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The famous General Gordon was his first cousin, and it was owing to this fact that Hake’s son, Mr. Egmont Hake, was entrusted with the material for writing his authoritative books upon the heroic Christian soldier. Between Hake’s eldest son, Mr. T. St. E. Hake, a rising novelist, and the General the likeness was curiously strong.
His ideal poet was Pope, and when he read, or rather looked into, Hake’s ‘World’s Epitaph,’ he thought he did Hake the greatest honour by saying, “There are lines here and there that are nigh as good as Pope’s.” On the other hand, Hake’s acquaintance with Borrow’s works was far behind that of some Borrovians who did not know Lavengro in the flesh, such as Mr. Saintsbury and Mr. Birrell.
Hake’s best work is that, I think, contained in the volume called ‘New Symbols,’ in which there is disclosed an extraordinary variety of poetic power. In execution, too, he is at his best in that volume. Christina Rossetti has often told me that ‘Ecce Homo’ impressed her more profoundly than did any other poem of her own time. Also its daring startled her.
Hake’s sonnet-sequence ‘The New Day,’ just published. As far as literary and artistic work goes, it was, perhaps, the richest period of his life; and that it was also one of the happiest is clear not only from his own words, but also from the following testimony of Dr. Hake, who saw much of him there:—
When a friend or an acquaintance relates an anecdote of him the asperity with which he does so is really remarkable and quite painful. It was—it must have been—far from Dr. Gordon Hake’s wish to speak unkindly of his old friend who remained to the last deeply attached to him.
Hake’s account of that Christmas gathering of the Rossettis at Bognor in 1875—a gathering which he has made historic—that to-day I should be writing an obituary notice of the “parable-poet” himself.
Hake’s relations towards Rossetti were of the deepest and most sacred kind. Rossetti had the highest opinion of Hake’s poetical genius, and also felt towards him the greatest love and gratitude for services of an inestimable kind rendered to him in the direst crisis of his life.
I have told elsewhere the whimsical story of Hake and Rossetti, of Rossetti’s delightful account of his reading as a boy, in a coffee-house in Chancery Lane, Hake’s remarkable romance ‘Vates,’ afterwards called ‘Valdarno,’ in a magazine; his writing a letter about it to the unknown author, and getting no reply until many years had passed.
Nor was Hake’s feeling akin to that fine despair Before the foreheads of the gods of song which true poets, great or small, know—that fine despair which, while it will sometimes stop the breath of one of the true sons of Apollo, as it actually did strike mute Charles Wells, and as at one time it threatened to stop the breath of Rossetti, will lead others to write, and write, and write.
This, of course, was true enough; and Hake’s asperities when speaking of Borrow in ‘Memoirs of Eighty Years’—asperities which have vexed a good many Borrovians—simply arose from the fact that it was impossible for two such men to understand each other.
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