CHAPTER XXI

MY NOVELIST FRIENDS: PART I

BY far the greater number of my literary friends have been novelists. I have counted no less than two hundred and seventy male novelists who have visited us at Addison Mansions, and I have no doubt that I have forgotten enough to bring the number up to three hundred.

Of Walter Besant, a short sturdy man, with a bushy brown beard and blue eyes behind spectacles, which could be very merry or very indignant, I have spoken elsewhere. Besant, who pronounced his name with the accent on the second syllable (it is said because people always pronounced the famous theosophist’s name with the accent on the first syllable, though the recollection of its Byzantine etymology may also have guided him), was very outspoken. He could not abide the famous Annie Besant; he considered that she was a millstone about his brother’s neck, and made no bones over saying so. That brother was a master at Cheltenham College when I first went there. But I do not remember if I ever saw Mrs. Besant there, though we saw the masters’ wives as a body in the College Chapel every Sunday morning. Another matter on which he was outspoken was his repulsion for George Eliot—not her works, but her personality. He once said to me that her head reminded him of a horse’s, and on another occasion said that no woman’s face had ever struck him as more sensual.

His own personality was splendid. He was so genial, though such a fighter; he was so splendidly full of energy, so quick to catch on to ideas, so masterful and wide-grasping in carrying them out; so absolutely friendly; such a good enemy, and so astonishingly warm-hearted. I never had a greater personal feeling of respect and affection for any great man than for Besant.

All the world knows how much he effected for authors, and how much he sacrificed for them. He made as large an income as any great novelist of his time, but he might have made much more and lived another twenty years, if he had not slaved for his brother authors.

George Meredith, who succeeded him as head of the literary craft, was never at Addison Mansions, though his daughter came twice with Lady Palmer. I only had the privilege of knowing him towards the end of his life, when his time and his health were far too precious to be spent on going to at-homes, though he was very kind about having younger authors introduced to him at the parties which Lady Palmer gave in his honour when he was staying with her. Once seen, George Meredith could never be forgotten. You were delighted to find that a man who had created a literature within a literature, the writer who by common acclaim is the greatest of all English novelists, was so rare and impressive in his appearance and speech. His face was singularly beautiful in its old age, surmounted by a fleece of snow-white hair, and illuminated by bright blue eyes, absolutely clear. He was, of course, an excellent talker, and both his voice and his way of using it were strikingly emphatic. There are few old men whom I have met to whom I should so unhesitatingly apply the word majestic. The whole face, with its well-trimmed beard and unexaggerated features, reminded me of the bearded Zeus in the group of the three gods on the frieze of the Parthenon.

He was very gracious also to young authors, though it must have been a severe tax on him to have so many worshippers introduced to him. For George Meredith was not a man like Oliver Wendell Holmes. A lady whom I introduced to him began, “It must bore you terribly, Dr. Holmes, to have everybody who is introduced to you telling you how they admire your books.”

“On the contrary, madame,” he said gallantly, “I can never get enough of it. I am the vainest man alive.”

On the same occasion Holmes told me that he had been unable to do any writing (except his short _Hundred Days in Europe_) for years, because his entire time was taken up with answering complimentary letters.

Hardy did come to 32 Addison Mansions, Hardy who has received the Order of Merit, and is proposed for next year’s Nobel prize for literature, as the head of the literary craft, one of the great masters of English fiction. I am very proud to have known Thomas Hardy; he is not only so great, but so silent and reserved, that it is not easy to know him. I have met him often, but seldom seen him talking, except very quietly to an intimate friend. He has generally been on the edge of a crowd, observing—we have the fruits of that profound observation in his novels. That slight figure, that melancholy face, with the watchful eyes, was always a cynosure, for Hardy has been the object of unbounded admiration for many years. I remember his being the bright particular star about whom the late Lady Portsmouth was always talking at her house-parties at Eggesford, where I stayed, as far back as 1885.

I have a letter from him which is one of my most treasured literary possessions. He wrote it to me to explain his point in introducing the passage about the slaughtered pig after I had reviewed _Jude, the Obscure_, at considerable length and with minute criticism in the _Queen_. I have alluded to his almost equal eminence as a poet in another chapter.

It is natural to couple Hall Caine with Thomas Hardy, for both of them were brought up as architects, though they turned to literature, and reached the topmost rung.

Hall Caine has been an intimate friend of mine for many years. Our friendship began before he was a novelist, in the days when he was a critic of the _Athenæum_ and the _Academy_, and an editor of poetry. His sending me _The Sonnets of Three Centuries_ in the year in which he lost his housemate, the poet and artist, Dante Rossetti, was the beginning of our friendship. He began publishing novels in 1885, and two years later leapt into the front rank of novelists with his magnificent _Deemster_.

After my return from America I began to see more and more of him. He became a director of the Authors’ Club, of which I was Honorary Secretary, and one of the chief speakers at the New Vagabonds Club.

In 1894 he reached, with _The Manxman_, the height of fame, at which he has since continued. I prophesied its enormous success in a long review of it, which I wrote for the _Queen_, which came out simultaneously with the publication of the book. We were in Rome together at the time that he was writing the _Eternal City_, and in Egypt together while he was writing _The White Prophet_.

No one could be in the presence of Hall Caine for five minutes without knowing that he was in the presence of a remarkable man. His resemblance to Shakespeare is extraordinary, not only in the dome-like expanse of his forehead and the Elizabethan slope of his beard, but in the burning eyes and the shape of the eyecups. He looks the genius that he is.

Hall Caine has always had the merit of being highly approachable and affectionate, and if his conversation is apt to centre round the work he is doing, it is always most interesting and pregnant.

At Rome, for instance, where I very often had lunch with him in his flat at Trinità del Monte, overlooking the city, and went for walks with him, he was very full of the Vatican, where he constantly went to see certain cardinals, who were most indiscreet in their confidences.

He was intimate with the Italian Government, too. I met various members of the Cabinet at his table, and one of them, Ferraris, then Postmaster-General, as well as editor of the _Antologia Nuova_, has done me many acts of friendship since.

