in my memory are less intimately associated with Henley. Harold Frederic
wrote for him occasionally--wrote few things, indeed, more amusing than
his _Observations in Philistia_, a satire first published in the
_National Observer_--but his chief business was the novel and the _New
York Times_ correspondence. He was an able man, something more than the
typical clever American journalist, a writer of books that deserve to be
remembered but that have hardly outlived him. He was an amusing
companion, the sort of man it was delightful to run across by chance in
unexpected places, for which reason my most agreeable recollections of
him are not in Buckingham Street but in the streets and _cafés_ of
Berlin and Vienna that summer he was studying Jews in Southeastern
Europe, and first knew there were Jews in Vienna when J., who afterwards
began to study them for himself, introduced him to the _Juden Gasse_. He
liked a good dinner, and gave us more than one, and he was an amusing
talker over it and also on our Thursday nights until he got to the stage
he always did get to of telling tales of his boyhood when he carried
milk to the big people in his part of the Mohawk Valley, was dazzled by
his first vision of Brussels carpet on their floors, and determined to
have Brussels carpet on his own before he was many years older, and I
can answer for it that, by the time I knew him, his house was all
Brussels carpet from top to bottom. They were most creditable tales and
entertaining too at a first hearing, but they staled, as all tales must,
with repetition.
S.R. Crockett never wrote anything for Henley. Henley would have been
outraged by the bare suggestion, and Crockett the writer was never
handled with the gloves by Henley's Young Men in the _National
Observer_. But with Crockett himself they had no quarrel. We all liked
him--a large red and white Scotchman, the Scots strong in every word he
spoke, hustling us all off for a fish dinner at Greenwich on the
strength of his first big cheque for royalties; or as happy to spend the
evening sitting on our floor and diverting William Penn with the ball of
paper on the end of a string that William never wearied of pursuing,
partly for his amusement, partly because, with his innate politeness, he
knew it contributed to ours.
I cannot imagine a Thursday night without Rosamund
Marriott-Watson,--Graham R. Tomson as she was then,--beautiful,
reminiscent of Rossetti in her tall, willowy slimness, with her long
neck like a column and her great halo of black hair and her big brown
eyes, appealing, confinding, beseeching. Fashion as she, the poetess,
extolled it week by week in the _National Observer_, became a poem with
a stately measure in frocks and hats, a flowing rhythm in every frill
and furbelow. I lost sight of her later, for reasons neither here nor
there, but it pleases me to know that not many months before her death
she looked back to those years as her happiest when weekly, almost
daily, she was going up and down the Buckingham Street stairs which her
ghost, she said, must haunt until they go the way of too many old stairs
leading up to old London chambers. Violet Hunt was almost as faithful.
And both contributed, as I did, a weekly column--mine that amazing
article on cookery--to the _Pall Mall's_ daily _Wares of Autolycus_,
daily written by women and I daresay believed by us to be the most
entertaining array of unconsidered trifles that any Autolycus had ever
offered to any eager world. Graham Tomson was even moved to commemorate
our collaboration in verse the inspiration of which is not far to seek,
but of which all I remember now is the beginning:
O, there's Mrs. Meynell and Mrs. Pennell,
There's Violet Hunt and me!
for Mrs. Meynell contributed a fourth column, though she never
contributed her presence to Buckingham Street.
Once or twice, George Moore hovered from group to group, his childlike
eyes of wonder protruding, wide open, and his ears open too, no doubt,
for, if I can judge from his several books of reminiscences, his ears
have rarely been closed to talk going on about him. After reading the
Irish series I should suspect him not only of well-opened ears but of an
inexhaustible supply of cuffs safely stored up his sleeves. Bernard Shaw
honoured us occasionally, but I have learned that, bent as he is upon
talking about himself, whatever he has to say, he grows more fastidious
when others talk about him and say what they have to. Now and then,
Henry Norman, journalist, his title and seat in Parliament yet to come,
dropped in. Now and then Miss Preston and Miss Dodge came, both in
London to finish in the British Museum the studies begun in Rome. Rarely
a week passed that James G. Legge was not with us, then deep in his work
at the Home Office but full of joy in everything that was most joyful in
the Nineties--its fights, its books, its prints, its posters. And I
might name many besides, some forgotten, some dead, some seen no more
by me, life being often more cruel than death in the separations and
divisions it makes. But two voices above the others are almost as
persistent in my ears as Henley's--the voices of Bob Stevenson and Henry
Harland.
