Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

“ I suppose if a man were starved of sleep he would die, as if he were starved of food and drink. And as with a man who has felt the imperious call of sleep, so it is with a man who has felt the imperious call of love. To some men it comes late: I have lived forty years without it, but now that it has come, though I know I must be a villain, I feel as if love were as much part of my human nature as sleep, and I feel that life is a great, lovely, glorious thing, and that life with love is like winning a victory in which you do not let one ship escape. ”

“ He was at that time a busy journalist and in the first flush of his success as a novelist, and no one could have deserved it better, for his novels had the historical fidelity and felicity of Francis Parkman, in addition to their graceful and romantic style. In spite of the solid work he has done in politics, he will be remembered as an author more than as a politician, though now we clap him on the back for the splendid spade-work he does for the Conservative Party. As a writer he fires the imagination, like the bugles in his famous story. ”

“ There is a pathos haunting the Leonine Library, like that which stalks in the deserted halls of Holyrood, for here the first of the Popes to wear no earthly crown strove to carry on with undiminished dignity the more than royal ambition of the immortal Nicholas v., to make the Vatican the light of the world, to maintain on its hill a city that could not be hid. ”

“ She loves it best of anything in Will’s whole life. For, walking up to Donna Rusidda, he knelt before her and kissed her hand. As he rose his eyes fell instinctively upon her feet, which were beautiful even for a Sicilian aristocrat. The slender slippers were all dusty and cut, and the ruined white satin of one of them had a tell-tale stain of blood; and then the swift intuition of love told him that his trust was justified—that she must have run herself from the Palace to bring the cry for help—and he knelt once more before her, and covered her hands with tears as well as kisses. ”

“ We were in Rome together at the time that he was writing the Eternal City, and in Egypt together while he was writing The White Prophet.
No one could be in the presence of Hall Caine for five minutes without knowing that he was in the presence of a remarkable man. His resemblance to Shakespeare is extraordinary, not only in the dome-like expanse of his forehead and the Elizabethan slope of his beard, but in the burning eyes and the shape of the eyecups. He looks the genius that he is. ”

“ How great a man I felt the Admiral to be at that moment! as great as I felt him when we were running into the Nile and Trafalgar, with the French blazing away at us, and us reserving our guns double-shotted until we were near enough for them to tear the whole length of the ships we raked. To head the ship for it, our great Foudroyant, of which we were so proud, made every man feel his courage; while if the Admiral had ordered a boat to be lowered it would have taken some stiff-backed men to go in her—though he would, I have not the least doubt, have gone himself. ”

“ No one could have expressed the good and the bad in the American character with the same light touch and ruthless penetration. His is just the pen to depict the iron courage and the insight of genius which, with or without chicanery, lead to the amassing of millions—the selfishness, made endurable by grit and personal charm, of the American woman—the brilliant wit and pathetic lack of humour in Americans as a nation—the business side of sport. ”

“ Of all the secret places of the Vatican there is none which fires the imagination of the visitor more than the Garden of the Pope, so often called his Eden. The allusion is inevitable for at the very gates of the Vatican, on the pinnacle of the Castle of Sant' Angelo, is the great Bronze Angel with the drawn sword, whom the Pope will not pass, because the tomb of the heathen Emperor below is filled with the soldiers of the re-born Rome, which dispossessed the Church of the kingdom of this world. ”

“ Florence is Renaissance in architecture, Gothic in feeling. Its inhabitants, native and foreign, live in the past. It was here that I, born with a passion for realising the Middle Ages, acquired the undying desires which have taken me back so often and for such long periods, and have inspired me to write so many books about Italy and Sicily. From the very beginning I plunged into the life of Florence and the study of things Italian with extraordinary zest. ”

“ And now, after bare leisure to cool down as I should have thought, she was sitting by my side in a most superb costume—the great lady all over—a veritable queen in condescension. In the short drive from the Embassy to the Royal Palace she was all solicitude for me, fearing a return of the fever after the drenching of the afternoon; but, praise God, I felt no ill result. It is truly wonderful what effect my spirits have upon my health. When I have the enemy within cannon-shot, or the society of those I love, nothing mortal seems able to hurt me. ”

