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Title: Twenty Years of My Life
Author: Sladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton
Language: English
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TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
THE ROOF GARDEN AND POMPEIAN FOUNTAIN AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(_From the Painting by Yoshio Markino._)
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWENTY YEARS
OF MY LIFE
BY
DOUGLAS SLADEN
AUTHOR OF “WHO’S WHO”
WITH FOUR COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS AND TWELVE PORTRAITS
BY
YOSHIO MARKINO
Publisher’s Logo
NEW YORK
E·P·DUTTON & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E.,
AND BUNGAY SUFFOLK.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO
JEROME K. JEROME
ONE OF THE EARLIEST AND DEAREST OF MY
LITERARY FRIENDS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INTRODUCTION
WHEN I wrote _Who’s Who_, sixteen or seventeen years ago, I used to
receive shoals of funny letters from people who wanted, or did not want,
to be included, and now, when I have not edited the book for more than a
dozen years, I still receive letters of criticism on the way in which I
conduct it, and usually consign them to limbo. A few months ago,
however, I received the subjoined letter, which is so out of the
ordinary that I quote it to show what illustrious correspondents I have.
I must not attach the author’s name, though every grown-up man in the
civilised world would be interested to know it.
“DEAR SIR,
“Kindly cease to omit my name from your ever-increasing
list of persons as annually placed before the public for sale at
any price it is worth. Just put me down in place of Victoria
Alice, who is an American pure and simple, while I am left out
in the cold. I am the daughter of King Edward VII....[1] I am
the legal spouse of Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, being legally
married to him in 1890, Aug. 14, a ratification of which
occurrence was held by me in hallway of British Embassy, Paris,
France, 1900, same date. Just give me a notice, will you,
instead of harping on the sisterhood of King George V, who form
among themselves a similar affair to that held by female
contingent of Synagogue, doing more damage in the community, and
eventually in the world, than any one set of people anywhere,
with method so secret that even Rabbi is unable to uncover the
original design known as main point in England.
“Sincerely,
“Etc., etc.
“_October 23, 1913._”
Footnote 1:
This portion of the letter could not be printed.
If I could tell all I know about the interesting people I have met, the
book would read like my own _Who’s Who_ re-written by Walter Emanuel for
publication in _Punch_. As it is, the book contains a great deal of
information about celebrities which could never appear in _Who’s Who_,
and all the best anecdotes which I remember about my friends, except
those which would turn my friends into enemies, and even some of those I
mean to give in this preface, minus the names, to prevent their being
lost to posterity.
The twenty years of my life which I here present to readers are the
twenty years which I spent at 32, Addison Mansions, Kensington, during
which I was in constant intercourse with most of the best-known writers
of the generation. The book is therefore largely taken up with personal
reminiscences and impressions of them—indeed, not a few of them, such as
Conan Doyle, J. K. Jerome, I. Zangwill, H. A. Vachell, Charles Garvice,
Eden Phillpotts, Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Mrs. Croker, Mrs.
Perrin, Madame Albanesi, Compton Mackenzie, and Jeffery Farnol’s mentor,
wrote specially for this book an account of the circumstances which led
to their being authors. For it must be remembered that the majority of
authors start life in some other profession, and drift into authorship
as they discover their aptitude for it. Conan Doyle was a doctor, in
busy practice when he wrote _The White Company_; Jerome was a lawyer’s
clerk when he wrote _Three Men in a Boat_; both Hardy and Hall Caine
began as architects; Zangwill was a teacher, and W. W. Jacobs was a
clerk in the General Post Office.
An index of the authors of whom personal reminiscences are told in this
book will be found at the end.
Its earlier chapters deal with my life prior to our going to Addison
Mansions, giving details of my parentage and bringing-up, of the seven
years I spent in Australia and the United States, and my long visits to
Canada and Japan. From that point forward, except for the four chapters
which deal with the writing of my books, the present volume is occupied
chiefly with London literary society from 1891 to 1911.
It was in the ’nineties that the late Sir Walter Besant’s efforts to
bring authors together by the creation of the Authors’ Club, and their
trade union, the Authors’ Society, bore fruit. English writers, who had
hitherto been the reverse of gregarious, began to meet each other very
often at receptions and clubs.
In those days one made new friends among well-known authors, artists,
and theatrical people every day, at places like the Authors’, Arts,
Vagabonds, Savage, Hogarth and Argonauts’ Clubs, the Idler teas, and
women’s teas at the Pioneer Club, the Writers’ Club, and the Women
Journalists’, and various receptions in Bohemia. It was almost an
offence to spend an entire afternoon, or an entire evening, in any other
way, and though it made inroads on one’s time for work, and time for
exercise, it gave one an intimacy, which has lasted, with men and women
who have since risen to the head of their professions. That intimacy is
reflected in these pages, which show a good deal of the personal side of
the literary movement of the ’nineties and the literary club life of the
period.
I have endeavoured in this book to interest my readers in two ways—by
telling them the circumstances in my bringing-up, and my subsequent
life, which made me a busy man of letters instead of a lawyer, and by
giving them my reminiscences of friends who have won the affection of
the public in literature, in art, and on the stage.
As I feel that a great many of my readers will be much more interested
in my reminiscences than in my life, I advise them to begin at Chapter
VI—or, better still, Chapter VIII—from which point forward, with the
exceptions of Chapters XVI-XIX, the book is taken up more with the
friends I have had the good fortune to know than with myself.
Before concluding, I will give three or four stories too personal to
have names attached to them.
I once heard a Bishop, who in those days was a smug and an Oxford Don,
remark to a circle of delighted undergraduates, “My brother Edward
thinks I’m an awful fool.” As his brother Edward was Captain of the Eton
Eleven, and amateur champion of something or other, there is no doubt
that his brother Edward did think him an awful fool.
I once heard an author, at the very moment that Robert Louis Stevenson,
as we had learnt by telegram that afternoon, was lying in state under
the sky at Samoa, awaiting burial, say, replying to the toast of his
health at a public dinner, that he had been led to write his most
popular book by the perusal of Stevenson’s _Treasure Island_.
“I said to myself,” he naïvely remarked, “that if I could not write a
better book than that in six weeks, I would shoot myself.”
The same man, when another of his books had been dramatised, and he was
called before the curtain on the first night of its production, informed
the audience that it was a very good play, and that it would be a great
success when it was decently acted. So complacent was he about it that
the friend who tried to pull him back behind the curtain by the tails of
his dress-coat failed until he had split the coat up to the collar.
This man has the very best instincts, but he has a genius for poking his
finger into people’s eyes.
I once knew the brother of a Bishop, who left the Church of England, and
went to America to be a Unitarian clergyman, because he wished to marry
a pretty American heiress, and he had a wife already in England. By and
by his new sect heard of it, and expelled him with conscious or
unconscious humour for “conduct incompatible with membership in the
Unitarian Church.” He hired a hall from the piano company opposite, and
nearly the whole congregation moved across the street with him. Except
in the matter of monogamy, he was a most Christian man, and his
congregation had the highest respect and affection for him and his
bigamous wife; and this in spite of the fact that he constantly alluded
to the Trinity as he warmed to his subject in sermons for the
edification of Unitarians. If he noticed it, he corrected himself and
said Triad. He was one of the most delightful men I ever met, and his
influence on his congregation was of the very best.
In the days when I saw so much of actors at our own flat, and went every
Sunday night to the O.P., I was once asked to arbitrate in a dispute
between an actor-manager and the critic of a great daily, who had
exchanged “words” in the theatre. The critic either dreaded the expense
of a lawsuit, or had no desire to make money if he could obtain the
_amende honorable_. I heard all they had to say, and then I turned round
and said to the great actor, “Did you say that about Mr. ——?” and he
replied with an Irishism which I got accepted as an apology: “I really
couldn’t say; I’m such a liar that I never know what I have said and
what I haven’t said.”
These are stories to which I could not append the names, but the reader
will find as good and better if he turns up the names of S. H. Jeyes,
Oscar Wilde and Phil May in the index.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I MY LIFE (1856-1886) 1
II MY LIFE (1886-1888) 20
III I GO TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 26
IV I GO TO JAPAN 35
V BACK TO CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES 46
VI LITERARY AT-HOMES AND LITERARY CLUBS 52
VII WE START OUR LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 57
VIII OUR AT-HOMES: YOUNG AUTHORS WHO ARE NOW 73
GREAT AUTHORS
IX THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 82
X THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 103
XI LADY AUTHORS AT ADDISON MANSIONS 119
XII LITERARY CLUBS: MY CONNECTION WITH THE 146
AUTHORS’ CLUB
XIII LITERARY CLUBS: THE IDLERS AND THE 162
VAGABONDS
XIV LITERARY CLUBS: THE SAVAGE CLUB 183
XV MY CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 188
XVI THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS. PART I 204
XVII THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS. PART II 216
XVIII THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS. PART III 223
XIX HOW I WROTE “WHO’S WHO” 233
XX AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE 240
XXI MY NOVELIST FRIENDS. PART I 251
XXII MY NOVELIST FRIENDS. PART II 279
XXIII MY NOVELIST FRIENDS. PART III 288
XXIV OTHER AUTHOR FRIENDS 300
XXV FRIENDS WHO NEVER CAME TO ADDISON 307
MANSIONS
XXVI MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 312
XXVII MY ACTOR FRIENDS 328
XXVIII MY ARTIST FRIENDS 346
------------------------------------------------------------------------
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
COLOURED PICTURES BY YOSHIO MARKINO
THE ROOF GARDEN OF 32 ADDISON MANSIONS Frontispiece
THE MOORISH ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS 72
THE DINING-ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS IN 204
WHICH MOST OF MY BOOKS WERE WRITTEN
THE JAPANESE ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS 306
PORTRAITS BY YOSHIO MARKINO
DOUGLAS SLADEN 26
ISRAEL ZANGWILL 50
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 74
JEROME K. JEROME 98
MISS BRADDON 124
CHARLES GARVICE 150
G. B. BURGIN 174
SIDNEY LOW 119
HALL CAINE 224
W. B. MAXWELL 279
SIR GILBERT PARKER 324
SIR HERBERT BEERBOHM-TREE 344
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX OF REMINISCENCES
AT the end of the book will be found an index of the well-known people
about whom personal reminiscences or new facts are told—such as Prince
Alamayu of Abyssinia, Mme. Albanesi, Sir Edwin Arnold, Lena Ashwell,
Sarah Bernhardt, Sir Walter Besant, Rolf Boldrewood, Hall Caine, Dion
Clayton Calthrop, Mrs. Clifford, Bishop Creighton, Mrs. Croker, Sir A.
Conan Doyle, Lord Dundonald, Sir J. Forbes-Robertson, Charles Garvice,
Bishop Gore, Sarah Grand, George Grossmith, Thomas Hardy, Bret Harte, W.
E. Henley, Robert Hichens, John Oliver Hobbes, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Anthony Hope, J. K. Jerome, S. H. Jeyes, C. Kernahan, A. H. Savage
Landor, Maarten Maartens, Compton MacKenzie, Yoshio Markino, “Bob”
Martin, George Meredith, Frankfort Moore, Dr. G. E. Morrison of Peking,
F. W. H. Myers, Nansen, Cardinal Newman, Mrs. Perrin, Eden Phillpotts,
Rt. Hon. Sir Geo. Reid, Whitelaw Reid, Lord Roberts, the late Lord
Salisbury, F. Hopkinson Smith, Father Stanton, Mrs. Flora Annie Steel,
August Strindberg, Mark Twain, H. A. Vachell, J. M. Whistler, Percy
White, Oscar Wilde, Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Lord Willoughby de
Broke, Margaret Woods, Sir Charles Wyndham and Israel Zangwill.
D. S.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE
CHAPTER I
MY LIFE (1856-1886)
I WAS born on February 5, 1856, in the town-house of my maternal
grandfather. My father, a solicitor by profession, who died in the last
days of 1910, at the age of eighty-six, was almost the youngest of the
sixteen children of my paternal grandparents, John Baker Sladen, D.L.,
J.P., of Ripple Court, near Dover, and Etheldred St. Barbe. The name St.
Barbe has been freely bestowed on their descendants because the first
St. Barbe in this country has the honour of appearing on the Roll of
Battle Abbey.
My maternal grandparents were John Wheelton and Mary Wynfield. Mr.
Wheelton (I was never able to discover any other person named Wheelton,
till I found, among the survivors of the loss of the _Titanic_, a
steward called Wheelton; truly the name has narrowly escaped
extinction), from whom I get my third Christian name, was in business as
a shipper on the site of the General Post Office, and was Master of the
Cordwainers’ Company. He was Sheriff of London in the year of Queen
Victoria’s marriage. Though he lived at Meopham near Tonbridge, he came
from Manchester, and I am, therefore, a Lancashire man on one side of
the house. But oddly enough I have never been to Manchester.
Charles Dickens, when he first became a writer, was a frequent guest at
his hospitable table, and has immortalised him in one of his books. He
was in a way immortalised by taking a leading part in one of the most
famous law cases in our history, Stockdale _versus_ Hansard. As Sheriff
he had to levy an execution on Hansard, the printer to the House of
Commons, who had published in the reports of the debates a libel on Mr.
Stockdale. The House declared it a breach of privilege, and sentenced
the Sheriff to be imprisoned in the Speaker’s house, from which he was
shortly afterwards released on the plea of ill-health. But with the City
of London as well as the Law Courts against them, the members of the
House of Commons determined to avoid future collisions by bringing in a
bill to make the reports of the proceedings of Parliament privileged and
this duly became law.
I have in my possession an enormous silver epergne, supported by
allegorical figures of Justice and others, which the City of London
presented to my grandfather in honour of this occasion, with a few
survivors of a set of leather fire-buckets, embellished with the City
arms, which now do duty as waste-paper baskets.
I was baptised in Trinity Church, Paddington, and shortly afterwards my
parents went to live at 22, Westbourne Park Terrace, Paddington,
continuing there till 1862.
It was in this year that my last sister, Mrs. Young, was born, just
before we changed houses. My eldest sister, who married the late Rev.
Frederick Robert Ellis, only son of Robert Ridge Ellis, of the Court
Lodge, Yalding, Kent, and for many years Rector of Much Wenlock, was
born in 1850. My second sister, who married Robert Arundel Watkins,
eldest surviving son of the Rev. Bernard Watkins, of Treeton, and
afterwards of Lawkland Hall, Yorkshire, was born in 1851; and my
brother, the Rev. St. Barbe Sydenham Sladen, who holds one of the City
livings, St. Margaret Patten, was born in 1858.
My father, having become better off by the death of my two grandfathers
in 1860 and 1861, bought a ninety-six years’ lease of Phillimore Lodge,
Campden Hill, which I sold in 1911.
I believe that I never left London till I was four years old, when we
all went to stay with my uncle, the Rev. William Springett, who still
survives, at Dunkirk Vicarage, near Canterbury. While we were there I
first saw and dipped my hands in the sea, which I was destined to
traverse so often, at a place called Seasalter, to which we drove from
Dunkirk.
From 1862 to 1868, when my mother died, we children generally spent the
summer at Brighton, from which my father went away to a moor in
Yorkshire for the grouse-shooting. As a child, I soon grew tired of
Brighton, which seemed so like a seaside suburb of London. I used to
think that the sea itself, which had no proper ships on it, was like a
very large canal. I longed for real sea, like we had seen at Deal, where
we went to stay in my grandmother Sladen’s dower-house, shortly after
our visit to Dunkirk. There we had seen a full-rigged ship driven on to
the beach in front of our house in a gale, and had seen the lifeboat and
the Deal luggers putting out to wrecks on the Goodwin Sands, and had
seen the largest ships of the day in the Downs. I loved the woods we had
rambled in, between Dunkirk and Canterbury, even better still. I never
found the ordinary seaside place tolerable till I became enamoured of
golf. Without golf these places are marine deserts.
I never tasted the real delights of the country till we went in the
later ’sixties to a farmhouse on the edge of the Duke of Rutland’s moors
above Baslow, in Derbyshire. With that holiday I was simply enchanted.
For rocks meant fairyland, as they still do, to me. And there I had,
besides rocks, like the Cakes of Bread, the clear, trout-haunted
mountain-river Derwent, and romantic mediæval architecture like Haddon
Hall. Besides, we were allowed to run wild on the farm, to sail about
the shallow pond in a cattle-trough, to help to make Wensleydale cheeses
(this part of Derbyshire arrogates the right to use the name), and to
hack the garden about as much as we liked. It was there that I had my
first real games of Red Indians and Robinson Crusoe, and there that I
had the seeds of my passion for architecture implanted in me.
We drove about a great deal—to the Peak, with its caverns and its queer
villages, to the glorious Derbyshire Dales, and to great houses like
Chatsworth. Certainly Baslow was my fairy-godmother in authorship, and
my literary aspirations were cradled in Derbyshire. My father gave me a
good schooling in the beauties of England. We were always taken to see
every place of any interest for its scenery, its buildings, or its
history, which could be reached in a day by a pair of horses from the
house, where we were spending our summer holidays. He had the same
_flair_ for guide-books as I have, and taught me how to use them
intelligently.
Up till 1864 I was taught by governesses with my elder sisters. There
were three of them, Miss Morrison, Miss Bray, and Miss Rose Sara Paley,
an American Southerner, whose parents had been ruined by the Civil War.
She was a very charming and intelligent woman, and taught my eldest
sister to compose in prose and verse. For a long time this sister was
the author of our home circle. I was too young to try composition in
those days, but seeing my eldest sister do it familiarised me with the
idea of it. I also had a music mistress, because it was hoped that
playing the piano would restore my left hand to its proper shape, after
the extraordinary accident which I had when I was only two years old.
She was Miss Rosa Brinsmead, a daughter of the John Brinsmead who
founded the famous piano-making firm. The point which I remember best
about her was that she had fair ringlets like Princess (now Queen)
Alexandra, who had just come over from Denmark and won all hearts.
The accident happened by my falling into the fireplace, when my nurse
left me for a minute. To raise myself up I caught hold of the bar of the
grate with my left hand, and scorched the inside out. It is still
shrivelled, though fifty-five years have passed since that awful day for
my mother, when she found her only son, as she thought, crippled for
life.
But though it chapped terribly every winter, and would not open properly
for the next three or four years, I soon got back the use of my hand,
and no one now suspects it of being the least disfigured till I hold it
open to show them. The back was uninjured, and it looks a very nice hand
by X-rays, when only the bones are visible.
The doctor recommended that, being a child of a very active brain (I
asked quite awkward questions about the birth of my brother shortly
afterwards), I should be taught to read while I was kept in bed, as the
only means of keeping my hand out of danger, and I was given a box of
letters which I always arranged upon the splint of my wounded hand. By
the time that it was well I could read, and on my fifth birthday I was
given the leather-bound Prayer-book which I had been promised whenever I
could read every word in it. I have the Prayer-book still, half a
century later.
Poor Miss Brinsmead had a hopeless task, for though I could learn to
read so easily, I never could learn to play on the piano with both hands
at the same time, except in the very baldest melodies, like “God Save
the Queen,” and the “Sultan’s Polka.” These I did achieve.
In 1864 I was sent to a dame’s school in Kensington Square, kept by the
Misses Newman, from which I was shortly afterwards transferred to
another kept by Miss Daymond, an excellent teacher, where I had Johnny
and Everett Millais, and sons of other great artists, for my
schoolfellows.
In 1866, though it nearly broke my mother’s heart, I was sent to my
first boarding-school, Temple Grove, East Sheen—in the old house where
Dorothy Temple had lived, and Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston,
the greatest of that illustrious race, was born—the school, moreover,
which had numbered Benjamin Disraeli among its pupils. How many people
are there who know that Dizzy was schooled in the house in which
Palmerston was born—those two great apostles of British prestige?
Here I stayed for three years before I won the first junior scholarship
at Cheltenham College, and here, from my house-master, I had a fresh and
wonderful department of knowledge opened to me, for he used to take me
naturalising (both by day and by night, when the other boys were in bed)
on Sheen Common, then wild enough to have snakes and glow-worms and
lizards, as well as newts and leeches, and rich in insect prizes. I won
this favour because he accidentally discovered that I knew “Mangnall’s
Questions” and “Common Subjects” by heart. But though he was Divinity
Master, he never discovered that I knew my Bible quite as well.
He also taught me to lie. I had never told a lie till I went to Temple
Grove. But as he prided himself on his acuteness, he was
constitutionally unable to believe the truth. It was too obvious for
him. When I found that he invariably thought I was lying while I still
obeyed my mother’s teaching, and was too afraid of God to tell a lie, I
suddenly made up my mind that I would humour him, and tell whatever lie
was necessary to this transparent Sherlock Holmes. After this he always
believed me, unless I accidentally forgot and told him the truth. And I
liked him so much that I wished him to believe me.
He did not injure my character as much as he might have done, because I
was born with a loathing for insincerity. The difficulty came when he
and Waterfield, the head master, questioned me about the same thing, for
Waterfield mesmerised one into telling the truth, and he tempted one to
tell a lie. It reminds me now of Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love.”
At Temple Grove I acquired my taste for games and taste for natural
history.
In 1868, my mother, to whom I was passionately attached, died. I used to
dream that she was alive for months afterwards. And the great
theosophist to whom I mentioned this sees in it an astral communication.
To divert my thoughts from this, the greatest grief I had ever had, I
was sent to stay with my cousin, Colonel Joseph Sladen, who had already
succeeded to Ripple Court, and was then a Gunner Captain, stationed at
Sheerness. He belonged to the Royal Yacht Squadron, and had a schooner
yacht in which we used to go away for cruises up the Channel. I was a
little boy of twelve, and his two eldest sons, Arthur Sladen, now H.R.H.
the Duke of Connaught’s Private Secretary in Canada, and Sampson Sladen,
now the Chief of the London Fire Brigade, were hardly more than babies,
but I enjoyed it very much, because I was interested in the yachting and
in the firing of the hundred-pounder Armstrongs, which were the monster
guns of those days. We went in my cousin’s yacht to see the new ironclad
fleets of Great Britain and France, and we went over the _Black Prince_
and the _Minotaur_, the crack ships of the time.
A year after that, exactly on the first anniversary of my mother’s
death, I went to Cheltenham College, where I had taken a scholarship. I
was at Cheltenham College six years, and took four scholarships and many
prizes at the school, the most interesting of which, in view of my after
life, was the prize for the English Poem. I was also Senior Prefect,
Editor of the school magazine, Captain of Football, and Captain of the
Rifle Corps. I shot for the school four times in the Public School
competitions at Wimbledon, and in 1874 won the Spencer Cup, which was
open to the best shot from each of the Public Schools. I was the school
representative for it also in 1873.
At Cheltenham, I suppose, I laid the foundations of my literary career,
because, besides editing the school magazine for a couple of years, and
writing the Prize Poem, I read every book in the College library. It was
such a delight to me to have the run of a well-stocked library. The
books at home were nearly all religious books. I was brought up on the
sternest low-Church lines; we went to church twice a day on Sunday,
besides having prayers read twice at home, and hymns sung in the
afternoon. The church we attended was St. Paul’s, Onslow Square, where I
had to listen to hour-long sermons from Capel Molyneux and Prebendary
Webb-Peploe. The dull and long services were almost intolerable, except
when Millais, the great painter, who had the next pew, asked me into his
pew to relieve the crush in ours. Millais sat so upright and so forward
when he was listening that my father could not see me, and I used to
bury my face in the beautiful Mrs. Millais’ sealskin jacket; I had such
an admiration for her that I did not go to sleep. Millais—he was not Sir
John in those days—did not make his children go to church; I suppose he
went because he was fascinated by the eloquence of the sermons.
Molyneux, Marston and Peploe were all great preachers, though they bored
an unfortunate small boy to the verge of nervous prostration. We were
only allowed to read Sunday books on Sunday, and the newspapers were put
away, as they were to the day of my father’s death in 1910.
After my mother’s death I always longed to get back to school, because,
though we had to go to chapel every day, and twice on Sunday, there was
not that atmosphere of religion which made me, as a small boy, begin to
feel unhappy about lunch-time on Saturday, and not thoroughly relieved
till after breakfast on Monday. I hated Sunday at home; the two-mile
walk to and from church was the best part of it.
I have forgotten two other preparations for a literary career which I
perpetrated at Cheltenham. I and my greatest friend, a boy called Walter
Roper Lawrence (now Sir W. R. Lawrence, Bart., G.C.I.E.), who afterwards
rose to a position of the highest eminence in India, wrote verses for
the school magazine, and I published a pamphlet to avenge a contemptuous
reference, in the Shotover Papers, and was duly summoned for libel. The
late Frederick Stroud, the Recorder of Tewkesbury, who was at that time
a solicitor, got me off. I never saw him in after life, which I much
regretted, because he was, like myself, a great student of everything
connected with Adam Lindsay Gordon, the Australian poet. He died while I
was writing our life of Gordon.
At the beginning of 1875 I won an open classical scholarship at Trinity
College, Oxford, where I commenced residence in the following October.
At Oxford again I read voraciously in the splendid library of the Union.
There my love of games continued unabated. I shot against Cambridge four
years, and won all the shooting challenge-cups. I also played in the
’Varsity Rugby Union Football XV when I first went up.
I had delightful old panelled rooms on Number 7 staircase—a chance fact,
which won me a great honour and pleasure. One afternoon, when I came in
from playing football, the College messenger met me, saying, “Grand
company in your rooms this afternoon, Mr. Sladen—the President, and all
the Fellows, and Cardinal Nooman,” and he added, “When the President
looked at your mantelpiece, sir, he _corfed_.” My mantelpiece was strewn
with portraits of Maud Branscombe, Eveleen Rayne, Mrs. Rousby, and other
theatrical stars of that day—about a couple of dozen of them.
Shortly afterwards the President’s butler arrived with a note, which I
supposed was to reproach me with the racy appearance of my mantelpiece,
but it was to ask me to spend the evening with the President, because
Cardinal Newman had expressed a desire to meet the present occupant of
his rooms.
The Cardinal, a wan little man with a shrivelled face and a large nose,
and one of the most beautiful expressions which ever appeared on a human
being, talked to me for a couple of hours, prostrating me with his
exquisite modesty. He wanted to know if the snapdragons, to which he had
written a poem, still grew on the wall between Trinity and Balliol; he
wanted to compare undergraduate life of his day with the undergraduate
life of mine; he asked me about a number of Gothic fragments in Oxford
which might have perished between his day and mine, and fortunately, I
had already conceived the passion for Gothic architecture which pervades
my books, and was able to tell him about every one. He told me the marks
by which he knew that those were his rooms; he asked me about my
studies, and hobbies, and aims in life; I don’t think that I have ever
felt any honour of the kind so much.
At Oxford I spent every penny I could afford, and more, on collecting a
library of standard works, and I have many of them still. I remember
that the literary Oxonians of that day discussed poetry much more than
prose, and could mostly be classified into admirers of William Morris
and admirers of Swinburne, and I think the Morrisians were more
numerous. All of them had an academic admiration for Matthew Arnold’s
poems, and could spout from “Thyrsis” and the “Scholar Gipsy,” which was
compared with Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Thackeray’s daughter (Lady Ritchie) was at that time the latest star in
fiction, as I occasionally remind her.
I had the good fortune to know some of the greatest of the authors who
lived at Oxford when I was an undergraduate—Max Müller, Bishop Stubbs
the historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, Lewis Carroll, Dean Kitchin,
Canon Bright and W. L. Courtney.
Oxford in those days (as I suppose it does still) revolved largely round
“Bobby Raper,” then Dean of Trinity, a man of infinite tact and
kindness, swift to discern ability and character in an undergraduate,
and to make a friend of their owner, and blessed with a most saving
sense of humour. When they had finished at Oxford, a word from him found
them coveted masterships, or secretaryships to Public Men. He was the
link between Oxford and Public life, as much as Jowett—the “Jowler”
himself—who sat in John Wycliffe’s seat at Balliol. Lord Milner, St.
John Brodrick and George Curzon have gone farthest of the Balliol men of
my time. Asquith was before me, Edward Grey after. Trinity ran to
Bishops. Most of the men who sat at the scholars’ table at Trinity in my
time who went into Holy Orders are Bishops now, Archie Robertson, now
Bishop of Exeter, being the senior of them, Bishop Gore of Oxford, who
had rooms on the same floor as I had, and was one of my greatest friends
in my first year, was the Junior Fellow. He was a very well-off young
man, and used to spend huge sums on buying folios of the Latin Fathers,
and then learn them by heart. There is no one who knows so much about
the Fathers as the Bishop of Oxford. The present Archbishop of
Canterbury was at Trinity, but before my time, and so was Father
Stanton, who went there because he came of a hunting family, and it was
a hunting College, and he was a Rugby man. Bishop Stubbs and Freeman
were also Trinity men, and generally at the College Gaudies, where the
Scholars used to dine at the same table as the Dons and their guests.
Sir Richard Burton came once to a Gaudy when I was there, and told me
that he was very surprised that they had asked him, because he had been
sent down.
I said, “You are in very good company. The great Lord Chatham and Walter
Savage Landor were sent down from Trinity as well as you.”
But one well-known literary man of the present day holds the record over
them all, because he was sent down from Trinity twice.
Although I was a classical scholar, I refused to go in for Classics in
the Final Schools. “Greats,” otherwise _Literæ Humaniores_, as this
school is called at Oxford, embraces the study of Philosophy in the
original Greek and Latin of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, and Philosophy
and Logic generally. I was sick of the Classics, and I never could take
the smallest interest in Philosophy, so I knew that I should do no good
in this school, and announced my intention of going in for the School of
Modern History. This was too revolutionary for my tutor. He said—
“Classical scholars are expected to go in for Greats, and if you fail to
do so, we shall have to consider the taking away of your scholarship.”
I was astute in my generation; I went to Gore (the Bishop), who was my
friend, and always met undergraduates as if he were one of themselves,
and said to him, “Will you do something for me, Gore?”
“It depends on what it is,” he replied, with his curious smile.
“Tell the Common-room (_i. e._ the Dons, who used to meet in the
Common-room every night after dinner) that I really mean to go in for
History whether they take away my scholarship or not, but that if they
do take it away, I shall take my name off the books of Trinity and go
and ask Jowett if he will admit me at Balliol. You were a Balliol
undergrad; you know the kind of answer that Jowett would make to a man
who was willing to give up an eighty pounds a year scholarship in order
to go in for the School which interested him.”
“Jowett will take you,” he said, “but I will see what can be done here.”
That night I received the most unpleasant note an undergraduate can
receive—a command to meet the Common-room at ten o’clock the next
morning. They were all present when I went in. The President invited me
to take a seat, and my tutor (the Rev. H. G. Woods, now Master of the
Temple, of whom I still see something) said—
“Are you quite determined to go in for the School of History, Mr.
Sladen?”
“Quite,” I replied.
“Then we hope that the degree you take will justify us in assenting to
such a very unusual procedure.”
Then they all smiled very pleasantly, and I thanked them and went out.
They must have felt quite justified when, two years afterwards, I took
my First in History with congratulatory letters from all my examiners,
while all the scholars of Trinity who went in for the _School of Literæ
Humaniores_ took Seconds and Thirds. I should have got a Fourth, I am
convinced.
Again I read voraciously. For the first year I hardly bothered about my
text-books at all. I read biographies, books about architecture and art
and literature, historical novels, the writings of historical
personages, everything which threw brilliant sidelights on my subject.
And in the second year I learnt my text-books almost by heart, except
Stubbs’s _Constitutional History_ and _Selected Charters_. I simply
could not memorise them—they were so dry, and I hated the dry bones of
_Constitutional History_ almost as badly as philosophy. I learned
digests of them, which took less time, and were no dryer, and proved
equally efficacious in answering the papers.
In after years, when I was entertaining Bishop Stubbs at a reception,
which Montague Fowler and I gave in honour of Mark Twain at the Authors’
Club, he roared with laughter when I told him that I got a First in
History without reading his books, by learning the Digests of them by
heart.
He said, “I know they are dreadfully dull. Did you find my lectures very
dull when you came to them?” He had not forgotten that I had attended
his lectures for a couple of years.
I said, “No, not at all.”
“Honestly, did you get any good from them?”
“Quite honestly?”
He nodded.
I said, “Not in the usual way.”
“Well,” he asked, “how did you get any good from them?”
“You must forgive me if I tell you.”
“Tell me; it cannot be worse than what you said about my books.”
“Well,” I confessed, “the reason why I attended your lectures was that
you never bothered as to whether I was there or not, and I hardly ever
was there. I did not think any lectures were any good, but my tutor made
me attend sixteen a week, and the time which I was supposed to spend at
your lectures, I used to spend in my rooms reading. You were the only
gentleman among my lecturers—all the rest used to call the names, and
report me to my tutor if I was absent.”
He was immensely tickled, and said, “You deserved to get a First, if you
took things as seriously as that.”
But Bishop Stubbs was very human. He always read the lightest novel he
could lay hands on before he went to bed, to relieve his mind after
working, and save him from insomnia.
“They are so light,” he said, “that I keep other books in front of them
in my book-case.”
As an author, I have found the education I was given and gave myself a
very useful foundation. Those ten years I gave to the study of Latin and
Greek and classical history and mythology were not thrown away, because
I have written so many books about Italy and Sicily and Egypt, in which
having the classics at my fingers’ ends made me understand the history,
and the allusions in the materials I had to digest. It is impossible to
write freely about Italy and Greece unless you know your classics.
The two years of incessant study which I gave to taking my degree in
Modern History at Oxford have been equally useful, because it is
impossible to write guide-books and books of travel unless you have a
sound knowledge of history.
For a brief while my degree in history had a most practical and
technical value, for it won me the Chair of Modern History in the
University of Sydney, New South Wales.
Beyond a week or two in Paris, I had never left England before I went to
Australia in the end of 1879, a few months after I left Oxford, but I
knew my England pretty well, because my father had always encouraged me
to see the parts of England which contained the finest scenery and the
architectural _chefs d’œuvres_, like cathedrals. Ireland I had never
visited, and of Scotland I only knew Dumfriesshire, where my father
rented a shooting-box and a moor for four years; and where I had enjoyed
splendid rough shooting when I was a boy, in the very heart of the land
of Burns. “The Grey Mare’s Tail” was on one shooting which we had, and
the Carlyle cottage was right under our Craigenputtock shooting.
When I left Oxford my father gave me three hundred pounds to spend on a
year of travel, and I chose to go to Australia to stay with his eldest
brother, Sir Charles Sladen, K.C.M.G., who had been Prime Minister of
the Colony of Victoria, and was at that time leader of the Upper House,
and of the Constitutional Party in Victoria. I wanted to see if I should
like to settle in the Colonies, and go to the Bar with a view to a
political career. We were not rich enough for me to think of the House
of Commons seriously, and I have always taken a very keen interest in
politics.
Further, I wanted to go and stay on my uncle’s station to get some
riding and shooting, and to see something of the outdoor life of
Australia, of which I had heard so much. And I wanted desperately to try
living in a hot country. I knew by intuition that I should like heat.
I had not been staying with my uncle for a year before I had made up my
mind to live in Australia, a conclusion to which I was assisted by my
marriage with Miss Margaret Isabel Muirhead, the daughter of a Scotsman
from Stirling, who had owned a fine station called the Grampians in the
Western District of Victoria, and had been killed in a horse accident.
As I had not been called to the Bar before I left home, I found that I
had to go through a two years’ course, and take a law degree at the
Melbourne University. This I did, though the position was sufficiently
anomalous. For instance, I had to attend lectures by a Member of the
Government, the Solicitor-General. I knew him intimately at the
Melbourne Club and in private life, and we generally used to walk down
to the Club after the lecture. Sometimes we went into a pub, to have a
drink together, and we discussed anything from the forthcoming
Government Bills to Club stories. He told me one day, before the public
knew anything about it, of the intention of the Government to bring in a
Bill to make sweeps on racing illegal. As much as forty-five thousand
pounds had been subscribed for the Melbourne Cup Sweep the year before.
I said, “It is no good making them illegal; it only means that they will
be carried on under the rose, and that a whole lot of the sweeps will be
bogus. You can’t stop sweeps; all you can do is to put the bogus sweep
on a level with Jimmy Miller’s.”
“What would you do, then?” he asked.
“Well, if you really want to stop them, you should legalise them, and
put a twenty-five per cent., or fifty per cent. for the matter of that,
tax upon them. You’d spoil the odds so that sweeps would die a natural
death; and if they didn’t, you’d get a nice lot of money to save the
taxpayer’s pocket. You would be like the Prince of Monaco, who lives by
the gambling at Monte Carlo.”
He duly put the suggestion before the Government, but they thought that
this would be paltering with eternal sin, and passed their Bill to help
the bogus-sweep promoter.
This same man and I were asked one night to take part in a Shakespeare
reading at the Prime Minister’s. My friend was late, and the Prime
Minister, who was not a discreet man, began talking about him. Somebody
remarked what a wonderfully well-informed man he was.
“Yes,” said the Prime Minister, “my Solicitor-General is one of those
people who know nothing about everything. And the way he does it is that
he never opens a book; he just reads what the magazines and papers have
to say about books.”
Suddenly the Premier felt that his remarks were no longer being received
with enthusiasm, and looking up, saw his Solicitor-General waiting to
shake hands with him.
At the Melbourne University I formed one intimate friendship, which has
lasted ever since. Among my fellow-students was Dr. George Ernest
Morrison, the famous _Times_ correspondent of Peking. He was famous in
those days as the finest football player in the Colony, and he began his
adventures while he was at the University. For months we missed him;
nobody knew where he was—or if his father, who was head master of
Geelong College, did know, he never told. Then suddenly he turned up
again, and said that he had been walking from Cape York, which was the
northernmost point of Australia, to Melbourne. He had undertaken—and I
don’t think he had any bet on it—to make his way from Cape York to
Melbourne, alone, unarmed and without a penny in his pocket. In the
northernmost part of his journey, at any rate, there were a great many
wild blacks, and many rivers full of crocodiles to swim. But there are,
of course, no large carnivora in Australia, and a snake can be killed
with a stick. When he was swimming a river he used to construct a raft,
and put his clothes and his pack on it; he carried a pack like any other
sun-downer, and when he got to a station, did his bit of work to pay for
his bed and supper, and when he left it, if the next station south was
more than a day’s journey, he was given enough food to carry him
through. This is, of course, the universal custom in Australia when a
man is going from station to station in search of work, such as
shearing.
He had not a single misadventure. The reason why he took so long was
that his way from station to station naturally took him out of the
direct line to the south, and he made a stay at some of them. The
newspapers were so impressed with his feat that, shortly afterwards,
when the _Age_ organised an expedition to explore New Guinea, he was
given command of it. That was the last I saw of Morrison till we met a
few years afterwards at my house in London.
I never practised for the Melbourne Bar, for no sooner had I taken my
law degree than I was appointed to the vacant chair of Modern History in
the University of Sydney.
I had, since I landed in Australia, made my debut as an author, and had
already published two volumes of verse, _Frithjof and Ingebjorg_ and
_Australian Lyrics_. During the year that I held my chair, we had
apartments in the Old Government House, Parramatta, which had become a
boarding-house, and spent our vacations on the Hawkesbury and in the
Blue Mountains.
While I was at Parramatta I published a third volume of verse, _A Poetry
of Exiles_.
Then occurred an event which deprived me of one of my principal reasons
for remaining in Australia, the premature death of my uncle. This closed
my short cut to a political career; and I had long since come to the
conclusion that Australia was not the place for a literary career,
because there was no real publishing in Australia. Publishers were
merely booksellers, who acted as intermediaries between authors and
printers; they took no risks of publication; the author paid, and they
received one commission as publishers and another as booksellers. This
did not signify much for verse; the printing bill for books of verse is
not large, and poets are accustomed to bringing out their works at their
own risk in other countries besides Australia. But a large prose work of
a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand words is, at Australian
prices, extremely expensive to produce, and when it is produced, has
only a small sale because it does not bear the name of any well-known
English publishing house.
So I suddenly made up my mind to return to England.
The five years I spent in Australia were fruitful for my career as an
author, though I have never published anything about Australia, except
my own verses, and anthologies of Australian verse, and a life, and an
edition of the poems, of Adam Lindsay Gordon. The last was phenomenally
successful; I am sure that no volume of Browning has ever sold so well.
And one of the anthologies had a sale of twenty thousand copies in the
first ten years of its existence.
Australia supplied exactly the right element for my development. At
Cheltenham I was the most prominent boy of my time, and the prestige
with which I came up from school gave me a certain momentum at Oxford.
So I went out to Australia with a very good opinion of Public Schools,
and Oxford, and myself.
I soon discovered that nothing was of any importance in Australia except
sport and money. If Tennyson or Walter Scott had gone to a
bush-township, he would have been judged merely by his proficiency or
absence of proficiency as a groom. Horsemanship is the one test of the
inhabitants of a bush-township.
In Melbourne and Sydney and on “stations” it was different. Hospitality
was prodigal, and there was a disposition to regard with charity one’s
shortcomings from the Colonial point of view, and to accept with
sympathy the fact that one had distinguished oneself elsewhere. The
Australian man is very manly, and very hearty; the Australian woman is
apt to be very pretty, and to have a strong personality—to be full of
character as a lover.
The climate of Australia I found absolutely delightful. It is a land of
eternal summer: its winters are only cooler summers. The unchanging blue
of its skies is appalling to those whose prosperity depends on the
rainfall.
When I went out to Australia, just after leaving Oxford, I was enough of
a prig to profit very greatly by being suddenly thrown into an
absolutely democratic community. I was saved from finding things
difficult by the fact that I was born a Bohemian, in spite of my very
conventional parentage, and really did delight in roughing it. The free
and easy Colonial life was a great relief to me after the prim life in
my English home; and staying about on the great stations in the western
district of Victoria, which belonged to various connections of my
family, furnished the finest experience of my early life. I spent most
of my first year in Australia in that way, returning, in between, to pay
visits to my uncle at Geelong. Being in the saddle every day never lost
its thrill for me, because I had hardly ever been on a horse before I
went to Australia; and wandering about the big paddocks and the
adjoining stretches of forest, gun in hand—I hardly ever went out
without a gun—had something of the excitement of the books about the
American backwoods which I read in my boyhood. It is true that I would
rather have shot grizzly bears than the native bears of Australia, mere
sloths, and lions and tigers than kangaroos, but a big “forester” is not
to be sneezed at, and Australia has an extraordinary wealth of strange
birds—the cockatoos and parrots and parakeets alone give a sort of
tropical aspect to the forest, and the snakes give an unpleasantly
tropical aspect, though, fortunately, in Australia, they shrink from
human habitations.
When I married I went to live in Melbourne, close to public gardens of
extraordinary beauty and almost tropical luxuriance, and soon became
absorbed in the maelstrom of dancing and playing tennis, and watching
first-class cricket and racing.
When we went to Parramatta it was easy to make excursions to the
marvellous gorges of the Blue Mountains, which are among the grandest
valley scenery in the world.
Everything was large, and free, and sparsely inhabited—most expanding to
the mind, and the glimpse of the tropical glories of Oriental Ceylon,
which I enjoyed for four days on my voyage home, made me hear the “East
a callin’” for ever afterwards.
I found London desperately dull when we returned to it in 1884. I had no
literary friends, except at Oxford, where we took a house for three
months to get some colour into life again. It was on the banks of the
Cherwell, facing the most beautiful buildings of Magdalen, and the
Gothic glories of Oxford were manna to my hungry soul.
The summer, spent in Devonshire and Cornwall and Scotland, was well
enough, and in the winter, which we spent at Torquay, we had grand
scenery and beautiful ancient buildings, but the climate seemed
treacherous and cold after the fierce bright summers of Australia.
I must not forget that I came very near not going to Australia at all. I
felt the parting with my father extremely, and he was quite prostrated
by it. I had, a few days before starting, been introduced to the captain
of the old Orient liner _Lusitania_, in which I made the voyage—a hard,
reckless sea-dog—and he did me good service on that occasion. Two
letters came on board for me when we put in at Plymouth to pick up the
last mails and passengers. One of these letters contained a letter from
my father to the effect that if I wished to give up the passage and
return home I might do so. The captain, for some reason or other,
whether from having had a conversation with my father, or what,
suspected that the letter might have some message of that kind—he may
have had the same thing occurring in his experience before—so he did not
give me the letter till the next day, when I had no possible chance of
communicating with England until I got to the Cape de Verde Islands. By
that time, of course, I had thoroughly settled down to the enjoyments of
the voyage, and looked at the matter in a different light.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
MY LIFE (1886-1888)
ABOUT this time I was struck with the idea that for a person who
intended to make his living by writing books, Travel was a necessity,
and while one had no ties, it cost no more to live in various parts of
the Continent than to live in London.
The desire materialised sooner than it might have done, because Arthur
Chamberlain, whom we had met when we were sharing a house in Scotland
with the Wilkies (wife and daughters of the famous Melbourne doctor),
wrote letters, which would brook no refusal, for us to come and join him
at Heidelberg, where he was now a student, for the Quincentenary of the
Heidelberg University.
Before we went abroad we had a foretaste of the many pilgrimages to
archæological paradises which we were to make. We spent six weeks at
Canterbury, peculiarly delightful to me, because my family have been
landowners in East Kent from time immemorial, which made the
neighbourhood of Canterbury full of landmarks for me, and Canterbury is,
after Oxford, fuller of the Middle Ages than any town in England. Here,
having the run of the Cathedral library given me by its curator, Dr.
Shepherd (I hope I have spelt his name right), I commenced my studies of
Edward, the Black Prince—the local hero, who lies buried in the
Cathedral. This led to my writing the most ambitious of my poems,
“Edward, the Black Prince.” I wrote it among the ruins of the old
Cathedral Monastery at Canterbury, and the first edition was printed in
the Piazza of Santa Croce at Florence.
At Heidelberg, living for economy in a delightful pension kept by Miss
Abraham, who had been the Kaiser’s English governess, we met the set who
pass their years in wandering from one pension to another on the
Continent. Our immediate future was marked out for us. One family booked
us for a favourite pension at Zurich, another for Lucerne, another for
Lugano, another for Florence, another for Rome, another for Castellamare
di-Stabia below Pompeii.
And so we began the great trek. We summered at Heidelberg. Autumn in
Switzerland was perfectly beautiful, but the two or three months which
we spent in Florence formed one of the turning-points of my life. It was
there that we found a pension, which called itself an hotel, replete
with the atmosphere and charm and the little luxuries which Italy knows
so well how to give for seven francs a day. There we met people who came
to Florence year after year, and knew every picture, almost every stone,
in it—almost every ounce of pleasure which was to be got out of it. They
initiated us, in fact, into Florence, which was more of an education
than anything in the world.
Florence is Renaissance in architecture, Gothic in feeling. Its
inhabitants, native and foreign, live in the past. It was here that I,
born with a passion for realising the Middle Ages, acquired the undying
desires which have taken me back so often and for such long periods, and
have inspired me to write so many books about Italy and Sicily. From the
very beginning I plunged into the life of Florence and the study of
things Italian with extraordinary zest.
Going on to Rome for a month or two inspired me with the same feeling
for the classics as Florence had inspired in me for the Middle Ages.
I own that, when I was persuaded to go on from Rome to Castellamare, I
did so with certain misgivings. There did not seem to be the same
chances in it. We were going to a villa outside the town, whose sole
attraction seemed to be that it was six miles from Pompeii.
But when we got there, it had a profound influence on our lives. It
proved to be the villa where the Countess of Blessington had entertained
Byron and others of the immortals, a beautiful southern house, standing
on the green hill which buries in its bosom the ashes of Vesuvius, and
the ruins of Stabiæ, a city which shared the fate of Pompeii. It had a
vineyard round it; its quaint garden was overrun with sleepy lizards,
which you never catch asleep—the lizards in which the genius of Italy
seems to live.
We saw the sunset every night on the Bay of Naples and Ischia, which all
the world was talking about then because of the earthquake which had
lately ravished it. Every night we saw a tree of fire rising from
Vesuvius.
We used to spend our days in the orange groves of Sorrento, or driving
in donkey-carts to Pompeii, that city of the resurrection of the ancient
world. The weather was somnolently mild; for the first time we were
eating of the fruit of the lotus, which we have eaten so often since,
and which has pervaded my writings.
If Castellamare had only done that for us, it would be a milestone in my
life, but it also planted the seeds of unrest—_die Wanderlust_—in my
veins. Some one we met there—I don’t remember who it was now—had a craze
for Greek ruins; Roman ruins meant nothing to him, he said; there were
only two places for him, Athens and Sicily.
In Sicily it was Girgenti which won his heart, not Syracuse or Taormina,
and he almost persuaded us to go there. He obviously preferred it, even
to Athens. But the name meant nothing to me; I had read of Agrigentum in
the classics, and he showed me photographs of the glorious Greek
temples, which are still preserved in the environs of modern Girgenti.
Athens, on the contrary, had been before my mind ever since I was a boy.
The literature of Greece is, with the exception of Homer and Theocritus,
roughly speaking, the literature of Athens. I knew most of its principal
buildings almost as well as if I had seen them. I heard the call of
Athens, and to Athens we went from Castellamare.
Going there showed how comparatively cheap and easy it is to get to
distant places. We went through Taranto—Tarentum—to Brindisi; from
Brindisi to Corfu, in the Ionian Islands, the earthly paradise of the
fair Nausicaa, and the empresses of to-day; from Corfu to Patras and
Corinth; from Corinth to Athens.
The moral effect began before ever we reached Athens; it was so
vivifying to a student of the classics to pass Tarentum, and Cæsar’s
Brundusium, the Lesbos of Sappho, the Ithaca of Ulysses, Corinth and the
Piræus.
Lesbos! Corinth! Athens! Sappho! Ulysses! there was romance and undying
poetry in the very names.
The Greece of those days really was something out of the beaten track.
There were only two little railways of a few miles each, and there was
not an hotel worthy of the name anywhere outside of Athens. Even in
Athens, if you were not at a first-class hotel, kid’s flesh, and
sheep’s-milk butter, black bread and honey of Hymettus, and wine which
was full of resin, were the staples of diet. But what did it matter? We
lived in a house and a street with beautiful classical names—we lived in
the house of Hermes. And when we climbed up to the Acropolis at sunset,
we were in an enchanted land midway between earth and heaven, for we
were in the very heart of history surrounded by milk-white columns of
the marble of Pentelicus, and facing a rich curtain of sunset, which
hung over Ægina, and trailed into the waters of the Bay of Salamis.
Athens is gloriously romantic and beautiful, and Time has laid its
lightest fingers on her rocks and ruins, whose names are the
commonplaces of Greek history.
We spent some glorious weeks at Athens, made interesting by the
acquaintance of Tricoupis, the famous Prime Minister, and the presence
of the President of my college at Oxford—now Bishop of Hereford, from
whom I heard only the other day. From Athens Miss Lorimer’s unappeasable
hunger to see the world swept us on, after several happy weeks, to
Constantinople—the outpost of the East in Europe. Constantinople was one
of the most delightful experiences of my life. There is no call which I
hear like the call of the East, and in Constantinople you have the
noblest mosques west of India, and bazaars almost as barbarous as the
bazaars of North Africa, thronged, like the broad bridge of boats which
crosses the Golden Horn, with the mixed races of the Levant, in their
gay, uncouth costumes. The scene, too, is one of rare beauty, for the
great mosques are rooted in dark cypress-groves, and rear their domes
and minarets on the horizon, and the calm waters of the Golden Horn and
the Sea of Marmora are dotted with fantastic _caïques_.
We spent all too short a time there, dipping into the bowl of Oriental
mystery, in perfect April weather, when we were called home to meet a
sister-in-law coming from Australia.
I had, in the interval, published two more volumes of verse, _A Summer
Christmas_ and _In Cornwall and Across the Sea_, and I had printed at
Florence _Edward, the Black Prince_, begun during that long visit to
Canterbury in the spring of 1886, during which I steeped myself deeper
and deeper in the study of Gothic architecture, not yet realising what
an important part it was to play in my writing.
When we returned from Constantinople I had _The Black Prince_ properly
published in England, and though its sales were trifling, like those of
_A Summer Christmas_, it met with warm commendation from the critics.
Shortly after this we were inspired with the desire to visit the United
States in the autumn of 1888, and as we were going so far, we determined
so stay in one place while we were in England.
The place we chose was Richmond. I had always loved it since I was a
little boy at Temple Grove School in the neighbouring village of East
Sheen. It was sufficiently in the country for us to pass a spring and
summer there without irksomeness, and sufficiently beautiful and
old-fashioned to satisfy my cravings.
At Richmond we took a house in the Queen’s Road, and but for the very
large sum demanded for fixtures, we should have abandoned our American
trip, and taken the part of the Old Palace which has now been restored
at great expense by Mr. J. L. Middleton, for which I had a great
inclination. Mr. Middleton is a friend of mine and I have been over it
many times with him. It stands right opposite my study window. We liked
Richmond as much then as we do now, except for the long trail up from
the railway station to the Queen’s Road when we went to the theatre. We
were in the Park or on the adjoining commons every day, watching the
operations of Nature from the growth to the fall.
It was a busy time, for I wrote _The Spanish Armada_ on the occasion of
the Tercentenary of the immortal sea-fight, and I edited two anthologies
of Australian verse, _Australian Ballads_ and _A Century of Australian
Song_, for Walter Scott, Ltd. The pleasure of compiling these two
anthologies, the first books by which I ever made any money, was
enhanced because I did them at the unsolicited invitation of the late
William Sharp, the poet and author of the rhapsodies of “Fiona Macleod,”
who afterwards became a dear and intimate friend. He introduced me to
Charles Mackay, the editor of the famous _Thousand and One Gems of
English Poetry_, who adopted Marie Corelli as his daughter, and was
father of Eric Mackay. It was through him that I received the invitation
to do the Australian part of the _Slang Dictionary_, edited by M.
Barrére, the French Ambassador’s brother, for which also I received some
money.
These encouragements made me ask my friend, the late S. H. Jeyes, who
went to Trinity, Oxford, on the same day as I did, and was at the time
one of the editors of the _St James’s Gazette_, from which he afterwards
changed to the _Standard_, whether he thought that I ought to go to
America, or stay and pursue my chances in England.
He said, “Go; in America they will take you at your own valuation, and
when you get back, it will _be_ your valuation.”
And so it came that we took our passages in the old Cunarder _Catalonia_
from Liverpool to Boston.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
I GO TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA
The only literary at-homes I had been to before I went to America were
Edmund Gosse’s in Delamere Terrace, Louise Chandler Moulton’s in
Weymouth Street, and W. E. Henley’s in an old house in which he resided
at Chiswick.
I have written elsewhere how the Gosses used to receive their friends on
Sunday afternoons. Not many came, but those who did come were generally
famous in the world of letters.
Mrs. Moulton, on the other hand, often had a crowd at her receptions. It
was in her drawing-room that I first met Sir Frederick Wedmore, Mrs.
Alexander the novelist, and Coulson Kernahan, and Theodore Watts. She
herself was a charming poet, and liked entertaining poets. I met her
first at Sir Bruce and Lady Seton’s, at Durham House, which at that time
contained the finest collection of modern paintings in London.
[Illustration:
THE AUTHOR
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
It was fortunate that Henley’s friends were devoted to him, because he
was an invalid and could not get about. He was already a great power in
journalism. His paper, called at first _The Scots Observer_, and later
on _The National Observer_, had taken the place of the _Saturday
Review_, which was not at that time conducted with the ability of the
old _Saturday_. The men who gathered round him were very brilliant. I
forget what evening of the week it was that he was at home, but whatever
evening it was he kept it up very late, with much smoke and consumption
of whiskey; and the conversation was always worth listening to. Henley
was a magnificent talker, with a fund of curious knowledge, and he had a
knack of turning the conversation on to some strange kind of sin or some
strange kind of occultism, which was thoroughly threshed out by the
clever people present. He rather liked morbid subjects.
Edmund Gosse gave me introductions to H. O. Houghton, head of the
publishing firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and he and Henley and
Katherine Tynan gave me introductions to various authors. But my most
useful introduction I had through my chief American friend of that time,
Ada Loftus, who made the London correspondents of the _New York Herald_
and the _Boston Globe_ give full-length announcements of my approaching
visit to America—as long as they would give to William Watson now. They
labelled me in those announcements the “Australian Poet,” and that label
stuck to me during the whole of that visit to the United States. They
asked Mrs. Loftus, I suppose, what I had done, and she told them that I
had written several volumes of verse about Australia. Be that as it may,
those friendly announcements resulted in so many hospitalities being
offered to us by American authors and literary clubs that we really did
not need our introductions, especially in Boston, where Mrs. Moulton was
waiting to welcome us, and where I had old schoolfellows—the
Peabodys—connected with most of the leading families.
But I did present the introduction to Mr. Houghton—when does an author
neglect an introduction to a publisher?—and he showed us innumerable
kindnesses all the time we remained in Boston. It was to him that I owed
the invitations from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Whittier, and
Longfellow’s family to visit them in their homes—inestimable
opportunities. We spent three months in Boston, seeing all the best of
Boston literary society and the University bigwigs at Harvard, and then
we went for a month to New York until it was time for the ice-carnival
season at Montreal. At New York, with Edmund Clarence Stedman, the first
of American critics, as a godfather, the hospitalities of Boston were
repeated to us. But this was not our principal visit to New York.
Our first trip to Canada was intensely interesting to us, because there
we were in a new world, where the temperature was below zero, and the
snow several feet high in the streets, and the ice several feet thick on
the great river, up which ocean liners come from spring to autumn. The
ice-palace was already built, and rose like a mediæval castle of
alabaster; in the centre of the city the habitants were selling their
milk in frozen lumps in the market; all the world wore furs, for the
poorest could buy a skin of some sort made up somehow. There were still
buffalo-skin coats in those days in plenty, at three pounds apiece, and
those who could not afford a fur cap to their liking, wore a woollen
tobogganing tuque, which could be drawn down over the forehead and the
ears, just as some of the younger women and the children wore their
blanket tobogganing coats.
It was a new world, where nobody skated in the open, because of the
impossibility of keeping the ice free from snow, and where skating was
so universal an accomplishment that in the rinks people danced on skates
as naturally as on their feet in a ballroom.
One soon took for granted the monstrous cold, learned to swathe in furs
every time one left the house, even if it was only to go to the post, to
wear thin boots, because they were always covered with “arctics” when
one went out, and thin underclothing because one’s furs were so thick
out of doors, and the houses so furiously hot indoors; to have double
windows always closed, and hot air flowing into the room till the
temperature reached 70° and over.
It is no wonder that ice-cream, as they call it, is a feature at dinner
in winter in a Canadian hotel.
Outside, all the land was white, and all the sky was blue. Wrapped up in
furs, people so despised the intense cold that there was not one closed
sleigh—at Montreal in winter all the cabs were sleighs. By day we
sleighed up the mountain for tobogganing and came back in time for
tea-parties; by night we sleighed to dances or picnics. The merry jingle
of sleigh-bells was never out of one’s ears; and everything was so
delightfully simple—it was always beer and not champagne—and every one
took an interest in Australia and Colonial poetry. The tea-parties were
generally impromptus got up on the telephone. Every one in Montreal had
a telephone, though it was only the beginning of 1889.
Lighthall, the Canadian littérateur, came to call upon us the very first
afternoon that we were in Montreal, and he introduced us to our
life-long friends, the Robert Reids, and the George Washington
Stephens’s. Mrs. Reid and Mrs. Stephens were sisters. Mr. Stephens, the
Astor of Montreal, shortly afterwards became Treasurer of the Colony.
Lighthall introduced us also to Sir William Van Horne, the President of
the great Canadian Pacific Railway, which led to important results. We
only stayed in Canada a month then, but that was sufficient to convince
me that I did not want to live in a climate where the cold was as
dangerous as a tiger. It was brought home to me in an extraordinary way.
I was out walking with Mrs. Reid’s daughter, coming back from a
tea-party one evening. We saw a drunken man lying in the gutter. She
said, “We must get a sleigh and take that drunk to the police-station.
He will be dead in an hour if he lies there.”
When roused, he was sufficiently coherent to tell us where he lived, and
we took him home. The cold was so intense that she found one of her ears
frost-bitten before she got home; she had gone out in an ordinary hat
instead of a fur cap, because it was a tea-party and near home. The
unexpected delay in the open air to rouse the man, and driving him home,
made her pay the penalty of risking a frost-bite. We knew that it was
frost-bitten, because it had turned as white as if it had been powdered.
The policeman took up a handful of snow, and rubbed it for her—another
act of ordinary good Samaritanism in Canada.
We went straight down from Canada to Washington to see the change of
Administration from President Cleveland’s regime to President
Harrison’s. The climatic contrast was strong; Washington was as warm as
Rome. Our arctics and furs looked simply idiotic when we arrived in the
station.
The change of Administration in the United States is invested with a
good deal of magnificence. All the important people in America, who can
spare the time, go to Washington for it. There were many functions
during our visit. We were President Cleveland’s guests at his
farewell-party, and went to all the Harrison functions. Mrs. Cleveland
had a delightful personality; she was very pretty, very elegant, very
gracious, a tall woman, rather suggestive of the beautiful Dowager Lady
Dudley, with brilliant dark eyes and a brilliant smile. Cleveland was
not a pleasant man to meet. When I knew him he was a very strong man who
had become very stout. Everything about him suggested power. His face,
in spite of its fleshiness, was very powerful. He had a deliberate,
rather ungracious way of speaking, and his silences, accentuated by
rather resentful eyes, were worse. But a man who starts to sweep the
Augean stable for America needs these qualities; and he undoubtedly
improved the tone of the party opposed to him in the State by giving
them an opposition which they had to respect. But he had no conscience
in foreign politics.
The most interesting house we went to was Colonel John Hay’s. Hay was a
millionaire twice over, and had been Abraham Lincoln’s private
secretary. He was one of America’s best poets, and no man in the country
was more renowned for his personal charm or his lofty character. He was
afterwards Secretary of State, and Ambassador to Great Britain, and
could have been either then, if President Harrison had been able to
overcome Hay’s rooted objection to office. And Adalbert Hay, the
American Consul-general, who did so much for captive Britons in the Boer
War, was his son.
At Hay’s house you met alike the most famous politicians, the most
famous members of the Diplomatic Corps, and the most famous authors and
artists in America. There we met all the most distinguished members,
perhaps I might say the leaders, of the Republican Party.
Washington will always be a bright spot in my memory for another thing.
Henry Savage Landor, the explorer, was turned out of his room because
the whole hotel was wanted for President Harrison’s party, and as there
was not a room to be had in Washington, he slept for the remainder of
the time on a shakedown in my room. Both he and I used to spend a great
deal of our time with our next-door neighbour in K Street, General
William Tecumseh Sherman, the hero of the famous march through Georgia
in the Civil War—a grand old man, with a hard-bitten face, but very
human. I was present at his funeral in New York; thirty thousand
veterans—“the Grand Army of the Republic”—marched behind the riderless
horse, which bore his jack-boots and his sword.
From Washington we went to New York, and stayed there till the heat
drove us back to Canada, where we had an extraordinarily delightful
holiday in store for us. Sir William Van Horne had invited us to go as
the guests of the Canadian Pacific Railway right over their line from
Montreal to Vancouver and back, and as we had a month or more to spare
before the time we settled for our journey, we went first of all to the
land of Evangeline—Nova Scotia—and afterwards across the Bay of Fundy to
the valley of the St. John river in New Brunswick, and thence to Quebec
and Montreal, where we were the guests of the Reids, and for a fortnight
of the Stephens’s, in their summer home on the shores of Lac Eau Clair
in the Maskinonge forest, and of Agnes Maule Machar at Gananoque on the
Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence.
This experience of Canadian summer life was an extraordinary education
in beauty. A more perfect summer could not be imagined; the sky was
always blue, the sun was always vigorous, and there was generally a
light breeze. We half lived on the water, since all Canadians near a
river or lake have canoes and can manage them with the skill of an
Indian. The bathing was enchanting: we could catch a hundredweight of
fish sometimes, in that land of many waters. The wild flowers and wild
fruits of the meadows and woods were as plentiful as buttercups and
daisies in England; it was a land of many forests, many lakes, many
rivers; mountains near or distant were always in sight.
Nor was this all. On the lofty shores of the Bay of Fundy and the rock
of Quebec, and under the “Royal Mountain” at Montreal there were dear
old French houses, built in the days of the Thirteenth or Fourteenth
Louis, and most of them intertwined in the romance of Canadian history.
What a lovely and romantic land it was! And we saw it to perfection, for
Bliss Carman and Roberts, two Canadian poets, were our guides
everywhere. In all my years in Australia I never had half the enjoyment
out of the country-life that I derived from those two or three months of
a Canadian summer.
The wonders of our journey had hardly begun, though the first sight of
the old fortress of Quebec towering over the St. Lawrence, and of the
historic Fields of Abraham, are events never to be forgotten.
Still, we felt that a new era in our lives was beginning on that night
in early autumn when we steamed out of the chief station of the world’s
greatest railway westwards on a journey which would not terminate till
we stood on the shores of English Bay, and looked out on to the Pacific
Ocean.
We were so anxious to hurry out west to the new land that we only spared
ourselves a few days at Toronto to cross Lake Ontario to Niagara, and
spend an afternoon and evening with Goldwin Smith and George Taylor
Denison. They presented such a contrast—Goldwin Smith, the Cassandra
whose voice was always lifted against his country, except when he was
among her enemies, and Denison, a descendant of the famous Loyalist, and
the leader of Canadian loyalty to England. Denison was the winner of the
Emperor of Germany’s prize for the best book on Cavalry Tactics.
From Toronto we had not far to go by train before we found ourselves at
Lake Huron, and took a steamer of the company, built like a sea-going
vessel, to cross those two vast lakes, Huron and Superior, to Port
Arthur. They look like seas, and have storms as violent, though they are
fresh water, and in Lake Superior, at any rate, you could immerse the
whole of the British Islands. From Port Arthur we trained to Winnipeg,
the city of the plains, where we only stayed a few days before flying
across the prairie—a limitless plain as broken as the Weald of Kent,
jewelled with flowers in spring, and with game fleeing to the horizon
when cover is short.
After three days of eye-roaming, we woke to find our view barred by the
long wall of the Rocky Mountains, like castles of the gods.
At Banff, in the Rocky Mountains, we were to stay to contemplate the
finest open mountain scenery conceivable, and at the Glacier House to
contemplate a glacier, a forest and a stupendous peak threatening to
overwhelm a mountain inn. The scenery between the two was finer than
anything in the Apennines, with its torrents dashing between mighty
precipices, and its pine forests sweeping like a prairie fire over
mountain and valley, and its background of heaven-piercing Alps.
We entered the Glacier House at a dramatic moment, for Jim, the sports’
guide from Missouri, had just finished pegging out on the floor of one
of the sitting-rooms a trophy of his rifle that took me straight back to
the happy hours of my boyhood which I spent with Captain Mayne Reid—the
rust-coloured skin of a mighty grizzly bear which had turned the scale
at twelve hundredweight. Jim the guide had on a buckskin coat and
breeches, much stained with killing or skinning the bear: the spectacle
was a most impressive one.
From the glacier we tore down the valleys of the Thompson and the Fraser
to Vancouver, then a new wooden town perched on a forest clearing with
the tree stumps still scattered about its roads, but one of the great
seaports of the world in embryo—Canada’s Western Gate, the realisation
of the dream of La Salle.
We loved Vancouver, because here we were in a town and country in the
making, with a glorious piece of the forest primeval preserved for ever
as a national park. For a month we lived there, going every day to see
the sun set over the ocean which divided us from the mysterious
Orient—thinking over all that we had seen of a country which is like a
continent, in that three or four thousand miles’ journey on the
newly-opened line.
Then one day a little old bull-dog of a Cunarder, in the service of the
great railway, ran up the harbour, and moored herself to the wharf
beside the railway station. A tall dark officer, whose voice I heard
across the telephone a few hours before writing these lines, was leaning
over the gunwale. He and our party smiled pleasantly at each other, and
he invited us to go on board. The litter of the Orient was about the
decks. Chinese seamen and Japanese passengers were talking the
pigeon-English of the East to each other. And we felt that here was the
opportunity for stretching our hands across to the East. I accepted the
omen, and we booked our passages to Japan—drifting on as we had drifted
ever since we landed at Boston a year before.
The stout old _Parthia_ was going to lie a week or two in port before
she turned her head round for Yokohama and Hong Kong, and we spent most
of this time in an excursion across the strait to Victoria, the capital
of Vancouver’s Island, a little bit of England in the West, with a
dockyard still in Imperial hands.
As we returned from Victoria early in November, we met, on the
steamer, Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, who was about to be
Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean, on his way back from a
Big-horn expedition in the North.
“Where are you on your way to?” he asked me.
“Japan,” I replied.
“What now?” he said; “you must be fond of bad weather.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IV
I GO TO JAPAN
THE Admiral’s prognostications were correct. We met such heavy seas
passing Cape Flattery that the ship seemed to be trying to turn turtle.
We were unable to sit on deck from that day until the day that we
sighted Japan, and once we had to heave-to for eighteen hours. The worst
of the weather being so terrible was that the Captain was unable to
execute the Company’s instructions to take us to see the Aleutian
Islands, which only whalers know, and drop some stores there for
shipwrecked mariners.
But on that December morning, when we found ourselves in smooth water
and soft, summery temperature off the flat-topped hills of Japan,
surrounded by the billowing sails of countless junks, the very first
vessels we had seen since Cape Flattery faded out of sight, we felt
rewarded.
The East, the Far East, which I had heard “a-calling” all my life, was
right within my grasp. In a few hours’ time I should be standing on the
shores of fanciful and mysterious Japan, able to remain there as long as
I chose, for we had no fixed plans. We were just drifting on—drifting
through our lives—drifting across the world. My heart beat high; I might
have written nothing but a few books of verse which hardly anybody read,
but, at any rate, I had gone half round the world, and if I wished to
stay and dream for the rest of my life in the East, who was to say me
nay?
Whatever the causes, the effect was to give me the subject for which I
had been waiting to make my position as an author. From the day that I
published _The Japs at Home_, I shed my label of the “Australian Poet,”
and became known as the author who has been to Japan.
I even enriched the English language with a word—_Japs_. It had long
been in use in America, but no one had ventured to put it into a book in
England. Some thought it was undignified; some thought that it would
incense the Japanese. I not only put it into a book, but on the cover of
a book, which has sold a hundred and fifty thousand copies. Only to-day
I discovered that Japan’s great poet, Yone Noguchi, and the Japanese
publicist, T. G. Komai, use it in their books, which are written in
English.
I had, in Montreal, bought a No. 1 Kodak—a novelty in those days—and
with it I took several hundred photographs in Japan—it was from these
that Fenn, the artist, of McClure’s Syndicate, afterwards drew his
illustrations for my articles, which were reproduced in the earlier
editions of the book. The “Kodaks” not only served as the basis of the
illustrations, they made a most admirable journal for me to write from.
I commenced Kodaking and taking notes from the hour that we entered the
harbour of Yokohama, and kept it up without flagging till the day that
we left Yokohama for San Francisco. It was to those snapshots with
camera and pencil that my books on Japan owed the lively touches which
gave them their popularity.
We were a winter and a spring and a summer in Japan—for all except six
weeks which we spent in China. I paid most of my hotel bills in Japan by
writing my _Handbook to Japan_ for the Club Hotel Company.
In Japan we spent our entire days in sight-seeing. If we were not going
over interesting buildings (and I over Yoshiwaras), temples, castles,
baths or tea-houses in marvellous gardens—we were wandering about the
streets or the country in our _rikishas_, dismounting when there was
anything to photograph or examine or purchase. The _rikisha_ is a most
convenient way of getting about for a person who is making notes,
because he can write as he goes along, and pull up as often as he likes
when there is anything which needs his attention. Also, your
_Jinrikisha_ boy, if you choose carefully, speaks enough English to act
as an interpreter, and, from having taken foreigners to the sights so
often, is usually a tolerably efficient guide. Besides which, it is a
novel, pleasant and exciting method of locomotion.
We hired the best two _rikisha_ men we could hear of by the week, and
never regretted the extravagance. They were always there when we wanted
them, and in a very few days grasped exactly what we wished to do and
see. One was called Sada and the other Taro.
It was in this way that I acquired my knowledge of the Japan which can
be seen on the surface, and which is all that the average foreigner
wishes to see, and gave myself one of the three or four subjects with
which my name is identified.
We spent the first month in Yokohama, a much-maligned place, for it had
in those days an unspoiled native town at the back of the settlement,
and its environs were charming, whether one went towards Negishi or
towards Ikegami: I found enough to keep me hard at work for a month.
On the last day of the year we went to Tokyo. We had a reason for that;
we wished to see the great fair in the Ginza, which is one of the most
typical sights of Japan. Savage Landor, who had been in Tokyo for some
time, wrote that we must on no account miss it, and he took rooms for us
in the Tokyo hotel—which the Japanese called _Yadoya_, “the hotel.”
The Tokyo hotel was an experience: it had originally been the _Yashiki_
or town-house of a feudal prince, in the days when the Shogun reigned at
Tokyo. It had a moat (into which Miss Lorimer, who accompanied us on all
our travels, fell on the first night we were there, but which
fortunately contained more mud than water), and stood in an angle of the
outer works of the castle.
Just below it, small craft made a port of the outer moat of the castle:
in its courtyard carpenters were using up the large amount of waste
space which there is in a _Yashiki_ by nailing fresh rooms on to the
Daimio’s house, to make the hotel larger. It could not be called
anything but nailing on, because it was made of wood and paper, and was
not properly dovetailed into the existing building, but simply tacked
on. We learnt many upside-down notions by watching the builders and
carpenters, who did most things inside-out or upside-down, according to
our notions. Also the Japanese manager, the Abè San who was murdered a
few months ago, borrowed my clothes to have them copied by a Japanese
tailor, and the waiters wore their European clothes over their native
dress, and wriggled out of them behind a screen as soon as a meal was
over. If you called them at such a moment, whatever your sex, they might
come forward with their trousers half on and half off. The Japanese have
their own ideas of conventions between the sexes.
Wandering through that fair at the Ginza took one into the very heart of
Japan: it is held to enable people to settle their debts before New
Year’s Day.
Apart from the obituary parks of Shiba and Ueno, Tokyo is not reckoned
rich in temples, though it has a few very famous temples in the suburbs,
and more than a few within a short excursionary distance. But Shiba and
Ueno—and especially the former—present an epitome of Japanese life, art,
scenery and history.
It is difficult to imagine anything more beautiful than Shiba, though
the Japanese have a proverb that you must not call anything beautiful
till you have seen Nikko. The fir woods in which it stands are on a low
ridge commanding an exquisitive view of the Gulf of Tokyo, and in this
wood are embosomed the mausolea of most of the earlier Shoguns of the
Tokugawa House, which came to an end this winter with the death of the
abdicated Shogun. Each mausoleum has a beautiful temple beside the tomb.
The presence of so many temples has led the Japanese to exhaust their
landscape art on Shiba with lake and cherry-grove and cryptomeria. Such
natives as do not go there for religion are attracted by the pleasure
city, with its famous tea-houses, like the Maple Club, its shows, and,
above all, by its dancing. Here you may see the _No_-dance, the
_Kagura_-dance, and some of the best Geishas.
But the chief charm of Shiba to me was its absolute Orientalness
compared to the rest of Tokyo.
No sooner are you inside the great red gateway of the temples than you
are in the world of fairy-tales. For temple after temple opens up before
you, low fantastic structures, on which Oriental imagination has run
riot in colour and form. You are bewildered by the innumerable
courtyards of stone lanterns, the paraphernalia of drum-tower and
bell-tower, fountain and dancing-stage, which surround them. You are
sobered by the dark groves between the temples, which contain the tombs.
Temple and tomb are thronged by streams of dignified natives, some come
to worship and some to see the sights. Here you will find a service
going on, with white-robed priests kneeling on the mirrored floor of
black lacquer, for which you have to remove your boots. Outside the
actual temples the shows are in full blast, and picnicking proceeds
everywhere. All the Japanese are in their native dress. Gay little
musumes and gorgeous geishas flutter before you. The grand tea-houses
offer fresh visions of the Orient with their Geisha dances and their
fantastic gardens.
Ueno has the added charm of a large lake, covered with lotus-blossoms in
summer.
At no great distance from Shiba is the Shinagawa Yoshiwara, which, for
fantastic beauty, surpasses anything in Japan. With these and the water
life of the Nihombashi, and the life of the poor going on all day in the
streets—for the poor Japanese takes the front off his house all through
the day to air it—I should have found good occupation for my notebook
and camera for years.
If we had not been urged by other foreigners, I do not know when we
should have left Tokyo. And we saw little enough of them except at
meal-times, or when we went to the Frasers (Hugh Fraser was British
Minister of Tokyo, and husband of the well-known author, Mrs. Hugh
Fraser, Marion Crawford’s sister), or the Napiers. The Master of Napier,
the Lord Napier and Ettrick, just dead, was his First Secretary. But at
meal-times they talked so much of Easter at Miyanoshita, and the
cherry-blossom festival at Kyoto, and the annual festival at Nikko, and
the Great Buddha at Kamakura, and the sacred shrines of Ise, that we
fortunately felt obliged to visit them.
Miyanoshita, the favourite holiday-resort of the Europeans in Japan, is
high up in the mountains. The valley on the right of the long ridge
which leads up to it in spring is ablaze with azaleas and flowering
trees. It, itself, is perched on a mountain-side, above a densely-wooded
valley. Exquisite walks can be taken from it, such as the trip to
Hakone, the beautiful village which stands on the blue lake at the foot
of Fujiyama, in which the immortal grace of the great mountain is
reflected whenever the sun or moon is above the horizon. Miyanoshita is
equally famous for its mountain air and its mountain baths. The boiling
water, highly impregnated with sulphur, is brought down in bamboo pipes
from the bosom of the mountain to deep wooden baths sunk in the floor of
the hotel bathing-house. Life here is one long picnic: the energetic
take walks, the lazy are carried in chairs over the hills: people fly
here for week-ends in spring, and from the heat and damp of the summer.
Its great rival is Nikko, another mountain village, embosomed in shady
groves, with woods full of wild hydrangeas. In June Nikko is crowded for
the festival of Toshogu, the deified founder of the dynasty of Shoguns,
which was ended by the revolution of 1868—the principal festival of
Japan, inaugurated with the grandest procession to be seen nowadays, in
which all who take part in it wear the ceremonial dresses of three
hundred years ago.
Nikko has the two most beautiful temples in the magic land—those of
Iyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, and his grandson,
Iyemitsu. Here you see the most perfect lacquer and carving in all
Japan. And their courtyards are exquisitely terraced on the
mountain-side. Here, too, besides these and other glorious temples,
there are the added charms of scenery, a foaming sky-blue river, running
beneath the sacred scarlet bridge, and between the avenue of Buddhas,
commons of scarlet azalea, and thickets of wild wistaria.
Having seen Nikko, the sacred city of the Shoguns, one must needs see
Kyoto, the city of the Mikados, and Nara.
For seven centuries prior to the revolution in our own day, Kyoto was
the capital of the Mikados. Here they lived like gods behind a veil,
only penetrated by the hierarchy: they never left the palace gates
except in a closed palanquin: they added little but tombs to the city,
and their tombs were never shown. But the Shoguns, who ruled in their
name, and others great in the land, adorned Kyoto with some of the
greatest and most interesting temples in Japan, such as the temples of
the Gold and Silver Pavilions, the two Hongwanji temples, the temple of
the Thirty-Three Thousand Images, and the chief temple of Inari the
Goddess of Rice. And it being the ancient capital, we found the city
full of old prints and curios, and the old-fashioned pleasure resorts of
Japan.
Kyoto was a city of the pleasure-seeker of old time, as capitals are
wont to be. It has wonderful tea-houses in the city; its temple grounds
are like permanent fairs; and within a _rikisha_ drive is Lake Biwa, one
of the most exquisite lakes in the world, whose shores exhibit the
_chefs d’œuvres_ of the Japanese landscape-creator. Nothing could be
more exquisite than the temple grounds on the shores of Lake Biwa.
Of the many old-time festivals of Kyoto, the most famous survival is the
Miyako-odori, or cherry-blossom festival, held every year, when visitors
flock to Kyoto to see the cherry-groves in full blossom. The feature of
the festival is a wonderful ballet, for which the best dancers in Japan
gather in Kyoto. Even the Duke and Duchess of Connaught came to Kyoto
for it, when they were in Japan. We stayed for a long time at Yaami’s
when they were there, and when the Duke learned from Colonel Cavaye, his
private secretary, that I was a journalist, he gave me permission to
accompany his party to any function or expedition which I wished to
describe. The most interesting of them was the shooting of the rapids of
the Katsuragawa, some miles from Kyoto, where thirteen miles of
cataracts are negotiated in huge punts, built of springy boards. As we
were buffeting down the rapids, the Duke told me that our present King,
then Prince George of Wales, had said that shooting those rapids, and
the baths of Miyanoshita, where you have natural hot water in wooden
boxes sunk in the floor, were the two best things in the world.
In Kyoto, an antique city on a broad plain, embosomed in hills, capped
by temples, one has the very essence of old Japan. We stayed there a
long time, absorbing an atmosphere which may soon pass away, never to
return.
Within a day’s _rikisha_ drive of Kyoto is Nara, with its
thousand-year-old treasury of the most notable possessions of the
Mikados, and its glorious temples, and its sacred deer-park, and its
acres of scarlet azalea thickets.
