Produced by Al Haines
[Frontispiece: Arthur Warren]
LONDON DAYS
A BOOK OF REMINISCENCES
BY
ARTHUR WARREN
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1920
_Copyright, 1920_,
BY ARTHUR WARREN.
_All rights reserved_
Published September, 1920
Norwood Press
Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co.
Norwood, Mass., U. S. A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I First Glimpses of London . . . . . . . 1
II London in the Late Seventies . . . . . 9
III A Norman Interlude . . . . . . . . . . 18
IV I Take the Plunge . . . . . . . . . . . 28
V Browning and Moscheles . . . . . . . . 42
VI Patti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
VII John Stuart Blackie . . . . . . . . . . 79
VIII Lord Kelvin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
IX Tennyson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114
X Gladstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
XI Whistler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
XII Henry Drummond . . . . . . . . . . . . 170
XIII Sir Henry Irving . . . . . . . . . . . 185
XIV Henry M. Stanley . . . . . . . . . . . 205
XV George Meredith . . . . . . . . . . . . 222
XVI Parnell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
XVII "Le Brav' General" . . . . . . . . . . 260
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275
{1}
LONDON DAYS
CHAPTER I
FIRST GLIMPSES OF LONDON
One day at dusk, in the autumn of 1878, when I was eighteen, I arrived
at the heart of the world.
I was fresh from New England, and had left Boston, my native city,
seventeen days before, embarking at New York on the Anchor liner
_Alsatia_ three days later; disembarking at Tilbury after a turbulent
voyage that lasted two weeks to the hour. What was left of me passed
from the Fenchurch Street Station into Leadenhall Street, the least of
three passengers in a four-wheeled cab. Through the cab windows, and
the ghost of fog which simmered over gas lamps, flashed glimpses of the
city, splashes of light on the pavements illuminated windows bound in
brass, cumbrous drays and 'busses, and great grey horses, and
glistening pubs. The air was heavy with smoke. I heard the tramp of
thousands and thousands of persons, all homeward bound, and all wearing
top hats. And, of all names, there at the right on a clothier's sign,
the enamelled legend: "Dombey and Son!" My head was packed with
Dickens, and in a pocket was a linen-backed map.
{2}
In one way and another, by books and maps and imagination, I was
already on familiar terms with the world-city which I had never seen.
I had read it up, studied it, knew intricate maps of it, and stories of
its traditions. At a time when the youth of my country and generation
were expected to follow Horace Greeley's advice, "Go West and grow up
with the country" or, as interpreted by the cynics, "Go West and start
a graveyard"--I made a chance to go East across the Atlantic. And I
went. So I beheld the Old World. But I had chances enough, that is, I
made them, to see the New World later. And I saw it. History in the
making is interesting,--sometimes, and if you survive. History already
made and rounded and woven into legend, the scenes among which men have
lived and wrought through centuries, shaping the rich past on which we
build the present, hold a fascination which did not seem to come to me
from regions where man was pioneering. London was the magnet that
first drew me. And as the cab turned south from Leadenhall Street and
moved slowly along the noisy streams of traffic, I exclaimed presently,
to the disappointment of my companions who knew the town and were
prepared to point out its places of celebrity:
"London Bridge at last!"
"At last?" said they. "Why, this is quick work for the time of day.
How many minutes?"
"But I've been eighteen years on the way," said I.
I managed to keep awake and hungry till we got to the Wiltshire Road in
Brixton, where my guides {3} from Fenchurch Street were staying. The
stagger and strain of the sea voyage had left me stupidly weary, so
that as soon as possible after dinner I went to bed. Although I stayed
three weeks in that house, all recollection of a dining room has
vanished. That may be attributed to the zeal of youth and its
indifference to the art of dining, an art acquired speedily enough
later on. But never in the subsequent years have I been able to revive
a single memory of that Brixton house. And the only recollection of
the first three weeks in England is that on the first morning, at an
office in the City, I was violently seasick.
Atlantic passengers who begin their voyaging nowadays in luxuriously
fitted vessels of fifty thousand tons, and coddled within an inch of
their lives, lack the remotest notion of the sea travel of forty years
ago. The _Alsatia_, of the Anchor Line, was one of the largest and
finest ships afloat in 1878. She had a single smokestack and a single
screw, no covered deck for passengers, no barber shop, no electric
lights, not even an electric bell. Deck chairs were unknown, but later
you could buy them ashore and store them in the Company's baggage room
against your return. No meal could be served on deck without the
permission of the captain. The first mate was a surly ass who
threatened passengers with irons if he caught them infringing some
stupid rule, long since abolished; and although the steamer was fairly
new she belonged to the age when seamen hated fresh air in a hull, and
the smells from her bilges would have asphyxiated an ox. She was one
{4} tenth the size of the big liners of to-day, five thousand tons
being registered to her credit in the advertisements where she was
described as "a giant." She was a worthy sea craft, but she hopped,
skipped, and jumped all the way from New York to London, used fourteen
days in getting there, ten being made against head gales and heavy
seas, one of which threw a sailor from the maintop to the deck, killing
him, and sweeping overboard two hundred sheep which we carried on the
foredeck. Nearly all liners in those days carried sail and were
square-rigged. Their canvas was stained with soot and smoke, but it
had a steadying effect on the ship when spread to a favouring quarter.
Whether the _Alsatia_ carried sail I never knew for I was ten days
helpless and agonised in my cabin, and for three days more the
mastheads seemed to scrape the scudding clouds with a fore-and-aft
motion that tore your eyes if you looked skyward. It was only after we
had passed well up Channel, near Dover, that the wind eased and we
could venture on deck without clinging to life lines.
