J. COMYNS CARR

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA · MADRAS

MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO

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THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

J. COMYNS CARR

Stray Memories

BY HIS WIFE

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON 1920

COPYRIGHT

GLASGOW: PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.

TO OUR GRANDSONS RICHARD AND JOHN COMYNS CARR

FOREWORD

My husband wrote his own Reminiscences in his two books—Some Eminent Victorians and Coasting Bohemia, and it might justly be brought up against me that I could have nothing to add to what he has said himself.

But a critic remarked at the time that there were few “Reminiscences” in which the pronoun “I” occurred so seldom; and it is upon this ground that I venture to take my stand.

His friends meant so much to him that his talk is all of them. But they also loved him, and the few who are left among those of whom he wrote, as well as the many more of the younger generation who testify to-day to the exhilaration of his presence and the tonic of his humour may, I hope, find in my effort something which may recall to them his urbane and inspiring personality.

CHAPTER I

COURTSHIP

It was in June of the year 1873 that I first saw my husband.

Aimée Desclée was beginning a memorable season of French Plays at the Royalty Theatre, and it was in the capacity of dramatic critic to The Echo—a post to which he had recently been appointed—that “Joe Carr,” as his friends called him, sat awaiting the curtain to rise on that remarkable performance of Frou-Frou which set the cosmopolitan world of London aflame in its day.

He was twenty-four years of age; but he looked more, for though he had the complexion almost of a girl and that unruly twist in his fair, curling hair which belongs to early youth, he was broad-shouldered and had the strong build of the Cumberland statesmen from whom he was as proud to claim ancestry on his father’s side as he was of the Irish blood that came to him from his mother.

Not that I could have described him that evening: the stalls were too ill lit and my excitement over the play was too great.

I had but lately arrived from Italy—having [2]cajoled my father, then English chaplain at Genoa, into letting me “see London” under the care of my brother, resident there; so that I had just been shot from the socially restricted life of a parson’s daughter in the small English colony of a small foreign town into the comparative Bohemianism of the artistic set in the London of that day best described by my husband himself in the introduction to his book Coasting Bohemia.

There was much that must have been, unconsciously to myself, of rare educational advantage in the lovely scenery and picturesque surroundings of my childhood’s life on the Riviera and in the Apennines; and my parents so loved both Nature and Art that they gave us constant change of opportunity in these directions. Yet I must confess that as I grew up, the chestnut groves of the Apennines and the shores of the blue Mediterranean became empty joys to me, and even the comparative excitement of wearing my own and criticizing my friends’ frocks in the Public Gardens of Genoa or the keener delight of an occasional dance in a stately palace, was insufficient to fill my cravings; and I longed for freedom and the attractions of the world—more especially in London, which I only knew through visits to relatives during the holidays of a short period of my life at a Brighton school. And it was from the house of specially strict relatives that I definitely escaped that evening, to come to the wicked French play with my brother and his friend and

housemate, Mr. Frederick Jameson, an architect by profession, but incidentally a distinguished [3]musician—in later years the translator of the Wagner libretti.

Mr. Comyns Carr, to whom they introduced me, sat behind us; and, though he often told me that he marked me down as I came in, and somehow associated me with the personality of Aimée Desclée herself, I took small heed of him then, and when, as we sought a cab at the close of the performance, he volunteered to go back and search for a valueless brooch which I had lost, I did not have the grace to insist on waiting for his return before we hurried off.

But I was not to be punished; that very incident furnished occasion for a next meeting.

Through my brother he tracked me to a Bloomsbury boarding-house, whereto insubordination to the deserved reproof of the conventional relatives had made me condemn myself.

Oh, that boarding-house—with the city clerk’s bon mot, “Why are you like the spoon resting in your tea?” And the spinster convinced that the Italian Stornelli I sang in the evening must be “improper!” Could I have endured it if Mr. Jameson and my brother had not started the glorious idea of theatricals in their rooms hard by in Great Russell Street? And if, on the second day of my sojourn, the lodging-house slavey had not burst into the wee bedroom looking out to the backyard where I was putting on my hat, with the news that a gentleman was asking for me at the front door?

