THE HUMORISTS AT OUR AT-HOMES
AMONG the crowd of humorists who honoured Addison Mansions with their
presence it is natural to mention first the famous author of _Three Men
in a Boat_. There is no author for whom I feel a greater affection,
though, as he once said, “You and I are sure to have a diametrically
opposite opinion upon almost any point which may turn up, because we
were born the poles apart.” I was at the time his chief and only book
critic on _To-day_. I believe I was called the literary editor, though
all the patronage of the position was exercised by himself. It is
patronage which constitutes an editor; the sub-editor can perform the
duties. I believe also that it was I who suggested the name _To-day_. At
any rate, it was I who helped him to formulate the paper, and for the
first year or so it was my duty to do all the book reviews in it, and my
duty to receive all the ladies who came to see Jerome about the paper.
Of course, they mostly came in search of work or fame: those who wished
to be written about were very numerous, and expected to succeed by
making what is called the “Glad Eye” at him. He was _terribly_ afraid of
the “Glad Eye”; it made him turn hot and cold in swift succession. He
was unable to say “no” to a siren, and equally unable to say “yes” when
he meant “no.” He was also an intensely domesticated man, entirely
devoted to his family, and without the smallest desire for a flirtation.
So it fell to my lot to pick up the “Glad Eye,” a very agreeable job,
when you have not the power to give yourself away. I had no patronage to
bestow upon them. The only thing I could do for them was to write about
them if they were sufficiently interesting, which frequently happened in
that age of personal journalism. And, if they were quite harmless
worshippers, without any ulterior designs, I occasionally induced Jerome
to be worshipped for a minute or two. I made many lady friends at this
period, especially from the Stage.
Jerome hardly ever answered letters. He used to say, “If you keep a
letter for a month, it generally answers itself.” But he did not keep
them. He tore them up directly he had glanced at them. He knew at one
glance—probably at the signature—if he wanted to read a letter, and, if
he did not, he tore it up without reading it. He had a horror of
accumulating papers. He sometimes asked me to answer letters, as he had
faith in me as a soother. It was never part of my duties to write “yes,”
I had to gild “no.” He prefered to word his own acceptances, so as not
to say more than he meant. He did not even want me to read the
manuscripts. He prefered to read them himself. It did not take him long,
because if he did not come across something worth publishing by the
second page, he did not read any further. “You must grab your reader at
the beginning,” he used to say.
He was a very pleasant man to write reviews for. He believed in generous
criticisms. “You can have a page or two pages for your book of the
week,” he said, “according to its importance”—he decided that when I
chose my book—“but you can only have a page for the rest of the books
that come in, so you can’t afford to waste your space on bad books. If
you can’t say anything good about them, you obviously can’t afford them
any space. You can praise things up as much as you like if you can be
convincing about it: don’t be afraid to let yourself go about the book
of the week: I am sick of the _Spectator_ and the _Athenæum_, you never
get a full-blooded review out of them, unless it’s to damn something.
The more knowledge you can show about the subject of the book you are
praising, the better. But above all things, recommend it in the paper
just as you would recommend it to a friend: use the same language as you
would to a friend: be natural. And, whatever you do, beware of the Club
Man. When I read an article or a story, I always ask myself what a Club
Man would think of it; and if I know that he would like it, I turn it
down: his opinions are dead opposite to the Public’s.”
The likes and dislikes of the Club Man was one of the matters in which
my opinion was dead opposite to Jerome’s. The Club Man and the Man in
the Street between them fill the ranks of the average patriotic citizen.
It is they who pull the nation through in a crisis, and the City of
London leads them. At ordinary times their voice is drowned by the noise
of the Radical Party, and the giant Middle-class, to whom all appeals
for national safety have to be addressed—the blind Samson sitting
chained in the house of his enemies—cannot hear their warnings.
In any case, it is so hard for a book to be popular at clubs, where
people go to be interested and amused, that if it is popular there, it
will be popular anywhere, except with the Nonconformist Conscience.
Jerome had written _Three Men in a Boat_ and _The Idle Thoughts of an
Idle Fellow_ before I met him, and was consequently in enjoyment of
world-wide fame. He had established in the _Idler_ a monthly which had
no equal then as a magazine of fiction, and had a sale of a hundred
thousand copies a month, when he started _To-day_. He started it not
only to amuse, but to educate Public Opinion, when it had secured
attention by its brightness, for he had very strong views which he was
eager to preach.
