LITERARY CLUBS: MY CONNECTION WITH THE AUTHORS’ CLUB
WHEN we came back from the United States in 1891, besides our wide
American circle, most of whom were in the habit of frequently visiting
England in the season, we soon found ourselves in the heart of a
Bohemian society, which met almost daily at one or other club or
reception. Receptions had become the order of the day among London
literary people, artists and actors. The epidemic came over from America
at the same time as the habit of personal journalising. Certain popular
newspapers devoted columns and columns every week to giving every
species of good-natured gossip about the biographies and home-lives of
well-known people. It was this movement which culminated in the
production of _Who’s Who_. Interviewing was a feature of the day. From
living like hermit-crabs, English authors suddenly began to realise the
value of publicity in the sale of their wares.
They had always in a decorous Victorian way met at the Athenæum Club,
but that did not open its doors at all. The pleasant Garrick and the
Savile had an almost equal dread of literary burglars. The National Club
had only a select few authors who liked its fleshpots. But their younger
rivals saw in receptions a fresh element of interest to attract and
benefit members. The Arts Club, the newly founded Authors’ Club, the
Hogarth, the Savage, the Vagabonds, and the Playgoers, to all of which I
had been elected, were free and fearless in their hospitalities, and
here, and through friends I met in these clubs, I acquired the
friendship of many of the world’s workers.
The Arts Club in those days was a jolly place; charming and
distinguished men could be found dining there almost every night, and
after dinner you played pool with the Royal Academicians, or talked
scandal about the way that artists were elected, and pictures selected,
to the Royal Academy. These were most enjoyable evenings.
At the Hogarth, not far off, the artists who were not in the Academy or
in the Academy set, used to assemble. It is the artist’s habit to work
till daylight is gone, and then to waste his time in conversation or the
billiard-room. The talk, when it was not shop, was all what they call in
theatrical circles “gag.” Some of their shop was quite interesting,
because it ran upon new men and new methods. I liked the latter best.
Artists, unlike authors, are generally more ready to detract than to
praise. They wish to mount over the bodies of the slain; they do not
hold out a hand to those who are lower down the hill. But they were very
kind to each other with money, though they were so unkind to each
other’s work, and none of them seemed to stay at home to read after they
had done their work.
The Authors’ Club had been established recently enough for me to come in
as an original member. The Vagabonds Club, which had been in existence
for a good many years, had not yet expanded into the New Vagabonds Club,
nor had the White Friars organised banquets. The old Playgoers had a
good many literary members, chiefly dramatists or would-be’s. The Arts,
the happy hunting-ground of famous artists, had a few; the Hogarth, the
favourite meeting-place for less favourite artists, had a few more; the
Savage, in spite of its traditions, and the Garrick not many more; and
the editors of the _Idler_ were in the habit of giving teas, which
practically constituted a tea club without a subscription. I never was
at the Yorick.
The Authors’ Club at that time took the lead in receptions. Sir Walter
Besant, who founded it, made it his mission in life to bring authors
together, both for the enjoyment of each other’s company, and for the
defence of their common interests. For these purposes he originated both
the Authors’ Club and the Authors’ Society, which had, in 1891, the same
secretary, and himself for chairman of both, but which were technically
unconnected.
The Authors’ Club owed its success, and especially the success of its
meetings, to Oswald Crawfurd, not less than to Besant himself. Crawfurd
had written a book or two, but he had no eminence in literature, beyond
having put enough money into Chapman & Hall to become chairman of the
company and editor of its review, the _Fortnightly_. But Crawfurd was
rich, and at Eton, and as a Consul-General, he had won the friendship of
half the well-known people in London. He used his influence, his energy
and his money, prodigally, in making the new Club go. He entertained
possible members both at the Club, and in his own home and at favourite
restaurants; he wrote an enormous number of persuasive letters; he kept
the thing going generally. The Club was his protégé as much as Besant’s.
Besant, with whom I had been in correspondence before I went to America,
at the moment that he recruited me for the Club, was interested in
introducing American methods at its meetings, and as I had just returned
from America, the directors made me honorary secretary for this purpose.
I spent three years in America, and during that time enjoyed the
hospitality of all the leading literary and Bohemian Clubs in New York,
Boston and Washington. Washington, as far as I remember, had only one of
any importance, but Boston and New York were rich in them, and I brought
over ideas from them.
