I

One afternoon in the nineties, I called upon my friend Mrs. Chandler Moulton, the American poet. She had taken a first-floor suite of rooms in a large house in the west of London, in which other paying guests were also just then staying. I was shown into the reception room attached to Mrs. Moulton’s suite, and was told that she would be with me in a few minutes. Almost immediately after, another of Mrs. Moulton’s friends, Madame Antoinette Sterling, called, and was shown into the room where I was waiting. We had met before, and fell to chatting. Madame Sterling happened to mention the piece in her repertoire, which was not only her own favourite, but was also that which, in her opinion, best suited her voice. When I said that by some chance I had been so unfortunate as to miss hearing her sing it, she replied quickly:

“If that is so, I will sing it for you now.”

Then she rose, and drew herself up statuesquely—as it were to “attention”—and to her full height, a striking figure. Grant Allen once said to me that he suspected she had a strain of Red Indian blood in her veins. If that be so—I do not know—it showed itself in a certain proud imperturbability of bearing, and by the fact that she stood, if not exactly stock-still, at least almost motionless and gestureless. It showed itself, too, in the high cheek-bones; in the swarthiness of her complexion, and the snaky smooth coils of black hair that, parted low and loosely over the brow, toned down, and softened into womanliness, the almost masculine massiveness of the strong purposeful features. Throwing back her head, like a full-throated thrush, and with her hands clasped simply in front of her, she began to sing, low and flute-like at first, but as she went on letting her glorious voice swell out in an organ-burst of song.

The effect was singular. The London season was at its height, and the house was full of visitors, chiefly, I believe, Americans. When Madame Sterling began to sing, we could distinctly hear the buzz of conversation coming up from the floor below. Overhead, one could hear the restless movement of feet, and sounds like those which come from a kitchen—the chink of china and the clashing together of knives, forks, and spoons, as if in preparation for a meal—were also audible.

But as the first few notes of the rich, full, noble, and far-carrying contralto rang out, the chatter of voices below, the shuffle of feet, or of furniture overhead, even the necessary commonplace, vulgar sounds that came from the basement and the kitchen, were suddenly checked, shamed, and silenced; and, as the singer’s voice deepened into full diapason, one almost fancied that not only the men and women gathered together in different rooms under that one roof, but the very house itself, even the dead and inanimate pieces of furniture, were strained and stilled in listening silence.

I am reminded of this old-time and almost forgotten incident by an “Impression of Stephen Phillips,” contributed under the initials “H.W.B.” to the Outlook of December 18, 1915, by Mr. Horace Bleackley, the distinguished novelist. Just as that noisy boarding-house was at first surprised, and then, as it were, frozen into a strange, almost uncanny silence by Madame Sterling’s marvellous notes, so, by the majesty of spoken words, Stephen Phillips compelled an unwilling company to a like hushed and awed reverence.

“It was an evening party in an undergraduate’s rooms at Christ Church, Oxford, about twenty-seven years ago,” writes Mr. Bleackley. “It was a decorous gathering—not a ‘wine’—but there had been music and mirth, and none of us were at all inclined towards serious things. Suddenly the host announced that a member of the Benson Company—several of whom were our guests on this occasion—would give a recitation. A grave and thoughtful young man rose before us, with the features of a Greek god, whom most of us recognised at a glance (for we all had been at the theatre that week) as the Ghost in Hamlet. Somewhat resentfully we relapsed into silence, few showing any signs of enthusiasm, for scarcely any of us had the slightest doubt that we were going to be bored.

“For twenty minutes the actor held us spellbound. His voice was musical and his elocution that of a consummate artist. But this we had realised before. It was not the charm of his diction that enthralled us, but the melody of his verse—fresh and pure from the heavenly spring. And when he had finished there were awestruck whispers—which I seem to hear still—even from the Philistines: ‘It is his own poem!’ Few of that company can have been surprised when, about a decade later, all the world had hailed Stephen Phillips as one of the greatest of living poets.”