He was more of a Conservative than a Radical in those days; he had not
despaired of the Conservatives, then, though he was baggy about beastly
little nationalities. Suffragism had not then begun its March of
Unreason, and we were all in favour of giving woman a vote. But I am
bound to register the conviction that, if Suffragism had been a burning
question then, the paper would have been full of it, and enjoying a
circulation of a million, or whatever number the adult women suffragists
run to. I can picture Jerome, a man famous for his hospitalities, being
reduced to a hunger-strike by the ardour with which he would have
espoused the idea. He was always tilting against some abuse, always
asking for litigation. And he got it—or I suppose he would be editing a
newspaper now, instead of delighting both hemispheres with his plays. I
say advisedly “both hemispheres,” because he has a considerable public
as a dramatist in America.
One of the first books on which I let myself go, and wrote an absolute
appreciation, was that magnificent historical novel of Stanley Weyman’s,
_A Gentleman of France_. Jerome was delighted with the way I handled it.
Seeing Jerome so much in the office led to our being a good deal at each
other’s houses. He was living at that time in one of the nice old villas
in St. John’s Wood. The chief thing I remember about it was its
cattiness and its scrupulous tidiness. When you stay with him in the
country, you cannot leave your stick and hat in the hall, handy for
running out, as you might at Sandringham or Chatsworth. They are at once
arrested, and are very lucky if they get off with a warning from the
magistrate.
One of my diametrical divergencies from Jerome is in the love of cats. I
cannot respect a cat. To me it is a beast of prey, a sort of
middle-class tiger, operating in a small way, but at heart a murderer of
the Asiatic jungle. Jerome loves them, and makes dogs of them: he used
to fill the _Idler_ with Louis Wain’s human deductions from cats. He has
a telephone to their brains. I agree with Lord Roberts, who knows by
instinct when there is a cat in the room, though it may be wholly
concealed, and cannot enjoy himself until it is removed.
Like most real humorists whom I have known, and I have known many from
Mark Twain and Bill Nye downwards, Jerome is not a “funny man” in
ordinary life. He is, on the contrary, except when he is on his legs,
before an audience, or taking his pen in his hand, apt to be a very
serious man, though his conversation is always illuminated by flashes of
wit. He is much more apt to air strong opinions about serious questions.
The Jerome you see in _Paul Kelvin_ and _The Third Floor Back_ is the
real Jerome. He is the loyalest friend and most tender-hearted man
imaginable. His kindness and hospitality are unbounded. You cannot stay
with Jerome in his own house without being inspired by the deepest
respect and affection for him. He is an ideal husband and father, a
friend of the struggling, a just and generous master. Like Conan Doyle,
though he has never shone in first-class cricket or golf, Jerome is very
athletic in his tastes. In spite of his glasses, he is a fine
tennis-player and croquet-player; he is a fine skater also, and devoted
to the river and horses. It was partly a horse accident in which he and
Norma Lorimer were involved, and both showed extraordinary courage,
which made me feel for him as I do.
He is essentially an open-air man, whose thoughts are all outside
directly he has got through his statutory amount of work with his
secretary.
But though the serious man weighs down the humorist in Jerome, you would
not guess it from his personal appearance. When he rises to speak, his
bright eye, the smile playing round his mouth, his cool confident
bearing, the very way in which he arranges his hair, which has not yet a
particle of grey about it, is more suggestive of the humorist, the man
who is accustomed to making hundreds roar with laughter at his speeches,
and scores of thousands with the flashes of his pen.
Jerome has no love for London, though he has a town residence and enjoys
Bohemian society, and is very popular in it. For many years he has lived
on the Upper Thames, and he is in the habit of going to Switzerland for
the skating.
I asked Carl Hentschel, who was one of the three who went on the trip
immortalised in _Three Men in a Boat_, to tell me about it. He said—
“It is rather interesting to look back to the days of _Three Men in a
Boat._ Jerome at that time was in a solicitor’s office in Cecil Street,
where the Hotel Cecil now stands, George Wingrave was a junior clerk in
a bank in the City, and I was working in a top studio in Windmill
Street, close to where the Lyric Theatre now stands, having to look
after a lot of Communists, who had had to leave Paris. Our one
recreation was week-ending on the river. It was roughing it in a manner
which would hardly appeal to us now. Jerome and Wingrave used to live in
Tavistock Place, now pulled down, and that was our starting-point to
Waterloo and thence to the river. It says much for our general harmony
that, during the years we spent together in such cramped confinement, we
never fell out, metaphorically or literally. It was Jerome’s unique
style which enabled him to bring out the many and various points in our
trip. It was a spell of bad weather that broke up our parties. A steady
downpour for three days would dampen even the hardiest river-enthusiast.
