A VISIT TO LONDON
In the autumn of 1892 my university days were interrupted by a visit to
London. Political economy, as taught and written in German, was becoming
more and more of a puzzle to me, in spite of the fact that I had made
valuable progress in picking up and using German colloquial expressions.
I could berate a cabby, for instance, very forcefully, but somehow I
could not accustom my ear to the academic language of Professors
Schmoller and Wagner. I finally persuaded my people that if I was to
continue to explore political economy I ought to be allowed to come to
terms with it in my own vernacular, at least until I knew something
about it separate from German, which, at that time, was quite as much a
study to me as political economy itself. My arguments in this matter
eventually prevailed, and I was sent off to London to read up on the
subject in the British Museum. That this reading was a good thing in its
way is doubtless true, and the six months spent in London at that time I
have always counted among the _Streber_ months of my career. Perhaps I
devoted more time than was right to geography and the books of travelers
and explorers, but I pegged away at my major too, after a fashion, at
times covering my desk with books on the subject. If many volumes
stacked up in front of a reader make a savant in the British Museum,
then I deserved a place in the front rank.
But with all my good intentions, reading and note-taking, the main good
that London did for me, was accomplished outside of the somber pile in
Bloomsbury. The Museum was principally a place in which to retreat when
the life in the streets seemed likely to unduly excite my _Wanderlust_.
There I could also read about many of the things that interested me in
London itself.
Colonization was the special subject I was supposed to be looking into,
but Dr. Richard Garnett, the official at the Museum who gave me my
reader's ticket, could never get over the notion that I meant
"composition," when telling him the subject I was to take up. Three
times I insisted that it was _colonization_, but whether the good man
was deaf, or determined that I should tackle composition, I never found
out. My friend, Arthur Symons, introduced me to him and distinctly heard
me say colonization, but this did not help matters. The good doctor
insisted on showing me about the reading room, pointing out the general
reference books which he thought would facilitate my acquaintance with
composition. We frequently greeted each other in the corridors
afterwards, but the doctor kindly refrained from quizzing me concerning
my reading, and probably had quite forgotten what it was all about
anyhow--a matter of conjecture in my own mind on occasions.
My most intimate friend during this first visit to London was Symons,
and I have to thank him for putting me on the track of many interesting
people and experiences. I went to him with an introduction from Berlin,
where he visited me later on. In 1892 he was living in Fentin Court in
The Temple, Mr. George Moore being a close neighbor in Pump Court, I
think. Both men took hold of my imagination very much, being the first
English writers that I learned to know. With Moore I had only slight
conversations, but I remember now that he evinced considerable interest
in my "tramp material." Indeed, ten years after our first meeting he
reminded me of an adventure which I, at one time, had related to him.
Symons, on the other hand, I saw very frequently, and I might as well
accuse him right away of being my literary god-father, if I may be said
to deserve one. Whether he realized it at the time or not, it was the
writer's atmosphere which he let me into, that made me ambitious to
scribble on my own account.
One day he told me that he had received fifteen pounds for an article
for _The Fortnightly_.
"Fifteen pounds!" I mumbled to myself on the way back to my lodgings.
"Why, that sum would keep me here in London over a month." Later, in
Berlin, I experimented for the first time with the effects of an article
by me in a magazine. Symons' wonderful fifteen pounds were to blame. I
sent the paper, a short account of the American tramp, to _The
Contemporary_. It was accepted. In a few days I received page proofs of
the article, and in the next number it was published. No youthful
writer ever had his horizon more ambitiously widened than mine was when
that article was printed and paid for. I assured the editor instanter
that my tramp lore was inexhaustible, and begged him to consider other
submissive efforts on my part. He intimated in his reply that submission
was a fine quality, but that _The Contemporary_ did not confine its
pages to trampology, and that his readers had had enough of that subject
for the time being.
* * * * *
The little back room in the Crown Tavern, near Leicester Square, where a
number of the young writers in London congregated at night, in my time,
has given way to much more pretentious quarters. Symons and I had got
into the habit of taking nightly walks about town, leading nowhere in
particular at the start, but interrupted usually, for an hour at least,
about half-past eleven at "The Crown." The place itself never meant much
to me as a rendezvous because I have never been able to get enjoyment
out of a back-parlor pushed up against a bar. Separate, each institution
has its amenities but Englishmen seem fond of a combination of the sort
mentioned.
Two of the young men who forgathered at "The Crown" in 1892 have passed
on for keeps--Lionel Johnson, the author of "The Art of Thomas Hardy,"
and the personal statement to me that he knew every inch of Wales; and
Ernest Dowson, a man who lived in a queer, rambling old storehouse on
the docks--a possession of his own, and who knew much about London that
he should have been allowed to tell.
The gatherings in the back parlor were comparatively innocent little
intentions upon life and literature. I got good out of them in a number
of ways, and might have benefited by them more had my intentions been
more distinctly literary. What Swinburne, Pater, Wilde, Verlaine and
others were doing and saying was not half so interesting to me as what
some haphazard pick-up might say to me and Symons, during our stroll
after the Crown meeting was over. On one occasion, however, an Irish
journalist, who was present, succeeded in getting me patriotically
indignant. He had spent the afternoon in Westminster Abbey, happening,
among other things, upon Longfellow's bust.
