TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE
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[Illustration:
THE ROOF GARDEN AND POMPEIAN FOUNTAIN AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(_From the Painting by Yoshio Markino._)
]
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TWENTY YEARS
OF MY LIFE
BY
DOUGLAS SLADEN
AUTHOR OF “WHO’S WHO”
WITH FOUR COLOURED ILLUSTRATIONS AND TWELVE PORTRAITS
BY
YOSHIO MARKINO
Publisher’s Logo
NEW YORK
E·P·DUTTON & COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
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PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
BRUNSWICK ST., STAMFORD ST., S.E.,
AND BUNGAY SUFFOLK.
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AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED
TO
JEROME K. JEROME
ONE OF THE EARLIEST AND DEAREST OF MY
LITERARY FRIENDS
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INTRODUCTION
WHEN I wrote _Who’s Who_, sixteen or seventeen years ago, I used to
receive shoals of funny letters from people who wanted, or did not want,
to be included, and now, when I have not edited the book for more than a
dozen years, I still receive letters of criticism on the way in which I
conduct it, and usually consign them to limbo. A few months ago,
however, I received the subjoined letter, which is so out of the
ordinary that I quote it to show what illustrious correspondents I have.
I must not attach the author’s name, though every grown-up man in the
civilised world would be interested to know it.
“DEAR SIR,
“Kindly cease to omit my name from your ever-increasing
list of persons as annually placed before the public for sale at
any price it is worth. Just put me down in place of Victoria
Alice, who is an American pure and simple, while I am left out
in the cold. I am the daughter of King Edward VII....[1] I am
the legal spouse of Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, being legally
married to him in 1890, Aug. 14, a ratification of which
occurrence was held by me in hallway of British Embassy, Paris,
France, 1900, same date. Just give me a notice, will you,
instead of harping on the sisterhood of King George V, who form
among themselves a similar affair to that held by female
contingent of Synagogue, doing more damage in the community, and
eventually in the world, than any one set of people anywhere,
with method so secret that even Rabbi is unable to uncover the
original design known as main point in England.
“Sincerely,
“Etc., etc.
“_October 23, 1913._”
Footnote 1:
This portion of the letter could not be printed.
If I could tell all I know about the interesting people I have met, the
book would read like my own _Who’s Who_ re-written by Walter Emanuel for
publication in _Punch_. As it is, the book contains a great deal of
information about celebrities which could never appear in _Who’s Who_,
and all the best anecdotes which I remember about my friends, except
those which would turn my friends into enemies, and even some of those I
mean to give in this preface, minus the names, to prevent their being
lost to posterity.
The twenty years of my life which I here present to readers are the
twenty years which I spent at 32, Addison Mansions, Kensington, during
which I was in constant intercourse with most of the best-known writers
of the generation. The book is therefore largely taken up with personal
reminiscences and impressions of them—indeed, not a few of them, such as
Conan Doyle, J. K. Jerome, I. Zangwill, H. A. Vachell, Charles Garvice,
Eden Phillpotts, Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Mrs. Croker, Mrs.
Perrin, Madame Albanesi, Compton Mackenzie, and Jeffery Farnol’s mentor,
wrote specially for this book an account of the circumstances which led
to their being authors. For it must be remembered that the majority of
authors start life in some other profession, and drift into authorship
as they discover their aptitude for it. Conan Doyle was a doctor, in
busy practice when he wrote _The White Company_; Jerome was a lawyer’s
clerk when he wrote _Three Men in a Boat_; both Hardy and Hall Caine
began as architects; Zangwill was a teacher, and W. W. Jacobs was a
clerk in the General Post Office.
An index of the authors of whom personal reminiscences are told in this
book will be found at the end.
Its earlier chapters deal with my life prior to our going to Addison
Mansions, giving details of my parentage and bringing-up, of the seven
years I spent in Australia and the United States, and my long visits to
Canada and Japan. From that point forward, except for the four chapters
which deal with the writing of my books, the present volume is occupied
chiefly with London literary society from 1891 to 1911.
It was in the ’nineties that the late Sir Walter Besant’s efforts to
bring authors together by the creation of the Authors’ Club, and their
trade union, the Authors’ Society, bore fruit. English writers, who had
hitherto been the reverse of gregarious, began to meet each other very
often at receptions and clubs.
In those days one made new friends among well-known authors, artists,
and theatrical people every day, at places like the Authors’, Arts,
Vagabonds, Savage, Hogarth and Argonauts’ Clubs, the Idler teas, and
women’s teas at the Pioneer Club, the Writers’ Club, and the Women
Journalists’, and various receptions in Bohemia. It was almost an
offence to spend an entire afternoon, or an entire evening, in any other
way, and though it made inroads on one’s time for work, and time for
exercise, it gave one an intimacy, which has lasted, with men and women
who have since risen to the head of their professions. That intimacy is
reflected in these pages, which show a good deal of the personal side of
the literary movement of the ’nineties and the literary club life of the
period.
I have endeavoured in this book to interest my readers in two ways—by
telling them the circumstances in my bringing-up, and my subsequent
life, which made me a busy man of letters instead of a lawyer, and by
giving them my reminiscences of friends who have won the affection of
the public in literature, in art, and on the stage.
As I feel that a great many of my readers will be much more interested
in my reminiscences than in my life, I advise them to begin at Chapter
VI—or, better still, Chapter VIII—from which point forward, with the
exceptions of Chapters XVI-XIX, the book is taken up more with the
friends I have had the good fortune to know than with myself.
Before concluding, I will give three or four stories too personal to
have names attached to them.
I once heard a Bishop, who in those days was a smug and an Oxford Don,
remark to a circle of delighted undergraduates, “My brother Edward
thinks I’m an awful fool.” As his brother Edward was Captain of the Eton
Eleven, and amateur champion of something or other, there is no doubt
that his brother Edward did think him an awful fool.
