WE START OUR LITERARY AT-HOMES IN LONDON
I WAS well known at authors’ clubs and authors’ receptions long before I
was known as an author. In fact, I doubt if many of those who swarmed to
our at-homes ever thought of me seriously as an author, or even realised
that I wrote. They knew of me as the friend of authors, artists, and
actors, and people who were merely charming, and well enough off to
entertain, and enjoyed meeting the celebrities of Bohemia. They credited
me with a certain capacity as a host, who always introduced the right
people to each other.
I had graduated in a good school for entertaining at Boston and New
York, where the hostess takes care that each of her guests before they
leave shall have been introduced to the persons most worth meeting. If
Oliver Wendell Holmes was in the room at Boston or the American
Cambridge, every guest was presented to him. At a large literary at-home
in New York you were sure to have been introduced to a Mark Twain, or a
Howells, or a Stockton before you left. Americans make a point of having
a guest of honour at an at-home, and I tried to keep this up as a
feature of our at-homes at Addison Mansions.
It was some time before we were able to start our Bohemian at-homes in
London, because when we arrived we had hardly a single acquaintance in
Bohemia, except Gleeson White, and _his_ author, artist and actor
friends, like ours, were all in America. Like ourselves, he had been
three years absent from England.
The hundreds of English and American authors, artists and actors who
knew us at 32, Addison Mansions will recollect chiefly a very narrow
hall hung with autographed portraits of celebrities, a room whose
woodwork and draperies suggested one of the old Mameluke houses at
Cairo, a room whose walls were covered with Japanese curios, and two
other rooms, one of which was lined to the height of several feet from
the ground with ingeniously-fitted-in book-cases, and the other was a
bedroom in disguise. These and a ten by seven telephone room, likewise
lined with book-shelves, which only had enough chairs for a
_tête-à-tête_, formed the suite in which we held the weekly receptions
in the American style at which so many people, now famous, used to meet
every Friday night, regaled only with cigarettes, whiskeys-and-sodas,
claret cup, bottled ale and sandwiches.
There must have been some attractions about them when actors like the
Grossmiths, and authors like Anthony Hope, and half-a-dozen R.A.s used
to find their way out to these wilds of West Kensington Friday after
Friday towards midnight. Perhaps it was that we never had any
entertainment when we could help it, and friends were able to make our
flat a rendezvous where they could be secure of having conversations
uninterrupted by music, and to which they could bring a stranger whom
they wished to introduce into Bohemia.
Occasionally a stranger so introduced, who happened to be a famous
reciter, felt constrained, as a matter of returning hospitality, to
insist on reciting for us. But in the main, as a large number of our
guests were performers, they were glad that no performances were
allowed, for if they had had to listen to other people, they would have
felt bound, as a matter of professional etiquette, to perform
themselves. If there are performances and you are a performer, it is a
reproach not to be asked to perform.
It was Kernahan who first took us to the Idler Teas.
With Sir Walter Besant I had been in correspondence before I left
England, and on my return he wrote asking me to join the Authors’ Club,
with which my name was so intimately associated for many years. But I
did not meet so many Bohemians there as I did at the Idler Teas and the
dinners of the Vagabonds Club, of which I became a member because the
circle of brilliant young authors whom Jerome and Barr had enlisted for
the _Idler Magazine_ were many of them “Vagabonds.”
At the Idlers and Vagabonds I met most of the rising authors, and when
the American rush to London commenced, I took many distinguished
Americans to the Idler Teas, and to the receptions of people whom we met
there. In this way we soon had a very large acquaintance in Bohemia,
eager to meet our American friends, when we commenced our at-homes on a
modest scale to give our literary acquaintances from the opposite sides
of the Atlantic the opportunity of meeting each other.
I met many authors as well as actors at the Garrick and the Savage—in
addition to the authors I met at the Authors’ Club and the Savile, and
as I was at that time a member of the Arts, and the Hogarth, a very
lively place, I met a great many artists. Of black-and-white artists, at
any rate, who patronised the latter, I soon knew quite a number—Phil
May, Bernard Partridge, Dudley Hardy, Reginald Cleaver, Ralph Cleaver,
Hal Hurst, Melton Prior, Seppings Wright, Holland Tringham, Paxton,
James Greig, John Gülich, Louis Baumer, F. H. Townsend, Fred Pegram,
Chantrey Corbould, Frank Richards, Bernard Gribble, Will Rothenstein,
Aubrey Beardsley, Willson, Starr Wood and Linley Samborne.