We visited all; we visited the two great cities of Osaka and Nagoya,
with their magnificent castles, and Kamakura, with its gigantic Buddha
and its ancient monasteries. We visited all the most famous cities and
points of scenery in Japan; and the pleasure of our visit was heightened
by our going away to China for six weeks in the middle of it, because
when we came back our eyes were far keener to observe and to appreciate,
while we had the knowledge acquired in our former visit to guide us.
We were truly sorry to leave Japan. I should be quite content to be
living there still; but if we had remained there, Japan would not have
taken its part in my development as a writer, for though I should
doubtless have compiled a book or books about Japan, they would have
been sent home as the productions of an amateur, and very likely have
had such difficulty in finding a publisher that they would have been
brought out in some hole-and-corner way, instead of my selling _The Japs
at Home_ in the open market, and thereby laying the foundation of my
career as a travel-book writer.
Japan supplied me with the material for several books, not counting the
handbook which I wrote for the Club Hotel—_A Japanese Marriage_, next in
point of sales to _The Japs at Home_; _Queer Things About Japan_, which
sold best of all my books in guinea form; _More Queer Things About
Japan_, which I wrote with Norma Lorimer; _When We Were Lovers in
Japan_, a novel which was originally published under the title of
_Playing the Game_; and _Pictures of Japan_; while I have written
countless articles and short stories about the country.
I had almost forgotten that I had a book—my _Lester the
Loyalist_—published in Japan. Though it only contained about twenty
pages, it took two months to print. How the result gratified me, I wrote
in _The Japs at Home_.
“I forgot all the delays when I saw the printed pages, they were so
beautiful, and really, considering that Mr. Mayeda was the only man in
the establishment who could read a word of English, the printing was
exceedingly correct. The blocks had turned out a complete success,
though, of course, the proofs of the covers did not look as well as they
would when mounted and crêped.
“The Japanese have a process by which they can make paper crêpe
book-covers as stiff as buckram.
“‘Well, Mr. Mayeda, how did your little boy like the stamp-book you
mended up for him so beautifully?’ I asked one day.
“‘Ah! it is very sad; he has gone to hell. But the little boy, he has
loved the stamp-book so that he has taken it to hell with him. It is on
his _grave_, do you call it?’
“Mr. Mayeda was thinking of what the missionaries had told him when he
was learning English.
“A few weeks more passed. Mr. Mayeda brought us the perfect book. He was
so flushed and tearful that I poured him a couple of bumpers of
vermouth, which he drank off with the excitement of an unemployed
workman in England when he makes a trifle by chance, and spends it right
off on his beloved gin.
“‘Is anything the matter, Mr. Mayeda?’ I asked.
“‘It is so sad. My other little boy has gone to hell, too. And I am so
poor, and I have to keep my wife’s uncle, and my father is very silly,
and so I get drunk every night.’
“The books he had brought were exquisite. The printing was really very
correct, and the effect of the long hexameter lines, in the handsome
small pica type, on the oblong Japanese double leaf of silky
ivory-tinted paper, every page flowered with maple-leaves in delicate
pearl-grey under the type, was as lovely as it was unique.
“The block printings on every single leaf were done by hand—the leaf
being laid over the block, and rubbed into it by a queer palm-leaf-pad
burnisher.
“The covers were marvels of beauty, made of steel-grey paper crêpe,
ornamented, the back one with three little sere and curled-up maple
leaves drifting before the wind, and the front one with a spray of maple
leaves in all their autumn glory and variety of tints, reproduced to the
life.
“Across the right-hand end of the sprig was pasted a long white silk
label in the Japanese style. The good taste, the elegance, the colours
of this cover, fairly amazed me.”
Our visit to China was taken at the instigation of friends in Japan, who
made an annual trip to the Hong Kong races. I cannot say that it
interested me as much as Japan; but we only had time to visit Hong Kong,
Shanghai, Canton and Macao, and of these, Canton alone was absolutely
Chinese. Canton is as typical a Chinese city as one could desire—supreme
in commerce, a hot-bed of Chinese aspirations. But it is very poorly off
for fine old buildings; it is more interesting for its huge water
population, living in long streets of boats, and for the wonderful
gardens of some of its merchants.
Macao is chiefly interesting as a very ancient outpost of Europe in the
East, old enough for Camoens to have lived and written his immortal
Lusiad there in the sixteenth century. It has little to call for the
attention of the stranger, except nice old gardens with huge
banyan-trees, and gambling hells, where you learn to play _Fan-tan_. It
only flourishes as an Alsatia for rogues outside of British and Chinese
jurisdiction.
Shanghai is a fine European town, with luxuries and conveniences, for
which Hong-Kongers sigh, and a most picturesque walled native town,
which contains one of the most beautiful tea-houses in the East.
Hong Kong is a gay city, because it is so full of British naval and
military officers. It is also rather a beautiful place, having a
mountain right over the town, which is the sanatorium and summer-resort.
I met many old schoolfellows there, who took care that invitations
should be sent to us for all the Service festivities, which are so thick
at Race-time. And they also told me what to see in Hong Kong and Canton
and Macao.
But, knowing that I was only to be in China for a month and a half, I
made no effort to ground myself in knowledge of everyday China, but gave
myself up to enjoying the gaieties and tropical luxuries.
China thus had no effect on my literary development. Our stay there was
a mere holiday, at which I had a fresh and exhaustive round of military
and naval festivities.
The island of Hong Kong is not a good place for studying the Chinaman,
except as an employé of the Englishman.
On our return from China to Japan we were fascinated by the almost
tropical beauty of the Japanese summer. There was also a good deal of
British gaiety, for the Fleet had moved just before us from China to
Japan.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
BACK TO CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES
THE Pacific as we crossed it on our return from Japan to America was
very different to the Pacific of our outward journey. Instead of being
on a small ship, so buffeted by the seas that we could not remain on
deck, with hardly another white passenger on board except missionaries,
we were on a large ship—the finest which crossed the Pacific in those
days—full of “Society” people returning from the East, and the sea was
like the traditional mill-pond.
We landed at San Francisco and stayed a week at the Palace to see
something of life in the Californian capital. It struck me as very like
life in Australia, especially in the character of the buildings and the
appearance of the people. But the cold winds of the San Francisco summer
have no parallel in Australia.
The chief effect of my visit to California in the development of my
writing was that, receiving a contract to write a number of articles for
the _San Francisco Chronicle_, my first prose writing had to be lively
enough to satisfy the lively Californian audience. This was a good
training.
From San Francisco we went up the Pacific coast to Vancouver, with good
opportunities for learning the humours and vulgarities of Western
America.
The tail-end of summer and the autumn we spent in working our way back
from Vancouver to Montreal, breaking our journey wherever we felt
inclined to try the joys of wild life in Canada—at the head waters of
the Fraser, the Sicamous lakes in the Kootenay country, various spots on
Lake Nepigon and the wild North shore of Lake Superior, Lake Nipissing,
the Lake of the Woods, Trout Lake, and so on, besides the chief towns
like Winnipeg, and the regular tourist stopping-places at Banff and the
Glacier House. At some places we had the opportunity of watching the
life of the Siwashes, or Coast Indians, of Esquimaux blood, who live
chiefly by catching and drying the salmon which we saw coming up the
Fraser like a river of fish in a river of water. At others we saw the
lordly Red Indian—Stony or Blood or Blackfoot—and on the Rainy Lake we
saw two thousand Ojibways on the war-path—all cartridge-belts and
feathers—camped on the outskirts of a Canadian town (without inflicting
the smallest scare on the inhabitants), while they were waiting to see
if they should have to go and support the Ojibways across the border in
their war upon a Baltimore Company, which had infringed their rights.
The Indians, in their shrewd way, first tried their luck in the United
States Courts, who decided in their favour, so war was not declared.
At Sicamous we saw eighty fresh skins of black bears, who had been
slaughtered while they were feeding on the salmon stranded in shallow
water, owing to the failure of the berry crop. In their anxiety to spawn
in shallow water, the salmon crush their way up into tiny brooks and
ponds where the bears can catch them easily, and the farmers sweep them
out of the water with branches.
At the Glacier House, Jim the guide’s slaying of the great grizzly bear,
when we were there before, inflamed my imagination. I cultivated Jim. I
climbed the great Assulkan Glacier with him after the first fall of
autumn snow, and made a vow about glaciers which I have religiously
kept; and having a Winchester sporting rifle with me, I went out with
him to try and get a shot at a grizzly, whose track he had seen. But we
saw no more of that bear, which was, perhaps, fortunate for me, for
though I had won many prizes at rifle-shooting, I had not been brought
face to face with any dangerous game, and a grizzly decidedly falls into
that category.
We had splendid fishing all the way across, and delightful camping out;
and altogether had an experience of outdoor life in Western Canada,
which is very unspoiled and wild—a snakeless Eden, that certainly told
in my development as a writer.
At last the autumn came to an end. We felt the first breath of winter
standing by the river side, where Tom Moore wrote his famous _Canadian
Boat Song_—the woods were a glory of crimson and gold.
We said good-bye to Canada and turned our footsteps to New York. There
we met a warm-hearted American welcome. Our numerous friends seemed to
find an almost personal gratification in the fact that we had been to
the Far North-West and to the Far East, to the Pacific Coast and to
Japan and China.
I was now no longer exclusively the “Australian Poet,” I was a sort of
mild explorer, and people talked Japan to me whenever they were not
talking about themselves. There was a good deal of this to do, because I
had a commission from Griffith, Farran & Co. to compile a book on the
younger American Poets, and nearly every one I met seemed to be a poet.
I was sitting next to H. M. Alden, the editor of _Harper’s Magazine_,
one night at dinner. Suddenly he pulled out his watch. “It is now nine
o’clock,” he said; “at this moment there are a hundred thousand people
in America writing poetry, and most of them will send it to me.”
One of them was the English curate of the most fashionable church in New
York, and he was in a quandary. He wished to be in the book, but he had
heard that there was to be a biography of each poet, giving his date of
birth, parentage, career, etc. He did not wish his date of birth to be
known—he thought that it would interfere with his prospects as a
lady-killer. “Was it compulsory for him to say how old he was?” he
whined.
“You need not tell the truth about it,” I suggested.
In the compilation of that book I saw a great deal of human nature,
because I met the poets, whereas in _Australian Poets_, which I edited
simultaneously, I had to do my work entirely by correspondence.
We spent a delightful winter and spring in New York, because we had Miss
Lorimer’s beautiful sister, Mrs. Hay-Chapman, one of the finest amateur
pianists I ever heard, staying with us all the time, so that we had a
feast of music, and as I was doing literary and dramatic criticisms for
the _Dominion Illustrated_, the leading weekly of Canada, we had plenty
of new books and theatre tickets. This, and the articles on Japan I was
writing for the American Press and McClure’s Syndicate, kept me quite
busy.
My sojourn in America had a most important influence on my literary
career, because it taught me my trade as a journalist. Needing money,
and having no connections, I had to make my way as a journalistic free
lance in the open market, and I succeeded in making a fair income out of
it.
But I never tried to get a publisher (though one came to me), for the
simple reason that I never contemplated entering the lists as a
prose-writer. A large and well-known firm bought editions in sheets of
my various volumes of verse, which surprised me very much, till they
went bankrupt shortly afterwards without paying for them. The purchase
was not of sufficient magnitude to be the cause of the bankruptcy, as
the ill-natured might suggest.
I have often regretted that I did not form a close personal connection
with a single publishing house over there, instead of having each
individual book, as it was ready, sold to whichever publisher the agent
happens to do business with.
Also I blame myself for not learning the art of pleasing the American
novel-reader. Their book market is a much more valuable one than ours,
and unfortunately the worst fault a novel can have in their eyes is its
being “too British.” A book like _The Tragedy of the Pyramids_ is
anathema to them.
The only prose book I published during my sojourn in America was _The
Art of Travel_, for which the publisher, a Greek, forgot to pay me a
single penny of what he contracted. I afterwards turned into it an
advertisement for the North German Lloyd, and got something, about fifty
pounds, I think, out of them.
I must not take leave of America without recording my impressions of the
other American cities which I visited besides New York and Boston.
San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma and other western towns were spoiled for
me, because the working-classes in them were so “swollen-headed” and
rude that any educated or gently-born person felt like a victim of the
French Revolution as he was making his way to the scaffold, surrounded
by wild mobs thirsting for his blood. The lower classes in the cities of
the Pacific Coast insult you to show that they are your equals. And
except as manual labourers, they never could be anybody’s equals,
because God created them so common. It is these people and the
unscrupulous speculators who make money. The decent people get ground
between the upper and lower grindstone in a land where living costs out
of all proportion to the rewards of education.
We spent some time also in Washington, which is their exact converse.
Washington has its vulgar rich, who go there to make a “season” of it,
and its venal and lobbying politicians who make the vast temple, which
acts as the American Capitol, a den of thieves, but they do not take the
first place in the public eye. The really fine elements in the American
nation are well represented at Washington, and form a natural Court, in
which the President may or may not be prominent. That depends on whether
he is fit to be their leader. It is they, and not the President, who
keep up the traditions of their country before the eyes of the various
Embassies. Such a man was Colonel John Hay. Their presence helps to make
Washington a delightful city.
The American Government is extremely polite and hospitable to visiting
authors. I was such a small author in those days that I felt positively
embarrassed when, a few hours after our arrival in Washington, President
Cleveland’s private secretary, Colonel Dan Lamont, called with an
invitation for us to go to supper with the President and Mrs. Cleveland
and be present at the last reception they gave before they left the
White House.
And when President Harrison came into office, Mr. Blaine, the new
Secretary of State, invited us to share his private box to witness the
inaugural procession.
[Illustration:
ISRAEL ZANGWILL
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
These were civilities beyond one’s dreams, and added to them were the
never-ceasing hospitalities at houses like John Hay’s, and the Judges’,
and the delightful receptions at which one met the great scientists
connected with the Smithsonian Institute, and the chief authors and
editors congregated at Washington.
To witness a change of Administration at Washington and partake in its
hospitalities is extraordinarily stimulating and interesting. It was a
privilege far beyond my deserts to meet the great public men of America.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI
LITERARY AT-HOMES AND LITERARY CLUBS
THE literary at-home is an American institution. It may not have been
invented there, but it has certainly flowered there. I did not visualise
the literary at-home at all until I attended the Sunday evenings of my
dear old friend, Louise Chandler Moulton, the author of _Swallow
Flights_, at Boston. Her house was the centre of literary society there.
She knew every one who was worth knowing in literary circles in England
and America, and she had a passion for collecting them on Sunday nights.
There I learnt the essential simplicity and common-sensibleness of
American entertainments. No one went for the refreshments; there were
none except coffee and various kinds of cakes. It was, in fact,
afternoon tea, with coffee instead of the drink which cheers without
inebriating, held at 9 p.m. instead of 5. Her evenings were crowded.
When I went to New York I found the New York literary people collected
every Sunday night in the hospitable home of Edmund Clarence Stedman,
the chief literary biographer of his day. Laurence Hutton, too, the
author of _Literary Landmarks in London_, and editor of certain pages of
_Harper’s Magazine_, had a few people on Sunday nights. There was always
the same simplicity about eating and drinking, and the same absence of
any entertainment, except being introduced to American celebrities, or
occasionally listening spellbound while one of them told a humorous
story in the inimitable American way.
Charles de Kay, the chief art critic in New York of that day, was one of
the few people who gave big afternoon teas in the English style. De Kay
belonged to one of the oldest literary families in New York, for he was
the grandson of Joseph Rodman Drake.
These were the private literary at-homes. They yielded in importance to
the story-tellers’ nights of the various clubs, generally Saturday
nights. Sometimes there was a large house dinner at the Club, sometimes
nothing happened until the reception began, about nine, but in any case,
the procedure was the same. First of all, the most brilliant men of the
day told anecdotes, and then the assemblage broke up into small groups,
when the introduction of strangers to each other was the feature of the
evening. It was in this way that I came to know nearly every important
American writer of that day. Sometimes two good anecdote-tellers would
be put up to banter each other, and the encounters would be very witty.
I remember one encounter in particular between a Bostonian and a
professor of the University of Chicago. The professor alluded most
feelingly to the departed glories of Boston—Boston which considered
itself the hub of the universe—and dilated upon the new era which was
dawning for Chicago. The Bostonian got up and agreed with every word he
said.
“I am surprised at my friend’s agreeing with this,” said the professor.
“Not at all,” said the Bostonian. “I speak as one of the owners of
Chicago.”
The audience rocked with laughter, recalling the fact that this
Bostonian had turned a respectable fortune into millions by buying up a
large area in Chicago when it was ruined by the great fire.
At another such evening Mark Twain said the circumstance which gave him
the greatest satisfaction in his life was the fact that Darwin, for a
year before his death, read nothing but his works. Darwin’s doctors, he
added, had warned him that he would get softening of the brain if he
read anything but absolute drivel.
Sometimes there were discussions at these evenings, and one of them was
about the merits of a certain Society poetess, whose poems enjoyed an
unbounded sale without meeting with the approbation of the critics. “Do
you not admit,” asked one of the lady’s admirers of the editor of the
_Century Magazine_, “that Miss Van —— is the poetess of passion?”
“Yes,” said the editor, “Miss Van —— is the poetess of passion—of
boarding-house passion.”
I never came away from one of these evenings without feeling that I had
been partaking of intellectual champagne.
When I was in America Eugene Field edited one of the great Chicago
dailies, and was the principal author of the West. My first meeting with
him was a characteristic one. I was at an at-home in New York, talking
to the editress of a fashion paper, who had also written books of
twaddly gush about travel. The hostess brought up Field, and introduced
him to the editress.
“Very glad to meet you, ma’am,” he said. “I think I may say that I have
read all your books with the greatest interest.”
“Are you a writer, Mr. Field?” she asked. “I am sorry to say that I have
never heard of you.”
“Nor I you, ma’am; but you might have pretended, same as I did.”
There used to be very large at-homes every Sunday night at the flat of a
wealthy old lady who owned an important newspaper. Her guests were
mostly authors and artists, and she hardly knew any of them by sight,
and never gave any of them commissions to work for her paper. Sometimes
she did not even put in an appearance at her at-homes, which went on
just the same, as if she had been there. Her guests came to meet each
other, not her. She was not at all literary; her only ambition was like
Queen Elizabeth’s—to be taken for a young and beautiful woman. She was
no longer either, but she dressed the part. Young America used openly to
make fun of her weakness on these occasions, and I well remember the
editor of _Puck_ (a New York comic paper), to whom she was showing a
beautiful copy of Canova’s nude statue of Napoleon’s sister, Pauline
Borghese, gravely pretending that he thought it was a statue of herself,
and complimenting her on the likeness which the sculptor had achieved.
His impudence carried him through; his delighted hostess believed that
he believed it, and explained, with genuine colour coming into her
rouged cheeks, that in spite of the likeness, it was not her, but
“Princess Pauline.”
As the refreshments at this house were on a very liberal scale, it was a
good place to meet the section of the Press which is not satisfied with
a mere feast of reason and flow of soul. One also met fame-hunters, like
the sculptor whom I will call Vermont, who came to cultivate the Press.
I was introduced to him at this house, and I hoped that I should never
see him again, because he was such a colossal egotist. One day, a few
years afterwards, to my dismay, I met him in Fleet Street. I said, “How
do you do, Mr. Vermont?”
He said at once, “Can you do something for me?” which was his invariable
habit.
I said “yes” cheerfully, meaning to wriggle out of it, for I did not
want to do it. I was under no obligation to him, because I had been
careful not to give him the opportunity of offering me any hospitalities
while I was over there. He said, “I have never been in England before.
Can you tell me if I ought to use a letter-writer?”
I said, “I think so; what is it—a new kind of typewriter?”
He said, “No, it is a book which tells you the proper ways for writing
letters.”
Remembering that the last letter I had received from him began, “Mr.
Douglas Sladen, Esq., Dear Sir,” I said I thought he ought, and as we
were in Fleet Street, recommended him to go to Hatchard’s in Piccadilly.
I was interested to know the kind of impression he would make on Arthur
Humphreys, to whom I sent him with my card. I carefully gave him a card
without an address in the hope that I should not see him any more. But
he got my address from Humphreys, and came to see me the next day. It
appeared that he had brought a large group of statuary with him, which
he wished to present to the City of London. Could I help him in this? he
wished to know. I said yes. I gave him an introduction to the Lord
Mayor, and to the editor of the _Illustrated London News_, to both of
whom I was a total stranger. He went away very pleased with himself. The
next time I met him was at the Lord Mayor’s Day banquet at the Mansion
House. I asked him how he had got on, and he said that he owed more to
me than any one he had ever met. The Lord Mayor had accepted the
sculpture, and given orders for it to be erected somewhere in the
Guildhall Library until its final position could be decided on, and the
editor of the _Illustrated London News_ was going to give the front page
of his next number to a reproduction of the immortal work. After this I
met him at every important function to which I received an invitation.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII
WE START OUR LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON
I WAS well known at authors’ clubs and authors’ receptions long before I
was known as an author. In fact, I doubt if many of those who swarmed to
our at-homes ever thought of me seriously as an author, or even realised
that I wrote. They knew of me as the friend of authors, artists, and
actors, and people who were merely charming, and well enough off to
entertain, and enjoyed meeting the celebrities of Bohemia. They credited
me with a certain capacity as a host, who always introduced the right
people to each other.
I had graduated in a good school for entertaining at Boston and New
York, where the hostess takes care that each of her guests before they
leave shall have been introduced to the persons most worth meeting. If
Oliver Wendell Holmes was in the room at Boston or the American
Cambridge, every guest was presented to him. At a large literary at-home
in New York you were sure to have been introduced to a Mark Twain, or a
Howells, or a Stockton before you left. Americans make a point of having
a guest of honour at an at-home, and I tried to keep this up as a
feature of our at-homes at Addison Mansions.
It was some time before we were able to start our Bohemian at-homes in
London, because when we arrived we had hardly a single acquaintance in
Bohemia, except Gleeson White, and _his_ author, artist and actor
friends, like ours, were all in America. Like ourselves, he had been
three years absent from England.
The hundreds of English and American authors, artists and actors who
knew us at 32, Addison Mansions will recollect chiefly a very narrow
hall hung with autographed portraits of celebrities, a room whose
woodwork and draperies suggested one of the old Mameluke houses at
Cairo, a room whose walls were covered with Japanese curios, and two
other rooms, one of which was lined to the height of several feet from
the ground with ingeniously-fitted-in book-cases, and the other was a
bedroom in disguise. These and a ten by seven telephone room, likewise
lined with book-shelves, which only had enough chairs for a
_tête-à-tête_, formed the suite in which we held the weekly receptions
in the American style at which so many people, now famous, used to meet
every Friday night, regaled only with cigarettes, whiskeys-and-sodas,
claret cup, bottled ale and sandwiches.
There must have been some attractions about them when actors like the
Grossmiths, and authors like Anthony Hope, and half-a-dozen R.A.s used
to find their way out to these wilds of West Kensington Friday after
Friday towards midnight. Perhaps it was that we never had any
entertainment when we could help it, and friends were able to make our
flat a rendezvous where they could be secure of having conversations
uninterrupted by music, and to which they could bring a stranger whom
they wished to introduce into Bohemia.
Occasionally a stranger so introduced, who happened to be a famous
reciter, felt constrained, as a matter of returning hospitality, to
insist on reciting for us. But in the main, as a large number of our
guests were performers, they were glad that no performances were
allowed, for if they had had to listen to other people, they would have
felt bound, as a matter of professional etiquette, to perform
themselves. If there are performances and you are a performer, it is a
reproach not to be asked to perform.
It was Kernahan who first took us to the Idler Teas.
With Sir Walter Besant I had been in correspondence before I left
England, and on my return he wrote asking me to join the Authors’ Club,
with which my name was so intimately associated for many years. But I
did not meet so many Bohemians there as I did at the Idler Teas and the
dinners of the Vagabonds Club, of which I became a member because the
circle of brilliant young authors whom Jerome and Barr had enlisted for
the _Idler Magazine_ were many of them “Vagabonds.”
At the Idlers and Vagabonds I met most of the rising authors, and when
the American rush to London commenced, I took many distinguished
Americans to the Idler Teas, and to the receptions of people whom we met
there. In this way we soon had a very large acquaintance in Bohemia,
eager to meet our American friends, when we commenced our at-homes on a
modest scale to give our literary acquaintances from the opposite sides
of the Atlantic the opportunity of meeting each other.
I met many authors as well as actors at the Garrick and the Savage—in
addition to the authors I met at the Authors’ Club and the Savile, and
as I was at that time a member of the Arts, and the Hogarth, a very
lively place, I met a great many artists. Of black-and-white artists, at
any rate, who patronised the latter, I soon knew quite a number—Phil
May, Bernard Partridge, Dudley Hardy, Reginald Cleaver, Ralph Cleaver,
Hal Hurst, Melton Prior, Seppings Wright, Holland Tringham, Paxton,
James Greig, John Gülich, Louis Baumer, F. H. Townsend, Fred Pegram,
Chantrey Corbould, Frank Richards, Bernard Gribble, Will Rothenstein,
Aubrey Beardsley, Willson, Starr Wood and Linley Samborne.
At the same time we saw a good deal of such well-known painters as David
Murray, R.A.; Solomon J. Solomon, R.A.; Arthur Hacker, R.A.; J. J.
Shannon, R.A.; Walter Crane; Llewellyn, the P.R.I.; Sir James Linton,
P.R.I.; G. A. Storey, A.R.A.; Sir Alfred East, R.A.; R. W. Allan; J. H.
Lorimer, R.S.A.; J. Lavery; Herbert Schmalz; Hugh de Trafford
Glazebrook; Yeend King; William Yeames, R.A., who married my cousin,
Annie Wynfield; and Alfred Parsons, A.R.A.
Various ladies’ clubs, and clubs to which both sexes were admitted,
contributed not a little to the extraordinary amount of social
intercourse which then was a feature of Bohemia. The Pioneer Club, the
Writers’ Club, and the Women Journalists’ were, frankly, associations of
working women. And there were many members interested in literature in
the Albemarle and the Sesame, ladies’ clubs which admitted men as
guests. Once a week at the Writers’ Club, and very often at the Pioneer,
they had large gatherings at which literary “shop” filled the air.
Thus in a short time we came to know hundreds of authors and artists
(male and female), actors and actresses, and kept open house for them
every Friday night.
The Pioneer, the forerunner of the Lyceum, was a great institution in
those days. Rich women, interested in woman’s work, established it and
bore some of its expense for the benefit of women workers. It had a fair
sprinkling of well-known authoresses, and the prominent women in all
sorts of movements. Its afternoon and evening receptions—the latter
generally for lectures—were most interesting affairs. There was no
suffragist movement in those days to overshadow everything else. Women’s
Rights were a joke like “bloomers,” which are now suggestive of
something very different.
The Writers’ Club was more frankly literary, more frankly “shop.” You
met non-writing workers too in those basement premises in Norfolk
Street, which have seen the birth of so many reputations. I remember
meeting there a suffragist whose name is known all over the world now,
but when I was introduced to her it was only known to her
fellow-workers. She asked me what I thought of the suffragists. Not
knowing who she was, and not having thought anything about them, I
replied, “Oh, I’ve nothing against them except their portraits in the
halfpenny papers!” It made her my friend, for she had suffered from
rapid newspaper reproduction that very morning.
I always enjoyed those gatherings of women workers very much, though
many of them had ideas for the betterment of England which involved the
destruction of all I cherished most, and some were terrifying in their
earnestness like the she-Apostle of antivivisection, who had a
hydrophobic glitter in her eye, which reminded me of a blue-eyed collie
I once had, but had to give away because it bit.
This lady was the cause of my gradually dropping away from those
pleasant receptions. It was no good going to them because no sooner had
I been introduced to anybody interesting, than she came up and wanted me
to start enlisting them for the cause, though I knew that I should never
employ an antivivisectionist doctor in the case of a serious illness any
more than I should employ a homœopathist. She afterwards became an
_advocatus diaboli_—an apologist for the outrages of the Militants,
which she said were necessary to draw attention to the wrongs of women.
In after days, when I had written a novel which became very popular (_A
Japanese Marriage_), I was asked to lecture before the Pioneer Club on
some subject connected with the book. Noticing that their lectures were
generally rather of an abstract nature, and not having at all an
abstract mind myself, I chose for my subject, “The Immorality of
Self-Sacrifice.” The book was largely taken up with the unhappiness
inflicted on the hero and the heroine because she was a good
churchwoman, and his deceased wife’s sister, and would not marry him,
though she was desperately in love with him, until long afterwards she
was disgusted with the narrow-mindedness of a clergyman cousin.
I gave that lecture in the innocence of my heart. I imagined that the
Club would be so anxious to pioneer for the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill,
that I should carry the audience with me. I made the mistake of being
too abstract. If I had contented myself with being “agin’ the
Government” and delivered a technical diatribe in favour of the Bill,
ladies with a mission on this particular subject would have started up
on every side.
As it was, speaker after speaker found my idea immoral. Self-sacrifice
was the order of the day; they preached self-sacrifice; they plumed
themselves upon self-sacrifice. They did not approve of me at all. But
what I objected to because it was self-sacrifice, they objected to
because they were rebels, so the evening went off very well.
Bohemian Club evenings in those days differed from those of the present
day because most of them were confined to men. The Playgoers’ Club was
almost the only one which admitted ladies; and at that time it confined
them mostly to lectures. The ladies’ Clubs certainly welcomed men, but
the serious element was more conspicuous there. The idea of having a
literary club at which ladies and gentlemen constantly dined together
for pleasure had not been born.
The actors and actresses and well-known speakers of our acquaintance we
met mostly at the old Playgoers’ Club, or at Phil May’s Sunday nights in
the stable which had become his studio.
The old Playgoers’ was a most breezy place, where no one was allowed to
speak for more than a few minutes, unless he could bring down the house
with his wit. The ordinary person making a good sound speech was howled
down. The chairman sometimes interfered to save a more distinguished
orator. I remember the chairman of the club saying at one of the
Christmas dinners to the section in the audience who were far enough
away from the speaker to be talking quite as loud as he was, “Will those
bounders at the back of the room shut up?”
The women writers very appropriately established themselves as a
Writers’ Club in the area flat underneath A. P. Watt’s literary agency.
There was no connection, but I suppose it resulted in an illustrious man
author occasionally coming on from Watt’s to have a cup of tea at the
Writers’ Club. They had an at-home every Friday afternoon, which was
always extremely well supported.
I enjoyed going to these Writers’ Club teas very much, and went often,
and on one or other occasion met most of the leading women workers of
the day.
The Writers’ Clubbists did not take women’s theories so seriously as the
Pioneers, perhaps because they were not subsidised, and had no fierce
patron to keep them at concert pitch, but they were more literary, and,
until the rise of the Women Journalists’, had almost the monopoly of
working women writers. The Sesame had some, and when it was founded
later on, the Lyceum became a regular haunt of them.
It was only in our last days at Addison Mansions that we joined the
Dilettanti, a dining club of authors and artists, run by Paternoster and
his charming wife. It has only a few score members, who once a month eat
an Italian dinner together, washed down by old Chianti, at the Florence
Restaurant in Soho, and listen to a brilliant paper by one of their
members, which they afterwards discuss, with a great deal of wit and
freedom. Henry Baerlein, Mrs. George Cran, and Herbert Alexander, are
among its wittiest members, and Mrs. Adam, daughter of Mrs. C. E.
Humphry, the ever-popular “Madge,” is quite the best serious speaker.
The speaking is more really impromptu than at the Omar Khayyam, for the
papers generally have titles which do not convey the least inkling of
what they are to be about, and it is therefore impossible for people to
prepare their speeches beforehand.
Literary at-homes were a great feature of that day. There was a large
set of Literary, Art and Theatrical people who used to meet constantly
at the houses of Phil May, A. L. Baldry, A. S. Boyd, Moncure D. Conway,
Gleeson White, Dr. Todhunter, William Sharp, Zangwill, Rudolph Lehmann,
E. J. Horniman, Joseph Hatton, Max O’Rell, John Strange Winter, George
and Weedon Grossmith, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, J. J. Shannon, Mrs. Jopling,
and Jerome K. Jerome. And the more eminent authors and artists, at any
rate, used to meet a great deal at Lady St. Helier’s, Lady Lindsay’s,
Lady Dorothy Nevill’s, the Tennants’ and the H. D. Traills’.
Sometimes they met in the afternoon, and sometimes in the evening—more
often the latter, because the artists came in greater numbers, and the
actors, when the Theatres were closed. As I have said, there were very
seldom performances at any of them, because the people met to talk, and
be introduced to fresh celebrities, and whether the reception was in the
afternoon or the evening, the hospitalities were of the simple American
kind. They were _bona fide_ meetings of clever people who wished to make
each other’s acquaintance. Our friends came to us on Friday nights. At
first, like Phil May, we kept open house every week, but as the number
of our friends increased, we gradually tailed off to once a fortnight
and once a month, because we had almost to empty the house out of the
windows to make room for all who came.
When we ceased to receive every week, we sent out notices to the friends
we wanted to see most that we were going to be at home on such an
evening, and from this we passed to giving each at-home in honour of
some special person, whom our friends were invited to meet. I cannot
remember half the special guests they were invited to meet, but among
them were Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Mark Twain, Mrs. Flora Annie Steel,
Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Maarten Maartens, Hall Caine, H. G. Wells,
W. W. Jacobs, Sir Frederick Lugard (then Captain Lugard) when he came
back from his great work in Uganda, F. C. Selous when he came back from
his mighty hunting in South Africa, Zangwill, J. J. Shannon, Frankfort
Moore, Savage Landor and Dr. George Ernest Morrison.
In a very short time, Bohemian at-homes, at which author and artist and
actor met, became the rage in the Bohemian quarters of London—West
Kensington, Chelsea, Chiswick, and the North-west. There were many
people who were never so happy as when they went to an at-home every
afternoon and evening of the week. They were all workers, and most of
them too poor to use cabs much, so one wondered when they found time to
do their work. That they did it was obvious, for most of them were
producing a good deal of work, and many of them were laying the
foundations of not inconsiderable fame.
At some of these receptions they had a little music, but at most of them
they had no entertainment. For the clever people who went to these
receptions did not go long distances to sit like mutes while some third-
or fourth- or fortieth-rate artist played or sang; they went to meet
other well-known Bohemians—well-known men and charming women. The most
successful hosts were those who asked celebrities and pretty people in
equal quantities: the celebrities liked meeting pretty people, and the
pretty people liked meeting the celebrities.
Some celebrities were quite annoyed if there were only celebrities to
meet them; they wanted an audience.
I remember Whistler the painter and Oscar Wilde being the first two
people to arrive at a reception at Mrs. Jopling’s house in Beaufort
Street, where I had been lunching. They were intensely annoyed at having
only the Joplings and myself as audience; it was no good showing off
before us, since we knew all about them. They were quite distant to each
other, and more distant to us. But as the time wore on, and nobody came,
Wilde had time to think of something effective to say—he never spoke, if
he could help it, unless he thought he could be effective.
“I hear that you went over to the Salon by Dieppe, Jimmy,” he sneered,
“were you economising?”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Whistler. “I went to paint.”
“How many pictures did you paint?” asked the æsthete, with crushing
superiority.
Whistler did not appear to hear his question. “How many hours did it
take?” he asked.
“You went, not I,” said Oscar. “No gentleman ever goes by the Dieppe
route.”
“I do, often,” said our charming hostess, who had this great house in
Chelsea, with an acre or two of garden: “it takes five hours.”
“How many minutes are there in an hour, Oscar?” drawled Whistler.
“I am not quite sure, but I think it’s about sixty. I am not a
mathematician.”
“Then I must have painted three hundred,” said the unabashed Whistler.
It was at this at-home later on that Whistler made his often-quoted
mot—not for the first time, I believe. A pretty woman said something
clever, and Wilde, who could be a courtier, gallantly remarked that he
wished he had said it.
“Never mind, Oscar,” said Whistler, who owed him one for the gibe about
the Dieppe route; “you will have said it.”
They were really very fine that afternoon, because they were so
thoroughly disgusted at not having more people to show off before;
showing off is a weakness of many authors and artists and actors, though
Bernard Shaw is the only one that I remember who has had the frankness
to admit it in _Who’s Who_.
We used to begin receiving at nine for the sake of people who had trains
to catch to distant suburbs—as Jerome K. Jerome remarked, “other people
always live in such out-of-the-way places”—and kept the house open till
the last person condescended to go away, which was generally about
three. Any one who had been introduced to us was welcome to come, and to
bring any of his friends with him, and in this way we met some of the
most interesting people who came to the flat during our twenty years of
tenancy. For instance, Herbert Bunning, the composer, whose opera _La
Princesse Osra_, presented at Covent Garden, was drawn from Anthony
Hope’s novel by a permission which I obtained for him, brought with him
one night M. Feuillerat, who married Paul Bourget’s delightful sister,
and Madame Feuillerat. M. Feuillerat in his turn brought with him Emile
Verhaeren, one of the greatest living Belgian poets. M. Feuillerat
himself was at the time professor of English literature in the
university at Rennes, and both he and Madame Feuillerat spoke admirable
English. On another Friday they were going to bring Paul Bourget
himself, but he did not fulfil his intention of coming to England at the
time.
Another distinguished foreigner who came about the same time was Maarten
Maartens, a Dutch country gentleman whose real name is Joost Marius
Maarten Willem van der Poorten-Schwartz. Hearing so much of his
beautiful chateau in Holland, I asked him how he could tear himself away
so much as he did. His reply was that for nine months in the year the
weather in Holland was awful, and for the other three generally awful.
This great writer had an epigrammatic way of expressing himself. He said
that an eminent critic, who constituted himself his patron when he was
in England, had warned him not to go to the Authors’ Club (of which I
was the Honorary Secretary), because most of the people who went there
were very small fry. He said that he had taken no notice of the warning
because he had observed that his informant wore a piece of pink sarcenet
ribbon for a tie, and that he, Maarten Maartens, knew enough of the
Englishman’s idea of dress to be aware that the critic could not be a
judge of ties, and wear pink sarcenet ribbon; and he argued that a man
so self-satisfied and so ignorant about ties might be equally
self-satisfied and ignorant about Authors’ clubs. I asked him if he had
written any books in Dutch. He said, “No, what is the good, when there
are so few people to write for? Only Dutchmen speak Dutch. It was a
choice of writing in English or German, if I was to have an audience,
and I chose English.”
Georg Brandes, the great Danish critic, who had so much to do with the
recognition of Ibsen, told me when he came to our flat and I asked him a
similar question, that in his later books he had taken to writing in
other languages for the same reason. He was extremely interested, I
remember, in Sergius Stepniak, the exiled Russian revolutionary, as was
the then permanent head of the Foreign Office, whom I approached with
some diffidence on the subject when they were both dining at a Club
dinner of which I had the arrangements. Stepniak, whom I always found,
in my intercourse with him, a very amiable man, had all the stage
appearance of a villain, with his coal-black hair, his knotty, bulbous
forehead, his black Tartar eyes, black beard and sombre complexion.
Of Zola, a studious-looking man with a brown beard, a rather tilted
nose, and pince-nez, I have spoken in another chapter.
Anatole France I never met till quite recently, at a little party at
John Lane’s. He was as abounding in _simpatica_ as Zola was wanting in
it. He was rather short, and held his head sideways like the late Conte
de Paris, with his closely-cropped beard buried in his chest. But he had
unmistakably the air of a great man, and extraordinarily bright and
sympathetic eyes—a captivating personality.
As I began with foreigners I will deal with them before passing on to
the many interesting Anglo-Saxons who assembled in those rooms during
those twenty years.
August Strindberg, the Scandinavian novelist and dramatist, was to have
come to see us when he was in England in the ’nineties. He forwarded an
introduction, but did not follow it up owing to the distance of his
sojourning place. Before he left Scandinavia, he had asked a friend who
was supposed to know all about England for a nice healthy suburb of
London, far enough out for the air to be pure. The friend suggested
(without, I think, any idea of practical joking) that Gravesend should
be the place, and at Gravesend Strindberg remained during the whole of
his stay in London, doubtless composing novels or dramas upon London
society.
Many well-known Frenchmen naturally came to see us, like Gabriel
Nicolet, the artist, and Eustache de Lorey, who had been an attaché of
the French Legation in Teheran, and who afterwards collaborated with me
in _Queer Things about Persia_ and _The Moon of the Fourteenth Night_.
Since his return from Persia he had become eminent as a composer. He
wrote the music of one of the most popular songs in _Les Merveilleuses_,
in addition to being the composer of the opera _Betty_, which was
produced in Brussels, with Mariette Sully in the leading part. Melba
herself contemplates appearing in the leading rôle in his second opera,
_Leila_. De Lorey had made some most adventurous expeditions, including
one with Pierre Loti in Caucasia, and he was such a brilliant raconteur
of his adventures that I asked him why he did not make a book of them.
He replied that the travel-book is not the institution in France which
it is in England, and that though he spoke English fluently, he could
not write a book in English. Finally we decided to collaborate as
related in a later chapter.
We had many Asiatic visitors, but no Africans, I think, unless one
counts Englishmen who had won their spurs in the dark continent, like
Sir Frederick Lugard. Decidedly our most interesting Asiatic visitors
were Japanese like Yoshio Markino and Prof. Nakamura. Prof. Nakamura was
for three years a pupil of Lafcadio Hearn. He came over to England for
the Japanese Exhibition, and remained here a few years, studying
educational methods for the Japanese Government.
He said that Lafcadio Hearn would see nothing of his pupils because he
was only interested in the Old Japan, and was afraid of introducing
modern ideas if he saw much of any Japanese who were not absorbed in the
same studies as himself. I remember Bret Harte pleading much the same
objection to revisiting California.
Yoshio Markino has been one of our most intimate friends for years. I
cannot say in what exact year he first came to 32 Addison Mansions. I
know that I first met him through M. H. Spielmann, who wrote to me
telling me all about Markino’s powers as a black-and-white artist, and
asking me to get my editor friends to give him some work, of which he
stood in need. Not until he published _A Japanese Artist in London_ at
my suggestion, and with a preface written by me, a few years after, did
I know how badly he stood in need of that work; Japanese etiquette
prevented him from intruding his private affairs upon a stranger. I was
successful in getting him a little illustrating work, and I got him some
translating work, better paid, I suspect, than original contributions of
men like the late Andrew Lang to the great _Dailies_. It came about in
this wise: I was anxious to include in _More Queer Things about Japan_,
a translation of a Japanese life of Napoleon, which had come into my
hands. There were five volumes of it with extremely amusing
illustrations. Neither I nor the publishers knew what a small amount of
words can make a volume in Japanese. The publisher looked at the volumes
and thought that he was making a very shrewd bargain when he offered
five pounds a volume as the translator’s fee. Each volume proved to
contain about a thousand words, so Markino got five pounds a thousand,
when the publisher meant to offer him about five shillings.
After this I lost touch of Markino for a long time, till Miss E. S.
Stevens, who had been my secretary, and was then doing work as a
literary agent, invited us to meet him at her Club. Very soon after that
I was at the annual soirée of the Japan Society with Miss Lorimer and
another girl, and my cousin, Sampson Sladen, who was then only third in
command of the London Fire Brigade, when we ran across Markino, who
remained with us all the evening. He invited myself and the members of
our household to the exhibition of the sketches which he had painted to
illustrate _The Colour of London_. From that time forward his visits
were very frequent till we left London, and on two separate occasions he
went to Italy with us for several months.
It was on the first of these occasions, while we were all staying at 12
Piazza Barberini in Rome, that he showed me a letter which he had
written to Messrs. Chatto & Windus about the second of the volumes he
illustrated, _The Colour of Paris_. The letter was as brilliant, as
interesting, as amusing, as one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s or Lafcadio
Hearn’s. I saw that he was a born writer, and from that time forward did
not rest until I had persuaded him to write his first book, _A Japanese
Artist in London_. I got him the contract from the publisher for this
book and wrote the preface.
While we were in Paris he brought us an invitation to dinner from the
brilliant Parisian who was afterwards our dear friend, poor Yvonne, who
died the other day after months of suffering. When we arrived she had a
terrible headache, and we had to have our dinner without her, presided
over by her niece, a gay and pretty child of thirteen, who made as
self-possessed a hostess as any grown-up. We talked a great deal that
night over Italy, and a great deal more when Markino came to see us at
the little Cité de Retiro, near the Madeleine, and the result was that
he decided to do a book on Italy with Miss Olave Potter, he supplying
the pictures, and she the letterpress—the book that took form as _The
Colour of Rome_, which Messrs. Chatto & Windus promptly agreed to
commission, and of which I shall have more to say elsewhere. That winter
and the summer of another year we all spent together in Italy, and the
painting of the illustrations for _The Colour of Rome_ led indirectly to
Markino’s writing _A Japanese Artist in London_, and the beginning of
his brilliant literary career.
Markino’s writings achieved such an instant popularity with English
readers that I feel sure that they will like to know his habits of work,
which I had the opportunity of observing during the two long visits he
paid with us to Italy. For a painter of architecture and landscape his
method is unique. Take, for instance, the story of the illustrations to
Miss Olave Potter’s book, _The Colour of Rome_. First of all, since he
was a stranger to Rome, and knew neither its beauty spots nor its most
interesting monuments, we took him walks to see all the most illustrable
places. He selected from them the number he had promised to paint.
Sometimes he took more than one walk to a place before he commenced the
study for his picture, but intuition is one of his gifts, and he was
seldom long at fault in discovering the best standpoint.
Having chosen this, he took his drawing-pad to the spot and made a rough
sketch of it with notes written in Japanese of the colours to be used,
and any special things he had to remember. Sometimes, where there was a
great deal of detail, or of sculpture, he used paper with crossed lines
on it, so as to preserve his proportions. But Markino, beautifully as he
can paint detail, resents it, and prefers subjects unified by a haze of
heat or mist.
He never took his paints out with him, and never did a finished drawing
in the open air. He took his notes home with him and ruminated over
them, till the idealised picture presented itself to his brain. Then he
set to work on it, taking little rest till it was finished—always
absolutely faithful to colour and effect, though the picture was painted
entirely indoors.
That was his method of painting. He did no writing in Rome. But he came
constantly to our flat when he was writing _A Japanese Artist in
London_, _My Idealled John Bullesses_, and _When I was a Child_.
Sometimes he liked to talk over his chapters before he began to write
them, when they were slow at taking shape. But more generally he brought
the chapters written in the rough to his Egeria, and read them over to
her. They had blanks where he could not remember the English word which
he wanted to use. It was in his mind, and he would reject all words till
he found the word he was thinking of.
As he read the chapters aloud, the wise Egeria made corrections where
they were necessary to elucidate his meaning—to clarify his style, but
never treated any Japanese use of English as a mistake, unless it made
the sense obscure. That is how the fascinating medium in which Markino
writes took shape.
Take, for instance, Markino’s omission of the _articles_. The Japanese
language has no articles. Markino therefore seldom uses them, and his
English is written to be intelligible without them, just as a legal
document is written to be intelligible without punctuation. Again, if he
used a word in a palpably wrong sense—_i. e._ with a meaning which it
had never borne before, or was etymologically unfit to bear—she left it
if it helped to express in a forcible way what he intended.
The result of this respectful editing was to produce a most fascinating
and characteristic type of English, which has won for Markino a public
of enthusiastic admirers. He has, as Osman Edwards said, _the heart of a
child_, when he is writing, and he combines with it a highly original
mode of thinking and expressing himself, but their effect would have
been half lost if he had not found in his Egeria an adviser with the eye
of genius for what should be corrected and what should be retained of
his departures from conventional English.
When the chapters were corrected thus, Egeria typed them out, making any
corrections or additions which were necessary to the punctuation, and
generally preparing the manuscript for the press.
I am encouraged to think that these details of the way in which the
books were edited will interest the public, because J. H. Taylor, the
golf champion, once cross-examined me on the subject, as we were walking
down the lane from the Mid-Surrey golf pavilion to his house. He had
been reading _A Japanese Artist in London_, and was so delighted with it
that he wanted to know exactly how this wonderful style of writing was
born.
And there is no doubt that it is a wonderful style of writing. It is not
pigeon-English; the Japanese do not use pigeon-English, they abhor it.
It is the result of a deliberate intention to apply certain Japanese
methods of expression (like the omission of the article) to the writing
of English, in order to produce a more direct medium, and the result has
been a complete success. Markino’s English is wonderfully forcible. It
hits like a sledge-hammer. He has a genius for discovering exactly the
right expression, and he thinks on till he discovers it. As a reason why
his English is not broken English, but a medium using the capabilities
of both languages, I may mention that he has been living in America and
England for nearly twenty years.
[Illustration:
THE MOORISH ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(_From the Painting by Yoshio Markino._)
]
Besides Japanese, we had many Indian visitors.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII
OUR AT-HOMES: THE YOUNG AUTHORS WHO ARE NOW GREAT AUTHORS
OF all the men who used to come to 32, Addison Mansions from our having
met them at the Idler teas, none were more identified with the success
of Jerome’s two periodicals _The Idler_ and _To-day_ than Arthur Conan
Doyle and Israel Zangwill. Doyle had been writing for ten years before
he achieved commanding success. Be that as it may, he was undoubtedly
the most successful of the younger authors who were familiar figures in
that Vagabond and Idler set. Doyle, who was the son of that exquisite
artist, Charles Doyle, and grandson of the famous caricaturist H. B.,
and nephew of Dicky Doyle of _Punch_, ought to have been granted a
royaller road to success, for he had enjoyed a very early connection
with literature, having sat as a little child on the knee of the
immortal Thackeray. Thackeray’s old publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., have
been his, but he had travelled to the Arctic regions and to the tropics
and practised for eight years as a doctor at Southsea before he charmed
the world with his famous novels _The White Company_ in 1890, and _The
Refugees_ in 1891, and astonished it with the _Adventures of Sherlock
Holmes_ in the latter year. He was a doctor at Norwood when I first made
his acquaintance. He was a little over thirty then, and a keen
cricketer, being nearly county form (indeed, he did actually play once
for Hampshire, and might at one time have played regularly for Hampshire
as an Association back). It was not until late in life, however, that he
found time enough to get much practise at games. Then for some years he
played occasional first-class cricket, having an average of thirty-two
against Kent, Derbyshire and other good teams; in the last year he
played for the M.C.C. That was after the war, when he was over forty. He
played a hard Association match in his forty-fourth year.
From an early stage in his literary career he enjoyed the admiration and
the deepest respect of all his fellows in the craft, and for years past
has undoubtedly been morally the head of the profession. Upon him has
fallen the mantle of Sir Walter Besant. In saying this, I am not
instituting any comparison between the merits of his various lines of
work, which in their own line are quite unexcelled, and those of the
other leading authors, but he is not only among the handful who may be
called the very best authors of the day, he is the man to whom the
profession would undoubtedly look for a lead in any crisis.
Say, for instance, that the idea, so often debated recently, of authors
combining with publishers to fix the price of a novel at ten and
sixpence, and refusing to work for or sell their goods to any one who
would not abide by this decision, were put to a vote in the literary
profession, what Doyle thought would count most. The profession as an
army would range themselves under his banner. Suppose a question, like
the insurance question which has been threatening the livelihood of
thousands of doctors, were to arise for authors, they would look to
Doyle for a lead. If the decision which he made benefited authors as a
whole, but cost him half or three-quarters of his income, and a
syndicate approached him with a huge offer to abandon the camp, nobody
could suppose for one moment that Doyle would listen to them. His moral
courage, his loyalty, his generosity, his patriotism, added to his
wonderful literary gifts, have confered upon him a commanding position.
Of his gifts I shall speak lower down. It is as the patriot that one
must always consider him first. He is not naturally a party man, though
he happens to have contested Edinburgh as a Liberal Unionist, and the
Hawick boroughs as a Tariff Reformer. There have been moments when he
has been openly opposed to some measure of the Unionist Party. He really
belongs to the Public Service party. He made notable sacrifices for his
country at the time of the Boer War. First he gave up his literary work
to serve unpaid on the staff of the Langman Field Hospital and
afterwards to write the pamphlet on _The Cause and Conduct of the War_,
an attempt to place the true facts before the people of Europe, which
brought him nothing but great expense and the undying gratitude and
respect of his fellow-countrymen. That he cares nothing for popularity
where principles are concerned is shown by the attitude he took over the
famous horse-maiming case, or his acceptance of the Presidency of the
Divorce Law Reform Union.
[Illustration:
SIR A. CONAN DOYLE
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
His sturdy character is reflected in his physique, and there are few
people in London who do not know that unusually big and strong frame,
that round head, with prominent cheek-bones, and dauntless blue eyes,
the bluff, good-humoured face: for his sonorous voice is frequently
heard from the chair of public meetings where some protest for the
public good has to be raised, or at a dinner-table on the guest nights
of clubs. Sir Arthur, for he was knighted in 1902, is a most popular
speaker; hearty, engaging, amusing, in his lighter moods, most trenchant
and convincing in a crisis, of all the authors of the day he merits most
the title of a great man.
The curious thing is that although every one knows how much he respects
Doyle as a great man, and every one is aware that he is one of the most
popular, if not the most popular, of the authors of the day, not every
one has analysed the soundness of his literary fame. In my opinion, of
all very popular authors, Doyle deserves his popularity as an author
most. No man living has written better historical novels, judged from
the standpoint of eloquence, accuracy or thrill. Doyle has carried the
accuracy of the man of science into all his studies, and his power to
thrill with eloquence and incident is beyond question. His detective
stories are equal to the best that have ever been written. His history
of the South African War is not only the best history of the war, but it
is a model of contemporary history, always the most difficult kind to
write, because only the eye of intuition can distinguish respective
values amid contemporary incidents. He has been highly successful as a
playwright too. His _House_ _of Temperley_ is the best Prize-Ring play
in the language, as his novel, _Rodney Stone_, which had no lady-love
heroine, was the best Prize-Ring novel, and his play on Waterloo,
produced by Sir Henry Irving, has become a classic. I have alluded
elsewhere to the dramatisation of his _Sherlock Holmes_ which has been
played thousands of times. Doyle not only was present at our at-homes at
32 Addison Mansions, but, living out of town, once stayed with us there,
as we stayed with him at Hindhead on another occasion. But owing to his
living out of town, he was a great deal less familiar figure at
receptions than most of the other younger authors of the first rank,
except Rudyard Kipling and J. M. Barrie, both of whom cordially hate
“functions” of any kind. Doyle, placed in the same circumstances as they
are, forces himself to go to many functions for which he has less time
than they have, for his literary output is infinitely greater, and he
has so many other duties to perform, and always performs them.
When I asked Doyle what first turned him to writing, he said—
“All the art that is in our family—my grandfather, three uncles, and
father were all artists—ran in my blood, and took a turn towards
letters. At six I was writing stories; I fancy my mother has them yet.
At school I was, though I say it, a famous story-teller; at both schools
I was at I edited a magazine, and practically wrote the whole of it
also.
“When I started studying medicine, the family affairs were very
straitened. My father’s health was bad, and he earned little. I tried to
earn something, which I did by going out as medical assistant half the
year. Then I tried stories. In 1878, when I was nineteen years old, I
sent _The Mystery of the Sassasa Valley_ to Chambers. I got three
guineas. It was 1880 before I got another accepted. It was by _London
Society_. From then until 1888 I averaged about fifty pounds a year,
getting about three pounds a story. My first decent price was
twenty-eight pounds from the Cornhill for _Habakuk Jephson’s Statement_
in 1886. Then at New Year, 1888, Ward, Lock & Co. brought out _A Study
in_ _Scarlet_, paying twenty-five pounds for all rights. I have never
had another penny from that book; I wonder how much they have had? Then
came _Micah Clarke_ at the end of 1888, which got me a more solid
public. It was not until 1902 that I was strong enough to be able to
entirely abandon medical practice. Of course, it was the Holmes stories
in the _Strand_ which gave me my popular vogue, but _The White Company_,
which has been through fifty editions, has sold far more as a book than
any of the Holmes books.”
Kipling I regard as the genius of the junction of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, and England owes an incalculable debt to his
patriotism and eloquence. If Doyle is the voice of the literary
profession, Kipling is the voice of the country. He speaks for the
manhood of England in a crisis. All through the African War a letter or
a poem from Kipling was the trumpet voice of national feeling. No poet
who has written in English has ever inspired his countrymen like
Kipling. His poems, though they have not the poetical quality of those
of our great standard poets, have the prophetical quality, which is just
as important in poetry, in a higher degree than any of them. They are
Rembrandt poems, not Raphael poems, and they will remain without loss of
prestige, an armoury for every patriotic or manful writer and speaker to
quote from. I reviewed Kipling’s poems when they were first published in
America for the leading Canadian paper. I am thankful that I hailed them
as the work of genius, and it was a proud moment when I first shook
hands with him in the early ’nineties. Though his short stories are the
best in the language, I always think of him as a poet, because he is our
_vates_.
It is best to mention Barrie, our other genius, here, though I have
little to say about him. On the rare occasions when he speaks in public,
he speaks admirably, and he enjoys universal respect. As far as
literature is concerned, no man’s lines have been laid in pleasanter
places. Unlike Doyle, Anthony Hope, Stanley Weyman and others, Barrie
did not have to wait for recognition. It is notorious that from the very
beginning he never had the proverbial manuscript in the drawer; in other
words, that he always found an immediate sale for whatever he wrote. He
began as a journalist.
Anthony Hope I first met at an Idler tea. He was one of the brilliant
band of younger authors whom Jerome was among the first to recognise. In
those days he kept the distinction between “Anthony Hope” the writer,
and Anthony Hope Hawkins the barrister, most rigidly. Being the son of a
famous London clergyman, Mr. Hawkins, of St. Bride’s, Fleet Street, a
cousin of Mr. Justice Hawkins, a scholar of Balliol, and an eloquent
speaker, his prospects at the Bar were very good. There was an idea that
they would suffer if it were known that he indulged in anything so
frivolous as writing love-stories. These were the days when he was
composing his immortal “Dolly Dialogues” for the _Westminster Gazette_,
and when he was just beginning the succession of witty and delicate
novels which made his fame. He had, I have always understood, been
writing for some years, before he could make any impression on the
public, and even then he had no hope of making a living by literature. I
made one of his early novels my book of the week in _The Queen_, in a
most enthusiastic review, and incidentally mentioned his real name. His
friends, perhaps they were officious, entreated me not to do it again,
lest it should injure his prospects. A year or two afterwards there was
no question off which profession he was to make a living, though as he
coquetted with politics, and contested a constituency or two, he
probably kept up the legal fiction of his being at the Bar for some time
longer.
As he had enjoyed the distinction of being President of the Oxford
Union, he was a practised speaker before he came to London. He had
plenty of opportunities of exercising his skill without waiting for
briefs, for he became a frequent speaker at Club dinners. The charm of
his voice and his delivery, the polish and wit of his speeches were
recognised at once, and his popularity as a speaker has been undisputed
from that day to this.
It was noticed that, though he was so brilliant and fluent, when making
a speech, he was rather a silent man at receptions, except where
politeness demanded that he should exert himself. But this is a common
trait in the more considerable authors. They are frequently not only
rather silent, but ill at ease. In those days one could count the
authors who were both brilliant socially and brilliant writers, on one’s
fingers.
One legal habit Anthony Hope retained; he went to chambers to do his
writing as he had been accustomed, and lived in other chambers, and was
regarded as a confirmed bachelor till he married. He came to Addison
Mansions very frequently in the ’nineties. The incident I remember best
was his loss of presence of mind when I tried to save him from a
terrific American bore, a middle-aged lady. Somebody had brought her; I
had not met her before, and she was having a systematic lion-hunt. She
thought that A. H. H. was Anthony Hope, but she was not certain, and
said to me, “Is that _Anthony Hope_? I must know _Anthony Hope_.”
Wishing to save him from the infliction, because he was always rather
distrait with bores, I said, “That is Mr. Hawkins.” I didn’t think she
knew enough about literature to be aware of the identity, nor did she,
but he had unfortunately caught the words “Anthony Hope,” and smiled,
and started forward, and was lost. As he had unconsciously convicted me
of falsehood, I left him to his fate.
Generous to needy brother authors, punctilious in the performance of the
duties to the literary profession, which his eminence confers on him (in
such matters as the Authors’ Society and literary clubs), wonderfully
patient and courteous, an admirable literary craftsman, who never turns
out slipshod work, as well as a brilliant romancer and witty dialogist,
Anthony Hope Hawkins deserves every particle of his popularity and
success.
I have not dilated on his plays, though he has achieved great success on
the stage, because dramatists tell me that he is not going to write for
it any more.
The popularity of our at-homes was at its height before Frankfort Moore
had decided to come over to England, giving up the editorial post he
held in Ireland, to devote all his time to novel-writing. He and his
delightful wife, the sister of Mrs. Bram Stoker, took lodgings at Kew,
and were ready for many receptions, so that he might meet his
fellow-authors in London. As Bram Stoker had then for years been
Irving’s right hand, they had an excellent introduction ready-made, but
they brought letters of introduction to us, and, up to the time of his
leaving London, he was among our most intimate literary friends.
Frankfort Moore’s success in London was instantaneous, as well it might
have been, since he was a brilliant and witty speaker, as well as a
writer of brilliant, witty and very charming books. Hutchinson eagerly
took up the publication of his works, and the literary clubs soon
learned to depend upon him as one of the best after-dinner speakers. In
about ten years he made a fortune, and retired to take things in a more
leisurely way at an old house in Sussex, where he was able to adequately
house his fine collection of old oak, old brass, old engravings and old
china, in which he was a noted connoisseur.
His immediate success justified his giving up his lodgings at Kew, and
taking a nice, old-fashioned house in Pembroke Road, which he soon began
to transform with his panelling, and his collections. His retirement
from London left a great gap in many social circles. He was a universal
favourite—a man of real eminence, although he regarded his achievements
so modestly.
One of the most valued of our visitors was the celebrated Father
Stanton, of St. Alban’s, Holborn, who introduced himself to me when he
was on his way to Syracuse with F. E. Sidney, with whom he went to
Seville on that expedition which resulted in the publication of the
latter’s _Anglican Innocents in Spain_, the book which aroused such
anger among Roman Catholics. We were the only two occupants of a
sleeping compartment on the Italian railways. He was not wearing
clerical dress, and I had no notion who he was until the conclusion of
our journey, when Sidney, who had joined us, informed me. We did a lot
of sight-seeing in Syracuse together, especially in the cathedral (built
into an entire Greek temple, ascribed to Pallas Athene). Both Stanton
and Sidney were experts in old gilt, in which Sicily is very rich—the
organ at Syracuse is an example. From that time until Stanton’s death we
constantly met at the house of Sidney, who has the best collection of
sixteenth-century stained glass in England, and built a house in Frognal
with the proper windows to receive it. Though Stanton and I did not
agree in Church matters, we were yet staunch friends, and I was an
immense admirer of one who did so much for the regeneration of the poor
in one of the worst districts of London.
The greatest compliment we ever received at our at-homes was when Lord
Dundonald, who had known us for some years, and had just come back from
his famous relief of Ladysmith with his irregular cavalry, came and
spent the best part of the afternoon with us. He looked worn and very
sunburnt, but it was one of the events of our lifetimes to hear the
stirring details of England’s greatest military drama in this
generation, direct from the lips of the man who had given it its happy
termination.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER IX
THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES
AMONG the crowd of humorists who honoured Addison Mansions with their
presence it is natural to mention first the famous author of _Three Men
in a Boat_. There is no author for whom I feel a greater affection,
though, as he once said, “You and I are sure to have a diametrically
opposite opinion upon almost any point which may turn up, because we
were born the poles apart.” I was at the time his chief and only book
critic on _To-day_. I believe I was called the literary editor, though
all the patronage of the position was exercised by himself. It is
patronage which constitutes an editor; the sub-editor can perform the
duties. I believe also that it was I who suggested the name _To-day_. At
any rate, it was I who helped him to formulate the paper, and for the
first year or so it was my duty to do all the book reviews in it, and my
duty to receive all the ladies who came to see Jerome about the paper.
Of course, they mostly came in search of work or fame: those who wished
to be written about were very numerous, and expected to succeed by
making what is called the “Glad Eye” at him. He was _terribly_ afraid of
the “Glad Eye”; it made him turn hot and cold in swift succession. He
was unable to say “no” to a siren, and equally unable to say “yes” when
he meant “no.” He was also an intensely domesticated man, entirely
devoted to his family, and without the smallest desire for a flirtation.
So it fell to my lot to pick up the “Glad Eye,” a very agreeable job,
when you have not the power to give yourself away. I had no patronage to
bestow upon them. The only thing I could do for them was to write about
them if they were sufficiently interesting, which frequently happened in
that age of personal journalism. And, if they were quite harmless
worshippers, without any ulterior designs, I occasionally induced Jerome
to be worshipped for a minute or two. I made many lady friends at this
period, especially from the Stage.
Jerome hardly ever answered letters. He used to say, “If you keep a
letter for a month, it generally answers itself.” But he did not keep
them. He tore them up directly he had glanced at them. He knew at one
glance—probably at the signature—if he wanted to read a letter, and, if
he did not, he tore it up without reading it. He had a horror of
accumulating papers. He sometimes asked me to answer letters, as he had
faith in me as a soother. It was never part of my duties to write “yes,”
I had to gild “no.” He prefered to word his own acceptances, so as not
to say more than he meant. He did not even want me to read the
manuscripts. He prefered to read them himself. It did not take him long,
because if he did not come across something worth publishing by the
second page, he did not read any further. “You must grab your reader at
the beginning,” he used to say.
He was a very pleasant man to write reviews for. He believed in generous
criticisms. “You can have a page or two pages for your book of the
week,” he said, “according to its importance”—he decided that when I
chose my book—“but you can only have a page for the rest of the books
that come in, so you can’t afford to waste your space on bad books. If
you can’t say anything good about them, you obviously can’t afford them
any space. You can praise things up as much as you like if you can be
convincing about it: don’t be afraid to let yourself go about the book
of the week: I am sick of the _Spectator_ and the _Athenæum_, you never
get a full-blooded review out of them, unless it’s to damn something.
The more knowledge you can show about the subject of the book you are
praising, the better. But above all things, recommend it in the paper
just as you would recommend it to a friend: use the same language as you
would to a friend: be natural. And, whatever you do, beware of the Club
Man. When I read an article or a story, I always ask myself what a Club
Man would think of it; and if I know that he would like it, I turn it
down: his opinions are dead opposite to the Public’s.”
The likes and dislikes of the Club Man was one of the matters in which
my opinion was dead opposite to Jerome’s. The Club Man and the Man in
the Street between them fill the ranks of the average patriotic citizen.
It is they who pull the nation through in a crisis, and the City of
London leads them. At ordinary times their voice is drowned by the noise
of the Radical Party, and the giant Middle-class, to whom all appeals
for national safety have to be addressed—the blind Samson sitting
chained in the house of his enemies—cannot hear their warnings.
In any case, it is so hard for a book to be popular at clubs, where
people go to be interested and amused, that if it is popular there, it
will be popular anywhere, except with the Nonconformist Conscience.
Jerome had written _Three Men in a Boat_ and _The Idle Thoughts of an
Idle Fellow_ before I met him, and was consequently in enjoyment of
world-wide fame. He had established in the _Idler_ a monthly which had
no equal then as a magazine of fiction, and had a sale of a hundred
thousand copies a month, when he started _To-day_. He started it not
only to amuse, but to educate Public Opinion, when it had secured
attention by its brightness, for he had very strong views which he was
eager to preach.
He was more of a Conservative than a Radical in those days; he had not
despaired of the Conservatives, then, though he was baggy about beastly
little nationalities. Suffragism had not then begun its March of
Unreason, and we were all in favour of giving woman a vote. But I am
bound to register the conviction that, if Suffragism had been a burning
question then, the paper would have been full of it, and enjoying a
circulation of a million, or whatever number the adult women suffragists
run to. I can picture Jerome, a man famous for his hospitalities, being
reduced to a hunger-strike by the ardour with which he would have
espoused the idea. He was always tilting against some abuse, always
asking for litigation. And he got it—or I suppose he would be editing a
newspaper now, instead of delighting both hemispheres with his plays. I
say advisedly “both hemispheres,” because he has a considerable public
as a dramatist in America.
One of the first books on which I let myself go, and wrote an absolute
appreciation, was that magnificent historical novel of Stanley Weyman’s,
_A Gentleman of France_. Jerome was delighted with the way I handled it.
Seeing Jerome so much in the office led to our being a good deal at each
other’s houses. He was living at that time in one of the nice old villas
in St. John’s Wood. The chief thing I remember about it was its
cattiness and its scrupulous tidiness. When you stay with him in the
country, you cannot leave your stick and hat in the hall, handy for
running out, as you might at Sandringham or Chatsworth. They are at once
arrested, and are very lucky if they get off with a warning from the
magistrate.
One of my diametrical divergencies from Jerome is in the love of cats. I
cannot respect a cat. To me it is a beast of prey, a sort of
middle-class tiger, operating in a small way, but at heart a murderer of
the Asiatic jungle. Jerome loves them, and makes dogs of them: he used
to fill the _Idler_ with Louis Wain’s human deductions from cats. He has
a telephone to their brains. I agree with Lord Roberts, who knows by
instinct when there is a cat in the room, though it may be wholly
concealed, and cannot enjoy himself until it is removed.
Like most real humorists whom I have known, and I have known many from
Mark Twain and Bill Nye downwards, Jerome is not a “funny man” in
ordinary life. He is, on the contrary, except when he is on his legs,
before an audience, or taking his pen in his hand, apt to be a very
serious man, though his conversation is always illuminated by flashes of
wit. He is much more apt to air strong opinions about serious questions.
The Jerome you see in _Paul Kelvin_ and _The Third Floor Back_ is the
real Jerome. He is the loyalest friend and most tender-hearted man
imaginable. His kindness and hospitality are unbounded. You cannot stay
with Jerome in his own house without being inspired by the deepest
respect and affection for him. He is an ideal husband and father, a
friend of the struggling, a just and generous master. Like Conan Doyle,
though he has never shone in first-class cricket or golf, Jerome is very
athletic in his tastes. In spite of his glasses, he is a fine
tennis-player and croquet-player; he is a fine skater also, and devoted
to the river and horses. It was partly a horse accident in which he and
Norma Lorimer were involved, and both showed extraordinary courage,
which made me feel for him as I do.
He is essentially an open-air man, whose thoughts are all outside
directly he has got through his statutory amount of work with his
secretary.
But though the serious man weighs down the humorist in Jerome, you would
not guess it from his personal appearance. When he rises to speak, his
bright eye, the smile playing round his mouth, his cool confident
bearing, the very way in which he arranges his hair, which has not yet a
particle of grey about it, is more suggestive of the humorist, the man
who is accustomed to making hundreds roar with laughter at his speeches,
and scores of thousands with the flashes of his pen.
Jerome has no love for London, though he has a town residence and enjoys
Bohemian society, and is very popular in it. For many years he has lived
on the Upper Thames, and he is in the habit of going to Switzerland for
the skating.
I asked Carl Hentschel, who was one of the three who went on the trip
immortalised in _Three Men in a Boat_, to tell me about it. He said—
“It is rather interesting to look back to the days of _Three Men in a
Boat._ Jerome at that time was in a solicitor’s office in Cecil Street,
where the Hotel Cecil now stands, George Wingrave was a junior clerk in
a bank in the City, and I was working in a top studio in Windmill
Street, close to where the Lyric Theatre now stands, having to look
after a lot of Communists, who had had to leave Paris. Our one
recreation was week-ending on the river. It was roughing it in a manner
which would hardly appeal to us now. Jerome and Wingrave used to live in
Tavistock Place, now pulled down, and that was our starting-point to
Waterloo and thence to the river. It says much for our general harmony
that, during the years we spent together in such cramped confinement, we
never fell out, metaphorically or literally. It was Jerome’s unique
style which enabled him to bring out the many and various points in our
trip. It was a spell of bad weather that broke up our parties. A steady
downpour for three days would dampen even the hardiest river-enthusiast.
One incident, which, I believe, was never recorded, but would have made
invaluable copy in Jerome’s hands, happened on one of our last trips. We
were on our way up the river, and late in the afternoon, as the sky
looked threatening, we agreed to pull up and have our frugal meal, which
generally consisted of a leg of Welsh mutton, bought at the famous house
in the Strand, now pulled down, with salad. We started preparing our
meal on the bank, when the threatened storm burst. We hastily put up our
canvas over the boat, and bundled all the food into it anyhow. It got
pitch dark, and we were compelled to find the lamp and tried to light
it. After a while we found the lamp, but it would not light; luckily we
found two candle ends, and by their feeble light began our meal. We had
hardly begun our meal when I said after the first mouthful of salad,
‘What’s wrong with the salad?’ George also thought it was queer, but
Jerome thought there was nothing wrong. Jerome always did have a
peculiar taste. Anyhow, he was the only one who continued. It was not
till the next day that we discovered that owing to our carelessness of
using two medicine bottles of similar shape, one containing vinegar and
the other Colza oil, the lamp and the salad were both a bit off.”
When I asked Jerome what first gave him the idea of writing he said—
“I always wanted to be a writer. It seemed to me an easy and dignified
way of earning a living. I found it difficult; I found it exposes you to
a vast amount of abuse. Sometimes, after writing a book or play which
seemed to me quite harmless, I have been staggered at the fury of
indignation it seems to have excited among my critics. If I had been
Galileo, attacking the solar science of the sixteenth century, I could
not have been assaulted by the high priests of journalism with more
anger and contempt. But the work itself has always remained delightful
to me. I think it was Zangwill who said to me once, ‘A writer, to
succeed, has to be not only an artist, but a shopkeeper’—and of the two,
the shopkeeper is the more necessary. I am not sure who said that last
sentence; it may have been myself.
“You write your book or play while talking to the morning stars. It
seems to you beautiful—wonderful. You thank whatever gods there be for
having made you a writer. The book or the play finished, the artist
takes his departure, to dream of fresh triumphs. The shopkeeper—possibly
a married shopkeeper with a family—comes into the study, finds the
manuscript upon the desk. Then follows the selling, bargaining,
advertising. It is a pretty hateful business, even with the help of
agents. The book or the play you thought so fine, you thought that every
one was bound to like it. Your publisher, your manager, is doubtful. You
have a feeling that they are accepting it out of sheer charity—possibly
they knew your father, or have heard of your early struggles—and yield
to an unbusinesslike sentiment of generosity. It appears, and anything
from a hundred to two hundred and fifty experienced and capable
journalists rush at it to tear it to pieces. It is marvellous—their
unerring instinct. There was one sentence where the grammar was
doubtful—you meant to reconsider it, but overlooked it; it appears
quoted in every notice; nothing else in the book appears to have
attracted the least attention. At nine-tenths of your play the audience
may have laughed; there was one scene which did not go well; it is the
only scene the critic has any use for. Their real feeling seems to be
that the writer is the enemy of the public; the duty of all concerned is
to kill him. If he escapes alive, that counts to him.
“I remember the first night of a play by my friend, Henry Arthur Jones.
There had been some opposition; it was quite evident that the gallery
were only waiting for him to appear to ‘boo’ him, as if he had been a
criminal on the way to the scaffold. I was standing by the gallery exit,
and the people were coming out. Said one earnest student to another, as
they passed me, ‘Why didn’t the little——come out and take his punishment
like a man?’ ‘Cowardly, I call it,’ answered the other. They knew what
was in store for him in the next morning’s papers; they knew that a
year’s work, perhaps two, had been wasted. I suppose that it would be
asking too much to suggest that they might also have imagined the
heartache and the disappointment. The playwright who does not succeed in
keeping every one of a thousand individuals, of different tastes and
views and temperaments, interested and amused for every single minute of
two hours, must not be allowed any mercy.
“Yet for a settled income of ten thousand a year, and no worry, no
abuse, and no insults, I do not think any of us would exchange our job.
I suppose we are all born gamblers—it is worth risking the half-dozen
failures for the one success.
“And the work itself, as I said—one only wishes one’s readers enjoyed it
half as much; circulations would be fabulous. _Three Men in a Boat_ I
started as a guide to the Thames. It occurred to us—George, Charles and
myself—when we were pulling up and down, how interesting and improving
it would be to know something about the history of the famous places
through which we passed; a little botany might also be thrown in. I
thought that other men in boats might also like information on this
subject, and would willingly pay for it. So I read up Dugdale, and a
vast number of local guides, together with a little poetry and some
memoirs. I really knew quite a lot about the Thames by the time I had
done, and with a pile of notes in front of me, I started. I think I had
a vague idea of making it a modern ‘Sandford and Merton.’ I thought
George would ask questions, and Harry intersperse philosophical remarks.
But George and Harry would not; I could not see them sitting there and
doing it. So gradually they came to have their own way, and the book as
a guide to the Thames is, I suppose, the least satisfactory work on the
market.
“I suppose, like Mrs. Gummidge, I felt it more. It must have been about
five years before I succeeded in getting anything of mine accepted. The
regularity with which the complimenting editor returned my manuscripts
grew monotonous, grew heart-breaking. But, after all, it was _The Times_
newspaper which accepted my first contribution. Some correspondence on
the subject of the nude in Art made me angry, and I wrote a letter
intended to be ironic. It attracted quite a lot of comment, and, fired
by this success, I wrote to _The Times_ on other topics. The _Saturday
Review_ praised their irony and humour, and Frank Harris invited me a
little later to contribute. But we differed, I think, upon the subject
of women.
“_The Passing of the Third Floor Back_ I wrote for David Warfield, the
American actor, and discussed the matter with David Belasco in the
train, when I was on a lecturing tour in America. I read him and
Warfield the play at the Belasco Theatre in New York. It was after the
performance was over, and we three had the great empty theatre to
ourselves. Then we went to Lamb’s Club, and Warfield, I think, had
macaroni, and Belasco and I had kidneys and lager beer, and discussed
arrangements. Firstly Anderson was to draw sketches of the characters,
and it was while he was doing this in his studio at Folkestone that
Forbes-Robertson dropped in for a chat. Percy Anderson talked to him
about the play, and Forbes-Robertson took up the manuscript and read it.
Belasco was a little nervous about the play. I did not like the idea of
forcing it upon him, and other small difficulties had arisen, so, having
heard from Percy Anderson that he had talked to Forbes-Robertson about
the play, I thought I would go and see him. He, too, was nervous about
it, but said that he felt that he must risk it. We produced it at
Harrogate, for quite a nice, respectable audience, and they took it
throughout as a farce. One or two critics came down from London, and
commiserated with Forbes-Robertson on his luck.
“It was the miners of Blackpool who put heart into us; they understood
the thing, and were enthusiastic. Then we produced it at St. James’,
and, with one or two exceptions, it was besieged with a chorus of
condemnation—deplorable, contemptible, absurd, were a few of the
adjectives employed, and Forbes-Robertson hastened on the rehearsals for
another play. A few days later, King Edward VII, passing through London
on his way to Scotland, devoted his one night in London to seeing the
piece. He said it was not the sort of thing he expected from Jerome, but
he liked it. And about the same time strange people began to come, who
did not know what the St. James’ Theatre was, and did not quite know
what to do when they got there, and they liked it, too.”
I first met Zangwill—Israel Zangwill—at one of the old pothouse dinners
of the Vagabond Club. He had not long given up editing _Ariel_, and was
already known for his biting wit as a speaker. When the lean, arrestive
figure of the Jewish ex-schoolmaster craned over an assemblage, there
was always an attentive silence. He had not yet immortalised himself by
those inimitable etchings of Jewish life, in which the graver and the
acid were employed so ruthlessly—the Tragedies and Comedies of the
Ghetto. But he was in sympathies already a novelist, for on that
particular occasion he was upbraiding Robert Buchanan for forsaking
literature for the drama. His own eyes have wandered to the stage since
then. The curly black hair—an orator’s hair—the sallow complexion of the
South, the pallor of the student, the eagle nose, the assertive smile,
the confident paradox—how well I can recall them! He was a young man in
those days.
Jerome was always a thorough believer in Zangwill. And he showed his
judgment by making him his first serialist in _To-day_. He paid him five
hundred pounds for the serial rights of the first of those remarkable
novels of Jewish life, as much, I believe, as he paid for the serial
rights of _Ebb-Tide_, the book R. L. Stevenson wrote in collaboration
with his step-son, Lloyd Osbourne.
Zangwill was a very constant and much-appreciated visitor at our
at-homes, as was that encyclopædia of knowledge, his brother Louis. And
their sisters sometimes came with them. They all lived together in those
days at Kilburn. I remember going to a party at their house to meet Sir
Frederick Cowen, the musician, which had a most comical finish. There
were six of us left, and only one hansom between us. Three got inside,
two sat on the splash-board, and Heinemann spread himself on the roof in
front of the man, and kept filling the skylight with his face, like a
Japanese Oni. Phil May sat in the middle inside. He was very excited,
and we were trying to keep him quiet, so as not to draw the attention of
the police to the fact that the hansom was carrying more than it was
licensed for. When we got to the Edgware Road, he began to yell for the
police, and a stalwart constable signalled to the cabby to heave to. He
advanced to the side of the cab. “What is the trouble, sir?” he asked,
preparing to rescue the artist from the literary men among whom he had
fallen.
Phil gave one of his knowing smiles, and said, “I want to go to
Piccadilly Circus, and they are trying to take me home.”