This horror of seasickness was as unexpected as it was distressing,
for, if I had not been brought up on the sea, I had been accustomed to
it long enough, and had sailed an eighteen-foot catboat up and down
Massachusetts Bay, where there is rough water much of the time and
scope for seamanlike work all the time. Whether on long rollers, or on
choppy water, I had never been troubled by the sea's motion until the
_Alsatia_ tumbled across the Atlantic, and then it was my head that
bore distress, and not my {5} centreboard. It seemed as if the
fragment of brain still remaining in me broke loose and rattled from
skull to toes, bounding back with a hideous roar and horrid pressure
which found no relief till we got into quiet water. I vowed never to
go to sea again. Since then I have made more than fifty voyages on the
North Atlantic alone.
There was a man aboard who had a salty sailor's fondness for a howling
sea, and we became amazing friendly. And he was amazing fat, so that
he took very short steps. As I was no thicker than a lath, and
six-feet-an-inch-and-a-half tall, there was contrast enough as he
paddled alongside me. Creeping from the hated stateroom where ten
nearly foodless and acutely torturing days had been passed in a damp
melancholy, I saw a dozen or fifteen passengers--our full
strength--seated at a long table on the starboard side of the saloon,
listening to Mr. Pickwick reading "Othello." He was as round as
Pickwick, not quite so cherubic as Phiz's immortal drawing, and minus
the spectacles. In the tossing night, when we had forgotten that any
portion of the universe was ever still, he was declaiming Othello's
speech to the Senate.
The figure and the fact were incongruous, but the effect of the
declamation was not. He read all the tragedy, barring a few cuts. I
supposed him a comic actor with an ambition for tragic parts. Some
sailors staring through a deck light took him for a "sky pilot" reading
the burial service for their fellow, but thought him over-long about
it. His name was Henry Murray. He was a Scotsman {6} retired from the
Chinese trade. He was also a Free Mason, Past District Grand Master
for China. He was returning to England with the intention of becoming
a public reader. He intended even to become an actor of Falstaff and
he had long been a capable amateur. His father had been a famous actor
in Edinburgh; his brother commanded the Guion liner _Arizona_, and
later, the _Alaska_.
Henry Murray was a good judge of acting. But his fondness for acting
was fatal to his fortunes and his life. The first he spent in efforts
to establish himself; the second he wore out in disappointment over the
failure of his plans. I remember him with genuine affection, because
he was the first to open to me any door in the mighty and mysterious
world of London.
Plans had no place in my baggage, at least no plans requiring space. I
had practically worked my way to London where I was to join the staff
of an American engineering concern who were introducing an invention.
Though lacking years I had sufficient application, and I had learned
enough of the business to justify my appointment. That, in fact, had
been my purpose, and I worked hard to achieve it and uphold it. But I
wanted to write. And, being in London, why not write about London? I
knew that Mrs. Glasse's recipe for cooking hare had begun, "First catch
your hare", and so the prescription for my own case ran, "First learn
your London." Meantime I had my vocation to lean on. During the
business hours of four years I ran with my vocation, and, out of
business hours, followed my hobby.
{7}
Old Mother London gave me the key to her streets, and diligently I used
it. Into every old church I wandered, and into every old building that
had given shelter to Fame when she touched a poet, a philosopher, a
painter, a literary man, a tragedian, a soldier, sailor, or a king.
And I knew the burial places of those she cherished, and those she
flouted, or those she flirted with, no less than the living places of
those who still pursued her on any of the grey mornings in which I
rambled. They became as familiar to me as any 'bus line, and I became
a walking directory to the odd corners where she had preened her
feathers for an hour or for a space of years. I became saturated with
her legends, and occasionally an arbiter in cases of suspected masonry
whose identity rumour and record had disputed or concealed. That was
one form of amusement. The play was another.
I was at home in London from the moment of my arrival at Fenchurch
Street. It had been a far cry to Fenchurch Street, and when a lad made
it in company with a rotund gentleman of Pickwickian build, the chances
were sure to be amusing. After trying two or three boarding houses, I
settled in chambers just out of Queen Square in Bloomsbury. Murray was
in apartments half a mile away, in Marchmont Street. Marchmont Street
was shabby in those days, whatever it may be now. On the west side of
it, over a tailor's shop kept by her husband, was the shabby, but clean
and shining house of Mrs. Floyth, a melancholy woman who had been maid
or housekeeper to John Stuart Mill when {8} the manuscript of Carlyle's
"French Revolution" was burned to light the fires! I have always
wondered if the old lady herself were responsible for that
conflagration. It might have accounted for her settled melancholy.
My chambers near Queen Square were in a spacious old house which was
panelled and carved from roof to entrance hall. There soon began to
meet here, once or twice a month, a congenial group, smoking
churchwarden pipes. It called itself the "Quill Club", talked
politics, the drama, and books, and the members disagreed as heartily
as any human beings could on all the topics of life.
There would have been no interest in listening to another fellow's talk
had you been in agreement with him. There were but two rules in the
Club: the first that a man should say what he thought; the second--give
his reasons for thinking so. When a man failed to sustain his opinion
by his reasons he paid for the tobacco. The Quills, as may be
supposed, were chiefly of a trade, quill drivers. But they were not
entirely so: one was "by way of being" an artist, another was a
solicitor, a third was inclined to surgery, a fourth made musical
boxes, the fifth was a dentist, and the others pursued literature, at
greater or smaller distances, and incidentally contributed small feed
to the presses in Fleet Street, or elsewhere. Of a dozen, ten are
dead. Some made goals, some fell by the way. But they all enjoyed
life and work, for all were young. And sometimes they could pay their
bills.
{9}