At the same time we saw a good deal of such well-known painters as David
Murray, R.A.; Solomon J. Solomon, R.A.; Arthur Hacker, R.A.; J. J.
Shannon, R.A.; Walter Crane; Llewellyn, the P.R.I.; Sir James Linton,
P.R.I.; G. A. Storey, A.R.A.; Sir Alfred East, R.A.; R. W. Allan; J. H.
Lorimer, R.S.A.; J. Lavery; Herbert Schmalz; Hugh de Trafford
Glazebrook; Yeend King; William Yeames, R.A., who married my cousin,
Annie Wynfield; and Alfred Parsons, A.R.A.
Various ladies’ clubs, and clubs to which both sexes were admitted,
contributed not a little to the extraordinary amount of social
intercourse which then was a feature of Bohemia. The Pioneer Club, the
Writers’ Club, and the Women Journalists’ were, frankly, associations of
working women. And there were many members interested in literature in
the Albemarle and the Sesame, ladies’ clubs which admitted men as
guests. Once a week at the Writers’ Club, and very often at the Pioneer,
they had large gatherings at which literary “shop” filled the air.
Thus in a short time we came to know hundreds of authors and artists
(male and female), actors and actresses, and kept open house for them
every Friday night.
The Pioneer, the forerunner of the Lyceum, was a great institution in
those days. Rich women, interested in woman’s work, established it and
bore some of its expense for the benefit of women workers. It had a fair
sprinkling of well-known authoresses, and the prominent women in all
sorts of movements. Its afternoon and evening receptions—the latter
generally for lectures—were most interesting affairs. There was no
suffragist movement in those days to overshadow everything else. Women’s
Rights were a joke like “bloomers,” which are now suggestive of
something very different.
The Writers’ Club was more frankly literary, more frankly “shop.” You
met non-writing workers too in those basement premises in Norfolk
Street, which have seen the birth of so many reputations. I remember
meeting there a suffragist whose name is known all over the world now,
but when I was introduced to her it was only known to her
fellow-workers. She asked me what I thought of the suffragists. Not
knowing who she was, and not having thought anything about them, I
replied, “Oh, I’ve nothing against them except their portraits in the
halfpenny papers!” It made her my friend, for she had suffered from
rapid newspaper reproduction that very morning.
I always enjoyed those gatherings of women workers very much, though
many of them had ideas for the betterment of England which involved the
destruction of all I cherished most, and some were terrifying in their
earnestness like the she-Apostle of antivivisection, who had a
hydrophobic glitter in her eye, which reminded me of a blue-eyed collie
I once had, but had to give away because it bit.
This lady was the cause of my gradually dropping away from those
pleasant receptions. It was no good going to them because no sooner had
I been introduced to anybody interesting, than she came up and wanted me
to start enlisting them for the cause, though I knew that I should never
employ an antivivisectionist doctor in the case of a serious illness any
more than I should employ a homœopathist. She afterwards became an
_advocatus diaboli_—an apologist for the outrages of the Militants,
which she said were necessary to draw attention to the wrongs of women.
In after days, when I had written a novel which became very popular (_A
Japanese Marriage_), I was asked to lecture before the Pioneer Club on
some subject connected with the book. Noticing that their lectures were
generally rather of an abstract nature, and not having at all an
abstract mind myself, I chose for my subject, “The Immorality of
Self-Sacrifice.” The book was largely taken up with the unhappiness
inflicted on the hero and the heroine because she was a good
churchwoman, and his deceased wife’s sister, and would not marry him,
though she was desperately in love with him, until long afterwards she
was disgusted with the narrow-mindedness of a clergyman cousin.
I gave that lecture in the innocence of my heart. I imagined that the
Club would be so anxious to pioneer for the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill,
that I should carry the audience with me. I made the mistake of being
too abstract. If I had contented myself with being “agin’ the
Government” and delivered a technical diatribe in favour of the Bill,
ladies with a mission on this particular subject would have started up
on every side.
