Transcribed from the 1913 John Long edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

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BOHEMIAN DAYS IN
FLEET STREET

BY
A JOURNALIST

LONDON
JOHN LONG, LIMITED
NORRIS STREET, HAYMARKET
MCMXIII

First published in 1913

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
THE STREET OF ADVENTURE

Books beget books, even when they are books of autobiography. Not that the writer of reminiscence will admit as much. He is—if you believe him—the victim of an irrepressible impulse, or he has at length (usually at great length) yielded to the solicitations of a large circle of acquaintances. I am impelled to my present enterprise by no sense of my own aptitude, nor have my discerning friends urged that some record of my experiences would supply a long-felt want. My book—like a great many other books—owes its existence to a book that went before it. In other and plainer words, if Mr. Philip Gibbs had not written his novel entitled “The Street of Adventure,” this present collection of reminiscences would never have been attempted. And I should, perhaps, apologize to Mr. Gibbs for saddling him with the awful responsibility. The novel to which allusion has been made—and a very excellent one it is—suddenly, but with much distinctness, suggested my course. The muck-rake of reminiscence is deliberately taken up because I represent a condition of Press life that has apparently ceased to exist. If one accepts the statements of Mr. Gibbs—and there is every reason why one should—the Fleet Street of to-day bears no sort of resemblance to the Fleet Street of yesterday. If I describe the London Press and the London Pressman of less than two decades ago, I am describing a state of things that has been reformed off the face of the earth, and a race of men extinct as the Dodo.

To an old member of the Press this is the real significance of “The Street of Adventure,” for the story describes—with entire candour and accuracy; one can entertain no doubt about that—the working of the Metropolitan Press and its personnel as they exist at this the dawn of the century. I have read chapter after chapter of the story with a growing sentiment of astonishment and dismay. The accomplished author describes, at first hand, a conjuncture of men and conditions so different to that existing in my time that I completely fail to recognize in this picture of the present a single salient characteristic of the past. Had the writer discovered for us evidences of a natural progress of evolution, a survival of fitness, an institution rising on stepping-stones of its dead self to higher things, this book had never been conceived. But this melancholy tale suggests a sad and sudden deterioration, the inauguration of a period of decadence, the setting in of a newspaper rot. It is in the belief that a certain interest must centre about times that have gone beyond recall, and round the names of the men whose successors are ruthlessly painted for us in the pages before me, that I address myself to the task of fixing the random recollection of some twenty jocund years.

During the seventies and eighties I knew my Fleet Street well. I worked among its presses; was on intimate terms with many of its most famous habitués; revelled in its atmosphere; and, in a word, lived its strenuous but happy life. And I would wish no better now—could such things be—than to live it all over again: granted, of course, that I lived it under the same conditions and among the same companions. Under the conditions and among the companions described in “The Street of Adventure,” a survivor of the seventies or eighties would find life intolerable. For the conditions, as described, are degrading, and the companionship unwholesome and depressing. It is impossible to catch the new atmosphere, to visualize the new journalist. And any nascent desire I may once have cherished to visit the scenes of my ancient labours has been effectually quenched by the perusal of these squalid records.

The time occupied in the unfolding of the drama which marks our author’s starting-point commences with the founding of an important daily paper, and ends with the foundering of the same. The dramatis personæ belong entirely to the staff of the wonderful party organ, with the proprietor, shadowy but maleficent, brooding over the adventure like a gloomy and heartily detested Fate. In making the acquaintance of the members of the staff I am being introduced to a new race. I recognize nothing in character, equipment, or even in physique, that for a moment recalls the figures of the past. For “there were giants on the earth in those days.” The characters represented here are anæmic, neurotic, hysterical. Their professional avocation brings them into competition with women, and the conditions of their service involves working with them as colleagues and accepting them as comrades. This intimate professional association may account for the hysterics—to some extent. But it does not account for the infinite joylessness which is the dominant note of the record. The various characters seem to move in a fuliginous cloud beyond which they are always scenting disaster. Should the disaster ensue, they are as men and women without hope. When, in effect, the dreaded calamity does overtake them—not without due notice—they are like mountain sheep in a thunder-storm: awe-stricken and helpless. We of a brisker time might, under similar circumstances, have imitated sheep in that we would have had recourse to our “damns.” But the gentlemen of “The Street of Adventure” have not spirit enough even for that. To change the figure: Their ship has foundered; they abandon themselves to their fate, for not one of them can swim.

Now, in the times of which I am about to record a few personal impressions, total disaster of the kind described here was impossible. That is to say, collapse of a newspaper did not involve the endowment of the individual members of its staff with the key of the street. For although the failure of a journal—and I have watched over the last hours of more than one or two of them—might mean a temporary crippling and a serious curtailment of income to certain members of the staff, it never involved a drought in all the springs of income. For even the most important writers on the staff of a daily newspaper had other irons in the fire. Indeed, the more important the writer, the greater the number of fires offered for the accommodation of his irons. But the adventurers in this new Fleet Street are represented as being bound body and soul to a single proprietor. They are in thrall to one insistent master. In the morning they are expected to report themselves at the office, and are then to take their places in a sort of common-room waiting for orders, much as messenger-boys at their call-centres lounge around waiting for their “turn.”

The atmosphere, as I endeavour to catch it from these illuminating pages, is that of a barracks—barracks provided for an army where women serve in the ranks. One by one the anxious, nervous waiters are sent on their several missions. Their tasks are not of a very cheerful or inspiring kind. Crime-hunting, according to Mr. Gibbs, appears to be a tremendous “feature” in the journals of the period, and the crime-hunter, as observed by him, is the most virile (perhaps I had rather say the least effeminate) of these queer adventurers. He, at all events, “lives up” to his mission, and even provides his home with an object-lesson in the social strata through which he works in search of his quarry, for he has taken under his “protection” a member of the criminal classes, and established her as mistress of his flat in Battersea. Pretty well this for one of the most distinguished members of the staff of a leading Metropolitan journal! and quaint reading for those who belong to other times, and illustrated—I am happy to think—other manners. If, however, the ladies and gentlemen of the newspaper staff of the period are depicted as eccentric in both conduct and appearance, their conversation when they forgather in their gaollike common-room, or in their favourite taverns, is neither bright nor edifying. They interchange some cheap philosophical reflections, and occasionally employ a preciosity of diction which, introduced in the eighties, was laughed out of Fleet Street by the men of that bustling time. Beyond these exchanges of conversational mock-jewellery, their talk is all of “shop.” And deadly dull it is. The poor creatures never deviate into fun. Their young lives are coloured by a sense of apprehension and oppression. To them the newspaper is an awful mother. Yet her death means the sealing-up of the founts by which they live. And all their thoughts are grey and melancholy in anticipation of the imminent catastrophe. When eventually the long-anticipated doom is announced, the sensation of the reader is that of relief. The chapter in which the disaster is set forth is, as a piece of writing, so forcible and so convincing that one is driven to the conclusion that the writer is describing an actual occurrence. And the victims? Does their conduct under the final stroke evoke our sympathy as their apologist evidently means that it should? Personally I am conscious of no sentiments other than those of pity and contempt. When the proprietor makes the announcement that he has gone the limit, and that no further issue of his costly and ill-fated paper will be made, some of the men are described as weeping; all are more or less hysterical. The busy builders of an overturned ant-heap arouse our admiration by their courage and capacity and resource. The pitiable creatures who crawl out into the night from the crumbling press-heap of Fleet Street can but provoke a gibe. Some of them seek the oblivion purchasable in public-houses—for the journalist in “The Street of Adventure” understands a tavern only as a place in which to get drunk—others seek consolation in the flats of the lady members of the staff, an expedient more sober at once and more economical. I quit their society with pleasure. They belong to a marrowless, joyless, invertebrate breed; seedy, selfish, but superior persons, affording at all times a safe medium for maleficent mind-microbes on the prowl after a reliable culture.

If “The Street of Adventure” supplies a cinematographic record of the London journalistic life of to-day, it should be well worth while, I think, to compose some account of the very different conditions prevailing on the Press less than two decades ago; to present some fairly recognizable sketches of the gentlemen of the Press who bore the burden and heat of that day; to indicate the manner in which our cheery duties were discharged; and—a more difficult matter—to render, if possible, something of the atmosphere of the period. My own experience, roughly speaking, covers a period of twenty years. It extends from 1870 to 1890. The mere record of a few of the names of those with whom at one time or another I became associated indicates at once the great gulf fixed between the Then and the Now. There were, among others, George Augustus Sala, Godfrey Turner, “Scholar” Williams, Edmund Yates, Gilbert Venables, Tom Purnell, Archibald Forbes, Captain Hamber, George Henty, John Augustus O’Shea, Edmund O’Donovan, Hilary Skinner, Charles Williams, Henry Pearse, John Lovell. In the mere matter of physique this short catalogue suggests another age of journalists. Imagine these men, or any one of them, being thrown into hysterics by the failure of a newspaper to pay its way. Fancy Forbes in tears over the Daily News reduced to a halfpenny! Or Edmund O’Donovan, on the morrow of his proprietor’s financial ruin, seeking balm for his wounded spirit in the flats of lady colleagues!

By the nature of his calling the journalist is thrown much into contact with those outside his profession. The descriptive writer and special correspondent touches life at all points. A memorable struggle in the Commons House; the more lurid impact of armies; coronations; first nights at the theatre; command nights at the opera; the funerals of statesmen; prize-fights—the thousand pageants that make up the passing show called “public life”—these were approached by the Press correspondents, not in the spirit of nervous despondency described as characterizing the attitude of the puppets of Mr. Gibbs. My contemporaries went to work in an optimistic mood, mixed with the pageant with an air of cheery familiarity, and recorded their impressions in articles which would be considered nowadays as too picturesque, too vigorous, and too literary in style. Their functions brought them into pleasant contact with the heroes of whom they sung. They were given to looking at things from the inside as well as from the outside. They made friendships among the Parliament men, the pugilists, the pulpiteers, and the players, of whose exploits they were the chartered chroniclers. If an acquired familiarity with social functions of every sort could constitute a Society man, then the journalist of my period should—after a long and exhausting experience—possess all the gifts and graces of that ineffable being. And at the least his retrospect should be of the most pleasant description. He will recall with delight his experience of the dandies and the dullards, the wits and the wantons, with whom he came in contact during his excursions in those higher altitudes. Actors and actresses were, of course, his ordinary prey. Among the stars of the dramatic firmament he revolved in an amity now and then disturbed by some notice less fulsome than the object of it may have deemed acceptable. But on the whole the terms existing in my time between Press and Stage were those of immense consideration each for each. That the love of each for each has grown more ardent in these later days may be attributable to the prodigious increase in the advertising orders received by newspaper managers from the managers of playhouses. Painters were less amenable. Them you had to meet socially. They had the least possible respect for the professional journalist’s opinion of pictures. They affected to ignore newspaper criticism of their exhibited works, or, if they were thrust upon them, shuddered as they read. Artists in black-and-white found their way to Fleet Street, but their dealings were confined to the illustrated papers. The first time that a drawing appeared in a daily paper was, if I remember rightly, when the Daily Telegraph published what it called “a portrait sketch” of Lefroy the murderer, a publication which led, it may be remembered, to the arrest of that miscreant. To-day the black-and-white artist is in the ascendant, and I entertain a pious hope that the day is not far off when its critics will habitually say of a newspaper, not that it is well or ill “written,” but that it is well or ill “drawn.”

This book will be largely anecdotal. I may therefore be permitted at this point—irrelevantly and parenthetically—to introduce a reminiscence of Oscar Wilde which the mention of Lefroy recalls to me; I might forget it later. I was sitting at Romano’s in the company of that clever and ill-fated genius shortly after the trial of Lefroy. Wilde was amusing the company with his affectations and paradoxes. “If,” he said, in his ineffably superior way—“if I were not a poet, and could not be an artist, I should wish to be a murderer.” “What!” exclaimed one of us, “and have your portrait-sketch in the Daily Telegraph?” “Better that,” cooed Wilde, “than to go down to the sunless grave unknown.” On the same occasion the merits of Irving—then attracting the town—came up for discussion. Wilde was a warm supporter of the actor’s methods, and indulged in a strain of exaggerated praise over the performance then holding the boards at the Lyceum. “But what about his legs?” inquired an irreverent listener. “Irving’s legs,” answered Wilde, with the manner of a man who is promulgating some eternal truth—“Irving’s legs are distinctly precious, but his left leg is a poem!”

Having permitted myself this moment of “comic relief,” I proceed to state the plan which I propose to follow in the following pages. I disclaim any title to the office of auto-biographer. I am nobody. My own twenty years’ experience is nothing. The interest of my reminiscences centres entirely in those others among whom my lot was cast. So, having in the three following chapters described the stages over which I drifted into journalism, I shall in the succeeding chapters abandon any chronological arrangement of narrative, and group in each section certain events, individuals, enterprises, and incidents. And the interest I hope to enhance by the introduction of incidents and anecdotes that have come under my personal observation and been uttered in my own hearing.

As I essay to challenge my memory of that pleasant past, the first results are not satisfactory. The pictures are confused in composition and blurred in general effect. After a little patient waiting—much in the manner of our late friend Stead in Julia’s bureau—the blurred pictures acquire other characteristics. The second effect is kaleidoscopic. The retrospect is full of movement and colour. At last the kaleidoscopic effects become mere atmosphere, and one by one, or in groups, the dramatis personæ take their places on the stage. And the curtain rises on the play.

CHAPTER II
DRIFTING INTO IT

Nowadays, I understand, there are schools to educate young gentlemen for the Press. Indeed, in my own time a school of journalism was founded by a man who had taken to the calling quite late in life. But I have never heard that the seminary in question turned out any pressman of eminence or even of uncommon aptitude. The founder of the singular academy was a Mr. David Anderson, about whom and about whose school I may have something to say in another chapter.

A man of very different calibre, a profound literary scholar, the most cultured critic of his time, was, at a more recent period, imbued with Anderson’s idea that a special training was desirable in the case of candidates for a vacancy on a newspaper staff. He was, indeed, prepared to carry the notion much farther than the system of perfunctory instruction instituted by the founder of the “school,” who was more or less a blind leader of the blind. The second reformer to whom I allude contemplated the establishment of a Chair of Journalism at the University of Birmingham. Indeed, he had obtained considerable support for his enterprise, and had it not been for his lamented death, I believe, the scheme would have taken shape. I had several opportunities of discussing the proposal with Professor Churton Collins—for it is of that accomplished critic and enthusiastic educationist I am speaking—and, although it was difficult to withstand arguments conveyed in the Professor’s felicitous language, and uttered in his melodious and persuasive tones, I was never quite convinced of the utility of the scheme. From whence are the Professors to be drawn? Not from the ranks of journalism, surely. Because the men who have risen to such an eminence in journalism as would qualify them for the position would be very unlikely to abandon their fat editorships for the poor emoluments of such a Chair.

Churton Collins was a man with a passion for accuracy. His whole teaching was a protest against the slipshod style in literature. His favourite epithet was “charlatan,” which he hurled against all incompetent persons professing to instruct the public. Moreover, though in the earlier stages of his career he wrote for newspapers, he was never what was known as “a newspaper man.” He was on the Press, but not of it. And I question if he had taken much notice of its later developments. Had he observed the signs of the times as they are seen in our daily broadsheets, he would have perhaps admitted that among the qualifications which should be demanded in any occupant of a University Chair of Journalism was a good working knowledge of the camera, and the ability to instruct students in the most suitable subjects for photographic reproduction.

Schools of journalism and professorships of Press lore are “all my eye and Betty Martin.” The journalist, like the poet, is born, not made. A University education can do him no harm. A large proportion of the men of the seventies and eighties had had a distinguished University career. Nor does the absence of a college education prejudice the aspiring neophyte. Those men, indeed, who have made themselves a name in journalism—such men, for instance, as George Sala and Archibald Forbes—started without any of the equipment supplied by an Alma Mater. Any training worth mentioning must be picked up on the Press itself. And the main qualification is a natural aptitude. Thus, the journalist—self-taught man, or public-school man, or University man—just drifts into it.

Personally I have to admit that it was in my own case entirely a matter of drifting. Unconsciously and gently impelled toward it by the motions of a certain desire for facile and frequent expression in print, one becomes eventually the subject of an invincible attraction. Those who were responsible for the ordering of my early life took a large view of their responsibilities. The same persons who had provided me with a rattle and a cradle, in later years selected for me a profession. And although I have never ceased to be a member of the learned profession chosen for me, in the same way that I abandoned the rattle and the perambulator, it has never afforded me either the amusement or the support supplied by the toys or the equipages of childhood. I am indebted to it, however, for some cherished friendships, and for introductions to some valuable “openings” into that teeming journalistic arena with which I was to become identified. Those set in authority over me believed that I was “cut out” for a barrister. But when I, my friends, was called to the Bar, I’d an appetite—well, for anything but law. The law never appealed to me. Literature always did. Before I went into chambers—and for some time after that—the only interest the Temple possessed for me was that Goldsmith lay buried there, and that there Warrington and Pendennis railed against the publishers, and wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, thus antedating by many years the actual appearance of that journal. While reading for the Bar and keeping my terms, I had few acquaintances in London beyond those I met at the dinners in Hall, and Mr. MacDermott, with whom I “read.” The town seemed deadly lonely at first. It takes some time before the new-comer realizes that he is part of the crowd that jostles him, before the feeling of isolation gives way to that of fellowship.

When I first came up, I lodged at the house of an old gentleman in Woburn Place, Russell Square. He was a typical Londoner, and he followed a calling of which, I should imagine, he must have been the very last professor. He was a painter of hatchments. In those days the death of a member of the aristocracy was indicated by the appearance on the house-front of a canvas bearing a representation of the armorial bearings of the deceased. This work of art was usually fixed between the windows of the first-floor. These grim heraldic emblazonments were at one time exhibited in considerable profusion in the streets and squares of the West End. The custom seems to have “gone out.” So many swells now live in flats, where the exhibition of such mural decoration might be misunderstood and resented, that the grisly custom has grown into desuetude. My landlord was the last of the hatchment painters. He was a little man close upon seventy years of age. He was extremely good-looking, had small side-whiskers and a tiny imperial, both snow-white. The rest of his face was clean-chaven. His salient physical peculiarity was a pink and white complexion which have been the despair and envy of his aristocratic patrons. He was a brisk, cheery mortal wonderfully quick in his movements. For the rest, he loved the London in which he had been born, and from which he had never wandered much farther than Hampton Court; he had a fund of information about the houses of Mayfair and Bloomsbury; he was a determined playgoer; he had an acquaintanceship with some actors and actresses, and was on particularly friendly terms with Charles Mathews. Naturally, he was a wellspring of gossip regarding the noble families with whom his melancholy art made him acquainted.

