Following Darkness/Preface
FOLLOWING DARKNESS
It is not without some hesitation that I offer to the public the following fragment of an autobiography, even though in doing so I am but obeying the obvious intention of its author. When the papers of Mr. Peter Waring came into my possession I had indeed no idea of its existence, and I have now no means of telling when it was written. The fact that he left it unfinished proves nothing. He may have begun it and abandoned it years ago: he may have been working at it shortly before his death. That he intended to carry it to completion, there is, I think, abundant evidence in a mass of detached notes and impressions bearing on a later period of his life. These, rightly or wrongly, I have not printed, partly because the earlier portion has in itself a certain unity and completeness, which would be marred were I to add anything to it, and partly because they never received his personal revision. Moreover, many of them are in the highest degree fantastic and exotic, so that it is at times difficult to take them literally, especially if the simplicity and directness of the earlier pages be borne in mind.
Those who are familiar with Mr. Waring's writings published during his lifetime—writings in which the personal element is so slight—will hardly be prepared for anything so intimate as this journal. His critical methods were entirely scientific. Of their value I am not the proper person to speak, having neither the necessary knowledge, nor, to tell the whole truth, the necessary sympathy. Our paths, if they seemed to run parallel for a moment, diverged very early in life, and I could never take much interest in the work to which he devoted his real, though, I venture to think, somewhat narrow gifts. He was still a young man—barely thirty-six—when he died, but he had already become eminent in his own particular line, that of the newer art criticism, invented, I believe, by the Italian, Morelli. It was scarcely a career to bring him much under the public eye, but his "Study of the Drawings of the Early Italian Masters" gained him, I understand, the recognition of a small number of persons, of various nationalities, occupied in making similar researches. He was busy with the proofs of the second and larger edition of this work when, on the 10th of September, 1911, he died under tragic circumstances. The mystery of his death, about which there was some noise in the papers at the time, will, I think, never now be cleared up, though, to my own mind, it is perfectly clear that he was murdered.
In relation to the autobiography, a word or two of comment and explanation is possibly due to the reader. To begin with, I have altered all the proper names save two—my own, and that of Mrs. Carroll, of Derryaghy, Newcastle, County Down, his oldest friend, which I have allowed to remain. I feel this, myself, to be unsatisfactory, but I cannot see how at present it is to be avoided. Again, though I have added nothing, I have left out a few pages—only a few—and none, I believe, of importance, so far as the understanding of the whole is concerned. For this I have no excuse to offer, except that it seemed to me that he himself should have omitted them.
In the main the portrait he has given of himself coincides with my own impression of him in early life. I can remember very well when I first came to know him at school. I was more struck by his gifts then, perhaps, than I was later, though even at that time he seemed to me to be intensely one-sided. He was very intelligent, but from the beginning his whole manner of looking upon life was, in my opinion, unfortunate. It may sound harsh to say so, but as the years passed I do not think he improved. Latterly, he appeared to me to have little but his fine taste. It was as if everything had become subservient to an aesthetic sense, which was extraordinarily, morbidly acute. Yet even while I write this I have a suspicion that I am not doing him justice. If he had been nothing but what I say he was, I should not be able to look back with tenderness upon the friendship of those early days, whereas the recollection of that friendship will always remain one of the pleasantest memories of my life. I regret that it should have been broken, but that was almost inevitable. It came about slowly and naturally, though no doubt the actual break was hastened by a mutual friend of ours, who informed me that Waring had described me as borné and tedious. That is the kind of thing which rankles. You may say to yourself it is of no consequence, but to have an uneasy feeling that your friend finds your company dull quickly becomes unendurable. A man would rather be thought almost anything than a bore; hence it was that for a long time I entirely ceased to see him. I regret it now, for he may never have made the fatal remark, and even if he did, judging from his journal, it need not have been inconsistent with affection.
The last time I saw him was at Mrs. Carroll's house, about a year before his death. She had asked me down, I suppose by Waring's request, and I went, though I stayed only one night. I had not seen him for years until this occasion, and I was struck, and even shocked, by his altered appearance, and still more by his manner, which was that, I imagined, of a man haunted by some secret thought that has come between him and everything about him. This impression, though I do not desire to lay stress upon it, may throw a light on certain of the later notes I have not printed, and these, in turn, may afford some clue as to the mystery surrounding his death, for it is evident that he had come under the influence of strange and disreputable persons, who professed to experiment in occult sciences—spiritualism, and even magic. His hair had turned quite white at the temples. He seemed restless and dissatisfied; and, whatever else he may have found in his long wanderings, I could not believe he had found peace.