As it was, speaker after speaker found my idea immoral. Self-sacrifice
was the order of the day; they preached self-sacrifice; they plumed
themselves upon self-sacrifice. They did not approve of me at all. But
what I objected to because it was self-sacrifice, they objected to
because they were rebels, so the evening went off very well.
Bohemian Club evenings in those days differed from those of the present
day because most of them were confined to men. The Playgoers’ Club was
almost the only one which admitted ladies; and at that time it confined
them mostly to lectures. The ladies’ Clubs certainly welcomed men, but
the serious element was more conspicuous there. The idea of having a
literary club at which ladies and gentlemen constantly dined together
for pleasure had not been born.
The actors and actresses and well-known speakers of our acquaintance we
met mostly at the old Playgoers’ Club, or at Phil May’s Sunday nights in
the stable which had become his studio.
The old Playgoers’ was a most breezy place, where no one was allowed to
speak for more than a few minutes, unless he could bring down the house
with his wit. The ordinary person making a good sound speech was howled
down. The chairman sometimes interfered to save a more distinguished
orator. I remember the chairman of the club saying at one of the
Christmas dinners to the section in the audience who were far enough
away from the speaker to be talking quite as loud as he was, “Will those
bounders at the back of the room shut up?”
The women writers very appropriately established themselves as a
Writers’ Club in the area flat underneath A. P. Watt’s literary agency.
There was no connection, but I suppose it resulted in an illustrious man
author occasionally coming on from Watt’s to have a cup of tea at the
Writers’ Club. They had an at-home every Friday afternoon, which was
always extremely well supported.
I enjoyed going to these Writers’ Club teas very much, and went often,
and on one or other occasion met most of the leading women workers of
the day.
The Writers’ Clubbists did not take women’s theories so seriously as the
Pioneers, perhaps because they were not subsidised, and had no fierce
patron to keep them at concert pitch, but they were more literary, and,
until the rise of the Women Journalists’, had almost the monopoly of
working women writers. The Sesame had some, and when it was founded
later on, the Lyceum became a regular haunt of them.
It was only in our last days at Addison Mansions that we joined the
Dilettanti, a dining club of authors and artists, run by Paternoster and
his charming wife. It has only a few score members, who once a month eat
an Italian dinner together, washed down by old Chianti, at the Florence
Restaurant in Soho, and listen to a brilliant paper by one of their
members, which they afterwards discuss, with a great deal of wit and
freedom. Henry Baerlein, Mrs. George Cran, and Herbert Alexander, are
among its wittiest members, and Mrs. Adam, daughter of Mrs. C. E.
Humphry, the ever-popular “Madge,” is quite the best serious speaker.
The speaking is more really impromptu than at the Omar Khayyam, for the
papers generally have titles which do not convey the least inkling of
what they are to be about, and it is therefore impossible for people to
prepare their speeches beforehand.
Literary at-homes were a great feature of that day. There was a large
set of Literary, Art and Theatrical people who used to meet constantly
at the houses of Phil May, A. L. Baldry, A. S. Boyd, Moncure D. Conway,
Gleeson White, Dr. Todhunter, William Sharp, Zangwill, Rudolph Lehmann,
E. J. Horniman, Joseph Hatton, Max O’Rell, John Strange Winter, George
and Weedon Grossmith, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, J. J. Shannon, Mrs. Jopling,
and Jerome K. Jerome. And the more eminent authors and artists, at any
rate, used to meet a great deal at Lady St. Helier’s, Lady Lindsay’s,
Lady Dorothy Nevill’s, the Tennants’ and the H. D. Traills’.
Sometimes they met in the afternoon, and sometimes in the evening—more
often the latter, because the artists came in greater numbers, and the
actors, when the Theatres were closed. As I have said, there were very
seldom performances at any of them, because the people met to talk, and
be introduced to fresh celebrities, and whether the reception was in the
afternoon or the evening, the hospitalities were of the simple American
kind. They were _bona fide_ meetings of clever people who wished to make
each other’s acquaintance. Our friends came to us on Friday nights. At
first, like Phil May, we kept open house every week, but as the number
of our friends increased, we gradually tailed off to once a fortnight
and once a month, because we had almost to empty the house out of the
windows to make room for all who came.
