Waite - A Magician of Many Parts

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A E Waite by Alvin Langdon Coburn 922

A E W I T EM G I C I N OF M N Y P RTS

R A GIL ER T


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First published 1987© R · A. GILBERT 1987

Allrights reserved. No part of this bookmay.be,reproduced or utilized in any,formor by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopying, recordingor by any information storage and

retrievalsystem, without permissionin writing from the Publisher.

British LibraryCataloguing in Publication Data

Gilbert R AA.E. Waite .magician of many parts.

1. Waite Arthur Edward 2. Occultsciences Biography

I Title1 3 3 0 9 2 4 B F 1 4 0 8 2 W 3

ISBN 1-85274-023-X

Crucible isan imprint of theThorsons Publishing Group Limited,Denington Estate, Wellingborough,

Northamptonshire N N8 2 RQ

Printed and bound in Great Britain

1 3 5 7 •9 1 0 8 6 2

CONTENTS

Preface Page 9Introduction Page

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 1 _From the New World Page 5

_ T he Church of Rome I found would suit Page 2

3 _Dangerous Rubbish: Penny Dreadfuls

and a World of Dreams Page 26

4 _The Tiresome Verse-Reciter Page 3

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ 5 _ _ Love that never told can be Page 38

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 6 - _ While yet a boy I sought for ghost s Page 47

7 Dora and the Coming of Love Page 57

8 _Frater Avallauniusand T he Road of Excess Page 67

9 No t verse now, only prose Page 76


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10 _ H e that aspired to know

A New Light of Mysticism Page 88

11 _The Hidden Church and a SecretTradition Page 97

2Golden Demons that none can stay -

An Hermetic Order of the .Golden Dawn Page 105

13 _The Independent and Rectified Rite:

the Middle Way Page 6

_ 14 Brotherhood is religion -

An Adept among the Masons Page 124

15 The Way of Divine Union Page

16 _Frater Sacramentum Regis and his

Fellowship of the Rosy Cross Page 142

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 17 The Passing of Arthur Page 155

Afterword: The Faith of A.E. Waite Page 163

Appendix A: I) The New Light of Mysticism Page 167

Appendix A: II) A Tentative Rite for An Order of theSpiritual Temple Page 170

Appendix B: The Constitut ion of the Secret Council ofRites Page 173

Appendix C: I) The Manifesto of 24 July 1903 Page 177

Appendix C: II) Constitut ion of the R R et A.C.Page 179

Appendix D: The Most Faithful Agreement andConcordat Page 8

Appendix E: I) The Fellowshipof the Rosy Cross,Constitution and Laws Page 8

Appendix E: II) The Clothing of Celebrants andOfficers Page 185

Notes Page 189

Select Bibliography Page 199

Index Page 203


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PREF E

As I was coming into the world, Waite was going out; and it was my discoveryof this curious, iftenuous, link between us that changed a mild interest in Waiteinto a fascination an obsession, if my wife is to be believed).for the man andhis work.

I discovered also that Waite was a very private man; his autobiography-Shadows ife and Thought which I have abbreviated throughout the text as T ~ r e v e a l sfar less of his outer li fe than i t appears to do, for Waite was moreconcerned to expound his mystical philosophy and to encourage others to seekfor themselves the Wa y of Divine Union than to record his personal history.In the autobiography he epitomises the image he presented to W. Yeats: thatof t he one deep student of these things known to me .

But his maddening vagueness and cavalierattitudeto the fine details of suchepisodesof hislifeashe didchooseto relatemaskeda desireto preservefor posteritythe full s tory or at least the story of his adult l ife, for there was much abouthis childhood that was well enough concealed to.make conjecture the principaltool for i ts dis interment. N ot tha t he necessari ly intended such a carefulconcealment, bu t rather that he neglectedto take proper care of his papers theywere stored in damp cellars and basements) so that many of them deterioratedbadly and some. of the most important were completely destroyed including

everything that related to his mother s family, and all the letters he had receivedfrom Yeats.

And yet there remain somany ofhis papers that no biographercouldjustlyask for more; by chance aided, as like to think, by diligence} I was led firstto his diaries and then to the larger bulk of his papers: personal, commercial,and esoteric. From other sourcesI obtained copiesof hisforty years correspondencewith Arthur Machen, and of hisequallyprolificcorrespondencewith hisAmericanfriend, Harold Voorhis. With the aid of the late Geoffrey Watkins I traced manyof those wh o had known Waite in his later life and recorded their memoriesand impressions of him. All ofwhich has taken far longer than it ought to havedone, and many of those wh o helped me when I began mypursuit of this multi-


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10 A. E. WAITE - MAGICIAN OF MANY PARTS _

faceted m a n f o r so he proved to be are no w themselves dead.To those wh o remain I am heavily indebted. The details of Waite s American

ancestrywere unearthed forme by Mr CharlesJacobsof Bridgeport, Connecticut;while information on his early lifewas provided by Fr. Hubert Edgar, O.P., MrRaphael Shaberman, and Fr. Horace Tennent. Much of the footwork aroundLondon was undertaken by my son, Nicholas, and Mr Timothy d Arch-Smithgave me the benefit of his expert opinion over the quest ion of Waite s early

predilections.Over the matter ofWaite s personal life havebeen greatly helped by ArthurMachen s children Mrs Janet Pollock and Mr Hilary Machen and by MrGodfrey Brangham, Mr RogerDobson, Mr Michael Goth and Mr ChristopherWatkins, all of whom supplied me with a wealth of correspondence betweenWaite and Machen; andby Mr A. B. Collins, Miss Marjorie Debenham, MrC. J. Forestier-Walker, Mrs Madge Strevens, and Mr Colin Summerford, wh ohave each provided invaluable information on Waite s tw o marriages and on hislater life.

For the story of Waite s involvement with the Golden Dawn and with theFellowship of the Rosy Cross I am greatly indebted toMr Warwick Gould, theRevd Dr Roma King, Mr.Keithjack son.Mr Roger Parisious, Mrs FrancinePrince,Mr John Semken, Mr Andrew Stephenson, and those anonymous survivors ofthe Fellowship of the Rosy Cross wh o wish forever to remain unknown.

AleisterCrowley s referencesto Waite were found forme byMr Clive HarperandMr Martin Starr,while I could not havecharted Waite s masoniccareerwithoutthe constant help and encouragement of Mr John Hamill, the Librarian of theUnited Grand Lodge of England. havebeen similarly helped by the staff ofthe BritishLibrary(ReferenceDivision) and of the libraryof the Warburg Institute.I must also thank th e many correspondents wh o have provided me withsuggestions, clues,andobscure titbits ofinformationduring the time of my quest.

Bu t above allmy thanks are due to Ellic Howe, Lewis Richter, and the RevdKevin Tingay: three friends and colleagues wh o for the past fifteen years haveaided and abetted me far beyond the call of duty in my pursu it of Waite andall his works. lowe them a debt that cannot easily be repaid.

Lastly must thank my wife, wh o has lived with Waite for aslong asshehas lived with his biographer and has yet contrived to tolerate us both.

R. A. GILBERTBristol February 98

INTRODUCTION

WRITING to his friend Louis Wilkinson, on 7 April 1945, Aleister Crowleyremarked in uncharacteristicallycharitable fashion-- If it had not been for Waite, doubt if, humanly speaking, should ever have got in touch with the GreatOrder. Inevitably he prefixed this praise with abuse: Waite certainly did starta revival of interest in Alchemy, Magic, Mysticism, and all the rest. That hisscholarship was so contemptible, his style so over-loaded, and his egomania sooutrageous doesnot kill to the point ofextinction, the worth of hiscontribution.Even this is mutedcriticism for Crowley; more often he heaped abuse on Waitewith gusto, tingeing it with venomous personal attacks that were as unjustifiedaswere hisassaults on Waite s writing. His characterization ofWaite (inhis novelMoonchild as Edwin Arthwait , a dull andinaccuratepedant without imaginationor real magical perception , is more a reflection of his self-perception. But wh yshould Crowley, flamboyant, indifferent to public opinion and public morals,and with a perpetualcircle of sycophantic acolytes,be soexercised with the needto condemn a man he perceived as a fellow occultist?

Throughout the ten issuesofhis periodical h Equinox Crowley maintaineda stream of invective and abuse against A. E. Waite, condemning the man, hisworks, his fr iends and all that he stood for. As there was vir tual ly no publiccirculation of h Equinox these attacks seem futile, and can only be explainedbya wish on Crowley s part tojustifyhis own actions. He had written to Waitein 898 after reading h Book of Black Magic and receivedin reply the adviceto go awayand read Eckartshausen s h Cloud upon the Sanctuary. Having readthe book Crowley realized that there is a hidden, Interior Church behind theouter institutions; but when he subsequentlyjoined the Hermetic Order of theGolden Dawn he failedto find the Interior Church for the simple reason thatit was never there. Such a Church the Holy Assembly would inevitably,haverequired from Crowley what he did no t wish to give: the renunciation of hisself-centred nature. This he could only preserve by the practice of magic andit was Waite s measured analysis of the futility and wickedness of magic thatso enraged him in later years.


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of his importance in the field of mysticism and one must rest content with theknowledge tha t hi s con tr ibut ion to the h is to ry of ideas is at l ast becomingappreciated for.its. true worth.

Bu t is the story of his life worth t he te lli ng? I f for no o ther reason thanto give an understanding o f T he Growth of a Mystic s Mind-s-which is howhe perceivedhis own career-it is;and there areother sound reasons. When writinghis autobiography, Shadows of Life n Thought Waite pointed ou t that TheseMemoirs, are a record, no t a confession, and it is a wise counsel after all to keep

one s ow n skeletons in one s ow n cupboard , whileexpressing the hope that T hesuppressio veri has been minimised so far as possible, while the suggestio falsi isabsent throughout. Much that.interests the student of rejected knowledge ,however,is containedin that suppressedtruth and Waite s skeletons,when released,wil l point their f ingers at others besides himself. Indeed, i t is impossible tounderstand the development ofthe Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn withouta detailed knowledge of Waite s role in its history and his relationship with itsmembers, just asa knowledge of the wider Occult Revival of the nineteenthcentury is impoverished without an awareness of Waite s role in its various aspects.