“ Peter's like a saint in glory, on his Sedia Gestatoria.
Every visitor must needs enter the Vatican by one of three entrances: by whichever he may enter he must be dead of soul whose imagination is not fired.
If it is the gate in the little pavilion, as graceful as a Classical temple, which admits the unprivileged to the Pope's Garden, the Vatican Library and the Museum of Sculpture, the Sistine Chapel and Raffaelle's Stanze and Loggia, he will be met by a procession of the gods of Greece, chiselled out of fair white marble in the workshops of two thousand years ago. ”

“ Each mausoleum has a beautiful temple beside the tomb. The presence of so many temples has led the Japanese to exhaust their landscape art on Shiba with lake and cherry-grove and cryptomeria. Such natives as do not go there for religion are attracted by the pleasure city, with its famous tea-houses, like the Maple Club, its shows, and, above all, by its dancing. Here you may see the No-dance, the Kagura-dance, and some of the best Geishas.
But the chief charm of Shiba to me was its absolute Orientalness compared to the rest of Tokyo. ”

“ With that immense establishment of the British Embassy on her hands, no matter what the time of day, or what the function was that required to be attended, all he had to do was to take his place beside the smiling beauty, and find himself at the point where his duties began. She was the centre of life, the ear and tongue of royal favour at Naples.
A man like the Admiral, so inexhaustible in emergencies, but so prone to sink back into a low state of vitality between whiles, was more than ordinarily likely to slip into such an arrangement easily. ”

“ If Gissing had not died, and there was no reason why he should have died if he had taken ordinary care of himself—he would only be fifty-six if he were alive now—he would have had a reputation like Barrie or Bernard Shaw by this time, for even during his lifetime people were just beginning to wake up to the extraordinary qualities of his writing. I am not comparing him to either of those two; I only make the comparison because everything pointed to his having popularity. Every now and then some excellent writer achieves popularity. No one knows why. ”

“ As we laid ourselves alongside of the third ship—that was the Spartiate, the fourth—that was the Aquilon, raked us with double-shotted guns. The concussion was awful; the crashing of masts and yards, and the yells and death groans which arose from our bows, attested the precision of their aim. The men in the forecastle would have been fairly staggered if it had not been for Will. I could see St. Vincent’s men looking as if they had received their death-warrant; and I am sure I felt quite sick, as I was covered with human blood spouting from the quivering limbs and mangled bodies all round. ”

“ I found London desperately dull when we returned to it in 1884. I had no literary friends, except at Oxford, where we took a house for three months to get some colour into life again. It was on the banks of the Cherwell, facing the most beautiful buildings of Magdalen, and the Gothic glories of Oxford were manna to my hungry soul.
The summer, spent in Devonshire and Cornwall and Scotland, was well enough, and in the winter, which we spent at Torquay, we had grand scenery and beautiful ancient buildings, but the climate seemed treacherous and cold after the fierce bright summers of Australia. ”

“ God knows I would die for Emma, as I would die for my country. I pray that I may never be the villain to her. There has been love, I know, perfectly pure between a man and woman, which has yet been most disastrous for the man, if not for his country also. But, thank Heaven, this is not so with Emma. It has been entirely for the advancement of our country, of which I have been permitted to be the instrument. Without that wonderful woman we should never have got to my battle at all: it was she who secured us our supplies at Syracuse ”

“ Like most real humorists whom I have known, and I have known many from Mark Twain and Bill Nye downwards, Jerome is not a “funny man” in ordinary life. He is, on the contrary, except when he is on his legs, before an audience, or taking his pen in his hand, apt to be a very serious man, though his conversation is always illuminated by flashes of wit. He is much more apt to air strong opinions about serious questions. The Jerome you see in Paul Kelvin and The Third Floor Back is the real Jerome. He is the loyalest friend and most tender-hearted man imaginable. ”

“ The town of Syracuse looks as I could imagine the cities of the Bible would have looked, when one sees it from the mouth of the Anapo at the opposite side of the great port on a July noon. Not a film of smoke rises from the low flat roofs of the mellow white-and-yellow houses, which, in their turn, seem to be crouching down within the shadow of the city walls. ”