Jerome’s neighbour in those days, Joseph Hatton (than whom there could have been no more striking contrast to him), was one of his and my dearest friends. There were few men so dear to their friends as Joe Hatton. He had an enormous circle of them in literature, and on the stage, and so won their hearts with his geniality and loyalty that they forgot how eminent he was, and treated him as a brother. But Joe Hatton, in addition to the vast amount of work he did as editor and critic, wrote some of the best novels of his day. I can see him now as he so often came to our house, a rather small man with a brown beard, a lift of the chin, a ready smile, and such very bright sympathetic brown eyes. He used to bring his pretty little daughter with him before she was grown up. How proud he was of her first successes on the stage, and the fairy-book she wrote! He had a house with a very nice garden in St. John’s Wood, where he gave parties at which one met all the leading actors and actresses of the day. They could always spare time for a reception at Hatton’s, as actors always stopped for a word with him at the Garrick Club on Saturday nights.

Of Doyle, Kipling and Barrie, Anthony Hope and Frankfort Moore, I have spoken in another chapter.

Stanley Weyman was such a rare visitor to London that he was not often at our house. But I have corresponded with him a good deal. I knew when I made _A Gentleman of France_ my book of the week in _To-day_, and hailed the author as an historical novelist of the first rank, on what a solid basis his work rested, for we were at Oxford at the same time, and he took his First in History almost in the same term as I took mine. He is a very fair man, with an eyeglass, much more like a soldier than an author.

Poor Crockett, a big tall man, with a fair beard, the type of the Saxons who fought against the Conqueror at Hastings, was not very often in London, but when he was there, he was a conspicuous figure at our at-homes. We had many tastes in common, including Italy. Crockett asked my advice when the question arose of his giving up the ministry. He was at that time Free Church minister of Penicuik, a little place in Midlothian, with a salary, as far as I remember, of a hundred or two a year, but as an author was making a thousand or two a year, and able to earn a good deal more if he could save the time which he had to devote to his clerical work. His congregation were aghast at the idea of losing their beloved minister just as he had sprung into Anglo-Saxon fame, and, with Scottish casuistry, represented to him that it would be wrong for him to neglect the work of the Lord for any worldly object. Crockett thought, and I agreed with him, and decided him, that he would be more certain of doing good if he allowed some man to whom the minister’s stipend was necessary to be minister of Penicuik, while he did his teaching and his preaching with his pen.

F. W. Robinson’s short, thick-set figure, and heavy moustache, were as conspicuous. It is strange how soon poor Robinson has been forgotten. His work was popular with readers, and treated with respect by critics, and he was one of the bigwigs at literary clubs and receptions, but with his death all memory of him seemed to pass away, except among his old friends.

G. A. Henty, on the other hand, though he has been dead for years now, seems to stand before us still, with his great beard, his great pipe, his great body, and his breezy personality. Henty loved clubs and literary gatherings. The Savage was his particular stronghold, when he had said good-bye to war-correspondenting in distant lands. He was the typical chairman there, with his Father Christmas beard, and his volumes of smoke, and his bluff personality. He had been as popular among his fellow-correspondents. Was it not Henty who lost his only pair of boots, when the British army marched into some capital (I think it was King Theodore’s in Abyssinia), and took his place in the triumph in carpet slippers, riding on a pony?

Henty’s work as a war-correspondent gave him the copy for those wonderful books which made him the boys’ Dumas. He was a great personality, and, as I saw, on the only two occasions when I ran across him in a crisis, a born ruler of men.

He often came across from his house on Clapham Common to our at-homes, and looked like a strayed Viking, or a master-mariner, among the other authors and authoresses. Sailing was his hobby.

Speaking of Abyssinia, it is natural to me to mention Prince Alamayu—Ali, as we used to call him. He was sent to Cheltenham College, so that he might live in the house of Jex-Blake, then Principal of Cheltenham, and afterwards head master of Rugby and Dean of Wells. Of all the head masters of his time, Jex-Blake had the most considerable reputation as a courtier and a man of the world. Alamayu was brought to England after the capture of Magdala, and came to Cheltenham in 1872, when he was eleven years old. He was just a royal savage when he came to Cheltenham; if he was hot, he took his coat off and threw it on the ground, and left it. He had no tutor to go about with him; he just mixed with the boys in the ordinary way. And at first he had the cruelties of his bringing-up; he once, for instance, pushed a small boy into the water to see the splash he would make. But he soon got cured of this, for Jex-Blake wisely left him to fight his own battles, and though a sense of chivalry made the boys very indulgent to the poor little orphaned black, they soon let him know that bullying was not to be one of his privileges, though almost anything else was treated as a joke.

When Jex-Blake went to Rugby, Alamayu went with him, and thence, when he was eighteen, he went to Sandhurst to qualify for the British Army. That was fatal. He was his own master there, with no one to make him take care of his health, or restrain himself in taking spirits. He soon contracted some deadly disease—pneumonia, I think—and died. Queen Victoria showed her regret by having him buried in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor.

I knew him very well, because I was in the head form when he came to the school, and was often at Jex-Blake’s house, and was asked by “Jex” to keep an eye on him. He was a nice little boy, with a very affectionate disposition, and not at all stupid. It was his misfortune to lose at a critical moment of his life the firm and tactful hand which had disciplined and protected him for seven years.

Green Chartreuse is almost as deadly as aeroplanes. I knew a man, a very well-known man, who went mad because he drank thirty-six green Chartreuses in one day.

It is natural to mention George Manville Fenn in the same breath as Henty. He was another old friend of mine, and of all the men I have known, retained his youth the longest. Fenn’s hair remained golden and undiminished in its vigour, and his figure remained slim and upright till he was nearly seventy. He lived at the beautiful old red-brick house on the river at Isleworth, which stands at the gates of the Duke of Northumberland’s park, and is known as Syon Lodge. There he turned out those wonderful boys’ romances of his in a steady stream. Like Henty, I met him constantly at the Savage and Vagabond Clubs, and at my own flat. He was very fond of meeting his fellow-craftsmen. His son, Fred Fenn, used to come too. At that time he was sub-editor of the _Graphic_, and I think he afterwards became first editor of the _Golden Penny_. In any case, he freed himself from the fetters of journalism by writing _Amasis_, that admirable Egyptian comic opera, in which Ruth Vincent won all hearts. He not only had the cleverness to write it, but formed the company which put it on, and stood an action at law about it triumphantly—a rare instance of grit.