Mr. Bleackley’s “Impression” was gathered long before Phillips had reached the plenitude and the maturity of his power, for the poet was then a very young man, leaving Cambridge as he did without taking a degree, and joining his cousin’s Sir F.R. Benson’s touring theatrical company. Those who heard Phillips at his prime and at his best, will agree with me that his rendering of poetry cannot be described by such words as “reading,” “recitation,” or “recital.” The plain unexaggerated fact is that by mere words his rendering of poetry cannot be described.

I am not writing of his acting, nor of his public reading, for, excellent and memorable as were both, I doubt whether those who have heard and seen Phillips only upon the stage, or the platform, have any idea what he was like at his best—and at his best he never was in public. It was in his own or in a friend’s home, and in the company only of intimates, of whose sympathy and understanding he was assured, that Phillips was his natural self, and therefore, his natural self (alas, that he was not always that natural self!) being inherently noble, at his highest and best. I have heard spiritualists assert that the presence of one single person of unsympathetic temperament has made it impossible to attain the necessary trance condition on the part of the medium, and so has brought a sÉance to nought.

Whether that be so or not I cannot say, for I have no knowledge of spiritualism, but I recall occasions when Stephen Phillips had been strangely disappointing, and, in explaining his failure to me afterwards, he said:

“I couldn’t help it. That man or that woman’s very presence spoilt everything and put me off. I seemed to feel his or her cold and fish-like eyes fastened upon me as I read. I was all the time as aware of that person’s boredom as sailors are aware, by the change in the coldness of the atmosphere, of approaching bergs. Worse, I was like a skater, fallen into a hole under the ice; who can find no way out, but is held down and drowned under a roof of solid and unbroken ice. One man, one woman, like that in my audience, or even in a room, keeps me self-conscious all the time, and so makes poetry impossible; for poetry, high poetry, is the sublimation, the exaltation, of the senses into soul. It is the forgetting of self, the losing, merging and fusing of one’s very individuality into pure thought, and into visions and revelations of the Truth and the Loveliness that are of God.”

II

It has been my fortune to know not a few poets. It has been my fate to play listener while they, or most of them, read aloud their verses. To them, presumably, some sort of satisfaction was to be derived from the self-imposed task; otherwise I should not have been thus afflicted. To me the case was one of holding on, directly under the enemy’s artillery and without returning his fire, the casualties in my own moral garrison being heavy. I was in fact for the most part as severely punished as was Stephen Phillips on one occasion of which he told me.

The wife of a friend of his was chatting in her drawing-room one afternoon with two or three callers, among whom was Phillips. To them entered the host her husband, who, drawing the author of Marpessa aside, whispered to him, “Come along, Phillips, let’s enjoy ourselves!”

“I was rather tiring of the drawing-room talk,” said Phillips, in relating the incident, “and my host’s alluring words were like Hope. They told a flattering tale. ‘Rumour has it,’ I said to myself, ‘that there are in his cellars some bottles of port upon which it is good to look when the colour is tawny in the glass. Nectar for the gods, was the way one connoisseur described it. Does this mean that my host is going to crack a bottle in my honour? Does this mean he is going to fit me out with one of those choice cigars which he has also the reputation of possessing?’ ‘Come along, Phillips, and let’s enjoy ourselves!’ were his words.

“And what do you think happened? He lured me away to a dark and chilly library, and read Francis Thompson’s poems to me for three mortal hours. If that is his idea of enjoying himself it isn’t mine!”

