CHAPTER IX
THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES
AMONG the crowd of humorists who honoured Addison Mansions with their presence it is natural to mention first the famous author of _Three Men in a Boat_. There is no author for whom I feel a greater affection, though, as he once said, “You and I are sure to have a diametrically opposite opinion upon almost any point which may turn up, because we were born the poles apart.” I was at the time his chief and only book critic on _To-day_. I believe I was called the literary editor, though all the patronage of the position was exercised by himself. It is patronage which constitutes an editor; the sub-editor can perform the duties. I believe also that it was I who suggested the name _To-day_. At any rate, it was I who helped him to formulate the paper, and for the first year or so it was my duty to do all the book reviews in it, and my duty to receive all the ladies who came to see Jerome about the paper. Of course, they mostly came in search of work or fame: those who wished to be written about were very numerous, and expected to succeed by making what is called the “Glad Eye” at him. He was _terribly_ afraid of the “Glad Eye”; it made him turn hot and cold in swift succession. He was unable to say “no” to a siren, and equally unable to say “yes” when he meant “no.” He was also an intensely domesticated man, entirely devoted to his family, and without the smallest desire for a flirtation. So it fell to my lot to pick up the “Glad Eye,” a very agreeable job, when you have not the power to give yourself away. I had no patronage to bestow upon them. The only thing I could do for them was to write about them if they were sufficiently interesting, which frequently happened in that age of personal journalism. And, if they were quite harmless worshippers, without any ulterior designs, I occasionally induced Jerome to be worshipped for a minute or two. I made many lady friends at this period, especially from the Stage.
Jerome hardly ever answered letters. He used to say, “If you keep a letter for a month, it generally answers itself.” But he did not keep them. He tore them up directly he had glanced at them. He knew at one glance—probably at the signature—if he wanted to read a letter, and, if he did not, he tore it up without reading it. He had a horror of accumulating papers. He sometimes asked me to answer letters, as he had faith in me as a soother. It was never part of my duties to write “yes,” I had to gild “no.” He prefered to word his own acceptances, so as not to say more than he meant. He did not even want me to read the manuscripts. He prefered to read them himself. It did not take him long, because if he did not come across something worth publishing by the second page, he did not read any further. “You must grab your reader at the beginning,” he used to say.
He was a very pleasant man to write reviews for. He believed in generous criticisms. “You can have a page or two pages for your book of the week,” he said, “according to its importance”—he decided that when I chose my book—“but you can only have a page for the rest of the books that come in, so you can’t afford to waste your space on bad books. If you can’t say anything good about them, you obviously can’t afford them any space. You can praise things up as much as you like if you can be convincing about it: don’t be afraid to let yourself go about the book of the week: I am sick of the _Spectator_ and the _Athenæum_, you never get a full-blooded review out of them, unless it’s to damn something. The more knowledge you can show about the subject of the book you are praising, the better. But above all things, recommend it in the paper just as you would recommend it to a friend: use the same language as you would to a friend: be natural. And, whatever you do, beware of the Club Man. When I read an article or a story, I always ask myself what a Club Man would think of it; and if I know that he would like it, I turn it down: his opinions are dead opposite to the Public’s.”
The likes and dislikes of the Club Man was one of the matters in which my opinion was dead opposite to Jerome’s. The Club Man and the Man in the Street between them fill the ranks of the average patriotic citizen. It is they who pull the nation through in a crisis, and the City of London leads them. At ordinary times their voice is drowned by the noise of the Radical Party, and the giant Middle-class, to whom all appeals for national safety have to be addressed—the blind Samson sitting chained in the house of his enemies—cannot hear their warnings.
In any case, it is so hard for a book to be popular at clubs, where people go to be interested and amused, that if it is popular there, it will be popular anywhere, except with the Nonconformist Conscience.
Jerome had written _Three Men in a Boat_ and _The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow_ before I met him, and was consequently in enjoyment of world-wide fame. He had established in the _Idler_ a monthly which had no equal then as a magazine of fiction, and had a sale of a hundred thousand copies a month, when he started _To-day_. He started it not only to amuse, but to educate Public Opinion, when it had secured attention by its brightness, for he had very strong views which he was eager to preach.
He was more of a Conservative than a Radical in those days; he had not despaired of the Conservatives, then, though he was baggy about beastly little nationalities. Suffragism had not then begun its March of Unreason, and we were all in favour of giving woman a vote. But I am bound to register the conviction that, if Suffragism had been a burning question then, the paper would have been full of it, and enjoying a circulation of a million, or whatever number the adult women suffragists run to. I can picture Jerome, a man famous for his hospitalities, being reduced to a hunger-strike by the ardour with which he would have espoused the idea. He was always tilting against some abuse, always asking for litigation. And he got it—or I suppose he would be editing a newspaper now, instead of delighting both hemispheres with his plays. I say advisedly “both hemispheres,” because he has a considerable public as a dramatist in America.