Then there are those wh o crossed his path. For varying reasons, RobertBrowning, Arthur Machen, and Charles Williams all had dealings with Waite

and the story of his l ife throws sidel ights on the story of theirJives also. Andjust asWaite was more than a myst ic or maligned occul tist , so there are otherfacets to his character and other aspects to his career: a man wh o could exaltin verse the loveof Go d and of man while praising with equal facility the gloriesof malted milk iscurious enough to be examined in his own right. If his questfor the Secret Tradition is seen asa tarnished following of occultism, and if hispoetryis relegated to a minor placeamong the lesser poets, his progress throughlife nonetheless remains both eccentric and entertaining.

1 _F R O M TH N W W O R L

The other day I came acrossan Affidavit of Theodore L. Mason, M.D., residing in State ofNew York, King s County, City of Brooklyn, who affirmed that in the month ofSeptember1857 he was called to attend the wife ofCharles F.Waite, who was duly deliveredof a child.Captain and Mrs Waitewere boarders in the house of Mrs Sarah Webb, Washington Street,City of Brooklyn.

This testimony callsfor a certain interpretation. Dr Mason was probablycalledin at theend of the month in quest ion, but my ac tual b i rth date was Oct. 2nd.

So, seventy-nine years later, Waite described his own birth to his inquisitive

American correspondent, Harold Voorhis-who subsequently identified theboarding-house and sent Waite a description of the site:

206 Washington Street which was on the corner of Concord and Washington Streets) inBrooklyn isnow coveredby the approach for the Brooklyn Bridge. It istwo blocks from theBrooklyn end of the Bridge itself. The evennumber.sideof Washington Street now has nota single buildingon it. After thebridge approach ends-after covering about ten blocks-theremainder has been made into a rest-park. Washington Street ends nearly opposite the CityHall in Brooklyn. 1

Th e time ofWaite s birth canbe identified with even greater precision thanthe place, for it is given-as 1:00 p.m. local time 5:36 p.m. GMT on Friday,

2 October 1857-on the horoscope cast for him inMarch 1923by an unknownastrologer. Wh y Waite, wh o disliked and disbelieved in astrology, should havehad a horoscopecast is a question that isdifficult to answer. It isequally difficultto explain why the affidavit of 1857 was sworn.

Wai te h imse lf says only tha t i t was made at the ins tance of my paternalgrandfather, that there might be some record of my nativity from a family pointof view, and in case of legal difficulties on either side of the Atlantic . Moresignificantlyhe suggests that if one of his American relatives had wished to helphim financially i t was desirable to smooth his path asregards my lawful genesisand identity SLY p. 13). This the aff idavi t could no t do, for al though thereis no quest ion t ha t t he child was Arthur Edward Waite, the document gives


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him neither name nor sex. No r could it make him legitimate.Th e only contemporary evidence that Emma Lovell, Waite s mother, ever

married Captain Waite is an entry in Reuben Walworth s Hyde Genealogy of1864. 2 There, Charles Frederick Waite isrecorded asmarrying, in 1850 EuniceLovell of London . The mistake over the name may havebeen no more than acareless transcription of a signature, but the entry is odd in other ways. Othercontemporary marriages recorded in the Hyde Genealogy include both the monthand the day-for Charles Waite only the year is given, and he is inexplicably

credited with three children..Nowhere elseis a third child mentioned. It is, tosay the least, a remarkably unreliable record of recent events.If Waite is to be believed, the marriage-if marriage there was- took place

in the church of St Mary Abbots, Kensington, bu t the church registers containno record of the event in 1850,. or in any year from 1849 to 1857. No r is themarriage recorded at the office of the Registrar General in St Catherine s House.It is,· of course, possible that Emma Lovellwas married in America, but if so,it was the only marriage in the Waite family for which no recordssurvive, Afinal possibility is that of a marriage at sea; bu t why, then, did Emma Lovellpretend otherwise?

Sheundoubtedly me t Captain Waite at sea-on her way homefrom Canada,

according to. Waite-but the Lovellfamily disapproved of him strongly: therewere none too friendly feelings, .either because my father was American o r -more probably-not in the United StatesNavy SLY, p. 17 . This isdisingenuous,for the Lovellswould haveknown, asWaite himself did, that the Waite familywas not only eminently respectable bu t also distinguished.

Th e Waites were not descended from Thomas Wayte the Regicide, but hadsettled in New England beforethe outbreak of the English CivilWar: one GamalielWaite isrecorded aslivingin Bostonin 1637. A branch of the family had movedto Lyme in Connecticut before 1700 and it was from Thomas Waite of Lymethat Charles Frederickwas descended.During the War of Independencethe Waitessupported the colonists and Marvin Waite, a countycourt judge in Connecticut,was one of Washington s electors in the first presidentialelection. Th e law seemsto. have been a favoured profession for the Waite family, culminating in theappointment in 1874 of Morrison Waite (Charles Frederick s cousin) as ChiefJustice of the United States of America. (Other connections with the law weresometimes less happy: in 1680 a John Waite was ajuror at the Witchcraft trialsin Boston.)

No r did the family sufferfrolp the stigma o f Dissent, for unlike most NewEnglanders the Waites were devout Episcopalians. Evidently there were otherreasons for the Lovells disapproval-and not because of a disparity in age, foralthough Captain Waite was younger than EmmaLovell(he was born on 8 March1824 it wasby a matter ofonly eighteen months. It was, it seems, .not so much

- FR OM TH E N EW W O R L D 17a disapproval of Captain Waite as of Emma and her way of life.

Married or not, Emma Lovellremained with Captain Waiteuntilhis death.

My mother was with him in hisvoyageson many occasions and crossed the Atlantic at leasttwelve times; on a day he had a half-sharein a certain merchant ship and died in one whichcame to grief in mid-ocean. I heard of his sleeping on deck because ofits water-logged stateand succumbing to exposure in a bitter winter-tide. He was buried at sea,and I believethatthefirstmatebrought the vesselsomehow to England, whereit wassold,presumablyfor breakingup. SLY, p . 14)

Emma, however, was notwi th him on his last voyage: my sister s approachingbirth being already in view, and I also, no.doubt, s til l in arms.

Captain Waite died on 29 SeptemberJ858, andthree days laterhisposthumousdaughter, Frederica Harriet, was born at Yonkers in Ne w York. Initially, Emmawent to Lyme:

There isno knowing how or where the newsof her lossreached her; but i t took mymotherto Lymefor something like twelvemonths while her husband s affairswere settled. It wasexpected that she would remain in perpetuity for want of other refuge, having regard to hernarrow means; but lifein my grandfather s housespelt dependence, andLymewas an impossibleproposition for a young and educated Englishwoman of the upper middle-class. SLT,p. 15

Whether shedisliked the Sabbatarianism of Lyme or, asWaite suggests, shehad no intention ofbecoming a N ew England Nun EmmaLovell returnedto England with her children, but to an equally miserable situation. Neitherher mother nor any other of the Lovellswelcomed her arrival: Events-of afteryears shewed in a plenary sensethat there was never a homeward coming desiredor looked for less SLY, p. 16 . If the Lovellshad disapproved of Emma beforeshe met Captain Waite, their att itude to her now-returning with the fruitsof her relationship-bordered on hostility. It was,.perhaps, nota surprisingreception on the part of a pious middle-classfamily,bearing in mind the prevailingpublicstandardsofmorality at thetime, andthe story ofher marriage at Kensingtonmay have been invented by Emma to shield her children from th e distressing

truth about their legal status.In Waite s casethe deception failed. That he knew of his illegitimacy seemsclear from thecontent of the long dramatic poem, A Soul s Comedy, 5 whichhe published in .1887. The hero of the poem is an orphan whose life parallelsthat of the author: he has the sameexperiences of boyhood, undergoes the sameemotional turmoil, and suffers from the same religious. doubts. He is alsoillegitimate-the child of an illicit marriagebetween a brother and his half-sister.In turn, the hero himselfhas anillicitaffairand fathers a son wh o is alsomodelledon Waite: he hasthe same name, Austin Blake,that Waite adopted asa pseudonymfor some of his early poems. No r do the parallels end here: the hero s parentsmeet at Lyme (where he is born), and his second selfis conceived and born in


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1857. What effectthe poem had upon Mrs Waite can only be guessed at. If shechose to identify herself with the hero s mother the implications were appalling;for Waite, cruelly and with unnecessary embellishment, had woven into the storyepisodes from Emma Lovell s own past.

Shewasborn on 18 August 1822 the seconddaughter of the secondmarriageof Francis Lovell, w ho had made his money in India , retired early, and cometo live at Sloane Street, Chelsea. Little elseis known of him. (Waite is alwaysmaddeningly vague about names, dates, and placesin hisautobiography, arguing

that m y business throughout [is] with the lineage ofthe soul, rather than withearthly generations and that things external signify little enough, ,except asthey help or hinder the inward l ife [SLY pp 14, 35].) On 8 December 1810a Francis LovellofStPancras married Elizabeth Ottley at St George s, HanoverSquare, and this may well havebeen the first marriage of Emma s father. MrLovellhad three children by hisfirstwife: a son, Francis, wh o became a physician,and tw o daughters: Eliza, wh o married a Mr Gordon, and Mary Ann, wh oemigrated to Australia. By 1820 he had remarried and proceeded to add six morechildren to hishousehold in SloaneStreet. Of the three sons of the secondmarriageGeorge, the eldest, is a name only , while the second, William, was describedby Waite asliving quietly till about fifty y e ~ sof age ; Waite further recalled

tha t he once, only once, had a mee ting with his sis ter after her return fromAmerica albeit on neutral ground, in the garden ofa public house near ChalkFarm Road.