But to return to our Zangwills. Louis Zangwill had not yet shown his
strength as a writer, but any one who had tested it, marvelled at the
width of his knowledge. In those days Israel Zangwill favoured Slapton
Sands for his summer holidays. We met him there. He used to wander about
in a black coat and white duck trousers, gathering inspiration. The
sunshine and scenery inspired him to be a perfectly delightful
companion. We once met him yet further afield—at Venice. Norma Lorimer
and I came upon him and Bernard Sickert, the artist, in the Casa Remer,
an adorable old palace, with an open courtyard and a processional stair,
on the Grand Canal. It was quite unspoiled by repairs in those days. It
contained a curio-dealer by the water’s edge, and at the head of the
staircase was a large room in which a very beautiful young Jewish girl
sat sewing for some sweating tailor. We had landed and made an
archæological excursion up the staircase, when we discovered her. She
arose, and with proper presence of mind, and with a total absence of
_mauvaise haute_, conducted us to the curio shop kept by papa. There we
met Zangwill and Sickert. We were all of us tempted by some very
beautiful mediæval iron gates, which would have been a glory in any
nobleman’s park, but as we none of us had a park, and even the six
hundred francs he wanted for them, added to the cost of transport to
England, would have been a considerable sum for any of us, we denied
ourselves, and Zangwill gave a dinner in honour of the event, at a tiny
restaurant on a screwy little canal behind the Piazza of San Marco. The
food and the wine were excellent, and we sat on till the moon was high,
and Venice, on those small old canals, looked like a theatrical
representation of itself for _The Merchant of Venice_. Then we wandered
back to the Piazza to Florian’s, the café whose proud boast it is that
it has never closed its doors day or night for four hundred years. If
you are sleeping in Venice on a summer night—and, in spite of its noise
and its mosquitoes, is there anything more adorable than Venice on a
summer night?—you will find that the habit is not confined to Florian’s.
At Florian’s we sat down to coffee. We could not get a seat outside; the
band was playing “La Bohême,” and the municipality was throwing red and
green limelight on San Marco in honour of a royal birthday. There was no
waiter either, inside, and Sickert amused himself with drawing an almost
life-sized head of Zangwill with a piece of charcoal which he had in his
pocket, on the marble table. It was a bit of a caricature, but far the
best likeness I ever saw of the great Jewish novelist. When the waiter
did come, without waiting to take our orders, he went to fetch a damp
cloth to clean the table. _Ars longa, vita brevis_—I would not let him
touch it, and told the proprietor what a prize he had as I went out. I
have often wondered what the fate of that table was. Zangwill, the
apostle of Zionism, has always been intensely proud of his nationality,
so he has never minded cutting jokes about it. He brought the house down
at a Vagabond Christmas dinner, where he was taking the chair, by
remarking in his opening sentence, “It’s a funny thing to ask a Jew to
do.” This was the dinner at which he introduced to English audiences the
story which had lately appeared in a German comic paper. A carpenter was
in a crowd waiting to see the Emperor pass. He had an excellent
position, but he was very uneasy because he had promised to meet a
conceited young brother-in-law, and the brother-in-law had not turned
up.
“Will the Jackanapes never come!” cried the carpenter. A policeman
promptly arrested him.
“I was speaking of my brother-in-law,” gasped the poor carpenter.
“You said ‘Jackanapes’; you must have meant the Emperor,” said the
policeman.
When I asked Zangwill what made him turn to book-writing, he said—
“I never ‘turned’ to book-writing, because I never thought of doing
anything else, and I have said all I have to say on that subject in the
chapter of _My First Book_, published by Chatto & Windus, a book which
should be a sufficient mine to you for all your friends. I was told at
the Grosvenor Library that the middle-class Jews boycotted all my
books—in revenge for the Jewish ones—but the Jewish ‘intellectuals’ have
always rallied round me, for I remember that the Maccabeans gave me a
dinner to celebrate the birth of _Children of the Ghetto_—a dinner, by
the way, at which Tree announced, amid cheers, that he had commissioned
me to adapt _Uriel Acosta_. I never took the commission seriously, but I
gave him a one-act play, _Six Persons_, which had a long run at the
Haymarket (giving Irene Vanbrugh her first good part), and still
survives, twenty years after, having been played quite recently at the
Coliseum and the Palladium by Margaret Halstan as well as by Miss Helen
Mar somewhere else.
“An anecdote I remember telling at this dinner was: A man said to me,
‘My son has had typhoid, but he enjoyed himself reading your book.’
“‘Where did he get it from?’ I asked, because it was the old
three-volume days, and I knew he could not have bought it.
“Thinking of the typhoid, he replied, ‘From the drains.’
“This theory of the origin of my book is, I believe, favoured in high
ecclesiastical quarters.”
I knew Mark Twain very well. He and Bret Harte were, I suppose, the two
most famous American authors who ever came to our at-homes at No. 32.
Bret Harte, though he was such a typically American writer, spent all
the latter part of his life in England. I first met him at Rudolph
Lehmann’s hospitable dinner-table. No one could fail to be struck with
Bret Harte. He was so alert, so handsome, and though his plumes—his hair
was thick and sleek to the day he died—were of an exquisite snow-white,
he had a healthy, fresh-coloured face, and a slender, youthful figure,
always dressed like a well-off young man. He used to come to our house
with the Vaudeveldes. Madame Vaudevelde, herself an authoress, and the
daughter of a famous ambassador, kept a suite of rooms in her great
house in Lancaster Gate for his use, whenever he was in London.
“Don’t you ever go back to California nowadays?” I asked him once.
“No. I dare say that if I saw the new California, with all its
go-aheadness and modernness, I should lose the old California that I
knew, whereas now it has never changed for me. I can picture everything
just as it was when I left it.”
He retained his vogue to the end. Any magazine would pay him at the rate
of a couple of pounds for every hundred words. They used to say that the
Bank of England would accept his manuscripts as banknotes. He never
failed to charm, whether he was telling some story at a dinner-party, or
talking to some undistinguished woman, young and beautiful or old and
plain, who had asked to be introduced to him as a celebrity—and a
celebrity Francis Bret Harte certainly was, for he founded a whole
school in English literature.
Mark Twain was also very kind, but when I was in New York he was living
at Hartford, the capital of the adjoining State of Connecticut. He
described himself to me as a “wooden nutmeg,” in allusion to a former
thriving industry of the State. I met him when he was engaged to
entertain a ladies’ school at New York. That did not cost nothing. The
idea seemed to me very American, that an author at the height of his
fame, as Mark Twain then was—for he was fifty-five years old, and it was
twenty-one years since he leapt into fame with _The Jumping Frog_,
should accept an engagement to “give a talk” in a private house. The
school received good value for its fee. He not only gave them an hour’s
entrancing address, but he stayed on till quite a late train, having
anybody and everybody introduced to him, and being cordial to them all.
Nor was his cordiality short-lived. I had done nothing then, except
publish a few books of verse. Yet we became and remained till the day of
his death, twenty years later, familiar friends. This was before I
received that memorable invitation from Oliver Wendell Holmes to be his
guest at the monthly meeting of the Saturday Club at Boston, where Mark
Twain proved that the English were mentioned in the Bible.[2] He told
story after story in that address, but I don’t remember any of them.
They were all good in tendency, that was one thing; there was no making
fun of anything that was good or noble or sincere with him. He was, like
our own humorist, Jerome, intensely serious in his soul, and he was
projecting a big book about the Bible—as a publisher, for he was already
in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., who were producing
the huge _Library of American Literature_, of which E. C. Stedman was
joint editor.
Footnote 2:
When challenged to prove it, he read out the text, “For the meek shall
inherit the earth.”
In order to make all great men authors, it had the idea to give the most
famous sayings of historical Americans, where they had not written
anything. In this way Abraham Lincoln became an author. I expect that it
was that encyclopædia which years afterwards brought the house of
Charles L. Webster & Co. down, though it was sold “on subscription,”
with thousands of copies ordered before the book was begun. Mark Twain
found himself responsible for debts of fifty thousand pounds. I met him
soon afterwards, and began condoling with him on his losses as a
publisher. He replied, “I am no publisher, nor ever was. I only put the
money up for them to play with.”
To make up his losses to him, a leading American firm—I seem to
recollect that it was the Harpers, but I may be wrong—made him a
gigantic “syndicate” proposal for all rights, which brought in large
sums of money.
When I met him then, he had just come off ship-board. I asked him how he
was.
“Better’n I ever was in my life. I’ve gotten a new lease.”
“How?”
“Well, it’s a long story. You must know that when I am staying in a
hotel, or on board ship, I can’t go to bed while there is one person
left to talk to in the bar. This habit, I don’t know what ways exactly,
gave me a cough that I couldn’t get rid of, till an old Auntie from
Georgia told me to try drops of rum on sugar. It took away my cough, and
I liked it fine. I went on taking it after my cough had gone; it grew to
be a habit, and before I knew where I was my digestion had gone. I tried
all the doctors I could hear of, at home, and in England, and in
Germany, including Austria, to cure that. But it was not possible; all
they could do for me was to find out what I liked best to eat or drink,
and tell me to do without it. I was wasting to a shadow, so I sent for
my own doctor, and said to him, ‘Doctor, I can’t stand this any longer;
life isn’t worth living, what there is going to be of it, and that
doesn’t seem to be much. I am going to commit suicide.’ ‘Maybe it is the
best thing to do,’ he said. ‘Do you know what is the most painless form
of death?’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I am going to eat and drink everything I like
best for a week, and according to all of you, it ought to take much less
time than that.’
“So I did, and I assure you, Mr. Sladen, before the week was up, I was
as well as ever I had been in my life.”
He could reel off this sort of story by the hour, with that slow drawl
of his, which was so mightily effective.
Frank Stockton, the kindliest and most delicate humorist of America, I
knew very well, and any one who knew him intimately could not help
regarding him with affection. He was a little man with a club foot, and
rather a timid expression, which he made use of when telling his
immortal after-dinner stories; he emphasised the timidity until the
point came, and his face was wreathed with smiles. Stockton was a great
gardener. His garden out at the Holt near the Convent station in New
Jersey was large and beautiful, and the product of his own imagination.
It seemed incredible that a garden like that should have no kind of a
hedge or fence, but he explained that in America to put a fence round
your garden is considered an insult to the democracy, who by no means
always deserve to be trusted in this matter.
Stockton was so good-natured that his wife used to say he would never
have done any work at all if he had not had a dragon at his side to
guard him. She was not much like a dragon. But on one point she was
inexorable; when the time had really come for him to set about
fulfilling a contract, she insisted on his going into New York to a
hotel with as blank an outlook as possible, so that he should not waste
time over gardening; he could not trust himself within sight of a green
leaf.
Stockton was a wood-engraver to start with, and was thirty-eight years
old before he abandoned it to do editorial work. A year later he became
assistant-editor of _St. Nicholas_, the American children’s magazine. It
was not until 1880 that he gave it up to devote himself entirely to
book-writing. Up till 1879, the year in which he published _Rudder
Grange_, he only wrote children’s books, and he did not publish his next
book for grown-ups, _The Lady or the Tiger_, for another five years.
Another old member of the Vagabond Club, always a very intimate friend
of Jerome’s, who was often at our at-homes was Pett Ridge, the humorist
whose knowledge of the East End of London is sometimes compared to
Dickens’s; indeed, many consider him unequalled as a writer of Cockney
humour and an interpreter of Cockney humanity. Unlike Jerome, Pett
Ridge, who also has very earnest convictions and has done a world of
good, has the humorist in him always near the surface. He used to be a
constant speaker at literary clubs, and most popular for his
never-failing fund of humour, which was heightened by his demure
delivery.
[Illustration:
JEROME K. JEROME
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
With Pett Ridge, it is natural to mention W. W. Jacobs, our best sea
humorist. People used to be surprised that the small, slight,
youthful-looking man, who was known to them as a clerk in the General
Post Office, should be the delineator of those inimitable captains and
bo’suns and hands before the mast of little sailing-craft which ply
round our coasts. He was one of the men to whom the members of the
general public, who strayed to literary dinners, were most anxious to be
introduced. Their admiration made him shy, and it was a long time before
he grew accustomed to do himself justice in his public speeches, for he
is one of our most genuine humorists. He owed his unique knowledge of
coasting-craft and their navigators to the fact that his father owned a
wharf on the Thames, and that it was one of his chief pleasures as a boy
to go down to the wharf and make friends with the sea-dogs. After his
marriage he went to live in Essex, but, as a bachelor living in London,
he was a very familiar figure at our at-homes. To those who frequented
literary gatherings in the days of which I am speaking, it is natural to
think of H. G. Wells with Pett Ridge and Jacobs, but Wells was much less
seen at these gatherings, because he lived out of town at Worcester
Park. He was already married when I made his acquaintance, and had got
through the first marvellous part of his career, on which he draws for
so many of his books.
He and his wife found a great difficulty in coming to our at-homes,
because they were such very late-at-night affairs. Once they stayed with
us, sleeping at the Temperance Hotel round the corner, called rather
inappropriately the “London and Scottish,” because all our bedrooms were
turned into sitting-rooms for the night. The pair of them looked
ridiculously young. Wells was very boyish in those days; he was slight
in figure and youthful in face, with thick, rebellious, fairish hair,
and a charmingly impulsive manner. It seems odd to think now that then
he suffered from such very bad health that he was not expected to live
long. Those were the days in which he used to write about flying men and
scientific millennia, most brilliant books which told the British public
that a genius had dropped from heaven, whose crumbs were picked up by
Mr. John Lane. Wells became a Vagabond at a very early date, but he
disliked making speeches, and, in point of fact, hardly ever did make
one in his early days, so his wonderful literary gift was not recognised
so quickly as it would have been if he had been constantly making
speeches before literary clubs and other large audiences.
A feature of Wells’ writing is his marvellous versatility. He will make
a hit on entirely fresh lines, indulge the public with a few other books
on these lines, and then, before they have time to tire of them, break
out in another fresh vein. It is hard to believe that the same man wrote
_Select Conversations with an Uncle_ and _Marriage_, though it is true
that seventeen years elapsed between their publication, and there were
many changes of style between the two. In those days he was only a
brilliant novelist; now we recognise in him a profound thinker, a solver
of social problems, even if we ourselves are Conservatives.
In the _New Machiavelli_ and _Marriage_ there is intuition in every page
and almost every line. You can read them with sheer delight for the
writing alone; they do not depend on the story, however excellent.
Another humorist who was a constant visitor was Max O’Rell—the genial
and irascible Frenchman who, as Paul Blouet, the name to which he was
born, was principal French master at St. Paul’s School. Max O’Rell lived
in a house with a garden at St. John’s Wood. We were very fond of him
and his pretty wife, and much shocked when the two blows fell so quickly
upon one another. Max O’Rell fought for France against the Germans, and
he always looked a fighting man, with his strong figure and belligerent
moustache. He was a fine fencer, and had, I am sure, fought duels in his
time; with his temperament he could not have kept out of them; he was up
in arms in a moment. I remember how fiercely he turned upon Norma
Lorimer for using the expression, “The British Channel.”
“Why British?” he asked.
But he was quite floored by the repartee, “Because of the weather.”
Max O’Rell was always quick at repartee himself—except in America. Of
America and Americans he always spoke in public with his tongue in his
cheek, but in private he was “screamingly funny” about them. He should
certainly have left a posthumous volume of unpalatable truths about
America. It would not have hurt him in the Great Beyond, and it would
have convulsed the English-speaking world. He must often have felt in
America as he felt at Napier, New Zealand, where the audience at the
Mechanics’ Institute, or some such place, would have none of him.
“I am good enough for London and Paris,” he said, speaking to me about
it afterwards; “I am good enough for New York, Boston and Chicago; I am
good enough for Melbourne and Sydney. But I am not good enough for
Napier, New Zealand—Napier, with its five thousand inhabitants, etc.,
etc.”
He had the same staccato style in his lectures and after-dinner speeches
as he had in his _John Bull and His Island_ and his other famous books,
and he easily drifted into it in his conversations.
Other humorists of the little circle—it is to be noted how many there
were—were Robert Barr, Barry Pain and W. L. Alden. Barr, as co-editor of
the _Idler_, was a pivot of literary society like Jerome. But his home
for a considerable portion of the period was a long way down in Surrey,
too far for his friends to pursue him to it. This was not without
design, for he was a man so fitted to shine in literary society, that
his one chance of writing his delicate and delightful novels was to bury
himself in the country.
He made his reputation as “Luke Sharp,” the most brilliant humorist of
the _Detroit Free Press_, at that time the most-quoted paper in America,
and he was very American both in appearance and speech. His brusqueness
and pugnacity were at times terrifying, but underneath them lay a gentle
nature and a most affectionate heart. He was a man who inspired and
returned the warmest affection. His grim humour was famous: it suited
the handsome features, marred with smallpox, the close-trimmed naval
officer’s beard, the sturdy frame, the strong American accent, much
better than his dainty love-stories did. There was no more popular
speaker; his influence among his fellow-journalists was unbounded. He
and his pretty and charming wife, an excellent foil for his pugnacious
exterior, were frequent hosts at the Idler teas, and frequent guests at
our flat. Barr was very biting about England’s national foibles, but
they never moved him to such outbursts of righteous indignation as the
intermittent immoralities of the United States Government.
He remained faithful to his birthplace till his premature death, for he
called two successive homes of his in the South, Hillhead, after the
district of Glasgow in which he was born. In his later days he was so
much the editor, so much the novelist, that one forgot the humorist,
except when he was convulsing a knot of friends, to whom he was talking
at a reception, or the audience he was addressing across a dinner-table.
Barry Pain and W. L. Alden, on the other hand, were always humorists.
Alden, who had a most whimsical mind, had been the American
Consul-General at Rome, and had, in consequence, been made a Cavaliere
by the Italian Government. His title was part of his humorous equipment.
It seemed so droll that a typical, middle-class American like Alden,
should be a cavalier. Both he and his wife were kindly and agreeable
people, but most of his personality went into his writing.
Barry Pain, on the other hand, had a forceful personality. Whenever you
meet this cheery cynic, with his bright dark eyes, you know that you are
in the presence of a man who was born to be editor of _Punch_. He was a
constant speaker at literary clubs, though I don’t think that he liked
speaking at first. His speeches were full of the same brilliant
paradoxes as his books. His cynicism was tempered by overflowing
good-nature. He was always such a hearty man. He was another of the
people who soon flew into the country to get away from parties, and have
time for his numerous contributions to weekly journals. But while he
lived in London he was very often at our house. I made his acquaintance
at the Lehmanns’—he married Stella Lehmann—soon after he had come down
from Cambridge. At Cambridge he had been R. C. Lehmann’s bright
particular star in Granta, and Lehmann, who had wealth, good looks, and
a brilliant athletic record to back up his very great abilities as a
writer, had at once become influential in London journalistic circles.
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CHAPTER X
THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES
TO use the famous expression applied by Dr. Johnson to his College at
Oxford, we had quite a nest of singing-birds at 32 Addison Mansions,
for, to mention only three of them, William Watson, John Davidson and
Richard le Gallienne were at the same time habitués of our at-homes, and
Bliss Carman, the Canadian, was constantly with us when he was over
here.
Sir Lewis Morris, who was considered likely to succeed Tennyson as
laureate at a time when those young poets were in the nursery, sometimes
walked down from the Reform Club to call on us, but he always came on
odd afternoons, a tall man, with a gaunt red face, who in those days was
inclined to put his poetical triumphs behind him, and be the Liberal
politician. Personally, I much preferred the poems of Lord de Tabley, a
delightfully dignified, gentle and affable personage. His poems have
never received full justice; for Graeco-Roman atmosphere he must be
classed with those who come just below Shelley, Keats and Matthew
Arnold—above Horne’s “Orion,” I think.
Edmund Gosse, who introduced me to Lord de Tabley, introduced me also to
the late H. O. Houghton, at that time head of the eminent publishing
firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the John Murrays of America, and to the
late Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the _Century Magazine_, two men at
whose houses I met all the most famous authors of Boston and New York
respectively. Gosse, who had for his brother-in-law the late Sir Alma
Tadema, lived in those days at Delamere Terrace, and at his house on
Sunday afternoons you always met authors of real distinction, men like
Lord de Tabley, Maarten Maartens, Austin Dobson, or Wolcott Balestier,
Kipling’s brother-in-law, the type of genius in a frail body. Edmund
Gosse, besides being one of those poets, rare nowadays, who preserve the
traditional grace of form, the distillation of thought which
characterises the poetical masters of the “Golden Treasury,” was
instrumental in giving England Ibsen and the other Scandinavian giants
of the generation.
Austin Dobson, a man who has the mild and magnificent eye of Browning’s
_Lost Leader_, the Horace of lighter English poetry, began life, like
Gosse, as a Civil Servant, and, like Gosse, is as felicitous in his
essays and his criticisms as in his poems. But, since he lived at Ealing
and had five sons and five daughters, he was very little to be seen at
literary gatherings in the days of which I speak.
It is natural to mention Andrew Lang with them. They were the three best
lighter poets of their generation, but Lang had the advantage over the
others of being one of the most brilliant scholars of his time—no man
since the mighty Conington displayed such a mass of classical erudition,
combined with a genius for popularising it, especially in the direction
of translation. Lang’s prose translations can be compared with
Conington’s rhymed versions of Virgil and Horace. He had also a passion
for the occult, and was one of the best scholars in comparative
occultology and mythology.
His tall, lean figure, mop of grey hair, and screwed-up scholar’s eyes,
were as familiar among golfers and anglers as at the Savile Club, and
other literary coteries, which he deigned to honour with his presence.
He reduced rudeness to a fine art, and never showed his heart to any one
old enough to understand it. But he was nearly a big man as well as a
big scholar.
One cannot think of Lang without thinking also of Frederic W. H. Myers,
whom I met far earlier. As a child he was remarkable; at thirteen, on
entering Cheltenham College (where I was educated long afterwards), so
precocious was his scholarship that he was placed with boys of seventeen
and eighteen. I doubt if there ever has lived another English boy who
learned the whole of Virgil by heart for his own pure delight, before he
passed the school age. He won the senior classical scholarship in his
first year at thirteen; besides gaining the first prize for Latin
lyrics, he sent in two English poems in different metres, and both were
the best and came out top!
At the university few men have won more honours. Myers was to Cambridge
as Lang was to Oxford—and more also. He was greater in pure scholarship,
and far greater as a poet, for he wrote “St. Paul,” almost the finest
quatrain poem in the English language. His later volume of poems,
entitled _The Renewal of Youth_, is perhaps less well known, but this
was the poem that he himself cared for most, and its compressed force
and intensity of feeling and wonderful beauty of expression have gained
it a steadily increasing public.
In his later years he became more absorbed in psychical research. The
success of his famous work, _Human Personality, and its Survival of
Bodily Death_, is well known. The epilogue, pp. 341-352, has become
almost a classic, and the book has now been translated into nearly all
European languages. This would have surprised Frederic Myers enormously.
He wrote to a friend in 1900, “I am occupied in writing a big book which
I don’t expect any one to read, but I do it for the satisfaction of my
own conscience.” He laboured in this field up to his death, with the
same ardour and strenuousness that he threw into all his work.
He was a wonderful personality—no one who ever saw his unforgettable
eyes, and beautiful majestic head, and heard his marvellously eloquent
voice, could ever forget him. Myers is buried just where he should be
buried—by the side of Shelley and John Addington Symonds in the new
Protestant cemetery at Rome, under the ancient cypresses which top the
city wall. Close by, this wall of Aurelian is pierced by the gate
through which St. Paul was led to his martyrdom. The people who stood on
the wall where the author of “St. Paul” lies buried, could have seen the
Saint pass out.
Myers and H. M. Stanley married two sisters. I always though it so
appropriate that Stanley’s brother-in-law, one of the greatest scholars
Cambridge ever nursed, should have been so great an explorer in the
Universe. A mutual friend told me that when Myers was on his deathbed,
Henry Sidgwick, the philosopher, quoted to Mrs. Myers some lines in “The
Renewal of Youth,” the poem which Myers himself, and many of his
Cambridge friends, thought the best of all his work—
“Ah, welcome then that hour which bids thee lie
In anguish of thy last infirmity!
Welcome the toss for ease, the gasp for air,
The visage drawn, and Hippocratic stare;
Welcome the darkening dream, the lost control,
The sleep, the swoon, the arousal of the soul!”
Sidgwick thought these lines, and indeed, the whole poem, wonderful, far
finer than “St. Paul.”
Of the younger generation of the poets, four of the most noted, William
Watson, W. B. Yeats, John Davidson and le Gallienne, were at one time
almost weekly at our flat. Watson, whose powerful clean-shaven face
always reminded me of Charles James Fox, before that inventor of
irresponsible Liberalism lost his looks by dissipation, I see still
sometimes. It was only last year that he and his beautiful young wife
asked me to visit them at their house in the country.
The sturdy Yorkshire stock of which he came is reflected in his poems.
He is accustomed to think and write upon large national and
international movements, and he has a splendid gift of sonorous and
epigrammatic diction. I did not share the views he expressed, but that
did not prevent me from admiring the way in which he expressed them. In
my mind, there was no question but that the laureateship lay between him
and Kipling. But at Oxford Bridges already had a reputation as a poet
while I was an undergraduate.
When Yeats first came to our house he was a shock-headed Irish boy of
twenty-six, without any regard for his personal appearance. He did not
care whether he had any studs in his shirt or not, and once he came in
evening dress without a tie. But we knew then that he was a genius, and
the world knows it now. He has a fairy-like muse, whose quill is dipped
in pathos. He had then only just given up the idea of being an artist,
like his father. He was an art student for three years. His poems and
plays will live.
Yeats was very naïve. I remember his complaining to me in the early days
of the Irish Literary Society that it suffered under a grave
disadvantage; its authors were unable to write as “nationalistically” as
they would have desired, because the Irish never bought books, and the
brutal Saxon would not buy them if they went too far in denouncing him.
Those were not his exact words, but they give the substance of them. One
might fancy that these young men and young women, falling between the
devil and the deep sea, took refuge in playwriting, because the
Englishman will go and see a play which is sufficiently pathetic or
sufficiently funny, no matter how disloyal to himself its sentiments may
be; but his purse-strings are tighter with regard to displeasing books.
Yeats was always highly appreciated. When he published _John Sherman_ it
was thought that he had a career as a novelist before him, but he did
not follow this up.
Another Irishman whom I may mention here is Dr. Todhunter, though he
already had some silver in his beard twenty years ago, and was the
_doyen_ of our poets, and at the beginning the most considerable in his
accomplishments. He had made his name with “The Black Cat” and the
“Sicilian Idyll,” and belonged to an older generation.
English literature is much the poorer by John Davidson having taken his
own life, in despair at the scantiness of the rewards which his genius
could earn. Davidson was a man I liked very much. His robust personality
was reflected in his brilliant eyes and colouring. His heartiness and
sincerity were transparent and he was a very vital poet. He came often.
Davidson was inspired; there are lines of white fire in “The Ballad of
the Nun.” His cheery, courageous face and blithe smile did not in the
least suggest a man who would commit suicide; they were much more
suggestive of the bloods who lived in the piping times of King George
III. He was another Lane discovery, I think, and I suspect that Lane
brought him to our house, as he brought Beardsley and many another man
destined to be celebrated, W. J. Locke among them.
Le Gallienne I knew better than any of them. He and his brother-in-law,
James Welch, were conspicuous features at our parties, Welch because he
was irresistibly funny, and in the habit of exercising his wonderful
gift of mimicry at odd moments—we all believed in his future eminence.
Le Gallienne was even more conspicuous for his personal appearance and
frank posing. He had a face like Shelley, and the true hyacinthine
curls, if hyacinthine curls mean the rich, waving black hair which one
associates with the Greeks of mythology. He was really a rather vigorous
and athletic man, and he used to say in the most captivating way, “You
mustn’t mind me letting my hair grow, and living up to it—it is part of
my stock-in-trade. People wouldn’t come to hear me lecture without it.”
Undoubtedly his picturesque appearance made him one of the most striking
figures in any literary assemblage, but he also had splendid gifts as a
poet. I have always thought that his version of Omar Khayyam is one of
the most beautiful, and has never received justice in comparison with
other versions. Like Fitzgerald, he was unable to translate from the
original, but that did not signify, because hardly any one in England,
in or out of the Omar Khayyam Club, can understand the original, and the
most popular version of the Rubaiyat is valued, not for what Omar put
into it, but for what Fitzgerald put into it. Huntly McCarthy, who was
only in our house once or twice, did, of course, actually make a
translation of the Rubaiyat, but he is a literary marvel who has not yet
come into his own, author of exquisite poems, and of some of the most
brilliant and delightful historical novels by any living writer. His
father, the genial leader of the Home Rule Party, who loved Ireland
without hating England, and wrote history blindfolded to prejudice, that
grand old man, Justin McCarthy, was a much more frequent visitor. I can
see him now, with his long beard, and eloquent Irish eyes behind very
conspicuous glasses, leaning on his daughter Charlotte, and I can hear
his rich brogue. It was a great honour to be admitted to the intimate
friendship of Justin McCarthy, and when he grew more infirm, and went to
die at Westgate, where he lived on for a surprising time, he never
failed to remember me with a line at Christmas.
I ought to mention Oscar Wilde here, who had a wonderful gift of
poetical expression, and whom I met when we were both undergraduates at
Oxford, where he used to call himself O. O’F. Wills Wilde—Oscar
O’Flaherty Wills Wilde. He was always known as Wills Wilde.
But our parties were too crowded for him; he prefered to come to see me
on a chance afternoon, like Lewis Morris. He hated having people
introduced to him, until he had expressed the desire that they should
have the honour, and in meetings so Bohemian he could not have escaped
it. He took a scholarship at Oxford, and won the University prize for
the English poem, and I rather think he got a First Class, but one did
not think of him _dans cette galère_. He had, even in those days, a
desire to be conspicuous, and in those days æstheticism pranced through
the land. Garments of funny-coloured green baize, with a Greek absence
of any pretence at dressmaking, were the badge of the æsthetic female,
who to take first prize was required to have red hair and green eyes,
and a mouth like a magenta foxglove. And the idea was that men should
wear black velvet knickerbocker suits, with silk stockings and black
velvet caps like pancakes. I never saw them doing it, except in an
æsthetic pottery shop in the Queen’s Road, Bayswater, where they sold
Aspinall’s enamels, and on the stage, where Gilbert and Sullivan’s
_Patience_ took the place now occupied by works of genius like Bernard
Shaw’s _Chocolate Soldier_. Wilde never wore the dress at Oxford, but he
was quite courageous in adjuncts. At one time he banished all the
decorations from his rooms, except a single blue vase of the true
æsthetic type which contained a “Patience” lily. He was discovered by
the other undergraduates of Magdalen prostrated with grief before it
because he never could live up to it. They did what they could to revive
him by putting him under the college pump.
But they applauded his wit, at the coining of a famous example of which
I was privileged to be present. We were both in for a Divinity exam. at
the same time. There was no Honour school in Divinity; it was simply a
qualifying exam. to show that we had sufficient knowledge of the
rudiments of the religion of the Church of England to be graduates of a
religious university; we used to call the exam. “Rudiments” for short.
I went to the exam., like a good young man, at the advertised hour, nine
o’clock; Wilde did not arrive till half-an-hour later, and when Spooner,
the Head of New College, who was one of our examiners, asked him what he
meant by being so late, he said, “You must excuse me; I have no
experience of these pass examinations.”
It was the morning of the _viva voce_ examinations, and his being late
did not really signify because W is one of the last letters in the
alphabet. But the examiners were so annoyed at his impertinence that
they gave him a Bible, and told him to copy out the long twenty-seventh
chapter of the Acts. He copied it out so industriously in his exquisite
handwriting that their hearts relented, and they told him that he need
not write out any more. Half-an-hour afterwards they noticed that he was
copying it out as hard as ever, and they called him up to say, “Didn’t
you hear us tell you, Mr. Wilde, that you needn’t copy out any more?”
“Oh yes,” he said, “I heard you, but I was so interested in what I was
copying, that I could not leave off. It was all about a man named Paul,
who went on a voyage, and was caught in a terrible storm, and I was
afraid that he would be drowned, but, do you know, Mr. Spooner, he was
saved, and when I found that he was saved, I thought of coming to tell
you.”
As Mr. Spooner was nephew of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the insult
was of a peculiarly aggravating nature, and he ploughed him then and
there. As my name also came low down in the alphabet, I was a witness of
the whole performance.
Herbert Trench, the poet, who, when he became a theatrical manager,
discovered the “Blue Bird,” often came, a very handsome Irishman of the
blue-eyed and black-haired type. I met him when he and I were fellow
members of the House Committee which discussed the poorness of the
dinners at the old Authors’ Club.
Frederick Langbridge, the charming poet, who was joint author of Martin
Harvey’s evergreen “Only Way,” only came once or twice, because, like
Dean Swift, he was exiled by an Irish preferment. He is Rector of
Limerick.
Wilde once brought a friend with him, whose name was Barlass. He wrote
poetry which Wilde admired, though it had no market, and claimed to be a
descendant of the Katherine Douglas who barred the door with her arm
when the bolt had been stolen, to save King James III of Scotland from
his murderers, and was nicknamed Katherine Barlass. I have a volume of
his poems still, but the thing I remember best about him was an episode
which happened when we were both at Wilde’s house in Tite Street one
day. Upstairs in the drawing-room he had asked Wilde, “What do you think
of George Meredith’s novels?”
Wilde, having nothing effective to say at the moment, appeared not to
hear him. But as he was going out of the front door, he said, “George
Meredith is a sort of prose Browning,” and when Barlass was halfway down
Tite Street, he called after him, “And Browning also is a sort of prose
Browning.”
Bliss Carman wrote some of the most delightful poetry of them all. Born
in Canada, where they have eternal sunshine in summer, and brought up in
those parts of the Maritime provinces where little mountains and little
lakes and little rivers and little forests combine with a bold coastline
to make Acadia an Arcady, it was only natural that he should be able to
transfigure in his poems the Old World Arcady, with Pan, Faun, Syrinx
and Adonis, and all the lovely rabble of mountain, sea and woodland
nymphs.
Carman could write from a typical Canadian inspiration also. He could
make you see Grandpré, and the lives of the men who won Canada from the
wilds and maintained a seignorial grace of life in the new France, which
was born in the days of the Roi Soleil, and lived under the white flag
till it went down in the glorious sunset on the heights of Abraham.
Carman’s poetry is rich in romance, and he was a romantic figure, for
with his great stature and fair hair, and blue eyes, he looked as if he
might have been one of the Norsemen led to the far north of the
continent by Leif, the son of Erik, a thousand years ago, whose
descendants were discovered roaming in the Arctic only the other day. As
a matter of fact, he was descended from one of the most famous men among
the United Empire loyalists, who left the United States when they could
no longer live there under the British flag, and gave Canada her
unconquerable backbone.
I should have mentioned ere this two dear friends of ours who are both
dead—William Sharp and Gleeson White. White was one of my oldest
literary friends. We knew him when we were living at Richmond before we
went to America, and saw a lot of him during the three years we were
there. We came home, I think, just before him. William Sharp introduced
him to us. Sharp, who was the friend of nearly every well-known author
of his time, began life as poet and critic. As general editor of the
“Canterbury Poets,” his name is a household word. There was no
wider-minded critic, none who had a wider knowledge of the poetry and
other verses of his day. But his chief contribution to literature
consisted of the works of “Fiona Macleod,” which were never acknowledged
as his during his lifetime, though he never denied their authorship to
me. We saw him frequently, not only at Addison Mansions, but abroad,
for, like ourselves, he was an insatiable wanderer over Italy and
Sicily.
Gleeson White did not write much verse himself, but he edited a volume
of society verses under the title of _Ballades and Rondeaux_, in the
“Canterbury Poets,” which had a really public effect. It collected the
best examples of the ballades and rondeaux, and verse in other old
French forms, written by Gosse and Dobson, and Lang, and other
well-known writers, in such a convenient form, and gave the rules for
writing them so clearly, that everybody who had any skill in versifying
set to work to write ballades and rondeaux, and bombard the magazines
and newspapers with them. There was a rage of ballade-writing which can
only be compared to the limerick competitions of _Pearson’s Weekly_. Of
Gleeson White’s accomplishments as an art critic I have spoken
elsewhere.
Edgar Fawcett, the New Yorker who was so often at our parties on both
sides of the Atlantic, was one of the best American writers of ballades,
though thousands of American writers, according to the sardonic Miss
Gilder, turned them out by machinery.
Sharp himself was more inclined to the sonnet, as was our mutual friend,
Theodore Watts (now Watts-Dunton), who lived with Swinburne at the
Pines, Putney, and will always be remembered as Swinburne’s greatest
friend. Watts’s sonnets in the _Athenæum_ became as well known to
literary people as Dr. Watts’s hymns. They were among the best sonnets
of the day. Watts was Swinburne’s companion on his famous swimming
excursions. Like the matchless poet who refused the laureateship, he was
a magnificent swimmer.
Hall Caine was at that time the chief authority upon the sonnet, as he
was one of the chief literary critics of the _Athenæum_ and the
_Academy_. He gave me about that time his _Sonnets of Three Centuries_,
which I still keep.
Two other followers of the Muse who came to our parties were Mackenzie
Bell and Norman Gale.
Adrian Ross—Arthur Reed Ropes—who so long carried on a dual literary
life—a Fellow of King’s, an Examiner to the University, and writer of
text-books at Cambridge, while he wrote the songs for George Edwardes’s
musical comedies in London, was a friend of ours before he came to live
in Addison Mansions, partly, I believe, because we lived there. He is an
amazingly clever man; his general knowledge is extraordinary. He took
various ’varsity scholarships and prizes at Cambridge and was the ablest
of the clever journalists with whom Clement Shorter surrounded himself
for his great move. He may also fairly claim to be W. S. Gilbert’s
successor as a writer of really witty and scholarly songs (which have
also been amazingly popular) for the principal musical comedies from _A
Greek Slave_ till the present day. Adrian Ross, who is a Russian by
birth, looks like a Russian with his big, burly form, and fair beard and
glasses, when you see him taking the chair at some feast of reason like
the Omar Khayyam Club. He is one of the chief Omarians, and might, if he
devoted himself to it, write just such a poem as Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat”
himself, for he has the gift of form, the wit, and the width of
knowledge, to draw upon. In the same way, if he had been born early
enough, he would have written some of our best ballades and rondeaux.
There, in addition to his extraordinary facility, he had the advantage
of being one of the best-read men in England on French literature, and
one of the chief authorities upon it. He married Ethel Wood, an actress
as clever as she is pretty, who, if she acted more, would be one of our
most successful character-actresses.
Rowland Thirlmere was another dual personality. When he came to see us
at Addison Mansions he was Rowland Thirlmere the poet, literary to his
finger-tips; when he was at home at Bury he was John Walker, a
Lancashire cotton-mill manager, an ardent Conservative politician, a
“Wake up, England!” man. Did he not write _The Clash of Empires_, a
classic on the German peril?
Douglas Ainslie, the poet of the Stuarts, who has now established for
himself a solid reputation in Philosophy, was still a diplomat when he
first used to come to see us.
We had not so many poetesses. The chief of them was Lady Lindsay, whose
_In a Venetian Gondola_ went through many editions, a poetess of the
same order and rank as the Hon. Mrs. Norton a generation before. Her
poetry was strengthened by sincere piety and morality. They gave it the
mysterious quality which attracts us in the old Sienese pictures.
Among the younger poetesses who came to us, two stood out—Ethel
Clifford, Mrs. W. K. Clifford’s daughter, who married Fisher Dilke, and
Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall.
The charm of Mrs. Dilke’s poetry is universally admitted, but Miss
Hall’s has not yet received anything like the recognition which it
deserves.
She is a step-daughter of the famous musician, Albert Visetti, and much
younger than any of the others. To see her, even to speak with her, one
would think that she thought more of her hunting-box and her horses than
of abstractions like poetry. At the time when I first met her, her
winters were equally divided between travelling and hunting, and she
appears to have gathered inspiration from both of these sources. Her
outdoor life in one of our most beautiful counties has given her a deep
love and appreciation of the country pleasures only to be found in
England. There is no one I know who writes more from inspiration. I
reviewed her first book, _’Twixt Earth and Stars_, with real enthusiasm.
Since then she has published _A Sheaf of Verses_, _Poems of the Past and
Present_, and _Songs of Three Counties and Other Poems_. Of these three
volumes, _Poems of the Past and Present_ shows her at her best.
Visetti was born a Dalmatian, but he has for thirty years been a British
subject—and a very patriotic British subject. He had the celebrated
composer, Arrigo Boito, for a fellow-student at the Conservatoire at
Milan. An even greater composer, Auber, introduced him to the splendid
court of the third Napoleon. Dumas père wrote a libretto for him. He was
Adelina Patti’s musical adviser for five years, and wrote “La Diva” for
her. He was admitted to the personal friendship of both the late King
Edward and the late Duke of Edinburgh. He was the first professor
appointed to the staff of the Royal College of Music. He has written
lives of Palestrina and Verdi.
“Dolly Radford,” a writer of delicate and sympathetic verse, and her
husband, Ernest Radford, used to come to us in those days. So, very
occasionally, did two Irish poetesses, Mrs. Shorter and Katherine Tynan.
The former, wife of the editor of the _Sphere_, has won herself an
assured position by Celtic ballads of a highly imaginative order. She is
Yeats’s closest rival.
I first met Mrs. Clement Shorter when she was staying with Miss
Katherine Tynan (Mrs. Hinkson) at Ealing, where Shorter first met her.
Mrs. Hinkson thus recalls Miss Dora Sigerson, as she was then, in her
_Reminiscences_—
“I was the means of introducing Dora some years later to Mr. Clement
Shorter, whom she married.
“We were all possessed with the common impulse towards literature. We
were all making our poems and stories. Dora Sigerson, who was then a
strikingly handsome girl, was painting as well, making statuettes and
busts, doing all sorts of things, and looking like a young Muse. Dr.
Sigerson was, as he is happily doing to-day, dispensing the most
delightful hospitality. His Sunday-night dinners were, and are, a
feature of literary life in Dublin, chiefly of the literary life which
has the colour of the green. At the time there was no Irish Literary
Society, as there is now, with Dr. Sigerson for its President. The best
of the young intellect of Dublin was to be found at Dr. Sigerson’s
board.”
Mrs. Shorter has written several volumes of poetry, one with an
introduction by George Meredith, novels and short stories. She also
still paints in oils, and models; her country garden at Great Missenden
has many examples of her talent in this direction.
Mrs. Shorter’s poetry has an ample range. Some of her ballads are
pitiful tragedies, told with a delicate sense of ballad simplicity, and
an exquisite ear for the broken music which is so essential to ballads;
and, at the other end of the gamut, she can also write songs in a
lighter vein that deserve a composer like Bishop to set them to
music—such songs as the poem called “The Spies” in her _Madge Linsey_
volume.
Katherine Tynan, who had married H. A. Hinkson before we ever met
personally, though years earlier she had given me introductions to
Louise Imogen Guiney, the American poetess, and other valued friends
among the writers in America, is the author of short lyrics, human and
graceful, which ought to find a permanent place in our anthologies, as
well as a popular novelist, and has lately written a charming volume of
her _Reminiscences_.
I have left Sir Edwin Arnold, Thomas Hardy and W. E. Henley to the end
of this chapter. Arnold, whom I used to see daily when we were both
living in Tokyo, was too infirm to come to us much in Addison Mansions
in his last days.
While he was in Japan, he lived in a native house in Azabu outside
Treaty limits, receiving permission to do so under the legal fiction
that he was tutor to the daughters of the wealthy Japanese who lent him
the house under a similar fiction. It was just outside the Azabu Temple,
a favourite resort for holiday-makers, and had delightful bamboo-brakes,
which rustled rhythm to Arnold in his garden. The house had its proper
paraphernalia of shifting wooden and paper shutters, thick padded mats
of primrose straw, flat cushions to kneel on, flat quilts to sleep on,
tobacco-stoves, finger-stoves and kakemonos. It was so native that you
always had to take off your boots when you went to see him. Here he
wrote the _Light of the World_, and he used to read it to me batch by
batch as he finished it. His manuscript was most edifying; he wrote a
beautiful scholarly hand, full of character, rather like the hand of
Lanfranc, who was Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of William the
Conqueror. He did very little sight-seeing or bargaining. His time was
taken up with receiving Buddhist abbots and the sages who, by
extraordinary abstinence and striking concentrations of mind and will,
had acquired supernatural powers, just as Hall Caine used to see the
leading Mohammedan _ulema_ in Egypt. They had a profound respect for
him. I always fancy that Arnold had in his mind some _magnum opus_ on
those Eastern superhumans, which he never gave to the world. He wrote a
good deal of poetry in those days besides the _Light of the World_,
chiefly translations, adaptations and imitations of the Hokku and other
Japanese forms of verse, in which he excelled. He not only had the
natural charm, he could put his mind on an Eastern plane of thought. He
looked quite Oriental when he was in Japanese dress; his dark skin, his
Oriental type, the deep reserve which lay behind his affability, all
suggested the child of the East.
Thomas Hardy (who honoured us with his presence very rarely) I must
mention in this context as a poet and not as a novelist, though he is
the head of the novelists’ craft to-day, undoubtedly. I am not certain
that he is not also our truest living poet, except Kipling. He has
certainly come nearer to finding a new poetical form than any modern
poet except Yone Noguchi, the marvellous Japanese, who has written some
of the finest contemporary poetry in our language, for Walt Whitman’s
psalm forms are not suited for any country but America, or for any
writer who is not one of the people working with his hands. His
crudities would not be tolerable in an educated man. But Hardy struck
out entirely fresh forms. Hardy shook off the ancient trammels of rhyme
and metre, while preserving a rich rhythm and a scholarly elegance, in
poems inspired with a broad humanity.
Henley, who, like Gray, wrote a few gems, which will find their place in
every anthology, was never in our flat at Addison Mansions, though he
was a friend of mine; he could not have climbed so many stairs if he had
tried.
I remember two sayings of his specially. In those days I wrote verses;
and he was good enough to read my books of verse and advise me on them.
He said there was some hope for me because I wrote short pieces, and, in
his opinion, the perfect poem should never contain more than three
stanzas. But I have long since abandoned verse writing.
The other was a thing which he said to me when he was giving me some
introductions, on the eve of my departure for America. I thought it was
a joke then, but subsequent events threw a light on it. He was urging me
after I left America to go on and see Stevenson at Samoa. He said that
Stevenson would be my inspiration, and as he was handing me the
introduction he said to me, with what I considered unnecessary emphasis,
“And when you see him, tell the beggar that I hate him for being so
beastly successful.”
Years afterwards Henley wrote of Stevenson with an acidity which his
friends regretted very much, and which proved to me that what he had
said to me as we were parting was one of those outbursts of candour for
which Henley was famous.
It required a big man like Henley to confess that he was envious, and
perhaps there was good reason why he should be, for considering the way
their careers began, and Henley’s magnificent intellect and gift of
expression, one would not have prophesied in the beginning that Henley
would only be appreciated by the critical few, and Stevenson by all the
world, gentle and simple.
I never did see Stevenson. We meant to have taken Samoa on our way back
from Japan to San Francisco, but the Japanese boat which should have
taken us there broke down, and we could not wait for the next.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XI
LADY AUTHORS AT ADDISON MANSIONS
THE great “Miss Braddon,” who is now one of the most valued of my
friends, and a not infrequent visitor, never came to 32 Addison
Mansions. She achieved fame before any living novelist. She had
published _Aurora Floyd_ and _Lady Audley’s Secret_ more than half a
century ago, in 1862, while Thomas Hardy did not write _Under the
Greenwood Tree_ and _A Pair of Blue Eyes_ till ten years after that. Her
powers are undiminished. Her _Green Curtain_, published fifty years
later, is one of the finest books she ever wrote.
Nor did I ever meet Miss M. G. Tuttiett, who, since she wrote her great
_Silence of Dean Maitland_, has been known to all the world as “Maxwell
Gray,” until I became her neighbour at Richmond. These lost years have
deprived me of a great pleasure, because, apart from my admiration for
her novels, I share two of her hobbies—her enthusiasm for her garden and
her enthusiasm for Italy.
I used to esteem it an honour and a privilege when dear old Mrs.
Alexander—Mrs. Hector was her real name—used to toil up the stairs to
our parties. Her books were delightful, and she was one of the earliest
of my literary friends, for I met her at Louise Chandler Moulton’s
before I went to America.
Still more, on account of her infirmity, did I appreciate it when Mrs.
Lynn Linton came. My intimacy with her arose from two facts. When my
novel, _A Japanese Marriage_, came out, she wrote to me in the warmest
terms about it. She not only was enthusiastic about it as a novel, but
thought it an unanswerable piece of advocacy for the relief of the
Deceased Wife’s Sister (now happily accomplished). After that I was a
frequent visitor at her flat in Queen Anne’s Mansions, and later we met
as fellow-guests at Malfitano, the beautiful villa of Mr. and Mrs. J. J.
S. Whitaker at Palermo. She looked the grande dame, and she was a great
woman as well as a great writer, admired in both capacities by all the
great writers of her day, which was a long one—long enough to include
Walter Savage Landor. Her championing of _A Japanese Marriage_ came as a
very complete surprise to me, because she was noted for severity as a
moralist, and the marriage of the hero and the heroine by the American
Consul, after the clergy had refused to marry them, in the eye of the
Law was no marriage at all, since neither of them was an American
subject—it was a mere manifesto that they meant to live together as man
and wife. That letter of hers was the beginning of one of my most
delightful friendships.
I don’t remember when I first met Mrs. Croker or Mrs. Perrin or Flora
Annie Steel, though they have all been valued friends for many years. As
they are all Anglo-Indians, I suppose that I must have met one of them
through some member of my family in the Indian Army or Indian Civil
Service, and the others through her. My family have been much connected
with India. To mention only two of them, my cousin, General John Sladen,
was a brother-in-law of Lord Roberts, and actually kept house with him
in India for a year, and his brother, Sir Edward Sladen, was the British
resident who played so great a part in Burmah, and whose statue has the
place of honour in the Burmese capital.
Of one thing I am certain, that the marriage of Mrs. Croker’s beautiful
daughter—the belle of Dublin—to one of the Palermo Whitakers, was not
the introduction, for Mrs. Croker has never been to Palermo, and I
remember her asking me all about the Whitakers’ famous gardens in
Sicily. Captain Whitaker did not live there; he was with his regiment.
It is natural to mention Mrs. Steel, Mrs. Perrin and Mrs. Croker
together, for they long divided the Indian Empire with Rudyard Kipling
as a realm of fiction. Each in her own department is supreme.
In the days when we first knew her, and she was living in Ireland, it
used to be like a ray of sunshine when pretty Mrs. Croker, with her blue
eyes and her bright colour and her delightful Irish tongue, paid one of
her rare visits to London. As I write these words, I am about to pay a
visit to her in her Folkestone home. She is exactly the type you would
expect from her irresistible books.
When I asked Mrs. Croker what first gave her the idea of writing, she
said—
“My very first attempt at writing was in the hot weather at
Secunderabad. When my husband was away tiger-shooting, and I was more or
less a prisoner all day owing to the heat, I began a story, solely for
my own amusement. It grew day by day, and absorbed all my time and
interest. This was _Proper Pride_. With reluctance and trepidation I
read it to a friend, and then to all the other ladies in the
regiment—under seal of secrecy. Emboldened by this success, I wrote
_Pretty Miss Neville_, and when I returned home with the Royal Scots
Fusiliers, I had two manuscripts among my luggage. These went the usual
round, but at the end of a year I received a small offer for _Proper
Pride_. It came out in August 1892, without my name, and was immediately
successful—principally owing to long and appreciative notices in _The
Times_ and _Saturday Review_, both on the same day. Three editions went
off in a month, and I must confess that no one was as much surprised by
this success as I was. Subsequently I sold the copyright of _Pretty Miss
Neville_ for one hundred pounds, and though now a lady of thirty, she
still sells, in cheap editions. I attribute my good fortune to the fact
that my novels struck a new note—India and army society—and that I
received very powerful help from unknown reviewers. I like writing,
otherwise I could not work. I believe I inherit the taste from my
father’s family, who were said to be ‘born with a pen in their hands’!”
Mrs. Croker tells me that it was I who first introduced her to London
literary society. I consider this one of the most charming successes of
my literary career.
Mrs. Perrin, on the other hand, since she came back from India, has
played a continuously prominent part in London literary life. She has
been a leading figure at literary clubs and receptions, and has been a
pillar of “the Women Journalists.” As story-teller and psychologist
combined, she has no superior. Those of her wide public who know her in
private life know a brilliant and charming woman of the world, with a
proved capacity for managing literary affairs.
When I asked Mrs. Perrin what started her in a literary career, she
said—
“I think I took to writing from sheer need of occupation. When I married
my husband in India, as a girl of eighteen, we were sent to a place in
the jungle where he had charge of an enormous aqueduct which was under
construction. He had several Coopers Hill assistants under him, not one
of whom was married, and I was the only English woman in the locality.
There was no station—or permanent settlement; our houses were temporary
erections of mud, and we were miles from the railway. The landscape
consisted of a sea of yellow grass about the height of a man, and there
was only one road, which lay behind our bungalow—the grand trunk road
that is the backbone of India. I began to write here, just to amuse
myself, and then when we went to less isolated spots, I gained
confidence and used to send little articles and turn-overs to the
_Pioneer_—the principal Indian daily paper. These were nearly always
accepted, and so I took courage and wrote a novel called _Into
Temptation_, which ran through that prehistoric magazine _London
Society_, long ago defunct. The book came out in two volumes and had
very fair notices. Then I wrote another called _Late in Life_, which ran
serially in an Indian weekly, off-shoot of the _Pioneer_, and in England
through the _Belgravia_, and then came out in two volumes. So you may
imagine—or rather, realise—how long ago I began! Both these novels are
now to appear revised and corrected in Messrs. Methuen’s 7_d._ series.
“However, I did not receive the financial encouragement I had hoped for
from these first efforts, and I lost heart. For nearly ten years I wrote
nothing but a few Indian short stories. Then when my husband was offered
an appointment at home, and we retired before we had ‘done’ our full
time in India, I collected these stories, and they came out under the
title of _East of Suez_. The book was a success and since then I have
written and have been published steadily.
“I am deeply interested in India, in the people and their religions, and
histories and social systems, and as I was sixteen years in the country
I had an opportunity of receiving lasting impressions, and of gaining
invaluable experience. I come of a family which has been officially
connected with India for five generations. My great grandfather was with
Lord Cornwallis, on his staff, at the taking of Seringapatam, and the
surrender to Lord Cornwallis of Tippoo Sahib’s two little sons as
hostages. He was afterwards Chairman of the old East India Company—known
in those days as John Company.
“I cannot think of anything more anecdotal in my experience as a
novelist—I can only remember the disappointments and the difficulties of
what success I have made, at which, perhaps, I may now bring myself to
smile, but I do not think they would be interesting if related!”
A few years ago Mrs. Steel was also one of the most prominent figures in
London literary society. She had written _On the Face of the Waters_,
one of the finest historical novels in the language; she was a hard and
earnest worker in all sorts of movements, and as a fighting speaker
there were few to match her. She could make a good set speech, but her
set speeches were nothing to the oratory of which she was capable if,
when she was totally unprepared, indignation stung her into springing to
her feet to denounce the offender. Then her words came as blows come
from a man who hits another man because he is incensed beyond endurance.
A face full of life and expression added force to her words.
Since Mrs. Steel settled down on an estate in Wales, she has been little
in London. But in those days she had a sort of country house on the
Notting Hill slope of Campden Hill. She is a keen politician, and not
long ago sold the opening page of _On the Face of the Waters_ as her
subscription to the Women’s Cause.
Another author lost to London is Sarah Grand. She used to be our
neighbour; she shared a flat in the Abingdon Road with her step-son,
Haldane McFall, the art critic, and author of that remarkable novel,
_The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer_. I met her soon after the success of
_The Heavenly Twins_—a young woman with indignant blue eyes, very
reserved, but with a rare charm of manner behind her reserve. I was
introduced to her, I think, by Heinemann, who was often at our at-homes.
He had, as I understood, purchased _The Heavenly Twins_ from her ready
printed, copyright and all for a hundred pounds, but when the success
came had torn up the agreement, and substituted a royalty agreement,
paying the royalties from the beginning. She had already, I gathered,
received twelve times the original sum in royalties.
Alfred Walford often came to see us—his wife, Mrs. L. B. Walford, more
occasionally, since she was the mother of a large family as well as many
books, and they lived in Essex. Alfred Walford used to chaff himself
about his connection with literature being to produce the paper on which
it was printed. He was a paper-maker; and she, at that time, was the
favourite novelist of the Colonies. She was the daughter of that
Colquhoun of Luss who wrote that famous book _The Moor and the Loch_.
The gentle-faced “Miss Thackeray,” the great novelist’s daughter, now
the widow of Sir Richmond Ritchie, I did not know in those days, but I
used to meet her afterwards at Lady Lindsay’s. There was a time when her
_Old Kensington_ was my favourite novel.
And here I must say something about my old and dear friend, Lady
Lindsay, who has so recently passed away, and whose lameness prevented
her from toiling up the stairs to our at-homes very often. For many
years I was constantly at her house, both at her famous dinner-parties
and running in to have a talk about books when I was sure of finding her
alone, for she was good enough to be much interested in my work.
[Illustration:
“MISS BRADDON”
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
The daughter of a Cabinet Minister, the Right Hon. Henry Fitzroy (son of
the first Lord Southampton), a descendant of Nathan Meyer de Rothschild,
who founded the fortunes of his House, and sister-in-law of the Loyd
Lindsay, V.C., who became Lord Wantage, she knew nearly every noted
person of her time, and those whom she did not know, she generally could
have known but for some prejudice against them. At her dinner-parties
you met men like Tennyson and Gladstone and Layard of Nineveh—great
politicians, great nobles, great authors, great painters, but hardly any
one from the theatrical world. I was nearly always the least important
person present. Eight was her favourite number, though sometimes there
were a dozen at her famous round table. The conversation used to be
brilliant; the company was arranged with a view to that—naturally the
chief guest often got possession of the table, and we sat and chronicled
the historic scene in our hearts.
Afterwards, when one went up into the drawing-room, our eyes rested on
pictures by Sandro Botticelli and Titian, sixteenth-century Italian
wedding-chests, and other inheritances of the great. She wrote more than
one volume of poems which went into several editions.
It is natural to mention beside her another great lady who was in touch
with all the notabilities of her time, Walpole’s descendant, Lady
Dorothy Nevill, who married a descendant of Warwick the Kingmaker’s
elder brother, the Baron of Abergavenny. Her husband was at one time the
heir-presumptive of the Marquis of Abergavenny. She happily gave her
reminiscences to the world, as Lady Lindsay always meant to do, so
readers know her connections, though she was too modest to show how
Disraeli leaned upon her advice. Among the most interesting things which
I remember in her house in Charles Street, Berkeley Square, were the
unique mementoes of her ancestor, the tremendous Sir Robert Walpole, the
Asquith of the eighteenth century. It was she who told me that Nelson
was called Horatio because Horace Walpole presented his father to the
living of Burnham Thorpe, which is still in the gift of the Earls of
Orford.
Lady St. Helier, another great London hostess, at whose house I have met
some of the most celebrated people of the day—Lady St. Helier and her
daughter, Mrs. Allhusen, never came to see us till we had left Addison
Mansions for the Avenue House, Richmond. No woman has been more
integrally a part of the life of her time than Lady St. Helier, who
wrote an admirable volume of reminiscences. Mrs. Allhusen has the
inspiration of owning a house where one of the masterpieces of
literature was written—Gray’s _Elegy_. For the house in which Gray wrote
it after the inspiration, which came to him as he was leaning over the
gate of Stoke Poges Churchyard, has been enlarged into Stoke Court, and
the room in which Gray wrote out the _Elegy_ forms part of Mrs.
Allhusen’s writing-room.
Marie Corelli, like Hall Caine, has a dislike of literary receptions. I
cannot remember if she ever came to Addison Mansions, though we have
been friends for many years, and I remember going to brilliant
dinner-parties at her house in Longridge Road. Her stepfather, Charles
Mackay, who adopted her, was one of my earliest literary friends.
Her stepbrother, Eric Mackay, author of the famous _Love-letters of a
Violinist_, lived with her, and he came to our at-homes so frequently
that I think she must have come with him sometimes. They were a very
musical family. It is always said that Marie Corelli, had she so chosen,
could have won as much fame in music as she has in literature. Her books
illustrate Hall Caine’s axiom that the greatest novels are those which
deal with the elemental facts of human nature. Her grasp of human nature
has won her countless readers in both hemispheres.
It is not universally known that Marie Corelli is an admirable
speaker—so lucid, so convincing, able by perfect elocution to reach the
furthest corner of the large hall of the Hotel Cecil without raising her
voice. Though she lives at Stratford-on-Avon, and is identified with all
its functions, she is frequently to be seen in London at places like
Ranelagh or dancing at the great balls at the Albert Hall.
Almost alone of the chief lady novelists of that time, Mrs. Humphry Ward
was never at Addison Mansions. The most interesting thing I remember in
conversation with her was her confession to me one day when we were at
Mrs. W. K. Clifford’s that she enjoys handling the character of a person
who is a failure better than the character of a person who achieves
success. Heroes apparently do not appeal to her.
Mrs. W. K. Clifford was often at Addison Mansions. She is a very old
friend of mine, and a great personality. Mrs. Clifford is an admirable
example of the modern woman, breezy, wholesome, warm-hearted,
clear-visioned, lucid in expression, interested in all questions of the
day, and withal one of our best novelists. Early in life she suffered a
loss which would have overwhelmed most women, for she lost her husband,
Prof. W. K. Clifford, F.R.S., who was already reckoned the third
mathematician in Europe, at the same age as Wolfe fell at Quebec,
thirty-three, when they had only been married four years, and she was
still a girl. He was the most brilliant Fellow of Trinity (Cambridge) of
his day, and the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society. There is nothing
he could not have done and would not have done if he had lived, for
there was no side of life which did not appeal to him. People of every
rank and of every shade of thought came to see him, and no matter how
little they agreed with him, they were always hypnotised for the hour.
He had wonderful dark-lashed blue eyes, like his daughter, and a
wonderful soul seemed to be looking out of them.
But she did not allow her loss to prostrate her, and she has lived to
see her house one of the Meccas of literature in London, and her
daughter, Mrs. Fisher Dilke, a recognised poetess.
Talking of Mrs. Clifford reminds me of the chequered career of _The
Love-letters of a Worldly Woman_. It was published just twenty years
ago, and though the first edition sold out immediately, no second
edition was published in England, but in America, where it was
non-copyright, it sold enormously. There were a dozen pirate editions of
it, including a marked edition, which means one with the most popular
passages indicated. Such a height of popularity did it reach that it was
actually sold at street-corners in New York! But I have heard that Mrs.
Clifford only got fifteen pounds royalties off the whole dozen editions.
The first batch of love-letters in this volume appeared anonymously in
the _Fortnightly_, and were generally attributed to Oscar Wilde. As a
piece of poetical justice when Housman’s _An English-woman’s
Love-letters_ were published seven years later, they were attributed to
Mrs. Clifford. _The Love-letters of a Worldly Woman_ was a remarkable
book, and fully deserved its American popularity.
Mrs. Clifford is, above all things, an idealist and a lover of good
work. She has said, in one of her books, “in good love and good work lie
the chance of immortality for everything that is worth having or being;
and yet, though I’ve aimed at the sun, and longed to put into the
beautiful world something worthy of it, I have never hit higher than a
gooseberry bush, or achieved anything that gave me satisfaction. And
I’ve been so full of enthusiasms and dreams ... perhaps one of the
dreams will come true some day—who knows? For if I live to be ninety, I
shall still feel, as I do now, that the soul of me is as young and fresh
as ever; and it is a sense of the beauty of things, of the kindness that
underlies human nature, even when it’s choked with weeds at the top,
that gives one courage, and helps one to do.”
Beside Mrs. Clifford I should mention Margaret Woods, whom I first met
when I was an undergraduate at Oxford, and her husband, the present
Master of the Temple, was my tutor, engaged to her while I was his
pupil. I remember his asking me and other undergraduates to meet her in
his rooms. I do not think he told us why, but we knew. She was one of
the few charming women that the monastic Oxford of that day contained.
Her father, afterwards the famous Dean of Westminster, was master of
University College; I used to go to his Socrates lectures. He was
dissatisfied with the progress we were making, and boldly—it was very
bold at Oxford—charged us with paying too much attention to athletics,
and it was then that he made his famous mot, that he had never taken any
exercise in his life, except by occasionally standing up when he was
reading. I have heard that it is equally true of Mr. Chamberlain, but it
was Dean Bradley who said it. The Bradleys were an excessively clever
family. The Dean had a brother or a half-brother a great philosopher, a
don at Merton, and another, Andrew Bradley, a Fellow at Balliol, who
became Professor of Literature at another University. I forget what his
sister, Emma Bradley, did, but she was famous. Three of his daughters,
Mrs. Woods, Mrs. Birchenough, Mrs. Murray Smith, are authoresses, Mrs.
Woods being one of the best novelists of the day, and in my opinion the
best of all poetesses in the English language. When Tennyson died there
was a movement in favour of her being made the laureate, and no woman
has ever had such claims for the post. She made her mark very young with
_A Village Tragedy_ and _Esther Vanhomrigh_, and has written notable
books ever since. Beautiful workmanship, singularly broad humanity, and
truth to life are the characteristics of her prose. In poetry she has
the gifts of both Brownings. She lives in an ideal home, the panelled
Master’s House at the Temple, which has, however, one drawback, that the
only way out of it to a cab on a wet night is to be carried in a sedan
chair; a sedan chair of the eighteenth century is kept in the hall for
the purpose, and passes from one Master of the Temple to another.
Charles Kingsley’s daughter, Mrs. St. Leger Harrison—the “Lucas Malet”
of fame—used to come to us sometimes before she went back to live at
Eversley, immortalised by her father; and once her cousin, the famous
African explorer, the other Mary Kingsley, came. Lucas Malet is all that
one might expect of Charles Kingsley’s daughter and the writer of _Sir
Richard Calmady_.
It seems natural to mention the author of _Concerning Isabel Carnaby_
beside the author of _Sir Richard Calmady_. The two books made a stir
about the same time, and the public mixed their titles with great
impartiality. The author of the former, Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, now
the Hon. Mrs. Felkin, with her sister, Edith Fowler, was a good many
times at Addison Mansions. I have told the story of her becoming an
authoress in my chapter on the Idlers and Vagabonds.
I should have mentioned Beatrice Harraden before. When you see this
small, slight, delicate-looking woman, with her bright eyes, you are
forcibly reminded of the invalid heroine of _Ships that Pass in the
Night_. But Beatrice Harraden is a public school woman; she was at
Cheltenham College—the ladies’ College—and has taken the liveliest
interest in all the interests of women since. She was cured, I fancy, of
some pulmonary disease by going to California. She now has one of the
most unique flats in Hampstead. I do not remember how I met her, but it
was a long time ago, and I was very elated, because I always thought
_Ships that Pass in the Night_ one of the best-written short novels in
the language.
Helen Mathers has for many years been a dear friend of ours. She was
another of the authors whose acquaintance it elated me to make. Although
she is much about the same age as myself, she made her two successes
with _Comin’ Through the Rye_ and _Cherry Ripe_ when I was a boy at
school. Her husband, Henry Reeves, the eminent orthopædist, was one of
the very first doctors to make practical use of the X-rays. She had a
son in the army who promised to be her worthy successor in literature
had he lived, as the writing which he achieved proved. Her real name was
Mathews. She was a cousin of the Estella Mathews who married my near
neighbour, George Cave, K.C., M.P., who was in my team, as was Mr.
Justice Montague Shearman, when I was Captain of the Public Schools
Football Club at Oxford, and who now occasionally plays golf with me
when he can get a day off from the Courts, and from the case against
Home Rule.
Frances Hodgson Burnett I first met in Washington, where she was the
wife of a well-known doctor, and the mother of two beautiful boys in
velvet Patience suits, locally called Fauntleroy suits, in honour of her
book _Little Lord Fauntleroy_. But she was not an American; she was an
Englishwoman born in Manchester, who had made her fame with a book about
the north of England, called _That Lass o’ Lowrie’s_. Eventually she
came back to live in her native England, first of all in a house in
Portland Place and afterwards in a manor house in Kent. Her gigantic
success with books and plays did not turn her head; she was always the
same gracious human woman she had been when she was making her way.
John Oliver Hobbes, on the other hand, though she lived so much in
England, and wrote all her books over here, was an American-born, the
daughter of John Morgan Richards, who was at one time Chairman of the
American Society in London, and had as much to do with _entente
cordiale_ between England and the United States as any American
Ambassador at the Court of St. James’. He was, as it were, a sort of
social ambassador. The great house in Lancaster Gate in which he lived
till he retired from business was a focus of entertainment for both
branches of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Mrs. Craigie was a friend of our present Queen. She was extraordinarily
clever and extraordinarily charming. She always gave every one to whom
she was talking the knowledge that for the time being nobody else
existed for her. In intellect she was the equal of any contemporary
woman writer; added to this, she was very pretty, very engaging, very
well dressed, and certainly proved the truth of the proverb “Whom the
gods love, die young.” She had the gift of bringing out the wit as well
as the best qualities of others.
Another American authoress who has spent most of her life and done all
her writing in England is Irene Osgood, who came here as a very
beautiful young bride of fabulous wealth, and rented a house which was
one of the shrines of English literature—Knebworth, the home of Bulwer
Lytton. She did not write _Servitude_, the book by which she will be
remembered, there, but at Guilsborough, in Northamptonshire, another
seat which she took for the hunting.
Yet another American authoress, who was also young and beautiful when
she came to England, was Amelie Rives, who was at that time wife of J.
A. Chanler, a great-grandson of the original Astor, but is now Princess
Troubetzkoi. The daughter of a Virginian country gentleman, she simply
leapt into fame with a book called _Virginia of Virginia_, which took
the Americans by storm. She was irresistibly clever, and very
striking-looking, with her pale gold hair, clear dusky complexion, and
big blue eyes.
Gertrude Franklin Atherton, a remarkable-looking Californian with the
same pale gold hair and rather the same complexion as Amelie Rives,
whose mother was a great-grandniece of Benjamin Franklin, was at one
time a very frequent visitor of ours. She was a long time getting her
recognition, and then suddenly leapt into her full fame. But those who
used to meet her socially knew from the first that she was a woman of
commanding intellect. She had an odd trick of wearing a quill thrust
through her hair.
Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson are among my oldest literary friends. I
made Williamson’s acquaintance when he was sub-editor of the _Graphic_,
and asked me to write an illustrated article on Adam Lindsay Gordon.
Alice Livingston was an American girl, who came over to England to spend
a year with some friends, and has never been back in her own country for
more than three months at a time since. She had a letter of introduction
to C. N. Williamson, who introduced her to a number of London editors,
and thus gave her a chance of success in story-writing. After their
marriage she wrote many serial stories, some of which appeared in book
form; but the first great “Williamson success” was _The Lightning
Conductor_, suggested by their earliest motoring adventures in France
and Italy. C. N. Williamson having expert knowledge as a mechanical
engineer (he intended to be one, before he determined to become a
writer), it was easy to mingle amusing mechanical details of motoring
with the story, a feature which appealed to lovers of automobiles in the
days, ten or eleven years ago, when the sport was an uncertain
adventure.
They both love story-telling—Mrs. Williamson used to “print” stories
when she was six years old, before she could write—and have written a
good many popular travel novels since _The Lightning Conductor_. They
love also to see the far corners of the world, though they contrive to
spend two or three months each winter in their Riviera house, and a
month or two in summer among their friends in London.
Next to travelling, they love to build houses, and make them beautiful.
If they see some land on a hillside with a splendid view, they can
hardly resist buying it, and planning exactly the sort of house which
ought to exist there. This means that they sell their last house, and
begin another, with a different sort of garden, but there must always be
a bull-dog in it, rejoicing in the name of Tiberius, or “Tibe.”
Madame Albanesi, one of the most successful novelists of the day, and
wife of the well-known musician, is an old friend of ours. She had long
been one of the most successful writers of serial fiction in popular
journals, but it was not until after her marriage with Signor Albanesi
that she turned her attention to novels—one of the earliest of these
books receiving remarkable reviews. She conceived the idea of
advertising these reviews herself, with the result that she was
approached by a number of leading publishers for her next book, and
happily followed with the book which established her name—_Susannah and
One Other_, a book which has been running for over ten years, and is
still selling. The book-reading public only required to have its
attention adequately drawn to her novels, to see what admirable stories
they were—faithful to life, pulsing with human nature.
I asked Madame Albanesi what first made her write. She said that she
could not remember when she had not tried to write in some form or
other, and that happily for her, when she was quite a girl circumstances
threw her into a circle where her gift of imaginative writing was warmly
encouraged, and opportunities were found for turning this gift to the
most satisfactory results. I remember Madame Albanesi telling me that an
interesting fact in connection with her earlier writing was that her
imagination was so fertile that she used—before she was twenty years
old—to keep three or four serials running at the same time. She never
had less than two going at once, and wrote them in instalments from week
to week, and never took a note. Everything was published anonymously,
and a new serial would begin before the old one was finished. Madame
Albanesi regards her serial work as being the very best training for
telling a good story.
I ought to have mentioned earlier, since she belonged to that
generation, John Strange Winter, a shining light in Bohemia at the epoch
of which I am writing. She made her first success when I was at Oxford,
with _Bootles’ Baby_, and _Hoop-la_, but she had lost her vogue before
we went to live at Addison Mansions, though her name remained a
household word, and she continued to publish a number of popular books.
She was then living in an old house at Merton near Wimbledon, but
shortly afterwards came to live at West Kensington, because she found
Merton too far out.
She was a woman of inexhaustible energy, and had a very kind heart. She
was exceedingly good to young authors and journalists; she made their
cause her own; she welcomed them to her house, and visited theirs. She
was a sister-in-law of George Augustus Sala. She was unfortunate in
losing her public; she would have it again if she were alive now. But at
that time a wave of preciousness and morbidness, which left her
stranded, was passing over the country.
“George Egerton” and “Roy Devereux,” very pretty and clever women, were
at the top of that wave among women, the former with books like
_Keynotes_, the latter, and George Egerton’s beautiful sister, Miss
Dunne, with brilliant and virile journalism in the _Saturday Review_,
the _Pall Mall_ and elsewhere. Lane was their publisher, Beardsley was
their illustrator, H. G. Wells headed the list of their male rivals,
followed by Arthur Machen, H. D. Lowry and others. I have all their
books—such slim books for novels. Fisher Unwin had another school of
them, headed by John Oliver Hobbes, as daring from the sex point of
view, but lighter in touch, which he published in long slim books with
yellow paper covers at eighteenpence each. _Some Emotions and a Moral_
came out in this series, which I heard some one ask for at Smith’s
Library quite seriously as _Some Morals and a Reputation_. These were
Wells’s _Time Machine_, _Stolen Bacillus_, and _Wonderful Visit_ days.
I asked George Egerton, who was in camp at Tauranga during the Maori war
as an infant, and as a child was in her uncle Admiral Bynon’s fleet
while he was bombarding Valparaiso, and who I knew was intended for an
artist, what had made her turn writer. She told me—
“Why I wrote? Because I had to. Why I wrote as I did? Because I felt
woman could only hope to do one thing in literature—put _herself_ into
it. Write not in breeches, but in corsets. That I took the name of
George Egerton was partly because I did not think any publisher would
take stories of that kind written by a woman, partly to see if my sex
would make itself felt. _Keynotes_ went into seven languages in two
years. I am not dead abroad. At the Goethe Centenary in Weimar the Dr.
Professor who gave the lecture on literature of the century, spoke of
Rudyard Kipling and George Egerton as the two who had introduced a new
note, a new method, into English literature ‘in our time.’
“I gave up writing books when I found that authors are ‘unsecured
creditors’—not worth the candle unless one can reel off popular stuff. I
can’t. I go to America with plays. I make any money I make there. I
shall arrive here too. I am doing a big book now, and I am starting a
book of recollections. If one attaches credence to the fortune-tellers,
I am to live to be an old woman. It might be amusing, if only to
demolish the men and women of straw one has seen lauded to the skies, in
one’s memory.”
Marie Belloc, who had not then married Lowndes of _The Times_, was a
constant visitor. She belonged very much to the Idler and Vagabond set
of which we saw so much, and was already longing to write novels, though
many years were to go by before she was able to fulfil her wish. She is
a sister of Hilaire Belloc, the free-lance M.P. of the last Parliament,
one of the wittiest writers of the day, who has the further distinction
of having been a driver in a French artillery regiment and a Scholar of
Balliol afterwards. It should be added that he was twenty-three when he
went up to Oxford.
Marie Stuart Boyd, of the same set, the wife of the well-known _Punch_
and _Graphic_ artist, did not begin to publish her delightful books till
nearly ten years later, though she was a regular contributor to
important Reviews.
Mrs. Frankau (“Frank Danby”), who came with her sister, Mrs. Aria, had
at that time dropped writing for engraving, and did not resume it till
some years later. _Pigs in Clover_, and her other successes in fiction,
belong to a much later date.
One of the most daring and witty of women writers, Violet Hunt, was
constantly at our at-homes. With a father who was a well-known artist, a
Fellow of Corpus Christi, Oxford, and a friend of Gladstone’s, and a
mother who wrote novels of repute; and brought up in the brilliant set
which gathered round Burne-Jones and Ford Madox Brown, it was no wonder
that she should be extraordinarily clever, and no one was surprised when
she produced scintillating books like _The Maiden’s Progress_ and _A
Hard Woman_. South Lodge, their house on Campden Hill, was a Mecca for
distinguished literary people. It was there that I first met Andrew
Lang, Robert Hichens, Somerset Maugham, Katherine Cecil Thurston in a
crowd of writers of high calibre. It was one of the few houses where
Lang was natural without being rude.
I now come to a group of able women writers whom I met at clubs like the
Pioneers and the Writers’, though they mostly came often to our at-homes
afterwards. First among them I may place that brilliant and delightful
writer, Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick, who published her early novels under the
pseudonym of “Mrs. Andrew Dean.” Her husband, Mr. Alfred Sidgwick, is
the author of well-known works on logic, and one of the earliest of the
modern school of philosophers, known as the Pragmatists. He is a cousin
of Mr. Henry Sidgwick (d. 1900), the distinguished Professor of Moral
Philosophy at Cambridge, who married Mr. A. J. Balfour’s sister, the
guardian spirit of Newnham.
Mrs. Sidgwick’s novels have always been full of verve. She has steeped
herself in the literature of three countries, and until she married knew
the world better from the Continental point of view than from the
English. But her marriage took her amongst English people, so that she
has had unusual opportunities of understanding two nationalities
intimately. In those days we saw a good deal of her because she lived at
Surbiton, but for many years past she has lived in Cornwall.
At the same club I met Miss Montrésor, whose delicate health has
prevented her seeing much of London literary society, though she lives
in South Kensington. With her _Into the Highways and Hedges_ she leapt
into fame at a single bound. Miss Montrésor is a genius. Her intuition
enables her to describe with fidelity phases of life with which she
cannot have had any acquaintance. When she wrote _Into the Highways and
Hedges_, my friend Sheldon, who was the London manager of D. Appleton &
Co., gave me five pounds to write a careful opinion of it, to see
whether his firm, to whom it had been offered, should publish it or not.
I gave them a long opinion, in which I told them that they could not
possibly refuse such a book. But they did refuse it, because almost any
American publisher will refuse any novel which is not by a novelist who
has already made a great name. Some other New York firm took it, and it
was the book of the year in America.
At a club, too, I met Annie Swan (whose husband, Dr. Burnett Smith, was
last year Mayor of Hertford), twenty years and more ago, a woman
completely unspoiled by success, which came to her early and without
stint, and remained. She stands at the very head of the writers of the
wholesome school of fiction. In those days she lived at Hampstead, in a
house called “Aldersyde,” after the novel which gave her her fame. She
is one of those people whose obvious sincerity charms you the moment you
meet them. I don’t know whether she is interested in spiritualism, but I
did on one occasion meet Florence Marryat and Dora Russell together at
her table.
Of Florence Marryat (Mrs. Francis Lean), the daughter of the immortal
Captain Marryat, I saw a good deal at one time. She was a very regular
attendant at a dining club called the Argonauts, which Frankfort Moore
and I got up because the Vagabonds would not then admit ladies to their
banquets. Spiritualism played an immense part in her life. She was also
a very voluminous writer. I remember her telling me that she had written
more than seventy novels. She was a tall, striking-looking woman, whose
eyes suggested intimacy with the occult.
The Leightons, who are among my most valued friends, I certainly met at
some club—Marie Leighton is the best newspaper serial writer of the
day—a story-teller born, and, like her husband, a great authority on
dogs. One at any rate of her thrilling stories has been dramatised and
others are sure to follow, as the managers of the melodrama theatres
recognise how immensely dramatic her stories are.
“Lucas Cleeve,” another frequent visitor at our house, wife of Colonel
Kingscote, and daughter of Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, M.P., who made with
Mr. Balfour, Lord Randolph Churchill, and Sir John Gorst the celebrated
Fourth Party, had an extraordinary facility for writing novels of a
certain merit, and, like her father, was a great linguist and traveller.