I once heard an author, at the very moment that Robert Louis Stevenson,
as we had learnt by telegram that afternoon, was lying in state under
the sky at Samoa, awaiting burial, say, replying to the toast of his
health at a public dinner, that he had been led to write his most
popular book by the perusal of Stevenson’s _Treasure Island_.
“I said to myself,” he naïvely remarked, “that if I could not write a
better book than that in six weeks, I would shoot myself.”
The same man, when another of his books had been dramatised, and he was
called before the curtain on the first night of its production, informed
the audience that it was a very good play, and that it would be a great
success when it was decently acted. So complacent was he about it that
the friend who tried to pull him back behind the curtain by the tails of
his dress-coat failed until he had split the coat up to the collar.
This man has the very best instincts, but he has a genius for poking his
finger into people’s eyes.
I once knew the brother of a Bishop, who left the Church of England, and
went to America to be a Unitarian clergyman, because he wished to marry
a pretty American heiress, and he had a wife already in England. By and
by his new sect heard of it, and expelled him with conscious or
unconscious humour for “conduct incompatible with membership in the
Unitarian Church.” He hired a hall from the piano company opposite, and
nearly the whole congregation moved across the street with him. Except
in the matter of monogamy, he was a most Christian man, and his
congregation had the highest respect and affection for him and his
bigamous wife; and this in spite of the fact that he constantly alluded
to the Trinity as he warmed to his subject in sermons for the
edification of Unitarians. If he noticed it, he corrected himself and
said Triad. He was one of the most delightful men I ever met, and his
influence on his congregation was of the very best.
In the days when I saw so much of actors at our own flat, and went every
Sunday night to the O.P., I was once asked to arbitrate in a dispute
between an actor-manager and the critic of a great daily, who had
exchanged “words” in the theatre. The critic either dreaded the expense
of a lawsuit, or had no desire to make money if he could obtain the
_amende honorable_. I heard all they had to say, and then I turned round
and said to the great actor, “Did you say that about Mr. ——?” and he
replied with an Irishism which I got accepted as an apology: “I really
couldn’t say; I’m such a liar that I never know what I have said and
what I haven’t said.”
These are stories to which I could not append the names, but the reader
will find as good and better if he turns up the names of S. H. Jeyes,
Oscar Wilde and Phil May in the index.
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CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I MY LIFE (1856-1886) 1
II MY LIFE (1886-1888) 20
III I GO TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 26
IV I GO TO JAPAN 35
V BACK TO CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES 46
VI LITERARY AT-HOMES AND LITERARY CLUBS 52
VII WE START OUR LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON 57
VIII OUR AT-HOMES: YOUNG AUTHORS WHO ARE NOW 73
GREAT AUTHORS
IX THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES 82
X THE POETS AT OUR AT-HOMES 103
XI LADY AUTHORS AT ADDISON MANSIONS 119
XII LITERARY CLUBS: MY CONNECTION WITH THE 146
AUTHORS’ CLUB
XIII LITERARY CLUBS: THE IDLERS AND THE 162
VAGABONDS
XIV LITERARY CLUBS: THE SAVAGE CLUB 183
XV MY CONNECTION WITH JOURNALISM 188
XVI THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS. PART I 204
XVII THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS. PART II 216
XVIII THE WRITING OF MY BOOKS. PART III 223
XIX HOW I WROTE “WHO’S WHO” 233
XX AUSTRALIANS IN LITERATURE 240
XXI MY NOVELIST FRIENDS. PART I 251
XXII MY NOVELIST FRIENDS. PART II 279
XXIII MY NOVELIST FRIENDS. PART III 288
XXIV OTHER AUTHOR FRIENDS 300
XXV FRIENDS WHO NEVER CAME TO ADDISON 307
MANSIONS
XXVI MY TRAVELLER FRIENDS 312
XXVII MY ACTOR FRIENDS 328
XXVIII MY ARTIST FRIENDS 346
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
COLOURED PICTURES BY YOSHIO MARKINO
THE ROOF GARDEN OF 32 ADDISON MANSIONS Frontispiece
THE MOORISH ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS 72
THE DINING-ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS IN 204
WHICH MOST OF MY BOOKS WERE WRITTEN
THE JAPANESE ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS 306
PORTRAITS BY YOSHIO MARKINO
DOUGLAS SLADEN 26
ISRAEL ZANGWILL 50
SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE 74
JEROME K. JEROME 98
MISS BRADDON 124
CHARLES GARVICE 150
G. B. BURGIN 174
SIDNEY LOW 119
HALL CAINE 224
W. B. MAXWELL 279
SIR GILBERT PARKER 324
SIR HERBERT BEERBOHM-TREE 344
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INDEX OF REMINISCENCES
AT the end of the book will be found an index of the well-known people
about whom personal reminiscences or new facts are told—such as Prince
Alamayu of Abyssinia, Mme. Albanesi, Sir Edwin Arnold, Lena Ashwell,
Sarah Bernhardt, Sir Walter Besant, Rolf Boldrewood, Hall Caine, Dion
Clayton Calthrop, Mrs. Clifford, Bishop Creighton, Mrs. Croker, Sir A.
Conan Doyle, Lord Dundonald, Sir J. Forbes-Robertson, Charles Garvice,
Bishop Gore, Sarah Grand, George Grossmith, Thomas Hardy, Bret Harte, W.