One of the first books on which I let myself go, and wrote an absolute appreciation, was that magnificent historical novel of Stanley Weyman’s, _A Gentleman of France_. Jerome was delighted with the way I handled it.
Seeing Jerome so much in the office led to our being a good deal at each other’s houses. He was living at that time in one of the nice old villas in St. John’s Wood. The chief thing I remember about it was its cattiness and its scrupulous tidiness. When you stay with him in the country, you cannot leave your stick and hat in the hall, handy for running out, as you might at Sandringham or Chatsworth. They are at once arrested, and are very lucky if they get off with a warning from the magistrate.
One of my diametrical divergencies from Jerome is in the love of cats. I cannot respect a cat. To me it is a beast of prey, a sort of middle-class tiger, operating in a small way, but at heart a murderer of the Asiatic jungle. Jerome loves them, and makes dogs of them: he used to fill the _Idler_ with Louis Wain’s human deductions from cats. He has a telephone to their brains. I agree with Lord Roberts, who knows by instinct when there is a cat in the room, though it may be wholly concealed, and cannot enjoy himself until it is removed.
Like most real humorists whom I have known, and I have known many from Mark Twain and Bill Nye downwards, Jerome is not a “funny man” in ordinary life. He is, on the contrary, except when he is on his legs, before an audience, or taking his pen in his hand, apt to be a very serious man, though his conversation is always illuminated by flashes of wit. He is much more apt to air strong opinions about serious questions. The Jerome you see in _Paul Kelvin_ and _The Third Floor Back_ is the real Jerome. He is the loyalest friend and most tender-hearted man imaginable. His kindness and hospitality are unbounded. You cannot stay with Jerome in his own house without being inspired by the deepest respect and affection for him. He is an ideal husband and father, a friend of the struggling, a just and generous master. Like Conan Doyle, though he has never shone in first-class cricket or golf, Jerome is very athletic in his tastes. In spite of his glasses, he is a fine tennis-player and croquet-player; he is a fine skater also, and devoted to the river and horses. It was partly a horse accident in which he and Norma Lorimer were involved, and both showed extraordinary courage, which made me feel for him as I do.
He is essentially an open-air man, whose thoughts are all outside directly he has got through his statutory amount of work with his secretary.
But though the serious man weighs down the humorist in Jerome, you would not guess it from his personal appearance. When he rises to speak, his bright eye, the smile playing round his mouth, his cool confident bearing, the very way in which he arranges his hair, which has not yet a particle of grey about it, is more suggestive of the humorist, the man who is accustomed to making hundreds roar with laughter at his speeches, and scores of thousands with the flashes of his pen.
Jerome has no love for London, though he has a town residence and enjoys Bohemian society, and is very popular in it. For many years he has lived on the Upper Thames, and he is in the habit of going to Switzerland for the skating.
I asked Carl Hentschel, who was one of the three who went on the trip immortalised in _Three Men in a Boat_, to tell me about it. He said—
“It is rather interesting to look back to the days of _Three Men in a Boat._ Jerome at that time was in a solicitor’s office in Cecil Street, where the Hotel Cecil now stands, George Wingrave was a junior clerk in a bank in the City, and I was working in a top studio in Windmill Street, close to where the Lyric Theatre now stands, having to look after a lot of Communists, who had had to leave Paris. Our one recreation was week-ending on the river. It was roughing it in a manner which would hardly appeal to us now. Jerome and Wingrave used to live in Tavistock Place, now pulled down, and that was our starting-point to Waterloo and thence to the river. It says much for our general harmony that, during the years we spent together in such cramped confinement, we never fell out, metaphorically or literally. It was Jerome’s unique style which enabled him to bring out the many and various points in our trip. It was a spell of bad weather that broke up our parties. A steady downpour for three days would dampen even the hardiest river-enthusiast. One incident, which, I believe, was never recorded, but would have made invaluable copy in Jerome’s hands, happened on one of our last trips. We were on our way up the river, and late in the afternoon, as the sky looked threatening, we agreed to pull up and have our frugal meal, which generally consisted of a leg of Welsh mutton, bought at the famous house in the Strand, now pulled down, with salad. We started preparing our meal on the bank, when the threatened storm burst. We hastily put up our canvas over the boat, and bundled all the food into it anyhow. It got pitch dark, and we were compelled to find the lamp and tried to light it. After a while we found the lamp, but it would not light; luckily we found two candle ends, and by their feeble light began our meal. We had hardly begun our meal when I said after the first mouthful of salad, ‘What’s wrong with the salad?’ George also thought it was queer, but Jerome thought there was nothing wrong. Jerome always did have a peculiar taste. Anyhow, he was the only one who continued. It was not till the next day that we discovered that owing to our carelessness of using two medicine bottles of similar shape, one containing vinegar and the other Colza oil, the lamp and the salad were both a bit off.”