Th e third son, Edward, had a more adventurous l ifein which Emma wasinvolved: he ha d drifted over to Canada, where he must have wasted himselfand hissubstance. Beforeher American cruises,my mother wasthere for a season,presumably in his care; but a curious cloud covers the circumstance which ledto this Canadian visit. There were stories about the carelesslifeledby my UncleEdward, stories of rye whiskey, it s crude and potent qualities; .and it might bethat his sister Emma was sent out for his rescue and reform.

But there may havebeen other reasons than solicitudetor a wayward son

in the decision to pack her off to Canada.Thereis aproblemalsorespecting my mother herself, then-e-I p r s u m ~ nthe earlytwenties.It will neverbe solvednow; but something occurred either asthe result of speculationor aninscrutable gift, to reduce her capital by half; and my maternal grandmother may havesenther to oneof the colonies, thus removingher from some inimical influence and hoping perhapsthat she might marry and settle down abroad. SLY p. 17)

Whatever the inimical inf luence was, Waite took it up and turned hismother s flight from th e first family of her twice-married father into an episodeof hisfictional heroine s history. And whatever the real reason for her Canadianjourney, Emma Lovell returned and met Captain Waite.

_ H E THAT ASPIRED TO K N O W 19

He at least had the good grace to die honourably and, for all her rejection,Emma Waite could yet look upon her sisters with a degree of wr y satisfaction.Harriet, the elder, married Augustus the brotherof Charles Dickens, and mighthave expected fame and fortune, bu t instead lost in succession her sight and herhusband who fled to America with Bertha Phillips, an erstwhile friend of hiswife s , and made a l iving by lecturing on his brother s works. Embit tered bythis desertion Aunt Harriet lived with her mother in Bayswater, refusing to meether elder sister for many years and dominating Mrs Lovell, wh o was rathe r a

negative personality, easilyinfluenced, easilyover-ridden and anxious probablyto havepeaceat any price in her own home circle . Waite remembered his auntby her absence: During all the years of my childhood she never crossed ourthreshold, nor wasmy mother invited to enter their sacredprecincts , SLY p. 41 .

The youngest sister,Julia, waslesshostile. Shehad married the fine-looking,open-handed, roystering Frederick Firth , bu t he too deserted his wife and wentto America, leaving her to bringup three children alone. Eventually he returned,but AuntJulia refused to seehim, having formed otherarrangementsfor herselfand the l it tle ones SLY p. 18). Perhaps her unlucky experience of marriagemade he r more sympathetic towards her sister,for Waite recalledoccasionalvisits,more especially after 1872 when hismother movedto Bayswaterand he hadreachedan age at which the fact that his cousins were all some years older than himselfmattered little.

Frederick, the eldest of his cousins, Waite described as worthless , but heremembered the tw o girls, Louie and Elsie, with affection. He maintained hisf ~ i e n d s h i pwith them in later years, b ut w he n he called on Elsie, the youngerSIster at her home in Chiswick in 1937 he had no t seen her for over twentyyears: he found her scarcelyrecognizable and discovered that shecould remembernext to nothing about our past family history . He had no interest in hiscousinschildren, and when he once saw tw o ofLouie s daughters he thanked my guidingstars that we need never meet again SLY p. 104 .

Waite remained curiously detached from all his relatives both LovellsandWaites throughout hislife,largelybecauseof hismother s isolation from them,and the consequent absence of any sense of family identity or of family rootshad a profound effect upon him. As he grew into his extended adolescence hissocial diffidence increased and his tendency to introspection intensified. Butalienationfrom a wider familywas not the only factor in the shaping ofWaite scharacter; his mother soughtconsolation in religion and this had an evendeepere f f e ~upon her son. _


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2

TH E C HUR CH OF ROME IFOUND W OULD SUIT

I N H E R religious observation Emma Lovell was typical of the English middleclass-sa Church-going woman of a quiet Anglicantype SLY p.19)-and whenshe returned from America she maintained her religious respectability, howeversuspect she may otherwise have been in her family s eyes. Th e small Waite familysettled from th e first somewhere between Kentish Town and Hampstead, forWaite recorded that my earliest recollections are round about Haverstock Hill,for there grows up before me a spacious Protestant Church, where Mr Hathawaywas a curate or priest-in-charge, and where on one occasion it was [Mrs Waite s]lot to m ake th e responsions as sole congregation at Morning Prayer , Bu t theChurch of England proved unable to provide the spiritual consolation that Emma,faced with th e open hostility of th e Lovell family, so urgently needed.

She sought it instead from the Church of Rome, to which she turned inthe summer of 1863. Whether from chance-s-Waite says that we werewalkingout, once o n a n afternoon, when it pleased Go d to send us rain in S ummer, andwe were driven i nt o t he refuge ·o f a Church SLT p. 1 9 ) - o r after carefulconsideration will never be known; bu t on 8 October 1863 Emma Waite andher children were received into th e Roman Catholic Church b ya DominicanFriar, Father Austin Rooke. 2 Th e memory of this sub-conditione baptism remainedwith Waite: I can jus t remember being t ak en , on a day, into some kind of

Baptistry-as it se ems to m e - o n t he n o rt h side of the Sanctuary, possibly aLady Chapel, and being therere-Christenedconditionally, in casesome Protestantminister had missed his mark in flipping water from thumb and middle fingers.SLY p. 19).

Th e decision to convert would no t have been takenlightly: Roman Catholics\ had been freed of their political disabilities only so r ecen tl y a s 1829, and the

establishment of th e Catholic Hierarchy in 1851 still aroused passionate debate.Waite himself never understood what led his mother to take a step that alienatedher still further from her family.

My mother was not in any considerable sense a woman led by emotions, even a woman of

T HE C HU R CH OF ROME I F OU ND W OU LD S UI T 21sentiment, and still less a person of intellectuallife. I do no t know how she came to changeher form of so-called Faith; and when I saw him once on aday in my fi rs t twent ies i td id notstrikeme that FatherRooke could becalleda persuasiveman, or one who would awakenpersonaldevotion, even in susceptible girls. SLY p. 2

Before her reception she had watched th e laying of the Foundation Stoneof th e Dominican Priory at Haverstock Road, and it may be that the splendourof the occasion impressed her sufficiently to lead to her seeking o u t t he Church.

Whatever the immediate cause of her conversion, Emma Waite never doubtedfor one moment that she h ad d on e t he right thing and i f there had been anydoubts on th e question of respectability they were allayed by the presence of theDominican nuns in Fortess Terrace, whose Superiorwas the Revd Mother MaryCatherine Philip Bathurst, a convert hersel fand an aristocra t. In such companyEmma Waite felt as if a seal of legitimacy were placed upon the whole business .An d if the conversion was momentous for his mother, it was equally soforWaite,wh o later said of it: I d o no t believe in my heart that there has ever been greaterguidance thanthat which took me into the humble Dominican Church of KentishTown. SLY p. 19).

They did no t remain l on g u nd er t he care of the Dominicans, bu t driftednorthward from Kentish Town and passed under the spiritual providence of thePassionists at Stjoseph s Retreat, Highgate , where, in due course, Waite madehis first confession, received his first communion, and was laterconfirmed. Trueto form he gives no d at es fo r any of these events. and i t has no t been possibleto t race them in the archives of St Joseph s Retreat, bu t his first communionwas probably in 1865, and if his confirmation was at the age of twelve it wouldprobably have taken place la te in 1869.

From the beginning Waite was an ardent Catholic. At St joseph s he servedasan altar-boy, although in a shy and nervous manner, fo r I was ever consciousof an awkward gaitin childhood, and of the strictures and privations of poverty .In spite of this, serving at the altar gave hi m his love of th e Altar and ofallthat belongs to R it es . · It gave me thesense of the Sanctuary, ofa world and a

call therein SLT p. 22). No r d id t he Church neglect his education, althoughWaite is characteristically vague about his schooling.

O f the fi rs t school he says only w it h w h om and where it w a s - i n whatstreet no t far a w a y - I carry no notion , although he recalls himself in whollynegative terms as backward, nervous, self-conscious and self-disrrustful--acondition reinforced, n o d ou bt , by the .frequent unsettling moves from onetemporary home in KentishTown to •another. 4 D u ri n g t he early part of 1870he attended th e Bellevue Academy under its Principal, George White, a prolificauthor of both educational and religious works, whom Waite unkindly describedas a vast, loosely incorporated and impassioned man, wh o was affirmedcrediblyto eat s ix eggs at his early dinner on Fridays and whose time was spent fretting


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and fuming and raging over an academy of third-rate day-boys . 5

Later in the year he transferred to the school of a Mr Kirkby in Upper ParkRoad, Belsize Park, at first asa day-boy and later asa boarder. Here presumablyI must have learned something, bu t in truth I k no w n ot w ha t, and must havebeen under this nondescript guidance for six or seven months, when the pupilsof both classes were electrified by an astonishing and untoward occurrence. Th eamiable and excellent Mr Kirkby had vanished in a cer ta in n ig ht , m ak in g o ffwith any ready cash that he found in his s is ters purses . I went home with my

strange story and never heard what became of him SLY p.37).After this fiasco the family moved to Bayswater-not so much to be near

Mrs Lovell in Ledbury Road asto enable Arthur to attend St Charles s College,a Catholicboys school housed at that timein a tallbuilding adjoining the churchof St Mary of th e Angels. Th e College had been founded in 1863 by CardinalManning s nephew, William, and by 1870it had gained a considerable academicreputation while endeavouring t o bring education within the reach o f all wh odesire a sound and high course of instruction for their sons at a moderate cost .

Waiteclaimed to have spent threeyears asa day-boy at St Charles s College,bu t he does no t appear on the Class Lists until 1872, and although his nameison the registerforJanuaryand February 1873 there isno record of hisattendance

or progress d ur in g t ha t t er m ( it was probably at this time that he fell i ll withscarlet fever ). He would also then have reached fifteen years of age, and thusbecome a senior student with a consequent increase in school fees from 12 to15 guineas a year. It was already proving difficult for Waite s mother to pay forher son s education and it seems likely that by 1873 she could no longer affordto keep him at school.