E. Henley, Robert Hichens, John Oliver Hobbes, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Anthony Hope, J. K. Jerome, S. H. Jeyes, C. Kernahan, A. H. Savage
Landor, Maarten Maartens, Compton MacKenzie, Yoshio Markino, “Bob”
Martin, George Meredith, Frankfort Moore, Dr. G. E. Morrison of Peking,
F. W. H. Myers, Nansen, Cardinal Newman, Mrs. Perrin, Eden Phillpotts,
Rt. Hon. Sir Geo. Reid, Whitelaw Reid, Lord Roberts, the late Lord
Salisbury, F. Hopkinson Smith, Father Stanton, Mrs. Flora Annie Steel,
August Strindberg, Mark Twain, H. A. Vachell, J. M. Whistler, Percy
White, Oscar Wilde, Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Lord Willoughby de
Broke, Margaret Woods, Sir Charles Wyndham and Israel Zangwill.
D. S.
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TWENTY YEARS OF MY LIFE
CHAPTER I
MY LIFE (1856-1886)
I WAS born on February 5, 1856, in the town-house of my maternal
grandfather. My father, a solicitor by profession, who died in the last
days of 1910, at the age of eighty-six, was almost the youngest of the
sixteen children of my paternal grandparents, John Baker Sladen, D.L.,
J.P., of Ripple Court, near Dover, and Etheldred St. Barbe. The name St.
Barbe has been freely bestowed on their descendants because the first
St. Barbe in this country has the honour of appearing on the Roll of
Battle Abbey.
My maternal grandparents were John Wheelton and Mary Wynfield. Mr.
Wheelton (I was never able to discover any other person named Wheelton,
till I found, among the survivors of the loss of the _Titanic_, a
steward called Wheelton; truly the name has narrowly escaped
extinction), from whom I get my third Christian name, was in business as
a shipper on the site of the General Post Office, and was Master of the
Cordwainers’ Company. He was Sheriff of London in the year of Queen
Victoria’s marriage. Though he lived at Meopham near Tonbridge, he came
from Manchester, and I am, therefore, a Lancashire man on one side of
the house. But oddly enough I have never been to Manchester.
Charles Dickens, when he first became a writer, was a frequent guest at
his hospitable table, and has immortalised him in one of his books. He
was in a way immortalised by taking a leading part in one of the most
famous law cases in our history, Stockdale _versus_ Hansard. As Sheriff
he had to levy an execution on Hansard, the printer to the House of
Commons, who had published in the reports of the debates a libel on Mr.
Stockdale. The House declared it a breach of privilege, and sentenced
the Sheriff to be imprisoned in the Speaker’s house, from which he was
shortly afterwards released on the plea of ill-health. But with the City
of London as well as the Law Courts against them, the members of the
House of Commons determined to avoid future collisions by bringing in a
bill to make the reports of the proceedings of Parliament privileged and
this duly became law.
I have in my possession an enormous silver epergne, supported by
allegorical figures of Justice and others, which the City of London
presented to my grandfather in honour of this occasion, with a few
survivors of a set of leather fire-buckets, embellished with the City
arms, which now do duty as waste-paper baskets.
I was baptised in Trinity Church, Paddington, and shortly afterwards my
parents went to live at 22, Westbourne Park Terrace, Paddington,
continuing there till 1862.
It was in this year that my last sister, Mrs. Young, was born, just
before we changed houses. My eldest sister, who married the late Rev.
Frederick Robert Ellis, only son of Robert Ridge Ellis, of the Court
Lodge, Yalding, Kent, and for many years Rector of Much Wenlock, was
born in 1850. My second sister, who married Robert Arundel Watkins,
eldest surviving son of the Rev. Bernard Watkins, of Treeton, and
afterwards of Lawkland Hall, Yorkshire, was born in 1851; and my
brother, the Rev. St. Barbe Sydenham Sladen, who holds one of the City
livings, St. Margaret Patten, was born in 1858.
My father, having become better off by the death of my two grandfathers
in 1860 and 1861, bought a ninety-six years’ lease of Phillimore Lodge,
Campden Hill, which I sold in 1911.
I believe that I never left London till I was four years old, when we
all went to stay with my uncle, the Rev. William Springett, who still
survives, at Dunkirk Vicarage, near Canterbury. While we were there I
first saw and dipped my hands in the sea, which I was destined to
traverse so often, at a place called Seasalter, to which we drove from
Dunkirk.
From 1862 to 1868, when my mother died, we children generally spent the
summer at Brighton, from which my father went away to a moor in
Yorkshire for the grouse-shooting. As a child, I soon grew tired of
Brighton, which seemed so like a seaside suburb of London. I used to
think that the sea itself, which had no proper ships on it, was like a
very large canal. I longed for real sea, like we had seen at Deal, where
we went to stay in my grandmother Sladen’s dower-house, shortly after
our visit to Dunkirk. There we had seen a full-rigged ship driven on to
the beach in front of our house in a gale, and had seen the lifeboat and
the Deal luggers putting out to wrecks on the Goodwin Sands, and had
seen the largest ships of the day in the Downs. I loved the woods we had
rambled in, between Dunkirk and Canterbury, even better still. I never
found the ordinary seaside place tolerable till I became enamoured of
golf. Without golf these places are marine deserts.
I never tasted the real delights of the country till we went in the
later ’sixties to a farmhouse on the edge of the Duke of Rutland’s moors
above Baslow, in Derbyshire. With that holiday I was simply enchanted.
For rocks meant fairyland, as they still do, to me. And there I had,
besides rocks, like the Cakes of Bread, the clear, trout-haunted
mountain-river Derwent, and romantic mediæval architecture like Haddon
Hall. Besides, we were allowed to run wild on the farm, to sail about
the shallow pond in a cattle-trough, to help to make Wensleydale cheeses
(this part of Derbyshire arrogates the right to use the name), and to
hack the garden about as much as we liked. It was there that I had my
first real games of Red Indians and Robinson Crusoe, and there that I
had the seeds of my passion for architecture implanted in me.
