London Days: A Book of Reminiscences. Arthur Warren

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      No one was ever bored at the Moscheles' afternoons. How could one be bored when host and hostess gave no thought to themselves but all their thought to their guests? Even the Swami I met there did not depress my spirits as many Swamis have done. I forget his name. I have met regiments of them in one country and another. Mostly they blazed, not with humility but importance. He, I say, had a worldly air, as if he were an Anglican bishop. He had also a sense of humour which was not entirely subdued as he listened to an American lady expounding the doctrine of "Votes for Women." "Madame," said he, "may I ask a question?"

      The lady looked assent.

      "Your husband: does he share these views?"

      "Not yet," she replied.

      "Ah," said the Swami. And there were gusts of laughter.

      "I may add," said the lady, "that I am not yet married."

      Then the laughter came in shrieks, and the Swami smiled. But this, of course, was a generation before the suffragettes were brandishing hatchets like the Redmen, and burning churches and slashing paintings like the Huns.

      But I have alluded to Browning, and have done so because whenever I think of Moscheles, I always think of him in association with Browning. Their friendship was very intimate, and that is one fact which shows the kind of man Moscheles was. After that glimpse and how-d'ye-do-good-bye at the old brown-brick bungalow which the Earl of Cadogan was so glad to destroy when the chance arrived to do so, it had been arranged by Moscheles and the poet that we should meet again with another friend of the three at a little lunch of four. But fate, or, to be precise, politics, which may be another name for fate, decided otherwise, and I had to go far afield to chronicle the results. Never again did that little company come together unless it were at Browning's open grave, on the midday of the dying year. The reaper Death had mown quickly.

      When the scene shifted to Westminster Abbey, I waited at the cloister doors till I could pass to a seat in the Poets' Corner. While waiting at the door, I heard from the pressing throng behind me the voice of an Irish writer whom I had known and had lost from sight five years before. While looking for the familiar face that belonged to the delicious brogue, there came the sound of a great key turning an ancient lock, and then the door swung open. "Come," said another friend, and we went in, getting separated before we had gone far, but taking seats near the draped grave.

      Browning's son was chief mourner. The poet had died in his son's home, the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice. And now, this day at Westminster was the last day of 1889. The great bell of the Abbey began tolling; its deep notes floated down from its tower as they sought lodgment in the hearts of the assembling throng, and with every stroke some face appeared that all England, or the world, knew well. After thirty years I can recall many of the faces that the grey light of the dull day, softened by the colouring of the Abbey windows, fell upon. There were tiers of people. Even the openings in the triforium revealed them, and by the great western doors they were packed, though they could catch but glimpses of the chancel, and most of them not that. Huxley's was the first face I saw. I had first seen it in the same place, almost on the same spot, years before, at Darwin's funeral. Max Muller and George Meredith were near him now. One thought that England sent her celebrated living men that day to meet the famous multitudes whose bodies have been laid away beneath the Abbey pavement for centuries upon centuries. There were Lord Wolseley and the Lord Chief Justice, Lord (then Professor) Bryce, Frederic Harrison, Holman Hunt, Henry Irving, Sidney Colvin, Whistler and Poynter and Alma-Tadema and Sir John Lubbock (afterwards Lord Avebury).

      London was covered with a thickening fog. You could scarcely see the Abbey from Dean's Yard. Within the Abbey the arches aloft dissolved in mist, a mist of copper and pale gold where the light glanced through rose windows. Slipping into one's memory came Mrs. Browning's lines:

      "—view the city perish in the mist

      Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea,

      The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host

      Sucked down and choked to silence."

      Candles from the choir places, and long-chained lamps, sent their soft, yellow gleams eerily through the veil which seemed to hang above us. And as the high noon drew near my glances fell upon the historians Kinglake, Lecky, and Froude. Would any one of the three ever write of this scene in England's history, I wondered? Bret Harte, Burne-Jones, George du Maurier, Leslie Stephen, William Black, Bancroft, and John Hare, and the publishers Blackwood, Macmillan, Murray, and Spottiswoode, ambassadors and ministers, the heads of universities, of learned societies, were shown to their places, singly or in groups, or took positions where they could find them, standing against the monuments. And when no more people could find space, the Abbey clock struck twelve, and the great west doors swung open, and down the long central aisle came the funeral train. Then arose the choral music which for one hundred and seventy years has risen at every burial within the Abbey, the burial office composed and played by Croft and Purcell when they were organists at Westminster.

      Sir Frederick Bridge is playing it now, as Robert Browning, all there is of him on earth, is carried on his bier through the dense throng, to pause a while at the foot of the chancel steps beneath the central lantern. Choir and clergy precede him. On either side of him walk Hallam Tennyson, Doctor Butler (of Trinity College, Cambridge), Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Sir Theodore Martin, Archdean Farrar, Professor Masson, Professor Jowett (master of Balliol), Sir Frederick Leighton, Sir James Paget, Sir George Grove, George Murray Smith (Browning's publisher), and Professor Knight (of the University of St. Andrews). Then as the service proceeds (the Archbishop of Canterbury is here, Dean Vaughan, and others eminent in the Church) the choristers sing a "Meditation" which Sir Frederick Bridge has composed to Mrs. Browning's poem:

      "What would we give to our beloved?

      The hero's heart to be unmoved,

      The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep,

      The patriot's voice to teach and rouse,

      The monarch's crown to light the brows?

      'He giveth His beloved sleep.'

      "O earth, so full of dreary noises!

      O men, with wailing in your voices!

      O delved gold, the wailers heap!

      O strife, O curse that o'er it fall!

      God strikes a silence through you all,

      And 'giveth His beloved sleep.'

      "His dews drop mutely on the hill,

      His cloud above it saileth still,

      Though on its slopes men sow and reap,

      More softly than the dew is shed,

      Or cloud is floated overhead,

      'He giveth His beloved sleep.'"

      The organ and the choir paused; all sounds died away. God struck a silence through us all. It fell upon a throng that faced the world's loss as if suddenly confronted by the flight of the soul for whose absence all mourned. And just then there fell a shaft of sunlight, golden, magical, touching the bier, and then it faded slowly away. To many, very many among the silent company, the loss by this death was a personal one; to all it had more than a touch of that. It must be so when a great poet dies. What I remember as vividly as all else was the great number of young faces in the Abbey, as if the rising generation did reverence to him who had passed.

      By and by the last hymn had been sung, the Dean had pronounced the benediction, and Bridge, at the great organ, made the old Abbey thrill to its inmost stones with the vibrating tones of the Dead March from "Saul." Now the coffin had been lowered into its grave at the foot of Chaucer's tomb. Before us and at each hand were monuments, tablets, inlaid stones, marking the burial places of Spenser, Dryden, Gay, of СКАЧАТЬ