CHAPTER XXX
The personality of Alfred H. Louis is identified with New York for me; he accompanied my remaining years there, guide, philosopher and friend. He took in hand that indiscriminate heterogeneous reading which the Free Library made possible. He proved an unfailing and inspiring counsellor. How, why or whence he came to be in America at all I never knew. One thing that stirred him into vehemence, when the past was mentioned, was the name of Gladstone. With flashing eyes and voice of thunder he condemned the Grand Old Man, both as to character and policy, in unmeasured terms. Gladstone, apparently, had done him a personal injury as well. "We cannot let that man come among us," was Gladstone's dictum, when Louis's name was being considered as a candidate for Parliament by the Party.
"He is too earnest." This fragment was all he ever told me, but there lay evidently much behind it. "Too earnest!" he repeated with contemptuous indignation.
Of his days at Cambridge he was more communicative, though, unfortunately, I kept no notes. The eloquence and earnestness of his speeches at the Union, when Sir William Harcourt was president, made, according to his own account, a great stir. Of Dr. (Bishop) Lightfoot, of Benson, afterwards Archbishop, he had intimate memories, coloured by warm praise. His book on "England's Foreign Policy" (Bentley, 1869) apparently angered Gladstone extremely, and Louis's political career was killed.
He was called to the bar. Of success, of important cases, he told me nothing. His early brilliance suffered, I gathered, a strange eclipse, and from things he hinted at, I surmised—I cannot state it definitely—that a period in some kind of maison de santé followed about this time. That he had been, then or later, in an asylum for the insane, I heard vouched for repeatedly in London years later. For an interval before the breakdown came, he was editor, or part-editor, of the Spectator, and in some similar connexion, as owner or editor, he served the Fortnightly too. George Eliot he knew well, giving me vivid descriptions of her famous Sundays, and of his talks with George Henry Lewes and Herbert Spencer. He claimed to be the original of Daniel Deronda. He was a pupil of Sterndale Bennett's on the piano. Of his friendship with Cardinal Manning he had also much to tell.
It was in the domain of politics that I first began to notice the exaggeration and incoherence of his mind, and it was "in politics," evidently, that the deep wounds which would not heal had been received. In music, poetry, literature, above all in law, his intelligence had remained clear and sound, his judgments consummate, his knowledge encyclopædic. Large tracts of memory in him were, apparently, obliterated, whole stretches of life submerged, but his legal attainments had remained untouched. A business friend of mine "briefed" him to lecture on International, Company and Patent Law; and the substance of those "Lectures" stood the test, years later, of the highest English and French Courts.
The lonely old man's kingdom was his mind, and he dwelt in it aloof, secure, contented, unassailable. Into the big empty stretches a half education had left in my own, he poured his riches with unstinted satisfaction, even with delight. Worldly advice he never proffered; the world had left him aside, he, in his turn, left the world aside. To practical questions he merely shook his Moses-head: "That," he would say, "you must decide for yourself. Considered in relation to the Eternities, it is of little moment in any case." To any question, however, of a philosophical kind, to any enquiry for explanation about what perplexed or interested me in the realm of thought, he would reply with what I can only call a lecture, but a lecture so lucid, so packed with knowledge and learning, with classical comment and quotation, often with passages of moving eloquence, and invariably in language so considered that no single word could have been altered, and the "essay" might have been published as it stood—lectures, in a word, that enthralled and held me spellbound for hours at a time. For his knowledge was not knowledge merely, it was knowledge transmuted by emotion into that spiritual wisdom called Understanding.
The respect he inspired me with was such that rarely did I venture upon a personal question, though I longed to know more about himself and his mysterious story. His face sometimes betrayed intense mental suffering. On one occasion, feeling braver, owing to a happy mood that seemed established naturally between us, I attempted rather an intimate question of some kind about his past. He turned and stared with an expression that startled me. It was so keen, so searching. For several minutes he made no reply. His eyes narrowed. I felt ashamed. I had wounded him. The truth was, it seems, I had touched his heart.
"Listen," he said presently. In a voice full of tears and deep emotion, a very quiet, a very beautiful voice, he replied to my question. The expression of his eyes turned inwards, there rose in memory the ghostly figure of someone he had loved, perhaps loved still. The whole aspect of the old exiled poet became charged with an intolerable sadness, as he spoke the lines, not to myself, but to this vanished figure—"Shadowed by yearning memory's raven wing":
Through all that my poor words can say or sing,
The measure of the love to thee I bring.
One day thou wilt, when, by a graven stone
That bears a name, thou standest, white, alone,
Shadowed by yearning memory's raven wing,
Rained on by blossoms of some wind-torn spring
Wherefrom thirst-quenching fruit shall ne'er be grown.
Then—power shall rest upon the vanished hand
Once too much trembling to thy touch for power;
Then—shall my soul at last thy soul command
As it might not in Time's brief fitful hour;
And what Life's fires might neither melt nor burn
Shall yield with tears to ashes and the urn.
I had my answer. Never again did I venture on a personal question.
All our talks came round to poetry in the end. It was his deepest love as well. Sound lawyer he may have been, but inspired poet, to me at least, he certainly was. His own poems he severely deprecated, calling them, with the exception of the "Night Song," "poor things, though from my heart." His room, it seems, was littered with them in manuscript, which he rarely tried, and never wished, to sell. Some time later Mr. Alden, Editor of Harper's Magazine, questioned me for information "about a wonderful old gentleman who comes into the office like an emperor, and offers me a poem as though he were parting painfully with a treasure he hardly dared let out of his keeping, and certainly does not wish to sell for cash." To all, thus, he was a mystery. If he was uncared for, he was at the same time indifferent to human care. Great intellect, great mind, great heart, he seemed to me, a wraith perhaps, but an august, a giant wraith, draped by mysterious shadows, dwelling in a miserable slum, cut off from his kind amid the dim pomp and pageantry of majestic memories.
It was thus, at any rate, with the pardonable exaggeration of ignorant twenty-five, I saw and knew the Old Man of Visions. It was his deep heart of poetry, rather than his fine intellect I worshipped. The under-mind in him, the subconscious region, I think, was whole and healed; it was the upper-mind, the surface consciousness, that alone was damaged. If this mind was wrecked, this brain partly in ruins, the soul in him peered forth above the broken towers, remaining splendidly aware. Not even the imperfect instrument through which it worked could prevent this fine expression: behind the disproportion of various delusions, behind the outer tumbled ruins, there dwelt unaffected in him that greater thing than any intellect—Understanding.