“ Why should it be a paradox for one who loves beauty and harmony, and strives to realise it in his work, but who sees around him a world scrambling for money, glutted with riches at one end of the social scale, and penniless and destitute at the other, while all the time the bounty of Nature and the invention and labour of man provides abundance—but only for those who can exchange the necessary counters, and for those who hold the keys of the means of the maintenance of life? ”

“ Now, no man that ever breathed was less of a coxcomb than Admiral Harry, but as the name of his ancient family was to pass out of the earth with his death, he looked to it that the son-in-law who succeeded to his honours and his great estate should be of such rank and fame that it might be no regret even for the Fleets of Eastry to be lost in their greater honours: some Duke it might be, or at least an Earl, whose belted ancestors had fought for the White or Red Rose; and Katherine Fleet, aged now eighteen, might have had any such an one as came within the magic of her moods. ”

“ About Rome I intend to publish a book like How to See Italy, and Sicily, the New Winter Resort, combined, to make use of my street by street study of the Eternal City. I know Rome far better than London. Rome has always appealed to my historical enthusiasm, in the one point where Florence leaves me cold, for Florence was, as it were, at the back of the door while kingdoms were being carved out of the unformed mass of Europe during the Middle Ages, while Rome gave the world laws, language and civilisation, collated from the wisdom of the ancient world. ”

“ You are sometimes a boy with the wiseness of a man, and sometimes a man with the foolishness of a boy.”
He felt the blood rushing to his face: her criticism was rather franker than he liked, but she had addressed him with greater familiarity than she had yet allowed herself.
“You do not like her,” she said. “Well, I will tell you: your Admiral, who has a weasel’s eye for the French, may be caught napping by a woman; and she is very much in love with him—as any woman might be,” she added, with a little tragedy sigh; “for men are so scarce, though you will be one some day, Signor W-Will. ”

“ Wrapped up in furs, people so despised the intense cold that there was not one closed sleigh—at Montreal in winter all the cabs were sleighs. By day we sleighed up the mountain for tobogganing and came back in time for tea-parties; by night we sleighed to dances or picnics. The merry jingle of sleigh-bells was never out of one’s ears; and everything was so delightfully simple—it was always beer and not champagne—and every one took an interest in Australia and Colonial poetry. The tea-parties were generally impromptus got up on the telephone. ”

“ To be at once a boy and a sailor gives one a proper appetite for such things. And I ever had as keen an appreciation of a beautiful woman as most men; and these Italian and Sicilian women, when they choose, can be so infinitely alluring, with their little laughter and their merry wit, and their open pleasure in their beauty. Donna Rusidda was in the highest spirits, and since all talked English, as being my only language, her broken English made her flashes of wit irresistible. ”

“ He told his audience that it came to him in an instant, like all great things in life, which hit on the head like a bullet. He was reading some peculiarly diabolical misrepresentations by the German editors. “Yet these men,” he told himself, “were, in the ordinary affairs of life, honest men. Many books have been written from our standpoint; but, in the first place, a German editor cannot buy a book which costs six shillings or more, and in the second place, he has not got time to read through it. The only thing is to give him free of cost something which he can read in an hour. ”

“ I am not to her a mere man, but the saviour of England, and the Sicilies, from the wicked murderous French. Nelson the man is nothing to her. He is, as you see, a little one-eyed, one-armed being, obliged to brush his hair over his forehead to hide an untidy scar. If she thought of the man at all she would think of a big fine man like Captain Troubridge; and if she is a bit motherly to me, why, so she is to my mids, and it’s all because I’m such a poor little thing playing hide-and-seek with fever. ”

“ I only had the privilege of knowing him towards the end of his life, when his time and his health were far too precious to be spent on going to at-homes, though he was very kind about having younger authors introduced to him at the parties which Lady Palmer gave in his honour when he was staying with her. Once seen, George Meredith could never be forgotten. You were delighted to find that a man who had created a literature within a literature, the writer who by common acclaim is the greatest of all English novelists, was so rare and impressive in his appearance and speech. ”