His studio was in Great Ormond Street, and next door to the Working Men’s College, where he had got to know the Rev. F. D. Maurice and the Rev. Charles Kingsley. Of the latter broad-minded Broad Churchman he had several stories. One only can I recall. Kingsley had felt called upon to reprove a parishioner of his on a growing spirit of miserliness which he was exhibiting. The fellow was well off, a widower, and living alone. He was denying himself the necessaries of life, when his Rector thought it time to remonstrate. But the old man was immune against reason, or, rather, he had an objection to every argument urged by his spiritual adviser. At last Kingsley took him on lower ground. The old fellow had an only son. He was a sailor and a notoriously free-handed young man. “This money,” urged the Rector, “which you are hoarding, and which you might employ so usefully, will come at last to your boy, who will fling it about with both hands.” “Ah, well,” observed the unrepentant niggard, “if Jim has on’y half the pleasure a-spendin’ on it as I’ve had a-savin’ on it, I wholly envy ’im—that ’a do.” A congregation composed of rustics of that type must have been a bit of a trial to a man of Kingsley’s optimistic temperament. But, then, his reverence was also endowed with the saving grace of humour.

I suppose the hatchment habit—which had persisted for so many generations—had fallen into a rapid decline just about this period, for my cheery little landlord had but lately taken to letting apartments. The income from heraldic painting had ceased to prove sufficient for the upkeep of a big house. The old gentleman’s housekeepers were a wife and daughter, whose second-hand acquaintance with the heraldry of the great had induced the belief that, if not actually “in Society,” they were very much in touch with it. Their conversation was studded with allusions to “Lady This” and “Lord That.” It was some time before I discovered that their constant conversational appeals to “the Dook,” a personage with whom, it might appear, they lived on terms of considerable intimacy, was His Grace the Duke of Bedford. Their supposed friendship with that nobleman rested solely on the circumstance that His Grace was the ground landlord of the premises in which they lived. “I shall certainly speak to the Dook about it,” or, “You must reelly write to His Grace, my dear,” were tit-bits that were served up to me ad nauseam when—as would sometimes be the case—I was asked to join the ladies at five o’clock tea. In his reminiscences of “the nobs,” as the Upper Ten were then called, the hatchment painter himself betrayed no snobbishness whatever. He related anecdotes of his noble employers, just as he would tell a “good thing” about a divine, or an actor, or an artist.

And talking of artists, I may mention here that the only person of distinction whose acquaintance I ever made through my host was Frost, the accomplished follower of Etty as a painter of the nude. I had the mild, man-in-the-street sort of admiration of Frost’s work, which I had seen on the walls of the Royal Academy Exhibition, then held, not at Burlington House, but in Trafalgar Square. And from his pictures I expected—such are the perverse preconceptions of youth—to meet a young, tall, flamboyant man with flowing locks and the airs of a Grand Seignior. We were walking one morning—my host and I—down the main avenue of the Regent’s Park. It was spring-time. The flower-beds were ablaze with bulb plants. But few people were about at the moment. Presently we came upon a small and sombre man feeding the sparrows, which followed him in flocks, hovering about his head, and now and then lighting on his hand to snatch a crumb. The small, sombre man was dressed in rusty broadcloth. He wore a wig, had a most melancholy expression, and might have been put down as a superannuated tax-collector, a solicitor run to seed, a Dissenting preacher out of work; but not one man in a thousand would have identified him as a painter of nude subjects, which had been severely reprobated by the unco’ guid. Yet the amiable provider of food for the sparrows was none other than the celebrated Mr. Frost. Frost was a bachelor, and his house was kept for him by a couple of old maiden sisters, who had little sympathy with the direction in art which their brother’s genius had taken. But the sparrows in Regent’s Park altogether approved of their eccentric benefactor. And in this particular form of charity he was the forerunner of the amiable M. Pol (that is the Frenchman’s name, I think) whom I have watched feeding the birds in the gardens of the Tuileries. On this occasion Frost was not to be tempted into any discussion on art. He was intent on arguing the question of drains with my friend, and spoke on the sewer question with the dry particularity of a sanitary engineer. Altogether a disappointing experience of the painter of “Actea: the Nymph of the Shore,” a work which had stimulated all my youthful enthusiasm.

The first movement in the drifting stage of my career was the result of my presence at the first performance of “School” at the old Prince of Wales Theatre in Tottenham Street. The hatchment painter and I had long before agreed that we would be present on that memorable occasion. The night came at last. We were early—or what in those days would have been considered early—and obtained seats at the back of the pit. At that time the suburbs still remained sane. There was no queue of demented women posted outside pit and gallery doors at eight o’clock in the morning so as to be in good time for a performance commencing at eight at night. But the seating capacity of Miss Wilton’s theatre was limited, the pittites being restricted to a very small area, and, having passed the check-taker, we felt that we might consider ourselves lucky in having gained admittance at all. Ah, to recall the sensations of that playgoing! The sigh of relief as I settle myself in my seat! The roseate air of pleasurable anticipation on the faces of those about me; the empty rows of the booked stalls stretching from the front row of the pit to the orchestra; the eager scanning of the features of the stalls as they file in; the curious feeling of cheery elation, of high expectation—these are sensations which grow very stale with use; they are the prerogatives of youth. Enjoy them, my boys, while you are in your heyday. They are moods for which the old and the blasé would give a ransom to experience once again.

Indirectly and ultimately this visit to the pit meant much to me. Immediately it meant my first appearance in print in a London publication; eventually it meant my first acquaintance with a dramatic author. Ultimately, perhaps, it meant the determination to a calling quite apart from that to which I had been devoted by my friends. My chirpy companion, as he kept pointing out to me the various distinguished stall-holders as they filed into their places, little dreamed—as, indeed, how should he?—that he was conversing with a dramatic critic in embryo, and that in the course of a few short years I, too, would have a stall set apart for me in that select parterre.

With the production of “School” the Bancroft management and the Robertson comedies reached high-water mark, and all the town was soon rushing to the Royal Dustbin in its grimy and shabby little street off the Tottenham Court Road. A return to the natural in comedy has always spelled success. Farquhar’s was such a return. Goldsmith’s return to nature was hailed by a community sick of stilted heroics and artificial sentiment. Sheridan later on recalled the playgoer to the fact that to give a humorous presentation of society as it is means the highest pleasure to the patron and the highest profit to the playwright. At this present time of writing a return to nature has a meaning very different indeed to that which it bore at other periods. Nowadays the meaning of a return to nature seems to be a return to obscenity. Natural is a term connoting lubricity. And to this confusion in the minds of some modern dramatists as to the true significance of words I attribute much of the irritation caused by supervision and most of the agitation fomented with a view of disestablishing the censorship. But in the old Tottenham Street days we had not as yet accepted the quaint perversion of ideas at present offered us by an anæmic, exotic, futile section of playwrights, whose goods are exhibited at unlicensed matinées, because—luckily—the managers see “no money” in them. The word “nature” was not understood in this foul fashion by T. W. Robertson. The men and women of Robertson’s comedies were the men and women of his own day. The incidents were amusing without being preposterous, or pathetic without being maudlin. The construction of the Robertson series was close, intelligible, sequent. His dialogue rippled rather than sparkled; the story was invariably simple, wholesome, attractive; and over each production was the incommunicable Robertson atmosphere.

And the management that presented these dainty works exercised a care, a taste, and a scrupulous devotion to the details of representation which came as a revelation to those acquainted with the stage methods of the period; and marked, indeed, a revolution in stage management. It is not overstating the case to say that, had it not been for the lead given in this direction by the Bancrofts in the ’sixties and early ’seventies, and subsequently followed up with still greater éclat by the same artists at the Haymarket, one would scarcely have witnessed the elaborate sets and costly casts to which Irving accustomed us in the ’eighties and ’nineties, or on which, in our own time, Sir Herbert Tree spends so much money and so much intelligent enterprise. In the history of stage reform, however, the Bancrofts must always figure as pioneers; nor is anyone who is old enough to remember the London stage as it was accepted before their management of the Prince of Wales Theatre, at all likely to controvert the statement. Happily for the public, the lead was quickly and largely followed. The old-fashioned stage-manager became a thing of the past. What was once the exception is now the rule.

“Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.”

Slender as was my experience of London theatres and immature as was my judgment, I was intelligently impressed by the idyllic delicacy of the work represented, and by the exquisite rendering accorded by a company so wonderfully fitted with their parts. I confess to having felt an enthusiasm then which now I should have some difficulty in explaining. That emotion was soon to find an opportunity for expression. When “School” had been running for some little time, a letter appeared in the Times, conceived in that spirit of dignified rebuke which, in its correspondents, seems to have appealed to successive editors of that great newspaper. In this communication Robertson was crudely accused of having stolen the play, lock, stock, and barrel, from a play then (or recently) running in Germany. I had no acquaintance with the German language and no time (so insistent on protest was my indignation) to inquire into the facts. But I felt that from the internal evidence afforded by “School” I would be able to make a good case. Even in those remote days many of our most admired articles of so-called British manufacture were “made in Germany,” and most of them bore about with them the ineffaceable signs of their origin. I strongly felt that on internal evidence I should have little difficulty, in that “School” was “quite English, you know,” and that, above all, there was no trace whatever of anything German in the conception or the treatment. I had already seen the play a second time when the Times letter made its appearance. On the night of the day on which it was published I paid a third visit to the pit of the Tottenham Street playhouse. When I got back to my “diggings,” I sat down and commenced to write what I intended to be a letter to Jupiter Tonans of Printing House Square, but what turned out to be my first professional contribution to the London Press. Next day I abandoned my more legitimate studies, and rewrote and polished—as well as I knew how—the essay over which I had burned my first sacrifice of midnight oil. The result was in no way suitable as a letter in the correspondence column of a newspaper. My own poor outlook assured me of that. Where to send the essay? A copy of a weekly magazine called Once a Week lay on a chair in the room. I caught it up, looked for the editorial address, wrote a brief note to the editor apprising him of the drift of my contribution, addressed an envelope, and posted my “stuff,” as I subsequently learned to call my articles in manuscript.

Had a mentor, skilled to advise, been available at that moment, he would no doubt have advised me to send my essay to any other publication, but not to Once a Week, because the paper in question was then under the editorial control of a member of the staff of the Times. So that—a circumstance of which I was happily ignorant—the organ selected haphazard for my venture was the very last that should be likely to serve my purpose. Four days after its despatch I received a proof of the article with a request that it should be “returned immediately” to the printer. A delightful sensation—that of correcting one’s first galleys of matter moist from the press! The following week the article appeared in all the pride of print, though I confess that the pride of print (a mere figurative locution) was as nothing to the pride of the author who already saw himself on the high-road to fame and fortune. Alas! it is a highroad which, while the gayest and cheeriest to travel, rarely leads to fame, and never to fortune. . . . I have no doubt that this first published composition of mine was a tremendously faulty piece of work—immature and pretentious. But the appearance of no subsequent production of mine has afforded me a tithe of the pleasure. And, incidentally, it was the means of my making the acquaintance of “Tom” Robertson.

Our acquaintanceship—never an intimate one—began with a correspondence, friendly and genial on his side, ebullient and unctuous, I fear, on mine, for I was very young. Some time elapsed before I met him in the flesh. The introduction was effected at the Albion Tavern in Russell Street, Covent Garden. That famous hostelry has gone by the board this many a day. When first I knew it the Albion was a London institution for which one might have prophesied a permanence as secure as that of St. Paul’s. It faced the north side wall of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, some distance west of the stage-door. It was the favourite supper resort of theatrical people, and famous for its tripe and onions and for its marrow-bones. An excellent dinner of fish, joint, and cheese was served earlier in the evening at half a crown a head—the carver, in white smock and apron and white cook’s cap, wheeling the joint round from table to table on an ambulatory dumb-waiter, and carving in front of the customer, and according to the customer’s desire. The place was run by two brothers, named Cooper, who owned a similar house in Fleet Street. This was called the Rainbow. It was a great luncheon-resort of lawyers, and three-fourths of the present occupants of the judicial bench must have taken their midday meal there from time to time. The Rainbow, alas! where once law officers chopped and learned leaders absorbed the midday refresher, is now mainly a wine-bar—the daily resort of the Guppys, the Joblings, and the Smallweeds of the profession.

The brothers Cooper were not very much in evidence at either house. They presented none of the characteristics of the typical licensed victualler. Indeed, they were the most highly respectable looking men to be seen in any walk of life—rosy-cheeked, white-whiskered, of solemnly benign expression, and dressed with an amount of elderly foppishness which, in a drab mid-Victorian age, was quite delightful to behold. Up the Thames—somewhere in the Hampton Court direction, if I remember aright—where their home was, the neighbours who were “not in the know” supposed them to be stockbrokers of a sporting turn of mind. But if the Coopers took no ostensibly active part in the management of the Albion, they were most effectively represented by their head-waiter—the incomparable Paunceford. Even now, across the years, one can see his beaming face, his head held a little to one side—a propitiatory pose—his twinkling eye, his mellifluous and insinuating tone as he proceeds from box to box, half an hour, or even an hour, after closing-time, with the half-plaintive, half-humorous admonition of “Time, gentlemen, if you please!” Paunceford and the Albion should both have been made immortal. For when the Albion closed its doors, another race of waiters had arisen, and Paunceford’s occupation was gone. The last time I passed through Russell Street, Covent Garden, a merchant from the neighbouring market was running the premises as a store for fruit and vegetables. I wonder whether the ghosts of those departed who once made merry within ever appear to the eminent salesman, flitting behind his mountains of green-stuff, or playing phantom hide-and-seek among his boxes of oranges and bananas.

The first meeting between Robertson and myself was cordial enough, but though he evidently appreciated the defence of “School,” which was the basis of our friendship, it was equally apparent that he had expected to meet an older man, and one who was at least somewhere “in the movement.” When at last we were alone, he became communicative. He was at the time probably suffering from the premonitory distresses of the disease which was destined to carry him off untimely. My first impression was of the bitterness with which he discussed men and things. It was so entirely different from that which I had expected in the mood of one who stood so illuminated in the sunlight of popular approval. Fame and competence had come too late for him. The long, hungry struggle for recognition had soured a nature once, perhaps, sunny enough. More than once during our conversation he alluded to his troubles with his first success, “Society.” It had originally been intended for Buckstone at the Haymarket—then par excellence the Comedy theatre; and for six years after its refusal by Buckstone its author had hawked it about to all the London managers and to some in the provinces. I had asked him what chance of recognition a beginner at stage-writing should have with the managers. This it was that brought “Society” on the tapis. He drove home the lesson with the argumentum ad hominem. His deliverance certainly put me off any vague scheme I may have formed of commencing dramatist, and made me resolve to advance in the critical career upon which, in my youthful folly, I imagined I had successfully embarked. Speaking with great acerbity, he said:

“I was born among stage associations. I grew up among them. It was the natural thing for me to look to the stage for my daily bread. My earliest craft was stagecraft. If I was compelled to carry about in my back-pocket for six years the play into which I had put all my experience before I could get a hearing, you can calculate for yourself the chances of an outsider.”

Reverting to the charge of having drawn on the work of others for his most popular success, he said:

“The author of a successful play is always charged with plagiarism. It was a commonplace to accuse Sheridan of the crime. And Shakespeare was—according to the critics—the greatest thief of all. I am, at least, pilloried in good company.”

After a pause, he continued, with increased bitterness:

“According to your critic, the only man who never plagiarizes is the dramatist who is hidebound by tradition; whose work reeks of the essence of authors who have gone before him, or who are his contemporaries. The only originality they know of is originality of phrase. Original dramatists of the sort generally find time to do a little dramatic criticism as well, so that their case runs no danger of being understated on the press.”

I could not help reflecting at the time that of all men T. W. Robertson had least reason to complain of the indifference or the ineptitude of the dramatic critics. Altogether my sentiment on bidding Robertson “Good-night” was one of depression, which quite overbalanced that feeling of elation which a raw and callow youth would naturally experience after having enjoyed a couple of hours intimate and uninterrupted chat with the most popular dramatist of the hour.

William Brunton—that most lovable and luckless of Irishmen and artists—had given me the coveted personal introduction. Him I had met at the hatchment studio in Great Ormond Street. Brunton was himself a dabbler in heraldry, and, before he started as a comic artist on the pages of Tom Hood’s Fun, had been something of an authority on family escutcheons. A handsome, distinguished-looking fellow was Brunton in those days. His laugh was contagious, and greeted impartially his own jokes and those of his friends. His own jokes were curious, involved, impromptus, mostly without meaning, but characterized by an irresistible quaintness of manner. His own hearty enjoyment of these cryptic morceaux made up for any lack of substance in the things themselves, and, by a sort of infection, aroused the laughter of his hearers. Thus I have myself roared with merriment over his report of the ultimatum delivered by the Irish widow on a third-floor-back in Clare Market to her countrywoman occupying the third-floor-front. It was the way he did it, for in cold print the joke scarcely moves even the most facile muscles:

“I declare to Hiven, Mrs. Dooley ma’am, if ye don’t take yer washin’ off the lobby, I’ll quit th’ tinimint! There it is shmokin’ like a lime-kiln, and my dog Towzer barkin’ at it, thinkin’ it’s a robber!”

When Brunton heard of my appearance for the defence of Robertson in the matter of “School,” and became acquainted with my desire to be introduced, he at once promised, in his jovial, off-hand manner, to bring about the accomplishment of my wish. That he faithfully fulfilled his undertaking has been seen. I met Brunton shortly after at the Strand Theatre. I confessed to him that Robertson’s conversation had not exhilarated me, and that I had not been prepared for a mood so pessimistic in a man so fortunate.