One incident, which, I believe, was never recorded, but would have made
invaluable copy in Jerome’s hands, happened on one of our last trips. We
were on our way up the river, and late in the afternoon, as the sky
looked threatening, we agreed to pull up and have our frugal meal, which
generally consisted of a leg of Welsh mutton, bought at the famous house
in the Strand, now pulled down, with salad. We started preparing our
meal on the bank, when the threatened storm burst. We hastily put up our
canvas over the boat, and bundled all the food into it anyhow. It got
pitch dark, and we were compelled to find the lamp and tried to light
it. After a while we found the lamp, but it would not light; luckily we
found two candle ends, and by their feeble light began our meal. We had
hardly begun our meal when I said after the first mouthful of salad,
‘What’s wrong with the salad?’ George also thought it was queer, but
Jerome thought there was nothing wrong. Jerome always did have a
peculiar taste. Anyhow, he was the only one who continued. It was not
till the next day that we discovered that owing to our carelessness of
using two medicine bottles of similar shape, one containing vinegar and
the other Colza oil, the lamp and the salad were both a bit off.”
When I asked Jerome what first gave him the idea of writing he said—
“I always wanted to be a writer. It seemed to me an easy and dignified
way of earning a living. I found it difficult; I found it exposes you to
a vast amount of abuse. Sometimes, after writing a book or play which
seemed to me quite harmless, I have been staggered at the fury of
indignation it seems to have excited among my critics. If I had been
Galileo, attacking the solar science of the sixteenth century, I could
not have been assaulted by the high priests of journalism with more
anger and contempt. But the work itself has always remained delightful
to me. I think it was Zangwill who said to me once, ‘A writer, to
succeed, has to be not only an artist, but a shopkeeper’—and of the two,
the shopkeeper is the more necessary. I am not sure who said that last
sentence; it may have been myself.
“You write your book or play while talking to the morning stars. It
seems to you beautiful—wonderful. You thank whatever gods there be for
having made you a writer. The book or the play finished, the artist
takes his departure, to dream of fresh triumphs. The shopkeeper—possibly
a married shopkeeper with a family—comes into the study, finds the
manuscript upon the desk. Then follows the selling, bargaining,
advertising. It is a pretty hateful business, even with the help of
agents. The book or the play you thought so fine, you thought that every
one was bound to like it. Your publisher, your manager, is doubtful. You
have a feeling that they are accepting it out of sheer charity—possibly
they knew your father, or have heard of your early struggles—and yield
to an unbusinesslike sentiment of generosity. It appears, and anything
from a hundred to two hundred and fifty experienced and capable
journalists rush at it to tear it to pieces. It is marvellous—their
unerring instinct. There was one sentence where the grammar was
doubtful—you meant to reconsider it, but overlooked it; it appears
quoted in every notice; nothing else in the book appears to have
attracted the least attention. At nine-tenths of your play the audience
may have laughed; there was one scene which did not go well; it is the
only scene the critic has any use for. Their real feeling seems to be
that the writer is the enemy of the public; the duty of all concerned is
to kill him. If he escapes alive, that counts to him.
“I remember the first night of a play by my friend, Henry Arthur Jones.
There had been some opposition; it was quite evident that the gallery
were only waiting for him to appear to ‘boo’ him, as if he had been a
criminal on the way to the scaffold. I was standing by the gallery exit,
and the people were coming out. Said one earnest student to another, as
they passed me, ‘Why didn’t the little——come out and take his punishment
like a man?’ ‘Cowardly, I call it,’ answered the other. They knew what
was in store for him in the next morning’s papers; they knew that a
year’s work, perhaps two, had been wasted. I suppose that it would be
asking too much to suggest that they might also have imagined the
heartache and the disappointment. The playwright who does not succeed in
keeping every one of a thousand individuals, of different tastes and
views and temperaments, interested and amused for every single minute of
two hours, must not be allowed any mercy.
“Yet for a settled income of ten thousand a year, and no worry, no
abuse, and no insults, I do not think any of us would exchange our job.
I suppose we are all born gamblers—it is worth risking the half-dozen
failures for the one success.
“And the work itself, as I said—one only wishes one’s readers enjoyed it
half as much; circulations would be fabulous. _Three Men in a Boat_ I
started as a guide to the Thames. It occurred to us—George, Charles and
myself—when we were pulling up and down, how interesting and improving
it would be to know something about the history of the famous places
through which we passed; a little botany might also be thrown in. I
thought that other men in boats might also like information on this
subject, and would willingly pay for it. So I read up Dugdale, and a
vast number of local guides, together with a little poetry and some
memoirs. I really knew quite a lot about the Thames by the time I had
done, and with a pile of notes in front of me, I started. I think I had
a vague idea of making it a modern ‘Sandford and Merton.’ I thought
George would ask questions, and Harry intersperse philosophical remarks.
But George and Harry would not; I could not see them sitting there and
doing it. So gradually they came to have their own way, and the book as
a guide to the Thames is, I suppose, the least satisfactory work on the
market.