Sir John Gorst introduced me to her. I met him at Castle Combe, which
now belongs to him, and then belonged to his brother, the late Edward
Chadwick Lowndes. I was staying with my brother-in-law, Robert Watkins,
the agent of the estate, which is one of historical interest, for its
archives prove it to have been irretrievably wasted by Sir John
Fastolfe, Knt., Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who had married the widow of the
last of its Scroop owners, and managed the estate for her. He built the
chancel arches in the church, fine and early Perpendicular. The Scroop
and Falstaff house has long since disappeared, while the Cromlech of a
British Chief, and a Roman Camp, continue almost perfect. I was often
the guest of Sir John’s eldest son, Sir Eldon, when I was in Egypt, and
his younger son, Harold, and his charming wife, have been our intimate
friends for many years. Mrs. Harold Gorst, who was a Miss Kennedy of the
famous Shrewsbury School family of scholars, has an extraordinary
knowledge of the life of the poor in London, and her novels reflect it
with a fidelity which should have won them ten times their circulation.
Quite a prominent place among the authoresses who used to assemble on
those evenings at Addison Mansions is occupied by novelists who began as
my secretaries, and whom I trained to write.
I have been singularly fortunate in my choice of them. Not only have
they given me so much satisfaction as secretaries that I have only had
to send one away for inefficiency, and none for any other reason, but
they have made such good use of the opportunities they had for observing
the ways of book-writing, that in the twenty-seven years since the first
came to me, they have between them had more than twenty-seven books
published and paid for by leading firms like Hutchinson, Heinemann,
Methuen, Hurst & Blackett, Constable & Co., Chatto & Windus, Eveleigh
Nash, Mills & Boon and Stanley Paul.
My first secretary was Norma Lorimer, who came to us in her teens,
before our memorable journey to America, Canada and the Far East. She
has accompanied us on every important journey we ever made in Europe,
Asia, Africa and America since I returned from Australia. When
typewriting came in, she ceased to be my secretary, because she was
never a typist, but she continued to live with us, and act as hostess,
since my wife’s health has never permitted her to undertake the strain
of managing the large literary, artistic and theatrical receptions which
we held weekly for a good many years.
During that period Miss Lorimer made an immense circle of friends, which
included practically every one in our acquaintance. Men like Fisher of
the _Literary World_, and Robert Barr urged her to write a book for
years before she could persuade herself to put pen to paper, though
seeing so many of my books put together, and transcribing when they were
finished, had familiarised her with the process of book-making, and
though she had assisted me at every stage, in sight-seeing with an
armful of guide-books, in making copious notes, in studying all the
available authorities on the subject, and in digesting and arranging the
information if it was a travel-book, or in giving her advice about the
story if it was a novel. She must have been with us quite ten years
before she published her first book, _A Sweet Disorder_. Since then,
besides the two books in which she collaborated with me, _Queer Things
about Sicily_ and _More Queer Things about Japan_, she has brought out
_Josiah’s Wife_, _Mirry-Ann_, _By the Waters of Sicily_, _Catherine
Sterling_, _On Etna_, _By the Waters of Carthage_, _The Pagan Woman_,
_By the Waters of Egypt_, _By the Waters of Italy_, _The Second Woman_,
_A Wife out of Egypt_, and _By the Waters of Germany_.
It gives me great satisfaction to think that she was my pupil in
writing, for most of these books will stand reading again and again for
the admirable sayings and analyses of life with which they are strewn,
as well as for their stories, and the knowledge displayed in them. They
are redolent with the atmosphere of the Isle of Man, Japan, Italy,
Sicily, Tunis and Egypt, and one of them, _Josiah’s Wife_, contains a
brilliant picture of America, where she lived with us for nearly three
years.
Miss Lorimer comes of a very clever family. Her uncle, James Lorimer,
was Professor of International Law in the Edinburgh University, and
wrote some of the standard books upon the subject. He was a man of
international reputation. His hobby was the restoration of Kellie Castle
in Fifeshire, which he acquired from Lord Kellie and Mar, and, as the
Latin inscription sets forth, “rescued it from the bats and the owls.”
Living at Kellie was the inspiration of three of his clever children.
His youngest son, now Sir Robert Lorimer, has become the most famous
living Scottish architect. He had the high honour of building the Chapel
of the Knights of the Thistle in St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh. His
second son, J. H. Lorimer, the Scottish Academician, is recognised as
one of the soundest painters of the day. One daughter, Lady im Thurn,
caught the trick of the beautiful moulded plaster ceilings at Kellie,
done by a wandering band of Italian artists in the seventeenth century,
and was entrusted with the execution of the moulded plaster ceilings
which Lord Bute had made for his House of Falkland. Another daughter is
an author, and the other married Sir David Chalmers, the only man who
ever earned two pensions as Chief Justice of two tropical colonies.
My next secretary was Miss Maude (Mary) Chester Craven, who had
quarrelled with her stepfather, and was seeking to make her own way in
the world.
She was a singularly clever girl, very much interested in literature,
with a great sense of humour, and a great idea of “copy.” Had she come
to me later, when I was writing the various volumes of _Queer Things_
series, I should have been able to make better use of her help. She was
most generous and self-sacrificing, and when she had thrown herself into
the subject, you could hardly get her away from the papers. And she was
very well read on certain subjects.
A few years after she left me she wrote an excellent book called _Famous
Beauties of Two Reigns_. Since then she has found a niche all to herself
in book-producing—teaching people who have led interesting lives, and
have good stories to tell, but have had no literary experience, how to
put their biographies together and editing them herself. The books
produced in this way have proved some of the greatest sensations of our
times. Lady Cardigan led off, followed by the adventurous ex-Crown
Princess of Saxony, and Lord Rossmore’s racy recollections came as an
_entr’acte_ to the drama of Meyerling as narrated by Countess Larisch.
Editing these books has made Miss Craven—she is now Mrs. Charles
ffoulkes, wife of the Master of the Armour of the Tower of London—an
admirable raconteur, and she told me that the late M. Charles Sauerwein,
directeur of _Le Matin_, had offered her a large sum to write her
reminiscences of her “sitters,” but conscientious scruples prevented her
from accepting the tempting offer, as to disclose all she knew would
have caused trouble in London and elsewhere.
The ex-Crown Princess of Saxony, for instance, was a most ingenuous
person, who would have written a chapter, had Miss Craven permitted her,
on “why the royal honeymoon bored her to tears,” and much more that
would have caused endless scandal and heartburnings to the Saxon court.
“Our Louise,” as she was termed by her subjects, had a positive mania
for cleanliness, and she told Miss Craven that once when she was
travelling with her mother the water supply gave out and she was in
despair how to wash her hands. But necessity originated a brilliant
idea, and at the next stop Louise rushed to the buffet, and returned
with a waiter staggering under many bottles of mineral water, with which
she performed her ablutions. “Surely,” remarked the Grand Duchess of
Tuscany, “there is no accounting for your vagaries, Louise!”
Miss Craven asked the Princess what she most desired to do when the
dullness of palace life obsessed her. “To post a letter in a pillar-box
like any one else,” was the reply. Once, coming from the Continent, she
overheard some fellow-passengers discussing her rather freely, and
entering into the spirit of the adventure, Louise joined in the
conversation, and for once saw herself as others saw her. “Well,” said
she, as the train slowed into Charing Cross, “you’ve had an opportunity
of meeting that terrible woman—I am the ex-Crown Princess,” and when the
horror-stricken occupants of the compartment saw her name upon her small
luggage, they realised that the pretty, vivacious, fair woman was none
other than the former wife of the King of Saxony.
Lady Cardigan (whose recollections “Labby” described as a classic)
disliked the blue pencil, for she saw no reason why you should not say
what you like in a book. She was a most brilliant anecdotist, and Miss
Craven said she could tell good stories for a fortnight without
repeating herself. One, which related to a well-known Bacchanalian
member of the aristocracy, is worth recalling. The gentleman in question
once kissed a pretty housemaid, who made a decidedly original protest.
“I wonder, my Lord,” said the girl, “that a nobleman like you don’t
drink champagne. Brandy do colour your breath.”
Lady Cardigan held the opinion that sauce for the goose was sauce for
the gander. “Men fall in love with ballet-girls, barmaids and servants,”
she once remarked, “so why shouldn’t women fall in love with men of
inferior station if it amuses them?”
Maude Craven could tell of flutterings in the dove-cotes of Mayfair, and
of many skeletons in ancestral cupboards whose bones must have rattled
in dread of what Lady Cardigan’s marvellous memory could have recalled
about them.
The lady who followed Miss Craven had only been with us for a short time
when the doctors told her that she could not live in England. She went
to California and got married. Miss Marie Ivory, who followed her,
married a famous artist.
Miss Ethel Phipps, the next, was with us for several years, and
accompanied us to Italy and Sicily, and inaugurated the system of
tissue-paper scrap-books, which I have found so useful in collecting the
materials for my books of travel. And she was an excellent typist, the
first excellent typist we had had, though I took up the use of the
typewriter quite early. The first I ever had was a Remington which I
bought in 1883 in Sydney from a man named Cunningham who reported law
cases for the _Sydney Morning Herald_. He sold it to me for half the
price he had given for it (I paid him about fifteen pounds, I think),
because the judges would not look at his notes when they were in
typewriting. He had bought the instrument under the idea that the extra
legibility would be received with acclaim. The judges thought that the
machine might not write down what the reporter meant it to—they credited
it with the powers of a planchette, which was then very fashionable.
Miss Phipps wrote a very amusing little book called _Belinda and
Others_, which Warne bought from her and published both in England and
America.
When she left us because she was needed at home, her place was taken by
a very clever and interesting girl fresh from school, who has made a
great name for herself in fiction—Miss Ethel May Stevens, whose pen-name
is Ethel Stefana Stevens. We took her to Sicily almost directly she came
to us, and Italianised her surname into the nickname Stefana, by which
even her own relations grew to call her.
The moment I saw her I was struck by her brilliance and intelligence,
and I did not require to learn that she had carried everything before
her at Miss Douglas’s famous school in Queen’s Gate, to know that she
was much the ablest of the ladies who answered my advertisement when
Miss Phipps had to leave us.
At various times she travelled all over Italy and Sicily with us, and
visited Tunis and Carthage. She was with us for several years, and a
great worker. On her fell the almost incredible labour of typing out and
keeping sorted the immense mass of materials accumulated chiefly from
Italian sources, for the Encyclopædia called _Things Sicilian_, which
forms the bulk of my _Sicily, the New Winter Resort_.
She had studied a great deal before she came to us, and besides a good
knowledge of French and German and music (she played the violin
charmingly), had a strange accomplishment—she spoke Romany, the Gipsy
language, so fluently that when she made up a little, even gipsies took
her for a gipsy. She had learnt it in the New Forest, which was near her
home. She began before she had been very long with us the gipsy novel,
which now, after many years, she has taken up again. It was a story with
a strong love interest in it, but it gave no promise of the admirable
gift of writing which she has shown in her published works like _The
Veil_ and _The Mountain of God_. In the large amount of reviewing which
she did for me—against time, it was true—she had a habit of introducing
stock phrases and introductory periphrases, such as “the worst of the
whole matter was that,” “that redoubtable,” “the venerable form of.” Her
criticisms of books were in judgment very good, but in expression they
were verbose and lacking in distinction. She was always studying in the
fine library which I had collected as a reviewer. Besides gipsy-lore and
music she was especially interested in everything connected with
occultism and amulets, and the Black Art generally, and everything
connected with the Orient. It was in the three excellent chapters which
she wrote for my _Carthage and Tunis_, where they are signed with her
own initials, E. M. S., instead of the E. S. S. she uses now, that Miss
Stevens first showed what she could do when she tried. The chapters are
Chapter VI, Volume I, “The Lavigerie Museum at Cairo”; Chapter XVIII,
Volume II, “Superstition in Tunis”; Chapter XX, Volume II, “A Tunisian
Harem, and the Tombs of the Beys.”
It was when she was visiting Tunis with us that she first heard the
“East a-callin’.” She found it absolutely irresistible. In the short
time that we were there she began to learn Arabic, and acquired quite a
good knowledge of Arab amulets, and the Egyptian amulets in the museum
at Carthage. She afterwards paid another visit to Tunis before she wrote
her memorable book, _The Veil_, one of the most successful novels of its
year.
In search of a fresh Oriental subject, she next went to Haifa, the
Syrian seaport, where she was lucky enough to live in the little colony
which surrounded the present head of the Bahai movement, and to see a
great deal of the inner working of that movement, which is said to count
half the Shia Mohammedans (chiefly Persians) among its secret adherents.
So high an opinion did Abbas Effendi form of her abilities, that he
invited her to stay in his house and gave her a special course of
instruction, which lasted over many months, in the philosophy of the
sect.
Her stay at Haifa also supplied her with the materials for her second
novel, _The Mountain of God_. Since then she has published several able
and successful books, just as _The Earthen Drum_, _The Long Engagement_,
_The Lure_ and _Sarah Eden_, for the material of which she paid two
visits to Jerusalem.
My next secretary, who was with me for seven years, has also had three
books published by leading firms.
It is not by any means an uncommon thing for authors’ secretaries to
become authors. One of the most conspicuous examples is Mary E. Wilkins,
now Mrs. Freeman-Wilkins, who was for a long time secretary to Oliver
Wendell Holmes. I well remember the day when he stopped me in the street
in Boston (U.S.A.), to say, “I have a hated rival. My secretary, Mary
Wilkins, has just published a novel—a much better one than I ever
wrote.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XII
LITERARY CLUBS: MY CONNECTION WITH THE AUTHORS’ CLUB
WHEN we came back from the United States in 1891, besides our wide
American circle, most of whom were in the habit of frequently visiting
England in the season, we soon found ourselves in the heart of a
Bohemian society, which met almost daily at one or other club or
reception. Receptions had become the order of the day among London
literary people, artists and actors. The epidemic came over from America
at the same time as the habit of personal journalising. Certain popular
newspapers devoted columns and columns every week to giving every
species of good-natured gossip about the biographies and home-lives of
well-known people. It was this movement which culminated in the
production of _Who’s Who_. Interviewing was a feature of the day. From
living like hermit-crabs, English authors suddenly began to realise the
value of publicity in the sale of their wares.
They had always in a decorous Victorian way met at the Athenæum Club,
but that did not open its doors at all. The pleasant Garrick and the
Savile had an almost equal dread of literary burglars. The National Club
had only a select few authors who liked its fleshpots. But their younger
rivals saw in receptions a fresh element of interest to attract and
benefit members. The Arts Club, the newly founded Authors’ Club, the
Hogarth, the Savage, the Vagabonds, and the Playgoers, to all of which I
had been elected, were free and fearless in their hospitalities, and
here, and through friends I met in these clubs, I acquired the
friendship of many of the world’s workers.
The Arts Club in those days was a jolly place; charming and
distinguished men could be found dining there almost every night, and
after dinner you played pool with the Royal Academicians, or talked
scandal about the way that artists were elected, and pictures selected,
to the Royal Academy. These were most enjoyable evenings.
At the Hogarth, not far off, the artists who were not in the Academy or
in the Academy set, used to assemble. It is the artist’s habit to work
till daylight is gone, and then to waste his time in conversation or the
billiard-room. The talk, when it was not shop, was all what they call in
theatrical circles “gag.” Some of their shop was quite interesting,
because it ran upon new men and new methods. I liked the latter best.
Artists, unlike authors, are generally more ready to detract than to
praise. They wish to mount over the bodies of the slain; they do not
hold out a hand to those who are lower down the hill. But they were very
kind to each other with money, though they were so unkind to each
other’s work, and none of them seemed to stay at home to read after they
had done their work.
The Authors’ Club had been established recently enough for me to come in
as an original member. The Vagabonds Club, which had been in existence
for a good many years, had not yet expanded into the New Vagabonds Club,
nor had the White Friars organised banquets. The old Playgoers had a
good many literary members, chiefly dramatists or would-be’s. The Arts,
the happy hunting-ground of famous artists, had a few; the Hogarth, the
favourite meeting-place for less favourite artists, had a few more; the
Savage, in spite of its traditions, and the Garrick not many more; and
the editors of the _Idler_ were in the habit of giving teas, which
practically constituted a tea club without a subscription. I never was
at the Yorick.
The Authors’ Club at that time took the lead in receptions. Sir Walter
Besant, who founded it, made it his mission in life to bring authors
together, both for the enjoyment of each other’s company, and for the
defence of their common interests. For these purposes he originated both
the Authors’ Club and the Authors’ Society, which had, in 1891, the same
secretary, and himself for chairman of both, but which were technically
unconnected.
The Authors’ Club owed its success, and especially the success of its
meetings, to Oswald Crawfurd, not less than to Besant himself. Crawfurd
had written a book or two, but he had no eminence in literature, beyond
having put enough money into Chapman & Hall to become chairman of the
company and editor of its review, the _Fortnightly_. But Crawfurd was
rich, and at Eton, and as a Consul-General, he had won the friendship of
half the well-known people in London. He used his influence, his energy
and his money, prodigally, in making the new Club go. He entertained
possible members both at the Club, and in his own home and at favourite
restaurants; he wrote an enormous number of persuasive letters; he kept
the thing going generally. The Club was his protégé as much as Besant’s.
Besant, with whom I had been in correspondence before I went to America,
at the moment that he recruited me for the Club, was interested in
introducing American methods at its meetings, and as I had just returned
from America, the directors made me honorary secretary for this purpose.
I spent three years in America, and during that time enjoyed the
hospitality of all the leading literary and Bohemian Clubs in New York,
Boston and Washington. Washington, as far as I remember, had only one of
any importance, but Boston and New York were rich in them, and I brought
over ideas from them.
I explained to Besant what seemed to me the best features of American
literary gatherings, and he evolved from them a programme for our weekly
dinners at the Authors’ Club; but he thought that reading a paper,
followed by a discussion, or entertaining a great author, whose health
was proposed and who had to make a reply, was more suited to an English
audience than telling anecdotes. I think he was right; telling anecdotes
is not an English art. The American expects boundless patience from his
audience while he elaborates the gist of the story; the longer he
prolongs the agony, the better his audience likes it. He has made a fine
art of story-telling, and does it well enough to take the place of a
curtain-raiser at a theatre. The Englishman only does it in
private—generally to the distress of his family—or introduces it
incidentally into one of his speeches. Except barristers, and
politicians, and clergymen, most Englishmen are afraid of the sound of
their own voices in public, though Englishwomen often do not suffer from
this disability. There is really some justification for the story of the
man who was asked to give a definition of _woman_. He began, “Woman is,
generally speaking....” “Stop there!” said his friend. “If you went on
for a thousand years you would never get so near it again.”
Englishwomen as a class are much better speakers than Englishmen.
We got along comfortably at the Authors’ Club with entertaining eminent
persons, and expecting them to speak in recognition of the compliment,
until Sir Augustus Harris was asked to propose the health of Isidore di
Lara, whose opera he had just presented at Drury Lane. Harris made a
long speech, in which he told us all that he had done for grand opera,
how much money he had spent, what singers, male and female he had
discovered and the rest of it, and was very pleased with himself, and
after about half-an-hour sat down without making the slightest allusion
to di Lara. Oswald Crawfurd, I think it was, who noticed the omission,
and, springing to his feet, proposed the toast.
After this it was felt that we ought to do something to strengthen the
programme, and Besant proposed a form of entertainment which had come up
in the United States since I had lived there. A man with the eminent
name of Luther had hit upon an idea for giving authors a fourth profit
on their works, and making them all contributors to his own profit. He
called it “Uncut Leaves.” Under this name he offered all the most
eminent authors in America a generous price if they would read their
productions in a lecture hall before they were published serially, so
that they received money for recitation as well as for serial rights,
book rights and dramatic rights. I believe it went very well in America
for a while, but in London it was impossible to persuade a Meredith or a
Hardy to listen to such a proposal. To start with, only a funny man had
a chance of getting an English audience to listen to him reading his own
productions.
Later on we did try the anecdotes with some success at informal dinners.
In any case the Authors’ Club dinners and entertainments became a great
success. It was the most popular literary institution of the day, both
at its temporary first home in Park Place, and afterwards at its proper
house in Whitehall Court. Some of the most eminent men were its guests.
Among them, besides great authors, were great prelates, great generals,
great admirals, great politicians, who enjoyed being entertained by the
Authors’ Club better than at public banquets, because they only had to
speak to fifty or a hundred men instead of addressing huge assemblies,
and the formal part of the proceedings lasted such a short time that
they might chat afterwards in the smoking-room or the billiard-room with
their hosts, who always had among them men whose books they had been
admiring for years. While Besant lived he was a great inspiration, and
when he died his place was taken by others who had sprung to the
forefront of literature in the interval.
The Authors’ Club differed from the original Vagabonds Club because only
the Speaker or Speakers of the evening spoke, and the dinner was a more
luxurious one. Most of the literary Vagabonds went to the Authors’ Club
too, but at the Authors’ you met a fair sprinkling of the older authors
like Sir Walter Besant, and, occasionally, Thomas Hardy. The gatherings
were much larger. The Club contained many more members, and the bringing
of guests was much more usual. Besant and Oswald Crawfurd brought a
great many, generally distinguished men.
If the names of everyone present at some of those dinners were published
now, people would be astonished to see what a high percentage of them
have become household words.
[Illustration:
CHARLES GARVICE
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
Among them were John Hay, the greatest man the United States ever sent
us as an Ambassador; the old Lord Chancellor; the old Lord Chief
Justice; Lord Avebury, who invented the “bank-holidays” known as “St.
Lubbock’s-days”; Lord Strathcona, the father of the Canadian Pacific
Railway, and the synonym for patriotic munificence in these latter days;
Lord Wolseley, then Commander-in-Chief; Sir Ian Hamilton, who won the
important battles of Wagon Hill and the Diamond Hills in the South
African war; Sir Edward Seymour, the great Admiral, who won as much
reputation by daring to be a failure on his march from Tientsin to
Peking as he did by all his successes; Admiral Sir William Kennedy, the
wittiest speaker in the navy; Admiral Sir Hedworth Lambton, now Sir
Hedworth Meux; and Admiral Sir Percy Scott, who saved the situation in
the South African war by converting his 4·7 ship guns into field guns to
meet the Boers’ “long Toms”; Bishop Creighton, and Bishop Ingram, of
London; Bishop Gore, then of Worcester; Sir Robert Ball, the astronomer;
Sir Leslie Stephen, the father of _The Dictionary of National
Biography_; Sir Alma Tadema; Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Macaulay’s
nephew, who wrote two of the greatest biographies in the language, _The
Life of Macaulay_ and _The Life of Fox_, and has sons who rival him; Sir
William Ramsey, F.R.S.; two famous brothers, the late Rt. Hon. Alfred
Lyttleton, the greatest of all the giants of sport on record except C.
B. Fry (who made the same impression on Parliament as he had made on his
Eton schoolfellows by his loftiness of character), and his brother
Edward, almost equally great in cricket, the head master of Eton; with
authors like Rudyard Kipling, Ian Maclaren, Doyle, Barrie, Anthony Hope,
Augustine Birrell, and Henry Arthur Jones. There are others equally
eminent, if I could only remember them.
The greatest favourite we ever had among our guests at the Authors’ Club
was “Ballahooley”—Robert Jasper Martin of Cromartin, better known as Bob
Martin—a magnificent-looking Irish squire of the Charles Lever type, who
bubbled over with natural wit.
Bob Martin was a brother of Violet Martin of Ross, and cousin of Edith
Œnone Somerville the lady M.F.H., who collaborated in _Some
Reminiscences of an Irish R.M_. and other famous books of Irish life and
character, and though he did not write much, he had the same limitless
fund of humour.
The first time that ever I took him to the Authors’ Club the late Lord
Wolseley was the guest of the evening, and an admirable guest of the
evening he was—illustrious, interesting, urbane, a brilliant talker. He
and Martin were old friends, and after Lord Wolseley’s health had been
proposed and he had responded in a speech which told us all about his
literary work—like Moltke, he was an author by instinct—Martin got up to
tell us some of his inimitable Irish stories. The first was one about
Lord Wolseley himself. In the days when he was only a colonel, a
sergeant-major came to him for a day’s leave to help his wife in doing
the Company’s washing.
“I’ve been speaking to your wife, Pat,” said Colonel Wolseley, “and she
begged me, whenever you came to me for leave on her washing-day, to
refuse you because you get in her way so.”
The man saluted, and turned to leave the room, but when he got to the
door he turned round and saluted again, and asked, “Have I your leave to
say something, Colonel?”
“Yes, Pat.”
“Well, what I wish to say, sir, is that one of us two must be handling
the truth rather carelessly, because I haven’t got a wife.”
True or untrue, Lord Wolseley did not deny the impeachment.
That same night “Ballahooley” told us of his first experience of the
Castle at Dublin. He was asked to stay there the first time he ever came
to town, and he was not used to town ways. When his jaunting-car pulled
up at the door of the Castle, he told the footman to give the coachman a
drink, which was the custom of the country at Cromartin. The footman
stared at him.
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I heard,” said the footman slowly, and disappeared to fetch
the drink because Martin swore at him so. When he came back, he brought
a liqueur-glass of Benedictine on an immense silver tray. The coachman
took the glass and smelt it—doubtfully.
“It’s all right, Pat, it was made by the Holy Fathers.”
Thus encouraged, Pat drank it off. He made a wry face.
“Don’t you like it, Pat? It’s very good.”
“Oh, it’s good enough,” said the Jehu, “but what I’m thinking is that
the man who blew that glass was mighty short of breath.”
That same evening he told us of the first election to a District Council
which was ever held on his estates. The place was a hotbed of
Nationalism, and Bob Martin was very anxious to have a friend of his,
who was a Conservative, elected on to the Council. So he assembled all
his tenants, and said to them, “I wish you’d elect this man. I’ve never
asked you to do anything for me before, and I’ve made more money out of
one rotten song (‘Ballahooley’) than out of the whole blessed lot of you
ever since I came in for this place.”
Their Irish minds were so struck by this piece of special pleading that
they returned his candidate unopposed.
Bishop Creighton was a very entertaining guest. Just because he was so
great and so potent as an administrator, he could be perfectly natural
when he was dining with a couple of score of authors. One could not
imagine the present Bishop—whom I remember in the days when he was at
Keble—he was a very plucky player at football, which he had learned at
Marlborough—blurting out like his predecessor that the first thing he
asked about a parson who was recommended for a living in his gift was
“Is he a hustler?” Nor can one imagine him fencing with the late Father
Stanton of St. Alban’s, Holborn, over the use of incense.
I wish I had not forgotten the name of that club to which he and Balfour
and I forget what others of the greatest in the land, a dozen or twenty
in all, mostly great politicians or prelates, belonged, who dined
together at the Grand Hotel once or twice a month, and quietly enjoyed
themselves like the _Dilettanti_. I suppose that it exists still.
Bishop Gore was delightfully human the night that we entertained him at
the Authors’ Club. He said that he felt quite shy of replying to the
toast of his health—that generally, when he was speaking, he was
addressing an audience upon subjects on which he was entitled to speak
with authority, and upon which his audience were very anxious to hear
what he had to say, but that on this occasion he was going to talk about
a subject which interested no one, meaning himself, and he was quite at
a loss what to say.
Sir Evelyn Wood, one of the few men who have ever won the V.C. both as a
sailor and a soldier—he was a midshipman before he was a soldier, and
made a famous ride with dispatches—and he has been called to the Bar
since—supplemented his speech in reply to the toast with a selection of
rattling anecdotes.
Sir Ian Hamilton, the General who saved Ladysmith by his victory at
Wagon Hill, described the touch and go of his battle, which saved
Ladysmith, in the slang of ordinary conversation, which made it
extraordinarily impressive. It was very appropriate, too, for slang was
the language of the brief council of war which Sir Ian held with the
Colonel of the Devons before they launched the charge which saved the
day.
One of the most interesting dinners we ever had was the dinner we gave
to Zola in the Whitehall Rooms. We had other guests, varying from
Stepniak, the Nihilist, to Frank Stockton and Bill Nye, the American
humorists. Stockton told one of his characteristic American after-dinner
stories of the “lady or the tiger” sort. Nye was really wonderful. He
said that he himself belonged to an old French family—that the Nye
family used always to spell their name Ney, but they changed it because
one of the family was unfortunate. This allusion to the bravest of the
brave brought the house down, but it took about a quarter of an hour to
explain it to Zola.
Henry Arthur Jones was extraordinarily interesting—Jones, if you catch
him in the right mood, can make a really fine speech, full of
imagination.
One man whom I first met at the Authors’ Club, and whom I afterwards got
to know better, though I have not seen him for many years—Lucien Wolf,
had an extremely original way of working. Besides his ordinary press
work, once a month he contributed a presentation of the foreign politics
of the world to one of the principal Reviews. As foreign editor of a
daily paper, he had the subject at his fingers’ ends, but it troubled
him in a subject so full of tangled threads to break off his work for
meals and to go to bed. Writing that article took about forty-eight
hours, and during that time he hardly left his study; he did not go to
bed at all; like the Admiral who gave them their name, he had sandwiches
brought to him where he sat. He apparently felt no ill-effects from this
tremendous effort of will-power and industry, though, of course, he
looked very tired. His articles on foreign affairs in the monthly
Reviews took the premier place.
Poulteney Bigelow was a character at the Authors’ Club in those days.
The son of an American Ambassador—minister, as they were then called—he
was, for some reason or another, an intimate personal friend of the
German Emperor, with whom he constantly stayed, and of whom he treasured
many anecdotes. He once nearly persuaded the Emperor to dine at the
Authors’ Club. He disappeared for a while, and went out West in the
United States again, from which he came back very full of the shooting
exploits of Theodore Roosevelt, another of his friends.
Bigelow always maintained that the Spanish-American war was the best
thing which ever happened for the relations between Great Britain and
the United States. He said that the garrison, who died like flies in the
Philippines, were mostly drawn from the South-Western States, where the
hatred of England had been liveliest, and their colonial experiences
made them understand how considerate the English were to subject
peoples, and how very inconsiderate subject peoples were apt to be to
their rulers.
We had quite a bevy of leading editors among our members, some of whom
put in an appearance pretty constantly, but it never was a very active
editor’s club; I think they were too afraid of would-be contributors.
William Sinclair, the Archdeacon of London, who was the principal figure
at London functions for nearly a generation, was a pillar of the Club.
He was a constant attendant at its house dinners, and apart from his
influence and position, was a brilliant raconteur. Sometimes, like a
true Scotsman, he told a story against himself, as when he told us why
he was such a popular preacher at the Guards’ chapel—because the men
said that he was the only person who ever preached to them with a voice
like a sergeant-major.
Sinclair had met everybody of any importance in his time. He had one
beautiful story of a Scotsman who suddenly became a Cabinet Minister on
four or five thousand a year, and sported a butler. Sinclair, who was
staying with him, in all innocence asked what the man’s name was, and
his hostess said, “I don’t know; we always call him waiter.”
After Besant’s death, the two men who were most prominent at the
Authors’ Club were certainly Conan Doyle and Anthony Hope—Doyle
especially, because he was for a long time chairman of the Club, and a
frequent attendant at the dinners. I wish I could remember only a tithe
of the interesting and amusing things he said at that dinner-table, for
Doyle always says something memorable in his speeches. But once I was so
interested that I kept a note of what he said written down on my menu
card. It was about his famous pamphlet—_The War; its Causes and its
Conduct_. He told his audience that it came to him in an instant, like
all great things in life, which hit on the head like a bullet. He was
reading some peculiarly diabolical misrepresentations by the German
editors. “Yet these men,” he told himself, “were, in the ordinary
affairs of life, honest men. Many books have been written from our
standpoint; but, in the first place, a German editor cannot buy a book
which costs six shillings or more, and in the second place, he has not
got time to read through it. The only thing is to give him free of cost
something which he can read in an hour. My materials were all to hand. I
know how humane Tommy Atkins was to his enemies, and I had been flooded
with letters on the subject in reply to an advertisement I had inserted
in the newspapers. Half-a-dozen things which have occurred to me in my
life must have been foreordained.
“At a small dinner that night I sat next to ——. I explained my project
to him. ‘How will you get the money?’ he asked. ‘From the public.’
‘Well, I’ll get a thousand pounds for you.’
“Chance had thrown me against the man who knew everything I wanted to
know. He could even tell me the names of the people who could translate
it into the various languages. Five months later I had the book on my
table in twenty languages. Rich men gave their fifty pounds to the
scheme, poor people scraped together their half-crowns to do their
widow’s-mites’ worth for England. I sent that pamphlet to every man in
Europe whose opinion counted. Leyds gave me the cue. It is astonishing
how few people govern the public opinion of the world. In two countries
an honest second edition was called for—Hungary and Portugal. In the
latter, our old ally, there was a most kindly feeling for us, a genuine
anxiety to learn the true facts of the case. In Germany the whole twenty
thousand copies were distributed; twelve thousand of them gratis, and
eight sold. The Swiss actually printed an edition for themselves.”
He told us this on the night that we entertained him and Gilbert Parker
in honour of their knighthood, and he told us how that morning a letter
of congratulation from his gunsmith had arrived, addressed to “Sir
Sherlock Holmes.” The best thing he ever told us about _Sherlock Holmes_
was its fate when he made a play of it, and sold it to a famous actor.
The actor stipulated that he should be allowed to alter it as much as he
liked, and when Doyle went to the rehearsals, he found that there was
practically nothing of his play left except the title. That was all the
actor really wanted to buy; he had made his own play out of the Sherlock
Holmes stories before he went to Doyle.
It was at an Authors’ Club dinner that Hall Caine made his awful
disclosure about Londoners’ insides. He said that no family could live
in London for more than three generations unless its members went away
for a change of air, and that the smoke-charged state of the atmosphere
turned their insides from a healthy red to a slaty black. It was that
same night that he recited his poem “Ellan Vannin” to us.
I remember, in the early days of the Authors’ Club, J. M. Barrie telling
the Club a story in the American story-teller’s fashion. I don’t suppose
for an instant that it had actually happened. I expect it was just a
_ben trovato_, but it was none the less amusing. He apologised for being
late. He had been to the wrong club. He had never been to the Authors’
Club before, he said (though he was a member of the committee), so he
asked a policeman the way. From the way in which he pronounced the word,
the policeman thought he meant Arthur’s, which was quite near the
Authors’ Club when it was in its temporary premises in Park Place. When
he got there he found it a very grand place, he said. The club porter
looked him up and down, and said “The servants’ entrance is round the
corner.”
It took the moral courage of a Scotsman to tell that story—true or
untrue. It was inimitably funny, told in the broad Doric of _The Little
Minister_.
Jerome actually had an experience of this sort in New York. But it was
not due to the obtuseness of the club porter. He received a straight-out
invitation from the servants of one of the great New York clubs to spend
the evening with them. I suppose they have their story-tellers’ nights
like the members. He said that he never enjoyed himself more in his
life.[3]
Footnote 3:
The Authors’ Club, before it was reconstructed, contained a number of
very representative members. Among them were Sir Walter Besant, Conan
Doyle, Frankfort Moore, Hall Caine, Lindsay Bashford, R. D.
Blumenfeld, F. T. Bullen, W. L. Courtney, S. R. Crockett, Sir Michael
Foster, secretary of the Royal Society, J. Foster Fraser, Sydney
Grundy, Charles Garvice, F. H. Gribble, H. A. Gwynne, the editor of
the _Morning Post_, Major Arthur Griffiths, Rider Haggard, Cutcliffe
Hyne, Anthony Hope, Clive Holland, Joseph Hocking, E. W. Hornung, Sir
Henry Irving, J. K. Jerome, Henry Arthur Jones, Edward Jenks, who
wrote that famous book _Ginx’s Baby_, and was once M.P. for Hull,
Rudyard Kipling, Otto Kyllman, Archdeacon Sinclair, Norman McColl,
editor of the _Athenæum_, Prof. Meiklejohn, father of the V.C. who was
killed in putting a horse that could not jump at some railings in the
Park to avoid running over a child; A. W. Marchmont, Bertram Mitford,
J. Eveleigh Nash, Gilbert Parker, Barry Pain, J. M. Barrie, Max
Pemberton, Sir J. Rennell Rodd, British Ambassador at Rome, Morley
Roberts, Algernon Rose, who reconstituted the club, Bram Stoker, M. H.
Spielmann, Prof. Skeat, the great etymologist, H. R. Tedder, the
librarian of the _Athenæum_, Herbert Trench, Horace Annesley Vachell,
W. H. Wilkins, Percy White, Lacon Watson, Horace Wyndham, and others.
But the Club could never rise much above three hundred members. Many a
time have G. Herbert Thring, the secretary, and I discussed with our
board, consisting from time to time of Besant, Oswald Crawfurd, Lord
Monkswell, Tedder, the literary executor of Herbert Spencer, Conan
Doyle, Anthony Hope, Hall Caine, Frankfort Moore, Morley Roberts, and
Percy White, projects for bringing in more members. The change from the
temporary premises in Park Place behind St. James’ Street, to the
pleasant rooms overlooking the river, did something for us. But we were
faced by a dilemma, which was that we had to widen the basis of our
membership to get enough members to pay the huge rent of the premises,
which we had taken for a term of years. If, instead of having these
premises, we had hired a reading-room, and a smoking-room, and a
dining-room in a hotel, we could have got the accommodation for a
hundred a year, and as only a tithe of the Club ever used it, except on
the nights when they were brought together by notice for the Club
dinners, any premises would have been large enough; the hotel would
always have lent us a room of any size which we could fill for a dinner.
The Whitefriars principle would have suited us admirably, and the Hotel
Cecil would have made a good venue. But we had these premises on our
hands, and we wanted a larger membership, not to fill them, but to make
financial arrangements easier. I myself in my time enlisted no fewer
than a hundred members for the Club. But that did not fill up the
wastage.
Thring saw the need of widening our basis as clearly as I did, but we
never could carry our board with us to make an enlargement of the
franchise sufficiently drastic, because they wished to be guided by the
feeling of the men who used the Club most, and their feeling was
decidedly against it—mainly, I believe, because they thought that the
extra members we wanted to relieve the finances would make the Club too
full to be restful. So in one way and another the old Club was drifting
on to the rocks when Algernon Rose (with Charles Garvice as his
chairman, and Cato Worsfold as honorary solicitor) took the matter in
hand as honorary secretary. I did not see the throes. I was out of
England on one of my wander-years.
Rose, with a clear-sighted policy, boundless energy and self-sacrifice,
and inexhaustible tact, not only pulled the Club out of the fire, but
has made it one of the most flourishing organisations in London, with
two hundred town members, three hundred suburban members, five hundred
country members, and six hundred oversea members. He could easily have a
thousand town members if he wanted them, but the town membership is
strictly limited to two hundred, and the suburban to three hundred,
because that is the limit of habitués which the premises can
accommodate. Unfortunately you can’t have five-day members at an
Authors’ Club like you do at a Golf Club.
And nowadays members use the Club in a way they never did when I was the
honorary secretary and we exhausted our ingenuity in efforts to make the
club more inhabited through the week. The increase of attendance at the
Monday night dinners is one of the most wonderful things of all. Week
after week they have enormous dinners, and Rose provides a brilliant
succession of famous guests of the evening. The other Tuesday I read a
report of an Authors’ Club dinner in the _Daily Telegraph_ which filled
three columns.[4]
Footnote 4:
Among the guests of the evening at the Authors’ Club since Rose took
it over have been musicians like Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir
Walter Parratt, Sir Frederick Cowen, Mr. William H. Cummings, Sir
Hubert Parry; supreme scientists like Sir George Darwin, F.R.S., Sir
Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., Sir William Ramsay, F.R.S., Sir William Crookes,
F.R.S., Prof. Schäfer, F.R.S.; great lawyers, like Lord Chancellor
Halsbury, the late Lord Chief Justice, and Lord Justice Fletcher
Moulton; men who have been great outside the Empire like Sir Robert
Hart, and Dr. G. E. Morrison of Peking, and Mr. F. C. Selous, the
mighty hunter; great politicians, like Lord Milner, and Lord Wemyss;
great explorers, like Sir Ernest Shackleton; great artists, like the
late Sir Hubert von Herkomer; distinguished foreigners, like the
American Ambassadors, Whitelaw-Reid and Page; well-known literary men,
like Harold Cox, secretary of the Cobden Society, Maarten Maartens,
Sir Owen Seaman, Sir Sidney Lee, W. B. Maxwell; and great actors, like
Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree.
The Club retains practically all its old outstanding names, including
that of Thring. Thring for many years was the Authors’ Club personified.
He not only conducted its business; he peopled the club. Men went to
lunch there because they knew they would meet Thring. They dropped in
after business hours because they knew that Thring, at any rate, would
be there. He kept the social life of the Club, as typified in the Club
pools, and so on, going, and he was the friend of all the members,
except those who desired to remain unsociable. And, in consequence, he
always had his finger on the pulse of the Club.
The questions of club discipline which came up before the board in its
early days were some of them of the most extraordinary nature. One man
hated hearing clocks tick, and whenever he was left alone in a room
always stopped the clock. Somebody else wished to have him turned out of
the Club, but the Chairman said he did not see how it could be regarded
as ungentlemanly behaviour, and proposed that no action should be taken,
but that we should take it in turns never to leave the honourable member
alone!
The Rev. John Watson, who, under the pen-name of “Ian Maclaren,”
suddenly burst into fame with _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush_ when he was
forty-four years old, was a Liverpool clergyman, the minister of the
Sefton Park Presbyterian Church. He had long enjoyed a reputation in his
circle in Liverpool for story-telling and as a public speaker. His
speeches were as good as his stories, and admirably delivered. His
personal charm was as great as the respect in which he was held. He was
very humorous. He told us one night, when he was our guest at the
Authors’ Club, that his boy at Rugby had said to him, “Father, I suppose
that your books are all right to some people, or you would not be able
to do so much for us. But couldn’t you write something which would be
good enough for me to show the other chaps?”
One wonders if this was the boy who is now the head of Nisbet’s great
publishing house. If it was, how pleased he would be to have the
publication of some of the books that were not good enough “to show the
other chaps!”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIII
LITERARY CLUBS: THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS
AT the beginning the Authors’ Club had no exact rivals, but there were
two institutions, very much intertwined, which came near it in a way—the
Vagabonds Club and the Idler teas. The Vagabonds Club, in its
conception, had been a little coterie of authors who met in the rooms of
their friend, the blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston; but before I came
back from America Marston was dead, and the coterie had been turned into
a small dining club, which used to take eighteen-penny dinners at cheap
restaurants, and in theory drank beer and smoked clay pipes. The
committee included Jerome, C. N. Williamson and F. W. Robinson, and the
Club had among its members, besides those just mentioned, Conan Doyle,
Israel Zangwill, Anthony Hope, Bernard Partridge, Dudley Hardy, Phil
May, Hal Hurst, Rudolph Blind, Pett Ridge, Joe Hatton, Robert Barr,
Coulson Kernahan, W. L. Alden, Hall Caine, Sir Alfred East, E. W.
Hornung, Sir Gilbert Parker, J. M. Barrie, Barry Pain, Arthur Morrison,
Solomon J. Solomon, and, of course, George Burgin, the original and
indefatigable secretary.
Of these people Jerome and Barr were editors of the _Idler_, Burgin was
sub-editor, Doyle, Zangwill, Pett Ridge and Anthony Hope were its
favourite contributors. The _Idler_, in those days published by Chatto &
Windus, was edited in a flat in Arundel Street, Strand, and there every
week, on Wednesday afternoons, as far as I remember, the editors gave a
tea at which they welcomed their contributors, and any friends whom
contributors chose to bring with them, and the friends of these friends
thereafter. It was like the snow-ball system of selling umbrellas in the
United States.
The teas were of the simplest. I do not think we had anything except
bread and butter and tea, but nobody wanted more; it was sufficient that
here was the common meeting-ground for men and women, where you might,
and often did, meet the ablest young authors of the day. I should say
that the Idler teas were the first literary gatherings in London
attended by Weyman and Crockett, and they certainly were the first
attended by Anthony Hope, W. W. Jacobs and Frankfort Moore.
We received the warmest welcome at the Idlers, because there were many
literary Americans in London just then, and both Jerome and Barr were
insistent that I should bring as many as possible of them to their teas.
At those teas the principal occupation was introducing every freshcomer
to as many people as possible, as the hosts do at American at-homes; and
Jerome made a good many of his arrangements for articles and
illustrations with the people who came to the teas. It was
characteristic of the Idler and Vagabond gatherings to talk shop and do
business without any pretence of concealment.
Hal Hurst and Dudley Hardy were two of Jerome’s favourite illustrators.
Other artists who were there a great deal were Robert Sauber, John
Gülich, Lewis Baumer, Fred Pegram, James Greig, Paxton, A. S. Hartrick,
Louis Wain, who almost always drew cats with human expressions, a little
man named Martin Anderson, who called himself “Cynicus,” and had an
allegorical vein of humour. He won himself undying popularity here by
bringing to one of those teas a charmingly pretty young American, who
was soon to feel her footing as a writer. She had not yet written _The
Barn-stormers_. This was Alice Livingston, who is now known to all the
world as Mrs. C. N. Williamson. Townsend, the present art-editor of
_Punch_; Chris and Gertrude Hammond, who were among the most charming
book-illustrators of that day; Seppings Wright, the naval war
correspondent; Holland Tringham, Melton Prior, Fred Villiers and many
other artists came constantly.
The great advantage of those Idler teas was that women as well as men
could be present, and in those days women were not considered worthy to
be admitted to authors’ banquets, except at the annual function of the
Authors’ Society. Of course, you had the chance of meeting women authors
at the at-homes of the Pioneer, Writers’, and Grosvenor Crescent Clubs,
because they were all ladies’ institutions. But at their entertainments
you met only a very few men of any importance, and not particularly many
women of literary importance, other than journalistic. They were more
interested in women’s movements—the Pioneer might almost be called the
ancestor of the Suffragettes.[5]
Footnote 5:
Among the eminent women whom I remember seeing at the Idlers were
Marie Corelli, Mona Caird, Mrs. Sidgwick (Mrs. Andrew Dean), Mrs.
Campbell Praed, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mrs. Lynn Linton, Mrs. Alexander,
Mrs. Meynell, Miss Montrésor, Lucas Malet and Ellen Thorneycroft
Fowler.
The conversations at the Idler teas were very shoppy. I remember being
introduced to Ellen Fowler as the woman whose witty sayings had long
been the delight of the exalted circles in which she moved, and who had
been induced by the various leading authors whom she knew to write a
book. This is the sort of laudation which we professional authors often
hear and usually distrust. But the book happened to be _Concerning
Isabel Carnaby_, and when I learned that the circle which she had
dazzled was the circle in which the Liberal leaders moved, since she was
the daughter of Sir Henry Fowler, M.P., afterwards Lord Wolverhampton, I
understood that she certainly would have received an encouragement to
write books from the authors and critics who were admitted to Front
Bench Liberal dinners.
Mona Caird, whom we met often at the Women’s Clubs afterwards, did much
for the emancipation of women in those days, for she was not only
clear-sighted and convincing in what she said and wrote, but she had a
winning personality which commanded the sympathies of those who were not
predisposed to share her views.
It was at an Idler tea that I first met George Bennett Burgin, with whom
I was to be so intimately connected for so many years as joint Hon.
Secretary of the New Vagabonds Club. He was the sub-editor of the famous
_Idler Magazine_, and his tact and geniality were constantly in
requisition, for the pugnacity of his chiefs was proverbial, and some of
the best contributors were equally pugnacious.
I forget if it was a recognised part of the proceedings at the Old
Vagabond dinners to have a set subject for discussion. Some one always
did get up and make a short speech, and in a club which had men like
Jerome and Zangwill and Barry Pain to draw on, the speaking was always
witty, unless the subject forbade it. The chief difference was that
people did not discuss the speech by getting on their legs to fire
witticisms at the speaker. They discussed it where they sat, sometimes
talking to each other about it (or anything else), sometimes raising
their voices to question the man who had been speaking, or to argue with
him.
There was much less discussion of the subject than there was talking of
shop. The point of the gatherings was that a number of brilliant young
authors and artists dined together fraternally once a month.
It was a great boon to me suddenly to be received into the intimacy of
some of the busiest and best-known authors and editors and
black-and-white artists of the day, to hear and take part in their
“shop.”[6]
Footnote 6:
This Idler and Vagabond set included, besides those mentioned above,
Anthony Hope, Frankfort Moore, Israel Zangwill, Eden Phillpotts, C. N.
Williamson, F. W. Robinson, Joseph Hatton, Coulson Kernahan, George
Manville Fenn, G. A. Henty, W. Pett Ridge, H. G. Wells, Frederic
Villiers, Henry Arthur Jones, Francis Gribble, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur
A. Beckett, William Watson, John Davidson, H. Breakstad the Norwegian,
and Carl Hentschel, the founder of the old Playgoers Club.
Burgin, the hon. secretary of the Old Vagabonds Club, who was once
private secretary to Sir Samuel Baker in Constantinople and Asia Minor,
and has been a great traveller in recent years, was sub-editor of the
_Idler Magazine_ until 1899. Since then he has given himself up to
novel-writing, gardening and the control of literary clubs. One of his
novels, _Shutters of Silence_, has been through thirty editions. His
books are distinguished alike by uncommon vivacity and by exceptional
skill in using local colour. They are very good indeed, and if they had
their rights would be among the most popular books of the day.
I have made several attempts to discover when the original Vagabonds
Club was actually started, and the best account I have had of it was
from Kernahan, one of the oldest members. I certainly did not join it
till about five years later.
He writes—
“Marston died February 14, 1887, Valentine’s Day. Yes, I was one of
those who visited his rooms, 191 Euston Road. When he founded the Club I
do not exactly know. I fancy it had only just been started when, at his
invitation, I joined in 1886. We dined at Pagani’s and then adjourned to
his rooms, keeping it up very late. After he died the Club practically
ceased, as it was he who ran it. Then I think Herbert Clark proposed
that we should continue meeting and call ourselves the Marston Club—not
a good name, as I always held, for it gave the idea that it was like the
Browning club or society, for the study of his poems, whereas it was
merely a gathering of Marston’s old friends. All the same, lots of
interesting men came to it. His father, Dr. Westland Marston, for one.
So things went on for a long time, and the thing was dropping to pieces
for want of some one to work it, until you came along, put us in the
shop window, and, lo and behold, the old Club became a new force.”
It was not so very long after I joined the Club that it fell on evil
days, not, I hope, because I joined it, but because it contained
Socialists, who are apt to wreck things. The course they took was most
revolutionary. There were two of them on the committee, and they
insisted on having committee meetings, which insisted on having a voice
in the management of the Club.
The Club would not stand it; it transformed itself into a New Vagabonds
Club without the offending members. I took a leading part in the
transformation. I became associated with Burgin in the honorary
secretaryship because I persuaded a hundred well-known men, like
Crockett and Weyman and Reginald Cleaver, to join the Club, and we
retained the old committee, minus the impossibles, and strengthened by
the inclusion of Frankfort Moore and Joe Hatton. And this was a
well-behaved committee, because I do not think it met once during its
whole existence of not far short of twenty years. Burgin and I were the
honorary secretaries and managers, and we used to decide everything,
without even thinking of the committee, who, as reformed, had only one
idea in their heads, which was that they were not to be bothered unless
there was some real necessity for it.
Our most successful dinner, at which about six hundred people were
present, was held in honour of Field-Marshal Lord Roberts—the idol of
the nation. Lord Roberts has a wonderful memory, not only for faces, but
for the records which go with the faces. When I met him the other night
at the Authors’ Society dinner, of which likewise he was the guest, he
took me by the arm, and whispered, “Isn’t _Who’s Who_ getting very fat?”
which was his way of showing that he remembered that I was the author of
_Who’s Who_ in its present form—or, rather, in the form which it bore
from 1897 to 1899, when its figure was not so middle-aged.
That Vagabond dinner to Lord Roberts was in honour of the publication of
his celebrated _Forty-One Years in India_, and the Authors’ Society
dinner to him was also in its honour, though so many years later.
Jerome took the chair to Lord Roberts at the Vagabonds. He was very
interested in _Forty-One Years in India_. He had commissioned me to
write the long review of it in the _Idler_, and I am sure that he and
the Field-Marshal, V.C., though looking at everything from an exactly
opposite standpoint, got on like a house on fire.
The dinner to Lord Roberts was the very largest we ever had, though the
lunches to Sarah Bernhardt and to Sir Henry Irving were about as
numerously attended. Irving made himself perfectly charming, but when he
came to reply to the toast to his health, the audience were confronted
by the curious phenomenon that the first actor in Europe was totally
unable to make himself heard even half-way across the hall, and if they
could have heard what he said, they would have been confronted by the
equally curious fact that he was no speaker. That, however, is
nothing—very few actors can speak, always excepting my friend, Tree,
who, if he is in the mood, brings the house down time after time with
his naïveté.
There were few eighteen-carat dramatic celebrities whom we did not
entertain at the Vagabonds—Irving and Sarah Bernhardt, Wyndham and Mary
Moore, the Trees and Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the Bourchiers and the
Maudes, the young Irvings, and Lena Ashwell, occur to me first.
Sarah Bernhardt’s appearance was a very memorable one. Mr. Balfour was
in the chair. He was Prime Minister at the time, and had important
business at the House of Commons that afternoon. Sarah was
three-quarters of an hour late. I, who had charge of the guests, while
Burgin was making sure that all his orders for a banquet of five hundred
people had been carried out, felt more nervous than I had ever felt in
my life at the slight which was being offered to so great a man. I
racked my brain for adequate apologies, but Mr. Balfour said, with his
perfect manners, “Please don’t worry yourself about that, Mr. Sladen.
Tell me about Japan.”
If Sarah was as great as he was in other respects, she certainly was not
as great in this respect, for a day or two afterwards, T. P. O’Connor
asked Sarah and Mortimer Menpes, and Norma Lorimer and myself, to have
tea with some M.P.s on the terrace of the House of Commons. We duly
arrived—even Sarah was fairly punctual—and were herded in the lobby of
the House, like people waiting to see the editor in a newspaper office,
while a search was made for T. P. O’Connor. He could not be found
anywhere, and a long time passed. I do not know how long it was, but it
seemed years, because Sarah was so angry. She had expected to be met at
the door with due ceremony—perhaps the leaders of both parties, the Lord
Chancellor, and the Speaker—but nobody met her at all, and none of us
could speak French well enough to understand the unmeasured language she
was using about O’Connor. Finally, she lost her temper altogether, and
though she had told me on several occasions that she could not speak
English, she was quite equal to telling us in our own language what she
thought of T. P. Finally, some wholly unsuitable member of the Irish
party—Dillon, or somebody just as gloomy—came, waving a telegram.
O’Connor, it appeared, had been caught in a railway accident coming back
from the Henley Regatta, miles from a telegraph office. As soon as he
got to a place where he could telegraph from, he did telegraph, but
Sarah was not appeased, even though Menpes offered to go to her island
off the coast of Brittany and arrange a Japanese room for her.
I remember a similar contretemps, almost equally amusing, when George
Cawston, one of the directors of the Chartered Company, gave a great
supper at Willis’s rooms in honour of a South African millionaire. He
invited a number of eminent people to meet him—politicians, soldiers,
authors, actors, artists and public people generally, most of whom knew
each other. The millionaire, who was very “swollen-headed,” was
shamelessly late. So, finally, Cawston decided to begin without him. The
people made up parties, and sat down at the various little tables, and
enjoyed the munificent supper, and finally went away not knowing or
caring whether the millionaire had been there or not. They had most of
them never heard of him.
Sarah came to us a year later to a huge afternoon reception, which we
got up in her honour, and she honoured us by giving us a long and
magnificent recitation from _L’Aiglon_ (which she had just produced), in
which she was supported by her leading man.
We entertained other famous soldiers besides Lord Roberts, such as Lord
Dundonald, when he came back from the great exploit of his life, the
relief of Ladysmith, and Sir Ian Hamilton. Cecil Raleigh, I remember,
took the chair to Sir Ian Hamilton, and showed his versatility by making
a really admirable speech. I do not remember who it was who took the
chair to Lord Dundonald, but he told a characteristic story of Lord
Dundonald in his earlier service in Egypt.
When the news of the fall of Khartum reached the army which might have
relieved Khartum, if Sir Charles Wilson had pushed on, taking the risks
as Lord Roberts would have taken them, after the victory of Abu Klea,
the General asked for an officer to volunteer to carry the dispatches to
Sir Redvers Buller at the base. It was necessary to have some one with a
knowledge of astronomy, because he had to find his way across the
desert, to avoid the great loop of the Nile above the Second Cataract.
There were many men who would have risked the dangers of meeting
wandering parties of dervishes, but there was only one of the force who
was not only prepared to take the risk, but possessed the requisite
astronomical knowledge, and that was Lord Cochrane, a subaltern in the
2nd Life Guards, the future Lord Dundonald. He carried out his mission,
and in an incredibly small number of hours presented the dispatches to
Sir Redvers, whom he found sleeping under a palm tree. As soon as he had
delivered them, he collapsed with exhaustion.
He is a grandson, of course, of the immortal frigate Commander, the
fighting Lord Cochrane, the Almirante Cochrane who was the liberator of
South America, and is a distinguished inventor. He invented the pocket
heating apparatus for soldiers to carry when doing sentry work in cold
climates, the extra light carriages used for machine-guns in the Boer
War, and the apparatus for enabling cavalry soldiers to turn out ready
for duty as quickly as firemen.
From time to time we entertained distinguished ecclesiastics such as the
late and the present Bishops of London and the ex-Bishop of Ripon.
Creighton was much the best guest of the three, for he had a most saving
gift of humour.
For some reason or other, on the night that he was with us, at the
conclusion of his speech returning thanks for the way in which his
health has been proposed, he had to propose the toast of journalism,
coupled with the name of the editor of _The Times_. He said, “I do not
know much about newspapers; I read so few of them. I have only one test
for them, and that is their suitability for wrapping up shooting boots.
And, judged by this standard, _The Times_ is the best newspaper.”
It was not easy to get the better of Creighton, with his humour to back
up his wisdom and firmness. But my dear old friend, the late Father
Stanton, who was a frequent visitor to Vagabond entertainments with F.
E. Sidney, once got the better of him, and he was very amusing in
telling the story of it.
Creighton, it appears, went to a service of Stanton’s, because he wished
to wean him from certain ritualistic practices. After the service was
over, they had a talk in the vestry, which was quite cordial, because
Creighton knew the essential greatness and goodness of Stanton’s
character. Stanton, who was very astute and tactful about getting his
own way, and yet avoiding trouble with his Bishop, adroitly kept the
conversation away from dangerous points, and finally the Bishop gave up,
and called for his carriage. Stanton escorted him to the carriage door,
and as he was driving off, Creighton got out what he had come to say.
“I don’t like that incense of yours, Stanton.”
“Nor do I, my lord, it’s wretched stuff—only three and sixpence a pound,
but I can’t afford any better.”
“Do without it, Stanton, do without it altogether,” said the Bishop.
Lord Charles Beresford was another of our guests, and so was Admiral
Lambton. Both of them made a violent attack on _Bridge_, which they said
was sapping the energy of the nation by the awful waste of time to which
it led.
Beresford was very amusing. He said, “The Navy is the finest thing in
the world for a man. If I hadn’t been in the Navy, I should have been in
prison.”
I only once saw Beresford seriously put out, and that was when he had to
speak after that great man, Seddon, the Premier of New Zealand, whose
patriotic attitude about the Boer War counted for so much in making the
democratic colonies support the mother country so splendidly against the
Boers. Seddon, like other New Zealanders I have known, could make a
great speech, but did not know when he had used up all he had to say. In
the first part of that speech for the Vagabonds, he began with great
éclat, and then maundered on and on about “Womman,” as he pronounced her
generic name, while Beresford grew so impatient that when his turn came
to speak he excused himself with a few witty sentences about their
having heard so much good speaking.
Seddon brought two charming daughters with him, and one of them made a
felicitous retort to a maladroit person who condoled with her on her
father’s not having been knighted like the leader of the Conservative
Opposition in New Zealand, Sir William Russell, whose name had appeared
in the Gazette of the day before.
“I don’t mind,” she said; “Billy’s a darling.”
Norman Angell, the apostle of peace, in books like his famous _The Great
Illusion_, and also the _Daily Mail_ correspondent of Paris, was our
guest on one occasion.
The most unexpected turns happened at times. One night we had an
athletic dinner, with C. B. Fry and Eustace Miles for our chief guests,
and Pett Ridge in the chair. There was hardly a word talked about
athletics the whole evening, for Pett Ridge is most interested in work
among the poor, and so are Fry and Miles, and the speeches related
almost entirely to the serious side of the humorist and the athletes.
The world at large did not know how earnest Fry is about good works
until he refused to go to Australia in the all-England Eleven because he
could not leave his work on naval training for boys until a certain sum
was raised for the training-ship. In those days it regarded him merely
as one of the greatest batsmen ever seen, and the only man who had ever
had five blues at the university, and been captain or president of the
university in three different kinds of games. Some of them remembered
too, that he was a Scholar of his College, and got a First. None of
them, I am quite sure, knew that he would have been unable to go to
Oxford at all, because he had no money to go on, except his scholarship
at Wadham, if he had not borrowed the money, and repaid it out of his
own earnings after he left the university. Could anything be more
magnificent than that the man who holds the record of all Englishmen,
and for that matter, that of all recorded men, for achievements in
games, should have paid for himself at the university? Yet there were
some people in the Club that night who expressed their disapproval to me
at the Club’s entertaining a mere athlete!
But there were many more who expressed their disapproval of our
entertaining Christabel Pankhurst as our guest of the evening—most of
them ardent Radicals, who disliked the practical jokes of the
suffragettes upon Cabinet ministers. We Conservatives felt no more
sympathy for people who do idiotic damage, but were more tolerant. I did
not propose the toast, although I was in the chair, and have always
desired to give the vote to women with the proper qualifications. I
called upon an old friend, a very successful barrister, whom I suspect
of being an ardent Liberal, though he is an ardent suffragist—Fordham
Spence—to propose it. He made the kind of points which could not fail to
enlist the sympathies of a popular audience—asking which of the men who
were present would have the pluck to go to prison and starve themselves
for a principle, as these women did. He pointed dramatically to our
guest, a pretty, slim girl, who hardly looked out of her teens, and told
us what she had done. He was the clever advocate all through; he begged
the question almost as flagrantly as Miss Pankhurst herself, when she
got up to reply to the toast.
I prefer to hear the arguments of the suffragists stated in the
dispassionate way in which Mrs. Fawcett states them, pure appeals to
reason and justice, stated without any attempts to draw red herrings
across the trail—in fact, stated by a judge, instead of pleaded by an
advocate. I think they would be difficult to resist. The weak point of
the militant suffragettes is that they not only do things of which
moderate people cannot approve, to attract the public attention, but
they have no consideration for our commonsense; they talk to us like
Socialists talk to a mob in Trafalgar Square, not as a great Scientist,
like Lord Kelvin, would address the British Association. That is the
convincing way.
I do not know if Miss Pankhurst made many converts to the cause that
night; she certainly made many personal friends. An hour or two later I
met her at a supper given by Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Mappin at the Savoy,
and had the good fortune to sit next to her once more. She was off duty
then, and saying that she really must begin to play games again to keep
her “fit” for her work.
Two of the most successful dinners we ever had were to Captain Scott,
the Antarctic explorer, and Ernest Thompson Seton. At the Scott dinner
the great hall of the Hotel Cecil was packed to its utmost limits,
though it was not due to any premonition that he might not come back.
Before Scott perished the world had got into the idea that Arctic and
Antarctic exploration was not really so dangerous as going out with a
friend who was learning to drive a car. But Scott had such an
irresistible personality; he looked the very type of man whose courage
and resourcefulness and indomitable endurance would get him and those
who depended on him out of the tightest place. And he would have got his
party through if the supplies in the hut had been left at their proper
strength. Scott was one of those blue-eyed men who can meet any danger
with a smile, and are absolutely devoid of fear. I never knew a man for
whom I had a more instinctive liking, or to whom I should so naturally
turn for support when facing death. Few men are such an asset to their
race as he was.
Ernest Thompson Seton held his audience as no other Vagabond guest has
ever done. The born naturalist and the natural orator are combined in
him. He made a lecture, which had probably done duty several times as a
lecture, do duty for his personal reply to the proposal of his health;
it did not betray its origin, and yet it was a moving plea for the whole
brute creation; he invested the lower animals, probably unjustly, with
all sorts of human traits and human feelings, and made the audience feel
for them as they feel for the hero or heroine in a tragedy. It was
really wonderful; I never heard such a mixture of ingenuity and
eloquence, or a speech more thrillingly delivered. He is the apostle of
animated Nature.
I was abroad when the Club entertained Lord Curzon and Winston Churchill
and Lord Leighton, but I was present when Lord Willoughby de Broke made
such a popular guest. The position was rather a difficult one; not
having noticed the views which Jerome had been expressing on the House
of Lords to the local yokels, I asked him to take the chair, because he
was the most successful playwright in the club—he had just produced _The
Third Floor Back_—and our guest was one of the best amateur actors.
Jerome’s speech was not marked by his usual verve; like Balaam, he had
come to curse, and he was so won over by the splendid manliness of the
guest that he was unable to do anything but bless. Lord Willoughby de
Broke would doubtless have given us a much more entertaining evening if
Jerome had spoken of him to us as he spoke of his fellow-peers to the
yokels, for no one is so ready with a retort. Who does not remember his
retort at the meeting which he was addressing in favour of Mr. Balfour.
He was saying something in praise of him, when a voice at the back
called out “Rats!” He smiled sweetly—“I was speaking of Mr. Balfour,” he
said, “not of the first Lord of the Admiralty.”
[Illustration:
G. B. BURGIN
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
Later on, at that same meeting, a heckler asked him where he got his
title, and was told “just where you got your d——d ugly face—from my
father.”
He gave us some pretty flashes of wit that night, but not of the
scathing order which makes him one of the protagonists who fight against
Home Rule. With his physical strength and activity, his dauntless
courage, and his power of swaying great assemblages with his speeches,
he is a born leader.
There were few well-known literary men and women in the London of the
time who were not guests of the Vagabonds Club. The best speech we ever
had from a woman author was, I think, from Flora Annie Steel, who,
contrary to the habit of most speakers, explained to start with that she
was likely to make a very good speech because we had taken her
unexpectedly, and she was very angry with the last speaker—whom she
proceeded to mince.
But charming Mrs. Craigie, “John Oliver Hobbes,” made us a very
fascinating one when she was our guest of the evening. That was the
night on which she complained that people persisted in identifying her
with her heroines, especially with the kind of heroine whom a woman does
not wish to be suspected of drawing from herself, like her “Anne” (I
think in _The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham_).
Anthony Hope, who was the next speaker, complained that he had never had
such luck, that he had been hoping ever since he wrote _The Prisoner of
Zenda_ that somebody would confuse him with Rupert of Hentzau, but that
no critic had ever obliged him.
Once, at any rate, he was the guest of the Club, and he occupied the
chair, I should say, nearly every year during its existence. I wish I
had kept a record of the _bons mots_ which never failed to adorn his
speeches. One of them comes to my mind as I write these words; he said
that the reason why England and the United States were not better
friends arose from their inability to understand each other’s humour.
He and Conan Doyle were the mainstays of our chair at the New Vagabonds.
Doyle may have taken it even oftener than he did. He was the chairman we
instinctively chose for a great occasion, like that on which we had Lord
Roberts for our guest, though he did not actually take the chair that
night, for we could rely upon him to say the generous and dignified
words which would express the feelings of the Club, as he did in
proposing the health of Lord Roberts at the Authors’ Society dinner,
when he said that Lord Roberts was the one guest who, short of royalty,
must always take the first place in any gathering of his countrymen, the
first, not only in rank and distinction, but in the grateful love and
veneration of Englishmen.
Doyle was in the chair at the farewell dinner which the Club gave in
honour of Burgin and myself at the Connaught Rooms, and said just
exactly the right things to make us feel very proud, and to voice the
regret of the Club at meeting for the last time. The Club did not
exactly die, because it was amalgamated with the O.P. Club.
Carl Hentschel was a very prominent member of both clubs, and when
Burgin and I were unable to carry on the Vagabonds any longer, he very
kindly came forward, and was willing either to take over the honorary
secretaryship of the Vagabonds, or to amalgamate the two clubs. Finally,
seeing that Bohemians had more dining clubs than they had the leisure to
attend, we decided in favour of amalgamation, and there is some talk now
of the Playgoers combining with them both.
George Grossmith was one of our best members. We had him as a guest, and
he often gave us an entertainment. One of his most felicitous efforts
was when he proposed his own health, and was very sarcastic about
himself. But that was a favourite vein of humour with him. Those who
were at the great party which he and Weedon gave at the Grafton
Galleries will remember the story of the clergyman’s wife who was
getting up a bazaar, and suggested that they should ask George Grossmith
to give them a performance, because he was such a fool—“You can always
get him to do things for nothing,” she explained, and added, “The best
of him is that he can be humorous without being funny.”
She was right about his being generous; that was always characteristic
of George Grossmith.
Bill Nye distinguished himself in an equally original manner when he was
the guest of the evening. It was Independence Day, and he had enjoyed
such a reception from the American colony that he was sleepy, to say the
least of it, before he reached the New Vagabonds. Not one word could the
chairman get out of him during the dinner, but no sooner had the
chairman said, “Gentlemen, you may smoke,” than Nye got up and returned
thanks for all the handsome things which had been said about him. He
spoke at great length, and with the greatest fluency, and it was only
with considerable difficulty that he could be stopped. He is the only
man I ever remember to have come to one of the dinners so tired, though
I have seen others unbend as the evening grew old; and it was entirely
due to the accident of his arriving in London on Independence Day. And,
as poor Phil May said, of course, your tongue does sometimes run away
with you, when you are on your legs.
Arthur Diósy (the son of that Martin Diósy who was secretary of the
Hungarian Revolution), who was chairman of the Japan Society for years,
had talked so learnedly about Japan, and had mouthed the Japanese names
so lovingly, that every one imagined that he had been in Japan for at
least half his lifetime. Most people went further, and, not knowing that
the Hungarians were Mongols who conquered parts of Europe a thousand
years ago, imagined, from the Mongolian type in his features, of which,
as a Hungarian, he was so proud, that he was a Japanese. Even the name
did pretty well if you spelt it wrong. When he did go to Japan for the
first time, and received an enormous welcome from the Japanese
authorities as the founder of the Japan Society, and the practical
originator of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, we, his fellow-members of the
Vagabond Club, gave him a dinner in honour of the event.
I am an original member of the Japan Society, and had the honour of
giving them their opening address in the season of 1912.
We had a very interesting guest in Sir George Scott Robertson, the
doctor who was knighted for his successful defence of Chitral when the
combatant officers were all _hors de combat_. Robertson not only wrote
his name on the golden roll of the besieged who have endured to the end
and who have prevailed, but he gave us one of the best speeches we had
ever heard at the Club. He told us marvels of his other claim on his
country—his exploration of Kafiristan, a country which had kept its
population pure from other strains, and had preserved unique monuments
until, in our own generation, the Afghans began to absorb it, and he
proved himself a great orator, with a well of biblical English flowing
into his impromptu speech.
Sir Edward Ward we entertained for his share in another and yet more
memorable defence, for it was to him, more than anybody else, that
England owes the preservation of Ladysmith. He foresaw what was coming,
and before it was too late got on the track of everything edible and
potable in Ladysmith; he made the horses, which were not going to be of
any use, into chevril, a horsey form of Bovril, and if the siege had
gone on much longer, he would have found a way of making _suprêmes_ out
of old boot-soles. He made the provisions last by his foresight and
administrative capacity, and he was almost as invaluable with his
indomitable pluck and cheeriness. He was for years Permanent Secretary
of War, and it is a mighty pity that he is not Secretary of State for
War, for which his unparalleled knowledge of Army administration and his
robust commonsense would make him the ideal appointment. No detail is
too small for Ward to attend to it; no person is too small for him to
listen to courteously and patiently. He made a great impression on the
Vagabonds, for he has an Irishman’s wit in speaking, and is most
soldierly looking, a man of Herculean build.
Sir George Reid, the High Commissioner of Australia, is one of the best
speakers we had at the Club; he is very witty when he is witty, and from
time to time turns serious with marked effect. I had known him many
years before he came to the Vagabond dinner; I made his acquaintance in
the early ’eighties, when I held the Chair of History in the University
at Sydney, and he was the only Free-trader of any influence in
Australia. Since then he has been the Premier of Federated Australia,
and now most worthily represents the Commonwealth, for he has impressed
on the Government that he is a force to be reckoned with, even where the
colonies are only vaguely affected.
In decided contrast to him was the Princess Bariatinsky—Lydia Yavorska,
the Russian actress who married a cousin of the Czar. We entertained her
as a recognition of her splendid acting in Ibsen’s _Doll’s-House_, where
her foreign accent was no drawback, and her tragic power had scope.
There are other Vagabond dinners which, I remember, went off with much
éclat, though I cannot recall their incidents—dinners to great sailors
like Lord Charles Beresford and Lambton, now Meux, and Shackleton of
Antarctic fame, dinners to great soldiers like Sir Evelyn Wood; dinners
to great artists like Lord Leighton and Sir Alma Tadema and Linley
Sambourne, all, unfortunately, now dead, and J. J. Shannon, still with
us and still young; dinners to great actors like Ellen Terry and Tree,
Wyndham and Mary Moore and the younger Irvings and the Bourchiers and
the Asches and Forbes-Robertson and Lena Ashwell; and dinners to great
authors like Doyle, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Hall Caine, H. G. Wells, Mrs.
Burnett, Jerome, W. L. Courtney and Robert Barr. They were all great
occasions, with two, three or four hundred present, but readers will
wish to be spared the details of dinners to perfectly well-known people
unless they brought out some fresh trait, or some priceless anecdote.
It is to be hoped that the Vagabond dinners will come to life again, not
on the huge and expensive scale which is going out of vogue, but little
meetings of really eminent people gathered at some restaurant in Soho,
to eat a dinner which reminds them of joyous Bohemian days in Paris or
Italy, and to enjoy the pleasures of a general conversation upon the
topics of Bohemia, such as we used to have in the days when we met as
men only (which we will never do again), before we were reformed
Vagabonds.
The Argonauts, a little dining club which Frankfort Moore and I founded,
before the Vagabonds allowed ladies at their dinners, to dine every
Sunday or every other Sunday at Mrs. Robertson’s tea and luncheon rooms
in Bond Street, where we had our club-room, would give a good example to
follow. We seldom had a guest or speeches. A number of well-known people
used to dine together for the pleasure of each other’s company. We left
our places as soon as we had finished dinner, and broke up into little
knots to converse. There you really could see your friends, and
introduce interesting people to each other.[7]
Footnote 7:
The members of this club, as far as I can remember, were: Conan Doyle,
E. W. Hornung, Justin McCarthy, M.P., J. K. Jerome, S. R. Crockett,
Anthony Hope, Gilbert Parker, Oswald Crawfurd, W. H. Wilkins, J.
Bloundelle-Burton, Frankfort Moore, Moncure D. Conway, Rudolf Lehmann,
Edward Heron Allen, Barry Pain, Arthur Playfair, Arthur Diósy,
Reginald Cleaver, G. A. Redford, Lewis Hind, Herbert Bailey, Walter
Blackman, G. W. Sheldon, Edward Elkins, Edgar Fawcett, Louis F.
Austin, Bernard Partridge, John Charlton, Sir James Linton, Mortimer
Menpes, Basil Gotto, Emerson Bainbridge, M.P., Sir J. Henniker-Heaton,
M.P., Penderel Brodhurst, C. N. Williamson, Arthur A’Beckett, H. B.
Vogel, Horace Cox, Grant Richards, Joe Hatton, Percy White, Clarence
Rook, Henry Arthur Jones, Adrian Ross, Herbert Bunning, Judge Biron,
Grimwood Mears, Rudolph Birnbaum, Ben Webster, Mrs. C. N. Williamson,
Flora Annie Steel, John Oliver Hobbes, Florence Marryat, “Iota,” Mrs.
Campbell Praed, Annie Swan, Arabella Kenealy, George Paston, Norma
Lorimer, “Rita,” Mrs. Stepney Rawson, Violet Hunt, May Whitty, Rosalie
Neish, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Mrs. C. E. Humphry, and Mrs. Oscar Beringer.
To these I must add one of the two famous Greenes who were singers; I
cannot find the initial. It will be observed that there was hardly a
person in the club whose name was not well known.
At these Vagabond dinners, the ordinary procedure was for two or three
or four hundred members, male and female, to assemble to do honour to a
famous guest. As soon as dinner was over, the chairman proposed the
health of the King, and made the stereotyped joke about any lady, who
wished, being permitted to smoke. He had this excuse at the Vagabonds,
that many of the men smoked before they had received permission. Then he
proposed the health of the guest, and the guest replied. All guests made
the same jokes about the name “Vagabonds.” I rather think that they must
have been supplied to them by the toast-master at the Hotel Cecil, who
always “prayed silence” with special gusto for “Mr. Hanthony ’Ope,”
because no other name gave him the same chances.
When the guest had finished his speech, which was usually a very good
one, because we chose them for their speaking, unless they were very
eminent, we retired into the adjoining hall for an entertainment of
singing, story-telling and conjuring, which I always thought spoilt the
evening, much as I appreciated the performances of men like Churcher and
Harrison Hill and Bertram, or Willie Nichol, or Reggie Groome, for when
you had a number of eminent people collected together, far the best form
of entertainment was to introduce them to each other. I remember the
positive pain I felt at Lady Palmer’s, when, a few minutes after she had
introduced me to George Meredith for the first time, Johannes Wolff, the
violinist, played a thing of Beethoven’s which was as long as a sermon.
I wanted to hear George Meredith so much more than him, having regarded
him as one of the greatest masters of literature all my life, and
wishing to surrender to the extraordinary charm of his way of speaking.
I sympathise with a famous tenor, who told me that the first time he
heard Handel’s _Messiah_, when they came to the _Hallelujah Chorus_, he
said, “Let’s get ‘oot,’ there’s going to be a row.”
Personally, I used to try and induce the most interesting people
present, except the guest of the evening, to stay outside, and have
whiskies and sodas. They generally hadn’t the good taste to prefer
singing to whiskies and sodas; I hadn’t, either, though I don’t drink
whisky.
But the Hotel Cecil, where we held the Vagabond dinners, was not as bad
as the Savage Club. In the old days there, if you did not wish to spend
your evening glued to one chair, listening to singing, you had to stand
in a tiny bar, the size of a scullery, and hear the same jokes from the
same steady drinkers, just as you would have heard the same songs every
Saturday evening if you had stayed in the room all the time. The Savage
is a much more literary club now, and the accommodation is better
arranged. I do not want to say anything against the old Savage. Those
performances were good enough for anybody to listen to once, even King
Edward VII, who, when he was Prince of Wales, dined there, and said that
he had never enjoyed himself so much in his life. What I objected to was
the constant repetition of the same performance Saturday after Saturday,
without having any place for members to sit and talk if they did not
want to hear the music. But I have been to many Bohemian dinners in my
time, and I have not met many men, except Walter Besant, who confessed
that performances made him feel, as they make me, that he would have a
nervous breakdown if he listened to them for half-an-hour longer. I have
noticed that most men, when they go to a club of this kind, where there
are a number of really eminent people in the room, have no objection to
listening to one vapid song after another, instead of being introduced
to, we will say, Lord Kelvin, or Tennyson, or Sir Henry Irving, and this
though they could have an equally good performance any night of their
lives by paying for a seat in the promenade of a music-hall. When will
people understand that the two sorts of entertainments ought to be kept
separate—that the great object of a literary dinner is for one to meet
men who write, or the people whom all the newspapers are writing about?
You can go to a concert by paying for it; you cannot meet these people
by any other means except introduction, and the hour or two after you
have done eating at a public dinner is all too short a period for the
chance of introduction to the world’s workers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XIV
LITERARY CLUBS: THE SAVAGE CLUB
I WAS for a number of years a member of the Savage Club, and I was an
honorary member there for a long time at an earlier period, when I first
came home from Australia and the waiting list was full.
I sometimes hinted to the then secretary that I had out-lived my month
of honorary membership several times over. His answer was invariably the
same: “Rules are intended to be enforced against disagreeable people.” I
remained an honorary member till I went away to America in 1888. Some
years afterwards, when I returned from America, I became an ordinary
member.
At first I loved the Savage. There were not many author-members, it was
true, who ever put in an appearance, except Christie Murray and Patchett
Martin—Barrie was a member, but he was never there. The Club did not run
to authors. What celebrities there were were chiefly actors and artists.
But it was a club that consisted more of the admirers of the arts than
their professors, men who packed the dinner-table every Saturday night,
and made an enthusiastic audience for the actors and musicians and
reciters, who did “turns” to amuse the company and get their names known
to the public, if they were not already popular favourites, like W. H.
Denny, Fred Kay, Odell, Willie Nichol and Reggie Groome.
I have known the Savage Club long enough to remember Brandon Thomas and
Seymour Hicks being regarded as brilliant amateurs, who never would be
anything more. But both were very favourite performers at giving
sketches accompanied by the piano. Penley was often there, but never
would perform. One of the favourite _jeunes premiers_ of musical
comedy—I forget which—used to sing “I’ll sing thee Songs of Araby” every
Saturday night.
Before I went to America, while I knew hardly any one in Bohemia, and it
was all new to me, I loved those Saturday nights. We had a bad
half-crown dinner, in which I generally sat between quite uninteresting
people—well-off furniture dealers and that kind of thing, who were most
of them, however, keen and intelligent patrons of music and the drama,
and belonged to the Savage for that reason. Most of them, too, were old
members, with a large number of friends at whom they fired good-humoured
banter across the tables. I found them willing to take one into their
good-fellowship in the readiest manner, and occasionally one was
rewarded by finding oneself near an affable celebrity.