Nor mine, I hasten to add, unless the reader were Stephen Phillips himself, to listen to whom was the most exquisite artistic pleasure imaginable. I agree with Mr. Bleackley that it was not Phillips’s voice, nor his diction, nor his art that enthralled the hearers, but I question whether Mr. Bleackley is right in attributing the effect produced to the fact that the poet was speaking his own poem. For that effect was the same whether the poem were by Phillips himself or by Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, or Swinburne. In ordinary conversation Phillips’s voice was not notably beautiful. It was clear, musical, resonant, and finely modulated—that was all. Had one done no more than talk with him, I am not sure that his voice would thus far have impressed itself upon the memory. But in speaking poetry, his voice was as different from the voice to which one was accustomed in conversation as is a lit taper from the same taper when unkindled. Poetry kindled the taper of his soul to flame, as only poetry could. His genius was more supremely evident at such times—that is to say, when he was living poetry, when he was, as it were, caught up and filled by some Pentecostal spirit of poetry outside himself—than when he was, in travail and labour, if under the pure impulse of inspiration, creating poetry. Then from the man to whom we were listening the fetters of the senses (alas, that those fetters should sometimes hold so closely and so heavily as to drag us downwards to earth!) seemed to fall away, and his soul to soar back to the heaven whence he had fallen.

He would begin to read or to recite with slow unemotional deliberateness—the enunciation perfect, and the voice exquisitely modulated—but at first there was just a suspicion of a chant, an incantation, as if by a spell to call up the Spirit of Poetry before us. It was beautiful, it was the perfection of elocutionary art, but for the time being it seemed cold and afar from us and our lives, like the frozen marble beauty of Greek statuary. Soon his voice would deepen, and the room become strangely still. It was the listeners now who reminded one of statuary, for each sat unmoving, scarcely breathing, every sense, every thought, centred on the reader who, his great eyes ablaze, yet all unseeing, sat as if in a trance. This was no longer Stephen Phillips, our friend and intimate with whom we had walked and talked.

All of us know what it is suddenly and unexpectedly to hear that we shall see on earth, no more, a friend, who but yesterday was with us, and of us, alive and well, his familiar and happy self. “No! No! He is not dead! It cannot be! It must not be!” we cry out when first told—as if death were something unnatural and abnormal; as if it were but some oversight, some mistake, against which we have but to enter our protest, to move High God to set it right. But even as we thus cry out, even as we stagger back under the shock, and turn sick and faint—so unendurable is our first sense of pity for the dead—even then our pity passes, for we know it is we, the living, not the dead, who are in need of pity. Even then and thus early (so instantly ancient is death, once we realise that it has come) some strange new majesty, august and awful, has come between our friend and us, as if to withdraw him an Æon and a world away. And for the moment, and while the spell was upon him, and upon us, the soul of Stephen Phillips, when he was thus entranced by poetry, seemed scarcely less far-removed from us, and from our little world, than are the newly dead. For though to no mortal has the soul of a man been visible, to some of us who have listened to Stephen Phillips in those rare moments, it seemed as if the soul of a man had at least become audible.

Then, in some vague way, one’s thoughts wandered back to the time when God walked in the Garden in the cool of the evening, and His Voice was heard by mortals. For then the exigencies of Time and Space were abrogated. The little room, wherein the poet sat and read, while we listened, was so strangely transformed for us, that we saw the vision of Dante and Milton unfold themselves before our eyes. The poet could so speak a word as to make it seem like the Spirit of God breathing upon the face of the waters, and calling new worlds into being. He could so speak that single word as to make it almost a world in itself.

When in Swinburne’s second chorus in Atalanta in Calydon Phillips came to the lines

with the last word “sleep,” as it came from Stephen Phillips’s lips, the very world itself seemed to close tired eyes, to wander away into unconsciousness, and finally to fall on sleep. James Russell Lowell once said that if Shakespeare be read in the very presence of the sea itself, his voice shall but seem the nobler, for the sublime criticism of ocean; and the words recall Stephen Phillips to me as I write, for in his voice, when he was deeply stirred by poetry, there was something measured, unhasting, majestic, like the vastness of great waters, moving in flood of full tide under the moon.

I have tried to give the reader some idea of his rendering of poetry, and I have failed, for, as I have already said, it cannot be described. Some godlike spirit, outside himself, seemed, in these supreme and consecrated hours, suddenly to possess him, and, when the hour and the consecration were past, as suddenly to leave him. But, while that hour lasted, there was only one word for Stephen Phillips, poet, and that word was Genius.