TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

THE ROOF GARDEN AND POMPEIAN FOUNTAIN AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS. (From the Painting by Yoshio Markino.)

WEN Y YEARS

OF MY FE

BY

DOUGLAS SLADEN

AUTHOR OF "WHO'S WHO "

WITH FOUR COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS AND TWELVE PORTRAITS

BY YOSHIO MARKING

487035

1 . 3 - 4-3

NEW YORK

E-P-DUTTON & COMPANY PUBLISHERS

FEINTED IN GWSAT BRITAIN BY

RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,

BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E.,

AND BUNGAY SUFFOLK.

AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED TO

JEROME K. JEROME

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 corre- spondents 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 them- selves 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,

'v Etc., etc.

" October 23, 1913."

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

1 'This portion of the letter could not be printed,

viii INTRODUCTION

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 FarnoPs 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 bring- ing-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

INTRODUCTION ix

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 reminis- cences 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 naively 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 drama- tised, 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.

x INTRODUCTION

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 clergy- man, 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 uncon- scious 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 mono- gamy, 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 him- self 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. PAOK

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 LITEEARY AT-HOMES AND LITEBAEY CLUBS ... 52

VII WE START OUR LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON . . 57

viii OUR AT-HOMES: YOUNG AUTHORS WHO ARE NOW GREAT

AUTHORS 73

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 AUTHORS*

CLUB . . 146

XIII LITERARY CLUBS : THE IDLERS AND THE VAGABONDS . 162

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

xi

xii CONTENTS

CHAF. PAOB

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 MANSIONS . 307

XXVI MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 312

XXVII MY ACTOR FRIENDS 328

XXVIII MY ARTIST FRIENDS . 346

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOURED PICTURES BY YOSHIO MARKING

To face page THE ROOF GARDEN OF 32 ADDISON MANSIONS . Frontispiece

THE MOORISH ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS .... 72

THE DINING ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS IN WHICH MOST

OF MY BOOKS WERE WRITTEN 204

THE JAPANESE ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS . . , 306

PORTRAITS BY YOSHIO MARKING

DOUGLAS SLADEN 26

ISRAEL ZANGWILL < .50

SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 74

JEROME K. JEROME 98

MISS BRADDON 124

CHARLES GARVICE 150

G. B. BTJRGIN . 174

SIDNEY LOW 191

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 pro- fession, 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

2 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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.

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 3

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 mediaeval 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,

4 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 extra- ordinary 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

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 5

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 natural- ising (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 Ques- tions " 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

6 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 after- wards. 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

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 7

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 un- fortunate 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,

8 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 scholar- ship 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 cor fed." 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

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 9

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 Keat's " 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 Miiller, 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

10 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 Literce Humaniores, as this school is called at Oxford, embraces the

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 11

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 under- grad; 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 under- graduate 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."

12

Then they all smiled very pleasantly, and I thanked them and went out.

They must have felt quite justified when, two years after- wards, 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 Literce 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

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 13

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 cTaeuvres, 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

14 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 Govern- ment, 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 any- thing 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.

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 15

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 northern- most point of Australia, to Melbourne. He had undertaken

16 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

— 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

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 17

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 suc- cessful ; 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 dis- position to regard with charity one's shortcomings from the Colonial point of view, and to accept with sympathy the fact

18 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 some- thing 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 luxuri- ance, and soon became absorbed in the maelstrom of dancing and playing tennis, and watching first-class cricket and racing.

MY LIFE (1856-1886) 19

When we went to Parramatta it was easy to make excur- sions 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 Quincen- tenary of the Heidelberg University.

Before we went abroad we had a foretaste of the many pilgrimages to archaeological paradises which we were to make. We spent six weeks at Canterbury, peculiarly delight- ful 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

MY LIFE (1886-1888) 21

from one pension to another on the Continent. Our imme- diate 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 Heidel- berg. 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 Blessingtonhad 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 Stabise, a city which shared the fate of Pompeii. It had

22 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 Sor- rento, 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 Taren-

MY LIFE (1886-1888) 23

turn, and Caesar's Brundusium, the Lesbos of Sappho, the Ithaca of Ulysses, Corinth and the Piraeus.

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 ^Egina, 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. Con- stantinople 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 caiques.

24 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 neigh- bouring 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,

MY LIFE (1886-1888) 25

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. Barrere, 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.

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

26

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THE AUTHOR

Drawn by Yoshio Markino

UNITED STATES AND CANADA 27

^hreshed 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 intro- ductions to various authors. But my most useful intro- (Juction 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 »nd 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

28 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

ocean liners come from spring to autumn. The ice-palace was already built, and rose like a mediaeval 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 litterateur, came to call upon us

UNITED STATES AND CANADA 29

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. Light- hall introduced us also to Sir William Van Home, the Presi- dent 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

30 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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.

UNITED STATES AND CANADA 31

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 extra- ordinarily delightful holiday in store for us. Sir William Van Home had invited us to go as the guests of the Canadian Pacific Railway right over their line from Montreal to Van- couver 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 extra- ordinary 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 Moun- tain " 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-

32 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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

UNITED STATES AND CANADA 33

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

34 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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.