I explained to Besant what seemed to me the best features of American
literary gatherings, and he evolved from them a programme for our weekly
dinners at the Authors’ Club; but he thought that reading a paper,
followed by a discussion, or entertaining a great author, whose health
was proposed and who had to make a reply, was more suited to an English
audience than telling anecdotes. I think he was right; telling anecdotes
is not an English art. The American expects boundless patience from his
audience while he elaborates the gist of the story; the longer he
prolongs the agony, the better his audience likes it. He has made a fine
art of story-telling, and does it well enough to take the place of a
curtain-raiser at a theatre. The Englishman only does it in
private—generally to the distress of his family—or introduces it
incidentally into one of his speeches. Except barristers, and
politicians, and clergymen, most Englishmen are afraid of the sound of
their own voices in public, though Englishwomen often do not suffer from
this disability. There is really some justification for the story of the
man who was asked to give a definition of _woman_. He began, “Woman is,
generally speaking....” “Stop there!” said his friend. “If you went on
for a thousand years you would never get so near it again.”
Englishwomen as a class are much better speakers than Englishmen.
We got along comfortably at the Authors’ Club with entertaining eminent
persons, and expecting them to speak in recognition of the compliment,
until Sir Augustus Harris was asked to propose the health of Isidore di
Lara, whose opera he had just presented at Drury Lane. Harris made a
long speech, in which he told us all that he had done for grand opera,
how much money he had spent, what singers, male and female he had
discovered and the rest of it, and was very pleased with himself, and
after about half-an-hour sat down without making the slightest allusion
to di Lara. Oswald Crawfurd, I think it was, who noticed the omission,
and, springing to his feet, proposed the toast.
After this it was felt that we ought to do something to strengthen the
programme, and Besant proposed a form of entertainment which had come up
in the United States since I had lived there. A man with the eminent
name of Luther had hit upon an idea for giving authors a fourth profit
on their works, and making them all contributors to his own profit. He
called it “Uncut Leaves.” Under this name he offered all the most
eminent authors in America a generous price if they would read their
productions in a lecture hall before they were published serially, so
that they received money for recitation as well as for serial rights,
book rights and dramatic rights. I believe it went very well in America
for a while, but in London it was impossible to persuade a Meredith or a
Hardy to listen to such a proposal. To start with, only a funny man had
a chance of getting an English audience to listen to him reading his own
productions.
Later on we did try the anecdotes with some success at informal dinners.
In any case the Authors’ Club dinners and entertainments became a great
success. It was the most popular literary institution of the day, both
at its temporary first home in Park Place, and afterwards at its proper
house in Whitehall Court. Some of the most eminent men were its guests.
Among them, besides great authors, were great prelates, great generals,
great admirals, great politicians, who enjoyed being entertained by the
Authors’ Club better than at public banquets, because they only had to
speak to fifty or a hundred men instead of addressing huge assemblies,
and the formal part of the proceedings lasted such a short time that
they might chat afterwards in the smoking-room or the billiard-room with
their hosts, who always had among them men whose books they had been
admiring for years. While Besant lived he was a great inspiration, and
when he died his place was taken by others who had sprung to the
forefront of literature in the interval.
The Authors’ Club differed from the original Vagabonds Club because only
the Speaker or Speakers of the evening spoke, and the dinner was a more
luxurious one. Most of the literary Vagabonds went to the Authors’ Club
too, but at the Authors’ you met a fair sprinkling of the older authors
like Sir Walter Besant, and, occasionally, Thomas Hardy. The gatherings
were much larger. The Club contained many more members, and the bringing
of guests was much more usual. Besant and Oswald Crawfurd brought a
great many, generally distinguished men.
If the names of everyone present at some of those dinners were published
now, people would be astonished to see what a high percentage of them
have become household words.
[Illustration:
CHARLES GARVICE
_Drawn by Yoshio Markino_
]
Among them were John Hay, the greatest man the United States ever sent
us as an Ambassador; the old Lord Chancellor; the old Lord Chief
Justice; Lord Avebury, who invented the “bank-holidays” known as “St.
