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_ Throughout the eighties at least, and probably for some years before,
the British Museum reading room was used daily by a gentleman of such
astonishing and crushing ugliness that no one who had once seen him
could ever thereafter forget him. He was of fair complexion, rather
golden red than sandy; aged between forty-five and sixty; and dressed
in frock coat and tall hat of presentable but never new appearance.
His figure was rectangular, waistless, neckless, ankleless, of middle
height, looking shortish because, though he was not particularly
stout, there was nothing slender about him. His ugliness was not
unamiable; it was accidental, external, excrescential. Attached to
his face from the left ear to the point of his chin was a monstrous
goitre, which hung down to his collar bone, and was very inadequately
balanced by a smaller one on his right eyelid. Nature's malice was so
overdone in his case that it somehow failed to produce the effect of
repulsion it seemed to have aimed at. When you first met Thomas Tyler
you could think of nothing else but whether surgery could really do
nothing for him. But after a very brief acquaintance you never
thought of his disfigurements at all, and talked to him as you might
to Romeo or Lovelace; only, so many people, especially women, would
not risk the preliminary ordeal, that he remained a man apart and a
bachelor all his days. I am not to be frightened or prejudiced by a
tumor; and I struck up a cordial acquaintance with him, in the course
of which he kept me pretty closely on the track of his work at the
Museum, in which I was then, like himself, a daily reader.
He was by profession a man of letters of an uncommercial kind. He was
a specialist in pessimism; had made a translation of Ecclesiastes of
which eight copies a year were sold; and followed up the pessimism of
Shakespear and Swift with keen interest. He delighted in a hideous
conception which he called the theory of the cycles, according to
which the history of mankind and the universe keeps eternally
repeating itself without the slightest variation throughout all
eternity; so that he had lived and died and had his goitre before and
would live and die and have it again and again and again. He liked to
believe that nothing that happened to him was completely novel: he
was persuaded that he often had some recollection of its previous
occurrence in the last cycle. He hunted out allusions to this
favorite theory in his three favorite pessimists. He tried his hand
occasionally at deciphering ancient inscriptions, reading them as
people seem to read the stars, by discovering bears and bulls and
swords and goats where, as it seems to me, no sane human being can see
anything but stars higgledy-piggledy. Next to the translation of
Ecclesiastes, his _magnum opus_ was his work on Shakespear's Sonnets,
in which he accepted a previous identification of Mr W. H., the "onlie
begetter" of the sonnets, with the Earl of Pembroke (William Herbert),
and promulgated his own identification of Mistress Mary Fitton with
the Dark Lady. Whether he was right or wrong about the Dark Lady did
not matter urgently to me: she might have been Maria Tompkins for all
I cared. But Tyler would have it that she was Mary Fitton; and he
tracked Mary down from the first of her marriages in her teens to her
tomb in Cheshire, whither he made a pilgrimage and whence returned in
triumph with a picture of her statue, and the news that he was
convinced she was a dark lady by traces of paint still discernible.
In due course he published his edition of the Sonnets, with the
evidence he had collected. He lent me a copy of the book, which I
never returned. But I reviewed it in the Pall Mall Gazette on the 7th
of January 1886, and thereby let loose the Fitton theory in a wider
circle of readers than the book could reach. Then Tyler died, sinking
unnoted like a stone in the sea. I observed that Mr Acheson, Mrs
Davenant's champion, calls him Reverend. It may very well be that he
got his knowledge of Hebrew in reading for the Church; and there was
always something of the clergyman or the schoolmaster in his dress and
air. Possibly he may actually have been ordained. But he never told
me that or anything else about his affairs; and his black pessimism
would have shot him violently out of any church at present established
in the West. We never talked about affairs: we talked about
Shakespear, and the Dark Lady, and Swift, and Koheleth, and the
cycles, and the mysterious moments when a feeling came over us that
this had happened to us before, and about the forgeries of the
Pentateuch which were offered for sale to the British Museum, and
about literature and things of the spirit generally. He always came
to my desk at the Museum and spoke to me about something or other, no
doubt finding that people who were keen on this sort of conversation
were rather scarce. He remains a vivid spot of memory in the void of
my forgetfulness, a quite considerable and dignified soul in a
grotesquely disfigured body. _
Read next: PREFACE TO THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS: Frank Harris
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