“That’s nothin’,” declared Brunton cheerily. “You should hear Tom sometimes. Last night he was denyin’ th’ existence of th’ Almighty. Dr. Barnett, the editor of the Sunday Times, was present. B— was at one time a Dissenting divine, you know, and is as orthodox as the Pope of Rome. He gently rebuked Tom. It was only addin’ fuel to the flame. ‘If there be a God, why don’t He destroy me now?’ says Tom. Then it was old Barnett’s turn. With a sweet smile and the soft accent of a sort of evangelical angel, he answered: ‘You forget, Tom, that the Almighty is capable of an infinite contempt!’ And be jabers,” concluded Brunton, “poor Robertson was as dumb as an oyster for the rest of the evening.”

It was a noble retort, and it is pleasant to know that Robertson accepted it in silence, and subsequently expressed a very pretty contrition. Robertson was the first experience I had of the fact that an author’s personality or temperament can rarely be gathered from his works. During my sojourn in the tents of Shem I was destined to meet many famous illustrations of the same truth.

CHAPTER III
LEARNING TO SWIM

The receipt of a cheque in payment for the Robertson article in Once a Week convinced me, not only that I had discovered my métier, but that I had formally entered upon a profitable occupation, which would be pursued under most agreeable conditions. Let me at once confess that some years were to elapse before the returns from my literary labours amounted to a sum that would pay for my tobacco and my laundry. But if in the period of keeping my terms cheques were few and far between, I got no end of an opportunity of seeing my name in print as the author of at least one prodigious poetical work and of several essays, chiefly of dramatic criticism. It is pleasant to reflect that these exercises—early and immature though they were—brought me several friends in the literary and artistic world. At this juncture, indeed, it appeared probable that I would eventually develop into a “litery gent” whose future outlook would be that of considerable dubiety as to the respectability of the journalistic calling.

A friendly solicitor—I had been admonished to make friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness—introduced me at a City dinner to William Harrison Ainsworth, author of “The Tower of London” and other lurid romances. It was a bit of a surprise to meet the venerable man, for, truth to tell, I had thought him long since dead. He was by no means dead, however, or even apparently moribund, but extremely alive to anything that looked like business. His Manchester training never failed him to the end. He exhibited a fatherly interest in me, which was extremely flattering to my vanity, and before we parted he had arranged a luncheon date for the following week. He was living at the time at Hurstpierpoint in Sussex. I kept the appointment, you may be well assured, and after our little midday meal the worthy exponent of Dick Turpin opened his business.

It was a simple affair. He had acquired a magazine some time before, and, finding that its circulation did not come up to his expectations, he had resold to a relative—a cousin of his own. He had agreed with the sanguine relative that he would continue to send in signed contributions, and that he would secure the services of other brilliant writers; and I was one of the “brilliant writers” whose exertions were to raise the cousin’s hopeless purchase into a position of safety. Harrison Ainsworth candidly assured me that the proprietor was not in a position to pay for the serial rights of my esteemed contributions. But the copyright should remain mine—a valuable concession and consideration!—and I should receive suitable remuneration when the magazine “turned the corner.” Ah, that fugacious corner which, always nearing, is rarely reached, and never by any chance turned! How often has it lured the novice and tempted even the needy veteran victim! I agreed to all my host’s suggestions. As I left him, he murmured a tremulous “God bless you!” and I was conscious of a fine feeling of elation as I returned to town—my star evidently in the ascendant.

If there was no money to be obtained from my new engagement, there was some fun: there was excellent practice, and there was the unexpected introduction to a “set” whose members I had always admired at a distance, but with whom my taste and training had denied me an understanding sympathy. For a while I fluttered in those reserved groves. But when at last the Street of Adventure claimed me as its own, my new associates drew me from those higher altitudes. The loss, I am sure, has all been mine.

On the magazine, to which I had pledged myself, I commenced as a poet, a poem being the only thing I had by me. The cousinly proprietor—an extremely pleasant old gentleman, also named Ainsworth—appeared glad to accept anything. He was the only person whom I have known literally to laugh over misfortunes. He was a septuagenarian Mark Tapley. He gave excellent dinners at Ravenscourt Park—the house in which he entertained has long since been reduced to what printers call “pie,” its place being covered with brand-new “mansions” and “gardens” and villas. It speaks volumes for the old gentleman’s good-nature that, when my “poem” appeared, filling five pages of his periodical, he never uttered a word of rebuke or reproach. That was forty years ago, and I still regard the incident with gratitude, for the composition was a narrative of great duration. The scene was laid in Italy, the subject romantic, and the verse written in heroic couplets, interspersed with lyrics after the manner made fashionable by the Poet Laureate. I never saw it again after my first rapturous readings, but I have little doubt that it was sad stuff.

I then resolutely set myself to keep my proprietor fed up with prose essays. I had the material, and I took no end of pains with the setting. They were for the most part essays in literary criticism, and one or two of them attracted the attention of the right sort of people. Many years after its appearance, I was surprised and gratified to find one of these early articles quoted in the Athenæum by Theodore Watts-Dunton, and quoted, moreover, by that distinguished man of letters as being authoritative. Alas! by the time this appreciation of my literary research and criticism appeared I had ceased to take myself very seriously, and I was mixing in a society that did not take anything very seriously. In my early years I had the run of a good dramatic library, particularly rich in editions of the Elizabethan masters. The majority of my essays of this period were derived from those boyish studies, fortified by later browsings in the reading-room of the British Museum. The eminent but erratic Irish gentleman with whom I was reading Law had suggested the Museum, little imagining the direction which my researches there were sometimes to take. To which of these fugitive pieces of the Ainsworthonian period of my novitiate I owed my introduction to Madox Brown, the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite painter, I cannot distinctly recall. Clearly, it would not have been to that terrible Italian romance in heroic couplets. But the thing happened somehow, and I still remember the pleasurable sensations I experienced when Oliver, the son of the great artist, called on me by appointment and took me round to the house in Fitzroy Square, to be introduced to his father. Madox Brown was a handsome man, of medium height, broad-shouldered, with a wiry beard, at that time just beginning to show the grey autumnal tints. The charm of the man was to be caught in the sweet benignity of his expression and in the musical cadences of his voice. He was evidently the devoted family man. And it was his interest in his own children that caused him to suffer the society of other young fellows struggling for notice. Among those who dropped in at the studio that afternoon were Theo Marzials, the author of the popular “Twickenham Ferry,” and Hueffer, the exponent of Wagner, who was engaged to Brown’s daughter.

A reception to which I received an invitation some weeks after was my first appearance in one of the select literary circles of the capital. It was in honour of Hueffer and his bride-to-be, and was held at the Madox Brown house in Fitzroy Square on the night before the wedding. It was a rather weird experience. And not even the fact that Swinburne was present—and his was a figure to arouse all my youthful enthusiasm—reconciled me to the gathering. I felt as much alone in this crowd as I had formerly felt in the seething streets. I beat an early retreat, profoundly impressed by the reflection that I did not possess the natural adaptability which would make me an acceptable member of a society with its own especial equipment, its own passwords, and its own particular pose. I should never have become a competent authority on that which Carlyle calls “the Correggiosity of Correggio.”

The Madox Brown connection led to an invitation to Westland Marston’s less “precious” Sunday receptions, and to those of Lady Duffus Hardy. At the latter house I met for the first time Joaquin Millar, the poet of the Sierras. Millar and I were to become great friends later on, but on first meeting him my feeling was one of frank dislike. At the time his pose was that of the wild man of the illimitable plains. He kept his hair in curling cataracts down his shoulders. He wore great jack-boots over his trousers, and was accustomed to appear in the Park mounted on a hack harnessed with a Mexican saddle, blinkers, and other absurd accoutrements. The rider wore a white sombrero, and gilt spurs six inches long. If his object was to attract attention, he undoubtedly succeeded. In the drawing-room of the Hardys he struck the sublimest attitudes, and, when he crossed the room, did it with a limp—because he had heard that Byron limped.

His utterances were studied with a view of occasioning surprise. He had then lately returned from a tour in Italy.

“What struck you most about Venice?” inquired one of his fair admirers.

“The bugs!” he replied with entire gravity, and stroking his golden beard.

“Oh, Mr. Millar!” exclaimed the lady, in shocked reproof.

“But,” he proceeded calmly, “the bugs in Venice are not the mild domestic animals you cultivate in this country. A Venetian bug has a beard and moustache as big as the King of Italy’s.”

It was during this stay in England that Millar met a lady to whom he became engaged, and the poet would have married her had her parents not discovered in time that the wild man of the illimitable plains had already a wife and child stranded somewhere on the South Pacific Coast.

Joaquin Millar became in time quite a civilized Christian, and I reflect, with some natural satisfaction, that I was the humble means in the hands of Providence that, some years after our first frigid meeting, succeeded in inducing him to get his hair cut. An immense social and moral rehabilitation followed this sacrifice on the part of a poet who had his share of the Divine afflatus. What he lost in picturesqueness he gained in self-respect, and during his brief sojourns in London he figured as a Bohemian observant of the conventions, and possessed of a certain subtle humour, which rendered his society very agreeable to his club mates at the Savage.

The travelling American millionaire is a strange portent in his way; but to me a far more wonderful thing is the American who on a small and irregular pay, often derived from correspondence with some third-rate newspaper, supplemented by the proceeds of a few magazine articles, manages to travel all over the habitable globe. You will meet them—cultivating literature on a little oatmeal—in London, in Paris, in Rome, in St. Petersburg, in Tokio, in Honolulu. They are always waiting for remittances, and they are always on the move. One of these wanderers I met at Millar’s rooms in Bloomsbury. She was a fine woman—robust, large-eyed, sentimental, but with a certain saving sense of humour. Her sole means were derived from a weekly letter written for a San Francisco newspaper. Yet she was setting out to do what she called “the grand tower.” She was not so lucky as the others. I met her at the same rooms a year afterwards. She had just returned from “the grand tower.” She looked awfully worn and ill, and she was accompanied by a gigantic brigand, who had not a word of any language save his own incommunicable patois. He breathed hard and scowled and shrugged his shoulders while he rolled his eyes and smoked innumerable cigarettes. His name, even when gently broken to us by his fair introducer, was a wholly impossible thing. But he was a Count—or so he said. And the infatuated correspondent of the Californian paper was “my lady,” for she had married the brute. The Count had probably been a Neapolitan luggage-porter, or something of the kind, and my own private opinion is that he beat the poor woman and otherwise ill-treated her.

Charles Warren Stoddard is another name which pleasantly connects itself with those days of emergence. There are few parts of the civilized globe over which “dear Charlie”—as his intimates called him—has not trotted. He lived the absolutely “natural life” in the South Seas. The result of that enervating experience may be seen in two very delightful books, “South Sea Idylls,” published over thirty years ago, and “The Island of Tranquil Delights,” published in this country a couple of years since. He travelled all over Europe, joining a monastic brotherhood at Rome. This he quitted after a few years’ experience, his memories of tropical islands, perhaps, engendering a hankering after the fleshpots. On one of the Pyramids he met Williamson the actor—to become in the fulness of time Williamson the successful Australian manager—and on the tomb of the Pharaohs he gave Williamson an introduction to me, which led to a very delightful acquaintanceship. From a Japanese poet named Noguki, who recently produced a wonderful book of verse in London, I heard that he had met Stoddard in Tokio, and that he was then on his way to take up a Chair of English Literature at a University in Washington. But he must have wandered away from that place of safety, for I next heard of him as having escaped by the skin of his teeth from the awful seismic disaster in San Francisco. You don’t want much money in a monastery, and you probably get enough to live on while teaching English literature to the youth of the United States. But, deducting these two brief periods of retirement from wandering, Stoddard must have moved around, surveying the wonders of the world, on an income entirely derived from fugitive articles in the papers of California.

Stoddard brought me to see Mark Twain at the Langham Hotel. The two men were great friends, and, indeed, I believe that some of the descriptive touches in the lectures delivered in London by Twain were “written in” by Stoddard. It was a fearfully foggy afternoon on which we made our call. Twain was walking up and down his sitting-room, evidently in a low key. The sight of Stoddard, however, cheered him. He pointed to a table at the end of the room, on which were ranged, in vast quantities, the materials necessary for the compounding of cocktails, and begged us to help ourselves. When we had got our medicine “fixed”—an operation which our host kindly undertook for me—Stoddard asked suddenly:

“Say, Clemens, what have you done with your shorthand writer?”

“Shot him,” replied Twain grimly.

“You don’t say!” exclaimed Stoddard.

“I shot him out into the fog. He couldn’t hurt the fog much. Another ten minutes of him would have killed me.”

Then came out the explanation of this short and cryptic dialogue. In genial conversation with his visitors Twain got off some uncommonly “good things,” and, as he rarely recalled the items that went best, he was induced to engage a stenographer, who, concealed from him and from his visitors, should take down the coinage of his wit as it came hot from the mint. The shorthand writer was duly installed in his cave. Visitors arrived. But Twain’s conversational powers had deserted him. “Couldn’t scintillate worth a cent” would have been his own way of describing the situation. The knowledge of the fact that a paid reporter was taking him down seemed to sterilize his brain. The stenographer had got on the humorist’s nerves. Twain before his visitors opened not his mouth.

I question, however, whether any stenographer could have conveyed, by the mere words uttered by Twain in conversation, the peculiar charm and savour of his impromptus, which lay in the manner rather than in the matter. Ready, apposite, and spontaneous, he undoubtedly was; but the melancholy drawl which he affected, the quaint American accent, the impassive features of the speaker, added enormously to the value of the utterance. And these, of course, transcend the powers of a reporter to reproduce.

Against the advice of his agent—poor old George Dolby, who had acted in the same capacity for Dickens—Twain had stopped his lectures at the Hanover Square Rooms for a “spell” in the provinces. On the evening of the day on which we called he was to resume the course which he had abandoned. The low key in which we found him was the result of the fog, in the first place; and, in the second place, he was worrying himself by recalling the warnings Dolby had given him about the danger of interrupting the course originally, his fear of the power of some new attraction, his knowledge of the fickleness of public taste. And as the afternoon advanced the fog grew more dense. We remained with the depressed humorist until Dolby arrived to escort him to the rooms. An hour before the time for commencing the lecture all four of us got into a growler, and were swallowed by the fog. I have never measured the distance between the Langham Hotel and Hanover Square, but I think I could manage it in ten minutes. It took our cabby just three-quarters of an hour to land his fare. He lost his way twice, and finally was obliged to get off the box, engage the services of an imp carrying a link, and lead his dejected horse. Dolby had been right in getting us off early. When we arrived at the hall, we had just ten minutes in hand.

Twain was in a state of the most profound depression. Stoddard and I took our places in the front row of the stalls. The house was full of fog, and only half full of audience. Dolby afterwards told me that he had experienced the greatest difficulty in inducing Twain to appear at all. An appeal to his honour and the risk of ignoring an engagement with his public at last prevailed. About five minutes after the advertised time he came out. He advanced slowly to the very edge of the platform—the tips of his pumps, indeed, went over the edge. He craned his neck, peering through the mist. In his sad, slow way he commenced:

“Ladies and gentlemen . . . I don’t know . . . whether you can see me or not. . . . But I’m here!”

You observe that there is nothing in the mere words. But their spontaneity and appositeness told at once. The effect was electrical. The audience was put into a good humour, and the lecture went with a roar of laughter and applause from start to finish.

Dr. Gordon Hake was a friend whom I made through a review of his “Poems and Parables,” printed by my Tapleyan editor. Hake was a most courtly old gentleman, and when actively engaged in the pursuit of his profession—he had been a general medical practitioner—must have possessed an enviable degree of what is known among physicians as “a fine bedside manner.” The doctor had a pleasant little place at Coombe End, just beyond the spot at which Roehampton Lane impinges on Wimbledon Common. Under his hospitable roof I met one or two famous men and a goodly number of men who aspired to be famous. Of the famous men I shall here make mention of one only.

George Borrow, author of “Lavengro” and “Romany Rye,” was an old friend of Hake’s, and I was invited down to Coombe End to meet that very extraordinary old gentleman. Dr. Hake had taken care to warn me that it would be as well to say nothing of my contributions to periodical literature, as Borrow had a great dislike to literary persons. My claim to that description being of the slightest, I quite gladly assented, and as a result George Borrow and I became on fairly friendly terms—or I had rather put it: the Gipsy King was less bearish to me than to some of the others with whom he was thrown into contact. I did not at that time understand his hostile attitude to contemporary professors of literature. I do now. Borrow had enjoyed for a brief period the questionable delights of being lionized in London society. His “Bible in Spain” had created a furore. An immense amount of curiosity was created as to the personality of a man who had gone through the extraordinary adventures described in that romantic book. For a couple of seasons Borrow was invited everywhere, and then as capriciously he was dropped. At the end of the sixties, when I met him, the hostesses who had fought with each other for his presence could not have told you whether the great man was alive or dead.

A big, broad-shouldered, slightly stooping man, with white hair, shaven face, and bushy eyebrows, was the George Borrow whom on a fine summer afternoon I met on the lawn at Coombe End. He was dressed in rusty broadcloth. At the moment he was about to take a walk across the common. He did me the honour to ask me to accompany him. The only book of his that I had read at that time was “The Bible in Spain.” It used to be given to me when I was quite a little boy as suitable Sunday reading. It was very unlike the general run of Sunday reading to which I had become accustomed. It was, indeed, a series of lurid adventures, hairbreadth escapes, desperate encounters, fire, thunder, murder, and sudden death—a boy’s book of the most pronounced type. And its title notwithstanding, I felt, even in those young days, that the incidents related must have been evolved by the teeming imagination of a novelist.

