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 ​Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/12 ​Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/13 ​Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/14 ​Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/15