But the conversation was seldom in the least bit intellectual. Books
were treated as non-existent in the Savage of that day. There were
hardly any, even in the library, except poems given by the poets
themselves. I was always heartily glad when the dinner was over, and the
fusillade of ordering drinks was over, and the performance began.
The club-house was situated then, as now, in Adelphi Terrace, a fine row
of Georgian houses standing on a sort of marine parade above the bank of
the Thames. If you looked over the railings on the opposite side of the
road, you would expect to find a beach like Brighton’s. I have never yet
looked over these railings, so I don’t know what there is below, but
there must be vaults, which are used for something, under the road, in
such a valuable locality.
The room where we held the dinners and these brilliant club concerts was
only separated by a wall from David Garrick’s dining-room. He made the
mistake of living in the wrong house.
The theory why we dined at 6.30, was that popular actors and singers
could dine with us, and give us a turn before they went to their
theatre. In practice, they very seldom came, unless they were having a
holiday, voluntary or otherwise. But there were always enough of them
“resting” to give us a brilliant evening.
For some little time after dinner the Club did not settle down
sufficiently to make its favourite performers willing to give their
turns. It made too much noise over diluting whisky with soda, and
manœuvring to get the waiter’s attention. This gave the new aspirant his
chance. If he was timid and low-voiced, he did not always get the
attention of the room, but it was not difficult to get the chairman to
call on him. I know by experience how difficult it was to get any old
“hand” to sing first. I called upon the bores first, when I was in the
chair. There were several of them, whom the Club had grown into the
habit of tolerating every Saturday night, so they had earned a right to
be called on. They all said that they had colds, and afterwards, when
the performance was at its height, sent round notes that they felt
better, and would try to give a turn if I called upon them now. But I
ignored the notes so long as I had any one else to call on. They were
mostly reciters; almost any kind of song will go in a club which takes
up a chorus.
Some of the humorous reciters were very good. The club was never tired
of hearing Robert Ganthony give a scene in a Metropolitan Police
Magistrate’s Court; or that youthful octogenarian, Fitzgerald, the
artist, mimicking a rehearsal at Astley’s in the old days; or Odell, the
idol of the Savage, going through his wonderful repertoire. Early in the
evening, Walter Hedgcock, the Crystal Palace organist, would give us the
song he never could publish, because he was blocked by an earlier
setting—Kipling’s “Mandalay.” It was delightful music, and was
eventually published as the “Mousmee,” with words which I wrote for him
in the metre of “Mandalay.” Hedgcock did not mind coming on early,
because he could always pick up the audience with the first bars of
“Mandalay.”
Townley, who was Registrar of Births and Deaths at St. Pancras, I
think—except on Saturday nights and Sundays—was our funniest singer; he
was a natural comedian. The Club always insisted on its favourites
singing the same songs. He had to sing a song called “Hoop-la,” or
something of the kind. Willie Nichol had to sing “Loch Lomond”;
Cheesewright had to sing “The Three Jolly Sailor-Boys”; Denny, who was
afterwards our honorary secretary, did generally give us something
recent from the music-halls. But the old “hands” eyed him half
resentfully while he did it.
I soon came to regard Odell as an oasis, because, though the Club made
him sing and recite the same things Saturday after Saturday, he had a
blessed gift of gag. In the midst of his ballad about the Fleet, the one
Warham St. Leger wrote for _Punch_, he stopped one night to tell us how
he lost his last engagement. It was in a piece based on the wreck of the
_Princess Alice_, the Thames steamer in which so many lives were lost.
Odell played the part of captain of the steamer, and all went well till
one night, as he expressed it, just at the fatal moment, when the people
in the stalls were taking off their coats because they were so
perspiring with excitement, he could stand the tension no longer, so he
took out his watch and said, “It’s just five o’clock. I wish I had gone
back by the penny ’bus.” The audience rose in their places, and stoned
him with whatever came handy, and he pretended that after that he never
could get an engagement.
As I don’t drink after dinner, and don’t smoke at all, I began to find
these concerts very tiring as soon as I knew all the performances by
heart. But there was no other place of meeting except the bar. We badly
needed a smoking-room, adjoining the dining-room and the bar, where
those who had brought interesting people with them could introduce them
to interesting Savages, without losing touch with the evening, as they
did if they went up to that melancholy library, which has probably been
given over to some legitimate purpose, like _Bridge_, long ago.
I frequently agitated for this smoking-room, and I believe that they got
it eventually. The bar did too good a business; you did not see people
getting intoxicated; its habitués carried their liquor too well. But I
have seen one man drink as many as thirty-three whiskys-and-sodas in a
single evening, and I saw him the other day—twenty years
afterwards—looking as fit as possible.
Gradually I came to the conclusion that as there were so many other
interesting things happening on Saturdays, it was not wise to give my
Saturday evenings up to the Savage, and there was “nothing else to” the
club in those days. It had not then become the favourite lunching-place
of the great editors, an important venue for authors.
So I retired from the Savage, as I retired from the Devonshire a few
years afterwards. When one of the committee of the Devonshire asked me
why I retired from it, I said that I only used it for funerals, and that
I was retiring because they had made that an extra. This was a fact. The
windows of the Devonshire Club are one of the best places for seeing a
royal funeral—or, of course, any other royal procession. The committee
discovered this, and put on a charge of ten pounds a seat, to pay for
the decorations of the Club. So many people wanted these seats that they
had to be balloted for. The action of the committee was justified. But,
as I had not used the Club since the funeral of Queen Victoria, when I
found that I could not see the funeral of King Edward from its windows
without balloting for the privilege of paying ten pounds for it, I sent
in my resignation, and paid a guinea for a seat from which I could see
the funeral for the whole length of Oxford and Cambridge Terrace. I went
with Norma Lorimer and Markino, who painted a wonderful picture of it.
The people on whose roof we hired the seats from the contractor, asked
us to lunch, and became quite intimate friends. They proved to be Mr.
Sanderson Stuart and his daughter—the youthful genius of sculpture.
We used to get most notable guests at the Savage—was not the list headed
by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. I was in the chair the night that
Nansen was the guest of the evening. It was on the eve of his departure
for the North Pole, and I hammered the table and asked the Club if they
would allow me to invite our guest to write his name on the wall behind
his seat, to remain there till he came back again. They assented with
rapturous applause, and the name is there still, glazed over. I have
told in another chapter what he said to the “Savage” who wished to
accompany him to the Arctic Circle.
The Savage Club is, undoubtedly, one of the institutions of London, and
every literary visitor to these shores should see one of its Saturday
nights.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XV
MY CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM
I MUST allude briefly to my long connection with journalism.
When I settled in London in 1891, I had already done a good deal of
journalism in New York and San Francisco. In the latter my writing had
chiefly lain in travel-articles on Japan, to which San Francisco, as the
Pacific Capital of the United States, naturally looks. In New York I had
written on travel—much of my _Japs at Home_ appeared in travel-articles
for the McClure Syndicate. But I also wrote a number of literary and
personal articles for the _New York Independent_, the _Sun_, the
_World_, and so on, such as my _Reminiscences of Cardinal Newman_ told
in the first person. In doing this I found that what America demanded
was the personal reminiscence.
When I came to England, I naturally sought work on the same lines, and
had no difficulty in finding editors who saw the opening for this
comparatively fresh line in British journalism.
I turned first to Fisher, of the _Literary World_, whom I had met at the
Idler teas, and who had invited me to do some reviewing for him. He had
_Table-Talk Notes_ as a feature, and here my first journalism appeared.
When I was helping Jerome to formulate _To-day_ in 1893, I suggested to
him that we should have a book of the week, in which we told as much
about the author as we knew, and that biographical gossip about authors
and artists and actors should be one of our chief features. He was
completely in favour of it, and I wrote a good deal for him, especially
about authors.
About the same time, Lewis Hind became editor of the now defunct _Pall
Mall Budget_, and I carried out the same idea for him in a regular
_causerie_, to which we gave the name of the _Diner-Out_, and which I
signed “St. Barbe”—the family name of my maternal grandmother.
Between these three papers I was pretty fully occupied. But my mind was
turning towards a more congenial form of journalism—the travel-article.
Percy Cox, a son of the Horace Cox whose name appeared on the _Queen_ as
its publisher for so many years, was anxious to develop its travel side,
and while the late Sievers Drewett was organising the wonderful travel
department, which now has its annual _Queen Book of Travel_, he employed
me to write a series of articles on my travels in Greece and Turkey, and
a regular travel-serial on the trans-continental journey across Canada,
which I amplified and brought out as _On the Cars and Off_.
While I was doing these, Clement Shorter, who had been a sort of
literary editor to the _Queen_—all the important books being sent to
him, and he writing a sort of _causerie_ about them—became too busy with
his offspring, the _Sketch_, to do any more work for the _Queen_, and I
was offered his place. My suggestion that we should have a signed “book
of the week” for the most important book—unsigned minor reviews to be
worked in anywhere about the paper—and that I should do my _Diner-Out_
column for the _Queen_, instead of the _Pall Mall Budget_, was accepted,
and I began my literary connection with the _Queen_, which lasted for so
many years. I kept the _Diner-Out_ for biographical gossip about authors
chiefly, and for announcements of forthcoming books, which could be made
interesting by personal gossip. Actual reviewing I kept as far as
possible out of that column. In those days, though the _Queen_ was and
always had been the chief ladies’ paper, it had not nearly so many
departments of feminine interest as it has now, so there was plenty of
space for book-reviewing, which became a very important feature of the
paper. I was only responsible for the _Book of the Week_ and the
_Diner-Out_, though I did perhaps a page of unsigned minor reviews,
which were never attributed to me.
I had one faithful reader in her late Majesty, Queen Victoria. I learned
this quite incidentally. I had taken a _manoir_ in Brittany for the
summer, and at the house of Mrs. Burrowes, a niece of the late Lord
Perth, met the lady who filled the post of reader to Her Majesty; Queen
Victoria prefered having books and newspapers read aloud to her. This
lady informed me that Her Majesty had my _Diner-Out_ column in the
_Queen_ read to her every week, and was most amused by it.
As the woman’s side of the paper developed, the space for reviewing
became more and more restricted, and the _Diner-Out_ became simply a
column of small reviews, without any of its own features, and finally, I
think, the name itself very often dropped out.
While I was doing the reviewing for the _Queen_, we were travelling a
great deal in France, Italy, Sicily and Egypt. The books which I
published on these countries were, as far as the travel portion of them
was concerned, largely drawn from these articles in the
_Queen_—beginning with _Brittany for Britons_. Some of them, such as the
Normandy articles, I never did re-publish, and I contributed to the
_Queen_ enough articles on Italy to form another volume, besides those
which have already appeared in my books on Italy and Sicily.
I still do some reviewing for the _Queen_, but I do little other
journalism now, except when I am approached by some newspaper to do an
article on a subject upon which I have special knowledge.
The fact is, that in recent years I have employed my journalistic
faculties on the preparation of books like _Who’s Who_, _Sladen’s London
and Its Leaders_ and _The Green Book of London Society_, which need much
the same kind of gifts as personal journalism does.
[Illustration:
SIDNEY LOW
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
_The Green Book_ was a sort of one-line _Who’s Who_, which only
mentioned the leading people in each walk of London life, except the
bearing of a title. The selection of the chief personages and experts in
each line—say, for instance, shooting or fishing or golf or writing
books—was not made by any correspondence with the people themselves, but
was entrusted to the chief expert in each line. Golf was by a runner-up
for the Amateur Championship, fishing by the fishing editor of the
_Field_, exploration by the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society,
and so on.
_Who’s Who_ itself must form the subject of a separate chapter.
I have no older friend in journalism than Sidney Low. We went to Oxford,
I think, on the same day—he was a Scholar of Balliol and I was a Scholar
of Trinity—and we certainly knew each other very well there, and have
been intimate friends ever since. His ability received early
recognition. Before he had left Oxford ten years, he was editor-in-chief
of a great London daily, and he has written books which have become
standard works, like the _Dictionary of English History_, which has been
through half-a-dozen editions. Since he gave up editing he has
represented the leading papers on the most important special missions.
He has been an alderman of the London County Council, and he has been
one of the chief forces in literary society. If I were asked who had
introduced me to the largest number of eminent persons, I should say
Sidney Low—without hesitation. No man passes saner or more moderate
judgments on the great questions of the hour. Indeed, I should say that
Low stands in journalism for what a man who was at Oxford with both of
us—George Cave, K.C., M.P.—stands in politics—for moderation in
statement, combined with great firmness of principle and judgment.
With Low’s name I must couple that of the late Samuel Henry Jeyes, who
was his colleague both on the _St. James’s Gazette_ and the _Standard_.
He was a beloved friend of us both, but my intimacy with him began much
earlier. He was my greatest friend at Trinity, Oxford, and one of the
Oxford men of whom I saw most in after life. We were elected Scholars of
Trinity on the same day; we had rooms on the same staircase; we went to
all the same lectures till we passed mods., and I taught him to play
billiards. It was the only game of manual skill which he ever did play.
He lashed the adulation for sport which prevails at Oxford with the
gibes of which he was such a master. When we had only been up at Oxford
for a few days, A. J. Webbe, who was the special idol of Trinity because
he was captain of the ’Varsity Eleven, asked all of us Trinity freshmen
to meet some of the lions of the Oxford Eleven. All of us except Jeyes
were vastly elated. We all, except Jeyes, talked our best cricket shop
to make a good impression on the demigods. At last he could stand it no
longer, and, waiting till there was a dead pause in the conversation, he
said, “This b——y cricket!” I can remember the tableau still.
His reputation as a wit came up with him from Uppingham. All Uppingham
men could remember how, when he was caught cribbing with a Bible on his
knee at a Greek Testament lesson, and his class-master had said to him
triumphantly, “What have you there, Jeyes?” he said, “A book, sir, of
which no man need be ashamed,” and how when Thring, the greatest head
master of his time, had asked him how he came to be ploughed in
arithmetic for his Oxford and Cambridge certificate, he replied from
Shakespeare, “I cannot reckon, it befits the spirit of a tapster”—a
readiness which Thring would have been the first to appreciate.
Among the best things I remember him saying at Oxford are his definition
of the Turks in a great debate over the Bulgarian atrocities, as a
people “whose morals are as loose as their trousers, and whose vices are
as many as their wives.” And it was he who said, “I don’t want to go to
Heaven, because Gore (now Bishop of Oxford) is the only Trinity man who
will be there, and I’d rather be with the rest.”
Jeyes never spoke at the Union—he despised it—or he would have been as
great a success as the miraculous Baumann or Freeman, now Rector of
Burton-on-Trent. I never remember hearing Cave speaking at the Union,
though perhaps he did.
One of Jeyes’ wittiest retorts was to “Bobby” Raper, at that time Dean
of Trinity, who was “hauling” him for some meretricious disregard of
College discipline. The glib excuse was not wanting, but Raper was
stern. “No no, Mr. Jeyes, that won’t do. You told me the exact opposite
of that last term.” “I know I did, Mr. Dean, but that was a lie.”
He owed the Dean one, for the first thing he did when he went up to
Trinity had been to go and call on the Dean and tell him that he had
conscientious scruples against going to chapel.
“Morning chapel, you know, Mr. Jeyes,” said the Dean, “is a matter of
discipline and not of religion, but if you really have conscientious
objections, I’ll put on a roll-call for you at 7 a.m.”—Chapel was at 8
a.m., so Jeyes swallowed his nausea.
But Jeyes’ wit was tireless. He was a fine scholar—he made his pupils
write wonderful Latin prose when he became a don at University—I presume
during the undergraduacy of Lord Hugh and Lord Robert Cecil. But he tore
himself away to be a journalist, and became in time an assistant-editor
of the _St. James’s Gazette_, and later of the _Standard_.
As a journalist he was distinguished by incorruptibility of no common
sternness. Though he had always spoken as a Liberal at Oxford (very
likely out of malice, because all his friends were Conservatives), he
was one of the pillars of Conservative journalism. He knew all the
chiefs of the Conservative party, and enjoyed great influence with them.
He was so rugged and unbending. I never knew a harder editor to “work.”
He wrote a Spartan life of Chamberlain, for whom he had a great
admiration, except in the matter of Tariff Reform.
He married an old friend of ours, the beautiful Viva Sherman, an
American nearly related to the Senator-Vice-President and the General.
Both before and after his marriage he was a frequent visitor at our
house, and we often met at Ranelagh and elsewhere. He enjoyed a
discussion with Norma Lorimer. Her wit provoked his, and their
conversations were most brilliant to listen to.
At last poor Jeyes was struck down with cancer—aggravated, I believe, by
cigar-smoking, in which he was a noted connoisseur. He bore it with
magnificent fortitude, and for a long time kept it a secret. Even I did
not know that he had been mortally ill till he was dead. But I was one
of the three old Oxford friends who stood by his grave—his oldest
friend, except H. B. Freeman, who read the service. Sidney Low was the
other. Charles Boyd was there too, but he belonged to a much younger
generation.
If Jeyes had known that his life would be so short, he would perhaps
have devoted more time to book-writing. It is a pity—except for his
country and the Conservative party—that he gave up so much of his life
to necessarily ephemeral journalism. I always heard that but for a flaw
in a will he would have been owner of one of the greatest provincial
journals in England.
Peace be to his ashes. He was a merry soul, and if the theosophists are
right about our astral bodies meeting the spirits of the departed, there
is no one with whom I should so much enjoy an astral conversation as
Jeyes. He would be such a volatile spirit. I can imagine the naïveté
with which he would describe his experiences.
The Rev. Herbert Bentley Freeman—the Rector of Burton-on-Trent—a cousin
of the historian, and a descendant, I believe, of the mighty Bentley of
Phalaris renown, came up to Trinity from Uppingham in the same term as
Jeyes. Freeman and A. A. Baumann, who was afterwards Conservative M.P.
for Peckham, were the two most brilliant speakers at the Union in my
day. The undergraduates said that both wrote their speeches beforehand,
and learned them by heart and practised their delivery.
Years afterwards I met Baumann when he had given up his safe seat at
Peckham and unsuccessfully contested a seat in the North, I think at
Manchester.
“What made you give up Peckham?” I asked. “They would have gone on
electing you there as long as you lived.”
“My dear chap, life isn’t worth living when you are member for Peckham.
I live in South Kensington, and while I was member for Peckham I used to
find my hall full of constituents by the time I came down for breakfast,
and by lunch-time you’d have thought that I was having an auction of my
furniture.”
But of all the men who were at Oxford with me, no one has been so
prominent, then and now taken together, in intellectual circles as W. L.
Courtney. Courtney was then a rather young New College don, who had the
distinction of being married to an extremely smart-looking wife. That
would have been a distinction by itself in the Oxford of that day, for
few were married in a way suitable to impress undergraduates. Added to
that, he cut the most eminent figure in athletics of any don in Oxford.
He was the treasurer of the University Boat Club, while the dons
respected him as the ablest man in Oxford at philosophy. I was not there
when he gave it all up to come to London and be literary editor of the
_Daily Telegraph_ and editor of the _Fortnightly Review_, but I can
imagine the consternation which fell upon that ancient seat of learning
when their bright particular star, the admiration alike of don and
undergraduate, “chucked it,” as they say, for journalism. Of course he
did wisely, for in an incredibly short space of time he had as
distinguished a position in London as he had had at Oxford. His
influence on literature has been immense. He has stood for the
combination of scholarliness and up-to-dateness. His own books range
from essays on the verge of fiction to some of the most important works
on philosophy published in his generation. Incidentally, the creator of
_Egeria_ is our best dramatic critic, and a writer of plays.
Both the late and the present editors of the _Field_, William Senior and
Theodore Andrea Cook, came to our Addison Mansions receptions. That
delightful man, William Senior, the “Red Spinner” of fishing journalism,
and his wife came very often to us. Theodore Andrea Cook is the ideal
editor for a great sporting paper like the _Field_, for he had not only
been editor of a great daily, but he had rowed in the Oxford boat, and
been a Scholar of his College, and he had captained the all-England team
in the international fencing matches at the Olympic games which were
held at Athens. He has also written very sound books on an unusual
variety of subjects (one of which, his book on _The Spiral in Nature and
Art_, was most widely discussed); and is one of the most delightful
writers we have of travel-books on France. Of course, everything which
he has written upon sport is _ex cathedra_.
Walter Jerrold, who lives a little higher up the river than I do, in an
old house with a great garden, a very old friend, and a much older
Vagabond than I, often came with his wife to us at Addison Mansions.
Jerrold is a grandson of the famous wit, Douglas Jerrold. He was for
more than a dozen years sub-editor of the _Observer_. But fortunately he
found time for editing of another nature as well, which will help his
own books to give him a permanent place in our literature. He is one of
our best editors of nineteenth-century classics; his biographical and
bibliographical introductions are the most useful of their kind—just
what you would expect from the grandson of a man who was a star in the
firmament of which he writes.
Clement Shorter, who married the Irish poetess, and was editor of the
_Illustrated London News_ when we met at Rudolph Lehmann’s in the
“nineties,” is another editor of books as well as papers. The Brontës
are his special protégés. He is the acknowledged Brontë expert, and
every one has read his new book on George Borrow. He has been great at
founding—he not only founded the _Sketch_, the _Sphere_ and the
_Tatler_, but he was one of the founders of the _Omar Khayyam Club_,
beloved of Radical litterateurs, though it deals not with English
politics, but English Persics. Here you are always sure of good
speaking—Mr. Balfour and Mr. Asquith, and all the important Cabinet
Ministers and ex-Cabinet Ministers have spoken there on occasion. I have
never heard Shorter speak himself, but I understand that he is a very
good political speaker, and I can picture him telling a Lincolnshire
audience how wrong it is to have an income not half as great as his own,
for Shorter has been deservedly prosperous. He is a great journalist—one
of the pioneers of modern journalism. He was a Civil Service clerk when
in 1890 he became editor of the _Illustrated London News_, and only a
couple of years had passed before he started the _Sketch_, the model of
a new class of paper, for the same office, and continued to edit both
papers till 1900. Then he thought that he would like to have a paper of
his own, and raised a hundred thousand pounds to found the _Sphere_ and
the _Tatler_, with which he has been associated ever since, as editor of
the former and director of both. They are rightly among the most popular
illustrated papers of the day, for they have reduced the handling of the
personal element to a science, and Shorter always was a brilliant
editor. His success has been largely due to his colossal energy and
industry. He has taken a minute interest in every detail of the
production of both papers.
In the midst of all his journalistic labours, Shorter has found time to
write some admirable books, and has made himself with two books a
specialist on Napoleon in his period of exile at St. Helena.
Herbert White, the present editor of the _Standard_, is one of the
best informed of all the English newspaper editors about Continental
politics, because he went through such an arduous schooling in
Austria and Germany, and knows German as well as he knows English.
He married the niece of an Austrian political leader, and after
war-correspondenting in the Græco-Turkish war of 1897, represented
leading English, American and French newspapers at Vienna from 1897
to 1902, and Berlin from 1903 to 1911. Besides this he has taken
twenty special journalistic missions in every country of the
Continent except France and Russia.
I should be accused of sycophancy if I said all I should like to say of
Robertson Nicoll, of whom I saw a good deal before we were both such
busy men. But there are some things about Nicoll to which nobody can be
blind, besides the position of respect which he enjoys in the literary
community. He makes a _bona fide_ attempt to educate his party in
politics, and his public in a spirit of commonsense and toleration
instead of appealing to their prejudices, and no man has done more in
the way of securing the publication of the books of unknown authors of
merit, who have justified his expectations and given the world great
books. Nicoll has been the sincere and enthusiastic friend of merit. I
can say this without prejudice, because his firm have published nothing
of mine.
Similarity of name, and their common friendship with the A. S. Boyds,
makes me mention here James Nicol Dunn, whose editorship of the _Morning
Post_ was marked by such an advance in the political weight of that
paper. Dunn was managing editor of the _National Observer_ in its prime.
For solid efficiency as a journalist, he had no superior in the country.
It would have been a bad day for England when he left it to edit the
_Johannesburg Star_, if it had not been so important that the chief
organ of the Transvaal should be in such brave, moderate and judicious
hands, at such a critical period in the history of South Africa.
T. P. O’Connor is a very old friend of mine. I met him first when we
were both in America in 1888-1889, and we have been on terms of
Christian names ever since. Though we differ strongly in politics, it
has never affected our friendship, for T. P. is very fair to his
enemies, except when he happens to have a special hatred for them. He
has founded four papers—the _Star_, the _Sun_, _T. P.’s Weekly_ and _M.
A. P._—but I am not sure as to how far he is still interested in any of
them.
T. P. is to me a fascinating personality. He is so generous and genial.
The swift recognition, the ready smile, the warm affectionate manner,
have endeared him to hosts of friends, and every one recognises that he
has a golden pen which invests everything he touches with interest, and
an acute intelligence—acute enough to sift even the Humbert mystery and
present a clear analysis of it, as witness his _Phantom Millions_.
He is a golfer too, and once upon a time used to play with W. G. Grace,
who, it seems, in spite of his being the best cricketer that ever lived,
always hits his shot along the ground except from the tee, though he
drives and puts pretty well. I got this egregious piece of journalism
from him when we were sitting next to each other at the dinner given by
M. Escoffier, at that time, and probably still, cook at the Carlton
Hotel, who gave a gourmet’s feast on the occasion of the publication of
his book on cookery, published by Heinemann. Heinemann invited me. The
chief thing I remember about the feast is that the wine Escoffier
selected was _Pommery Naturel_, and that the _tour de force_ was lamb
stuffed with sage and onions to replace the usual mint sauce.
John Malcolm Bulloch, the editor of the _Graphic_, who gave me such
immense assistance when I was writing _Adam_ _Lindsay Gordon and His
Friends in England and Australia_, is an author whose father and
grandfather were authors before him. His specialities are the ancient
University of Aberdeen, of which he is an M.A., and the great house of
Gordon. He edited the _House of Gordon_ for the New Spalding Club, and
has written many pamphlets on Gordon genealogy besides his book on _The
Gay Gordons_.
I happen to enjoy the friendship of the editors of both the _Bookseller_
and the _Publishers’ Circular_. George H. Whitaker, who is a doctor by
profession, saw a good deal of the world as a ship’s doctor when he was
a young man. Now the world sees a good deal of him as head of the firm
which publishes _Whitaker’s Almanack_, as well as editor of the
_Bookseller_—famed, as a trade-organ ought to be, for the justice of its
reviews.
R. B. Marston, who edits the _Publishers’ Circular_, edits the _Fishing
Gazette_ also. He founded the Fly Fishers’ Club. The Marstons are famous
fishermen—his father, Edward Marston, who has just died at a Nestor’s
age, had been one of Izaak Walton’s chief followers both with pen and
rod. R. B. is, besides writing books on fishing and photography, one of
the chief writers on our food supplies in war, an energetic and
patriotic public man.
My oldest acquaintance in journalism, except Sidney Low, is Penderel
Brodhurst, the editor of the _Guardian_. We used to meet at Henley’s in
the days before I went to America, which was in 1888. He was in those
days the walking encyclopædia of the _St. James’s Gazette_, and
afterwards edited the long-defunct _St. James’s Budget_. He was, as he
is, a man wrapped up in his work: he could, if he had chosen, have been
a personage in literary society on his very historical name, for he is a
descendant of the Penderel who saved King Charles II in the oak at
Boscobel, and enjoys a pension therefor, probably one of the oldest
pensions still running in England, and he is, though he does not use his
title, an Italian marquis (Penderel de Boscobel, created 1782).
Lindsay Bashford, being literary editor of the _Daily Mail_, has only
had time to write one book—_Everybody’s Boy_—but that was a very good
one. But he has a sufficient literary record apart from that, for he was
lecturer on English literature at a French university.
J. A. Spender, the editor of the _Westminster_, is another
author-editor. I have known him for many years. He comes of a brilliant
family, for he is a son of Mrs. J. K. Spender, and brother of Harold
Spender. He was an Exhibitioner of Balliol, and Harold was an
Exhibitioner of University College, Oxford. Both of them are authors of
half-a-dozen books, and both of them are wonderfully clever and
well-informed men, real powers in journalism.
Sir Owen Seaman, of _Punch_, who was Captain of Shrewsbury School, and
took a First in the Classical Tripos, and the Porson Prize at Cambridge,
can best be described as the modern Calverley, for no one since
Calverley has written such brilliant satirical lyrics. He was the “O.
S.” of the _National Observer_, and who does not remember “The Battle of
the Bays,” “In Cap and Bells” and “Borrowed Plumes”?
H. W. Massingham, of the _Nation_, the most conspicuous political
journalist on the Liberal side, one of the few Liberals who dare to try
and lead their party against its will, has only written a couple of
books, both rather technical, _The London Daily Press_ and _Labour and
Protection_.
Sidney Paternoster, the assistant-editor of _Truth_, is well known as a
novelist, as is Adcock, of the _Bookman_, but, taken as a whole, editors
of great newspapers are not writers of books.
Ernest Parke, director of the _Daily News_ and _Leader_ and the _Star_,
was at one time a regular attendant at the Vagabond banquets, as was his
sub., Hugh Maclaughlan. Parke and I saw the Coronation together from a
seat in the triforium of Westminster Abbey right over the little square
of Oriental carpet on which His Majesty King George V was crowned, so we
had a splendid view of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Garter
King-at-Arms, addressing the North, South, East and West as witnesses,
and of the Dukes of Beaufort and Somerset, towering above Lord Kitchener
as he walked between them, an object lesson which I suppose was not
unintended. Parke is a great journalist, and made the _Star_ a force in
literature. Leonard Rees, of the _Sunday Times_, who shines as a
literary critic as well as a musical critic, with whom I have had much
correspondence, I have never met personally. But Vivian Carter, who was
on the staff of the Institution of Civil Engineers till only a dozen
years ago, and has in the last five years edited the _Bystander_ with
such conspicuous success, is a mutual friend of the C. N. Williamsons
and myself. We meet there.
J. S. Wood, the founder and managing director of the _Gentlewoman_, and
one of the real founders of the Primrose League, was often from the
beginning at our at-homes, with his pretty Italian wife, and his
daughters as they grew up. We used to meet them in the season at
Ranelagh, too. Wood has been much more than a founder and editor of
newspapers, for he has been connected with the management of several of
our most important charities, and has himself been instrumental in
raising a quarter of a million for them.
All the Kenealys (Arabella and Annesley, both authors, Edward and Noel,
both editors) were frequent visitors at our flat, except Alexander
Kenealy, the editor of the _Daily Mirror_, who was in America for twenty
years before he became news editor of the _Daily Express_, and, later,
editor of the _Mirror_. More than any of the others, Alexander Kenealy
inherits the splendid abilities of his father, the famous Dr. Kenealy,
Q.C., M.P., one of the greatest lawyers of his time, who took up the
case of the Tichborne claimant when others had abandoned it as hopeless,
and almost pulled him through.
Another of our editor friends was Edwin Oliver, at that time editor of
_Atalanta_ and subsequently of the _Idler_, and, since 1910, of the
widely influential _Outlook_.
I cannot conclude my chapter on journalism without reference to Sir Hugh
Gilzean-Reid, whose pet plaything was the Institute of Journalists. He
used often to come to our house with his charming daughters. Sir Hugh,
who had made a considerable fortune out of journalism, large enough to
let him live in Dollis Hill, the house near Willesden which Lord
Aberdeen lent to Mr. Gladstone, never forgot the working journalist, and
it was he who engineered the agitation which defeated the intention of
two of the great London dailies to issue Sunday editions like the
American _Sunday World_ and _Sunday Sun_. As Herbert Cornish was the
creator, he was chief founder and first President of the Institute of
Journalists also. He used to give large garden-parties at Dollis Hill,
chiefly to people who appreciated its having been consecrated by the
residence of Mr. Gladstone, though there were others, like ourselves,
who went because we liked his family so much. He was a philanthropic
man, and did an immense amount of good.
The first paid journalism I ever did was writing articles on public
school life for the _Educational Reporter_ when I was a boy at
Cheltenham. About the same time I wrote a story for _Bow Bells_ called
“Douglas Thirlstaine’s Wooing,” which was not paid for, and soon after
that I supplied unpaid notes about Cheltenham College to a Cheltenham
paper, which had never been able to get them, as a favour to the late
Frederick Stroud, who had got me out of the libel action brought by the
editors of the _Shotover Papers_. I wish I could find that libel now. It
was a small pamphlet of a few pages, published under the title of
_Overshot_ by a printer in Turl Street, Oxford. I saw about the printing
of it when I was up in Oxford competing for a scholarship at Trinity or
Balliol, lodging with Ray, who was afterwards to be my scout, in one of
the sixteenth-century cottages which now form part of Trinity.
In Australia the only money I made in journalism was five pounds which I
received from the _Queenslander_ for the serial rights of a novel which
I have never re-published, and a guinea which I received from the
_Illustrated Australian News_ as a prize for the best poem on
Federation.
When I got back to England, the first paid journalism I did was for the
_Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News_, edited by A. E. T. Watson, who
now edits the _Badminton Magazine_, and who projected and edits the
_Badminton Library_, and is a member of the National Hunt Committee—one
of the chief sportsmen in journalism. The subjects on which I wrote were
Australian cricket and Australian poetry, like Gordon’s, and on both
subjects I was the chief authority until I went to America, odd as it
may seem now. I also wrote on Gordon for the _Graphic_, and had a long
historical article in the _Cornhill_, and a serial novel—_Trincolox_—in
_Temple Bar_.
When I went to America, I wrote a good deal for papers and magazines,
but almost entirely in verse, except a series of articles which I had to
telegraph from Montreal about the Carnival to a great American daily. I
remember thinking that the telegraphing was such a useless expense for
such unimportant stuff.
In Japan I wrote a good deal for the _Japan Gazette_, but my
contributions were gratis, because there the editor, Nuttall, now one of
the editors of the _Daily Telegraph_, was expected to write the whole
paper himself. I used to help him, and he exerted himself to get various
permissions for me. He was a very capable man, who kept his paper
interesting though he had to make his bricks without straw.
However, when I got back to America from Japan I commenced journalism in
real earnest. I wrote a good many articles at four pounds a column for
the _San Francisco Chronicle_, and, as I have said, wrote for many
papers in New York, and when I returned to England I introduced the
American biographical journalism to many papers, and at one time was
fully occupied with it, until I diverted the capabilities I used for it
to the founding of _Who’s Who_.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVI
THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS: PART I
MY active literary career dates from my return from America. Hitherto,
with the exception of the _Handbook to Japan_ and the potboiler for the
North German Lloyd, and a shilling shocker, published anonymously, and
the two series of articles on Japan executed for the _San Francisco
Chronicle_ and McClure’s Syndicate respectively, my literary aspirations
had all been poetical. I had published volumes of my own verse entitled:
_Frithjof and Ingebjorg_, _Australian Lyrics_, _A Poetry of Exiles_, _A
Summer Christmas_, _In Cornwall and Across the Sea_, _Edward the Black
Prince_, _The Spanish Armada_, _Lester the Loyalist_, and four
anthologies, _Australian Ballads and Rhymes_, _A Century of Australian
Song_, _Australian Poets and Younger American Poets_, one of which,
_Australian Ballads_, had a very large sale, though I only had ten
pounds for doing it.
[Illustration:
THE DINING-ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(_From the Painting by Yoshio Markino._)
]
But in America I had been under the necessity of making money, because
my private income was unequal to the increased expense of living in
America. The articles for McClure and the _San Francisco Chronicle_ were
the outcome of this necessity, and having found that I could add
materially to my income by writing about travel when in America, I
conceived the idea of making my articles on Japan, a country then but
little known in England, into a book. I went to Mr. A. P. Watt, then not
many years established, and he procured me a commission from Hutchinson
& Co.—the first of a series of commissions which has gone on from that
day to this. That book was _The Japs at Home_, the most successful, in
point of sales, of all my books, for not less than a hundred and fifty
thousand copies of it have been sold by various publishers. Hutchinson &
Co. brought out editions of it at eighteen shillings (two), six
shillings, and three-and-six, and then, having got through four editions
of it, and believing the sale at an end, gave the book up to me. Another
publisher sold fifteen thousand copies of it at half-a-crown, and then
exchanged the book rights with me for the serial rights, and since then
there has been a shilling edition, an enormous sixpenny edition, and a
threepenny-halfpenny edition; the shilling and the threepenny-halfpenny
editions are selling still.
Following _The Japs at Home_ came _On the Cars and Off_, the success of
which was ruined by having illustrations which took six weeks to
produce. It was a guinea book, and a first edition of a thousand copies
was sold directly. But the second edition was not ready till nearly two
months later, and by that time the interest in the book was dead.
My next book of travel was _Brittany for Britons_, published as one of
the familiar little half-crown guides of A. and C. Black, of which a
great number of copies were sold. I cannot say how many, because I
parted with the copyright.
After this my energies were diverted from travel-books for a while,
because I wanted to try my hand at novel-writing. The result was _A
Japanese Marriage_, which, after _The Japs at Home_, has been my most
successful book in sales. About ten thousand copies of it were sold in
octavo form, and as a sixpenny various publishers have sold a hundred
and twenty thousand.
For two years after our return from America we confined ourselves to
short excursions to the milder parts of England—Hampshire, chiefly round
Norman Christchurch; Devonshire, in the nook of Dartmoor round
Drewsteignton, and on the gloriously wild coast round Salcombe; and the
woods of the Isle of Wight. During this period I finished _The Japs at
Home_, and wrote _On the Cars and Off_, which was not published till
1895, about our double journey across America from Halifax to
Vancouver’s Island.
Then a new interest came into my life—we were persuaded in 1895 to spend
a summer and autumn at St. Andrews, and there I acquired the inevitable
taste for golf, which has kept me interested and amused and healthful
and unaging. Certainly this was one of the most fortunate inspirations
we ever had for a holiday, since, after being devoted to games at school
and College and in Australia, I had left off football and cricket and
tennis, and even shooting, as soon as I settled in London.
Poor old Tom Morris never had a worse pupil, for I play everything
wrong, and owe the prizes and medals I have won at golf to the
straightness of eye which helped me to win every shooting challenge cup
at Cheltenham and every shooting challenge cup at Oxford. At St. Andrews
I not only had a glorious spell of golf, but fell deeply in love with
romantic and historical Fifeshire. There are few places which combine so
many attractions as St. Andrews. It is the capital of golf; its cliffs
capped with old houses, and its ancient port, are beautiful enough for
Sicily, and its great ruined castle and its immemorial cathedral make it
architecturally the most interesting place in Scotland after Edinburgh
and Stirling. Nor does it yield to many in historical interest. I should
live there if it had a climate like Naples.
It gave us such a hunger for old architecture and romantic scenery that
in the following summer we went to the old Breton towns on the Gulf of
St. Malo. We stayed at St. Servan in a seventeenth-century _manoir_
called La Gentillerie, which we had from the chaplain, my school-friend,
William Vassall, who stayed with us as our guest in his own house.
From a point close by we could look across the harbour to St. Malo, with
its mediæval walls and crane’s-bill steeple, and on the other side were
no further from Dinan. From St. Servan we went on for a month in
Normandy, which I much prefer to Brittany. Towns like Rouen and Caen,
Coutances and Bayeux, Evreux, Lisieux and Falaise, are citadels of
mediævalism.
During this holiday I wrote my third travel-book, published in England,
_Brittany for Britons_, issued a year later, and put the final touches
on my first acknowledged novel, _A Japanese Marriage_.
It was my two books on Japan, _The Japs at Home_ and _A Japanese
Marriage_, which helped me to gain a literary position; both went into
several editions in their first year. Between them they have sold more
than a quarter of a million copies.
But I was on the verge of a book-success of another kind, which could
hardly be called a literary success, though more people connect my name
with this than with any of my books. Messrs. A. & C. Black, who had
published _A Japanese Marriage_ and _Brittany for Britons_, approached
me to know if I would expand _Who’s Who_, of which they had just
purchased the copyright.
They showed it to me, and asked me if I could turn it into a book of
reference—a sort of cross between the old _Who’s Who_ and _Men of the
Time_ was the idea which shaped itself from our discussion.
The two visits which we paid to Salcombe in Devon, the second of them
with Reginald Cleaver, have not yet furnished me with any subject for
writing.
The year 1896, in which I compiled the new _Who’s Who_, was also a
notable year for me from the travel point of view. At last I faced the
exertion of taking my family to Sicily, which had been my ambition for
exactly ten years. It was not such a stereotyped journey as it is now. I
began to make inquiries about it when we reached Naples, and could not
find an Englishman in the place—even the Consul-General—who had ever
been to Sicily. But the Consul-General made inquiries, and said that he
did not think travelling in Sicily was very difficult or dangerous. He,
however, asked me if I had a revolver, and recommended me not to take
out a licence for it at the Consulate, because in Sicily a licence is
not available for the whole island, but only for one province, and there
are seven provinces. He also told me that he was quite sure that no
Sicilian ever took out a licence, though they all carried firearms. As
for malaria, he did not know; he never troubled about it; he always
spent the summer in or near Naples, and never felt any the worse for it.
This Consul was my great friend, Eustace Neville-Rolfe, who had lately
sold his ancestral estate of Heacham in Norfolk. Nelson students will
remember allusions in the great Admiral’s letters to his uncle Rolfe at
Heacham. But my friend hated the climate of Norfolk, and hated its
politics, and settled at Naples, where a good many years afterwards they
made him Consul-General for the unconstitutional reason that he knew
more about Naples than any living Englishman. He had the unique
distinction of joining the Consular Service as a Consul-General.
When we got to Sicily we found it perfectly easy and safe. The Whitakers
of Palermo, to whom he gave us an introduction, at once became our
friends, and told us all we ought to see and all we ought to do in the
island. On that trip we paid fairly exhaustive visits to Palermo,
Taormina, Syracuse, Girgenti, Marsala, Trapani, Selinunte, and Segesta,
and flying visits to Catania and Messina.
Sicily is an adorable country. Grass, flowers and fruit-trees grow right
down to the edge of the sea, where there is any soil, for half the
island is rock. There are no brigands on the sea-coasts, and nearly
every monument worth visiting is in sight of the sea. There is not a
place in the island from which you cannot see a mountain. It is the land
of the orange and the lemon; and possesses the rare charm of ancient
Greek and mediæval Arab architecture.
Sicily inspired me to write the largest of all my books, _In Sicily_,
and inspired a publisher to produce it in an _édition de luxe_, whose
two volumes weighed fourteen pounds, and contained four hundred
illustrations. I called it _In Sicily_ because it was not until several
years afterwards that I considered that I knew enough about the island
to write a book with the more pretentious title of _Sicily_. A great
French author paid me the compliment of appropriating my title, and a
good deal of my information, a few years afterwards. I began to write
_In Sicily_ in 1896, but it was not published till 1901.
We spent the spring of 1896 in Sicily, and the summer at Lulworth, on a
little round cove in South Dorset. We went there partly because it was
said to be the mildest place in England, partly because Thomas Hardy
told me that he had laid the scene of one of the chief episodes in _Tess
of the D’Urbervilles_ in an old farmhouse near the station which served
Lulworth; it had a hopelessly unromantic name—Wool.
In the following summer we went to Ostend for the season, because I
wanted to see the gambling and the fashions. The morals of the Ostend of
that day may be gathered from this. A friend of mine who was staying at
the principal hotel with her husband, was asked by the proprietor if
they were properly married. She was most indignant, and said that of
course they were.
“Very well,” he said coolly, “then I think you ought to go to some other
hotel, because you are the only people in mine who have been married.”
That same hotel manager considered that things were no longer what they
were, for an Indian Maharajah had that morning complained at being
charged two pounds for a chicken—that the English and Americans were no
longer fools, and, in fact, that the only fools left were the Austrians.
The late King of the Belgians was in residence at the chateau, and had
not one, but three, notorious French actresses staying with him.
Apart from its _plage_ and its gaming-tables, I should have found Ostend
a dull place if it had not been for Henry Arthur Jones, who was there,
off and on, writing a new play, and ready to discuss it. He had had a
play at the St. James’s which had not gone too well, and he asked me if
I could account for it. I suggested that allowing a hospital nurse to
frustrate an elopement was more calculated to gratify the gallery than
the stalls, and that the St. James’s was a stalls theatre.
Jones had one curious habit—whenever he felt at a standstill in writing
his play he used to say he must have a change of air, and then fly away
to Homburg or some other place which took many hours to reach. He was
much interested in gambling, though he did not gamble seriously. I
imagine that he found the gaming-tables full of “copy.”
In the winter we went to Sicily again, and in the summer to Salcombe
again.
In the following winter my connection with _Who’s Who_ ceased. My
agreement with the publishers was only for three years in case the book
was a failure, and the publishers pronounced it a failure.
Almost immediately afterwards I had an attack of jaundice, brought on,
or not brought on, by the incident, and after a short stay at Brighton,
went to recruit my health at Nice, from which I paid many visits to
Monte Carlo, though I did not gamble much.
On our way back from Nice we did what not one Englishman in a hundred,
among the thousands who winter in the Riviera, does, got off at
Tarascon, and wandered about the cities of Troubadour-land, such as
Tarascon, Arles, Nîmes, Avignon and Les Baux, the deserted capital of a
dead principality, where the houses, instead of being built, are hewn
out of the face of the rock. Provence is full of ancient Roman
buildings, and of Romanesque buildings, hardly to be distinguished from
them; and, in our day, in spite of the law against it, they used the
Roman amphitheatres for the modern equivalent of gladiatorial
games—bull-fights. Bull-fighting always began on Easter Sunday.
I registered a resolve, which I have never kept, to write a book about
Provence.
That summer we spent at Cookham on the Thames. Since we were unable to
go abroad, we went on the river, as being the most frankly “Continental”
place in England. We had perfect weather, and Ostend itself did not give
us more pleasure than the reach of the river between Cookham and
Maidenhead. I found lying in a punt outside the lock at the Cliveden end
conducive for finding incidents for fiction.
And I had not done sufficient creative work since I began _Who’s Who_.
Indeed, _The Admiral_, my novel of the love of Nelson and Lady Hamilton,
which I finished at Ostend, had been nearly my whole output, for
_Trincolox_ had been written ten years before, and published in _Temple
Bar_. I was, of course, working at the materials for _In Sicily_ all the
time, and in the spring of 1900 we paid another three months’ visit to
Sicily to see that all my facts were up to date.
We were at Syracuse during the darkest days of the Boer War. About half
the people in the house were Germans, who were openly pleased at the
succession of disasters which had befallen the British arms before they
could get proper forces out to South Africa, to fight an enemy who was
prepared in every single detail before he forced on the war. It seemed
as if the disasters never would stop, and these amiable people told us
so every day. But one fine day a British battleship, one of the largest
then afloat, steamed into the great harbour of Syracuse, and anchored in
the waters where the Athenians were annihilated in their last sea-fight
against the Syracusans. We were down on the quay, and so was nearly
every other foreigner in Syracuse, when a launch put off from H.M.S.,
and made towards us. The Captain, a typical sea-dog—it was Callaghan,
now one of our chief Admirals—was in the stern. As he stepped ashore he
said: “We have just had a wireless from Malta—Kimberley is relieved.” It
was most dramatic to have the news brought to us by the biggest
battleship in the Mediterranean, how French had introduced a new feature
into warfare by raising a siege with a dash of five thousand cavalry
riding all day as hard as they could. I shall never forget it.
We returned to Rome in time for the Papal Jubilee, the sixth centenary
of the original Jubilee established by Boniface VIII in 1300. Some of
the ceremonies were extraordinarily interesting, and the procession of
Leo XIII in St. Peter’s was one of the most impressive things I ever
saw. I think it was that which inspired me to write _The Secrets of the
Vatican_, though I did not complete it for publication till nearly seven
years afterwards.
That summer again we went to Cookham, which had serious results, for my
son was thrown into contact with some charming boys who had just passed
into the Army, and were spending their vacation from Woolwich at Bourne
End, a mile up the river from Cookham. Nothing would do for him after
this but to go into the Army. I did not oppose it, because he was an
absolutely idle boy at school, and it seemed such a good thing that he
should want to pass any exam., and further, I was almost as much under
the glamour of those dear boys—poor St. John Spackman, who was
afterwards killed in the polo-field, was one of them—as he was.
That inspired me to write _My Son Richard_, which is a story of river
life and boys who want to serve their country. I took him to Captain
James, the leading Army crammer, and said that he wanted to get into the
Army. In a few home questions, James discovered that he had never done
any work at school, and said he had better go into the Artillery—he
could not get into the Line. I looked incredulous, and he explained that
in the Artillery exams. there are papers in more subjects which boys do
not learn at school, so that a boy who has not done any work has not
lost time over this—such things, for instance, as “fortification” and
“military topography.”
My son amply fulfilled his prognostications by securing ninety per cent.
of the marks in the military subjects, and only sixteen marks out of two
thousand in Latin. Still, he passed, but, to his great disappointment,
was not allowed to go out to the war which had just begun, because he
was too young.
In this year, 1901, in which both my big book _In Sicily_ and my novel
_My Son Richard_, first saw the light, I had plenty to do, for I was
finishing and attending to the publication of _Queer Things about
Japan_, which was the best received of all my books of travel. It owed
its success largely to the timely moment at which I wrote it. Knowing
Japan well, I was convinced that there was going to be a Russo-Japanese
war, and Sidney Dark, the brilliant literary editor of the _Daily
Express_, as alive a journalist and critic as there is in London, was at
that time manager of the firm of publishers to whom I offered the book,
because they had recently taken over the publication of the sixpenny
edition of _A Japanese Marriage_. It was not hard to convince him that
there was war in the air for Japan, and he commissioned the book with
the happiest results. Much of it appeared serially in the papers
connected with the Tillotson Syndicate, which at that time had Philip
Gibbs for its editor. He accepted my offer to write him eight long
instalments about Japan for the Syndicate. Just as I had finished and
dispatched them, he wrote to tell me that he did not think that Japan
was a sufficiently live subject, and asked me not to write the articles.
No sooner had he written the letter than he received the articles. He
read them and thought them so good that he sent me a telegram cancelling
his letter, and used them. They form the backbone of the book. He had
asked me to be as humorous as possible. Other editors thought them very
amusing, and when the approach of war made Japan the topic of the day,
showered commissions on me.
Norma Lorimer, who was all through Japan with us, was of great
assistance to me in recalling our life there, and I got her a good many
commissions for articles, which were afterwards collected with some of
the articles that I wrote during the war into _More Queer Things about
Japan_.
In this same year, 1901, Hutchinson & Co. published _My Son Richard_,
which, as I have said above, was a novel about boys who had just passed
into the Army, and girls of the same age, spending the summer on the
river at Cookham. As an instance of rapid printing, I may mention that
Hutchinson got me all the proofs of this book in seven days, but he
recently, in 1913, eclipsed this by making the printer give me all the
proofs of _Weeds_ in six days.
_My Son Richard_ was very popular. A Duchess wrote to a newspaper which
was collecting statistics about the popularity of books, that this was
the nicest book she had ever read, and when it came out as a sixpenny,
the village grocer at Cookham ordered hundreds and told me that every
maidservant for miles round was buying it. I wish they would buy all my
other sixpennies. To reach the servant class is a most difficult
achievement.
As Miss Lorimer had broken her leg that year and still could not move
about much, we went for August to Baveno on Lago Maggiore, to an hotel
with a garden on the lake, where she had a room looking right over the
exquisite Borromean Islands, Isola Bella and Isola dei Pescatori. Italy
has always been her favourite subject for writing. She corrected the
proofs of her _By the Waters of Sicily_ here, which is as popular as
ever, though it has been out for twelve years.
Baveno had the happiest effect on her. The air is lovely, and her window
looked right over the finest sweep of Lago Maggiore, with the islands in
front and the snow-tipped Alps behind. Heavy square-prowed barges with
junk sails used to glide slowly across the eye-line, and light
high-prowed fishing-boats with hoods like Japanese sampans darted about
near the shore, which had long pergolas overhanging the lake and
Passion-vines sweeping over every shed.
A month’s rest at Baveno made her leg quite well, and then we were able
to spend a fascinating September in the mountain city of Bergamo;
Brescia, with its history and monuments of a thousand years; and Venice,
which is always most adorable in summer. The Feast of the Redentore in
July is the crown of the year at Venice. We had learnt, and we have
often made use of our knowledge since, that Italy is at her best in
summer.
I do not seem to have published any books in 1902 or 1903, though I was
writing steadily all the time, and had a couple of serials running in a
magazine, but I was collecting materials hard for the biggest piece of
work I have ever accomplished. Those who take up _Sicily, the New Winter
Resort_, a small octavo, and _In Sicily_, two immense quartos, will be
surprised to hear that the smaller book contains a far greater amount of
reading matter than the larger—half as much again, I should say—though
the one costs five shillings net and the other three guineas. The
Directors of the Rete Sicula, for whom I compiled the smaller book,
stipulated that it was to be cheap in price and handy in form. This book
is an encyclopædia of Sicily. It itemises every monument of any
importance, every custom, every piece of scenery noted for its beauty,
every railway station, and gives information about every name which
comes prominently into the history or the mythology of the island. It
also gives directions how every monument and beautiful piece of scenery
is to be reached.
Nineteen hundred and two was the last summer which we spent at Cookham.
My son was then at Woolwich, and we stayed at Cookham so that he could
have his week-ends on the river. That winter and spring we again spent
in Sicily and Italy. But that summer we spent at Tenby for the first
time, because my son had now been gazetted to a Company of Artillery
which was stationed at Pembroke Dock. Tenby I consider one of the most
beautiful coast-places in the United Kingdom. It stands on a rock over
the sea, and still retains a considerable portion of walls and towers
built in the reign of the third Edward, and restored during the Spanish
Armada scare in 1588. It has also a magnificent Gothic church, and one
Gothic house. Its position is hard to beat, for its rock stands between
two splendid stretches of sand, and when the wind blows on one side you
are out of the wind on the other. On the north sands is a green bluff.
If you walk inland it is easy to find deep woods, and if you walk across
the golf-links (there is very good natural golf) you come on to noble
downs with gorgeous precipices sheering down to the sea, and rich in the
ruins of historic and prehistoric men—literally historic, for there is
Geoffry of Monmouth’s castle of Manorbier, and far beyond, my ancestor
Aylmer de Valence’s castle of Pembroke, which, like the castle of the
Carews, rises out of the windings of the great haven of the West.
Such is Tenby, round which, under the name of Flanders, I built a
romance in my novel, _The Unholy Estate_.
The golf-links served both Tenby and the naval and military officers at
Pembroke Dock. Nearly every day I used to meet the Gunner and Infantry
subalterns and captains disporting themselves on the links, and I was
often over at Pembroke in the barracks. It was there that I picked up my
knowledge of young soldiers, which I put into use in _The Unholy
Estate_, _The Tragedy of the Pyramids_ and _The Curse of the Nile_.
The winter we generally spent in Italy, except the winter and spring of
1906, when we were once more in Sicily, and went across from Sicily to
visit Tunis and Carthage.
In 1904 I was busy putting the finishing touches on two books about
Japan, _More Queer Things about Japan_, the book in which I collaborated
with Norma Lorimer, and _Playing the Game_, which in the cheap editions
has had its name changed to _When We Were Lovers in Japan_. This book
has been running serially in _Cassell’s Magazine_. It never had half the
popularity or circulation of _A Japanese Marriage_, though it had much
more value as a study of Japan and the Japanese, for it deals with the
transition of Japan from a weak Oriental nation to one of the great
powers of the world, and gives an acid picture of the futility of the
diplomats to whom Great Britain entrusts her interests.
In this same year, 1904, Methuen brought out _Sicily, the New Winter
Resort_. In 1905 I turned my attention to Sicily once more, working up
the serial which had appeared in _Cassell’s Magazine_ into the volume
which the publishers insisted on christening _A Sicilian Marriage_, to
try and lend it some of the popularity of _A Japanese Marriage_, which
it never acquired, and the world never discovered that it was an
excellent popular guide-book to Palermo, Girgenti, Syracuse and
Taormina.
In the same year I brought out _Queer Things about Sicily_, a companion
volume to _Queer Things about Japan_, with Norma Lorimer.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVII
THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS: PART II
IN 1906 I was busy writing two books into which a good deal of history
came, _Carthage and Tunis, the Old and New Gates of the Orient_, and
_The Secrets of the Vatican_, the former of which I published at the end
of that year, and the latter at the beginning of the following year.
We were hovering between Italy in the winter, and Tenby in the summer,
and taking uncommonly little out of our rent at 32 Addison Mansions.
I had always been mightily interested in Carthage. I hated Carthage
being beaten by Rome, partly, perhaps, because history has invested the
career of Hannibal and the fall of Carthage with such undying romance.
When we were in Sicily in 1906 we suddenly made up our minds to go to
Tunis, of which Carthage is practically a suburb, just as when we were
at Vancouver we suddenly made up our minds to take a trip to Japan.
Carthage is disappointing to those who wish to see Punic remains. Of the
mighty walls described by Polybius, there remains hardly one stone upon
another. Its impregnable naval harbour and arsenal have dried up into
mere ponds—in fact, there is nothing Punic about it, except subterranean
tombs, which you can only reach by being lowered in a basket, and the
gorgeous coffins and ornaments which came out of them, and are preserved
in the museum of the White Fathers.
But of Roman Carthage there are plenty of remains—an amphitheatre, and a
theatre, and mighty underground cisterns, and the foundations of immense
churches. In that amphitheatre a most interesting lot of saints were
martyred, St. Perpetua herself among them.
No ruins have been discovered connected with the career of St.
Augustine, the Carthaginian to whom the White Fathers attach so much
more importance than to Hannibal or Hamilcar; and all memories of Dido
have hopelessly disappeared. Any remains that there might have been of
the citadel so desperately defended against Scipio, have been
obliterated by the erection of a cathedral on the site, the consummation
of the life-work of Cardinal Lavigerie. That there is not one human
being for a congregation, except the White Fathers in the monastery,
does not appear to signify at all. The cathedral is there, just on the
spot where you want to forget it most, and think of the tremendous human
tragedy to which that hill is sacred.
I loved wandering about the site of Carthage, ruminating upon history; I
found the study of the saints of Carthage fascinating, and gave a good
deal of my book to them when I came to write about Carthage, in which I
also gave translations of the very extensive passages which Virgil
devotes to it, without apparently having possessed any antiquarian
knowledge at all upon the subject.
History is very ironical here. You sometimes meet wandering, or encamped
about the site of Carthage, Berbers, lineal descendants of the
aborigines dispossessed by Dido and her Phœnicians when they founded
Carthage, who lasted as a race to see Phœnician Carthage perish, and the
Christian and Roman Carthage, which rose upon its ashes, perish likewise
before the invading Arabs, and the Arabs, after temporary subjugation by
this or the other invader, finally conquered by the French. Their
language, too, has survived, though it was in danger of extinction till
French scholars made its preservation and study a hobby.
It must not be forgotten that when Carthage came to life again she had
her revenge on Rome, for the Vandal King of Carthage captured Rome, and
carries its empress in chains to Carthage, with the Table of the
Shewbread, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Seven-branched Candlestick
captured by Titus—trophies to which the Romans had ever since attached
superstitious importance.
In the last half of 1906 and the spring of 1907 I was unusually busy. We
spent the summer for the fourth year in succession at Tenby. Eustache de
Lorey was there with me collaborating in _Queer Things about Persia_. I
planned the outline of the book; I suggested subjects for the chapters;
I extracted some of them by cross-examination; I wrote down others when
he was in an anecdotal vein. And some he wrote in French, and we
translated them together. Had he been able to accumulate a book in
English unaided, there was no reason why he should not have written it
all himself. His careful, slightly foreign English was very effective.
But I may take this credit to myself, that the book would never have
been conceived without me, and even had it been conceived, it would
neither have been begun, nor, having been begun, would it have been
finished, without my professional industry. I enjoyed writing it very
much indeed. De Lorey was such a delightful companion, and I learnt so
much about Persia by writing a book on it. This sounds like a paradox,
but it is a universal truth.
Simultaneously I was engaged on finishing my own book on Carthage and
Tunis. In this book I had to rely almost entirely on French materials,
because the two main sources of information are the official
publications of the French authorities, and commercial firms interested
in the exploitation of Tunis, and the publications of the White Fathers
out at Carthage, about its site and its remains.
I was also finishing a book upon which I had been at work for some
years—_The Secrets of the Vatican_, in which I enjoyed the assistance of
his Eminence the Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster, in the chapter
which dealt with the Church crisis in France.
When I went to ask him to help me, he asked me what I was going to call
my book. I replied, _The Secrets of the Vatican_. He said, “Doesn’t it
sound rather——”—instead of giving me the word, he gave a sniff. I shall
never forget that sniff—it expressed the whole situation. I hastened to
explain that the Secrets were all archæological secrets, and he handed
me the materials for my chapter.
Some time before this, he had asked our mutual friend, Cortesi, Reuter’s
agent at Rome, to tell me a story of the Pope, in connection with my
_Sicily, the New Winter Resort_. Cardinal Bourne had taken a tour in
Sicily, using my _Sicily_ as his guide. When he got back to Rome, he
showed an anecdote in the book to the Pope. The anecdote was about
Cardinal Newman, who had told me an extraordinary experience he had had
in Sicily. It was at Castrogiovanni, where he lay for some weeks between
life and death, suffering from a fever, which was the result of his
being totally robbed of sleep by fleas when he was making a tour round
Etna. The greatest affliction with which he had to contend was the
incessant ringing of church bells—Castrogiovanni, the Enna of Ceres and
Proserpine, has more churches for its size than any city in Sicily. Poor
Newman’s only chance of sleep, which meant life to him, was to keep his
head under the bedclothes in that semi-tropical climate. The inhabitants
went about aghast, saying that he had a devil. The Pope thought the idea
of the future Prince of the Church (Protestant though he was then)
having a devil, was ludicrously funny, and laughed till his sides ached,
like an ordinary man. When Newman did recover from the fever, and was on
his way from Sicily to Sardinia in a fruit boat, he wrote his famous
hymn, “Lead, kindly light.”
_The Secrets of the Vatican_ formed one half of a book which I began as
a commission from Eveleigh Nash some years before. The numerous changes
in non-papal Rome, and the important excavations of its pagan monuments,
which were announced, but postponed and postponed, made me despair of
ever getting the book finished, and finally I decided to publish the
part which related to the Vatican in a volume by itself. This, after
going through three editions, has been, for further publication, divided
into two parts. The personal matter about the present Pope, and the
information about the ceremonies which relate to the election,
coronation, death and burial of a Pope, and about the composition of his
court, are still published by Hurst & Blackett, with certain additional
information on the subject, under the title of _The Pope at Home_, while
the part which relates to the history, architecture and collections of
the Vatican, is now published by Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., under the
title of _How to See the Vatican_.
_The Secrets of the Vatican_ was published in 1907, a few months before
we began our memorable expedition to Egypt, which has played such an
important part in my writings ever since.
Having to study economy in our travels, we determined to break the
journey to Egypt in Italy, and with that idea went to Lake Como in the
last days of July 1907.
Anything more beautiful than Lago di Como in August it is difficult to
conceive. All the way up its west side the lake is fringed with crimson
oleanders in full blossom. Though the days are cloudless, and the nights
encrusted with stars, by perfect summer weather, there are no
mosquitoes. It is a land of peaches, and of old villas with gardens,
which look as if they had come down from the ancient Romans, with their
vases and pavilions and terraces and broad flights of steps leading down
into the clear water of the lake—this is the lake from Arconati to
Cadenabbia.
Here we spent a month under the acacia and tulip trees, revelling in
fruit and flowers, before we went south to Como City; and east to
Sermione, in the reedy shallows of Lago di Garda, dominated by the
castle of the Scaligers, which loses not one ray of sunshine from
sunrise to sunset; to storied Mantua in its marches; to Verona, half
ancient Roman, half Gothic, and wholly romantic, and to Venice the
matchless.
Venice is a stone city conjured up from the sea. In the city proper
there is no more earth than you might have in roof-gardens. There are no
horses, no motors. You seem to be living on the roof of the sea. The
palaces, which rise from the water in such unending succession, were
mostly built in the Middle Ages, when Venice had the sea-trade of the
world. The finest of them line the Grand Canal from side to side for a
mile from its mouth, and at its mouth are the most beautiful buildings
in Europe, which have been standing there three and four and five
hundred years at the head of the stately flight of steps where the world
once came to the feet of Venice—St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace, and the
Library, surrounding that Piazetta of smooth white flagstones. You feel
that they are too beautiful to be true, that they must be the airy
fabric of a vision, which will presently pass away, and leave not a
wrack behind.
I never go to Venice without wondering why I can live away from it. Yet
I have never published my tribute to it, except in periodicals, and in
the pages about it which come into my _How to See Italy_.
I have to say the same of Florence, to which we moved from Venice on our
progress through Italy to Egypt. Like Venice, I have visited it many
times, and I find Florence one of the most inspiring cities in the
world. The Venetian, unless he be a guide or a gondolier, is silent to
foreigners; he takes no account of them; there are few foreigners living
in Venice. But in Florence there are five thousand foreigners, who talk
about the glories of Florence every day, and all the inhabitants seem to
be children of the Medici Florence, who think that every foreigner’s
mind should be in the Florence of the Middle Ages. You talk pictures or
history all day long.
From Florence we went on to Rome and Naples, where we were to take ship
for Egypt. Of Rome I have written much in _How to See Italy_, as well as
in _The Secrets of the Vatican_, which contained the fruit of years of
study. I have also published in periodicals enough to fill another book
about the parts which belong to the kingdom of Italy, as the Vatican
belongs to the Papacy. To Rome I go back regularly. About Rome I intend
to publish a book like _How to See Italy_, and _Sicily, the New Winter
Resort_, combined, to make use of my street by street study of the
Eternal City. I know Rome far better than London. Rome has always
appealed to my historical enthusiasm, in the one point where Florence
leaves me cold, for Florence was, as it were, at the back of the door
while kingdoms were being carved out of the unformed mass of Europe
during the Middle Ages, while Rome gave the world laws, language and
civilisation, collated from the wisdom of the ancient world.
Naples itself is not an inviting town, but it slopes up from one of the
most beautiful bays in the world, and it is rich in outstanding
objects—Capri in front, Vesuvius on the left, the hill of Posilippo on
the right, and the three great castles, St. Elmo, del Ovo and Nuovo,
which make the points of a vast triangle from the sea to the
mountain-top, while in the centre is the rock of Parthenope, now called
the Falcon’s Peak, the site of Palæpolis, the old city, which came
before Neapolis, the new city.
The outskirts of Naples are of the highest interest, for on the south
side the disinterred ruins of Pompeii and Herculanæum lie under their
destroyer, Vesuvius, the most interesting volcano in the world; and on
the other are Cumæ, the first settlement of the Greeks in the virgin
lands of Italy, which was their America; and all the volcanic phenomena,
which furnished Roman mythology with the details of its Hades.
Pompeii is of undying interest to me, especially since the new custom
has come in of leaving any fresh treasures which are discovered, _in
situ_. There is no place where, if you study it in conjunction with the
collections in the museum of Naples, you can so easily picture the life
of the Greeks and Romans as at Pompeii. I have many times thought of
writing upon Pompeii.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XVIII
THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS: PART III
IT was Benton Fletcher, one of the “identities” of Egypt, equally well
known as an artist who does valuable work in connection with excavations
and does delightful landscapes, which are the fashion with “winterers”
in Egypt, who first put into my head the idea of visiting that matchless
country. Egypt is literally matchless; there is no country in the world
which has such a winter climate, and no country in the world which has
monuments so ancient and so perfect, so close together and so
accessible. Every monument which is not in an oasis is on the Nile, and
the Nile in Egypt is like a railway in other countries.
Fletcher not only worked up my enthusiasm to the point of going there,
but met us on our arrival in Cairo, and initiated me in the secret
beauties of the Arab city. But for him _Oriental Cairo_ would never have
been written.
I was also much influenced by the photographs published by Leo Weinthal
in _The African World_ and _Fascinating Egypt_.
We sailed from Naples to Alexandria in the November of 1907. We did not
delay an hour there, but took the next train to Cairo.
At Alexandria Egypt is Roman, and the monuments which have yet been
excavated are not, with the exception of one marvellous late tomb, very
interesting. But Alexandria is an unexcavated Pompeii, and when some
Schliemann among its leading merchants decides to devote his energies
and his fortune to excavating the vast mounds which still bury Roman
Alexandria, we may expect finds of astonishing interest. In the desert,
about thirty miles from Alexandria, is the city of St. Menas, an early
Christian Pompeii, where there has already been excavated a wonderful
Basilica founded by the Emperor Arcadius.
Except for a few articles in the _Queen_, I did little writing in Egypt
beyond taking copious notes. But these I did more completely than I ever
had done before, and as my secretary was with us, they were typed out
every evening, and are now bound together into a sort of diary-journal
of our entire visit. To make them more complete as journals, I took
eight hundred photographs, and certainly bought as many more, and as
complete a collection of postcards as I could form. Therefore I was in a
very sound position for writing my various books upon Egypt after I had
returned home. The first book I wrote upon our visit was _Egypt and the
English_, consisting partly of what we saw while we were staying in
Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor, Assuan, the Fayyum, the Great Oasis, and while
we were journeying up the Nile to the second cataract, and down the Nile
to its Rosetta and Damietta mouths, and over the Desert Railway into the
Sudan; and partly of the result of my inquiries about the political
condition of Egypt. When the book came out, many reviewers took up the
attitude that what I said was too alarmist, but when Mr. Roosevelt
repeated it to the letter, the Government took the warnings seriously,
and appointed the best possible man, Lord Kitchener, to take the place
of Sir Eldon Gorst, whose policy of scuttle and kowtow may have been
dictated by the Government which appointed him.
I knew that my facts were sound, because I had not only sucked as much
information as I could out of British officials and editors, and the
Leader of the Egyptian Bar, but also from the leading Syrians and
Armenians, who see much more behind the scenes than the English, because
Arabic is their business language, and the Arabs associate with them
freely in private life. Among Syrians especially I had repeated
conversations with Dr. Sarrûf and Dr. Nimr, the proprietor and editor of
_El Mokattan_, the most important Arab paper in Egypt, to whose opinions
Lord Cromer had always attached the greatest importance, and they had
told me how to meet such of the Nationalist leaders as spoke English.
These were actual Egyptians, so _Egypt and the English_ did give native
opinion both directly from the mouths of Egyptians, and indirectly
through Syrians and Armenians.
[Illustration:
HALL CAINE
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
I wrote _Egypt and the English_ for a commission to write _Queer Things
about Egypt_. The then chairman of Hurst & Blackett, when he saw the
political chapters in the book, considered them so interesting and
important that he asked me to hold over the humorous chapters for
another book. Which I did. But in the interval he sold the business of
Hurst & Blackett to my old friends Hutchinson & Co., who published my
real first success, _The Japs at Home_. They were quite ready to take
another book on Egypt from me, and we decided to make these chapters the
nucleus of that book to be published under the original title of _Queer
Things about Egypt_. This book gives the humours of the native city in
Cairo, and the humours of travel on the Nile. The parts of the book
which attracted most attention were those which dealt with Arab life in
Cairo in the native quarters round the Citadel, and with Arab
architecture and art, so Hutchinson asked me to do another large volume
on Egypt, devoted entirely to _Oriental Cairo—the City of the Arabian
Nights_. For that part of Cairo is almost as much an Arab City of the
Middle Ages as was Granada in the days of the Moors, and the stories of
the Arabian Nights were made into a book by a Cairene in the sixteenth
century.
_Egypt and the English_ was published in 1908, _Queer Things about
Egypt_ in 1910, and _Oriental Cairo_ in 1910.
In 1908 I also wrote, and Hurst & Blackett published, _The Tragedy of
the Pyramids_, which has been one of the most successful of my novels.
It was written as a counterblast to Hall Caine’s _White Prophet_, which
at that time was running as a serial in the _Strand Magazine_. I
considered that Caine was giving an entirely incorrect impression of our
army in Egypt. The book is now in its ninth edition, and was an
imaginary picture of the revolution which would have overtaken Egypt, if
Sir Eldon Gorst’s scuttle and kowtow policy had been persisted in. I had
a great deal to say about the Senussi in this book—the battle of the
Pyramids was fought against a great host of invading Senussi. The
British public had then heard little of the Senussi. But in the
Turko-Italian war the Senussi have proved a far more dangerous enemy to
Italy than the Turks, as they are very hardy and move with great
rapidity. They are said to own many zawia, or convents, in Egypt, and to
have established a network of wells at twenty-four hours’ distance from
each other all over the great desert of the Sahara—also to have
twenty-five thousand swift camels accumulated against any invasion of
their country, which is almost conterminous with the great desert. Boyd
Alexander, the famous explorer, is considered to have fallen a victim to
his intrusion upon their territory, which they openly forbid to
Christians, on pain of being assassinated. But their Prophet refused to
join forces in any way with the Mahdi when he had possessed himself of
the Egyptian Sudan.
_The Tragedy of the Pyramids_ was published in 1909, _Queer Things about
Egypt_, and _Oriental Cairo_, in 1910, the same year which saw the
publication of _The Moon of the Fourteenth Night_, the romance which I
wrote in collaboration once more with Eustache de Lorey. As it had so
much of the travel-book about it, it was not brought out in the form of
a novel. It was, in fact, the biography of a dashing young French
attaché, who is still alive, pretty faithfully told. He had no objection
to our using it if we killed him off in the book, to throw the girl’s
relations off the track, in case they should try to kill him in real
life. The public never realised that it was actually reading a romance
of real life, that there had been such a person as Bibi Mâh, that the
escapades of Edward Valmont were not imaginary, but episodes in a career
of gallantry. The book comes very near to being a journal of life in the
Persian capital at the beginning of the revolution.
In the autumn of 1908 we went back to Italy to spend the six cold months
in Rome, hoping that we should have one of those winters which you
sometimes get in Rome, as full of sunshine as spring—only cold when you
are in the wind and out of the sun. Yoshio Markino spent that winter
with us at 12 Piazza Barberini. I got my friend Percy Spalding, one of
the directors of Chatto & Windus, to give him a commission to do the
illustrations for _The Colour of Rome_, and as I knew Rome so well, I
conducted him to nearly all the beauty-spots which furnished the
subjects of his illustrations. I showed him many others which did not
appeal to him, for Markino will not begin a picture until some _motif_
in the locality has appealed to his artistic temperament. He is an
artist to the finger-tips. His fidelity is all the more extraordinary
when you take into consideration his method of painting a landscape.
In those days he had written nothing but a short chapter in _The Colour
of London_, and _The Colour of Paris_, but he used to show me the
letters he wrote to Spalding and Ward, of Chatto’s, about the book,—most
brilliant some of them were, and I saw that he was a born writer. I
suggested to him as early as this that he should write his life in
Japan—I had not then grasped what a story he had to tell of his life in
England.
He felt the cold in Rome very severely. He used to consume quantities of
the childish substitutes for fuel provided in Roman hotels.
In that first visit which he paid to Italy, he was not much interested
in the architecture or the art, just as he never visited the Louvre
while he was in Paris painting _The Colour of Paris_. And the scenes of
historical events interested him little more, though often they played
an important part in the history of the world. He was absorbed in the
novel lines of buildings; the gay colours of Italy; the strangeness to
him of the atmospheric effects of Rome; the subtle and ceaseless humours
in the life of the Italian poor. And their clothes delighted him, with
their gay, faded colours, their rags, and the fine abandon with which
they were worn.
We were in Rome collecting materials for my book on _How to See Italy_,
and I was writing the _Tragedy of the Pyramids_ mostly in bed, before I
got up in the morning. Between five and eight a.m. is a favourite time
for writing with me. I seldom begin later than 5.45; I have a cup of tea
brought to me at 6 a.m. I also wrote a good deal in periodicals about
the great earthquake at Messina. The Italian papers were naturally full
of details, which had not been telegraphed to England, and we used to
get wonderful cinema films, which made one quite an eye-witness of the
events. In Italy you can go to the cinema for twopence.
I was about to make a tour of the earthquake scenes in South Italy and
Sicily, and to go on to Malta, where my son was then quartered, when I
was suddenly called home by the alarming illness of my father, who was
given up by the doctors, though he recovered and lived for nearly two
years afterwards.
We re-visited a few favourite spots, such as Pisa and Lucca, on our way
up, as we did not hope to see Italy again for some time.
As it chanced, it was little more than a year before we were back in
Italy again, on the most interesting tour which we have ever spent in
that country. I had a commission from Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. to write
for them _How to See Italy_, which was destined to be so popular, and
there were forty-five cities in Italy which I wished to visit or
re-visit before writing this book. I wrote it for the Italian
Government, as Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. were aware, and they had offered
me many facilities. They had the blocks made for the illustrations. I
went over their entire collection of photographs in making my choice,
and where no photograph existed, they sent their special photographer to
take one. Also they allowed me to travel about on their lines wherever
my wish took me free of charge, so I was able to wander about Italy in a
way in which the expenses would ordinarily have been too great for any
book.
Markino went with us again on this journey, which lasted from July to
November. This time I had got him a commission from Constable & Co. to
illustrate a book by Miss Potter, which was published under the title of
_A Little Pilgrimage in Italy_.
We visited all our cities, starting from Genoa, and proceeding to
Florence, Arezzo, Cortona, Perugia, Deruta, Todi, Siena, St. Gimignano,
Passignano, Monte Oliveto, Asciano, Chiusi, Città della Pieve, Assisi,
Foligno, Spoleto, Spello, Bevagna, Montefalco, Trevi, Clitunno, Gualdo
Tadino, Gubbio, Urbino, Rimini, Ravenna, San Marino, Ancona, Loreto,
Terni, Narni, Orvieto, Viterbo, Ferento, Bagnaja, Monte Fiascone, Rome,
Tivoli, Milan.
As soon as we had left the mountain heights of Arezzo and Cortona, the
Etruscan eyries from which the Romans marched down to their red fate on
the shores of the lake Trasimene, we learned how hot mid-Italy can be in
midsummer. Even on the rock of Perugia, fifteen hundred feet above the
sea, you could not walk on the sunny side of the street without an
umbrella on account of the risk of sunstroke, and the heat was almost
unendurable as we drove across the hills the thirty or forty miles to
Todi, a little city which the Gods of the Middle Ages have kept to
themselves.
Perugia was always defiant, from Etruscan times. With a man like Duke
Frederick of Urbino to rule and lead its fierce citizens, Perugia would
have been more potent than Urbino, or Rimini, or Mantua, or Ferrara,
perhaps a city of the first rank, like Milan or Florence. Its rock made
the whole city a citadel, and it sits astride the road from Rome to the
Alps, with the fertile Vale of Umbria to provision it.
The Vale of Umbria below Assisi is only rivalled by the shores of Lake
Trasimene in the beauty of its women—we know them from the pictures of
Raphael, Perugino, and Pinturricchio. I wish I could put its magic into
words—the nobility of its farm-houses, the soft grace of its orchards
and olive-gardens, its antique hermitages.
Summer in the Vale of Umbria was perfect, and certain of its beauties
were such as could only be seen in summer, like the translucent sources
of the Clitumnus, which, with their lawny banks, remind you of the
Twenty-third Psalm. I would rather go and see them, below the tall
poplars which are a landmark across the plain, than the graceful little
Roman temple above them, which is a landmark for travellers.
Foligno is only a walk from exquisite Spello, a city which is a hill
covered with Gothic houses. Foligno and the cities on the hills round it
are rich in great pictures by small masters; but Spoleto is, after
Perugia, the prize city of Umbria. It is rich in monuments of all ages;
in its walls it has prehistoric masonry of three ages; it defied the
assaults of Hannibal; you can still see the house of Vespasian’s mother,
and other Roman monuments of the classic age; it is rich in the
handiwork of the forgotten centuries which followed; it has a church
built like a pagan temple in the fourth century after Christ; it has the
most stupendous aqueduct in Italy, carried across a valley from the hill
of Groves, on arches two hundred and fifty feet high; and a unique
cathedral, planted in the valley, like its other great church; it was
the capital of the only King of Italy who bore the title before Victor
Emmanuel. Standing on the hillside, embosomed in groves, looking over
the plain, in an amphitheatre of mountains, Spoleto is a place which
never leaves the memory.
We went straight from it to most famous cities—Gubbio was not its equal,
except when the sunset fired the façade of its city hall, six hundred
years old and three hundred feet high; and Urbino, on its dizzy height,
crowned with the fantastic palace of Duke Frederick, is a prosaic place
beside it; Ravenna, for all its mosaiced churches, built by Justinian
and his successors, when the first millennium was half spent, has no
glory of site, nor has Rimini; Ancona has only its site and its glorious
Byzantine cathedral, on a green hill between two seas.
We wandered from town to town such as these; we drove all day from
Rimini to San Marino, the castled eagle’s nest, which is still an
independent Republic; we went to Loreto on the Virgin’s day, and saw
peasants, who had come in ox-carts from the recesses of the Apennines.
We stood below and above the stupendous waterfalls of Terni, the most
stupendous in Europe. But we saw no naturally nobler city than Spoleto.
All that summer we wandered about the byways of Tuscany, Umbria, Latium,
and the March of Ancona. We hardly ever saw an English face. We stayed
for the most part in humble native inns. It was a hot summer, even for
Italy, but we were not frightened by the heat from going where we meant
to go, nor by the fetish of malaria, for we stayed a week at Ravenna in
September. We never enjoyed ourselves more in our lives. We tested an
Italian summer fairly on the hot plains and sun-baked hills. I needed
the experience to write _How to See Italy_.
