The 'Old Wayfarer'.
(I)

This hitherto unpublished poem is by Ernest Rhys. Besides being the General Editor of the excellent Everyman's Library, for which, the year I met him, he edited the thousandth number, he is a poet of no mean order and a writer of lucid prose. Many of the Introductions at the beginning of the volumes of the above popular Library were written by him. I intend relating how the pleasant sounding lines of verse, with which I have headed this section of my reminiscences, came to be written. I also wish to write about my several meetings with their author while for a month or two he was living in the Cornish village of Polruan - by - Fowey, in a summer somewhere near the middle of the late world War. We had lived for more than twenty years on 'the green cliff', and by that 'open sea', It was our house he wrote about and my wife and I were each the 'Friend' he addressed the verses to. It is her 'brush' he alludes to in the sixth line, she being a professional painter (and I, too, have done some amateur work in that way). The 'poet's dream' of the next line has reference to the inward promptings that have led me to produce much verse, of a sort.

Being in need of rest, as he may well have been at his age, then eighty-five, and with his multifarious literary activities, he had applied to his old friend Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch for advice as to obtaining lodgings at or near Fowey. Q, or probably his daughter Joy, got him rooms in Polruan, overlooking the busy harbour, with all its war-time comings and goings.

My meeting with him came about in this way. I was resting one morning on a seat at the top of the hill, close to the remains of the old Church that five hundred years ago extended from the ruins eastwards for more than two hundred feet, and near the coast-guard's look-out hut. Before me was the open sea, and to the right there shone a view of the coast from the Gribben, past Mevagissey and Gorran Haven to the headland called The Dodman - Q's 'Deadman's rock'. It was early in the morning and the sun was still in the east, showing up, forty miles away, part of the Lizard peninsular near Cadgwith, looming in a mist of sunshine. I watched the sun lighting up the windows of the houses across the wide bay, and glancing dazzlingly back at me from rows of glass-roofed greenhouses ten miles and more away.

Presently a strange old man approached me and sat down at my side. From his pocket he produced a slim book, a copy of Robert Bridges' Anthology, "The Spirit of Man", and glanced alternately at the view and at the pages of his book. Soon he asked me the name of the little town shining opposite. I told him it was Mevagissey, and then ventured to ask him what he was reading, "for", said I, "I am interested in books.""
Well now," he repied, "you ought to know this excellent collection by Robert Bridges, "The Spirit of Man!" I love it - spite of its irritating index. I was looking up the four or five passages from Dostoevsky, who was a prophet, indeed. Listen to this!" And very clearly he read the words. His voice trembled with deep feeling as he went on.
"Surely it is not a vain dream that a man shall come to find his joys only in acts of enlightenment and of mercy, and not in cruel pleasures, as he doth now, in gluttony, lust, pride, boasting and envious self-exaltation. I hold firmly that this is no dream but that the time is at hand..... I believe that through Christ we shall accomplish this great work... and all men will say 'The stone which the builders rejected is become the chief stone of the corner'. And of the mockers themselves we may ask, if this faith of ours be a dream, then how long is it to wait ere ye shall have finished your edifice, and have ordered everything justly by the intellect alone without Christ? .... In truth they have a greater faculty for dreaming than we have. They think to order all wisely, but, having rejected Christ, they will end by drenching the world with blood. For blood crieth again for blood, and they that take the sword shall perish by the sword."
"That is fine!" said I. "And terribly true!"
"Yes, Dostoyevsky was, indeed, a real seer into the essence of things. The hellish war now going on proves him right when he wrote that these Christ-rejecters 'will end by drenching the world with blood'.
But let us be less serious for a while, and turn for a few minutes to the still beautiful country side. Listen!