We drove about a great deal—to the Peak, with its caverns and its queer
villages, to the glorious Derbyshire Dales, and to great houses like
Chatsworth. Certainly Baslow was my fairy-godmother in authorship, and
my literary aspirations were cradled in Derbyshire. My father gave me a
good schooling in the beauties of England. We were always taken to see
every place of any interest for its scenery, its buildings, or its
history, which could be reached in a day by a pair of horses from the
house, where we were spending our summer holidays. He had the same
_flair_ for guide-books as I have, and taught me how to use them
intelligently.
Up till 1864 I was taught by governesses with my elder sisters. There
were three of them, Miss Morrison, Miss Bray, and Miss Rose Sara Paley,
an American Southerner, whose parents had been ruined by the Civil War.
She was a very charming and intelligent woman, and taught my eldest
sister to compose in prose and verse. For a long time this sister was
the author of our home circle. I was too young to try composition in
those days, but seeing my eldest sister do it familiarised me with the
idea of it. I also had a music mistress, because it was hoped that
playing the piano would restore my left hand to its proper shape, after
the extraordinary accident which I had when I was only two years old.
She was Miss Rosa Brinsmead, a daughter of the John Brinsmead who
founded the famous piano-making firm. The point which I remember best
about her was that she had fair ringlets like Princess (now Queen)
Alexandra, who had just come over from Denmark and won all hearts.
The accident happened by my falling into the fireplace, when my nurse
left me for a minute. To raise myself up I caught hold of the bar of the
grate with my left hand, and scorched the inside out. It is still
shrivelled, though fifty-five years have passed since that awful day for
my mother, when she found her only son, as she thought, crippled for
life.
But though it chapped terribly every winter, and would not open properly
for the next three or four years, I soon got back the use of my hand,
and no one now suspects it of being the least disfigured till I hold it
open to show them. The back was uninjured, and it looks a very nice hand
by X-rays, when only the bones are visible.
The doctor recommended that, being a child of a very active brain (I
asked quite awkward questions about the birth of my brother shortly
afterwards), I should be taught to read while I was kept in bed, as the
only means of keeping my hand out of danger, and I was given a box of
letters which I always arranged upon the splint of my wounded hand. By
the time that it was well I could read, and on my fifth birthday I was
given the leather-bound Prayer-book which I had been promised whenever I
could read every word in it. I have the Prayer-book still, half a
century later.
Poor Miss Brinsmead had a hopeless task, for though I could learn to
read so easily, I never could learn to play on the piano with both hands
at the same time, except in the very baldest melodies, like “God Save
the Queen,” and the “Sultan’s Polka.” These I did achieve.
In 1864 I was sent to a dame’s school in Kensington Square, kept by the
Misses Newman, from which I was shortly afterwards transferred to
another kept by Miss Daymond, an excellent teacher, where I had Johnny
and Everett Millais, and sons of other great artists, for my
schoolfellows.
In 1866, though it nearly broke my mother’s heart, I was sent to my
first boarding-school, Temple Grove, East Sheen—in the old house where
Dorothy Temple had lived, and Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston,
the greatest of that illustrious race, was born—the school, moreover,
which had numbered Benjamin Disraeli among its pupils. How many people
are there who know that Dizzy was schooled in the house in which
Palmerston was born—those two great apostles of British prestige?
Here I stayed for three years before I won the first junior scholarship
at Cheltenham College, and here, from my house-master, I had a fresh and
wonderful department of knowledge opened to me, for he used to take me
naturalising (both by day and by night, when the other boys were in bed)
on Sheen Common, then wild enough to have snakes and glow-worms and
lizards, as well as newts and leeches, and rich in insect prizes. I won
this favour because he accidentally discovered that I knew “Mangnall’s
Questions” and “Common Subjects” by heart. But though he was Divinity
Master, he never discovered that I knew my Bible quite as well.
He also taught me to lie. I had never told a lie till I went to Temple
Grove. But as he prided himself on his acuteness, he was
constitutionally unable to believe the truth. It was too obvious for
him. When I found that he invariably thought I was lying while I still
obeyed my mother’s teaching, and was too afraid of God to tell a lie, I
suddenly made up my mind that I would humour him, and tell whatever lie
was necessary to this transparent Sherlock Holmes. After this he always
believed me, unless I accidentally forgot and told him the truth. And I
liked him so much that I wished him to believe me.
He did not injure my character as much as he might have done, because I
was born with a loathing for insincerity. The difficulty came when he
and Waterfield, the head master, questioned me about the same thing, for
Waterfield mesmerised one into telling the truth, and he tempted one to
tell a lie. It reminds me now of Titian’s “Sacred and Profane Love.”
At Temple Grove I acquired my taste for games and taste for natural
history.
In 1868, my mother, to whom I was passionately attached, died. I used to
dream that she was alive for months afterwards. And the great
theosophist to whom I mentioned this sees in it an astral communication.
To divert my thoughts from this, the greatest grief I had ever had, I
was sent to stay with my cousin, Colonel Joseph Sladen, who had already
succeeded to Ripple Court, and was then a Gunner Captain, stationed at
Sheerness. He belonged to the Royal Yacht Squadron, and had a schooner
yacht in which we used to go away for cruises up the Channel. I was a
little boy of twelve, and his two eldest sons, Arthur Sladen, now H.R.H.
the Duke of Connaught’s Private Secretary in Canada, and Sampson Sladen,
now the Chief of the London Fire Brigade, were hardly more than babies,
but I enjoyed it very much, because I was interested in the yachting and
in the firing of the hundred-pounder Armstrongs, which were the monster
guns of those days. We went in my cousin’s yacht to see the new ironclad
fleets of Great Britain and France, and we went over the _Black Prince_
and the _Minotaur_, the crack ships of the time.