Richard Jefferies never came to see me at Addison Mansions; he was dead, I think, before we went there. But I have a long and pathetic letter which he wrote to me some time before he died, setting forth the cross-fire of diseases from which he was suffering, and asking me if I thought the climate of the exquisite Blue Mountains of New South Wales would afford him any relief. One can picture how the genius of Jefferies would have blossomed forth amid that matchless gorge scenery (where you hear the bell-birds calling) and amid the natural history curiosities of a new land.

Grant Allen, who lived in a charming house in the Haslemere district, was a constant visitor to our flat. We had visited his people in Canada before we met him. His father was the principal inhabitant at Kingston, Ontario, the dear old-fashioned town which contains Canada’s Military Academy. The old Allen had a fine house with a delightful garden, right on Lake Ontario. Grant Allen was a remarkable-looking man, with his long red beard, and keen, hawk-like face. He always reminded me of the gaunt, red-bearded faces one sees on knights and lovers in the great French tapestries of the fifteenth century. And he had the same spare figure as they have, and the same habit of arching his back. He was a remarkable man, who, famous as he was, never got his due as a writer. He was never an F.R.S., though half the Fellows of the Royal Society were his inferiors in scientific attainments, and he never reached eminence as a novelist, though he wrote some amazingly clever and powerful books. He had a great contempt for actresses on account of their want of conversation. He said they could not talk about anything but the stage. I once came away with him from a party at H. D. Traill’s, where he had taken down to supper a woman who was beyond dispute the greatest actress of her time. He was complaining loudly about it; he said that he thought she was the most stupid woman he had ever met.

But he was happy in his friendships. His brother-in-law, Franklin Richards, father of the publisher, Grant Richards, was recognised as one of the soundest philosophers of his day at Oxford—I say this though his lectures were entirely thrown away on me. I had to attend them because he was a don of my College, but Philosophy was Chinese to me.

One of Grant Allen’s greatest friends in the last part of his life was Richard le Gallienne, who went to live in that house in the wood beyond Haslemere to be near him. Le Gallienne had a sort of summer-house in the wood, a long way from the house, in which he wrote those charming poems, secure from interruption. I often went to see him in the days when he lived in the King’s Farm at Brentford, which was not a very farm-like house. But I only once went to see him at Haslemere, and on that occasion I found him at the summer-house, dressed as carefully as if he had been in town, but with an eye on country effects. He had on a black velvet coat and waistcoat, and a rich black evening tie, but immaculate white flannel trousers; and I must admit that even in this costume he managed to look appropriate.

When we were living at Cherwell Lodge, Oxford, that delightful marine villa across the Cherwell from the Gothic part of Magdalen, Grant Allen brought his best friend to see us, Edward Clodd, the secretary of the London Joint Stock Bank, who, in the intervals of a business career, had written a number of great books, beginning with _The Childhood of the World_.

W. D. Howells only came once to see us at Addison Mansions, but I saw more of him when I was living in New York, when he used to come in at tea-time to that little hall-room we had for a sitting-room in that boarding-house in West Forty-second Street. It gave me pleasure to see him under my own roof, because I remembered how eagerly I bought and read his novels when I was at Oxford, and David Douglas was bringing out _A Chance Acquaintance_, _Their Wedding Journey_, and so on, in the dainty little shilling paper volumes which were the fortunate precursors of the modern sevenpenny. Howells was rather a stout, bull-necked man, very capable-looking, and in those days had a thick mop of grey hair. In after years we knew his Italian books, written while he was a Consul in Italy, almost by heart. They are photographic in their fidelity.

George W. Cable was another American who came to the flat but once. Like Howells, he seldom honoured England with a visit. His books, and John Burroughs’, too, I first knew in the little David Douglas Library, and I well remember reading his _Old Creole Days_ all night, because I was so fascinated with it.

I was staying at the house of my sister’s father-in-law, the Court Lodge at Yalding, at the time, and the month was June—I had just come down from Oxford. At some impossibly early hour—midnight seemed only just to have slipped past—the dawn streamed in, and made me blow my candle out, and the birds began their comment on the peach garden. Five-and-thirty or forty years have passed since then, but the delight of Cable’s poetical touch remains still in my memory. Cable always rather reminded me of Hardy, though being a Southerner from New Orleans he is darker skinned. When he wrote _Old Creole Days_, he was the idol of the South, but later, when he took up the colour question on the other side, he would have been torn to pieces by the mob of New Orleans if they had got hold of him, so he took up his residence in Massachusetts.

I always slept in the haunted room in that house, a very old house, with a kitchen and vaulted cellars going back to the time of Edward III. It contained a very large cupboard, between the old-fashioned chimney-piece and the window, in which somebody is supposed to have been bludgeoned to death, the corpse afterwards being dragged across the floor, and when the window had been thrown up with a bang, flung on the flags below. At one particular season of the year, the noises which indicate this procedure plainly have been heard by various people. I have forgotten when it happened, but it must have been a very long time ago, for everything to have been done so openly.

I have slept in that room repeatedly, alone, and never heard the noises or thought about it being haunted, but I should not like to sleep in the kitchen, for it was only separated by a moth-eaten sort of door from the wickedest-looking cellars I ever remember, which, unless something has been done to them since then, lose themselves in pitch-dark spaces.

Another author, whose delightful essays on nature used to be brought out in those dear little volumes of David Douglas’s, and whom I read with even more enthusiasm in those days, was John Burroughs, whom I visited in his home at West Park, on a broad reach of the Hudson. He told me that he wrote most of those essays when he was a clerk in the Treasury at Washington, where his duties were to sit opposite the safes, and see that no improper person had access to them. I have forgotten what safes, but I suppose they were those which contained the United States gold reserve. He used to project the scenes in _Wake Robin_ and _Pepacton_ on the blank doors of the safes in his mind, as the cinema projects dissolving views on the lecturer’s sheet. The sedentariness of this pursuit gave him acute indigestion, and he was advised that nothing but manual labour and a vegetable diet would cure it. When I was with him, I think he lived entirely on asparagus, lentils and onions. He could eat about three pounds of asparagus at a sitting, as I suppose other people could if they weren’t going to have any meat or pudding. He told me one thing which filled my soul with joy. As manual labour was part of the cure, he started a vineyard, in a position chosen with great care, on a steep sloping bank of the Hudson facing due south. His grapes ripened here three or four weeks before any one else’s, with the result that he got a hundred pounds a ton for them instead of four pounds. Bravo, literature!