When we ceased to receive every week, we sent out notices to the friends
we wanted to see most that we were going to be at home on such an
evening, and from this we passed to giving each at-home in honour of
some special person, whom our friends were invited to meet. I cannot
remember half the special guests they were invited to meet, but among
them were Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Mark Twain, Mrs. Flora Annie Steel,
Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Maarten Maartens, Hall Caine, H. G. Wells,
W. W. Jacobs, Sir Frederick Lugard (then Captain Lugard) when he came
back from his great work in Uganda, F. C. Selous when he came back from
his mighty hunting in South Africa, Zangwill, J. J. Shannon, Frankfort
Moore, Savage Landor and Dr. George Ernest Morrison.
In a very short time, Bohemian at-homes, at which author and artist and
actor met, became the rage in the Bohemian quarters of London—West
Kensington, Chelsea, Chiswick, and the North-west. There were many
people who were never so happy as when they went to an at-home every
afternoon and evening of the week. They were all workers, and most of
them too poor to use cabs much, so one wondered when they found time to
do their work. That they did it was obvious, for most of them were
producing a good deal of work, and many of them were laying the
foundations of not inconsiderable fame.
At some of these receptions they had a little music, but at most of them
they had no entertainment. For the clever people who went to these
receptions did not go long distances to sit like mutes while some third-
or fourth- or fortieth-rate artist played or sang; they went to meet
other well-known Bohemians—well-known men and charming women. The most
successful hosts were those who asked celebrities and pretty people in
equal quantities: the celebrities liked meeting pretty people, and the
pretty people liked meeting the celebrities.
Some celebrities were quite annoyed if there were only celebrities to
meet them; they wanted an audience.
I remember Whistler the painter and Oscar Wilde being the first two
people to arrive at a reception at Mrs. Jopling’s house in Beaufort
Street, where I had been lunching. They were intensely annoyed at having
only the Joplings and myself as audience; it was no good showing off
before us, since we knew all about them. They were quite distant to each
other, and more distant to us. But as the time wore on, and nobody came,
Wilde had time to think of something effective to say—he never spoke, if
he could help it, unless he thought he could be effective.
“I hear that you went over to the Salon by Dieppe, Jimmy,” he sneered,
“were you economising?”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Whistler. “I went to paint.”
“How many pictures did you paint?” asked the æsthete, with crushing
superiority.
Whistler did not appear to hear his question. “How many hours did it
take?” he asked.
“You went, not I,” said Oscar. “No gentleman ever goes by the Dieppe
route.”
“I do, often,” said our charming hostess, who had this great house in
Chelsea, with an acre or two of garden: “it takes five hours.”
“How many minutes are there in an hour, Oscar?” drawled Whistler.
“I am not quite sure, but I think it’s about sixty. I am not a
mathematician.”
“Then I must have painted three hundred,” said the unabashed Whistler.
It was at this at-home later on that Whistler made his often-quoted
mot—not for the first time, I believe. A pretty woman said something
clever, and Wilde, who could be a courtier, gallantly remarked that he
wished he had said it.
“Never mind, Oscar,” said Whistler, who owed him one for the gibe about
the Dieppe route; “you will have said it.”
They were really very fine that afternoon, because they were so
thoroughly disgusted at not having more people to show off before;
showing off is a weakness of many authors and artists and actors, though
Bernard Shaw is the only one that I remember who has had the frankness
to admit it in _Who’s Who_.
We used to begin receiving at nine for the sake of people who had trains
to catch to distant suburbs—as Jerome K. Jerome remarked, “other people
always live in such out-of-the-way places”—and kept the house open till
the last person condescended to go away, which was generally about
three. Any one who had been introduced to us was welcome to come, and to
bring any of his friends with him, and in this way we met some of the
most interesting people who came to the flat during our twenty years of
tenancy. For instance, Herbert Bunning, the composer, whose opera _La
Princesse Osra_, presented at Covent Garden, was drawn from Anthony
Hope’s novel by a permission which I obtained for him, brought with him
one night M. Feuillerat, who married Paul Bourget’s delightful sister,
and Madame Feuillerat. M. Feuillerat in his turn brought with him Emile
Verhaeren, one of the greatest living Belgian poets. M. Feuillerat
himself was at the time professor of English literature in the
university at Rennes, and both he and Madame Feuillerat spoke admirable
English. On another Friday they were going to bring Paul Bourget
himself, but he did not fulfil his intention of coming to England at the
time.