A year after that, exactly on the first anniversary of my mother’s
death, I went to Cheltenham College, where I had taken a scholarship. I
was at Cheltenham College six years, and took four scholarships and many
prizes at the school, the most interesting of which, in view of my after
life, was the prize for the English Poem. I was also Senior Prefect,
Editor of the school magazine, Captain of Football, and Captain of the
Rifle Corps. I shot for the school four times in the Public School
competitions at Wimbledon, and in 1874 won the Spencer Cup, which was
open to the best shot from each of the Public Schools. I was the school
representative for it also in 1873.
At Cheltenham, I suppose, I laid the foundations of my literary career,
because, besides editing the school magazine for a couple of years, and
writing the Prize Poem, I read every book in the College library. It was
such a delight to me to have the run of a well-stocked library. The
books at home were nearly all religious books. I was brought up on the
sternest low-Church lines; we went to church twice a day on Sunday,
besides having prayers read twice at home, and hymns sung in the
afternoon. The church we attended was St. Paul’s, Onslow Square, where I
had to listen to hour-long sermons from Capel Molyneux and Prebendary
Webb-Peploe. The dull and long services were almost intolerable, except
when Millais, the great painter, who had the next pew, asked me into his
pew to relieve the crush in ours. Millais sat so upright and so forward
when he was listening that my father could not see me, and I used to
bury my face in the beautiful Mrs. Millais’ sealskin jacket; I had such
an admiration for her that I did not go to sleep. Millais—he was not Sir
John in those days—did not make his children go to church; I suppose he
went because he was fascinated by the eloquence of the sermons.
Molyneux, Marston and Peploe were all great preachers, though they bored
an unfortunate small boy to the verge of nervous prostration. We were
only allowed to read Sunday books on Sunday, and the newspapers were put
away, as they were to the day of my father’s death in 1910.
After my mother’s death I always longed to get back to school, because,
though we had to go to chapel every day, and twice on Sunday, there was
not that atmosphere of religion which made me, as a small boy, begin to
feel unhappy about lunch-time on Saturday, and not thoroughly relieved
till after breakfast on Monday. I hated Sunday at home; the two-mile
walk to and from church was the best part of it.
I have forgotten two other preparations for a literary career which I
perpetrated at Cheltenham. I and my greatest friend, a boy called Walter
Roper Lawrence (now Sir W. R. Lawrence, Bart., G.C.I.E.), who afterwards
rose to a position of the highest eminence in India, wrote verses for
the school magazine, and I published a pamphlet to avenge a contemptuous
reference, in the Shotover Papers, and was duly summoned for libel. The
late Frederick Stroud, the Recorder of Tewkesbury, who was at that time
a solicitor, got me off. I never saw him in after life, which I much
regretted, because he was, like myself, a great student of everything
connected with Adam Lindsay Gordon, the Australian poet. He died while I
was writing our life of Gordon.
At the beginning of 1875 I won an open classical scholarship at Trinity
College, Oxford, where I commenced residence in the following October.
At Oxford again I read voraciously in the splendid library of the Union.
There my love of games continued unabated. I shot against Cambridge four
years, and won all the shooting challenge-cups. I also played in the
’Varsity Rugby Union Football XV when I first went up.
I had delightful old panelled rooms on Number 7 staircase—a chance fact,
which won me a great honour and pleasure. One afternoon, when I came in
from playing football, the College messenger met me, saying, “Grand
company in your rooms this afternoon, Mr. Sladen—the President, and all
the Fellows, and Cardinal Nooman,” and he added, “When the President
looked at your mantelpiece, sir, he _corfed_.” My mantelpiece was strewn
with portraits of Maud Branscombe, Eveleen Rayne, Mrs. Rousby, and other
theatrical stars of that day—about a couple of dozen of them.
Shortly afterwards the President’s butler arrived with a note, which I
supposed was to reproach me with the racy appearance of my mantelpiece,
but it was to ask me to spend the evening with the President, because
Cardinal Newman had expressed a desire to meet the present occupant of
his rooms.
The Cardinal, a wan little man with a shrivelled face and a large nose,
and one of the most beautiful expressions which ever appeared on a human
being, talked to me for a couple of hours, prostrating me with his
exquisite modesty. He wanted to know if the snapdragons, to which he had
written a poem, still grew on the wall between Trinity and Balliol; he
wanted to compare undergraduate life of his day with the undergraduate
life of mine; he asked me about a number of Gothic fragments in Oxford
which might have perished between his day and mine, and fortunately, I
had already conceived the passion for Gothic architecture which pervades
my books, and was able to tell him about every one. He told me the marks
by which he knew that those were his rooms; he asked me about my
studies, and hobbies, and aims in life; I don’t think that I have ever
felt any honour of the kind so much.
At Oxford I spent every penny I could afford, and more, on collecting a
library of standard works, and I have many of them still. I remember
that the literary Oxonians of that day discussed poetry much more than
prose, and could mostly be classified into admirers of William Morris
and admirers of Swinburne, and I think the Morrisians were more
numerous. All of them had an academic admiration for Matthew Arnold’s
poems, and could spout from “Thyrsis” and the “Scholar Gipsy,” which was
compared with Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Thackeray’s daughter (Lady Ritchie) was at that time the latest star in
fiction, as I occasionally remind her.
I had the good fortune to know some of the greatest of the authors who
lived at Oxford when I was an undergraduate—Max Müller, Bishop Stubbs
the historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, Lewis Carroll, Dean Kitchin,
Canon Bright and W. L. Courtney.
Oxford in those days (as I suppose it does still) revolved largely round
“Bobby Raper,” then Dean of Trinity, a man of infinite tact and
kindness, swift to discern ability and character in an undergraduate,
and to make a friend of their owner, and blessed with a most saving
sense of humour. When they had finished at Oxford, a word from him found
them coveted masterships, or secretaryships to Public Men. He was the
link between Oxford and Public life, as much as Jowett—the “Jowler”
himself—who sat in John Wycliffe’s seat at Balliol. Lord Milner, St.
