. Knowing what I knew about these two, and 
feeling as I felt about George's tremendous love for your 
only child, I was, for a while really miserable. 

Saighton, 

6th Nov., '95. 
My dear Charles, 

What can you think of my silence ? I postponed my 
reply until my return here from visiting ; but you will sorrow 
with us to hear no sooner was I back than my little Percy 



RECOGNITA. 17 

was severely injured by a fall from his pony. His thigh is 
broken and alas ! very near the socket. Dear Charles, I 
cannot tell you what the last 48 hours have been ; but now 
there is a lull in the fearful pain. I was more than an hour 
with him on the ground, alone, before help came. I can't 
think of it without strangling. Then I got him on to a plank 
and into a cart. His courage and beauty made it harder not 
to break down. As I carried the plank into the house, after 
all that pain and cold and fear of the unknown, he hailed 
Cuckoo with a cheery voice as he passed her. 

I cut him out of his little clothes and boots, for he would 
allow no one else to touch him. When the Doctor said it was 
his thigh I broke down, but I pulled myself together for I was 
the one person he trusted, and stood by him while he took 
the ether, and pulled his poor beautiful little leg while they 
set it ; and yesterday I held him fast with two hands for 14 
hours while he rode out the storm of pain. His Mother, 
thank God ! was away until late last night when the very 
worst was over. 

Yesterday was more terrible than any horror I had ever 
imagined ; but, it brought us together in such a fire of agony, 
that I believe to-day, as I have never yet been able to believe, 
that neither death nor any eternity after death can ever part 
me from my little beautiful child. He believed that my hands 
helped him, and fixed his fever-bright eyes on mine with love 
and trust even as the paroxysms came on, calling out " hold 
me tighter, Papa, hold me tighter, here it comes." Well 
to-day, he is not in such pain, and I have never felt such 

gratitude to God ! Dear Charles ! forgive all this 

Yours ever, GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

I confess I've had to pull myself together to copy this 
supreme out-pouring of unselfish love and devotion. I wrote 
to him from Rome as best I could. What I said seems to have 
touched you all, for which I was thankful ; for sympathy is 
something, it does lighten our burdens if others share them. 
A few days later I got better news. 



i8 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

Saighton, Chester, 

i3th November, 1895. 
My dear Charles, 

I prize your letter, and at once write to say that we 
are much happier about our little Perf. Grateful, indeed, 
to-day past all expression of gratitude, for we are over, and 
well over, the day I dreaded most of all. Yesterday they 
put him under ether again, and re-set the thigh on a bent 
rest, in order to bring the lower fragment into line with the 
upper one, which is pulled upward by muscles. I have been 
dreading this almost to the point of physical sickness for the 
last week. Well ! it was done beautifully by the surgeons, 
and, to my unspeakable joy he has had no renewal of the 
muscular spasms and pain. I never dared hope for so much, 
and it seems a miracle ; and is one truly. So now we have 
only to make him happy, and to hope that in the end his leg 
will be a limb worthy of him. He sends you his ' best love,' 
and Sibell sends her love, and we are all touched by your 
letter and wish we could see you. 

He is a gallant little fellow. After all he has had to go 
through he went into action like a hero, calling out " good- 
bye, Mamma " in a muffled voice under the mouth-cap, and 
waving his little hand to her with a cheery flourish. 

As you say, we cannot understand these things, but I 
begin to see that Pain is the parent of Love. If there were 
no pain, or dread of pain, in the world, there would be little 
love. I felt my love of him roaring up to heaven like a great 
fire fanned by a hurricane as I looked on his agony. 

But no more of this. All is now well, much better than 
I hoped, and the nightmares of apprehension are beginning 
to leave me." 

Later on he sent me another note confirming the satis- 
factory restoration of Percy's leg : Saighton, 26th August. 
Dear old Charles, One word of friendship and affection to go 
with the enclosed claim on friendship. Write to me soon, 
and do come and see us. The Perf is at his very best, and 
let me write it with reverent thanks he is riding again with- 



RECOGNITA. 19 

out the faintest trace of nervousness ; galloping over the fields 
like Jackanapes, with his cap well on the back of his dear 
round head." 

Of course when one saw Perfoo as he appears here, in 
white open-work frock and silk sash, gazing with wide Irish 
eyes into the mysterious camera, looking for all the world 
like an incipient " bruiser," about to clench his fists for the 
next round, one could understand George's idolatry. Thanks 
be to God George saw him baptized, witnessed his marriage, 
and the two enjoyed five and twenty years of unalloyed filial 
and parental love. 

That Percy should love riding, and learn to ride well 
was George's great ambition for him. Three years before 
the accident George wrote to his sister : 
Saighton Grange, 
Chester, 

September 25th, 1892. 
Darling Pamela, 

I must write you one line about Perfoo' s riding. The 
day before yesterday he went out for the first time, boy-saddle 
on Cuckoo's old grey pony, led, of course, by a man on foot. 
He has a perfect seat, erect without any sign of constraint. 
He looked, in fact, like a good rider coming in from hunting 
quite at his ease. I was really astonished to see his legs drop 
naturally into position, stirrup iron on the ball of his foot, 
reins held in left hand after once shewing, and little crop 
neatly caught in the right. I walked alongside. He talked 
the whole time about foxes and coverts and the prospects 
of sport, and did not seem to be aware that he was high up 
from the ground, or that there was any occasion for nervous- 
ness. Even when the pony turned rather briskly to go home 
he did not tighten his hold on the reins or stop talking. All 
he said when he came in was : " I don't suppose many little 
boys ride such a big pony as that." He is only to ride a very 
short time, 20 minutes, every day, so as not to tire his thighs. 
He at once took possession of all the saddlery in succession 
to Bendor. " This is my saddle now, isn't it ? All this 
harness is mine." And to the groom, " Where are the reins 



20 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

I had when I was a baby ? " "At home in the saddle-room." 
" What will they be for now ? I suppose they'll do if another 
little boy comes ! Won't they ? Won't they ? " Repeated 
to the obvious embarrassment of his attendant. 

When we came in we took a walk in the garden and 
noticed the chestnut leaves turning yellow. I said : " And 
in the winter they'll all be gone." " Yes," said Perfoo, " and 
you don't see many lying on the ground. They go up some- 
where. I don't know where, do you ? " I think he was 
trying to fit the leaves into the scheme of metempsychosis 
with perpetual rebirth, which is at present the religion to 
which he adheres. The leaves, doubtless, go up somewhere 
and come down again to have another good time, just as the 
soul does in his opinion. 

Love to all, 

Your loving brother, 

GEORGE. 
Saighton, 

October loth, 1892. 
Darling Pamela, 

I had a great burst of writing yesterday, finishing my 
Dedication of the Ronsard translations, at a sitting 4 till 8.30 
in the evening. Whether from excitement, or indigestion 
following on hunger and excess (I think the former), I could 
not sleep, and lying awake this little song came into my head 
at about four o'clock this morning. Mamma may like it, as 
I borrow her name for Perfoo, and you, on account of your 
patriotic proclivities : 



I. 



Heart's Delight is five years old, 
And rides an old white pony, 

With the easy seat of a rider bold, 
By grassy ways and stony. 

In crimson cap and crimson gown, 
He rides his pony up and down. 




mery 



RECOGNITA^ 21 

2. 

Heart's Delight is five years old, 

His face is fresh and sunny, 
His English hair just touched with gold 

Amidst a browner honey, 
And English eyes of deepest blue, 

Whose courage looks you through and through. 

3- 
Heart's Delight believes the Sea 

Was made for him to paddle ; 
He also firmly holds that he 

Was born into the saddle, 
By right of Saxon blood and Norse 

To Kingdom of the Sea and Horse. 

4- 
Of all the blessings given me 

By Heaven, I prize rather, 
Above all other gifts, to be 

A simple English father 
Of one more little English lad 

Alive to make his country glad. 



I have got a tune in my head for " Heart's Delight," 
which I shall now try to pick out on the piano. 

Love to all 

Your loving Brother, 

GEORGE. 

P.S. Here is the music as well as I can write it. But the 
time always bothers me. 

And fifteen years later in a letter to Pamela he says : 
"It is jolly to find that 20 years cannot abate one's huge 
delight in riding to hounds ; and the added joy of seeing Perf 
always in the first flight and often cutting out the work is 
exquisite. If I can keep my place of old days I am pleased 
like a boy. If he beats me I am in the seventh heaven." 



22 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 



Needless to say I took no part or lot in these out-door 
dangers. I once went out hunting, I don't mind telling you 
in confidence, but I don't think that any one concerned with 
the matter, not even the horse, and certainly not myself, was 
keen that the experiment should be repeated. George in- 
duced me to learn the bicycle, and I got on sufficiently well 
to make several short expeditions with him, but here again 
the control was too uncertain. The only thing that could 
be absolutely relied upon was my incurable tendency to steer 
straight into any moving object coming towards me along 
the road. 

Nevertheless, when George and I were talking alone 
during the long two hours between dark and dinner on a 
winter's afternoon, he would often expand freely on the ad- 
vantages of hunting, never as far as I can remember from a 
huntsman's point of view, but always on its recreative aspect. 
I don't think that outwitting the fox formed any part of his 
interest in the matter. What he loved was " the rapture 
of the revel as it sweeps across the plain." His riding was 
thought to be brave, bordering on reckless. What he always 
enlarged upon to me when he got home was the physical 
joy of the thing, the swift movement, and the extraordinary 
exhilaration which comes from an ample oxygenation of the 
blood. To him all this was a real recreation, and set up a 
physical and mental glow. He would sit down in front of 
the fire and demand music, or he would describe the beauti- 
ful lights upon the Broxton Hills, or a glorious sunset behind 
Moel Famma. 

He wrote to a great friend of his in 1910 : " I have 
hunted with beagles at 8 a.m. in the morning and played 
lawn tennis after polo in the evening. I never felt so well 
in all my life and am black, blue, purple, green, yellow, and 
soot colour with bruises on both sides from my waist down 
to my ankles. I finished up yesterday by my pony's legs 
slipping away as I turned, so he squashed me just in front of 
the Queen of Spain. But it didn't hurt me in the least, or 



RECOGNITA. 23 

shake me a bit. You see I am writing about myself too 
just a happy animal Centaur-self, that rejoiced to be able to 
gallop for an hour without getting out of breath." 

" I love the small book (Barrie's Tribute to George Mere- 
dith on his death), I had not seen it before. I think you know 
that all who love Life are immortal. And that is why I 
loved your letter as much as the small book. It is a brave 
letter and clear as the crystal weather that helped to inspire 
it. 

I have been in bed with congestion of the lungs, but am 
well again and my spirits bounding up. It is good for me to 
be sent to bed once in 10 years or so. For afterwards I whiz 

off into the blue like a stone out of a catapult Now I feel 

like a bird and could sing all day ; do indeed hum and dance 
instead of walking, and I turn all this exuberance as a charm 
in your direction, so that you shall sing too. 

Out in the air again 

Over the downs ! 
How the wind drowns 

Body and brain ; 
Hums in my ears, 

Blinds me with tears, 
Washing the world of the dead Winter's stain. 

Spring winds are here again, 

Scouring the world, 
See the dust whirl'd 

Over the plain ; 
Cleansing the mind 

Foully confined 
Day after day in the prison of pain. 

Listen ! the lark again 

Sings where the skies 

Dazzle our eyes ; 
Oh, how he strains, 

Sharper than sight, 

Pierces the height, 
Tingles from Heaven, like glittering rain." 



24 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

And up to the end riding meant very much to him, and 
he had a very human interest in his favourite horses, as, in- 
deed, he had in all animals, especially in the silver pheasant 
at Clouds who was inspired with undying hatred of the motor- 
car, and rushed to it, and pecked at it violently every time it 
came to the door. This elegant oriental I met lately with 
Pamela in a fir wood up at Glen, in magnificent plumage, 
very companionable, walking along and apparently talking 
in an under-tone to himself ; possibly about his wife recently 
arrived from the Stores. 

Sometimes when I went into the room where George 
was writing, he'd say : " This is one of Percy's dogs. He 
follows me everywhere. He likes my day, my room and my 
fire. I have to keep on letting him in and out, but he's very 
affectionate." 

There was another of Percy's Sealyhams at Clouds, not 
the " mother of many," but the lady with a black patch over 
one eye, and the opposite ear cocked up, who invariably 
turned upside down on the sofa, and pushed her paws out 
whenever she was affectionately spoken to. I can see George 
sitting beside her, in his Cheshire hunt coat, waiting for the 
guests to come down to dinner, and touching her paws lightly 
with his fingers, and saying : " This is the sentimental one." 

It is a great joy to me that this dear little Bunny is now 
your constant companion. She has an exquisite tempera- 
ment, and most peaceful ways, alone, in the house, with you ; 
but about the domain at Eaton, and in company with the 
more dissolute dachshunds, she flings herself into the chase 
with the most abandoned recklessness, disappearing up drains 
and down rabbit holes, to the despair of her guardian. 

I think George's whole attitude towards animals was 
coloured by his desire to domesticate the entire species. He 
often asked me why nothing had been done since prehistoric 
times to draw wild creatures into friendship with man. Here 
are two characteristic letters of his to his niece and sister 
about horses and birds : 




l'.; VJr //>///' 



RECOGNITA. 25 

Clouds 

East Knoyle, 
Salisbury, 

4th September, 1911 
Darling little Clare, 

I loved your letter and the Equestrian portrait. I shall 
frame it and keep it in my room. It is very good and natural. 

Percy and I have 8 hunters here. They love being 
visited. When they hear my steps, out comes a long row 
of long faces on long necks over the bars of loose-boxes. Then 
they rub me with their noses and think in their dear, slow, 
puzzled way about hunting ; remembering dimly that there 
is something else in life more glorious than eating. 

On Wednesday to their huge surprise at 6 o'clock in the 
morning they will see the Hounds and the Hunt Servants' 
liveries. Then they will remember it all distinctly, and give 
a little squeak of joy and throw a buck. But the summer 
flies will remind them that it is only cub-hunting, and their 
slow thoughts will revolve back to the cool comfort of their 
stables. But on Thursday Terence and Cardinal will say 
' Hullo, going by train, are we ? ' and get into horse-boxes 
by force of habit. When they get out in the evening they 
will think they are going to their stable at Saighton, and 
wonder why they are ridden to Eaton. Then they will see 
white tents and remember the call of trumpets and the other 
glory of mimic war, and ' the thunder of the Captains and 
the Shouting.' So they will be very happy doing the things 
that their ancestors did with Man's ancestors 15,000 years 
ago. For the men of the first Stone Age drew some excellent 
portraits of long-faced horses on the tusks of mammoths ; 
and, we must suppose, loved the horses. 

Terence and Cardinal will feel that it is wise to go on 
doing what horses have learned in 5,000 generations to do. 
They feel this. They will not think it, for they are happier 
than philosophers and feel things an art which philosophers 
Jose the knack of. They will see, and smell, and hear that, 
in camp, there are as many horses as men, and be very proud 
of the equality, and of the number of horses all pawing the 



26 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

ground and grunting together. When the silver-throated 
trumpets blow ' Feed ' they will all neigh together ; partly 
because they are always ready to eat ; but, also, because 
they feel a strange thrill in their slow brains when one sound 
makes them remember one thing distinctly ; the strange 
thrill that Man felt when he was learning to speak. 

The next morning when the trumpet sings ' Troops 
right wheel ' round they will go so suddenly that the 
recruit more ignorant than they will nearly tumble off 
on the near side. Thus, again, will they feel the joy of com- 
panionship with Man, heightened by generous emulation in 
the Arts of Peace and War. 

Your loving Uncle, 

GEORGE. 
35, Park Lane, 

i6th March, 1908. 
Most darling Pamela, 

I have been thinking of you constantly and taking com- 
fort from scraps of news. And I have been meaning to write 
news to you, since that is all I can do whilst you are im- 
prisoned by this detestable scourge and worried by the baby's 
illness. But, first, I had to give anything the chance of 
happening, either to me, or in me, which I could conceivably 
write about. It was inconceivable that I should write about 
the House of Commons ; and I lived there till last Saturday, 
then I broke out. 

In the afternoon I went to the Zoo with Sibell .... I 
chose the Zoo. There were other suggestions, as, a performance 
of Pilgrim's Progress, and a Concert at the Queen's Hall. But 
I needed air and life, preferably of a primitive kind, so I chose 
the Zoo in spite of Sibell's remark that I ought to wait until 
we could go with children. I wanted to go for myself and, 
specially to look at Birds. When flying from men, I avoid 
monkeys and addict myself to birds. (Parrots are not birds ; 
and are useless to one escaped from the House of Commons. 
" O ! for the wings of a dove " is in aspiration that does not 
waft me to the voices of parrots). 



RECOGNITA . . 27 

I went to the real, bird-like birds, who live in a row, 
just to the right after entering the Gardens. These birds are 
like our birds in a dream, or a Grimm's Fairy Story. Natur- 
ally, many of them are blue ; others are green, or orange, or 
earth-colour, and one was crimson. Yet they are not ma- 
caws, or toucans, or other monstrosities. They are Thrushes, 
Starlings, Doves, Robins, Partridges and Quails, but of slim- 
mer shape and brighter colour than our birds. And some are 
mixtures of these, and some are distinct but comparable 
such as Minas, Bower-birds and Weaver-birds. And all are 
alert and happy and vocal, as they said in the xviiith century. 

The front of the first cage was a Kate Greenaway tree, 
a box the stem 3 feet 6 high, the spreading top four feet 
wide. I stepped round the corner and in the heart of the 
green there sat, and looked at me, a thrush, the colour of an 
orange. There he sits and sings ; as yellow as Walter Crane's 
Yellow Dwarf. There were miniature doves and quails, no 
larger than wood-wrens, or small pebbles in the desert. And 
there was one Mina not the plump, fat, Indian sort of Mina 
but slim as a shuttle and parti-coloured, black and yellow. 
His name is ' George.' He loves mankind. He like Lord 
Nelson knows no fear. He sat on my fingers and the keeper 
put him into his pocket. As I walked away I saw him in close 
conversation with two little red-haired girls, who had walked 
straight out of a Holman Hunt picture. He does all this 
from love, or mere absence of fear. But these two gifts are 
almost one. Mere absence of fear carries a delicacy denied 
to the appetite of gazelles, however graciously embellished 
by melting eyes and insinuating approach. 

Now, the keeper of these birds, has a great contempt 
for America. ' They call that a ' blue bird ' the common 
' blue bird ' of America ; but it's a robin.' And one sees, 
by the profile and beak, that it is a robin. Or, again, ' They 
call that a robin, but it's a thrush.' And one sees that it is 
a thrush ; only with a red breast, and very big, and, so, called 
a robin by Americans. This keeper pierced the facile deceit 
of the large and obvious. He made a profound observation 
on Americans apologetically ' But they were very ignorant 



28 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

when they went there.' Thus did he dismiss and forgive the 
Pilgrim Fathers, with an ' Ite missa est.' So much and no 
more for the Pilgrim Fathers who landed on the Plymouth 
rock. But what of their descendants ? They are still igno- 
rant. They class by superficial resemblance, and claim 
because of size. Some day they will produce an American 
Bible, much bigger than our Bible, and as like it as a thrush 
is to a robin. 

From the birds I went to the elephants. I detest half- 
measures and compromises after a fortnight in the House 
of Commons. The birds are beside man's life. This the 
Romans knew when they wrote ' ubi aves ibi angeli ' ' where 
there are birds, there are angels.' But the elephants are 
before man's life. They are primeval and sacrosanct. Yet 
they like to be fed ; even on biscuits. A due attention to 
Birds and Elephants, to the volatile and monumental, inures 
one to time and prepares one for eternity. We have the 
elephants' glacier-like progression towards a geological mu- 
seum, and the bird's swift dip and high quiver of indomitable 
song. Both are for ever falling, at different paces and angles ; 
as Lucretius declared in six books ; crystallised by the French 
in one phrase ' La chute des choses.' 

But, for me, the yellow thrush singing in the green bush 
and the fearlessness of George are immortal And, if for me, 
then for everybody, for ever. I say to both, ' Thou wast 
not meant for Death, Immortal Bird, No hungry generations 
tread thee down.' I cannot say so much for the gazelles. 
Yet, because they are beautiful, though voracious, I will 
give them immortality. 

But, darling Pamelo, the last thing I meant to do was 
to moralize. I went to the Zoo to escape morality. 

In the evening we dined with Lettice and with Beau- 
champ. It was a pleasing entertainment not unlike the 
Zoo. For we had ambassadors and ministers of many nations 
suddenly caged in surprising contiguity, with their wives. 
It was not too, unlike the Zoo. I have dropped into poetry 
like Silas Wegg 



RECOGNITA. 29 

This morning still in pursuit of a holiday I walked 

through Hyde Park I saw them (two workmen) 

leaning one against the end the other against the wheel of a 
large barrow. They were motionless figures in the wind- 
swept variety of the Park in March. It was not a landscape 
animated by figures, but a group of two statues animated by 
wind-waved branches. As I advanced they seemed larger 
in accordance with the law of perspective but they did not 
move. Nor, do I think, that they spoke. But, as I passed 
the group, they spoke, without moving. And this is what 
they said, for I heard them. First Workman to second Work- 
man ' Well, Sir, I think it's time that we should do some- 
thing.' Second Workman to First ' Right you are, and 
what would be better than half a pint of Beer.' They are 
one with the Penguins and Gazelles putting beer for fishes 
and buns. We cannot all be birds or elephants. We cannot 
all be swift or wise. But some can sing. And I do wish I 
could sing to you, Darling, in your cage, of ' the Daedal Earth 
and the dancing stars ' For all life is good and eternal. 

Your devoted Brother, 

GEORGE. 



One of the most delightful memories of old days at Saigh- 
ton were our expeditions to Hawarden. Several years before 
I had had charge of Mr. Gladstone's collection of porcelain 
in Liverpool, and had met him at Knowsley, and talked with 
him about what I think the disastrous influence of Josiah 
Wedgwood upon the old English ' slip ' ware, of which Lord 
Derby had one or two good local specimens. Later on I 
stayed with Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone at Iwerne, and experienced 
the extraordinary fascination of his powerful personality. 
I can see George now sitting opposite to me at the lunch table 
at Hawarden listening to Mr. Gladstone discoursing on the 
huge development of over-sea steamship transit " Very 
different, Sir, from when I as a boy took letters for India 
to Messrs. Earle's office for my father, and put them in a bag, 



30 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

hanging behind the office door from which I was told they 
might or might not emerge during the following three months." 
It was on this occasion that George began to interest 
Mr. Gladstone in my discoveries among old Vernacular Italian 
hymn books. Mr. Gladstone gave me a penetrating look of 
sceptical enquiry " I had no idea, Sir, there were such 
things ; surely the Church of Rome has always discouraged 
any kind of public devotional literature in the Vernacular ? 
Can there be anything of merit among them ? " I was asked 
to read one of them to him : 

FELICITA VERA, E SICURA IN 
PARADISO . 

Se questa valle di miserie piena 

Par cosi amena, e vaga, or che sia quella 

Beata, e bella region di pace, 

Patria verace. 

Se questo tempestoso Mar di pianto 
Par dolce tanto, a chi con fragil barca 
Errando il varca, qual gioia, e conforto, 

Sara nel porto ! 

Se grato e '1 campo, ove'il crudel nemico 
Per odio antico guerra ogn'or ci muove, 
Che sia la, dove al vincitor si dona 

L'alta Corona ? 

Deh lasciam dunque questa oscura valle, 
Che'l dritto calle della via smarrita 
Cristo n'addita, e dice : O Pellegrino 

Ecco il cammino ! 

Prendi la Croce, e dietro a me t'invia, 
lo son la via, e sono il vero Duce, 
Che ne conduce alia Citta superna, 

Di gloria eterna. 

A day or two after our visit to Hawarden I received 
a letter asking me to send Mr. Gladstone a copy of the above, 
to which I added the following admirable translation by 
Father John O'Connor, which follows the original, even to 
the cross rhymes : 



RECOGNITA. 31 

THE SURE AND CERTAIN JOYS OF THE PARADISE 
OF GOD. 

If this poor vale, with helpless sorrow teeming 
Is so fair-seeming, ah ! What shall it be, 
Th' unstinted glee of yonder home-land blest, 
Our lonely soul's safe nest ! 

If this unrestful sea of stormy weeping 
At times is sleeping, when in vessel frail 
We spread our sail, to course it o'er and o'er, 
How calm the sheltered shore ! 

If 'tis a pleasant field where foe so cruel 
His ancient duel deals relentlessly, 
What peace shall be, when we at last put on 
Th' eternal crown hard-won ! 

Oh ! let us leave this valley grey and dreary, 
For we are weary with vain journeying, 
And Christ our King points out : " O sheep astray ! 
Behold the only way 1 

Take up your cross with me, and leave the byway, 
I am the Highway, and the only guide 
Who gain, betide what will, yon City white 
Of endless pure delight ! " 

Apropos of Mr. Gladstone, George used to love a story 
Alfred Lyttelton told me of his brother's visit to Hawarden, 
when he joined his uncle walking alone in the garden, and the 
two went up the slope towards the old keep. Passing a large 
walnut tree Edward Lyttelton said to Mr. Gladstone, " Now 
I don't remember that walnut tree being as large as that, 
and what a crop of nuts ! I've forgotten, Uncle William, 
whether you like walnuts." Mr. Gladstone, with some 
solemnity, " Edward, I have not eaten a walnut now for 
sixty-eight and a half years " and then with some sadness 
" Nor indeed a nut of any kind ! " 



32 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

When told by Alfred, with deep sonorous tones, it was 
inexpressibly droll. And Alfred venerated Mr. Gladstone, 
as George did, as we all did, knowing full well that we shall 
never see anything like that again. I have always over my 
desk a wonderful photograph of him taken shortly before he 
died, sitting in profile writing at a table, absorbed, and un- 
conscious of everything but the work in hand, and the late- 
ness of the hour ! 

Another place we visited was Beeston Castle. Here 
George was in his element. Armed with the main outlines 
of Viollet le Due's thesis " La Forteresse " he brought the 
hill to life again in the various stages of its military occupation, 
British, Roman, and Mediaeval, and did his best to date the 
confused masses of fallen masonry. The last time we were 
there, if you remember, I had the luck to see lying on the 
path a small dark stone of unusual material in a sandstone 
country. Mark and his Lady were climbing the slope above 
us. I told George to pick up the stone, for I feared if I took 
it up he might think that I had brought it with me and was 
playing a practical joke on him. So he picked it up and 
found it to be a perfectly formed dark flint arrow head. His 
delight knew no bounds, and he locked it away so securely 
that he never had it at hand when he wanted to show it to 
anyone. 

And then Chester ! What joy that gave him. The 
Roman baths, the altars, the groined roofs. St. John's 
Church, and the town itself, with its wonderful walls, and old 
world streets. Do you remember too, our expedition to 
Garden, the pony-trap across the fields, George's delight in 
the poplars and willows, the old black and white house (since 
burnt down), the portrait of the Duke of Guise in the drawing- 
room, and George's excitement over the fragment of a Caxton 
he found in the smoking-room, and old Mr. Leach's sacri- 
legious chaff, " That's the sort of stuff we light our pipes 
with," and his description of watching the old mother fox 
' boxing ' down the dung-beetles for her cubs in an evening ? 

He took me down to Eaton, I remember, when I first 
came to you, to show me the Roman columns and altar in 



RECOGNIT A . 33 

the garden, the altar dedicated by the 2oth Legion to " The 
Nymphs and Fountains," found in Great Boughton in a 
field, " surrounded by abundant springs of fine water." And 
then into the library to see the early manuscript of Piers 
Plowman, and the large collection of Civil War tracts. 

It was on a Sunday afternoon that he walked with me 
for the first time to see the new Church at Eccleston, one of 
the most beautiful modern ecclesiastical buildings in England. 
Service was going on, and he sat with me away at the back, 
I think almost under the tower. The choir was chanting his 
favourite Psalm, the I04th, full of wonderful imaginative 
praise, the second half of each verse answering to the first 
in antiphonal rhythm, now repeating, now accentuating, and 
now expanding the meaning. 

" Thou deckest Thyself with light as it were with a 

garment : 

And spreadest out the heavens like a curtain." 
" O Lord how manifold are Thy works : 
In wisdom hast Thou made them all ; the earth is full 

of Thy riches." 

He talked about this as we walked home across the grass 
fields, and asked me if I had read Christina Rosetti's poem 
engraved on a brass heart-shaped plate let into the Church wall, 
just over my head. I had, and saw it then for the first time : 
" Remember me when I am gone away, 
Gone far away into the silent land ; 
When you can no more hold me by the hand, 
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay. 
Remember me when no more day by day 
You tell me of our future that you planned ; 
Only remember me ; you understand 
It will be late to counsel then, or pray. 
Yet, if you should forget me for a while 
And afterwards remember, do not grieve ; 
For if the darkness and corruption leave 
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had, 
Better by far you should forget and smile 
Than that you should remember and be sad." 



GEORGE WYN DH AM 



In those days, and in Ireland, he enjoyed every moment 
of his strenuous life, and spread joy and fun on all sides of 
him. If there was a dinner-party, official or homely, he was 
a great host, always carrying a certain old-fashioned air of 
presiding at a banquet, which gave dignity to the feast. He 
liked splendour at particular moments, in life, art, and litera- 
ture. I think that books and horses were his only real ex- 
travagances. Of course if he had Henley, or Mahaffy, or 
Chesterton, or Belloc, or Father Delany to dine, the great 
moment came when he brought them along the table to him, 
or moved to them, and waved away the domestics, passed 
the decanters, lit a cigarette, and buoyed up with the rapture 
of a day's hunting, set the intellectual ball a rolling. 

As life advanced he developed at times an excusable 
impatience with irrelevant interruptions to intellectual con- 
versation. He focussed his mind so completely on a given 
subject, that if some well-intentioned but drifting guest asked 
him what he thought of the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, 
in the midst of an earnest enquiry as to who was " The onlie 
begetter of these insuing sonnets," George woi id look round 
in despair from one sympathetic person to another. 

At the same time, should some irresponsible talker at the 
table prove quite unable to hold on to any particular point 
for two minutes together, and simply use one subject as a 
spring-board for another, and so on, nobody would enjoy the 
joke better than he did, as he out-ran all competitors in leaping 
iightly along from reasons for the moon influencing the tides, 
to lunatics, eugenics, evolution, revelation, Mrs. Eddy, women 
suffrage, the party system, Chesterton, Marconi, wireless 
telegraphy, Sir Oliver Lodge, psychical research, excise, tariff 
reform, etc., etc. And what delighted him was to trace out 
afterwards the pedigree of these associated ideas, and to find 
the missing link between psychical research and excise ! 

I remember one evening at Chief Secretary's Lodge 
when he and Father Delany and myself were left alone for a 
long talk after dinner, and George put this ripe and experienced 



RECOGNITA. 35 

and delightful Jesuit Father through a searching cross-ex- 
amination on the form of government enjoyed by his illustrious 
Society ; on the functions of the General and his advisory 
council ; on the powers deputed by him to Provincials ; on the 
status of everyone, from the lay-brother to the top-dog. I 
think we all enjoyed it, George did, and I hope Father Delany 
did. At any rate he gave us an interesting description of a 
international gathering of Provincials, their daily conversation 
being wholly in Latin, which took George's imagination back 
to the dinner-table of Sir Thomas More. 

It was not only with the illustrious and the intellectual 
that he could be charming. He had a quick eye to discover 
the diffident and the inexperienced in any company, and 
adapted himself with much care to change the winter of their 
discontent into a glorious summer. His mother had taught 
him the value of appreciation, and he gave it freely. In fact 
he had, thank God, an imagination, and a generous disposition, 
and just at the moment when any of these shy souls had be- 
come most uncomfortably conscious of themselves and their 
clothes, and a general paralysis of the organ of speech had set 
in, and even the erect posture was becoming intolerable, 
George, with his most gentle manner would step in and ask 
after some favourite dog, or obstinate pony, or eccentric 
governess, and in three minutes these victims had forgotten 
to hate themselves and learnt to love him. 

Nor was it only his own house that engaged all his love 
and thought. When Pamela and Eddy put down by the 
ample margin of the Wiltshire Avon, their perfect homestead 
at Wilsford, George wrote thus to his sister in the year 1906 : 

Saighton, 
Most Darling Pamela, Lady Day, 1906 

How would next Saturday suit lor crossing the threshold ? 
Sunday is the first of April, the real New Year's Day, so that 
I shall begin the year with you in the new Wilsford. April, 
Avril, the month of Aphrodite, is my favourite out of all the 
pomp. I want to be one of the first to cross the threshold, 
and hope that my little gifts for the children will be ready by 
then. But I must find something for Christopher and David. 



36 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

I saw a little joke in a shop window the other day ; a 
picture of a fat man drowning in mid-stream and calling out 
' Help ! help ! I can't swim.' A lean American on the bank 
replies, ' Wall, I can't swim either, but I don't make such a 
darned noise about it.' 

We came here Friday, after much punting at West- 
minster, and on Saturday I had a good hunt two capital 
gallops over the vale. To-day I played with my books and 
defied the North East wind. 

The owls woke me up at five o'clock. I could hear their 
wings as they brushed past our windows. They are paid, 
like old watchmen, to call the birds. For the dawn chorus 
began immediately. The garden is full of confiding thrushes 
with latticed breasts, looking sentimental out of round, liquid 
eyes. What with the east wind and over-eating, they are 
' as sad as night for very wantonness,' sad, of course, in the 
comfortable, over-fed, sentimental way that makes for liquid 
eyes and liquid utterance. There is nothing austere about a 
thrush. Lyrical people are never austere. 

Sibell, Percy and I go to Clouds for Easter, and I shall 
ride over to see you then. But I hope Saturday next will 
suit, for I long to see the House whilst it is still self-conscious 
and appreciative of attention. Houses and children pass 
beyond that stage so soon, and hate being told that you re- 
member them when they were so high. 

