On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (11 page)

Little Joseph for many long weeks continued to seem much like
others, and if he had then died (as some cousins hoped he would, and
as, indeed, there seemed to be a good chance on the day that he
swallowed the pebble at Bournemouth) I should have no more to write
about. There would be an end of little Joseph so far as you and I
are concerned; and as for the family of Duggleton, why any one but
the man who does Society Notes in the
Evening Yankee
should
write about them I can't conceive.

Well, but little Joseph did not die—not just then, anyhow. He lived
to learn to speak, and to talk, and to put out his tongue at
visitors, let alone interrupting his parents with unpleasing remarks
and telling lies. It was early observed that he did all these things
with a
je-ne-scais-quoy
and a
verve
quite different from the manner
of his little playmates. When one day he moulded out, flattened and
unshaped the waxen nose of a doll of his, it was apparent to all that
it had been very skilfully done, and showed a taste for modelling,
and the admiration this excited was doubled when it was discovered
that he had called the doll "Aunt Garry". He took also to drawing
things with a pencil as early as eight years old, and for this talent
his father's house was very suitable, for Mrs. Duggleton had nice
Louis XV furniture, all white and gold, and a quaint new brown-paper
medium on her walls. Colour, oddly enough, little Joseph could not
pretend to; but he had a remarkably fine ear, and was often heard,
before he was ten years old, singing some set of words or other over
and over again very loudly upon the staircase to a few single notes.

It seems incredible, but it is certainly true, that he even composed
verses
at the age of eleven, wherein "land" and "strand",
"more" and "shore" would frequently recur, the latter being commonly
associated with England, to which, his beloved country, the
intelligent child would add the epithet "old".

He was, a short time after this, discovered playing upon words and
would pun upon "rain" and "reign", as also upon "Wales" the country
(or rather province, for no patriot would admit a Divided Crown) and
"Whales"—the vast Oceanic or Thalassic mammals that swim in Arctic
waters.

He asked questions that showed a surprising intelligence and at the
same time betrayed a charming simplicity and purity of mind. Thus he
would cross-examine upon their recent movements ladies who came to
call, proving them very frequently to have lied, for he was puzzled
like most children by the duplicity of the gay world. Or again, he
would ask guests at the dinner table how old they were and whether
they liked his father and mother, and this in a loud and shrill way
that provoked at once the attention and amusement of the select
coterie (for coterie it was) that gathered beneath his father's
roof.

As is so often the case with highly strung natures, he was morbidly
sensitive in his self-respect. Upon one occasion he had invented
some boyish nickname or other for an elderly matron who was present
in his mother's drawing-room, and when that lady most forcibly urged
his parent to chastise him he fled to his room and wrote a short
note in pencil forgiving his dear mamma her intimacy with his
enemies and announcing his determination to put an end to his life.
His mother on discovering this note pinned to her chair gave way to
very natural alarm and rushed upstairs to her darling, with whom she
remonstrated in terms deservedly severe, pointing out the folly and
wickedness of self-destruction and urging that such thoughts were
unfit for one of his tender years, for he was then barely thirteen.

This incident and many others I could quote made a profound
impression upon the Honourable Mr. and Mrs. Duggleton, who, by the
time of their son's adolescence, were convinced that Providence had
entrusted them with a vessel of no ordinary fineness. They discussed
the question of his schooling with the utmost care, and at the age
of fifteen sent "little Joseph", as they still affectionately called
him, to the care of the Rev. James Filbury, who kept a small but
exceedingly expensive school upon the banks of the River Thames.

The three years that he spent at this establishment were among the
happiest in the life of his father's private secretary, and are
still remembered by many intimate friends of the family.

He was twice upon the point of securing the prize for Biblical
studies and did indeed take that for French and arithmetic. Mr.
Filbury assured his father that he had the very highest hopes of his
career at the University. "Joseph," he wrote, "is a fine, highly
tempered spirit, one to whom continual application is difficult, but
who is capable of high flights of imagination not often reached by
our sturdy English boyhood…. I regret that I cannot see my way to
reducing the charge for meat at breakfast. Joseph's health is
excellent, and his scholarship, though by no means ripe, shows
promise of that …" and so forth.