IV
I have no fancy for nicknames in any place or at any time. I have
suffered too much from my own. But I dislike the familiarity of them
above all in print. And yet, I could no more call Bob Stevenson anything
save Bob than I could venture to abbreviate the Robert or the Louis of
his cousin. He had been given in baptism a more formal name--in fact, he
had been given three of unquestioned dignity: Robert Alan Mowbray. But I
doubt if anybody had ever known him by them or if he had ever used them
himself. When he wrote he signed his fine array of initials, and when he
was not R.A.M.S., he was Bob.
[Illustration: Painting by Himself
"BOB" STEVENSON]
It seems to me now a curious chance, as well as a piece of good luck,
that the two most eloquent of the company in Louis Stevenson's _Talk and
Talkers_ should have come to us on our Thursday nights, for Bob was the
Spring-Heeled Jack, "the loud, copious, and intolerant talker" of
that essay just as Henley was the Burly.
He was not more spring-heeled in his talk than in evading capture for
it. In his later years he made few visits. If we wanted him we had to
gather him up by the wayside and bring him home with us. The newspaper
work I was doing then took me the rounds of the London galleries on
press days and, as he was the art critic of the _Pall Mall_, I was
continually coming across him busy about the same work in Bond Street or
Piccadilly. Nothing pleased me better than to meet him on these
occasions, for he could make the dull show that I, in my dull way, was
finding dull the most entrancing entertainment in London. His every
visit to a gallery was to him an adventure and every picture a romance,
and the best of it for his friends was that he would willingly share the
inspiration which he, but nobody else, could find in the most
uninspiring canvas, an inspiration to criticism that is, not to
admiration--he never wavered in his allegiance to the "Almighty Swells"
of Art. Once he began to talk I did not care to have him stop, and I
would say, "Why not come to Buckingham Street with me? You have not seen
J. for a long while." He would vow he couldn't, he must get back to Kew
to do his article. I would insist a little, he would waver a little, and
at last he would agree to a minute's talk with J., excusing himself to
himself by protesting that Buckingham Street was on his way to the
Underground, as it was if he chose to go out of his way to make it so.
Before he knew it, the minute had stretched out to our dinner hour when
he was persuaded that he would save time by dining with us, as he must
dine somewhere; if he went right afterwards, he could still be back at
Kew in plenty of time to finish his article for the last post.
Of course he never did go right afterwards--what talker ever did go
right anywhere immediately after dinner when the real talk is only
beginning? Presently people would filter in and now, well adrift on the
flood of his own eloquence, nothing could interrupt him and he was the
last to leave us, the later it grew the more easily induced to stay
because he knew that the last train and the last post and all the last
things of the day had gone and that he must now wait for the first
things of the morning.
If I could talk like Bob Stevenson I would not be interrupted either.
Greater excitement could not be had out of the most exciting story of
adventure, and I do not believe he knew until he got to the end any
more where his talk was going to lead him than the reader knows how the
story is going to turn out until the last chapter is reached. Louis
Stevenson described certain qualities of his talk, but made no effort to
give the talk itself, and in Bob's case, as in Henley's, it was the talk
itself that counted. There was no acting in it as in Henley's or in
Whistler's--no burying of his head in his hands and violent gestures--no
well-placed laugh and familiar phrase. The talk came in a steady stream,
laughter occasionally in the voice, but no break, no movement, no
dramatic action--the sanest doctrine set forth with almost insane
ingenuity, for he was always the "wild dog outside the kennel" who
wouldn't imitate and hence kept free, as Louis Stevenson told him;
extraordinary things treated quite as a matter of course; brilliant
flashes of imbecility passed for cool well-balanced argument; until
often I would suddenly gasp, wondering into what impossible world I had
strayed after him. And he would tell the most extravagant tales, he
would confide the most paradoxical philosophy, the most topsy-turvy
ethics, with a fantastic seriousness, never approached except in the
Arabian Nights of Prince Florizel for the puppets of whose adventures,
as for Spring-Heeled Jack, he was the sitter. It was a delightful
accomplishment, but dangerous when applied to actual life. I cannot
forget his advice once to a friend on the verge of a serious step that
might sink him into nobody could foretell what social quagmire. Bob
could see in it only the adventure and the joy of adventure, not the
price fate was bound to demand for it. To him the mistake was the unlit
lamp, the ungirt loin--the adventure lost--and, life being what it is, I
am not sure that he was not right.
