Michael was then immensely vivacious, full of vitality and curiosity. When young she had doubtless been very pretty, and for years kept traces of colour in her white hair. But if Michael was small, ruddy, gay, buoyant and quick in word and temper, Henry was tall, pallid, singularly beautiful in a way not appreciated by common people, that is, white with gray eyes, thin in face, shoulders and hands, as if touched throughout with gray long before the graying of her temples. Sudden shadows would flit over the face at some inner perception or memory. Always of fragile health, she was very quiet and restrained in voice and manner, a singularly alive and avid spectator and questioner, occasionally speaking with force and vivacity, but instinctively retiring, and absorbed by an intensely reflective inner life.
Yet it is clear that she, as well as Michael, loved the give-and-take of social intercourse within their circle. She too liked to catch up and pass on an amusing story about a contemporary, and thoroughly enjoyed a joke. After the austere Bristol days, when their gravity might have been at least a thousand years old, they grew steadily younger through the next fifteen years. "Michael had," says Father John Gray, "the look, the laugh, and many of the thoughts of a child." Both were witty, but Michael, the richer and more spontaneous nature, had a warm gift of humour almost Rabelaisian. She loved fun, and jesting, and mimicry. With her frequent smile, her sparkling eyes, and her emphatic tones and gestures, she was an extremely animated storyteller. Henry's wit had a more intellectual quality: it was quicker and sharper in edge than Michael's, and it grew keener as she grew older, till it acquired almost a touch of grimness, as when she said to a friend during her last illness: "The doctor says I may live till Christmas, but after that I must go away at once."
Henry was not a sedulous correspondent: indulged by Michael, she only wrote letters when a rare mood prompted her to do so. But the fortunate friend who heard from her at those times received a missive that was like an emanation from her soul, tender, wise, penetrative, gravely witty and delicately sweet. One would like to give in full some of those letters, but must be content to quote characteristic fragments of them. Thus, in March of 1888, she wrote to Miss Alice Trusted:
I feel you will never let yourself believe how much you are loved by me.... Your letter is one of the most precious I have ever received. Ah! so a friend thinks of one; would that God could think with her! But it is a deep joy to me to be something to the souls that live along with me on the earth....
In May she wrote to the same friend an account of a visit to their "dear old friend, Mr Browning":
He came in to us quite by himself, with one of his impetuous exclamations, followed by "Well, my two dear Greek women!" We found him well, lovingly kind, grave as ever. His new home is well-nigh a palace, and his famed old tapestries (one attributed to Giulio Romano) have now a princely setting.... He fell into a deep, mourning reverie after speaking of the death of Matthew Arnold, whom he called with familiar affection-;Mat. Then his face was like the surface of a grey pool in autumn, full of calm, blank intimité.
Another visit is described in July of the same year:
We have again been to see Mr Browning, and spent with him and his sister almost the only perfect hours of this season. Alice, he has promised me to play, the next time we meet, some of Galuppi's toccatas!... He read to us some of the loveliest poems of Alfred de Musset, very quietly, with a low voice full of recueillement, and now and then a brief smile at some touch of exquisite playfulness. He is always the poet with us, and it seems impossible to realise that he goes behind a shell of worldly behaviour and commonplace talk when he faces society. Yet so it is: we once saw it was so. In his own home, in his study, he is "Rabbi ben Ezra," with his inspired, calm, triumphant old age. His eyes rest on one with their strange, passive vision, traversed sometimes by an autumnal geniality, mellow and apart, which is beautiful to meet. Yet his motions are full of impetuosity and warmth, and contrast with his steady outlook and his 'grave-kindly' aspect.
One finds acute artistic and literary estimates in these letters. Thus, after an appreciation of Whistler's nocturnes, she remarks of his Carlyle portrait, "It is a masterpiece; the face has caught the fervid chaos of his ideality."
Of Onslow Ford's memorial of Shelley she says: "The drowned nude ... is an excellent portrait of the model, and therefore unworthy of Shelley, to my mind. The conventional lions and the naturalistic apple-boughs don't coalesce. The Muse is but a music-girl. I like the bold treatment of the sea-washed body."