Why have I written lintel twice instead of threshold ? 
I can think of no reason except that I like the word better. 
Nobody threshes corn in the doorway now, and, if they ever 
did, I doubt if they gave a utilitarian name to such a mystical 
limit. I shall call it the door-sill and not the threshold, since 
I may not call it the lintel. 

Your devoted Brother, 

GEORGE. 
Saighton, 

I5th September, 1906. 
Beloved Pamela, 

Wilsford was delicious. That bit, or slip, of the river- 
valley and down, and the wideness of sky and earth it com- 



RECOGNITA. 37 

mands, is a bit, or slip, of my larger dream-life. It plucks 
at my own heart-strings. A sudden intimate aspect of loose 
hedge-rows, a keen, known, smell of chalk-dust and sheep, 
the little triangle of grass and trees where we branch from 
Amesbury to Wilsford, the Stones, Fargo ; all these are eternal 
to me. I find that I am the same person who rode there 
thirty years ago. They have not changed and I have not 
changed. And what they were 30 years ago, they were 60 
years before that. And so was I, 600 years before that. 
Therefore, I give you eternal life. 

I made a little tune to my song, in the mode of 600, or 
6,000, years ago. The little air of it tries to sing how every day 
is new, and, at the same time, a day of the days. 

Perf and I had a great day to-day ; we rode at 7.15 for 
two hours and have been together all day. He is just be- 
ginning to love Poetry. Imagine my delight at recognising 
another aspect of eternity in heritage. We have pretty well 
gutted Keats to-day, all the Odes and St. Agnes Eve, with a 
plenty of soldiering talk, and riding talk, and political talk 
thrown in, to throw up the supremacy of the fantastic. 

That is the river of life ; the surface that reflects Heaven, 
and, derived from far sources in the hills, goes out at last to 
sea, to foregather again and reflect Heaven once more. The 
drudgery of turning the mill, the party-political mill, of hatred, 
malice and all uncharitableness, is but an incident. So, 
' Hey day ! and grey day, But every day is new,' and yet, 
thank God, as old as the hills, and secure as the stars 

Send me back my little barbaric air. 

Your devoted Brother, 

GEORGE. 



One of George's most engaging characteristics was the 
simple loving way he talked about his family. I never found 
in him a trace of fatiguing petty detraction. He would read 
some letter to himself and then start off : " You know my 
mother and Pamela so well, how is it you have missed seeing 



38 GEORGE WYNDHAM 

more of Mary Elcho ? She is great company. An intense 
and active intellectuality. She lets nothing conceal itself 
that can be unravelled. The worst of this political treadmill 
is that I see so little of them all." He would speak of his 
sister, Madeline Adeane, her tact and her judgment. The 
beauty of her personality. His appreciation of his father was 
very penetrative. It went below the agitation about small 
things, and found his unusual individuality, his humour, his 
unassailable spontaneity. Do you remember how George 
liked that letter written by his father to Percy, without re- 
ference to any previous conversation or correspondence 
saying : " There are three things which I hope you will not do 
(i) Become a Roman Catholic (z) Marry an American girl 
(3) Go into the House of Commons ! " As to Guy, I think 
that one of the great regrets of George's life was that politics, 
the war in South Africa, Guy's appointment as Military 
Attache at St. Petersburg, and family ties, had separated him 
so much and so long from the brother who from early youth 
he loved so dearly. Do you remember how anxious he was 
during those last few days in Paris, to know if Guy had re- 
ceived the C.B. ? 

i6th February, 1914. I am sitting in the Lower room 
of the Tower at Saighton, as in years gone by, writing at the 
oak desk George copied from Catena's picture of St. Jerome. 

A great peace has fallen over the country after a three 
days heavy gale. 

There was a roaring in the wind all night ; 
The rain came heavily and, fell in floods ; 
But now the sun is rising calm and bright ; 
The birds are singing in the distant woods ; 
Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods. 

Below me are the two rose gardens enclosed by high, 
broad, yew hedges, which I first remember but a few inches 
from the ground. The eager heralds of the impatient spring 
are thrusting their lovely shafts through the green sward, 
and in the upper garden there is a starry galaxy of snow-drops, 



RECOGNITA. 39 

mingled with the early pink and white cyclamen which I 
brought from Monte Cassino twenty years ago. There is a 
beautiful light over the Welsh hills, and in the wide green 
fields that lard the Cheshire plain the pools are filled to the 
brim with the floods of February. 

This is the little library George occupied till 1905, when 
he moved into the Upper Room ; and here, more than any- 
where, and to-day, more than any day, have I felt him very 
near to me. Indeed he has been so all along since August last, 
and I almost dread to complete these Recognita lest it seem 
like another parting. 

But not from this tower shall go forth any note of sadness, 
for in it his finest literary work was done. Here he wrote his 
best, and talked his best, before his spirit was broken in the 
political mill. Here he fed his soul on the philosophy of the 
Sonnets, the identity and eternity of Truth and Beauty, and 
the immortality of Love. Eternity ? Perchance the ice- 
cap shall " topple the earth over on its axis, and civilization 
fossilize at the bottom of the sea ! " But what if this be only 
an imagination that daunts the imprisoned soul of man ? 
And what if this vibratory apparition in the ether of space 
which w r e call matter, were to cease, at the bidding of whatever 
energy started it off and keeps it going ; and the phenomena 
of the universe, " the cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous 
palaces," were to dissolve and fade like some insubstantial 
pageant ; and what if we ourselves prove to be the sort of stuff 
such dreams and apparitions are made on, as the story is 
woven on the arras, and our little life surrounded by this sleep, 
from which we shall awaken into our great life, since our 
terrestrial birth is but " a sleep and a forgetting ? " 

Some such assurance as this has made life worth living 
and death worth dying to every hero of humanity. 

These, and a hundred other recognita come to me as 
I think of George in his original and adopted homes. And 
all this joy of home only came to him that he might share it 
with his friends ; not because it was occasionally touched 
with any sort of splendour, but really and truly for its own 
delightful sake. Nor again for any splendour or notoriety 



^o GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

brought by those who came to him. There was nothing 
resplendent about Henley except a heroic spirit, and a bril- 
liant intellect, battling with a suffering frame and adverse 
fortune, but George loved the man and wept as he spoke of 
him. 

For me, your house was really a home. 

With these recollections of the homes he lived in, and 
the places he loved, I gather into remembrance all the kith 
and kin that were dear to him, especially the children of his 
sisters and his brother ; and I beg each and all, whether they 
bear his name or not, to remember that they share his honoured 
descent, and are in duty bound out of loyalty to his love, and 
respect for his illustrious life, to study not only him, but 
what he studied. He gave his mind to high and enduring 
themes for action and contemplation, and spent his life in 
chivalrous endeavours to help and to heal. 



RECOGNITA. 41 



' Lo, all the lovely things we find on earth, 
Resemble for the soul that rightly sees 
That source of bliss divine which gave us birth ; 
Nor have we first fruits or remembrances 
Of heaven elsewhere. Thus, loving loyally, 
I rise to God, and make death sweet by thee." 

I wish that the biographers of illustrious persons would tell 
us more of what their heroes liked, and less of what they did. 
Eminence so often sails past the goal blown by breezes over 
which it had no control, or propelled by the labour of other 
men's arms, that a sort of unpleasant suspicion haunts many a 
noble story of achievement. 

It may be very interesting to know if Shakespeare stole 
deer, or built a theatre, or paid his father's debts, or left his 
widow the second best bed, but I want to know what authors 
he liked, what he talked about at the Mermaid, whether he 
enjoyed Holbein's pictures, what music moved him most, 
what nonsense made him laugh, what pathos made him weep. 
He gave out a great deal and must have taken in much more, 
and it would vastly increase our intimacy with the man if 
only someone could tell us what mental food he enjoyed, and 
why he liked it. 

And so with regard to George, I feel that in what he 
loved! get him and him alone ; whereas in what he did, I may 
get George & Co. He put his whole heart into his Shakespeare 
work, and just spread himself through every sentence of that 
appreciation without restraint ; so that there one has only 
him and his best-beloved poet. But when you get to the Irish 
Land Act, how much more complicated the thing becomes. 
This enactment had 30 or 40 ancestors, satisfactory and other- 



42 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

wise, like most ancestors, the history and effects of which were 
known to a few experts. To this tangled skein was attached 
a new strand, which was partly the adjustment of an ancient 
quarrel, partly an inducement to sell, and partly an induce- 
ment to buy. The framer of such a Bill has to box the com- 
pass with every clause of it to make sure that it will be palat- 
able to his own Cabinet and party, to the Irish party, to the 
landlords, the tenants, and that ogre of cabinet ministers, the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer. The thing ends up by being a 
huge compromise, rather like those classical landscapes of 
the early i8th century, where one feels that the artist has been 
requested by his patron to have so much mountain and forest, 
elegantly distributed ; so much sea or lake, with so many 
waves ; so much glow in the sky ; so many classical ruins on 
the shore ; and so many nymphs dancing in the glades. After 
all which one turns with joy and relief to the studies from 
nature by the same artist, preserved in the Print Room of the 
British Museum, and begins to wish that the painter had never 
had any patrons. Such considerations form my excuse for 
writing somewhat freely about the works of art beloved by 
George. 

Artistic perception is a natural gift which may be improved, 
but not acquired. I believe it to be generally allied with that 
singular simplicity of soul which is an attribute of children and 
of genius. It is an intuitive recognition of truth and beauty. 
A man may be born without it, as some are born unable to 
distinguish red from green. Or a man may bring it with him 
on his birthday, but lose it afterwards by neglect, or paralyse 
it by strangulation. 

If he try to recover it in middle age, he has, in the language 
of Scripture, to be born again ; that is to say he has got to throw 
away a whole cargo of rubbish carted into him by vulgar 
surroundings, and see things once more as he saw them when 
a child, simply, really, and truly. That is why I use the word 
' strangulation ' people get choked with rubbish 

It was no virtue in George that he was born with fine 
perceptions. It was not his foresight that caused him to be 
surrounded in early years with lovely things of every kind. 



RECOGNITA, 43 

His merit lies in the fact that he responded to the call, that he 
did not let second-rate objects blind his admiration for Greek 
work of the 5th century before Christ, or for Gothic work of 
the I3th century after Christ : that he elected always to be 
wholly himself, and refused to try to be anybody else : that he 
used his discrimination to know the difference between real 
people and sham people, real writers and sham writers, real 
politicians and sham politicians, real society and sham society : 
and that he brought this discrimination to bear on noble things, 
and that he liked to group them together for the benefit of the 
world. 

This love of truth, this perception of beauty inspired his 
whole life and work. His Shakespeare, his Plutarch, his 
Ronsard, his Walter Scott, and his Rectorial Address on the 
Springs of Romance glow with it. It was the fountain of his 
romantic chivalry and loyalty in things political, I hold that 
men like this are rare and splendid beings, treasure-seekers and 
torch-bearers, whose lives are one long service of praise, for 
" all great art is praise." And as the good God has spread 
before us in this universe an infinite selection of noble things, 
so, too, has He given us, all down the ages, a procession of 
these illuminati, who lighten our darkness, rouse our en- 
thusiasm, and rekindle the sacred lamp that shall never be 
finally put out. Their great characteristic is that they find 
the best things, and love them for themselves alone. They 
possess that ' single ' eye which is full of light. Others hunt 
after the fashionable, the notorious, the safe, or the profitable, 
but these souls seek noble things for themselves alone, and to 
these things they give themselves up with every fibre of their 
being 

* * * 

The truth of what I have written will be plain to anyone 
that knows George's published writings These are before the 
world, and I shall not quote them. My purpose here is to 
bring to your recollection and my own those personal re- 
miniscences and writings which remind us how this love of 
truth and beauty permeated his whole domestic, literary and 
artistic life. 



44 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

In November, 1895, he wrote to me: "I am in the 
worst period of authorship, viz. : debating whether I shall 
transpose the start I have made with an Introduction to 
Shakespeare's Poems. The fact is that I am so disgusted 
with the work of the critics on the Sonnets as to be unable to 
write a quiet Introduction, short memoir, Adonis, Lucrece, 
Sonnets, and am going in bald-headed for William as the 
sweetest Lyrical and Elegiac poet, working up to lyrical dis- 
course and Sonnet 90, " Then hate me when thou wilt," as 
the perfection of human speech. This all makes for madness, 
and an undue consumption of tobacco. But, my dear Charles, 
what stuff it is ! Lucrece and all. I had really never read 
Lucrece, but just listen to this : 

" For sorrow, like a heavy hanging bell, 

Once set on ringing, with his own weight goes." 

Only William has ever written like that, and this must 
be driven into the people who glibly quote Hazlitt's " Ice- 
Houses " and wearily repeat that a lady in Lucrece's unfortun- 
ate predicament is little likely to apostrophize time, opportunity, 
eternity, sorrow, and any other abstractions that suggest a 
good tirade." 

He loved nothing better than a leisurely browse among 
the pages of his facsimile of the First Folio. The sight of that 
particular old type whetted his appetite for the intellectual 
feast. I had for some time amused myself by getting to- 
gether groups of quotations from the Immortal William, not 
miscellaneous elegant extracts, but collections illustrating 
definite subjects, and he used to delight in looking over the 
manuscript. My idea was that though we may know little 
of Shakespeare himself outside his writings, we could gather 
a good deal about him from them, by studying the effect of 
what he observed upon his language. Men do not wax elo- 
quent unless they are moved by that whereof they discourse, 
and I thought that such an anthology might form a sort of 
index to his mind. 



RECOGNITA. 45 

When the objection was raised that a dramatist speaks 
for his characters, and not for himself, I replied that a signifi- 
cant stress laid upon certain things, distributed through all 
the plays and poems, and put into the mouths of many and 
various characters, would seem to prove that these things 
touched the writer deeply. 

In addition to this I held that an anthology of this sort 
would be valuable to students, and increase their interest in 
Shakespeare's method of literary work, his selection of words, 
his choice of epithets, and his use of metaphors. George and 
I used to have great times together hunting for fine things. 
One or two of the groups are before me now and are very 
delightful. There is something so primeval and child-like 
about Shakespeare. He takes such interest in the sun and 
moon and stars, in the sea, in the eyes of men, in the brown 
earth and the green fields. 

A splendid flow of eloquence comes into his language 
when he touches the life of the sun ; the Dawn, for example : 

' Yon grey lines 
That fret the clouds are messengers of day." 

" Look love, what envious streaks 
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder East. 
Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day 
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops." 

" But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, 
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill." 

How beautiful is this imagery of the early dawn as a mes- 
senger, now standing tiptoe, now walking o'er the dew ! A 
little later the sun has been transmuted into an alchemist : 

' The glorious sun 

Stays in his course, and plays the alchemist, 
Turning, with splendour of his precious eye, 
The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold" 



46 GEORGE WYNDHAM 

" Lo, here the gentle lark, weary of rest, 

From his moist cabinet mounts up on high, 

And wakes the morning, from whose silver breast 

The sun ariseth in his majesty ; 

Who doth the world so gloriously behold 

That cedar tops and hills seem burnish'd gold." 

" I with the morning's love have oft made sport ; 
And,, like a forester, the groves may tread, 
Even till the Eastern gate, all fiery-red, 
Opening on Neptune with fair blessed beams, 
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams." 

" Full many a glorious morning have I seen 
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, 
Kissing with golden face the meadows green, 
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy." 

Or take his use of the sunset as a figure of the decline and fall 
of human life and greatness. For example when ^Egeon is 
condemned to death by the Duke of Ephesus : 

" Yet this my comfort ; when your words are done 
My woes end likewise with the evening sun." 

Or when Achilles says to Hector : 

" Look, Hector, how the sun begins to set, 
How ugly night comes breathing at his heels : 
Even with the vail and darking of the sun, 
To close the day up, Hector's life is done" 

Or when the dying Gaunt after saying that the tongues of 
expiring men " enforce attention like deep harmony/' is given 
the wonderful line : 



' The setting sun, and music at the close." 



RECOGNITA . 47 

After the death of Cassius in " Julius Caesar," Titinius finds 
his body and says : 

" Cassius is no more. setting sun, 

As in thy red rays thou dost sink to-night, 

So in his red blood Cassius' day is set, 

The sun or Rome is set. Our day is gone ; 

Clouds, dews, and dangers come ; our deeds are done ! " 

And then the night : 

" Seeling night 
Scarf up the tender eye of beauteous day." 

" A time when creeping murmur and the poring dark 
Fills the wide vessel of the universe." 

And the stars : 

" The star that ushers in the even' 
And gives a beauty to the sober west." 

" When sparkling stars twire not thou gilds' t the even." 

' There's husbandry in heaven ; 
Their candles are all out." 

" Comets, importing change of times and states, 
Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky." 

Just taste that last line once or twice, it is so wonderful. 
George and I simply stared at one another when we got to it. 

Some of the short descriptive phrases, presenting an 
image in a few words, give one quite a shock, such as : 

" The time of night when Troy was set on fire." 

" See where she comes, apparell'd like the spring." 



48 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

" Humming water must overwhelm thy corpse, 
lying with simple shells." 

" In the great hand of God I stand." 

" Her bed is India, there she lies, a pearl" 

" The hunt is up, the morn is bright and gay, 
The fields are fragrant, and the woods are green." 

" Sluiced out his innocent soul through streams of blood," 

And then the wonderful passages about the human 
eye : 

" By heaven, the wonder in a mortal eye ! " 
" Oppose thy steadfast-gazing eyes to mine." 
" A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind." 
" Your eyes are lode-stars." 

1 ' Stars, stars, 

And all eyes else dead coals ! " 

And when he speaks of the bees as : 

" Singing masons building roofs of gold." 

Amongst these extracts there is also a small collection 
from other Elizabethan writers : 

"Sweet silent rhetorick of persuading eyes." 
" Cold down that makes the fields look old." 



RECOGNITA . 49 

"Night lays her velvet hand upon day's face." 
And 

" Under her sable pinions folds the world." 

" Embroidered o'er with quaint enamelled eyes, 
That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers, 
And purple all the ground with vernal /lowers." 

' The south inspires 

Life in the spring, and gathers into quires 
The scatter'd nightingales. Now the astonisht spring, 
Hears in the air the feathered people sing." 

I print these extracts just as we read them to one another, 
and gloated over them as men enjoy fragments of early Greek 
vases, because they will always remind you and me of how 
much time and talent and loving labour he gave to literature 
to the right use of words. He liked to find out where 
words came from, and when they arrived, and what they 
meant when they got here, and what they mean now. He 
liked to wonder at the amazing epithets and metaphors which 
abound in Shakespeare's work. He felt the bite of the ice in 
" The frosty Caucasus," which is gone if we substitute the 
name of any other range of mountains ; as he felt the burning 
glow of midsummer in " Tawny Spain." 
A passage like : 

" momentary grace of mortal men 

Which we more hunt for than the grace of God," 

set him talking at once as to what it is that constitutes such 
felicity of expression ; what part alliteration plays, and how 
much we are indebted to the genius that selects this word 
" Momentary," to alliterate with " mortal men," and to con- 
note something illusive and ephemeral, requiring to be hunted 
for, and contrasted with " the grace of God," that palpable 
and eternal good. To this must be added of course the effect 
of the musical rhythm of the lines. Ruskin's prose is full of 
this. 



50 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

Take the passage I quote from him on page 15 : 

Morning breaks as I write 
Along those Coniston Fells. 

And Ruskin himself told me that much of the metrical rhe- 
toric of his early books was enhanced by his walking up and 
down the room while he was constructing the sentences. 

One of the interesting things about Shakespeare is his 
knowledge of how and where to use the most unpromising 
words. For example, with all due respect, I do think that the 
word ' shove ' is a very difficult one for a poet to ' shove ' in 
anywhere. I don't know why, but it suggests " comics " at 
the Pantomine, and rude tipsy people crowded in narrow 
entries, and differences between elderly ladies with " darkened 
eyelids " in the police court. Yet Shakespeare uses it, and 
does it to perfection : 

" In the corrupted currents of this world 
Offence s gilded hand may shove by justice." 

There is a miracle for you ! and the word seems to have con- 
noted something rude, insolent, and even corrupt, with 
Shakespeare. 

When some one wrote a book about Shakespeare being 
a Puritan, George got on the warpath at once. We had great 
fun hunting up matter for reply. I have a note of one point 
before me now. It is about the rosary. Queen Constance 
is speaking in King John, some one has said to her that Prince 
Arthur is weeping, and she says : 

" His grandam's wrongs, and not his mother s shames, 
Draw those Heaven-moving pearls from his poor eyes, 
Which Heaven shall take in nature of a fee : 
Ay, with these crystal beads Heaven shall be bribed 
To do him justice, and revenge on you." 

One can hardly imagine a Puritan using this simile 



REC OGNIT A . 51 

I remember another passage which ' caught him by 
the throat,' as he puts it, at the end of The Winter's Tale, 
when the Third Gentleman describes the family reunion, 
and joy " waded in tears," and " the old shepherd stands 
by like a weather -bitten conduit of many kings reigns." 

What a simile ! suggesting venerable old age, open air wear 
and tear, an overflow of weeping, and that loyal clinging in 
long service to the ancient house, which the antique leaden 
pipes bearing royal symbols on Tudor mansions give one to 
this very day. 

This delight in pregnant phrases never left him. He 
came into 44 Belgrave Square one night full of a sentence 
in Mr. Birrell's 1912 Rectorial Address at Glasgow. Mr. 
Birreli, combating Disraeli's dictum about the Majesty of 
Great Events, used the phrase " Oblivion must have swal- 
lowed whole Iliads of great events." " Let me in a single 
sentence say I like it," he said to Mr. Birreli. 

I remember a discussion we had quite recently about a 
passage in Shakespeare. I had been to the first night of 
Othello at Her Majesty's, and came next day to look at his 
fac-simile of the first Folio to see the words : 

4 

" Of one whose hand 

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away 
Richer than all his tribe." 

Now in the First Folio the word ' Indian ' is clearly 
' Judean ' ; but subsequent editors make it ' Indian/ because 
it thus appears in quarto editions printed before the Folio. 
My arguments were these : (i) ' The base ' indicates a special 
person. (2) ' The base ' indicates an error of villainy. (3) 
That there is some point in talking about wealth and tribe 
if the Jews are in question, but very little if it is only Indians. 
(4) That if the ' pearl ' be meant for our Blessed Lord, and the 
base Judean Judas, there is a possible parallel, if we contrast 
the blind jealousy of the Jewish Priests with that of Othello. 
George clung to the question of scanning. He wanted ' In- 
dian ' to make the line run well. I maintained that I had 



52 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

no objection to a short e in Judean. Beside which I thought 
it possible that the printer of the quarto had turned the n 
upside down, and afterwards put in the i. 

This led us to that wonderful passage at the end of Othello 
when Lodovico says to lago, " O Spartan dog, more fell than 
anguish, hunger, or the sea ! " Pain of mind and pain of body, 
connoted with the cruel and inexorable sea ! Elsewhere 
Shakespeare says, " More fierce and more inexorable far than 
empty tigers or the roaring sea." These are the kind of things 
he would talk about from dusk till dawn. 

I have several letters from him about his Shakespeare 
work, and I give the following to show how minutely he went 
into every detail. 

Saighton, 

4th Sep., '97. 
My dear Charles, 

It is good to have got a letter from you ; but how much 
better if you would come before the good ship W.S. is launched ! 
What operations might we not perform on the text with the 
keen instruments of your wit ! 

You get full marks for " whether "=" or." 

I had first put my money on ' entitled in their parts ' ' of 
the first part ' : of the second part, etc., in a legal document. 
But I am now convinced it is heraldic. Compare again 
Lucrece, 52 72, marking 57 8. 

" But Beautie, in that white entituled. 

From Venus doves doth challenge that faire field. 

' Entitled '=' entituled, because W.S. always maintains 
the termination ed and elides the preceding vowel ; cf. ' re- 
memb'red ; ' murd'red, ' etc., etc. There is no exception. 

The ' Legh ' whom you cite I take to be ' Leigh,' con- 
stantly quoted by Guillim (1610) as thus (saith Leigh) 
after many pronouncements. 

I have other conundrums for the York Herald when he 
returns. Guillim's term ' Stainand colour,' 1 for example. 
There seem to be two : Tawny or Tenne, and Murrey or San- 
guine. They seem to be ' Stainand ' because compounded 
of two " bright colours " ; and they are also used in ' diminu- 



RECOGNITA*. 53 

tions,' viz., marks of infancy. But what, anyway, is ' Stain- 
and ' ? 2. What was John of Gaunt 's coat of arms, badge 
or crest ? Did it contain any punning emblem of gauntness ? 
I ask because when Gaunt says (Ric. II. ii. I. 82) " Gaunt 
am I for the grave ; Gaunt as a grave," I suggest a play upon 
words no longer apparent. I want the first grave to mean 
engraved coat, badge, or crest. Can it ? This because I 
want this meaning for ' grave ' in Lucrece 198 . 

" O foul dishonour to my household's grave" 
c.f. 2 Henry VI. V. i. 202. ' Household badge ' ; and Ric. 
II. iii. I. 24. " household coat." 

I finished my notes on ' Lucrece ' last night. It has been 
stiff work for, barring Germans, of whom I am not taking any, 
I have no precursors but Malone, Steevens and Bell. 

My notes on the sonnets only want revision, and then, 

then ! I am done with a piece of work which has been a 
liberal education. Yours affectionately, 

GEORGE W. 

P.S Come and read Guillim with me, he is a perpetual 
joy. To him " An Unicorne Sejant (depicted like a pony 
balancing a barber's pole on his forehead) is no monster, no, 
nor even an " Exorbitant animull." " Some," it is true, 
" have made doubt whether there be any such Beast as this, 
or no. But the great esteeme of his Home (in many places to 
be scene) may take away that needlesse scruple." O for the 
Age of Faith ! 

P.S. 2. You know more of the streets than I. Now, 
tell me when a gentleman's watch is lifted, do the pursuing 
crowd shout " Stop thief ! Stop thief ! Holla ! Holla ! ? " 

1 hope they do, for the word means stop. Surely I cannot 
have invented this ? Will you " ask a policemen ? " 

We had a great innings at Guillim, and I remember well 
George's joy over his exposition on the terms used in falconry, 
such as that after the hawk has eaten one ought not to say 
" She wipeth her beake," but " She smiteth or sweepsth her 
beake." ' You must say, your Hawke jouketh, and not 
sleepeth. Also your Hawke pruneth, and not picketh her- 
self. . ...Your Hawke is said to Rowse, and not shake herself. 



54 GEORC YNDHAM. 

She manteleth, and not stretcheth when she extendeth one of 
her wings along alter her legges, and so the other. After she 
hath thus manteled her selfe, she Crosseth her wings together 
over her back, which action you shall term, the warbling of 
her wings, and say, she WarUeth her wings." And so on. 

In the autumn of 1907 George spent a good deal of time 
preparing a speech proposing " The Memory of Sir Walter 
Scott," and among Philip Hanson's letters is one on this sub- 
ject, which he kindly allows me to print here, as it is very 
typical of the way in which George gathered up innumerable 
strands round any subject he took on hands : 

35, Park Lane, W., 

17 9, '07. 
My dear P.H., 

I wish it had been possible for you to look in at Saighton 
during these last glorious days of sunshine. Lady Grosvenor 
went to Lady Beauchamp yesterday to welcome another 
grand-child, and I came here to have my leg electrified. To- 
morrow I go to Derwent, then Hornby Castle, then Clouds, 
on Thursday or Friday next week. 

I am writing after a day of happy solitude in a London, 
neither swept nor garnished, but empty and exhilarated by 
serene September sunlight. I feel brisk. And the feeling, 
long lost, chimes with the outward aspect and reminds me of 
early days at the War Office in '98 and '99. So my thoughts 
turn to you. 

I have ' broken the back ' of my address on ' Walter 
Scott ' ; written the first half and the end, and sketched the 
rest of the second half. This has given me stimulus and 
excuse for wide reading over 1798 1832. What a Time ! 
Napoleon, Wellington, Pitt, Canning, Gcethe, Victor Hugo, 
Byron, Scott and meanwhile such quintessential flowers as 
Keats and Shelley blossoming unseen. 

And here we are, rather ' now ' we are, still unravelling 
the meaning of the so-called Romantic Revival. I see Politics 
by the light of Art. 



IT A . 55 

If I do see anything, I see that they, the ' makers ' in 
Politics or Poetry were puzzled by a mistaken, and false 
antagonism between the ' Classic ' and ' Romantic.' I see 
that the ' Classic ' is not an original, or primary mode of the 
mind's energy to express the need of the heart. There are 
two original modes, the Romantic and Realist, based re- 
spectively on Imagination and Observation. Either, or 
both, become ' classic.' But that is a secondary mode of 
either. You choose and polish your Imagination or your 
Observation, until the element of Wonder disappears from 
your image of life. The ' Classic ' becomes a statue at Chats- 
worth : the Realistic a clerk at his desk. 

Then the passion for Wonder revives in man the wanderer. 
And the little try to gratify it for pence. The school of Horror 
substitutes a Hobgoblin for the Statue. The school of scandal 
substitutes a Profligate for the clerk. Each tries to tickle or 
shock. 

Scott's huge performance was to hark back to first springs. 
He was lucky, like all conquerors. He happened to have read 
and liked the old Romances and imitated them. He hap- 
pened to have read and understood the new Realists and 
analysed Defoe. 

Then and that is the supreme thing which he did 
he merged the two in Waverley, anno 1814. He canalized the 
welter of cross-currents and drew off the power in a stream 
of literary energy which turned the mills of the Oxford move- 
ment, the Young England movement, and, last of all, the 
Morris-Rossetti movement ; Keats and Shelley were beautiful 
flowers that grew by the brim : Hugo and Byron, tumultuous 
currents, deep or surface, that never got out of the whirlpool. 

He did in literature what Disraeli meant to do in politics. 

The Literary stream is now almost lost in sand. The 
political stream never was canalised. Napoleon nearly did 
it for the continent. Here, in our Island, Canning died ; 

Wellington became ' The Duke ' ; and Disraeli I 

cannot finish this sentence because I don't know what exactly 
happened to him. He would have rounded it off with an 
epigram. But there is nothing epigrammatic about a man who 



56 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

starts with observing British institutions, the Peerage, the 
Church, the Gentry, labour ; and imagining World History 
in terms of oriental empire ; who despises the first, and post- 
pones the second ; and ends by becoming the servile slave of 
both 

But that the coupling of Imagination and Observation, 
these two engines of the mind to minister to the needs of the 
heart is the job of our Political giant ; when we get him. 

Meanwhile, it is meanwhile a long while and very mean. 
If only poets would sing, meanwhile ! But they never do, 
any more than birds in a mist, which optimists like myself 
declare to be mere mists of Autumn, heralds of winter's lean 
alacrity, and Spring's exuberance : and pessimists declare to 
be abnormal vapours brooding before an earthquake. " The 
sedge is withered from the lake and no birds sing." 

Indeed, a writer in the ' Outlook ' maintains that birds 
poets will never sing again. He is chronicling the death 
of Sully-Prudhomme as the last of those birds. This, says he, 
is a ' practical ' age. But what " in the name of glory " do 
we practise ! 

Yours ever, 

GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

In a letter to Pamela dated from St. Pagan's 26th August, 
1907, a few days after his letter to Philip, he writes : " I am 
' pickling away ' at my address on Sir Walter Scott. I have 
six or seven things to say about him. As an address is de- 
livered each year it is unnecessary to repeat the obvious. 
I shall avoid the ' good Sir Walter ' business. Except, per- 
haps, just to note that his works gain a reflected charm from 
our knowledge of a personality which he was at such pains to 
dissemble. I am very vague at present. Probably the essay 
will form round two aspects. I. His Art. He was a ro- 
mantic. That is how he saw things and said them this, 
with all pertinent comparisons and contrasts, etc. The 
romantic revival in England and France. Here I am on 
my native heath. 

1 1 . His meaning. W 7 hat was it that he saw and said ? 
So I lead up to the last motif, which is Reconciliation re- 



RECOGNITA . 57 

conciliation of Highlands to Lowlands ; of England to Scot- 
land ; of Jacobite to Hanoverian ; of servant to master ; of 
the present with the past. 

I sketched a conclusion on those lines which may do. 
In any case, it is well to have a goal to work up to. In getting 
there one may diverge to another and a better goal. But here 
is my sketch of the end : 

By these reconciliations, by searching for recondite 
chords of human experience, he feels his way towards the 
supreme reconciliation of man to man's fate. His ' diapason 
closes full on man.' This is the work, often unconscious, of 
great masters. But for their magical counterpoint the pre- 
sent would be all to each of us ; ' an apex,' Pater calls it, 
' between two hypothetical eternities ' : a masked note, so 
poignant that it pierces. All this has been said, better than I 
can say it. Only the other day a friend pointed out to me this 
phrase in Lander's Imaginary Conversations, ' the present, 
like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is 
past and what is to come.' But how few among writers, 
Classic, Romantic, or Realist, have known this, and shewn it. 

Walter Scott is of those few. He extracted secrets from 
oblivion, so to endow what is with the charm of what has been, 
and to put us in case to expect the future. He strikes a full 
chord upon the keys of Time. It is only the greatest musicians 
of humanity who thus enrich the present by fealty to the past 
and make it a herald of eternal harmonies." 