I think his talk struck me as the more extraordinary because he looked
so little like it. In the Nineties he had taken to the Jaegers that
usually stand for vegetarianism, teetotalism, hygiene--all the drab
things of life. He wore even a Jaeger hat and Jaeger boots--as complete
an advertisement for Jaeger as old Joseph Finsbury was for his Doctor.
No costume could have seemed so altogether out of character with the
fantastic, delightful, extravagant creature inside of it, though,
really, none could have been more in character. It had always been Bob's
way to play the game of life by dressing the part of the moment. Before
I met him I had been told of his influence over Louis Stevenson, whose
debt to him for ideas and conceits was said to be immeasurable, and
nobody who knew Bob has doubted it. I feel convinced that Louis owed to
him also his touch of the fantastic, the unusual, in dress, since it
belonged so entirely to Bob and was no less entirely in keeping with his
attitude towards the universe and his place in it--his tendency of
always probing the real for the romantic.
Knowing one cousin and the books of the other, I should say it was Bob
who, in their childhood, originated the drama of the Lantern-Bearers and
the evil-smelling lantern under the great coat, symbol of adventure and
daring--that it was Bob who, in their gay youth, evolved the black
flannel shirts to which they owed the honour of being, with Lord
Salisbury, the only Britons ever refused admission to the Casino at
Monte Carlo, and which were worn by the Stennis Brothers in _The
Wrecker_,--that it was Bob who impressed upon Louis the importance of
being dressed for the scene until he surpassed himself in his amazing
get-up for the _Epilogue to an Inland Voyage_. Bob's own disguises
rarely got into print, but in Will Low's _Chronicle of Friendships_
there is a photograph of him in his student days, figuring as a sort of
brigand of old-fashioned comic opera, that shows he did not from the
beginning shirk the obligations he imposed upon others. I remember a
huge ring, inherited from his father to whom the Czar had given it for
engineering services in Russia, which he kept for formal occasions so
that when I saw it covering his finger, almost his hand, at the dinner
to which we had both been invited, I understood that to him the occasion
was one of ceremony and he never failed to regulate his conduct
accordingly. I was glad the ring did not appear on our Thursday nights,
so much freer of formality, and therefore more amusing, was he without
it. The large perfection of his Jaegers in his last years was no less
symbolic; in them he was dressed for the rôle of middle age which he,
who had the gift of eternal youth, had already reached when I first knew
him. It was a rôle to which, at the time, I attributed his concern about
his health--his anxiety to know if we, any of us, had influenza before
he would come home with me, his rush from the room or the house at a
sniff or a sneeze. The truth is Bob shared Henley's love of the visible
sign, or it may be nearer the truth to say that he shared his own love
of it with Henley and his cousin who rarely, either of them, wrote
anything in which it is not felt.
But Henley loved the visible sign for itself--the romance was actually
in the tap-tap of the blind man's staff, in the pagan obelisk towering
above the Christian river. Bob loved the visible sign for the hint it
gave to his imagination, the adventure upon which it sent him galloping.
He could build up a romance out of anything and nothing--he was the
modern Scheherezade, but, as time went on, with nobody to repeat his
stories. He could have made the fortune of any number of young men with
their cuffs ready, but the only young man who ever did use his cuff was
Louis Stevenson when they were young together. Bob had not the energy to
put down his stories himself--he would not have written a word for
publication had he not been forced to. For him the romance would have
been lost in the labour of recording it, and, anyway, he was always
consistent in not doing more work than he was obliged to in order to
live. He had not the talent for combining, or identifying, his pleasure
with his work. Painting was the profession for which he had been
trained, but with it he amused himself and, as far as I know, never made
a penny out of it. When he talked he would have lost his joy in the
invention, the fabrication, had he thought he must turn it to profit. Of
the curious twist of his imagination there remains but the faint
reflection here and there in Prince Florizel and the romantic
adventurers swaggering and talking splendid nonsense through the earlier
tales by Louis Stevenson, whose books grew less and less fantastic as
his path and Bob's spread wider apart. Even in the earlier tales Bob
will not be discovered by future generations who have lost the key.