“I suppose, like Mrs. Gummidge, I felt it more. It must have been about
five years before I succeeded in getting anything of mine accepted. The
regularity with which the complimenting editor returned my manuscripts
grew monotonous, grew heart-breaking. But, after all, it was _The Times_
newspaper which accepted my first contribution. Some correspondence on
the subject of the nude in Art made me angry, and I wrote a letter
intended to be ironic. It attracted quite a lot of comment, and, fired
by this success, I wrote to _The Times_ on other topics. The _Saturday
Review_ praised their irony and humour, and Frank Harris invited me a
little later to contribute. But we differed, I think, upon the subject
of women.
“_The Passing of the Third Floor Back_ I wrote for David Warfield, the
American actor, and discussed the matter with David Belasco in the
train, when I was on a lecturing tour in America. I read him and
Warfield the play at the Belasco Theatre in New York. It was after the
performance was over, and we three had the great empty theatre to
ourselves. Then we went to Lamb’s Club, and Warfield, I think, had
macaroni, and Belasco and I had kidneys and lager beer, and discussed
arrangements. Firstly Anderson was to draw sketches of the characters,
and it was while he was doing this in his studio at Folkestone that
Forbes-Robertson dropped in for a chat. Percy Anderson talked to him
about the play, and Forbes-Robertson took up the manuscript and read it.
Belasco was a little nervous about the play. I did not like the idea of
forcing it upon him, and other small difficulties had arisen, so, having
heard from Percy Anderson that he had talked to Forbes-Robertson about
the play, I thought I would go and see him. He, too, was nervous about
it, but said that he felt that he must risk it. We produced it at
Harrogate, for quite a nice, respectable audience, and they took it
throughout as a farce. One or two critics came down from London, and
commiserated with Forbes-Robertson on his luck.
“It was the miners of Blackpool who put heart into us; they understood
the thing, and were enthusiastic. Then we produced it at St. James’,
and, with one or two exceptions, it was besieged with a chorus of
condemnation—deplorable, contemptible, absurd, were a few of the
adjectives employed, and Forbes-Robertson hastened on the rehearsals for
another play. A few days later, King Edward VII, passing through London
on his way to Scotland, devoted his one night in London to seeing the
piece. He said it was not the sort of thing he expected from Jerome, but
he liked it. And about the same time strange people began to come, who
did not know what the St. James’ Theatre was, and did not quite know
what to do when they got there, and they liked it, too.”
I first met Zangwill—Israel Zangwill—at one of the old pothouse dinners
of the Vagabond Club. He had not long given up editing _Ariel_, and was
already known for his biting wit as a speaker. When the lean, arrestive
figure of the Jewish ex-schoolmaster craned over an assemblage, there
was always an attentive silence. He had not yet immortalised himself by
those inimitable etchings of Jewish life, in which the graver and the
acid were employed so ruthlessly—the Tragedies and Comedies of the
Ghetto. But he was in sympathies already a novelist, for on that
particular occasion he was upbraiding Robert Buchanan for forsaking
literature for the drama. His own eyes have wandered to the stage since
then. The curly black hair—an orator’s hair—the sallow complexion of the
South, the pallor of the student, the eagle nose, the assertive smile,
the confident paradox—how well I can recall them! He was a young man in
those days.
Jerome was always a thorough believer in Zangwill. And he showed his
judgment by making him his first serialist in _To-day_. He paid him five
hundred pounds for the serial rights of the first of those remarkable
novels of Jewish life, as much, I believe, as he paid for the serial
rights of _Ebb-Tide_, the book R. L. Stevenson wrote in collaboration
with his step-son, Lloyd Osbourne.
Zangwill was a very constant and much-appreciated visitor at our
at-homes, as was that encyclopædia of knowledge, his brother Louis. And
their sisters sometimes came with them. They all lived together in those
days at Kilburn. I remember going to a party at their house to meet Sir
Frederick Cowen, the musician, which had a most comical finish. There
were six of us left, and only one hansom between us. Three got inside,
two sat on the splash-board, and Heinemann spread himself on the roof in
front of the man, and kept filling the skylight with his face, like a
Japanese Oni. Phil May sat in the middle inside. He was very excited,
and we were trying to keep him quiet, so as not to draw the attention of
the police to the fact that the hansom was carrying more than it was
licensed for. When we got to the Edgware Road, he began to yell for the
police, and a stalwart constable signalled to the cabby to heave to. He
advanced to the side of the cab. “What is the trouble, sir?” he asked,
preparing to rescue the artist from the literary men among whom he had
fallen.
Phil gave one of his knowing smiles, and said, “I want to go to
Piccadilly Circus, and they are trying to take me home.”