“ I have no need to marry the first lover with a title who presents himself. I am a lord’s daughter, passing rich—and passably good-looking, Will?”
“Be serious, Kitty.”
“Indeed I must, and say good-bye, Will,” she cried, as the strokes had ceased ringing out from Eastry Tower some two or three minutes, “for the minuet was for twelve o’clock, and I am engaged to Lord Dover—for that only. Good-bye, dear Will.” ”

“ One of my diametrical divergencies from Jerome is in the love of cats. I cannot respect a cat. To me it is a beast of prey, a sort of middle-class tiger, operating in a small way, but at heart a murderer of the Asiatic jungle. Jerome loves them, and makes dogs of them: he used to fill the Idler with Louis Wain’s human deductions from cats. He has a telephone to their brains. I agree with Lord Roberts, who knows by instinct when there is a cat in the room, though it may be wholly concealed, and cannot enjoy himself until it is removed. ”

“ But we, who were privileged to see that extraordinary man during every hour of his daily life, were well accustomed to the spectacle of him prostrated with sickness—from which, however, the chance of a battle would rouse him, like the sound of a trumpet, into the martial, alert little figure that seemed to the men who were to follow his orders to death, like the angel who came down to smite the hosts of Sennacherib. ”

“ If I look out on to the Bay, the serried lines of lights show me ships which fought in your victory, the greatest the sea has ever seen. If I look on the land, wherever I see a flare of light, or hear a band of music, I know that they are celebrating you. The Queen, in her palace, has your heroic name hardly ever off her lips ”

“ I am sure that Donna Rusidda, as she came forward to welcome us to the poor house, in which she had been born, and her ancestors before her, for five hundred years, looked as fit to be a queen as any woman in Europe: she was so beautiful, her nostrils, her mouth and chin were so delicately cut. I have seen no cameo of antiquity equal in beauty of outline to that which she had executed and presented to Will the time we sailed away to the reconquest of Naples—the cameo which every day is pinned on black velvet upon Katherine’s wrist, for she is a gentler memory to Katherine than even to Will. ”

“ Only yesterday morning, after a week of this tender nursing, her head was a little nearer to me; and feeling that this was the last of such mornings, I being now sufficiently the better to be able to resume my ordinary day, I ventured to press my lips firmly upon the bright hair just above the noble forehead,—so intellectual, so exquisite, in the contour of its brows,—intending to signify gratitude for her care, and the end of my pleasant ailing. ”

“ Besides, my people are not your people, and it is a long way—I do not know how far, perhaps thousands of miles—from Sicily to England; and we are a people who live in a summer land, where one can even gather figs of thistles, but where everything one gathers turns into the lotus before it reaches the mouth, and robs the mind and limbs of all desire saving to eat and drink and be merry. And we of Sicily, called of the ancients the ‘laughing land,’ cannot even be merry, for every race which has conquered Sicily knows that it must itself be conquered afterwards. ”

“ But the windows of the Admiral’s chamber commanded view enough for any mortal man to desire. In the distance were the long line of mountains culminating in the snow-topped St. Angelo, twice as high as Vesuvius, which divides the Bay of Naples from the Gulf of Salerno, and, in the jaws of the Bay, Capri; while nearer in were the Castel dell’ Uovo rising up sheer from the drawbridge running out from Santa Lucia; the hill of Pausilippo, with its white villas peeping out from dark trees; and between them the royal garden with its feathery palms and ilex avenues. ”

“ These water-mazes are very popular with the rich; and in some instances, like the present, immense sums are spent on their construction: indeed, they form the staple of amusement at an excursion to an unfamiliar palace or villa, where only one or two are in possession of the knowledge where the traps lie. You are safe nowhere: the shower may be lying in wait for lovers in a retired walk, or for a whole company on the most frequented lawn. But the water is laid on more lightly for the most part than Donna Rusidda laid it on for Will. ”