Ah, that is the true Milton! Not the pompous theologian of Paradise Lost!"
"Yet", cried I "Paradise Lost is full of lovely passages!"
"Of course!" he replied. "Six grains of wheat to six bushels of chaff!"
"Well, friend," I said, I must go now. Will you come with me and look at my books, and, if you will, hear me read a few of my own verses? I don't know whom I have the pleasure of addresseing - my name is Robert Hall, and I live close by."
"O, I am Ernest Rhys! I, too, am a poet, and I am longing to hear your verses - and to see your books!"
So together we walked to my home on the green cliff. And together we sat and browsed here and there on the pastures of literature in my room. For a few days I was living alone, my wife having gone to London on a visit. Ernest Rhys settled into my arm-chair and told me about himself. From a shelf he took a small volume that he saw there, 'Shorter Lyrics of the Twentieth Century', published by my old friend Harold Monro at his 'Poetry Bookshop'. It has a foreword by the super-tramp Poet, W.H. Davies. Rhys opened it at page 140, and said, 'Here you have my autobiography in a nutshell! Listen!"

"I see!" said I. "Your father was Welsh, your Mother English, you were born in London, you have spent many days by Welsh streams, you married an Irish lady, - you must have had a very varied and most romantic and adventurous career."
"And I am now waiting for death to introduce me to more romantic adventures. And it cannot be long before that mysterious life opens for me, for I am eighty-five now."
I aksed, "Are you still busy with literary work, Mr. Rhys? I think I remember seeing your name in the volumes of Everyman's Library."
"Ah, yes!" he replied. "I have been General Editor of the series from the beginning and my ambition of late has been to finish the thousandth number and then retire. I thought that I should then have deserved that boon, and could take the blessing of leisure gracefully. Well, what do you think? I am just finishing the desired volume, but as for retirement, I see no prospect of it yet."
"Were you not responsible, too, for some numbers of "The Canterbury Poets" - the dear little "Canterburies?"
"Yes, quite a number of them I wrote introductions for. True, they were delightful pocket-friends, half a century ago, or was it more!"
"So retirement for you is not yet, Mr. Rhys?"
"Alas, No! for I get very tired in London, and find work there increasingly difficult. That is why I have come to this remote corner of Cornwall. I have had to bring with me quite a library of reference books and others, but I must say that I sometimes wish I could take a bus and slip into the British Museum!"
"And you still write poetry?"
"Indeed, yes! Whatever the mental machinery may be that produces verse, it goes on and on working almost automatically."

Out of his pocket he brought a note-book for my inspection, full of lead-pencil scribblings, some, to me, illegible. He read to me one or two of the little pieces, but none that I heard then I considered of outstanding merit.

He changed the subject and said, "I must look at some of those leather-bound little volumes on that shelf. They fascinate me, and I am sure they are worth looking at."

We took down the greatest treasure of my small collection of books, Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici, the rare edition published unknown to Sir Thomas by his officious friends before, in his resentment at their interference, he prepared and brought out his own first edition in 1643. My copy is dated 1642. My little book greatly pleased 'Q' whe I showed it to him a month or two before he died which sad event occurred a year or two after Rhys's visit.

"Now here," cried the old man, taking down another volume, "Is a strange and rare little book - I see it is about two hunderd and fifty years old - Erasmus - some of his colloquies, or dialogues. And I see that each page has two columns, one in Latin and th other in English."
"Do you know," I said, "that Charles Reade used many of these colloquies as material for his famous story "The Cloister and the Hearth", in which, of course, Erasmus himself figures as a baby?"
"Yes!" he answered, "And he stole quite brazenly, without disguise, and without the slightest acknowledgement, whole pages, copying without alteration, for instance the piece "Naufragium" - the Shipwreck. And this incident of the Monk, and that of the unmoved woman nursing her child in the tempest! And here again" - turning over some pages - "he took bodily out of this book 'Erasmus's description of the inns of Germany and of Burgundy! And there is a lot more than that he appropriated, the thief! Reade was the prince of plagiarists.
Ah, here is another Erasmus! The famous Antipolemus, The Plea of Reason, Religion and Humanity against War. Addressed to aggressors. I see your copy is 150 years old. The original of course was written about 400 years ago."
"One of my favourite books!" said I.
"It deserves to be," he replied. We do not need more up-to-date arguments against that arch-evil War. To think that the world has had the opportunity of reading such fine reasoning for 400 years, and in spite of that is capable of carrying on the present devilry!"
So we flitted from book to book, as butterflies from flower to flower, and, satiated with honey of poetry and mystical philosophy, we separated, planning another meeting soon.