I never guessed who it was, but, through the sunshine that struck into the dingy hall, I saw a strong [4]figure on the door-step and, as I advanced out of the dimness, a mouth hidden in a fair beard—thick and long according to the fashion of the hour—parted in a smile; then I recognised the young man whom I had seen two nights ago at the play.

He had brought my lost brooch, but I don’t think the excuse was needed. I knew why he had come, though at the moment an unwonted shyness had fallen on me, and I think I did not know whether to be pleased or frightened.

He said, “Mayn’t I come in?”

And I recollect my vexation as I answered, “There’s nowhere to come to! The drawing-room is full of old ladies—the sort who tell one that a waterproof and an umbrella are the safe dress for a girl in London.”

How he laughed! the laugh that many knew and loved him for: and any who recollect the speckled-hen variety of the waterproof of the seventies will not wonder.

Then he said: “But you are going out. Which way are you going?”

My reply so well betrayed utter ignorance of London thoroughfares that his next remark was natural.

“Well, as I know you’re a stranger, I won’t say you’ve a small bump of locality!” he said. And how often did he say it again in after years! “But you had better let me take you along. I’m going that way.”

He told the lie unblushingly—and unblushing I did as he bade me and followed him into the street.

I had been brought up with the strictness not [5]only of my father’s cloth but of Italian customs, and I felt I was doing a bold thing: in those days my whole English adventure was considered bold by Mrs. Grundy, and my poor father had already come over on a hasty visit from Italy to place me with those relatives from whom I had escaped; but on that occasion I was simply overborne. Long afterwards, at a crush where Royalty was present, my husband won a bet that he would sup in the Royal room merely by the way in which he bade the footman drop the dividing red rope, and by the same way of bidding a porter put his valise on a cab, he won another with J. L. Toole as to his luggage passing unexamined on a return from abroad. So it was by some kindred “way” that he led me forth that day—whither I knew not. And honestly, I forget where we went. I only knew that he took me a long way—in more senses than one—and showed me many things that were new and told me many that were more Greek to me than I chose to admit at the time.

I was an ignorant girl—the smattering of a brief boarding-school education counting probably far less than the companionship of refined parents in a land of beauty, and of the sort of cultivation in which Joe lived and revelled I knew absolutely nothing.

I don’t know that, at that stage in my career, I ever had so much desire to learn as I pretended—and I am not sure that Joe cared.

Yet he was in those days of his youth at the height of his enthusiasm on matters of Art; he had just written those articles on living painters—[6]specially noting the so-called Pre-Raphaelites—which had drawn considerable notice to his pseudonym of “Ignotus,” and he was, at the moment, one of Rossetti’s favoured young admirers.

But I knew nothing of all this; nor of his having already begun his career of a “wit” as Junior of the Bar on the Northern Circuit. In fact, what I recall of him then is not his wit but his tenderness. He was the ardent pursuer, the first man I had met with whom I was afraid to flirt, because—in spite of some tremulousness in his eager insistence—there was something that said: “I mean to succeed.”

So I stood dreaming before the masterpieces of the National Gallery, and he, I am bound to say, was content with much silence as we sat in the large, cool rooms on that hot May day.

Later on, when he was showing me what to admire, I would teaze him by pointing to some atrocity in Art, and say: “That is what I really like.” But not that day.

And when the hour came for me to return to the boarding-house, I think his sole thought was upon the contriving of our next meeting. As we passed the British Museum—he looked up at the windows of my brother’s rooms facing it, and said: “Sheridan Knowles’ ‘Hunchback,’ you said.”

“Yes,” I replied. “And I do Julia and Mr. Jameson Master Walter. But it may all fall through because he can’t find a man for the lover. It is desolating.”

I can recall the slow look he gave me; but then he smiled and said: “Is that what you would say in your foreign tongues?”