Late in the evening we sat together. He was so silent that I looked at him to see if he had fallen asleep. The room we were sitting in—the morning-room—gave on to a garden at the side of the house, into which one could easily pass through tall French windows. The night was warm, and one of these windows stood wide open, letting in the scent of flowers, but with a curtain drawn across it to keep out moths and other winged creatures attracted by lamplight. I did not speak, but waited for him to talk or to keep silent as he chose. After a while I got up to examine a few black-framed etchings that hung upon the walls. These, with some pieces of china, formed the only decorations. I drew back the curtain and looked out into the night. The moon was high above the trees, and I could hear the low sound of waves breaking on the shore. When I turned round he was watching me, and I was struck by his expression, which was that of a man on the point of making some very private communication. But perhaps my sudden movement disconcerted him, for he said nothing, and in a little I could see the impulse had left him. I began to talk, not of my own work, which I thought would have no interest for him, but of his, which I was surprised to find he seemed to regard as equally unimportant. I asked him what had first led him to take it up.
"There was nothing else," he answered.
Seeing that I waited for him to go on, he made an effort to shake of his abstraction. "If I hadn't found it I should have bored myself to death. What is there for a boy of eighteen, with no taste for society, and left to wander about Europe alone, to do? Fortunately, I had always cared for pictures, and early Italian art appealed to me particularly."
"Of course, you had your writing."
"I never wrote a line except to take notes. I was nearly thirty before it occurred to me to publish anything. Even then, it was only for a few pedants more or less like myself that I wrote. My writings are of no account. The only people I can imagine it pleasant to write for are quite young people. They might lend your work a sort of charm by reading their own youth and enthusiasm into it. But it is not easy to arouse enthusiasm by describing how Bernardino de' Conti paints ears, or how Pontormo models hands. For one thing, nobody wants to know. All that it leads to is that presently you find yourself approaching the most innocent work of art with the mind of a detective, revelling in clues and the æsthetically unimportant. Nine-tenths of your enjoyment comes from the gratified sense of your own ingenuity. Of course it is wrong. When I was a boy I fell in love with one of Giotto's frescoes in the Upper Church at Assisi, a thing half-peeled from the wall, and representing Saint Francis preaching to the birds. But why I liked it had nothing in the world to do either with Giotto or Saint Francis. I simply saw a bit of decoration, a Japanese print in gray and blue. . . . . . That is the proper spirit. One day, however, a year or so later, I was in the Louvre, in the Salle des Primitifs, and before me was a beautiful little picture which hangs on the side wall, near the door. Below it was printed an artist's name, Gentile da Fabriano. I looked at the picture again, and I said to myself, 'Why Gentile, when it is obviously by Jacopo Bellini?' That was the beginning."
"You don't think, then, it matters very much?"
"About Gentile? Not in the least. I haven't even persuaded them to make the alteration in the catalogue."
But I could see he was talking merely not to be silent, so I got up and we lit our candles. At the top of the staircase I said good-night, for our bedrooms were on opposite sides of the house, but he pushed open a door.
"There is a picture here," he said.
I followed him into the big, dark room, black shadows that seemed almost solid gliding away before us. He took my candle and held both up so that their light flickered across a small canvas that hung just above the level of our eyes. The painting represented the head of a quite young girl, and I recognised it at once as a portrait of Katherine Dale. I am no judge of pictures, so I will only say that this picture gave me pleasure. Yet I should have hesitated to call the face beautiful, and it certainly was not pretty. It reminded me rather of an early Millais—that is to say, the subject reminded me of a Millais type. There was the same breadth of forehead, the same rich colouring and steadfast, serious eyes that were more like the eyes of a boy than of a girl. I wondered why he had brought me in to look at it just now, and thought it had perhaps been painted by a celebrated artist.
"Whose is it?" I asked, and was greatly surprised when he told me he had done it himself, from memory. I had never seen any of his work before, and I congratulated him on his success, which seemed to me to be really a genuine one. I asked another question, but he did not reply. He merely returned me my candle, which I held up for another look. The small, wavering, uncertain flame lent a curious air of life to the portrait, and I continued to regard it, for the frankness and simplicity of the young face gave me great pleasure. When I glanced round I discovered I was alone. My companion had disappeared without my noticing it, and evidently he had gone out, not by the way we had entered, but by another door at the father end of the room. That this was the case I had more positive proof next moment, for a sudden draught extinguished my candle so swiftly and unexpectedly that I had an odd feeling that somebody had stolen up behind me and blown it out.