The mention of Scott leads me to say something of Car- 
michael's Carmina Gadelica. It is an anthology of Gaelic 
Hymns and Incantations, orally collected in the Highlands 
and Islands of Scotland, and published in the original tongue 
with an English translation. The Introduction and Notes 
contain a mine of information on the people and their customs 
and folk-lore. What surprised George was that an Irish 
speaker in Dublin translated the Scotch Gaelic with ease, 
but there was really nothing extraordinary about it. The 
book entranced him, and well it might. He was bent on giving 
me a copy, but I knew the book had gone to four times its origi- 
nal cost, and demurred, He sent it oil with the following letter : 



58 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

35, Park Lane, W., 

2 II., '08. 

My dear Charles, 

' Carmina Gadelica ' are despatched to-day. I had 
ordered a new copy, but found yet a third in my book-case. 
I must have laid them down like Port. 

So you need give no thought to their price, or cost, but 
you must, rather, consider their value and worth. Their 
value is their own. Their worth consists in adding solemnity 
and point to our hilarious divagations over the springs of 
Romance, and the Macaronic sermons. 

The introduction should be noted for 2 reasons : First, 
because Puritanism is there shewn to have made an old fiddler 
sell his fiddle and break his heart ; Secondly, because con- 
firmation is lent to my theory that popular poetry was written 
by the learned and handed down by the lewd, or unlearned. 

All songs derive from the Sanctuary or the Court. The 
Court was the great invention of Barbarism, and marks its 
triumph over Savagery. In the Court, the Barbarian re- 
conciled strength and Justice ; a startling paradox in his day. 
In the Sanctuary the Church unveiled Mercy and Peace, and, 
so, turned the paradox into a platitude. 

The rivers from each origin flash and mingle in the Poetry 
of the Middle Age. It is a fair stream reflecting all the per- 
sonages of the Court of Heaven. It is filled with the water of 
life in every sense and not choked with the dust of ages. 

I have read Carmina Gadelica through this afternoon. 
They are full of life and lore, of Wisdom, and, therefore, of 
repose. We can repose on the Past. 

In fine, my gift is the recording stele of our exploration 
to discover the Springs of Romance and their foam-bow of 
Ryhme. Yours ever, 

GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

P.S. " High are the Peaks and shadow-gloom 'd and 
Huge ! " 

P.S. 2. Please send me the name and number of the 
Hymn which may give me a model for my Pageant-chorus 
and an air." 



RECOGNITA. 59 

One example I must give of the gems which Carmichael 
picked up among the highland cottages : 

HOUSE PROTECTING. 

God, bless the world and all that is therein, 
God, bless my spouse and my children, 
God, bless the eye that is in my head, 
And bless, God, the handling of my hand, 
What time I rise in the morning early, 
What time I lie down late in bed, 

Bless my rising in the morning early, 

And my lying down late in bed. 
God, protect the house and the household, 
God, consecrate the children of the motherhood, 
God, encompass the flocks and the young, 
Be thou after them and tending them, 
What time the flocks ascend hill and wold, 
What time I lie down to sleep, 
What time the flocks ascend hill and wold, 
What time I lie down in peace to sleep. 

In his introduction Mr. Carmichael gives a touching 
example of the manner in which the old Gaelic-speaking people 
have been treated by their ' superior ' descendants : 

" I was taking down a story from a man, describing how 
twin giants detached a huge stone from the parent rock, and 
how the two carried the enormous block of many tons upon 
their broad shoulders to lay it over a deep gully in order that 
their white-maned steeds might cross. Their enemy, how- 
ever, came upon them in the night-time when thus engaged, 
and threw a magic mist around them, lessening their strength 
and causing them to fail beneath their burden. In the midst 
of the graphic description the grandson of the narrator, him- 
self an aspirant teacher, called out in tones of superior au- 
thority, ' grandfather, the teacher says that you ought to be 
placed upon the stool for your lying Gaelic stories.' The 
old man stopped and gasped in pained surprise. It required 
time and sympathy to soothe his feelings and to obtain the 



Go GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

rest of the tale, which was wise, beautiful, and poetic, for the 
big, strong giants were Frost and Ice, and their subtle enemy 
was Thaw. The enormous stone torn from the parent rock 
is called ' Clach Mhor Leum nan Caorach,' the big stone of 
the leap of the sheep. Truly ' a little learning is a dangerous 
thing ' ! This myth was afterwards appreciated by the 
Royal Society of Edinburgh." 



And here I wish to put on record two examples of English 
literature, dearly loved and often quoted by George. Both 
are exquisite in themselves and typical of his taste and char- 
acter. The first portrays, as no other example that I know 
of does, a perfect picture of tender love and chivalry ; and 
the second gives a vast and sympathetic delineation of the 
world's rondure, and its varied influences upon the art of 
mankind. Emerson has truly said, " The English delight in 
the antagonism which combines in one person the extremes 
of courage and tenderness ; Nelson dying at Trafalgar, sends 
his love to Lord Collingwood, and, like an innocent schoolboy 
that goes to bed, says, ' Kiss me, Hardy,' and turns to sleep." 
Shakespeare drew his example from the field of Agincourt 
where the Duke of Exeter speaks of the deaths of York and 
Suffolk to Henry V. : 
Exeter : 

The Duke of York commends him to your Majesty. 
King Henry : 

Lives he, good uncle ? Thrice, within this hour, 
I saw him down ; thrice up again, and fighting ; 
From helmet to the spur, all blood he was. 
Exeter : 

In which array, brave soldier, doth he lie 
Larding the plain : and by his bloody side, 
Yoke-fellow to his honour-owing wounds, 
The noble Earl of Suffolk also lies, 
Suffolk first died : and York, all haggled over, 
Comes to him, where in gore he lay insteep'd, 



RECOGN IT A . 61 

And takes him by the beard ; kisses the gashes 

That bloodily did yawn upon his face ; 

And cries aloud ' Tarry, dear cousin Suffolk ! 

My soul shall thine keep company to heaven ; 

Tarry, sweet soul, for mine, then fly a-breast, 

As, in this glorious and well-foughten field, 

We kept together in our chivalry ! ' 

Upon these words I came, and cheer 'd him up ; 

He smil'd me in the face, raught me his hand, 

And, with a feeble gripe, says ' Dear my lord, 

Commend my service to my sovereign.' 

So did he turn, and over Suffolk's neck 

He threw his wounded arm, and kiss'd his lips ; 

And so espous'd to death, with blood he seal'd 

A testament of noble-ending love. 

The pretty and sweet manner of it forc'd 

Those waters from me, which I would have stopp'd ; 

But I had not so much of man in me, 

But all my mother came into mine eyes, 

And gave me up to tears. 

The following passage is from Ruskin's ' Stones of Venice ' 
" The charts of the world which have been drawn up by 
modern science have thrown into a narrow space the expression 
of a vast amount of knowledge, but I have never yet seen any 
one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to imagine the 
kind of contrast in physical character which exists between 
Northern and Southern countries. We know the differences 
in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp which 
would enable us to feel them in their fulness. We know that 
gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines ; but 
we do not enough conceive for ourselves the variegated mosaic 
of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that 
difference between the district of the gentian, and of the olive 
which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon 
the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment, try to raise ourselves 
even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediter- 
ranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its 



6z GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

ancient promontories sleeping in the sun : here and there an 
angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the 
burning field ; and here and there a fixed wreath of white 
volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes ; but for the 
most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, 
Italy and Spain, laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the 
sea-blue, chased as we stoop nearer to them, with bossy beaten 
work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with terraced 
gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among 
masses of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm, that abate 
with their grey-green shadows the burning of the marble 
rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under lucent sand. 
Then let us pass farther towards the North, until we see the 
orient colours change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, 
where the pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of 
France, and dark forests of the Danube and Carpathians 
stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the Volga, 
seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils 
of the mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture 
lands : and then, farther North still, to see the earth heave 
into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor, bordering 
with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and wood, 
and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the 
Northern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift, and 
tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots 
of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the 
hunger of the North wind bites their peaks into barrenness ; 
and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, death like, 
its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. 

And, having once traversed in thought this gradation 
of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let 
us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel change in the 
belt of animal life ; the multitudes of swift and brilliant 
creatures that glance in the air and sea, or tread the sands of 
the Southern zone ; striped zebras and spotted leopards, 
glistening serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet, 
Let us contrast their delicacy and brilliancy of colour, and 
swiftness of motion, with the frost-cramped strength, and 



RECOGNITA . 63 

shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the Northern tribes ; 
contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and 
leopard with the wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the 
bird of paradise with the osprey : and then, submissively 
acknowledging the great laws by which the earth and all that 
it bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not condemn, 
but rejoice in the expression by man of his own rest in the 
statutes of the lands that gave him birth. Let us watch him 
with reverence as he sets side by side the burning gems, and 
smooths with soft sculpture the jasper pillars, that are to 
reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless sky ; 
but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when, with 
rough strength and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth 
animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the 
moss of the moor-land, and heaves into the darkened air the 
pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with a work of an 
imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea ; crea- 
tions of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life ; 
fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that 
shade them." 

This was only read at length when we first knew one 
another. It was afterwards known in conversation by the 
symbol of " The Sirocco Wind." 

I remember so well during his last Christmas holidays 
a long talk we had at Clouds about a I3th century manuscript 
in the British Museum (Lansdowne 757) containing the de- 
scription of a meeting between Queen Guinevere and Lancelot. 
It is admirably translated in Paget Toynbee's ' Dante Studies 
and Researches,' and is so tender, so delicate, and full of 
beauty, that it seems to make all modern attempts at love 
scenes inadequate and vulgar. Yet there it all is, the secret 
twilight liason in the meadows away among the bushes ; the 
Queen's longing for the darkness to fall, and her striving to 
fill the day with talk and frolic till the appointed hour ; the 
introduction by Gallehault, and the long series of questions by 
which the Queen discloses the over-mastering love of Lancelot ; 
his modesty and reserve, and her half cruel pertinacity, all 
these combined into a picture that one never forgets. 



64 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

If George had been spared, the world would have had a 
wonderful book on the mediaeval Romances. 

In 1898, I published a selection of passages from The 
Holy Court, the translation by Sir Thomas Hawkins of a work 
by Nicolas Caussin, S.J. I read much of the complete volume 
to George out of the 1634 edition, and he helped me to choose 
the passages. He liked the rich figurative Jacobean English 
of Sir Thomas Hawkins, of which the following paragraph 
is an example : 

The Soul clothed with the Royal Purple of God. 

"If the body be a fair shell, the soul is the pearl. If 
the body be the lantern, the soul is the light. If the body, 
as Saint Ambrose saith, be the triumphant chariot of the 
peaceable Solomon, the soul is the queen which sitteth thereon 
to guide and govern it. If the body be as the green moss of 
some sea-neighbouring rock, the soul is the diamond which 
within hideth its lustre. It is the well-beloved of God which 
is fallen from His Mouth into this mortal prison. It is that 
which advantageously is marked with His stamp and image. 
It is that on which the Creator hath distended His royal purple, 
as is said in the prophet Ezekiel : and this royal garment is 
no other than a collection of all the perfections of creatures 
contracted in the soul of man, as the figure of the world would 
be in the circumference of a ring." 



As I am trying to remind you of what he loved, I want 
to put on record a few words about George's delight in music. 
He had the equipment necessary for a keen appreciation, with 
little or no technical knowledge. Like Sir Walter Scott, he 
would have been glad to have had some instruction. He 
tried hard to fathom the mysteries connected with the tem- 
pered scale, and often maintained that we had lost more in 
poignancy of tone by its adoption, than we had gained in 
convenience of modulation. 



1 

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o 

f 



I. Is - te Con - let - sor, Do-mi-rri, CO - len - tcs Quern pi 
i . This is the day where - on the Lord's true wit- ness, Whom all 



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the 



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PPP 



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r , -r- r r ' r r 

lau - dant po - pn - li per or - hem, Hac di - e lae - tM 

na tions lov -ing-ly do ho - nOUr, Wor thy at last was 

f-^'- \ J J J j^. 



i 



r r r r r r 

me -ru.it be - a - tas 
found to wear for. ev er 






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de - re 
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sc:n - dent. 



SEEfefe 



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ve ma ris 



tei - la, 



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At-que Ktn-per Vir go, 



Fe-lixece-U pot 



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Somen> illud Ave 
Qabrielis ore, 
Fonda not in ptce. 
Blatant Hevje none*. 

3- 

Solve vincla reit, 
Profer lumen czcis, 
Mala notra pelle, 
Bona cuncta posoe. 

4- 

Morutra te esse Matrera, 
Suroat per te preces, 
Cui pro nobis natug 
Tulit eso taut. 

5- 

Virgo singularii, 
Inter omnes miti*, 
flo* cnlpis folutot, 
Mites tac, et casto*. 

6. 

Vitam prfesta purara, 
Iter para tutum, 
Ut M*dentcs Jesurn, 
berdper coHztemur. 



Sit latu Deo Patri, 
Summo Chriito dociu, 
Spiritui tancto, 
Tribiu honor unvu. AM 



RECOGNITA. 65 

His taste was uncommon and very positive. Whatever 
new fragments I picked up during our long friendship, he never 
failed to ask for certain things which he found gave him rest 
and intellectual satisfaction. It is the character of these 
pieces that is interesting. For example, the " O Salutaris 
Hostia " on page 214 of Arundel Hymns is an organ study by 
John Sebastian Bach. The chorale which Bach has here 
harmonized is not particularly striking as a melody. The 
whole value of the piece centres in a progression of harmonies 
that gave George intense joy. This wonderful procession of 
suspensions and resolutions which would indeed be caviare 
to the general, affected him profoundly. There is such a 
wealth and rich splendour in the chords one might fear that 
form and force would be smothered in decoration, but on the 
contrary, the predominating character is strength, the thing is 
heroic hymnody. He loved the daring of the last chord but 
one, where the voice holds F sharp and the bass sounds E sharp. 

Another of his favourites was an " Ecce Panis Ange- 
lorum," by Samuel Wesley, on page 169 of Arundel Hymns : 
especially the line " Cohaeredes et Sodales," where again come 
a succession of strong suspensions, and the minor key. He 
had no use whatever for the school of sickly sentimental 
hymn-tunes. He would only listen to vertebrate melodies 
and strong harmonies. 

I print here his two favourite melodies from Arundel 
Hymns, because they illustrate better than any description 
of mine his love for what is sturdy and heroic in tune and 
harmony. Many a time we have heard him shout the " Ave 
Maris Stella " with exultation, and the " Iste Confessor," 
he never tired of. The glorious outburst into G major at the 
beginning of the second line, and the long rolling cadence on 
the first syllable of the last line entranced him. I can hear 
him now at that last verse : 

Sit salus illi, decus atque virtus, 
Oui super cceli solio coruscans, 
Totius mundi seriem gubernat 
Trinus et Unus. 



66 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

Healing and power, grace and beauteous honour 
Always be His, Who shining in the highest, 
Ruleth and keepeth all the world's vast order, 
One God, Three Persons ! 

The song which affected him most was, " Es blinkt der 
Thau," by Rubinstein. Of this remarkable composition, set 
to the German words of E. von Boddien, he never tired. It 
is built up in three distinct sections. The first restrained in- 
troductory theme, with quiet flowing accompaniment, is a 
contemplation of the scene, how the dew glistens in the grass 
at night, while the moon passes on in tranquil splendour, and 
the nightingale sings in the bushes. This is repeated, and 
tells us how a tremor floats over the fields in the twilight, and 
all the spring breathes perfume into it, whilst the lovers wander 
in the midst. All this subdued, calm, contemplative. When 
the last note of the bird's song has died away in the accompani- 
ment, the second movement leaps forth " O spring-time how 
fair thou art ! " And on go the increasingly impassioned 
phrases, describing the lover wandering in this wealth of 
blossoming, with his trembling love leaning upon his arm, and 
their first kiss in the realm of heaven, while they firmly believe 
in the foolish dream that this might last for ever and ever ! 
To the repeated last line of the words, " Das es ewig, ewig, so 
bleibe," are given rapidly rising movements which culminate 
on a suspension which is resolved into an exquisitely pathetic 
phrase used to similar words in another song by the same 
composer. There are others I know, of considerable musical 
attainments, to whom this song has meant very much, ever 
since it first appeared. To George it was " perfect music," 
wedded " unto noble words." 

Many things may, will, and should be said about George, 
but one thing must be said, which is that he rejoiced to have 
lived in the generation that knew and appreciated Richard 
Wagner. He had an advantage over me in this matter, for 
he had less knowledge of previous composers, and had always 
lived in a sympathetic atmosphere ; whereas one of my music 
teachers was John Hullah, and he, though it is Jiardly credible, 



RECOGNITA, 67 

in a work dated 1884, actually wrote these words : " I find 
in the pieces of which ' Tannhauser ' is composed, an entire 
absence of musical construction and coherence ; little melody, 
and that of a most unoriginal and mesguin kind ; and harmony 
chiefly remarkable for its restless, purposeless, and seemingly 
helpless modulation." The civilised world has long since 
settled this dispute. My only interest in this quotation is 
that it led George and myself one night to a very long and 
interesting discussion about the tyranny of convention in the 
arts and the force of genius necessary to " ring out the old " 
and " ring in the new." The causes of these great revolutions 
are often remote and unexpected, but the debris of the various 
upheavals are visible in the mansions and museums of Europe. 
Marcus Aurelius still suffers from the green slime trickling 
off his nose and beard in the laurel shrubberies of early eigh- 
teenth century classical gardens, and fragments of " Abbots- 
ford Gothic " linger in the corridors at Eaton. When Benja- 
min West was about to paint the Death of Wolfe, Sir Joshua 
Reynolds and the Archbishop of York and why him I cannot 
imagine called on the painter to beg him not to proceed with 
his intention of putting the figures into the costumes they 
actually wore at Quebec, as it would be an outrage on the 
convention that military heroes must appear in Classical 
equipment. West heard their advice but did not take it. 
When the picture was finished Sir Joshua sat before it for a 
long while, and then frankly acknowledged that West had 
conquered, and had probably opened up a new era in art. 

The man who is to do justice to this subject has got to 
know a good deal, not only about art, but history, politics, 
philosophy and poetry. He must reckon up, not only the 
triumphant heroes, but their victims. Not only Wedgwood, 
but the slip- ware artists he crushed out, killing our one native 
English majolica. Not only Vanbrugh, but the glorious 
timber mansions which preceded him. Not only that dread- 
ful insurrection known as the harmonium, but the delightful 
old serpents and cellos, and string, wind, and wood, all and 
sundry, which tuned up from the west-end galleries of our old 
parish churches He must try and trace the influence of 



68 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

foreign travel, foreign royalties, and foreign learning upon 
fashions in art. Particularly, too, must he study patronage, 
public and private, and its effect on the artist and the patron. 
He will have to understand also that with patrons of im- 
mature or enfeebled intellect, the plasterer, the upholsterer, 
and the grate, fender, and chandelier maker, have often been 
the real masters, dominating the domestic landscape with such 
insurrections of brass and glass and gilding, that the canvasses 
of Titian and Tintoret pale into insignificance. There was a 
day when the library was whitewashed, but the Gospels 
written in silver and golden letters upon leaves of purple 
vellum, over which a thousand years and more could come and 
go ; but now the ceilings and picture frames reflect the gold and 
silver, and the books are printed on some chemical amalgam 
of wood-pulp and casein, that may or may not be brown and 
rotten in 50 years. He may find that the greatest works have 
had the public for a patron, and that in proportion as artists 
have been at the mercy of individualistic patrons, the work 
has been less great. He may find that Wagner's huge appeal 
to humanity in allegory and opera, hounded down by his own 
profession, and only patronised by the great when his work 
was nearly done, was actually assisted by the fact that he had 
no one's crotchets to consider, but strove only to win and 
overwhelm the soul of man. 

George was on the other track. He was disposed to 
date the birth of song and poem from the Court, rather than 
the Folk. I felt that it had grown up as probably the Mass 
developed, by the congregation bringing in the Kyrie, the 
Gloria, and the Credo, and these being gradually incorporated 
into the liturgy. Surely the poets and minstrels in the Court 
of Henry II. who gathered the Arthurian legends in Wales, 
worked on the same principle as Wagner, and adapted what 
they would from legends already on the lips of the people ? 

Anyway, we were whole-hearted devotees at the shrine 
of Richard Wagner, who had given us one of the greatest joys 
of our lives, and we read together Hoffman's " Poet and Com- 
poser," and tried to grasp the true inwardness of all that 



RECOGNIT A . 69 

Wagner had done for Opera. I went so far as to write a book 
on Parsifal, and George was enthusiastic about it, and read my 
proofs. 

Do you remember George's first visit to Bayreuth, when 
he was worn to a shred by the struggles of a General Election ? 
Dear me, how we have laughed over it ! His arrival at the 
station about mid-day, in an exhausted condition ; the drive 
to the Opera House, and the appalling moment in the middle 
of the first act of Parsifal when the scenery, quite unexpectedly, 
began to move, and George's firm conviction that his brain 
had given way, accompanied by misgivings about his purse, 
his pocket-book, his means of indemnification, and the nature 
of the collapse from which he was suffering ! A slight hitch 
in the movement of the rolling landscape restored his equani- 
mity and enabled him to take himself in hand. On another 
occasion we all went together, the Edmunds, and you, and 
George and myself. George contracted a terrible throat, and 
I got a bad nasal catarrh. I recollect going with Edmund 
to a hosier's shop, which bore the encouraging label, " English 
Spoken," to purchase a supply of handkerchiefs for my afflic- 
tion. The Proprietor was sent for, and I asked for hand- 
kerchiefs : " Hangsheefs, yes, 'ow many buttons ? " was the 
reply. Edmund went out into the street to laugh it off. 

When I first met you I had already begun to collect 
words and music for Arundel Hymns. George took great 
interest in the work. It was the first attempt made in England 
to step outside the well-worn tracks of the Lutheran and 
Anglican traditions, and to bring into one book a cosmopolitan 
collection of hymn-tunes. I spent a year in Italy copying 
melodies in vast and unexplored stores of Vernacular hymno- 
logy, dating from the i6th century. I had a large and re- 
markable compilation of old tunes sent to me from Bohemia. 
I had others from Spain, France, Germany, and Denmark. 
He and I tried our hands at translating Adam St. Victor, 
and in the upper-room at Saighton had many a long con- 
fabulation on the poetic value of the hymns. You will re- 
member he asked my friend, Father John O'Connor, to visit 
him in Ireland, and delighted in his work. It was George 



70 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

I think who suggested putting under Edward Clifford's drawing 
of a white dove with extended wings, Father O'Connor's lines: 

" White Dove of Peace, Great God of consolation 
Brood o'er the souls that moan in tribulation 
And with the whisper of serene to-morrows 
Soothe all their sorrows." 

Among the many subjects that stirred George's imagina- 
tive and critical faculties in later years was the problem of 
the antiquity of man, gradually being revealed to us by the 
study of cave deposits, stone implements, drawings, carvings, 
etc. He was profoundly interested also in the astronomical 
questions opened up with regard to the ice age by Croll and 
Drayson, and was delighted when I sent him the first Part of 
the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, in 
which he read Dr. Sturge's work with avidity. If he had lived 
to take office again he would have been a valuable ally for 
Prehistoric students. He felt very strongly that this depart- 
ment of archaeology, if properly encouraged, would yield great 
results, and he thought the new school of enquiry full of pro- 
mise. I sent Dr. Sturge a collection of neolithic implements 
which I gathered from the fields on the Clouds Estate, and he 
very kindly gave George a report upon them as to their patina- 
tion and striation. Dr. Sturge ended his report with these 
words : " I strongly advise further search in the district 
from which these flints have come as they are of great interest, 
and prove that some at any rate of the periods present in 
Suffolk are also present in Wiltshire." 

George was greatly delighted at Christopher's interest 
in flint implements, and gave me a description of his pre- 
liminary examination for Osborne by a table-load of naval 
officers who asked Kit what he had been doing during the 
holidays, and got back a dissertation on ' flinting,' on scrapers 
and arrow-heads, and axe-heads, their shapes and uses ; on 
worked edges, and bulbs of percussion, which surely must 
have been news to some of them. The best proof of George's 
enthusiasm about this subject shall be given in his own words, 
from a letter to me : 



RECOGNITA. 71 

The Swan Hotel, Wells, 

4th June, 1911. 
My dear Charles, 

This is the kind of hairpins we are. Sibell was so im- 
pressed by my excitement over Mr. Balch assistant Post- 
master (for his profession) and a genius at archaeology (for his 
glory and our delight) that she telegraphed incontinently 
to you to join us. I knew it was impossible, but the ebullition 
expressed our feelings. Let me explain at once. Mr. Balch 
burrows into the entrails of the Mendip Hills, and emerges 
from Troglodyte habitations, laden with flint imple- 
ments, bone implements, bronze implements, iron implements, 
and the bones of our predecessors in Britain. He has been a 
pure joy to me a Celt with speculation in his clear blue eyes, 
who rejoices, as our grandfathers did over Waterloo, because, 
in his opinion (buttressed by an array of facts) when the Lake 
Village near Glastonbury was blotted out, ' our people/ as 
he says, stuck it out through the Roman occupation 
returning to the caverns of the Stone Age, to the Hyena, and 
held their own till the last waves of Saxon conquest pushed 
them over the Parett river, and even into Wales. 

Having explained why I am pleased, I will now revert 
to the Historic method. By this device you will know all the 
time that Balch is looming beyond the normal expectations 
and fulfilments of a visit to an ancient Cathedral. 

We left Paddington at 10.30 a.m. yesterday, Saturday, 
3rd June, 1911. It seems years since to me. Our ' slip ' 
carriage stopped at Westbury, in obedience to the law of 
gravitation. We changed and went West by Frome to Wit- 
ham. We changed and went We^t again by Shepton Mallet 
to Wells. Thanks to the imperfect railway system of our 
motherland Wells is habitable. We arrived about 1.30 on a 
sultry day. Perfunctory glances at the ' Guide to Somerset ' 
had as I travelled told me that ' Wookey Hole ' was near 
Wells. I walked to the Inn, whilst Sibell took the one-horse 
bus, and, so, passed a sign-post on which I plainly read Wookey 
Hole. This determined my fate. After a preliminary stroll 
round the Cathedral and that is wonderful for the statues 



72 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

and specially the statue of William the Conqueror, with his 
elbows more than a-kimbow by 45 degrees and the chain 
gate, etc., I said to Sibell that I should be bilious if I did not 
take a walk. So, on the plea of health, and the cheerful dis- 
position that springs from health, and is essential to a holiday 
I started along the road (knowing no better) for Wookey Hole. 
I vaguely knew the name and was informed by the Guide 
Book that Boyd Dawkins found a Hyena cave there 50 and 
more years ago. That was all my knowledge, but enough to 
direct my purpose. 

I found the village of Wookey Hole, and was told I could 
get a guide to the cavern at the farm by the paper-mill. All 
in due order, a smiling maiden at the farm set me on the track 
to the cavern, and said the guide would come. Charles, as 
Sir Thomas Malory frequently remarks, " all this was but 
enchantment " for Wookey Hole is no place of holiday resort, 
like Stonehenge. When you leave the road, by the Farm, you 
pass through a stable gate into an orchard full of white chickens; 
you see a little path from the orchard beginning to climb and 
fall and climb along the left side of a steep dell, which promises 
to become a gorge, with the river Axe that is soon to make 
paper translucent and green over white sand below you. 
You sit down to await the guide. He appears, a youth of 15 
or 1 6 years, with 2 candles and a can of petrol. He speaks 
in the language of Barnes which is easier to read than to hear. 
Away you go with him along the dell that becomes strange. 
It is heavily wooded on both sides ; there is a hanging mist over 
the water. The path rises and, as the river Axe is now 50 feet 
below you, issuing from the rock, you are confronted by a 
beetling crag of limestone, from every ledge of which the Jack- 
daws discuss your advent. In the base of that crag there is a 
little locked door 4ft. 6in. high. You unlock it. The youth 
advises me to leave my stick inside, I add " and my hat ! " 
He says, " no, it might save you from a blow on the head later 
on." We light our tapers and go in. The narrow passage, 
between boulders, descends and mounts, as the path had un- 
dulated. Only it is inside the mountain. He throws a flash 
of petrol on the rock and lights it with the taper, now and 



RECOGNITA . 73 

again, to assist climbing or descent. Then he begins to talk 
about what sounds like Mr. Bosh. I become interested 
in Mr. Bosh. I ask how tactlessly ! him to spell the name. 
He thinks there is an r and an h in it. But, anyway, this is 
where his hero found a skeleton of a man and the skeletons of 2 
goats, and pottery. And this, shewing a sheer cliff up to the 
left, is where his hero gets up by a rope ladder into other 
galleries and halls. After descending a steep incline, so steep 
and long that we reach the l&vel of the river Axe, we come into 
a great cavern, like a Chapter-house, 75 feet high, with a dia- 
meter of 40 yards, and there is the river Axe. He throws 
petrol on its surface, lights it, and reveals cool depths of 
translucent green over white sand. We go on ; and do this 
twice more. For there are 3 great Chapter-Houses inside 
the hill ; and more beyond, now blocked by the water-level. 
Balch has explored them when the water is drawn off by the 
Mill, | a mile behind us. 

We return. I walk back by a footpath over the hill, 
with Glastonbury Tor 6 miles to my right, and Wells Cathedral 
in front of me. I miss Sibell, and ask for Balch. I need him. 
I am conducted by the bus-driver of the Inn to an alley, leading 
to a cottage garden full of flowers and children. The bus- 
driver goes to the back and hammers. Balch the blue- 
eyed Celt appears at the front door. I announce myself 
and my dear Charles in 2 minutes I am ' up to the hilt ' 
with him as tho' you and I were talking together. My 
dear, this man is a man to know. He has plans and sections. 
He has written the ' Netherworld of the Mendips.' He has 
his rows of flint implements, and his photographs of all else. 
He is perfectly simple and wide-eyed with enthusiasm ; but 
a true scholar. There are the querns from Wookey Hole 
which he has mounted, and with which he has ground flour 
to taste what it was like. 

Then come the simple questions, " What do you think 
of this Denarius of Marcia 124 B.C. It is nearly 200 years 
before the Roman occupation ? " I say, I think it was not 
hoarded by a Roman, but that it filtered through the Europe 
of 124 B.C. He agrees. We get on to Rhodes's gold coin of 



74 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

Antoninus found in Rhodesia. He knows all about that and 
has a brother there. Back, then, to Wookey Hole and conun- 
drum No. 2. He shews me the bulk of an earthenware jar 
with stripes from top to bottom and between them, holes 
deliberately made with a wooden tool, but disposed well 
like the constellations, or the chance holes made by book- 
worms in wooden bindings. And he asks what I think of that. 
I say " I have never seen anything like it." He answers, 
" Nor anyone else till 6 weeks ago when I found it in Wookey 
Hole. I've sent it to London. What do you think it can be ? " 
I felt excited and said, " If there's any repetition of pattern, 
or anything like the Oghams, holes in clay, instead of notches 
in stone, you may have got a script." His blue eyes blazed. 
He said, " We read the Egyptian Hieroglyphs and dig in Crete ; 
why don't we try to understand the things here ? " I said, 
" I hope you can stay here." He answered, " I have stayed 
for 26 years and prevented my promotion, and now my friend, 
who worked with me, is gone." I asked if the P. M. G. knew 
of his work. He answered, " No." 

Then he came to conundrum No. 3. A Bone equilateral 
triangle with a round hole in each angle. I was absolutely 
flummoxed. I thought of silly solutions an oranment for 
harness stuck on with gold pins, etc. anyway a plaque of 
some sort. But he said, " No. Each of these holes is striated. 
This is the invention perhaps of one man for making a 
perfect rope with a triple cord ; and I've made them with it." 

Well, my dear, I must not go on any longer. But this 
is a man to know and a place to study. I asked him to lun- 
cheon with Sibell and self to-day. He accepted, but I saw it 
would be better not to press. I said, " This is my holiday at 
Wells. But its your holiday too, and you must not bother 
about me. I live within easy motor reach and have a friend 
Charles Gatty, who loves these things, and we must come to 
see you together. So he gave me his address, and shewed me 
a short way back to the Inn, and remained in his cottage- 
garden full of flowers, and his children, just as the moths and 
bats were coming out in the sunset air. 



RECOGNITA . 75 

Sibell was an angel about my delay and merely tele- 
graphed to you. I walked her out after dinner by moon-light 
to the heights ; went to early service at 8, and collared Canon 
Holmes and got into the Library at 12.15. 

The Library ! But for the Stone Age and the Celtic 
resistance to Rome, and the Saxons, I should have been wild 
over the library. Mark you, there is no break in the Deans of 
Wells. It never had & Monastery, so Henry VIII., of uxorious 
memory, did not smash it. Freeman says that here are more 
Ecclesiastical buildings still devoted to worship and learning 
than in any other city of Europe. And that is so. We have a 
Cathedral, a Palace, a Deanery, a Close, a Theological College 
in the buildings of the I4th century, and miles of high walls 
overgrown with saxifrage and Valerian Lilacs d'Espagne. 

What I liked best in the Library above other treasures 
e.g. an autograph of Erasmus and a Pliny by Jensen I 
think and a Bull of 1061, 5 years before the Conquest in 
legible Latin, Petrus et Paulus, etc. With a perfect abbrevia- 
tion at the end Bene Valete. 
And so say I. 

Yours affectionately, 

GEORGE W. 

P.S. We do Glastonbury to-morrow. Go to Dunster 
Tuesday. To Cirencester Wednesday, and wind up on Friday, 
the gth, at Hewell Grange, Redditch. 

It is evident to me that you and I must motor to Wells 
from Clouds and stay there 2 or 3 days and hear all that 
Balch has to say, and see all that Balch has to shew. 

Also, perhaps, you being in touch both with Hudson 
and Archaeology and loving the Celts might let Lloyd 
George know that Balch ought to have a chair of Celtic arch- 
aeology, in a Celtic University, or that he should at least be 
Curator of a Celtic Museum. 



I need not remind you that we all did go te Wells, ex- 
plored Wookey Hole., and visited Mr. Balch. 



