It has been desired by some of the personal friends of the great
English writer who established this magazine, {1} that its brief
record of his having been stricken from among men should be written
by the old comrade and brother in arms who pens these lines, and of
whom he often wrote himself, and always with the warmest generosity.
I saw him first nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to
become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last, shortly
before Christmas, at the Athenaeum Club, when he told me that he had
been in bed three days--that, after these attacks, he was troubled
with cold shiverings, "which quite took the power of work out of
him"--and that he had it in his mind to try a new remedy which he
laughingly described. He was very cheerful, and looked very bright.
In the night of that day week, he died.
The long interval between those two periods is marked in my
remembrance of him by many occasions when he was supremely humorous,
when he was irresistibly extravagant, when he was softened and
serious, when he was charming with children. But, by none do I
recall him more tenderly than by two or three that start out of the
crowd, when he unexpectedly presented himself in my room, announcing
how that some passage in a certain book had made him cry yesterday,
and how that he had come to dinner, "because he couldn't help it",
and must talk such passage over. No one can ever have seen him more
genial, natural, cordial, fresh, and honestly impulsive, than I have
seen him at those times. No one can be surer than I, of the
greatness and the goodness of the heart that then disclosed itself.
We had our differences of opinion. I thought that he too much
feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretence of under-
valuing his art, which was not good for the art that he held in
trust. But, when we fell upon these topics, it was never very
gravely, and I have a lively image of him in my mind, twisting both
his hands in his hair, and stamping about, laughing, to make an end
of the discussion.
When we were associated in remembrance of the late Mr. Douglas
Jerrold, he delivered a public lecture in London, in the course of
which, he read his very best contribution to Punch, describing the
grown-up cares of a poor family of young children. No one hearing
him could have doubted his natural gentleness, or his thoroughly
unaffected manly sympathy with the weak and lowly. He read the
paper most pathetically, and with a simplicity of tenderness that
certainly moved one of his audience to tears. This was presently
after his standing for Oxford, from which place he had dispatched
his agent to me, with a droll note (to which he afterwards added a
verbal postscript), urging me to "come down and make a speech, and
tell them who he was, for he doubted whether more than two of the
electors had ever heard of him, and he thought there might be as
many as six or eight who had heard of me". He introduced the
lecture just mentioned, with a reference to his late electioneering
failure, which was full of good sense, good spirits, and good
humour.
He had a particular delight in boys, and an excellent way with them.
I remember his once asking me with fantastic gravity, when he had
been to Eton where my eldest son then was, whether I felt as he did
in regard of never seeing a boy without wanting instantly to give
him a sovereign? I thought of this when I looked down into his
grave, after he was laid there, for I looked down into it over the
shoulder of a boy to whom he had been kind.
These are slight remembrances; but it is to little familiar things
suggestive of the voice, look, manner, never, never more to be
encountered on this earth, that the mind first turns in a
bereavement. And greater things that are known of him, in the way
of his warm affections, his quiet endurance, his unselfish
thoughtfulness for others, and his munificent hand, may not be told.
If, in the reckless vivacity of his youth, his satirical pen had
ever gone astray or done amiss, he had caused it to prefer its own
petition for forgiveness, long before:-
I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain;
The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain;
The idle word that he'd wish back again.
In no pages should I take it upon myself at this time to discourse
of his books, of his refined knowledge of character, of his subtle
acquaintance with the weaknesses of human nature, of his delightful
playfulness as an essayist, of his quaint and touching ballads, of
his mastery over the English language. Least of all, in these
pages, enriched by his brilliant qualities from the first of the
series, and beforehand accepted by the Public through the strength
of his great name.
But, on the table before me, there lies all that he had written of
his latest and last story. That it would be very sad to any one--
that it is inexpressibly so to a writer--in its evidences of matured
designs never to be accomplished, of intentions begun to be executed
and destined never to be completed, of careful preparation for long
roads of thought that he was never to traverse, and for shining
goals that he was never to reach, will be readily believed. The
pain, however, that I have felt in perusing it, has not been deeper
than the conviction that he was in the healthiest vigour of his
powers when he wrought on this last labour. In respect of earnest
feeling, far-seeing purpose, character, incident, and a certain
loving picturesqueness blending the whole, I believe it to be much
the best of all his works. That he fully meant it to be so, that he
had become strongly attached to it, and that he bestowed great pains
upon it, I trace in almost every page. It contains one picture
which must have cost him extreme distress, and which is a
masterpiece. There are two children in it, touched with a hand as
loving and tender as ever a father caressed his little child with.
There is some young love as pure and innocent and pretty as the
truth. And it is very remarkable that, by reason of the singular
construction of the story, more than one main incident usually
belonging to the end of such a fiction is anticipated in the
beginning, and thus there is an approach to completeness in the
fragment, as to the satisfaction of the reader's mind concerning the
most interesting persons, which could hardly have been better
attained if the writer's breaking-off had been foreseen.
The last line he wrote, and the last proof he corrected, are among
these papers through which I have so sorrowfully made my way. The
condition of the little pages of manuscript where Death stopped his
hand, shows that he had carried them about, and often taken them out
of his pocket here and there, for patient revision and
interlineation. The last words he corrected in print were, "And my
heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss". GOD grant that on that
Christmas Eve when he laid his head back on his pillow and threw up
his arms as he had been wont to do when very weary, some
consciousness of duty done and Christian hope throughout life humbly
cherished, may have caused his own heart so to throb, when he passed
away to his Redeemer's rest!
He was found peacefully lying as above described, composed,
undisturbed, and to all appearance asleep, on the twenty-fourth of
December 1863. He was only in his fifty-third year; so young a man
that the mother who blessed him in his first sleep blessed him in
his last. Twenty years before, he had written, after being in a
white squall:
And when, its force expended,
The harmless storm was ended,
And, as the sunrise splendid
Came blushing o'er the sea;
I thought, as day was breaking,
My little girls were waking,
And smiling, and making
A prayer at home for me.
Those little girls had grown to be women when the mournful day broke
that saw their father lying dead. In those twenty years of
companionship with him they had learned much from him; and one of
them has a literary course before her, worthy of her famous name.
On the bright wintry day, the last but one of the old year, he was
laid in his grave at Kensal Green, there to mingle the dust to which
the mortal part of him had returned, with that of a third child,
lost in her infancy years ago. The heads of a great concourse of
his fellow-workers in the Arts were bowed around his tomb.