My first walk with Borrow confirmed me in the certainty of my childish instinct. Crude uncritical people, without a due respect for literary genius, would, on the strength of his conversation during that walk of mine, have characterized him offhand as a flamboyant liar. The true explanation is that he was continually evolving or devising incidents which, once given shape, remained with him as facts to be thenceforth remembered and related as occurrences duly observed. I feel sure that Borrow firmly believed that he had personally experienced all the eburescent transactions described in his “Bible in Spain.” On our way across the common he was accosted by a tramp. Borrow was infuriate. He invited the sturdy beggar to fight—he even began to divest himself of his broadcloth frock-coat; but the beggar made off. He was in search of benefactions, not of blows. Had the beggar been a gipsy, Borrow’s attitude would have been quite friendly. He would have, were it needed, administered to the wants of the swarthy nomad; but an English beggar was in the eyes of Borrow simply an habitual criminal, and as such should be soundly trounced whenever encountered.

In a road t’other side the common he took me into a beerhouse, and called for two half-pints of “swipes.” Thus in such places they call their thinnest, sourest, and cheapest ale. Borrow drank his as one enjoying a rare vintage. With difficulty I sipped a tipple, which I found to be simply villainous. In the far corner of the taproom sat a man at a table. He had finished his mug of ale, and was slumbering.

“See that fellow?” asked Borrow in an impressive stage whisper.

“Yes,” I replied faintly, for the beer was positively making me ill.

“That man is a murderer. Finish your swipes. I’ll tell you all about it when we get out.”

And once out, he proceeded to tell me all about it. Here he was at his best. You could not help listening, admiring, and—almost—believing. It was so wonderfully done: the whole invented narrative, the squalid details, the sordid motive, the escape from justice owing to the presence on the jury of a friend of the prisoner, the verdict of “Not Guilty” rendered by an eleven of the vaunted Palladium starved into acquiescence by one determined boot-eater—all this the venerable old gentleman related with the utmost sincerity and circumstantiality.

On the following morning I took a walk across the common unaccompanied. I revisited the little swipe-shop. The man who had served us was behind the bar. He was the landlord. Did he recollect serving myself and another gentleman in the taproom on the previous afternoon? Of course he remembered. There was a third person in the taproom at the time? Of course there was. Did he know anything of that third person? Of course he did. Why, that was old William Mobbs, of Putney, carter to Mr. — (mentioning a market-gardener in the vicinity).

“Anything against him?” I inquired.

“Anything agin William Mobbs!” exclaimed mine host indignantly. “William is the most virtuosest man within a ragious of twenty mile! I b’leeve he’s the qui’test, law-abidin’est old bloke in the ’ole world.”

And in this way was Borrow’s murderer rehabilitated for me by one who knew him.

This visit of Borrow’s to Dr. Hake came to an abrupt close in a somewhat melodramatic way. Two families of gipsies set up an encampment on the common. Hosts who entertained Borrow in the country had to take their chance of an incident of that kind happening, for the gipsies seemed to scent their protector out. He spoke their language, he wrote their songs. By some of them he was known as their “King.” The presence of the nomadic tribe was immediately made known to Borrow by one of their dirty but intelligent scouts. The “King” thereupon made a call of ceremony upon his distinguished subjects. When he returned to Coombe End, he informed Dr. Hake that his friends the gipsies were in a difficulty about their water-supply, and that he had taken upon himself to give them permission to fill their buckets at the good doctor’s well. The good doctor consented with concealed misgiving. His fears were justified. The gipsies came on to his little estate, and not only took his water, but took away anything portable that happened to be lying around.

In his most courteous manner Dr. Hake told his illustrious guest what had happened. Borrow literally raged. The man who insulted his Romany friends insulted him. His friends were incapable of any act of ingratitude to a man whose hospitality he was accepting. But the worthy Hake insisted that, as a matter of mere fact, certain fowls, linen, and garden tools, had disappeared from the place at a time which synchronized with the Romany incursion. It was enough. The incensed “Lavengro” ordered his portmanteau to be packed and taken to the station. He flung out of the house, ignoring the kindly au revoir of his gentle host. After many moons he came to his senses again, and was reconciled to one of the most amiable, hospitable, and accomplished men of his time.

On two or three occasions after my introduction I met Borrow in town. He had apartments near the Museum. He was invariably civil. But this I attribute to the fact that I was able to talk pugilistic lore with him, and to introduce him to Nat Langham’s, a centre of “the fancy,” of the existence of which it surprised me to find so great an admirer of the P.R. completely ignorant. When I proposed this excursion we were in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, and Borrow had been met by me as he was walking along the side-path with a copy of the Old Testament in Hebrew held close to his failing eyes. He thrust the book into his pocket and accompanied me. I shrewdly suspect that this was the only occasion on which a Bible found its way into Nat Langham’s famous crib.

Some time after Borrow’s death I was regularly engaged in writing for the newspapers, and it came in my way to make some inquiries concerning the circumstances under which he passed away. They were grim enough. In a lonely old farmhouse, situated by the whispering reeds of a Suffolk broad, he breathed his last. He was quite alone at the time when he was in extremis. And when at last the massive form was found lying there, cold and stark and dead, it was gathered up and pressed into a deal box. hastily put together by the village carpenter, and despatched by rail from the nearest railway-station—a sad and tragical ending, surely, for an imperious genius who had been in his day the lion of a London season, and whose writings have established a cult comparable only to that which has arisen over Fitzgerald and the libidinous old Persian philosopher, whom he made to live again in his wonderful paraphrase.

Of Dante Gabriel Rossetti I had but a passing glimpse. The poet-painter called on George Hake (a son of Borrow’s friend) when I happened to be stopping with him at Oxford. But the impression left is vivid enough. Six or seven years had passed since the bitter domestic bereavement had taken place which saddened his life and induced the habit that shortened his days. In appearance he presented neither the delicate, almost ascetic, figure of the early portraits nor the wan aspect of the later likenesses. One might have almost called him robust. He had the general aspect of a prosperous country squire. We all three chatted on current topics, and in Rossetti’s contributions to the talk he was now incisive and epigrammatic, and again fanciful and quaint. He was not for a moment pessimistic or bitter. The Rossetti presented to the public is, I know, a very different sort of individual. I can only repeat that I describe the man as I saw him during the closing years of the sixties.

Mr. Hall Caine presents a Rossetti of a very different sort. In a work of autobiography that popular writer devotes the greater portion of his book to a narrative of his relations with the poet. Mr. Caine became acquainted with the poet when his powers were decaying and his work practically finished; when he was habitually drugged and incapable of normal emotions; when he was deserted by his friends, and grateful for the companionship of almost anybody.

The literary venture of Mark Tapley Ainsworth failed to justify the auriferous future that his cousin, the novelist, had prophesied for it. The unfortunate owner was losing over it more money than he could afford. He called on me to announce the sad circumstance. He was as joyous as ever. He laughed merrily as he spoke of his bitter disappointment. I felt it impossible to sympathize with his mood. In my crass ignorance of the publishing world, the death of a magazine was a tragic thing. It affected me almost as the passing away of some eminent man. We lunched over the event (a sort of “wake,” it seemed to me) at the Blue Posts in Cork Street, and the proprietor of the magazine, the decease of which was about to be announced, was in the gayest of spirits. After all, the dear old chap may be excused at exhibiting some feeling of relief. It had been for him, as he cheerily explained, “a matter of always paying out, and never paying in.”

He certainly had not embarrassed himself by paying anything to me. But the regular occupation had been excellent practice, and the immediate ponderable result was the formation of a circle of acquaintances among literary men and artists. We drank, in excellent claret, to the resurrection of the dead periodical. But we honoured the toast as those who have no hope. Mark Tapley and I parted on excellent terms. We walked down the Burlington Arcade, and took leave of each other when we reached Piccadilly. His last word was a jape at the expense of himself and his venture. The last sound I heard of him was a particularly jolly laugh as he ambled off.

This collapse of the Ainsworthian magazine; my “call”; the removal from lodgings in Woburn Place to chambers in the Temple—these may be conveniently taken as roughly marking the end of my informal novitiate. I don’t know whether the habit of giving “call suppers” still persists. I was persuaded that the obligation to invite my friends to one was incumbent on me. The repast was ordered at my chambers for eight, and all my guests turned up. On the other side of Fleet Street, and nearly opposite Middle Temple Lane, was an oyster-house and restaurant called Prosser’s. At that establishment the supper was ordered. I regret to say that I recollect very little of the entertainment. My health was proposed, and a bright career at the Bar foretold for me by a gentleman who is now an ornament of the judicial bench. An artist present drew a picture entitled “Coke upon Littleton,” which evoked roars of laughter by reason of its audacious Rabelaisian humour. And an Hibernian journalist, who is now an English M.P., sang “The Wearin’ o’ the Green.” I replied—coherently—to the toast of my health. After that things became a trifle blurred. Prosser had done me too well.

CHAPTER IV
INTO THE MAELSTROM

A call to the Bar and a residence in the Temple necessitate a somewhat intimate acquaintance with Fleet Street. But, of course, they do not make of one a Fleet Street man in the journalistic meaning of that phrase. Some time was to pass yet ere I could regard myself as free of the street—so to say. The haunts of the Templar are not those of the Pressman. The former, when of an afternoon he quits the “dusty purlieus of the Law,” usually hastens westward. The haunts of the journalist are in Fleet Street itself. Yet it was to barristers, after all, that I owed my initiation into the mysteries of the newspaper world.

In those days a considerable number of young barristers—and some old ones—were more or less dependent on their contributions to the Press for an income. Tired of idling in chambers and

“Beckoning the tardy briefs,
The briefs that never came.”

they had struck boldly off into the whirling, throbbing life that surrounded their quiet cloisters. Among those who were to influence my career at this stage were “Willie” Dixon, son of Hepworth Dixon, the author of “Spiritual Wives” and other books which had a mighty vogue in their day and seem now to be forgotten; Patrick Macdonald, a Scotsman with a knowledge of Law that would have landed him on the Bench had he lived to justify the opinion of the solicitors who “discovered” him too late; and Robert Williams. To the former gentlemen I owed my introduction to the Savage Club, where for a time I became a frequent visitor, though not qualified for membership under their drastic first rule—a rule which has, I understand, become considerably relaxed, in order to give admission to that Mammon of Unrighteousness with which clubmen, among others, are commanded to “make friends.” Here, for the first time, I met some of the practical journalists—the men whose profession it was to feed the palpitating monsters of Fleet Street with their mighty pabulum of “copy.”

But my real introducer was Williams. It was to his influence that I was indebted for my “chance.” His unerring advice, his ungrudging assistance, his fine faith in my aptitude, made the beginning easy for me. Robert Williams was, perhaps, the most remarkable man of his time in the Street of Adventure. He was a Welshman, with but little of the Welsh temperament save the hopefulness characteristic of that race. He was a graduate of Jesus College, Oxford, becoming thereafter a Fellow of Merton. His nickname at the University was “Scholar” Williams, which sufficiently indicates the sort of reputation he had acquired. He was one of the finest Greek scholars of his day. His “Notes on Aristotle” are still regarded as authoritative by examiners. He was, I think, tutor both to Lord Rosebery and Lord Lansdowne. He was a member of the Reform Club before he had ever seen Pall Mall. Lord Rosebery took a great interest in the career of Williams after he left Oxford and had flung himself into Fleet Street, for he married and threw up his Fellowship.

Lord Rosebery’s influence took an extremely practical turn. For instance, he bought the Examiner for Williams. But the “Scholar,” although a very accomplished contributor, had not been cut out by Nature for an editor. This he proved, not only in his conduct of the Examiner, but in the founding and editorial management of a venture which followed. He sold the property which Lord Rosebery had made over to him, and with the proceeds started a weekly illustrated paper called Sketch—to be distinguished from The Sketch belonging to the Ingram group, a much more recent candidate for popular favour. The capital which Williams had acquired by the sale of the Examiner was only sufficient to keep his new venture running for a few weeks. He transferred it to an owner of sporting papers, in whose hands it died the death.

But the finest journalistic work of “Scholar” Williams may be seen in his leading articles in the Daily Telegraph. For some years he was retained on the staff of that journal, transferring his services eventually to the Standard. He had a prodigious memory. In that respect he was the equal of Lord Macaulay. Indeed, at Oxford he was always regarded as a “coming Lord Macaulay.” He knew Dickens by heart, and his apposite quotations from that author are more frequent than allusions from Aristotle. He had a very keen sense of humour, and in exercising his gifts in that way he had no sort of compunction. Indeed, I fear that to his habit of “giving away the secrets of the Prison House” in humorous recital and to mixed audiences may be attributed the events which immediately preceded his transference from Peterborough Court to Shoe Lane.

A striking appearance was that of Robert Williams. I can recall vividly his form at this moment as he makes his way down Fleet Street. In figure he was a miniature Dr. Johnson—bulky, short in the neck and short in the sight. He had a broad, clean-shaven face, and, so far as his features were concerned, possessed the true forensic aspect. He went always clad in black, and invariably proceeded down the street with a book or a paper held close to his eyes. As he forged his way ahead he constantly collided with citizens hastening in the opposite direction. These frequent impacts did not seem to retard his progress or inconvenience in any way the stolid scholar who walked slowly and serenely on, oblivious of the frequent rebukes and objurgations which his progress evoked. He had a loud metallic voice, which in conversation was always raised, so that his observations were heard by persons at a considerable distance off. His laugh—well it did you good to hear Williams laugh at a joker, his own or another’s.

Williams, too, was a man who could not only laugh at a joke against himself, but could even tell a joke against himself. One of these stories is worth recalling in this place, although it has to do, not with his journalistic, but with his barristerial work. I may perhaps premise this, as elucidatory of the point of the narrative: Montagu Williams was at that time one of the most popular men at the Criminal Bar. He was the terror of evil-doers. And if he were engaged for the prosecution, the unfortunate man in the dock often pleaded guilty, “lest a worse thing happen unto him.”

It happened that Robert Williams was briefed one day to prosecute a prisoner for burglary. The trial took place at the Old Bailey, and Williams was seated just beneath the dock, and well within hearing of anything that might transpire there. The prisoner was duly put forward, the indictment read, and the malefactor asked to plead. Williams then heard the following whispered colloquy take place between the accused man and the warder:

“Who’s a-prosecutin’ me?” inquired the caged gaol-bird.

“Mr. Williams,” whispered the warder.

“Guilty, me lord!” said the prisoner to the court in the accent of penitential despair.

In due course Williams rose to enlighten the tribunal as to certain incidents in the previous career of the individual whom he was endeavouring to consign to “chokey.” The thread of his narrative was, however, cut by the following conversation, hurriedly battledored between the burglar and his custodian:

“I thort,” said the man, indignantly reproachful, “you said as Mister Williams was a-prosecutin’ me.”

“Well,” replied the warder, “that is Mr. Williams—Mr. Robert Williams.”

“Oh!” exclaimed the prisoner, as one become the subject of a sudden illumination. “I thought you meant Mr. Montagu Williams. I ain’t a-goin’ to plead guilty to that little beggar. . . . Not Guilty, me lord!”

It is satisfactory to be able to add that on this occasion, and in spite of his amended plea. Williams succeeded in consigning his cynical detractor to a long term of imprisonment.

Once I accompanied Williams to the Court of Queen’s Bench. On that occasion he was less triumphant. It was at the old Courts in Westminster. Williams had to move for a new trial before three of Her Majesty’s Judges. One of them happened to be Blackburn. Williams moved on three points. He had said but a few words on the first of these heads, when Blackburn, with that brutal disregard for the susceptibilities of the Junior Bar for which he was notorious, cut my unfortunate friend short with the request: “Get on with your next point.”

Somewhat abashed, Williams proceeded to open his second argument. He had barely stated his point, when his tormentor again interrupted with—

“Let us hear what you’ve got to say about your third reason.”

Williams was nettled. The influential solicitor who had instructed him was in court. He felt that he must make a stand for his client.

“I trust, my lord, that I am not irrelevant,” he ventured, with a tone of offended dignity.

“But you are!” was the brusque retort of Blackburn (J.).

The effect of this rebuff was so considerable that Williams attacked his third point without spirit, without interruption, and without success.

I have said that some of the finest journalistic work of Robert Williams appeared as “leaders” in the Daily Telegraph. I might go farther. In my opinion, some of those leading articles were, for trip, style, reasoning, and allusiveness, the best things that had ever appeared in that newspaper. I am speaking now of the best of Williams, for he was an unequal writer, and his success depended much on the sympathy evoked by his subject. He threw the essays off with consummate ease. I remember congratulating him on this wonderful facility.

“Nothing in it, my dear fellow,” he replied. “You’ve only to follow strictly the rule of our office, and your leader will come as easy as sand off a shovel.”

“And the rule?”

“All leaders,” he replied, “are divided into three paragraphs, and no paragraph must begin with the word ‘The.’ Simple, ain’t it? Eh, what?”

An answer which seemed rather to argue that, his extraordinary journalistic capacity notwithstanding, he regarded the Press with a sentiment not far removed from cynical contempt.

And yet to have taken a first place as a writer on a journal boasting such a staff as the Telegraph then possessed should have gratified the ambition of any ordinary man. Mr. (subsequently Sir) Edwin Arnold was really Editor, though nominally working under the direction of Mr. Edward Lawson (now Lord Burnham). A courteous and accomplished gentleman, Arnold will perhaps be remembered by posterity in respect of his “Light of Asia.” That poem was an awakening for the easy-going, slow-thinking, credulous, missionary-meeting-supporting British public, who had been taught from infancy that Buddha was a false god, and the centre of a foul and degrading faith. To Sir Edwin Arnold is mainly due the fact that in England to-day there are thousands who have some appreciation of the life and the doctrines of “the teacher of Nirvana and the Law.” Sir Edwin had the courage of his Oriental convictions. He chose as his second wife a Japanese lady.