When I asked Jerome what first gave him the idea of writing he said—
“I always wanted to be a writer. It seemed to me an easy and dignified way of earning a living. I found it difficult; I found it exposes you to a vast amount of abuse. Sometimes, after writing a book or play which seemed to me quite harmless, I have been staggered at the fury of indignation it seems to have excited among my critics. If I had been Galileo, attacking the solar science of the sixteenth century, I could not have been assaulted by the high priests of journalism with more anger and contempt. But the work itself has always remained delightful to me. I think it was Zangwill who said to me once, ‘A writer, to succeed, has to be not only an artist, but a shopkeeper’—and of the two, the shopkeeper is the more necessary. I am not sure who said that last sentence; it may have been myself.
“You write your book or play while talking to the morning stars. It seems to you beautiful—wonderful. You thank whatever gods there be for having made you a writer. The book or the play finished, the artist takes his departure, to dream of fresh triumphs. The shopkeeper—possibly a married shopkeeper with a family—comes into the study, finds the manuscript upon the desk. Then follows the selling, bargaining, advertising. It is a pretty hateful business, even with the help of agents. The book or the play you thought so fine, you thought that every one was bound to like it. Your publisher, your manager, is doubtful. You have a feeling that they are accepting it out of sheer charity—possibly they knew your father, or have heard of your early struggles—and yield to an unbusinesslike sentiment of generosity. It appears, and anything from a hundred to two hundred and fifty experienced and capable journalists rush at it to tear it to pieces. It is marvellous—their unerring instinct. There was one sentence where the grammar was doubtful—you meant to reconsider it, but overlooked it; it appears quoted in every notice; nothing else in the book appears to have attracted the least attention. At nine-tenths of your play the audience may have laughed; there was one scene which did not go well; it is the only scene the critic has any use for. Their real feeling seems to be that the writer is the enemy of the public; the duty of all concerned is to kill him. If he escapes alive, that counts to him.
“I remember the first night of a play by my friend, Henry Arthur Jones. There had been some opposition; it was quite evident that the gallery were only waiting for him to appear to ‘boo’ him, as if he had been a criminal on the way to the scaffold. I was standing by the gallery exit, and the people were coming out. Said one earnest student to another, as they passed me, ‘Why didn’t the little——come out and take his punishment like a man?’ ‘Cowardly, I call it,’ answered the other. They knew what was in store for him in the next morning’s papers; they knew that a year’s work, perhaps two, had been wasted. I suppose that it would be asking too much to suggest that they might also have imagined the heartache and the disappointment. The playwright who does not succeed in keeping every one of a thousand individuals, of different tastes and views and temperaments, interested and amused for every single minute of two hours, must not be allowed any mercy.
“Yet for a settled income of ten thousand a year, and no worry, no abuse, and no insults, I do not think any of us would exchange our job. I suppose we are all born gamblers—it is worth risking the half-dozen failures for the one success.
“And the work itself, as I said—one only wishes one’s readers enjoyed it half as much; circulations would be fabulous. _Three Men in a Boat_ I started as a guide to the Thames. It occurred to us—George, Charles and myself—when we were pulling up and down, how interesting and improving it would be to know something about the history of the famous places through which we passed; a little botany might also be thrown in. I thought that other men in boats might also like information on this subject, and would willingly pay for it. So I read up Dugdale, and a vast number of local guides, together with a little poetry and some memoirs. I really knew quite a lot about the Thames by the time I had done, and with a pile of notes in front of me, I started. I think I had a vague idea of making it a modern ‘Sandford and Merton.’ I thought George would ask questions, and Harry intersperse philosophical remarks. But George and Harry would not; I could not see them sitting there and doing it. So gradually they came to have their own way, and the book as a guide to the Thames is, I suppose, the least satisfactory work on the market.