"I can't see," he said, at the end of his account of his afternoon,
unmistakably referring to the Longfellow bust, "why the Americans can't
bury their dead at home." It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him why
the Irish couldn't keep their alive at home, when some one said: "Soda,
please," and the difficulty was both watered and bridged over.
I suppose that "The Crown" meetings were mutual admiration parties of a
kind, but of an innocent kind. I recall a callow youth (who had
squandered his patrimony in Paris), with a slender volume of reminiscent
verse, button-holing me and saying: "Really, you know ---- (a member of
the company) is a genius. His command over vocables is something
stupendous." Blank has since made a name for himself, but I remember
looking at him at the time, innocently wondering whether he was a
genius, and, if so, what vocables were.
But in spite of the ready assistance offered to all hands to think well
of themselves, the gatherings usually netted one something worth while
in the end, either in criticism or incident. They call to mind now a
series of gatherings held a number of years later in New York among a
collection of American writers. And this thinking of the two
combinations reminds me of what George Augustus Sala once said to me in
Rome. I had gone to him, according to agreement, to ask him what he had
to say to a young man, anxious to do well in journalism, about writing
in general. He was sitting at breakfast when I dropped in at his hotel,
very much surrounded by macaroni and the local newspapers.
"And what are your pleasures?" Sala began without warning, as if I had
gone to him for medical advice.
I was so upset by this beginning of things that, for the life of me, I
could not think for a second or two what my pleasures were. I finally
managed to say that I enjoyed whist.
"Stop it," said Sala, his Portuguese eyes fairly boring through me.
"Stop it. Whist means cards, and cards mean gambling. Stop it."
After a pause, "What are the other pleasures?" If whist meant gambling,
I reasoned that tobacco must premise opium. However, I admitted that I
liked tobacco.
"Not strange--not strange," said Sala. "One who writes needs a smoke.
What else? Are you a woman-hater?"
"No, sir, I'm not," I replied most emphatically. Sala looked at me
queerly, but did not pursue the subject. I had been introduced to him by
a man who, wrongly or rightly, had the reputation of saying cross things
about women.
"Do you drink?" Sala continued in a moment.
"Yes, when I feel like it."
"_Stop it, stop it._ Drinking means boozing, boozing means busting, and
busting means hell--hell, young man, remember that."
There was a pause, during which Sala looked out of the window as if he
had taken my pulse and was deciding how much faster it could beat before
I must die. Pretty soon he turned my way, and, after some general advice
about coming to an early decision as to whether I meant to be a purely
descriptive writer or not, delivered himself to this statement: "If you
settle in London as a journalist, you'll be a drudge. If you try New
York, you'll be a boozer--_unless_," and again the Portuguese eyes shot
at me, "_you keep out of the rut_."
In reviewing my past experiences I have often thought of this talk with
Sala when comparing the two different sets of writers I learned to know
in London and New York. Offhand I should say that honors were even
between them as regards the virtues, any advantage in this particular
falling, if there was any, to the Englishmen on account of the early
closing hours in England.
It was after the celebrated closing hours that Symons and I often had
some of our most entertaining strolls. Symons was inveterately on the
scent for "impressions and sensations," while I found happiness merely
in roving. I suppose that I received impressions and sensations of their
kind just as well as Symons did, but somehow when I began to describe
them they did not seem to have enough literary dignity to belong in the
same class with those that Symons could tell about and later describe in
print.
One night, we separated, each to wander as long as he was interested,
and in the morning to compare reports. It so happened that neither of us
on this particular occasion saw enough that we had not enjoyed together
on other jaunts, to make the undertaking very amusing. But we both
agreed that such explorations could be made uncommonly entertaining by a
literary artist, if he would honestly tell what he had stumbled upon.