It was a guide-book on a new principle. While I was writing of the
cities and scenery of Italy, generally I grouped them in provinces, but
I devoted other chapters to the hobbies of travellers. I told the lover
of paintings where all the best paintings in Italy are to be found, and
which places have the richest galleries. I did the same for the lovers
of architecture, sculpture, mosaics, and scenery. I told the traveller
how to see all the principal sights of Italy by rail, without going the
same railway journey twice, and I tried to convert English travellers to
the delightful native inns of Italy, and I gave them the prices of inns
all over Italy.
The idea of the book was, briefly, to enable any one to see at a glance
which parts of Italy he ought to visit in pursuit of his special
studies. And I had three special chapters on the changes in Rome, which
have made all the old books on Rome out of date.
When we reached London in the late autumn, I found a sad change in my
father, who had reached the great age of eighty-six. He had lost much of
his memory, and very often did not care to speak. He gradually failed,
until one night between Christmas and the New Year he passed away quite
peacefully, holding my hand.
I sold the house on Campden Hill—Phillimore Lodge—in which he had lived
for nearly fifty years, to Sir Walter Phillimore. The estate was so
burdened with legacies, made while he was a much richer man, that I
should have lost by accepting my inheritance if I had not sold all the
real estate.
I had no wish to live there. For years it had been my intention to leave
London when I no longer had my father to consider. I wanted to go to
some rural spot just outside London, where I could have pleasure in
being at home in the summer months, because I like going abroad in the
winter, and you must make use of your house some time during the year.
At Addison Mansions we were only at home for a month or two in some
years.
I set about looking for a new house almost immediately, and after nearly
taking an old Queen Anne mansion in the Sheen Road, finally settled on
the Avenue House, Richmond, which stands in the north-west corner of the
old Green, with its front windows looking down the Avenue, and across
the Green to the Old Palace, and its back windows looking over the old
Deer Park and the Mid-Surrey Golf Club to the trees of Kew Gardens. In
the winter we can see a mile or two of grass and trees from those
windows, and the river when the tide is high. The house suited me
perfectly; it had a charming old-fashioned garden, with ancient trees, a
cedar of Lebanon, a mulberry, and an arbutus, which covers itself with
flowers and fruit, among them, besides two great wistarias and many
flowering laburnums, lilacs and hawthorns. I added rockeries in the
Sicilian style, and various features of a Japanese garden.
The house had the further advantage of being only a few minutes’ walk
from the railway stations, from golf at Mid-Surrey, and from one of the
most beautiful reaches of the Thames.
Here I have written the present book, _The Unholy Estate_, _The Curse of
the Nile_, and my parts of _Adam Lindsay Gordon and His Friends in
England and Australia_, and _Weeds_; and I was here when _How to see
Italy_ was published.
I was sorry in a way to say good-bye to Addison Mansions, which had been
my home during the most interesting years of my life. I liked the rooms;
I should have liked to transport them to Richmond.
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CHAPTER XIX
HOW I WROTE “WHO’S WHO”
OF all the books I have written, none have attracted more attention than
_Who’s Who_.
Various biographical dictionaries of living persons were in existence
before the new _Who’s Who_ appeared in 1897—_Men of the Time_, _People
of the Period_, and so on. But none of them were annual, and none of
them were published at a popular price. I myself had attempted to get a
cheap annual biographical dictionary published, before A. & C. Black
came to me with their proposal about _Who’s Who_. I put the idea into
the hands of a literary agent for sale. It was very much on the lines of
_Who’s Who_, but not on so ambitious a scale, and I thought that Sell,
who has a Press directory, might be likely to buy it. No one did buy it,
and when I told an interviewer, who came to get “copy” out of me about
_Who’s Who_, about it, that agent was wrong-headed enough to think that
I was trying to libel him, instead of trying to claim originality for my
idea.
However that may be, Adam Black, one day, when I was talking to him
about my novel, _A Japanese Marriage_, which A. & C. Black had
published, produced a copy of the old _Who’s Who_, an insignificant
pocket-peerage, of which he had just purchased the rights, and asked if
I could make anything of it for the firm. Having made a synopsis of my
own idea for that literary agent to sell, I had it cut and dry, and it
was settled that I should do the book as soon as the agreement could be
drawn up. As events proved, it was drawn up too hurriedly, for I signed
it without insisting on the clause which has gone into all my other
agreements of the same kind—that, in case the publishers wished to be
released from the agreement because the book was not as successful as
they hoped, the book should become my property. I do not say that the
Blacks would have consented to the insertion of this clause, but it is
certain that I ought never to have signed it without, because I put into
it ideas, whose originality and value has abundantly been proved since.
It was agreed that I should edit it for three years certain, but that if
the book was not successful by then the agreement should terminate. At
the end of the three years, they determined that the book was not a
success, and terminated the agreement. At the time that I wrote this
book there was no one in London with the same knowledge as I had as to
who should be included in the book, because my three years’ work in New
York papers had made me take up biographical journalism—a profession
which did not exist in London till I brought it over from America, and
which never took permanent root in England. In fact, it very soon
withered out of existence.
It is an odd fact that this book in its dried pippin form, which went on
for about half a century before it was expanded, never struck the world
as having a specially good title, till Adam Black recognised its value,
though now its title is regarded as a stroke of genius.
“But how are you going to get the information?” he asked, when I had
detailed my formula for the biographies, much the same as that which is
used for _Who’s Who_ now, with the exception of the details about
telephones and motors, which were not part of English everyday life in
1897, and a few other points which I ought to have thought of.
“I shall make the people themselves give it.”
“But will they ever do it?”
“I think so, if we give them proper forms to fill up, and get a
well-known peer and a well-known commoner to fill up their forms as
specimens before we send the others out.”
“You’ll have to tell them that you’re going to use their biographies as
specimens. I wish nothing to be done of which anybody could complain.”
In the matter of the special stationery provided for the purpose, the
firm were extraordinarily liberal. They only studied attractiveness,
just as they had special type cast for setting up the book because none
of the small types offered to us were sufficiently beautiful. The
selection of the long blue envelopes, opening at the side, has an almost
public interest. Adam Black requested that we should leave the matter of
envelopes over until the following week, when he was to meet Lord
Rosebery on the yacht of his brother-in-law, George Coates. When Lord
Rosebery was asked what kind of envelope he should treat with most
respect in opening his correspondence, Lord Rosebery pronounced in
favour of this particular form of long blue envelope, because it was
used by the Cabinet for their communications. So we adopted it, and the
first persons in official circles who received it may have experienced a
strange flutter of expectation, because we did not in those days, I
think, have the envelopes stamped _Who’s Who_, lest they should defeat
their object of being taken for Cabinet communications.
Then came the question of whom we should invite to write their
biographies to be models for the biographies of other people. I selected
the Duke of Rutland for the peers, and Mr. Balfour for the commoners.
The Duke, both as Lord John Manners and as Duke, had occupied one of the
first places in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen. He had filled his
place in the Cabinet with distinction; he had been the typical
aristocrat; his exquisite politeness had helped the democracy to forgive
him for writing “Let Wealth and Commerce ... die. But give us still our
old nobility.”
I wrote to ask him to fill the biographical form, which I had drawn up,
to be the model for other members of the peerage, and with his usual
consideration, he acceded. Then I wrote to Mr. Balfour to ask him to
write his biography, to be a model for the untitled. The only title he
bore was so proud that we usually, as I did then, forget to reckon it
among titles—the “Right Honourable.” Mr. Balfour, too, acceded, and he
was particularly suitable, because, in addition to being the first man
in the House of Commons, recreation had a real meaning in his case,
since he was known to be an inveterate golfer.
The idea of adding “recreations” to the more serious items which had
been included in previous biographical dictionaries was adopted at one
of the councils of war which we used to hold in the partners’ room of A.
& C. Black, at 4 Soho Square. And for selling purposes it proved far and
away the best idea in the whole book, when it was published. The
newspapers were never tired of quoting the recreations of eminent
people, thus giving the book a succession of advertisements of its
readability, and shop-keepers who catered for their various sports
bought the book to get the addresses of the eminent people, who were,
many of them, very indignant at the Niagara of circulars which resulted.
I wonder if many people remember the old _Who’s Who?_—a little red 32mo,
which looked something like the Infantry Manual with its clasp knocked
off. It was a sort of badly kept index to the Peerage, as futile as an
1840 Beauty Book. We turned it into a dictionary of biography for living
people, and we made it eternally interesting by persuading the people
whom we included in it to give us their favourite recreations. I chose
(from an un-annual biographical dictionary edited by Humphry Ward) the
type, which had to be specially cast for it; I chose the people who
deserved to be included in it; I drafted the letters and the forms to be
filled up, which were sent to each person; and I persuaded those two
very eminent men to be the bell-wethers for persuading other people to
fill up their forms, an idea which was crowned with success. The late
Duke of Rutland’s and Mr. Balfour’s fillings up of the forms were
printed at the heads of the forms sent out to other people, and few
people objected to following where they had led the way. But among these
few recalcitrants were Lord Salisbury and Mr. Chamberlain, and most
naval officers. Army officers, on the other hand, were generally very
obliging. Architects and literary men filled up their forms best,
artists and actresses worst, though actors were almost as bad. You would
have thought that the actual formation of the letters in framing a reply
was a torture to artists, actors and naval officers. The actresses, if
you had compiled the biographies by interview, would have asked for two
columns each.
Many people thought it necessary to write me rude letters, demanding
what right I had to intrude upon their privacy, and ordering me not to
include their names. To one of them, the head of an Oxford College, I
wrote, “Dear Sir, If you had not been head of —— College, no one would
have dreamt of including you, but since you are, you will have to go in
whether you like it or not.”
The late Duke of Devonshire said that his recreation had formerly been
hunting. One man said that he did not see how the ownership of four
hundred and fifty thousand acres made him a public person. A prominent
authoress first of all refused to fill up her form at all. I wrote to
tell her that in that case I should have to fill it up for her. She
showed no concern about this until I sent her a proof of the biography,
in which I made her out ten years older than she really was, and said
that I meant to insert the biography in that form unless there was
anything she wished to correct. She then corrected it, and added so much
that it would have taken the whole column if I had inserted all she
sent.
W. S. Gilbert wrote the rudest letter of anybody. He said he was always
being pestered by unimportant people for information about himself. So I
put him down in the book as “Writer of Verses and the libretti to Sir
Arthur Sullivan’s comic operas.” He then wrote me a letter of about a
thousand words, in which he asked me if that was the way to treat a man
who had written seventy original dramas. Next year he filled up his form
as readily as a peer’s widow who has married a commoner.
Bernard Shaw said in 1897 that his favourite recreations were cycling
and showing off, and informed the world that he was of middle-class
family, was not educated at all “academically,” and coming to London
when he was twenty, for many years could obtain no literary recognition,
even to the extent of employment as a journalist.
But the most humorous experience I had in connection with _Who’s Who_
was when I succeeded in bringing a certain actor-manager to book. He had
repeatedly promised to fill in his form, and failed to do so, when I
found myself next to him at a public dinner to which we had both been
invited. “Why did you not send me that biography?” I asked him, and he
said, “Well, the real reason is that I thought I should have to say how
damned badly I have behaved to my wife.”
The book was a complete literary success; the newspapers gave it column
reviews, chiefly consisting of the unsuitable recreations of prominent
people.
When I edited it, _Who’s Who_ contained a great deal of information
besides the biographies, such as lists of peculiarly pronounced proper
names, keys to the pseudonyms of prominent people, names of the editors
of the principal papers. Some of the real names were so unreasonable
that people wrote to know why they were not included in the lists of
pseudonyms; one of these was Sir Louis Forget.
Ascertaining the correct pronunciation of peculiar names was very
diverting; there was such a divergence of opinion among people of
Scottish birth about words like “Brechin.” I was bewailing their egotism
to the late Lord Southesk, when he said, “I have been collecting
peculiarly pronounced Scottish names and their proper pronunciation for
years. You can have my list.”
I thanked him and gladly inserted them all. A very good friend of mine,
the late Hugh Maclaughlan, who was sub-editor of the _Star and Leader_,
in reviewing the book over his own name, found great fault with my
Cockney pronunciation of the Scottish names. I do not know to this day
whether he was serious, or, as schoolboys say, “pulling my leg,” and in
any case, I did not mind, but Lord Southesk was furious.
“Tell Mr. Maclaughlan,” he said, “that I am the man whom he called a
Cockney, and that my ancestor commanded the Highlanders at the battle of
Harlaw.” Harlaw was the last great battle between the Highlanders and
the Lowlanders, and was fought in the year 1411.
One of the funniest entries in the book was made by a famous authoress,
who wrote in her biography “she is at present unmarried.”
One of the most amusing experiences I had when I was editor of _Who’s
Who_ was my receiving a message from a Mrs. Williams or Williamson,
asking me to call on her upon a matter of great importance. I imagined
that at the very least Queen Victoria (Mrs. Williams was supposed to
have influence in such matters) had deputed her to offer me a
knighthood. At any rate, from the tone of her letter, it ought to have
been a considerable advantage of some sort which was to be bestowed upon
me. I was not much flustered because the lady had not the reputation of
giving anything for nothing. But I own I was rather taken aback when I
was shown into her den, and she said, “I sent for you because Mrs.
Dotheboy Tompkins”—or some such name—nobody of the slightest
importance—“wishes you to put her into _Who’s Who_.”
I said, “The only answer I can give you is that I do not consider Mrs.
Tompkins of sufficient importance. I don’t know how you will break this
to her. Good-afternoon.”
It was such colossal impertinence, her sending for me instead of writing
to me, though that would have been bad enough, that I was determined not
to spare her.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XX
AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE
AS I lived four or five years in Australia, and have written various
books upon Australian poets, and as both my wife and my son are
Victorians by birth, it is natural for me to devote a chapter to
Australians in literature whom I have known, counting both people from
the Old Country who became Australians by residence, and those who were
born or educated in Australia, though their writing career has been in
England.
I never met either Gordon or Kendall—Adam Lindsay Gordon and Henry
Clarence Kendall, the twin stars of Australian poetry, naturally come
first to one’s mind in writing of Australian literature, because poetry
in Australia, as usual, preceded prose as an art.
Gordon, whose nephew, Henry Ratti, living in London, had just placed
himself in communication with me in a couple of long letters, and
invited me to lunch when he died so prematurely, had been dead for
nearly ten years before I landed in Australia. But Kendall did not die
till I had been in Australia for nearly three years. I was in Victoria
when he died; I think I had actually been appointed to the Chair of
Modern History in the University of Sydney before it happened, so I
missed him by a very narrow margin. So little stir did his death cause
in Victoria that I never even heard of it, and imagined that he had been
dead for years, though he wrote lyrics only excelled in music by
Shelley’s, Swinburne’s and Poe’s in the whole of English literature. Yet
he had visited Melbourne, and was, in fact, there and in the company of
Gordon the very day before his rival died. Kendall, unlike Gordon, was
Australian born.
Far the greatest author born on Australian soil is, of course, Mrs.
Humphry Ward, a Tasmanian by birth, though Australia had long passed out
of her life before she wrote. “Tasma” was also a Tasmanian by birth, and
“George Egerton,” whose father, Captain Dunne, fought in the New Zealand
war, was born in Melbourne.
Mrs. Campbell Praed, on the other hand, was not only born in Queensland,
the daughter of a prominent Queensland politician, Thomas Lodge Murray
Prior, but has gone to her native land for the scene of her brilliant
novels. Ill-health kept her from coming often to Addison Mansions, where
she had a double claim to literary homage, for, apart from her own
eminence as a novelist, she has a matrimonial connection with William
Mackworth Praed, the brilliant novelist and father of Society Poetry.
Rolf Boldrewood, though born in London, has been so long in Australia
that he almost counts as a Colonial (Australian born) rather than a
Colonist (settler). He went to the old Sydney College in New South Wales
more than seventy years ago, and though he spent the greater part of his
life as a Police Magistrate and Warden of the gold-fields in New South
Wales, began life as one of the pioneer squatters of Victoria. His
experiences gave him a rich equipment for writing tales of wild life in
the old Colonial days, like _Robbery Under Arms_, with which he made
such a huge reputation in 1888. I remember him as a writer ten years
before that, when he used to send a weekly _causerie_ to the
_Australasian_, admirably written under his famous pseudonym. I believe
that he used to call it “Under the Greenwood Tree.” He had already
written and published the novel which he afterwards called _The
Squatter’s Dream_. It was a thin paper volume, a sort of cross between
our sixpennies and the French three francs fifty coverless novels, and
it was called in those days _Ups and Downs_. It was a true story; it
dealt with the ups and downs of the famous Mossgiel Station, which made
John Simson’s great fortune, and the ruin by drought of the De Salis
brothers who had the station before him. It was published anonymously.
Rolf Boldrewood’s real name is Thomas Alexander Browne. His mother was a
Miss Alexander. Both the Brownes and the Alexanders were huge men;
Rolf’s brother, Sylvester Browne, was the tallest man in Australia, a
couple of inches taller than my uncle, Sir Charles (who was just under
six foot six, and I think may have owed some of his influence in the
early days to his great stature). The Brownes were not only very tall,
but very strongly-built men. Their adventurousness took them to West
Australia, where they made large fortunes during the mining boom.
Guy Boothby and Louis Becke, on the other hand, both much younger men,
were real Colonials, Becke having been born at Port Macquarie, New South
Wales, and Boothby at Adelaide, where his father was a member of
Parliament and his grandfather a Judge. That did not prevent him from
leading the wildest life. At one time he was an explorer and crossed
Australia from north to south. At another time he was stoker on a tramp
steamer trading between Singapore and Borneo. He “struck oil” with the
detective stories of Dr. Nikola, which the _Windsor Magazine_ ran in
opposition to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in the _Strand Magazine_,
and at one time was making nine thousand a year out of his writing. I
remember his chartering an eight hundred ton steam yacht, and he had
some wonderful prize dogs at the Manor House, close to the Kempton Park
racecourse, in which he lived.
Becke was never so fortunate in his earnings, though he was a far
superior writer. He acquired his wonderful knowledge of the Australian
coast and the South Sea Islands as supercargo of one of the schooners
which trade between the islands and Sydney. He was one of Fisher Unwin’s
discoveries, and came very near achieving a _Kidnapped_ and _Treasure
Island_ success, for which, as far as first-hand knowledge was
concerned, he was infinitely better equipped than Stevenson.
Frank Bullen, Becke’s rival in South Sea knowledge, was not an
Australian, but born in Paddington. Like Becke, he was in the Merchant
Service. I have more to say about him in another chapter.
Ada Cambridge, who was for a long time the best-known novel-writer in
Australia, was born in Norfolk, and spent all her time in East Anglia
till she married the Rev. J. F. Cross, and sailed with him to Australia
in 1870, the year of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s death. She published her
first novel about seven years later. Cambridge was her maiden name.
Ethel Turner, Mrs. H. R. Curlewis, is another of the few Australian
authors living in Australia who have had large publics in England. As a
reviewer, I hailed with delight her first books, _Seven Little
Australians_ and _The Family at Mis-Rule_, and prophesied the wide and
continuous success which she has attained with her stories of child life
in Australia. Mrs. Curlewis was born in Yorkshire, but she has lived in
Sydney ever since I can remember.
Frances Campbell (Mrs. Howard Douglas Campbell), the author of _Love the
Atonement_, _The Two Queenslanders_, and other novels, married a cousin
of the late Duke of Argyll, who was out in Queensland, and commenced
writing at his Grace’s suggestion. In point of fact, she came to us with
a letter of introduction from him. Since then she has been an active and
successful journalist, doing several special journeys abroad as
correspondent for the great London dailies. She is not to be confused
with Mrs. Vere Douglas Campbell, the mother of Marjorie Bowen, who is
also a novelist. I made the mistake myself once.
Mrs. Mannington Caffyn, who under the pseudonym of “Iota” wrote the
famous _A Yellow Aster_, was a beautiful and spirited Irish girl, the
daughter of a country gentleman, who took to hospital nursing as a
profession, and married a doctor, whose ill-health drove him to
Australia. Her life there was full of hard experiences, but she did not
make a mark in literature till her return to England. Andrew Lang was
struck with the extraordinary ability of _A Yellow Aster_, and urged
with all his influence one of the old classical publishing houses to
bring it out, but in vain. Hutchinson saw his opportunity, accepted the
book, advertised it with genius, and made a colossal success of it.
Other successes followed, so real that she was able to send her growing
boys to a crack public school. Another novelist not born in Australia,
but resident there for some years, was “Rita,” who was educated in
Sydney.
The Countess von Arnim, author of a delightful series of books from
_Elizabeth and Her German Garden_ to _Fraulein Schmidt_ and _Mr.
Anstruther_, was an Australian born, the daughter of Mr. Herron
Beauchamp.
Haddon Chambers, one of my earliest literary friends in London, though I
have seen little of him for many years, I met because we came from
Australia at about the same time. He was born near Sydney, of Irish
parents, and was for a while in the New South Wales Civil Service, like
his father before him. Feeling, as I did, that Australia was no place
for a literary career, he visited England when he was twenty, and
returned to England for good when he was twenty-two, a handsome, alert,
indomitable Australian boy. He looked very boyish in those days.
Beginning life in England as a journalist and story-writer, he suddenly
took London by storm with his play, _Captain Swift_. Captain Swift was
one of the greatest parts which Beerbohm-Tree has created, and from that
time forward Chambers became one of the dramatists who count.
To my mind, the best author living in Australia at the present moment is
the Rev. William Henry Fitchett, President of the General Conference of
the Methodist Church of Australia, editor of a magazine and a weekly
newspaper, and Principal of a ladies’ college in Melbourne. He made his
name with a series of remarkable books about the exploits of the British
army—writing at first under the pseudonym of “Vedette.” Few men have
ever written so brilliantly or so sympathetically on the subject as the
author of _Fights for the Flag_ and _Deeds that Won the Empire_.
A. B. Paterson, the poet who wrote “The Man from Snowy River,” is an
Australian by birth and residence. He is another of the few Australian
authors who have a vogue in England without ever having lived there. He
is recognised not only as one of the chief poets of Australia, but as a
publicist. He is a solicitor by profession.
W. H. Ogilvy, the best living Australian poet, was not born in
Australia, nor does he live there now, but he spent many years in the
Australian bush, and caught its spirit better than any poet except Adam
Lindsay Gordon.
The Countess of Darnley, who wrote some fiction a few years ago, was the
beauty of Melbourne when I was there in the ’eighties. Lord Darnley met
her when he came out to Australia with one of the English cricket
elevens. He was then the Hon. Ivo Bligh, a name which will never be
forgotten in the history of sport.
The charming and elegant Eleanor Mordaunt, author of _Lu of the Ranges_,
the best novel ever written about hardships in Australia, is English by
birth.
“_Lu of the Ranges_,” says a _nil admirari_ Australian newspaper, whose
editor could not have known that she was born in England, “is a notable
contribution to Australian literature.... It is solidly constructed,
finely written, frank to the verge of brutality, and inherently
Australian. Lu, pictured on the cover by the fool illustrator as a
charming English maiden, is a drab and very human girl of the backwoods,
who, to the end of her life, could not speak grammatically. Her language
is the sort that looks neater printed with a dash; and she has a temper
of her own. A hard, glittering, valiant personality, whom life teaches
to take care of herself ‘on her own.’
“A veritable child of the bush, she was inured alike to heat and cold,
to hard work and a spare diet, to an almost incredible isolation.... For
the children of the bush are, above all things, old, like the primitive
forms of vegetation, the wistful-eyed, prehistoric animals which are
with their fellows. When they grow up and find their way to the cities,
they blossom into a splendid youth, which never again quite leaves them;
or else, scared and bewildered, they creep back again to the wild places
whence they came. But to the irresponsible gaiety of childhood they are
for ever strangers.”
It was the outcome of the seven years of struggles, more than once
coming perilously near starvation, which she had in the colony of
Victoria. Some of her short stories are good enough for Rudyard Kipling.
That she has not assumed her place in the front rank of novelists is due
only to the immense barriers to recognition which have to be surmounted
owing to the mountains of fiction which are cast up every year, and
stand between the new writer and fame.
When I asked Eleanor Mordaunt about her life in Australia she said—
“In Australia I edited a woman’s paper, and made gardens, and blouses
for tea-room girls, and worked in an engineer’s shop at metal work, and
was four times carried into public hospitals for dying. I never had a
penny in the bank—and more than once not in the world. Once I lay in bed
for three days because I had nothing to eat. Then came thirty pounds for
a manuscript of essays from _Lothian_ of Melbourne (published 1909 under
the title of _Rosemary_), and seven pounds a woman owed me for painting
her a set of silk curtains, and two pounds for _The Garden of
Contentment_, and I got up and went out and bought a pound of chops, and
cooked and ate them all. I did all my housework at night, and all the
washing.
“In Leek this time I lived on fifteen shillings a week with the weavers,
and knew no one else except the two daughters of the Trade Union
secretary, and never had so much love and kindness in my life. The book
comes out next autumn, and is called _Bellamy_.”
Mary Gaunt, the novelist and traveller, was born and brought up in
Victoria. Her father was a well-known judge in the Colony. She had met
with considerable success in journalism before she left the Melbourne
University.
Dr. George Ernest Morrison, who made himself so famous as correspondent
of _The Times_ in Peking, was, as I have said elsewhere, a
fellow-student and friend of mine at the Melbourne University, and has
been a great friend ever since. It was I who persuaded Horace Cox to
publish his _An Australian in China_, the only book he has ever
published, though I myself conveyed to him an offer of a thousand pounds
on account for a book about China before the Allied Powers invaded it.
He was unwilling to enter into a contract, and the matter dropped. He
has since then resigned his position on _The Times_, and become English
adviser to the Government of China. His book on China, whenever it does
come, will be read all over the world, because no European has ever
understood Chinese politics as well as he has.
His knowledge of the country Chinese, the two hundred million toiling
agricultural poor, is just as extraordinary. His gigantic journeys
across China have given him a chance of seeing them as no other
Anglo-Saxon, and probably no other white man, ever has seen them. His
first journey was from Shanghai to Rangoon by land in 1894, which he
accomplished at a cost of eighteen pounds, and on which he went unarmed,
as usual. That is the journey described in _An Australian in China_. His
second was from Bangkok in Siam to Yunnan city in China and round
Tonquin in 1896; his third across Manchuria from Stretensk in Siberia to
Vladivostok; his fourth from Peking to the border of Tonquin; his fifth
from Honan city in Central China across Asia to Andijan in Russian
Turkestan, nearly four thousand miles.
Morrison, whenever he came back to England from the East, used to come
straight to Addison Mansions. One night he turned up about 10 p.m.
“How long have you been in London?” I asked.
“About two hours.”
The hero of so many striking adventures (in which most people would feel
inclined to include the siege of Peking, for he was badly wounded in it,
and without his leadership the city would have fallen) is, though his
bushy hair has turned snow-white, singularly youthful-looking. His
rounded clean-shaven face has not a line or a wrinkle from its long
sojourn under Eastern suns. His blue eye has a merry twinkle in it which
gives his face a humorous expression when it is not hardened for action.
Those who have seen him in a crisis, know how stern and resolute and
uncompromising it can be. He has a slim, active figure.
Just before he was appointed _Times_ correspondent in China, I
approached Sir Henry Norman, who was at that time one of the editors of
the _Daily Chronicle_, and whom I knew, to try and get the proprietors
of that paper to give him a similar appointment in China, or in some
country where Spanish is spoken, for Morrison speaks Spanish fluently. I
enumerated all the qualifications which immediately afterwards led _The
Times_ to make the best appointment they made since De Blowitz. At the
end of it Norman just said with a cold smile, “Oh, all your geese are
swans,” and changed the subject. I wondered if he ever let the
proprietors of the _Chronicle_ know what a goose they had lost, and whom
they could have secured for quite a moderate salary. To his honour be it
known, that Moberly Bell, of _The Times_, recognised Morrison’s value
the moment the young doctor approached him.
Morrison’s middle fame was of a quite unusual sort. His walk across
Australia without money and without arms had been a nine days’ wonder.
His gallant explorations in New Guinea, culminating in his being brought
home with a barbed wooden spear-head inside him, and being sent on to
Edinburgh because no one in Australia could extract it, made him a
celebrity in Scotland as well as Melbourne. But when Prof. Chiene
extracted the spear-head successfully, Morrison’s exploits, for the time
being, were lost sight of in those of the great surgeon, and he became
known as “Chiene’s case.”
G. W. Rusden, the only important historian of New Zealand and Australia
till Henry Gyles Turner’s book appeared, I knew very well. We lived
together, until I was married, at Cotmandene, Punt Road, South Yarra, a
suburb of Melbourne. In fact, I was married from there. He had for many
years been clerk of the Parliaments in Melbourne, and was actually
engaged in writing his histories when we were living together. He was a
strange mixture in his sentiments—a violent Tory in everything except
where natives were concerned. But he was even more violent as an
advocate for coloured people. At that time the Maories were giving a
good deal of trouble in New Zealand, and Bryce, the Minister for Native
Affairs, showed great resolution and capacity in dealing with them. This
infuriated Rusden, who, partly from the yellow journals in New Zealand,
and partly from Sir George Grey, who had been Governor and afterwards
Premier of the Colony, gleaned a farrago of libels, accusing Bryce of
murdering native women and children. He showed these reports to me
triumphantly. At the risk of losing his friendship, for he was very
touchy, I begged him not to make any use of these materials, which
appeared to me patently false. But he persisted in inserting portions of
them. Years afterwards, when both he and I were living in England, Bryce
brought an action for libel against him in the London Courts on these
very grounds. Rusden went to my uncle’s firm, Sladen and Wing, as his
solicitors, on account of his friendship with my other uncle, Sir
Charles. My cousin told me about it. “Well,” I said, “make him pay
anything to keep it out of court. I was living with him when he wrote
that part of his history, and saw the materials, and he hasn’t a leg to
stand on.”
But Rusden was a great deal too stubborn to compromise—and the verdict
against him was five thousand pounds damages.
Turner also is an old friend of mine. He was long manager of the
Commercial Bank in Melbourne, and was one of the founders and editors of
the _Melbourne Review_. He and the late Alexander Sutherland, who was a
schoolmaster, wrote the excellent book on Australian literature which
has been the foundation of all subsequent works on the subject,
especially in the matter of our knowledge of Adam Lindsay Gordon.
And here I must mention my two closest Australian literary
friends—Arthur Patchett Martin and Margaret Thomas. Margaret Thomas, who
was brought up in Australia, though she was actually born in England,
began life as a sculptor. She won the silver medal of the Royal Academy,
and executed, among other public works, the memorial to Richard
Jefferies in Salisbury Cathedral, and the memorials to various Somerset
celebrities in the Somerset Valhalla, founded by the Kinglakes at
Taunton. She was so successful also as a portrait painter that she was
able to retire with a competency, and devote the rest of her life to
travel and book-writing. She has written travel-books on Syria, Spain
and Morocco, and hand-books on painting and sculpture. Probably no one
living has such a wide knowledge of the picture-galleries of the
Continent.
Patchett Martin was born at Woolwich, but went to Australia at an early
age, and was educated at the Melbourne Grammar School and University. He
helped to found, and edited the _Melbourne Review_, and was intimately
associated with the theatre, because his sister married Garner, the
principal theatrical impresario of Australia. He settled in London in
1882, and practically introduced Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems to their
popularity in England, where they had been neglected except for the
reviews and articles which appeared in _Baily’s Magazine_, about the
time of Gordon’s death a dozen years before. While editor of the
_Melbourne Review_, Martin was among the very first to “boom” Robert
Louis Stevenson, who was his model in his own delightful poems and
essays. His big, burly form and hot, good-humoured face were very
familiar in the Savage Club in the ’eighties.
Australian authors in London centre round the Royal Colonial Institute,
and the _British Australasian_, the editor of which, Mr. Chomley, is the
secretary of the literary circle at the Royal Colonial Institute, which
meets on Thursday nights, and has most interesting papers and
discussions.
Both the former librarian (my old friend, J. R. Boosè, who is now the
secretary) and the present, P. Evans Lewin, who was for a brief period
the chief librarian of South Australia, have kept the track of nearly
every book which has been published about Australia or by an Australian,
and Australian authors and journalists make a regular club of the
Institute when they are in London.
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CHAPTER XXI
MY NOVELIST FRIENDS: PART I
BY far the greater number of my literary friends have been novelists. I
have counted no less than two hundred and seventy male novelists who
have visited us at Addison Mansions, and I have no doubt that I have
forgotten enough to bring the number up to three hundred.
Of Walter Besant, a short sturdy man, with a bushy brown beard and blue
eyes behind spectacles, which could be very merry or very indignant, I
have spoken elsewhere. Besant, who pronounced his name with the accent
on the second syllable (it is said because people always pronounced the
famous theosophist’s name with the accent on the first syllable, though
the recollection of its Byzantine etymology may also have guided him),
was very outspoken. He could not abide the famous Annie Besant; he
considered that she was a millstone about his brother’s neck, and made
no bones over saying so. That brother was a master at Cheltenham College
when I first went there. But I do not remember if I ever saw Mrs. Besant
there, though we saw the masters’ wives as a body in the College Chapel
every Sunday morning. Another matter on which he was outspoken was his
repulsion for George Eliot—not her works, but her personality. He once
said to me that her head reminded him of a horse’s, and on another
occasion said that no woman’s face had ever struck him as more sensual.
His own personality was splendid. He was so genial, though such a
fighter; he was so splendidly full of energy, so quick to catch on to
ideas, so masterful and wide-grasping in carrying them out; so
absolutely friendly; such a good enemy, and so astonishingly
warm-hearted. I never had a greater personal feeling of respect and
affection for any great man than for Besant.
All the world knows how much he effected for authors, and how much he
sacrificed for them. He made as large an income as any great novelist of
his time, but he might have made much more and lived another twenty
years, if he had not slaved for his brother authors.
George Meredith, who succeeded him as head of the literary craft, was
never at Addison Mansions, though his daughter came twice with Lady
Palmer. I only had the privilege of knowing him towards the end of his
life, when his time and his health were far too precious to be spent on
going to at-homes, though he was very kind about having younger authors
introduced to him at the parties which Lady Palmer gave in his honour
when he was staying with her. Once seen, George Meredith could never be
forgotten. You were delighted to find that a man who had created a
literature within a literature, the writer who by common acclaim is the
greatest of all English novelists, was so rare and impressive in his
appearance and speech. His face was singularly beautiful in its old age,
surmounted by a fleece of snow-white hair, and illuminated by bright
blue eyes, absolutely clear. He was, of course, an excellent talker, and
both his voice and his way of using it were strikingly emphatic. There
are few old men whom I have met to whom I should so unhesitatingly apply
the word majestic. The whole face, with its well-trimmed beard and
unexaggerated features, reminded me of the bearded Zeus in the group of
the three gods on the frieze of the Parthenon.
He was very gracious also to young authors, though it must have been a
severe tax on him to have so many worshippers introduced to him. For
George Meredith was not a man like Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lady whom I
introduced to him began, “It must bore you terribly, Dr. Holmes, to have
everybody who is introduced to you telling you how they admire your
books.”
“On the contrary, madame,” he said gallantly, “I can never get enough of
it. I am the vainest man alive.”
On the same occasion Holmes told me that he had been unable to do any
writing (except his short _Hundred Days in Europe_) for years, because
his entire time was taken up with answering complimentary letters.
Hardy did come to 32 Addison Mansions, Hardy who has received the Order
of Merit, and is proposed for next year’s Nobel prize for literature, as
the head of the literary craft, one of the great masters of English
fiction. I am very proud to have known Thomas Hardy; he is not only so
great, but so silent and reserved, that it is not easy to know him. I
have met him often, but seldom seen him talking, except very quietly to
an intimate friend. He has generally been on the edge of a crowd,
observing—we have the fruits of that profound observation in his novels.
That slight figure, that melancholy face, with the watchful eyes, was
always a cynosure, for Hardy has been the object of unbounded admiration
for many years. I remember his being the bright particular star about
whom the late Lady Portsmouth was always talking at her house-parties at
Eggesford, where I stayed, as far back as 1885.
I have a letter from him which is one of my most treasured literary
possessions. He wrote it to me to explain his point in introducing the
passage about the slaughtered pig after I had reviewed _Jude, the
Obscure_, at considerable length and with minute criticism in the
_Queen_. I have alluded to his almost equal eminence as a poet in
another chapter.
It is natural to couple Hall Caine with Thomas Hardy, for both of them
were brought up as architects, though they turned to literature, and
reached the topmost rung.
Hall Caine has been an intimate friend of mine for many years. Our
friendship began before he was a novelist, in the days when he was a
critic of the _Athenæum_ and the _Academy_, and an editor of poetry. His
sending me _The Sonnets of Three Centuries_ in the year in which he lost
his housemate, the poet and artist, Dante Rossetti, was the beginning of
our friendship. He began publishing novels in 1885, and two years later
leapt into the front rank of novelists with his magnificent _Deemster_.
After my return from America I began to see more and more of him. He
became a director of the Authors’ Club, of which I was Honorary
Secretary, and one of the chief speakers at the New Vagabonds Club.
In 1894 he reached, with _The Manxman_, the height of fame, at which he
has since continued. I prophesied its enormous success in a long review
of it, which I wrote for the _Queen_, which came out simultaneously with
the publication of the book. We were in Rome together at the time that
he was writing the _Eternal City_, and in Egypt together while he was
writing _The White Prophet_.
No one could be in the presence of Hall Caine for five minutes without
knowing that he was in the presence of a remarkable man. His resemblance
to Shakespeare is extraordinary, not only in the dome-like expanse of
his forehead and the Elizabethan slope of his beard, but in the burning
eyes and the shape of the eyecups. He looks the genius that he is.
Hall Caine has always had the merit of being highly approachable and
affectionate, and if his conversation is apt to centre round the work he
is doing, it is always most interesting and pregnant.
At Rome, for instance, where I very often had lunch with him in his flat
at Trinità del Monte, overlooking the city, and went for walks with him,
he was very full of the Vatican, where he constantly went to see certain
cardinals, who were most indiscreet in their confidences.
He was intimate with the Italian Government, too. I met various members
of the Cabinet at his table, and one of them, Ferraris, then
Postmaster-General, as well as editor of the _Antologia Nuova_, has done
me many acts of friendship since.
Jerome’s neighbour in those days, Joseph Hatton (than whom there could
have been no more striking contrast to him), was one of his and my
dearest friends. There were few men so dear to their friends as Joe
Hatton. He had an enormous circle of them in literature, and on the
stage, and so won their hearts with his geniality and loyalty that they
forgot how eminent he was, and treated him as a brother. But Joe Hatton,
in addition to the vast amount of work he did as editor and critic,
wrote some of the best novels of his day. I can see him now as he so
often came to our house, a rather small man with a brown beard, a lift
of the chin, a ready smile, and such very bright sympathetic brown eyes.
He used to bring his pretty little daughter with him before she was
grown up. How proud he was of her first successes on the stage, and the
fairy-book she wrote! He had a house with a very nice garden in St.
John’s Wood, where he gave parties at which one met all the leading
actors and actresses of the day. They could always spare time for a
reception at Hatton’s, as actors always stopped for a word with him at
the Garrick Club on Saturday nights.
Of Doyle, Kipling and Barrie, Anthony Hope and Frankfort Moore, I have
spoken in another chapter.
Stanley Weyman was such a rare visitor to London that he was not often
at our house. But I have corresponded with him a good deal. I knew when
I made _A Gentleman of France_ my book of the week in _To-day_, and
hailed the author as an historical novelist of the first rank, on what a
solid basis his work rested, for we were at Oxford at the same time, and
he took his First in History almost in the same term as I took mine. He
is a very fair man, with an eyeglass, much more like a soldier than an
author.
Poor Crockett, a big tall man, with a fair beard, the type of the Saxons
who fought against the Conqueror at Hastings, was not very often in
London, but when he was there, he was a conspicuous figure at our
at-homes. We had many tastes in common, including Italy. Crockett asked
my advice when the question arose of his giving up the ministry. He was
at that time Free Church minister of Penicuik, a little place in
Midlothian, with a salary, as far as I remember, of a hundred or two a
year, but as an author was making a thousand or two a year, and able to
earn a good deal more if he could save the time which he had to devote
to his clerical work. His congregation were aghast at the idea of losing
their beloved minister just as he had sprung into Anglo-Saxon fame, and,
with Scottish casuistry, represented to him that it would be wrong for
him to neglect the work of the Lord for any worldly object. Crockett
thought, and I agreed with him, and decided him, that he would be more
certain of doing good if he allowed some man to whom the minister’s
stipend was necessary to be minister of Penicuik, while he did his
teaching and his preaching with his pen.
F. W. Robinson’s short, thick-set figure, and heavy moustache, were as
conspicuous. It is strange how soon poor Robinson has been forgotten.
His work was popular with readers, and treated with respect by critics,
and he was one of the bigwigs at literary clubs and receptions, but with
his death all memory of him seemed to pass away, except among his old
friends.
G. A. Henty, on the other hand, though he has been dead for years now,
seems to stand before us still, with his great beard, his great pipe,
his great body, and his breezy personality. Henty loved clubs and
literary gatherings. The Savage was his particular stronghold, when he
had said good-bye to war-correspondenting in distant lands. He was the
typical chairman there, with his Father Christmas beard, and his volumes
of smoke, and his bluff personality. He had been as popular among his
fellow-correspondents. Was it not Henty who lost his only pair of boots,
when the British army marched into some capital (I think it was King
Theodore’s in Abyssinia), and took his place in the triumph in carpet
slippers, riding on a pony?
Henty’s work as a war-correspondent gave him the copy for those
wonderful books which made him the boys’ Dumas. He was a great
personality, and, as I saw, on the only two occasions when I ran across
him in a crisis, a born ruler of men.
He often came across from his house on Clapham Common to our at-homes,
and looked like a strayed Viking, or a master-mariner, among the other
authors and authoresses. Sailing was his hobby.
Speaking of Abyssinia, it is natural to me to mention Prince
Alamayu—Ali, as we used to call him. He was sent to Cheltenham College,
so that he might live in the house of Jex-Blake, then Principal of
Cheltenham, and afterwards head master of Rugby and Dean of Wells. Of
all the head masters of his time, Jex-Blake had the most considerable
reputation as a courtier and a man of the world. Alamayu was brought to
England after the capture of Magdala, and came to Cheltenham in 1872,
when he was eleven years old. He was just a royal savage when he came to
Cheltenham; if he was hot, he took his coat off and threw it on the
ground, and left it. He had no tutor to go about with him; he just mixed
with the boys in the ordinary way. And at first he had the cruelties of
his bringing-up; he once, for instance, pushed a small boy into the
water to see the splash he would make. But he soon got cured of this,
for Jex-Blake wisely left him to fight his own battles, and though a
sense of chivalry made the boys very indulgent to the poor little
orphaned black, they soon let him know that bullying was not to be one
of his privileges, though almost anything else was treated as a joke.
When Jex-Blake went to Rugby, Alamayu went with him, and thence, when he
was eighteen, he went to Sandhurst to qualify for the British Army. That
was fatal. He was his own master there, with no one to make him take
care of his health, or restrain himself in taking spirits. He soon
contracted some deadly disease—pneumonia, I think—and died. Queen
Victoria showed her regret by having him buried in St. George’s Chapel
at Windsor.
I knew him very well, because I was in the head form when he came to the
school, and was often at Jex-Blake’s house, and was asked by “Jex” to
keep an eye on him. He was a nice little boy, with a very affectionate
disposition, and not at all stupid. It was his misfortune to lose at a
critical moment of his life the firm and tactful hand which had
disciplined and protected him for seven years.
Green Chartreuse is almost as deadly as aeroplanes. I knew a man, a very
well-known man, who went mad because he drank thirty-six green
Chartreuses in one day.
It is natural to mention George Manville Fenn in the same breath as
Henty. He was another old friend of mine, and of all the men I have
known, retained his youth the longest. Fenn’s hair remained golden and
undiminished in its vigour, and his figure remained slim and upright
till he was nearly seventy. He lived at the beautiful old red-brick
house on the river at Isleworth, which stands at the gates of the Duke
of Northumberland’s park, and is known as Syon Lodge. There he turned
out those wonderful boys’ romances of his in a steady stream. Like
Henty, I met him constantly at the Savage and Vagabond Clubs, and at my
own flat. He was very fond of meeting his fellow-craftsmen. His son,
Fred Fenn, used to come too. At that time he was sub-editor of the
_Graphic_, and I think he afterwards became first editor of the _Golden
Penny_. In any case, he freed himself from the fetters of journalism by
writing _Amasis_, that admirable Egyptian comic opera, in which Ruth
Vincent won all hearts. He not only had the cleverness to write it, but
formed the company which put it on, and stood an action at law about it
triumphantly—a rare instance of grit.
Richard Jefferies never came to see me at Addison Mansions; he was dead,
I think, before we went there. But I have a long and pathetic letter
which he wrote to me some time before he died, setting forth the
cross-fire of diseases from which he was suffering, and asking me if I
thought the climate of the exquisite Blue Mountains of New South Wales
would afford him any relief. One can picture how the genius of Jefferies
would have blossomed forth amid that matchless gorge scenery (where you
hear the bell-birds calling) and amid the natural history curiosities of
a new land.
Grant Allen, who lived in a charming house in the Haslemere district,
was a constant visitor to our flat. We had visited his people in Canada
before we met him. His father was the principal inhabitant at Kingston,
Ontario, the dear old-fashioned town which contains Canada’s Military
Academy. The old Allen had a fine house with a delightful garden, right
on Lake Ontario. Grant Allen was a remarkable-looking man, with his long
red beard, and keen, hawk-like face. He always reminded me of the gaunt,
red-bearded faces one sees on knights and lovers in the great French
tapestries of the fifteenth century. And he had the same spare figure as
they have, and the same habit of arching his back. He was a remarkable
man, who, famous as he was, never got his due as a writer. He was never
an F.R.S., though half the Fellows of the Royal Society were his
inferiors in scientific attainments, and he never reached eminence as a
novelist, though he wrote some amazingly clever and powerful books. He
had a great contempt for actresses on account of their want of
conversation. He said they could not talk about anything but the stage.
I once came away with him from a party at H. D. Traill’s, where he had
taken down to supper a woman who was beyond dispute the greatest actress
of her time. He was complaining loudly about it; he said that he thought
she was the most stupid woman he had ever met.
But he was happy in his friendships. His brother-in-law, Franklin
Richards, father of the publisher, Grant Richards, was recognised as one
of the soundest philosophers of his day at Oxford—I say this though his
lectures were entirely thrown away on me. I had to attend them because
he was a don of my College, but Philosophy was Chinese to me.
One of Grant Allen’s greatest friends in the last part of his life was
Richard le Gallienne, who went to live in that house in the wood beyond
Haslemere to be near him. Le Gallienne had a sort of summer-house in the
wood, a long way from the house, in which he wrote those charming poems,
secure from interruption. I often went to see him in the days when he
lived in the King’s Farm at Brentford, which was not a very farm-like
house. But I only once went to see him at Haslemere, and on that
occasion I found him at the summer-house, dressed as carefully as if he
had been in town, but with an eye on country effects. He had on a black
velvet coat and waistcoat, and a rich black evening tie, but immaculate
white flannel trousers; and I must admit that even in this costume he
managed to look appropriate.
When we were living at Cherwell Lodge, Oxford, that delightful marine
villa across the Cherwell from the Gothic part of Magdalen, Grant Allen
brought his best friend to see us, Edward Clodd, the secretary of the
London Joint Stock Bank, who, in the intervals of a business career, had
written a number of great books, beginning with _The Childhood of the
World_.
W. D. Howells only came once to see us at Addison Mansions, but I saw
more of him when I was living in New York, when he used to come in at
tea-time to that little hall-room we had for a sitting-room in that
boarding-house in West Forty-second Street. It gave me pleasure to see
him under my own roof, because I remembered how eagerly I bought and
read his novels when I was at Oxford, and David Douglas was bringing out
_A Chance Acquaintance_, _Their Wedding Journey_, and so on, in the
dainty little shilling paper volumes which were the fortunate precursors
of the modern sevenpenny. Howells was rather a stout, bull-necked man,
very capable-looking, and in those days had a thick mop of grey hair. In
after years we knew his Italian books, written while he was a Consul in
Italy, almost by heart. They are photographic in their fidelity.
George W. Cable was another American who came to the flat but once. Like
Howells, he seldom honoured England with a visit. His books, and John
Burroughs’, too, I first knew in the little David Douglas Library, and I
well remember reading his _Old Creole Days_ all night, because I was so
fascinated with it.
I was staying at the house of my sister’s father-in-law, the Court Lodge
at Yalding, at the time, and the month was June—I had just come down
from Oxford. At some impossibly early hour—midnight seemed only just to
have slipped past—the dawn streamed in, and made me blow my candle out,
and the birds began their comment on the peach garden. Five-and-thirty
or forty years have passed since then, but the delight of Cable’s
poetical touch remains still in my memory. Cable always rather reminded
me of Hardy, though being a Southerner from New Orleans he is darker
skinned. When he wrote _Old Creole Days_, he was the idol of the South,
but later, when he took up the colour question on the other side, he
would have been torn to pieces by the mob of New Orleans if they had got
hold of him, so he took up his residence in Massachusetts.
I always slept in the haunted room in that house, a very old house, with
a kitchen and vaulted cellars going back to the time of Edward III. It
contained a very large cupboard, between the old-fashioned chimney-piece
and the window, in which somebody is supposed to have been bludgeoned to
death, the corpse afterwards being dragged across the floor, and when
the window had been thrown up with a bang, flung on the flags below. At
one particular season of the year, the noises which indicate this
procedure plainly have been heard by various people. I have forgotten
when it happened, but it must have been a very long time ago, for
everything to have been done so openly.
I have slept in that room repeatedly, alone, and never heard the noises
or thought about it being haunted, but I should not like to sleep in the
kitchen, for it was only separated by a moth-eaten sort of door from the
wickedest-looking cellars I ever remember, which, unless something has
been done to them since then, lose themselves in pitch-dark spaces.
Another author, whose delightful essays on nature used to be brought out
in those dear little volumes of David Douglas’s, and whom I read with
even more enthusiasm in those days, was John Burroughs, whom I visited
in his home at West Park, on a broad reach of the Hudson. He told me
that he wrote most of those essays when he was a clerk in the Treasury
at Washington, where his duties were to sit opposite the safes, and see
that no improper person had access to them. I have forgotten what safes,
but I suppose they were those which contained the United States gold
reserve. He used to project the scenes in _Wake Robin_ and _Pepacton_ on
the blank doors of the safes in his mind, as the cinema projects
dissolving views on the lecturer’s sheet. The sedentariness of this
pursuit gave him acute indigestion, and he was advised that nothing but
manual labour and a vegetable diet would cure it. When I was with him, I
think he lived entirely on asparagus, lentils and onions. He could eat
about three pounds of asparagus at a sitting, as I suppose other people
could if they weren’t going to have any meat or pudding. He told me one
thing which filled my soul with joy. As manual labour was part of the
cure, he started a vineyard, in a position chosen with great care, on a
steep sloping bank of the Hudson facing due south. His grapes ripened
here three or four weeks before any one else’s, with the result that he
got a hundred pounds a ton for them instead of four pounds. Bravo,
literature!
Henry James, in virtue of his long sojourn among us, belongs to England
almost as much as he does to America. He still lives in London in the
winter, but in the warm part of the year he retires to a delightful
Georgian house on the crest of the hill at Rye, one of the most
old-world places in England. Henry James’s house and garden are exactly
what you would choose for him—the most refined and dignified and subtle
novelist in the language. The house is called “Lamb’s House,” but it has
nothing to do with Charles Lamb, though it is exactly the house which he
would have chosen, when fortune came to him. All the garden is adorable,
but especially the Dutch court behind the house, and the kitchen-garden,
surrounded by the most ancient cottages in Rye, with roofs red and
chimneys bewitched. Between the garden and the kitchen-garden is a
red-brick Georgian pavilion, facing the top of the street, as the
Tempietto faces the long sloping lane which leads up to the Sculpture
Gallery of the Vatican, and it is not less beautiful than the Tempietto.
Everything is appropriate; the novelist even bought the cottages at the
back of the kitchen-garden, to prevent them being rebuilt, and thus
ensured the permanence of a perfect setting. He has a singularly noble
head and face, the type one would like to imagine for a Cicero.
Richard Whiteing, who leapt into fame at a comparatively late age, with
_No. 5, John Street_, after having been one of the most important
newspaper writers in England for many years, is another man whom you
would pick out in any crowd for his splendid head.
Sir Gilbert Parker, who was a regular habitué of our at-homes before he
went into Parliament and became such an overworked man, was in those
days a slim, black-bearded Colonial, with noticeable blue eyes. He was
born in Canada, the son of a British officer stationed out there, and
knew Australia as well as Canada—in fact, I met him because we had both
been in Australia. He was at that time a busy journalist and in the
first flush of his success as a novelist, and no one could have deserved
it better, for his novels had the historical fidelity and felicity of
Francis Parkman, in addition to their graceful and romantic style. In
spite of the solid work he has done in politics, he will be remembered
as an author more than as a politician, though now we clap him on the
back for the splendid spade-work he does for the Conservative Party. As
a writer he fires the imagination, like the bugles in his famous story.
Henniker-Heaton, on the other hand, will be remembered not for his
biographical dictionary of Australians, which was the precursor of
_Who’s Who_, but for his achievement in politics—a postal reform as far
reaching as that of Rowland Hill, the father of the post-office. I
prophesied his success in print nearly thirty years ago. He is a shining
example of what a man who has a great ideal can do by singleness of
vision; nothing could shake him from his ideal of a universal penny
post; ridicule was poured on it; the big battalions were brought up
against it; but he pursued it doggedly. He showed infinite patience,
infinite good-nature, infinite tact. He brought his personal influence
to bear on politicians of both sides. He went to conferences all over
the world; he entertained delegates from all parts of the world; he
collected and classified every species of statistic; he accumulated
irresistible facts until he had a penny postage, not universal, because
it does not bridge the twenty miles between Kent and France,[8] but
universal for the possessions of the Anglo-Saxon nations, for the United
States came into the agreement as well as the Empire. Nor did his
activities stop at the post-office; for he has achieved reforms of
almost equal magnitude in telegraphic charges. Now he is taking a
well-deserved rest, and I cannot help thinking that he would take it
very usefully if he had a flat in Berlin, and saw the Kaiser every day.
A monarch of the force and intelligence of the Kaiser could not help
seeing the irresistibleness of the argument that a letter ought to be
taken from London to Hamburg and Berlin for the same price as it is
taken to the heart of British Borneo, and if he once happened to notice
it, he would brush away the cobwebs which impede it.
Footnote 8:
Now happily soon to be accomplished.
To Alfred Austin I was never attracted, except by his enthusiasm for
gardens and Italy. He was made Laureate because he was a leader writer,
not because he was a poet, and possessed neither the ability nor the
affability for the post. Had he gone on writing about blackthorn and
blackbirds, he would have left a greater name as a poet, and would not
have been made the victim of the famous story which is told of a
Scottish law lord, who, meeting him at a country house, said, “Well, Mr.
Austin, are you still writing ‘pomes’?”
“One must do something to keep the wolf from the door,” replied the
poet, with official modesty.
“And is that what you use those ‘pomes’ for?” asked the man of law,
giving one visions of a small man with a big moustache belabouring a
wolf on the door-step with a roll of manuscript.
I know of only one more malicious story, which relates to the bestowal
of a bishopric. While it was in the balance, Lord Salisbury was
suffering from one of his fits of insomnia, and, as his custom was, sent
for an M.P. son, whose speeches were the only thing which could make him
sleep. His son bothered him all night to bestow the see—it was the
premier bishopric—on its present holder. At last Lord Salisbury lost
patience. “Oh! give it to him, and leave me. I prefer insomnia.”
It was _à propos_ of insomnia that Lord Salisbury made his finest retort
in the House of Lords. A new Liberal peer, to whom the leader was
particularly acid, because, having been a whip in the House of Commons,
he was rather conscious of his importance, was, in spite of the fact
that his income arose chiefly from a brewery, advocating Local Option,
because he said that the number of public-houses was a temptation to
drink. “Of course,” said Lord Salisbury, “I do not enjoy the same
opportunities as the noble Lord does for knowing the effect of the
number of public-houses upon the amount which is drunk, but I don’t see
his line of argument, because, though I live in a house with forty
bedrooms, I never feel the slightest inclination to sleep.”
The Irish Party, too, came in for his acid wit. Who has forgotten his
comment on the member of the Irish Party who libelled him, and went to
America, when he lost the action, to escape paying the costs? Lord
Salisbury only shrugged his shoulders, and said that escaping was the
_forte_ of the Irish, adding, “Some prefer the fire-escape, and some the
water-escape.”
Harold Frederic owed some of his vogue as a novelist in this country to
Mr. Gladstone, who had an immense enthusiasm for his great novel, _In
the Valley_. Frederic, a big burly man, with a burly moustache, was the
ablest American journalist in London, till the advent of Isaac Nelson
Ford for the _Tribune_, and Harry Chamberlain for the _Sun_ and the
Laffan Agency. Frederic represented the _New York Times_. He was a man
coarse in his speech, and rather coarse in his fibre, and full of
prejudices, but he had the gift of political prophecy, and, like Balaam,
his utterances were dictated by the voice within him, and not by what he
had come to say. His letters to his paper were splendid journalism. He
used often to come to Addison Mansions, because he lived just round the
corner in the old house on Brook Green. He might have been with us now,
if he had not been a Christian Scientist. He was an enormous consumer of
alcohol, though I never knew him the worse for liquor, and when he was
taken with his last illness, the professor of Christian Science, who was
called in by a woman who had great influence over him, was not able to
insist upon banishing spirits as a regular practitioner would have done.
The result was that he took stimulants (which were worse than poison to
him) whenever he felt bad, and ruined his chance of recovery.
Rider Haggard I have spoken of elsewhere.
Frank Hopkinson Smith is a man I should have liked to see more of at
Addison Mansions; he was one of the men I liked best among my friends in
American literary clubs. He was an engineer by profession, who had
carried out many important contracts. Writing, though he was one of the
best writers in America, was an afterthought with him. Like Du Maurier,
that delightful man and delightful writer, he stumbled upon his most
brilliant gift.
Du Maurier became a novelist because he had become such a master of
situation and polished dialogue in his pictures and their titles. Frank
Hopkinson Smith grew to be a novelist out of the anecdotes which he told
so brilliantly at story-tellers’ nights at the Century Club. He had a
fund of stories about the Italian labour which he employed in contracts.
He always used to declare that engaging Italian labour was as simple as
Kodaking, which had for its motto, “You press a button—we do the rest.”
He said that no matter how many men he needed, all he had to do was to
ring up an Italian boss the night before, and tell him that he wanted so
many men for a certain kind of job. Then they would be at any station in
the city at seven o’clock the next morning, with the proper tools. He
added that he always put a clause into the contract that if any of them
murdered each other, the number was to be made up at once.
“That is their weakness,” he said, “but they only practice it on each
other. It’s the only kind of labour I would undertake a contract with.
They’re better than the Irish, anyway.”
“I don’t agree with you,” said Vermont, the sculptor; “they’re so
cruel.”
“Cruel!” retorted Hopkinson Smith. “What price this? An Irishman named
Larkin hired an organ-monkey from an old Dago for a dollar a day. The
monkey was often badly bruised when he came back at night, and looked
frightened to death when Larkin came to fetch him in the morning. So one
Saint’s day when the old Dago had a holiday, he determined to follow
them up and watch them. The Irishman drove along till he came to the
bridge over the railway at the bottom of Twelfth Avenue, where the coal
carts all pass on their way up from the depot. Then he took the monkey
out of the cart, and tied him to a post ten or twenty yards away from
the bridge, but in full sight of it. Then he drove his horse and cart to
a convenient place a little way off, and awaited events.
“Presently the coal carts began to stream across the bridge, and the
monkey in terror ran up to the top of the post. The whole way across
every carter took cock-shots at it with pieces of coal. Occasionally one
hit it, and then the monkey screamed with rage and pain. As soon as
there was a cart load of coal lying at the foot of the post, Larkin
brought up his horse and cart and shovelled them in, first putting the
monkey where he could not be seen, to show that the sport was over for
the present. When he was loaded up, he hitched the monkey to the cart
again, and drove into New York to the retailer who bought the coal from
him.
“But the next morning, when he came for the monkey, he found not only
that monkey, but every monkey in the organ-grinders’ quarter, gone, and
when he got down to the bridge, the place was looking like a zoo.”
Suddenly the popular anecdote-teller wrote _Colonel Carter of
Cartersville_, one of the best American novels of its generation.
William de Morgan, the other novelist who achieved his first book
success so late in life, was never at Addison Mansions, but I had the
honour of meeting him at a much more interesting place—the little
_atelier_, somewhere in the Kilburn district, where he made the famous
lustre tiles by which he was known before he took to literature. George
Joy, the artist who painted the famous picture of Gordon meeting his
death at Khartum, took me to see De Morgan, knowing how enthusiastic I
was over the famous Mazzara Vase, and the other pieces preserved in
Sicily of the old Sicilian Arab lustre ware.
Of Bret Harte and Maarten Maartens I have spoken elsewhere.
Egerton Castle, whose _Young April_ is the most delightful book of the
romantic school, in which Anthony Hope, Henry Harland, and a few others
have written with such charm, was a rare visitor. Any one could see that
he had been a soldier. But the militariness of his active, upright
figure is no doubt partly due to the fact that he is one of the finest
fencers in the country. He has been a representative of England in the
international contests. He is likewise, as his books show, a notable
connoisseur, and he has ample means to indulge his tastes, not only from
the wide popularity of the novels which he writes, mostly in
collaboration with his wife, but from his having owned one of the chief
daily newspapers, the _Liverpool Mercury_, which is now amalgamated with
the _Liverpool Post_. The Agnes Castle who collaborates with him is, of
course, his wife, not his sister.
Percy White was a constant visitor. He has been my intimate friend since
he published his first novel, _Mr. Bailey Martin_, that merciless
dissection of suburban snobbery. I used to write for him when he edited
_Public Opinion_, and that was a long time ago. He was one of the
handsomest men in literature, with his merry, boyish face, dark eyes,
and bright golden hair. C. B. Fry, the greatest all-round athlete in the
records of sport, is his nephew, and, though darker, reminds me very
much of Percy White as he was. Florence White, who paints portraits, is
his sister.
Percy White’s books have never met with the circulation they deserve. If
he had been born an American, they might have had the largest
circulation in the world. He is just the writer whose circulation would
have spread like wildfire, if he had lived in America, and written of
American social life as he has written of ours. No one could have
expressed the good and the bad in the American character with the same
light touch and ruthless penetration. His is just the pen to depict the
iron courage and the insight of genius which, with or without chicanery,
lead to the amassing of millions—the selfishness, made endurable by grit
and personal charm, of the American woman—the brilliant wit and pathetic
lack of humour in Americans as a nation—the business side of sport.
Once upon a time I introduced him to a man whom I will call the Vidler,
who ran a newspaper, and never paid anybody anything except by
advertisements in that paper. He made periodical business journeys,
collecting advertisements for his paper—my heart bled for the
advertisers—and used to engage an editor to look after his paper while
he was away. He chose Percy White for the honour on this occasion, and
asked me if I could bring them together. I gave White his message,
warning him that he would only be paid in promises, and was surprised to
hear that he was willing to discuss the matter with the Vidler. The
Vidler gave him a wonderful dinner at the Carlton, probably not paid for
yet, and then took him back to his chambers to discuss the matter in
hand. White sat up with him nearly all night, gravely taking down notes
of his projects for the paper, but reserved his decision, which resulted
in a negative. I met him the next day, and asked him how he had got on,
and when I heard how late he had been kept, apologised for all the
trouble to which I had put him, knowing how little chance there was of
his getting any pecuniary advantage out of it.
“Don’t apologise, my dear Douglas,” he said; “I got a whole book out of
him. He’s the finest study I ever met in my life.”
As Percy White did not take up the appointment, I set myself to find a
man who was willing to take the post, and would not suffer for it. I
found a man who was as sharp a diamond as the Vidler himself. He was
duly engaged, and I always wondered which did the other in the eye. I
have my suspicions, because when I met the Vidler a year or two
afterwards at Monte Carlo, he did not allude to the finish.
George Gissing did not come often, though we had the great link of both
knowing and loving the Ionian Sea.
If Gissing had not died, and there was no reason why he should have died
if he had taken ordinary care of himself—he would only be fifty-six if
he were alive now—he would have had a reputation like Barrie or Bernard
Shaw by this time, for even during his lifetime people were just
beginning to wake up to the extraordinary qualities of his writing. I am
not comparing him to either of those two; I only make the comparison
because everything pointed to his having popularity. Every now and then
some excellent writer achieves popularity. No one knows why. His
excellence is against his having a wide public, and it is very seldom
possible to tell why one is taken and another left. As the Bible proverb
says, “Two women shall be grinding at the mill; one shall be taken and
the other left.”
Gissing had a genius for imparting romance to the sordid.
W. J. Locke often came in those days. He was secretary to the Royal
Institute of British Architects, and combined with it the post of
literary adviser to John Lane, the publisher—a collaboration which
resulted in the publication of many notable books, of which none were
more eventually successful than his own, except, I suppose, H. G.
Wells’s, and I think that it was he who advised Lane to bring out the
works of Wells, and Harland’s _The Cardinal’s Snuff-box_, and Kenneth
Grahame’s _Golden Age_.
Locke was always one of the most distinguished-looking persons in a
room, with his tall, slight figure, very well dressed, and his
hair—golden, with a natural wave in it—beautifully valeted. His
theatrical successes did not begin till much later, nor had he developed
his powers as a public speaker. He published admirable and solidly
successful books before he took the reading world by storm with _The
Beloved Vagabond_, and his novels won the respect of his
fellow-craftsmen from the first. In those days he lived in a modest flat
at Chelsea, and was a pretty regular attendant at literary clubs and
receptions.
Coulson Kernahan was one of the most prominent figures in the set,
because he had both a brilliant personality, and was producing a
remarkable series of books, beginning with _A Dead Man’s Diary_. Coulson
is one of our oldest and most intimate literary friends. I met him again
directly I came back from America. He was at that time literary adviser
to Ward, Lock & Co.
When James Bowden split from his partners, Ward, Lock & Co., and started
a publishing business of his own, Kernahan went with him, and continued
his profoundly imaginative series with books about Heaven—long, thin
volumes, longer and thinner even than the John Oliver Hobbes booklets,
which Fisher Unwin was bringing out. They sold by the hundred thousand.
They were the literary topic of the day, till Norma Lorimer in despair
said, “Kernahan is growing too chummy with his Creator.”
In another line his imagination produced _Captain Shannon_, a mysterious
and thrilling adventure book. But he was soon to find his _métier_, and
leave thrilling fiction to Mrs. Kernahan. He became a lecturer, for
which his brilliant personality, his eloquence, his gift of humour, and
his conviction, had cut him out. He went to live in the country; he
lectured; he became an officer in the Territorials. And now he has
turned them all to account in the service of the Empire, to which he is
so passionately devoted, by going round as a caravan-lecturer to make
the youth of the country awake to the national peril from
unpreparedness.
At a National Defence meeting, last summer, at which Kernahan was the
chief speaker, with Rudyard Kipling in the chair, Kernahan told his
audience of his last good-bye word with Captain Robert Scott.
The hero of the South Pole asked him what he was doing, and whether he
had any new book on the stocks.
“No,” was the reply; “I am neglecting my scribbling to work for Lord
Roberts and National Defence.”
“Good!” said Scott, with unwonted warmth and enthusiasm. “Good! I’m with
you there!”
Speaking of Lord Roberts, the grand old soldier is very appreciative of
the work Kernahan is doing in this direction. The veteran Field Marshal
not only wrote a eulogistic introduction to the Territorial author’s
book on soldiering, but when the latter has been addressing great
audiences on National Defence, has on several occasions sent telegrams
to the chairman, asking that his thanks be conveyed to the speaker, and
warmly commending Kernahan’s patriotism and the work he is doing for his
country. Kernahan is almost as widely known for his friendships as for
his writings. He has known intimately many distinguished men and
women—authors, actors, soldiers, artists, explorers and politicians. On
the walls of his library are many signed and inscribed portraits of
celebrities, as well as pictures inscribed to him by the painters. On
his shelves are numerous books dedicated or inscribed to him by the
writers. One takes up a volume of Swinburne and finds written in it, “To
Coulson Kernahan, whom Swinburne dearly loved, and who as dearly loved
him. From his old and affectionate friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton.”
Another bears the inscription, “With the kind regards of Arthur James
Balfour.” Yet another, “To Coulson Kernahan, from his old chum, Jerome
K. Jerome.”
He is famous too, or I should say infamous, as “infamous” is the only
word to apply to it, for the illegibility of his handwriting. His friend
Harry de Windt, brother of the Ranee of Sarawak, tells a good story of
this. It is to the effect that Kernahan once received a letter which ran
as follows—
“Dear Kernahan,—Many thanks for your letter. The parts we could make out
are splendid. We are using the rest as a railway pass. No one can read
enough of it to say that it isn’t a railway pass, and as life is too
short for any one to find out what it really says, the collector has in
the end to let us through.”
Of Horace Annesley Vachell, one of those whom the gods love, well born,
more than usually prepossessing in appearance and disposition, a
sportsman, and one of the best novelists of the day, I saw a good deal
when he first came back from California, and brought me a letter of
introduction, asking me to help him to meet the literary people in
London. I was immensely attracted to him, as attracted to him as I was
to his books, for which he had a good foundation in the variety of life
which he had led. He started with Harrow and the Rifle Brigade, and had
been many things, from a rancher in California to an artist, before he
found his vocation in literature. _The Hill_, his famous Harrow school
novel, increased his popularity wonderfully, but he was an admirable
writer from the first, both in story and style. I have heard it stated
that on one of his great books his publishers made the sporting
suggestion that he should receive no advance on account of royalties,
but a thirty per cent. royalty from the beginning, and that he accepted
the offer.
When I wrote to Vachell to ask him what had made him turn his attention
to writing, he wrote back—
“MY DEAR SLADEN,
“Bad times in California turned me to scribbling, although
I had written some short stories for the magazines. I am rather
proud of the fact that I burnt my first very long novel on the
advice of a friend, who said that he could find a publisher for
it, and yet urged cremation instead!”
Vachell told me that one of the triumphs in his career which he valued
most was the winning of the half-mile race for Sandhurst against
Woolwich, which gave them the victory in the Sports that year, 1881.
Later he was asked to run against Myers, the famous American, but wisely
refused to do so.
He told me an amusing story of the hundred-pound prize which _T. P.’s
Weekly_ offered for the person who could discover most mistakes,
typographical and so forth, in one of his novels, which he had been
unable to revise himself. A parson wrote to him most indignantly, saying
that there were no mistakes at all in the book, and that he was
surprised that Vachell should lend himself to a cheap dodge for
advertising a novel. He hinted that Vachell had obtained money from
him—he had bought a six-shilling copy—under false pretences! Vachell in
return sent him one announcement of the result of the competition. The
man who won the prize discovered nearly _four hundred_ errors! This
sounds quite incredible, but it is true, as a most lengthy document in
his possession proves. The knowledge of his works displayed by the
winner fairly confounded him.
He had some strange personal experiences in California. A big cowboy
rushed out of a saloon in the West, one day, followed by another cowboy
brandishing a big six-shooter. The first cowboy took refuge behind the
only cover in sight, a telegraph-post. He dodged round this, while the
second cowboy emptied his pistol into the post. All six bullets were in
the post! Afterwards, when he was chaffed by me for missing his man, he
retorted, “Boys, the son of a gun shrunk!” Both cowboys were full of
sheep-herder’s delight.
And he told me another amusing Californian anecdote.
“I met a pretty girl whom I had not seen for months. She informed me
that she was engaged to be married, and when I asked for details, she
replied, ‘He is not very rich in this world’s goods, but in morals, Mr.
Vachell, he’s a millionaire.’ She married her moral millionaire, and
about a year later I met her again. She was alone. Remembering her
phrase, I said, ‘How is your moral millionaire?’ She replied instantly,
‘He’s bust!’ I heard later that she had just divorced him.”
And a short while ago he sent me one of the best newspaper bulls I
remember, which appeared in the _Western Daily Press_ review of _Loot_,
on Dec. 19, 1913.
“Mr. Vachell, who is perhaps most widely known as the author of one of
the best modern stories of school life, _The Hell_, in which Harrow is
described,” etc.
Another of those whom the gods love is A. E. W. Mason, who met with
success very early. Mason was a Dulwich boy, and a Trinity, Oxford, man,
and was on the stage before he took to literature, to his permanent
advantage, for it gave him that practical acquaintance with stage-craft
which hastened his success as a dramatist.
From the moment that he published _The Courtship of Morrice Buckler_ it
was recognised that Mason was a romance-writer with the charm of an
Anthony Hope. And his reputation has gone on increasing. _The Four
Feathers_ was a book of genius. Unlike most authors, Mason has remained
a bachelor, consoling himself with yacht-sailing among the Hebrides when
he grows tired of social distractions and politics. For some years he
represented the important constituency of Coventry in Parliament as a
Liberal. And he was one of the few Liberals who dared to be independent,
which is probably the reason why he gave up politics. He was one of the
most boyish-looking members in the House, blue-eyed, clean-shaven,
fresh-coloured and slim. He has changed very little since he left
Trinity. He is a charming public speaker, and his boyishness is one of
his great charms in speaking. My friendship with Mason began on our
first visit to Salcombe, the little Devonshire town on the wooded inlet
which lies behind the Bolt Head. He had sailed into the inlet in a small
yacht, and came to see me as an old Trinity man. Mason is one of the men
who count.
Max Pemberton has had many successes in his half-century of life.
Educated at Merchant Taylors, and Caius, Cambridge, he nearly got into
the Cambridge boat. He started his literary life by editing one of the
chief boys’ papers and writing boys’ books—his _Iron Pirate_ had a
prodigious vogue among future men. From this he soon passed to editing
_Cassell’s Magazine_, which occupied ten of his fifty years, and writing
novels, with their scenes laid in romantic and half-civilised
countries—what one might call “Balkan” novels. In these he has hardly
any rivals, because to an instinct for construction, and skill in
dialogue and description, he adds unusual ingenuity in contriving plots
and selecting subjects, and accuracy in handling facts. Pemberton’s
novels present most vivid pictures of the far countries in which their
scenes are laid.
I met him first at the Savage Club; we were sitting next to each other
at dinner, and he introduced himself as the editor of _Cassell’s
Magazine_, and asked if I felt disposed to write a series of Japanese
stories for him—the stories which were afterwards worked up to _When We
were Lovers in Japan_ (_Playing the Game_). I was very much flattered by
his proposal, and from that day to this we have remained intimate
friends. This series was followed by the series of Sicilian stories
which were worked up into my novel, _Sicilian Lovers_. In both series I
was to give as much local colour as possible.
After this we began to go to each other’s houses, and I well remember
the first time that we went to Pemberton’s, before he had moved to
Fitzjohn’s Avenue. It was a Sunday evening, and he had asked us to meet
poor Fletcher Robinson, who would have been one of the greatest
journalists of the day if he had survived. He was born to it, for he was
a nephew of old Sir John Robinson, who managed the _Daily News_ for many
years. He was, at the time of his death, assistant-editor of a great
daily, and he was one of the persons whose death was attributed to
incurring the displeasure of the celebrated Egyptian mummy in the
British Museum. He was a huge, fair man, with curly sandy hair; he was
beloved of society, and a poet as well as an editor.
The popular account of his death is that, not believing in the malignant
powers of the celebrated mummy-case in the British Museum, he determined
to make a slashing attack on the belief in the columns of the _Daily
Express_, and went to the museum, and sent his photographer there, to
collect the materials for that purpose: that he was then, although in
the most perfect health, struck down mysteriously by some malady of
which he died. The ancient Egyptians certainly seem to have been able to
protect the tombs and coffins and bodies of their dead by active
spiritual powers, which I respect. But in any case, the adage of
chivalry, _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_, ought to prevent people from
behaving unkindly to anything that concerns the dead.
We continued to see a good deal of the Pembertons till Max took Troston
Hall in Suffolk because he found that London gaieties interfered with
his work. But a few years later he felt drawn back to London, and took
chambers in St. James’s, though he kept Troston on, and it was in those
chambers that he wrote one of his great successes, the revue _Hallo
Ragtime_—the best and most popular revue ever written.
Unlike so many of our leading authors, Max Pemberton, who is a
distinguished-looking man—one would take him for a diplomat—is as
interesting to meet as his books are to read. He shines in society.
A mutual friend of us both is Robert Leighton. Mrs. Leighton I have
mentioned above. Leighton’s gifts are of a serious editorial order,
though he has written boys’ books of wide popularity. The Leightons are
among the most popular figures at literary gatherings—they are so
lovable that they have an immense circle of friends. Robert Leighton is
recognised as having no superior as a writer on dogs. They have left
their house in St. John’s Wood now and gone to live in an old-world
house at Lowestoft.
When Arthur Morrison, who was already known as a brilliant journalist,
one of Henley’s most incisive young men, made such a success with his
_Tales of Mean Streets_ and his _Martin Hewitt_ stories, one imagined
that he would pour out a stream of books like other writers who have
“boomed.” But he has been exceedingly moderate. We had a bond of
sympathy which used to bring him to our house. We had a collection of
very unusual Japanese curios of the humble order, and he had one of the
finest collections of Japanese prints in the country. We never saw as
much of him as we wished because he lived in Essex, and when the success
of his books enabled him to do his work where he liked, he grew more and
more reluctant to come to London.
Another man of that generation to whom we grew much attached was Eden
Phillpotts. In those days he was struggling with ill-health and
over-work. London did not agree with him, and he had to write his novels
in the intervals of journalism. Though he told me that they seldom went
out elsewhere, he and his pretty wife were often at 32 Addison Mansions.
They lived at Bedford Park in those days. While he was assistant editor
of _Black and White_—that paper edited by so many of our friends—it
seemed to be a different one every year, during its brief existence—he
began to feel the strain a good deal, and finally determined to burn his
ships and go back to his native Devon—he was a grandnephew of the famous
Bishop of Exeter—and depend entirely upon his novels.
The experiment was a complete success. His health improved in his native
air, and directly he could give the proper leisure to writing his
novels, he sprang into almost the first rank—alike for the extraordinary
power of his stories, for his intimate knowledge of Devonshire and
Devonian character, and for the individuality of his style. Phillpotts
never deteriorates. He is one of those men who carry the stamp of
intelligence and _simpatica_ on their faces. Now he is following in the
footsteps of the other great novelists and getting a footing on the
stage, where he will be well represented this year.
Robert Hichens is a very handsome and intellectual-looking man—if his
portrait had been executed by the steel engravers of a hundred years ago
it would have borne a striking resemblance to the portraits of Lord
Byron. He has regular, clear-cut, refined features, of a very similar
type. I have not run across Hichens as often as might be expected in
Sicily and Egypt, though we have both been in these countries,
especially the former, so much. But I did meet him one evening at Luxor,
in the midst of one of those superb Egyptian sunsets. He was on his
_dahabea_, which he had brought over from its usual anchorage near the
bar on the Thebes side. It was a luxurious and very Oriental-looking
_dahabea_. The saloon, separated from the cabins by heavy Persian
curtains, would have made a far more picturesque scene for _Bella-Donna_
on the stage than the steam-_dahabea_ which appeared in the actual play.
He was living on one of the old sailing-_dahabeas_, which are the most
delightful to occupy, though people generally do not sail up from Cairo
nowadays, but have them towed up to Luxor before they join them, so as
to have all their time in the picturesque, temple-studded reach between
Luxor and Assuan.
That meeting is riveted in my mind, because Hichens, in thanking me for
a long and enthusiastic review which I had written over my signature in
the _Queen_ about his _Garden of Allah_, said that though I had spoken
in such terms of the book, and brought out all its good points, he had a
conviction that in my heart of hearts I felt a sort of repulsion for it,
which was true. I thought the heroine’s falling in love with such a man
at first, and her sending him back to his cell as a monk afterwards,
equally repellent; while I could not help doing homage to the book, and
revelling in its Eastern setting.
Some time after my return to England I was nearly brought into a very
close relation with Hichens.
One morning Sir George Alexander came post-haste to call on me. I was
not in. So at lunch a telegram as long as a letter arrived—would I see
him in the theatre after such an act that night? The royal box was at my
disposal if I cared to see the play. I telephoned my acceptance to
Helmsley—a good actor, but far too good a manager to be spared to take a
part—and wondered what was up. When I got to the theatre, I discovered
what I was wanted for. Hichens’s _Bella-Donna_ was coming on. All the
preparations were ready for his inspection, and Hichens could not be
found by telegram in Europe or Africa. Alexander asked if I would
superintend the staging. The fee fixed was a liberal one. But I was in a
quandary. I knew that neither J. Bernard Fagan, who had dramatised the
story, nor Alexander, had ever been in Egypt, and that the play and its
mounting, however well done, must be full of slips, to which I ought to
object. About Alexander I was not disturbed, for I knew that his only
idea would be to get the thing right. But with Fagan it might be
different. He would doubtless have been studying the subject fiercely,
and I should have to reckon with his _amour propre_, and probably lose a
friend—who had been at Trinity, Oxford, like myself—that delightful
Sheridan-like person and personality, so I gave rather a modified
consent. I suggested that fresh efforts should be made to find Hichens,
but promised that if finally he could not be found I would take his
place in correcting the Egyptianities of the piece.