“I suppose, like Mrs. Gummidge, I felt it more. It must have been about five years before I succeeded in getting anything of mine accepted. The regularity with which the complimenting editor returned my manuscripts grew monotonous, grew heart-breaking. But, after all, it was _The Times_ newspaper which accepted my first contribution. Some correspondence on the subject of the nude in Art made me angry, and I wrote a letter intended to be ironic. It attracted quite a lot of comment, and, fired by this success, I wrote to _The Times_ on other topics. The _Saturday Review_ praised their irony and humour, and Frank Harris invited me a little later to contribute. But we differed, I think, upon the subject of women.
“_The Passing of the Third Floor Back_ I wrote for David Warfield, the American actor, and discussed the matter with David Belasco in the train, when I was on a lecturing tour in America. I read him and Warfield the play at the Belasco Theatre in New York. It was after the performance was over, and we three had the great empty theatre to ourselves. Then we went to Lamb’s Club, and Warfield, I think, had macaroni, and Belasco and I had kidneys and lager beer, and discussed arrangements. Firstly Anderson was to draw sketches of the characters, and it was while he was doing this in his studio at Folkestone that Forbes-Robertson dropped in for a chat. Percy Anderson talked to him about the play, and Forbes-Robertson took up the manuscript and read it. Belasco was a little nervous about the play. I did not like the idea of forcing it upon him, and other small difficulties had arisen, so, having heard from Percy Anderson that he had talked to Forbes-Robertson about the play, I thought I would go and see him. He, too, was nervous about it, but said that he felt that he must risk it. We produced it at Harrogate, for quite a nice, respectable audience, and they took it throughout as a farce. One or two critics came down from London, and commiserated with Forbes-Robertson on his luck.
“It was the miners of Blackpool who put heart into us; they understood the thing, and were enthusiastic. Then we produced it at St. James’, and, with one or two exceptions, it was besieged with a chorus of condemnation—deplorable, contemptible, absurd, were a few of the adjectives employed, and Forbes-Robertson hastened on the rehearsals for another play. A few days later, King Edward VII, passing through London on his way to Scotland, devoted his one night in London to seeing the piece. He said it was not the sort of thing he expected from Jerome, but he liked it. And about the same time strange people began to come, who did not know what the St. James’ Theatre was, and did not quite know what to do when they got there, and they liked it, too.”
I first met Zangwill—Israel Zangwill—at one of the old pothouse dinners of the Vagabond Club. He had not long given up editing _Ariel_, and was already known for his biting wit as a speaker. When the lean, arrestive figure of the Jewish ex-schoolmaster craned over an assemblage, there was always an attentive silence. He had not yet immortalised himself by those inimitable etchings of Jewish life, in which the graver and the acid were employed so ruthlessly—the Tragedies and Comedies of the Ghetto. But he was in sympathies already a novelist, for on that particular occasion he was upbraiding Robert Buchanan for forsaking literature for the drama. His own eyes have wandered to the stage since then. The curly black hair—an orator’s hair—the sallow complexion of the South, the pallor of the student, the eagle nose, the assertive smile, the confident paradox—how well I can recall them! He was a young man in those days.
Jerome was always a thorough believer in Zangwill. And he showed his judgment by making him his first serialist in _To-day_. He paid him five hundred pounds for the serial rights of the first of those remarkable novels of Jewish life, as much, I believe, as he paid for the serial rights of _Ebb-Tide_, the book R. L. Stevenson wrote in collaboration with his step-son, Lloyd Osbourne.
Zangwill was a very constant and much-appreciated visitor at our at-homes, as was that encyclopædia of knowledge, his brother Louis. And their sisters sometimes came with them. They all lived together in those days at Kilburn. I remember going to a party at their house to meet Sir Frederick Cowen, the musician, which had a most comical finish. There were six of us left, and only one hansom between us. Three got inside, two sat on the splash-board, and Heinemann spread himself on the roof in front of the man, and kept filling the skylight with his face, like a Japanese Oni. Phil May sat in the middle inside. He was very excited, and we were trying to keep him quiet, so as not to draw the attention of the police to the fact that the hansom was carrying more than it was licensed for. When we got to the Edgware Road, he began to yell for the police, and a stalwart constable signalled to the cabby to heave to. He advanced to the side of the cab. “What is the trouble, sir?” he asked, preparing to rescue the artist from the literary men among whom he had fallen.
Phil gave one of his knowing smiles, and said, “I want to go to Piccadilly Circus, and they are trying to take me home.”
