I little thought when I recently quoted from Dr. Hake’s account of that Christmas gathering of the Rossettis at Bognor in 1875—a gathering which he has made historic—that to-day I should be writing an obituary notice of the “parable-poet” himself. It is true that, having fractured a leg in a lamentable accident which befell him, he had for the last few years been imprisoned in one room and compelled during most of the time to lie in a horizontal position. But notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding his great age, his mental faculties remained so unimpaired that it was hard to believe his death could be so near.

Dr. Gordon Hake. From a crayon-drawing by D. G. Rossetti reproduced by the kind permission of Mr. Thomas Hake

Although, owing to his intimacy with George Borrow, Hake was associated in the public mind with the Eastern Counties, he was not an East Anglian. It was at Leeds (in 1809) that he first saw the light. His mother was a Gordon of the Huntly stock, and came of “the Park branch” of that house. The famous General Gordon was his first cousin, and it was owing to this fact that Hake’s son, Mr. Egmont Hake, was entrusted with the material for writing his authoritative books upon the heroic Christian soldier. Between Hake’s eldest son, Mr. T. St. E. Hake, a rising novelist, and the General the likeness was curiously strong. Nominated by one of his uncles to Christ’s Hospital, Hake entered that famous school. He gives in his ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ a very vivid picture of it and also a really vital portrait of himself. From his very childhood he was haunted by a literary ambition which can only be called an insatiable passion. It lasted till the very hour of his death. When eleven years of age he became acquainted with that one poet whose immensity of fame has for more than three centuries been the flame into which the myriad Shakespeare moths of English literature have been flying. The Shakespearean of eleven summers did not, like so many Shakespeare enthusiasts from Davenant down to those latest Shakespeares, Homers, and Miltons of our contemporary paragraphists, get himself up to look like the Stratford bust. The only man who ever really looked like that bust was the late Dion Boucicault, who did so without trying. But Shakespeare’s wonderful work acted on the imagination of the child of eleven in an equally humorous way. “Shakespeare’s perfection,” he says in his memoirs, “not only made me envious of the greatest of writers, but it depressed me in turn with the feeling that I could never equal it howsoever long I might live.”

Yet although this passion never passed away, but waxed with his years, it must not be supposed that Hake suffered from what in the “new criticism” is sweetly and appropriately called “modernity”—in other words, that vulgar greed for notoriety that in these days, when literature to be listened to must be puffed like quack medicine and patent soap, has made the atmosphere of the literary arena somewhat stifling in the nostrils of those who turn from “modernity” to poetic art. Nor was Hake’s feeling akin to that fine despair

Before the foreheads of the gods of song

which true poets, great or small, know—that fine despair which, while it will sometimes stop the breath of one of the true sons of Apollo, as it actually did strike mute Charles Wells, and as at one time it threatened to stop the breath of Rossetti, will lead others to write, and write, and write. It is, however, life’s illusions that in most cases make life tolerable. When in old age calamity came upon Hake, and he was shut out from life as by a prison wall, his one solace, the one thing that really bound him to life, was this ambitious dream which came upon the Bluecoat boy of eleven.

His mother was in easy circumstances, and when a youth Hake travelled a good deal on the Continent, where his success in the “great world” of that time was swift and complete. If this success was owing as much to his exceptionally striking personal appearance and natural endowment of style as to his intellectual equipments—high as these were—that is not surprising to those who knew him. Of course he was well advanced in years before I was old enough to call him my friend; but even then he was so extremely handsome a man that I can well believe the stories I have got from his family connexions (such as his wife’s sisters) of his appearance in youth. With the single exception of Tennyson, he was the most poetical-looking poet I have ever seen. And circumstances put to the best uses his natural gift of style; for it was in the plastic period of his life that he met the best people on the Continent and in England. I suspect, indeed, that after the plastic period in a man’s life is passed it is not of much use for him to come into contact with what used to be called “the great world.” To be, or to seem to be, unconscious of one’s own bearing towards the world, and unconscious of the world’s bearing towards oneself, is, I fancy, impossible to a man—even though he have the genius and intellectual endowment of a Browning—who is for the first time brought into touch with society after the plastic period is passed.