7< 



GEORGE WYNDHAM 



We used to dream of a Ballet, like Excelsior, with a series of 
scenes round one spot on Salisbury Plain, the first showing Pre- 
historic Cave Man, during the recession of the ice-cap in the 
Palaeolithic age ; the next with traces of civilization and 
habitation during the Neolithic period ; then the Celtic in- 
vasion, followed by the Roman, Saxon, and Norman epochs. 
And always the same spot, and evermore a pair of lovers, and 
continually the same struggle for existence, and through it all 
Mother Earth, like Saturn, perpetually devouring her children. 

George enjoyed much an expedition to the British Museum 
or South Kensington. We had our favourites in both. Among 
the Greek sculpture in the British Museum I think he liked best 
what is called the ' Apollo ' from the Choiseul-Goumer Col- 
lection. Whether it is an original statue, or a copy of a bronze ; 
a deity, a pugilist or an athlete, is disputed, and does not 
matter. It is a noble figure of a young man, nude, upright, of 
vigorous form, belonging to the period of transition from the 
archaic to the central time of Greek Art (B.C. 460 ?) George 
was attracted by the heroic character of this figure, and the 
disdain of physical fear conveyed to him by the expression in 
the face. He preferred it, though the head is small and the 
breast large, to the symmetrical works of the central period. 
It seemed to him a more splendid type of human being. Need- 
less to say it set him off there and then in the gallery to expound 
suggestive theories why within a short period of the world's 
history the Greek race developed art and literature at such an 
extraordinary pace ; why this art production permeated 
through all the provinces ; and why he and I should so often 
prefer the dawn to the mid-day of their culture. He felt, 
I think, what Samuel Butler expressed, that " the youth of an 
art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting 
period." 

I must admit that these discussions generally culminated 
by his saying that the unventilated condition of the galleries 
was such, that he voted for an early exit into the open air, 
and a drive to the Zoological Gardens. Delightful little 
holidays these, on off Parliamentary days, for he loved London, 
its old churches and associations, the good-tempered crowd, 



RECOGNITA. 77 

and the courteous policemen, who must often enough have 
saved his life, for he walked recklessly across those dangerous 
streets, absorbed in discussion. 

Belonging to nearly the same period of Greek art as the 
Apollo, is the Ludovisi relief, probably part of an altar, re- 
presenting the Birth of Aphrodite. I remember taking the 
photograph of this, the very day I found it, to 35 Park Lane, 
and enjoying the gleam of delight that came into George's 
eyes. It has been argued that this is not archaic but archaistic 
work. The merit with George lay in the beauty, not the date. 
This exquisite fragment was found near the Villa Ludovisi in 
1887 ; and is now in the Museo delle Terme, Rome. 

There were two pieces at South Kensington we always 
visited, a sarcophagus, in white marble, for many ages a water- 
trough, on one side of which is carved in low relief, the full- 
length figure of a woman. The head has both a crown and a 
nimbus, and it is thought that it may represent Saint Justina 
of Padua. Like the best Italian work in low relief it shows 
a marvellous knowledge of how to obtain an effect of pro- 
minence without any particular depth. The extreme height 
of the highest point is less than three inches from the back- 
ground, yet the impression given is almost that of a recumbent 
figure in the round. The head is sunk back naturally into the 
pillow, showing a lovely neck. The hair is thrown in graceful 
profusion round the head. The eyelids fall peacefully over the 
eyes as in sleep. The arms are crossed over the centre of the 
body. The feet are nude, and were modelled from such as 
have been well walked upon. The touching simplicity of this 
exquisite work, its truthful directness, and the grace and 
beauty of it affected him profoundly. 

The other piece we always sought is an ivory crozier of 
the I3th century, his favourite epoch in the whole of human 
history. Here he found beauty, restraint, and the amazing 
sense of ' rightness ' which overwhelms one in Lincoln, Salis- 
bury, Westminister, and Chartres. In this, as in St. Justina's 
sarcophagus, one sees that the bossy effect given by mediaeval 
sculpture in low relief arises from the artist creating several 
planes at different depths. I possess a small ivory diptych, 



78 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

French I4th century work, which George loved ; here the plates 
are less than a quarter of an inch thick, but the numerous 
surfaces required by the figures the Gothic arches the cross, 
the crockets, etc., give a surprising depth and richness to the 
general effect. 

You had this early Gothic work close to you in your 
childhood at Roche Abbey, one ruined arch of which is worth 
all the architectural achievements of Gilbert Scott or Alfred 
Waterhouse. 

Of all the buildings George had ever seen the Cathedral 
at Chartres moved him most. I fancy you must have been 
there with him ten or twelve times. The strength of the 
structure, the rigid dignity of its sculptured decoration, the 
mystery of the interior and the association of age satisfied all 
the aspirations of his aesthetic and historic senses. The 
sculpture here is no mere applied decoration, it seems to be a 
product of the structure, and to form part of the architectural 
inspiration, just as that grew out of the Faith. It welcomes 
the worshipper at each porch and gateway, like a preparatory 
prologue to the Divine Drama. It contains an epitome of 
Almighty God's dealings with the human race in the orders of 
nature and grace, from the creation of the world, until the Last 
Judgment. It is the visible Bible of the poor. When we step 
down in to the darkened aisles, all around us blazes a trans- 
lucent mosaic of glowing colour from 130 windows, which, 
according to report, were all there before the year 1300. George 
loved the beauty and variety of the metal tracery that holds 
this jewelled splendour, the ingenuity that has adapted each 
design to the space allotted, the record these windows preserve 
of the local guilds of workmen, such as the vintners, the boat- 
builders, etc., who gave them to the Church, and the profound 
knowledge of Holy Scripture displayed throughout the series. 

When Benny took me to Paris the day after George was 
laid in his grave, we went to the Sainte Chapelle and Notre 
Dame, to look at the windows which George and he had visited 
only a few days before. George loved France. He had 
French blood in his veins, and he loved the French people, 



RECOGNITA. 79 

their poets and their language. I do indeed regret that he 
never saw Mimizan. Do you recall how he made me describe 
every detail of it after my first visit ? 

He loved France, and rejoiced greatly in his friendship 
with M. Rodin. I remember so well the night M. Rodin dined 
at 35, Park Lane, and met Benny, who insisted on his coining 
to Grosvenor House the next evening to meet the King. 
Difficulties as to court costume and decoration were swept 
on one side by George, who protested that London produced 
everything at a moment's notice, and would hear of no obstacles. 
Pamela has most kindly lent me the two following letters 
describing George's visit to M. Rodin near Paris : 

Pavillion de Bellevue, 
Darling Pamela, 24 Mai, 1904. 

I came to these parts as you know to be ' busted ' 
by Rodin, and, at last, have struck a perfect ' pitch ' here at 
Bellevue .... You may imagine how I delighted in Rodin for 
four or five solid hours a day. I stand for \ hour and then 
talk for ten minutes. We have run over the whole Universe 
lightly, but deeply. His conversation is something like this : 

La beaute est partout ; dans le corps humain, dans les 
arbres, les animaux, les collines, dans chaque partie du corps, 
aussi bien dans la vieillesse que dans la jeunesse. Tout est 
beau. Le modele n'est qu'un. Dieu la fait pour refleter la 
lnmiere et retenir 1'ombre. Si nous parlons images, c'est 
ainsi qu'il s'est exprime en faisant la terre. Je ne lis pas le 
Grec, les Grecs me parlent par leurs oeuvres. . . .Eh bien, oui, 

voyez (prenons un moment de repos) .... (Shewing one of 

his groups) .... C'est la main de Dieu. Elle sort du rocher, 
du chaos, des nuages. Elle a bien la pouce d'un sculpteur. 
Elle tient la limon et la dessus se creent Adam et Eve. La 
femme c'est la couronne de 1'homme. La vie, 1'energie 
c'est tout..ces portes ? Oui, elles seront bientot finies. 
J'y ai travaille pendant vingt ans. Mais j'ai beau- 
coup appris pendant ce temps la D'abord, je cherchais le 
mouvement. Apres j'ai su que les Grecs on trouve la vie 
dans le repos. C'est tout ce qu'il faut. Ou la vie circule, la 
sculpture plait ! ' 



80 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

So here we are near his house at Meudon. This, Bellevue, 
is a French Richmond. We came to it, 20 minutes in a boat, 
and up 100 yards in a funicular. We are on a height, amid 
tree-tops, in silence, with the forest of Meudon behind us. 
We drove in it before dinner, heard the cuckoo and nightingale ; 
smelt the damp woods, saw the sunset and dined on a terrace 
as the stars came out. It is an ideal spot, 20 minutes from 
picture galleries, and any friend you want to see .... and two 
minutes walk from a forest. Our rooms are light and clean 
and look out over the void into the stars. It is just like 
Cliveden. The site was chosen by Madame de Pompadour, 
and the ruins of her ' Brimborieu ' are next the terrace, over- 
grown with ivy .... The bust is going to be very good ; not in 
the least catastrophic or Demiurgic, but just simply. 

Your devoted brother, 

GEORGE. 
Pavilion de Bellevue, 

26 Mai, 1904. 
Darling Pamela, 

I must just add to my letter that nightingales sing here 
all night. I listened to them at midnight and again at 2 a.m. 
this morning. It is much to be on a height amid tree tops, 
with nightingales, six or seven, singing between you and the 
river below, and beyond the river, a deep violet gloom, picked 
out by the tearful lights of Paris. The nightingales are 
singing now 10.45 terriffically. I wonder what they 
thought of the Band which played Faust and Tristan among 
their trees till an hour ago ? 

There are soft scarfs of cloud against the stars, and sap- 
phire darkness overhead. The acacias are Japanese in blossom. 
The roses ramp up old stocks. The band thank God has 
gone to bed, a dog is barking in Auteuil, over the river, I hear 
the whistle and pantings of trains. And these nightingales 
go it jug-jug-tu-whee-whee-reu-reu-reu-whee-tu-tu-tereu, jug- 
j ug-whee-whee-paissle-paissle-reu-too-and sof orth . 

As Rodin says it is curious that with all our Art, our 
Sculpture, our painting, our theatres, we have done nothing 
so good as Nature. What an irony it is of the Aristophanes 



RECOGNITA. 81 

of Heaven that we labour, with our Imperialisms and our 
Nationalisms, our gold-mines and transits, our Education 
(may God forgive us !) to make more people who shall see, 
and be able to see, the beauty of the World. And yet all the 
time we destroy it. 

Here, for how long ? for a year or two more, the old 
road reaches in zig-zag up a forbidding ascent of cobble-stones 
to forests as they were in the I3th century. The river flows 
100 yards below. And beyond the dog barks, as when he 
guarded savages in their wattled forts. But further the 
trains pant and rumble and whistle and ' tout Paris ' asserts 
itself in points of electric light. 

Your devoted brother, 

GEORGE. 



82 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 



" He would have all as merry 

As, first, good company, good wine, good welcome, 
Can make good people." 

George had a great appetite for nonsense, and appreciated 
its recreative value. He preferred a silly joke to polished 
wit. Anything at the Pantomine that had a sere wed-up 
bulb of hair on the back of its head, with a stray wisp extended 
from it ; and wiped its nose on an apron, and had slippers 
down at the heel, and dealt with a wash-tub and a mangle, 
and pulled indescribable garments out of a clothes-basket, 
and talked confidentially over the footlights to the conductor 
of the orchestra about " Camden Passage," or " Jane's bad 
leg," suited him exactly. 

I had to tell him sometimes precisely what I'd seen at 
the Halls, how Mr. Bagsden came on with a heap of crockery 
plates, and fell his length, and became involved with an 
adhesive fly-paper, ultimately leaving the stage covered with 
smashed-up earthenware " all which," as he would remark 
at a late hour in the smoking-room, "is of so much more 
importance than our mechanical political operations." 

Dan Leno delighted him, and I had to pick up fragments 
about the Zoo, and the Tower, and the Hunt, that fatal hunt, 
when they shouted to Dan, " Take the ditch," and he re- 
luctantly swallowed about a pint of it I had to gather up 
what I could of this delicious nonsense, because he really came 
to regard me as a sort of purveyor of mental pick-me-ups. 
How many times think you during the last 20 years has he 
asked for the reminiscences of that ancient metropolitan 
drinking-fountain, Mrs. 'Ooper ? Of course he had an ex- 
quisite sense of humour, and, what was singularly satisfactory 




C7 

a* & ^ 



RECOGNITA . 83 

to me as life advanced no objection to old jokes. He said 
he liked old friends, old books, old wine and old jokes. The 
word ' chestnut ' had no meaning for him as far as I was con- 
cerned, thank goodness ; the only thing he hated was my 
asking him beforehand if he knew the story 

Sometimes we would take Burton's Anatomy of Melan- 
choly from the shelves and stray lightly from chapter to 
chapter, dropping here and there on to priceless paragraphs, 
such as the following, from Burton's section on the ' Averters 
of Melancholy ' : " ' Tis not amiss to bore the skull with an 
instrument to let out the fuliginous vapours. Sallust Sal- 
vianus (de re medic, lib 2. cap. i) because this humour hardly 
yields to other physick, would have the head cauterized, or the 
left leg below the knee, and the head bored in two or three 
places, for that it much avails to the exhalation of the vapours 
. . . . Gordonius (cap. 13, part 2), would have these cauteries 
tryed last, when no other physick will serve ; the head to be 
shaved and bored to let out fumes, which, without doubt, will 
do much good. 



Once or twice I read to him from my old edition of Sir 
Thomas More's works, " The Declaration of the Sphere," 
which I think supremely droll, and he was in every sense 
worthy of it. The scene is so ludicrous : a learned but rather 
hen-pecked husband, wrestling with a difficult problem, 
involving a very long explanation, in which he is constantly 
interrupted by a strong-minded wife, thereby causing con- 
fusion in his language ; culminating in her triumphant refuta- 
tion of the entire thesis. It is a thing seldom seen by anyone, 
so I will reprint it here. 

It comes from the controversial English writings of Sir 
Thomas More. The Blessed Thomas, arguing against Tyndall, 
says : " Then must Tyndall, if he make his reason like mine, 
make the synagogue of the Jews like to the Church of Christ 
in perpetuity of lasting and continuance upon earth, or else 
shall his argument, and his ensample, be as like to mine as I 



84 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

wist once a gentle-woman make unto her husband, which 
longed sore to teach her, and make her perceive the treatise 
of the sphere, and bidding her consider well what he should 
shew her. And first he began at the earth, and to make her 
perceive that the earth hangeth in the midst of the world by 
the poise and weight of himself, and the air compassing the 
water and the earth round about on every side. You must 
(quoth he) learn and mark well this, that in the whole world 
higher and lower is nothing else but outer and inner, so that 
of the whole world, earth, water, air, and all the spheres above, 
being each in a round compass over other, the earth 
lieth in the very midst, and as we might say in the 
womb: and that is, of the whole world, from every part, 
the inner-most place : and from it upon all sides toward the 
heaven as it is outward, so is it higher, so that as I tell you in 
the whole world all is one higher and more outward, lower and 
more inward. 

And therefore the earth since he is in the very midst, 
that is the most inward place of the whole world, he is there- 
fore in the lowest, for of the whole world, the innest is as I 
told you the lowest. And then, since the earth lieth in the 
lowest, his own weight you wot well must needs hold him there, 
because you perceive yourself that no heavy thing can of 
himself ascend upward. 

And then the earth lying already in the lowest place, if 
he should fall out of place on any side, like as he should fall 
from the inner part to the outer, so should he fall from the 
lower place into the higher. And that you wot well it cannot, 
because it is heavy. And therefore imagine that there were 
a hole bored even through the whole earth, if there were a 
mill-stone thrown down here on this side from our feet, it 
should finally rest and remain in the very midst of the earth. 
And though the hole go through, yet the stone could not fall 
through, because that from the midst as it should go outward 
from the inner-most part, so should it (which a mill-stone may 
not do) ascend higher from the lowest place, because as I 
told you in the whole world upon every side to go outward 
from the innermost is ascending, and to go inward from the 



RECOGNITA. 85 

outermost is descending, and ever the outer part is on every 
side of the whole round world the higher, and the inner part 
the lower. 

Now while he was telling her this tale, she nothing went 
about to consider his words, but, as she was wont in all other 
things, studied all the while nothing else, but what she might 
say to the contrary. And when he had, with much work and 
oft interrupting, brought at last his tale to an end, ' well ' 
(quoth she to him, as Tyndall saith me), ' I will argue like, 
and make you a like sample. My maid hath yonder a 
spinning-wheel ; or else, because all your reason resteth in the 
roundness of the world, come hither thou girl, take out thy 
spindle and bring me hither the whorl. Lo, sir, you make 
imaginations, I cannot tell you what. But here is a whorl, 
and it is round as the world is, and we shall not need to imagine 
a hole bored through, for it hath a hole bored through indeed. 
But yet, because you go by imaginations, I will imagine with 
you. Imagine me now that this whorl were ten mile thick 
on every side, and this hole through it still, and so great that 
a mill-stone might well go through it. Now if the whorl 
stood on the one end, and a mill-stone were thrown in above 
at the other end, would it go no further than the midst trow* 
you ? By God, if one threw in a stone no bigger than an egg, 
I ween if you stood in the nether end of the hole, five mile 
beneath the midst, it would give you a pat upon your pate 
that it would make you claw your head, and yet should you 
feel none itch at all.' 

It were too long a tale to tell you all their dispisions. 
For words would she none have lacked, though they should 
have disputed the space of seven years. But in conclusion, 
because there are no more words but one whereby he might give 
her a true sample, nor she could not perceive the difference 
between the world and the whorl, but would needs have them 
alike, and both one, because both were round ; her husband was 
fain to put up his sphere, and leave his wife her whorl, and 
fall in talking of some other matter." 



86 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

That George himself enjoyed the humorous side of his 
life and surroundings may be judged from the following 
letter : 

Saighton Grange, 
Chester, 

Oct. 20th, 1889. 
My dear Charles Gatty, 

I feel impelled to write to you this morning, and should 
have liked to bring a fresh mind to a joyous task, but owing 
to the absurd ' prickings ' that beset me (not towards our 
Bishop's suggestion) but to do what appears to be work, I 
have wasted and jaded myself over a packet of scrawls to low 
politicians of the baser sort. This, and the absurd political 
experiences I underwent yesterday have reduced my mind to 
a state of " Old December bareness everywhere." 

When we publish our work on the Political and Social 
aspect of the Middle Classes the events of yesterday will 
furnish a bulky chapter. A procession in carriages at a foot's 
pace with innumerable halts and eight brass bands, for two 
hours through the slums of Manchester all enwrapped and 
shrouded by a cold coal fog, lead to a Mass Meeting in the 
gilded hall (the worst for speaking I ever was in) of the Belle- 
vue Gardens, glittering with flashy decoration and redolent 
of saw dust and swipes. Here we spoke to the many. After- 
wards we dined with the few, or rather the fifty leading sup- 
porters of A.J.B. in an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. 
We wound up with fireworks the principal effect being an 
exhibition of the capture of the Bastille, whether as an illus- 
tration of what Ireland would come to without Balfour, or a 
warning of the result of his policy, I did not know. 

That I should write of such only shews "How like 

a winter hath my absence been, from thee." Politics and 
Banquets are a sad substitute for Palestrina and Browning. 
I forgot to read you ' A Grammarian's Funeral.' ' You will 
like it. 

How I wish you would come here again on the 3oth or 
3ist, I get back on the former, and my sister, Lady Elcho, 
will be here. 



RECOGNITA. 87 

The day before yesterday, the captain jewel of my car- 
canet, Froudy, gave us exquisite delight in which you would 
have shared Princess Mary drove over from Eaton ; 
Froudy was seen to leave the room only to return having 
donned a high jet and crape bonnet in honour of H.R.H. 
You may suppose that Sibell and I enjoyed this. ' Perfoo ' 
remembers you still by the name of ' Gacky,' and still ap- 
preciates the joke of ' Crooer Perfoo.' My journey to Ireland 
is put off till Tuesday. Perfoo refers to it in sad accents, " No- 
o-o Papa, Boat " or " Boap," and seems to know and express 
all the melancholy emotions physical and mental which a 
departing vessel can inflict upon its human freight. This 
letter is to remind you that you are bound by solemn oaths 
to send me a complete calendar of your engagements in order 
that I may bully you into sharing the off days with me. 

Yours affectionately, 

GEORGE WYNDHAM. 



I remember years ago, when he was Mr. Balfour's Secre- 
tary, he told me they went to stay with some Tory magnate, 
in order to attend a political meeting. Mr. Balfour having 
retired for meditation before speaking, George was left to the 
attentions of their host, who stood by a huge silver salver 
crowded with all kinds of what Dan Leno termed " Refrseh- 
ments." Extending a friendly hand to George the host ad- 
dressed him thus : " I beg your pardon, sir, but I did not 
catch your name." George " Wyndham." Host 
" Wyndham ? Well now thats a curious thing, for I really 
do believe that the very best dinner I ever had in all my life, 
was at the Wyndham Club ! " 



Once, very late at night or very early in the morning 
after some observation of mine as to Mr. Balfour's ordinary 
attitude towards politics being too detached and cold for the 



88 GEORGE WYNDHAM 

average Tory voter, George said to me as I departed to rest : 
" The truth about Arthur Balfour is this : he knows there's 
been one ice-age, and he thinks there's going to be another." 



He told me once about some visitor who had come to 
the house and insisted on reading out loud sensational para- 
graphs from the newspapers about disasters that had occurred 
in various parts of the country. " My plan of campaign," 
he said, was to subscribe to a disreputable journal that kept 
up its circulation solely on horrors. Armed with this I no 
longer dreaded the startling announcement at breakfast that 
a lady had fallen over the cliff at Bamborough, for I was able 
to cap it at once with the burning of a hundred Sunday school 
children in the State of Illinois. In this way it gradually 
dawned upon my guest that a few mineral trucks off the line 
at Doncaster was of no use at all, when I was ready on the 
spot with an entire excursion train precipitated from a sus- 
pension bridge in Kansas." 



He had a practical joke played on him, and I think he 
must have enjoyed it, when the Commanding Officer of the 
opposing force in the yeomanry manoeuvres, crept in the 
darkness under the tent after George's mess dinner, and 
heard from below the table the entire programme of attack 
for next day's battle, retiring about 2 a.m. to re-arrange his 
troops, but leaving a smouldering squib under George's chair ! 



The time I saw him laugh most was when I first got hold 
of " The Wallet of Kai Lung," and read extracts to him from 
the Probation of Sen Heng. By the time we got to the in- 
cident of the imitation ducks the tears rolled down his cheeks. 
You will remember our reading the book aloud at Chief Secre- 



RECOGNITA. 89 

tary's Lodge. George begged me to write to the author and 
express our gratitude to him which I did. The Wallet is a 
masterpiece of restrained humour. The characters and 
incidents in the various tales are not more absurd than those 
in many another story-book, but the atmosphere in which 
they live and move, created chiefly by a sustained flow of 
grave but ornate oriental courtesy among all concerned, and 
an exceptionally large and happy selection of unexpected 
adjectives among the descriptions, produces an effect which 
cannot be described. If one had to select a short passage 
conveying the tone of the work, I think the following auto- 
biography of the Brigand Chief in the introductory chapter 
is as typical as any : 

' It would be useless to try to conceal from a person of 
your inspired intelligence that I am indeed Lin Yi,' continued 
the robber. ' It is a dignified position to occupy, and one 
for which I am quite incompetent. In the sixth month of 
the third year ago, it chanced that this unworthy person, at 
that time engaged in commercial affairs at Knei Yang, became 
inextricably immersed in the insidious delights of quail- 
fighting. Having been entrusted with a large number of 
taels with which to purchase elephants' teeth, it suddenly 
occurred to him that if he doubled the number of taels by 
staking them upon an exceedingly powerful and agile quail, 
he would be able to purchase twice the number of teeth, and 
so benefit his patron to a large extent. This matter was 
clearly forced upon his notice by a dream, in which he per- 
ceived one whom he then understood to be the benevolent 
spirit of an ancestor, in the act of stroking a particular quaiL 
upon whose chances he accordingly placed all he possessed] 
Doubtless evil spirits had been employed in the matter ; for 
to this person's great astonishment, the quail in question 
failed in a very discreditable manner at the encounter. Un- 
fortunately, this person had risked not only the money which 
had been entrusted to him. but all that he had himself become 
possessed of by some years of honourable toil and assiduous 
courtesy as a professional witness in law cases Not doubting 
that his patron would see that he was himself greatly to blame 



go GEORGE WYNDHAM 

in confiding so large a sum of money to a comparatively young 
man of whom he knew little, this person placed the matter 
before him, at the same time showing him that he would suffer 
in the eyes of the virtuous if he did not restore this person's 
savings, which, but for the presence of the larger sum, and a 
generous desire to benefit his patron, he would never have 
risked in so uncertain a venture as that of quail-fighting. 
Although the facts were laid in the form of a dignified request 
instead of a demand by legal means, and the reasoning care- 
fully drawn up in columns on fine parchment by a very illus- 
trious writer, the reply which this person received showed 
him plainly that a wrong view had been taken of the matter, 
and that the time had arrived when it became necessary for 
him to make a suitable rejoinder by leaving the city without 
delay." 



He got some excellent humour from many guests at 
Chief Secretary's Lodge. I remember Lord Atkinson telling 
him a yarn about an Irishman in a West American Bar whose 
straitened circumstances caused him to offer his services at a 
low rate for any occupation available. The offer was accepted 
by the proprietor of a travelling menagerie, whose lion had 
died that very day. The proposal was that the Irishman 
should be sewn into the lion's skin, and exhibited at the 
evening performance. All went well till the entertainment 
began, when the Proprietor commenced his speech, to an 
accompaniment of drums and trumpets, by announcing that 
he proposed to bring together in one large cage, the cat, the 
monkey, the dog, the lion and the tiger. Upon this the lion 
began to protest, but was silenced by the tiger raising his 
paw and remarking in a well-known accent, " You needn't 
mind me sure I'm from Roscommon myself." 



Some one else in Dublin gave us an excellent reminiscence 
ot Father Healy. It seems that after he became celebrated 



RECOGNITA. 91 

as a wit an old college acquaintance, an elderly Priest in 
County Galway, wrote to remind him of early days, and ex- 
pressed the hope that they might meet again. Father Healy 
replied saying he lived at Bray, and that if the Priest ever 
came to Dublin he would be glad to see him. By return of 
post came a letter saying that he was coming in a few days, 
so Father Healy asked him to dinner. In ten minutes after 
arrival he was discovered to be a first-class bore, so Father 
Healy suggested they should go up to the Royal Dublin 
Society and attend a lecture by some Jesuit Father on a re- 
mote province of Africa. When they got to the Hall the 
Lecturer was showing the lantern slide of a huge chimpanzee, 
and speaking of this animal as " a most humane, tractable, 
obedient creature." " What an outrage," says Father Healy, 
" how can you a Christian Minister sit and hear that horrible 
animal called humane, tractable, and obedient ? For good- 
ness sake get up and make a protest " The old man rose to 
his feet and pointing to the chimpanzee asked with considerable 
warmth, " Do you mean to tell me, sir, that that awful looking 
creature there is humane, tractible and obedient ? " Upon 
which Father Healy stood up, and pointing to the old priest, 
said to the Lecturer with great dignity, " Don't answer him, 
Sir, I know that old man well, he's looking for a cheap curate." 



Another Irish tale that delighted him was one about 
two men who set out for a walk to Ballinasioe, being told 
before they started that the distance was fourteen miles. 
After two hours steady trudge along the road one of them 
enquired of a man breaking stones, " Are we on the right 
way to Ballinasioe ? " " You are, Sorr," was the reply. 
" And how far might it be ? " he asked. " It will be just 
fourteen miles from here to Ballinasioe " responded their 
informant. On they went again for another two hours, and 
then stopped and shouted to a woman hoeing turnips in a 
field, " Are we on the right road to Ballinasioe ? " ' You 
are, Sorr," savs she. " And how far is it from here ? " he de- 



92 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

manded. " Well, from the corner there." says the woman, 
" we call it just fourteen miles to Ballinasloe." Upon which 
the enquirer turned to his companion and said, " Thanks be 
to God, Mike, we are holding our own ! " 



There was one standard joke that went on for years, and 
adapted itself to many and various occasions. It arose out 
of a letter written to me in 1874 by my sister, Mrs. Ewing, 
then on a visit to an old governess of ours, whose intellect, 
never very strong, had begun to ramble, over-weighted with 
the responsibilities of a school, and the farrago of pretentious 
generalizations imported into her class-rooms by German 
professors. The letter is published in my sister's Memoir, 
and I will only repeat here what is necessary : 

" I have been staying with M.M. I wish I could impart 
my mental gleanings. I made several experiments on her 
intellect. I tried to pin her again and again but QUITE 
without success or (on her part) sense of failure. I tried 
to remember what she had said afterwards and I could not 
succeed. I could'nt carry a single sentence. 
Generally speaking I gather that 

' The Kelts are destroying themselves the Teutonic 
Element MUST prevail one feels genius the thing Herr 
Beringer Dr. Zerffi but whatever one may FEEL, so it is ! 
Every other nation COMMENCED when we LEAVE OFF. WE 
BEGAN with the DRAMA and left off with the Epic Milton's 
What is-it ? But there you have Hamlet where do you find 
a character like HAMLET ? NO WHERE! That's the 

beauty of it Last week Dr. Zerffi said ' All religions 

are one and one religion is all particularly the Brahmas.' 
It was splendid ! and none of the young ladies knew it before 
they came He's a great man and the Teutonic Ele- 
ment must prevail. The Kelts are very charming, but they 
will GO. We've the same facial angle as the Hindoo," etc., 
etc 



RECOGNITA. 93 

It was this that caused George to write to me from the 
House of Commons on an eventful evening : 
" My dear Charles, 

As the Irish M.P.'s were borne out shouting and strug- 
gling by 10 policemen to each member, I remarked, ' The 
Celts are very charming but they must GO.' 

Yours affectionately, 

GEORGE W. 



He delighted in Mrs. Ewing's work, and wrote reproachfully 
to me in September, 1897, " WHY did you never read us ' Hoo 
oor wee Baby was burrnt ' in Mrs. Ewing's letters ? It makes 
me cry with laughter." My sister gives it thus in a letter to 
my aunt, Mrs. Elder : 

" I don't know if the following will read comprehensibly. 
Told it was overwhelming, and was a prime favourite with 
the Scotch audience. 

Hoo oor Baby was burrned. 

(How our Baby was burnt). 

(You must realize a kind of amiable bland whine in the way 
of telling this. A caressing tone in the Scotch drawl, as the 
good lady speaks of oor wee Wullie, etc. Also a roll of the r's 
on the word burned). 

' Did ye never hear hoo oor wee Baby was burrned ? 
Well ye see it was this way. The Minister and me had been 
to Peebles and we were awfu' tired, and we were just haeing 
oor bit suppers when oor wee Wullie cam doon-stairs and he 
says ' Mither, Baby's burrrning.' 

" Y' unerstan it was the day that the Minister and me 
were at Peebles. We were awful tired, and we were just 
at oor suppers, and the Minister says (very loud and nasal), 
' CallNurrse \ ' but as it rarely and unfortunitly happened 
Nurrse was washing and she couldna be fashed. 

" And in a while our WEE Wullie cam down the stairs 
again, and he says ' Mither ! Baby's burning.' 



94 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

" as I was saying the Minister and me had been away 
over at Peebles, and we were in the verra midst of oor suppers, 
and I said to him ' Why didna ye call Nurse ? ' and off he 
ran. " and there was the misfirtune of it Nurrse was 
washing, and she would' nt be fashed. 

" And in a while oor wee Wullie came down the 
stairs again and he says, ' Mither ! Baby's burrrned.' And 
that was the way oor poor wee baby was burnt ! " 



One night at Clouds the conversation turned on Norman 
Angell's " Great Illusion," and George, addressing himself 
to Chesterton, warmed up to a somewhat violent diatribe 
against the Cosmopolitan ideal, ending up with " I think 
that sort of thing is the very devil." To which Chesterton 
immediately replied, "It certainly was he who took Him to the 
top of the mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of 
the world \ " 



He laughed a good deal over a somewhat interminable 
ballad I wrote about a parrot, who lived in a garret, and 
amused himself by widening a hole in the wall made by some 
mice, and dragging out manuscripts from a hidden recess. 
The pith of the matter is in the last 5 verses : 

"He dragged them behind and he pushed them before, 
Till the litter of centuries covered the floor, 
And amongst it a manuscript volume of plays, 
In a very neat hand of Elizabeth's days. 

The experts poured in from the ends of the earth, 
To examine that book and determine its worth, 
They argued so long it became quite renowned, 
Though no satisfactory solution was found 



RECOGNITA. 95 

Till Doctor Erasmus Simonides Johnson, 

A Professor at large from the State of Wisconsin, 

Pronounced it at once without hesitation, 

As Shakespeare's handwriting at Bacon's* dictation. 

It was put up at Christie's and offered for sale, 
And the bidding drove on like a leaf in a gale, 
Till the price of that document stands undefeated, 
Since Morgan and Rockfeller's agents competed. 

The house is pulled down and the family dead, 
But the Parrot lives on, aged eighty 'tis said ; 
Ungrateful descendants whose wealth he had found, 
Having spent all the cash sold the bird for a pound. 