For the sake of posterity, if not for my own, I would have been wiser on
Thursday nights to think less of my next morning's article than of his
inventions. As it is, I retain merely a general impression and an
occasional detail of his talk. I am glad I remember, for one thing, his
unfailing prejudice in favour of his friends, so amiable was the side of
his character it revealed--though it revealed also his weakness as
critic. He had a positive genius for veiling prosaic facts with romance
where the people he liked were concerned. How often have we laughed at
his amiability to a painter of the commonplace who had happened to be
his fellow-student in Paris, whose work, as a consequence, his friendly
imagination filled with the fine things that to us were conspicuously
missing, and whose name he dragged into every criticism he wrote, even
into his Monograph on Velasquez, nor could he be laughed, or argued out
of it.
And I am glad I remember another trick of his imagination, though it was
like to end in disaster for us all, so equally characteristic was it of
his genius in weaving romance from prose. He was talking one evening of
wine, upon which he had large--Continental--ideas, declaring he would
not have it in his house unless all his family, including the servants,
could drink it without stint and also without thought of
expense--though, if I am not mistaken, his household staff consisted
chiefly of a decent old Scotchwoman who would have scorned wine as a
device of the foreigner. The triumphant ring of his voice is still in my
ears as he announced that he had found a merchant who could provide him
with just the wine he wanted, good, pure, light, white or red, an
ordinary brand for sevenpence a bottle, a superior brand for eightpence.
The marvel of it all was that we believed in that wine and when the
company left for home, the merchant's address was in almost everybody's
pocket. It was not a bad wine in the sample bottles J. and I received a
day or two later, nothing much to boast of, but harmless. For the
further cheapness promised we next ordered it by the case, one of red
and one of white--a rare bargain we thought. But in the end it was the
most expensive wine it has ever been our misfortune to invest in. For
when it came in cases it was so potent that nobody could drink as much
as a glass without going to sleep. I never had it analyzed, but, after a
couple of bottles, I did not dare to put it on the table again, or to
use it even for cooking or as vinegar. To balance our accounts, we did
without wine of any kind, or at any price, for many a week to come. But
we had our revenge. In the course of a few months Bob's wine merchant
was summoned before the magistrate for manufacturing Bordeaux and
Burgundies out of Greek currants and more reprehensible materials in the
backyard of his unpretending riverside house, and it was one of our
Thursday night fellow victims who had the pleasure of exposing him in
the _Daily Chronicle_. Bob did not share our resentment. He had his
pleasure in the charm his imagination gave to every drop of the few
bottles he drank and managed not to die of.
I began to notice in the galleries and on Thursday nights that Bob
became more and more engrossed in the question of his health and quicker
to fly at a sniff or a sneeze. The time came when no persuasion could
bring him home with me. He described symptoms rather than pictures, his
interest in anything in the shape of paint weakened. I fancied that he
was romancing, that he was playing the hypochondriac as part of his rôle
of middle-age, and I thought it a pity. It might provide a new
entertainment for him, but it deprived us of the entertainment of his
company. Then I hardly met him at all, or if I did he was too nervous to
linger before each painting or drawing, to gossip about it and
everything under the sun. He would walk through the galleries with one
leg dragging a little--the visible sign, I would say to myself, amused
to see that he could turn romance into reality as easily as reality into
romance. He would start for Kew right off, without any loitering,
without any delicious pretending that he was going in the very next
train and then not going until the very next train meant the very next
day. But before long I learned that there was no romance about it, that
it was grim reality, the grimmer to me because I had taken it so
lightly. His illness was mere rumour at first, for few people went to
his house in far Kew to see him. It was more than rumour when he ceased
altogether to appear in the galleries, for we knew he was dependent
upon art criticism for his butter, if not for most of his bread. I had
not got as far as belief in his illness before the news came that he had
set out upon the greatest adventure of all and that no more would
Buckingham Street be transfigured in the light of his romancing,
glorified by his inexhaustible fancy. I owed him much: the charm of the
personality of "this delightful and wonderful creature" in Henley's
words of him, pleasure from his talk, stimulus from his criticism, and I
wish I had had the common sense to do what I could to make him live as a
pleasure and a stimulus to others. My mistake on our Thursday nights was
to keep my cuff clean, my note-book empty.