Lubbock’s-days”; Lord Strathcona, the father of the Canadian Pacific
Railway, and the synonym for patriotic munificence in these latter days;
Lord Wolseley, then Commander-in-Chief; Sir Ian Hamilton, who won the
important battles of Wagon Hill and the Diamond Hills in the South
African war; Sir Edward Seymour, the great Admiral, who won as much
reputation by daring to be a failure on his march from Tientsin to
Peking as he did by all his successes; Admiral Sir William Kennedy, the
wittiest speaker in the navy; Admiral Sir Hedworth Lambton, now Sir
Hedworth Meux; and Admiral Sir Percy Scott, who saved the situation in
the South African war by converting his 4·7 ship guns into field guns to
meet the Boers’ “long Toms”; Bishop Creighton, and Bishop Ingram, of
London; Bishop Gore, then of Worcester; Sir Robert Ball, the astronomer;
Sir Leslie Stephen, the father of _The Dictionary of National
Biography_; Sir Alma Tadema; Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Macaulay’s
nephew, who wrote two of the greatest biographies in the language, _The
Life of Macaulay_ and _The Life of Fox_, and has sons who rival him; Sir
William Ramsey, F.R.S.; two famous brothers, the late Rt. Hon. Alfred
Lyttleton, the greatest of all the giants of sport on record except C.
B. Fry (who made the same impression on Parliament as he had made on his
Eton schoolfellows by his loftiness of character), and his brother
Edward, almost equally great in cricket, the head master of Eton; with
authors like Rudyard Kipling, Ian Maclaren, Doyle, Barrie, Anthony Hope,
Augustine Birrell, and Henry Arthur Jones. There are others equally
eminent, if I could only remember them.
The greatest favourite we ever had among our guests at the Authors’ Club
was “Ballahooley”—Robert Jasper Martin of Cromartin, better known as Bob
Martin—a magnificent-looking Irish squire of the Charles Lever type, who
bubbled over with natural wit.
Bob Martin was a brother of Violet Martin of Ross, and cousin of Edith
Œnone Somerville the lady M.F.H., who collaborated in _Some
Reminiscences of an Irish R.M_. and other famous books of Irish life and
character, and though he did not write much, he had the same limitless
fund of humour.
The first time that ever I took him to the Authors’ Club the late Lord
Wolseley was the guest of the evening, and an admirable guest of the
evening he was—illustrious, interesting, urbane, a brilliant talker. He
and Martin were old friends, and after Lord Wolseley’s health had been
proposed and he had responded in a speech which told us all about his
literary work—like Moltke, he was an author by instinct—Martin got up to
tell us some of his inimitable Irish stories. The first was one about
Lord Wolseley himself. In the days when he was only a colonel, a
sergeant-major came to him for a day’s leave to help his wife in doing
the Company’s washing.
“I’ve been speaking to your wife, Pat,” said Colonel Wolseley, “and she
begged me, whenever you came to me for leave on her washing-day, to
refuse you because you get in her way so.”
The man saluted, and turned to leave the room, but when he got to the
door he turned round and saluted again, and asked, “Have I your leave to
say something, Colonel?”
“Yes, Pat.”
“Well, what I wish to say, sir, is that one of us two must be handling
the truth rather carelessly, because I haven’t got a wife.”
True or untrue, Lord Wolseley did not deny the impeachment.
That same night “Ballahooley” told us of his first experience of the
Castle at Dublin. He was asked to stay there the first time he ever came
to town, and he was not used to town ways. When his jaunting-car pulled
up at the door of the Castle, he told the footman to give the coachman a
drink, which was the custom of the country at Cromartin. The footman
stared at him.
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I heard,” said the footman slowly, and disappeared to fetch
the drink because Martin swore at him so. When he came back, he brought
a liqueur-glass of Benedictine on an immense silver tray. The coachman
took the glass and smelt it—doubtfully.
“It’s all right, Pat, it was made by the Holy Fathers.”
Thus encouraged, Pat drank it off. He made a wry face.
“Don’t you like it, Pat? It’s very good.”
“Oh, it’s good enough,” said the Jehu, “but what I’m thinking is that
the man who blew that glass was mighty short of breath.”
That same evening he told us of the first election to a District Council
which was ever held on his estates. The place was a hotbed of
Nationalism, and Bob Martin was very anxious to have a friend of his,
who was a Conservative, elected on to the Council. So he assembled all
his tenants, and said to them, “I wish you’d elect this man. I’ve never
asked you to do anything for me before, and I’ve made more money out of
one rotten song (‘Ballahooley’) than out of the whole blessed lot of you
ever since I came in for this place.”
