Dark Lady of the Sonnets | Page 4

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