Fortunately, at the last minute Hichens did turn up, and I was saved
from the responsibility. I was very grateful, for when the first night
came, and with it stalls for the performance, there were many little
points to which I should have had to take exception, though they made no
difference to the enjoyment of such of the public as had not been in
Egypt. Still, I am sure that Fagan would have felt sore about my
correcting his scenes like a schoolboy’s Latin verses. As it happened,
Alexander and Mrs. Patrick Campbell were so magnificent in their parts,
and the piece was so splendidly produced, that the public did not bother
itself about small details, but flocked to see the play. It could hardly
have been a greater success than it was for any improvements that I
could have suggested. I never saw Hichens at his residence in
Taormina—we never happened to be in the Sicilian Eden at the same
moment.
[Illustration:
W. B. MAXWELL
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXII
MY NOVELIST FRIENDS: PART II
W. B. MAXWELL I hardly knew in those days, though I had met him years
before, and, in the long and elaborate review which I wrote of his
_Vivien_, had hailed him as a novelist who would rise to the very head
of his craft.
Maxwell, of course, had heredity and atmosphere in his favour. His
mother, the famous Miss Braddon, had written novels which took the world
by storm long before he was born—it is more than half a century ago
since an astonishing girl founded a new school of fiction with _Lady
Audley’s Secret_ and _Aurora Floyd_—and he and his wife live with his
mother in a stately old Queen Anne mansion in the Sheen Road at
Richmond. Maxwell, who looks like a youthful judge—he is clean-shaven,
and has a calm, judicial face, with an illuminating smile—has a judge’s
gift of scrutiny in reviewing life in his books. He is ruthlessly just
with his characters; they cannot deceive him. His sentences are not too
severe. But whatever their sentences are, the criminals leave the court
moral wrecks. He is obliged to mete out just sentences, but he is
ruthless in his summing up. His last novel, _The Devil’s Garden_, is an
excellent example of his great impeachments of wrong. His books have the
Até—the Nemesis—tracking down their victims as ruthlessly as the Œdipus
is tracked down in the tragedies of ancient Greece.
Another writer whose novels I admire immensely, and I have had to review
a good many of them, is H. B. Marriott Watson, the New Zealander. He has
a large public, and, in my opinion, ought to have a far larger one. As a
writer of novels of adventure, I think he has no superior among the
novelists of the day. For his adventures are most romantic, and his
writing is so good—so delicate where it ought to be delicate, so strong
where it ought to be strong. Added to which, he is scrupulous about
getting his local colour and “properties” correct. In appearance he is a
typical colonist—a huge man, with a dark, resolute face. When he first
became prominent in the literary world, you might have thought that he
was captain of the famous “All Black” football team, rather than a
writer. Apart from his success as a novelist, he has been a power in
journalism.
Charles Garvice, whose novels have a greater circulation than those of
any other living writer, is now my neighbour. We live exactly opposite
each other, with the breadth of Richmond Green between, with its old
lawns, and tall elms planted by dead kings. He lives in one of the Maids
of Honour houses, built a couple of centuries ago, abutting on the wall
of the Old Palace of the Tudors, in which Queen Elizabeth died, and
those Maids of Honour served. It has some beautiful eighteenth-century
painted panelling. I look out on its mellow brickwork, pointed with
white stone, and the fantastic Georgian ironwork of its gate,
half-buried in a tangle of swaying roses, from my study windows, just as
I look out on the crenellated wall and old perpendicular archway of King
Henry VII’s palace on the other side of the clipped yew and the great
stone-pine.
When I first knew Garvice, twenty years ago, he was farming his own
lands in Devonshire, and just beginning to find his public on this side,
though he had long enjoyed an enormous public in America. He used to pay
frequent visits to the Authors’ Club, where, since he had rooms in
Whitehall Court, he was more of a habitué than many men who lived in
London, and became extremely popular for his genuine good-fellowship. A
few years ago, when the Club was rather languishing, he became chairman
of the committee which undertook its reconstruction, and though he had
in the interval become one of the most popular and hard-worked novelists
of the day, lavished his time and energies with happy results, so that
now it has even more members than the Athenæum, and far more than any
other literary club. He is the central figure at its great dinners.
He wrote a delightful book about farming—not a literary exercise, but as
the outcome of many years’ practical work. Garvice, undoubtedly, has the
largest sale of any novelist in the world. I have seen the figures. Last
year’s sales alone amounted to 1,750,000 copies—books of all prices. His
romantic love-stories are conspicuous not only for their thrilling
plots—Garvice is a born story-writer—but for their freedom from all
deleterious influence. There is nothing goody-goody about them; they are
just wholesome, straight-forward romances—an almost lost art. He is only
the length of the Palace away from the river, where he keeps a
sailing-boat, and he is fond of riding in Richmond Park. He needs
recreations, for he is a very hard worker. Every morning he goes up to
his office in London, where he spends the business day in dictating his
novels, and he gives many of his evenings up to the Authors’ Club,
which, under his chairmanship, and the tireless secretaryship of
Algernon Rose, has now a membership of 1,600. Garvice is a great reader
of his brother-authors’ books.
Feeling that the public would like to know the secret of one of the most
remarkable literary successes on record—more than six millions of his
books have been sold—one night when I had run in to see him, I got him
to tell me his story over a pipe—he smokes hard all the time he dictates
his stories, and cannot go on when his pipe goes out till it is
refilled. This is what he told me.
“My first novel, though I had written a number of short stories before
this, was about the last of the three-deckers. When it was revised and
re-written quite recently, for a cheap edition, I understood fully why,
in its first form, it was not the brilliant success I, a youth of
nineteen, expected it to be. Quite early in my literary career I made
the acquaintance, which grew into a warm friendship, of the proprietor
of a weekly fiction periodical which had attained an enormous
circulation. He was a clever editor, with a keen nose for good stuff;
and he would buy nothing else, for he had hit upon the excellent idea
that, if you gave the masses good stuff at a low price, they would jump
at it. They jumped. I wrote the leading story for this paper for many
years, and was well paid. The serials attracted the attention of George
Munro, the famous American publisher, who was running a similar paper in
New York. He arranged for me to send advance sheets for it, and he
afterwards published the serial in cheap book form. They had an
enormous—to me a fabulous—sale, and are still selling.
“Munro started a sevenpenny magazine, asking me to edit the English part
of it, and to write a serial and a series of short stories. I worked
nearly day and night, and was so fully occupied and contented that,
absurd as it may sound, I never gave a thought to publishing the serials
in book form here in England; notwithstanding that the books were so
popular in America that one of George Munro’s rivals hit upon the
extremely ingenious idea of waiting until half a novel of mine was
published in serial form, getting some one else to finish it, and
issuing it in volume form before I had finished the story. Of course,
this was before the International Copyright Act. Blessings on its name!
“One day, my friend, that brilliant journalist, Robert Harborough
Sherard, while sitting at my writing-desk, took up the American edition
of _Just a Girl_. When I told him it was not published in volume form in
England, he asked my permission to take it away and try to place it. He
took it to Mr. Coulson Kernahan, who recommended it to the publisher for
whom he was reading. It came out, and, to my surprise and delight,
proved a success. The review that, more than any other, helped me, was a
very kind one in the _Queen_.[9] Then, again, the books were so
fortunate as to win the approval of Dr. (now Sir) William Robertson
Nicoll; and when he likes a book he does not fail to say so.
Footnote 9:
Written by myself.—D. S.
“The rest of my literary career, if the phrase may be permitted me, is
public property. I may add that, in my early days, I sold the copyrights
of my stories. Later on, I got them back by the simple expedient of
buying the periodical, lock, stock and barrel, in which they had
appeared; and I am glad to be able to state that I hold now the
copyright of everything I have written. Some of the books have been
dramatised, and others are on their way to the stage; indeed, at an
early age, I made a dramatic essay with a little play in two acts, which
was produced at the Royalty Theatre, and obtained a success chiefly, if
not entirely, owing to the splendid cast; amongst others, I was
fortunate enough to have such actors as Richard Mansfield, who
afterwards became so famous in America, that sterling player, Charles
Denny, and Fred Everill, of the Haymarket. It would be a poor play such
men as these could not pull through. Encouraged by my first effort, I
might have directed all my attention to the stage, but fiction had got a
firm hold upon me; it was safe and regular—and there you are! But I am
making a new start, and ‘you never can tell,’ as Mr. Shaw says.
“The story of my lecturing is soon told. I gave a lecture, consisting of
recitals linked together by biographical notes, for a Bideford debating
society. An agent who happened to hear it, thought it good enough for
the general public, and for some years past I have, during the winter
months, appeared on the lecture platform. It is a change of work, which
is good; and it is lucrative, which is also good, if not better.
“I have just been elected President of the Institute of Lecturers. The
duties of this office will fill in my spare time—when I get it.”
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (“Q”), another admirable writer, not only of
novels, but of poems and essays, I have seen hardly at all since he left
Oxford, where, sometime after me, he occupied my old panelled set of
rooms at Trinity (of which he was a Scholar like myself, and A. E. W.
Mason an Exhibitioner some years later), attracted probably by the fact
that they had been Cardinal Newman’s rooms when he was an undergraduate.
Couch was a splendid example of the _mens sana in corpore sano_. He was
stroke of the College boat, as well as the most brilliant Trinity man of
his time intellectually, and he looked it. He had a lithe, active
figure, and a humorous, self-reliant face, with light eyes—the type
which takes so much beating. For a brief time he had a very successful
journalistic career in London, but he quickly decided that it was not
worth while to live in London unless you were rich enough to do all the
nice things which came along, and returned to his native Cornwall to
devote himself to literature. In Cornwall he not only wrote delightful
books, but went in for sailing, and became a power in local Liberal
politics, and was knighted. Recently he has become Professor of Poetry
in the University of Cambridge—a post he was admirably fitted to fill,
since the mantle of Francis Turner Palgrave fell upon him as an
anthologist. His _Oxford Book of Verse_ is simply delightful.
Couch had from the first been a stylist. When congratulated early in his
career on the exquisite writing of a short story, he deprecated its
importance, because it was too conscious an imitation of De Maupassant.
“My great difficulty is not to imitate my models,” he said. In the light
of this saying, it is interesting to recall the fact that in 1897 he was
chosen for the high honour of completing Robert Louis Stevenson’s _St.
Ives_, which he did with absolute success. Stevenson must have been one
of the models he was trying not to imitate. There is no reason why he
should, for no one could want a more delightful style than his own.
_Hetty Wesley_ is an exquisite book.
Sir Henry Rider Haggard I ought to have mentioned long before this,
since he has been one of the recognised heads of the novelists’
profession for many years. Haggard had the good fortune for an
imaginative man to go out to South Africa when he and the South African
question were young. He was on the staff of Sir Theophilus Shepstone,
the Official Commissioner in the Transvaal, and actually assisted in
hoisting the British Flag over the Republic in 1887. His first book,
published in 1882, was about South African politics, but in 1884 he
began as a novelist, with _Dawn_, and in 1886 he achieved world-wide
fame with _King Solomon’s Mines_, one of the finest romances ever
written. _She_ came out a year later, and confirmed the success. He has
written many other famous novels. For years he was always quoted as the
most successful novelist—but that was before the days of “booming,” a
practice against which Haggard has steadily set his face. He told his
agent that he would not ever write to order, unless he was driven to
it—that the bare fact of having signed a contract to produce a given
thing by a given time paralysed his pen. Besides writing novels of
increasing seriousness, Haggard, like Doyle, has proved himself a
patriot, with the deepest sense of his responsibilities as a citizen. He
has twice tried to get into Parliament, with a view to legislation for
restoring agriculture in England, and he has given his time lavishly,
both to the investigation of the agricultural question and to serving on
various Commissions, as well as to writing books on various subjects
connected with the land. He came back from South Africa and went to live
in his native Norfolk many years ago, but in spite of this he has done
his duty in attending literary gatherings. His active figure, and
close-trimmed beard, give him the cut of a naval officer.
His brother, Major Arthur Haggard, who has seen much service in Africa,
and written well-known books, has done patriotic service for his country
in another way by organising the Union Jack Club and the Veterans’ Club
for soldiers and sailors.
Another visitor to Addison Mansions in latter days was William Romaine
Paterson, better known as “Benjamin Swift”—a man of extraordinary
ability, whom I should not be surprised to see in a Radical Cabinet. The
moment you meet him you are aware that you are in the presence of an
intellect of the first rank, and an uncompromising personality. A deep
reader and thinker, he has the gift of clear expression and glittering
sarcasm. I have seldom heard a more effective speaker. He has already
written a number of remarkable novels. He is a born leader, and he looks
it, with his commanding figure, his face, of the eagle type, and his
burning eye.
I ought to have mentioned Morley Roberts before, because he was a man of
whom I saw much in those days. He was often at our at-homes, and nearly
always in the Authors’ Club when I went there. He was the greatest
personality there in those days—not only as an author whose books every
one in the Club admired, long before the public took them at their true
value, but for his wide and deep knowledge, and for the adventures he
had successfully concluded with his splendid physique. We always felt
that Morley Roberts was essentially a man, that the strength of his
books was due to the daring life he had led. I have very seldom heard
Morley Roberts make a speech, but I have seen him hold a whole room of
brilliant men from his easy-chair beside the fire, while he unfolded
some curious piece of knowledge with surprising power and
interestingness. It was he who said that books of adventure are
generally written by sedentary cowards for sedentary cowards.
I met Morley Roberts first at a garden-party given by Rosamund Marriott
Watson, the poetess, whose husband I have for many years considered one
of the finest novelists of the day. She introduced us to each other
because we had both been to Australia, and I rather think that she
accused him as well as myself of having wooed the Muse of Poetry (though
there was no Muse of Poetry among the immortal nine). After that he came
a good many times to our house, though he never was fond of at-homes,
and I don’t remember his ever coming back after his long illness. A very
strong man, six feet high, or thereabouts, with a commanding face, and
flashing dark eyes, he was always one of the most conspicuous figures in
the room. He had been a sailor before the mast, a navvy out west, a hand
on a ranch, and I don’t know what all in his adventurous youth.
It seems incredible to think that Somerset Maugham, who is barely forty,
should have been a long time coming into his own, yet ten years elapsed
between the publication of _Liza of Lambeth_ and the production of _Lady
Frederick_, and in the interval he had written those delightful books
_The Merry-go-Round_ and _The Bishop’s Apron_. He came to us with a
mutual friend in the year 1897, when he had just written _Liza_. I
remember, when I read it, venturing, as an old reviewer, to prophesy
that such a writer must leap into fame forthwith. I was sure of it when
I read _The Merry-go-Round_, but the public did not quite answer to my
expectations. I have always heard that _Liza of Lambeth_ was inspired by
the gruesome sights and sounds which were his environment when he was at
St. Thomas’ Hospital, that he lodged in some street where, from his back
windows, he could see the she-hooligans hitting each other with their
babies. He is, a rare thing for an author, an admirable dancer.
Another man born in the same year, 1874, who came to his own through
plays, and was even longer in doing it, is Edward Knoblauch, the author
of _Kismet_, and joint author of _Milestones_. Knoblauch, who is an
American, born in New York, and educated at Harvard, and his sister,
came to us with Lena Ashwell a good many years ago. Knoblauch was Lena’s
reader at the Kingsway, and collaborated with the Askews in _The
Shulamite_, in which she created such a splendid character. He had
already adapted _The Partikler Pet_ for Cyril Maude. But he was writing
plays for years before he had a single one accepted, and it was not
until 1911 that he sprang into general fame with _Kismet_, quickly
followed by _Milestones_.
Louis Napoleon Parker, another old member of the Authors’ Club, is a
very old friend of mine. I think it was Adrian Ross who introduced us,
when he first came up from Sherborne School, where he was appointed
Director of Music upon leaving the Royal Academy of Music. Strangely
enough, one who has composed such delightful music is extremely deaf.
For many years, of course, he has been one of our leading and most
prolific playwrights, and only a short while ago he composed the
incidental music for his drama, _Drake_. Parker, who was born in France,
and might almost pass for a Frenchman, has been the translator of some
of the most celebrated French plays which have been “Englished” for our
stage—_Chanticleer_, _L’Aiglon_ and _Cyrano de Bergerac_ among them. He
has had yet another sphere of activity in producing the series of
splendid masques which are associated with his name. He is, indeed,
practically the inventor of the masque in its present form, such as the
Sherborne pageant, the Warwick pageant and the York pageant.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXIII
MY NOVELIST FRIENDS: PART III
HENRY HARLAND, who justly made such a prodigious hit with that exquisite
book, _The Cardinal’s Snuff-box_, I knew well in America. Stedman
introduced us at one of his at-homes. He wrote then under the pseudonym
of “Sidney Luska,” and was best known for some big action he had had
with some firm of publishers in New York, the American Cassells, I
think. He was a very opinionated man, and I did not at the time believe
that he would ever write so fine a book as _The Cardinal’s Snuff-box_,
which breathes the very air of Italy, and is the most exquisite idyll of
Italian life which we have in the language. But it is only just to him
to say that Stedman, in introducing him, spoke of him in terms which
should have made me believe this. He was born in St. Petersburg, and
looked rather like a Russian. He would have been fifty-two if he had
been alive. Lane always believed in him, and made him editor of the
_Yellow Book_. He and his pretty little wife had a flat in Cromwell
Road, and were popular in the “precious” section of literary society.
His early death was a great loss to literature.
Frank Bullen is one of the most interesting personalities I have met in
literature. He is so many-sided in his abilities and his experiences.
After being an errand-boy, and everything up to chief officer on a
sailing-ship, and a clerk in the meteorological office at Greenwich, he
became a writer, an orator and a philanthropist. No one has done more
for the men of the Merchant Service, for while he did all that man could
for them practically, he enlisted the sympathies of the world for them
in his books. A small, dark man, with very bright eyes, and a
sympathetic manner, except when he is moved to indignation, he was born
to dominate great audiences, especially when he is telling them of
wrongs which need practical redress. The wonders of the Lord which he
saw when he went down to the sea in ships, made such a profound
impression on his imagination that they fill the pages of his books with
eloquence and knowledge. With the exception of Joseph Conrad, he has no
rival among living writers as a sea-novelist. I think I met him at the
Idler first. I know that we became friends from the first day.
Dion Clayton Calthrop, that prince of light novelists, who is always
finding fame by some new stroke of genius, was our neighbour for several
years at Addison Mansions. He is such a distinguished-looking man that I
used to watch him and wonder who he was, until one night I met him
through a mutual friend. It is not surprising that he is so brilliant,
because he is the son of John Clayton, the actor, and grandson of Dion
Boucicault.
When I asked Calthrop, who started as an artist, what made him take up
writing, he said—
“I really took up writing owing to a bout of insomnia when I was living
in Paris, and as I was painting in the schools all day, I tried to write
at night. I read the sketches to Norman Angell, a friend of mine (who
wrote _The Great Illusion_), and through him met Manuel, the artist, and
through him they were published in _The Butterfly_.
“I believe in many irons in the fire; people specialise too much, so I
have books, plays, dress designs, or scene models, and a picture or two,
all going at once, and it is a great cause for regret to me that I
cannot write music. In the great days of Art, artists were so interested
in life that they tried everything—why shouldn’t we? I even have a
rock-garden full of Alpine flowers on my writing desk—true, it is only
four feet by one—but it is very interesting to see flowers grow as you
work. As a matter of fact, I am writing against an Alpine crocus, trying
to finish a book as it comes into bloom.”
Desmond Coke, one of the most brilliant of our younger novelists, I met
in 1904 through his mother, Mrs. Talbot Coke, who had been my colleague
on the _Queen_, the wife of one of our generals in the Boer War. Mrs.
Talbot Coke was at the time—as she is still—one of the principal
contributors to _Hearth and Home_, a paper which served as a literary
cradle to Robert Hichens, whilst it was sub-edited by no less a
personage than Arnold Bennett, who was just beginning to write his
series of great novels about the pottery towns.
Desmond Coke, who, under the pseudonym of “Charbon,” wrote the reviews
in a lively strain, possibly sometimes more welcome to his readers than
to the novelist reviewed, was at the time I speak of fresh from Oxford,
which he had made his own in fiction with that delirious skit on
feminine fiction, _Sandford of Merton_. Since then he has written a
number of novels, distinguished for their original ideas. He has long
been a keen collector, as his chambers in a backwater off Oxford Street
show, and has of late turned his collecting to good account by writing
the classic on _The Art of Silhouette_. He is very accomplished, and is
one of the chief pillars of Chapman & Hall’s publishing house. The
announcement, however, that Mr. H. B. Irving has secured his three-act
play, _One Hour of Life_, proves that here is yet another novelist who,
given the opportunity, would gladly exchange the quiet covers of
Bookland for the more adventurous and hectic boards of Theatredom!
E. H. Cooper was a very dear friend of mine, who came near being one of
the conspicuous figures of his time. He had a short life and a merry
one—merry, at all events, for his friends. He was, perhaps, too cynical
ever to be quite merry himself, except with children. His father was a
Staffordshire country gentleman, with an estate adjoining the Duke of
Sutherland’s, and the Duchess and her children and her nephews and
nieces were much attached to that wayward genius. While he was still an
undergraduate at Oxford, he contracted the taste for gambling on
horse-races, which kept him a poor man, but enabled him to write one of
the best racing novels of the language—_Mr. Blake of Newmarket_. That
did not prevent him from writing delightful children’s books, inspired
by the Duchess’s children. He was a very handsome and romantic-looking
man, with wonderful iron-grey eyes, but, like Byron, was born lame. For
a brief time he edited the _Daily Mail_, as a _locum tenens_, I believe,
and for a long time he was Paris correspondent of the _New York World_.
Once, during that period, he made a big coup at Chantilly, and for some
days pressed me with letters and telegrams to go and stay with him for a
week at Paris and “paint the town absolutely red” at his expense. We
were to stay at the Ritz. He said he was going to be really rich for a
week, and it would supply me with the material for a whole novel. But if
he was determined to waste his one stroke of luck, I was not going to be
a party to it, and I not only refused, but did my utmost to wean him
from the idea—unsuccessfully, I think. If Cooper had really given his
mind to novel-writing and journalism, he might have made a great name,
for he was brilliantly clever, and his distinction of manner made him an
impressive figure in society.
We were drawing near the end of our time at Addison Mansions when I met
Jeffery Farnol. Farnol, who is still young, is as likely as any one to
rank among the foremost novelists of his time. His _Broad Highway_ is
one of the best books produced by the generation, and _The Amateur
Gentleman_ was a good successor to it. He is an Englishman born, but
lived some time in America, where he made his living as a scene-painter.
There he wrote his great novel, and after disappointments in searching
for a publisher he sent it to Shirley Byron Jevons, at that time editor
of the _Sportsman_, a relative of the celebrated Professor Stanley
Jevons, the Political Economist, and brother of Dr. Frank Jevons,
Vice-Chancellor of Durham University, he himself being now connected
with literary journalism. Shirley Jevons at once recognised it as
something like a work of genius, and taking it to the old firm of
Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., told them that they must publish it.
It made its way a little slowly at first, but then the public, led by
the strong convictions of one man, swept him on to fame on an
irresistible tide. Farnol was born in Birmingham thirty-five years ago.
His parents came to London when he was seven, and he has made a suburb
of it, Lee, in Kent, his permanent home, though business may take him to
the United States for months at a time.
He married in his early twenties the daughter of Hawley, the scenic and
architectural artist, an Englishman living in America. She was on a
visit to relatives in England, and the rash young couple, soon after the
birth of a daughter, their only child, resolved to try their fortunes on
the other side of the Atlantic, the plucky and fascinating little wife
sharing there his bad fortune as now she shares his good. The struggle
was hard enough for a time, and, if Farnol cared to relate all that he
went through in those years, the story would be a human document of
great interest. At my house he met Yoshio Markino. I was about to
introduce the already famous Jap to the coming young Englishman, when
the impulsive Markino rushed at and fondled him, crying out in delight,
“Why, it’s Jacky!” They had been fellow-students at the Goldsmiths’
Institute when both were younger, and both unknown to fame. There Farnol
had shown welcome little kindnesses to the lonely, warm-hearted stranger
from Nippon. Their ways had parted, neither thinking to see the other
again, and least of all in this dramatic fashion and in these brighter
circumstances. _The Broad Highway_ has been dramatised for America, and
is to be staged in England. _The Amateur Gentleman_ is also to be
adapted to the stage. His third important story—he has done many shorter
things—is likely to be of modern times.
Francis Gribble is a very old friend of mine; we belonged to the same
literary clubs, and met constantly at them, and he and his charming
Dutch wife were often at Addison Mansions. Gribble, who is an Oxford
First Class man, besides his very able novels and his biographies, which
are recognised as classics on their subject, has made a neglected aspect
of Switzerland his particular province. He is the authority on the Swiss
towns, like Geneva and Lauzanne, where so much of the scenes of some of
his biographies had necessarily to be laid. He now spends a good deal of
his time in Continental travel. I remember his telling me that it was
through his study of Swiss towns that he was led on to write biography.
The connecting link was his accidental perusal of that wonderful book,
_Benjamin Constant’s Journal Intime_. He saw from it that the life of
Madame de Staël needed to be written from a new point of view, then he
was led on to cover the whole ground of the romantic movement in French
literature from Rousseau to Victor Hugo.
Frank Hird I have known many years. I met him first as editor of some
important journal—I forget what—with which I was arranging a
contribution, just as I met C. N. Williamson first as sub-editor of the
_Graphic_. I was astonished to find myself in the presence of a person
who was hardly more than a boy, very good-looking, very well-bred, very
well dressed. Since then I have met him repeatedly, and enjoyed the
friendship of one who fully came up to my first prepossession. I have
met him most, I think, at the hospitable villa of the Joseph Whitakers’
in Palermo, where he frequently stayed, and showed himself as good in
private theatricals as he is as an author. The place where he seemed
most in his element was when he was correspondent to one of the chief
London newspapers in Rome, and I used to meet him in salons like the
Countess Lovatelli’s. The Countess was the sister of the Duke of
Sermoneta, one of the highest of the Roman nobility, who has a similar
position to our Duke of Norfolk. The Sermoneta family have a proud
record in Italian archæology; the Countess herself is an author, and, as
a centre of public and literary life, the Lady St. Helier of Rome. Her
“salon” is said to be the only one in which the “Whites” and the
“Blacks” habitually meet. He was always the diplomatist, more than the
correspondent, though he was so excellent at his own work, and would
have risen high in diplomacy if he had made it his career.
Edgar Jepson and his wife were often at Addison Mansions, and I used to
meet him constantly at the Authors’ Club as I now meet him at the
Dilettanti. He is a man in whom his friends believed from the first, and
the quality of his books and his speaking have amply justified them.
Intellectually he is a typical Balliol man, but that does not prevent
his being one of the delights of Bohemia, where his popularity is
unbounded. Experts are agreed that on his day, he is the second best, if
not the best, auction-bridge player in England. He says of himself, that
he is a walking warning against writing fiction, since from his first
book he made 0, from his second six pounds nineteen and nine, and from
his third nine pounds ten and fivepence.
William le Queux has been an intimate friend of mine for many years. A
Frenchman by birth, he is a strongly Imperialist Englishman by
naturalisation, and in his writings and politics. He has led a most
interesting life. He was once an artist in the Quartier Latin, but he
deserted this for journalism, and was sent by _The Times_ as a special
correspondent to Russia, using the opportunity to acquire an
extraordinary knowledge of the secret workings of the Nihilists, just as
he has in recent years been very much behind the scenes in the Balkans
and Turkey. For a while he was sub-editor of the _Globe_, which post he
resigned as soon as his success as a novelist justified it. Since then
he has travelled continually, and acquired a unique knowledge of the
secret service of the Continental Powers. He is one of the most popular
novelists of the day, the secret of his popularity lying in his
brilliant handling of mysteries, and the use he makes of his knowledge
behind the scenes in Continental politics. His books dealing with
supposed invasions of England are masterpieces in their way, showing an
extraordinary grasp of military details. A member of the Athenæum Club
told me once that judges and bishops almost quarrelled with each other
when a new William le Queux book came into the Club. His affable face,
with bright, dark eyes, behind _pince-nez_, and an inscrutable
expression, is familiar to frequenters of the Devonshire Club and the
Hotel Cecil. The curious thing is that, though we have been such
friends, and have been frequent visitors to the same places on the
Continent, from the little republic of San Marino, of which he is
Consul-General, upwards, we have never, so far as I remember, met out of
England.
Bertram Mitford lived side by side with myself and “Adrian Ross” at
Addison Mansions for years. He belongs to one of the oldest families in
England. His father, the late E. L. Osbaldeston Mitford, of Mitford in
Northumberland, which has been in the possession of his family since
Saxon times, appearing in Doomsday Book, was a wonderful old gentleman;
he lived to be more than a hundred years old, and, till a few years
before his death, used to come up to London for first nights at his
favourite theatres.
Bertram Mitford is a good sportsman, who has travelled and shot in the
back parts of South Africa, and the wild lands bordering on India and
Afghanistan. His travels have inspired novels which are splendid books
of adventure. He has also been in Italy a good deal.
Guise Mitford, who has written one or two good novels, is his cousin, as
is the stately Lord Redesdale, the head of a cadet branch of his family,
who wrote the famous _Tales of Old Japan_. Miss Mitford, too, a once
most popular authoress, was of the clan.
Mitford and I used to see each other constantly in Addison Mansions, and
frequently at two or three clubs to which we both belonged, but I don’t
remember ever doing the journey between together, between them and our
flats. He often walked both ways for the exercise.
K. J. Key, the great cricketer, who for many years held the record for
the Oxford and Cambridge match, with his 130, and was afterwards Captain
of the Surrey Eleven for years, one of my most valued friends,
introduced me to Charles Marriott, of whose novels he was an immense
admirer. Key is a great reader. Unlike most cricketers, who prefer to
watch the game intently until they go in to bat, as if they were playing
whist or bridge, and wanted to see what cards were out, he used to read
a book or a newspaper till it was his turn to go in, and I have no doubt
that he saved a good deal of nerve energy by doing so. I think he met
Marriott in Cornwall, to which they are both devoted. Certainly, they
are both fond of photography. Marriott made a considerable _succès
d’estime_ with his first novel, _The Column_. He is, or was until
recently, the Art critic of one of the great London dailies, and is a
most accomplished man, of wide knowledge, and one of the best novelists
of the day. Living at Brook Green, he was a near neighbour of ours, and
from the time that Key introduced us to the time that we left Addison
Mansions, we saw a good deal of him. Key’s wife has recently published a
novel with a cricketer (not her husband) for its hero—_A Daughter of
Love_. She is a sister of Lascelles Abercombie.
Compton Mackenzie first came to Addison Mansions as a small boy at St.
Paul’s School, where he was a friend of my son. They began to be men
very early in my son’s little cupboard of a study, overlooking Lyon’s
cake-factory. I did not see him after he made his fame as a novelist
till we came to live at Richmond. He has, like myself, a passion for
gardening. He is, of course, a son of Edward Compton, the actor, and
Virginia Bateman, and his great-grandmother was a Symonds, aunt of John
Addington Symonds, so there is one of the best strains of literary
ability in the family. The famous Sir Morell Mackenzie was Edward
Compton’s cousin.
When I wrote to ask Compton Mackenzie, who is now indulging his passion
for gardening by living in Capri and making landscapes round his house,
what first impelled him to write novels, he said—
“I can remember shooting peas at your guests as they came in, and
throwing cake, etc. I don’t suppose we did it always, but I distinctly
remember doing it once or twice. It is difficult to extract anything
from the past and account for my writing novels. Yet I always had a
passion for writing. In the Upper Sixth in 1896, I, with two other boys,
ran a paper called _The Hectona_, of which, so far as I know, only two
numbers are in existence. It was printed on gelatine, and all the
contributions were copied out by myself in my execrable handwriting.
Like many magazines since, it expired of illegibility. Later, at Oxford,
I ran another paper called _The Oxford Point of View_.
“Gardening I took up to console myself for not being able to find a
publisher for my first book. It toured round London for nearly two
years, and I did not sit down and write _The Carnival_ until _The
Passionate Elopement_ lay bound upon my table. This was according to a
vow I had made. I started very early. _The Passionate Elopement_ was
printed just after I was twenty-five. It was originally—or some of it—a
play which I wrote to console my father for having got married without
warning or expectation. That was when I was twenty-two.
“_The Carnival_, I suppose, may be called the result of helping my
brother-in-law, poor Harry Pelissier, with his Alhambra Revue. I used to
rehearse the Corps de Ballet, and, I suppose, naturally made use of such
an opportunity to make a book.”
Lord Monkswell, who wrote a single novel, and whose sister, the Contessa
Arturo di Cadilhac, born Margaret Collier, has written some valuable
books about life in Italy, I met constantly as one of the directors of
the Authors’ Club. He was also my sponsor for another club. He was very
regular in his attendances at the Board Meetings of the Authors’ Club,
which he occasionally illuminated with a naïve outbreak, as in his
dictum about the National Liberal Club. At one of our Board Meetings, I
was advocating some change in the financial arrangements of the
billiard-room, and quoted as an example to be followed the rule at the
National Liberal Club.
“National Liberal Club!” cried Lord Monkswell, who was at that time
Under-Secretary for War in a Liberal Government; “why, I don’t call that
a club at all—I call it a railway station!”
Richard Orton Prowse has won admiration in high places with his
work. One of his novels ran as a serial in the _Cornhill_, and he
had a play produced by the “Stage Society.” He used to come to
Addison Mansions because we were in the same small house at
Cheltenham College—Gantillon’s, in Fauconberg Terrace. There were
only about half-a-dozen boys in the house, but we used to knock up a
game of football on a waste bit of ground at the back of the
terrace, with two small day-boys who lived in an adjoining house.
There were not more than eight of us all told—I think only seven,
and of the seven, besides Prowse and myself, there were the two
famous Renshaws, and the two famous Lambs. The Renshaws were very
small boys in those days, but so absolutely certain in their
catching, and their drop-kicking, that they counted in football
games with boys three or four years older. When they grew up, their
extraordinary scientificness in games was proved in the lawn-tennis
courts, because for years, until one of them died by his own hand,
they were undisputed champions. As it happened, I never met either
of them after they left school, but one day I was driving through a
remote Buckinghamshire village, White Waltham or something of the
kind, with a friend, when we observed a crowd, in the street outside
the village pound, of persons whom you would not have expected in
such a place. We inquired what the trouble was, and found that it
was an inquest on a suicide—one of the famous Renshaws.
Curiously enough, there was the same element of tragedy in the history
of the brothers Lamb—Captain Thomas Lamb and Captain Edward Lamb, were
for years the finest shots in the British army. Edward Lamb was the only
boy who ever won the Spencer Cup twice; when he was at school, there had
never been such a shot at a public school. Thomas Lamb, who had the
finest nerve I ever remember in any one, broke down in a match when he
went over to the United States to represent England, and was so
mortified that he shot himself on the way home.
I shall always remember with pride that I was the first person who ever
put a rifle into the hands of those two Lambs. I taught them how to
shoot, and did most of the explaining in that house in Fauconberg
Terrace, Cheltenham. I was at the time Captain of the school shooting
eight, and I had won the Spencer Cup myself in the Public Schools
matches at the preceding Wimbledon Meeting. I rather despaired about
Tommy Lamb; he was not quick at taking things in, but I knew that if he
could learn to shoot, his nerve and his doggedness might carry him to
any heights of success. The houses of Fauconberg Terrace were very high,
and there was a high parapet about a foot wide on the roof. I have seen
Tommy Lamb run along that parapet from end to end. He said, “If it was
only two or three feet from the ground, instead of two or three feet
from the roof, it would be nothing. Why should it make any difference?
It is all the same to me.”
Several feet from our study window, which had a storey underneath it,
there was a railing of about the same width. He used to jump from our
window on to that railing, and keep his balance. Anybody could do it, he
said, if it was nearer the ground. Why should it make any difference?
And he was always ready to jump from a height of twenty or thirty feet,
and never hurt himself.
The seventh boy in those football games was Frank Lamb, the youngest
brother. I never heard if he did anything in after life, but we six, I
am quite sure, had no thought beyond a football which bounced so
unevenly on that piece of waste land.
Tommy Lamb was a very fine fellow, singularly modest about his
achievements. Several years afterwards, when I first came back from
Australia, I went down to Wimbledon to see the Public Schools Veterans’
Match, in which I had captained Cheltenham three or four times. Lamb,
who was then in the flower of his shooting, was very anxious that I
should take his place in that year’s team. He thought it so wrong that I
should not be shooting. I had, fortunately, not fired off a rifle for at
least three years, or I should have had great difficulty in dissuading
him from effacing himself for me, and if I had been at my very best he
would have been heavens above me in the form he showed. That was the
sort of man he was. We were in the same house at Cheltenham for two or
three years, so I knew him extremely well.
These chapters in no way exhaust the list of my novelist friends—they
are merely reminiscences which I thought likely to interest readers
about some of them. I have not mentioned, for instance, one of my
greatest friends, that brilliant historical novelist, John
Bloundelle-Burton; or Hornung, Doyle’s brother-in-law, whom I first met
out in Australia thirty years ago; or Richard Pryce, that dainty
novelist and playwright; and I have passed by many other well-known
authors whom I knew equally well and saw very often.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXIV
OTHER AUTHOR FRIENDS
ONE is apt to let fiction speak for itself, as if it represented the
whole of literature. But it does not. Several of the men mentioned below
are novelists, but they owe their importance more to other books.
The late W. H. Wilkins, who was much at our house, is an example.
Wilkins, who was the son and heir of a West Country Squire, was an
extraordinary mixture—a man of fashion, who was at the same time an
industrious museum-worker. He wrote admirable books on the Georgian
Courts. But he will be best remembered as the editor to whom Lady Burton
entrusted her manuscripts for publication. It was from him that I
learned the irreparable loss which she inflicted on literature by
burning a number of Burton’s manuscripts because of the grossnesses
which they contained. There was no reason why any of these grossnesses
should have been published—the manuscripts could have been printed with
lacunæ where these passages occurred, and the manuscripts could have
been left to the nation in the British Museum on condition that the
offending passages never were published. But the idea of burning
unpublished works about Arabia, by the greatest of all explorers of
Arabia and students of Arab customs, was too infamous. Wilkins put it
down to her religion. She was a very ardent Roman Catholic.
He had a good deal to do with the _Ladies’ Realm_ in its early days,
when it was published by Hutchinson, and I believe he had a good deal to
do with the formation of the fortnightly part publications for which
this house is famous. He certainly was a friend and constant adviser of
Hutchinson’s. His books enjoyed a considerable sale. The novel he wrote
in collaboration with Herbert Vivian was one of the last of the
three-volumers.
Wilkins was a man of strong likes and dislikes, very affectionate to his
friends. Like E. H. Cooper, he was a well-known figure in society as
well as in literary circles—and, curiously enough, he, too, was lame.
Joseph Shaylor, the managing secretary of the Whitefriars Club, and the
managing director of Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., the
largest wholesale booksellers in the world, I have known almost as long.
It is interesting to note that Shaylor, besides being the largest dealer
in books commercially, has a most intimate and discriminating knowledge
of all the books which are worth reading, and issues delightful little
books on books, including his dear little annual _From Friend to
Friend_.
Every one knows his volume called _The Fascination of Books_. His career
is a romance; it reminds one of Dick Whittington. He has himself told us
that he is a self-made man—_i. e._ he has had nothing but his own
intelligence and grit to help him. He was born in Stroud in 1844, where
he was apprenticed to a bookseller named Clark. It was part of Shaylor’s
duty to fetch the London papers from the train in the morning. In 1864
he came to London, at once entering the firm of Simpkin, Marshall & Co.
His diligence and business acumen generally was noted, and after a while
he was given charge of one of the departments. It became increasingly
evident to his employers that their confidence in, and judgment of, this
young man from the country had not been misplaced, and within five or
six years after the formation of the company, as it now stands, Shaylor
was elected to the position of one of the managing directors.
Shaylor is an authority on the history of books and bookselling, and has
many interesting stories to tell of how things were done in the trade
years ago, when life was more leisurely. In those golden days, reviewers
had some power; a good review in _The Times_ sold two hundred thousand
copies of _The Fight at Dame Europa’s School_, timidly brought out in
the very smallest way, and an article in _The World_ sold four hundred
copies of _Called Back_. How a book sells depends very much upon the
original subscription before publication, of which Shaylor, as head of
the world’s biggest buyers, thinks it worthy. Of him it may be justly
said that he has his finger on the pulse of English literature and that
his diagnosis is accepted by the world.
Ernest Thompson Seton—who took for his pen-name Ernest Seton
Thompson—came to us first many years ago, when he became engaged to a
friend of ours, the beautiful Grace Gallatin, daughter of the Speaker of
the California House of Representatives. A descendant of the last Earl
of Winton, he went to Canada when he was only five, and lived in the
backwoods for ten years. Then he went to school and college in Canada,
and had two years’ art-training in London before he returned to Manitoba
to study natural history, eventually becoming naturalist to the Manitoba
Government. In 1898, when he was thirty-eight years old, he published
his _Wild Animals I have Known—the Biographies of Eight Wild Animals_,
which went through ten editions in the first year, and was the
foundation of his fame and large fortune. He founded the outdoor-life
movement, known as _The Woodcraft Indians_, which has a membership of
nearly a hundred thousand, and in addition to his soundness as a
naturalist, he is the most dramatic lecturer I have ever heard. He
lectures on the psychology of wild animals as if they were human beings,
and is said to be the most popular lecturer living. His books about wild
animals have delightful sketches of animal playfulness and humanness in
their margins, some of which are by himself, and some by his wife.
Dr. Dillon, whose articles in the _Daily Telegraph_ on the Balkan
question during the war formed the most illuminating comment on the
subject, I have been meeting for years at Violet Hunt’s. He is an
elderly man, who looks more the scholar and the recluse than the
publicist with his finger on the pulse of all Eastern Europe.
Max Beerbohm, Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree’s brother, is recognised as one
of the most brilliant wits and intuitive critics of the day, as well as
our most inspired caricaturist. There are few educated people in England
who are not familiar with his work. I met him first at a dinner of the
Women Journalists. We were both guests of the Club, and Mrs. T. P.
O’Connor, who was in the chair, said to me, “You know Max Beerbohm,
don’t you?”
I did not know him, though I had always wanted to know him, because I
was a great admirer of his work and his wit. I said, “No, I don’t,” and
was about to add what pleasure it would give me, when he took the words
out of my mouth by saying, “I refuse not to be known by Mr. Douglas
Sladen.” That was our introduction.
He was in splendid form that night. He and a man with an unpronounceable
Polish name, who was one of the leading foreign journalists in London,
were deputed to reply for the visitors. The Pole, who spoke very broken
English, at interminable length, made Max Beerbohm very angry, because
he hated the idea of speaking to a jaded audience, so when at length his
colleague sat down, and he rose to make his speech, he began, “I, too,
am a foreigner. I go about in holy terror of the Tariff Reform League.”
The audience recognised that he was really alluding to the Aliens Act,
and rocked with laughter.
I remember Mark Twain being similarly annoyed at a dinner of the
American Society, when he had to speak after a number of verbose
platitudinarians. He was quite dispirited when he rose, and confined
himself to a few sentences. After the dinner was over, he told me this,
and he went on to say, “But I was wrong, for the late Sir Henry
Brackenbury spoke after me, and look what he did with the audience! He
took them up in his hand, and moved them to tears and laughter, just as
he pleased.”
That speech of Sir Henry’s certainly was magnificently eloquent. It was
during, or just after, the South African War, and the phrases in which
he alluded to the war swept the audience, though they were mostly
Americans, right off their feet; they were as fine as John Bright’s
immortal allusion to hearing the angels’ wings in his Crimean War
speech. I only once heard a finer speech—the sermon preached in St.
Paul’s by the present Archbishop of York, then Bishop of Stepney, upon
the centenary of Nelson’s death. In that sermon over and over again the
words were flames. There is nothing so inspiring as a supreme speech at
a supreme moment.
Dr. G. C. Williamson, the art editor of George Bell & Sons, is one of
the most potent figures in the world of art—in fact, there are few
branches of art on which he has not got any reasonable information at
his fingers’ tips. He has written books which have met with wide
acceptation on several of them, and has been a great collector and
traveller.
I met him under curious circumstances. We were both, though I did not
know him then, in St. Peter’s, witnessing the Jubilee of Leo XIII. On
occasions like this in Italy no one interferes with the liberty of the
sight-seer, and as I was not, in the nature of things, likely to see the
Jubilee of another Pope, and I had to write a description of it, I
determined to seize whatever opportunity I could for seeing it, without
any _mauvais honte_. The cathedral had been so packed for the past six
hours that it was practically impossible to see anything unless you
seized some coign of vantage. Williamson and I were standing close to
one of the great piers of the nave, and the base had a projection some
feet from the ground. I determined to stand on it, but he was between me
and the pier. He very good-naturedly made way for me, and helped me to
scramble up, calling out “_Viva il papa re! Viva il papa re!_” all the
time. I offered, of course, to share my giddy eminence with him, turn
and turn about, but he was a devout Catholic, and though he saw no harm
in my ambitions, which he furthered so nobly, he was quite content to be
in the church, and worshipping. He did not want to see more than
everybody saw without striving, when at last it happened—the carrying of
the frail old Pope on his _Sedia Gestatoria_, supported on men’s
shoulders, between the snow-white _flabella_.
When it was all over, we exchanged cards, and that was the beginning of
my friendship with the famous art critic.
It certainly was about the most impressive sight I ever saw—that vast
cathedral, packed with a hundred thousand human beings, with the
nonagenarian Pope dressed in snow-white garments borne on his moving
throne from the High Altar to the Chapel of the Crucifix.
It is not too much to say that literary London felt a shock when it
heard that William Sinclair had resigned the Archdeaconry of London
which he had held with such conspicuous success for twenty-two years,
and retired to a Sussex benefice. He had been one of the foremost
figures in every London function of the time, since the Jubilee of Queen
Victoria, and he had started life as a Scholar of Balliol and President
of the Union—the University Debating Society at Oxford. Being a
bachelor, there was no reason why he should restrict himself to dining
at home, and, consequently, he was the most prominent figure at public
dinners, of a patriotic, philanthropic or useful character, where he
spoke comparatively seldom, considering what a good speaker he is. Being
a connection of half the Scottish aristocracy—he is a cousin of the Lord
of the Isles—he was equally conspicuous in country house parties. A
constant attendant at the functions of the Authors’ and other literary
clubs, his eminence as an ecclesiastic and a public man obscured the
fact that his performances as an author were among the most
distinguished of those present, for he has a gift of saying wise things
in epigrammatic form. His _magnum opus_ is a book on his own cathedral,
and here I may incidentally remark that few archdeacons have ever
exercised such influence on the Dean over the care of the cathedral. His
great object was to emphasise the voice of St. Paul’s as that of the
nation in its religious aspect, and it was with this view that he
prevailed on the Dean and Chapter and the Crown to install the Imperial
Order of St. Michael and St. George in the Chapel of the Cathedral where
they meet for annual commemorations. His loss, also, from the Sunday
afternoon pulpit of St. Paul’s has been distinctly felt. It was one of
the institutions of London. He was a wise man to retire for leisure to
write and travel while he was still in his prime.
Basil Wilberforce, the Archdeacon of Westminster, and son of the great
Bishop, I came to know because we used to meet at dinner at Lady
Lindsay’s. It was there that I heard him declare his firm faith in the
Holy Grail—I am refering to the vessel which had been discovered a short
time before at Glastonbury Abbey, and which was believed to emanate a
luminous _aura_ at night, from time to time. The Archdeacon declined the
honour of having it left in his bedroom at night to test the truth of
the allegation, either because he thought his emotions might act on his
imagination, or because he did not think himself worthy, but I
understand that it was left in Sir William Crookes’, the great F.R.S.’s
room for three nights without his observing any phenomena.
I remember George Russell—the Rt. Hon. G. W. E. Russell, the editor of
Matthew Arnold’s letters, and Under-Secretary for India in Lord
Rosebery’s Government—who was present that night, interposing a jarring
note of incredulity, which the Archdeacon very sweetly forgave in an old
friend.
Until her prolonged absences from London for ill-health, Mrs. Neish, the
wife of the Registrar of the Privy Council, was, on account of the
remarkable rapidity with which she made her way in literature as well as
for her beauty, a conspicuous figure in London literary society. She
made her way so quickly because she was a born writer, and mingled the
witty and the pathetic naturally. She was a daughter of Sir Edwin
Galsworthy. There is literature in the family. She is a first cousin of
the great novelist and playwright, John Galsworthy. Her husband’s father
was a Scottish laird, who in an inspired moment advanced the capital for
founding the _Dundee Advertiser_. She has often done the _Saturday
Westminster_ and written many nature sketches.
One of the principal figures in literary society, and one of my most
valued friends, is M. H. Spielmann, the great art critic who discovered
and bought the lost Velasquez a year or two ago. Spielmann was for
seventeen years editor of the _Magazine of Art_, and is an authority on
_Punch_ and its contributors, as well as on painting and sculpture. He
is the author of several standard works, and has been juror in the Fine
Arts’ section of innumerable exhibitions. He is also a keen politician
on the Conservative side, though he is the brother-in-law of the Rt.
Hon. Herbert Samuel, and is an admirable speaker. But you always feel
that it is not his accomplishments which count in Spielmann, though he
has so many; it is himself—his shining character, his almost feminine
gentleness and considerateness, combined with unusual firmness and
principle. There are few men in London who could be so ill spared as
Spielmann.
[Illustration:
THE JAPANESE ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(_From the Painting by Yoshio Markino._)
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXV
FRIENDS WHO NEVER CAME TO ADDISON MANSIONS
I OUGHT to say something here of the interesting people I have known,
who never happened to come to Addison Mansions, for one reason or
another.
Distance prevented the great Dr. Boyd of St. Andrews—the famous
A.K.H.B., of whom I saw a good deal in the long summer I spent at St.
Andrews—from coming. Dr. Boyd possessed the most crushing powers of
repartee of any person I ever met. One day, when he was walking with me
along the street at St. Andrews, which leads down to the links, some one
presented an American publisher, a partner in a famous firm, to him.
“I am very glad to meet you, Dr. Boyd,” said the publisher. “I enjoyed
your _Scenes from Clerical Life_ so much.”
“I did not write that book, sir,” said the terrible Doctor. “I wrote
_The Recreations of a Country Parson_—and you ought to know it, because
your firm stole them both.”
I once unconsciously helped him in using this talent, which happened in
this wise. Dr. Boyd was a reformer as drastic as John Knox. The great
humanising movement in the Scottish Church, which made its services and
music so much more beautiful and its attitude so much less angular, was
largely his work, for he was not only one of the most eloquent of the
notable ministers who worked for it, but he had any amount of backbone.
An old ultra-Protestant lady, having perceived this, paid an evangelist
a thousand a year to go about Scotland preaching against him. One Sunday
he was at St. Andrews, on the public space where the inhabitants used to
practice archery, preaching against Dr. Boyd. His preaching was all
“limehousing,” an appeal to the coarsest prejudice, most banal abuse and
derision. It was so ludicrous that I took most of it down in longhand,
in the intervals when he paused for applause, as he did whenever he
imagined that he was scoring. It so happened that I was having
afternoon-tea with Dr. Boyd, and that he was preaching in his own church
that evening. I began to sympathise with him in being made the subject
of such a persecution.
“Were you there?” he asked. I nodded.
“Do you remember at all what he said?”
I produced my notes.
“Do you mind reading them out to me?” he asked, after a despairing
glance at the writing. I did. He took no notes; but he had an admirable
memory, and he evidently took it all in, for that evening, without
having lowered his dignity by being present at the evangelist’s attack
on him, he turned the tables on the offender from his own pulpit, with a
dissection of his remarks which can only be compared to throwing
vitriol, though it was all done with beautiful polish and observance of
form.
He was never more amusing than when he was sympathising about the
difficulties which he described Andrew Lang as experiencing when he came
to St. Andrews. He was such a master of innuendo.
Dr. Boyd wrote his books in handwriting so minute that he could get two
thousand words on to one foolscap page. The firm who always printed them
for his publishers had large magnifying glasses fitted to the case on
which his copy was fixed for setting it up. And Dr. Boyd was very proud
of it.
One of Dr. Boyd’s sons has inherited his power as a writer—my friend
Charles Boyd, who acted for some time as private secretary to Cecil
Rhodes in South Africa.
Sir Charles Dilke, M.P., took a flattering interest in my books, and was
very friendly in his intercourse with me. The most amusing reminiscences
I have in connection with him are _à propos_ of a dinner at which we
were both taken in, though I was too obscure for it to signify in my
case.
A dinner for a high-sounding object was given at Prince’s. Sixty
important public men and leading writers and journalists were invited,
and Sir Charles Dilke was asked to respond to the toast of the evening.
His rising to speak was the signal for three great acetylene flares to
be turned on, which reduced the scores of electric lights in the room to
looking like the gas jets in the Richmond railway-station. This was
taken as a compliment to Sir Charles, though it would have disconcerted
any less practised speaker.
When his speech and the other speeches were over, the chairman
electrified the assemblage by informing them that a new sort of
gramophone would reproduce for them Tennyson’s last words in the voice
in which he spoke them. It was a most impressive moment. For a few
minutes one did not realise the colossal impertinence of pretending that
there had been a phonograph in Tennyson’s bedroom on this solemn
occasion. But, of course, the record might have been produced by a man
who knew Tennyson’s voice well enough to imitate it, as certain reciters
imitate celebrated actors. We did not realise this at the time. The next
day the dinner was duly reported, with the names of the makers of these
wonderful lamps, and this wonderful phonetic record, and later on it
transpired that these two parties had paid for the dinner, which was
only got up to advertise them.
This is one of the two cleverest pieces of journalism I remember. The
other happened on the night that King Edward died. A great London
linen-draping firm had an elaborate intelligence system during the
well-beloved monarch’s last illness. They were well served. I happened
to see the head of the firm about twelve hours before the nation was
plunged into mourning.
“You may take it from me,” he said, “that his Majesty won’t live another
twenty-four hours.”
As he was in the habit of making impressive statements, I discounted
what he said. But he was right, and acting on his information, he bought
up all the available mourning in the market, and scored a huge business
victory. I met him long afterwards, and alluded to the information which
he had given me.
“I wasn’t the only one who took pains to know,” he said, “for that
night, at the hour the King died, I was driving from the hotel, where I
had been dining, to my office, with the correspondent of one of the
great French newspapers. As we passed the Palace, one of the top windows
was opened, and a person came to it with a lighted candle, and blew it
out. ‘Did you see that? Do you mind driving me to the West Strand
post-office?’ said my French friend. ‘Why, no,’ I said; ‘but what do you
want to go there for?’ ‘To send a cipher-wire to my paper that his
Majesty is dead.’ ‘Isn’t it a great risk?’ I asked. ‘If it was, I would
take it. But even a good rumour is worth something.’”
The Frenchman was right, and he won his victory.
The late Lord Dufferin was another man who was very kind to me about my
writings. I suppose that they appealed to him for the same reason that
they appealed to Dilke. Both of them were deeply interested in Greater
Britain, and in travel generally, and I have written books full of
enthusiasm for travel and the Colonies.
Lord Dufferin never forgot any one who had served him. When his new
title forced a new signature on him, he sent a new photograph with the
Dufferin and Ava signature to all his journalist friends, though some of
them had passed out of his sphere for years.
He always did the right thing. I remember the late Lord Derby beginning
a speech at a dinner at Winnipeg at which I was present, “As Lord
Dufferin, who seems to have left nothing unsaid, observed,” etc.
On that same vice-regal progress to the West, I was showing Lord Derby
some Kodaks I had taken on various occasions at which he had been
present—crowded functions in cities, full-dress rehearsals of Chippeway
Indians on the war-path, and the like. One print was from a negative
which I had of these Chippewas, with their necklaces of cartridges and
their feather head-dresses, taken on the top of the massed choirs of
Manitoba, singing “God save the Queen.” Lord Derby begged this
photograph from me, “That’s a photograph of the whole trip,” he said.
He remained surprisingly popular, considering the maladroitness of one
of his aide-de-camps—a delightful Guardsman who is now dead. I have
heard this A.D.C., whom Nature had gifted with the most graceful
manners, say appalling things.
At one provincial capital, the mayor gave a ball in Lord Derby’s honour.
I had just been presented to the mayor, and was standing quite close to
him, when Lord Derby came in. When the official presentation was over,
Lord Derby, who always wished to get on a friendly footing with his
hosts, asked his A.D.C. in a whisper, “What is the mayor, M——?” The
Governor-General wished to know if his host bred cattle, or ran a
timber-mill, or owned a hotel, or what, so that he might say the
appropriate thing. But the A.D.C.’s reply, which, like Lord Derby’s
“What is the mayor, M——?”, was perfectly audible to that functionary,
was “Toned-down Jew.” So much for the _entente cordiale_ at—we will call
it Medicine Hat.
At a ball given by Lord Derby, I watched that same A.D.C. taking an
important politician, whom he should have known perfectly well, to
introduce him to his own wife, a young and pretty woman who considered
herself one of the lions of Canadian society. The situation struck me as
a promising one, so I listened to hear what he would say.
“Mrs. Um,” he said; “may I introduce Mr. Um-um to you?” She looked up at
him with an amused smile, and he continued quite blissfully, “He’s a
stupid old buffer, but I’ll get you away from him as soon as I can.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXVI
MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS
CONSIDERING the number of years which I have devoted to travel, I have
not met a great many explorers, certainly nothing like so many as I
should have met if I had been a regular attendant at the meetings of the
Royal Geographical Society. These interest me extremely, but I have an
unfortunate habit of going to sleep at lectures, however interesting I
find them, so I shrink from going to them. Otherwise I should have
joined the society long ago, and been a regular attendant.
The last time I went there was many years ago, when a great explorer and
mighty hunter had just returned from Mashonaland. He read an immensely
interesting paper; I quite forgot to go to sleep. Among the speakers who
followed was a pompous old gentleman, who scourged the lecturer with the
most inane platitudes, winding up with the question, “May I ask the
lecturer what he thinks of the climate of Mashonaland?” and the explorer
replied, “There’s nothing wrong with the climate of Mashonaland, but it
isn’t the sort of place where you could get drunk and lie all night in
the gutter, without knowing about it the next morning.”
The old gentleman gasped, and so, I think, did the audience, but the
lecturer seemed quite unconscious that he had done anything beyond
giving sound advice.
My friendship with the famous Dr. George Ernest Morrison, of Peking, I
have described in the chapter on Australians. When I was living in
Melbourne, I saw a good deal at the Melbourne Club of Augustus Gregory,
one of the doyens of Australian exploration, actually the first, I
believe, to accomplish the transcontinental journey successfully. He
told me that when their supplies ran short, the things they missed most
in the terrific heat were fat and sugar. When their water ran short,
they more than once refilled their water-bottles by wringing the dew out
of their blankets.
Curiously enough, fat and sugar were the things equally most missed by a
party of Canadian explorers who were engaged one winter in finding the
pass by which the Canadian Pacific Railway crossed the Rocky Mountains.
Their leader, who was running a small steamer up from Golden City to the
source of the Columbia in Lake Windermere, told me so, when I was a
passenger with him. I had just shot a wild goose on a shoal with my
Winchester rifle from the deck of the steamer, and he had come out of
his cabin to see what the matter was.
I had a unique experience at that Canadian Lake Windermere. I was lying
flat on my back in the reedy shallows at its edge, enjoying a bath in
water above human temperature, when a deputation of ranchers waited on
me to ask if I would act as judge in the annual horse-races for Red
Indians, which were to be held that afternoon. They had heard that an
author had come up with the steamer from Golden City, and wished to pay
me this unique compliment. I protested my inexperience in the matter,
but dressed and accompanied them to a sort of pulpit made of fresh
lumber, which I occupied while half-a-dozen races were run on little
barebacked horses (I wondered if these were _mustangs_, but did not dare
to show my ignorance by inquiring) by naked braves and squaws in
trousers with a feather trimming down the seam. As I escaped uninjured,
I suppose that my judgments were accepted. Colonel Baker, a brother of
Valentine and Sir Samuel, was one of the deputation.
In the time of which I am writing, when people came back from the wilds,
it was the fashion to fête them at the literary clubs. In this way I met
Captain Lugard, who was fresh back from his strenuous efforts in Uganda,
and Mr. F. C. Selous, when he came back from his pioneer expedition to
Mashonaland and Matabeleland, which led to their annexation, and the
foundation of Rhodesia. Selous was the greatest hunter that England ever
sent to South Africa. For twenty years he made his living as an
elephant-hunter and collector of rare natural history specimens, and
took the chief part in bringing about the annexation of Matabeleland. In
later days he has taken a great part in the measures for preserving the
wild animals of Africa by a splendid system of game laws, far stricter
than our own.
Of all the author-explorers who came to Addison Mansions, I have known
none so well as Arnold Henry Savage Landor, grandson of the poet Walter
Savage Landor. I first met Landor at Louise Chandler Moulton’s house in
Boston, on one Sunday night in 1888, when he was twenty years old, and I
have seen him constantly ever since. While we were at Washington, as I
have said elsewhere, he was my guest for a week. We were at Montreal
together one winter season, and saw each other nearly every day, and
when we got to Japan, almost the first person we saw there was Landor.
We stayed in the same hotel there for months.
When we first met Landor, he was an artist, who made a considerable
income by portrait-painting. It was not until after we had met in Japan
that he went upon his first exploring expedition among the Hairy Ainu in
the North Island of Yezo and the Kuriles.
After we left Japan, he went across to China, and went very far afield
in it. But he did not achieve world-wide fame until he made his
expedition into the Forbidden Land. Every one has read of the tortures
to which he was subjected there, but it is not every one who met him on
his way back, as we did, when his spine was so injured that he could not
sit down, and his eyes still had a white film over them from being
bleared with fire. I knew of his endurance, because I had seen him go
out in Montreal in an ordinary English overcoat and bowler when the
thermometer was twenty-five below zero; and I knew of his courage from
the fracas he had with the New York police when they were breaking the
queue at the Centenary Ball for people who gave them money to get in out
of their place, in which he came within an ace of being clubbed.
Landor is always witty. I heard him say to a man who was bragging to him
about the size of everything in his country, “You see, I am so small
that I have to come into a room twice before any one can see me.”
He is also extremely courageous. I once heard a dispute between him and
a man of six feet two, whose portrait he was painting. While he was
painting it, he did a small commission for this man’s partner, who
wanted it in a great hurry as a wedding-present.
“If you work for other people, I won’t have the portrait,” said the
giant.
“You must have it,” said Landor.
“Upon my word as a gentleman, _nothing_ can make me have it,” said the
giant, whose name was B——.
“Mr. B——,” said Landor, “nothing could make you behave like a
gentleman.”
And his courage in taking other risks is just as great.
Undismayed by his experiences in Thibet, he was back in the Himalayas
two years afterwards, and reached an altitude of 23,490 ft. He was with
the Allied troops on their march to Peking, and was the first European
to enter the Forbidden City. He visited four hundred islands in the
Philippines in a Government steamer, lent him by the United States for
the purpose. He crossed Africa in the widest part, marching 8,500 miles
to do it, and he crossed South America from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to
Lima in Peru, over the great central plateau, across the swamps of the
Amazon and the heights of the Andes, with followers selected from the
most desperate criminals in the gaols, because they were the only
Brazilians who would undertake the risk. That last journey alone cost
him seven thousand pounds. All Mr. Landor’s books are illustrated with
his own paintings and photographs. It must be remembered that he was an
artist before he was an explorer or an author.
Though he is contemptuous of hardships and semi-starvation in his
explorations, and travels with a lighter equipment than any other
explorer, he likes luxurious surroundings when he is back in
civilisation, and lives in a charming flat in one of our most luxurious
hotels.
He also has a large estate in Italy, near Empoli and Vinci, where he has
carried on the wine-growing business very successfully. Landor’s mother
is an Italian, and he himself was born and educated at Florence, where
his father, a younger son of the celebrated Walter Savage Landor, has
always lived, and amassed a magnificent collection of works of art.
It is not generally known that Landor was one of the first to take up
the invention of aeroplanes. He began long before the Wrights, as long
ago as 1893, when he succeeded in flying a hundred yards, and later he
built a more perfected machine not unlike the ordinary aeroplanes. But
he was away, making his celebrated journeys across Africa and South
America while the invention advanced with such leaps and bounds, and he
abandoned aviation.
Landor speaks many languages. He has lectured in English, Italian,
French, and German, before learned societies, and he can speak several
other European and Oriental languages and many savage dialects. For he
has travelled all over the world, although the attention of the public
has been concentrated on the big journeys of exploration which have
formed the subjects of his books.
Sir H. M. Stanley I only knew after he had retired from exploring, and
was living at Richmond Terrace, Whitehall. I met him through having been
a friend of his wife, who, as Dorothy Tennant, was a leading figure in
the most brilliant set in London Society, and in so many altruistic
movements. I had met her brother, Charles Combe Tennant, when we were
both at Oxford—he at Balliol and I at Trinity. He either proposed me or
seconded me, I forget which, for the Apollo, my other sponsor being J.
E. C. Bodley, who was both at Harrow and Balliol with Tennant. Bodley
has since become a very distinguished literary man. He is perhaps the
best writer we have upon French Constitutional questions, and he was
selected by the late King Edward VII to write the book on the
coronation, which involved a very wide knowledge of the British
Constitution.
Lady Stanley wrote a book on London Street Arabs and put together and
edited an admirable autobiography of her famous first husband, whose
name she retains. Her sister married Frederick Myers of Psychical fame,
the greatest Cambridge scholar of his generation.
But it is not only the books she has written, and the brilliant
intellectual people whom she has gathered around her, which constitute
her claim to being remembered, for she has taken a leading part in the
betterment of London. She has naturally worked hardest in Lambeth, where
she became acquainted with the swarming thousands of Surrey when Stanley
was member for one of the Lambeth Divisions, and it was from Lambeth
that she drew most of her boy-models to make studies for her book
illustrations of London ragamuffins.
Isabella Bird—Mrs. Bishop—one of the most famous travellers in the East,
I met once near Hakone in Japan. She was a curious-looking old lady,
dressed like a native woman, with nothing but rope-sandals, which cost
three-halfpence a pair, on her feet. We came upon her very suddenly,
because Norma Lorimer and I had gone in to examine the interior of a
pretty building made of some light-coloured, unpainted wood, into which
people seemed to go as they pleased. As Miss Lorimer was then not long
out of her teens, and the building proved to contain naked men and women
bathing together, only separated by a bamboo floating on the top of the
steaming pool, we came out much quicker than we went in, and almost fell
upon Isabella Bird and her attendant.
When we were at Khartum, the Sirdar, Sir Reginald Wingate, introduced me
to the famous Father Ohrwalder, the good old Austrian priest who had
made the sensational escape from Omdurman twenty years before, and wrote
the extraordinarily vivid account of his captivity which is one of our
principal sources of knowledge of life in Omdurman. He was then a
venerable old man, with a patriarchal beard, very frail, and exhausted
by conversing for a few minutes, but the Austrian Bishop, who spoke
excellent English, took his place, and we had an interesting
conversation. He was not, he informed me, allowed to make converts in
the northern part of the Sudan, where the inhabitants are chiefly
Mohammedan. I asked him if he made many converts among the pagans in the
southern part. He said not as many as he ought, but I elicited from him
that he set his face sternly against polygamy, and the Sirdar’s
Intelligence officer had informed us that one of the favourite forms of
investment in those provinces was to buy as many wives as you could and
make them work for you.
Wingate himself was most kind to us during our visit to the Sudan. He
placed his three steamers or yachts at our disposal, and deputed his
Intelligence officer to accompany us, whenever he had no actual need of
him.
The late John Ward, F.S.A., I never met on any of his journeys to Egypt
or the Sudan or Sicily, though we corresponded for some years. I have
found his books most valuable. He had a perfect genius for collecting
indispensable illustrations, and his books are encyclopædias of local
colour.
The late George Warrington Steevens, the finest correspondent the _Daily
Mail_ ever had—it is said that they paid him five thousand a year—a
small, pale, delicate-looking man, with double eye-glasses, and an
alert, rather humorous expression, used to come to us at Addison
Mansions with his wife. She was a good deal older than he was, but he
always said that she had been the making of his career, which came to an
untimely end while he was besieged in Ladysmith.
His conversation was as sparkling as his journalism. I remember when we
were discussing Kitchener’s conquest of the Sudan at the Authors’ Club
one night, telling him that Maxwell (now Sir John Maxwell, late
commanding the Army of Occupation in Egypt), who was one of Kitchener’s
most trusted officers, had been at Cheltenham College with me.
“What sort of man is Maxwell now?” I asked; and he answered, “The sort
of man you put in charge of a conquered town.”
Arthur Weigall, who was Inspector of Monuments in Upper Egypt when we
were there, came to see us several times at Addison Mansions. One hardly
expected to find a member of the great Kent cricketing family one of the
chief experts in deciphering Egyptian inscriptions and judging their
antiquities. Weigall was rather superstitious for so great an
Egyptologist, though I confess that I should not have liked to outrage
the dignity of the tomb of a queen at Thebes, as he and a house-party he
had at his fine mansion on the river near Luxor, proposed to do. They
got up a sort of comedy to be performed in the tomb, and the performance
was blocked by a series of accidents—sudden illness, the breaking of a
leg, and so on.
We had a delightful expedition with him to some of the less-known tombs
at Thebes. At his house I saw a couple of articles he had published in
_Blackwood’s Magazine_ on Aknaton, the heretic Pharaoh, and I think
Queen Ti. I saw at a glance that, like Sir Frederick Treves, he was a
born writer, with quite a Pierre Loti feeling for style, and learned, to
my surprise, that he had not been able to find a publisher for two books
which he had ready. I gave him a letter of introduction to my literary
agent, setting forth the circumstances, which resulted in the instant
acceptance of both books by leading publishers. One of them was his
admirable _Guide to the Antiquities of Upper Egypt_.
Edward Ayrton, a most brilliant young Egyptologist, who discovered the
famous gold treasure in the tombs of the Kings at Thebes, and has since
been Government Archæologist in Ceylon, we met at his lonely hut among
the tombs of the Kings. We came upon him the first time, dressed in
immaculate flannels, as if he was just starting off for a tennis match,
and playing _diavolo_. He is young enough to have been at St. Paul’s
with my son. It required a man of strong nerve to live where he lived,
surrounded by the spirits of so many Egyptian monarchs and their great
officers, and practically at the mercy of any evilly-disposed Arabs. The
spirits of bygone Egyptians have, above all others, in the history of
psychical science, manifested their sustained interest in human affairs.
Ayrton was acting then, not for the Government, but for a rich American.
John Foster Fraser, who was my colleague on _To-day_, though he is so
much younger than I am, a remarkably able and energetic man, who once
went a bicycle tour of nearly twenty thousand miles round the earth, and
would have gone farther if the land had not come to an end, has made
many long and adventurous journeys through dangerous countries, and has
written notable books. The story I liked best about his wanderings was
that he always used the public tooth-brush, provided by a civilised Shah
who had been to Europe, in the rest-houses of Persia. He certainly added
that no previous visitor to these rest-houses had ever known what the
brushes were used for.
Speaking of teeth, I once knew a dentist who visited Persia. Knowing the
prestige of the royal family there, he thought that his fortune was
made, when the Shah and his mother ordered sets of false teeth—the
Shah’s made of pearls, I think, and his mother’s of diamonds. But next
day he was overtaken by a crushing blow. The Shah, to prevent false
teeth from becoming too common, confined their use to the royal family,
and the poor dentist had to fall back on writing novels—it was C. J.
Wills.
This Shah, or another, on his return from a visit to Europe, made his
entire harem adopt British ballet-girls’ skirts.
This same Shah, when he visited London, asked the Secretary of State for
Foreign Affairs to recommend some one to show him round the gilded hells
of London. The man, whose accomplishments thus received official
recognition, gave great satisfaction, I believe, but as he is still
alive, I shall not divulge his name, lest he should be overwhelmed with
overtures from publishers. His mother was a famous Society hostess.
I have known some Arctic and Antarctic explorers. I was, as I have
mentioned elsewhere, in the chair at the Savage Club on the night that
we entertained Nansen. Trevor-Battye, who afterwards conducted an
expedition to Kolguev in the Barents Sea, himself, came up to me, asking
me to introduce him to Nansen. Of course, I had great pleasure in doing
so. Nansen, who was a tall, wiry man, and looked much less at home in
his dress-clothes and his Orders than in his Arctic furs, looked my
friend up and down. The latter was a remarkably smart-looking man, and
was very well dressed. Nansen was not to know that he came of a family
famed for their strength and endurance in Indian frontier warfare, so he
said with a smile, which showed the wide openings between his teeth in
his lower jaw, “If you come with me, remember that you won’t be able to
wash for three years”—he meant, of course, after they had got to the
Arctic regions. Battye, who is a most distinguished naturalist, and a
well-known author, was not deterred, but Nansen’s list was already
really full. Battye was editor-in-chief of Natural History in the
Victoria History of the Counties of England. At the Authors’ Club, where
he was a habitué in those days, we used to ask him why he had not gone
to the North Pole whenever we wanted to get a rise out of him. He was a
frequent visitor to our house.
Another Arctic explorer who often came to see us after he had got back
from his three years in the Arctic circle, was Fred Jackson, who
conducted the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition. Jackson was a very
adventurous man. He had made an expedition across the Great Tundra
Desert, and another across Australia, before he went to Franz Josef
Land. With his swarthy face, bright dark eyes, and general air of _joie
de vive_, Fred Jackson looks much more like the manager of some great
English business concern in the Tropics than an Arctic explorer. Yet he
was an Arctic explorer, and a very hardy one. Everybody remembers the
photograph of the meeting of Nansen and Jackson in the Arctic
circle—Nansen swaddled to the chin in the fur clothes of his kind,
Jackson showing a starched English collar, a proper tie, and a triangle
of shirt-front.
Back from the Arctic circle, Jackson volunteered for South Africa,
distinguished himself, won medals, and became a captain in the
Manchester Regiment—_Hac arte Pollux_.
We often had with us I. N. Ford, whose advent to England as
correspondent of the _New York Tribune_ was practically the beginning of
the _entente cordiale_ between Great Britain and the United States. His
predecessor, the well-known G. W. Smalley, had been very much spoiled in
English society, but he never set himself whole-heartedly to produce
hearty relations between the two countries any more than Harold Frederic
did in his correspondenting in the _New York Times_. _The Tribune_, had,
in fact, been frequently in open hostility to England—so open that I
heard the following conversation at a dinner-party in Washington in the
year 1889 at Colonel John Hay’s. General Harrison had just been elected
President of the United States, and the moderate Republicans made no
secret of the fact that they would have liked to see Colonel John Hay,
who had been Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, Harrison’s Secretary
of State. His character stood as high as any one’s in America; no man
since George Washington had been so fit to be President of the United
States; for he was as clear-headed and able and unwavering as he was
honourable, and his immense private wealth set him above temptation. But
it was that very wealth which prevented him from being nominated.
Americans are determined that wealth shall not command the Presidency as
it has the Senate.
Well, that night Savage Landor and I and a number of leading American
politicians—the men who were to form Harrison’s Cabinet were most of
them there—were dining with Hay at his palatial mansion, built in a
heavy-browed sort of Spanish-Moresco style by the celebrated Richardson.
The new President’s private secretary, a commercialish little
Englishman, had promised to come, and he kept us waiting so long that
finally we went in to dinner without him, half-an-hour late.
At last he made his appearance, breathless, and, upsetting a
water-bottle as he took his seat, blurted out, “Whitelaw Reid” (then
editor and proprietor of the _Tribune_) “has been moving heaven and
earth to get the Court of St. James’” (_i. e._ the post of American
Minister to England), “but the President won’t give it him. He’s afraid
that England will refuse to receive him because of the way in which the
_Tribune_ has behaved.”
A good many years later he achieved the goal of his ambition, for I. N.
Ford had come to England in the interval, and had made the _Tribune_ to
America what the London _Times_ is to England in the matter of foreign
politics. Ford had won distinction earlier as an author writing on
travel in Central America.
Another man who did a lot of spade-work in promoting the _entente
cordiale_ was John Morgan Richards, who has lived in England for many
years, and has more than once been President of the American Society of
London. American from his backbone to his finger-tips, John Richards had
a fine Quaker sense of justice and peace on earth which made the eagle
lie down with the lion like a couple of lambs wherever he was present.
His brilliant daughter, Mrs. Craigie—better known in literature as John
Oliver Hobbes—was a potent link between the two countries.
Both he and his converse, G. R. Parkin, the Canadian, who was the real
father of Imperial Federation, and who is now usefully and congenially
employed in managing the Rhodes Scholarship Fund, were often at our
house. G. R. Parkin and Gilbert Parker, another Canadian, were sometimes
confused with each other in those days, by people who did not know them
personally.
Canada has sent us a lot of good men. Beckles Willson, who lives in the
old mansion in Kent which was the birthplace of General Wolfe, the
conqueror of Canada, has poured out a stream of information about Canada
in a most attractive form. Who does not remember the elder Pitt asking
Wolfe, a boy of thirty-three, to dinner just after he had appointed him
to command the military in Canada? Wolfe got very drunk, and for a
moment Pitt feared that he had made a mistake. But he remembered how the
boy had behaved under fire in that descent on the Breton coast, and let
him go to Canada without misgivings.
I have known Seton Watson, the Perthshire Laird who has done so much for
the Slav population of Hungary, since he was a small boy. When at New
College, Oxford, he showed his future bent by winning the Stanhope—the
University Prize for an historical essay. His first work, after he went
down, was to translate Gregorovius’s _Tombs of the Popes_. But he soon
began to give his attention to Hungary, where he has travelled a great
deal, and took up the cause of the Slav races who are being oppressed by
the Magyars. He held a successful exhibition of their art in London a
year or two ago.
Another friend of mine who has done similar good work is Campbell
Mackellar. He, however, has chiefly devoted himself to the Balkans, and
in Montenegro no Englishman is so well known and beloved. At his
hospitable table I have met some of the leading representatives of the
Balkan States who came to England during the war.
Connected both by property and family with Australia, his book-writing
has been chiefly about Australia, and it was he who wrote the
description of the Adam Lindsay Gordon country in South Australia which
appears in the book I wrote with Miss Humphris about _Adam Lindsay
Gordon and His Friends in England and Australia_. Mackellar has likewise
done a good deal for the recognition of Australian Art in London—a fact
commemorated in an album of original sketches presented to him by the
Australian artists who are over here.
It was no mere accident which made Miss Humphris and myself collaborate
in _Adam Lindsay Gordon and His Friends in England and Australia_. It
was true that we were strangers when she wrote to ask me to collaborate,
but we brought common traditions to bear on the book. In Cheltenham,
where Gordon spent his boyhood, Miss Humphris lives, and I was six years
at the College. Gordon was a College boy, and his father was a College
master. Miss Humphris could not be at the College, as I was, but her
grandfather was the architect who built its principal buildings. Like
Gordon, both Miss Humphris and I went to Australia, and we spent years
there, though not so many as he did, and as a connection of one of
Australia’s greatest racing men—the famous Etienne de Mestre—it was
natural that she should take an absorbing interest in the steeplechasing
exploits of Adam Lindsay Gordon.
[Illustration:
SIR GILBERT PARKER
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
Edith Humphris has an extraordinary power of collecting and sifting
materials for a book. Off her own bat, she collected all the facts of
Gordon’s early life at Cheltenham and Prestbury. The grist which I
brought to the mill, besides a study of Gordon’s life in Australia and
his poems, which I had blocked out more than thirty years before, when I
tried to get Cassell’s to undertake its publication, was the mass of
material put at my disposal by people who had known him in the flesh,
and treasured remembrances and keepsakes of him. Miss Humphris knew that
the letters to Charley Walker existed; I tracked their owner down and
got permission to reproduce them. Henry Gyles Turner, who gave me leave
to use all the materials in _Turner and Sutherland_, was a friend of
mine in Australia. George Riddoch, who gave us all the Riddoch poems and
reminiscences, is a friend of mine, introduced by old friends in
Australia. Lambton Mount, Gordon’s partner on the West Australian
Station (brother of Harry Mount), is a friend of mine, and gave me all
his information orally. General Strange, who was Gordon’s friend at
Woolwich, and wrote about him in _Gunner Jingo’s Jubilee_, is an old,
old friend of mine. Frederick Vaughan and Sir Frank Madden and Mrs.
Lauder wrote their reminiscences for me, as did Campbell Mackellar of
the Gordon country in South Australia. And John Bulloch, the editor of
the _Graphic_, who wrote the wonderfully interesting pedigrees and
chapters about Gordon’s family, wrote them for me.
But Miss Humphris wrote all her part of the book, including a great deal
about Gordon in Australia, herself, from studies which she had been
making since she was a child.
Talking of Australia, at one time I saw a good deal of Basil Thomson,
the son of the great Archbishop of York, who in those days was an
author, but is now secretary of the Prison Commission, after having been
governor of Dartmoor and Wormwood Scrubbs prisons.