But to return to our Zangwills. Louis Zangwill had not yet shown his strength as a writer, but any one who had tested it, marvelled at the width of his knowledge. In those days Israel Zangwill favoured Slapton Sands for his summer holidays. We met him there. He used to wander about in a black coat and white duck trousers, gathering inspiration. The sunshine and scenery inspired him to be a perfectly delightful companion. We once met him yet further afield—at Venice. Norma Lorimer and I came upon him and Bernard Sickert, the artist, in the Casa Remer, an adorable old palace, with an open courtyard and a processional stair, on the Grand Canal. It was quite unspoiled by repairs in those days. It contained a curio-dealer by the water’s edge, and at the head of the staircase was a large room in which a very beautiful young Jewish girl sat sewing for some sweating tailor. We had landed and made an archæological excursion up the staircase, when we discovered her. She arose, and with proper presence of mind, and with a total absence of _mauvaise haute_, conducted us to the curio shop kept by papa. There we met Zangwill and Sickert. We were all of us tempted by some very beautiful mediæval iron gates, which would have been a glory in any nobleman’s park, but as we none of us had a park, and even the six hundred francs he wanted for them, added to the cost of transport to England, would have been a considerable sum for any of us, we denied ourselves, and Zangwill gave a dinner in honour of the event, at a tiny restaurant on a screwy little canal behind the Piazza of San Marco. The food and the wine were excellent, and we sat on till the moon was high, and Venice, on those small old canals, looked like a theatrical representation of itself for _The Merchant of Venice_. Then we wandered back to the Piazza to Florian’s, the café whose proud boast it is that it has never closed its doors day or night for four hundred years. If you are sleeping in Venice on a summer night—and, in spite of its noise and its mosquitoes, is there anything more adorable than Venice on a summer night?—you will find that the habit is not confined to Florian’s.
At Florian’s we sat down to coffee. We could not get a seat outside; the band was playing “La Bohême,” and the municipality was throwing red and green limelight on San Marco in honour of a royal birthday. There was no waiter either, inside, and Sickert amused himself with drawing an almost life-sized head of Zangwill with a piece of charcoal which he had in his pocket, on the marble table. It was a bit of a caricature, but far the best likeness I ever saw of the great Jewish novelist. When the waiter did come, without waiting to take our orders, he went to fetch a damp cloth to clean the table. _Ars longa, vita brevis_—I would not let him touch it, and told the proprietor what a prize he had as I went out. I have often wondered what the fate of that table was. Zangwill, the apostle of Zionism, has always been intensely proud of his nationality, so he has never minded cutting jokes about it. He brought the house down at a Vagabond Christmas dinner, where he was taking the chair, by remarking in his opening sentence, “It’s a funny thing to ask a Jew to do.” This was the dinner at which he introduced to English audiences the story which had lately appeared in a German comic paper. A carpenter was in a crowd waiting to see the Emperor pass. He had an excellent position, but he was very uneasy because he had promised to meet a conceited young brother-in-law, and the brother-in-law had not turned up.
“Will the Jackanapes never come!” cried the carpenter. A policeman promptly arrested him.
“I was speaking of my brother-in-law,” gasped the poor carpenter.
“You said ‘Jackanapes’; you must have meant the Emperor,” said the policeman.
When I asked Zangwill what made him turn to book-writing, he said—
“I never ‘turned’ to book-writing, because I never thought of doing anything else, and I have said all I have to say on that subject in the chapter of _My First Book_, published by Chatto & Windus, a book which should be a sufficient mine to you for all your friends. I was told at the Grosvenor Library that the middle-class Jews boycotted all my books—in revenge for the Jewish ones—but the Jewish ‘intellectuals’ have always rallied round me, for I remember that the Maccabeans gave me a dinner to celebrate the birth of _Children of the Ghetto_—a dinner, by the way, at which Tree announced, amid cheers, that he had commissioned me to adapt _Uriel Acosta_. I never took the commission seriously, but I gave him a one-act play, _Six Persons_, which had a long run at the Haymarket (giving Irene Vanbrugh her first good part), and still survives, twenty years after, having been played quite recently at the Coliseum and the Palladium by Margaret Halstan as well as by Miss Helen Mar somewhere else.
“An anecdote I remember telling at this dinner was: A man said to me, ‘My son has had typhoid, but he enjoyed himself reading your book.’
“‘Where did he get it from?’ I asked, because it was the old three-volume days, and I knew he could not have bought it.
“Thinking of the typhoid, he replied, ‘From the drains.’
“This theory of the origin of my book is, I believe, favoured in high ecclesiastical quarters.”