I have told elsewhere the whimsical story of Hake and Rossetti, of Rossetti’s delightful account of his reading as a boy, in a coffee-house in Chancery Lane, Hake’s remarkable romance ‘Vates,’ afterwards called ‘Valdarno,’ in a magazine; his writing a letter about it to the unknown author, and getting no reply until many years had passed. Hake’s relations towards Rossetti were of the deepest and most sacred kind. Rossetti had the highest opinion of Hake’s poetical genius, and also felt towards him the greatest love and gratitude for services of an inestimable kind rendered to him in the direst crisis of his life. To enter upon these matters, however, is obviously impossible in a brief and hurried obituary notice; and equally impossible is it for me to enter into the poetic principles of a writer whose very originality has been a barrier to his winning a wide recognition.

Hake’s best work is that, I think, contained in the volume called ‘New Symbols,’ in which there is disclosed an extraordinary variety of poetic power. In execution, too, he is at his best in that volume. Christina Rossetti has often told me that ‘Ecce Homo’ impressed her more profoundly than did any other poem of her own time. Also its daring startled her. It was, however, the previous volume, ‘Madeline, and other Poems,’ which brought him into contact with Rossetti—the great event of his literary life.

If the man ever lived who could take as much interest in another man’s work as his own, Dr. Hake in finding Rossetti found that man. Although at that time Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and Swinburne were running abreast of each other, there was no poet in England who would not have felt honoured by having his work reviewed by Rossetti. But Dr. Hake, whose name was absolutely unknown, had made his way into Rossetti’s affections—as, indeed, he made his way into the affections of all who knew him—and this was quite enough to induce Rossetti to ask Dr. Appleton for leave to review ‘Madeline’ in ’71 in The Academy—a request which Appleton, of course, was delighted to grant. And again, when in 1873 ‘Parables and Tales’ appeared, Mr. John Morley, we may be sure, was something more than willing to let Rossetti review the book in The Fortnightly Review; and, again, when ‘New Symbols’ appeared, there was some talk about Rossetti’s reviewing it in The Fortnightly Review; but this, for certain reasons which Rossetti explained to me—reasons which have been misunderstood, but which were entirely adequate—was abandoned. Down to the period when Dr. Hake went to live in Germany he and his son Mr. Gordon Hake were among the most intimate friends of the great poet-painter. Mr. Gordon Hake, indeed, a man of admirable culture and abilities, lived with Rossetti, who certainly benefited much by contact with his bright and lively companion. The portrait of Dr. Hake prefixed to Mrs. Meynell’s selections from his works is one of Rossetti’s finest crayons. It is, however, too heavy in expression for Hake.

Full of fine qualities as is his best poetry, full of intellectual subtlety, imagination, and a rare combination of subjective with objective power, there is apparently in it a certain je ne sais quoi which has prevented him at present from winning his true meed of fame. His hand, no doubt, is uncertain; but so is the hand of many a successful poet—that of Christina Rossetti, for instance. For sheer originality of conception and of treatment what recent poems surpass or even equal ‘Old Souls’ and the ‘Serpent Charmer’? Then take the remarkable mastery over colour exhibited by ‘Ortrud’s Vision.’ His volume of pantheistic sonnets in the Shakespearean form, ‘The New Day,’ written in his eighty-first year, is on the whole, however, his most remarkable work. The kind of Sufeyistic nature ecstasy displayed therein by a man of so advanced an age is nothing less than wonderful. And as to knowledge of nature, not even Wordsworth or Tennyson knew nature so completely as did Hake, for he had a thorough training as a naturalist. In looking at a flower he could enjoy not only its beauty, but also the delight of picturing to himself the flower’s inherited beauty and the ancestors from which the flower got its inheritance. And as regards the lyrical flow imported into so monumental a form as the sonnet, every student of this form must needs study the book with the greatest interest. His very latest work, however, is in prose. I find it extremely difficult to write about ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years.’ It is full of remarkable qualities: wit, humour, an ebullience of animal spirits that is Rabelaisian. What it lacks (and in some portions of it greatly lacks) is delicacy, refinement of tone. And surely this is remarkable when we realize the kind of man he was who wrote it.