[7]I got cured of such expressions later on, but that day I think I was ashamed of my careless speech, for I knew better; and I shook hands with him with a sense of disappointment as the slavey opened the door into the dingy brown hall. Had I been too flippant and free to please such a clever man?

That evening, however, when I went to the rehearsal in Great Russell Street, Mr. Comyns Carr was there; of course he had offered himself to play that lover’s part. He was busy enough—though not so busy as he had been before I knew him, when reading for his Law Scholarship at the London University. He had, in fact, if I remember rightly, just returned from his first experience on the Northern Circuit and was beginning to supplement his earnings at the Bar by literary efforts. But he was not too busy for this adventure, and there followed three weeks of rehearsals under Mr. Jameson’s management, during which my assets for the stage were calmly discussed, Mr. Jameson declaring that they were good, and finally winning my brother’s consent to the bidding of his theatrical friends—John Hare among them—to decide the question.

But Joe always pooh-poohed the notion.

And when I said: “Well, I’m going to earn enough to keep me in London somehow. I’m not going back to that dead-alive life at home!” he only said cryptically, “There are other ways.”

I think I was a bit huffed at the time and crowed when a lightly spoken word of praise came to me presently from a very authoritative quarter.

For one day, as we sat resting from our labours [8]in one of the window seats of the beautiful Adams room where Burne-Jones had once painted and that Whistler had not long left, a light rap fell on the door and a voice long loved by us all called out: “Anybody at home?” as the radiant face of Ellen Terry peeped merrily in upon us.

There was little work done that day; but our stage manager, whose old friend she was, bade me speak one of my speeches, and she said: “A good carrying voice, and she finishes her words.” No merit to me, who had been bred in a land where folk open their throats and where I had heard cultivated English only; but I was naturally flattered and, when “the night” came and I was awkward and terrified and John Hare smiled pleasant nothings and my kindly, ambitious stage-manager’s ardour was damped, I might have been sore cast down but that a new excitement and glamour had flashed into my life.

Joe Carr’s “way” was carving its straight course.

Many a time I had been caught wandering aimlessly up Gower Street pretending a shopping excursion and swearing that I had not seen him on the opposite pavement, and many a half-hour had we both pretended to enjoy the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum, but in truth it was only three weeks after that theatrical performance when I put my key one day into the door of the Dispensary over which were those historic rooms and felt rather than saw a figure behind me, and knew that the great moment had come for me and that I was to be carried off my feet.

As once before he said:[9] “May I come in?” And I answered nothing and left the key in the door (of which I never heard the end), and he followed me up to the big studio where we were to spend the first year of our wedded life.

I had come there that day for a singing lesson from Mr. Jameson and, when he returned presently, I am sure he guessed no more than we did that in four months he would be in America and would have rented his rooms to us for our first home.

[10]

CHAPTER II

THE HOME OF BOYHOOD

So from that day there was no more dingy boarding-house for me: my betrothed took me to his parents’ house at Clapham, where I well remember the courtly words: “I hear I have to congratulate my son Joe” with which I was received by his father.

Small blame would it have been to parents, ambitious for the advancement of their children, had they only seen in me a foreign adventuress without credentials coming to snatch one of the flowers of their flock; yet instead of that, most generously was I welcomed to a home of which I have never seen the like; and if sometimes bewildered and always non-plussed by the free-and-easy give and take and the wonderful argumentative capacity of that large and variously gifted family—I felt out of it—my lover was always unobtrusively protecting, and the artist-sister who had always shared his tastes and sympathized with his ambitions, often held out a kindly hand to help me up the steep places.

But they were few: the sunny places, full of real romance, of utter confidence in our future—[11]rash as it might appear to prudent elders—bright with his radiant enthusiasms and his fine ambitions, are the things that cannot fade from my memory.

In those days much verse was written not then intended for publication, but some of which has seen the light since.