35

36 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 photo- graphs 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 Yoshi- waras), 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

I GO TO JAPAN 37

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 watch-

38 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

ing the builders and carpenters, who did most things inside- out or upside-down, according to our notions. Also the Japanese manager, the Abe 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 land- scape art on Shiba with lake and cherry-grove and crypto- meria. 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 JVo-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

I GO TO JAPAN 39

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 Yoshi- wara, 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

40 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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, em- bosomed 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 nowa- days, 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 lyeyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa dynasty, and his grandson, lyemitsu. 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 :

I GO TO JAPAN 41

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'ceuvres 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.

42 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 atmo- sphere 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

I GO TO JAPAN 43

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 creped.

" The Japanese have a process by which they can make paper crepe 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

44 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

paper crepe, 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 school- fellows 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

I GO TO JAPAN 45

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 employe 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 Calif ornian 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 develop- ment 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

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BACK TO CANADA AND THE STATES 47

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 O jib ways 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 O jib ways 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 imagina- tion. 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 —

48

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-

BACK TO CANADA AND THE STATES 49

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 pur- chase 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 which- ever 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 con- tracted. 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.

50 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 hospit- able 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. Elaine, the new Secretary of State, invited us to share his private box to witness the inaugural procession.

These were civilities beyond one's dreams, and added to them were the never-ceasing hospitalities at houses like John

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

Drawn by YosMo Markino

BACK TO CANADA AND THE STATES 51

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 in- ebriating, held at 9 p.m. instead of 5. Her evenings were crpwded.

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 intro- duced 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

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LITERARY AT-HOMES AND CLUBS 53

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 storytellers' 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 assem- blage 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 en- counters 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,"

54

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 im- portant 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. Some- times 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 ex-

LITERARY AT-HOMES AND CLUBS 55

plained, 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 type- writer?"

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

56 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 sug-

57

58 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

gested 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 ttte-a-tete, 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 mid- night. 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 conversa- tions 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."

LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 59

At the Idlers and Vagabonds I met most of the rising authors, and when the American rush to London com- menced, 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 acquaint- ances 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 Gulich, 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.

60 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 over- shadow 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 base- ment 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 hi 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

LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 61

any more than I should employ a homceopathist. She after- wards 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 un- happiness 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 Govern- ment " 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

62 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 them- selves 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

LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 63

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 NevilPs, 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 intro- duced 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 fort- night 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

64 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 after- noon 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

LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 65

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 aesthete, 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

66 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 epigram- matic 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

LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 67

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 arrange- ments. 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 unmistak- ably 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.

68 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

Many well-known Frenchmen naturally came to see us, like Gabriel Nicolet, the artist, and Eustache de Lorey, who had been an attache 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 com- poser. He wrote the music of one of the most popular songs in Les Merveilleuses, in addition to being the com- poser of the opera Betty, which was produced in Brussels, with Mariette Sully in the leading part. Melba herself con- templates appearing in the leading role in his second opera, «. Leila. De Lorey had made some most adventurous t 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. Spielman, who wrote to me telling me all about Mar- kino's powers as a black-and-white artist, and asking me to get

LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 69

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 con- tributions 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 soiree 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,

70 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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, pre- sided 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 Cite de Retire, 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, land 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.

LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 71

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, beauti- fully 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

72 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

— 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 wonder- fully 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.

Besides Japanese, we had many Indian visitors.

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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 acquaint- ance. 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

73

74 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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

SIR A. CONAN DOYLE

Drawn by Yoshio Markino

OUR AT-HOMES 75

up his literary work to serve unpaid on the staff of the Langlam 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.

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 dis- tinguish respective values amid contemporary incidents. He has been highly successful as a playwright too. His House

76 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 Corn- hill for Habakuk Jephson's Statement in 1886. Then at New Year, 1888, Ward, Lock & Co. brought out A Study in

OUR AT-HOMES 77

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 nine- teenth and twentieth centuries, and England owes an in- calculable 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 votes.

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 manu- script in the drawer; in other words, that he always found

78 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 con- stituency or two, he probably kept up the legal fiction of his being at the Bar for some time longer.

A.S 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 exer- cising 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 re- ceptions, except where politeness demanded that he should

OUR AT-HOMES 79

exert himself. But this is a common trait in the more con- siderable 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 con- firmed 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 un- fortunately 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 slip- shod 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

80 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 publica- tion 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 achieve- ments 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

OUR AT-HOMES 81

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.

82

THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 83

And, if they were quite harmless worshippers, without any ulterior designs, I occasionally induced Jerome to be wor- shipped 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 Aihenceum, 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;

84 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 conse- quently in enjoyment of world-wide fame. He had estab- lished 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

THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 85

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 kind- ness 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

86 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 appear- ance. 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,

THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 87

during the years we spent together in such cramped confine- ment, 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-enthu- siast. 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 threaten- ing, 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 threat- ened 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 indig- nation 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

88 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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 un- erring 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

THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 89

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 mono-

90 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

tonous, 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

THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 91

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 immor- talised 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 encyclopaedia of know- ledge, 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,

92 TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE

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