IT IS difficult to express with just the happy shade of truth how little the knowledge of James Payn as the most lovable of men happened oppressively to involve taking the writer into account. It is, at all events, a simple and veracious statement of my own affectionate acquaintance with him that it scarcely ever came up between us directly that either of us were writers. I hardly know what would have occurred on any occasion if either he or I had suddenly become very literary. It was a feature of a long and an unclouded intercourse that I had positively to remind myself at need that books were in him quite as much as friendship and talk and hospitality and whist. Books, indeed, as he saw them, liked them and produced them, were exactly the equally immediate, sociable, personal things—things to be kept and used within the radius of healthy amusement; they were not mysteries and sanctities, embarrassments and problems—they might perfectly be overlooked, but not relegated and enshrined. As it happened then, we overlooked them—though I, perhaps, had most to try.
As I can speak of him only from my personal point of view, that of a comparatively late comer into a general circle very much wound up and going, which therefore rather imposed spectatorship, or, to put it crudely, observation, I may say that much of the interest of knowing him sprang exactly from this pleasant vision of him as the man of letters not on the stretch, the workman who had hit off a happy economy. He told of practice and ease—ease of feeling, I mean (precious boon!) about his trade and his daily job.
I recall how, on first becoming aware that, more quickly than I had either hoped or feared, I was knee-deep in London life, people and things put on a colour to me just in proportion as my imagination fitted them into some scheme, some theory of historic conditions and of the general English picture—some idea of tradition that, though it seemed to me I could put my finger on it, they (the real participants) were carrying out with an unconsciousness sometimes charming, often amusing, always magnificent. Payn, essentially, was unconscious, and so it was that he struck me as being, besides the gentlest, drollest, most human spirit, a man of a period, a survival, a witness with an answer to one’s particular curiosity. Great was that, inevitably, of an American rather continentalised and really, at last, seeing with his eyes and touching with his hands the unadulterated English school. Payn was of that lineage the natural, unaggressive, almost unwitting specimen.
Without the aid of years or other creaking machinery, he “went back”—went back as a link, in imagination and sympathy, to the taste and tone that I had supposed I should have come too late to catch. He seemed ever to belong to a literary fashion more remote than his time of life made possible—which was the effect of his turn of mind and his love of a “good story.” He presented the old feeling for that incontestable blessing with a fond familiarity that often made me envy him. I envied altogether his comfortable, sociable relation to letters and to his métier, which he had got so perfectly into harness. What he “went back” to above all was Dickens and the world of Dickens—I mean of Dickens and the whole Dickens period and pitch at the uncriticised stage. This particular colour kept him to the end, with his personal freshness both of sympathy and indifference (it was as if the latter, in particular, in certain directions, were renewed each morning), a vivid and consistent “case.”
I had, at all events, a friendly vision of all this that he kindly never did anything to spoil. He was always the author of “Lost Sir Massingberd,” which, without his being so very much my senior, he had miraculously managed to make contemporary with the picture of that remembered morning of life when I brushed the dew from Chambers’s Journal. What made him and kept him enviable was that he was the man of ingenious and active imagination who could yet remain untormented from within. From without it was doubtless another matter—sensitive and tender, he was quite accessible enough to the world’s worries to show his friends that he could always be droll at the expense of them. This power, towards the close of his life, fate subjected to tests enough; and yet when I last saw him his wit was unvanquished.
Therefore it is that I feel I keep nearer to him in memory by not breaking ground on his writings than by attempting to speak of them. The best were those in which he most gave his whimsical humour its head. These were admirable and, on a sifting, ought to be gathered together. But whether for comedy or drama, he gave even to the end of his sad last few years—in perpetual confinement and pain—the impression of the command of an independent faculty of laughter and sighs, a blessed chamber of the brain that could remain clear, show at last, at the top of the lighthouse, the lamp trimmed and the spark red, while darkness crept steadily on. His imagination had not made so much of the human bustle that to miss it was to miss all things. He wrought, like a good workman, to the latest hour, and as the world shrank more to what was devotedly close to him he had more and more affection to take and more and more gentleness to show.
April 9, 1898