The typical gathering, of the large family, presided over by the wise father whose “Landmarks, boys”! from the head of the table generally calmed any storm, was most often one of obstinate argument and fierce word-fights, and stands out now as the proper school where the keen critical faculty and the gift of ready repartee for which many friends now remember Joe Carr, were first forged and perfected.

And, be it noted, that however sanguinary the fight, there was never any malice, never any after ill-will among the combatants: generous natures and a Celtic sense of humour prevented that—not a little helped by the complete freedom of arena left by the parents.

The mother ruled her household as Victorian mothers did, and spared neither pains nor expense for her son’s ambitions and her daughters’ proper advancement in the world; she welcomed their friends with courteous Irish welcome, however little many of their tastes might be in harmony with her own; but she let them talk unmolested and was content to keep her own counsel, while she ministered lavishly to their creature comforts; and the father—a man of few words but of strong character and clear insight—kept his own views undisturbed. He had nevertheless more deeply, [12]though probably unconsciously, impressed them on his children, than his children then guessed. He was a broad Liberal, and it is interesting to note that, in days when we were even more insular than we are now, no fighter in the cause of freedom was forbidden his house because he was a foreigner. Under the auspices of Mr. Adam Gielgud—the son of a great Polish refugee—patriots from many lands who had sought our shelter, found their way to that hospitable roof. Pulski and Riciotti

Garibaldi are the only other names that recur to me, but there were more and they were all welcome. Men of after note in the art world and in journalism came also as friends of Joe’s or of his sister’s—shaken together with charming Irish and hard-headed North country cousins.

Many were the times when dinner had been ordered for six, and sixteen would sit down at the long mahogany table, the polishing of which Mrs. Carr supervised daily, laden with homely but abundant fare.

But Joe made many other friends in town who never found time to visit Clapham. In spite of his recent appointment as dramatic critic to The Echo his new friends were less among actors than among painters—Burne-Jones and perhaps chiefest just then, Rossetti, whose friendship he describes himself in Some Eminent Victorians. Nevertheless he had met Henry Irving through the son of the Lyceum manager, Mr. Bateman, and had often passionately praised him.

To the girl fresh from the small English colony abroad it was all vastly entertaining, though I did [13]not realize then how much of a figure my betrothed already was among the men of his time. Even the gayer part of my girlhood—the summers spent at S. Moritz, which my father had discovered, as a homely village in his yearly Alpine tramp—bore little resemblance to London excitements. I had but rarely seen the inside of a theatre and never a fine English actor, and my first vision of Henry Irving in “The Bells,” is a haunting memory still.

This was in July, 1873.

But this engrossing first season of mine had to be interrupted; for Joe, having at last obtained a commission from one of the dailies for holiday articles which would bring in a sum just sufficient to pay his expenses, was whirled off to the Engadine by my brother to be introduced to my parents as my suitor.

In some ways a strange meeting on both sides: to Joe the restrictions of a parson’s home—though greatly modified by the manner of a foreign life—must have seemed a contrast to the methodical yet easy-going Clapham household; to my parents the reckless courage of my lover’s plan of life, his bold enthusiasms and gay self-confidence must have been—to my father, at all events—somewhat startling. But my brother was a bit of an autocrat in the family circle and knew the position which Joe was likely to win in the London world of letters; my sister, a very young girl, kept the ball rolling merrily on the lighter side, while my mother quickly discovered deep points of sympathy with her would-be son-in-law, and the two would sit on the terrace [14]of our mountain home, looking on the green lake with the snow-capped peaks cleaving an indigo sky, and quote Wordsworth contentedly. To the end of her life they understood one another; but even my father came to recognise the value of a fine character above creeds. Certain it is that Joe was as much pleased with the Italian cooking

of the maid who sat on the sofa with the dish in her hands while waiting for him to ask for a second helping, as he was surprised at my brother advising him not to borrow a postage stamp when five minutes later my father proposed to settle a small yearly sum upon me which would enable us to marry as soon as Joe had any fixed income whatsoever.