I knew Mark Twain very well. He and Bret Harte were, I suppose, the two most famous American authors who ever came to our at-homes at No. 32. Bret Harte, though he was such a typically American writer, spent all the latter part of his life in England. I first met him at Rudolph Lehmann’s hospitable dinner-table. No one could fail to be struck with Bret Harte. He was so alert, so handsome, and though his plumes—his hair was thick and sleek to the day he died—were of an exquisite snow-white, he had a healthy, fresh-coloured face, and a slender, youthful figure, always dressed like a well-off young man. He used to come to our house with the Vaudeveldes. Madame Vaudevelde, herself an authoress, and the daughter of a famous ambassador, kept a suite of rooms in her great house in Lancaster Gate for his use, whenever he was in London.
“Don’t you ever go back to California nowadays?” I asked him once.
“No. I dare say that if I saw the new California, with all its go-aheadness and modernness, I should lose the old California that I knew, whereas now it has never changed for me. I can picture everything just as it was when I left it.”
He retained his vogue to the end. Any magazine would pay him at the rate of a couple of pounds for every hundred words. They used to say that the Bank of England would accept his manuscripts as banknotes. He never failed to charm, whether he was telling some story at a dinner-party, or talking to some undistinguished woman, young and beautiful or old and plain, who had asked to be introduced to him as a celebrity—and a celebrity Francis Bret Harte certainly was, for he founded a whole school in English literature.
Mark Twain was also very kind, but when I was in New York he was living at Hartford, the capital of the adjoining State of Connecticut. He described himself to me as a “wooden nutmeg,” in allusion to a former thriving industry of the State. I met him when he was engaged to entertain a ladies’ school at New York. That did not cost nothing. The idea seemed to me very American, that an author at the height of his fame, as Mark Twain then was—for he was fifty-five years old, and it was twenty-one years since he leapt into fame with _The Jumping Frog_, should accept an engagement to “give a talk” in a private house. The school received good value for its fee. He not only gave them an hour’s entrancing address, but he stayed on till quite a late train, having anybody and everybody introduced to him, and being cordial to them all. Nor was his cordiality short-lived. I had done nothing then, except publish a few books of verse. Yet we became and remained till the day of his death, twenty years later, familiar friends. This was before I received that memorable invitation from Oliver Wendell Holmes to be his guest at the monthly meeting of the Saturday Club at Boston, where Mark Twain proved that the English were mentioned in the Bible.[2] He told story after story in that address, but I don’t remember any of them. They were all good in tendency, that was one thing; there was no making fun of anything that was good or noble or sincere with him. He was, like our own humorist, Jerome, intensely serious in his soul, and he was projecting a big book about the Bible—as a publisher, for he was already in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., who were producing the huge _Library of American Literature_, of which E. C. Stedman was joint editor.
Footnote 2:
When challenged to prove it, he read out the text, “For the meek shall inherit the earth.”
In order to make all great men authors, it had the idea to give the most famous sayings of historical Americans, where they had not written anything. In this way Abraham Lincoln became an author. I expect that it was that encyclopædia which years afterwards brought the house of Charles L. Webster & Co. down, though it was sold “on subscription,” with thousands of copies ordered before the book was begun. Mark Twain found himself responsible for debts of fifty thousand pounds. I met him soon afterwards, and began condoling with him on his losses as a publisher. He replied, “I am no publisher, nor ever was. I only put the money up for them to play with.”
To make up his losses to him, a leading American firm—I seem to recollect that it was the Harpers, but I may be wrong—made him a gigantic “syndicate” proposal for all rights, which brought in large sums of money.
When I met him then, he had just come off ship-board. I asked him how he was.
“Better’n I ever was in my life. I’ve gotten a new lease.”
“How?”
“Well, it’s a long story. You must know that when I am staying in a hotel, or on board ship, I can’t go to bed while there is one person left to talk to in the bar. This habit, I don’t know what ways exactly, gave me a cough that I couldn’t get rid of, till an old Auntie from Georgia told me to try drops of rum on sugar. It took away my cough, and I liked it fine. I went on taking it after my cough had gone; it grew to be a habit, and before I knew where I was my digestion had gone. I tried all the doctors I could hear of, at home, and in England, and in Germany, including Austria, to cure that. But it was not possible; all they could do for me was to find out what I liked best to eat or drink, and tell me to do without it. I was wasting to a shadow, so I sent for my own doctor, and said to him, ‘Doctor, I can’t stand this any longer; life isn’t worth living, what there is going to be of it, and that doesn’t seem to be much. I am going to commit suicide.’ ‘Maybe it is the best thing to do,’ he said. ‘Do you know what is the most painless form of death?’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I am going to eat and drink everything I like best for a week, and according to all of you, it ought to take much less time than that.’
“So I did, and I assure you, Mr. Sladen, before the week was up, I was as well as ever I had been in my life.”