Henry James, in virtue of his long sojourn among us, belongs to England almost as much as he does to America. He still lives in London in the winter, but in the warm part of the year he retires to a delightful Georgian house on the crest of the hill at Rye, one of the most old-world places in England. Henry James’s house and garden are exactly what you would choose for him—the most refined and dignified and subtle novelist in the language. The house is called “Lamb’s House,” but it has nothing to do with Charles Lamb, though it is exactly the house which he would have chosen, when fortune came to him. All the garden is adorable, but especially the Dutch court behind the house, and the kitchen-garden, surrounded by the most ancient cottages in Rye, with roofs red and chimneys bewitched. Between the garden and the kitchen-garden is a red-brick Georgian pavilion, facing the top of the street, as the Tempietto faces the long sloping lane which leads up to the Sculpture Gallery of the Vatican, and it is not less beautiful than the Tempietto.

Everything is appropriate; the novelist even bought the cottages at the back of the kitchen-garden, to prevent them being rebuilt, and thus ensured the permanence of a perfect setting. He has a singularly noble head and face, the type one would like to imagine for a Cicero.

Richard Whiteing, who leapt into fame at a comparatively late age, with _No. 5, John Street_, after having been one of the most important newspaper writers in England for many years, is another man whom you would pick out in any crowd for his splendid head.

Sir Gilbert Parker, who was a regular habitué of our at-homes before he went into Parliament and became such an overworked man, was in those days a slim, black-bearded Colonial, with noticeable blue eyes. He was born in Canada, the son of a British officer stationed out there, and knew Australia as well as Canada—in fact, I met him because we had both been in Australia. He was at that time a busy journalist and in the first flush of his success as a novelist, and no one could have deserved it better, for his novels had the historical fidelity and felicity of Francis Parkman, in addition to their graceful and romantic style. In spite of the solid work he has done in politics, he will be remembered as an author more than as a politician, though now we clap him on the back for the splendid spade-work he does for the Conservative Party. As a writer he fires the imagination, like the bugles in his famous story.

Henniker-Heaton, on the other hand, will be remembered not for his biographical dictionary of Australians, which was the precursor of _Who’s Who_, but for his achievement in politics—a postal reform as far reaching as that of Rowland Hill, the father of the post-office. I prophesied his success in print nearly thirty years ago. He is a shining example of what a man who has a great ideal can do by singleness of vision; nothing could shake him from his ideal of a universal penny post; ridicule was poured on it; the big battalions were brought up against it; but he pursued it doggedly. He showed infinite patience, infinite good-nature, infinite tact. He brought his personal influence to bear on politicians of both sides. He went to conferences all over the world; he entertained delegates from all parts of the world; he collected and classified every species of statistic; he accumulated irresistible facts until he had a penny postage, not universal, because it does not bridge the twenty miles between Kent and France,[8] but universal for the possessions of the Anglo-Saxon nations, for the United States came into the agreement as well as the Empire. Nor did his activities stop at the post-office; for he has achieved reforms of almost equal magnitude in telegraphic charges. Now he is taking a well-deserved rest, and I cannot help thinking that he would take it very usefully if he had a flat in Berlin, and saw the Kaiser every day. A monarch of the force and intelligence of the Kaiser could not help seeing the irresistibleness of the argument that a letter ought to be taken from London to Hamburg and Berlin for the same price as it is taken to the heart of British Borneo, and if he once happened to notice it, he would brush away the cobwebs which impede it.

Footnote 8:

Now happily soon to be accomplished.

To Alfred Austin I was never attracted, except by his enthusiasm for gardens and Italy. He was made Laureate because he was a leader writer, not because he was a poet, and possessed neither the ability nor the affability for the post. Had he gone on writing about blackthorn and blackbirds, he would have left a greater name as a poet, and would not have been made the victim of the famous story which is told of a Scottish law lord, who, meeting him at a country house, said, “Well, Mr. Austin, are you still writing ‘pomes’?”

“One must do something to keep the wolf from the door,” replied the poet, with official modesty.

“And is that what you use those ‘pomes’ for?” asked the man of law, giving one visions of a small man with a big moustache belabouring a wolf on the door-step with a roll of manuscript.

I know of only one more malicious story, which relates to the bestowal of a bishopric. While it was in the balance, Lord Salisbury was suffering from one of his fits of insomnia, and, as his custom was, sent for an M.P. son, whose speeches were the only thing which could make him sleep. His son bothered him all night to bestow the see—it was the premier bishopric—on its present holder. At last Lord Salisbury lost patience. “Oh! give it to him, and leave me. I prefer insomnia.”

It was _à propos_ of insomnia that Lord Salisbury made his finest retort in the House of Lords. A new Liberal peer, to whom the leader was particularly acid, because, having been a whip in the House of Commons, he was rather conscious of his importance, was, in spite of the fact that his income arose chiefly from a brewery, advocating Local Option, because he said that the number of public-houses was a temptation to drink. “Of course,” said Lord Salisbury, “I do not enjoy the same opportunities as the noble Lord does for knowing the effect of the number of public-houses upon the amount which is drunk, but I don’t see his line of argument, because, though I live in a house with forty bedrooms, I never feel the slightest inclination to sleep.”

The Irish Party, too, came in for his acid wit. Who has forgotten his comment on the member of the Irish Party who libelled him, and went to America, when he lost the action, to escape paying the costs? Lord Salisbury only shrugged his shoulders, and said that escaping was the _forte_ of the Irish, adding, “Some prefer the fire-escape, and some the water-escape.”