But to return to our Zangwills. Louis Zangwill had not yet shown his
strength as a writer, but any one who had tested it, marvelled at the
width of his knowledge. In those days Israel Zangwill favoured Slapton
Sands for his summer holidays. We met him there. He used to wander about
in a black coat and white duck trousers, gathering inspiration. The
sunshine and scenery inspired him to be a perfectly delightful
companion. We once met him yet further afield—at Venice. Norma Lorimer
and I came upon him and Bernard Sickert, the artist, in the Casa Remer,
an adorable old palace, with an open courtyard and a processional stair,
on the Grand Canal. It was quite unspoiled by repairs in those days. It
contained a curio-dealer by the water’s edge, and at the head of the
staircase was a large room in which a very beautiful young Jewish girl
sat sewing for some sweating tailor. We had landed and made an
archæological excursion up the staircase, when we discovered her. She
arose, and with proper presence of mind, and with a total absence of
_mauvaise haute_, conducted us to the curio shop kept by papa. There we
met Zangwill and Sickert. We were all of us tempted by some very
beautiful mediæval iron gates, which would have been a glory in any
nobleman’s park, but as we none of us had a park, and even the six
hundred francs he wanted for them, added to the cost of transport to
England, would have been a considerable sum for any of us, we denied
ourselves, and Zangwill gave a dinner in honour of the event, at a tiny
restaurant on a screwy little canal behind the Piazza of San Marco. The
food and the wine were excellent, and we sat on till the moon was high,
and Venice, on those small old canals, looked like a theatrical
representation of itself for _The Merchant of Venice_. Then we wandered
back to the Piazza to Florian’s, the café whose proud boast it is that
it has never closed its doors day or night for four hundred years. If
you are sleeping in Venice on a summer night—and, in spite of its noise
and its mosquitoes, is there anything more adorable than Venice on a
summer night?—you will find that the habit is not confined to Florian’s.
At Florian’s we sat down to coffee. We could not get a seat outside; the
band was playing “La Bohême,” and the municipality was throwing red and
green limelight on San Marco in honour of a royal birthday. There was no
waiter either, inside, and Sickert amused himself with drawing an almost
life-sized head of Zangwill with a piece of charcoal which he had in his
pocket, on the marble table. It was a bit of a caricature, but far the
best likeness I ever saw of the great Jewish novelist. When the waiter
did come, without waiting to take our orders, he went to fetch a damp
cloth to clean the table. _Ars longa, vita brevis_—I would not let him
touch it, and told the proprietor what a prize he had as I went out. I
have often wondered what the fate of that table was. Zangwill, the
apostle of Zionism, has always been intensely proud of his nationality,
so he has never minded cutting jokes about it. He brought the house down
at a Vagabond Christmas dinner, where he was taking the chair, by
remarking in his opening sentence, “It’s a funny thing to ask a Jew to
do.” This was the dinner at which he introduced to English audiences the
story which had lately appeared in a German comic paper. A carpenter was
in a crowd waiting to see the Emperor pass. He had an excellent
position, but he was very uneasy because he had promised to meet a
conceited young brother-in-law, and the brother-in-law had not turned
up.
“Will the Jackanapes never come!” cried the carpenter. A policeman
promptly arrested him.
“I was speaking of my brother-in-law,” gasped the poor carpenter.
“You said ‘Jackanapes’; you must have meant the Emperor,” said the
policeman.
When I asked Zangwill what made him turn to book-writing, he said—
“I never ‘turned’ to book-writing, because I never thought of doing
anything else, and I have said all I have to say on that subject in the
chapter of _My First Book_, published by Chatto & Windus, a book which
should be a sufficient mine to you for all your friends. I was told at
the Grosvenor Library that the middle-class Jews boycotted all my
books—in revenge for the Jewish ones—but the Jewish ‘intellectuals’ have
always rallied round me, for I remember that the Maccabeans gave me a
dinner to celebrate the birth of _Children of the Ghetto_—a dinner, by
the way, at which Tree announced, amid cheers, that he had commissioned
me to adapt _Uriel Acosta_. I never took the commission seriously, but I
gave him a one-act play, _Six Persons_, which had a long run at the
Haymarket (giving Irene Vanbrugh her first good part), and still
survives, twenty years after, having been played quite recently at the
Coliseum and the Palladium by Margaret Halstan as well as by Miss Helen
Mar somewhere else.
“An anecdote I remember telling at this dinner was: A man said to me,
‘My son has had typhoid, but he enjoyed himself reading your book.’
“‘Where did he get it from?’ I asked, because it was the old
three-volume days, and I knew he could not have bought it.
“Thinking of the typhoid, he replied, ‘From the drains.’
“This theory of the origin of my book is, I believe, favoured in high
ecclesiastical quarters.”
I knew Mark Twain very well. He and Bret Harte were, I suppose, the two
most famous American authors who ever came to our at-homes at No. 32.