Their Irish minds were so struck by this piece of special pleading that
they returned his candidate unopposed.
Bishop Creighton was a very entertaining guest. Just because he was so
great and so potent as an administrator, he could be perfectly natural
when he was dining with a couple of score of authors. One could not
imagine the present Bishop—whom I remember in the days when he was at
Keble—he was a very plucky player at football, which he had learned at
Marlborough—blurting out like his predecessor that the first thing he
asked about a parson who was recommended for a living in his gift was
“Is he a hustler?” Nor can one imagine him fencing with the late Father
Stanton of St. Alban’s, Holborn, over the use of incense.
I wish I had not forgotten the name of that club to which he and Balfour
and I forget what others of the greatest in the land, a dozen or twenty
in all, mostly great politicians or prelates, belonged, who dined
together at the Grand Hotel once or twice a month, and quietly enjoyed
themselves like the _Dilettanti_. I suppose that it exists still.
Bishop Gore was delightfully human the night that we entertained him at
the Authors’ Club. He said that he felt quite shy of replying to the
toast of his health—that generally, when he was speaking, he was
addressing an audience upon subjects on which he was entitled to speak
with authority, and upon which his audience were very anxious to hear
what he had to say, but that on this occasion he was going to talk about
a subject which interested no one, meaning himself, and he was quite at
a loss what to say.
Sir Evelyn Wood, one of the few men who have ever won the V.C. both as a
sailor and a soldier—he was a midshipman before he was a soldier, and
made a famous ride with dispatches—and he has been called to the Bar
since—supplemented his speech in reply to the toast with a selection of
rattling anecdotes.
Sir Ian Hamilton, the General who saved Ladysmith by his victory at
Wagon Hill, described the touch and go of his battle, which saved
Ladysmith, in the slang of ordinary conversation, which made it
extraordinarily impressive. It was very appropriate, too, for slang was
the language of the brief council of war which Sir Ian held with the
Colonel of the Devons before they launched the charge which saved the
day.
One of the most interesting dinners we ever had was the dinner we gave
to Zola in the Whitehall Rooms. We had other guests, varying from
Stepniak, the Nihilist, to Frank Stockton and Bill Nye, the American
humorists. Stockton told one of his characteristic American after-dinner
stories of the “lady or the tiger” sort. Nye was really wonderful. He
said that he himself belonged to an old French family—that the Nye
family used always to spell their name Ney, but they changed it because
one of the family was unfortunate. This allusion to the bravest of the
brave brought the house down, but it took about a quarter of an hour to
explain it to Zola.
Henry Arthur Jones was extraordinarily interesting—Jones, if you catch
him in the right mood, can make a really fine speech, full of
imagination.
One man whom I first met at the Authors’ Club, and whom I afterwards got
to know better, though I have not seen him for many years—Lucien Wolf,
had an extremely original way of working. Besides his ordinary press
work, once a month he contributed a presentation of the foreign politics
of the world to one of the principal Reviews. As foreign editor of a
daily paper, he had the subject at his fingers’ ends, but it troubled
him in a subject so full of tangled threads to break off his work for
meals and to go to bed. Writing that article took about forty-eight
hours, and during that time he hardly left his study; he did not go to
bed at all; like the Admiral who gave them their name, he had sandwiches
brought to him where he sat. He apparently felt no ill-effects from this
tremendous effort of will-power and industry, though, of course, he
looked very tired. His articles on foreign affairs in the monthly
Reviews took the premier place.
Poulteney Bigelow was a character at the Authors’ Club in those days.
The son of an American Ambassador—minister, as they were then called—he
was, for some reason or another, an intimate personal friend of the
German Emperor, with whom he constantly stayed, and of whom he treasured
many anecdotes. He once nearly persuaded the Emperor to dine at the
Authors’ Club. He disappeared for a while, and went out West in the
United States again, from which he came back very full of the shooting
exploits of Theodore Roosevelt, another of his friends.