Harold Frederic owed some of his vogue as a novelist in this country to Mr. Gladstone, who had an immense enthusiasm for his great novel, _In the Valley_. Frederic, a big burly man, with a burly moustache, was the ablest American journalist in London, till the advent of Isaac Nelson Ford for the _Tribune_, and Harry Chamberlain for the _Sun_ and the Laffan Agency. Frederic represented the _New York Times_. He was a man coarse in his speech, and rather coarse in his fibre, and full of prejudices, but he had the gift of political prophecy, and, like Balaam, his utterances were dictated by the voice within him, and not by what he had come to say. His letters to his paper were splendid journalism. He used often to come to Addison Mansions, because he lived just round the corner in the old house on Brook Green. He might have been with us now, if he had not been a Christian Scientist. He was an enormous consumer of alcohol, though I never knew him the worse for liquor, and when he was taken with his last illness, the professor of Christian Science, who was called in by a woman who had great influence over him, was not able to insist upon banishing spirits as a regular practitioner would have done. The result was that he took stimulants (which were worse than poison to him) whenever he felt bad, and ruined his chance of recovery.

Rider Haggard I have spoken of elsewhere.

Frank Hopkinson Smith is a man I should have liked to see more of at Addison Mansions; he was one of the men I liked best among my friends in American literary clubs. He was an engineer by profession, who had carried out many important contracts. Writing, though he was one of the best writers in America, was an afterthought with him. Like Du Maurier, that delightful man and delightful writer, he stumbled upon his most brilliant gift.

Du Maurier became a novelist because he had become such a master of situation and polished dialogue in his pictures and their titles. Frank Hopkinson Smith grew to be a novelist out of the anecdotes which he told so brilliantly at story-tellers’ nights at the Century Club. He had a fund of stories about the Italian labour which he employed in contracts. He always used to declare that engaging Italian labour was as simple as Kodaking, which had for its motto, “You press a button—we do the rest.” He said that no matter how many men he needed, all he had to do was to ring up an Italian boss the night before, and tell him that he wanted so many men for a certain kind of job. Then they would be at any station in the city at seven o’clock the next morning, with the proper tools. He added that he always put a clause into the contract that if any of them murdered each other, the number was to be made up at once.

“That is their weakness,” he said, “but they only practice it on each other. It’s the only kind of labour I would undertake a contract with. They’re better than the Irish, anyway.”

“I don’t agree with you,” said Vermont, the sculptor; “they’re so cruel.”

“Cruel!” retorted Hopkinson Smith. “What price this? An Irishman named Larkin hired an organ-monkey from an old Dago for a dollar a day. The monkey was often badly bruised when he came back at night, and looked frightened to death when Larkin came to fetch him in the morning. So one Saint’s day when the old Dago had a holiday, he determined to follow them up and watch them. The Irishman drove along till he came to the bridge over the railway at the bottom of Twelfth Avenue, where the coal carts all pass on their way up from the depot. Then he took the monkey out of the cart, and tied him to a post ten or twenty yards away from the bridge, but in full sight of it. Then he drove his horse and cart to a convenient place a little way off, and awaited events.

“Presently the coal carts began to stream across the bridge, and the monkey in terror ran up to the top of the post. The whole way across every carter took cock-shots at it with pieces of coal. Occasionally one hit it, and then the monkey screamed with rage and pain. As soon as there was a cart load of coal lying at the foot of the post, Larkin brought up his horse and cart and shovelled them in, first putting the monkey where he could not be seen, to show that the sport was over for the present. When he was loaded up, he hitched the monkey to the cart again, and drove into New York to the retailer who bought the coal from him.

“But the next morning, when he came for the monkey, he found not only that monkey, but every monkey in the organ-grinders’ quarter, gone, and when he got down to the bridge, the place was looking like a zoo.”

Suddenly the popular anecdote-teller wrote _Colonel Carter of Cartersville_, one of the best American novels of its generation.

William de Morgan, the other novelist who achieved his first book success so late in life, was never at Addison Mansions, but I had the honour of meeting him at a much more interesting place—the little _atelier_, somewhere in the Kilburn district, where he made the famous lustre tiles by which he was known before he took to literature. George Joy, the artist who painted the famous picture of Gordon meeting his death at Khartum, took me to see De Morgan, knowing how enthusiastic I was over the famous Mazzara Vase, and the other pieces preserved in Sicily of the old Sicilian Arab lustre ware.

Of Bret Harte and Maarten Maartens I have spoken elsewhere.

Egerton Castle, whose _Young April_ is the most delightful book of the romantic school, in which Anthony Hope, Henry Harland, and a few others have written with such charm, was a rare visitor. Any one could see that he had been a soldier. But the militariness of his active, upright figure is no doubt partly due to the fact that he is one of the finest fencers in the country. He has been a representative of England in the international contests. He is likewise, as his books show, a notable connoisseur, and he has ample means to indulge his tastes, not only from the wide popularity of the novels which he writes, mostly in collaboration with his wife, but from his having owned one of the chief daily newspapers, the _Liverpool Mercury_, which is now amalgamated with the _Liverpool Post_. The Agnes Castle who collaborates with him is, of course, his wife, not his sister.

Percy White was a constant visitor. He has been my intimate friend since he published his first novel, _Mr. Bailey Martin_, that merciless dissection of suburban snobbery. I used to write for him when he edited _Public Opinion_, and that was a long time ago. He was one of the handsomest men in literature, with his merry, boyish face, dark eyes, and bright golden hair. C. B. Fry, the greatest all-round athlete in the records of sport, is his nephew, and, though darker, reminds me very much of Percy White as he was. Florence White, who paints portraits, is his sister.

Percy White’s books have never met with the circulation they deserve. If he had been born an American, they might have had the largest circulation in the world. He is just the writer whose circulation would have spread like wildfire, if he had lived in America, and written of American social life as he has written of ours. No one could have expressed the good and the bad in the American character with the same light touch and ruthless penetration. His is just the pen to depict the iron courage and the insight of genius which, with or without chicanery, lead to the amassing of millions—the selfishness, made endurable by grit and personal charm, of the American woman—the brilliant wit and pathetic lack of humour in Americans as a nation—the business side of sport.

Once upon a time I introduced him to a man whom I will call the Vidler, who ran a newspaper, and never paid anybody anything except by advertisements in that paper. He made periodical business journeys, collecting advertisements for his paper—my heart bled for the advertisers—and used to engage an editor to look after his paper while he was away. He chose Percy White for the honour on this occasion, and asked me if I could bring them together. I gave White his message, warning him that he would only be paid in promises, and was surprised to hear that he was willing to discuss the matter with the Vidler. The Vidler gave him a wonderful dinner at the Carlton, probably not paid for yet, and then took him back to his chambers to discuss the matter in hand. White sat up with him nearly all night, gravely taking down notes of his projects for the paper, but reserved his decision, which resulted in a negative. I met him the next day, and asked him how he had got on, and when I heard how late he had been kept, apologised for all the trouble to which I had put him, knowing how little chance there was of his getting any pecuniary advantage out of it.