John Brodrick and George Curzon have gone farthest of the Balliol men of
my time. Asquith was before me, Edward Grey after. Trinity ran to
Bishops. Most of the men who sat at the scholars’ table at Trinity in my
time who went into Holy Orders are Bishops now, Archie Robertson, now
Bishop of Exeter, being the senior of them, Bishop Gore of Oxford, who
had rooms on the same floor as I had, and was one of my greatest friends
in my first year, was the Junior Fellow. He was a very well-off young
man, and used to spend huge sums on buying folios of the Latin Fathers,
and then learn them by heart. There is no one who knows so much about
the Fathers as the Bishop of Oxford. The present Archbishop of
Canterbury was at Trinity, but before my time, and so was Father
Stanton, who went there because he came of a hunting family, and it was
a hunting College, and he was a Rugby man. Bishop Stubbs and Freeman
were also Trinity men, and generally at the College Gaudies, where the
Scholars used to dine at the same table as the Dons and their guests.
Sir Richard Burton came once to a Gaudy when I was there, and told me
that he was very surprised that they had asked him, because he had been
sent down.
I said, “You are in very good company. The great Lord Chatham and Walter
Savage Landor were sent down from Trinity as well as you.”
But one well-known literary man of the present day holds the record over
them all, because he was sent down from Trinity twice.
Although I was a classical scholar, I refused to go in for Classics in
the Final Schools. “Greats,” otherwise _Literæ Humaniores_, as this
school is called at Oxford, embraces the study of Philosophy in the
original Greek and Latin of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, and Philosophy
and Logic generally. I was sick of the Classics, and I never could take
the smallest interest in Philosophy, so I knew that I should do no good
in this school, and announced my intention of going in for the School of
Modern History. This was too revolutionary for my tutor. He said—
“Classical scholars are expected to go in for Greats, and if you fail to
do so, we shall have to consider the taking away of your scholarship.”
I was astute in my generation; I went to Gore (the Bishop), who was my
friend, and always met undergraduates as if he were one of themselves,
and said to him, “Will you do something for me, Gore?”
“It depends on what it is,” he replied, with his curious smile.
“Tell the Common-room (_i. e._ the Dons, who used to meet in the
Common-room every night after dinner) that I really mean to go in for
History whether they take away my scholarship or not, but that if they
do take it away, I shall take my name off the books of Trinity and go
and ask Jowett if he will admit me at Balliol. You were a Balliol
undergrad; you know the kind of answer that Jowett would make to a man
who was willing to give up an eighty pounds a year scholarship in order
to go in for the School which interested him.”
“Jowett will take you,” he said, “but I will see what can be done here.”
That night I received the most unpleasant note an undergraduate can
receive—a command to meet the Common-room at ten o’clock the next
morning. They were all present when I went in. The President invited me
to take a seat, and my tutor (the Rev. H. G. Woods, now Master of the
Temple, of whom I still see something) said—
“Are you quite determined to go in for the School of History, Mr.
Sladen?”
“Quite,” I replied.
“Then we hope that the degree you take will justify us in assenting to
such a very unusual procedure.”
Then they all smiled very pleasantly, and I thanked them and went out.
They must have felt quite justified when, two years afterwards, I took
my First in History with congratulatory letters from all my examiners,
while all the scholars of Trinity who went in for the _School of Literæ
Humaniores_ took Seconds and Thirds. I should have got a Fourth, I am
convinced.
Again I read voraciously. For the first year I hardly bothered about my
text-books at all. I read biographies, books about architecture and art
and literature, historical novels, the writings of historical
personages, everything which threw brilliant sidelights on my subject.
And in the second year I learnt my text-books almost by heart, except
Stubbs’s _Constitutional History_ and _Selected Charters_. I simply
could not memorise them—they were so dry, and I hated the dry bones of
_Constitutional History_ almost as badly as philosophy. I learned
digests of them, which took less time, and were no dryer, and proved
equally efficacious in answering the papers.
In after years, when I was entertaining Bishop Stubbs at a reception,
which Montague Fowler and I gave in honour of Mark Twain at the Authors’
Club, he roared with laughter when I told him that I got a First in
History without reading his books, by learning the Digests of them by
heart.
He said, “I know they are dreadfully dull. Did you find my lectures very
dull when you came to them?” He had not forgotten that I had attended
his lectures for a couple of years.
I said, “No, not at all.”
“Honestly, did you get any good from them?”
“Quite honestly?”
He nodded.
I said, “Not in the usual way.”
“Well,” he asked, “how did you get any good from them?”
“You must forgive me if I tell you.”
“Tell me; it cannot be worse than what you said about my books.”
“Well,” I confessed, “the reason why I attended your lectures was that
you never bothered as to whether I was there or not, and I hardly ever
was there. I did not think any lectures were any good, but my tutor made
me attend sixteen a week, and the time which I was supposed to spend at
your lectures, I used to spend in my rooms reading. You were the only
gentleman among my lecturers—all the rest used to call the names, and
report me to my tutor if I was absent.”
He was immensely tickled, and said, “You deserved to get a First, if you
took things as seriously as that.”
But Bishop Stubbs was very human. He always read the lightest novel he
could lay hands on before he went to bed, to relieve his mind after
working, and save him from insomnia.
“They are so light,” he said, “that I keep other books in front of them
in my book-case.”
As an author, I have found the education I was given and gave myself a
very useful foundation. Those ten years I gave to the study of Latin and
Greek and classical history and mythology were not thrown away, because
I have written so many books about Italy and Sicily and Egypt, in which
having the classics at my fingers’ ends made me understand the history,
and the allusions in the materials I had to digest. It is impossible to
write freely about Italy and Greece unless you know your classics.