It has been my privilege to go about with him not only in London, but also in Rome, in Paris, in Venice, in Florence, Pisa, &c.; and no matter what might be the quality of the society with which he was brought into contact, it always seemed to me that he was distinguished by his very lack of that accentuated movement which the littÉrateur generally displays. I merely dwell upon this to show how inscrutable are the mental processes in the crowning puzzle of the great humourist Nature, the writing man. Just as the most angular and gauche man in a literary gathering may possibly turn out to be the poet whose lyrics have been compared to Shelley, or the prose writer whose mellifluous periods have been compared to those of Plato, so the most dignified man in the room may turn out to be the writer of a book whose defect is a noticeable lack of dignified style. It was hard, indeed, for those who knew Hake in the flesh to believe that the ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’ was written by him. I suppose I shall be expected to say a word about the famous intimacy between Hake and Borrow. After Hake went to live in Germany, Borrow told me a good deal about this intimacy and also about his own early life; for reticent as he naturally was, he and I got to be confidential and intimate. His friendship with Hake began when Hake was practising as a physician in Norfolk. It lasted during the greater part of Borrow’s later life. When Borrow was living in London, his great delight was to walk over on Sundays from Hereford Square to Coombe End, call upon Hake, and take a stroll with him over Richmond Park. They both had a passion for herons and for deer. At that time Hake was a very intimate friend of my own, and having had the good fortune to be introduced by him to Borrow, I used to join the two in their walks. Afterwards, when Hake went to live in Germany, I used to take these walks with Borrow alone. Two more interesting men it would be impossible to meet. The remarkable thing was that there was between them no sort of intellectual sympathy. In style, in education, in experience, whatever Hake was Borrow was not. Borrow knew almost nothing of Hake’s writings, either in prose or in verse. His ideal poet was Pope, and when he read, or rather looked into, Hake’s ‘World’s Epitaph,’ he thought he did Hake the greatest honour by saying, “There are lines here and there that are nigh as good as Pope’s.” On the other hand, Hake’s acquaintance with Borrow’s works was far behind that of some Borrovians who did not know Lavengro in the flesh, such as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Birrell.

Borrow was shy, eccentric, angular, rustic in accent and in locution, but with a charm for me, at least, that was irresistible. Hake was polished, easy, and urbane in everything, and, although not without prejudice and bias, ready to shine gracefully in any society. As far as Hake was concerned, the sole link between them was that of reminiscence of earlier days and adventures in Borrow’s beloved East Anglia. Among many proofs that I could adduce of this, I will give one. I am the possessor of the manuscript of Borrow’s ‘Gypsies in Spain,’ written partly in a Spanish note-book as he moved about Spain in his colporteur days. It was my wish that Hake would leave behind him some memorial of Borrow more worthy of himself and his friend than those brief reminiscences contained in ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years.’ I took to Hake this precious relic of one of the most wonderful men of the nineteenth century in order to discuss with him differences between the MS. and the printed text. Hake was sitting in his invalid chair, writing verses. “What does it all matter?” he said. “I do not think you understand Lavengro,” said I. Hake replied, “And yet Lavengro had an advantage over me, for he understood nobody. Every individuality with which he was brought into contact had, as no one knows better than you, to be tinged with colours of his own before he could see it at all.”

This, of course, was true enough; and Hake’s asperities when speaking of Borrow in ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’—asperities which have vexed a good many Borrovians—simply arose from the fact that it was impossible for two such men to understand each other. When I told him of Andrew Lang’s angry onslaught upon Borrow, in his notes to the “Waverley Novels,” on account of his attacks upon Scott, he said, “Well, and does he not deserve it?” When I told him of Miss Cobbe’s description of Borrow as a poseur, he said to me, “I told you the same scores of times. But I saw that Borrow had bewitched you during that first walk under the rainbow in Richmond Park. It was that rainbow, I think, that befooled you.” Borrow’s affection for Hake, however, was both strong and deep, as I saw after Hake had gone to Germany and in a way dropped out of Borrow’s ken. Yet Hake was as good a man as ever Borrow was, and for certain others with whom he was brought in contact as full of a genuine affection as Borrow was himself.