“Don’t apologise, my dear Douglas,” he said; “I got a whole book out of him. He’s the finest study I ever met in my life.”

As Percy White did not take up the appointment, I set myself to find a man who was willing to take the post, and would not suffer for it. I found a man who was as sharp a diamond as the Vidler himself. He was duly engaged, and I always wondered which did the other in the eye. I have my suspicions, because when I met the Vidler a year or two afterwards at Monte Carlo, he did not allude to the finish.

George Gissing did not come often, though we had the great link of both knowing and loving the Ionian Sea.

If Gissing had not died, and there was no reason why he should have died if he had taken ordinary care of himself—he would only be fifty-six if he were alive now—he would have had a reputation like Barrie or Bernard Shaw by this time, for even during his lifetime people were just beginning to wake up to the extraordinary qualities of his writing. I am not comparing him to either of those two; I only make the comparison because everything pointed to his having popularity. Every now and then some excellent writer achieves popularity. No one knows why. His excellence is against his having a wide public, and it is very seldom possible to tell why one is taken and another left. As the Bible proverb says, “Two women shall be grinding at the mill; one shall be taken and the other left.”

Gissing had a genius for imparting romance to the sordid.

W. J. Locke often came in those days. He was secretary to the Royal Institute of British Architects, and combined with it the post of literary adviser to John Lane, the publisher—a collaboration which resulted in the publication of many notable books, of which none were more eventually successful than his own, except, I suppose, H. G. Wells’s, and I think that it was he who advised Lane to bring out the works of Wells, and Harland’s _The Cardinal’s Snuff-box_, and Kenneth Grahame’s _Golden Age_.

Locke was always one of the most distinguished-looking persons in a room, with his tall, slight figure, very well dressed, and his hair—golden, with a natural wave in it—beautifully valeted. His theatrical successes did not begin till much later, nor had he developed his powers as a public speaker. He published admirable and solidly successful books before he took the reading world by storm with _The Beloved Vagabond_, and his novels won the respect of his fellow-craftsmen from the first. In those days he lived in a modest flat at Chelsea, and was a pretty regular attendant at literary clubs and receptions.

Coulson Kernahan was one of the most prominent figures in the set, because he had both a brilliant personality, and was producing a remarkable series of books, beginning with _A Dead Man’s Diary_. Coulson is one of our oldest and most intimate literary friends. I met him again directly I came back from America. He was at that time literary adviser to Ward, Lock & Co.

When James Bowden split from his partners, Ward, Lock & Co., and started a publishing business of his own, Kernahan went with him, and continued his profoundly imaginative series with books about Heaven—long, thin volumes, longer and thinner even than the John Oliver Hobbes booklets, which Fisher Unwin was bringing out. They sold by the hundred thousand. They were the literary topic of the day, till Norma Lorimer in despair said, “Kernahan is growing too chummy with his Creator.”

In another line his imagination produced _Captain Shannon_, a mysterious and thrilling adventure book. But he was soon to find his _métier_, and leave thrilling fiction to Mrs. Kernahan. He became a lecturer, for which his brilliant personality, his eloquence, his gift of humour, and his conviction, had cut him out. He went to live in the country; he lectured; he became an officer in the Territorials. And now he has turned them all to account in the service of the Empire, to which he is so passionately devoted, by going round as a caravan-lecturer to make the youth of the country awake to the national peril from unpreparedness.

At a National Defence meeting, last summer, at which Kernahan was the chief speaker, with Rudyard Kipling in the chair, Kernahan told his audience of his last good-bye word with Captain Robert Scott.

The hero of the South Pole asked him what he was doing, and whether he had any new book on the stocks.

“No,” was the reply; “I am neglecting my scribbling to work for Lord Roberts and National Defence.”

“Good!” said Scott, with unwonted warmth and enthusiasm. “Good! I’m with you there!”

Speaking of Lord Roberts, the grand old soldier is very appreciative of the work Kernahan is doing in this direction. The veteran Field Marshal not only wrote a eulogistic introduction to the Territorial author’s book on soldiering, but when the latter has been addressing great audiences on National Defence, has on several occasions sent telegrams to the chairman, asking that his thanks be conveyed to the speaker, and warmly commending Kernahan’s patriotism and the work he is doing for his country. Kernahan is almost as widely known for his friendships as for his writings. He has known intimately many distinguished men and women—authors, actors, soldiers, artists, explorers and politicians. On the walls of his library are many signed and inscribed portraits of celebrities, as well as pictures inscribed to him by the painters. On his shelves are numerous books dedicated or inscribed to him by the writers. One takes up a volume of Swinburne and finds written in it, “To Coulson Kernahan, whom Swinburne dearly loved, and who as dearly loved him. From his old and affectionate friend, Theodore Watts-Dunton.”

Another bears the inscription, “With the kind regards of Arthur James Balfour.” Yet another, “To Coulson Kernahan, from his old chum, Jerome K. Jerome.”

He is famous too, or I should say infamous, as “infamous” is the only word to apply to it, for the illegibility of his handwriting. His friend Harry de Windt, brother of the Ranee of Sarawak, tells a good story of this. It is to the effect that Kernahan once received a letter which ran as follows—

“Dear Kernahan,—Many thanks for your letter. The parts we could make out are splendid. We are using the rest as a railway pass. No one can read enough of it to say that it isn’t a railway pass, and as life is too short for any one to find out what it really says, the collector has in the end to let us through.”

Of Horace Annesley Vachell, one of those whom the gods love, well born, more than usually prepossessing in appearance and disposition, a sportsman, and one of the best novelists of the day, I saw a good deal when he first came back from California, and brought me a letter of introduction, asking me to help him to meet the literary people in London. I was immensely attracted to him, as attracted to him as I was to his books, for which he had a good foundation in the variety of life which he had led. He started with Harrow and the Rifle Brigade, and had been many things, from a rancher in California to an artist, before he found his vocation in literature. _The Hill_, his famous Harrow school novel, increased his popularity wonderfully, but he was an admirable writer from the first, both in story and style. I have heard it stated that on one of his great books his publishers made the sporting suggestion that he should receive no advance on account of royalties, but a thirty per cent. royalty from the beginning, and that he accepted the offer.

