Derrick Vaughan - Novelist | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset

Derrick Vaughan--Novelist

'It is only through deep sympathy that a man can become a great
artist.'--Lewes's Life of Goethe.
'Sympathy is feeling related to an object, whilst sentiment is the same
feeling seeking itself alone.'--Arnold Toynbee.
Chapter I.
'Nothing fills a child's mind like a large old mansion; better if un- or
partially occupied; peopled with the spirits of deceased members of the
county and Justices of the Quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled
solitude of one, with my feelings at seven years old!'--From Letters of
Charles Lamb.
To attempt a formal biography of Derrick Vaughan would be out of the
question, even though he and I have been more or less thrown together
since we were both in the nursery. But I have an odd sort of wish to
note down roughly just a few of my recollections of him, and to show
how his fortunes gradually developed, being perhaps stimulated to
make the attempt by certain irritating remarks which one overhears
now often enough at clubs or in drawing-rooms, or indeed wherever
one goes. "Derrick Vaughan," say these authorities of the world of
small-talk, with that delightful air of omniscience which invariably
characterises them, "why, he simply leapt into fame. He is one of the
favourites of fortune. Like Byron, he woke one morning and found
himself famous."
Now this sounds well enough, but it is a long way from the truth, and
I--Sydney Wharncliffe, of the Inner Temple, Barrister-at-law-- desire,
while the past few years are fresh in my mind, to write a true version of
my friend's career.

Everyone knows his face. Has it not appeared in 'Noted Men,' and--
gradually deteriorating according to the price of the paper and the
quality of the engraving--in many another illustrated journal? Yet
somehow these works of art don't satisfy me, and, as I write, I see
before me something very different from the latest photograph by
Messrs. Paul and Reynard.
I see a large-featured, broad-browed English face, a trifle heavy-
looking when in repose, yet a thorough, honest, manly face, with a
complexion neither dark nor fair, with brown hair and moustache, and
with light hazel eyes that look out on the world quietly enough. You
might talk to him for long in an ordinary way and never suspect that he
was a genius; but when you have him to yourself, when some
consciousness of sympathy rouses him, he all at once becomes a
different being. His quiet eyes kindle, his face becomes full of life--you
wonder that you ever thought it heavy or commonplace. Then the world
interrupts in some way, and, just as a hermit-crab draws down its shell
with a comically rapid movement, so Derrick suddenly retires into
himself.
Thus much for his outer man.
For the rest, there are of course the neat little accounts of his birthplace,
his parentage, his education, etc., etc., published with the list of his
works in due order, with the engravings in the illustrated papers. But
these tell us little of the real life of the man.
Carlyle, in one