What Waitewas doing during the t ime be tween th e flight o f M r Kirkbyand his en try in to St Charles s Col lege is no t clear: perhaps i twas then thathe learned French from his mother, for it was during his time at th e Collegethat he learned Latin and-Greek and forgot most of the French she had taughtme . 6 He also recalledvividly Father Rawes the Prefect of Studies, with hisrather

feeble body, his flaming countenance and the remanents of an uncared-for-towcoloured mop . I t was almost cer ta inly Father Rawes wh o encouraged Waitein his earliest literary efforts and who, perhaps, suggested to him.that he hada vocat ion to the priesthood.

Waite unquestionably felt drawn to th e idea of priesthood. In an interviewin 1896 he described himself as having been intended for th e priesthood , andin later lifehe saw his role in his Fellowship of the Rosy Cross aspre-eminentlythat of a priest; bu t in adolescence three factors held hi m back. On e was hisendemic self-distrust more than all it was th e dreadful narrowness in all myways of life that kept.me stunted, alike withinand without ) and almost constantillness; the second was a gradual loss of faith; and the th ird though he was not

conscious of it until much later in life) -an abhorrence of th e idea of celibacy.Occasionally, however, he did make half-hearted foraystowards a vocation.

While s taying at Deal during th e winter of 1881 he helped a young server torealize his dream of becoming a missionary priest and wondered, on his ow npart, just for one moment whether it might be poss ib le after all to do withRome, howeverfar apart from a Hostel of the Lord in Deal. It came to nothing.

~ L Tp. 75). Bu t whateverhis early dreams and anxieties, they were overshadowedby tragedy.

In September 1874, tw o weeks before her s ixteenth bir thday, his s is terFrederica-weakened by scarlet fever-died from general debility . Her mothernever recovered from the loss, and Waite himselfwas more profoundly affectedthan his ow n account leads one to believe.

At fifteen years of age my sister Frederica died; n d suppose that my cousin Firth and myselfalone sawher body interred at KensalGreen. Shepassedaway without the benefit of Sacraments,in the haste of going away. The sorry dream ofbeingwas now a more sorry nightmare, whileas to my poorMother the hopeless daysof mourning went on for years. I was much too deadmyself for any reali ty of grief; bu t the dull, the vapid, the unprofi table had turned sour inmy heart and head . 7

Sincehis ow n recoveryfrom illnessWaite had been working asa clerk, probably

in a solicitor s office, in a position obtained for hi m byJames MellorSmethurst,an elderlybarrister.who becamehis cousins guardian after their mother s death.Waite says nothing of his clerical career, other than to indicate that it lasted forno more than tw o years--. at nineteen th e halter of clerical work had long sinceremoved its yoke-s-and to complain that i t was narrow and dul l and openedno prospects . Th e death of his sister increased the emptiness of his life. He wasincreasingly estrangedfrom his mother-xthere was nothing in common betweenus and there was no sympathy-s-and further illness, in th e late autumn of 1875,removed the chance of a universityeducation: Once at this timethe clouds seemedto open out, and the re was a p rospec t of sunshine for a moment. A friendlyhand was stretchedforward to assist hi m in graduating, after a humble fashion,

as an unat tached student at Oxford, bu t in the end th e scheme fell through.It was anotherdisappointment to be survived. 8 He evenconsidered suicide: Therecame a time indeed when I carried laudanum as a possible way of escape. Wasit a private pose offered to myself, I wonder, or did I think for a moment thatsel f is evaded thus? In any case, the po tion was not drunk SLY p. 85).

A pose i t a lmost cer ta inly was, for although Waite protests his loss of faithunceasinglyin his autobiography-e-There was nothing sodead for me as the lifeof the Latin Church. Th e Oblates of Mary Immaculate at Kilburn filled my soulwith emptiness, and I fared no better with th e Oblates of St Charles Borromeoat Bayswater SLT p. 58)-he no t only maintained his church attendance bu tbecame a str ident apologist for the Faith.


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24 A. E. WA I T E - MAGICIAN O F M AN Y P AR TS _

His earlyreading had been restricted to picture books, fairy tales, adventurestories and the poetry of Mrs Hemans, but during his adolescence it becamecatholicin a .very broad sense:

From the Fundamental Philosophy of Balmes, a Spanish theologian after the scholastic manner,to Hamilton and Stuart-Mill; from .the ascetic writers of the Latin Church t o the las t i ssueof th e National RefOrmer or the last pamphlet of Bradlaugh: from an antiquated commentaryon Genesis, through Pye and Hitchcock on geology, with something from the Connection ofthe Physical Sciences ali t t le from the Plurality of Worlds and more from pleasant old Brewster,so fo rward to the works of Charl es Darwin and the first cri ticisms of Mivart-thus ran thebizarre circle of [my] serious reading.

Th e effect was that he read himself speedily into religious chaos , 9 Order,however, rapidly supervened and from readingcontroversialworks Waite turnedto writing let ters and essaysin the same vein. By 877 he was contr ibut ing aseries of Essays for Idle Hours to a Catholic weekly, he Lamp-possibly atthe promptimg of Father Rawes, wh o was himselfa regular contributor. In oneof these essays Outcomes Waite made a violent attack upon the Reformation:

Centurieshad taughtthe childrenof this worldthe lesson thatthis Church could no t becrushedout with f ire and sword. Th e spirit of evil is persevering, and it therefore turned about for

othermeans and by a masterstroke of fiendish ingenuitythey devised a plan for sett ing upa secular religion in the place of the priestly Sacerdotalism an d a human Christianityin placeof thedivineChristianityof the Church. Toanswer their vileends,the whole spiritof Christianitywas altered or distorted, its most distinctive features struck out and only a few broad truthsretained Such a heresy which began by denying half the truths of God, was no t likelyto improve with t i ~ e h eSatan who had inspired had a far deeper intention than he whobegan i t, o r the princes who fostered it In the present day it is developed-e-we do notsay finally-into Pantheism, Agnosticism, Materialism, Idealism and every speciesof infidelity,every phase of Atheism.

No r was his purple prose confined to Catholicjournals. In one of the manysmallliteraryjournals of the time, he Idler he assailedone of its contemporariesand.compared it unfavourably with the gutter-press of the day: [ he NationalMagazine] has lessbrains, lessintelligence, lessenlightenment; more coarseness,more hopelessbigotry, more imbecilefanaticism. Waite wasmovedto this outburstby th e N o Popery stance of the National Magazine s editor-who had at leastthe good grace to print Waite s ironic letter of protest on behalf o f t he Church[ofl·whichwith pride and joy I am myself amember :

Bu t asPopery must e abolished, (Mr Harding [ the editor] uses no conditional terms) to saveProtestantism, this law will haveto be brought into force, allthe millions of existingCatholicsmust be exterminated. This is the logicaloutcome of your correspondent s words. Militaryinquisitorsandthe rabid rabbleof aninfuriated populace must burst into quiet Englishhomes,and drag their inmates to the dungeon and th e gibbet. The priest must-be torn from the altar,

T H C H U R C H OF R O M E I F O U N D W O U L D . S U I T 25and, for the sakeofthe next generat ion, the white robes of the acolytes, whose pure boy-facesg leam at the al ta r through clouds of incense, must be stained with blood. 10

Other letters ofthe sameperiod were more temperate. In 877 Waite defendedCatholic dogmas in the Kilburn Times: I f the children of the Church believeher to be the repository and teacher of the truth they are in conscience boundto accept her dogmas as the ·truth. If the Church claims to be the repositoryand teacher of the truth to be logical she must assert th e t ruth of her decrees.

In the Hendon Times he engaged in an argument over the character of ThomasaBecket, displaying a considerable knowledge of historical sources, while uponthe readers of he Universe he urged the need for evening classes for Catholicyoung men and women. There are , he said,

many such Protestant institutionsin London, but it must be confessed that we Catholics arerather backwardin this particular [Catholics] must either give up (and how hard thisis)their laudable wish of improving their education, or theymust haverecourse to the Protestantinstitutions, which arenumerous and often offer many allurements (medals, certificates, queen sprizes); and they are thus laid open to many temptations-to the evil effects of bad exampleand bad company; which otherwise they might have avoided. An d can nothing be don e? Iam loth to think so.

Much ashe might encourage others, however, he took no action himself,and in t ime he did lose his faith-though by a process of gradual erosion ratherthan through any sudden rejection following his sister s death, andthe Churchof Rome always remained for him, for all that he had left it, the only valid formof institutional Christianity. Th e Reformed Churches he loathed: the kindestcomment he could bring himselfto make about them was a description of themas a lean method of observance and worship which finds the soul in nudity andcaresfor it without clothingit , 11 His uncompromising attitude isperhaps bestsummed up by one of his aphorisms from Steps to the Crown in which he says:

. Protestantism is no t so much a dereliction of creed as a virus. of atmosphere(I. 2. xxxvi).

England, however, was an overwhelmingly Protestant nation and it was aProtestant ethos that was reflected in the popular literature of the t ime- the pennydreadfuls -that had enraptured Waite asa boy and continued to enchanthim throughout his adult life. The Catholic boy proved as susceptible to bloodand thunder.as his Protestant fellow.


