4                                      Karl Beckson

In 1908, doctors told her that Arthur's illness, "General Paraly¬
sis of the Insane" (regarded at that time as generally caused by
syphilis), would result in death within eighteen months. To the
American critic James Gibbons Huneker, in a letter at Dartmouth
College Library, she wrote: ". . . there is no hope of recovery;
and they can do absolutely nothing for him—they don't even at¬
tempt treatment—it is General Paralysis (the doctors say there is
no trace of the disease which generally accounts for this malady—
and Arthur always told me he never had had it—he would not tell
a lie—you know). .. ." To other friends, Rhoda wrote incessantly
that Arthur was dying. In a letter to the American lawyer and art
patron John Quinn, Huneker wrote in 1910 that "Rhoda, the
black panther, writes in a hopeless way, nevertheless I hear that
Arthur is much seen and is, apparently, improving." Indeed, he
outlived not only Rhoda but most of his friends when he died in
1945 at the age of seventy-nine, but after 1910, when the severity
of his mental illness had subsided, he was not the same critic he
had been before his breakdown. His capacity for critical discern¬
ment, evident in his earlier work, such as The Symbolist Move¬
ment in Literature (1899), which T. S. Eliot called a "revelation,"
was effected permanently by pathological incoherence.

Faced with the prospect of his early death—and, when that
seemed a misdiagnosis, the likelihood of a permanent mental dis¬
order—Rhoda attempted to salvage her life by becoming an ac¬
tress. The daughter of a Newcastle shipbuilder, she had first come
to London to study music; Arthur had met her through the sister
of Ernest Rhys, the writer and editor, who had been Arthur's
friend since the late 1880s. Their marriage in 1901, at the height
of Arthur's fame, brought her friendships with many of the most
prominent writers of the time. With Arthur's partial recovery,
she felt isolated and helpless in their cottage in Wittershani, Kent,
from which she wrote to Huneker:

[Arthur] keeps wonderfully well, tho' there is no reasoning power,
and he is apt to fly into ungovernable rages a propos of nothing—of
course Mr. Huneker, as you can well guess, it is terrible for me—I