But the writer who had given the Telegraph its peculiar cachet, and whose work was readily recognized by the readers of the paper, was George Augustus Sala. Sala, I maintain, was the best all-round journalist of his time. Nothing came amiss to him. Although the Saturday and Matthew might affect to sneer at the erudition of his “leaders,” it may be mentioned here that those superior critics sometimes mistook for Sala’s the work of Williams, whose scholarship was at least equal to that of the detractors. As a descriptive writer, Sala was quite without a rival, and the public soon “tumbled” to his piping. The early vogue of the “Telly” was due to his brilliant and unceasing series of pen-pictures. One saw the pageants that he wrote about. Coronations, royal functions, the marriage of Princes, great cathedral services—these incidents lived again in his vivid columns. Sala’s versatility was amazing. He wrote at least one remarkable novel; he illustrated some of his own humours; he is the author of a ballad—printed for private circulation only—of which Swift would have been proud. His “Conversion of Colonel Quagg” is one of the most humorous short stories ever written. He wrote an excellent burlesque for the Gaiety Theatre. His articles on Hogarth, contributed to the Cornhill, at the suggestion of Thackeray, exhibit him as an art critic of insight and of profound technical knowledge. His lectures on the conflict between North and South, delivered on his return from his mission as Special Correspondent during the American War, drew the town. He was a fine linguist, and, at a time when the art of after-dinner speaking was still held in some repute, he was easily first among many rivals. In the preface to one of his books, he says of the proprietors of the paper with which he was identified: “They accorded me the treatment of a gentleman and the wages of an Ambassador.” It is pleasant to be able to reflect that, however high the scale of remuneration may have been, Sala was always worth a bit more than his pay.

There is one phrase of Sala’s which, by means of quotation, has become a household word. “‘Sir,’ said Dr. Johnson, ‘let us take a walk down Fleet Street,’” is piously repeated even by well-informed literary persons as a saying of the great dictionary-maker duly recorded in Boswell’s “Life.” Johnson and Boswell were both innocent of it. The saw was one of Sala’s harmless forgeries, and was used by him as the motto of Temple Bar when he edited that magazine. There appeared in Punch one week a clever skit entitled “Egoes of the Week.” This was a travesty of an article which Sala was then contributing to the Illustrated London News under the title of “Echoes of the Week.” The parody was merciless, and, as some thought, malicious. The weaknesses of Sala’s manner were rendered with laughable exaggeration. His peculiarities of diction were ruthlessly imitated and emphasized. Some of his friends hoped to see him incensed, and looked forward eagerly for reprisals. But Sala took the attack lying down, emulating the spirit of his own Colonel Quagg. And the reason for this evidence of magnanimity under attack somewhat puzzled his associates until it was discovered that the Punch parody was written by Sala himself!

Godfrey Turner was another of the “handy-men” of the Telegraph. He had not that élan in style which characterized his colleague Sala, but he was a most agreeable essayist, and turned out some extremely neat vers de société. His song, supposed to be written by Boswell on Dr. Johnson, has genuine humour. Boswell sets out sober in the first stanza; he becomes merry as he proceeds; when he gets to the last verse he is drunk, and blurts out his real opinion of the great lexicographer. That catastrophic verse ran something like this, I think:

“‘The man that makes a pun,’ says he,
‘Would e’en commit a felony.
And hanged he deserves to be’—
Says (hic) that old fool Doctor Johnson.”

Turner was a bit of a purist, and sought always for the fittest word; and he was as particular in his dress as in his “copy.” He was a stickler for “good form,” and sometimes, when engaged on a mission, would offer a gentle hint to some eager correspondent whose manner in public offended his fastidious taste. Sometimes the hint was taken in good part; sometimes it was resented. On one occasion it secured for poor Godfrey a retort which covered him for a moment with ridicule. It happened in this way:

Some sapient person in society had come to the conclusion that the ordinary coffin was not constructed on the right hygienic principles. He contended that we should, when our turns came, be buried in coffins made of wicker-work. He constructed quite a number of these melancholy receptacles. They were brought to Stafford House for exhibition, and the leaders of Society and the representatives of the Press were invited to inspect. I attended the quaint and rather gruesome collection. Among the other journalists present were my friend Godfrey Turner and Humphreys, the sub-Editor of the Morning Post. Humphreys was an Irishman, a hopelessly eccentric individual, negligent in his dress and flamboyant in his manner. He was a fine fellow, however, had a head and beard like those attributed to Homer, and was every inch a gentleman. His foible was a belief in spiritualism. That he really believed in the actual presence of the dear departed I am convinced, for I have been in his company in the Strand and close to the offices of his own paper when he has interrupted the conversation to speak with the spirit of his great-grandfather, which had just made its presence known to him. The coffins at Stafford House seemed to appeal to his sense of humour. He became quite hilarious over them, and addressed several of the noble persons present by name, slapping belted Earls on the back, and repeating his cemetery jokes for the benefit of Countesses. This affronted the fastidious taste of Turner, who at last got Humphreys into a corner, and thus gently admonished him:

“I say, my dear fellow, do let us try and behave like gentlemen!”

“Thry away, me boy. It costs me no effort!” exclaimed Humphreys, leaving his discomfited friend for the society of a Viscount.

Clement Scott was another of the “young lions.” He was not very popular with the other members of the staff. Sala, I know, disliked him, for he told me so. Scott was the dramatic critic of the paper. He wrote a sugary, young-ladylike style that “took” with a large section of the public. It was a chocolate-creamy style, and “went down”—like chocolate creams. He understood the value of a phrase, and when he got hold of an effective one he ran it to death. For instance, there are poppies in the cornfields round Cromer. Probably there is a much greater profusion of poppies in cornfields in Kent or in Bucks, but Scott gives to Cromer a kind of monopoly in the right sort of poppy. The country in that part of East Anglia he “wrote up” as “Poppyland,” to the great advantage of the Great Eastern Railway Company, to which corporation he became a sort of unofficial Poet Laureate. When I first knew him, Scott had not yet “discovered” Cromer or written the syrupy sentiments of “The Garden of Sleep.” He was eloquent at that period over the beauties of the Isle of Thanet, for “Clemmy” was a personal friend of Mr. Joseph Moses Levy, the principal proprietor of the Telegraph, and was frequently his guest somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ramsgate. Clement Scott always took himself very seriously. Now, that was a pose rarely adopted by the journalists of my day. We regarded our calling as a means of obtaining a livelihood, certainly, and to that extent a serious occupation, but in the pursuit of it we gave ourselves no airs. We considered the whole business rather good fun, and were upheld by a consciousness of the fact that we were all more or less humbugs. Scott’s nonsense, however, suited the nonsense of the followers of Peterborough Court, and at a time of general scepticism it was refreshing to encounter a man who believed in something, even if that something happened to be himself.

Another of the “young lions” who roared in the Peterborough Court menagerie was Drew Gay. Phil Robinson perched for a while on the staff, and flitted elsewhere. All those I have named have finished their accounts with this world. Bennet Burleigh still lives, a prosperous gentleman, and the doyen of war-correspondents. Burleigh professed strong Socialistic principles at a time when they were regarded by respectable people as the most damnable heresies. My first experience of a Socialist Club was gained through Bennet Burleigh. He introduced me one night to the Social Democratic Club. This select association held its meetings in the cellars of a new building in Chancery Lane. One had to dive down two flights of stone steps to the subterranean rooms of the club. The rooms were full of gaunt, long-haired men of both home and foreign growth, and women in clinging (and not very cleanly) raiment. Whiskies and sodas were hospitably dispensed, and most of the women were smoking cigarettes and trying to look as though they were quite used to it and liked it. I encountered Dr. Tanner, the Member for Mid-Cork. He introduced me to a bright, interesting old lady, whose name I forget. We had an edifying chat, she and I, and when, a few nights afterwards, I met Tanner in the Lobby of the House of Commons, I asked him about the lady to whom he had introduced me.

“Oh,” replied Tanner good-humouredly, “that was the celebrated Madeline Smith. She is a married woman now.”

“You don’t mean Madeline Smith, the murderess?” I asked.

“I mean Madeline Smith, who was tried for murder, and for whom the jury found a Scotch verdict of ‘Not proven,’” he reminded me.

“And of such is the Social Democratic Club?” I observed.

“Que voulez-vous?” said Tanner, shrugging his shoulders.

But I have wandered somewhat wide of the matter in hand, which was to afford a little idea of the principal members of the staff among whom Robert Williams became enrolled.

Fleet Street—the thoroughfare itself, I mean—has undergone considerable change since those days. Nearly all the Dickens features have been shorn away from it, and the Dickens-land that impinged upon it has ceased to be recognizable. From the West we then entered Fleet Street through Temple Bar. In the north wing of that historic but obstructive gateway an old barber plied his calling. He reminded me of Mr. Krook in “Bleak House.” He was never what you would call quite sober. His face was blotched and fiery with his excesses, and his hand that held the razor trembled so violently that one wondered how he got through the day without wounding some of his customers. Once the operation commenced, however, the trembling ceased, and the razor sped unerring, steady, expert. What became of the old fellow when Temple Bar was taken down I have never heard. He would hardly, I imagine, have survived his disestablishment.

Sir Henry Meux bought the old structure, and had the Bar erected again as one of the entrances to Theobald Park. I have no doubt that Lady Meux had a word to say in the matter, for Lady Meux was a “sport” all over. I first knew her as Valerie Reece, of the Gaiety Theatre, where she was noted as being the most high-spirited of an extremely high-spirited lot. Her early days at Theobald Park were remarkable for some sporting events of a novel and exciting kind. Thus—or so the story went—her ladyship ordered a cargo of monkeys from India, and had the unfortunate Simian immigrants let loose in the park. As they fled gibbering from branch to branch, the determined little sportswoman took pot-shots at them, and had good fun while the supply held out.

Close by Temple Bar stood the old “Cock” Tavern. It was a snug, smelly, inconvenient, homely, stuffy, and (I should imagine) hopelessly insanitary old crib, much resorted to by barristers at lunch-time, for the chops and steaks were excellent. The “Cock” port was also reputed above reproach, but I never quite acquired the port habit, and should not like to obtrude my opinion; but I “hae ma doots.” The tavern will live for a while in Tennyson’s lines:

“O plump head-waiter at the Cock,
To which I most resort.
How goes the time? ’Tis five o’clock.
Go fetch a pint of port.”

And one notes here that Tennyson owns up to the barbarous custom of drinking port at five o’clock in the afternoon! Well, the “Cock” has gone by the board. A curious incident disturbed its declining days. A carved rooster was the sign of the tavern, and stood over the narrow entrance in Fleet Street. While the owner was under notice to quit his building, the sign was stolen one night, and has never been recovered from that day to this. Another “Cock” Tavern has been opened on the opposite side of Fleet Street, and lower down. This place also displays as its sign a carved rooster, which is believed to be the original from over the way. But it is not the original bird. That ancient fowl has become the property of the great American people. The wonder to me is how they missed collaring Temple Bar!

The widening of Fleet Street by throwing back the building line of the south side has naturally involved the removal of a good number of landmarks; and even where the widening has not been carried out, one observes, with certain pangs of regret, the disappearance of some well-beloved feature. The banking-house of Hoare (“Mr. W.,” as the squeamish lady called him) still stands, the carved wallet in its forefront bearing witness to the “pride that apes humility.”

But Gosling’s, as I knew it, is gone. Gosling’s I have always identified with Tellson’s in “A Tale of Two Cities.” “It was very small, very dark, very ugly, very incommodious. . . . After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacity with a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson’s down two steps, and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little counters where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the wind rustled it while they examined the signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet Street.” The description exactly fits Gosling’s before it got itself a new façade and became the mere branch of a bigger bank. And the Dickens Fellowship should have looked to it, and preserved for the nation this memorial of the master.

Close by was a shop for the sale of mechanical toys, in the window of which a steamer laboured heavily in a sou’-westerly gale, the rolling waves kept in a state of agitation by clockwork, and the whole effect being particularly real and naturalistic. The proprietor of this scientific toy-shop was eventually attacked by the virus that runs through Fleet Street. He became a newspaper proprietor, and a successful one. His translation happened in this way: Young Kenealy, son of the eminent but erratic counsel for the Claimant, founded a paper called Modern Society. His pious object was to rehabilitate his late father, and this could only be accomplished by reopening the whole of the dreary Tichborne case, of which the public was heartily sick. The paper did not pay, and it was eventually acquired, as a property, by the owner of the clockwork ocean. He, worthy man, had no axe to grind. He retained the services of a pliant editor, and made the organ a vehicle for that sort of gossip which goes down so well with suburban matrons. The paper went up by leaps and bounds. The new proprietor gave himself airs, dressed the part, exhibited himself in the Park, and in a brief period had managed to shed all traces of the obsequious Fleet Street tradesman. He crossed the bar years since—perhaps in his mechanical steamer—but his paper persists to this day.

At the corner of Chancery Lane, and above the shop of Partridge and Cooper, was a new restaurant called “The London.” The proprietor was a sanguine man, but made the mistake of being a little before his time. The Fleet Street men of his period preferred to lunch and dine uncomfortably. The owner of “The London” did us too well, and attended too scrupulously to the nicer amenities of the table. We tried the establishment, and then returned to our husks. Outside the new restaurant stood a burly commissionaire, with puffy red cheeks and purple nose. When the restaurant closed its doors for ever, the commissionaire remained, eager to perform the errands of all and sundry. He was rather a picturesque old fellow, and was for a long time one of the features of that end of the street. He wore a red shako, which added greatly to the picturesqueness of his appearance, and I should not be surprised to learn that in private life he drank heavily.

The favourite luncheon haunts of the journalist in the consulate of Plancus were the Cheshire Cheese in Wine Office Court, and the refreshment bar of Spiers and Pond at Ludgate Hill Railway-Station. At the latter place, between the hours of one and three, you were pretty certain to meet a number of confrères. Christopher Pond, one of the partners who ran the bar and restaurant at Ludgate Hill, was to be seen here on most days of the week. He was a big, broad-shouldered, hearty man, who made no secret of his desire to conciliate the members of the London Press. Among those who were daily worshippers at this shrine were Tom Hood, the Editor of Fun; Henry Sampson, then one of Hood’s staff, but afterwards to become famous as the founder of the Referee: “Bill” Brunton, the artist; Charles Williams, the war-correspondent; and John Augustus O’Shea, of the Standard. John Corlett used to drop in occasionally, and John Ryder, who lived down the line, invariably called in on his way to the theatre. Ryder was a fine raconteur, and he had the largest and most varied assortment of amusing reminiscences of any man I have ever met. Mr. Henry Labouchere used to tell a story of “Jack” Ryder which was eminently characteristic of the actor. When Labouchere produced “The Last Days of Pompeii” at the old Queen’s Theatre in Long Acre, Ryder was his stage-manager, and, in his desire to make the production as naturalistic as possible, he asked Labouchere to obtain some real lions. Labouchere demurred; Ryder pleaded.

“But,” objected Labouchere at last, “suppose the lions broke loose?”

“Well,” answered John cheerily, “they’d have to eat the band first.”

Another habitué of the Ludgate Hill resort was Louis Lewis. This extraordinary little man was a brother of the late George Lewis. Like his more illustrious relative, Louis also was a solicitor. One day Brunton had been having his lunch at the table in the corner, and before leaving the artist had made a drawing, on the tablecloth, of a somewhat Rabelaisian character. Louis Lewis entered as Brunton left, and took the seat which had been vacated by the artist. He at once saw the drawing, which appealed to such sense of humour as he possessed, and began to ogle it, laughing with a peculiar subdued chuckle which was peculiarly his own. At that moment Christopher Pond happened to come in. He noticed the mirth of little Louis, and proceeded to ascertain the cause of it. When he grasped the gross intention of the drawing, and as he conceived Lewis to be the author of it, he became extremely indignant, ordered his waiters to turn the innocent and protesting man off the premises, and informed those trembling menials that if any of them ever served the offender again it would mean instant dismissal. The smirched cloth was then removed, and at the laundry all evidence that could convict the real culprit was in due course destroyed. But the incensed solicitor served a writ on Pond the very next day, and the action was “settled out of court.”

There was a gentleman connected with the sporting Press in the seventies called Barney Briant. No one knew exactly what it was he wrote, or whether he wrote at all, but he had obtained an undoubted reputation as a sporting writer of parts. His most salient physical peculiarity consisted in the fact that his elbows seemed to have become glued to his sides. If Barney shook hands with a man—and he was for ever shaking hands—he moved his arm from the elbow only, never from the shoulder. I observed on this peculiarity to Reginald Shirley Brooks (assuredly one of the most amiable and most talented of the men of his time), and his explanation was illuminating.

“You see,” said Shirley, “Barney spends nearly the whole day in the narrow passage in front of the Cheshire Cheese bar. To do this in comfort, he has to keep his elbows well screwed in, to let the customers pass to and from the dining-room. In the course of generations the arms of his descendants will grow from the waist.”

The incident is recorded in this place as illustrating better than any mere verbal description the exiguous nature of the main passages of the Cheshire Cheese. The bar in the passage has been disestablished this many a year. It was a sort of glass case with barely room for two barmaids, a beer-engine, and some shelves of bottles. Sala called it “the bird-cage,” and the name stuck to the structure ever after. In recent years the Cheshire Cheese has attracted a considerable clientele on a claim that it was the favourite Fleet Street resort of Dr. Johnson. Mr. Seymour Lucas, the Royal Academician, indeed, adopted the theory without any exhaustive inquiry, and painted a picture in which the Great Bear is depicted “taking his ease” in this inn. There are some things which we may not know about the author of “Rasselas,” but among them, most assuredly, cannot be numbered the houses of entertainment which he frequented. Boswell followed old man Johnson about to all his “pubs,” and the fact that there is no mention in Boswell’s “Life” of his hero having visited the “Cheese” is evidence presumptive that he never did visit it. In his time the tavern in Wine Office Court was the nightly resort of the respectable tradesmen of Fleet Street who still lived above their shops—the last sort of company upon which the Doctor would think of intruding.

But if the Johnson legend must be dismissed as mythical, the chops, steaks, beefsteak puddings, and stewed cheeses, were substantial and indisputable. Godfrey Turner wrote in one of the Christmas annuals, then in great favour, a description of a meal at the Cheshire Cheese. The thing was wonderfully well done, and gave considerable umbrage to the proprietor, and to some of the literary gentlemen whom the writer introduced. The waiter in the room downstairs was one Tom Brown, who used to drive up from his place in the suburbs in a smart dogcart. William, who had no other name, was a short red-haired man with (appropriately enough) mutton-chop whiskers, very prominent teeth, a pink-and-white complexion, and a perennial sheep-like smile. Diners gave him their orders with minute particularity, assured that he would communicate their wishes to the cook, which William never did. This is the sort of thing that would happen:

First Customer: “A mutton chop very well done, please, waiter.”