(II)

The meeting took place before the planned one became due. At the house of a friend I found Ernest Rhys, quite at home, reading poetry aloud. Very naturally it came about that each member of the company read a poem to us all. Of course, this is the only way to read poetry, which is essentially musical and only fully appreciated when it reaches the mind through the spoken word. Rhys did not chant his verses as was the wont of several poetry-readers I have met. Shelley was the poet, some of who's shorter poems we mutually enjoyed.

The planned meeting took place at our house on the day after the Shelley reading. St. Francis of Assisi somehow became the principal subject of our conversation. It began with a remark by Ernest Rhys after he had scanned my bookshelves once more. "I see you have Chesterton's Francis and Dobson's and Mrs. Oliphant's and even Walter Raymond's popular volume. Good, but I cannot find Sabatier's life of the Little Brother."
"I plead guilty to not possessing what some think is the best of the lives of the Saint."
"It certainly is the best story of the life of St. Francis. And I think you will agree with me that it is strange that a Protestant pastor should have done so much better than the Catholic writers. He was able to catch the authentic Franciscan spirit and himself very delightfully embodied it, not only in his book, but in his own life. What they call the "Edition Definitive", has just appeared, and a lot of new knowledge has been included in a lengthy appendix to the original life."
"Well," I replied, "I remember now that I read Sabatier. I think in the nineties, and the joy, irradiating me then in the company of dear St. Francis is with me yet. Would you like to see some little poems of mine about the Saint, and the beautiful stories concerning him that have come down to us?"
"Yes, I must see those! Read them to me!"
So I hunted in the many little M.S. Volumes of my collected verse and found at least twenty pieces, half a dozen of which I read to my friend.
Rhys commented, "now I am glad, you have caught the joyous spirit of the Troubadours of God. It was more a French gaiety than an Italian seriousness that marked the "Little Brother's life. One might quote Keats, and say that the story of St. Francis's Life, and all concerning him are

"And I find", he went on, "more than a taste of 'that vintage' in your poems."
"It is good of you to say so," I said.
"Why don't you make a little volume of Franciscan poems, compose a few more, so as to make it a collection of thirty or forty pieces, and I will see what can be done about getting it published?"
"Well, it's worth considering", I said.
Here I will copy out just one of the poems that Ernest Rhys heard me read that Summer evening in my bookroom.

We agreed in regarding Bro. Francis as incarnating both unrestrained joy and severest asceticism. In him gaiety and austerity were reconciled and mated.
"Do you think", said I, "that his joy came from his suffering, or in spite of his suffering.?"
"I think we can regard both together as the true solution of the difficulty." replied Rhys. "Even on his death-bed, he composed his fine 'Hymn of the Sun', which was to him the symbol of God."
"And when ill," said I, "resting in Clare's Convent he would again and again pick up two sticks from the ground and scrape one across the other in the manner of a Viol, while he improvised and sang glad hymns in the French language.
"Do you think," I asked, "that he has a meaning and a message for us in this late, weary age?"
"Certainly! His stern joy is what is needed to correct our mad debauchery of war and greed."
"Come, friend!" I cried, "We shall have to be as joyous and romantic and as severe with ourselves as Francis was and accompany our Singing - Master and his care-free troop of disciples, not among the stony paths of Umbrian mountains, terraced with friuting vines, nor across the sunny valleys, silver-green with olive orchards, but along our English lanes and city streets, and indeed, wherever we find ourselves!"
Said Rhys, "Now you must make a poem of your rhapsody! At any rate we are both longing, and I think most people are longing for the glad simplicity of those first Spring-days at Assisi!"
"It is the joy of Francis," said I, "that somehow, we must make our own if we are to succeed in triumphantly meeting the colossal duties and responsibility that are advancing to meet us in the near future. Does not the old Book say, "The joy of the Lord is your strength?"
"Yes, friend, we must give a sad and disillusioned world a glimpse of the outshining of the same spirit of Light that shone from St. Francis as from his Master Jesus! Now, to change the subject, let me read to you some verses I have addressed to my dear wife, who left me, before this horrible War, I am glad to say."
"Please read it!" I said.