When I wrote to Vachell to ask him what had made him turn his attention to writing, he wrote back—

“MY DEAR SLADEN,

“Bad times in California turned me to scribbling, although I had written some short stories for the magazines. I am rather proud of the fact that I burnt my first very long novel on the advice of a friend, who said that he could find a publisher for it, and yet urged cremation instead!”

Vachell told me that one of the triumphs in his career which he valued most was the winning of the half-mile race for Sandhurst against Woolwich, which gave them the victory in the Sports that year, 1881. Later he was asked to run against Myers, the famous American, but wisely refused to do so.

He told me an amusing story of the hundred-pound prize which _T. P.’s Weekly_ offered for the person who could discover most mistakes, typographical and so forth, in one of his novels, which he had been unable to revise himself. A parson wrote to him most indignantly, saying that there were no mistakes at all in the book, and that he was surprised that Vachell should lend himself to a cheap dodge for advertising a novel. He hinted that Vachell had obtained money from him—he had bought a six-shilling copy—under false pretences! Vachell in return sent him one announcement of the result of the competition. The man who won the prize discovered nearly _four hundred_ errors! This sounds quite incredible, but it is true, as a most lengthy document in his possession proves. The knowledge of his works displayed by the winner fairly confounded him.

He had some strange personal experiences in California. A big cowboy rushed out of a saloon in the West, one day, followed by another cowboy brandishing a big six-shooter. The first cowboy took refuge behind the only cover in sight, a telegraph-post. He dodged round this, while the second cowboy emptied his pistol into the post. All six bullets were in the post! Afterwards, when he was chaffed by me for missing his man, he retorted, “Boys, the son of a gun shrunk!” Both cowboys were full of sheep-herder’s delight.

And he told me another amusing Californian anecdote.

“I met a pretty girl whom I had not seen for months. She informed me that she was engaged to be married, and when I asked for details, she replied, ‘He is not very rich in this world’s goods, but in morals, Mr. Vachell, he’s a millionaire.’ She married her moral millionaire, and about a year later I met her again. She was alone. Remembering her phrase, I said, ‘How is your moral millionaire?’ She replied instantly, ‘He’s bust!’ I heard later that she had just divorced him.”

And a short while ago he sent me one of the best newspaper bulls I remember, which appeared in the _Western Daily Press_ review of _Loot_, on Dec. 19, 1913.

“Mr. Vachell, who is perhaps most widely known as the author of one of the best modern stories of school life, _The Hell_, in which Harrow is described,” etc.

Another of those whom the gods love is A. E. W. Mason, who met with success very early. Mason was a Dulwich boy, and a Trinity, Oxford, man, and was on the stage before he took to literature, to his permanent advantage, for it gave him that practical acquaintance with stage-craft which hastened his success as a dramatist.

From the moment that he published _The Courtship of Morrice Buckler_ it was recognised that Mason was a romance-writer with the charm of an Anthony Hope. And his reputation has gone on increasing. _The Four Feathers_ was a book of genius. Unlike most authors, Mason has remained a bachelor, consoling himself with yacht-sailing among the Hebrides when he grows tired of social distractions and politics. For some years he represented the important constituency of Coventry in Parliament as a Liberal. And he was one of the few Liberals who dared to be independent, which is probably the reason why he gave up politics. He was one of the most boyish-looking members in the House, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, fresh-coloured and slim. He has changed very little since he left Trinity. He is a charming public speaker, and his boyishness is one of his great charms in speaking. My friendship with Mason began on our first visit to Salcombe, the little Devonshire town on the wooded inlet which lies behind the Bolt Head. He had sailed into the inlet in a small yacht, and came to see me as an old Trinity man. Mason is one of the men who count.

Max Pemberton has had many successes in his half-century of life. Educated at Merchant Taylors, and Caius, Cambridge, he nearly got into the Cambridge boat. He started his literary life by editing one of the chief boys’ papers and writing boys’ books—his _Iron Pirate_ had a prodigious vogue among future men. From this he soon passed to editing _Cassell’s Magazine_, which occupied ten of his fifty years, and writing novels, with their scenes laid in romantic and half-civilised countries—what one might call “Balkan” novels. In these he has hardly any rivals, because to an instinct for construction, and skill in dialogue and description, he adds unusual ingenuity in contriving plots and selecting subjects, and accuracy in handling facts. Pemberton’s novels present most vivid pictures of the far countries in which their scenes are laid.

I met him first at the Savage Club; we were sitting next to each other at dinner, and he introduced himself as the editor of _Cassell’s Magazine_, and asked if I felt disposed to write a series of Japanese stories for him—the stories which were afterwards worked up to _When We were Lovers in Japan_ (_Playing the Game_). I was very much flattered by his proposal, and from that day to this we have remained intimate friends. This series was followed by the series of Sicilian stories which were worked up into my novel, _Sicilian Lovers_. In both series I was to give as much local colour as possible.

After this we began to go to each other’s houses, and I well remember the first time that we went to Pemberton’s, before he had moved to Fitzjohn’s Avenue. It was a Sunday evening, and he had asked us to meet poor Fletcher Robinson, who would have been one of the greatest journalists of the day if he had survived. He was born to it, for he was a nephew of old Sir John Robinson, who managed the _Daily News_ for many years. He was, at the time of his death, assistant-editor of a great daily, and he was one of the persons whose death was attributed to incurring the displeasure of the celebrated Egyptian mummy in the British Museum. He was a huge, fair man, with curly sandy hair; he was beloved of society, and a poet as well as an editor.

The popular account of his death is that, not believing in the malignant powers of the celebrated mummy-case in the British Museum, he determined to make a slashing attack on the belief in the columns of the _Daily Express_, and went to the museum, and sent his photographer there, to collect the materials for that purpose: that he was then, although in the most perfect health, struck down mysteriously by some malady of which he died. The ancient Egyptians certainly seem to have been able to protect the tombs and coffins and bodies of their dead by active spiritual powers, which I respect. But in any case, the adage of chivalry, _de mortuis nil nisi bonum_, ought to prevent people from behaving unkindly to anything that concerns the dead.