William: “Well done, sir? Yessir.”

Second Customer: “Underdone chop, William.”

William: “Chop underdone, sir? Very good, sir.”

[Exit William.

William (heard without): “Cook, two muts down together, cook!”

On Saturday an enormous beefsteak pudding delightfully fortified with larks, oysters, mushrooms, and other seasoning, was served. This monster of the pudding tribe was put down to boil at one o’clock in the morning, and was served with great ceremony at one o’clock on the afternoon of the same day. Moore, the proprietor, cut the savoury mountain up. Every seat was taken a quarter of an hour before the dish made its appearance, and late-comers had to turn disconsolate away. On one fateful morning—a cold, foggy day in mid-winter—the usual congregation of pudding-worshippers had gathered together, hungry, expectant, keen-set. At the stroke of one the step of William was heard on the stair, and a pungent steam was wafted to the waiting gourmets. Then all at once was heard a slip, a groan, and, last of all, an awful crash. William, with the pudding in his arms, had slipped on the top of the flight of stairs leading to the hall, and the place was flooded with broken pudding-bowl and dismembered pudding, now mixing itself ineffectually with the sawdust of the floor. Mingled sighs and oaths arose on all sides. The mischief was, alas! irreparable.

After this, William was pensioned off by Moore, but the devoted old man could not be induced to quit the scene in which most of his life had been passed. He was not permitted to resume his official position as a waiter, but he turned up every morning at his usual time, and remained on the premises until closing-time. They were puzzled at first what to do with him. At last it was resolved to put him into a leather apron, and let him pretend to be having a very busy time in the cellar. From that cool and cobwebby grot he made frequent emergences during meal-times to indulge the one pleasure left him—that of a little familiar talk with an old customer. One day William was missed and his old customers knew instinctively that he was dead. The old fellow left considerable personality and some real estate.

I have now tried to sketch, however indifferently, some of the centres round which the Fleet Street maelstrom roared. Ceaselessly for more than twenty years I whirled round and round in its irresistible eddies. One never hoped, one never wished, for deliverance from the seething circle. Once caught up in it, the daily round was discovered to possess a fascination overwhelming, imperious, inexorable. It was a career the most strenuous, at once, and the most irresponsible. There was a sense of freedom, yet one was a slave of the lamp; a feeling of power, yet one was the mere mouthpiece of an organ. By the outsider one was alternately hated and courted, and one went one’s way.

As free-lance, as a member of a “staff,” as special correspondent, as leader-writer, book-reviewer, and dramatic critic, my experience has been considerable, and I have generally found my work delightful; but its greatest charm, after all, has been in the society of the comrades whom I have met by the way. Good-fellowship, loyalty to one another, a fine sense of chivalry, a constant readiness to help the lame dog over the style, a stern ostracism of the unhappy wight who evinced a congenital inability to play the game—these were the characteristics of the men of my time. Sitting down in the afternoon of my day to recall that pleasant past, I now, as I intimated in my opening chapter, drop all pretence of sequent autobiography, and proceed to present such groups and incidents, such characters and scenes, such mots and anecdotes, as may appeal to those who live in another time and pursue their calling under other conditions.

CHAPTER V
SOCIETY JOURNALISM

“Sassiaty is Sassiaty: its lors ar irresistibl.”—Yellowplush Papers.

Society journalism had been founded just before I began to earn a “living wage” in Fleet Street, but its development and popularity were items of later history. The ball was set rolling by Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles—to become known in other times as the intractable Conservative Member of Parliament, and the beloved “Tommy” Bowles of the man in the street. The familiar sobriquet only got into print after Bowles captured King’s Lynn in the Tory interest, but he was called by that playful diminutive long before he entered the House of Commons, although he himself was probably unaware, as he would certainly resent, the fact. Pottinger Stephens bestowed upon him the familiar name, and in Fleet Street and the Strand he was always known to his Press contemporaries as “Tommy.”

That this gentleman should have turned Liberal in his old age, and that he should have captured his ancient Conservative stronghold in Lynn for the Rads, will not seem at all extraordinary to those who are a little behind the scenes. Those who accomplish a great deal for their party naturally expect that their party will do a little for them, provided they possess the necessary qualifications. Tommy certainly had the qualifications, and it is equally certain that he “put in” a lot of good work for the Tories; but he was never a persona grata with his leaders. The Conservatives are rather stupid on matters of birth and parentage, and Bowles did not come up to their standards. Having fought and lost two elections “on his own,” the party sent him down to a forlorn hope at Lynn. To their surprise and disgust he won the seat. For years he served the Tories loyally in Parliament, but when there came a division of loaves and fishes, Bowles was invariably left out of the reckoning. In the last Parliament in which he sat on the Conservative benches, he fell foul of his party, and personally attacked his hereditary leaders. From his place he alluded to the Salisbury administration as “the Hôtel Cecil,” and described the Front Bench as “a gallery of family portraits.”

Bowles acquired his knowledge of journalism and his respect for the conventions of Society on the Morning Post. He had started life, I believe, in Somerset House, which was just over the way, and he became imbued with the notion—a very profitable notion, as it turned out—that a paper chiefly devoted to the “hupper suckles,” written in their interests, and employing what he used to call “the passwords of Society,” should be a financial success. To what extent (at that period) Bowles was in Society, or how he obtained a knowledge of its passwords, or what those cryptic passwords were, I have never been able to find out; but, as one astute editorial admonition is “Know what you don’t know!” those same passwords may have been part of a pleasant myth.

His paper was duly launched at the price of twopence, and under the admirable title of Vanity Fair. But the paper, smartly and even wittily written as it was, would have failed to reach the somewhat inaccessible class for which its founder proposed to cater had it not been for his discovery of Pellegrini, and the appearance in Vanity Fair of that Italian artist’s inimitable cartoons. The price was raised to sixpence, the paper hit those remote circles for which it had been destined, “Tommy’s” career was assured, and Society journalism was established in our midst.

A tremendous number of imitators have sprung up from time to time—“they had their day, and ceased to be”—but there were only two other publications that enjoyed permanent success; and those two, with the first Society organ founded by Mr. Bowles, constituted, and still constitute, what is understood as Society journalism. The second paper in the trio was The World, founded by Edmund Yates; and the third was Truth, established by Henry Labouchere. I was fortunate enough to write for all three; for two of them I have written voluminously.

Bowles used to aver that he had no staff. He wrote a great deal of the paper himself, and his “Jehu Junior” articles, written to accompany the cartoons, were models of what essays should be. Light, epigrammatic, pungent, and excessively neat, they were the one possible accompaniment to “Ape’s” caricatures. A sentence from the “Jehu Junior” article always appeared beneath the picture. I can recall a couple. Beneath the first picture of Disraeli was inscribed: “He educated his party, and dished the Whigs to pass Reform, but to have become what he is from what he was is the greatest reform of all.” When Bishop Magee made his great speech in the House of Lords in defence of the Irish Church, his likeness appeared in the Vanity Fair gallery, and it had appended to it this extract from the article by Bowles: “If eloquence could justify injustice, he would have saved the Irish Church.” And the output of the able little editor was always up to sample.

Although Bowles professed to conduct his paper without the aid of a staff, he engaged regular contributors, which is pretty much the same thing. These gentlemen were never consulted in a body. “Collectivity” was never “pretty Fanny’s way,” as the Tory party, too late, discovered. But individual members of the body of contributors were occasionally summoned to meet their editor and proprietor at his chambers. When I was first ushered into the august presence, Bowles had rooms in Palace Chambers, at the corner of St. James’s Street, over against the Palace itself. He had just commenced his yachting career at that period, and adopted the mariner’s pose ashore to the extent of receiving you in his bare feet—to give the impression, I suppose, of rolling seas and a slippery deck.

But if one did not meet one’s confreres in the rooms of the editor, we were bound to encounter in the outer world—perhaps at the printer’s or elsewhere. The printer was Peter Rankin, of Drury Court—a dour and adventurous Scot who, having conveyed a newspaper by means of registration from its rightful owner, continued the management of the property on his own account. He had not the success which usually attends these Napoleonic sportsmen in the Street of Adventure. He came to grief and death, and nobody seemed to care. At his printing-offices I met for the first time Willmott Dixon, then a contributor under the Bowles banner. Dixon was at that time a fresh-coloured, stout, broad-shouldered man with an indomitably sweet temper which indicated its permanence in a dimple in the cheek.

Willmott Dixon had brought into Fleet Street with him much of the ebullient spirit and readiness for practical fun for which he was noted at Cambridge in his undergraduate days. Bon-vivant, raconteur, and essentially good fellow, he was in general demand as a companion. After the days of our Vanity, I was associated with Dixon on many other papers, for he had the pen of a ready writer, and was in considerable demand. Of all the men I have known, he was the quickest producer of “copy,” and he seemed capable of coming up with his tale of work under any and all conditions. His sporting articles and stories under the nom de plume of “Thormanby” are well known, and his accounts of the old prize-fights are the best ever written. The amount of “copy” produced by Dixon would equal that of any three ordinary journalists, taking a period of years in the productive stage of each. But why should I speak of Willmott Dixon in the past tense? He is now a hale young fellow of seventy, and within the last few years he has published three successful novels under his own name, one collection of sporting stories under his nom de plume of “Thormanby,” and an autobiography entitled “The Spice of Life.” This is the sort of veteran whom Mr. Philip Gibbs should take down Fleet Street with him one fine day, with the idea of presenting him to the young gentlemen who weep and have hysterics when a newspaper happens to put up the shutters. Very few, I imagine, of the invertebrate Press gang of the period will be writing saleable novels at seventy!

Henry Pottinger Stephens, another of Vanity’s regular contributors, I first met at the office of the publisher. We were both there on the same errand, I believe, stalking an oof bird. Stephens had just returned from Paris, where he had been acting as one of the correspondents of the Times. He also was to be my associate in other papers, my companion in other adventures. To these I may recur in another chapter.

At what date it was I forget, but in the early eighties Bowles sold the paper to Arthur Evans. The price was, I think, £20,000. With this Bowles started the Lady, which, if not perhaps quite his own line of country, promised a bigger income than would ever be obtainable from his original venture. Under the new regime I continued to contribute. The proprietor confined his attention to the City article. The literary part of the paper was under Mr. Oliver Fry. From the time of the founding of Vanity Fair until its purchase half a dozen years ago by the Harmsworths—a period of, say, forty years—it had but two editors. Thus, the traditions of the paper were regarded, its tone and policy were continuous, and it retained in consequence its old subscribers and its old advertisers. An editorial chair held in forty years by two editors in succession marks a record. There were several editors during the Harmsworth epoch. But the new atmosphere did not seem to suit the old growth. It was sold again. The cartoons have always been the mainstay and chief attraction of Vanity Fair. When dear old Pellegrini died, Bowles had discovered an accomplished successor in “Spy.” Over this name Mr. Leslie Ward drew almost continuously for the paper for many years. Indeed, his work has appeared there up to a comparatively recent date.

When Edmund Yates founded the World, a departure in Society journalism was made. The new candidate for popular favour was to depend on its writing alone for its success. Yates had no misgivings about the propriety of engaging a staff. Bowles always held himself aloof from, and socially superior to, the Fleet Street man. Yates had been a Fleet Street man himself, and was unlikely to make that mistake. He liked to meet his contributors socially. He was at one with them. And they had an immense liking for their chief. For, although Yates was as savage as a Mohawk when he “went for” his enemies, he was devoted to his friends. Not infrequently, in the journalistic world, you will come upon soft-hearted sayers of hard-hearted things. Yates was a man of that sort. Warm in his friendships, genial in his manner, sympathetic to the tyro, he was out for scalps the moment he scented a hint of offence—it mattered not whether the offence was intended for him or for one of his friends.

In the inception of his “Journal for Men and Women,” Yates had the assistance of Henry Labouchere and Grenville Murray. And among the principal writers engaged to support the new venture were Bernard Becker, Henry Pearse, Dutton Cook, and Christie Murray. A. M. Broadley did not join till later on, I think; though when he did join he proved himself extremely useful in picking up those Society items upon which the World depended very much in the effort to prove acceptable to the “classes.”

Yates liked to have about him as staff officers men of goodly presence, gentlemanly address. And he had a horror of anything soiled or slovenly in the attire of his contributors. This latter characteristic of the World’s editor accounted for the engagement of lady journalists. It was, indeed, the paragraph of one of his women contributors that involved him in the criminal libel suit brought by Lord Lonsdale, resulting in the incarceration of Yates in Holloway—a severe punishment in respect of a stupid little paragraph, and a punishment the effects of which Yates carried with him to his dying day. There was one of the contributors who scarcely came up to the standard of physique which the editor regarded as desirable. This was Mr. (now Sir) H. W. Lucy. Yates gave that gentleman his first great chance of showing his paces as an independent descriptive reporter of proceedings in the House of Commons. Lucy’s weekly contribution was entitled “Under the Clock, by one of the Hands.” The title was supplied by the chief.

Lucy was a smart little fellow of tremendous industry and always conscious of his own ability to make his way in the world. His hair, turning grey even in that far-off time, stood up like the quills of the porcupine. He always gave you the impression of a man who had suddenly waked up in a fright. And the expression that seemed his normal one was that of a gentle surprise. He became, at another stage in his successful career, associated with a little Irishman—Mr. Harry Furniss—an artist for some time connected with Punch. It was a very quaint sight to see the two little chaps pottering through an art gallery in search of subjects for their merciless ridicule. Furniss, red-headed and rotund of paunch, looking like a sort of duodecimo edition of a City Alderman, whispered his jokes to his companion, accompanying the witticisms with an engaging smile, Lucy accepting them with his habitual look of gentle wonder.

Yates himself wrote the neatest, most scintillating, and most readable paragraphs of any man who has ever essayed that extraordinarily difficult art. But neither the appeal to Society, nor the descriptive pictures of Parliament, nor the now sparkling and now vitriolic paragraphs of the editor, brought on that happy event which is known in the newspaper world as “turning the corner.” That is the happy moment when the paper becomes increased in circulation, and advertising returns to the point at which it pays. It is always the unexpected that happens, and the contributions which raised the World from the commercial Slough of Despond were a remarkable series of articles on “West End Usurers,” attributed to Mr. Henry Labouchere. As a matter of fact, however, the material was collected by several persons, and I understood at the time that the proofs were submitted to Sir George Lewis before they were passed for the press.

Judging from the style in which some of them were written, concerning men notoriously wealthy, their filtration through Ely Place was an entirely necessary proceeding. When the victim was unlikely to resent attack or attempt reprisals, the onset was at times very warm indeed. Poor Hubert Jay Maurice was one of these latter. One never knew what the dapper gentleman’s real name was—probably Moses. He had been known as Mr. Jay and as Mr. Maurice. And he ended his days as Mr. Didcot, a music-hall agent, having succeeded in giving his only daughter in marriage to the cadet of a noble house. The Didcot article appeared during Christmas week, and ended with the pregnant sentence: “Indeed, this young man’s career has been so shameless that at this festive season of the year we will not ask our compositors to set it up in print.”

The success of the World once secured, the circulation went up by leaps and bounds, and Mr. Labouchere, quick to appreciate the effect of his own suggestion, and willing to secure for himself the profits to be made by exhibiting and denouncing the evil that is in the world, soon determined to run a paper of his own. This was Truth, the third in the triad of publications that made good a claim to the title of Society journals. Labouchere went to work very carefully and systematically in founding the journal which will always be associated with his name—a journal, it should be at once admitted, which, while it did much in the way of airing personal dislikes, did much more in ridding Society of pests and parasites, of swindlers and charlatans, than any other journal of our time.

My friend Robert Williams was consulted concerning the founding of the new paper. And from him I used to hear how matters were progressing. From him, for example, I learned that Mr. Horace Voules, of the Echo, had accepted the position of manager to the new venture. Voules always reminded me of the description of another Mr. Vholes as described in “Bleak House.” You recall the passage, perhaps? “If you want common-sense, responsibility, respectability, all united—Vholes is the man!” Williams was fond of telling a story of the interview between Labouchere and Voules at the time of the engagement. The story was ben trovato. But my own subsequent acquaintance with Mr. Voules convinced me that there was not any element of fact in it. The dialogue as reported by “Bobbos” ran thus:

Labouchere: “I understand, Mr. Voules, that, in dealing with the outside public, you are apt to be rather haughty in your manner?”

Voules: “Indeed!”

Labouchere: “Now, in your interviews with my little public, I desire that you will tone yourself down a little toward their level.”

Voules (bridling, but dignified): “Mr. Labouchere, ’aughty I never ham; but I ’ope I ’ave a proper pride.”

I can testify personally that, when I knew him, Horace Voules was perfectly sound in the matter of his aspirates. To me, indeed, he appeared to be over-solicitous about them.

No sooner had “Labby,” as he began to be called, got his venture launched, than he opened an attack on the owners of the Daily Telegraph in the most systematic, sustained, and unrelenting vein of personal journalism. Mr. Labouchere’s memoirs, which are in hand, may perhaps relate that old story. It is no business of mine to stir up the puddle. Man of the world, politician, diplomatist, cool-headed as Labouchere had always proved himself, he here undoubtedly permitted himself to be betrayed into a series of libels on an old friend, which were in no way creditable to him. His attacks thereafter were legitimate crusades against the undetected jackals who prey on the public. And the public is considerably in his debt in respect of them. While as to his more piquant and personal libels, it must be reluctantly admitted that their appearance and the circumstances which resulted from them added considerably to the jocundity of those Fleet Street days.

There were quite a number of stories current then as illustrating the delightful insouciance of Labouchere. Here are four of them:

When he was in the diplomatic service, he was sent on a mission to St. Petersburg. Before starting he had a dispute with the Foreign Office about his expenses. F.O. had its idea of the scale; Labouchere had his. But the Office refused to reconsider its decision. Labouchere took his leave, crossed the Channel, and was, to all appearance, lost. A week after the appointed time he had not arrived at St. Petersburg. A representative of F.O. was sent out on his trail. He was traced to Paris, and from thence to Vienna, where he was run to earth. In reply to his discoverer, he coolly said:

“The Foreign Office refused to pay me my expenses, and I’m walking to St. Petersburg.”