“ I am thankful that Lady Hamilton and I are not hidebound by any such superstitions. This is not to say that I have not had grave misgivings with my conscience, for it does not seem right that any man should enjoy such perfect happiness as I feel in the companionship of dear Lady H. It is the happiness that I mistrust, not the holding of friendly hands and meeting of friendly lips. And yet why should one mistrust happiness? ”

“ Yes, Naples is a Delilah—a beautiful creature without morals, without chasteness, without honour, but capable of forgetting herself in soft love—a creature that loves banqueting and excitement and lights and music and flowers—a creature, in fact, typified by the merry music which her light-hearted beggars play in her streets. ”

“ Neither army nor mob could daunt her from fighting for a friend as a tigress will fight for her cubs; and, what is finer, she is equally dauntless of responsibility. Had Emma been a sea-captain, she would have been as daring as Foley at the Nile. Heaven meant her to be a queen, but stayed its hand and sent her to a country where there was a Queen after her own heart, and to be the ambassador of a greater country, for she is the ambassador of Great Britain. Sir William is too much taken up with the set of his eyeglass and the handling of his snuff-box. ”

“ The Queen’s army cannot move till November, which will give me time and plenty to summon Valetta.
“Between it all I may get some action to clear my atmosphere. If I stayed long in Naples, I feel as if I should not be able to leave it. I have never lived till now, but I must struggle against it, though goodness knows why. Surely the Power which sent us into the world meant us to make the best of our lives. Not the best in a shore-parson’s sense, but the best in the sense of extracting the utmost cause for thankfulness out of life—the utmost gratitude for it. ”

“ There are some women who are not completely graceful, and yet give the onlooker a great sense of satisfaction. There is a sort of wild freedom, a declaration of strength and health, an evidence of courage and high spirits, which bespeak an animal perfection too intense for the gentle ease of grace. Katherine was one of those mettlesome women who make men’s blood tingle, and whose own red blood never runs cold in the direst peril. ”

“ She will deny me to people when they come to tell me the same tale—it is always the same tale—that the Emperor, Acton, the Russians, Sir Sidney Smith, the Bey, the Grand Signor, they are all of them doing nothing or worse than nothing, and Ball is helpless without even food from Sicily for the Maltese. Why should I have to listen to them every hour of the day? The Grand Signor is the best of them, and he is a mule ridden by those crafty Russians, who are playing the deep game. ”

“ It is quite easy to give the numbers of an army to a man who is playing ball with you, or trying to take off a pulcinello.
Donna Rusidda turned round to Will, who was still very grim and hurt, and looked as though he would give his whole prospects to hide himself in the little Saracen building which the Queen had erected as a kind of summer-house, and which was the last piece of shelter before the Palace, that rose with the splendour and solitariness of a temple half a mile away. ”

“ But he was fighting with a demon rather than with a man. I never saw a human being with such a fighting fury as Will, who sprang at him like a leopard. I do not see, however, how this should have prevailed, with Will’s ignorance of fence, had not the mossy ground on which the Prince was standing proved rotten, as mossy ground will at times, the surface rubbing off and leaving a slippery mud. The Prince’s foot slipped, and Will struck his sword out of his hand. The Prince called out to him to despatch him; but Will said, with his air, “My honour is satisfied—I am not one to kill a fallen man.” ”

“ Naples, as the Admiral said, is a city of fiddlers and light-o’-loves, utterly irresponsible; willing to begin a war with a nation like France, without counting the cost; marching to battle with the intention of turning her back the moment the enemy stopped retreating and faced her; willing to squander money that was needed for the very existence of the kingdom on pasteboard decorations and mythological fêtes; willing to accept any strong master, as Delilah accepted Samson, and from the very first thinking how she might betray him. ”

“ Since my arrival at Naples I have found all ranks, from the very highest to the lowest, eager for war with the French, who, all know, are preparing an army of robbers to plunder these kingdoms and destroy the Monarchy. I have seen the Minister of the insolent French pass over in silence the manifest breach of the third article of the treaty between his Sicilian Majesty and the French Republic. Ought not this extraordinary conduct to be seriously noticed? Has not the uniform conduct of the French been to lull governments into a false security, and then to destroy them? ”