There was a reminiscence concerning his father that George 
always enjoyed, especially as Pamela said that I told it all 
wrong, which was probably true, as she was there. Anyway 
my version of the story ran like this. George's father was 
on a visit with Pamela, to Longleat. The day they left there 
was considerable discussion between Lord Bath and Mr. 
Wyndham as to the shortest cross-country railway route to 
their destination ; a friendly suit, Bradshaw -versus Bradshaw. 
In the end Mr. Wyndham had his way, and he and Pamela 
were driven to a small, bleak, high-level station, miles from 
anywhere, the sort of thing you only get on fells, or downs, 
or Salisbury Plain. Here they and their luggage were dis- 
charged with the assistance of the footman, no porter being 
visible. The next stage of the tragedy was when the Honour- 
able Percy, finding the General Waiting Room entirely bereft 
of humanity, and this within ten minutes of the down train, 
bangs on the wooden window of the booking-office, but with- 
out any effect at all ; illustrating the Arab proverb with regard 
to abortive attempts at familiarity, " Ten thousand raps on 
the door, but no salutation from within ! " The thing was 
getting desperate. Out on to the platform. Not a soul 



96 GEORGE WYNDHAM 

there, but about 30 yards up a siding a porter, with scuttle 
and shovel getting coals off a truck for the Waiting-room. 
Here at last is something. " Hi I Hi ! " I can see and hear 
it all " Where's this down train ? " " There be no down 
train." " You mean to tell me you've no 2.35 from here to 
Warminster ? " " There be no train to Warminster till five 
minutes to fower." 

A sense of injury began to rankle in the sufferer's breast. 
No doubt the Bradshaw at Longleat was one, possibly two 
years' old. " Of course Bath could argue, must have argued, 
if we were looking at railway guides of different years. It's 
an extraordinary thing but you never can get servants to " 
" Where's the Station-Master ? " " He be at dinner." Back 
again into the Waiting-room where the patient Pamela sits 
crowned with an aureole of Swine-Fever placards and lists of 
persons prosecuted for travelling without tickets. An hour 
and a half ! Appalling prospect ! The landscape outside 
offers no solace, only a wide, bleak, seemingly endless vista of 
flat wind-swept fields, covered with broken flints, and dotted 
here and there with an occasional shepherd's hut on wheels. 
No literature but uncertain time-tables, County Council 
placards, hanging sheets of menacing texts from the prophet 
Isaiah, concluding with the consolatory promise that the 
wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them ; and 
emigration advertisements displaying huge vessels, crossing 
tropical seas, crowded with passengers, reclining in deck 
chairs under gay awnings, listening to orchestral music an 
aggravating contrast to the fate of two poor derelict creatures, 
cast away in a remote road-side railway station, without 
friends or refreshments, excepting the usual decanter of 
doubtful water, rimmed with a pale brown bacteriological 
deposit. 

He pries into every corner, examines everything within 
range, signals, water-tank, oil lamps, and even an unclaimed 
sack, lying on the platform, labelled to one Warren, of Windy 
Ridge farm, containing two live young pigs apparently trying 
to walk away at the same moment in opposite directions. 
Then he sits down in the waiting-room to see it through. 



RECOGNITA. 97 

Suddenly, and most unexpectedly, the doors are thrust 
open, and two women with a perambulator are blown in to the 
premises. In one's worst troubles it is something to have 
fellow-sufferers. They also must have been deceived. He 
becomes interested. They seat themselves and draw up the 
perambulator. He adjusts his eye-glass and awaits their 
word of sympathy. After a short pause the younger of the 
two lifts her eyes to the clock and says, " It's nice to be in 
such nice time." To which the older woman responds, " Yes, 
beautiful time." This was almost more than he could stand 
people deliberately rejoicing in disaster ! Three minutes go 
by and the older woman, anxious to confirm their gratitude 
for all that Providence has arranged, says, " It is nice to be 
in such nice time, isn't it ? " Upon which the younger woman 
echoes, " Beautiful time." Then the bib at the top end of 
the perambulator is pushed up by two tiny pink hands, and 
the doting parent leans over the conveyance exclaiming 
" Leonard ! Beaut-eye Boy \ ' 



I remember well George's amusement over an adventure 
I had in Hyde Park, close to your house. I was walking 
along, day-dreaming, when suddenly, from a crowd of strollers, 
a lady of considerable dimensions, gazed steadily into my face, 
broke into a bright smile of conscious recognition, and before 
I could collect my thoughts, rushed forward, seized me by the 
hand, exclaiming " Why, it's Captain Nicholson ! " Well, 
of course it wasn't, and I ought to have said so, and I didn't, 
partly owing to an involuntary sinking sensation in the solar 
plexus, but chiefly because the blow was so sudden and un- 
expected, and the lady so precise and positive, that I stood 
fascinated like a rabbit in front of a rattle-snake, half per- 
suaded that I really must be some sort of Nicholson. 

In any situation of this delicate kind, delay is dangerous. 
An immediate repudiation of identity carries weight, but one 
cannot put if off. If you hesitate you are lost. The thing is 
a quagmire, and to pause is to sink. I sank. 



98 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

" How delightful to see you again after all these years, 
you must come and dine with us at the Grosvenor Hotel ; 
and here is Cosmo." As I shook the husband's hand I was 
conscious of a misgiving in his expression which so alarmed 
me that I excused a hasty retreat on the plea of having to dress 
for dinner, and bolted. My last vision was a skittish wave 
of a red parasol, from behind which came the suggestive little 
aside " Oh ! those nights at Simla ! " It was some time 
before I had courage to face the Park again, alone. 



I think the last joke we all laughed at together was Percy's 
American dialogue admirably narrated at the tenants' dinner 
that last Christmas, of which the following is an imperfect 
representation : 

" Well, and how have things being going with you ? " 

" Pretty fair, I've had my ups and my downs." 

"That's good." 

" Well, not so good, for my father's dead." 

"That's bad." 

" Well, not so bad, for he left me his farm and stock." 

"That's good." 

" Well, not so good, for all the stock took rinderpest 
and died." 

"That's bad." 

" Well, not so bad, for they were all insured over value." 

" That's good." 

" Well, not so good, for the Insurance Company burst 
and the Chairman blew his brains out." 

" That's bad." 

" Well, not so bad, for I married the widow." 

" That's good." 

" Well, not so good, for she was a woman with a very 
violent temper." 

" That's bad." 

" Well, not so bad, for she had any quantity of money " 

" That's good." 



"RECOGNITA . 



99 



" Well, not so good, for in one of her tantrums she set 
fire to our house." 
"That's bad." 
" Well, not so bad, for she perished in the flames." 



He had prepared for us all, during the last days in Paris, 
a ' surprise ' joke We were to dine with him in London, 
I think on the Monday that brought us the fatal news. Percy 
set the wires going to find us all. I do not think George 
divulged the secret even to you ; but now we know that he 
had found a collection of mechanical toys, figures of animals, 
which on being wound up, march in procession into the dining- 
room. He wrote to Bendor on June 4, " I found a glorious 
menagerie of animals and will bring them too, or send them by 
express post. I made them all perform with Belloc, who 
shouted and danced with glee at their antics." 



ioo G E K G E W Y A' D II A M . 



" Give me my robe, put on my crown ; I have 
Immortal longings in me." 

Somebody, I think a lady, once said to me, " I know 
you're a Catholic, but what do you really think about religion ? 
It was a large order, and I did my best, but only because I 
happened to have answered practically the same question in 
print, and had been compelled to sort and express my ideas 
about it ; otherwise I might have been embarrassed. 

And yet that lady only tried to find out what we all want 
to know about people who interest us, or have become eminent 
in science or philosophy, or are about to die. Most of us have 
a look occasionally at the conversation of Socrates, and the 
letters of the Blessed Thomas More, in face of death, and even 
at the suicide's letter in the daily paper. We all like to read 
what Newton and Kelvin had to say about the existence of 
God and a future life. When I say " we all," of course I 
exclude the Materialists, they hate this sort of thing. Their 
fury with men like Sir Oliver Lodge and Sir William Crookes, 
is like the anger of the Shakespeare-Bacon Baronet, with that 
' Stratford Crown.' They are annoyed because vitalism is 
interesting and, therefore, popular, whilst mechanism is as 
dull as a threshing machine. People do want to know what 
intellectual men think about the religious problem, so let 
this be my excuse for writing a few words about the attitude 
of George's mind towards this great subject. 

It is sometimes surprising to Catholics that an intellectural 
man who has no Protestant prejudices, to whom authority, 
dogma, logic, and ceremonial are not hateful, can resolutely 
say ' I have accepted as well as inherited the Elizabethan 
settlement, and there's an end on it.' Nevertheless it happens. 



RECOGNITA. 101 

As far as my knowledge goes George thought that Providence 
had put him on board this vessel, that it was part of his na- 
tional and tribal equipment, and that to abandon it for an 
open sea, possibly to float up the Tiber, but possibly also to 
drift into some uncharted estuary, was not required of him. 
He was a loyal member of the established Church of England. 
In the early morning of the most important day of his life, the 
day he introduced his Irish Land Bill in to the House of Com- 
mons, he went to Holy Communion. 

He would have been right glad I know if Erasmus and 
not Luther had led the religious strike of the i6th century. 
He looked upon the destruction of the monasteries as a terrible 
disaster, intellectual and political He reverenced the Christian 
charity shown by the religious orders amongst the 
Catholic poor, and often spoke about the Saints and heroes 
he had known amongst the priests in the West of Ireland. 
In fact he was an Anglican with Catholic instincts. 

But George lived during a time when enlightened minds 
were attacking the foundations of every form of Christian 
faith, and in these speculations, and in the replies made to 
them, he was deeply interested. The origin of man, the 
antiquity of the human race, whether the universe be the issue 
of chance or purpose, whether or not our little life be "rounded 
with a sleep," on these questions he read much and talked 
often, like a boy bathing who holds on to the bank whilst 
feeling with his feet to try how deep the stream is. 

The mechanical view of the universe had no attraction 
for him whatever. He could not reconcile a purposeful man 
with a purposeless world. He had been brought up on Words- 
worth's " Character of the Happy Warrior," and he really 
had a plan and purpose throughout his whole life, which he 
would not let any German materialist tarnish with misty 
speculation. He did not believe that logic and the laboratory 
are the only roads to truth. He did not believe that the 
most elaborate catalogue of the chemical ingredients which 
constitute a woman's frame offers any complete explanation 
of the maternal instinct which reigns therein. But he wel- 
comed every effort made by the intuition and intellect of man 



102 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

to decipher the huge hieroglyphic of the visible universe, and 
wanted room for everybody to speak his mind. 

I have written earlier in this letter about the influence 
of nature upon George's temperament. He experienced 
always a subtle sympathetic intimacy through the senses with 
all natural phenomena, with light and darkness, sound, scent 
and colour. " Some of my friends," he said to me once or 
twice, " notice nothing when we go for a walk, and spoil my 
sunset with gossip and politics." I think he felt that there is 
a sort of sacramental union between the seen and the unseen 
universe, dimly apprehended by our ordinary senses, but 
more apparent to those less cultivated instincts and intuitions 
which rush in and seize the helm of the human being at certain 
magic moments, and yet seem to habitually guide the functions 
of many other forms of life. Intense physical and intellectual 
rapture at the beauty of the world, intense joy in the glory of 
sun and moon and stars and hills and streams, brought about 
in George at times an exalted emotion, akin, possibly to the 
" fine frenzy " of Shakespeare, that glances from heaven to 
earth, and from earth to heaven, seeking perchance by intuition 
to grasp some undiscovered relation between things temporal 
and eternal. In such moments it is possible that men realise 
intimations of immortality, and move about in worlds not 
realized : 

" There's a sunset touch, 

A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, 

A chorus-ending from Euripides, 

And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears 

As old and new at once as Nature's self, 

To rap and knock and enter in our soul." 

" Hence in a season of calm weather 

Though inland far we be, 

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 

Which brought us hither. 

Can in a moment travel thither, 

And see the children sport upon the shore, 

And hear the mighty waters rolling ever more." 



RECOGNITA. 103 

Early in our friendship there was at times a note of 
supreme sadness in his philosophy about the transient character 
of life. In November, 1889, he wrote to me : 

" The ' waste ' in the world ; the purposeless decay of 
lovely things with nothing effected by their death ; dying 
flowers, falling leaves, ruined works of art, and thoughts that 
perished even before they blossomed into expression, are to 
me the very type of the principle of EVIL in this world." 

In later days this pessimistic note disappeared, as he 
grasped a wider and deeper view of man's work and destiny. 
His first view was the inexperienced vision of childhood, the 
baby reaching out its hand to grasp the distant spire. But 
from first to last there was always the same tremendous 
sympathy. " I can't tell you," he wrote to Pamela in 1912, 
" the loveliness of the dawn at Clouds this morning. I watched 
it, and sunrise, and the mists, and the moon, from my window 
for one and a half hours." 

Before this he WTOte to me : " I wish you were here 
to-day, to walk with us in the ' happy autumn fields.' To-day 
there is silence and such peace everywhere. A few trees still 
golden, and the sky blue, in calm defiance of Winter's alarm. 
I have a lot of work to do, but I sit and stare out of the window 
at the green meadows kissed by the ' golden face ' of the sun, 
already ' reeling ' from the day with ' weary car.' One 
ploughed field set in their midst, almost the colour of a rich 
crimson-lake, and beyond a soft blue haze against the hills. 

The delight of the eyes is a great deal to me. So many 
people dream of it no more than the red cow walking in the 
second green field, who is unconsciously giving me exquisite 
pleasure as the sun shines on her back. 

I belong very much to this world of sense, and hope 
Blougram is right in thinking this the wisest course. I run 
no risk of being naked before I reach Timbuctoo 

My friend, I will write no more, though if you were here 
I would talk with you all day and night, as you know by 
experience. Let us meet soon. 

Yours ever, 

GEORGE WYNDHAM." 



104 GEORGE WYNDHAHf. 

The allusion is to Browning's " Bishop Blougranrs 
Apology " : 

" Do you know, I have often had a dream 

(Work it up in your next month's article) 

Of man's poor spirit in its progress, still 

Losing true life for ever and a day 

Through ever trying to be and ever being 

In the evolution of successive spheres 

Before its actual sphere and place of life, 

Halfway into the next, which having reached, 

It shoots with corresponding foolery 

Halfway into the next still, on and off ! 

As when a traveller, bound from North to South, 

Scouts fur in Russia ; what's its use in France ? 

In France spurns flannel ; where's its need in Spain ? 

In Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers ! 

Linen goes next, and last the skin itself, 

A superfluity at Timbuctoo." 

" To be human is to change ; to be perfect is to have changed 
often." We pass on in life from things seen to things unseen, 
like St. Augustine and St. Monica at Ostia. Fresh ideals 
beckon us on as our vision of life expands with experience, 
and George's early superficial pessimism gave way to deeper 
and deeper trust in the spiritual view of life. Among the 
writings that influenced him in this direction I would name 
' The Book of Thel ' by William Blake. He introduced me 
to this wonderful poem, as exalted in language as it is hi thought. 
Is there anything in English verse finer than these seven lines 
put into the mouth of the clod of earth ? : 

" O beauty of the vales of Har ! We live not for ourselves, 
Thou seest me, the meanest thing, and so I am indeed. 
My bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark ; 
But He that loves the lowly pours His oil upon my head, 
And kisses me, and binds His nuptial bands around my breast 
And says : ' Thou mother of My children, I have loved thee, 
And I have given thee a crown that none can take away." 



RECOGNITA. 105 

Now we had discussed, time and again, the interpretation 
of the Book of Thel, and had been disatisfied with the results. 
We could account for a good deal, but not for all. So I applied 
to Father John O'Connor, as true a poet as he is a friend, and 
he sent me, in October, 1901, an interpretation which I am, 
herewith, going to print, without permission, partly because 
he might object, but chiefly because George saw the manu- 
script as I give it, and was greatly interested in it. I do not 
print the whole poem because you, and all his family know it 
well. 

ESSAY ON THE BOOK OF THEL. 

All the living creatures of the world were busy with their 
daily life, except the youngest, the Human Soul, the latest 
thing made on this earth. She gave way to misgivings about 
the meaning and aim of existence, and allowed herself to be 
overcome with base self-pity for her doom of death. 

But from the lily of the valley she learns the minuteness 
of its beauty and the constant care of God for its appointed 
life and course, during which He makes it seem as if all Nature 
were for its sake. Even when it melts, it nourishes other 
beauteous things, for the soul of beauty does not die. 

Moreover the lily is for the sake of the lamb, the field, 
the kine, and cheerfully is their minister, smiling in their faces 
the while. 

Yet Thel objects that she is an object of pity, and does 
not stand alone. She shares the sorrows of the Cloud. Here 
the lily calls the Cloud to witness that its early death is not a 
sorrow, and the Cloud affirms that it is but the beginning of 
its joy, it dies to rise again. 

Thel says her life is not like this, and her death is not like 
the death of the Cloud. The Cloud in its dying is the life of 
the flowers, but Thel is only food for worms. 

Here the Cloud takes up the parable. If so, how great 
thy usefulness, how good thy fortune ! Come forth, Worm 
of the earth and give earth's queen her lesson ! 

The worm cannot speak lor itself, so Mother- Earth 
answers for it. 



io6 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

The comparison of the worm to a child just born, that 
only shows life by writhings and cries, is a two-edged sword 
of poesy. The worm by its writhing, calls to mind the red 
human thing ; the child's cries are heard by Blake as be- 
longing to the worm. 

But the Clay, mother of all bodies, makes things clear. 
" O Beauty of the vales of Har, we live not for ourselves. 
Even I that of myself can produce nothing wherefor I may 
live, am by the nuptial grace of God the mother of endless 
life. This I ponder, though I cannot ponder. Yet, I live and 
love." 

Thel ' dries the tears of pity with her white veil.' The 
Soul is being converted to see the deep meanings of the least 
things of creation. But with the white veil of her body she 
brushes away these tears of sympathy. She grows anxious 
for the body, that it must leave its shining lot for the cold bed 
of clay. 

So she is admitted to the secrets of the grave, and sees 
how every human heart is in some measure steadied and 
orientated by death, has deep anchorage for its tortuous unrest, 
is made more solicitous about the end and meaning of existence. 
Death does this not so much the prospect of our own death, 
as the death of those we cherish. 

Thel witnesses and realises the sorrow and horror of 
death in a gross material aspect very different from the senti- 
mental gloom which caused her first questionings. She is 
stricken dumb. She stood in silence listening to the voices 
of the ground till to her own grave-plot she came, and there 
she sat down. But from the hollow pit sorrow driven home 
to her real sorrow this time speaks with a very different 
voice, asking questions which drive her mind upon one inevit- 
able conclusion. 

Why are we tempted through our senses, ears and eyes, 
helpless as they are to resist what approaches them ? 

Again, why have our senses such power of expression, 
attraction, repulsion, so far beyond mere material effects ? 
Note well, " eyelids stored with arrows ready drawn." The 
eyelashes are compared to weapons of attack. Compare Mrs. 



RECOGNITA. 107 

Meynell's beautiful essay on the eyelid as the greatest organ 
of expression. 

Whence do eye and tongue derive their vast gifts and 
graces ? 

Why the infinite receptivity of ear and nostril ? 

ANSWER. 

There is a soul behind which can reject what the senses 
cannot refuse. 

The eye gives more than itself when it is the almoner of 
the soul. So does the tongue. 

The ear draws in what is endlessly greater than itself, 
for the soul is not too narrow to contain it all. 

The nostril inhales fear because of the spirit that fears 
i.e., the nostril widens with fear more than with its natural 
action of breathing, and the larger draught accelerates the 
pulse, defending the soul against fear. 

In fine, the body is not for its own sake but for something 
deeper, wider, greater than itself. Its aim and work here, 
even if it perished without reprieve, would justify its life, and 
make it worth living. 

But : Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning 
boy ? Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire ? 
Because not even the soul lives for itself, and the body's last 
expression of the soul's self-giving must be withheld until the 
soul is ripe for the marriage of true minds, which ought to 
precede the carnal consummation, and which is the last stage 
in the soul's growth. Nature says to the body : " Wait for 
the soul." Here is the body then, dead to its most intimate 
instinct until the soul's fullness of time. Is this not a parable 
that the body's complete death is but another " Wait " for a 
fuller growth of the soul ? The brutes obey each impulse 
implicitly, because they live by a sensitive soul alone, not by a 
spiritual form which perpetuates, for good or ill the sensitive 
appetites to which it yields consent. 

Thel shrieks with the greatness of the awaking from gentle 
gloom and irresponsibility, to stern immortality." 



io8 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

One word more about the solemn thought of immortality, 
and I have done. It is an extract from an article by Henri 
Bergson which George read to me, in both languages, with 
great fervour and delight, a few months before he died : 
" Consider exceptional joys like those of the great artist who 
has produced a masterpiece, of the scientific man who has 
made a discovery or invention. We sometimes say they have 
worked for glory and derive their greatest satisfaction from the 
applause of mankind. Profound mistake ! We care for 
praise in the exact measure in which we feel not sure of having 
succeeded ; it is because we want to be reassured as to our 
own value and as to the value of what we have done that we 
seek praise and prize glory. But he who is certain, absolutely 
certain, that he has brought a living work to the birth, cares 
no more for praise and feels himself beyond glory, because there 
is no greater joy than that of feeling oneself a creator. If, 
then, in every province, the triumph of life is expressed by 
creation, ought we not to think that the ultimate reason of 
human life is a creation which, in distinction from that of the 
artist or man of science, can be pursued at every moment and 
by all men alike ; I mean the creation of self by self, the con- 
tinual enrichment of personality by elements which it does 
not draw from outside, but causes to spring forth from itself ? 

May we not, therefore, suppose that the passage of con- 
sciousness through matter is destined to bring precision, 
in the form of distinct personalities, tendencies or poten- 
tialities which at first were mingled, and also to permit these 
personalities to test their force whilst at the same time in- 
creasing it by an effort of self-creation ? On the other hand, 
when we see that consciousness, whilst being at once creation 
and choice, is also memory, that one of its essential functions 

is to accumulate and preserve the past, that very probably 

the brain is an instrument of forgetfulness as much as one of 
remembrance, and that in pure consciousness nothing of the 
past is lost, the whole life of a conscious personality being an 
indivisible continuity, are we not led to suppose that the 
effort continues beyond, and that in this passage of conscious- 
ness through matter. . ..consciousness is tempered like steel, 



RECOGNITA. 109 

and tests itself by clearly constituting personalities and pre- 
paring them, by the very effort which each of them is called 
upon to make, for a higher form of existence ? If we admit 
that with man consciousness has finally left the tunnel, that 
everywhere else consciousness has remained imprisoned, that 
every other species corresponds to the arrest of something 
which in man succeeded in overcoming resistance and in ex- 
panding almost freely, thus displaying itself in true personali- 
ties capable of remembering all and willing all and controlling 
their past and their future, we shall have no repugnance in 
admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone, con- 
sciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life." 



no GEORGE WYNDHAM. 



" In evil days, when earth is old, 
And faith grows dim, and love is cold, 
Let Christian footsteps softly tread 
Where lie beneath the faithful dead ; 
And oft let Faith and Love repair, 
To gather light and kindling there." 

I have looked through the pages of this letter, which has 
rambled up anyhow of its own accord, and I find it but a scant 
reflection of this ignus ardens of humanity. I feel like one 
sitting in front of a fire that has gone out, and wishing I had 
more often warmed my hands before its generous blaze. So 
vital was he that my mind refuses to think of him as asleep and 
silent. So much does he still cling round those who love him, 
that it seems at times as if a pass-word would send him rushing 
into their midst. Samuel Butler says that " The whole life 
of some people is a kind of partial death a long, lingering 
death-bed, so to speak, of stagnation and nonentity." But 
George's whole life was a species of continual animation, 
perpetual re-creation, and conquest over stagnation. As 
some one wrote of his last moments, precipitated by heart 
seizure : Defying time, and death, and destiny, He stormed 
the gates of immortality \ He burnt himself out with sheer 
excess of functional activity. Function in him was not, as 
Shakespeare says, " smothered in surmise " ; he did things, 
he rushed out to realize and exercise all the natural and super- 
natural endowments of his soul and body. This was a great 
quality in him, but it brought corresponding defects. 

The intellectual processes necessary for an active political 
career, especially in critical times, demand not only wide 
reading, constant consultation, and intense concentration, 



RECOGNITA. in 

but require also a certain amount of quiet leisure for un- 
conscious cerebration. In later days George got too little of 
this. He spread himself, and spent himself, until his friends, 
I for one, felt shy of intruding on his time. He complained 
that I hid myself, and so I did. The door-bell of 35 Park 
Lane was always ringing. Groups of politicians, constituents, 
the promoters of literary enterprises, and friends in difficulties 
came for consultation, and his days became overcrowded. 
He was jostled, worried, pressed and tired. His chivalrous 
generosity would not let him muffle the bell, or relax his cor- 
respondence, or his public speaking, but the effect on him was 
not good, and he knew it. He got ' on the go ' and could 
not stop. Mentally exhausted, he increased rather than 
diminished his physical exercises and sandwiched in yeomanry 
manoeuvres, polo, tennis and hunting, between shadow- 
cabinets, political memoranda, speeches in the country, front 
opposition bench work in the House, the settlement of his 
father's affairs, and the problems of the Clouds' estate. Those 
who came nearest to him saw that he was a man whirling 
rather than walking through his days. It is not given to 
mortal man to enjoy such qualities as he possessed, untarnished 
by these drawbacks. Intense exuberance of intellectual and 
animal energy cannot always be restrained, over-mastering 
moments must come. " He mistook animal spirits for vigour," 
and overdrew his physical account. ' There is a myth among 
some Eastern nation that at the birth of Genius an unkind 
fairy marred all the good gifts of the other fairies by depriving 
it of the power of knowing where to stop." 

Long ago I had wanted him to abandon politics and give 
his life to literature. Loyalties held him and I could not press 
it. Last year he reminded me of my wish he had begun to 
think of it Clouds, farming, literature and archaeology. 

In the midst of this whirl he had at times misgivings 
whether some might think him lacking in consideration of 
them. Of course people don't talk about such things, but we 
are all very exacting, and are prone to think about them. 
Well, if there be any such silent claimants on George's spiritual 
estate for unrequited love, let them remember that no man 



ii2 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

ever spent himself with more lavish prodigality than he. You 
know better than I, that if your children read these pages, 
they will say to themselves, ' how true this all is, how near 
he came to everyone of us, sharing our joys and sorrows, 
sympathizing with our anxieties, and loving our children.' 
And they will be right. George had clean forgot how to be 
selfish ; he only seemed selfish to one because he was absorbed 
in another. This is why he was placed after death by those 
who knew him best among the souls described by Samuel 
Butler " who do actually live in us, and move us to higher 
achievements though they be long dead, whose life thrusts 

out our own and over-rides it who draw us ever more 

towards them from youth to age, and to think of whom is to 
feel at once that we are in the hands of those we love, and whom 
we would most wish to resemble. What is the secret of the 
hold that these people have upon us ? Is it not that while, 
conventionally speaking, alive, they most merged their life 
in, and were in fullest communion with those among whom 
they lived ? They found their lives in losing them. We 
never love the memory of anyone unless we feel that he or 
she was himself or herself a lover." 

In the realm of real life, as a functional human being, 
amongst his fellow men, George had a profound sympathy with 
all who were perplexed by the mysteries and miseries that 
surround us. I know no one who realised more deeply than 
he that " to come into the world is to come upon a cross, and 
that to be born man is to hold out hands and feet to be cruci- 
fied." Like the Father of Solomon's House in Bacon's Atlan- 
tis, " He had an aspect as if he pitied men," and those in trouble 
recognised it instinctively. But those who get into trouble 
are often the thoughtless, and the thoughtless do not 
face the serious aspects of life, but go gaily off to play 
golf, and sail yachts until there is a catastrophe the wife 
that ought to stay at home goes away, or the wife that ought 
to go wants to stay, or somebody steals, or some one is sane 
enough to keep out of the Asylum, but mad enough 
to make everyone else miserable ; and then there is a 
row, and people say it is a dreadful world, and something 



RECOGNITA. 113 

must be done, and somebody ought to be consulted, and 
George's writing-room becomes a sort of confessional and 
dispensary all in one, and after four hours of it I find George 
at once exhausted and excited, with every symptom of a 
temperature. And all the way to Kettners he discusses hypo- 
thetical cases of conscience, and assures me that he would 
make an excellent President of that Court where these things 
are linked up, or used to be, with such irrelevant topics as ill- 
caulked ships and wills. Then I suggest that he would find 
it more profitable to join a firm of solicitors whose well-trained 
clerks know which waiting-rooms the rival ladies have been 
ushered into solely by the rare odours that escape into the 
corridors, and take good care that Houbigon's Rose Blanc, 
must be kept clear of Piesse and Lubin's Jessamine. And 
so I try to joke him gently into our quiet corner of the restau- 
rant, where his mercurial temperament responds quickly to 
the application of good food, and by the time a cigarette is 
lighted we are full blaze into the natural and supernatural 
arguments for and against the Sacrament of Matrimony. 

Such was he when people came to him for help in trouble. 
But his mouth and ears were sealed to gossip. He never 
sought to interfere till he was asked, and had no passion for 
control or criticism. " I wish," he wrote to Pamela, at a 
time when he was harrassed by the shrewd activity of the 
world, " that people would think and feel and dream more, 
and fuss and scold less." With George MacDonald " he 
knew that the mission of man is to help his neighbour, but 
inasmuch as he was ready to help, he recoiled from 
meddling. To meddle is to destroy the holy chance. Med- 
dlesomeness is the very opposite of helpfulness, for it consists 
in forcing yourself into another self instead of opening yourself 
as a refuge to the other." 

Nor, again, was he critical or ' superior.' If anyone 
went to George with a difficult social problem he did not give 
them stock phrases such as " I don't know what the world's 
coming to," or " Why can't you see that people don't do these 
sort of things," or " I suppose I'm getting oldfashioned but 
," or " When I was a youngster people didn't behave 



H4 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

like this." He probably said " The dilemma is as old as the 
stone-age, and has generally been settled in one of three ways." 
If you turned up with a poem instead of a problem, there was 
none of the usual precious superiority. He greeted your 
enthusiasm with a cheer, and was full of generous encourage- 
ment for any stage of intellectual appreciation. Anybody 
that arrived with the roughest sketch of a walk in the woods, 
a ride over the down, a play, a day's hunting or a scientific 
lecture, found in him a sympathetic audience ready to enter 
into every detail, and fill up the picture with imaginative 
discourse. 

Of his unselfish affection and chivalrous friendship I 
am entitled to speak. As Liberal candidate for Parliament 
in 1892, I was cruelly libelled by my opponent. Although 
George was Secretary to Mr. Balfour at the time, he came 
openly to my rescue, and insisted on giving his own evidence 
of the libel at the trial. We went together to the Law Courts 
and won the suit. The entire press of the Empire confirmed 
the verdict, and the ' Times ' wrote of my opponent as " a 
man whose action tends to the infinite degradation of political 
life." 

This was well enough for me, but George had taken a 
strong line of his own, and I was in great anxiety. True the 
judges in the Supreme Court had described the libel as " in- 
famous," " wicked," " cruel," and " ungentlemanly," but 
Pulman's Weekly News a short time after the trial published 
flattering letters to my opponent from Lord Salisbury and Mr. 
Balfour, and I was terrified lest George's championship of my 
cause had raised trouble for his career. But he never turned 
a hair. He was in glorious form just as if we'd had three days 
good rat-hunting. Do you remember when the fight was 
over, seeing him sitting talking to my father, then over 80, in 
your room at 35 Park Lane ? 

Certainly of all the infamous tricks played by one politician 
on another I got the worst ; but then there was my chivalrous 
knight at hand, and so in one respect I got the best. After 
all it came to this, a gentleman hates cruelty. Moreover he 
could not endure the thought that a group of young politicians 



RECOGNITA. 115 

of his own party and position should ambush the open road 
to political life armed with the poisoned arrows of school 
scandal. 

So much then for the first important feature of George's 
character, he loved the human race and spent himself in its 
service. And next in importance to this I would name his 
determination to be wholly and solely himself. His impulses 
and desires were his own, and not those of others. He plunged 
for ideas, causes and friendships on his own initiative, and for 
themselves alone, and cared nothing for the opinion of any 
man in any street. The question as to whether his judgment 
was at times mistaken does not affect the matter ; right or 
wrong he was always himself. He inherited this from his 
father, and some from his great-grandfather, Lord Egremont, 
an exceptional example of independent individualism, whose 
portrait hangs in the smoking-room at Clouds, and about whom 
he wanted me to write a Monograph. 

Strong individuality is attractive and infectious. That 
is why feeble but appreciative minds imitate the personal 
peculiarities of the great, and diffidence follows courage into 
danger, and meanness is occasionally melted by real indifference 
to wealth. 

This independent individualism united George strongly 
to some, and separated him completely from others. It was 
the shape of his very character, indeed what is character but 
individual impress ? Whether it was the cause or effect of 
his courage I know not, but courage is necessary to a whole- 
hearted individualist in a society cramped with convention, 
and servile before notoriety. But electing thus to be entirely 
himself he wasted comparatively little of his life in routs and 
revels. He used to call a week-end visit to a country house 
" a 48 hour dinner-party." How could he sit and listen to a 
pack of people minding each other's business ? Wookey 
Hole would be more illuminating. All fashion-plate people 
working to a pattern fretted him, especially the American 
type, those with social aspirations thinly veneered with philan- 
trophy, literature, art and politics. He was not hunting for 
learning or distinction, but for efficiency and sincerity. He 



n6 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

venerated his shepherd, Littlecote, his gardener, England, 
his stud groom, Probyn, his chauffeur, Boyer, and his house- 
carpenter, Mallett, and was always talking about their ripe 
experience, their knowledge, and devotion to their work. 
To him they were functional human beings bound to his life, 
as he to theirs, with love and respect. 