I have no space to give the letter in full; it betrays in every line
the effect this gifted youth had produced upon one well acquainted
with the marks of future greatness;—for Mr. Filbury had been the
tutor and was still the friend of the Duke of Buxton, the sometime
form-master of the present Bishop of Lewes and the cousin of the
late Joshua Lambkin of Oxford.

Little Joseph's entry into college life abundantly fulfilled the
expectations held of him. The head of his college wrote to his
great-aunt (the wife of the Under Secretary of State) "… he has
something in him of what men of Old called prophecy and we term
genius …", old Dr. Biddlecup the Dean asked the boy to dinner, and
afterwards assured his father that little Joseph was the image of
William Pitt, whom he falsely pretended to have seen in childhood,
and to whom the Duggletons were related through Mrs. Duggleton's
grandmother, whose sister had married the first cousin of the
Saviour of Europe.

Dr. Biddlecup was an old man and may not have been accurate in his
historical pretensions, but the main truth of what he said was
certain, for Joseph resembled the great statesman at once in his
physical appearance, for he was sallow and had a turned-up nose: in
his gifts: in his oratory which was ever remarkable at the social
clubs and wines—and alas! in his fondness for port.

Indeed, little Joseph had to pay the price of concentrating in
himself the genius of three generations, he suffered more than
one of the temptations that assault men of vigorous imagination. He
kept late hours, drank—perhaps not always to excess but always
over-frequently—and gambled, if not beyond his means, at least with
a feverish energy that was ruinous to his health. He fell desperately
ill in the fortnight before his schools, but he was granted an
aegrotat
, a degree equivalent in his case to a First Class in
Honours, and he was asked by one or other of the Colleges to compete
for a Fellowship; it was, however, given to another candidate.

After this failure he went home, and on his father's advice,
attempted political work; but the hurry and noise of an election
disgusted him, and it is feared that his cynical and highly
epigrammatic speeches were another cause of his defeat.

Sir William Mackle, who had watched the boy with the tenderest
interest and listened to his fancied experiences with a father's
patience, ordered complete rest and change, and recommended the
South of France; he was sent thither with a worthless friend or
rather dependent, who permitted the lad to gamble and even to borrow
money, and it was this friend to whom Sir William (in his letter to
the Honourable Mr. Duggleton acknowledging receipt of his cheque)
attributed the tragedy that followed.

"Had he not," wrote the distinguished physician, "permitted our poor
Joseph to borrow money of him; had he resolutely refused to drink
wine at dinner; had he locked Joseph up in his room every evening at
the opening hour of the Casino, we should not have to deplore the
loss of one of England's noblest." Nor did the false friend make
things easier for the bereaved father by suggesting ere twelve short
months had elapsed that the sums Joseph had borrowed of him should
be repaid.

Joseph, one fatal night, somewhat heated by wine, had heard a
Frenchman say to an Italian at his elbow certain very outrageous
things about one Mazzini. The pair were discussing a local
bookmaker, but the boy, whose passion for Italian unity is now well
known, imagined that the Philosopher and Statesman was in question;
he fell into such a passion and attacked these offensive foreigners
with such violence as to bring on an attack from which he did not
recover: his grave now whitens the hillside of the Monte Resorto (in
French Mont-resort).

He left some fifty short poems in the manner of Shelley, Rossetti
and Swinburne, and a few in an individual style that would surely
have developed with age. These have since been gathered into a
volume and go far to prove the truth of his father's despairing cry:
"Joseph," the poor man sobbed as he knelt by the insanitary
curtained bed on which the body lay, "Joseph would have done for the
name of Duggleton in literature what my Uncle did for it in
politics."

His portrait may be found in
Annals of the Rutlandshire
Gentry
, a book recently published privately by subscriptions of
two guineas, payable to the gentleman who produced that handsome
volume.

If this page does not appal you, nothing will.

If these first words do not fill you with an uneasy presentiment of
doom, indeed, indeed you have been hitherto blessed in an ignorance
of woe.

It is lost! What is lost? The revelation this page was to afford.
The essay which was to have stood here upon page 127 of my book: the
noblest of them all.