Another distinguished foreigner who came about the same time was Maarten
Maartens, a Dutch country gentleman whose real name is Joost Marius
Maarten Willem van der Poorten-Schwartz. Hearing so much of his
beautiful chateau in Holland, I asked him how he could tear himself away
so much as he did. His reply was that for nine months in the year the
weather in Holland was awful, and for the other three generally awful.
This great writer had an epigrammatic way of expressing himself. He said
that an eminent critic, who constituted himself his patron when he was
in England, had warned him not to go to the Authors’ Club (of which I
was the Honorary Secretary), because most of the people who went there
were very small fry. He said that he had taken no notice of the warning
because he had observed that his informant wore a piece of pink sarcenet
ribbon for a tie, and that he, Maarten Maartens, knew enough of the
Englishman’s idea of dress to be aware that the critic could not be a
judge of ties, and wear pink sarcenet ribbon; and he argued that a man
so self-satisfied and so ignorant about ties might be equally
self-satisfied and ignorant about Authors’ clubs. I asked him if he had
written any books in Dutch. He said, “No, what is the good, when there
are so few people to write for? Only Dutchmen speak Dutch. It was a
choice of writing in English or German, if I was to have an audience,
and I chose English.”
Georg Brandes, the great Danish critic, who had so much to do with the
recognition of Ibsen, told me when he came to our flat and I asked him a
similar question, that in his later books he had taken to writing in
other languages for the same reason. He was extremely interested, I
remember, in Sergius Stepniak, the exiled Russian revolutionary, as was
the then permanent head of the Foreign Office, whom I approached with
some diffidence on the subject when they were both dining at a Club
dinner of which I had the arrangements. Stepniak, whom I always found,
in my intercourse with him, a very amiable man, had all the stage
appearance of a villain, with his coal-black hair, his knotty, bulbous
forehead, his black Tartar eyes, black beard and sombre complexion.
Of Zola, a studious-looking man with a brown beard, a rather tilted
nose, and pince-nez, I have spoken in another chapter.
Anatole France I never met till quite recently, at a little party at
John Lane’s. He was as abounding in _simpatica_ as Zola was wanting in
it. He was rather short, and held his head sideways like the late Conte
de Paris, with his closely-cropped beard buried in his chest. But he had
unmistakably the air of a great man, and extraordinarily bright and
sympathetic eyes—a captivating personality.
As I began with foreigners I will deal with them before passing on to
the many interesting Anglo-Saxons who assembled in those rooms during
those twenty years.
August Strindberg, the Scandinavian novelist and dramatist, was to have
come to see us when he was in England in the ’nineties. He forwarded an
introduction, but did not follow it up owing to the distance of his
sojourning place. Before he left Scandinavia, he had asked a friend who
was supposed to know all about England for a nice healthy suburb of
London, far enough out for the air to be pure. The friend suggested
(without, I think, any idea of practical joking) that Gravesend should
be the place, and at Gravesend Strindberg remained during the whole of
his stay in London, doubtless composing novels or dramas upon London
society.
Many well-known Frenchmen naturally came to see us, like Gabriel
Nicolet, the artist, and Eustache de Lorey, who had been an attaché of
the French Legation in Teheran, and who afterwards collaborated with me
in _Queer Things about Persia_ and _The Moon of the Fourteenth Night_.
Since his return from Persia he had become eminent as a composer. He
wrote the music of one of the most popular songs in _Les Merveilleuses_,
in addition to being the composer of the opera _Betty_, which was
produced in Brussels, with Mariette Sully in the leading part. Melba
herself contemplates appearing in the leading rôle in his second opera,
_Leila_. De Lorey had made some most adventurous expeditions, including
one with Pierre Loti in Caucasia, and he was such a brilliant raconteur
of his adventures that I asked him why he did not make a book of them.