He was at one time Attaché at our Embassy in Washington. The Minister was suddenly recalled to London, and Labouchere was left in charge. On the morning following the departure of the Ambassador, one of the members of the United States Government called. “Minister in?” he inquired curtly of Labouchere. “Not in,” replied Labby, lighting a cigarette. “Guess I’ll call again,” said the big politician. “Ah, do!” said Labouchere sweetly. An hour afterwards the same Great Man again put in an appearance. “Minister in yet?” he inquired sharply. “Not yet,” answered Labouchere from behind the paper which he was reading. “Can you give me any idea when he will be back?” asked the important senator impatiently. “I haven’t the remotest idea: he sailed for Europe yesterday,” was the soft answer not altogether calculated to turn away wrath.

When he stood for Northampton, Labouchere’s colleague was Charles Bradlaugh, who frankly avowed his atheism to the shoemakers and other horny-handed artisans who were his supporters. Now, Labouchere, who was an old campaigner, knew that the Liberals of the constituency would not stand two atheists. The moment his address was circulated, the Nonconformists took fright, and, although religious topics were altogether absent from the astute candidate’s pronunciamento, eager Dissent sniffed heterodoxy in every line of it. Labouchere thereupon sat down and wrote an autograph letter to every Nonconformist divine, on the register and off it, asking each of them to meet him, and for the purpose of discussing those topics which all good Liberals hold dear. He hired the biggest room in his hotel. He had a line of chairs drawn up in uncompromising rows along the two principal side-walls. At the end of the room was a table with a tumbler and a carafe of water. Lying promiscuously around were copies of the Daily News and the Christian World. The invited ministers turned up to a man. The candidate’s agent met them and conducted them, with every demonstration of respect, to the seats allotted to them. When Labouchere, waiting in an ante-chamber, was informed that they were all come, he entered the room. He bowed right and left, a sad smile on his lips, a black suit enveloping his person, and a general air of Chadband emanating from all parts of him. He took his place behind the table, poured out a tumbler of water, drank it down with all the gusto of one who thoroughly enjoyed it, and forthwith addressed his sad audience.

“My reverend friends,” he began, “I have invited you to meet me in order that we may interchange views on those topics which are of first-class importance to Liberals, and more especially to Liberals attached to the great, influential Nonconforming bodies. But before proceeding to the consideration of mere worldly matters, I shall ask the Reverend Mr. So-and-So to engage in a few words of prayer, beseeching the Lord’s blessing on our deliberations.”

That did the trick for him at Northampton.

“That gentleman an atheist!” said the Reverend Mr. So-and-So to a friend as they left the hotel. “He’s the first political candidate I ever knew to ask the Divine guidance in his campaign. He shall have my vote and my—er—little influence.”

Those who know anything about the depth of Labouchere’s religious feelings and the extent of his personal affection for Dissenters will best appreciate the humour of the situation.

When Labouchere was member for Middlesex—that was long before the Northampton days—the Lord Taunton who sat in the Upper House was his uncle. A member of the House of Commons who had mistaken the relationship addressed Labouchere one day on the Lobby.

“Ah, Labouchere,” he said, “I’ve just been in the other House, and I heard your father deliver a most admirable address.”

“I’m more than pleased to hear it,” said Labby; “for my father has been dead these ten years, and until the present moment I never knew where he had got to!”

Between Labouchere on Truth and Yates on the World there commenced a species of “snacking” or sparring which promised from time to time a rush into active and bitter hostilities. The paragraphs of one paper bristled with allusions to the slips of “Edmund,” and the other paper retorted racily on “Henry,” and we all looked out eagerly for an outbreak of real hostility; but it never came. The doughty champions both feared and respected each other, and they expended any gall which they may have secreted during their meditations on other victims. The papers still adhere pretty nearly to the lines laid down by their founders, though lacking the personal supervision of those distinguished editors. Yates died suddenly—tragically—on leaving the stalls of a theatre, and Labouchere, abandoning both the senate and the editorial seat, retired to Florence, where he recently died. The memoirs of “Labby” should be a stimulating and piquant collection.

The complete success of the three papers about which I have been writing naturally provoked a considerable amount of the sincerest form of flattery, and imitators sprang up like mushrooms, willing to share the rewards apparently reserved for those who catered for Society. These misguided adventurers discovered too late that even a Society editor must have his aptitudes—his special qualifications. Some of the new candidates for popular favour died the death. Others of them—dumb witnesses to that hope that “springs eternal in the human breast”—never in their lives arrived at paying-point, yet exist to this day. They pass from proprietor to proprietor. No one ever hears at what price they change hands. No one ever sees a copy sold on a stall. There is no trace of their existence in the clubs. Now and then one comes upon a back number in the coffee-room of an hotel. They are the pathetic derelicts of the Press—the pariahs of journalism. They persist by reason of their absolute badness. Their persistence recalls the inference set forth in the lines of Henry S. Leigh’s verses about Uncle John:

“If Uncle John goes living on,
How wicked Uncle John must be!”

It is amusing to note how proprietors, editors, and contributors, will differ as to the motive power which has given the first substantial rise in circulation. Voules always held—he has told me so a dozen times—that the success of Truth was brought about by the fashion articles of “Madge.” And Lucy of the World became possessed by the belief that the popularity of the Yates venture was partly due to the appearance therein of his articles from the gallery of the House of Commons. He determined to establish a paper on the lines laid down by Yates. And his leading article was to be his own series, entitled “Under the Clock, by One of the Hands.”

Lucy selected Mayfair as the name of the venture on which he was about to embark. There should be no mistake about his title to rank as a Society journalist. In that matter he could ruffle it with the best of them. He was, however, beset with difficulties from the beginning. In the first place—to his immense surprise and disgust—he found that Yates entirely declined to abandon his right in the heading of the Parliamentary articles, which continued to appear, from another “Hand,” until long after the death and burial of Lucy’s bantling.

Lucy found certain members of the staff of Mayfair intractable; the intractable aids declared that they found things impossible. And no one was greatly surprised when the new purveyor of social wares put the shutters up. Incidentally, Mr. Lucy’s paper was the means of enriching that harvest of English literature which is garnered by Mudie. It led to the publication of a couple of novels. In one of these works Mr. Lucy drew a character which was instantly recognized as a portrait of Mr. Christie Murray. Murray had been one of the intractables on the strength of the Mayfair. Christie was not only impatient of attack, but he was very well equipped for hitting back, which in due course he proceeded to do. Anyone interested in the literary amenities of the jocund days may find some diversion in referring to Christie Murray’s “The Way of the World.” Such merry jousts are inadmissible in these less strenuous times.

A much longer period of existence was granted to the St. Stephen’s Review, founded by Mr. William Alison. In the editorial scheme, this organ was to play Parliamentary measures—so to speak—in addition to its piping for Society. Its political cartoons by Tom Merry did good service on more than one electoral campaign. Alison was a member of the Junior Carlton Club, so that it is needless to indicate the policy for which his paper stood. Alison had chosen for his sub-editor one of the strangest of the strange persons who crowd the journalistic mart. His name was William Tasker. He wrote vapid verses and slushy prose by the ream, over the name of “Edgar Lee.” But if his literary output was of a middling sort, his lying was first-rate. He had become so much the servant of the habit that he often believed his own stories. Alison never contradicted him, and so the faculty increased, and the facility acquired by the little professor became quite marvellous. He was an extremely ill-dressed man, and grew the mutton-chop face fungi for which Frank Richardson affects such a distaste. He always wore a red tie, and it was always a soiled one. A bland, propitiatory smile played about the corners of his mouth. He would rush up to one in the Strand with this sort of news: “I’ve just been to Downing Street, and Disraeli told me—this is quite private, mind you—that he’ll go to the country in June.” The reply might be: “Hang it all! I’ve just left the House of Commons. Dizzy is on his feet, and has been for the last three-quarters of an hour.” But that sort of facer never disturbed Tasker. He would shake his head and smile a deprecatory smile, as he answered: “Optical illusion, my dear fellow. I tell you I’ve just left him in Downing Street. I mentioned your name to him, and he said: ‘Sound man that; give him my regards.’ And I said I would, and so I have.” I have heard him tell, with every detail, of his sprinting prowess. He could not run fifty yards. And he would descant on his success on the race-course, who did not know the meaning of a handicap. He survived for some years the passing of the journal with which he was associated. These he devoted to palmistry, astrology, and other wizard sciences, the profession of which, to a scientist knowing how to advertise—and where—may, even in these advanced days, yield a living of sorts.

But the surpassing claim of the St. Stephen’s Review to the respectful regard of posterity is the fact that it introduced Phil May to the British public. A Bohemian of Bohemians was Phil May when he was discovered, and a Bohemian of Bohemians he continued to the end—the all too early end. When he began to contribute to Alison’s paper, he was engaged in designing dresses for Alias the costumier. Alias had some funny stories about the difficulty he experienced in keeping Phil at his work. One day he arrived at the office having come through a heavy shower of rain. His boots, coat, and hat, were soaked. The humane little employer fussed about, induced him to remove his boots and coat, and provided him with slippers and a studio jacket. “I shall ’ave them dried,” he explained as he hurried off. The dear little chap, however, locked them up, assured that Phil May would not venture abroad without his boots and coat and hat. The hour was eleven of the forenoon. The programme of Alias was to hurry off, see his customers at one or two theatres, and return about one o’clock and take Phil—who he hoped would then have made several good designs—out to lunch. Passing Romano’s, he thought he would turn in and take a liqueur of brandy. He entered. There were shouts of laughter at the end of the bar. In the midst of an admiring crowd of “the boys” stood Phil May, fully attired in the costumier’s stock. He wore red Hessian boots to beyond his knees. On his head was the shako of a gendarme, and his slim figure was enveloped in a brigand cloak built for a big man. Of course the designs of the dresses had not been touched.

“I came here to see if they had got my boots,” Phil explained to the exasperated costumier. “Will you take anything?”

“I vill take You!” replied the little man, leading his designer into the Strand, where they were followed to the shop by a delighted crowd of urchins, who were divided in opinion as to whether the thin gentleman in costume was “Awthur Roberts” or “’Enery Hirving.”

When Phil had “come into his own,” when he was the favourite artist on Punch—favourite of the public, that is to say—he continued in the Bohemian courses which he had acquired in the lean and struggling years. At one time he was ordered horse exercise; and when he got the horse, it was thought, by the authorities at home, that it would be an excellent idea for Phil if he went into Fleet Street on horseback when business took him that way. This, it was thought, would insure his safe and early return to the domestic hearth. It answered well—for a bit. But one afternoon Phil was riding home from Fleet Street to his house in Kensington, and in passing through Leicester Square, thought that he would drop in at the “Cosy Club,” a small club then recently founded. He gave his horse in charge of an urchin to hold for him. It was then four in the afternoon. At two o’clock in the morning a police constable entered the club to inquire whether one of the members had left a horse in charge of a boy outside. The secretary remembered that May was the proud possessor of a steed. But May had left the club at midnight. He had forgotten all about his horse, and had driven home in a hansom.

Of the making of penny Society papers there was no end. But of those papers themselves there was generally an early end, and of these one may more conveniently treat in the chapter “De Mortuis.”

CHAPTER VI
A GAY SCIENCE

To anyone born with a taste for the theatre, a flair for the public demand in stage entertainment, and a desire for the society of actors and actresses, the position of dramatic critic on a London newspaper should be one of the most coveted berths on the ship. The opportunity of heralding a good play or of “slating” a bad one secures a true moment of satisfaction. Moreover, the occupation, notwithstanding the late hours, hot theatres, and liability to corporal punishment, involved, is one of the most healthy undertakings in the gift of the Press. A continuous pursuit of this gay science insures longevity. The dramatic critic is the most long-lived man in the profession. Some of the dramatic critics whom I knew in the early eighties and late seventies are still “hard at it,” I am pleased to hear. I imagine that the dramatic critic never dies. Like the majority of the plays upon which he passes judgment, he is translated or adapted.

John Oxenford, of the Times, was the doyen of the dramatic critics of my day. It was John’s proudest boast that he never wrote a word in the Thunderer that could do professional damage to an actor, or take the bread out of the mouth of an actress. An amiable sentiment, truly, but scarcely indicative of the critical attitude of a writer conscientiously performing his duty to the public, his employers—ay, and to the stage itself. Often after our Saturday dinner at the Junior Garrick Club, an association which I joined some time after my regular engagement as taster of new plays, I have heard the venerable man make this boast in a post-prandial speech. As the great majority of his hearers were actors, managers, and dramatic authors, the sentiment was invariably received with abundant applause.

Oxenford suffered for years from a chronic cough, which always announced his arrival at a theatre, and usually punctuated the performance throughout the night. Whether it was on account of this distressing affliction, or because he represented the leading journal, I do not know, but a box was always put at Mr. Oxenford’s disposition on the first night of a new play. Two determined “dead-heads” generally turned up sooner or later in the great man’s box. These were the late Lord Alfred Paget and John Murphy of Somerset House. The friendship between these three men, so different in station and in intellectual capacity, was exposed in a theatrical organ of the period, and in an article called “Dead-heads: Cornelius Nepos O’Mulligan.” O’Mulligan was evidently intended for Murphy. He was therein described as Oxenford’s toady, and his mission was indicated as being that of a diplomatic mediator who would persuade Oxenford to give a line of notice to some good-looking young woman on the stage in whom his lordship happened to take a passing interest. It was further suggested that Lord Alfred’s solicitude for the ambitious artist whom he wished to befriend was not altogether personal. Lord Alfred, it was said, was simply interesting himself in furtherance of the wishes of a third party—a Very Great Personage. That I do not believe. But what I do believe is that Oxenford was innocent of sinister designs on the part of his friends, and that when a kindly word appeared in the Times regarding the performance of some third-rate actress, enacting a fourth-rate part, the record testified to the possession of a kindly disposition and a congenital incapacity for saying “No.”

Murphy and Lord Alfred were both members of the Junior Garrick Club, and when the article to which I have alluded came out, Murphy consulted me as to what course he should take. Murphy had the baldest expanse of head I have ever seen—quite a continent it was. And it was surrounded by a fringe of red hair. He was clean-shaven, had a most bewitching squint, and a Cork accent of peculiar enormity.

“It’s not for meself I keer,” said John to me, with tears in his voice, “but Alfrid’s takin’ it to hear-r-r-t. He niver slep’ a wink since th’ attack on um come out. Now wh-h-at had we betther do?”

“I have no doubt that you and Lord Alfred will live it down,” I told him.

“Sure it’s what I’m afther tellin’ Alfrid meself. ‘Take no notice of um at all,’ says I. O’ny Alfrid wanted your opinion as well. He thinks sich a lot of your common-sinse, bedad.”

“Lord Alfred doesn’t suppose, by any chance, that I wrote the thing?” I asked.

“Alfrid would as soon think of suspectin’ Jan Axenford himself,” said Murphy. But he hesitated before he said it; his squint became more pronounced, and there was such a general air of confusion on his beaming and rubicund countenance that I was convinced that both the wily conspirators had attributed the essay to me, and that John had simply been “told off” by his noble friend to lure me into an admission.

Burlesque was still a leading card at the Gaiety, and one or two other “burlesque houses,” as they were called, though opera-bouffe was gradually superseding the old home-made article, with its pitiful puns and sawdust buffooneries. And the chorus engaged for these entertainments consisted of handsome girls possessing limbs suitable for exhibition in pink or yellow or violet tights. Murphy and Paget were constant visitors at these theatres. And his lordship would frequently present to some shapely ornament of the chorus a gold bangle as a token of his regards, and as an earnest of his desire for her success in the profession she had adopted. Some attempt on the part of a necessitous chorus girl to pawn one of his lordship’s bangles led to the discovery that the ornaments were of little value. And it eventually transpired that they had been purchased by the gross from a Jew dealer in Houndsditch. His lordship always posed among Bohemians as a poor man, and managers, therefore, thought it nothing that he should accept free admission to the playhouses. There was some searching of spirit among them when the aristocratic dead-head’s will was proved. He “cut up” for quite a lot of money. And when he died, John Murphy soon followed—of a broken heart, they said, and having nothing more to live for. So passed this par nobile fratum!

William Holland at one time “ran” the Surrey Theatre, with pantomime in the winter, and melodrama during the remainder of the year. I attended the Surrey during his occupancy, to notice a new piece by poor Henry Pettitt. Oxenford had a box as usual. And not only was his sneezing rather more distressing than usual, but he was accompanied by a lady whose babble was incessant. This acquaintance of the venerable critic was a person of no very exalted rank in Society, and Holland became anxious lest the sternutation and conversation in the box should interfere with the comfort of those in its immediate vicinity. During the second entr’acte he thought it well to pay his court to the eminent exponent of the higher criticism. He knocked at the door of the box, was bidden to enter, went in, and, greeting the occupants with his characteristic effusion, inquired:

“And what do you think of the play, Mr. Oxenford?”

“The play?” said the old gentleman. “Oh, the play is rot! . . . What do you think of it, my dear?”

“Rot?” exclaimed the lady friend thus addressed—“it’s muck!”

Only the word the fair creature employed was much coarser than “muck,” and the anxious manager went away sorrowing. However, an excellent notice of the melodrama subsequently appeared in the leading journal. It may interest a new generation of those who illustrate the gay science to learn that all the theatrical representative of the Times received for his services was one hundred pounds a year. At least, so Mr. Oxenford himself more than once assured me.

When Mowbray Morris succeeded Oxenford as the representative of the Thunderer, a very different spirit informed those columns of the Times devoted to the stage. Morris came to the task impressed with the idea that it was the business of a critic to criticize. “Have at you!” was evidently his motto. And he laid about him right merrily, not particular whom he might inconvenience by his shrewd thrusts; for, indeed, he was no respecter of persons, and was suspected of entertaining an invincible contempt for the personnel of the British stage. When Morris was appointed, Henry Irving was in the first flush of his triumph as manager of the Lyceum Theatre. And the shrewd actor-manager had inaugurated the custom of giving a reception to his friends on the first night of a new play.