Bret Harte, though he was such a typically American writer, spent all
the latter part of his life in England. I first met him at Rudolph
Lehmann’s hospitable dinner-table. No one could fail to be struck with
Bret Harte. He was so alert, so handsome, and though his plumes—his hair
was thick and sleek to the day he died—were of an exquisite snow-white,
he had a healthy, fresh-coloured face, and a slender, youthful figure,
always dressed like a well-off young man. He used to come to our house
with the Vaudeveldes. Madame Vaudevelde, herself an authoress, and the
daughter of a famous ambassador, kept a suite of rooms in her great
house in Lancaster Gate for his use, whenever he was in London.
“Don’t you ever go back to California nowadays?” I asked him once.
“No. I dare say that if I saw the new California, with all its
go-aheadness and modernness, I should lose the old California that I
knew, whereas now it has never changed for me. I can picture everything
just as it was when I left it.”
He retained his vogue to the end. Any magazine would pay him at the rate
of a couple of pounds for every hundred words. They used to say that the
Bank of England would accept his manuscripts as banknotes. He never
failed to charm, whether he was telling some story at a dinner-party, or
talking to some undistinguished woman, young and beautiful or old and
plain, who had asked to be introduced to him as a celebrity—and a
celebrity Francis Bret Harte certainly was, for he founded a whole
school in English literature.
Mark Twain was also very kind, but when I was in New York he was living
at Hartford, the capital of the adjoining State of Connecticut. He
described himself to me as a “wooden nutmeg,” in allusion to a former
thriving industry of the State. I met him when he was engaged to
entertain a ladies’ school at New York. That did not cost nothing. The
idea seemed to me very American, that an author at the height of his
fame, as Mark Twain then was—for he was fifty-five years old, and it was
twenty-one years since he leapt into fame with _The Jumping Frog_,
should accept an engagement to “give a talk” in a private house. The
school received good value for its fee. He not only gave them an hour’s
entrancing address, but he stayed on till quite a late train, having
anybody and everybody introduced to him, and being cordial to them all.
Nor was his cordiality short-lived. I had done nothing then, except
publish a few books of verse. Yet we became and remained till the day of
his death, twenty years later, familiar friends. This was before I
received that memorable invitation from Oliver Wendell Holmes to be his
guest at the monthly meeting of the Saturday Club at Boston, where Mark
Twain proved that the English were mentioned in the Bible.[2] He told
story after story in that address, but I don’t remember any of them.
They were all good in tendency, that was one thing; there was no making
fun of anything that was good or noble or sincere with him. He was, like
our own humorist, Jerome, intensely serious in his soul, and he was
projecting a big book about the Bible—as a publisher, for he was already
in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., who were producing
the huge _Library of American Literature_, of which E. C. Stedman was
joint editor.
Footnote 2:
When challenged to prove it, he read out the text, “For the meek shall
inherit the earth.”
In order to make all great men authors, it had the idea to give the most
famous sayings of historical Americans, where they had not written
anything. In this way Abraham Lincoln became an author. I expect that it
was that encyclopædia which years afterwards brought the house of
Charles L. Webster & Co. down, though it was sold “on subscription,”
with thousands of copies ordered before the book was begun. Mark Twain
found himself responsible for debts of fifty thousand pounds. I met him
soon afterwards, and began condoling with him on his losses as a
publisher. He replied, “I am no publisher, nor ever was. I only put the
money up for them to play with.”
To make up his losses to him, a leading American firm—I seem to
recollect that it was the Harpers, but I may be wrong—made him a
gigantic “syndicate” proposal for all rights, which brought in large
sums of money.
When I met him then, he had just come off ship-board. I asked him how he
was.
“Better’n I ever was in my life. I’ve gotten a new lease.”
“How?”
“Well, it’s a long story. You must know that when I am staying in a
hotel, or on board ship, I can’t go to bed while there is one person
left to talk to in the bar. This habit, I don’t know what ways exactly,
gave me a cough that I couldn’t get rid of, till an old Auntie from
Georgia told me to try drops of rum on sugar. It took away my cough, and
I liked it fine. I went on taking it after my cough had gone; it grew to
be a habit, and before I knew where I was my digestion had gone. I tried
all the doctors I could hear of, at home, and in England, and in
Germany, including Austria, to cure that. But it was not possible; all
they could do for me was to find out what I liked best to eat or drink,
and tell me to do without it. I was wasting to a shadow, so I sent for
my own doctor, and said to him, ‘Doctor, I can’t stand this any longer;
life isn’t worth living, what there is going to be of it, and that
doesn’t seem to be much. I am going to commit suicide.’ ‘Maybe it is the
best thing to do,’ he said. ‘Do you know what is the most painless form
of death?’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘I am going to eat and drink everything I like
best for a week, and according to all of you, it ought to take much less
time than that.’
“So I did, and I assure you, Mr. Sladen, before the week was up, I was
as well as ever I had been in my life.”