He replied that the travel-book is not the institution in France which
it is in England, and that though he spoke English fluently, he could
not write a book in English. Finally we decided to collaborate as
related in a later chapter.
We had many Asiatic visitors, but no Africans, I think, unless one
counts Englishmen who had won their spurs in the dark continent, like
Sir Frederick Lugard. Decidedly our most interesting Asiatic visitors
were Japanese like Yoshio Markino and Prof. Nakamura. Prof. Nakamura was
for three years a pupil of Lafcadio Hearn. He came over to England for
the Japanese Exhibition, and remained here a few years, studying
educational methods for the Japanese Government.
He said that Lafcadio Hearn would see nothing of his pupils because he
was only interested in the Old Japan, and was afraid of introducing
modern ideas if he saw much of any Japanese who were not absorbed in the
same studies as himself. I remember Bret Harte pleading much the same
objection to revisiting California.
Yoshio Markino has been one of our most intimate friends for years. I
cannot say in what exact year he first came to 32 Addison Mansions. I
know that I first met him through M. H. Spielmann, who wrote to me
telling me all about Markino’s powers as a black-and-white artist, and
asking me to get my editor friends to give him some work, of which he
stood in need. Not until he published _A Japanese Artist in London_ at
my suggestion, and with a preface written by me, a few years after, did
I know how badly he stood in need of that work; Japanese etiquette
prevented him from intruding his private affairs upon a stranger. I was
successful in getting him a little illustrating work, and I got him some
translating work, better paid, I suspect, than original contributions of
men like the late Andrew Lang to the great _Dailies_. It came about in
this wise: I was anxious to include in _More Queer Things about Japan_,
a translation of a Japanese life of Napoleon, which had come into my
hands. There were five volumes of it with extremely amusing
illustrations. Neither I nor the publishers knew what a small amount of
words can make a volume in Japanese. The publisher looked at the volumes
and thought that he was making a very shrewd bargain when he offered
five pounds a volume as the translator’s fee. Each volume proved to
contain about a thousand words, so Markino got five pounds a thousand,
when the publisher meant to offer him about five shillings.
After this I lost touch of Markino for a long time, till Miss E. S.
Stevens, who had been my secretary, and was then doing work as a
literary agent, invited us to meet him at her Club. Very soon after that
I was at the annual soirée of the Japan Society with Miss Lorimer and
another girl, and my cousin, Sampson Sladen, who was then only third in
command of the London Fire Brigade, when we ran across Markino, who
remained with us all the evening. He invited myself and the members of
our household to the exhibition of the sketches which he had painted to
illustrate _The Colour of London_. From that time forward his visits
were very frequent till we left London, and on two separate occasions he
went to Italy with us for several months.
It was on the first of these occasions, while we were all staying at 12
Piazza Barberini in Rome, that he showed me a letter which he had
written to Messrs. Chatto & Windus about the second of the volumes he
illustrated, _The Colour of Paris_. The letter was as brilliant, as
interesting, as amusing, as one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s or Lafcadio
Hearn’s. I saw that he was a born writer, and from that time forward did
not rest until I had persuaded him to write his first book, _A Japanese
Artist in London_. I got him the contract from the publisher for this
book and wrote the preface.
While we were in Paris he brought us an invitation to dinner from the
brilliant Parisian who was afterwards our dear friend, poor Yvonne, who
died the other day after months of suffering. When we arrived she had a
terrible headache, and we had to have our dinner without her, presided
over by her niece, a gay and pretty child of thirteen, who made as
self-possessed a hostess as any grown-up. We talked a great deal that
night over Italy, and a great deal more when Markino came to see us at
the little Cité de Retiro, near the Madeleine, and the result was that
he decided to do a book on Italy with Miss Olave Potter, he supplying
the pictures, and she the letterpress—the book that took form as _The
Colour of Rome_, which Messrs. Chatto & Windus promptly agreed to
commission, and of which I shall have more to say elsewhere. That winter
and the summer of another year we all spent together in Italy, and the
painting of the illustrations for _The Colour of Rome_ led indirectly to
Markino’s writing _A Japanese Artist in London_, and the beginning of
his brilliant literary career.