She sketches an illuminating comparison between the art of Pierre Loti's Pêcheur d'lslande and that of Millet; and declares that Huysmans' work "is the last word of decadence-;the foam on the most recent decay-;and yet there is something of meagre tragedy about it."
After a visit to the opera she writes:
We went to see Gluck's Orfeo. Julia Ravogli attaches one to her with that love which is almost chivalry, that one gives to a great and simple artist. Her hands are as expressive as a countenance, and her face is true, is pliant to ideal passion. Her voice is lovely, and she sits down by her dead Euridice and sings Che farò as a woodland nightingale sings her pain.
She exclaims at the "elegant Latin" used by Gerbert in his letters, "written in the dark tenth century"; agrees with Matthew Arnold that Flaubert has "neither compassion nor insight: his art cannot give us the verity of a temperament or soul"; but adds of his (Flaubert's) correspondence, "To me each letter in which he writes of art is full of incitement, help, and subtle justness."
She gives her impressions of Pater when delivering a lecture in December 1890:
He came forward without looking anywhere and immediately began to read, with no preface. He never gave his pleasant blue eyes to his audience.... There is great determination, a little brutality (in the French sense) about the lower part of his face; yet it is under complete, urbane control. His voice is low, and has a singular sensitive resonance in it-;an audible capacity for suffering, as it were. His courteous exterior hides a strong nature; there is something, one feels, of Denys l'Auxerrois in him-;a Bacchant, a Zagreus.
A criticism of the comedy of the nineties, and its manner of production, is thrown off lightly in a letter to Miss Louie Ellis:
We went to Pinero. He was taken at snail's pace, and so much that was disgraceful to humanity had to be endured at that rate that we groaned. Satire should always be taken with rapier speed-;to pause on it is to make it unendurable. The malice and anger must sparkle, or the mind contracts and is bored.
On an Easter visit to the country, in 1894, she wrote to Miss Trusted:
Yesterday we saw our first daffodils: they were growing in awful peace. The sun was setting: it had reached the tranquil, not the coloured stage; the air held more of its effect than the sky yet showed. We did not pluck a daffodil: they grew inviolable. After sunset, as we came thro' the firs, we saw a round glow behind them-;it was the Paschal moon rising. A chafer passed, like the twang of one string of an Æolian harp. The sound of the wind in the firs is cosmic, the gathering of many waters etherealized; and the sharp notes of individual birds cross it with their smallness, and with a pertinacity that can throw continuance itself into the background.
Writing to another friend at a much later date, she says:
We have seen Tagore for a quarter of an hour-;seen the patient and quiet beauty of a lustrous-eyed animal. He is full of rumination, affability; and his smile is a jewel, the particular jewel of his soul.
And in 1913, the last year of her life, when Mr Rothenstein had been making a sketch of her head for a portrait, she wrote him thanks which were both critical and appreciative, concluding:
It is a lovely and noble drawing: it is such a revelation of a mood of the soul-;so intense, I said, seeing it at first-;that is how I shall look at the Last Judgment, "When to Thee I have appealed, Sweet Spirit, comfort me."
It is significant that, wherever they went, the servants fell in love with Henry. Her manner, always gracious, was to them of the most beautiful courtesy and consideration. Michael was more imperious, more exigent. Warm and generous in her friendships, she yet was capable of sudden fierce anger for some trivial cause-;when, however, she would rage so amusingly that the offender forgot to be offended in his turn. She might banish a friend for months, for no discoverable reason, or might in some other rash way inconsiderately hurt him; but, though she would be too proud to confess it, she would be the unhappiest party of them all to the quarrel. "Of the wounds she inflicts, Michael very frequently dies," she once wrote in a letter.
But of her devotion to Henry, its passion, its depth, its tenacity and tenderness, it is quite impossible to speak adequately. From Henry's infancy to her death-;literally from her first day to her last-;Michael shielded, tended, and nurtured her in body and in spirit. Probably there never was another such case of one mind being formed by another. There surely cannot be elsewhere in literature a set of love-songs such as...