He could reel off this sort of story by the hour, with that slow drawl
of his, which was so mightily effective.
Frank Stockton, the kindliest and most delicate humorist of America, I
knew very well, and any one who knew him intimately could not help
regarding him with affection. He was a little man with a club foot, and
rather a timid expression, which he made use of when telling his
immortal after-dinner stories; he emphasised the timidity until the
point came, and his face was wreathed with smiles. Stockton was a great
gardener. His garden out at the Holt near the Convent station in New
Jersey was large and beautiful, and the product of his own imagination.
It seemed incredible that a garden like that should have no kind of a
hedge or fence, but he explained that in America to put a fence round
your garden is considered an insult to the democracy, who by no means
always deserve to be trusted in this matter.
Stockton was so good-natured that his wife used to say he would never
have done any work at all if he had not had a dragon at his side to
guard him. She was not much like a dragon. But on one point she was
inexorable; when the time had really come for him to set about
fulfilling a contract, she insisted on his going into New York to a
hotel with as blank an outlook as possible, so that he should not waste
time over gardening; he could not trust himself within sight of a green
leaf.
Stockton was a wood-engraver to start with, and was thirty-eight years
old before he abandoned it to do editorial work. A year later he became
assistant-editor of _St. Nicholas_, the American children’s magazine. It
was not until 1880 that he gave it up to devote himself entirely to
book-writing. Up till 1879, the year in which he published _Rudder
Grange_, he only wrote children’s books, and he did not publish his next
book for grown-ups, _The Lady or the Tiger_, for another five years.
Another old member of the Vagabond Club, always a very intimate friend
of Jerome’s, who was often at our at-homes was Pett Ridge, the humorist
whose knowledge of the East End of London is sometimes compared to
Dickens’s; indeed, many consider him unequalled as a writer of Cockney
humour and an interpreter of Cockney humanity. Unlike Jerome, Pett
Ridge, who also has very earnest convictions and has done a world of
good, has the humorist in him always near the surface. He used to be a
constant speaker at literary clubs, and most popular for his
never-failing fund of humour, which was heightened by his demure
delivery.
[Illustration:
JEROME K. JEROME
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
With Pett Ridge, it is natural to mention W. W. Jacobs, our best sea
humorist. People used to be surprised that the small, slight,
youthful-looking man, who was known to them as a clerk in the General
Post Office, should be the delineator of those inimitable captains and
bo’suns and hands before the mast of little sailing-craft which ply
round our coasts. He was one of the men to whom the members of the
general public, who strayed to literary dinners, were most anxious to be
introduced. Their admiration made him shy, and it was a long time before
he grew accustomed to do himself justice in his public speeches, for he
is one of our most genuine humorists. He owed his unique knowledge of
coasting-craft and their navigators to the fact that his father owned a
wharf on the Thames, and that it was one of his chief pleasures as a boy
to go down to the wharf and make friends with the sea-dogs. After his
marriage he went to live in Essex, but, as a bachelor living in London,
he was a very familiar figure at our at-homes. To those who frequented
literary gatherings in the days of which I am speaking, it is natural to
think of H. G. Wells with Pett Ridge and Jacobs, but Wells was much less
seen at these gatherings, because he lived out of town at Worcester
Park. He was already married when I made his acquaintance, and had got
through the first marvellous part of his career, on which he draws for
so many of his books.
He and his wife found a great difficulty in coming to our at-homes,
because they were such very late-at-night affairs. Once they stayed with
us, sleeping at the Temperance Hotel round the corner, called rather
inappropriately the “London and Scottish,” because all our bedrooms were
turned into sitting-rooms for the night. The pair of them looked
ridiculously young. Wells was very boyish in those days; he was slight
in figure and youthful in face, with thick, rebellious, fairish hair,
and a charmingly impulsive manner. It seems odd to think now that then
he suffered from such very bad health that he was not expected to live
long. Those were the days in which he used to write about flying men and
scientific millennia, most brilliant books which told the British public
that a genius had dropped from heaven, whose crumbs were picked up by
Mr. John Lane. Wells became a Vagabond at a very early date, but he
disliked making speeches, and, in point of fact, hardly ever did make
one in his early days, so his wonderful literary gift was not recognised
so quickly as it would have been if he had been constantly making
speeches before literary clubs and other large audiences.
A feature of Wells’ writing is his marvellous versatility. He will make
a hit on entirely fresh lines, indulge the public with a few other books
on these lines, and then, before they have time to tire of them, break
out in another fresh vein. It is hard to believe that the same man wrote
_Select Conversations with an Uncle_ and _Marriage_, though it is true
that seventeen years elapsed between their publication, and there were
many changes of style between the two. In those days he was only a
brilliant novelist; now we recognise in him a profound thinker, a solver
of social problems, even if we ourselves are Conservatives.