Bigelow always maintained that the Spanish-American war was the best
thing which ever happened for the relations between Great Britain and
the United States. He said that the garrison, who died like flies in the
Philippines, were mostly drawn from the South-Western States, where the
hatred of England had been liveliest, and their colonial experiences
made them understand how considerate the English were to subject
peoples, and how very inconsiderate subject peoples were apt to be to
their rulers.
We had quite a bevy of leading editors among our members, some of whom
put in an appearance pretty constantly, but it never was a very active
editor’s club; I think they were too afraid of would-be contributors.
William Sinclair, the Archdeacon of London, who was the principal figure
at London functions for nearly a generation, was a pillar of the Club.
He was a constant attendant at its house dinners, and apart from his
influence and position, was a brilliant raconteur. Sometimes, like a
true Scotsman, he told a story against himself, as when he told us why
he was such a popular preacher at the Guards’ chapel—because the men
said that he was the only person who ever preached to them with a voice
like a sergeant-major.
Sinclair had met everybody of any importance in his time. He had one
beautiful story of a Scotsman who suddenly became a Cabinet Minister on
four or five thousand a year, and sported a butler. Sinclair, who was
staying with him, in all innocence asked what the man’s name was, and
his hostess said, “I don’t know; we always call him waiter.”
After Besant’s death, the two men who were most prominent at the
Authors’ Club were certainly Conan Doyle and Anthony Hope—Doyle
especially, because he was for a long time chairman of the Club, and a
frequent attendant at the dinners. I wish I could remember only a tithe
of the interesting and amusing things he said at that dinner-table, for
Doyle always says something memorable in his speeches. But once I was so
interested that I kept a note of what he said written down on my menu
card. It was about his famous pamphlet—_The War; its Causes and its
Conduct_. He told his audience that it came to him in an instant, like
all great things in life, which hit on the head like a bullet. He was
reading some peculiarly diabolical misrepresentations by the German
editors. “Yet these men,” he told himself, “were, in the ordinary
affairs of life, honest men. Many books have been written from our
standpoint; but, in the first place, a German editor cannot buy a book
which costs six shillings or more, and in the second place, he has not
got time to read through it. The only thing is to give him free of cost
something which he can read in an hour. My materials were all to hand. I
know how humane Tommy Atkins was to his enemies, and I had been flooded
with letters on the subject in reply to an advertisement I had inserted
in the newspapers. Half-a-dozen things which have occurred to me in my
life must have been foreordained.
“At a small dinner that night I sat next to ——. I explained my project
to him. ‘How will you get the money?’ he asked. ‘From the public.’
‘Well, I’ll get a thousand pounds for you.’
“Chance had thrown me against the man who knew everything I wanted to
know. He could even tell me the names of the people who could translate
it into the various languages. Five months later I had the book on my
table in twenty languages. Rich men gave their fifty pounds to the
scheme, poor people scraped together their half-crowns to do their
widow’s-mites’ worth for England. I sent that pamphlet to every man in
Europe whose opinion counted. Leyds gave me the cue. It is astonishing
how few people govern the public opinion of the world. In two countries
an honest second edition was called for—Hungary and Portugal. In the
latter, our old ally, there was a most kindly feeling for us, a genuine
anxiety to learn the true facts of the case. In Germany the whole twenty
thousand copies were distributed; twelve thousand of them gratis, and
eight sold. The Swiss actually printed an edition for themselves.”
He told us this on the night that we entertained him and Gilbert Parker
in honour of their knighthood, and he told us how that morning a letter
of congratulation from his gunsmith had arrived, addressed to “Sir
Sherlock Holmes.” The best thing he ever told us about _Sherlock Holmes_
was its fate when he made a play of it, and sold it to a famous actor.
The actor stipulated that he should be allowed to alter it as much as he
liked, and when Doyle went to the rehearsals, he found that there was
practically nothing of his play left except the title. That was all the
actor really wanted to buy; he had made his own play out of the Sherlock
Holmes stories before he went to Doyle.
It was at an Authors’ Club dinner that Hall Caine made his awful
disclosure about Londoners’ insides. He said that no family could live
in London for more than three generations unless its members went away
for a change of air, and that the smoke-charged state of the atmosphere
turned their insides from a healthy red to a slaty black. It was that
same night that he recited his poem “Ellan Vannin” to us.