Markino’s writings achieved such an instant popularity with English
readers that I feel sure that they will like to know his habits of work,
which I had the opportunity of observing during the two long visits he
paid with us to Italy. For a painter of architecture and landscape his
method is unique. Take, for instance, the story of the illustrations to
Miss Olave Potter’s book, _The Colour of Rome_. First of all, since he
was a stranger to Rome, and knew neither its beauty spots nor its most
interesting monuments, we took him walks to see all the most illustrable
places. He selected from them the number he had promised to paint.
Sometimes he took more than one walk to a place before he commenced the
study for his picture, but intuition is one of his gifts, and he was
seldom long at fault in discovering the best standpoint.
Having chosen this, he took his drawing-pad to the spot and made a rough
sketch of it with notes written in Japanese of the colours to be used,
and any special things he had to remember. Sometimes, where there was a
great deal of detail, or of sculpture, he used paper with crossed lines
on it, so as to preserve his proportions. But Markino, beautifully as he
can paint detail, resents it, and prefers subjects unified by a haze of
heat or mist.
He never took his paints out with him, and never did a finished drawing
in the open air. He took his notes home with him and ruminated over
them, till the idealised picture presented itself to his brain. Then he
set to work on it, taking little rest till it was finished—always
absolutely faithful to colour and effect, though the picture was painted
entirely indoors.
That was his method of painting. He did no writing in Rome. But he came
constantly to our flat when he was writing _A Japanese Artist in
London_, _My Idealled John Bullesses_, and _When I was a Child_.
Sometimes he liked to talk over his chapters before he began to write
them, when they were slow at taking shape. But more generally he brought
the chapters written in the rough to his Egeria, and read them over to
her. They had blanks where he could not remember the English word which
he wanted to use. It was in his mind, and he would reject all words till
he found the word he was thinking of.
As he read the chapters aloud, the wise Egeria made corrections where
they were necessary to elucidate his meaning—to clarify his style, but
never treated any Japanese use of English as a mistake, unless it made
the sense obscure. That is how the fascinating medium in which Markino
writes took shape.
Take, for instance, Markino’s omission of the _articles_. The Japanese
language has no articles. Markino therefore seldom uses them, and his
English is written to be intelligible without them, just as a legal
document is written to be intelligible without punctuation. Again, if he
used a word in a palpably wrong sense—_i. e._ with a meaning which it
had never borne before, or was etymologically unfit to bear—she left it
if it helped to express in a forcible way what he intended.
The result of this respectful editing was to produce a most fascinating
and characteristic type of English, which has won for Markino a public
of enthusiastic admirers. He has, as Osman Edwards said, _the heart of a
child_, when he is writing, and he combines with it a highly original
mode of thinking and expressing himself, but their effect would have
been half lost if he had not found in his Egeria an adviser with the eye
of genius for what should be corrected and what should be retained of
his departures from conventional English.
When the chapters were corrected thus, Egeria typed them out, making any
corrections or additions which were necessary to the punctuation, and
generally preparing the manuscript for the press.
I am encouraged to think that these details of the way in which the
books were edited will interest the public, because J. H. Taylor, the
golf champion, once cross-examined me on the subject, as we were walking
down the lane from the Mid-Surrey golf pavilion to his house. He had
been reading _A Japanese Artist in London_, and was so delighted with it
that he wanted to know exactly how this wonderful style of writing was
born.
And there is no doubt that it is a wonderful style of writing. It is not
pigeon-English; the Japanese do not use pigeon-English, they abhor it.
It is the result of a deliberate intention to apply certain Japanese
methods of expression (like the omission of the article) to the writing
of English, in order to produce a more direct medium, and the result has
been a complete success. Markino’s English is wonderfully forcible. It
hits like a sledge-hammer. He has a genius for discovering exactly the
right expression, and he thinks on till he discovers it. As a reason why
his English is not broken English, but a medium using the capabilities
of both languages, I may mention that he has been living in America and
England for nearly twenty years.
[Illustration:
THE MOORISH ROOM AT 32 ADDISON MANSIONS.
(_From the Painting by Yoshio Markino._)
]
Besides Japanese, we had many Indian visitors.
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