In the _New Machiavelli_ and _Marriage_ there is intuition in every page
and almost every line. You can read them with sheer delight for the
writing alone; they do not depend on the story, however excellent.
Another humorist who was a constant visitor was Max O’Rell—the genial
and irascible Frenchman who, as Paul Blouet, the name to which he was
born, was principal French master at St. Paul’s School. Max O’Rell lived
in a house with a garden at St. John’s Wood. We were very fond of him
and his pretty wife, and much shocked when the two blows fell so quickly
upon one another. Max O’Rell fought for France against the Germans, and
he always looked a fighting man, with his strong figure and belligerent
moustache. He was a fine fencer, and had, I am sure, fought duels in his
time; with his temperament he could not have kept out of them; he was up
in arms in a moment. I remember how fiercely he turned upon Norma
Lorimer for using the expression, “The British Channel.”
“Why British?” he asked.
But he was quite floored by the repartee, “Because of the weather.”
Max O’Rell was always quick at repartee himself—except in America. Of
America and Americans he always spoke in public with his tongue in his
cheek, but in private he was “screamingly funny” about them. He should
certainly have left a posthumous volume of unpalatable truths about
America. It would not have hurt him in the Great Beyond, and it would
have convulsed the English-speaking world. He must often have felt in
America as he felt at Napier, New Zealand, where the audience at the
Mechanics’ Institute, or some such place, would have none of him.
“I am good enough for London and Paris,” he said, speaking to me about
it afterwards; “I am good enough for New York, Boston and Chicago; I am
good enough for Melbourne and Sydney. But I am not good enough for
Napier, New Zealand—Napier, with its five thousand inhabitants, etc.,
etc.”
He had the same staccato style in his lectures and after-dinner speeches
as he had in his _John Bull and His Island_ and his other famous books,
and he easily drifted into it in his conversations.
Other humorists of the little circle—it is to be noted how many there
were—were Robert Barr, Barry Pain and W. L. Alden. Barr, as co-editor of
the _Idler_, was a pivot of literary society like Jerome. But his home
for a considerable portion of the period was a long way down in Surrey,
too far for his friends to pursue him to it. This was not without
design, for he was a man so fitted to shine in literary society, that
his one chance of writing his delicate and delightful novels was to bury
himself in the country.
He made his reputation as “Luke Sharp,” the most brilliant humorist of
the _Detroit Free Press_, at that time the most-quoted paper in America,
and he was very American both in appearance and speech. His brusqueness
and pugnacity were at times terrifying, but underneath them lay a gentle
nature and a most affectionate heart. He was a man who inspired and
returned the warmest affection. His grim humour was famous: it suited
the handsome features, marred with smallpox, the close-trimmed naval
officer’s beard, the sturdy frame, the strong American accent, much
better than his dainty love-stories did. There was no more popular
speaker; his influence among his fellow-journalists was unbounded. He
and his pretty and charming wife, an excellent foil for his pugnacious
exterior, were frequent hosts at the Idler teas, and frequent guests at
our flat. Barr was very biting about England’s national foibles, but
they never moved him to such outbursts of righteous indignation as the
intermittent immoralities of the United States Government.
He remained faithful to his birthplace till his premature death, for he
called two successive homes of his in the South, Hillhead, after the
district of Glasgow in which he was born. In his later days he was so
much the editor, so much the novelist, that one forgot the humorist,
except when he was convulsing a knot of friends, to whom he was talking
at a reception, or the audience he was addressing across a dinner-table.
Barry Pain and W. L. Alden, on the other hand, were always humorists.
Alden, who had a most whimsical mind, had been the American
Consul-General at Rome, and had, in consequence, been made a Cavaliere
by the Italian Government. His title was part of his humorous equipment.
It seemed so droll that a typical, middle-class American like Alden,
should be a cavalier. Both he and his wife were kindly and agreeable
people, but most of his personality went into his writing.
Barry Pain, on the other hand, had a forceful personality. Whenever you
meet this cheery cynic, with his bright dark eyes, you know that you are
in the presence of a man who was born to be editor of _Punch_. He was a
constant speaker at literary clubs, though I don’t think that he liked
speaking at first. His speeches were full of the same brilliant
paradoxes as his books. His cynicism was tempered by overflowing
good-nature. He was always such a hearty man. He was another of the
people who soon flew into the country to get away from parties, and have
time for his numerous contributions to weekly journals. But while he
lived in London he was very often at our house. I made his acquaintance
at the Lehmanns’—he married Stella Lehmann—soon after he had come down
from Cambridge. At Cambridge he had been R. C. Lehmann’s bright
particular star in Granta, and Lehmann, who had wealth, good looks, and
a brilliant athletic record to back up his very great abilities as a
writer, had at once become influential in London journalistic circles.
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