He could reel off this sort of story by the hour, with that slow drawl of his, which was so mightily effective.
Frank Stockton, the kindliest and most delicate humorist of America, I knew very well, and any one who knew him intimately could not help regarding him with affection. He was a little man with a club foot, and rather a timid expression, which he made use of when telling his immortal after-dinner stories; he emphasised the timidity until the point came, and his face was wreathed with smiles. Stockton was a great gardener. His garden out at the Holt near the Convent station in New Jersey was large and beautiful, and the product of his own imagination. It seemed incredible that a garden like that should have no kind of a hedge or fence, but he explained that in America to put a fence round your garden is considered an insult to the democracy, who by no means always deserve to be trusted in this matter.
Stockton was so good-natured that his wife used to say he would never have done any work at all if he had not had a dragon at his side to guard him. She was not much like a dragon. But on one point she was inexorable; when the time had really come for him to set about fulfilling a contract, she insisted on his going into New York to a hotel with as blank an outlook as possible, so that he should not waste time over gardening; he could not trust himself within sight of a green leaf.
Stockton was a wood-engraver to start with, and was thirty-eight years old before he abandoned it to do editorial work. A year later he became assistant-editor of _St. Nicholas_, the American children’s magazine. It was not until 1880 that he gave it up to devote himself entirely to book-writing. Up till 1879, the year in which he published _Rudder Grange_, he only wrote children’s books, and he did not publish his next book for grown-ups, _The Lady or the Tiger_, for another five years.
Another old member of the Vagabond Club, always a very intimate friend of Jerome’s, who was often at our at-homes was Pett Ridge, the humorist whose knowledge of the East End of London is sometimes compared to Dickens’s; indeed, many consider him unequalled as a writer of Cockney humour and an interpreter of Cockney humanity. Unlike Jerome, Pett Ridge, who also has very earnest convictions and has done a world of good, has the humorist in him always near the surface. He used to be a constant speaker at literary clubs, and most popular for his never-failing fund of humour, which was heightened by his demure delivery.
With Pett Ridge, it is natural to mention W. W. Jacobs, our best sea humorist. People used to be surprised that the small, slight, youthful-looking man, who was known to them as a clerk in the General Post Office, should be the delineator of those inimitable captains and bo’suns and hands before the mast of little sailing-craft which ply round our coasts. He was one of the men to whom the members of the general public, who strayed to literary dinners, were most anxious to be introduced. Their admiration made him shy, and it was a long time before he grew accustomed to do himself justice in his public speeches, for he is one of our most genuine humorists. He owed his unique knowledge of coasting-craft and their navigators to the fact that his father owned a wharf on the Thames, and that it was one of his chief pleasures as a boy to go down to the wharf and make friends with the sea-dogs. After his marriage he went to live in Essex, but, as a bachelor living in London, he was a very familiar figure at our at-homes. To those who frequented literary gatherings in the days of which I am speaking, it is natural to think of H. G. Wells with Pett Ridge and Jacobs, but Wells was much less seen at these gatherings, because he lived out of town at Worcester Park. He was already married when I made his acquaintance, and had got through the first marvellous part of his career, on which he draws for so many of his books.
He and his wife found a great difficulty in coming to our at-homes, because they were such very late-at-night affairs. Once they stayed with us, sleeping at the Temperance Hotel round the corner, called rather inappropriately the “London and Scottish,” because all our bedrooms were turned into sitting-rooms for the night. The pair of them looked ridiculously young. Wells was very boyish in those days; he was slight in figure and youthful in face, with thick, rebellious, fairish hair, and a charmingly impulsive manner. It seems odd to think now that then he suffered from such very bad health that he was not expected to live long. Those were the days in which he used to write about flying men and scientific millennia, most brilliant books which told the British public that a genius had dropped from heaven, whose crumbs were picked up by Mr. John Lane. Wells became a Vagabond at a very early date, but he disliked making speeches, and, in point of fact, hardly ever did make one in his early days, so his wonderful literary gift was not recognised so quickly as it would have been if he had been constantly making speeches before literary clubs and other large audiences.
A feature of Wells’ writing is his marvellous versatility. He will make a hit on entirely fresh lines, indulge the public with a few other books on these lines, and then, before they have time to tire of them, break out in another fresh vein. It is hard to believe that the same man wrote _Select Conversations with an Uncle_ and _Marriage_, though it is true that seventeen years elapsed between their publication, and there were many changes of style between the two. In those days he was only a brilliant novelist; now we recognise in him a profound thinker, a solver of social problems, even if we ourselves are Conservatives.