The two years of incessant study which I gave to taking my degree in
Modern History at Oxford have been equally useful, because it is
impossible to write guide-books and books of travel unless you have a
sound knowledge of history.
For a brief while my degree in history had a most practical and
technical value, for it won me the Chair of Modern History in the
University of Sydney, New South Wales.
Beyond a week or two in Paris, I had never left England before I went to
Australia in the end of 1879, a few months after I left Oxford, but I
knew my England pretty well, because my father had always encouraged me
to see the parts of England which contained the finest scenery and the
architectural _chefs d’œuvres_, like cathedrals. Ireland I had never
visited, and of Scotland I only knew Dumfriesshire, where my father
rented a shooting-box and a moor for four years; and where I had enjoyed
splendid rough shooting when I was a boy, in the very heart of the land
of Burns. “The Grey Mare’s Tail” was on one shooting which we had, and
the Carlyle cottage was right under our Craigenputtock shooting.
When I left Oxford my father gave me three hundred pounds to spend on a
year of travel, and I chose to go to Australia to stay with his eldest
brother, Sir Charles Sladen, K.C.M.G., who had been Prime Minister of
the Colony of Victoria, and was at that time leader of the Upper House,
and of the Constitutional Party in Victoria. I wanted to see if I should
like to settle in the Colonies, and go to the Bar with a view to a
political career. We were not rich enough for me to think of the House
of Commons seriously, and I have always taken a very keen interest in
politics.
Further, I wanted to go and stay on my uncle’s station to get some
riding and shooting, and to see something of the outdoor life of
Australia, of which I had heard so much. And I wanted desperately to try
living in a hot country. I knew by intuition that I should like heat.
I had not been staying with my uncle for a year before I had made up my
mind to live in Australia, a conclusion to which I was assisted by my
marriage with Miss Margaret Isabel Muirhead, the daughter of a Scotsman
from Stirling, who had owned a fine station called the Grampians in the
Western District of Victoria, and had been killed in a horse accident.
As I had not been called to the Bar before I left home, I found that I
had to go through a two years’ course, and take a law degree at the
Melbourne University. This I did, though the position was sufficiently
anomalous. For instance, I had to attend lectures by a Member of the
Government, the Solicitor-General. I knew him intimately at the
Melbourne Club and in private life, and we generally used to walk down
to the Club after the lecture. Sometimes we went into a pub, to have a
drink together, and we discussed anything from the forthcoming
Government Bills to Club stories. He told me one day, before the public
knew anything about it, of the intention of the Government to bring in a
Bill to make sweeps on racing illegal. As much as forty-five thousand
pounds had been subscribed for the Melbourne Cup Sweep the year before.
I said, “It is no good making them illegal; it only means that they will
be carried on under the rose, and that a whole lot of the sweeps will be
bogus. You can’t stop sweeps; all you can do is to put the bogus sweep
on a level with Jimmy Miller’s.”
“What would you do, then?” he asked.
“Well, if you really want to stop them, you should legalise them, and
put a twenty-five per cent., or fifty per cent. for the matter of that,
tax upon them. You’d spoil the odds so that sweeps would die a natural
death; and if they didn’t, you’d get a nice lot of money to save the
taxpayer’s pocket. You would be like the Prince of Monaco, who lives by
the gambling at Monte Carlo.”
He duly put the suggestion before the Government, but they thought that
this would be paltering with eternal sin, and passed their Bill to help
the bogus-sweep promoter.
This same man and I were asked one night to take part in a Shakespeare
reading at the Prime Minister’s. My friend was late, and the Prime
Minister, who was not a discreet man, began talking about him. Somebody
remarked what a wonderfully well-informed man he was.
“Yes,” said the Prime Minister, “my Solicitor-General is one of those
people who know nothing about everything. And the way he does it is that
he never opens a book; he just reads what the magazines and papers have
to say about books.”
Suddenly the Premier felt that his remarks were no longer being received
with enthusiasm, and looking up, saw his Solicitor-General waiting to
shake hands with him.
At the Melbourne University I formed one intimate friendship, which has
lasted ever since. Among my fellow-students was Dr. George Ernest
Morrison, the famous _Times_ correspondent of Peking. He was famous in
those days as the finest football player in the Colony, and he began his
adventures while he was at the University. For months we missed him;
nobody knew where he was—or if his father, who was head master of
Geelong College, did know, he never told. Then suddenly he turned up
again, and said that he had been walking from Cape York, which was the
northernmost point of Australia, to Melbourne. He had undertaken—and I
don’t think he had any bet on it—to make his way from Cape York to
Melbourne, alone, unarmed and without a penny in his pocket. In the
northernmost part of his journey, at any rate, there were a great many
wild blacks, and many rivers full of crocodiles to swim. But there are,
of course, no large carnivora in Australia, and a snake can be killed
with a stick. When he was swimming a river he used to construct a raft,
and put his clothes and his pack on it; he carried a pack like any other
sun-downer, and when he got to a station, did his bit of work to pay for
his bed and supper, and when he left it, if the next station south was
more than a day’s journey, he was given enough food to carry him
through. This is, of course, the universal custom in Australia when a
man is going from station to station in search of work, such as
shearing.
He had not a single misadventure. The reason why he took so long was
that his way from station to station naturally took him out of the
direct line to the south, and he made a stay at some of them. The
newspapers were so impressed with his feat that, shortly afterwards,
when the _Age_ organised an expedition to explore New Guinea, he was
given command of it. That was the last I saw of Morrison till we met a
few years afterwards at my house in London.
I never practised for the Melbourne Bar, for no sooner had I taken my
law degree than I was appointed to the vacant chair of Modern History in
the University of Sydney.