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3DANGEROUS RUBBISH:

P EN NY D RE AD FU LS ANDA W O R L D OF DREAMS

O N E on a golden day , Wai te recalled. a l it tl e book of Arabian Tales wasbrought tome or my sister. . .by myunofficial guardian, a Mr William Walker,of happy memory SLT, p. 27). This family friend h.adbeen d e p u ~ e dby theDominicans to oversee th e spiritual welfare of Mrs Waite and her children, b utby his g if t he unwittingly laid th e foundations of a love of fantastic tales thatwould, in t ime, lead Wai te into paths t ha t t he C hu rc h shunned and ut ter lycondemned. Th e Arabian 1ales brought Waite into a world of hidden cities,sorcerers, and enchanted princesses, bu t for heroes he was obl iged to wait until

1869 and his discovery of The Boys of England.Pre-eminent among ol d boys books , The Bays of England was launched

in 1866 by Edwin J. Brett, asa weekly offering its youthful readers an endlessdiet of serial stories of chivalry and impossible derring-do, all of them illustratedby luridwoodcuts. It captivatedWaite, as di d its host of imitators, a ~ dhe c a ~ e

very learned on the periodical pressforboys by walking to and fro m th e districtand glueingmy eyeson the contents of newspaper shops SLY; p. 34). But parentaldisapproval was never far away. Black Rollo, t.he P ~ r a t e i n ~an? The .Skeleton Crewproved too much, and m y unofficial guardIan, combinationWIth my carefulmother, pu t an end to my reading of th e alleged dangerous rubbish , R u b ~ i s h

of course, bu t no t for me a dange r, wh o had no inclination towards running

away to sea, no chance of taking to th e road without a horse or of entering theLists of Chivalry. Rubbish once again, bu t i t was somethingto enter the worldof adventurousromanceeven from the backstairs, or from Londonpurlieus. SLY,p.35 . . . . .

For this addiction, however, there was to be no cure. Th e Christmas of 1870brought with it th e extra number of The LondonJournal and i e r ~ eEgan s TheHorrors of Hoathley Hall-adding a supernatural element to th e high adventureof The Bays of England. Th e spell was no w complete. W a ~ t e r e ~ das much asI could of dangerous rubbish and reflected, at the end of hIS Me, that I shouldnever have entered those other occult. paths, and come out of them to proceedfurther, had I not -amids t my last .attempt at schooling-come across th e

- _ _ D A N G E R O U S RUBBISH

ShadowlessRider,his League of the Cross of Blood, and the Forty ThievesofLondon,wh o were led by Black Hugh SLY, p. 36).

N o t t h a t he left th e Penny Dreadfuls behind. By th e age of twenty yearshe was writing his own. The earliest,1bm Trueheart; or the Fortunes ofa Runaway,appeared in The Idler in July 1878. Th e hero, an o rphan, is in th e charge of awicked uncle and an odious tutor wh o seek to rob the boy of his inheritance.His only friend ishis fai thful dog, Nelson, wh o helps hi m to g et t he better ofhis enemies in the course of a brawl. However,

In hisexcitement, our hero had quite forgotten hisuncle, who now approached him, andlayinghis hand heavily on his shoulder, while his voice trembled with suppressed passion, hoarselys a i d ~What youhave done todayis that whichyou canneverrepair,and what yearsof remorse,nor groans of sorrow cannot wash out. In making an enemy ofme you have done what youwill repent of to the last hour ofyour life, for my revenge will fal lso heavily upon you, thatit MUST crush you.

Tomshudderedat thebitter hate which histones expressedasmuch andmorethan hiswords.His uncle then left him and went in the direction ofthe house, calling on the tutor with

an oath to fo llow him.Th e Reverend Jonas Creeper obeyed, casting as he passed a look of fiendish malignity

on our hero, who met i t fearlessly. Nel son gave a low growl which quickened hi s s tepsconsiderably, and he hastened up the steps of the verandah four at a t ime.

Alas, this first episode was also th e last, for The Idler failed and the fate of bmTrueheart must remain for ever unknown.

Th e story was followed by Hamet the Moor, a Romance of Old Granada (inGreen Leaves, May 1879), Paul Dactyl, or the Travelling Merchant s Story (in TheStory 1eller for 1878), and by a series of tales written in th e 1880s bu t neverpublished. O ne o f them, The Invisibles, was set up in type for a projected fourthvolume of Horlick s Magazine in 1905, and thisWaite preserved with typed copiesof other delights such as The Princes of the Night The Scarlet Mask, and The BlackBrothers. They are, however, improved and for th e most part rather restrainedin manner-although one, a t least , does have an appropria te excess of blood.

In The Fall the House of Morland occur such passages as this: See, see, I cried, I t has life: i t is moving.

My father started back horror-struck, for the assassinhad risen-risen upon his handsand knees, and was crawling towards us. The mask had fallenfrom his face,revealing featuresof appalling hideousness. I shrieked with t er ro r as I gazed upon i t.

Here, here is fatality, cried my father, Th e death-blow only reveals their faces.

It means us harm, father. Beware, beware Surely that cannot be human. Let us fly.There was a yell; the monster had leaped upon us and had clutched myfather. From its

own torn and bleeding sideit had wrenched th e dagger, and raisedit aloft . My lovefor myparent gavea man s strength to myframe. I seizedand held the descending arm, str iving forpossession of the weapon.


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28 A. E. WA I T E - MAGICIAN O F M AN Y P AR TS _

A momentonly thecontest lasted. The assassin s.arm dropped, the pallorofdeathoverspreadhis countenance, and he fellback upon the grass. He uttered some words in alanguage which

I di d not understand, and was dead.

This, however, isan exception, and unlike Tom Tiueheart, these later tales cannotstand beside h BoysofEngland or the true PennyDreadfuls of Thomas PeckettPrest.

Bu t if Waite could no longer publish such stories, he could yet write about

them from the vantage point of an almost unrivalled knowledge of the genre,gained in large part from his ownever-increasing collection of the tales, for theBritish MuseumLibrary provedto be a great disappointment to him in this respect:so much so that in 1887 in his f irst s tudy of Penny Dreadfuls , he condemnedthe inadequacy of th e library catalogue in no uncertain terms: Th e lists in thereading room are full of errors; tales which were no t only completed bu t havebeen re-issued are labelled N o more published because the .museum copiesare imperfectvandother periodicals are declared to have suspendedissue when,asa fact, they havecontinued to exist for a considerable period subsequently. .

That-study, By-waysofPeriodical Literature, isimportant forits earlyrecognitiono f the historical significanceofpopular literature. Waite urged upon his readers

the need to preserve this vast and perishing literature which a l it t le care wil lrescue from complete oblivion . If not, he said, then in a Jew years the namesof these productions will be totally, asthey are for the most part now, unknown .His pleas would undoubtedly have fallen on more attentive ears if his ow n texthad not been bowdlerized.

At the t ime, WaljOrd sAntiquarian Magazine was ostensibly edited by itspublisher, George Redway, bu t in reality the editor was Arthur Machen, andit was due to Machen s sensibilities-heightenedby the contemporary prosecution

.ofVizetelly for publishing Zlla s novels-that Waite s intemperate language wascurbed. Thus, G. W. M. Reynolds, the high priest of cheap periodical fiction ,became hard-working rather than unscrupulous and was no longer a writer

for the peoplein the worstsense of the phrase; that is, hisworks, written obviouslyto expose and exaggerate the misconduct of the aristocracy, were, in moral andmanner, so objectionable that they were quite unfit for introduction into anyrespectable household. On e cannot help bu t suspect also that would-be collectorswould have sought more eagerly .for novels that were unhealthy always, andoften flagrantly vicious than for those that were merely eccentric .

Collectors, however, did arise, and when Waite visited the foremost of them BarryOno (i.e. F. V. Harrison) in 1927 he was amazed at.MrOno s vast andastonishing library .. Hi s ow n collection.had been sold.some years previously,in 1920, to a trulyunscrupulousbooksellernamed John Jeffery.Jeffery kept themuntil 1933 when he placed them in auction: this gaveWaite the satisfaction of

D A N G E R O U S RUBBISH 29seeing them sell at an average of per volume 2 u t no t before he had begunan ambitious study of the whole genre, entitled Dealings ·in Bibliomania.

In 1923 he suggested to WilfredPartington that the essay might be suitablefor anonymous publication in the lat ter s Bookman s journal, adding, with acharacteristic lack of false modesty, It is t rue that I am an expert-and thereisindeed no other-on the subject of PennyDreadfuls. I know allthe first editionsand all the dates; things which amateurs have no t dreamed ofhavepassed throughmy hands. 3 Partington toyed with the ideafor some years, finally agreeing that

something could be done with the manuscript in 1930 but by then i t was toolate: the Bookman sJournal faced serious financial problems and in 1931 it ceasedpublication. Waite made little effort to interest other publishers, and with theappearance in 1938 of Montague Summers s h Gothic Quest (followed in 1940by its companionvolume, Gothic Bibliography all hope of publishing Dealingsin Bibliomania came to an end.

On e reason for Partington s indecision over thebook was Waite s insistenceupon anonymity. In his later years he had become anxious that the public shouldsee hi m solelyas he described himselfin Who s Who,as th e exponent in poeticalandprosewrit ings of sacramental religion and the higher mysticism . They might,he thought, experience some difficulty in reconciling his role as a mystic withthat of enthusiast for h Boys of England and varney the vampire. His friends,however, had no such qualms.

While Waitewas busying himself with Dealings inBibliomania,Arthur Machenwas writing h Grande Iiouvaille for R. Townley Searle, wh o wanted it as anintroduction to .the .third catalogue of rare books issued by his Firs t Edi tionBookshop . In March 1923 it appeared-revealing to the world Waite s passionfor the Penny Dreadful . I t was an enter taining story:

Onceupon a t ime- i t isthe fairytalebeginning; and therefore averygood o n e I waswalkingup Pentonville with myoid friend, A. E. Waite. I t was a grey afternoon; one must .alwayschoose a grey afternoon if one would walk fit ly up Pentonvil le. I think we were sett ing ou ton ajourney to explore Stoke Newington, with the view ofdetermining whether Edgar AllanPoe sschoolwerestillinexistence.Thiswas amatter which hadengagedus both, at oddintervals,for years, and we had set ou t many times on the adventure, but had always wandered awayon quite alien trails and on haphazard quests; and to this day the matter remains sodoubtfulthat am not quite sure whether Waite and I everdiscovered the school in the dim Englishvil lage which Poe describes in Will iam Wilson . The fact was that both ofus had somanyinterests, which led us astray. Waite, perhaps, thought tha t he might f ind the Holy Grail ,disguised, disgraced and dishonoured in some back shop of a back-street; while I havealwayshad the great and absorbingdesireof going the other way.The other way? That is the secret.