In the _New Machiavelli_ and _Marriage_ there is intuition in every page and almost every line. You can read them with sheer delight for the writing alone; they do not depend on the story, however excellent.
Another humorist who was a constant visitor was Max O’Rell—the genial and irascible Frenchman who, as Paul Blouet, the name to which he was born, was principal French master at St. Paul’s School. Max O’Rell lived in a house with a garden at St. John’s Wood. We were very fond of him and his pretty wife, and much shocked when the two blows fell so quickly upon one another. Max O’Rell fought for France against the Germans, and he always looked a fighting man, with his strong figure and belligerent moustache. He was a fine fencer, and had, I am sure, fought duels in his time; with his temperament he could not have kept out of them; he was up in arms in a moment. I remember how fiercely he turned upon Norma Lorimer for using the expression, “The British Channel.”
“Why British?” he asked.
But he was quite floored by the repartee, “Because of the weather.”
Max O’Rell was always quick at repartee himself—except in America. Of America and Americans he always spoke in public with his tongue in his cheek, but in private he was “screamingly funny” about them. He should certainly have left a posthumous volume of unpalatable truths about America. It would not have hurt him in the Great Beyond, and it would have convulsed the English-speaking world. He must often have felt in America as he felt at Napier, New Zealand, where the audience at the Mechanics’ Institute, or some such place, would have none of him.
“I am good enough for London and Paris,” he said, speaking to me about it afterwards; “I am good enough for New York, Boston and Chicago; I am good enough for Melbourne and Sydney. But I am not good enough for Napier, New Zealand—Napier, with its five thousand inhabitants, etc., etc.”
He had the same staccato style in his lectures and after-dinner speeches as he had in his _John Bull and His Island_ and his other famous books, and he easily drifted into it in his conversations.
Other humorists of the little circle—it is to be noted how many there were—were Robert Barr, Barry Pain and W. L. Alden. Barr, as co-editor of the _Idler_, was a pivot of literary society like Jerome. But his home for a considerable portion of the period was a long way down in Surrey, too far for his friends to pursue him to it. This was not without design, for he was a man so fitted to shine in literary society, that his one chance of writing his delicate and delightful novels was to bury himself in the country.
He made his reputation as “Luke Sharp,” the most brilliant humorist of the _Detroit Free Press_, at that time the most-quoted paper in America, and he was very American both in appearance and speech. His brusqueness and pugnacity were at times terrifying, but underneath them lay a gentle nature and a most affectionate heart. He was a man who inspired and returned the warmest affection. His grim humour was famous: it suited the handsome features, marred with smallpox, the close-trimmed naval officer’s beard, the sturdy frame, the strong American accent, much better than his dainty love-stories did. There was no more popular speaker; his influence among his fellow-journalists was unbounded. He and his pretty and charming wife, an excellent foil for his pugnacious exterior, were frequent hosts at the Idler teas, and frequent guests at our flat. Barr was very biting about England’s national foibles, but they never moved him to such outbursts of righteous indignation as the intermittent immoralities of the United States Government.
He remained faithful to his birthplace till his premature death, for he called two successive homes of his in the South, Hillhead, after the district of Glasgow in which he was born. In his later days he was so much the editor, so much the novelist, that one forgot the humorist, except when he was convulsing a knot of friends, to whom he was talking at a reception, or the audience he was addressing across a dinner-table.
Barry Pain and W. L. Alden, on the other hand, were always humorists. Alden, who had a most whimsical mind, had been the American Consul-General at Rome, and had, in consequence, been made a Cavaliere by the Italian Government. His title was part of his humorous equipment. It seemed so droll that a typical, middle-class American like Alden, should be a cavalier. Both he and his wife were kindly and agreeable people, but most of his personality went into his writing.
Barry Pain, on the other hand, had a forceful personality. Whenever you meet this cheery cynic, with his bright dark eyes, you know that you are in the presence of a man who was born to be editor of _Punch_. He was a constant speaker at literary clubs, though I don’t think that he liked speaking at first. His speeches were full of the same brilliant paradoxes as his books. His cynicism was tempered by overflowing good-nature. He was always such a hearty man. He was another of the people who soon flew into the country to get away from parties, and have time for his numerous contributions to weekly journals. But while he lived in London he was very often at our house. I made his acquaintance at the Lehmanns’—he married Stella Lehmann—soon after he had come down from Cambridge. At Cambridge he had been R. C. Lehmann’s bright particular star in Granta, and Lehmann, who had wealth, good looks, and a brilliant athletic record to back up his very great abilities as a writer, had at once become influential in London journalistic circles.