Of course the tendency of individualism is to increase 
depth and strength of character. To learn how to form your 
own judgment over one department of life teaches you how to 
frame it with regard to another. The habit grows with 
practice, and where there is growth there is life. Not to grow 
is to become stagnant, like all bores. Slang expresses it in the 
epithet ' rotter,' somebody decaying. You could not be 
three minutes in a room with George without saying, " Well 
here's a real living being ! " You could not sit at table with 
him without finding all round him a sort of medium of joyous 
freedom, a great ample atmosphere in which there was room 
for everybody to live and breathe and renew their being. 
Living, he let live, and everyone about him had room for 
themselves, and became all they were capable of becoming. 
If he talked you down you could get your turn later on. O 
dear, how he and I have laughed together over that scene, 
I think in James Mills' memoir, but probably elsewhere 
where a great talker of the Macaulay type was hard at it, and 
near to him another spouter of the same sort watching like a 
lynx for an opportunity to leap in. The speaker in possession 
begins to clear his throat, and as he grinds on a witty by- 
stander gazing at the pair remarks, " If he spits he's lost ! " 

Of course it is no use trying to get away from the fact 
that a great many people in English society are very ordinary, 
and that a good deal of social converse, like a London omnibus 
route, consists of obstacles. Some cannot listen ; others catch 
an immaterial point, and try to make it the main issue ; others 
have become so glued to one aspect of a question that wild 
horses could not drag them to see another ; and the most 
tiresome selection of all come charged to the muzzle with 
journalism. Instead of being really themselves, and growing 
organically from within, they seem to increase by accretion 



RECOGNITA . 117 

from without, and paste their intellects over with newspaper 
cuttings, becoming incased like late Egyptian mummies in a 
cartonage built up of pressed layers of inscribed papyrus. 
Well, George was the very reverse of this. He kept his per- 
ceptive and reflective faculties in good order and just lived out 
loud. All he wanted was that there should be plenty of room 
for everybody. " People talk about Percy's spelling" he said 
to me when Perkins was yet a child, " but why should'nt he 
spell as he likes ? The great thing is to get him to express 
himself at all." In the long run of course Perkins had to go 
to school and learn how to spell, but George was not going to 
have the faculty of expression atrophied by a convention at 
8 years of age. 

There seems to be a widespread conspiracy in society 
against individuality, stifling the coming generations in public 
schools under a load of petty traditions and conventions ; 
coercing whole coteries of people to endure entertainments 
that nobody really enjoys ; compelling them to wear un- 
comfortable and unbecoming costumes under the plea that 
" these are very much worn just now " ; and checking origi- 
nality in authors, artists, and musicians with the tyranny of 
common-place convention. As Emerson says, " Society 
everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one 

of its members It loves not realities and creators, but names 

and customs." Even Falstaff said that if he had a thousand 
sons he would teach them to drink sack, showing there is 
social tyranny even in the tavern ! 

Of course we must remember it is an indolent world, 
that wants to go the way everybody else is going, and at the 
same pace. Prophets, who try to hurry things up, like fashions 
that change too quickly, are tiresome and disturbing, and the 
indolent world shuts up Carlyle by telling him he is an in- 
coherent Ezekiel. The indolent world is agreed that there 
shall be a pattern, a paradigm, to which all shall conform, 
or, be branded as freaks. Those who were tied to the mill- 
wheel of society probably thought George mad for spending 
ten or twelve Whitsuntide holidays at Chartres, instead of 
playing with them ; but I suppose one can write a book at 



ii8 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

Chartres, as well as make one at Chantilly No doubt what I 
am trying to say has been better said elsewhere, but I do not 
know where to lay my hands on it ; and yet I feel that it is 
most important to open out this question of individual in- 
dependence, because I do not know anything connected with 
George's character more significant than his appreciation of 
those whom he found to have the courage of to be wholly and 
solely themselves. It was the cement that sealed to his very 
soul two such diverse characters in other respects as Bendor and 
Philip Hanson. It is supposed sometimes that identity of 
tastes and studies unites people, but I am inclined to believe 
that similarity of human appreciations is a greater bond. 

Being oneself means deciding for oneself all along the 
line of life a thousand issues as to opinion and conduct. Any 
honest considerate soul, brought up among gentle surroundings, 
in cottage or castle, has no need to doubt his decisions. The 
right one's flow from him as spontaneously and naturally as 
water runs down hill. He needs no " Handbook to Polite 
Society." He is considerate to servants, deferential among 
strangers, merciful to the absurd, gentle with the sensitive, 
helpful to the hesitating, resolute with the weak. Nobody 
asks what his income is, they are too much interested in him. 
His parentage may be a mystery, but his understanding 
sympathy is a miracle. Everybody that knows him well, 
asks for him, at some time or another. He wants " to give, 
not take ; to serve, not rule ; to nourish, not devour ; to help, 
not crush " ; in fact he has disciplined himself, having ex- 
perienced in his own heart a wide and varied range of human 
realities, unalloyed by the fictions that confuse the judgments 
of indolent men. He is proof against the ridiculous terrors 
that haunt the feeble-hearted, as to whether they are wearing 
the right clothes, staying with the right people, living in the 
right neighbourhood, reading the right books, listening to the 
right music, playing the right games, and holding the right 
opinions. Oh, for a magician's wand to emancipate these 
enslaved multitudes, who grope about in automobiles and 
Pulman cars, seeking for an Empire when all the time the 
Kingdom of God is within them ! 



RECOGNITA 



119 



Often enough George and myself would divide the human 
race into ' functional ' and ' non-functional ' people. The 
' functional ' people are just simply artists in living. It is 
not a question of brains or education, or class or cash, but 
simply of character. They may be gipsies, or they may be 
gentlemen ; they may be absorbed in politics, or prize-fighting ; 
they may succeed, or they may fail ; they may go wrong, or 
they may keep right, but they live out every moment of their 
lives, with both eyes on their job, and neither on the mirror or 
the gallery ; pretending nothing, imitating nobody, but just 
being themselves. " Every man truly lives ; so long as he 
acts his nature, or someway makes good the faculties of him- 
self." And " the man that stands by himself, the universe 
stands by him also." One can only be a real artist in living by 
becoming unconscious of the process. The pianist who is 
conscious of his fingers or the notes in the sonata does not 
play it perfectly. Spontaneous unconscious self is the only 
really skilful, happy, or loveable self. That is why compli- 
ments are doubtful delights, they remind one too acutely of 
oneself ! 

" The secret of culture," says Emerson, " is to learn, 
that a few great points steadily re-appear, alike in the poverty 
of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan 
life, and that these few are alone to be regarded, the escape 
from all false ties ; courage to be what we are ; and love of 
what is simple and beautiful ; independence and cheerful 
relation these are the essentials, these, and the wish to 
serve, to add somewhat to the well-being of men." " I 
look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and 
honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character. Speak 
as you think, be what you are. . . .This reality is the foundation 
of friendship, religion, poetry, and art. At the top or at the 
bottom of all illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to 
work and live for appearances, in spite of our conviction, in 
all sane hours, that it is what we really are that avails with 
friends, with strangers, and with fate or fortune." 

George was a supreme artist in living. With every 
endowment of soul and body he wrung all he could get out of 



120 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

the best things in life, like some one impatient to put on im- 
mortality ; and gave all he could of the best things in himself, 
out of sheer sympathy with mortality. And being the artist 
he was, he greeted every trace of a like temperament in others. 
He lived all his life, and enjoyed right heartily every 
beneficient aspect of it. He was always making thanks- 
giving for congenial moments. " This is glorious, don't let 
us waste a minute of it. Now, Ned, not a syllable, please, 
about the House of Commons. I want to hear all about May 
and Magdalen in the South of France. Then Charles shall give 
us his flint finds at Erith, and I'll wind up with my visit to 
Hewell, and read you Sibell's letter from St. Giles's. Only 
I must hear all about Henry and the nth Hussars. What 
a splendid holiday we are having ! " His sense of gratitude 
bursts forth in a little manuscript poem headed " Easter. 
An Impression," which George wrote in a few moments at 
Clouds in March, 1913 : 

" I have forgotten how to sing, 
If ever I sang, so I only say 
That I am glad. For here is Spring 
And I am alive, thank God, to-day ' 

He, more than any man I ever knew, fed upon the present, 
leaving the past to anecdotage, and the future to adolescence 

He ran away from all morbid temptations to re-live 
past lives hi present moments, the ordinary indulgence of the 
afflicted, it seemed to him very often histrionic, unreal, and un- 
profitable. He embraced the present moment, as well as the 
present place. Nothing came amiss, fields, gardens, trees, 
soils, hills, streams, shepherds, cattle, engines, anything, 
as long as it was switched on to the functional life of man. 
I suppose the most unfortunate thing you could say to him, 
if you wanted to secure his goodwill, was that Salisbury Plain 
was flat and uninteresting. 

His mind ranged over a large field of life, past and present, 
extracting a continuous succession of aspects, which he trans- 
muted into new spiritual experiences. Living to him was a 



RECOGNIT A . 121 

perpetual recreation of himself. His day was a joy when it 
brought progress, effort, experience, and roused his entire 
living activity. " In newness of life " was a phrase he loved, 
as you know well. And this is why he was never dull, except 
he were ill, or tired. Every fresh grouping of his environment 
made a new man of him, and glorious surroundings were 
' heavenly alchemy.' As fast as he realised he collated, and, 
if the audience was sympathetic, he poured out. 

This positive functional activity, this gospel of perpetual 
re-creation left little room in him for reflections drawn from 
the cold storage of sceptical philosophy. He rejoiced in every 
line in which Shakespeare defies the " razure of oblivion " 
and " the tooth of time." Surely God created us artists to 
save us from becoming sceptics. What is our equipment but 
a bundle of purposeful instruments, helped by decision, and 
hindered by doubt ? 

Our doubts are traitors, 

And make us lose the good we oft might win 

By fearing to attempt. 

What are our faculties but the tools of artificers which 
thrive by use and perish from neglect ? To realise ourselves, 
to become all that we can be, means constant vigilance lest 
" function be smothered in surmise," and " the native hue of 
resolution be sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." 

Preoccupied as George was with intellectual and political 
interests and friends, he had little leisure or inclination to waste 
time over his outward appearance. The caricaturists never 
got beyond his clothes, and his gestures, but I don't think he 
studied any of these himself. He was the quickest dresser 
I have ever known. He once pleased Pamela exquisitely 
by expressing surprise at not being kept waiting too long 
while she got ready for a walk. " I don't know what people 

do," he said when they go to get ready ! They go upstairs 

and drop into wells." He thought once about his costume 
in recent years, and said to me, " Percy is going to bring me 
up-to-date," but I don't believe he ever got there. Every- 
thing looked well on him, because he was well made, but he 
lost precious little time in considering his own clothes, or 



122 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

criticising mine. Once only, standing on Lady Plymouth's 
doorstep, did I attempt to apologise for my old homespuns, 
and then and there, with some firmness, he begged me mever 
to do it again. I was sensitive about my clothes after a 
quarter of a century's criticism from relations, some of whom 
gave me their old suits to relieve my pocket and redeem my 
appearance ; but George never looked at what I wore, except 
once, when I met him in Hyde Park, and he asked me where 
I got my olive-green Antrim homespun overcoat, and I told 
him that being a Nationalist I bought my cloth in Ulster. 

George was really detached on the subject of wealth. 
Most of the people he knew intimately and saw habitually, 
were not well off. There was not a trace in him of that wide- 
spread illusion that wealth means anything at all unless laid 
out with royal intelligence. He regarded riches as he did 
any other human opportunity, good wits, good health or good 
looks. He found out in his teens that no amount of money 
will relieve the tedium of a dull individual, and that the effect 
of great possessions or great talents upon anything less than a 
noble nature is frequently disastrous. He hugged neither 
money nor life, nor ease. Times out of number he wanted 
to help me in my work and I would not let him. He gave, 
and sometimes largely, when he could ill-afford it. He loathed 
meanness. If he helped people he liked to do it on a service- 
able scale, generously and effectively. He did not fill the 
needy with cheap nothings. " For his bounty there was no 
winter in't ; an autumn 'twas that grew the more by reaping." 

He and I sometimes speculated as to what we should do 
if we had a really good margin of money each year, over and 
above the cost of decent comfort. Away we went, the de- 
velopment of Ireland ; discriminating help to young authors 
and composers ; the excavation of Palaeolithic Caves ; Greek 
papyri from lower Egypt ; experimental physics ; the Pope's 
Bible Commission ; English opera ; folk-lore, folk-song and 
folk-dance ; an honest newspaper ; a Shakespeare theatre 
with the plays ' in the round ' ; a library illustrating the 
Romance literature of Europe and any amount more. These 
came along quick enough, only the margins lingered* 



RECOGNITA. 123 

If any one says to me, ' Your portrait is painted to please, 
he had short-comings.' I would reply, ' Yes, thank God, 
George was human, but his defects bore no more relation to 
his virtues than Shakespeare's slips in history and geography 
do to his supreme work and understanding. Detraction was 
busy about George, as it is about most of us, because detraction 
is one of the principal forms of self-promotion, and those that 
cannot reach the citadel otherwise, must clamber up over 
the bodies of their companions who have taken it. When men 
undergo any kind of reverse in public life, up come the flies 
that batten on every blemish, who tell you that once on a time 
they saw, they heard, and so on and so forth. Well, I lived 
with George from time to time, sometimes for long. I noted 
his day, his mental occupation, his physical exercise, his coming 
and going, his meat and drink, and his instincts about right 
and wrong, and I claim that he won the respect of everyone 
that lived with him and worked with him. I know that he 
put everybody to shame in sheer physical activity and mental 
output. Men who dissipate their lives don't do this. We 
all know that the devoted Secretary who worked with him 
during the last years of his life, has a big undertaking before 
him only to classify the enormous amount of manuscript at 
Clouds and 35 Park Lane. And who could have loved and 
respected him more than Philip Hanson, Murray Hornibrook, 
and Denis Hyde, all of whom lived with him for years ? 

Of course there are, in every political group of men, some 
few of second-rate intelligence but endowed with industry 
or position, who are out to trip up every promising colleague. 
As this little failing of theirs is generally well known, most of 
their gentle depreciation is discounted, but now and again 
they achieve appalling success, though they seldom rise on the 
ruin they have brought about. 

One day, no doubt, perchance when you and I are gone 
hence, some more serious soul than myself will publish an 
orthodox biography of George ; will trace the story of his 
political action, and the development of his political ideas. 
It will be the history of an honest gentleman, whose chivalrous 
loyalty passed through a fiery furnace, and came out unseared. 



GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

If all the truth could be told now, it would leave him an even 
more illustrious memory than that he has. But by the. time 
delicate considerations for other people's feelings may be 
ignored, the generation that knew him will have passed away, 
and the politics of his epoch will be stale ; until which time 
truth will lie at the bottom of a well where she generally is. 
Why is there so much secrecy about diplomatic and political 
affairs ? If people dealt justly with each other, surely we 
should see less of this rush to rescue documents from publica- 
tion. 

Meanwhile, until the full-length finished portrait of 
George is forthcoming, accept a rough sketch. I have not 
written it for public applause. He was the apple of my 
eye, and the friend of my life, and to you he was everything 
We are not seeking newspaper notoriety. And what is the 
use of talking to the people who think of him as the super- 
ficial dandy ? Let them have a good dinner at the Wyndham 
Club ! And let us, who know what he was, keep his example 
ever green. I think Percy ought to have a day say his birth- 
day when we meet and remember him with joy and gladness 
and gratitude, 



My one hope is that no one will try to get what Wells 
calls a " static snapshot " of this vital mobile personality. 
It is difficult indeed to picture in words his plastic versatility. 
and get the flash and flow of him, the unexpected iridiscence, 
refracting all images, and throwing them off in many-coloured 
spray. How easy to freeze the fountain jet into an icicle ! 
Surely he is now, as he ever was, advancing, expanding, 
clutching innumerable reins of thought, driving wide teams 
of ideas from sphere to 'sphere. As he said once to Mahaffy, 
" If we cannot make our lives long, let us make them broad." 
You cannot re-construct such a character in words, any more 
than you can catalogue the storm and splendour of an April 
day. Character is so subtle that not 

" E'en the tenderest heart and next our own 
Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh " 



RECOGNITA. 125 

It is only in the omniscient infallible realms of journalism 
that all can be explained, if not by the sub-editor, at any rate 
by the editor when he comes in. 

Some men come to life again in their literature, like 
Charles Lamb ; others in their correspondence, like George 
Wyndham. The regulation biography of to-day bores me to 
tears. It is not so much what they say, as the tiresome way 
they say it. It's bad enough to lose one's friends without 
having them biographed into bores. I sometimes pray that 
the hero may be allowed to say " Damn," or show some sign 
of life ; but on grinds the regulation mill, and the poor victim 
is skinned, stuffed, and set up in a glass case, not " just like 
life," but just like nothing he ever was. Butler was right, 
we do really care more about knowing what kind of a person 
a man was, than about knowing of his achievements, no 
matter how considerable they may have been. And Dowden 
was right when he says about Shakespeare, " In the great 
tragedies we are concerned more with what man is than with 
what he does. 

Of the natural gifts with which George was endowed, of his 
poetic and literary accomplishments, some one worthier than 
I will write, but I must transcribe here a few words used about 
him by a distinguished author when he died : " He was, in 
my experience, quite alone among men in grace of accom- 
plishment, in ease of it, in bodily beauty, in beauty of heart 
and mind alone among men. The poet in him was what 
I looked to most. All the other things which he could do with 
such perfection tended to keep that under. But it was there 
there were times when he would let me see it ; and I hoped 
that in a few years more he might give over politics and open 
the doors of his heart and let the winged spirit he held there 
go free." 

To me, his principal talent was expository power. This 
required no effort and showed none, whereas literary com- 
position demanded strain. His conversation and corres- 
pondence were to me superior to his literary prose in that 
both were more spontaneous. He sometimes talked to excess, 
he could' nt help it, it poured out of him. He knew it perfectly 



126 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

well and would frequently say " Here I'm doing all the talking, 
just you chip in for a bit." His natural eloquence was ap- 
parent at an early age. One of his school-fellows writes to 
me : " My recollection of George was his extraordinary gift 
of speech. I shall never forget the sensation he caused at our 
House Debating Society. . . .1 doubt if one so young ever had 
such a wonderful command of language." 

Of his public speaking I heard little, but he had large 
audiences and was to the end in constant demand. When 
I did hear him I found an artificiality of manner which tended 
to conceal the real man from me, arising, without doubt, 
from the fact that he was doing something not dictated by his 
own inclination. He haled politics, and only the loyalty of a 
noble nature constrained him to tarry with them. Pamela 
remembers him saying to her the year before he died : 
"I'll do two years more because then I shall have worked 
as long as my father did. I don't want to leave off before 
that, but after two more years I shall feel free to live at Clouds." 



Knowing how much you value all genuine appreciation 
of George's varied gifts, I print here a letter from our friend 
Father John O'Connor : 

Heckmondwike, 

April, 1914. 
My Dear Charles, 

It is always keen pleasure to me to recall that wonderful 
August afternoon which was waiting for you and me at Saigh- 
ton in 1901. The old house was glowing red and the garden 
was almost too good to be true after the bleached East Coast 
and the blackened London and North- Western, when George 
Wyndham strode across the genial colours, lawn-tennis racquet 
in hand, searching for tea and guests. I could let myself go 
like a lady-novelist about the fine olive face beaming at us 
above the white suit of Irish homespun which just then hap- 
pened to be his favourite, and the remarkable over- 
tones in his voice which seemed to add expression to 



RECOGNITA. 127 

his eyes, and so on. Permit me anyhow to fling in these 
Futurist touches, as no painting or photograph can ever give 
the full effect of his eyes without his voice, nor explain how 
his voice could communicate the joy of living which their 
glance embodied. There was an harmonious self-expression 
in the whole man which thrilled and delighted me to an un- 
wonted degree, and I admired his grace and freedom of ges- 
ticulation until it made me realise how one is exiled in England 
from the gentle Latin ways. 

And although during the ensuing days, owing to your 
illness, we had speech of each other alone for hours together, 
I never heard him utter one idle or useless word, and his con- 
versation if printed would look better than most of the stuff 
one sees in leading articles, for instance. He was not only 
lively himself, but the cause of liveliness in others " Nothing 
I enjoy more than a bit of mental lawn-tennis," he said to me 
that Sunday night at the Chief Secretary's Lodge when we 
had run up against the wall of the universe by wondering 
why things are as they are and not entirely otherwise. We 
had agreed, I think, that Omar Fitzgerald's verse about 
grasping this sorry scheme of things entire was verbally as 
perfect as anything in literature but self-evidently lacking in 
any power to grasp which after all made it lack everything. 

And now as to George Wyndham's faultless instinct 
for the best in poetry, and the excellent reasons he could give 
for his preferences. I had read the sonnets and had my 
favourites among them of course, but I never knew how to 
sort out a plain poem which was all one diamond from those 
which only contained small gems of diction, until he read to 
me the greatest of all passion- verses beginning : " Then 
hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now." That same night 
he read all the Adonais of Shelley, interrupted by my outcries 
of deep pleasure at such lines as " The inheritors of unfulfilled 
renown," and " Life like a dome of many-coloured glass stains 
the white radiance of eternity." It was all new to me, and to 
hear such a poem read in such a voice, was an experience that 
has left its mark. To sum up : He was humane as the Italian, 
vivacious and sympathetic as the Frenchman, straight and 



GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

good-natured as the Englishman. It is very touching to recall 
how his passion for a kindred spirit and his reaching out after 
fellow-feeling made his public speaking a t'ailure until he found 
support from his audience, for it is a key to the strength of that 
appealing charm which made him unrivalled as a companion. 

His book on Ronsard and the Pleiade is a monument of 
his love of sharing his best with others. During most of his 
life he had conned the early French poets, and at the end of 
his public career he made it his business to 1-ring home to 
reading men a handful of the fine things he had found so that 
they too might be inspired to glean in the same fields. I 
suppose a critic ought to criticise, and I am sorry that he has 
done nothing to send people reading Christine de Pisan, and 
that he has given so little comment with his charming selections 
from Ronsard, Belleau, du Bellay, and the rest. I should like 
to know for instance if the famous Sonnet of du Bellay : 
" Heureux qui romme Ulysse " be a translation of a transla- 
tion of a lost Greek original, as I have heard stated. At the 
same time I am grateful for the scholarly patience and clear- 
ness with which he tracks the influence of the Pleiade into 
Elizabethan verse It is a very useful and pregnant hint to 
the " Barbarous Britisher " to point out that the matchless 
glory of the English heroic metre might not have been quite 
so matchless if Ronsard and his Pleiade had not a full genera- 
tion ahead set splendid headlines for our Spensers and Sidneys 
and Shakespeares. Whether it be instinct or a passion for an 
entente still more cordial, I cannot say, but in discovering 
with delight in my fortieth year that French also had its perfect 
Pentameter in Ronsard, I kept half-consciously repeating : 

And chantries, where the sad and solemn priest? 

Sing still for Richard's soul. 

It is commonplace appreciation to say that George 
Wyndham's translations do not read like translations, faith- 
ful, surprisingly faithful though they be. And it is too faint 
praise to say that his verse is derivative, though it never rises 
to the height of the great models It is full of poetry and easy 
mastery, but it never dares. Daring is a rarer qiiality than 
courage, and involves an unevenness of temperament which 



RECOGNITA. 

after all is an imperfection that if too common would be a 
great nuisance, and is useful to society only in the proportion 
of officers to men in a field force. It is also a relative thing 
and only justifiable by results. Perhaps I am maundering, 
but here is an instance of what I mean. Another translator* 
than our dear and pious dead renders 

Plus que le marbre dur me plaist 1'ardoise fine 



Et plus que 1'air marin la doulceur angeuine. 
by: 

More than immortal marble undecayed 
The thin sad slates that cover up my home : 



And more than all the winds of all the sea 
The quiet kindness of the Angevin air 



I have not got such a thrill from any version in Ronsard 
and la Pleiade, but here all the same is a real touch upon the 
nerve of Beauty, from Ronsard's " Sur la mort de Marie " 

So in the wonder of that first young loveliness 
Which earth rose up to praise and heaven bent down to 

bless, 
Fate came : and all of thee one little urn encloses. 

I can hear him reading these lines as beautifully as he wrote 
them. 

The paragraph on pp. 42-3 is a summing up of the work 
of the Pleiade which reveals, I think, his reason for taking so 
much trouble to introduce them. They were public-spirited, 
they attacked academic fossilism in its entrenchments and 

' G, K. Chesterton 



130 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

they wrote for pure joy, careless, exuberant, lovely with the 
dew of a different morning. He points out in another place 
pp. 15-21 how Ronsard fought gaily against that sour Pro- 
testantism which even in its defeat a century later contrived 
to curdle the heart of poesy in France and bring the P16iade's 
candid dawn to a drowsy yet self-conscious afternoon. 

Well, dear Charles, thanks to you, I knew him as a gay 
and gallant and high-minded gentleman, and his last book 
does not belie him. 

Yours affectionately in J.C., 

JOHN O'CONNOR. 

And to this let me add another appreciation which you 
must value, more than any words of mine, from a heart so 
loyal and true, a head so capable and wise, a friend so valued 
and loved by George himself, that any recollections of the 
most important years of George's life would be incomplete 
without it. 

Dublin, May, 1914. 
My Dear Charles, 

You have asked me to describe what I knew of the Chief's 
way of working at politics and administration, and in writing 
what follows, I have kept as closely as I could to simple de- 
scription. No one would expect an impartial estimate of a 
man from his private secretary ; on the other hand, it is not 
the purpose of what I have written to convey what many 
of those who will read it know, that I loved him very dearly, 
that he loved and trusted me, and that I owe to him the 
greater part of any fitness I have for public affairs. I have 
tried simply to make a picture of the Chief at work. 

To begin with the most obvious thing, he worked extremely 
hard. I was with him for the first five years of his life in office 
(out of a total of six and a half) ; and during that time I do 
not think he took a real holiday of more than a week or two ; 
and he always worked at high pressure ; nothing bored him so 
much as being half-occupied. Work, with him, always meant 
a strong concentration on a definite object. There is no doubt 
he over-did it, and that over-strain was largely responsible 
for the circumstances which led to his resignation ; but while 



RECOGNITA. 131 

this fierce energy lasted and it lasted without abatement all 
the time I was with him it was a magnificent instrument for 
turning out work. 

His career in office, short as it was, made rather exceptional 
demands on him. He became Under Secretary for War in 
the Autumn of 1898, and was called upon almost at once to 
explain and defend a considerable increase in the Army. 
Our Army is a complicated machine, constructed to meet 
special conditions ; it was characteristic of the Chief that he 
got a clear conception of those conditions into his mind and 
never at any time lost sight of them. Most people inside and 
outside the House of Commons who discuss the Army proceed 
by forgetting each of the conditions in turn. 

In October, 1899, came the South African War. It 
must have been rather hard for a man who was so keen a 
soldier as the Chief to stay at home, but that was a purely 
personal sentiment, and there was no doubt about his duty. 
As the Secretary of State, Lord Lansdowne, was in the House 
of Lords, the hardest part of the Parliamentary work fell 
upon the Chief, and he also took a very strenuous share of the 
administration. The scale of the war and its demands proved 
quite different from what had been expected, and everyone 
at the War Office was very much over-worked for several 
months. In the Autumn of 1900 there was a general election, 
and in the shifting -of Offices that followed, the Chief was sent 
to Ireland as Chief Secretary. He began thinking about the 
land question and the Congested Districts within a few days of 
his arrival, and never stopped till he left office ; he produced 
a large and complicated Land Bill in 1902, and a larger and 
more complicated one, which became law, in 1903. In 1901 
there was a good deal of agrarian disturbance, and it became 
necessary to put the Crimes Act in force ; and Coercion, besides 
raising the political temperature and making it much harder 
than usual to get other work done, naturally involves constant 
debates and discussions hi Parliament which absorb the time 
and energy of the minister responsible. 

The greatest energy would not have enabled him to do 
more than keep abreast of tte current duties of office if he had 



132 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

not had in a high degree the faculty of using subordinates. 
Many industrious men in office achieve very little because they 
insist on doing everything for themselves ; the Chief delegated 
a great deal, and was always looking for helpers ; and the more 
helpers he had, the harder he worked. He got devoted service 
from all of us who were really near him, largely of course from 
personal affection, because he was in himself so admirable and 
attractive, but largely because everyone who served him was 
sure of the most generous appreciation of work done, and sure 
also that the work, though it might seem dull or trifling in 
itself, was a necessary part of something well worth doing. 
Men will drudge hard if they can see that the drudgery is 
leading to something. With the Chief there was never any 
doubt of that. He never took work as it came, getting through 
a set task, which is what most of us do ; with him every effort 
was directed to some important object clearly denned in his 
mind ; he would always have it as clear as he could before he 
began to act, and he had the constructive imagination which 
enabled him to get the picture vivid and full. 

These may seem ordinary qualities ; I believe that they 
are rare, and that they constitute the difference between a 
statesman and a mere administrator. Government is carried 
on for the most part on a principle of drift ; administration 
consists of taking questions as they arise, and legislation of 
drafting measures for which there is an obvious public demand. 
This is the safest course for ordinary men, and indeed the bulk 
of the work of every man in power must be of this kind ; but 
there are some who insist on having a clear view of each 
question before they deal with it, and on some questions see a 
little further ahead than the rest of us ; these are statesmen, 
and the Chief was one of them. 

His thinking was constructive ; it was also concrete. 
These two qualities, I think, explain both his excellencies and 
his defects as a politician. He was always trying to do or to 
produce something positive ; therefore, he had very little 
pleasure in controversy, attack, or criticism of a negative 
character. In spite of occasional brilliant speeches, he was 
not, I think, very effective in opposition. And as he took no 



RECOGNITA. 133 

pleasure in raising objections to other men's proposals, so he 
was not very patient of objections to his own. He would 
gladly discuss methods or improvements to any required 
extent, but usually the thing to be done, as distinguished from 
the way to do it, was fixed and settled for his mind by hard 
thinking before he entered into the discussion, and he was not 
very ready to treat it as an open question. Then he thought 
in the concrete ; with him it was always a question of pro- 
ducing real results that would affect living men. This made 
his schemes very vivid to him ; he grasped them intensely ; 
he did not forget one aspect of them while thinking of another, 
as men often do who think in abstract categories ; and, there- 
fore, he was very powerful and persuasive in advocacy. On 
the other hand, he sometimes failed in explanation by over 
elaborating, and sometimes by being elliptical and obscure ; 
and I think these defects were due to the same vividness of 
thought which gave him his strength. He elaborated and 
adorned because the ideas to him were living things in which he 
delighted, and it pleased him, therefore, to beautify them and 
to trace their analogies ; and he was sometimes obscure through 
failing to remember that the subject was not as familiar to 
his audience as to himself. I remember once he was fascinated 
by a confidential memorandum on a naval problem, and very 
much desired to indicate the idea of it in a speech in the House 
without divulging anything secret ; he read over to me the 
passage in his speech, and I was able to assure him that it was 
safe, because no one who had not read the memorandum would 
have any idea what he meant. 

The same concrete way of thought prevented his having 
what is called a legal mind ; this added a great deal to his 
labour on the Land Bill. When he had got the expert (Franks) 
and the draftsman (Manders) to understand exactly what he 
wanted to do, he thought the clause ought to express the idea 
in clear and apt language ; he found it hard to adapt himself 
to the requirements of legal phraseology, whose object is, as 
some great lawyer has put it, not to express things clearly but 
unambiguously, so that a clever man anxious to distort the 
meaning shall not be able to do so. 



ijl GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

Again, his concentration on the idea with which he was 
working sometimes made it hard for him in discussion to 
enter into the mind of his opponent ; I have known him in the 
House of Commons fail to seize the point of an interruption, 
even a fairly obvious point, because he could not switch his 
mind off the track he was following in order to look at the 
question with the mind of the interrupter often because he 
could not realize how very little the interrupter knew of the 
facts. 

For these reasons he was, I think, better in exposition and 
advocacy than in debate, and in exposition he was, of course, 
greatly assisted by his eloquence. I do not propose to say 
much on that, because it was one of the things about him best 
known. It was very uncertain, and often failed ; when it 
succeeded it was equal to the best I have heard, and I believe 
many of much greater experience than I say the same. Some 
of his best speeches were made on unimportant occasions, 
simply because the subject was one in which he was interested, 
and an aspect of it happened to strike his imagination ; for he 
loved speaking well for its own sake, and would sometimes 
take great trouble with a speech for a small audience where 
no political effect was to be obtained. When he had time, he 
prepared his speeches elaborately and with great pains ; he 
repeated to me once with a mixture of admiration and re- 
probation a remark of Mr. Arthur Balfour's : " Why do 
you prepare speeches ? You know what you want to say, 
don't you ? " Like other speakers who prepare carefully, 
the Chief sometimes succeeded best when he had been pre- 
vented from preparing ; and it was a commonplace between 
him and his private secretaries that his best campaign speeches 
were always delivered on the eve or in the middle of his in- 
fluenza attacks, when he could hardly stand up. I think the 
reason hi both cases was the same, that he was then forced, 
by physical weakness or want of time, to drop elaboration and 
subtlety. The elaboration was usually not mere ornament, 
but an over-crowding of ideas ; Mr. Arthur Balfour, on being 
asked for advice after hearing one of his early speeches, said 
''My dear George, dilute, dilute, dilute." 



RECOGNITA. 135 

Probably the most successful speech he ever made so 
far as results go was that delivered in the House of Commons 
on the ist of February, 1900, in the debate on the defeats 
which opened the South African War. It was said at the time 
to have saved the Government ; and though that is no doubt 
an exaggeration, it did produce a most extraordinary change 
of feeling in the House of Commons. The token of success 
which the Chief valued most at the moment was, I think, that 
Sir Michael Hicks Beach (as he then was), a man not addicted 
to amicable demonstrations, clapped him on the back as he 
sat down. The structure of the speech was very simple ; 
it was mainly a narrative of events, of the problems the Go- 
vernment had to meet and the measures they took. The 
Chief once observed to me, apropos of another successful 
defence he had made in the House, " The best defence is 
always to tell the story, if you can make it clear ; because in 
the first place, the Government does not really act like a set of 
idiots, and when it is thought to do so it is usually because 
people do not know all the facts ; and in the second place, 
if you get your audience interested in the story they forget 
to be angry." 