Anyhow, on this long-ago afternoonwe were loungingup the weary-allhill of Pentonville,when Waite stopped suddenly.I lookedat himin some curiosity. There wasa singular expressionon hisface.His eye-I think-became fixed. His nostrils-to the best ofmy belief- twitched.


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30

Otherwise, therewasan oddfixity abouthis position. believe that in acertainkind ofsportingdog this attitude iscalled making apoint . I didnot sayanything: theOrder generallyknownas the Companions of the Eighties knows howand when.to preserve silence but there was,I fancy an interrogativeexpression in my eyebrow FraterSacramentum-I meanA. E. Waitestood still to gazefor amoment or two.. staring eagerlyat the opposite sideof the road-theright hand s ide ,asyou go up to the Angel-and said at last :-

Machen, I feelthat I must go into that shopover the way.I know there s somethingthere for me -

And sowe crossed over It was a smalland quite undistinguished shop on the sideof thegrey hill. I think it soldinkpots, pensand pencils, exercisebooks,comic songson long sheets,the eveningpaper,and the miscellaneous. I couldn t imagine what Waite couldexpectto findthere.

Wewent in. Somewhereat the backof the shoptherewasarow or two ofdingy, greasytattered old books; and a fire glowedin Waite s eyeas he beheld them. The scent held.

Haveyou anyoldbound volumesof boys stories? heaskedthe ancientman of the shop. Thereweretwo or threeleft, saidthe man, alittle astonishedI thought at theenquiry. Thereused to be a smalllending library here, he explained, and he had taken overthe stock.

And, tocutthe story short, Waitewent out into Pentonville, which, I amsure, hadnowbecomefor him not grey but radiant, with a copyof The Old House in WestStreet underhis arm.

Perhaps should explain. My friend Waite,besides taking overallmysticism,occultism,alchemyand transcendentalismfor hisprovince,has a hobby,likemost good men. In his casethis hobby is the collecting of Penny Dreadfuls of ancient date: the forties and earlyfiftiesare, I believe the goldenageof this adventure. Andamongst those Penny Dreadfuls , astheyareaffectionatelycalled,one of the choicest prizes is The Old House in West Street . AndWaite had got it for eighteen penceor half-a-crown: a greasy old bound volumeof the oldweeklyparts,vilelyprintedon wretchedpaperwith amazingwoodcuts:andyet afind, adelight.

Then if recollection serves wehad somegin. It was an occasion.

Machen gives no date to th e episode, bu t i t m us t have taken place early intheir long friendship, fo r in his essay of 1887 Wai te was able to describe Theo House in west Street in far greater detail than any other title that he mentioned: This was t h e m o st v ol um i no us of Prest s acknowledged product ions an d in

appearance it is superior to its predecessors. Some care, indeed seems to havebeen spent on it ; t he type is painfully small, bu t very clear. It is pr int ed in doub lecolumns and was issued l ike all Lloyd s publications in penny numbers eachcontaining an illustration. It reached to 104 numbersand wascompleted in August1846. He adds, i t is writ ten in Prest s usual s tyle of absurd melodrama at oncestilted and extravagant . Th e work is no w very scarce, an d is said to commanda fair price in t he marke t.

I t i s, in fact , an extremely rare book an d Machen wasqui te r ight : its discoverywas indeed a n occasion .

_

THE TIRESOMEVERSE-RECITER

P E N N Y D R E A D F U L S were fo r Waite as was fiction in general a bywayof l i t e ra tu re - fo r hi m th e highway was poetry. As a small bo y he ha d readMrs Hemans andwas captivatedby her sentimental verse-although more probablyby Casabianca than ashe claimed b y h e r Siege of valencia; bu t poetry in generalha d no hold over him andi t was no t until he was seventeen, in t he monthsfollowing his sister s death, that he conceived the burning ambition to be apoet.His ba rr en evenings h a d b ee n s pe nt w i th nothing to do bu t d r ea m a nd read

therein until quite suddenly a change came over th e face of things when I

found , on a day or a n ight , t ha t I, even I, could write verses. Yes it was a liftingof clouds, an d by the l ight in which they dissolved there was granted me arainbowgift of dreams. From t h at m o m en t presumably I read nothing bu t p oe m s a ndth e lives of those wh o ha d achieved a name in rhyme. A hunger and th ir s t afterglory in th e craft of song possessed m y w h ol e being. SLY p. 48)

He could never explain in later years what gave hi m this passion for poetry.It remained for hi m a question f or an answer to which he has v ex ed himselfvainly an d often . An d just as t he impulse to make verses was inexplicable, soit was incurable: .

I went up and down in the great city and wanderedin and out. There was a fever of verseupon me. took careof the sounds, asit seemsto me, and the sensetook careof itself, tillthere camesome rough lessons BecauseI wasseventeen and becauseat eighteen Shelley hadwritten Queen Mab it was obviouslyright and fitting that thus early there shouldbe givento the world somehowa thing ecstaticand undemonstrable ,denominated Zastroni. Describedas a lyrical drama, it was surelya wilderness of nonsense farprolonged SLY p. 50).

Th e n a me w as a marriage of Shelley s Zastrozzi and Ly tton s Zanoni an dwhen it was complete, Waite took Zastroni to Father Rawes; who whatever hema y have thought of th e poem did what he could to encourageme with earnest

k indly words, add ing tha t i t was long asyet be fore could dream of print .As Fr. Rawes had predicted Zastroni was never published bu t other poems

preserved in Waite s scrapbook o Early Verses , were. Th e earliest seems to have


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33 TH E TIRESOME VERSE-RECITER ::::; :;f rom an acute consciousness-e-sc common in such apprenticeships-of a sheerdisparity between ambition and ability . In an at tempt to reduce this dispari tyhewrote to Robert Browning for advice and guidance , but refrainedfrom sendingany samples of his work. Perhaps because of this reserve, Browning replied: 1

June 27th, 1876

Sir, - am sure I haveread your letter with great interest and sympathy; and if I thought Icould do youthe least good byreading your poems, would comply with your request. assureyouthat, evenin the event ofmy opinion-s-whateverit is worth-proving favourable, t wouldnot havethe least effectin procuring you anypublisher withwhom haveacquaintance. Everypublishing establishment hasits professed Reader , who reads,or does not read, but decideson the acceptanceor rejection of a manuscript-and manuscript poetry has little chance offinding favour in his eyes

The preferable course-if you want remuneration for your work, the only course-is tosendoneor more ofyour piecesto amagazine. But, if you permitme to adviseyou, do anythingrather than attempt to live by literature, anything good and reputable, I mean. An ungenialsituation-such as you seem to have retired from-would send you to your studies, and,subsequently, to a proper use of them-with a sense of relief and enjoyment you will neverobtain from singing all day long, when song is turned into the business of life.Praytakein good part what ambound to saywhen an applicant isas modest and intelligent asyouseem to be, and believe me,

Yours very.sincerely,

Robert Browning

Th e advicewas sound and Waite followed i t t leastto the extent of sendinghis poems to The Lamp An d although there was no financial necessity-EmmaWaite s circumstances.were materially improved after her mother s death in1874,· and Waite himself received, in 1876, a small legacy from his paternalgrandfather-he may havereturned to his ungenial situation . Certainly, he saidof Browning s letter writing in the third person) t he closing note of warningstruck deeply. into his hea rt , and he sough t to p ro fi t by the advice. A changein th e direction of hisenergiesdid not, however, bring much profit or happiness ;

bu t against this must be set the image of his manner of working depicted inhis earlypoem , T he Student :

I work in the midnight, seen only by stars,Which shine through the.darkness so mournfully sweet,

While the moon sometimes looks through the black lattice-bars,And her pale beams fall down at my·feet.

Forgotten, forgetting, and therefore content,Behold me at work on a work of my own,

Neither asking nor seeking for.help to.be.lent:What do am .doing alone

Clods of earth are piled above thee,Dust is now thy fair young form;

We wh o mourn thee, we wh o love thee,Have consigned thee to the worm.

Round thy grave the shadow creepeth,And the summer breezes blow;

There the drooping snowdrop sleepeth,There the yew and myrtle grow.

But thy pure soul, heavenward soaring,Far beyond the furthest star,

No w is at God s.throne adoring,Where the radiant angels are.

If Zastroni was of similar quality it is, perhaps, allto the good that it perished,with other ludibria and note-books .

A rather more polished epitaph, entitled Sleep , followed in 876 and wasalso printed, probably in TheLamp:

Thou wil tno t see the woodbine creep,

Upon the lattice bars;Thou w il t n ot hear the waters sweep,

Beneath the silver stars.Th y res t i s calm, thy res t i s deep,

Th e dust is on thy eyes;Th e dust remains for us ~ weep,

Thy soul is in the skies

Bu t Waite s energies were directed increasingly towards longer. 0ems .Recuperatingfrom illness at Ramsgate, in the winter of 875 he spent h.Isdaysat Dumpton Gap, an d stood on a ledge of cliff for an hour or more, WIth thesea beating under, or contemplated rock and weed, when tide was out, fromnarrow caves. 1 was looking for plots of poems, mostly great of length, andhankering still after the Lyrical Drama SLY p. 52). .

An d no t in vain for he promptly wrote The Seeker a Lyncal Drama andThe Fall ofMan a Miracle Play They are , a t best, of uneven quality ~ bothwere pu.blished, under the pseudonym?f ~ l i pDayre, althou.gh the Journalsin which they appeared have no t been IdentIfied. .

Waite was well aware of his literary shortcomings and suffered miserably

32 A. E. WAITE - MAGICIAN OF MANY P RT S -

b ee n A Dirge for his dead sister, written before th e end of 875 and printedin an unidentified journal:


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35 THE TIRESOME VERSE-RECITER . .;;;..;;;.34

urgeon you to show that the true spiri t inspires you by continuing to try and obtain someemployment which, while it leavesyou at libertyto prosecute your studies, givesyou the all-in

all sufficing privilege of independence. Surely, some such employment may be found-and

you must know that what you esteem a great prize, poet ical success , would be worthless,indeed, were i t to be picked up at f irst s tooping down in the public way. Why, pray, shouldyour handwriting remain unclerkly bad , it is not simply for want of a week s practiceat drawing circles against the sun , as the sailors say? Five minutes practice with a penci l at

mere circle making could remedy whatever is wrong soon enough. Finally, don t forget

whileyou count over what may be very real disadvantages of every kind-the immense set-offyou may boast-youth, energy and however low anybody mayreckon them-assuredly talents.Be a brave fel low, and see what you can do with these You will greatly gratify your t ruewell-wisher.