At another time we undertook a more audacious exploit--a 'bus ride to
the city limits, or into the country as far as the schedule allowed, and
then a tramp into the Beyond, as long as we could hold out. We took the
first 'bus we saw bound well into the country. It started from Liverpool
Street Station; Symons thought that it was headed east, but neither of
us was sure, the road twisted and turned so. Nightfall found us pushing
on bravely afoot, Symons glorying in the beautiful moonlight and
"sensation" of being "at sea" on land, while I got pleasure out of
Symons' romantic appreciation of a trip which reminded me very mundanely
of other nocturnal tramps at home. Midnight stopped us at an inn. One
of Symons' shoes was giving him trouble, and the romance of the
adventure was growing a little dim. We were dusty, tired and, I suppose,
suspicious-looking. The innkeeper hesitated before he would let us in,
and we had to explain how simple and innocent we were. In the morning,
having found our bearings to the extent that we learned we were headed
toward the North Sea--we refused to listen to anything more minute than
this--we went blithely on our way once more, happy in the consciousness
that, for the moment we were care-free, and bound for "any old place"
that took our fancy. But, alas! Symons' shoe got to annoying him again,
and his spirits began to droop. By ten o'clock they were plainly at
half-mast. His foot had become very painful, forcing him to sit down by
the side of the road. The jolly adventurer of the night before and early
morning had suddenly changed into an irascible literary man "on the
road." He said nothing about art, sentences or vocables. He said nothing
about anything but the pain in his foot was giving him. Blind travels
into the countryside took on a different aspect. It was The Temple for
Symons, and just as soon as a train could take him there. That fine
indefiniteness of the evening in the moonlight--that joyous keeping in
step with _Die Ferne_--the temptress into the Beyond--that dreamy,
happy, careless chatting about the great city left behind--these things
had vanished; our stroll to the North Sea or the North Pole, or wherever
it was that we dreamed we might get to, was at an end. I have seldom
known innocent bucolic intentions--we thought ours were
bucolic--dissipate into thin air so unconcernedly. But as Symons said
about many of our trips together, "the best part of them comes when you
look back over them in front of a good fire," and so he will probably
smile and look pleasantly reminiscent when he comes across this reminder
of our aimless jaunt into Essex.
I think he will also smile on reading my version of the Berlin-Havre
expedition. He had spent a month with me in my home in Berlin,
where, as usual, he dug all over the city for impressions and
sensations--"impreshuns and sensashuns" was the way they were finally
called in my household. When it came time for him to return to London,
he decided to accompany my sister and me as far as Havre on our sail
from Hamburg to New York. He had never been on an ocean liner, and
thought that the new experience would recompense him for the
"sensashuns" he failed to gather in Berlin. Besides, as we figured it
out, he could get to London a little cheaper this way. We were all
pretty poor at the time, and economy counted for a great deal in
"sensation" researches. I was bound for America to see if I could not
interest some publisher in printing articles and stories about tramps.
Down the Elbe from Hamburg, in fact all of the first day we were at sea,
Symons thought he had seldom had a more enjoyable time. The sea was
quiet, the weather was balmy, and there was a great deal to eat. The
next morning the sea had kicked up somewhat. I found Symons at
breakfast time on deck, holding fast to a railing running around the
smoking room. His face was wan and colorless, and he plainly showed that
he had had his fill of "sensashuns" for the time being.
"Strange motion, isn't it?" he murmured, gripping the railing afresh.
"Never fancied anything like this. I shall be glad to see Havre."
We made that port the following day. Symons was to ship from Havre to
Southampton, after having a look at Havre. I learned that our boat was
going to be delayed for twenty-four hours on account of repairs--she
seemed to be repairing all the way to New York--and that all three of us
could go ashore for a stroll. Symons' exchequer had, by this time, got
perilously low--he had the price of his ticket to London and, perhaps,
two francs over. All of us found some forgotten German coins of small
denominations in our pockets, and proceeded to an exchange office. No
transaction at the Bank of England ever seemed more important than did
this one with the French money dealer. Symons was to be the beneficiary,
and we higgled and haggled over the values of our _groschen_ and
_sechser_ as if millions were at stake. In the end we managed to
increase his holdings by two francs--that was all, and it was absolutely
all that we could afford. Symons was so glad to be in the right mood for
_terra firma_ sensations again that the two francs looked like two
hundred to him. At any rate he did not seem to care how large or small
the sum was--he thanked the gods prodigiously that he was strong enough
merely to walk.
We smuggled him on board for supper, and finally left him, as we
thought, until we should again be in England, as our boat was to sail
early the next morning, the repairs having been accelerated, so we were
told. Symons was to spend the night and next day ashore, waiting for the
Southampton boat. The next morning found our ship still tied up. We were
free to go ashore again, and have another "last" meal in a restaurant.
As we strolled up the main street, whom should we meet striding proudly
down the thoroughfare but Symons, his brown gossamer sailing merrily
after him.
"Fancy this!" he exclaimed on seeing us. "How jolly! But do you think
your boat ever will get started again."
Then he told us of the wonderful impressionistic night he had spent.
"After bidding you good-by," he explained, "I strolled back to
Frascati's. The moon was up, and I felt like strolling. When Frascati's
closed I walked along the beach for a while--it was a perfect night for
'sensations.'
"At last I got sleepy. There was a bathing machine near-by, and I
thought it would be a jolly adventure to spend the rest of the night in
it. Besides, I wanted to economize.
"I don't know how long I had been dozing, but toward morning I was
awakened by footfalls near-by. I peaked out. It was a guard--at least he
looked like one. I crept out of the bathing machine and dodged around
it conveniently until the man had passed. Then I went down on the beach,
and later up to the convent or monastery on the hill. The sun was just
creeping up over the horizon and there was a wonderful early morning
hush over everything. I sat down and wrote some verses. Really, the
impressionistic appeal was so overwhelming I could not help it. I've
never had such a jolly night."
We breakfasted together, took one more short stroll and then separated
again. Later, after seventeen days at sea, we learned that Symons had
made London without further accident.