[Illustration: Sketch by Aubrey Beardsley
HENRY HARLAND]
V
In the case of Henry Harland my conscience makes me no such reproach. If
ever a man became his own Boswell it was he, though I do not suppose
anything was further from his mind when he sat down to write. But as he
talked, so he wrote--he could not help himself--and all who have read
the witty, gay, whimsical, fantastic talk of his heroes and heroines,
especially in his last three books, have listened to him. He, no less
than his Adrian Willes--even if quite another man was the model--never
understood how it was possible for people to be bored. Flaubert once
said in a letter, "Life is so hideous that the only way of enduring it
is to avoid it." But Harland believed in plunging into it headlong and
getting everything that is to be got out of it. He had eyes to see that
"life is just one sequence of many-coloured astonishments", and the
colours were the gayer when he came to our Thursday nights because he
was still so young.
He and Mrs. Harland had been in London only a few years, his career as
Sydney Luska was behind him, his career as Henry Harland was before him,
he was full of life, energy, enthusiasm, deep in long novels, busy for
the _Daily Chronicle_, writing as hard as he talked, and he talked every
bit as hard as Bob Stevenson.
Like Bob, he seemed to love talk more than anything, but he must have
loved work as Bob never loved it, for he put the quality of his talk
into what he wrote. Bob Stevenson's writing never suggested his talk. I
might find his point of view and his amiable prejudices in his criticism
and his books--only he could have written his _Velasquez_ quite as he
wrote it--but nowhere do I find a touch, a trace of the Lantern-Bearer
or Prince Florizel or the Young Man with the Cream Tarts. But I never
get far away from Harland in his novels. I re-read them a short time
ago, and they were a magic carpet to bear me straight back to Buckingham
Street, and the crowded, smoky rooms overlooking the river, and the old
years when we were all young together.
A delightful thing about Harland was that he did not care to monopolize
the talk, to talk everybody else down. On the contrary, I doubt if he
was ever happier than when he roused, provoked, stimulated everybody to
talk with him. I remember in particular an evening when J. and I were
dining with him and Mrs. Harland at their Kensington flat, and Mr. and
Mrs. Edmund Gosse were there, and Mr. and Mrs. W.J. Fisher--Fisher was
then editor of the _Daily Chronicle_ and Mrs. Fisher was still Adrienne
Dayrolles on the stage--and Louis Austen, a handy man of journalism, and
when, happening to turn for a minute from Harland by whom I was sitting,
and to look round the table, I found I was the only one of the party not
talking--and we had got no farther than the fish! But I flatter myself I
have few rivals as an accomplished listener.
Often Harland had the floor to himself simply because everybody else
wanted to listen too. When what he calls in one of his books "the
restorative spirit of nonsense" descended upon him, his talk could
whisk off the whole Thursday night crowd, before they knew it, to that
delectable Land of Nonsense to which he was an inspired guide. Nobody
understood better how to set up the absurd and the impossible in the
garb of truth. An old admirer of his reminded me not long since of a
tale he used to tell, almost with tears in his voice, of the _petit
patissier_ who was hurrying through the streets of Paris to deliver
_brioches_ and tarts to customers and who, crossing the Boulevards, was
knocked down by a big three-horse omnibus. And as the crowd collected
and the _sergent-de-ville_ arrived, he was seen painfully and
deliberately freeing his one uninjured arm, feeling carefully in pocket
after pocket, and, as he drew his last breath, holding up triumphantly
the exact number of francs the Parisian on foot then had to pay for
venturing rashly to get in the way of the Paris driver. And Harland told
it all with such eloquence that it was some minutes before those who
listened realised he was laughing and began to laugh with him. And the
tale was typical of many others he loved to tell. As his talk led the
way to the Land of Nonsense, so he himself could of a sudden whirl us
all off to a restaurant, or a park, or an excursion we had not thought
of an hour, a minute before. Many a time, instead of sitting solemnly
at home reading or working as we had meant to, we would be going down
the river in a penny steamboat, or drinking coffee at the _Café Royal_
or tea in Kensington Gardens--but Harland as an inspired guide was at
his best in Paris I always thought, perhaps because in Paris he had so
much larger scope than in London.