One reason which perhaps made me under-value his 
public eloquence was the delight I took in his private talk ; 
talking with his personal staff about the work they were doing 
together was with him not only a relief from writing and 
reflection but a regular method of clearing and developing his 
ideas. I believe it was a very good method, and incidentally 
it gave the staff an interest in their work which nothing else 
could have given. In such conversations, the Chief welcomed 
criticisms and objections, and I think found them useful good 
or bad ; if good, the plan must be modified ; if bad, they at 
least represented obvious points which would probably have 
to be met in public. It was, therefore, a duty to criticise ; 
as a matter of pleasure one would have much preferred to 
listen. 

One thing that made his conversation bracing as well as 
interesting was his keen sense of proportion. He lost it 
temporarily, as all men do, when much over-fatigued, and I 



I 3 6 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

have known him waste time on trifles ; but that was a sure 
sign that he ought to take a rest ; normally, his mind con- 
centrated at once on the essential points. He liked to dwell 
upon them by way of keeping the mass of detail in its place ; 
he found it a help to have by him a set of what he called Charts 
very short statements, usually tabular, of the main facts and 
figures of a subject reduced to the barest form. 

Having always in his mind important and definite things 
that he wanted to do, he was naturally not very much in- 
terested in routine work. In every office there is this mis- 
cellaneous mass of work, consisting of numerous questions, 
some important and all requiring settlement one way or the 
other, but uninteresting because they come up as detached 
fragments of subjects with which there is no opportunity and 
perhaps no need to deal as wholes. The Chief's attitude 
towards this sort of thing was amusing ; he did the work, 
when it was put before him, with an air of half-humorous 
melancholy, as of one making concessions to the unreasonable 
prejudices of a friend. A slight variant of that position I 
remember from the early days of 1901, when Dowdall (now 
Sir Laurence Dowdall) of the Chief Secretary's Office, was his 
private Secretary, and I was assistant. Dowdall was full of 
experience and knowledge of the work of 4he Chief Secretary's 
Office ; I knew very little about it then, but the Chief was 
accustomed to work with me at the special things in which he 
was interested Land Purchase, the Congested Districts, 
Harbours, etc. One day at the Castle we had been at these 
things for some hours, and the Chief said it was time to go home. 
I said : " Dowdall has got a lot of papers here which he has 
been going through, and I think he could get a good many 
of them settled with you in a short time ; will you take them 
before you go ? " " Certainly," said the Chief, with an air 
of magnanimity ; " I think it's only fair." 

I am keenly conscious how imperfect a picture of the 
Chief at work these scrappy reminiscences make. After all 
the central dominating thing about his career was his character, 
and that was the same in everything he undertook. You 
remember how fond he wai of the Siegfried-motif ; he took it 



RECOGNITA. 137 

as a sort of musical motto. He was like a Siegfried in modern 
dress ; the same splendid youthful strength, the same vivid 
enjoyment of life, the same magnificent generosity. He 
threw himself into the adventure of Ireland, fought with all 
his strength, and achieved much ; he was the last man to think 
that either an occasional defeat or an untimely death mattered 
very much in comparison with an achievement. 

PHILIP HANSON. 

An old and loyal friend of George's asks me " Why was 
he not a greater success as a public man ? " To get any reply 
to this question, several things have to be considered, first, 
as regards himself, and secondly as regards his environment. 
He had a set back, but not worse than many a minister of State 
has suffered and recovered from, but it fell upon George when 
he was physically and mentally exhausted, and he was never 
the same man after it. I do not believe myself that it affected 
his position with the leaders of his party, but before he had time 
to recuperate, they themselves were bowled out by the election 
of 1906. Moreover, he was so personally linked up with Mr. 
Balfour, that those who were pushing for change, would not 
have minded at all I think, if he had taken to literature and 
farming, when Mr. Balfour laid down the reins. The new 
members of his party who came up to the House in 1906, knew 
very little about him. His environment was against him. 

As to himself, I think that men with brains on both sides 
of the House appreciated and acknowledged his intellectual 
powers. How far-sighted he was we shall none of us know, 
probably for many years. His political memoranda are 
sealed to us My own impression is that he was quite re- 
markably far-sighted. 

Again, one has to consider whether the friend who asks 
the question and George himself meant the same thing by the 
word " success." One of the greatest business men in Ireland 
writes to me that the recent prosperity of the Irish peasant 
is due to his Land Act, is not this success ? What opportunity 
had he afterwards ? I think that the positions he subse- 
quently defended regarding Frontiers, Tariffs, and Institu- 
tions, were quite sincerely advocated, but in a mode too rmot 



i 3 8 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

and subtle to make a lasting impression on the average hearer. 
I have asked unprejudiced listeners in and out of the House 
of Commons, and got from each a very similar reply. There 
was fluency, charm, well constructed sentences, keen criticism, 
noble ideas, but the points were too fine and the blades too thin 
for quarry work. His speeches were " fretted with nice 
distinctions." He had a great scheme at the back of his 
mind to remodel society. We were all to be educated by the 
State, apprenticed to the State, and defenders of the State. 
He would dream and talk about it all for hours together, 
but it was a literary man projecting a thesis, not a politician 
dealing with immediate practical problems. Perhaps he was 
looking at things vertically, whilst others saw them only 
horizontally ; perhaps his syntheses were too large for the 
average man to grasp. The whole thing may look different 
in years to come, and, after all, " a man cannot be said to have 
failed, because he did not get what he did not try for." Lowell 
says : 

" All true whole men succeed ; for what is worth 
Success's name, unless it be the thought, 
The inward surety, to have carried out, 
A noble purpose to a noble end, 
Although it be the gallows or the block " 

It will be asked, ' Was he not ambitious ? ' Yes, in the 
sense that Cardinal Manning was, that is to say, if he saw a 
bungler tinkering at a job, he wanted to be ' at it.' In short, 
he had the ambition of every sane able human being. People 
conscious of power who don't want to use it, from lack of 
sympathy, from love of indolence, from funk of competition, 
become, and deserve to become, " chimbly ornaments." 

An old friend and political ally of his tells me that there 
was a considerable modification in his speeches, of both manner 
and matter, from 1907 onwards. He considers that George 
became simpler and more direct in manner, and much more 
practical in matter. The question of demeanour in public 
speaking is very subtle. The selection of rather ' precious ' 
words, together with an over-polite delivery, as if the speaker 



RECOGNITA. 139 

was almost fictitiously anxious to please, may give the im- 
pression of a gracious, aristocratic patronage, of which he is 
entirely innocent. George's hearers little knew that their 
orator was so sensitive, so humble, so fearful of failure, so 
dependent on sympathy, that every speech was acute suffering 
in gestation, and often enough in delivery. Sometimes his 
eye would wander over the huge mass of upturned faces, and 
he would throw out gossamer-like filaments in search of some 
sympathetic soul from whom a smile, a nod, a chuck of the 
head, or a cheer, would send him off like a rocket. Mr. Wels- 
ford understood this so well that when he took the chair for 
George, as he often did, he prided himself on getting in a signal 
of encouragement at the exact moment George christened 
him his ' trainer ' ! I also had my office as political opponent, 
he tried his half-prepared orations on me, as a man tests a 
sharpened blade on a resisting surface. 

I also had my function in off-seasons, because I have 
always been immune constitutionally from any vindictive 
feelings towards those I differ from in faith or political opinion. 
I have no sympathy with party ferocity. I think it has done 
more to cripple the social value of the gentry, and undermine 
their position, than any other agency. There are so many 
cross-harmonies in politics, and there is so much humbug in 
party ferocity, that I think sensible men on both sides like a 
long-tempered opponent for a companion, it enables each of 
them to find his way to a higher plane of thought. 

I believe political life would have been easier to George 
if he had known more in his youth of the working people, and 
appreciated better the gigantic effects of the education Acts. 
Of the highly-cultured provincial middle-class he knew little. 
Here I had a great advantage, for I had known them in several 
parts of the country. We often talked about them, and he 
liked to hear me enlarge on the old Quaker and Unitarian 
families, descendants of the Independents of Cromwell's time, 
among whom are preserved so many splendid traditions of 
enlightenment, and from whom have come so many of our 
best social and artistic ideals and reforms. I mean such 



140 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

families as the Frys, the Bensons, the Rathbones, the Mar- 
tineaus and the Chamberlains. 

He enjoyed much a story Mr. Gladstone told me of John 
Ruskin on a visit to Hawarden, who, having listened to a 
long encomium on these families from Mr. Gladstone for 
having " cleaned out the prisons and liberated the slaves," 
asked, with quiet deliberation, and much to Mr. Gladstone's 
amazement and amusement, " And do you think, Sir, it was 
a good thing to either clean out the prisons, or liberate the 
slaves ? " 

Ruskin used to tell me that he wished he had known more 
of the English aristocracy. I wish that George had known 
more of the democracy. 

Mr. E. Ashton Bagley, who was at many of George's 
meetings in the North from 1909 onwards, tells me that George 
grew in favour with the working people in both Lancashire and 
Yorkshire ; that he was beloved by them, and was continually 
gaining influence. 

Over the politics of the present and the prospects of the 
future George and I talked incessantly, and differed hope- 
lessly. My coming Utopia was the co-operation of the whole 
human race in the conquest of the earth. I looked forward 
to a vast expansion of three great spontaneous movements 
which have welled up among the workers during my life 
co-operation in production and distribution, co-operation in 
cultivation, and co-operation in insurance. In this Utopia 
I had little room for troops or tariffs ; none for international 
hatred. I come away from modern histories as I sometimes 
come out of a tube station, with my orientation all athwart, 
and find myself flinging St. Paul's over my head. How can I 
regulate my love or hatred of Russians, Germans, or French- 
men by the balance of European power which I cannot under- 
stand ? Events develope so rapidly nowadays that the 
government will soon have to post outside our public buildings 
political barometrical readings Germany, stormy France, 
set fair, and the like. 

But George read the past into the future and thought 
my ideals Quixotic. Palaeolithic man fought, and men will 



RECOGNITA. 141 

always fight. I used to reply that our ice-age man doesn't 
fight, and that the Exquimaux have no soldiers or police ; 
the retort to which was that they had no need to fear conquest. 
That is it one dog going for the other dog's bone. I prefer 
the method adopted in the Kennels at Mimizan, where the 
huntsman gives each hound a share, and the lean ones the first 
look in. Exactly, but who is the huntsman ? We were on a 
well-worn track, as old as Plato, but we liked going to and fro 
on it, and never an unfriendly word. He was a great gentle- 
man, he did not talk to score. 

Of course everyone must admit that we have inherited 
a difficult problem, a world broken up by frontiers enclosing 
various races, speaking different languages, inoculated with 
ancient quarrels, and bristling with jealous competition for 
wealth, territory and supremacy. Who shall say to these 
troubled waters, " Peace, be still ? " We may have sur- 
passed the first man in the scientific development of the means 
of human life, but we have scarcely improved upon the second 
in abatement of desire for its destruction. I can imagine no 
solution of the problem but the gradual education of the 
world's workers towards a vast cosmopolitan confederation, 
and a substitution of social and scientific ideals for naval and 
military. I do not think the transition would be greater than 
that effected by the abolition of ancient slavery, and I can 
imagine Aristotle being as shocked at that, as George was at 
the extinction of war. 

People talk sometimes as if great transitions were im- 
possible, but read the last chapter of the Apocrypha and the 
first of St. Matthew's Gospel, and meditate on the stupendous 
gulf between them. And if the retort be that this gulf se- 
parated ideas and not conduct, I would reply that prophetic 
ideas become conduct in God's good time just as " Thou 
art Peter " became the Papacy : and out of Robert Owen's 
defective dreams arises the Wholesale Co-operative Society 
with an annual turn-over of above one hundred millions. 
Combat these ideas in the Quarterly Review, but who reads 
it ? The people read Wells, and Wells i3 talking thus :- 
" Our individualities, our nations and states and races art 



142 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

but bubbles and clusters of foam upon the great stream of the 
blood of the species, incidental experiments in the growing 
knowledge and consciousness of the race. I think this real 
solidarity of humanity is a fact that is only being slowly ap- 
prehended, that it is an idea that we who have come to realize 
it have to assist in thinking into the collective mind." And 
if the reply be that competition is necessary to evoke strength, 
the immediate answer is : " Yes, competition by all means, 
but competition with death, disease, famine, tempest, and 
ignorance with all, hi fact, that hinders our conquest of the 
earth but not with one another." 

To George all this was simply anathema. Perhaps he 
treated me as he did someone else with whom he had a mis- 
understanding, and on being asked how this could have arisen 
considering that the two had sat up night after night talking 
till three in the morning, George naively replied, " Yes we 
both of us talked, but I'm afraid neither of us listened ! " 
Perhaps he regarded me as a sort of domestic Devil's Advocate ! 

He was an artist by nature and a politician by accident. 
He saw things picturesquely, that is in relation to what they 
had been, or might be. He built up in his imagination, as an 
artist conceives a composition, the aristocratic, professional, 
and labour elements in an ideal empire ; and when actual facts 
and public opinion ran counter to his dream, it vexed his soul. 
Much of his political life was to him a via dolorosa, along 
which he was " unlearning the poetry of life and attaining to 
its prose." To him there was little chivalry left, and less 
idealism. But surely we must not confuse the old Crusades 
with the new. Our Saracens are the microbes, our Holy 
Sepulchre the human Temple of the Spirit, bent under the 
penal servitude of man, not only to feed, clothe and house 
itself, but to support whole phalanxes of highly trained officials, 
who continually construct, abandon, and reconstruct multi- 
tudes of engines destined to annihiliate the civilization the 
worker toils to create. 

He and I saw the world from different angles. The 
Wars of the Roses and the Feuds of the Barons had no 
fascination for me compared to a shop window in the Strand 



RECOGNITA. 143 

filled with Canadian corn and fruit, and fish. I had a real 
thrill of emotion when Eddy told me the Canadians had ex- 
tended their wheat-growing area nearly 500 miles north by 
intelligent hybridization. I feel, too, a positive affection 
for the old Irish woman travelling in a Canadian Pacific car, 
who, having listened for a long while to some " weary Willie " 
complaining of the monotony of the landscape, and the length 
of the journey, quietly remarked as she gazed through the 
window, " Sure it's a blessed country, I think God made it 
for the poor." 

To me the chivalry of to-day is to feed mankind, not to 
fight them, and the sooner Providence forces all nations to this 
point of view, the better pleased I shall be. But George 
wanted fighting men, and a frontier, and tariffs. And I know 
this, that when he was driven by the Tariff problem to the 
Statistical Abstract, he was staggered to find that England 
a raft moored out in the Atlantic with a fortnight's food on 
board, was a cosmopolitan clearing-house of money and goods, 
interlocked by financial bonds with the whole civilised world. 
He wanted a frontier of consanguinity, not cash. He had 
a horror of civil and military powers being dictated to by 
Bankers and Financiers. To clear these rocks he steered 
quite sincerely, towards an Imperial ring fence, to the refrain 
of "In exitu Israel ! " 



Much water has flowed under the pack-horse bridge at 
Derwent since George Wyndham and myself first gazed to- 
gether into that peat stained stream. Another generation 
of mankind has gone by, wider knowledge has been gained, 
new hopes, and fresh ideals have inspired the souls of men. 
If to-day some youthful member of his family or mine were to 
ask me, " Think you that the world is better ? " I would 
reply in the words of Edward Dowden : " I see that the 
world is going to be a very different world from that of my 
early days, and that I shall not live to know how very different 
it will be ; but my faith is that it is going to be a better world." 



I4 4 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

I am and always have been a whole-hearted Irish Nationa- 
list, so it is not for me to discuss the termination of George's 
Chief Secretaryship, and without all the original documents 
the task would be impossible. But I wish to ease my soul to 
this extent only, that I believe there are many impartial men, 
Conservative by tradition, but open to consider constitutional 
developments in Ireland, who believe to-day that George was 
more than once let go by hands that should have held him up, 
and who viewed with bitterness the loss to Ireland, and to the 
Empire, of, in their opinion, the most sympathetic and far- 
seeing Conservative Irish Minister of modern times. Also, 
that this resentment has engendered great and unexpected 
changes of feeling, among moderate men, in policy and party, 
in both Ireland and England. Until his own documents are 
forthcoming let the following letters to Pamela about Ireland 
suffice, especially for those who have been already tempted 
to guess about what they do not know : 

Saighton, 
Beloved Pam, 5th October, 1906. 

I got back to Saighton late last night after a month's 
racket, more or less, and am alone in my tower ; and alone in 
many ways. When one is alone, all the other lonely people 
begin to talk. The Psalmist, shouting out against his enemies 
in the night, becomes a pal. And everything that has been 
said well becomes a masonic grip of secret fraternity. I read 
' Puck of Pook's Hill ' yesterday, and I will be bound to say 
that nobody has enjoyed it, or will ever enjoy it, more than 
I did. It will I dare say strike you from the children, 
governess, tea-time, fairy-tale point of view. And, quite 
possibly, you will feel that, from that point of view, you know a 
great deal more than Rudyard Kipling. But anyway that 
is only the envelope of his letter. His letter what he meant 
was written to me. Because I am alone in my Tower. So I 
thanked him. 

Few of the lonely ones, who confabulate, have ever 
understood better all the time, and shewn better some of the 
time, than Browning, for example ; this is all that I could wish 
to hear about my work in Ireland and af terwards 



RECOGNITA. 145 

" So with this thought of yours that fain would work 
Free in the world : it wants just what it finds 
The ignorance, stupidity, the hate, 
Envy and malice and uncharitableness 
That bar your passage, break the flow of you 
Down from those happy heights where many a cloud 
Combined to give you birth and bid you be 
The royalist of rivers : on you glide 
Silverly till you reach the summit-edge, 
Then over, on to all that ignorance, 
Stupidity, hate, envy, bluffs and blocks, 
Posted to fret you into foam and noise. 
What of it ? Up you mount in minute mist. 
And bridge the chasm that crushed your quietude, 
A spirit-rainbow, earthborn jewelry 
Outsparkling the insipid firmament 
Blue above Terni and its orange trees." 

All I could wish to hear ; I should think so ! But I do 
hear it now in my tower and know it is far more than I deserve. 
But that is the little way of the lonely people. They are 
generous. Wasn't it jolly of Browning, only two pages after 
that, to tell a story of some conoscente who hid all the group of 
the Laocoon, and then invited the critics to say what his agony 
expressed. Then Browning says this : 

"One 

I give him leave to write my history 
Only one, said ' I think the gesture strives 
Against some obstacle we cannot see.' 

No more room, except to add that the lonely ones are un- 
common good company. 

Your devoted brother, 

GEORGE. 



146 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

Chief Secretary's Lodge, 
Phoenix Park, 

25th July, 1903. 
Darling Pam., 

I must begin a letter to you to-day perhaps finish it 
as you, more than anyone else, will appreciate the dramatic 
and pathetic completeness of the triumph which the King and 
Queen have won in Irish hearts. You love them because 
you have a fountain of loyalty in you which must gush out if 
it is allowed a channel. That is just how it is with the Irish, 
and how it has ever been. But they have hardly ever been 
given a channel for their loyalty. In all history the only 
sovereigns who ever tried, even, to be Kings to them were 
John, Richard II., and George IV. ; a sorry trio. But the 
Irish loved them ; the first two, to failure and death ; the last, 
until he turned on them or from them, and threw in his lot 
wholly with Orange uncouthness. I exclude James II., 
because he only went to Ireland to fight for his own crown, 
and failed to do that. 

To begin at the end, the situation was summed up this 
morning by a little girl, one of the thousands and thousands 
of children who for days have done nothing but smile and 
cheer and wave and yearn towards the King and Queen. 
She said to the philanthropist who was marshalling them for the 
last good-bye ' I am so glad that we may love the King now 
because he spoke so nicely about the Pope.' 

I revert to the beginning and the simple narration of 
things as I saw them. 

26th July, 1903. 

On Monday, 20th, I caught the Irish Mail (8.45 p.m.) 
from the House of Commons, found it full of Irish notables 
(laid down 4 hours sleep to have it in hand) and was met at 
Holyhead by a naval officer in a white cap. We climbed across 
a couple of ships to a steam pinnace and waited for the King's 
messenger in the second half of the mail. The waning moon 
hung low with a planet for pendant. The transparent sky 
paled towards dawn. The iron-clads seemed grey monsters 
in the distance. At last the second half droned in, a string of 



RECOGNITA. 147 

lights, and, with our King's Messenger and despatch boxes 
aboard, we ripped through the dawn-tinted glassy sea out to 
the Royal Yacht, with the grey monsters for her advance 
guard. My cabin was large, with pretty clean chintzes and 
pale blue silk duvet on the berth. It was too beautiful to 
sleep. I watched the daylight grow, or Torpedo-catchers 
tear by like nightmares ; heard the clock strike 4 and 5, and 
dropped off to the sound of weighing anchor. I woke at 7 to 
a sense of discouragement. The fairy serenity of overnight 
and dawn had changed to grey skies, grey seas, white horses 
and pitiless plunging rain. Through the mist and torrents 
the grey monsters on either side moved on, ignoring the waves. 
The Kish light-ship danced foolishly in a flutter of many- 
coloured bunting, and popped off two two-penny guns whose 
smoke merged in the mist and surf. 

I bathed, dressed in uniform with medals and Patrick 
badge, longed for breakfast, met Lords Knollys, Churchill, 
Admiral Stevenson, Condie Steevens, etc., all more or less in 
uniform, and all longing for breakfast. 

The rain still fell, but less relentlessly. I could not 
forego the entry ; so mounted to hurricane deck and watched 
the greater herd of grey monsters all the Channel and Home 
Fleets reaching in a giant avenue out to sea. We passed 
between them. Each was manned, and from each a bugle 
blew as we passed. The rack began to lift. Watery gleams 
spread and contracted, to spread again through the French- 
grey and chalky leadenness of the clouds over the Wicklow 
mountains. Kingstown a mile ahead blazed with bunting, 
like beds of geranium and calceolaria, with numberless white 
yachts within the moles. Torpedo-catchers again ploughed 
by, and, at last, breakfast. 

We began this with an awkward mixture of free and easy 
help-yourself added to attentions from powdered footmen 
in scarlet liveries. Nobody was at ease. The ladies looked 
as if it was earlier than usual. Knollys asked me 
what I thought of the Pope's death. The rain still fell, but now 
in jewels. An empty place at the head of the table next me 
had three substantial silver dishes, covered, in front of it. 



148 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

A hasty signal from Churchill warned me off them and to the 
side-board for my food. As I returned in came the King, 
fresh, happy, most kind, in uniform, and everybody was at 
their ease. The Pope's death and the weather did not matter 
so much. 

He ate well, looked well, spoke well. ' The Pope's dead, 

of course we had expected it ' 'A boiled egg ' ' Did 

you sleep well ? ' ' Some more bacon '...../ You 

are my Minister in attendance, as well as Chief Secretary, you 

know ? ' and so on with greatest kindness, good sense 

and calm, monumental confidence that every thing does go 
right. 

With but 20 minutes to spare before landing, but without 
a trace of effort or fuss, I found myself smoking a cigarette 
with him, altering the reply to the Kingstown address under 
his instructions ; getting it type-written, countermanding the 
Theatre, writing and telegraphing to Cardinal Logue, sending 
a communique to the Press, all as if there was any amount of 
time and no difficulties and the kindness beaming every mo- 
ment more benignant and all-embracing. 

Off I went in a steam pinnace, landed under an awning 
of white and old gold in stripes eighteen inches wide. On 
the wide red carpet were Duchess of Connaught, two little prin- 
cesses and Lady Dudley in chairs ; Dudley and Vice- Regal 
Court, the Deputation, and beyond State carriages, escort, 
soldiers, crowds, grand-stands packed, and, to the booming 
of salutes from all the grey monsters, the King's barge of deep 
navy blue with a huge Royal ensign, was pulled up by 12 blue- 
jackets. It was the first of many moments that thrilled. 

We drove, mostly at a walk, through n miles of bunting 
and cheering crowds ; growing denser and more vociferous. 
It culminated in the triangular space bounded by Trinity 
College and the Old Parliament House. My companions of 
the English Court began to admit that the people were really 
there and really jubilant. Every window and housetop was 
packed. The Bands took up ' God save the King ' for mile 
after mile ; the colours fell flat in the mud as the Sovereign 
passed. They cheered me a good deal, and the Land Bill and 



RECOGNITA. 149 

Wolseley and Bobs. As we reached the Vice-Regal the sun 
went in and the rain poured down. The King and Queen 
shook hands with us all, seeming as ever to be in no hurry and 
only engaged in making every one happy. 

This and the prolonged roar, blare, glare, glitter and 
glamour of two variegated, agitated, sonorous hours, telescoped 
the long, grey expectation of the morning, so that Kingstown 
and the Fleet became old memories, and the moon over Holy- 
head Harbour an experience in another life. (Aside to Pamela) 
' I doubt whether a letter on this scale can be finished 
However ' 

At my Lodge I found Sibell, Ormonde, Constance Butler, 

Dunraven and Lady and Col. Brock, the Queen's 

Equerry, and many more, then or later, for I have no re- 
collection of the people who have slept and fed here. 

Tuesday evening we dined at Vice-Regal Lodge with the 
King and Queen. I sat next to Princess Victoria. She is 
good, gentle and sensible and absolutely unselfish. We had 
great fun ; Lady Gosford on my right ; the Queen giving us 
little nods and smiles, pretending to be shocked and being 
amused at our laughing and chatter. Lady Gosford, wife of 
an ultra landlord, has made friends with me, and frankly 
acknowledges that the people do cheer the King more than in 
Scotland or London. The Queen talked to me after dinner and 
is delicious. 

Wednesday, 22nd. Started at 10 a.m., with Ormonde 
in full fig, sociable and pair, etc. Was cheered on the way. 
Chaffed Ormonde for being in infantry uniform. He 
explained that he was Colonel of the Kilkenny Militia 
' a fine lot they fought wonderfully well in South Africa.' 

In St. Patrick's Hall, Arthur Ellis and others coached 
us. I knew my part pretty well, but it is a strain to cling to 
the King's reply and learn up all the deputations in their 
order. There were 82 of them. The roar of cheers, ' God 
Save the King.' clatter of the escort, and we process and group 
ourselves about the Throne. I stood on the steps and pre- 
sented each of the 82 deputations. They were to present 
addresses. But they did anything but that ; shook the King's 



150 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

hand and marched off with address under arm ; were retrieved 
and address extracted. The last touch came, when the spokes- 
man of the Land Surveyors touched the tip of the King's 
fingers, shot the address into the waste-paper basket (into 
which I threw the cards after calling the names) and bolted 
at five miles an hour. The Queen was very naughty and did 
her best to make me laugh, so that my next was delivered 
in quavering tones. Yet the Queen did this in such a way 
as to make every one, including the culprit, feel comfortable 
and witty. I cannot adequately express the kindness and 
coolness of the King. He coached them in a fat cosy whisper 
' Hand me the address,' and then accepted it with an air and 
gracious bow, as if gratified at finding such adepts in Court 
ceremonial. 

The only people who approached him in simplicity and 
charm, were the two carmen who presented an address signed 
by 1200 jarveys. Only the Irish can do these things. They 
had not put on Sunday best, but their best ordinary clothes, 
scrupulously brushed. They never faltered and invented 
something between a bow and a curtsey that seemed exactly 
appropriate. 

After that a levee of 1500. We all got tired ; for the sun 
beat in on our eyes. It did, however, come to an end. There 
was just time to get back, lunch and change into frock coat, 
then off to Vice-Regal to see the King at 3.30. He, in no 
hurry and, if possible, with greater kindness, discussed many 
points which had arisen, suggested emendations in replies, 
all of them happy and dead on the bull's eye. At 4 p.m. I 
started with King, Queen, and Princess Victoria. He has 
always made them drive in their carriage. The enthusiasm 
of the crowd was even greater than on Tuesday. For 3 miles 
to Trinity one roar of cheers and frenzy of handkerchiefs. 
Every woman with a baby in Dublin was there to jump him 
up and down at the King ; every ragged urchin, every sleek 
shop-keeper every rough, every battered old Irish-woman 
with jewel eyes in wrinkled Russian leather face. They do 
not say ' God Save the King ' as we do, anyhow. They lift 
their hands to Heaven to imprecate ' God Bless the King,' 



RECOGNITA. 151 

as if adjuring the Deity to fulfil their most ardent desire and 
His most obvious duty. You may have read of Trinity. 
The papers did not report the drive back. We returned by 
Sackville Street the finest in Dublin and here the people 
became merely delirious. They worked themselves into an 
ecstasy and all sang ' God Save the King.' The Queen kept 
pointing to this or that tatterdemalion saying ' The poorer 
they are, Mr. Wyndham, the louder they cheer.' We went 
on through the poorest parts by North Circular Road, and 
ever and always, there was the same intense emotion. It 
brought tears to the Queen's eyes, and a lump in my throat. 
No one who did not drive in their carriage will ever know how 
mesmeric it was. It made me understand the Mussulman 
conquests and the Crusades. For here was a whole population 
in hysteria. Polo was still going on as we neared the Vice- 
Regal Gates and at the end of such a day nothing would 
serve but that we should drive on to the grass. The Queen 
asked them to play an extra ten minutes, for the game was 
over. And they did play to the tune of ' If doughty deeds my 
lady please.' Nobody, however, was killed. Though in one 
charge they drove a pony on to the rail, and turned him and 
rider head over heels into the spectators. We had a dinner 
party that night. 

Thursday, 23rd. Presented colours to the Hibernian 
School of little soldier boys. And then to the Review. This 
was the culmination. We rode in a cavalcade from the Vice- 
Regal, grooms, escort, etc., then the King and Duke of Con- 
naught. He asked me to ride just behind him with Duke of 
Portland. I wore my yeomanry uniform and rode a little 
thoroughbred mare I had commandeered from the 2ist Lancers. 
As we started the Royal Salute opened. At the Gate a scene, 
which I shall never forget, began. The Phoenix monument 
was a pyramid of mad humanity, screaming, blessing, waving 
hats and handkerchiefs, and so on down an interminable lane 
of frenzied enthusiasm. I love riding and a row ; but never 
before, or again, shall I witness such a sight. Some people 
thought it dangerous. But our blood was up and the King 
paced on perfectly calm among dancing dervishes and horses 



152 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

mad with fear and excitement. Even the horses of the Blues 
got quite out of control, rearing and pirouetting. It looked 
as if they must knock the King over. But as they plunged 
towards him, the Duke of Connaught or Roberts moved be- 
tween and Portland or self backed up. You must imagine 
100 acres of green sward framed by trees, with the mountains 
beyond changing under shafts of light between storms that 
never burst. There were thunderstorms all round ; but a 
sheet of burning sunshine on the Review. The horses mad- 
dened by the cheers from a nation, did knock down the whole 
of the Admirals and Captains specially invited from the Fleet. 
We rode away and down the line, my mare just behaved with 
enough spirit. 

And now, as I tell you everything, I will tell you two 
things that pleased me. Yesterday, a carman said to me : 
' We knew you in your uniform and watched you all the time 
with glasses from the wall.' And that afternoon the Queen 
said to me : ' How beautifully you ride.' She knows how to 
say what will please. 

Overnight Osbert Lumley told me that the great point, 
the ' clou ' as they say in France, was to be that the cavalry 
would line the whole route back to the Vice-Regal gates. 
This nearly settled the business. The stupendous cheering 
and surging of the crowds drove the horses out of their senses. 
Groups screamed at us out of the trees overhead, women and 
children wriggled through the horses' legs to get nearer. They 
knocked over Arthur Ellis, who is laid up with gout in con- 
sequence. A Lancers' chestnut horse put his fore-feet almost 
on to my shoulders. The King paced on and lit a cigarette, 
bowing and smiling and waving his hand to the ragamuffins 
in the branches. That finished me and now I love him. When 
we dismounted he laughed, thanked us all, and beamed enough 
to melt an iceberg. Sir William Ewart said to me that he had 
never seen such enthusiasm even for the late Queen. It is 
of no use to try and describe it ; but a great possession to have 
been there. 

In the afternoon we went to races, in the evening to dine 
with the Connaughts. It was memorable. The avenue to the 



RECOGNITA. 153 

Royal Hospital was festooned with Chinese lanterns. We 
banqueted in the great Hall of old oak, hung with armour. 
We sat down at two gigantic round tables, 32 at each, laden 
with roses. But I began to tire and so do you. After that 
we had a Court at the Castle. My solace and keen pleasure 
was to stand near the Queen. Her garter riband brought 
out the blue of her eyes. Her cramoisie train was hung to her 
shoulders by great jewels of dropping pearls. She had a high 
open-work lace collar, a breastplate and gorget you may 
say of diamonds and ropes of round pearls falling to her lap. 
And she is an Angel. We got to bed about 3 a.m. 

Friday, 24th. This is described in the papers. We 
slummed together in the most squalid streets. The bare- 
legged children and tattered members of the submerged, 
hurra-ed themselves hoarse and incidentally, smashed Port- 
land's hat, with a hard, heavy bunch of cottage flowers, dog- 
daisies and sweet peas tied up to the consistency of a cabbage. 

But this is enough. We went to Maynooth in the after- 
noon by train see papers and on the way back, with their 
supernatural kindness the King and Queen came here and 
loitered and talked and thanked and over-praised and made me 
love them just as if they had done nothing and had nothing 
to do except to please Sibell and myself. ' Kindness like this 
is genius,' and the line as Bossuet wrote it may stand for Her ; 
only it is sweetmess as much as beauty. 

In the evening we went to a party. The King kept me 
after all were gone, shewed the most eager desire to under- 
stand every twist in the labyrinth of Irish life, and was so kind 
to me that I cannot speak of it. 