I remember, in the early days of the Authors’ Club, J. M. Barrie telling
the Club a story in the American story-teller’s fashion. I don’t suppose
for an instant that it had actually happened. I expect it was just a
_ben trovato_, but it was none the less amusing. He apologised for being
late. He had been to the wrong club. He had never been to the Authors’
Club before, he said (though he was a member of the committee), so he
asked a policeman the way. From the way in which he pronounced the word,
the policeman thought he meant Arthur’s, which was quite near the
Authors’ Club when it was in its temporary premises in Park Place. When
he got there he found it a very grand place, he said. The club porter
looked him up and down, and said “The servants’ entrance is round the
corner.”
It took the moral courage of a Scotsman to tell that story—true or
untrue. It was inimitably funny, told in the broad Doric of _The Little
Minister_.
Jerome actually had an experience of this sort in New York. But it was
not due to the obtuseness of the club porter. He received a straight-out
invitation from the servants of one of the great New York clubs to spend
the evening with them. I suppose they have their story-tellers’ nights
like the members. He said that he never enjoyed himself more in his
life.[3]
Footnote 3:
The Authors’ Club, before it was reconstructed, contained a number of
very representative members. Among them were Sir Walter Besant, Conan
Doyle, Frankfort Moore, Hall Caine, Lindsay Bashford, R. D.
Blumenfeld, F. T. Bullen, W. L. Courtney, S. R. Crockett, Sir Michael
Foster, secretary of the Royal Society, J. Foster Fraser, Sydney
Grundy, Charles Garvice, F. H. Gribble, H. A. Gwynne, the editor of
the _Morning Post_, Major Arthur Griffiths, Rider Haggard, Cutcliffe
Hyne, Anthony Hope, Clive Holland, Joseph Hocking, E. W. Hornung, Sir
Henry Irving, J. K. Jerome, Henry Arthur Jones, Edward Jenks, who
wrote that famous book _Ginx’s Baby_, and was once M.P. for Hull,
Rudyard Kipling, Otto Kyllman, Archdeacon Sinclair, Norman McColl,
editor of the _Athenæum_, Prof. Meiklejohn, father of the V.C. who was
killed in putting a horse that could not jump at some railings in the
Park to avoid running over a child; A. W. Marchmont, Bertram Mitford,
J. Eveleigh Nash, Gilbert Parker, Barry Pain, J. M. Barrie, Max
Pemberton, Sir J. Rennell Rodd, British Ambassador at Rome, Morley
Roberts, Algernon Rose, who reconstituted the club, Bram Stoker, M. H.
Spielmann, Prof. Skeat, the great etymologist, H. R. Tedder, the
librarian of the _Athenæum_, Herbert Trench, Horace Annesley Vachell,
W. H. Wilkins, Percy White, Lacon Watson, Horace Wyndham, and others.
But the Club could never rise much above three hundred members. Many a
time have G. Herbert Thring, the secretary, and I discussed with our
board, consisting from time to time of Besant, Oswald Crawfurd, Lord
Monkswell, Tedder, the literary executor of Herbert Spencer, Conan
Doyle, Anthony Hope, Hall Caine, Frankfort Moore, Morley Roberts, and
Percy White, projects for bringing in more members. The change from the
temporary premises in Park Place behind St. James’ Street, to the
pleasant rooms overlooking the river, did something for us. But we were
faced by a dilemma, which was that we had to widen the basis of our
membership to get enough members to pay the huge rent of the premises,
which we had taken for a term of years. If, instead of having these
premises, we had hired a reading-room, and a smoking-room, and a
dining-room in a hotel, we could have got the accommodation for a
hundred a year, and as only a tithe of the Club ever used it, except on
the nights when they were brought together by notice for the Club
dinners, any premises would have been large enough; the hotel would
always have lent us a room of any size which we could fill for a dinner.
The Whitefriars principle would have suited us admirably, and the Hotel
Cecil would have made a good venue. But we had these premises on our
hands, and we wanted a larger membership, not to fill them, but to make
financial arrangements easier. I myself in my time enlisted no fewer
than a hundred members for the Club. But that did not fill up the
wastage.
