“When he leaves the room,” said a friend of his to us, “it is as if the light went out.”
If one had the gift of beholding auras, what a halo of fire would one not have seen about that wonderful head? We once said this to him.
He smiled. “I think everyone has got his flame to cultivate. I think I have cultivated mine.”
Most truly, indeed, has he done so; and not only in the divine way of his art, for year by year the selflessness and the magnanimity of his character seem to deepen and extend; and so, too--inevitable tragedy of years--the sadness. Impossible for any perfectly noble mind not to gather melancholy as life goes on!--a melancholy culminating in his case with the burthen of agony which the present sufferings of his own race have laid upon his shoulders.
Therefore these memories of the days when he was as a young god, the days when a celebrated painter could find no truer way of expressing him than by flinging on the canvas the radiant vision of an Apollo, are poignant memories. We are glad that we should have them, yet they bring a stab of pain for that lost high spirit which life inevitably dashes.
With us all, the good ship Youth sets forth merrily with sails taut and pennons fluttering, filling to the wind and breasting the waves! We know that inevitably the storm winds must catch her; that she will be beaten by breakers; drawn out of her course by false currents; that if she become not a derelict, if she does not founder with all hands, she must--too often--cast much of her treasure overboard, furl her white wings, and come creeping into a cold harbour. Even those who, like our rare and wonderful friend, have gathered glory and dignity and power, as they plough a mighty course, have passed from under radiant skies into the gloom of the storm. A sombre thing, the human span, at the best, and most blest nowadays.
What can we say of the fair craft that founders almost as soon as launched? Ah! the young ghosts in that London drawing-room! The sound of the children’s voices yet ringing in our ears! There is “Mustard-Seed,” the splendid little fair boy, who had been the favourite of our Shakesperian revels nine years ago--not yet nineteen, not a month a soldier--shot through the head on that Flanders field, the graveyard of England’s choicest! And the little Scotch lad, who used to prance about in his black velvet suit, with cheeks that shamed the apple--no one knows where he lies to-day; only two or three saw him fall. And his graver, gentler brother--a prisoner, even as we write in the first agony of the grief which has befallen him in the loss of his life-companion!