Bildungsromans; Fathers and sons -- Fiction; First loves -- Fiction; Ireland -- Fiction
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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