The words you so eagerly expected, the full exposition which was to
have brought you such relief, is not here.

It was lost just after I wrote it. It can never be re-written; it is
gone.

Much depended upon it; it would have led you to a great and to a
rapidly acquired fortune; but you must not ask for it. You must turn
your mind away. It cannot be re-written, and all that can take its
place is a sort of dirge for departed and irrecoverable things.

"Lugete o Veneres Cupidinesque," which signifies "Mourn oh! you
pleasant people, you spirits that attend the happiness of mankind":
"et quantum est hominum venustiorum," which signifies "and you such
mortals as are chiefly attached to delightful things."
Passer
, etc.,
which signifies my little, careful, tidy bit of writing,
mortuus est
,
is lost. I lost it in a cab.

It was a noble and accomplished thing. Pliny would have loved it who
said: "Ea est stomachi mei natura ut nil nisi merum atque totum
velit," which signifies "such is the character of my taste that it
will tolerate nothing but what is absolute and full." … It is no
use grumbling about the Latin. The nature of great disasters calls
out for that foundational tongue. They roll as it were (do the great
disasters of our time) right down the emptiness of the centuries
until they strike the walls of Rome and provoke these sonorous
echoes worthy of mighty things.

It was to have stood here instead of this, its poor apologist. It
was to have filled these lines, this space, this very page. It is
not here. You all know how, coming eagerly to a house to see someone
dearly loved, you find in their place on entering a sister or a
friend who makes excuses for them; you all know how the mind grows
blank at the news and all nature around one shrivels. It is a worse
emptiness than to be alone. So it is with me when I consider this as
I write it, and then think of That Other which should have taken its
place; for what I am writing now is like a little wizened figure
dressed in mourning and weeping before a deserted shrine, but That
Other which I have lost would have been like an Emperor returned
from a triumph and seated upon a throne.

Indeed, indeed it was admirable! If you ask me where I wrote it, it
was in Constantine, upon the Rock of Cirta, where the storms come
bowling at you from Mount Atlas and where you feel yourself part of
the sky. At least it was there in Cirta that I blocked out the
thing, for efforts of that magnitude are not completed in one place
or day. It was in Cirta that I carved it into form and gave it a
general life, upon the 17th of January, 1905, sitting where long ago
Massinissa had come riding in through the only gate of the city,
sitting his horse without stirrups or bridle. Beside me, as I wrote,
an Arab looked carefully at every word and shook his head because he
could not understand the language; but the Muses understood and
Apollo, which were its authors almost as much as I. How graceful it
was and yet how firm! How generous and yet how particular! How easy,
how superb, and yet how stuffed with dignity! There ran through it,
half-perceived and essential, a sort of broken rhythm that never
descended to rhetoric, but seemed to enliven and lift up the order
of the words until they were filled with something approaching
music; and with all this the meaning was fixed and new, the order
lucid, the adjectives choice, the verbs strong, the substantives
meaty and full of sap. It combined (if I may say so with modesty)
all that Milton desired to achieve, with all that Bacon did in the
modelling of English…. And it is gone. It will never be seen or
read or known at all. It has utterly disappeared nor is it even
preserved in any human memory—no, not in my own.

I kept it for a year, closely filing, polishing, and emending it
until one would have thought it final, and even then I continued to
develop and to mould it. It grew like a young tree in the corner of
a fruitful field and gave an enduring pleasure. It never left me by
night or by day; it crossed the Pyrenees with me seven times and the
Mediterranean twice. It rode horses with me and was become a part of
my habit everywhere. In trying to ford the Sousseyou I held it high
out of the water, saving it alone, and once by a camp fire I woke
and read it in the mountains before dawn. My companions slept on
either side of me. The great brands of pine glowed and gave me
light; there was a complete silence in the forest except for the
noise of water, and in the midst of such spells I was so entranced
by the beauty of the thing that when I had done my reading I took a
dead coal from the fire and wrote at the foot of the paper: "There
is not a word which the most exuberant could presume to add, nor one
which the most fastidious would dare to erase." All that glory has
vanished.