Robert Browning

Feb. 5, 1877

My Dear Mr [Waite]I m u st b e g your pardon for having delayed a l i tt le my thanks for your poems, and my

reply to the letter which accompanied them. Perhaps the difficulty of a p r o ~ e rreply m ~havehindered me somewhat. I really wish, most sincerely, to be of what service I am able. but ,first of all, in no mock-modesty, I want you to understand that I am by ~ o m ~ a n sa thoroughjudge in this matter. What I l ike and look for in poetry comes out, possibly, m an after-stage

of experiences; and the want ofit, earlier inlife,maybe as n e e ~ s s a r y ~ sthat.leavessh ould p r e c ~ d e

fruits on a tree: on the other hand, ·the existence of qualities which fall to seem c ~ c ~ u s l v e

proof of the right f ac ult y i n a p oe t, may be a rarer fact t h a ~I have noticed ~ rs u f ~ C e n t l y

sympathized with. I seein you very decided literary a c c o m p l ~ s h m e n tand no m c o ~ s l d ~ r a b l ~

masteryofthe mechanicalpart of verse-writing(thereishardly ashp ~ p tthe rhymeof umverse

w i th t u s on the first page , and your musical ear is very good Indeed. When one-after

forrIling this opinion of your productions-goes on to consider that they have b e ~ nhelped(according to your own account)by v e r ~scanty educat ion-I t ~ n kI am ~ o twrong m f m d l ~ g

them veryremarkable indeed-most assuredlytheyjustifyme In S u p p o s l n ~that Ua r ~quiteequal to any situation in which a decided literary skill is required. Now IfI fal l to ~ l s c o ~ e r

asmuch positivenovelty of thoughtor fancyasIsupposeisdemandedin thepoetry of a C O I ~ l n g

man -remember that I cannot help my own tastes, nor the standard of excellence which I

acknowledge-uhet the dispensers of reputationgenerallydiffer with me l t ~ g e t h ~ r n dthat, .since you please to refer to my ow n case, I amoften told I au: n o poet at all, preciselybe.causewhat I accept as a law of musical expression is no t taken-into account by thegenerahty ofcritics. Yet, with all these drawbacks to the worth of my opinion, I should be forced t ~ say, Don t tryto publishyet. It ispossiblethat successin poetry maycome out ~ ffuture ~ x e r t o n s ;

thereis nothinghereagainstsucha hope;but, in themeantime, I would-WIth a real In teres t -

did not occur to Waite that Browning s praisemay havebeen diplomaticand that the real message of the letter was the injunction Don t try to publishyet . This advice Waite ignored, and in the summer of 1877 he published, athisown expense, n Ode toAstronomyand otherPoems, a minutequarto pamphletof verse, written at divers t imes-one hundred copies of a few pages only SLT,p. 56). He did not choose to alter the rhyme that hadjarred on Browning s ear,and yet- to his surprise....... the tiny edition got sold, so I gained something inshillings rather than lost a cent by this initial venture . Among the purchaserswas Fr Rawes, who read the O de to Astronomy to the assembled pupils ofSt Charles s College. What they made of this decidedly mediocre poem is notrecorded.

Encouraged by hissuccess,Waite continued to pour out verse, but the majorliteraryperiod icals-b oth heavyweightslike The Athenaeumand lighter monthliessuch as Belgravia utterly ignored him, and the publications in which, as hemodestly s ys some things got into print , were modest indeed.

Then, asnow, the easiest road into print for fledgling poets was that of cooperation, and throughout the 1870s amateur periodicals flourished. A fewofthem-including The Golden Pen, which was edited by Waite': -circulated inmanuscript, but the m ~ o r i t ywere printed, and, on thewhole, printed anddesignedrather well. 2 Waite contributedshort poems to most of them, and two of themhe favoured with hislong, andclearlyderivative, LyricalDramas . The First Sabbath,modelled closely on P. Bailey s Festus, appeared in Echoes from the Lyre whileThe Poet s Magazine printedhis Byronic Fairy Romance , The Enchanted Uf,od. 3

No r was this all.In 1877an attempt had been made to establish an AmateurConference , but the first meeting, at Stratford-on-Avon, wasa disasterand nothingcame of it. Waite , however, took up the idea and in the fol lowing year wasinstrumental in founding Th e Central Union an association of authors andothers that met monthly, for the purpose of mutual criticism, over a period


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6 A . E . WAITE M GI I N OF M N Y PAR.TS _

of some tw o years. For the whole of that t ime W a i ~acted .as s e c r e t a ~wrotetheUnion s prospectus, and edited the first and only) Issue of Its unofficial organ, h entral Review and mateur News 4

Firmly established-among his fellow amateurs-s-as ~ p ~ e t.Waite nowundertook a more ambitious project, announcing for publication in February1879 Lucifer; a dramatic Romance and other Poems When this pamphlet of.64quarto pages finally appeared, in late spring, it had shrunkto 48 pages, s ~ e d d I ~ gtw o of its projected Three dramatic Poems . (only Th e Heart s T ~ a g e dinFairyland remained), and Lucifer had been relegated topage 29, having givenway on the title-page to yri the F a i r y z a n ~ManY,of the poems betray theinfluence of Waite s reading. The Wanderer s Life-Song , for example, owesmorethana little to Poe:

And we wander now and listenTo some ocean s murmur deep,

Though we see no waters glisten,Though we hear no wavelets leap.

Thou who rulest,thou who reignestO er the shadowy world unknown

We .have hoped when hope seemed vainestAnd toiled on with many a groan;

Say, when we embark in silenceBearing. neither scrip nor store,Shall we ply the weary oar,

Shall we reach the happy islandsSeen by seers in days of yore,Or upon.somerocky shore,

By no gleam of glory lighted,Wander cheerless, cold, benighted,

Lost for evermore?

The amateurspraisedthe book, but professional c r i t i c ~ a n o n ~ o u s ,f?r whileWaite preserved all the reviews he did no t identifY. the o u ~ ~ l sm w h ~ c htheyappeared) took a harsher view, which was no t e?tuely justified. Certainly, t ~ e

poems exude pessimism, doubt, and even d e s p ~ I r ;bU,t they are not .so poor I?either structure orcontent .as to merit condemnation as often crude andformless,no r did Waite deserve to be told that he cannot grasp a thought and hold i tfirm or t h at t he prevailing characteristic of his ideas is a certain Habb.iness,• o tto saypulpiness , Another reviewer praised the sequence of sonnets with whichthe book ends, bu t added, both rhyme .and rhythm must have greater carebestowedupon them, andmorbiditymust be avoided if Mr Waite isto produce

T H T I R ES O M E V E R SE R E C IT E R 7

anything worthy of after-remembrance .

Undauntedby these strictures, Waite wrotefor a third and lasttime to Browning,enclosing a copy of the book. Browning replied with yet more advice:

June 22nd, 1879My Dear Sir,

I havebeen sowhollyengaged for some time past, that it was impossible for me to readyour poems ascarefully asI wished, and now that I havereadeveryline, must t ry and be

ashonest and serviceable asyour accompanying letter seems to require and to deserve. Youhaveso many of the faculties of apoet, as toldyou before, thatyou may besafely advised-inthe assurance of havingthem readyforemployment when a proper occasion arises-to let thembe unemployed now when your business is to live-learn life: at present all these yearningsand regrets are an .accepted and recorded fact in the experience of everyyouthful susceptiblenature, andin once more expressing them, however musically,you eitherinvite attentionfromnatures l ikeyour own, and soonly too familiar with them, or from the opposites of these,natures to which your complaints areincomprehensible-asurpriseor an annoyance. Of Coursethere was a time when, at least in l iterature, there would havebeen novelty indeed in theavowal of suchaspirations and suchdisappointmentsas fillyour volume: bu t now weall wantwhetheror nowe get i t - an experience from those who havepassedthrough and surmountedaltogether-or even partially-the discoverieswe made at one-and-twenty . h t may you

not do in thenext ten years?-I hardly care how solong asit is earnestly and conscientiouslydone-which will answer your own doubts, and enableyou to help others who are at yourpresent stage of attainment Isaythis the more freely that you mean-as you manfully say-tocontinue in any caseto practise the composition of poetry: if so, I would suggest that youconfine yourself for the present to what is called objective poetry: take a fact, of any kind,and describe it scrupulously, letting it produce its Own effect: do not occupy yourself withyour own feelingsconcerning things in general,-how you wish them to beand regret tofindthem. Bygivingus one j ct yougiveus perhaps what we canexplain, aswe were hardly fittedto do at the age which happily is Stillyours. Shall I apologize for this rough libertyof adviceto one whom I would g ladly se rve? I think not-you will believe I am your affectionatewell-wisher.

RobertBrowning

O n this occasion Waite allowed Browning to·guidehim. He had come torealize that Browning was a shrewdjudge of character aswell asofpoetry, andWaite recorded that he profited by the advice he received; that he set himselfto learn life ; that he held overhis faculties of a poet until many lessons hadbeen pu t to heart; that the term of yearsmentionedby Robert Browningbroughtstrength to those faculties; and that the spark from heaven has possibly atlength fallen . He did not stop writing his poems, but only a very few wouldbe printed in the 1880s, there would be no more privately printed pamphlets,and nothing substantial would appear until 1886 and lsrafel An d t ha t was tobe a very different work indeed.