We continued to see a good deal of the Pembertons till Max took Troston Hall in Suffolk because he found that London gaieties interfered with his work. But a few years later he felt drawn back to London, and took chambers in St. James’s, though he kept Troston on, and it was in those chambers that he wrote one of his great successes, the revue _Hallo Ragtime_—the best and most popular revue ever written.

Unlike so many of our leading authors, Max Pemberton, who is a distinguished-looking man—one would take him for a diplomat—is as interesting to meet as his books are to read. He shines in society.

A mutual friend of us both is Robert Leighton. Mrs. Leighton I have mentioned above. Leighton’s gifts are of a serious editorial order, though he has written boys’ books of wide popularity. The Leightons are among the most popular figures at literary gatherings—they are so lovable that they have an immense circle of friends. Robert Leighton is recognised as having no superior as a writer on dogs. They have left their house in St. John’s Wood now and gone to live in an old-world house at Lowestoft.

When Arthur Morrison, who was already known as a brilliant journalist, one of Henley’s most incisive young men, made such a success with his _Tales of Mean Streets_ and his _Martin Hewitt_ stories, one imagined that he would pour out a stream of books like other writers who have “boomed.” But he has been exceedingly moderate. We had a bond of sympathy which used to bring him to our house. We had a collection of very unusual Japanese curios of the humble order, and he had one of the finest collections of Japanese prints in the country. We never saw as much of him as we wished because he lived in Essex, and when the success of his books enabled him to do his work where he liked, he grew more and more reluctant to come to London.

Another man of that generation to whom we grew much attached was Eden Phillpotts. In those days he was struggling with ill-health and over-work. London did not agree with him, and he had to write his novels in the intervals of journalism. Though he told me that they seldom went out elsewhere, he and his pretty wife were often at 32 Addison Mansions. They lived at Bedford Park in those days. While he was assistant editor of _Black and White_—that paper edited by so many of our friends—it seemed to be a different one every year, during its brief existence—he began to feel the strain a good deal, and finally determined to burn his ships and go back to his native Devon—he was a grandnephew of the famous Bishop of Exeter—and depend entirely upon his novels.

The experiment was a complete success. His health improved in his native air, and directly he could give the proper leisure to writing his novels, he sprang into almost the first rank—alike for the extraordinary power of his stories, for his intimate knowledge of Devonshire and Devonian character, and for the individuality of his style. Phillpotts never deteriorates. He is one of those men who carry the stamp of intelligence and _simpatica_ on their faces. Now he is following in the footsteps of the other great novelists and getting a footing on the stage, where he will be well represented this year.

Robert Hichens is a very handsome and intellectual-looking man—if his portrait had been executed by the steel engravers of a hundred years ago it would have borne a striking resemblance to the portraits of Lord Byron. He has regular, clear-cut, refined features, of a very similar type. I have not run across Hichens as often as might be expected in Sicily and Egypt, though we have both been in these countries, especially the former, so much. But I did meet him one evening at Luxor, in the midst of one of those superb Egyptian sunsets. He was on his _dahabea_, which he had brought over from its usual anchorage near the bar on the Thebes side. It was a luxurious and very Oriental-looking _dahabea_. The saloon, separated from the cabins by heavy Persian curtains, would have made a far more picturesque scene for _Bella-Donna_ on the stage than the steam-_dahabea_ which appeared in the actual play. He was living on one of the old sailing-_dahabeas_, which are the most delightful to occupy, though people generally do not sail up from Cairo nowadays, but have them towed up to Luxor before they join them, so as to have all their time in the picturesque, temple-studded reach between Luxor and Assuan.

That meeting is riveted in my mind, because Hichens, in thanking me for a long and enthusiastic review which I had written over my signature in the _Queen_ about his _Garden of Allah_, said that though I had spoken in such terms of the book, and brought out all its good points, he had a conviction that in my heart of hearts I felt a sort of repulsion for it, which was true. I thought the heroine’s falling in love with such a man at first, and her sending him back to his cell as a monk afterwards, equally repellent; while I could not help doing homage to the book, and revelling in its Eastern setting.

Some time after my return to England I was nearly brought into a very close relation with Hichens.

One morning Sir George Alexander came post-haste to call on me. I was not in. So at lunch a telegram as long as a letter arrived—would I see him in the theatre after such an act that night? The royal box was at my disposal if I cared to see the play. I telephoned my acceptance to Helmsley—a good actor, but far too good a manager to be spared to take a part—and wondered what was up. When I got to the theatre, I discovered what I was wanted for. Hichens’s _Bella-Donna_ was coming on. All the preparations were ready for his inspection, and Hichens could not be found by telegram in Europe or Africa. Alexander asked if I would superintend the staging. The fee fixed was a liberal one. But I was in a quandary. I knew that neither J. Bernard Fagan, who had dramatised the story, nor Alexander, had ever been in Egypt, and that the play and its mounting, however well done, must be full of slips, to which I ought to object. About Alexander I was not disturbed, for I knew that his only idea would be to get the thing right. But with Fagan it might be different. He would doubtless have been studying the subject fiercely, and I should have to reckon with his _amour propre_, and probably lose a friend—who had been at Trinity, Oxford, like myself—that delightful Sheridan-like person and personality, so I gave rather a modified consent. I suggested that fresh efforts should be made to find Hichens, but promised that if finally he could not be found I would take his place in correcting the Egyptianities of the piece.

Fortunately, at the last minute Hichens did turn up, and I was saved from the responsibility. I was very grateful, for when the first night came, and with it stalls for the performance, there were many little points to which I should have had to take exception, though they made no difference to the enjoyment of such of the public as had not been in Egypt. Still, I am sure that Fagan would have felt sore about my correcting his scenes like a schoolboy’s Latin verses. As it happened, Alexander and Mrs. Patrick Campbell were so magnificent in their parts, and the piece was so splendidly produced, that the public did not bother itself about small details, but flocked to see the play. It could hardly have been a greater success than it was for any improvements that I could have suggested. I never saw Hichens at his residence in Taormina—we never happened to be in the Sicilian Eden at the same moment.