Thomson, when I first knew him, had just come back from being Prime
Minister of the Tonga Islands. I asked why he gave it up. He said that
things were no longer what they had been in Government circles in Tonga;
when he was there, even the Government could only raise the wind by
having fresh issues of postage stamps manufactured for them by
stamp-dealers in England, who paid for the privilege of selling the
stamps in England without accounting for them to the Government of
Tonga. But in the palmy days of Tonga it was very different. Then, a
Prime Minister, who was also a Nonconformist missionary, procured the
monopoly of selling trousers from the King of Tonga, before he induced
the king to make the whole population turn Christian, and make it
illegal to appear without trousers.
You sometimes hear people say, “What would you do if you were on a
desert island?” I once came very near seeing life on a desert island—it
was in a little settlement of less than a dozen families, on an island
adjoining the mainland on a desolate coast of Asia. It had a Consul.
“It seems an awfully dead and alive hole,” I said to him.
“It is not so bad as it looks,” he replied. “We have a splendid rule
here; as there is no kind of amusement in the place, except making love,
we passed a resolution that no one should get in a temper over the
infidelity of a spouse. We manage our loves like other people manage
their friendships—if a woman likes to have an affair with another
woman’s husband, it is nobody’s concern but hers and his. Since we have
made this arrangement, this has been the happiest place in the world,
though we live on a mud bank, without even a tennis-court. Before this
golden age began, the quarrelling was awful. Two men simply could not
get out of each other’s way, and they felt obliged to resort to violence
to maintain their self-respect, though they might not value the
affection they were losing so much as an old glove.” I forget the
profession of the Solon to whom the community owed this up-to-date
method of law-giving.
Fred Villiers, the war-correspondent, was making his way across Canada
at the same time as we were, on a lecture tour. He had a number of
wonderful battle-slides, and he looked highly picturesque in his service
kit. He had also a splendid advance agent, whom I will only call by his
Christian name, because he was the son of an English bishop, and had
very distinguished connections. Henry never forgot his dignity, and even
in the wilds of the North-West always wore a tall silk hat, with its fur
worn thin by constant brushing, because he was Villiers’ agent.
We had run across him at many C.P.R. capitals before he came to our
rescue at a woe-begone place called Kamloops in British Columbia. We
arrived there after midnight, and proceeded to the hotel, which should
have been expecting us, as it was the only train in the day from
Montreal. We found the hotel open, but absolutely deserted. We could
have helped ourselves to anything we liked in the bar, and taken our
choice of the bedrooms. At that moment appeared Henry, who asked us what
we would like to drink, and told us the Kamloops charges for it. He then
took us round, and gave us our choice of bedrooms, and when we wanted to
know why he had suddenly become landlord, told us that the landlord had
just died, and the Irish servants were afraid to be in the house with a
corpse.
We slept the night there, and paid our bills to Henry in the morning.
Norma Lorimer, who was with us, had a room which smelt horribly of
disinfectants. Henry said that the dentist, who came up once a week from
Seattle, had used that room as his surgery the day before, but the
inhabitants said that the corpse was there.
This was nothing to an experience of Lewis Clarke, a son of the
celebrated Marcus Clarke, who wrote _For the Term of his Natural Life_,
and edited the first complete edition of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems—a
man who has had an extraordinarily adventurous life. This happened to
him, I think, in the wilds of New Guinea. He had gone to sleep under a
tree. During the night there came on a violent wind, and he was awakened
by something cold and heavy, which kept brushing his face. Whatever it
was, it only just touched him, and when he brushed it away, yielded
lightly to his touch. After pushing it away for a while, he came to the
conclusion that it did not matter, and got to sleep again. In the
morning he was awakened by an awful stench, and when he opened his eyes
to see what it was, found the bare toes of a dead Chinaman, who had
hanged himself, knocking against his nose.
When I was at Canton, I went to visit our Consul-General there. I was
with him in his office one day when he was trying a case. An Englishman
had gone out shooting, and a Chinaman had sent his children after him,
with instructions to get into the line of fire and be shot, which duly
happened. The affectionate father then brought an action against the
Englishman for damages occasioned to him by the injuries to his
children. It was perfectly plain that the children had had themselves
shot on purpose, but to my utter surprise the Consul made the Englishman
pay.
When the parties had left the room, I reproached him with the
miscarriage of justice. His only reply was, “I know it, my dear fellow,
as well as you do; but I have been Consul here for thirty years (I
forget exactly how many he said), and it is impossible for me to
conceive any circumstances under which the British Government would
support me.”
I may add that he was much loved and respected by the British community,
whom he was unable to protect.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXVII
MY ACTOR FRIENDS
SINCE I came back to London a score of years ago, I have known at least
a hundred actors and actresses, but they did not all visit us at Addison
Mansions—some, whom I knew quite well, never could summon up the energy
to go as far west as West Kensington. Actors like to live right in the
centre of things, or right out in country air. There is quite a colony
of them at Maidenhead; Maxine Elliot lives near Watford, in the Manor
House which belonged to my uncle Joseph, and Edward Terry had a house at
Barnes, which is now sublimed into Ranelagh Parade.
Among our chief actor friends were the Grossmiths. Weedon Grossmith,
with his pretty wife, came constantly. That diffident manner of his
hides brilliant abilities. We are apt to forget that besides being one
of the finest comedians of the day, he was once a regular exhibitor at
the Royal Academy (which furnished him with the subject for a farce).
What has made Weedon so “immense” is his absence of _mauvais honte_. He
has dared to play the humiliating parts, of which he is the finest
living exponent, with perfect sincerity. He has often said to me, “Why
don’t you write me a play, Douglas? If you make me a bally enough little
fool, I’ll take it; if you make me a big enough coward, I’ll take it; if
you make me a bad enough cad, I’ll take it. It is my art to put this
kind of character into the pillory.” And so it is; there is no one who
can excel him in depicting the ignoble, foreign as it is to his own
character.
His brother George, with his wife and daughters and his son
Lawrence—George the younger had already flitted from the paternal nest,
and was earning forty pounds a week—were also constant visitors.
Lawrence was always the mirror of smartness. I think he was very bored
with that sort of party, but he adorned it.
Geegee, as he loved to call himself, was full of frolic. He could make
light of anything. He made light of the awful play in which he appeared,
which was written for the mistress of a millionaire. The author was
given five thousand pounds to write a play and put it on the stage. The
only condition was that the millionaire’s mistress should be on the
stage the whole time, and have nothing to say.
He was once the cause of my seeing the finest piece of acting off the
stage which I ever saw. One of our greatest living actors is always
chaffed about his _penchant_ for duchesses. Grossmith and I were having
supper together by ourselves at his party at the Grafton Galleries.
Presently we saw the great actor standing beside us, and Grossmith,
without bothering about his being within earshot, said, “We’ll ask —— to
sit down and have some supper with us; when he’s been there about two
minutes, he’ll look at his watch, and say that he must leave us because
he promised to be at the duchess’s in a quarter of an hour.”
The great man sat down and attacked a mayonnaise vigorously. Presently
he looked at his watch, and made an elaborate and rather snobbish
apology to Grossmith for having to leave, but he had promised the
Duchess of ——d, etc., and all the time he was making it, trod on my foot
till I nearly yelled. Then he got up and left us, pausing to speak to
some one a few yards off to have the satisfaction of hearing Grossmith’s
“There, didn’t I tell you!”
Fred Terry, the “manliest actor on the stage,” and his beautiful wife,
Julia Neilson, used to come and see us sometimes. I met them first at
Hayden Coffin’s, where she was filling the room and the garden with her
glorious singing one summer dawn. When she rose from the piano, she made
several vain efforts to get Terry away; he was telling Coffin, myself,
and one or two others, some of his experiences. When she came back the
third time, he said, “My wife always has a devil of a trouble to make me
put on my dress-clothes, but when I have once got them on, I never want
to go home.”
That night, a rather shy little man, very alert and intelligent-looking,
had given us a recitation of his own which was so breathlessly witty,
that the audience could not seize all the points. Coffin introduced him
as “a very clever friend of mine, Mr. Huntley Wright,” and his name
meant nothing to the audience. A year later they would have stood on the
mantelpiece to get a better view of the king of musical comedians. Both
he and his sister Haidée, that brilliant character-actress, used to come
to Addison Mansions in those days. That the Coffins should do so was
natural, because I had known Charles Hayden Coffin since he was a boy at
school and I was a man at Oxford. He and his sisters and I and my
sisters used to skate together at Lillie Bridge. His father was the
leading American dentist of London, and Coffin himself was a dentist,
or, at all events, in training for it, for several years. But he had
such a glorious voice that it was inevitable that he should find his way
to the musical stage, and have the longest reign on record as a _jeune
premier_. He thrilled London with his “Queen of My Heart To-night.” He
has deserved his success twice over—both on account of his singing, and
for the way in which he has helped others; no one has done more for the
beginners in his own profession, and for helping unknown composers of
ability to get a hearing. There are many people quite famous now whom I
heard before they were known to fame at all, at his charming cottage,
that _rus in urbe_ on Campden Hill, which has the same initials as
himself—C. H. C., Campden Hill Cottage, Charles Hayden Coffin.
With Julia Neilson I should have mentioned her handsome cousin, Lily
Hanbury, who was, till her premature death, one of the beauties of the
London stage. She came often to us.
It is natural, in connection with her, to think of Constance Collier,
now Mrs. Julian L’Estrange, who filled her place, and has gone so much
farther, for she has not only personal attraction, but real power. She
was, as all the world knows, leading lady at His Majesty’s before she
went to America, but all the world does not know that she is the most
accomplished tango-dancer on the stage.
There is no more attractive figure on the stage than Ben Webster. Young
as he is, he found time to be a barrister before he began his long
succession of leading parts, and though he is one of the least stagey
actors on the stage, he was born in its purple. He is a grandson of Ben
Webster I., who had a claim to fame besides his acting which has long
since been forgotten, for he was the founder of the great _Queen_
newspaper, which he sold to Sergeant Cox—strange godfathers for the
_Queen, the Lady’s Newspaper_. Sergeant Cox was the uncle, not the
father, of Horace Cox, who was at the head of the _Field_, the _Queen_,
and the _Law Times_ for most of the last half century. Webster married
an actress, May Whitty, so well known, not only for her acting, but for
her activity in woman movements. They were very often at Addison
Mansions, and among the strongest supporters of our Argonauts Club.
Lena Ashwell we have known better than any other great actress, because
we came to know her family long before she went on the stage, through
her sister, Mrs. Keefer, wife of the engineer who built the famous
bridge over Niagara. In those days she was studying at the Royal Academy
of Music, and she is an F.R.A.M. She has a singularly beautiful voice
for singing as well as speaking. Conscious of the burning dramatic
temperament which won her her fame in the impersonation of the heroine
in _Mrs. Dane’s Defence_, she has always cast her eyes on the stage.
When she was only fourteen she spoiled a chicken she was cooking by
forgetting to remove the insides because she was so enthralled with
reading _King John_. In intensity she is unsurpassed by any actress on
the stage. She is really as good in tender parts as in grim parts, but
she is less known in them, though every one should remember how
delightful she was in _The Darling of the Gods_.
Lena Ashwell enjoys the almost unique distinction of having been born on
a British man-of-war, the fine old ship which did duty under Nelson, and
was the Wellesley training-ship till she was accidentally burnt a few
months ago. Her father was a captain in the Navy.
Having been brought up in Canada on the St. Lawrence, she is a wonderful
canoeist. Her grace on the water used to be the theme of the frequenters
of Cookham Reach.
Her brother, Roger Pocock, has written the best novels of the Canadian
North-West. They are descendants of the famous traveller, and had a
great-great-uncle, Nicholas Pocock, the sea-painter who painted Nelson’s
Battle of the Nile and Lord Howe’s Glorious First of June. Another
ancestor wrote farces in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.
Lena Ashwell owns the Kingsway Theatre, and has produced some notable
successes there, in which she showed her determination to give brilliant
beginners—whether actors or dramatists—a chance. But since 1908, when
she married Dr. Simson of Grosvenor Street, she has chiefly given
herself up to feminist and benevolent movements—the chief of which was
the founding of the Three Arts’ Club for young actresses, musicians, and
painters to make their home as well as their club. The Three Arts’ Club
has an excellent magazine of its own, and confers the various advantages
of an Institute on its members. She is also a prominent worker for the
Suffrage Movement.
One of the earliest of our actor friends, and one of our most frequent
visitors, was James Welch, who first came with his brother-in-law, Le
Gallienne. He had given up chartered-accounting for the stage for five
or six years before we knew him. But a good many years more had to pass
before he came into his own as the genius of farce, though he played
with real power and success in several of Ibsen’s plays, and Bernard
Shaw’s first play, _Widowers’ Houses_. It was in _Mr. Hopkinson_, in
1905, after he had been on the stage for eighteen years, that he became
an idol of the public, and was enabled to go into management.
Ever since then he has been enormously successful, and in spite of it,
has remained the same simple, impulsive, unspoiled person as ever. He
used often, as I have told in another chapter, to go to the Authors’
Club with me.
One night not long since, when I was chatting with him in his
dressing-room at the theatre, and was asking him when he could have
another game of golf, he said, “I don’t know, I’m sure. I have contracts
with cinema-film photographers for seven thousand pounds, and I don’t
see how the devil I am going to get them all in.”
I felt quite oppressed with the unfairness of things, for I had known
this same man when he was just as brilliant an actor, eating his head
off with chagrin at not being able to get an engagement (of which I am
sure he was badly in need pecuniarily), and now here were photographers
and film-makers tumbling over each other in their anxiety to take him in
his inimitable fooling in _When Knights were Bold_, or his misery and
stupefaction in his great condemned cell-scene from the Coliseum.
Welch is quite a decent golfer—down to 8, I think, though the time was
when I had to give him 8. He is also a remarkably good spinner of golf
stories. I tell him that whenever he is hard up for a curtain-raiser, he
could easily hold a house for half-an-hour with his golf-stories.
One of his favourites is about his caddie at Aberdeen, to whom he gave
two seats to see him in _When Knights were Bold_. Next day on the links,
he asked the man how he liked it.
“My wife laughed,” said the cautious Scot.
“And what did you think of it?”
“Oh, I? Now tell me, mon, do you make a guid thing of it?”
“I do pretty well.”
“Ye do?” said the caddie. “Then my advice to ye is, to drop golf—ye’ll
never make a living at that.”
Mrs. Welch is a daughter of Lottie Venne, one of the best women
comedians we ever had on the English stage—a frequent visitor to us at
one time, as was that fine actress, Fanny Brough (Mrs. Boleyn), an
eminent member of an eminent family, whom we first met at an Idler tea.
At the Idler, too, we met the Beringers, of whom we saw a good deal at
that time—Mrs. Oscar Beringer, the playwright, and her daughters Esme
and Vera, who were both on the stage. Vera, the younger, has followed in
her mother’s footsteps, and written plays—one with Morley Roberts. Esme,
who is very popular both as a woman and an actress, has played in a
large number of parts with an unvarying success.
We knew Beatrice (Robbie) Ferrar much better than either of her sisters,
though all three came to our at-homes, just as they were all three on
the stage. Though she had been on the stage six years when we met her,
she still looked a mere child. She was for years one of the best
_ingénue_ actresses (for which her pretty, small features, bright
colouring and demure expression, gave her natural advantages) on the
stage. She was one of the most familiar figures at the Idler functions.
Rowena Jerome, who has scored several successes in her father’s plays,
was only a little child, playing horses, remarkably clever and
precocious, in the days when we were going to the Idler teas and
Jerome’s house in the Alpha Road, St. John’s Wood.
Among other actors and actresses we met at the Idler teas or at Jerome’s
were Ian (Forbes) Robertson and his wife, and their daughter, Beatrice
Forbes-Robertson, Nina Boucicault, the Henry Arthur Jones’s, Kate and
Mary Rorke, Olga Nethersole, George Hawtrey, Lindo and Phyllis
Broughton. I saw Phyllis Broughton the other day, looking absolutely the
same as the very first time she ever came to our flat, twenty years ago,
the gentlest-faced actress I ever met.
Forbes-Robertson’s brother, Ian Robertson (who never used the name of
Forbes himself, though his pretty daughter Beatrice resumed it when she
went on the stage), came to us less frequently than his wife and
daughter, who were habituées.
Mrs. Robertson was a daughter of an old friend of mine, that remarkable
man Joe Knight, who always seemed to me as if he ought to have been
Henty’s brother. As dramatic critic of three leading newspapers, the
_Athenæum_, the _Globe_, and I forget the other, he had almost as much
power to make and unmake as Clement Scott had. He used his influence
most generously. At the same time he was a scholar of omniscience; he
performed the Herculean task of editing _Notes and Queries_ for the
proprietors of the _Athenæum_; and he had a daughter so good-looking and
charming that I always thought of her as Romola when I thought of her
with him. I have no doubt that before she married Ian Robertson she had
made herself as useful to the scholar as Romola.
Their daughter, Beatrice, has made a distinguished name for herself on
the American stage.
It was an odd thing that I should not have met (Sir J.) Forbes-Robertson
at Jerome’s, considering how much they have done since to make each
other’s fortunes in the _Third Floor Back_, for which Jerome, as he
always does when I am in England, sent me stalls on one of the opening
nights. But, as a matter of fact, I met Forbes-Robertson at Palermo in
the Venetian palace which Joshua Whitaker, the head of the great Marsala
wine-firm, built for himself, adjoining the old Ingham house in the Via
Bara. Forbes-Robertson was staying there, and I am in and out of the
Whitakers most days when I am in Palermo. He was convalescing from a
severe illness, and we went about, the little which he could manage,
together in Sicily, and afterwards for a whole week together in Venice.
He was, I remember, very tickled with one trip which he took in Sicily
when he got stronger. A nephew who lives in England, but has very large
possessions in Sicily, came out to stay with the Whitakers. They wished
him to visit his various properties in the interior when he was there.
But the thing did not interest him; he was a subaltern in the Guards,
taken up with much more important thoughts. But he was an ardent admirer
of Forbes-Robertson on the stage, and he was willing to go wherever his
uncle desired if Forbes-Robertson would go with him.
Forbes-Robertson was eager to oblige his hosts, and captivated with the
manner of the expedition, for, as they were going into brigandy parts of
the island, and the person of a great landowner is the favourite prey of
the brigand, they had to have an escort, and sit with loaded revolvers
on their knees.
Everything passed off happily, and Forbes-Robertson came back with the
knowledge that an orchard in which pistachio trees bear freely is as
good as a gold-mine.
In Venice he was quite well again, and spent all day in letting us show
him the _artist’s bits_ of Venice, for there was a time when, like
another of our leading actors, he expected to make his living as a
painter, not as an actor. He was educated at the Royal Academy till he
was twenty-one, after leaving the Charterhouse, where he was four years
the senior of Baden-Powell.
He was especially delighted with the gondola expeditions we made to the
back canals of Venice. One day it would be along by the lagoon, where
the timber-rafts lie floating, and collect weeds and local colour, past
the ruining abbey of the Misericordia and Tintoretto’s Church, S. Maria
del Orto, to Tintoretto’s house, now woefully humiliated by being a
“tenement,” but unrepaired and unaltered since that prince of painters
lived and worked in it. It may easily be found, since it is near the
Camel sign of a mediæval Moorish merchant. Another day it would be
across the Giudecca, where the big Adriatic fishing-boats, with figures
of saints and monsters on their scarlet and orange sails lie anchored,
generally with their sails flapping against their masts, as if they knew
that they were there for ornament to the landscape. Across the Giudecca
there was the famous Redentore Church, with its three far-famed Madonnas
by the pupils of Bellini, and there was more than one house with that
rarity for Venice—a garden.
Over the other side of the Giudecca we all went into the great old
garden of some Marchese. Venice has gardens there, but the Venetians are
so unused to gardens that they abandon them to dull evergreens, when,
having nothing to overshadow them, they might be as full of gay flowers
as a sarcophagus in Raphael’s pictures of the Resurrection. The only
person I know who does make use of his garden chances is Dr. Robertson,
the Presbyterian Minister, who wrote that wonderful book, _The Bible of
St. Mark’s_.
I think Forbes-Robertson enjoyed the visit to Tintoretto’s house best of
all. The well-head in the court was untouched except by the soft fingers
of three centuries; the studio, with its open timber roof and huge
fireplace, had nothing about it to distract the eye from memories, for
it was a bare tenement of the poor. And it was such a very little way
from S. Maria del Orto, a name made classic to the British public by the
robbery of one of the most precious Madonnas of John Bellini—Santa Maria
del Orto, which contains a frescoed choir by Tintoretto, and his
“Presentation in the Temple,” and his tomb. When we were looking at the
immortal Venetian pictures in the Accademia and the Doge’s Palace, or
studying the faded marbles which jewel the interior of St. Mark, he was
so overcome with reverence that it seemed almost a pain to him. He had
not, I think, been in Venice before. At all events, he did not know it
as I did—I could take him to any point of interest in the city by a few
minutes’ walk, and perhaps crossing the Grand Canal by a traghetto. I
have written half a book about Venice, and some of my best writing is
about it. I do not know why I never finished it.
Henry Arthur Jones’s family I have known since they were children. Mrs.
Jones used to come to our parties before the eldest of her children was
out of the schoolroom, and we spent one summer in the same house at
Ostend, so we have watched the elder girls coming to the front on the
stage with interest. Of the great dramatist himself I have spoken
elsewhere. If he had chosen, he could have been equally famous as a
writer of books. He has a profound mind, and a popular method of
statement.
Olga Nethersole could not come in the evenings to our at-homes, because
she was generally acting, but she came for long talks in the afternoons.
I found her remarkable, not only as an actress of a singularly emotional
type, but from the interest which she takes in the social problems of
the day, such as criminology and emigration. A year ago, at a party
given by the C. N. Williamsons at the _Savoy_, when we were comparing
notes on the Canadian North-West, from which she had just returned, and
which I knew twenty years ago, I was much struck by her grasp of the
subject.
I cannot remember whether it was at the Idler or at “John Strange
Winter’s” that I first met Martin Harvey, who, like Forbes-Robertson, is
a painter in his leisure moments. He was with Irving in those days,
recognised already as the most capable all-round actor in the company,
and for his wonderful conscientiousness and finish. Harvey had the good
sense to bide his time, and when he did launch on his own account in
_The Only Way_, which Frederick Langbridge, the poet, dramatised in
collaboration from Dickens’s _Tale of Two Cities_, he made an
instantaneous and gigantic success. In the days when he used to come to
us, he was singularly boyish-looking, and delightfully modest about his
powers, though all his friends knew that he was a genius.
It was certainly “John Strange Winter” who introduced us to Mary Ansell,
at that time one of the twin stars of Barrie’s first play, _Walker,
London_.
It may have been Mary Ansell, who was noted for her beauty, who
introduced us to the other star of the play, Irene Vanbrugh, equally
noted for her prettiness and her archness, who continues to this day to
interpret the whimsicalities of Barrie with such delightful
_espièglerie_. She was a Miss Barnes, daughter of a Prebendary of
Exeter—there were four daughters living with their mother in Earl’s
Court Road. Violet, the eldest, and Irene, the youngest, then unmarried,
were on the stage, Angela was a violinist or violoncellist—I never
remember which of these instruments my friends play—and Edith, the fair
one of the family, frowned on the stage, and married somebody of
importance in India. Angela came to us oftenest. A little later Violet
Vanbrugh married Arthur Bourchier, whom I had met long before when he
was at Christchurch, Oxford, and the leading light of the Oxford A.D.C.,
of which Alan MacKinnon, an old friend of mine at Trinity, who
introduced us, was another leading light.
Bourchier, the inimitable, is, I fancy, the only professional
Shakesperian actor who could have the chance of taking the part of one
of his own family in Shakespeare. For Cardinal Bourchier, Archbishop of
Canterbury, is a character in Shakespeare’s _Richard III_. He was also
Henry VI’s Chancellor, as Sir Robert de Bourchier was to Edward III in
1340—the first of the lay-Chancellors of England.
The first time I saw Bourchier act was when he was an undergraduate at
Oxford—the part was Harry Hotspur, and he was superb in it, because
this was a part in which he could use his art and his personality in
equal proportions. Since then I have seen him blend his two great
qualifications of character-acting and potent personality, in many
parts, in Henry VIII pre-eminently, and I have seen him exercise the
two qualifications separately in many parts, now as an old
seventeenth-century Bishop, overflowing with goodness, now as a bluff,
practical joker in boisterous farce with Weedon Grossmith. He is
certainly one of the finest actors on the stage, when you consider him
from the double standpoint of his tremendous personality, and his
power to disguise it in parts entirely foreign to one’s idea of
Bourchier. I cannot help liking him best as himself on the stage,
because to me there is nothing so interesting as personality, and he
has such an inexhaustible flow of wit and high spirits.
If Bourchier had had no success on the professional stage, his name
would have been immortalised in its annals, for it was he who persuaded
Jowett, of Balliol, the then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, to abolish the
statute of the University against Oxford having a theatre, and he
actually enlisted Jowett’s services into raising the money for building
one.
When I first went to Oxford, we had no theatre on account of the famous
statute. Our ancestors regarded actors as “rogues and vagabonds,” and
only a year ago a well-known actor got off serving on a jury on the
grounds that he was legally a rogue. But though the town might not have
a theatre, it might have as many low music-halls as it liked, because
the University did not consider what went on in “the halls” as acting at
all. The real point at issue—would the ladies of a caste like Irving’s
or Tree’s be as likely to tempt the St. Anthonys of Oxford out of their
hermitages in the deserts of learning—was entirely lost sight of.
With Bourchier one naturally thinks of Aubrey Smith, who had to play Sir
Marcus Ordeyne in Bourchier’s theatre—Smith, who was the chief light of
the Cambridge A.D.C., and the crack Cambridge bowler of his time in the
’Varsity matches.
Smith’s beautiful sister, Mrs. Cosmo Hamilton, who latinised her name
into _Faber_ when she went on the stage—she told me so herself—was only
just coming into her own when she died—cut off in her very flower. There
was no more genuinely liked and esteemed woman on the stage.
Granville Barker, the typical clever, red-headed boy, though he was not
then old enough to have been promoted to dress-clothes, used to come
with an extremely intelligent and charming mother, the mother of a large
family, I always understood, though she looked far too young. They were
brought by Edwin Waud, the artist, as far as I remember, and they were
friends of Gleeson White’s. Granville was a very bright boy when you
spoke to him, but he was never much in evidence; he left his mother, so
that she might enjoy herself, instead of having to keep him amused. He
may have gone to the sandwiches and lemonade in the dining-room—more
probably, he was not allowed to smoke, and went to do that.
I fancy that Acton Bond, who now runs the British Empire Shakespeare
Society, must have been a friend of Gleeson White’s, because he came
into our life so very early. Bond was an institution in Bohemia. He was
a singularly handsome and distinguished-looking actor, who took
Shakespeare and other “costume” parts. He was one of the most courteous
men I ever met, and I knew that I could confer pleasure on anybody by
introducing Bond. This was an important consideration to a host who made
a point of keeping all his guests introduced and amused for all the
evening. Bond knew all the denizens in Bohemia, and had a fund of
conversation about them, in addition to being personally very
interesting; and, as a fair golfer, a good man in a boat, a good dancer,
and so on, was a “find” for a country house. Even when he was acting
most, his heart inclined to the other side of his profession—to training
people for the stage and running the Actors’ Association—a sort of Union
for Actors. He did an immense amount of useful work. He married the
charming Eve Tame comparatively lately. A tall man, with a graceful
figure, he carried himself extremely well, and, with his fine classical
head, perpetuated the tradition of the Kembles.
Ray Rockman was one of our Argonaut friends, and became a very intimate
friend indeed. She stayed with us at Salcombe and elsewhere, besides
being constantly at our house. With her tall, slight, aristocratic
figure, the face of a marquise of Louis XV’s court, and her wonderful
Oriental eyes, she had the presence of the greatest _tragédiennes_ who
have adorned our stage. When you see her in a drawing-room, you think
instinctively of Sarah Bernhardt’s great parts, and rightly, because she
was Sarah’s understudy in them in Paris before she came to England. If
any actor-manager had wanted a leading lady for tragedy, she would have
been one of the most famous actresses on our stage to-day, for she had
the divine fire. But London does not run to tragedies, except for the
glorification of an actor- or actress-manager, so she had to descend to
being the villainess of melodramas generally finishing up with suicide
in the last act. In the _Great Ruby_ she showed her real dramatic power.
But she has never had the chance of becoming the leading lady at one of
our chief theatres like His Majesty’s, where she could have taken London
by storm with her magnificent presence and carriage and the passion she
can put into her acting with her marvellous Oriental eyes and coal-black
hair. These she owes to her being a South Russian. I am not sure whether
she was born in Russia or the United States, where her father is a
doctor in Montana—a friend of the Copper King. If any one were to make a
play out of Sarah Siddons, Ray Rockman would be the ideal actress to
cast for the leading part.
It was Ray who introduced me to the wonderful Annie Russell, the most
temperamental of American actresses. I say American, though she was born
in Liverpool, because practically all her work has been done on the
other side, and it was Ray who introduced me to Sarah Bernhardt.
Unfortunately, Sarah does not like talking English, and I am not equal
to saying anything very interesting in French, though I read it with
facility, and know plenty of “kitchen” French for use at hotels and
railway-stations. Sarah sent me seats to see her in _Hamlet_, which she
pronounced “omelette.” I found it rather wearisome, to be quite honest,
because I hear French so badly, and when I went down to see Ray and her
in her dressing-room at the end of the first act, I gladly accepted her
invitation to spend the rest of the evening in her dressing-room, “if I
could not follow her easily.”
It was extremely interesting to watch her dressing, and she did not take
any more notice of my presence than if I had been a fly, while she was
actually being got ready for the stage, though she made herself
extremely pleasant during the acts when she was off the stage. She could
divest herself of the personality of Hamlet, and resume it at a moment’s
notice. Ray speaks French as well as English, so everything was quite
simple, with her there to interpret. During the longest interval a
message came down for her that the Prince of Wales (afterwards King
Edward VII) was in the house, and Sarah went off to see him for a long
time; it seemed like half-an-hour. She invited me to go with Ray to
visit her at that wonderful rock island off the Breton coast, but for
some reason or other I did not make the effort. I think I had made
arrangements to go to St. Andrews.
Elizabeth Robins I met at the Idler. One always thought of her as the
actress in those days, and not, as one now thinks of her, as the
novelist. Elizabeth Robins is a tall, spare, Western woman, with a very
eloquent face. She is the greatest Ibsen actress we have had in England.
She had the unusual courage, for the stage, to think that good looks and
elegance in dress were of no consequence, when she was presenting
Ibsen’s characters. Her one desire was to fulfil his conception exactly,
and she did it most convincingly.
A few people, like myself, knew that she was the “C. E. Raimond” who
wrote _George Mandeville’s Husband_ for that series of Heinemann’s, but
we imagined it to be a passing phase with her, instead of the prelude to
a series of great novels on burning questions.
I do not know who brought Gertrude Kingston to us first, but she often
came. She was the accomplished violinist mentioned in Lord Roberts’
dispatch of September 13, 1901, as having rendered special service
during the war in South Africa. Mrs. Silver, for this is her real name,
is an authoress as well as an artist and a collector, as I discovered
when we were going over the old things in Phillimore Lodge together
before the sale.
Alice Skipworth was a lovely woman with a gorgeous voice, whose fortunes
on the stage were made in an extraordinary way. An actor-manager engaged
her without any experience of acting to understudy his wife, who
financed his plays, in an American tour. When they got to Philadelphia,
I think it was, on the second night his wife took ill, and Mrs.
Skipworth duly took her place. Philadelphia went wild over her beauty
and her voice, and the actor-manager found himself in the unpleasant
predicament of having to decide whether he would close his doors, or
persuade his wife to let Mrs. Skipworth go on taking her place. His
wife, who was, I believe, very charming herself, was a sensible woman,
and thought it would be better to coin money by doing nothing than to
bankrupt herself by acting, so the understudy acted and sang throughout
the tour, and came back a leading lady in musical comedy. She was a very
clever woman; she could have written an excellent novel about Bohemian
life; she had the knowledge; and she was both witty and epigrammatic.
I need not explain who Murray Carson is. He was a very great light in
those circles, because he was an actor-manager, and as such had the
distinction of giving Lena Ashwell one of her first chances in
_Gloriana_. In addition to his successes as an actor and a manager, he
was joint author with Louis Napoleon Parker in that delightful play
_Rosemary_, since which he has written many plays. He is quite a
well-known figure at various literary clubs, noted for his remarkable
resemblance to the first Napoleon. The collaboration of these two
Napoleons was, I imagine, a mere coincidence.
My last meeting with Decima Moore I am never likely to forget. She was
very fond of watching polo, and we were sitting together in the pavilion
at a club to which I belong, when a man was thrown from his pony, and
dragged along the ground for several yards on his face, his nose
ploughing a regular furrow till it was broken. I went down to where he
was lying. Every one thought he was killed, because he lay insensible
for so long. When he did come to, he said, “Is my nose broken, doctor?”
The doctor said it was, and then he said, in my hearing, “Then I hope
you will make a better job of it than God did,” which seemed to me the
most extraordinary piece of _sang-froid_ for a man who, the moment
before, had been almost across the threshold of life and death.
Sir Charles Wyndham, whose real name I cannot for the moment remember,
and “Mary Moore,” I have seen chiefly on the Riviera at Cimiez. I make
it the excuse for my forgetfulness that he forgot what he was forgetting
once, when, coming up cordially to shake hands with me, he said, “I
remember your name quite well, but I can’t recall your face.”
Wyndham fought in the war between North and South in the United States,
and he was a member of the company of John Wilkes Booth, the actor, at
the time that the latter assassinated President Lincoln in the theatre;
I have never heard if he was actually on the stage at the time. He was
brought up, I understood, as a doctor.
As an instance of Wyndham’s lapses of memory, I may quote that one day
at Ranelagh he asked me if I was a member of the Club. I said “Yes.”
“Can I telephone from here?” “Oh, yes.”
When we got to the telephone, he began turning up the name of his man of
business, who had a name, which I will not mention, as ordinary as
Skinner; there might have been a couple of score of the name in the
telephone book. He read down the list. “I can’t remember his initials,”
he said. I looked at him as if to say, “Don’t you often see him?” He
caught my eye. His actor’s intuition told him my thoughts. “I know what
you’re thinking,” he said. “Yes, I do ’phone to him every day, but I
can’t for the life of me tell which of all this lot he is.”
Irving once told me at lunch a story which he probably told many others.
He was touring in the United States, and staying either at St. Louis or
Cincinnati. One morning at breakfast a large rat ran across the room. As
he had been up till past five that morning, being entertained by the
local Savage Club—I forget its name—he was feeling rather cheap, and
gave a little start. “You needn’t mind him, Mis’ Irving,” said the negro
waiter; “he’s a real one.”
The Trees I have known for a long time. It is an undiluted pleasure to
meet Tree out at lunch—like all actors, he affects lunches more than
dinners. There are few men so witty. When most of the great actors and
actresses were exhausting their powers of polished vituperation on the
unhappy Clement Scott for his generalisations upon the morals of the
stage, Tree’s reply as to what he thought of the matter was, that
nothing Clement Scott had said made him think any less of him, and Lady
Tree’s rejoinder to the late W. T. Stead is historical.
Cyril Maude always gives me his smile when we meet at a certain polo
club, and often “passes the time of day” to me very pleasantly. But I
know that he is another of the people who remember your name, when they
meet you, but cannot recall your face. Still, I forgive him for the sake
of that Major in _The Second in Command_. His charming wife, Winifred
Emery, whose triumph I saw the night she won her place in the first rank
as Marguerite in Irving’s _Faust_—she was the understudy—always
remembers my face as well as my name. There never was an actress on our
stage who showed more spirit, unless it is Lena Ashwell turning on a
bully, for Lena turns to bay like the lion “on that famed Picard field.”
The Maudes’ daughter is now rapidly coming to the front. I saw her as
one of Portia’s ladies in the _Merchant of Venice_ looking
(intentionally, I suppose) for all the world like the exquisite
Tornabuoni heiress in the choir frescoes of Santa Maria Novella at
Florence, and could hardly believe that it was the same merry, everyday
girl that I meet at the Adrian Ross’s.
[Illustration:
SIR HERBERT BEERBOHM-TREE
_From the drawing by Yoshio Markino_
]
Edward Terry I first met at the Savage, where he was one of the most
influential members, and afterwards at Barnes, where he had a dear old
house near the church, which has been improved away to make room for a
sweet-shop and a garage and an auctioneer’s lair. Though he was so
capable in the chair, and such an excellent comedian, I don’t remember
his ever saying anything worth remembering when we walked or “bussed”
down Castelnau together.
Penley I never met in private life; I only met him at the Savage, where
he never would do a turn, and where his dignity—not assumed—when he was
in the chair was as funny as _Charley’s Aunt_, and proceedings were
conducted in the voice of the curate in _The Private Secretary_.
I first met Mrs.—and Mr.—Patrick Campbell at a party at Oswald
Crawfurd’s in the very early ’nineties. She had been enjoying triumphs
in the provinces for some years, but London was for the first time being
thrilled by that marvellously seductive voice, that languorous grace,
and that panther-like personality, which is sleek till it springs. Of
all actresses, Mrs. Campbell is most closely connected with Kensington,
for she was born in the Forest House, Kensington Gardens, and lives no
farther off than Kensington Square, where she occupies one of the old
houses on the west side.
_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ at one end of her career in London, and
_Bella-Donna_ at the other, established the fact that for parts in which
the infidelity of a wife brings in passion and intrigue of tragic
proportions, she has few equals on the stage of any country. It is the
Italian side of her nature coming out—her mother was a Miss Romanini.
Indeed, one can picture her at her very finest in an Italian mediæval
play—such as the scene where his beautiful mother mourns over the body
of the terrible young Griffonetto Baglioni.
Like Lena Ashwell and Julia Neilson, Mrs. Campbell (Mrs. George
Cornwallis West) might have expected to make her name by music.
She supplies one more illustration of the siren voice of Africa, which
never ceases to call to those who have once listened to it. For Patrick
Campbell made his work in Africa, and died there in the Boer War, and
now their daughter Stella, who had made her mark on the stage with her
_Princess Clementina_ in Mason’s play, has married and gone to live at
Nairobi.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER XXVIII
MY ARTIST FRIENDS
MY first connection with artists came through my cousin, David Wilkie
Wynfield, who was the nephew and godson of the great Sir David Wilkie.
He was a popular artist in both senses of the word, for engravers used
to multiply his pictures like “The New Curate,” and there was no more
popular figure at the Arts’ Club or in the homes of his brother artists.
A repartee of his was the origin of the picture in _Punch_, where a
painter who wants to know why he does not get into the Royal Academy is
told that he should not wear such thick boots. He and some brother
artists, of whom I think Marcus Stone and G. A. Storey are the only
survivors, took Ann Boleyn’s castle of Hever (when, if not abandoned to
the owls and bats, it had not yet become the home of the Astors), as a
summer sketching-box, and I have a picture of them grouped round the
entrance arch, which he painted.
So that he might have a better opportunity of introducing me to all his
friends, he put me up for “The Arts,” of which I remained a member till
his death. In those days it was located in a delightful old house in
Hanover Square, which had belonged to and been frescoed by Angelica
Kauffmann. There I made the acquaintance of the most famous artists of
the day, both painters and sculptors, for your artist, unlike your
author, loves to go to the club at night to relieve his mind after his
long day’s work, by playing pool or demolishing the claims of his rivals
to be considered artists in long technical conversations through clouds
of smoke. The art of blowing smoke-rings is a speciality of artists. I
have heard a famous R.A. recommend a young painter, who was complaining
that _he_ could never get his pictures into the Royal Academy, to paint
small grey pictures. “Why?” asked the disappointed aspirant. “Because
they are the pictures which Leighton needs to show off his own pictures
properly, and he always picks them out first.”
Another time, at the committee meeting when Herbert Schmaltz was up for
election, the chairman asked, “Does anybody know anything about Mr.
Schmaltz?” and the most popular landscape painter of the day replied,
“Mr. Schmaltz is a man who has taken the illustration of the Bible into
his own hands.”
It was Wynfield who introduced me to Joe Jopling. There have been few
at-homes more popular than Mrs. Jopling-Rowe’s. Jopling, who was a great
rifle-shot—he won the Queen’s Prize at Wimbledon—as well as a regular
exhibitor in the Academy, died a few years after I came to know them,
and his widow married George Rowe. Mrs. Jopling-Rowe, who is a popular
and admirable portrait-painter, and a constant exhibitor at all the
principal picture-shows, like the Academy and the Salon, when first I
knew her lived at Beaufort Street, Chelsea, but an epidemic of burglars
drove her from there to Pembroke Road, Earl’s Court, and from thence to
an old house in Pembroke Gardens. It made no difference to her at-homes,
which have always been crowded with really distinguished people, for she
has known all the leading artists, most of the leading authors and
actors, and not a few of the leading public men and women of her time.
Millais painted her portrait in her youthful prime, and if one sees her
standing near it, where it hangs in her house, one notices how little
she has altered in those intervening years, which have been so full of
painting triumphs and brilliant society.
Many artists used to come to Addison Mansions. West Kensington is not
like St. John’s Wood or Chelsea; there was no West Kensington Arts’
Club, and artists had not many meeting-places except Phil May’s studio
and our flat. Solomon, already nearing his zenith, used often to come
with his brother Albert, and so did Arthur Hacker, though they both
lived some way off. We were asked to Solomon’s wedding—we and Henry
Arthur Jones, I think, were the only Gentiles present at this splendid
ceremony, carried out with all the historical rites. Albert Solomon very
good-naturedly sat with us to tell us the significance of everything. It
was as interesting as an Easter service in a Sicilian cathedral.
It was easier for J. J. Shannon, for he lived quite close, in Holland
Park Road, in an old farmhouse, which he gradually transformed into a
charming mansion, where one used to meet most interesting people.
David Murray, the famous landscape painter, was another frequent visitor
among the Academicians, very popular for his wit and camaraderie, very
ready to help any one who needed a push in high quarters.
He has altered surprisingly little—only last summer I met him at a ball
at Sir St. Clair Thompson’s, the eminent throat specialist’s, whom I
knew as far back as 1886 when he was honorary secretary of the Club at
Florence. David was dancing as much as most of the young men, and not
looking perceptibly older than when I met him a quarter of a century
ago. He is another of the intellectual artists who read deeply, and he
is much interested in Japan. He very good-naturedly came to advise me
about my pictures when I was selling the contents of Phillimore Lodge,
but we had already parted with the celebrated Nattier of Louis XV
dressed as Hercules—a Burke heirloom—my father sold that to Colnaghi for
£1500.
Alfred Drury, that delightfully poetical sculptor, was another
Academician who came often. Drury has a beautiful voice.
It was only in our last days at Addison Mansions, after we had given up
those large evening at-homes, that William Nicholson, not an
Academician, but one of the greatest artists of them all, came.
Nicholson was not only one of the finest painters of the day in
inspiration and technique, but was the pioneer of a new movement, being
the first painter to have an artificial reproduction of daylight
installed in his studio—a costly and highly scientific combination of
various lights. By means of this painting is rendered independent of the
weather and the time. He has painted all night before now. Mark Barr, a
scientific friend of ours, who devised the apparatus for this, the most
brilliant man I ever met, brought him.
Another pioneer of art who used to come to Addison Mansions often, when
he had a studio in Brook Green, was Francis Bate, the moving spirit of
the New English Art Club. His influence on art has been profound. The
new English Art Club may have been identified with a certain extravagant
phase by scoffers, but it has embraced men like Sargent and Shannon, as
well as apostles of stiff blue cabbages.
The public were quick to appreciate the charm of the soft grey studies,
in which so little was indicated and so much implied, of Theodore
Roussel and Paul Maitland. Maitland, in spite of his delicate health,
was a student as well as a painter. He was a very clear thinker, like
the late Sir Alfred East, another Academician who often joined our
symposia. I always felt that East could have made his name as easily in
literature as in art.
The artist who has played the greatest part in the book life of his time
is, of course, Walter Crane, a really profound student and thinker, who
has held all sorts of most important directorships in art, and delivered
lectures of historical importance. No artist has such a record in _Who’s
Who_, for Crane is not only an illustrator of books, but a writer, and
as eminent a socialist as he is an artist. He describes himself as
“mostly self-taught,” but he was apprenticed to W. J. Linton, and
exhibited in the Royal Academy when he was only sixteen. He lives in
ideal surroundings, in a rambling house, more than two centuries old, in
Holland Street, Kensington. The thing which always struck me more than
the old curios which find such a fitting niche in the house, are the
rubbings of the brasses of his ancestors, for Crane has a long line of
knightly ancestors, one of whom was Chancellor of England in Stuart
times. Of his work I need not speak, for he has founded one of the
schools of modern English Art.
When I asked Walter Crane if he had been turned into an artist by any
sensational incident, he said—
“My progress—if I may so call it—has been very gradual and quite
unsensational, I think—except to myself. I had the great advantage of
having an artist for a father, and never remember the time when I did
not handle a pencil of some kind, though it was often a _slate_ pencil.
I had no early struggles to have my wish to be an artist allowed and
encouraged, or any strife about the realisation of that ideal with a
bourgeois-minded family, as one so often hears about in artists’
histories. I never started for anywhere with half-a-crown in my
pocket—anything of the sort usually quickly burnt a hole in what little
pocket I may have had—and no doubt that is the principal reason why I
remain poor.
“My early fondness for drawing animals caused confident and friendly
critics to say, ‘He will be a second Landseer!’ and nothing could have
had a more glowing prospect for me at the time; but times have a way of
changing, and ideals change with them, especially when one is ‘growing
up.’
“At the age of sixteen I had what might be called my first picture
accepted at the Royal Academy—first time of asking—but the subject was
‘The Lady of Shalott,’ and my source of inspiration was by no means
Landseer, but rather the pre-Raphaelites, and I was already deeply read
in Ruskin.
“You speak of the ‘paradox of my being a socialist’ in spite of my
descent. Why should it be a paradox for one who loves beauty and
harmony, and strives to realise it in his work, but who sees around him
a world scrambling for money, glutted with riches at one end of the
social scale, and penniless and destitute at the other, while all the
time the bounty of Nature and the invention and labour of man provides
abundance—but only for those who can exchange the necessary counters,
and for those who hold the keys of the means of the maintenance of life?
“Socialism does not mean lowering the standard of life, but raising it,
and with the abolition of the struggle for mere bread, and the
substitution of co-operation for competition, it will be possible to
build a society founded upon some better basis than cash, a surplus
value. Indeed, it may be said that a true aristocracy might then become
possible, since personal qualities and character would then have their
real value, purged of the harrowing, selfish burden of private ownership
of the means of life, and estimated by service to the community.”
My most intimate artist friend is Réné de l’Hôpital, who, in spite of
his name and his descent, speaks not a word of French. De l’Hôpital is
one of those happy portrait-painters who can get a likeness; but he is
more than that; if he had a literary turn, he could write as good a book
as any one on “collecting” economically, for he has a wonderful
knowledge of old furniture and its West-end and East-end values. I know
the extent of his knowledge because he and my brother-in-law, the late
Frederick Robert Ellis, were my advisers when I sold the contents of
Phillimore Lodge, and the auctioneer said they fetched half as much
again as they were worth, because we knew their value and their points
were so well brought out. De l’Hôpital owed his knowledge partly to the
fact that he was born in a great old house full of treasures. Having
known what it was to struggle himself, when he became an artist against
the wishes of his family, he does a great deal for the poor.
De l’Hôpital, who is a French count, son of the sixth Duke de Vitry, has
had the honour of painting Prince Arthur of Connaught and Pope Leo XIII,
and was a Gold Staff officer at the coronation of King George V. He
married a daughter of John Francis Bentley, the great architect who
built the Westminster Cathedral. Mrs. de l’Hôpital has written a book
entitled _The Westminster Cathedral and its Architect_, and collaborated
with me in one of my books in which she would not allow her name to
appear.
Two painters who used to come to Addison Mansions arise in my mind with
East. Both were portrait-painters, recognised as among the soundest
executants of their craft—J. H. Lorimer and Hugh de Trafford
Glazebrook—for both were interested in literature as well as art—a not
common trait among artists—and both of them paint portraits with
enduring and outstanding merit. Lorimer, as I have said, was the son of
the late Prof. Lorimer of Edinburgh University, the eminent
international jurist who made the restoration of Kellie Castle his
hobby, and brother of Sir Robert Lorimer, who restored St. Giles’
Cathedral at Edinburgh, and a cousin of Norma Lorimer, the novelist.
Glazebrook was a brother of Canon Glazebrook, late head master of
Clifton, an Oxford friend of mine who never won the high jump, though he
could clear five feet eleven, because he happened to have for a
contemporary the only man who ever cleared six feet in the ’Varsity
sports.
A new school of black-and-white artists was coming rapidly to the fore.
Pictorial journalism on an unprecedented scale had invaded England from
America, and a number of new illustrated papers and magazines had
started, and they relied for their pictorial side on ideas which must
have seemed revolutionary to those who had been brought up on the old
standard productions of the _Illustrated London News_. The foundation of
_The Graphic_ a decade or two earlier had been a sign of the times.
The most extraordinary artist of the movement could hardly be called a
journalist proper, because most of his work was done for books published
by John Lane, and for the _Yellow Book_. Beardsley, who was a mere boy,
with his boyishness accentuated by his fair hair and consumptive’s
pink-and-white complexion, came nearly every week with a very pretty
sister who made her name rapidly on the stage. Beardsley, who had a
workmanship of spiderish delicacy and an imagination like Edgar Allan
Poe, which resulted in the creation of female types of appalling
wickedness and snake-like fascination, did not talk much “shop”; he was
more occupied with the studies on which these extraordinary creations
were founded. He was a very interesting man to talk to, very modest. He
always impressed me as a man with a wonderful future if he were not cut
off, as he was, by an early death.
Phil May, another genius of the movement, was one of our most constant
visitors. He lived, as I have said, in a studio improvised from a
stable, almost opposite Shannon, in those days. He did more than most
men to revolutionise black and white, because he was one of the first
who grasped the value of Japanese effects and introduced them into his
work. But his method of producing these Japanese effects was not
Japanese. A Japanese artist fills the brush, which he uses as pen and
pencil, with Indian ink, and secures his effects with a few dexterous
sweeps. Phil May drew his picture in the English way with comparatively
few lines, then studied his own work to see what was superfluous, and
rubbed out every superfluity. He was not the rapid worker which one
imagined from his style. After he left the Australian paper with which
he was connected, he remained a free lance for years, drawing whatever
came into his head as irresistible, and selling it to one or other
journal, and bringing out collections of his drawings of the year in his
famous annual. It was, perhaps, not the best way of making money, but it
came very naturally to him, for he was as brilliant a wit as he was an
artist. He was a man of inspirations; he could be irresistibly funny
with such simple materials as the henpecked husband. He was the reverse
of henpecked himself. He had a devoted and very pretty wife, who was
forgiving to all the faults he committed in his bland and childlike way,
and I often used to think that his jokes about henpecked husbands formed
his way of crying “peccavi.” Who that had ever seen it could forget his
picture of the husband coming home at three o’clock in the morning and
being asked, “What do you mean by coming home at this time of night?”
and pleading that there was nowhere else open? Or his picture of the
drunken lion-tamer, who had taken refuge from his wife in the lion’s
cage, with his wife outside the cage crying “You coward!”
I do not think he ever made his speech in the rooms of the Piscatorial
Society the subject of a picture, but it was worth it. He was the guest
of the evening and had dined a little too well—at any rate, as far as
drink was concerned. When he rose to respond to the toast of his health,
he looked round the room and saw dozens of glass cases stuffed with
salmon and pike of monstrous size, the pride of the Society. He took
them all in with a wave of his hand, and said, “I suppose you will tell
me that there is only one ——y kipper on that wall!”
On another occasion I was with Phil and Corbould at the Savage Club. We
stayed there very late, and when Phil finally made up his mind to go
home, he could not remember where he lived. Of course, we knew his own
studio quite well, because it was close to our homes, and we had been
there scores of times, but he was not residing there; he was staying in
lodgings, for he had just come back from the Japan fiasco. He had
received a commission from the _Graphic_ to go to Japan for a year or
more, and do sketches for them. They offered him very liberal terms, and
he accepted them. He let his studio for a year, and started off full of
good intentions. But he never got to Japan. He stopped somewhere on the
way—a very long way from England—and abandoned himself to a lotus life
of mild dissipation—we might, perhaps, have called him a
lotus-drinker—and the _Graphic_ had to bring him home again. It was soon
after he got home that this event at the Savage happened.
“Where to?” asked the cabby.
“I don’t know,” said Phil. “I have forgotten where I live; it is not my
own house.”
“Well, how am I to get you there?” asked the cabby.
“I do not know what the name of the house is,” said Phil; “but I think I
could draw it.”
“There are a good lot of houses in London,” said the cabby, “and they
are mostly all alike.”
“But there is a church near it,” said Phil; “and I could draw that.”
A menu card and a pencil were procured, and he drew a picture of the
ordinary London house and a rather toyshop church. The cabby looked at
it and said, “I know where it is; that’s Osnaburgh Terrace,” so Phil got
into the cab, and then the cabby turned round to Corbould and myself and
said, “That’s Phil May, ain’t it?” We said yes, and he unbuttoned his
coat and put the menu card carefully in his pocket, remarking, “It will
be worth something some day.”
The extraordinary thing was that any one who was so witty and such a
consummate artist should have been ignored by _Punch_ for so many years,
though he became in the end one of its most honoured contributors. The
editor approached him in a very curious way when he felt that he could
not ignore him any longer. He did it through the firm who at that time
reproduced illustrations for _Punch_.
Phil May was one of the best-hearted of men, generous to a fault, alike
with his money and in his attitude to his rivals.
Very famous people used to come sometimes to those ultra-Bohemian
gatherings in his studio, including some of the Queens of the music-hall
stage.
It was Phil May, I believe, who drew the inimitable cartoon in the _St.
Stephen’s Review_ of Mr. Gladstone, with a malevolent eye, gathering
primroses on the banks of the Thames on the anniversary of his
illustrious rival’s death, which had for its title—
“A primrose by the river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.”
The cartoon was received with universal acclaim, but the general
public—_quorum pars fui_—did not bother as to who the artist was. I did
not know Phil at the time. He was just back from Australia, where he had
been working for the _Sydney Bulletin_.
Phil May had the head of a mediæval jester, and was fond of drawing
himself in the cap and bells.
Another black-and-white humorist of a different type who was with us
just as much was Dudley Hardy, whose satirical sketches of ballet girls
and their admirers filled the periodicals of the day, obscuring Dudley
Hardy’s claim as an artist. He was a son of the well-known marine
painter, T. B. Hardy, and was lured from doing the really admirable work
with which his friends are familiar, by the fatal popularity of his
theatrical caricatures. It was long before he could make up his mind to
break away from that and do himself justice in painting. His sister
married a very great friend of ours, a water-colour painter of
extraordinary cleverness and charm, Frank Richards. We have many of his
pictures, mostly impressionist water-colours, which prove the heights to
which Richards could have risen if he had continued to have the leisure
to which he was born. He might have done very well in black-and-white
too. He could have come nearer to Phil May than most people, for he too
had caught the spirit of Japan in the simplicity and bold curves of his
drawing; and he had considerable humour. His limpidity and the charm of
his colouring were especially shown in his paintings of Venice.
His portrait of Dudley Hardy is simply admirable, for Dudley, with his
whimsical smile and jaunty way of wearing his hat, looks like a Parisian
notable.
For some years we saw more of Reginald Cleaver than any other artist.
Cleaver was at that time the favourite artist of the _Graphic_, as well
as a regular contributor to _Punch_. He was excellent in catching
likenesses, and his crisp and beautiful handiwork made his pictures of
passing events most attractive. The _Graphic_ always sent him to the
most important functions, such as royal weddings. He hated this work,
because he was far too gentlemanly and too shy to push, and the people
in charge of royal functions seemed to take a pleasure in putting every
disadvantage they could in the way of the artists and journalists who
had to immortalise the occasion for their fellow-countrymen. The artist
was expected to stand behind the organ or anywhere else provided he was
sufficiently out of sight; whether he could see or not was of very
little consideration. But one day Fate overtook the autocrat who used to
browbeat the Press. It was in the days when the late King was Prince of
Wales, and his brother, the Duke of Edinburgh, had just become a German
reigning prince as Prince of Saxo-Coburg Gotha. Cleaver, who was posted
where he could not see the procession as it entered, imagined that the
Duchess of Edinburgh as a reigning princess would take precedence of the
Princess of Wales, and gave her precedence in his picture in the _Daily
Graphic_. Before ten o’clock the next morning a messenger from
Marlborough House arrived at the _Graphic_ office to know the meaning of
this libel, and the editor explained that the artist had been placed in
a position where he could not see the Princess. The Princess was
furious. She attached no blame to the artist, but she sent for the
autocrat and gave him to understand that there must be no more accidents
of this kind, and from that day forward there was a great change in the
way in which artists were treated at royal functions.
We spent several of our summer holidays together. Cleaver’s sketches of
famous people at historical functions will have a permanent value. He
had no rival in fidelity and charm in this kind of work. In recent years
the world has seen too little of his work owing to his being so much
abroad. He is the elder brother of Ralph Cleaver, the well-known
political caricaturist.
Holland Tringham, a very good-looking and well-bred man, of whom I saw a
good deal at that time, had a battle royal with a millionaire duchess
over a similar question. He went down to represent one of the chief
illustrated papers at a great ball she was giving at her country house.
When he got there, he was received with scant ceremony, but began his
work. When supper-time came, the housekeeper arrived to tell him that he
would find his supper in the still room. He showed her the beginnings of
his sketch—and he was a brilliant artist—and said, “Take this to her
Grace and tell her that if she does not come and fetch me to supper with
her guests, I shall tear it up, and go home.”
Her Grace came, took him to supper, and introduced him to her friends
galore, and the picture appeared. Of course, Tringham was very sure of
his position as an artist with the paper, or he would not have risked
the chance of being sacrificed on the altar of the offended duchess. I
should like to have heard what the housekeeper told her.
There has not been so much of this snobbery lately among hostesses; the
race for publicity having become too acute.
I must have met Sambourne, who succeeded Sir John Tenniel as chief
artist of _Punch_, when I was a boy, for he married a Miss Herapath, and
when we were children she and her brothers were generally having tea at
our house in Upper Phillimore Gardens if we were not having tea at
theirs a few yards away. I never lost sight of him, and in the last
years of his life saw more rather than less of Sambourne, whose
thoroughness was always a marvel to me. No pains were too great for him
to be accurate in the details of his cartoons and whimsicalities. I
forget how many thousand photographs he told me he had, which he could
use like a dictionary. But I remember that his idea of the best day’s
holiday one could take was to go to Boulogne in the morning on a day
when there was a good sea on, lunch there, and come back in the
afternoon.
His successor on _Punch_, Bernard Partridge, was very often at Addison
Mansions in the old Idler and Vagabond days. He had already achieved
fame in two directions—as a black-and-white artist whose handiwork was
unexcelled for delicate beauty and romantic charm, and as an actor. But
he did not act under his own name; he was Bernard Gould behind the
footlights. Partridge’s father, the late Prof. Richard Partridge, was a
Fellow of the Royal Society and one of the greatest surgeons of his day.
Mrs. Partridge, then Miss Harvey, was also often at our at-homes.
Another _Punch_ and _Graphic_ artist often with us was Alexander Stuart
Boyd, whose wife, Mary Stuart Boyd, is a favourite novelist of the great
house of Blackwood. Boyd has the dry wit of his race, so it is not
surprising that such a fine artist should have found his way to _Punch_.
He now gives his time to painting and spends much of his time at a house
he has in the Balearic Islands. He was a very old Vagabond. I met him
there or at the Idler teas.
There, too, I met Hal Hurst, my neighbour and constant associate for
years, though we do not often meet now. I have various pictures of his
in my present house. Hurst, who was a very clever artist, and his friend
Alyn Williams, the president of one of the two Miniature Painters’
Societies, not only shared a studio in Mayfair, but married beautiful
young wives about the same time, who were constantly together, one very
dark and the other very fair. Mrs. Williams was the picture of health,
but suddenly she was struck down by a mysterious malady, and almost
wasted to death, a terrible shock to all who had seen much of them.
Then, for no apparently sufficient reason, she suddenly picked up again,
threw off her malady completely, and was restored to her old radiant
health; it was like coming back from the grave. The Royal Family have
been great patrons of Williams’ miniatures.
Oddly enough, I knew the president of the other society of miniature
painters equally well—Alfred Praga, an Italian by extraction, a
well-known and popular member of the Savage Club. Praga lives in a
picturesque grey house off Hornton Street. His wife is a well-known
writer.
With them it is natural to mention the brilliant Robert Sauber, a German
by extraction, who for years was one of the most popular artists in
journalism; whatever paper or magazine you took up, it was almost sure
to have a cover with a charming female figure designed by Sauber. I have
a delightful specimen painted for the menu of the Vagabond Club on some
important occasion. But Sauber was not only a journalistic artist; he
has been painting large decorative panels and ceilings and portraits for
the last thirteen years, and has done no illustrations for the last
twelve years. He is an exhibitor at the principal Salons in London,
Paris and Munich.
While mentioning _Punch_ artists, I forgot two who were constant
visitors at Addison Mansions—John Hassall and Chantrey Corbould.
The man who helped to keep our at-homes going more than any one else was
Chantrey Corbould, the artist, a godson of the great Sir Francis
Chantrey, whose bequest is almost as famous as his sculpture; he was a
nephew also of Charles Keene, the immortal _Punch_ artist and etcher, on
the mother’s side. Edward H. Corbould, his father’s eldest brother,
taught the Royal Family.
Corbould was a huge man, with a very jovial, high-coloured, handsome
face, and a very horsey appearance, as becomes one of the best
hunting-picture artists who ever drew for _Punch_. He had a very loud
and hearty laugh, which could be heard all over the house, and told good
stories, and always had a court of the ladies of Bohemia round him in
the inner room. He had one golden quality; whenever he saw a woman
sitting neglected, he went over and fetched her to join his circle, and
the older and uglier she was, the more particular he was to do it.
I was wrong in saying that we never had an entertainment at our
at-homes—Corbould’s stories were an entertainment, but people had not to
keep silent with them; the more noise they made, the better he liked it.
He was very funny sometimes.
When I asked Corbould what first turned his attention to Art, he said—
“I was always for the Arts. Charles S. Keene, my mother’s brother, took
me in hand, saying ‘sketch from Nature,’ so I am altogether self-taught.
I never went to any Art school. Keene’s idea was that I should
eventually step into a ‘staff appointment on _Punch_.’ I began under
Shirley Brooks, then Tom Taylor, and later under F. C. Burnand. Tom
Taylor promised me the first vacancy at ‘The _Punch_ Table,’ but he
died, and F. C. Burnand took on Furniss. I began with _Punch_ in the
early ’seventies; later I worked for the _Graphic_, the _Illustrated
London News_, the _Daily Graphic_ (1890), etc. I have always loved
‘gee-gees.’”
John Hassall is a universally popular man, and certainly one of the most
capable artists of the day. One cannot be sure to what heights he will
rise. He was not much more than a boy when he first came to our house,
and he was not much more than a boy when he first got into _Punch_. As
he is a brilliant caricaturist, with a strong political sense, he could
be the Conservative F.C.G. whenever he chooses. Probably he would
dislike the drudgery of producing constant political cartoons—all work
done against time. G. R. H., the famous cartoonist of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_, found the work too exacting, and Hassall, the most popular
poster designer of the day, has many irons in the fire which require
attending to. But he is a born caricaturist of the unexaggerating kind
which the future will demand.
Joseph Pennell, the artist, and his charming wife, one of the best
travel-writers in America, have been friends of ours for many years.
They live in an old house in Buckingham Street, Strand, near the gate,
which now does nothing on the Thames Embankment but is, I suppose, the
last of the water-gates of the Thames. Pennell conferred one of the
great pleasures of our lives on us by making us go to Le Puy, at the
source of the Loire, which he had been drawing for some periodical. The
statues of saints and tiny chapels standing up on needle rocks against
the sky, which look so fascinating in his sketches, are not a whit less
fantastic in real life, and, until quite lately, you could see from the
plain High Mass being celebrated in the cathedral, which was at the
western end of the rock. The great west doors were flung open for the
purpose, until the mortality among the priests became too great. At Le
Puy the old market-women wear their hats over their caps, and frogs are
as cheap as dirt—real edible frogs.
I went to a banquet given by the town to its most famous son, M. Dupuy,
who was then Prime Minister of France, and was, as it happened, a
native, though he did spell the Puy in his name with a small p. We paid
three francs a head—less than half-a-crown—for the banquet, including
wine, and an introduction to the Premier.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
INDEX
of the leading people about whom Personal Reminiscences or New Facts are
related.
Adcock, St. John, 200
Ainslie, Douglas, 114
Alamayu, Prince, 256-257
Albanesi, Madame, 133
Alden, H. M., 48
Alden, W. L., 102
Alexander, Boyd, 226
Alexander, Sir George, 277, 278
Alexander, Mrs. (Mrs. Hector), 119
Allen, Grant, 258-259
Allhusen, Mrs. Henry, 126
Angell, Norman, 171
Argonauts’ Club, The, 179-180
Arnim, Countess von, 244
Arnold, Sir Edwin, 116-117
Ashwell, Lena, 331-332, 345
Atherton, Gertrude Franklin, 131-132
Austin, Alfred, 263
Authors’ Club, The, 146-161
Ayrton, Edward, 319
Balfour, Rt. Hon. A. J., 153, 168, 235
Barker, Granville, 339
Barlass, Douglas, 111
Barr, Robert, 101-102, 162-163
Barrie, Sir J. M., 77, 157, 158
Bashford, Lindsay, 199-200
Bate, Francis, 348
Battye, Aubyn Trevor-, 320-321
Baumann, A. A., 194
Beardsley, Aubrey, 352
Becke, Louis, 242
Beerbohm, Max, 302-303
Belloc-Lowndes, Marie, 135
Beresford, Lord Charles, 171
Bernhardt, Sarah, 167-169, 341
Besant, Annie, 251
Besant, Sir Walter, 58, 147-150, 182, 251
Bigelow, Poulteney, 155
Bird, Isabella, 317
Boldrewood, Rolf, 241-242
Bond, Acton, 339-340
Boosè, J. R., 250
Boothby, Guy, 242
Bourchier, Arthur, 338-339
Bourget, Paul, 66
Bourne, Cardinal, 218-219
Boyd, A. K. H., 307-308
Boyd, A. S., 357-358
Brackenbury, Sir Henry, 303
“Braddon, Miss,” 119
Bradley, Dean, 128
Brandes, Georg, 6
Brinsmead, John, 4
Brodhurst, J. Penderel, 119
Bullen, Frank, 242, 288-289
Bulloch, J. M., 198-199
Bunning, Herbert, 66
Burgin, G. B., 162, 164-165, 166, 176
Burnett, Mrs. Frances Hodgson, 130
Burroughs, John, 260, 270
Burton, Sir Richard, 10
Cable, G. W., 260
Caine, Hall, 113, 157, 253-254
Callaghan, Admiral Sir G., 210-211
Calthrop, Dion Clayton, 289
Campbell, Frances, 243
Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 278, 345
Cardigan, Lady, 141-142
Carman, Bliss, 111-112
Castle, Egerton, 267
Cave, George, K.C., M.P., 130, 191
Cawston, George, 169
Chambers, Haddon, 244
Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston, 175
Clarke, Lewis, 327
Cleaver, Reginald, 355-356
“Cleeve, Lucas,” 138
Cleveland, President, 30, 50
Clifford, Mrs. W. K., 127-128
Coffin, C. Hayden, 329-330
Coke, Desmond, 289-290
Cook, Theodore Andrea, 195
Cooper, E. H., 290-291
Corbould, A. Chantrey, 353, 354, 358-359
Corelli, Marie, 25, 126
Cornish, Herbert, 202
Coronation, The, 200
Couch, Sir A. T. Quiller-, 283-284
Courtney, W. L., 194-195
Crane, Walter, R.I., 349-350
Craven, Miss Maude Chester, 140-142
Crawfurd, Oswald, 148
Creighton, Bishop, of London, 153, 170-171
Crockett, S. R., 255
Croker, Mrs. B. M., 120-121
“Danby, Frank,” 135
Darnley, Countess of, 245
Davidson, John, 107
De l’Hôpital, René, 350-351
De Lorey, Eustache, 67, 218, 226
De Morgan, William, 266-267
Denison, George Taylor, 32
Derby, late Earl, 310-311
Devonshire Club, 187
Dickens, Charles, 1
Dilettante Club, The, 62
Dilke, Sir Charles, M.P., 308-309
Dillon, Dr., 302
Diósy, Arthur, 177
Dobson, Austin, 104
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 73-77, 156-157, 176
Dufferin, late Marquis of, 310
Dundonald, Earl of, 81, 169, 170
Dunn, James Nicol, 197
Edward, H.M. King, 181, 187, 309, 341
Egerton, George, 134-135
Eliot, George, 251
Escoffier, M., 198
Fagan, J. Bernard, 278
Farnol, Jeffery, 291-292
Fawcett, Edgar, 112
Fenn, Fred, 258
Fenn, G. M., 257
Field, Eugene, 54
Fletcher, Benton, 223
Forbes-Robertson, Sir J., 90, 334-336
Ford, I. N., 321-322
Fowler, Ellen Thorneycroft, 129, 164
France, Anatole, 67
Fraser, John Foster, 319-320
Frederic, Harold, 264-265
Freeman, Rev. H. B., 194
Fry, C. B., 172
Garvice, Charles, 280-283
George V., H.M. The King, 41
Gilbert, W. S., 237
Gissing, George, 269
Glazebrook, Hugh de Trafford, 351
Glazebrook, Canon M. G., 351
Gore, Right Rev. C., Bishop of Oxford, 10, 11, 153, 192
Gorst, Mrs. Harold, 138
Gorst, Sir John, 138
Gosse, Edmund, 26, 103
Grace, W. G., 198
“Grand, Sarah,” 124
“Gray, Maxwell,” 119
Gribble, Francis, 292-293
Grossmith, George, 176-177, 328-329
Grossmith, Weedon, 328, 338
Haggard, Sir H. Rider, 284-285
Hamilton, General Sir Ian, 154, 169
Hardy, Dudley, 355
Hardy, Thomas, 117, 208, 253
Harland, Henry, 288
Harraden, Beatrice, 129-130
Harris, Sir Augustus, 149
Harte, Bret, 94-95
Harvey, Martin, 337
Hassall, J., 358, 359-360
Hatton, Joseph, 254-255
Hay, Colonel John, 30, 50, 150, 321-322
Hearn, Lafcadio, 68
Hedgcock, Walter, 185
Helmsley, C. T. H., 278
Henley, W. E., 26, 117-118
Henniker-Heaton, Sir J., 263
Hentschel, Carl, 86-87, 176
Henty, G. A., 256
Hichens, Robert, 277-278
Hicks, Seymour, 183
Hind, Lewis, 188-189
Hird, Frank, 293
“Hobbes, John Oliver,” 131, 175
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 27, 96, 145, 252
“Hope, Anthony” (A. H. Hawkins), 78-79, 175-176, 180
Houghton, H. O., 27
Howells, W. D., 259
Humphris, Edith M., 324-325
Hunt, Violet, 135-136
Hurst, Hal, 358
Ingram, Rt. Rev. A. F. Winnington-, Bishop of London, 153
“Iota” (Mrs. Mannington Caffyn), 243
Irving, Sir Henry, 167, 344
Jackson, Frederick, 321
Jacobs, W. W., 98-99
James, Henry, 261-262
Jefferies, Richard, 258
Jepson, Edgar, 293-294
Jerome, Jerome K., 65, 82-91, 96, 158, 162-163, 167, 188, 334
Jerrold, Walter, 195-196
Jeyes, S. H., 25, 191-194
Jones, Henry Arthur, 154, 209, 336-337, 347
Jowett, Rev. Benjamin, Master of Balliol, 10, 338
Kenealy, Alexander, 201
Kenealy, Arabella, 201
Kernahan, Coulson, 165-166, 270-271
Key, K. J., 295
“Kingston, Gertrude,” 342
Kipling, Rudyard, 77
Knight, Joseph, 334
Knoblauch, Edward, 287
Lamb, Captain Thomas, 298-299
Lambs, The, 297, 298-299
Lambton (Meux), Admiral Sir Hedworth, 171
Landor, A. H. Savage, 30, 37, 314-316, 322
Lane, John, 134, 269, 352
Lang, Andrew, 104, 308
Larisch, Countess Marie, 141
Lawrence, Sir Walter, Bart., G.C.I.E., 8
Le Gallienne, R., 108, 259
Lehmann, Rudolf, 94
Leighton, Marie Connor, 137, 275-276
Leighton, Robert, 275-276
Le Queux, William, 294
Lewin, P. Evans, 250
Lindsay, Lady, 114, 124-125
Linton, Mrs. Lynn, 119-120
Locke, W. J., 269
Longfellow, Miss Alice, 27
Lorimer, Norma, 139-140, 212-213, 215, 327
Lovatelli, Countess, 293
Low, Sidney, 191
“Maartens, Maarten,” 66
McCarthy, Justin, M.P., 108
McCarthy, Justin Huntly, 108
Mackay, Charles, 25
Mackellar, C. D., 323-324
Mackenzie, Compton, 296-297
“Maclaren, Ian,” 161
Maclaughlan, Hugh, 238
“Malet, Lucas,” 129
Markino, Yoshio, 69-72, 226-227, 228
Marriott, Charles, 295
Marryat, Florence, 137
Marston, R. B., 199
Martin, A. Patchett, 183, 249, 250
Martin, Robert Jasper, 151-154
Mason, A. E. W., 273-274
“Mathers, Helen,” 130
Maude, Cyril, 344
Maugham, W. Somerset, 286-287
Maxwell, Gen. Sir J. G., 318
Maxwell, W. B., 279
May, Phil, 92, 352-355
Meredith, George, 181, 252
Miles, Eustace, 172
Millais, Sir J. E., P.R.A., 7
Mitford, Bertram, 294-295
Monkswell, Lord, 297
Montrésor, Miss, 136-137
Moore, T. Frankfort, 79-80, 166
Mordaunt, Elinor, 245-246
Morris, Sir Lewis, 103
Morrison, Arthur, 276
Morrison, Dr. G. E., 15, 246-248, 312
Moulton, Louise Chandler, 26, 52
Murray, David, 348
Myers, F. W. H., 104-106
Nansen, Frithjof, 187, 320-321
“Neilson, Julia,” 329, 330, 345
Neish, Mrs. Charles, 306
Nethersole, Olga, 337
Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 125
Newman, Cardinal, 8-9, 219
Nicholson, William, 348
Nicoll, Sir W. Robertson, 197, 282
Nimr, Dr., 224
Norman, Sir Henry, M.P., 247
Nye, Bill, 154, 177
O’Connor, T. P., 168, 198
Odell, J. S., 186
Ohrwalder, Father, 317-318
Oliver, Edwin, 201
O’Rell, Max, 100-101
Osgood, Irene, 131
Pain, Barry, 102
Pankhurst, Christabel, 172, 173
Parke, Ernest, 200
Parker, Sir Gilbert, 262
Parker, Louis Napoleon, 287
Partridge, Bernard, 357
Paternoster, G. Sidney, 62, 200
Pemberton, Max, 274-275
Pennell, Joseph, 360
Percival, Bishop of Hereford, 23
Perrin, Mrs. Charles, 121-123
Phillpotts, Eden, 276-277
Praed, Mrs. Campbell, 241
Prowse, R. O., 297
Raper, R. W., 10, 192-193
Ratti, Henry, 240
Reid, Rt. Hon. Sir George, 178-179
Reid, Sir H. Gilzean, 201-202
Reid, Whitelaw, 322
Renshaws, The, 297-298
Richards, J. M., 322-323
Ridge, W. Pett, 98, 172
“Rita,” 244
Rives, Amelie, 131
Roberts, Field-Marshal Earl, V.C., 120, 167, 169
Roberts, Morley, 285-286
Robertson, Rt. Rev. A., Bishop of Exeter, 10
Robertson, Sir George Scott, M.P., 177-178
Robertson, Mrs. Ian, 334
Robins, Elizabeth, 341-342
Robinson, F. W., 255-256
Robinson, Fletcher, 275
Rockman, Ray, 340-341
Rolfe, Eustace Neville, 207
Roosevelt, Theodore, 224
Rose, Algernon, 159-160
Rosebery, Lord, 235
“Ross, Adrian,” 113-114
Rowe, Mrs. Jopling, 64, 347
Rusden, G. W., 248-249
St. Helier, Lady, 125, 293
Salisbury, late Marquess of, 264
Sambourne, Linley, 357
Sarrûf, Dr., 224
Sauber, Robert, 358
Savage Club, 181-187
Saxony, Ex-Crown Princess of, 141, 142
Schmalz, Herbert, 347
Scott, Capt., R.N., 173
Seaman, Sir Owen, 200
Seddon, Rt. Hon. J. R., 171
Selous, F. C., 313-314
Seton, Sir Bruce, 26
Seton, Ernest Thompson, 173-174, 302
Seymour, Admiral Sir Edward, 151
Seymour, Admiral Sir Michael Culme, 34
Shannon, J. J., R.A., 348
Sharp, William, 25, 112, 113
Shaw, Bernard, 65, 237
Shaylor, Joseph, 301-302
Sherman, Gen. W. Tecumseh, 30
Shorter, Clement, 196-197
Shorter, Dora Sigerson, 115-116
Sickert, B., 92-93
Sidgwick, Henry, 105-106
Sidgwick, Mrs. A., 136
Sidney, F. E., 80
Sinclair, Archdeacon, 155, 156, 304-305
Sladen, Arthur, C.M.G., 6
Sladen, Sir Charles, K.C.M.G., 14
Sladen, Douglas Brooke (my father), 1
Sladen, Col. Sir Edward, 120
Sladen, Gen. John, 120
Sladen, John Baker, D.L., J.P., 1
Sladen, Lieut. Sampson, R.N., 6, 69
Smith, Frank Hopkinson, 265-266
Smith, Goldwin, 32
Solomon, Solomon J., R.A., 347
Southesk, the late Earl of, 238
Spender, Harold, 200
Spender, J. A., 200
Spielmann, M. H., 306
Stanley, Lady (Dorothy), 316-317
Stanley, Sir H. M., 105, 316
Stanton, Father, 10, 80-81, 170-171
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 27, 52, 96
Steel, Mrs. Flora Annie, 123, 175
Steevens, G. W., 318
Stepniak, Sergius, 67, 154
“Stevens, Miss E. S.,” 143-145
Stockdale _versus_ Hansard, 1
Stockton, Frank, 97-98, 154
Stoker, Bram, 80
Strindberg, August, 67
Stubbs, Bishop of Oxford, 12
“Swan, Annie S.,” 137
“Swift, Benjamin,” 285
Taylor, J. H., 72
Tedder, H. R., 158
Tennyson, 309
Terry, Fred, 329
“Thirlmere, Rowland,” 114
Thomas, Brandon, 183
Thomas, Margaret, 249
Thomson, Basil, 325
Thring, G. Herbert, 158-160
Thurston, Katherine Cecil, 136
Tree, Sir H. Beerbohm–, 344
Trench, Herbert, 110
Tringham, Holland, 356-357
Turner, Henry Gyles, 248, 249
“Twain, Mark,” 53, 95-97, 303
Tynan, Katherine, 116
Vachell, H. A., 271-273
Vagabonds’ Club, The, 162-182
Van Horne, Sir William, 31
Victoria, H.M. Queen, 189-190
Villiers, Fred, 326
Visetti, Albert, 115
Ward, Sir Edward, K.C.B., 178
Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 126-127, 241
Ward, John, F.S.A., 318
Watson, A. E. T., 202-203
Watson, H. B. Marriott, 279-280
Watson, R. Seton-, 323
Watson, William, 106
Watt, A. P., 204
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 113
Webbe, A. J., 191-192
Webster, Ben, 330-331
Weigall, A. E. P., 318-319
Welch, James, 107, 332-333
Wells, H. G., 99-100
Weyman, Stanley, 255
Wheelton, Mr. John, Sheriff, 1
Wheelton, Mary (my mother), 4, 5, 6
Whistler, J. MacNeill, 64
Whitaker, G. H., 199
White, Gleeson, 112
White, Herbert K., 197
White, Percy, 267-268
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 27
Wilberforce, Archdeacon, 305-306
Wilde, Oscar, 64, 108-111
Wilkins, Mary E., 145
Wilkins, W. H., 300-301
Williamson, Alice (Mrs. C. N.), 132-133, 163
Williamson, C. N., 132-133
Williamson, Dr. G. C., 304
Willoughby de Broke, Lord, 174-175
Wills, C. J., 320
Wingate, Sir Reginald, 317, 318
“Winter, John Strange,” 133-134
Wolf, Lucien, 154-155
Wolseley, Field-Marshal Viscount, 151-152
Wood, Field-Marshal Sir Evelyn, V.C., 154
Wood, J. S., 201
Woods, Rev. H. G., Master of the Temple, 11
Woods, Margaret, 128-129
Worsfold, Dr. Cato, 159
Wright, Huntley, 330
Wyndham, Sir Charles, 343-344
Wynfield, David Wilkie, 346
Yeats, W. B., 106-107
Zangwill, Israel, 88, 91-94
Zola, Emile, 67, 154
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○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
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