Yesterday, we saw them off, and I agreed in sentiment 
with an old Irish woman on the platform, who just sobbed, 
saying, ' Come back, Ah ! ye will come back ! ' That was the 
cry that pierced through the blaring of the bands, and the 
Blessings and the cheers. ' Come back ' they kept calling in 
every street. And these are the people whom some call 
disloyal. 

Your most loving brother, 

GEORGE. 



154 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

George loved a story a lady told me about a journey 
through Canada. Her train was delayed at some very remote 
station, and she had to take a night's lodging in a farm. The 
accommodation was given by a fellow-passenger, an Irish- 
Canadian fanner, travelling back from a visit to Ireland. 
When they reached the homestead, her host untied a hand- 
kerchief carried from the old country, and one by one a family 
of five barefoot children were made to stand upon a green sod, 
cut from a hill-side in County Kerry. 



27th March, 1914. I am sitting with Denis Hyde in the 
Library at Clouds, the last achievement of George's home life, 
over which he spent considerable time, planning, sketching, 
and deliberating, incidentally with all his friends, particularly 
with the beloved Detmar Blow. It is difficult to imagine a 
more perfect workshop for a student than George created on 
the second floor of Clouds, by throwing three rooms facing 
south, into one long recessed gallery, inspired by Wells and 
Marsh's Library in Dublin. At each end is a latticed window 
with a seat below it, and between the seats an avenue 72 feet 
in length. Through the side windows one looks down on to 
the splendid sweep of green sward sloping from West to East, 
fringed with a belt of beeches. 

Round the tops of the massive oak bookshelves are Latin 
inscriptions in gold on a blue ground ; and on the door of a 
recess : " This Library, formerly three bedrooms, was planned 
by George Wyndham, and was constructed under his guidance 
by W. Mallett, E. J. Mallett, D. Farthing, and E. P. North- 
field, A.D. 1912." I catalogued a great number of his books 
when they were at Saighton, and hope to complete the work for 
Percy. This might lead me to try my hand at an essay on 
George in his library, for its contents have a great deal to do 
with his intellectual history. In this " sweet asylum of in- 
tellectual life " he and I had hoped to spend many happy 
hours together. Perhaps, in a sense, it may yet be so. 



RECOGNITA. 155 

1 shall never forget him, I suppose over 20 years ago, 
sitting by my side in the Bibliotheca Laurenziana at Florence, 
pulling out the precious Greek manuscripts, chained to the 
desks, which had been brought over by the theologians who 
came to the Council of Florence. What thrilled him was that 
we were handling the very first copies of Homer and Plato, 
known and seen by Western Europe. Close by, we were told, 
was the room in which Aldus set up his type. This splendid 
and intelligent expenditure of wealth by the Medici family, 
made a profound impression on him, not only the collection 
of these precious works, but their preservation by Pope Leo 
X. in the library designed by Michael Angelo. I remember 
we went over to the Medici Chapel to see Benozzo Gozzoli's 
frescoes of the journey to Bethlehem, in which the figures and 
faces of the Eastern Kings are said to be portraits of John 
Paleologus, last Emperor of Byzantium, and the Patriarch of 
Constantinople, visitors to the Council ; and behind them 
Lorenzo the Magnificent himself, representing King Balthazar. 



And now, looking back over a quarter of a century, ought 
I not to thank God that such a friend was given to me, who 
understood me better than I understood myself, and always 
over-valued me to my good ? As a child I was lonely and 
invented people to live with, but I was not more intimate 
with them than I was with him. From first to last I felt 
absolutely at home with him. Everything that came into my 
mind I just let out, and a long silence embarrassed neither of 
us. We dared to be silent together because we knew each 
other very well. I think I rested him and sometimes re- 
freshed him. He often liked me about when he was writing, 
and would turn silently round and look at me when he was 
building a difficult sentence. We read a great deal aloud to 
each other. He read Browning and Chaucer quite excellently. 
Tragedy and comedy sometimes blended when I became 
uncontrollably sleepy, and tried vainly to lift my tired eye- 
lids as the pregnant but obscure passages of Browning leapt 



156 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

past my fatigued mental vision. This naturally occurred on 
evenings when George was more than ordinarily wide awake ; 
but often enough after a short struggle I ended up as brisk as 
he. What I like to think of is his splendid generosity in 
sharing with me the best of all he got. I see him again in the 
upper-room at Saighton with the volumes lying ready for me, 
and his royal enthusiasm selecting the order of the feast. Or 
setting out for a long walk from the door at Saighton or Clouds, 
his cap under his arm, his hair lifted by the wind, absorbed 
in imaginative talk about the Court of Henry II., or the 
quarrels of the Elizabethan poets and play-wrights, the pace 
so quick and the points touched so numerous that the effect 
was often enigmatic from sheer condensed speed. By the 
time we got on to an eminence he would begin on land-marks 
or contours this way Alfred went to meet the Danes, or over 
that brow runs the Roman Road. He had a great love for 
maps, and an excellent visual memory. Companionship of 
this kind is rare. He often said to me, " We can talk in 
allusions which is a great comfort, it is so tiring having to 
explain everything." " The Pheacians " was one of our 
' hieroglyphics.' It arose out of a description Robert Hudson 
gave me of Mr. Gladstone at a public luncheon, sitting next 
to the Mayor of some East Coast sea-port, a noble weathered 
skipper of a fishing-smack, who sat listening in confused 
dismay as the Grand Old Man poured out a long dissertation 
from Homer about Pheacian methods of catching lobsters ! 
This met any occasion when the discourse o'er-topped the 
understanding. We had gradually manufactured a collection 
of such symbols which were very useful, and sufficiently 
enigmatic in mixed company. 

Another of them was the word " Semolina," which came 
from a story, told, I think, by Harold Frederic, who said that 
he went into a Restaurant and tried to score off an elderly 
waiter with Dundreary whiskers, by glancing down the bill 
of fare and saying, " I should like some rice pudding, some 
plum pudding, and some castle pudding " ; to which the old 
man, quite unmoved, replied, " and what's the matter with the 
Semolina pudding ? " All Mr. Frederic's audience laughed 



RECOGNITA. 157 

at the waiter's triumph, except a curate, who remarked, after 
a short pause, in a rich throaty accent : " But you have not 
yet told us what was the matter with the Semolina pudding ! " 
This is how the name of that innocent farinaceous nourishment 
came to be the symbol of abject mental futility. 

This kind of intimate companionship is one of the treasures 
of life, for ordinary society holds us all on the surface of things ; 
whereas intimacy plunges us into the great deeps. The essence 
of it is the appreciative understanding of one mind by another, 
greater or less than itself. The generous appreciation of 
superiors is wholesome and helpful, the flattery of inferiors 
is degrading and detestable. With George there was a sanguine 
expectancy that made all his geese try to become swans, partly 
to make him love them, and partly from sheer love and grati- 
tude to him. To come within range of this buoyant anticipa- 
tion, out of the depressing influence of a domestic circle in 
which all the minus marks had been long remembered, and 
often recalled, was a glorious holiday. Emerson hits this 
absolutely : " Our chief want in life is somebody who shall 
make us do what we can. This is the service of a friend. 
With him we are easily great. There is a sublime attraction 
in him to whatever virtue there is in us. How he flings wide 
open the door of existence ! What questions we ask of him ! 
What an understanding we have ! How few words are 
needed ! It is the only real society. A real friend doubles 
my Possibilities and adds his strength to mine, and makes 
a well-nigh irresistable force possible to me." 

The fact is George belonged to that select order of men who 
are capable of realizing intense intimacies. Fastidious he was, 
no doubt, and sensitive ; stifled by pompous men, blatant 
women, noisy servants, and stupid interruption ; but spreading 
his " unconfined wings " among gentle spirits, exchanging 
spontaneous thought, away from glare and noise, in some quiet 
place. There, with transmitter and receiver in perfect attune, 
the messages flashed to and fro across the incorporeal ether, 
and men and women forgot for a while, even tailor and dress- 
maker. With sympathetic instruments George could generate 
and sustain an atmosphere of such sodality, that many would 



158 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

ask themselves on leaving his company, " Why do most of us 
live habitually so far below our possibilities ? " On the other 
hand, the exquisite machinery of his being was so sensitive, 
its appetite so fastidious, that a slight jar threw it out of gear, 
and the blunted edge had very little feeling in it. 

Yet, how sensitive he was ! One of his oldest and best- 
beloved friends Mabel Montgomery tells me that the first 
time she saw George was at a children's party in London, to 
which a wandering Punch and Judy had been invited for the 
amusement of the juvenile guests. When the racket began, 
and the puppets whacked each other over the head, and Judy 
was tossed helpless from Punch's truncheon into the curtained 
abyss below, George burst into a flood of tears and would not 
be comforted. In later years he entertained a less hysterical 
view -of this drama, for I remember well at Glastonbury, 
only two or three summers ago, when you and Lady Plymouth 
and myself and others were wandering through those im- 
pressive aisles, and wringing the last note of Arimathean and 
Arthurian legendary romance out of the sacred precincts, 
suddenly, there was borne from afar on the solemn evening 
air, the nasal clarion of the bombastic hero of the last sur- 
viving relic of medaeval miracle-play. Needless to say, the 
entire party broke into a gentle trot, and found, in the fore- 
front of the village street, this ancient tragedy being enacted 
before the upturned faces of a hundred happy children, whom 
they at once joined. The perspiring operator who immedia- 
tely took round the cap, was so delighted at the shower of 
silver that he repeated the more exciting scenes ; whilst Toby, 
in frilled red and white collar, gazed with detached demeanour 
on the group of market collies at some distance, and the fan- 
tastic puppet bobbed, nodded, and squeaked in front of him, 
" a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying 
nothing ! " 

George was very sensitive, and to be sensitive is to suffer, 
for " life is a comedy to those who think, but a tragedy to those 
who feel " ; the most acute sufferings are often inflicted by 
innocent stupidity, that dotes whilst it damages. 



RECOGNITA. 159 

Once or twice I saw him profoundly moved, with the 
floodgates of emotion opened wide. Do you remember how 
touched he was by his visit to the Convent at Foxford in County 
Mayo ? He poured out his soul to me about it at Chief Secre- 
tary's Lodge that night " And what do you think they have 
up over the altar in the Chapel ? Mitis sum et humilis corde." 
After all the clang and din of well-advertised philanthropy, 
it was a joy to peep into the quiet five-mile circuit of social, 
educational, agricultural and industrial restoration brought 
about by the Sisters of Charity, and over all the divine in- 
spiration Mitis sum et humilis corde. 



George lived in constant contact with acute intellects, 
and knew well and felt keenly the power of sarcasm, but I 
never remember his glorying in its use. He had power to 
hurt, and did no hurt. He laughed when I told him the story 
of the Cambridge don, who remarked, after the inaugural 
lecture of the new Professor of History, " I did not think we 
should have missed his poor dear predecessor so soon," thereby 
killing two birds with one apparently innocent stone, but he 
did not set himself to do likewise. He walked gently through 
life trampling on as few living things as possible, because he 
possessed a kindly temperament, and was a great gentleman. 
He was a fountain of loving kindness to all who knew him. 
In 1910 he wrote to an intimate friend : " Inwardly and 
intentionally I am a mascot. Never forget that : inwardly a 
mascot ; intentionally an active well-wisher for you to be 

happy So when I wish you a Happy New Year, it isn't 

a phrase. It is a simple announcement of a power I am 
vested with to bring happiness and their heart's desire to 
those I am fond of, even if they don't care twopence about me. 
I have that power because I have no great wishes for myself. 
It just spills over from me to those who have been brought 

near me by their wishes In many ways unguessed, you 

will find that I am your friend, and a lucky friend, because of 
this exuberance of vitality and luck that goes altogether 



i6o GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

beyond my own needs. I have no need in me except to help 
my friends, and to be fond of them and to assist their happiness." 

About three months before his death he wrote to the same 
friend : " I have little reason for my exuberant share of joy 
and fun. Indeed, I have been having a rough time, but that 
to me seems to make no difference. Just as some people 
are born with a weak chest, or a curved spine, or a bad temper, 
or a lugubrious distaste for LIFE (due to liver or lungs) I 
was born with a Fountain of youthful expectation and delight. 
But also, Dear, as you know, with a deep well of sympathy. 
O, my Dear, what it is to Live in spite of everybody and every- 
thing ! I do, somehow. I went to London yesterday for 
Army Estimates and family tragedies. Well, I just did the 
estimates, and saw lawyers, and went to bed at 1.30. Then 
I slept in the knowledge that I should fly back. And I did. 
I woke at a quarter to seven like a boy of 17. Got to Waterloo 
20 minutes before the train. Got to Salisbury at n. Got 
on my horse and hunted and rode home for 6 immortal hours 
of galloping and jumping, and singing to my horse when he 
was tired and I was jubilant." 



And suppose it were put to me now : " Well, and what 
could one learn from George Wyndham that one could not 
easily find elsewhere " ? I would reply : " He taught one the 
value of courage, that is the art of paying as little heed as 
possible to the crowd of petty fears of death, illness, theft, 
poverty, disloyalty, and detraction, which haunt the human 
heart ; and simply to be your whole brave self, for all the rest 
of your life. 

He taught one, that having so far conquered oneself, 
and thereby economised a large percentage of time, hitherto 
wasted in apprehensions of great catastrophes that don't 
occur, and petty calamities that don't count, you may then 
devote yourself, soul and body, to some beautiful, invigorating 
or useful human interest. 



RECOGNITA. 161 

He taught one that out of this forgetfulness of self, and 
absorption into one's job, be it prayer, politics, painting, polo 
or ploughing, there will arise a simple love of others, which will 
make them love you. 

He taught one that to recreate oneself physically and 
mentally, is to earn the joy that comes from fearless endeavour, 
and expresses itself in mirth and merriment. 

All of which may be summed up in a motto he often gave 
to me : " Courage, Love, and Fun." 

He taught one that each of us has to make up his mind 
whether life be worth living or not, and that to shirk this 
decision, and drift in the line of least resistance, is to atrophy 
the functions of soul and body ; to be little loved, and less 
wanted ; and to be branded as a deserter by all true men. 

He taught one that to elect to join the ranks of those who 
generously accept the aboriginal mandate to subdue the earth, 
is to find oneself in company with the noblest of God's creatures, 
from those who decorated the cave-dwellings of the ice-age 
by the light of moss and oil lamps, to such as now seek to 
girdle the round world with Herzian waves ; despite the silence 
of God, the obliteration of past human effort, and the curtain 
drawn across the future. He taught one that men rise to 
higher things through ever reaching out to nobler ideals of 
Truth and Beauty, Love and Duty ; the loftiest of which 
is to be found in the teaching and practice of Him Whose 
blessed Feet, " were nail'd for our advantage on the bitter 
cross." 



It may be said of George : 

He held his soul with both his hands, 
And bound it by a thousand strands 

To Truth and Beauty. 
Then wove the story of his days, 
A warp of Love a woof of Praise, 

A web of Duty. 



162 GEORGE WYNDHAM. 

And now I must release you and go back to my daily 
life and work. I have written about our great loss and eased 
my grief by "remembering happier days." Right glad shall 
I be if one word of this mitigates for a moment the greatest 
sorrow of your earthly life. If it does, then look at this letter 
sometimes, for though it is only a faint sketch, and no finished 
portrait, it is the labour of a very loving hand, which has tried 
to outline the figure of a very noble gentleman. Imperfect 
these Recognita must be, compared with those locked away 
in your own heart, dear Lady ! Indeed I hardly dare to let 
my clumsy hand touch upon your wound, so recent, so sensitive, 
so irreparable ! Flesh and blood trembles as we look into the 
void created by such a separation, the empty shelves, the 
vacant rooms, the closed correspondence, the completed com- 
panionship ! Still, " in the great hand of God we stand," 
and He sets us apart in the flesh to bring us together in the 
spirit, in newness of life, where this mortal shall put on im- 
mortality. Imprisoned here among the things of time and 
sense, " like benighted men we miss our mark." Indeed, 
what are books written about absent friends but dream- 
pictures of vanished faces and silent voices for " the sleeping 
and the dead are but as pictures " that grow fainter as we 
gaze back upon them, and in real life were semblances only 
of those " ultimate selves " who have all along been our real 
companions, shrouded from us within the veil of this material 
universe ? 

To all who knew George well, and to thousands who 
venerate him in Ireland and England, his unlocked for death 
was a heart-rending shock. In a sense it was well for him that 
he passed through the gateway before he knew it, and well for 
those who loved him that they were spared the agony of seeing 
his unfettered spirit imprisoned among the drab details of 
gradual decay. But there is intense pathos in this early though 
merciful death. After all he was a brilliant human creature. 
He plunged like a young thorough-bred into the vortex of 
English life, touched it in all its most interesting phases, 
political, literary, artistic and scientific ; and brought a beauti- 
ful bodily presence, gracious manners, and astounding power of 



RECOGNITA. 163 

stimulating and suggestive converse into the society of his day. 
He put on to the Statute-Book of Great Britain and Ireland 
an Act of supreme importance ; gave half his life, at his own 
cost and charges, and at vast expense of vital energy, to the 
politics of his country, and might well have looked forward 
to some years of rest and retirement. But it was not to be ; 
" God's finger touched him, and he slept." May he rest in 
peace ! his body laid beside his father's, among the labourers 
on the lands he loved, whilst his ardent spirit flies back to that 
Supreme Source of life from whence it came. 

So now, dear Lady, fare you well. For all the loving- 
kindness you and he have given me through many years, I 
thank you with all my heart. 

CHARLES T. GATTY. 



POSTSCRIPT. 

The foregoing pages were completed during the month 
of July. In August the war broke out, and both your sons 
went to the front. 

I said good-bye to Percy at Grosvenor House on August 
n, and handed to him the complete proofs of " Recognita," 
most of which he read during the last few days he spent in 
London, whilst I was at Eaton with Bendor. I am thankful 
to say he delighted in the book, and marked all the pages I 
hoped he would love, such as 15, 16, 17, 19 and 20. 

On September 14 he was instantaneously killed by rifle 
fire about 12 miles East of Soissons. The halo of gallant 
self-sacrifice for the sanctity of international treaties and the 
freedom of mankind glorifies the sorrow of his wife and kindred, 
but nothing can fill his place. 



Extracts from Correspondence. 

From Percy to Diana describing the fight at Landrecies. 

" 24th or 25th August but lost count. 
Mind you this war is going to be no cake-walk for us. 
We beat the Germans at actual fighting, but they have wonder- 
fully good staff work and plans and arrangements, and till by 
brute force we can (continued i p.m. next day) As I wrote 
the last word the alarm went. It was, however, only a few 
scouts came round, but we thought the fact significant. 
Had a hurried tea, and at 7 o'clock went out with the Company 
to guard all the approaches to the town. We were told there 
were some English and French troops who would want to come 



166 POSTSCRIPT. 

through. Hardly was it dark, about 8 p.m., and raining, 
when we heard a body of men approaching. We challenged 
them to halt, they came on answering in French. We told 
them again to halt ; they were then only 10 or 20 yards off, and 
with a yowl they sprang forward, and yelled " Deutschland." 
After that words fail me. Hell was let loose. Our men lay 
down flat and poured volley after volley into them. I 
flattened myself against a wall and quaked. In about 3 
minutes it subsided and awful groans filled the air. Then 
little Charles Monk came out and said, " Come on No. 3, line 
the road," and we all gathered round. Another Company 
came up in support, and David (Bingham) got his machine 
guns into action. Nothing can describe what followed. They 
kept charging up to us, and we replied with volley after volley. 
The men were marvellous, quite cool and obeyed all our fire 
orders to the letter. I have never known anything like the 
bursts of fire. They then brought up a gun, at 200 yards, and 
fired lydite point blank at us ! ! My word it was a caper. 
They kept coming on, and at about 12-30 made a final des- 
perate effort. I thought we never could stick it, but we did. 
I just said my prayers as I lay, nose buried in the ground, and 
waited for my bit of shell or bullet. But, glory be to God, it 
never came. We drove them right back with our fire, and 
they never came on again, and they tell me 2,000 of them never 
will again. The troops were too marvellous. We were 
getting enfiladed at one moment, and had to retire about 20 
yards ; not a man went back further, when we shouted a turn 
round and die like a Coldstreamer. They shot like demons, 
and absolutely straight. I got out of all my heavy kit, pack, 
revolver, knapsack, etc., and piled it in front of me, and got a 
rifle and bayonet from one of the dead un's. We just shot and 
shot in great paralysing bursts of fire. When we retired 20 
yards, I had to leave my kit, so now I have nothing but what 
I stand up in. No coat, no woolly, no nothing. Our losses 
were 119 men killed and wounded, 2 of whom were sergeants 
in my Platoon. I am afraid poor little Archer Windsor Clive 
is dead now, but not sure, and Hawarden as well. Rupert 
Keppel, Dick Rowley, and Robert Whitbread were wounded. 



POSTSCRIPT 167 

But, well its an experience I never want again, they tell me 
it will make history. We marched off 14 kilometres directly 
afterwards, and now a big battle is on, but we're in reserve, 

and I am writing tucked away in a corn-stook, waiting 

We must smash this lot in front of us now. I don't know how 
many there are, but our blood is up now, and we will go on 
till we drop. I have lost all count of time and dates, but it 
seems years since I slept, and we have only one frugal meal a 

day ; lucky to get that sometimes Have shot an 

aeroplane with my platoon and bagged it Hurrah ! ! " 

From Percy to his Mother : 

Wednesday, August 27th about, but lost count. 

Just a little line to say I am wonderfully well and safe. 

We had a tremendous fight night before last which you 
may read about, but if you don't see it in papers have written 
account to Diana. 

Poor little Archer Windsor Clive was very badly wounded, 
and I am afraid since dead, but not quite sure of this yet. 

Will you see Lady Plymouth from me, and tell her he was 
most gallant all that night, and try and explain how we all 
everyone of us, feel for her and miss him. 

As you will see from my letter to Diana it was the most 
ghastly night. But the most wonderful performance on the 
part of our men. We are so proud of them, everyone talking 
of it here now, it really was a bit extra. Poor Little Hawarden 
I am afraid is dead, too, and Dick Rowley, Rupert Keppel and 
Robert Whitbread wounded. But we absolutely slaughtered 
the Germans, so that's all right. 

Tell Lady Plymouth that Archer was only hit at the very 
end, and I saw him directly after it, and he was then un- 
conscious, so I think he suffered very little. God bless you 
my Darling ; this is an awful war, but it must be to the death 
now, we have marched and fought continuously for a week 
now, and can't stop till we wipe out altogether this lot in front 
of us, about 4 Corps we think. 

Thank Lettice for her darling post card arrived yesterday. 



i68 POSTSCRIPT. 

Send socks for the men, cheap cigarettes and tobacco as 
often as you can. Address them to me, and I will give them 
to my Platoon. 

I don't know how we shall go on when winter comes. 
I have got nothing except what I stand up in ! Lost all my 
kit in the dark in the fight ! Slept in the rain last night in the 
middle of a field. But curled up close to little Vaughan and 
we kept each other fairly warm ! 

Anyhow we are all now in wonderful health and great 
spirits. I shot an aeroplane last night. The savagery of war 
is awful, but we are perfect gentlemen compared to the Ger- 
mans who stop at nothing However I trust we will soon stop 
them ! ! Saw dear old Benny twice, last time the day before 
yesterday, looking wonderfully well. 

We going on again now 

From Percy to Denis Hyde : 

" Friday, 

Sept. nth, 1914. 

I have just this minute received your letter, the first I 
have got, but apparently the second io/- you sent, it is dated 
August 28th. It's the first mail we have had in for three 
weeks. We heard about a week ago that two mails had been 
lost, so I fear the worst for the nice things you sent me. But 
go on sending them and hope for the best, and anything that 
the tenants' wives make for the troops have registered and 
sent straight to me and I will give them to my Company. 

I was hungering for a letter from you from Clouds, I 
thought I should never hear. But I felt you were writing and 
sending things. Go on doing it, and I long to hear about the 
horses which are left, and how they are, and the garden and 
all the people. Give them all my love. Things I think are 
going pretty well now, but it is so big one can't grasp the whole 
situation. However, we are going the right way at last, and 
have pressed on since Sunday last, but it is terrible hard, and 
now alas the weather has broken down. I have got nothing 
but what I stand up in, lost all my kit in a night attack. Plenty 
of horrors of War now, spoil anyone's appetite bar mine. I 



POSTSCRIPT. 169 

have never been so fit in my life, a bit thin but jolly well. This 
Battalion has had most of the fighting, but nothing at all 
satisfactory or big. It's nothing like what you would expect, 
but its uncomfortable. What it will be like in a month's 
time I tremble to think. One thing it will do is to redouble 
one's pleasure in life and home comforts. You will never 
catch me grousing about anything again once I get home ! 

It's impossible to give you the situation, because for one 
thing I don't really know it, nor does anyone else, bar, perhaps, 
French, and I don't suppose he can know it all because it's 
so huge and varies hourly ; and second, I am not allowed to say 
anything. We have lost 14 officers and only got 2 per company 
left instead of 6 ! ! ! ! Well, Bless you and give Mr. Miles 
and Mrs. Simnett and Bertha and Probyns and Englands and 
Malletts and everyone my love. I long to see you all again. 
Write and give me some account of the finnacial situation 
soon, and keep on writing and sending things, 

Best of luck, 

Yours, 

P.W." 
From Percy to his Mother : 

" Sept. n, 1914. 

Just a line of love and hugs and to say I am well. I 
think things are going all right now, but one really can't tell 
at all, it's so big and huge, no one knows anything. We just 
march and fight small sorts of engagements about once a week, 
always Tuesdays, and sometimes Sundays. We just hope and 
pray for the best. 

I see a lot of dear Benny and he is splendid. Supplies 
me with socks and chocolate which are the two absolute 
necessities of life. 

Got a mail in this morning, the first for 3 weeks, and 
among it was a delicious soft brown muffler, and 2 very Bimish 
bits of soap, but it was not your writing ; perhaps Jenny sent 
them off. We do think of you so, and long for home. The 
war is becoming rather dull now, but I expect any minute it 
may become too exciting again, so I won't grumble. The 



V POSTSCRIPT. 

great tragedy is that the weather has quite broken down now. 
It has been too, too, lovely, but now, rain and cold winds. 
What it will be like in a month I tremble to think. 

If you make things for the men, or your Guild does, I 
think it would be as well to register them and send direct to me. 
I hear very few things sent from England really reach the 
right people. It's very sad to think so, but I am afraid it is 
often the case. 

We have had several more officers wounded, and now, 
out of the 6 that started in our Company, only little Vaughan 
and me left. We have lost 15 one way and another, but I 
think only 3 died. 

I wonder what you are all doing, I feel it must be far 
more dreadful for all of you in England than for us. We 
certainly suffer great discomforts at times, but as long as we 
get food, and up to now we have done well, we blow along in 
very happy fashion. We are just such tiny pawns in the 
game. We worry about nothing, just try and do our best in 
our immediate front, and hope and pray for it all to end soon. 

Here is Durrell with some tea for us. He is being a 
treasure on this game. You might send him some little things. 
Also dear little Vaughan, who has only had one letter all this 
time." 

" Sept. 12, 1914. 

Got darling letter this morning written on 28th August. 
Loved it so. We still advance and things I think going really 
well ; however, must not boast yet, but from my experience of 
a great retreat I can imagine what the Germans must be going 
through. Big fighting going on now on our right and left, 
but nothing much in front of us. But we all keep plugging 
on, and are in tremendous heart. Very wet yesterday and 
to-day, but got into a barn last night, and slept very well. 

Seen dear old Benny twice to-day, once just now, re- 
turning from the battle on our left, where he had been shelled, 
but in great form. He has gone back to Headquarters now, 
so all right. Also saw Hitchcock riding Benny's second 
horse you can't imagine the joy it gives one seeing dear 
Home faces." 



POSTSCRIPT. 171 

From Bendor to Lord Ribblesdale : 

Sep., 15. 

You will doubtless know by now that Percy was killed 
yesterday gallantly leading his men at Soupir, about 12 miles 
East of Soissons. 

He was killed at once, shot in the head at close range 
(rifle bullet), just at the edge of a wood, coming on to the open. 
It was just at the back of the Chateau Soupir, which belongs 
to a Madame Boursin. It was a very great attack on the 
Germans, followed by a counter attack on their part, and the 
ground was thick with their slain when I was up there. He 
must, as far as I can make out, have been shot at about 2 p.m. 
Monday, the I4th, but there was a good deal of confusion when 
I was up there. I went to his grave (he was buried in the wood 
where he fell), by Cotterel Dormer, an officer in his Company. 
They have got all his things. This sounds a cold-blooded 
letter, but you know my feelings, and there is not time to 
express them here. He went in good company, David Bing- 

ham, and several others killed Cakes Banbury bad 

wounded, and Vaughan slightly. My thoughts are with dear 
little Diana, and with my Mother, whom I hardly dare write 
to. I should like you to see the latter if possible, and tell her 
I have written to you. I cannot write her, as I don't know 
when Rawlinson will break the news. Can you explain all 
this to her ? I am heart broken myself. When this is over 
I must come and see you. I know Diana will be braver than 
the brave. Perf was, and his example will last throughout 
the ages." 

From Bendor to his Sister, Lady Shaftesbury : 
" East of Soissons, 

I5th Sept., 1914. 

I have no time to write as I should like. Our Percy has 
gone in a merciful and gallant manner at the head of his men. 
1 cannot write details now. 

I was at his little grave to-day in a wood where he fell at 
Soupir at the back of Chateau Soupir, 12 miles East of Soissons, 
and could not get out owing to shell fire, but I managed to 



172 POSTSCRIPT. 

get there to-day. He was shot as far as I can tell instan- 
taneously at about 2 p.m., Monday, September I4th. I was 
allowed to wire to Sir H. Rawlinson to break the news, so I 
daren't^write to Mother or Diana for fear they have not heard 
already. Will you some time explain my position to them. 
He went in good company with several of his friends in a way 
most befitting to him, with a heap of German slain round him. 

My darlings I grieve with you all and feel hopelessly 
heart-broken, it is tragic. I have not time to write and this 
is a cold-blooded letter. My heart bleeds for Mother and 
Diana. We must think, dear ones, of Percy and George 
together. I cannot write more, and this letter you must 
explain to Mother and Diana. I have written more fully to 
Lord Ribblesdale. You must all gather round Mamma and 
little Diana. When Mother knows explain my not writing, 
my thoughts are so with her. 

David Bingham was killed with him, so they go into a 
glorious partnership." 

From Colonel Geoffrey Fielding, the Colonel of Percy's 
Regiment, to Diana : 

" Sept.is. 

I am writing to you about Percy ; but I feel so sad that I 
hardly know how to write. He was shot yesterday while 
gallantly holding on to a position against a very strong counter- 
attack made by the Germans. I can hardly tell you what a 
loss he is to the regiment ; there was no more gallant fellow, 
more charming companion, or better officer in the regiment, 
and great as his loss is to us, my first thoughts are of you, and 
I write to you to express the sympathy of the whole Brigade. 
We have had a hard time since we have been out here, long 
drudging marches, hot weather, and little sleep ; but Percy 
was always the same always smiling and cheering everyone 
up, and telling the men not to mind as we should eventually 
win. The devotion of his men to him was most touching, 
and I have seldom seen an officer's loss so grieved over by his 
men. Percy was shot through the head, and his death was 
instantaneous." 



POSTSCRIPT. 173 

From M. Durrell, soldier-servant to Percy, to Martin 
Wilson, nephew to Mrs. Percy Wyndham : 

September 24th, 1914. 

No. 3 Company received your presents which were very 
acceptable, and as they came from a young gentleman so 
nearly related to Mr. Percy Wyndham, they were eagerly 
sought after. By this time I expect you know of your poor 
Uncle's death. 

He died a Soldier's death, leading his Platoon in the 
firing line against the Germans. The whole of the Company 
was sad when they heard of it. He was like a Father to his 
men, and I have seen him in the night, after a long and weary 
march (during the retirement from Mons) rubbing ointment 
on his men's blistered feet, when he was tired himself. He was 
always amongst his men encouraging and helping them. 
What the Company thought of him it is impossible for me 
to tell you. 

We hope that when you grow to be a man, that you will 
be as strong, brave and respected a gentleman as your beloved 
Uncle Percy. The Company wish to express their deepest 
sympathy to you. 

This letter, written on behalf of No. 3 Company, 3rd 
Battalion Coldstream Guards, by 

M. Durrell, Servant to Lt. Percy Lyulph Wynd- 
ham ; and Company Q.M.R. C Fox. 



And so, fired with hope, and cheerily sharing with his 
comrades the hardships and horrors of war, he went bravely 
on, thinking only of others, those around him, and everyone at 
home ; even the dogs and horses, and the gardens at Clouds, 
bathed in the autumn sunshine. From his childhood he had 
loved gardens. Do you remember how he delighted George 
by improvising poetry when quite a little boy ? I found in 
the Library at Clouds a manuscript book in which George 
wrote with his own hand : 

" Poem composed and dictated to Sibell by Percy on the 
morning of Thursday, November 30th, 1893, 



174 POSTSCRIPT, 

Two Angels over Mother, 
One Angel over me. 
Saighton Tower is on a hill, 
All around are glossy fields. 
The crows fly by the hedge-rows 
. When the round sun goes to bed, 
The trees stand so high, 
Where they make their happy nests. 
Percy's flowers grow 
Within his white garden-gate, 
' Love-in-a-mist ' and ' Pansies,' 
And sweetest Mignonette." 



Let us write upon his grave these lines of William Blake : 

" Bind ardent hope upon your feet like 

shoes, 

Put on the robe of preparation ! 
The table is prepared in shining heaven, 
The flowers of immortality are blown." 

C.T.G. 



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