L OV E T H T NEVER TO L D C N BE


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L O V E T H A T N EV ER T OL DCAN BE

D U RI N G much of th e Victorian era th e majority of periodicals for childrenwere overtly, almost aggressively, religiousin tone, although there were exceptions,among the most prominent of which wasjamesHenderson s }DungFolks Paper. 1Its most famous contributor was Robert Louis Stevenson-both Treasure Islandand Kidnapped first appeared in its pages-but th e bulkofits contentscame fromless eminent authors, among whom was A. E. Waite. In themid-1880s Waitewrote a series of essaysfor The YOung Folks Paper, on such obscure subjects as Ever-burning Lamps , T he Phoenix , Legends of th e Rainbow an d even on

ElectricityinDomestic Life , and contributeda number of poems to th e LiteraryOlympic : a feature of th e paper devoted to the budding literary talents of itsreaders. In these columns Waitegained sufficient recognition asan aspiring poetto be included among the biographical Portraits in th e Christmas Supplementof 1885; bu t beforehis rise to limited fame in The YOungFolks Paper he had beennurtured by one of its contemporaries.

A poem by Waite, A n Exhortation , ha d appeared in April 1878 in Auntjudy s Magazine,2 to be fol lowed at intervals by some of his better efforts untilAugust 88 when T he Sea Fowl was printed in on e of th e last issues of themagazine before its closure in the following spring. He had been introducedto Auntjudy s Magazine by an eccentric clergyman wh o was a family friend of

th e editor, Horatia Gatty, and wh o was to prove a formative influence duringWaite s early adult life. He was an accomplished writer ofboth prose and verseand he undoubtedly helped Waite in his career; bu t it was not in the field ofliterature that he proved of greatest. service.

GrevilleJohn Chester 3 was born at Denton, in N or fo lk , on 25 October1830. In 1858, after his g raduat ion f rom Balliol Col lege , Oxford,. and hi ssubsequent ordination, he was appointedVicar of St]ude s, Moorfields, at Sheffield,where he astonished th e population with both his extreme high-churchmanshipand his extraordinary missionary zeal. He would stand, with his curate, i n theirsurplices at th e entrance to th e church an d solicit th e passers-by to come in , andhe later celebrated th e first harvest festival ever held in Sheffield. Bu t his greatest

L OV E T H T NEVER TO L D C N BEand most lasting moral success was considered to be T he influence that he gainedover young men-youths at an age when th e turning is commonly made, eitherto t he r ig ht hand for good or to th e left for evil,

All this came to an end , however, in 1867 when he ret ir ed f rom the roleof parish priest-apparently because ofill ..health-and took up a ne w career astraveller and amateur archaeologist. He first visited the United States of America,where he travelled extensively before returning home to give a markedly hostileaccount of the country and its people-whom he heartily detested-in his book

Tiansatlantic Sketches 1869). After his adventures in the West he made regularwinter excursions to th e Middle East, exploring and excavating in Egypt andPalestine sometimes on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund), returning toEngland each spring with a fresh haul of antiquities; most of these he presentedto the Ashmolean Museum.at Oxford.

He also took to writing novels; one of which julian Cloughton; r Lad-liftin Norfolk 1880)-illustrates his great and continuing interest in young men,in whom he seemsinvariably to haveinspired a profounddevotion that occasionallymanifested itself in curious ways. Writing to ·the Sheffield Daily ulegraph afterChester s death, on 23May 1892, a Mr Harry Hems related the following anecdote:

One summer evening, in Old Park Woods, Mr Chester and I - then a lad-were together,and he was giving me a lesson in geology when another lad, all in tatters, came along. Atsight of the rev. gentleman he suddenlybecame all aglow with excitement, and rushing athim, threw himself down, and began kissing his feet and legs. I learned afterwards that ourlatefriend had sheltered and nursedthis youth after some serious accident, and this was theirfirst meetingafterwards. I haveseenmen in the East cast themselvesdown and kissanother sfeet, but this was the first and last t ime I eversaw it done in phlegmatic England.

He was to inspirea similar, ifless flamboyantly expressed, devotion in the youngA. E. Waite.

Chester, whom Waiteconsidered to be t he first good friend that I evermadeamong seniors , came into his life about 1877 when Waite was twenty yearsold, having heard of me first because he knew Firth, my cousin, and insis tedthat I shouldbe brought to see him. It was done accordingly, no t a little againstmy cousin s wil l . Wai te described Chester as a t ravelled man of f or ty and atalismanic eccentric whom i twas aboonto know and assuredly one in a thousand,one also wh o must have been handsome in youth and was no w of a notablepresence, a fine passionate man. He was everand continually in a righteous rageabout something, th e convention in most cases being that it. was for th e publicgood SLY, p. 59) .

He commented further: I f Chester made real friends with anyone, thatperson-whoever-had cause to count it as an epoch in his tale of life , adding,but wi thout elaboration, I t was such in my ow n case and, even to this day,

E W I T E M G I C I N OF M NY P RTS


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_ L O V E TH T NEVER TOLD C N BE J -;;..;;;;;.

And since I love him, may I choose him nowTobe my faithful friend? Soul s Comedy, p. 48)

Th e acolyte waits for Jasper when the Mass is ended:

His lovefor Gabriel isreiteratedin other passages, with increasing frequencyafter the youngacolyte dies, andculminates in a long, impassioned and obsessional

hymn to the dead Gabriel-of which these verses are typical:

Is thy heavenly bliss complete?Hast thou now no more des ire

For the lovewe thought ' so sweetEre thy soul ascended higher?

Thy blue eyesare deep, and deepTheir expression lies'therein;

They their inward counsel keep,All their secrets shut within.

And so he led me t o the porch w hi ch l oo k' dOu t on the silent night. And still he heldMy hand,and said,.You are a stranger here,Do come again This is the One True Church,And all who jo in i t will be happy on .earth,And go to Heaven as welL-Will you be here?I asked. 0 , always, he replied, I serveBefore the altar Will you be my friend?Said I. He answer'd, I will loveyou always,If you wil l only come. So then we kiss 'd,And parted.(A Soul s Comedy, pp. 49-50)

Wh o sprinkles the liliesthat bind thy brow

With the dews that. keep them cool and bright?Wh o folds thy garments white?

What hand caresses and tends thy tresses,And claspsthy golden girdle now?

Wh o washes thy feet that are white and fair,An d dried them with his hair? Soul s Comedy, pp. 170-1)

But the real Gabriel was not dead.Waite gives no clue to Gabriel's identity, but clearly he had no connection

with Highgate, for by 1881 StJoseph's Retreat was ten yeats in Waite's past.Equally clearly he had a real existence, for twenty-five years later-and fourteen

All aroundWere men, like fairy kings, in robes of gold,And-boys in white who held long torches ~While two were swinging censers full of.smoke,And flame and fragrance. On e was like a saint,His hair a ll gold ..About the Church they cameIn long procession; there his'eyes met mine,

E W I T E M G I C I N OF M NY P RTS _

he and his eccentricities, his .rampantprejudices, his love.of his ow n way andhis generous heart arelively and precious memories' (SLT, p. 60). All of whichdescribes a personality the very antithesis of the gauche and naive young manhe befriended, for T he truth is that I was notmuch more than twelve at sixteenyears and had no t reachedintellectual puberty when I lived to he twenty-one'(SLT, p. 52 . But for all his self-perceived immaturity Waite was drifting intoemotional turmoilin the shape of a 'romanticfrienship' and he.would need allof Chester's sympathetic and experienced guidance to draw' him back from a

potentially destructive relationship.From th e beginning of his career asa poet Waite had attemptedversedramas,

but they had been invariably badly constructed and far too short for their themesto be developed. Recognizing these weaknesses Waite.began, in the autumn of1881, to sketch out. 'a long tale, a tale with a happy ending that would, so hehoped,.suffer from· none of them. Th e first draft of the ' tale' was completedwithin twelvemonths, but i t wasto be another fiveyearsbefore Soul s Comedywas published.

Th e structure and style of the poemare modelled on those of Bailey's Festus,while the title was clearly intended to be associated with Browning s Soul s Tragedy Waite, however, gives his ow n explanation of the tit.lein aprefat?ry

note: 'A tragedyin its ancientand legitimate sensedepicts the triumph of destinyover man; th e comedy, or s tory with a happy ending, represents the triumphofrnan overdestiny. It isin this sensethat the spiritualhistoryofJasper Cartwrightis cal led a Soul 's Comedy A Soul s Comedy, 1887, .p. vi).

Th e plot, with its themes of unwitting incest, treachery, illegitimacy, andfinal redemption, iswholly Waite's ow n and isbasedto adegree on his somewhatbitter perception of his parentage. Both t he major and minor heroes GasperCartwright and his illegitimate son, Austin Blake) are self-portraits, while theintertwined sub-plot-the story of the obsessive love of Jasper for the youngacolyte Gabriel-is a working ou t of Waite'sfeelings and experiences at the timehe began the f irst draf t.

Inthe complex plot of the poem Waite, as the hero Jasper Cartwright, firstseesGabriel when he enters by chance StJoseph's Retreat the Roman Churchwhich stands.on Highgate Hill ) and watches the Mass:

43 L O V E T H T NEVER TO L D C N BE42


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years after Greville Chester's death Waite published another Gabriel poem inwhich both his ow n feelings and Chester's awareness of them are set out moreopenly than in the ambiguous Soul s Comedy:

Then, knowing that none except yourself aboveWith me below, will penetrate our love,However plainly stands the written word,

Let me conceal no more, whose heart is stirr 'dTo tell outright what then I spoke.aloneEither to you, apart in undertone,Or but in parablesto other men. 4

Well, you are dead, and.God is strong to saveBut certain secretmatters to my graveI carry heavilyconcerning you,Wh o were through all so good and more than true;Stil l in your heart make them a safe retreat,If you can do so.iat the judgment-seat.

And this poem, unlike Soul s Comedy, tells the true story:

Old friend, whate'er our early verse may tell,Here is the mystery of Gabriel.

He describes his first sight of Gabriel an d his realizationthat his feelingsmust remain unspoken:

but the past is lost to Waite for,

Oh you are dead, and he has gone away

Asin your

Waite - A Magician of Many Parts

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