I had, since I landed in Australia, made my debut as an author, and had
already published two volumes of verse, _Frithjof and Ingebjorg_ and
_Australian Lyrics_. During the year that I held my chair, we had
apartments in the Old Government House, Parramatta, which had become a
boarding-house, and spent our vacations on the Hawkesbury and in the
Blue Mountains.
While I was at Parramatta I published a third volume of verse, _A Poetry
of Exiles_.
Then occurred an event which deprived me of one of my principal reasons
for remaining in Australia, the premature death of my uncle. This closed
my short cut to a political career; and I had long since come to the
conclusion that Australia was not the place for a literary career,
because there was no real publishing in Australia. Publishers were
merely booksellers, who acted as intermediaries between authors and
printers; they took no risks of publication; the author paid, and they
received one commission as publishers and another as booksellers. This
did not signify much for verse; the printing bill for books of verse is
not large, and poets are accustomed to bringing out their works at their
own risk in other countries besides Australia. But a large prose work of
a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand words is, at Australian
prices, extremely expensive to produce, and when it is produced, has
only a small sale because it does not bear the name of any well-known
English publishing house.
So I suddenly made up my mind to return to England.
The five years I spent in Australia were fruitful for my career as an
author, though I have never published anything about Australia, except
my own verses, and anthologies of Australian verse, and a life, and an
edition of the poems, of Adam Lindsay Gordon. The last was phenomenally
successful; I am sure that no volume of Browning has ever sold so well.
And one of the anthologies had a sale of twenty thousand copies in the
first ten years of its existence.
Australia supplied exactly the right element for my development. At
Cheltenham I was the most prominent boy of my time, and the prestige
with which I came up from school gave me a certain momentum at Oxford.
So I went out to Australia with a very good opinion of Public Schools,
and Oxford, and myself.
I soon discovered that nothing was of any importance in Australia except
sport and money. If Tennyson or Walter Scott had gone to a
bush-township, he would have been judged merely by his proficiency or
absence of proficiency as a groom. Horsemanship is the one test of the
inhabitants of a bush-township.
In Melbourne and Sydney and on “stations” it was different. Hospitality
was prodigal, and there was a disposition to regard with charity one’s
shortcomings from the Colonial point of view, and to accept with
sympathy the fact that one had distinguished oneself elsewhere. The
Australian man is very manly, and very hearty; the Australian woman is
apt to be very pretty, and to have a strong personality—to be full of
character as a lover.
The climate of Australia I found absolutely delightful. It is a land of
eternal summer: its winters are only cooler summers. The unchanging blue
of its skies is appalling to those whose prosperity depends on the
rainfall.
When I went out to Australia, just after leaving Oxford, I was enough of
a prig to profit very greatly by being suddenly thrown into an
absolutely democratic community. I was saved from finding things
difficult by the fact that I was born a Bohemian, in spite of my very
conventional parentage, and really did delight in roughing it. The free
and easy Colonial life was a great relief to me after the prim life in
my English home; and staying about on the great stations in the western
district of Victoria, which belonged to various connections of my
family, furnished the finest experience of my early life. I spent most
of my first year in Australia in that way, returning, in between, to pay
visits to my uncle at Geelong. Being in the saddle every day never lost
its thrill for me, because I had hardly ever been on a horse before I
went to Australia; and wandering about the big paddocks and the
adjoining stretches of forest, gun in hand—I hardly ever went out
without a gun—had something of the excitement of the books about the
American backwoods which I read in my boyhood. It is true that I would
rather have shot grizzly bears than the native bears of Australia, mere
sloths, and lions and tigers than kangaroos, but a big “forester” is not
to be sneezed at, and Australia has an extraordinary wealth of strange
birds—the cockatoos and parrots and parakeets alone give a sort of
tropical aspect to the forest, and the snakes give an unpleasantly
tropical aspect, though, fortunately, in Australia, they shrink from
human habitations.
When I married I went to live in Melbourne, close to public gardens of
extraordinary beauty and almost tropical luxuriance, and soon became
absorbed in the maelstrom of dancing and playing tennis, and watching
first-class cricket and racing.
When we went to Parramatta it was easy to make excursions to the
marvellous gorges of the Blue Mountains, which are among the grandest
valley scenery in the world.
Everything was large, and free, and sparsely inhabited—most expanding to
the mind, and the glimpse of the tropical glories of Oriental Ceylon,
which I enjoyed for four days on my voyage home, made me hear the “East
a callin’” for ever afterwards.
I found London desperately dull when we returned to it in 1884. I had no
literary friends, except at Oxford, where we took a house for three
months to get some colour into life again. It was on the banks of the
Cherwell, facing the most beautiful buildings of Magdalen, and the
Gothic glories of Oxford were manna to my hungry soul.
The summer, spent in Devonshire and Cornwall and Scotland, was well
enough, and in the winter, which we spent at Torquay, we had grand
scenery and beautiful ancient buildings, but the climate seemed
treacherous and cold after the fierce bright summers of Australia.
I must not forget that I came very near not going to Australia at all. I
felt the parting with my father extremely, and he was quite prostrated
by it. I had, a few days before starting, been introduced to the captain
of the old Orient liner _Lusitania_, in which I made the voyage—a hard,
reckless sea-dog—and he did me good service on that occasion. Two
letters came on board for me when we put in at Plymouth to pick up the
last mails and passengers. One of these letters contained a letter from
my father to the effect that if I wished to give up the passage and
return home I might do so. The captain, for some reason or other,
whether from having had a conversation with my father, or what,
suspected that the letter might have some message of that kind—he may
have had the same thing occurring in his experience before—so he did not
give me the letter till the next day, when I had no possible chance of
communicating with England until I got to the Cape de Verde Islands. By
that time, of course, I had thoroughly settled down to the enjoyments of
the voyage, and looked at the matter in a different light.
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