I am sorry that as I have no copy of it, and only dimly remember it, this poem cannot be reproduced here.
"She left me, I said," he went on," but, no, she has never left me! We are together always, inseparable! I converse with her night and day, and feel the pressure of her hand on mine. Together we ramble along the cliff, and, as one listener, hear the sea and the wind, the sea-gulls and sky-larks' songs. Together we bend over the tufts of wild thyme, and together breathe its sweetness. My dear one was never closer and never dearer."

I could reply little to this pathetic speech, except to say that I wished I could have met one so beloved by him.

(III)

My wife returned next day, and it was not long before Ernest Rhys took tea with us out of doors, in a roughly built shelter we had made at the east end of one of our lawns. The sky had but few clouds that dazzlingly glowed, while the colour of the sea was as intense and deep a blue as any I have seen in the Mediterranean.

He showed us and read aloud to us, the beginning of a poetic Romance he was writing. I have not more than a confused recollection of this, and I wonder if it will ever win the honour of print.

As my wife is an artist, some of our talk was of pictures and of painters he had met. Sir William Rothstein, for one, and he suddenly broke out "Now I have it! You must illustrate your husband's poems on St. Francis! I am sure you have plenty of sketches that would help!"

We told him that only a year or two before we had been in Italy and had visited Assisi, each of us, but chiefly she, making sketches of the place, and some of the outlying sacred shrines associated with the Little Brother, such as the Church and Convent of St. Damian, still so vitally and beautifully haunted after seven hundred years, by the Spirit of Clare and her friend Francis.
"Well, we will see what can be done between us." he said.

Then he told us of some of the well-known people he had met, the Meynells, Alice and Wilfred, and others of the poetic fraternity. A great friend of his had been Rabindranath Tagore when he visited England. Of painters, too, he had stories to tell, especially of William Rotherstein, as I have already mentioned.

So for an hour or two we watched the glowing blue sky, and the deeper-toned sea with its fishing boats amd little sailing yachts, and its crowds of vociferous gulls, a pair of which birds we had made friends with for more than twenty years, and learned in our intercourse with them, much of gull-psychology. They came close to the tea-table, and we threw pieces of cake and bread to them, for seeing a stranger with us they did not come and take the food out of our hands as they would have done had we been alone.

Again he spoke of his dear one, so near to him in spirit, and all-but-materialised by his love. We met once or twice again, and then he returned to London. We had a letter from him in a day or two, enclosing the poem with which I introduced my remarks about Ernest Rhys - "Dear Friend of the Green Cliff etc."

Since then I have neither seen him nor heard from him, and only once or twice vaguely of him. I trust he is still able to carry on his work in connection with Everyman's Library. There was a rumour he had become a boarder at some Home for old people. If this be so, I am sure he is still conscious of the real presence of his dear one, and finds his leisure made sweeter by poetical converse with her spirit. It is possible that 'The Old Wayfarer', as he called himself has at last reached the rest and refreshment of the Inn at the close of his earthly day, where in company with his beloved, he may perhaps think sometimes of the sunny green cliff at Polruan, and the frinds he once met there, and, maybe, regret that where he now dwells there is 'no more sea'. That is, if the words of St. John can be taken literally.