Thring saw the need of widening our basis as clearly as I did, but we
never could carry our board with us to make an enlargement of the
franchise sufficiently drastic, because they wished to be guided by the
feeling of the men who used the Club most, and their feeling was
decidedly against it—mainly, I believe, because they thought that the
extra members we wanted to relieve the finances would make the Club too
full to be restful. So in one way and another the old Club was drifting
on to the rocks when Algernon Rose (with Charles Garvice as his
chairman, and Cato Worsfold as honorary solicitor) took the matter in
hand as honorary secretary. I did not see the throes. I was out of
England on one of my wander-years.
Rose, with a clear-sighted policy, boundless energy and self-sacrifice,
and inexhaustible tact, not only pulled the Club out of the fire, but
has made it one of the most flourishing organisations in London, with
two hundred town members, three hundred suburban members, five hundred
country members, and six hundred oversea members. He could easily have a
thousand town members if he wanted them, but the town membership is
strictly limited to two hundred, and the suburban to three hundred,
because that is the limit of habitués which the premises can
accommodate. Unfortunately you can’t have five-day members at an
Authors’ Club like you do at a Golf Club.
And nowadays members use the Club in a way they never did when I was the
honorary secretary and we exhausted our ingenuity in efforts to make the
club more inhabited through the week. The increase of attendance at the
Monday night dinners is one of the most wonderful things of all. Week
after week they have enormous dinners, and Rose provides a brilliant
succession of famous guests of the evening. The other Tuesday I read a
report of an Authors’ Club dinner in the _Daily Telegraph_ which filled
three columns.[4]
Footnote 4:
Among the guests of the evening at the Authors’ Club since Rose took
it over have been musicians like Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, Sir
Walter Parratt, Sir Frederick Cowen, Mr. William H. Cummings, Sir
Hubert Parry; supreme scientists like Sir George Darwin, F.R.S., Sir
Oliver Lodge, F.R.S., Sir William Ramsay, F.R.S., Sir William Crookes,
F.R.S., Prof. Schäfer, F.R.S.; great lawyers, like Lord Chancellor
Halsbury, the late Lord Chief Justice, and Lord Justice Fletcher
Moulton; men who have been great outside the Empire like Sir Robert
Hart, and Dr. G. E. Morrison of Peking, and Mr. F. C. Selous, the
mighty hunter; great politicians, like Lord Milner, and Lord Wemyss;
great explorers, like Sir Ernest Shackleton; great artists, like the
late Sir Hubert von Herkomer; distinguished foreigners, like the
American Ambassadors, Whitelaw-Reid and Page; well-known literary men,
like Harold Cox, secretary of the Cobden Society, Maarten Maartens,
Sir Owen Seaman, Sir Sidney Lee, W. B. Maxwell; and great actors, like
Sir Herbert Beerbohm-Tree.
The Club retains practically all its old outstanding names, including
that of Thring. Thring for many years was the Authors’ Club personified.
He not only conducted its business; he peopled the club. Men went to
lunch there because they knew they would meet Thring. They dropped in
after business hours because they knew that Thring, at any rate, would
be there. He kept the social life of the Club, as typified in the Club
pools, and so on, going, and he was the friend of all the members,
except those who desired to remain unsociable. And, in consequence, he
always had his finger on the pulse of the Club.
The questions of club discipline which came up before the board in its
early days were some of them of the most extraordinary nature. One man
hated hearing clocks tick, and whenever he was left alone in a room
always stopped the clock. Somebody else wished to have him turned out of
the Club, but the Chairman said he did not see how it could be regarded
as ungentlemanly behaviour, and proposed that no action should be taken,
but that we should take it in turns never to leave the honourable member
alone!
The Rev. John Watson, who, under the pen-name of “Ian Maclaren,”
suddenly burst into fame with _Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush_ when he was
forty-four years old, was a Liverpool clergyman, the minister of the
Sefton Park Presbyterian Church. He had long enjoyed a reputation in his
circle in Liverpool for story-telling and as a public speaker. His
speeches were as good as his stories, and admirably delivered. His
personal charm was as great as the respect in which he was held. He was
very humorous. He told us one night, when he was our guest at the
Authors’ Club, that his boy at Rugby had said to him, “Father, I suppose
that your books are all right to some people, or you would not be able
to do so much for us. But couldn’t you write something which would be
good enough for me to show the other chaps?”
One wonders if this was the boy who is now the head of Nisbet’s great
publishing house. If it was, how pleased he would be to have the
publication of some of the books that were not good enough “to show the
other chaps!”
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