The reception was held on the stage itself after the conclusion of the performance. Very agreeable, and even memorable, functions they were. The stage had been quickly transformed into a palatial hall, made comfortable by a judicious arrangement of curtains and palms, and—as at that advanced period of the night guests were usually in need of sustenance—tables were laid out laden with cold viands in profusion. And there was plenty to drink. Now, the attitude of Morris towards the stage was that of a person who did not accept the existence of the actor as a social fact, and he resented this surely innocent effort on the part of Irving to gratify his friends. It would all have been very well had the new critic kept his opinions on this head to himself. Unfortunately, he gave them to the readers of his journal. He attributed sinister motives to the founder of the feast, and boldly averred that it was an attempt to influence the Press with “chicken and champagne.” The phrase “chicken and champagne” in this connection persisted for a long time—for a much longer time than Mowbray Morris continued in his post. From the beginning of his managerial career it had been Irving’s great aim to consolidate friendly relations with the London and provincial newspapers. And the fearless and unconventional satirist of “chicken and champagne” gave the popular manager of the Lyceum furiously to think.

May I here, in justice to the present policy of the Times in the control of its dramatic columns, acknowledge the fact that the gentleman who at present represents that journal at the theatres more nearly approaches the ideal of what a dramatic critic ought to be than any of the men who were my contemporaries, and that he is head and shoulders above any of his own contemporaries? It is pleasant to be able to say this of any department of a Press which exhibits many of the symptoms of decadence. Mr. Walkley’s attitude regarding stage affairs is nicely calculated. He is beautifully poised. He never condescends to a contemptuous pose. On the other hand, he is never inclined to accept the dramatic art too seriously. He states his opinions with playfulness and not with brutality. He exhibits a fine spirit of detachment. He never insults the professors of the art. On the other hand, he declines to take those gentlemen as seriously as they take themselves. Under all that he writes may be discovered the social philosopher. His essays are scholarly without pedantry, lively without vulgarity, piquant without mordacity, and they always afford the most stimulating “reading.”

My mention above of Henry Pettitt reminds me of another writer of melodrama whom we, of the jocund years, were sometimes called upon to review. This was Paul Merrit. Paul was an enormously fat man with the absolutely hairless face of a boy. He had a high falsetto voice, and his blood-and-thunder dramas were crude, lurid, penny-plain-and-twopence-coloured productions. He had a great facility in plots and situations, and, in respect of these gifts and graces, was called in by Sir Augustus Harris to collaborate in one or two of the autumn melodramas at Drury Lane. Paul was the last man in all Europe to whom would apply the term “literary.” Yet he became a member of one or two literary clubs. On the day on which the death of Thomas Carlyle was announced, some of us were sitting in one of these institutions discussing the passing of the Sage of Chelsea. To us entered Paul Merrit. He wore the drawn and despairing expression of one who had suffered a severe personal bereavement. He had in his hand a journal containing a long obituary notice of Carlyle. Holding it towards us, he said in his high falsetto, shaken by a queer tremolo of emotion:

“Well, gentlemen, another gap in our ranks!”

The notion was too farcical. The claim of Merrit to a fellowship with Carlyle dispelled the cloud that the intelligence of the death of the author of the “Sartor Resartus” had superinduced. And, to the great surprise and disgust of poor Paul, we all burst into an incontrollable roar of laughter. Merrit eventually abandoned writing and took to farming. In that occupation, I understand, he discovered his métier.

I mentioned a little while back that the business of dramatic criticism is conducive of longevity. When I first went professionally to the theatre stalls in 1870, until I gave up that healthy practice in 1890, I saw on first night after first night the same faces. They never appeared to be ill or tired. They never sent substitutes on important premiers. They never appeared to grow any older from year to year.

There was Joseph Knight, for example. He was occupying the critic’s stall long before I ever saw the inside of a London theatre, and he continued to occupy it—with credit to himself, and to the great satisfaction of the performers—for years after my connection with the Press had ceased. He was a fine, burly, broad-shouldered man. Hailed from Yorkshire, I think, and with his bronzed face, brown beard, genial smile, and keen eye, presented more the appearance of a retired officer of the mercantile marine than of a haunter of the auditorium, and a man who usually got up in the afternoon, and came home with the milk in the morning. He had a hearty way with him, and talked in a torrent that seemed to rush over pebbles. “Willie” Wilde used to give a wonderfully realistic imitation of Jo Knight, which the subject overhearing in the foyer of the Avenue Theatre one night gravely resented. But the two men “made it up,” and Knight, indeed, became so friendly with his imitator that on one occasion he asked him to write his weekly article in the Athenæum for him. Willie readily consented; and when the article in due course appeared, it turned out to be a really remarkable travesty of dear Jo’s somewhat turgid and oracular style. The essay gave great delight to those who were in the secret. But Knight never saw the joke—I question whether he ever saw any joke—and expressed to Wilde his gratitude for the admirable manner in which he had filled his place.

Once and only once did I see the “Knight Owl” in a rage. Joseph was a sort of pluralist in dramatico-critical benefices, representing at one time three or four daily and weekly publications. This fact came to the knowledge of the very young critic of a very young weekly paper, who thought that he saw his way to a pungent personal paragraph. The paragraph duly made its appearance, and Knight was severely taken to task because he was in the habit of writing about the same performance in several newspapers. The young critic put it at half a dozen, which was overshooting the mark by at least two. At the very next first night of a new play, Knight and his small accuser were in their stalls before the rising of the curtain. Knight, perceiving his prey from afar off, made toward him and, assuming a very threatening attitude, said:

“What you wrote about me in your infernal paper is—A Lie!”

The youthful criticaster adjusted his monocle, produced a notebook and pencil, and, with the well-bred suavity of a man dying to oblige his accuser, inquired, “How many of it is a—er—lie?” and prepared to take down the correction for use in a future issue. But the torrent of Knight’s speech tumbled unintelligible over the pebbles, and he returned to his own stall snorting defiance.

Moy Thomas was an excellent judge of what a play ought to be, and understood also the sort of treatment best suited to the public for whom he wrote. For many years he wrote the dramatic notices for the Daily News. In those far-off days it had a literary staff, the character of which was not second to that of any morning journal. Thomas’s articles were remarkable for their admirable lucidity, sound judgment, and polished literary style. He also provided the dramatic notices for the Graphic.

“Willie” Wilde, whom I have just mentioned in connection with the burly Joseph Knight, was a determined first-nighter. He was an exceedingly talkative man, and he talked so very well that one did not care to stop his agreeable chatter even when it was inconveniently out of place. One evening I happened to occupy a stall next to that of a then well-known gentleman of the Jewish persuasion who commenced in Fleet Street as an advertising canvasser, and subsequently blossomed into a newspaper proprietor, although the newspaper in question was, to quote the immortal excuse of the wet-nurse in “Mr. Midshipman Easy,” “a very little one.” I imagine he has done well, for the last time I saw him he was lolling back in a victoria, and driving down Portland Place with the air of a man who owned all the houses on both sides. On the occasion to which I allude, he had not as yet arrived at the victoria stage. Indeed, he had been released from gaol that very morning. He had been remanded in custody on a charge of a commercial kind; but being now out on bail, and having none of that supersensitiveness which would characterize a Gentile similarly situated, he celebrated his release by taking his wife to the theatre. Wilde was sitting immediately behind the pair, and next to William Mackay, to whom, as the play proceeded, he indulged in a series of humorous commentaries. Our hero, being very intent on the play—an opera-bouffe—became at last annoyed by the chatter behind him, and, turning round to Mackay, who had not uttered a word, said in a voice audible all over the place:

“I wish, sir, you’d make less noise.”

Mackay, conscious of innocence and deeply resentful, turned to Wilde, and observed audibly, with a touch of malice which was seldom absent from his impromptus:

“Do keep quiet, Willie; you are annoying the occupant of the adjoining cell.”

A London edition of the New York Herald was published in the Strand at the time when this little incident happened, and next morning the critic of that journal, under the head of “An Incident,” tacked the story on to his dramatic notice—names and all. He added the comment: “A word in season, how good it is!”

Wilde and his friend, who were both Irishmen, and had at various periods written the dramatic notices for Vanity Fair, represented the new school of criticism. They took neither themselves nor the dramatic art seriously. Accepting the dictum of their fellow-countryman, Sheridan, as to the purpose of the theatre and the limitations of dramatic art, their articles were irreverent, audacious, a little contemptuous. Vanity Fair encouraged this attitude towards players and playhouses. And, indeed, it was the natural and inevitable result of the seriousness with which the critics of the period were beginning to take both themselves and the theatre. The proprietors of the Daily Telegraph were greatly interested in theatrical affairs. Mr. Edward Lawson, now Lord Burnham, was the son-in-law of Mr. Ben Webster, of the Adelphi Theatre; and that paper led the way in devoting a considerable space to theatrical matters. “Epoch-making” became quite the appropriate phrase to employ regarding any new production which was unusually well received. Clement Scott, the critic of the Daily Telegraph, was an instrument ready to the hand of his employers. His standard of all dramatic work appeared to be the Robertson comedies as staged by the Bancrofts—just as in later years Mr. William Archer found nothing very good after “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray.” That forgotten comedy was Mr. Archer’s “epoch-making play.”

Both Mr. Archer and Clement Scott had served an apprenticeship on the London Figaro, and surely no two members of a staff were ever before so unequally yoked together. Scott was impulsive, always in extremes of heat or cold, and never very particular as to the accuracy of his phrases. Archer was a “dour body,” solid in matter, turgid and dogmatic in manner, and as solemn in statement as a Presbyterian meenister. The atmosphere of seriousness by which Mr. Archer has surrounded himself when dealing with playhouses is, indeed, impenetrable, fuliginous.

Perhaps, all being said and done, the proper attitude of the man retained for this sort of work is neither that of satirical sceptic and scintillating detractor, nor that of fanatical worshipper and solemn commentator. Ernest Bendall, in my time, struck, I think, the golden mean. He was never betrayed into excessive praise or excessive censure. He found nothing in the theatre to make such a demand on the emotions as should call for literary heroics. Yet his judgments were sound, and they carried weight. He was temperate in expression, had a natural facility for hitting on the right word, and he always wrote like a gentleman. Bendall may have had contemporaries who wrote more brilliantly, but none who wrote with a nicer sense of his duty to the public, and with less desire to parade his own idiosyncrasies. A more admirable selection for the office of Censor under the Lord Chamberlain could not have been made.

Nesbit was another of the serious exponents of the art of dramatic criticism. He followed Morris on the Times, but whether he was his immediate successor, or whether some other contributor intervened, I do not recollect. I have never kept a diary, and I have never preserved a letter written to me. And I would embrace this opportunity of advising any young journalist who may happen to read these recollections to make a point of writing up his diary, and of filing letters possessing any literary value. Had I made a practice of diarizing, my present task would be very considerably lightened; and if I had kept my letters from contemporaries, I should by now have had a very fine collection of autographs upon which to draw for the entertainment of my readers. Nesbit wrote well, but he wrote too much. The marvel to me about his work always was, that, accomplishing so tremendous an output, he was able to keep his supply in bulk up to his sample. But Nesbit was dull—and that’s a fact. He and Archer approached the task of reporting a play much in the attitude of a Judge taking his seat to try a man for murder.

But there was a third class of reviewer. He adopted neither the solemn mood affected by Ibsenites and Irvingites, nor the detached and playful attitude of those who perpetuated Sheridan’s sane assignment of the position of the stage. James Davis was a fair representative of this third class. “Jimmy” delighted in setting the mummers by the ears. He attacked without scruple and without mercy. He had all the audacity of the free-lance, with all the love of mischief which characterizes the schoolboy. And yet “Jimmy” was one of the best-natured little fellows in the world. But he revelled in what the Germans call mischief-joy. And when you put a pen into his hand, it ran to libel as surely as the needle turns to the pole. He owned at various times the Cuckoo, originally started by Edmund Yates. He founded the Bat—wherein he fell foul of the whole theatrical hierarchy—and near the end he established a weekly organ called the Phœnix, which lacked somewhat of his old dash and vim. A member of the Jewish community, he was wanting in one of the racial characteristics. He cared nothing for money—as money. He married money, and he made money, and all the time he was flinging money about with both hands. It is strange to remember that, notwithstanding his early and persistent attacks on the stage and its professors, he eventually became a popular writer of musical comedy, and during this period he made thousands of pounds, and was the means of giving employment to hundreds of the performers whom he affected to hate. James was a most cheery companion, a finished gourmet, a lavish and agreeable host, a determined gambler, and a rattling good little chap. He went through several fortunes, died worth nothing, and he was the best bridge-player of his day.

The serene atmosphere in which the critic of plays dwelt was seldom disturbed by storms. Tempest did occur, however, to the intense delight of the newspaper-reading world, and to the great scandal of the more serious supporters of the British drama. Thus, Henry Irving found it advisable to take criminal proceedings against a paper for a perfectly harmless and very humorous skit written by Mr. G. R. Sims. Never, surely, in the history of the theatre was so much cry made over such a contemptible quantity of wool. But we were just beginning to stand on our dignity, you see, and the Lyceum manager stood for all that was respectable and traditional. Never, perhaps, had the suburbs been so moved as on that occasion. And had Mr. Sims been tried by a jury drawn from the fastnesses of Brixton, Clapham, and the Camden Road, he would have had but a short shrift. Happily for all concerned, the matter was amicably settled in court. It ended like a French duel—shots were exchanged, but nobody was hurt.

A more serious forensic encounter took place in the Court of Common Pleas. I had not at that time commenced business on the Press as a regular writer about plays; but I was enormously interested in all that concerned the drama and I attended the trial concerning which I shall say a word or two. The case was called “Fairlie v. Blenkinsop.” It came on for hearing before Mr. Justice Keating in the Court of Common Pleas in Westminster Hall. Fairlie was the lessee and manager of the St. James’s Theatre.

Mr. Fairlie’s manager—“producer” he would be termed in these fastidious days—was Richard Mansell. Mansell was an Irishman whose real name was Maitland, and he had been the first to introduce opera-bouffe. with English words, to a London audience. With very little money, but with unbounded pluck, he took the Lyceum Theatre, and produced “Chilperic” and “Le Petit Faust,” bringing Hervé over from Paris to conduct the orchestra. The thing was a great success, but Dick Mansell had about as much notion of theatrical finance as had his great London predecessor, Dick Sheridan. The money flowed quickly into the treasury, but it flowed out in even greater volume. The system of accounts was lax, and Mansell, who should never have looked back after that successful venture, did nothing but look back for the rest of his life. He died a short time since after a long and painful illness. But to the last he was the hopeful, hearty, handsome Irishman whom I had met for the first time on the day that the disaster at Sedan was reported in the papers.

The management opened their theatre with an opera-bouffe entitled “Vert Vert,” translated from the French by Henry Herman, who afterwards made a reputation for himself as the author of “The Silver King.” The attack made on the opera by Vanity Fair was fierce, scathing, unsparing. The writer was especially nasty about the ladies of the chorus, whom he said could neither act, sing, nor dance, but who, he supposed, were exhibited before the public because “there are some rich young men about town, and several old ones, who devote their time and energies to the discovery and encouragement of dramatic talent in good-looking young women.” That was the gravamen of the charge—that and an allusion to a dance called the “Riperelle.” Serjeant Ballantine was for the plaintiff, and Mr. John Day (afterwards Mr. Justice Day) was for the defendant.

The interest of the occasion centred greatly in the cross-examination of Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, subsequently the representative of King’s Lynn, and the beloved “Tommy” of the House of Commons. Ballantine, of course, could see nothing wrong in anything theatrical, and contrived by maladroit questions to let “Tommy” get in some answers which Day dare not have elicited in chief. In particular he made the mistake of cross-examining him about the “Riperelle.” “It is the cancan in its essential part,” explained Bowles. Ballantine, rushing on his fate, pressed the witness. “Tell us,” he thundered, “in what the indecency of the dance consists.” Stroking his blonde cavalry moustache, and smiling pleasantly, Bowles replied, with great distinctiveness and amid a dead silence: “The ‘Riperelle’ is an illustration by gesture of the act of —” But the conclusion of the sentence is scarcely of a kind to be repeated here. It won the case. The jury found for the defendant without leaving the box. Mr. Fairlie soon after his theatrical experiences resumed his proper name of Philips, read for the Bar, was called, and in 1890 I happened to be with him in settling a case of newspaper libel in which he was engaged for the plaintiff. Mr. F. C. Philips has furthermore made a reputation for himself as a writer of excellent fiction. His “As in a Looking-Glass” has gone through many editions, and is to this day, I understand, “asked for” at Mudie’s.

That sort of criticism, however, is no longer in vogue, which for some reasons, I think, is rather a pity. And one of them is that theatre-goers have ceased to accept dramatic criticisms as being in any way a guide to the theatre. Bad plays are so frequently treated with respectful notices, and the public reading the criticisms have been so frequently deceived, that this department of a newspaper’s literary contents has become negligible. The most frank and most business-like method would be to drop all pretence at criticism, and simply “report” each new play. It will come to that.

A well-known barrister who wrote criticisms on plays was Sir Douglas Straight. He had not then received the honour of knighthood. He was the inseparable companion of Montagu Williams, represented the licensed victuallers in the House of Commons, and wrote his dramatic criticisms in the Sporting Times.

It would be impossible to give a complete list of the dramatic critics who exercised their craft during the couple of decades that comprise my experience of the front of the house. But as a suitable conclusion to this chapter on a gay art I shall endeavour to call up the appearance of the approaches and auditorium of a leading theatre on the production of an important work. In an attempt to visualize the scene, some figures will present themselves that, without this aid to memory, might—to my lasting regret—be overlooked. I shall not attempt to recall any particular play. But I shall select what I shall suppose to be a typical first night at the Lyceum Theatre at the beginning of the eighties. One proceeds along the Strand leisurely and in chastened mood. The tail of the pittites is struggling out of the covered passage that leads to the pit entrance. That passage, by the way, had been nicknamed by a witty policeman the “Cowshed,” in honour of certain elderly ladies who used to pervade that part of the Strand, and who were accustomed to take shelter in this recess. Turning out of the Strand into Wellington Street, one sees the long line of cabs and carriages discharging their occupants between the classic pillars which stand before the Lyceum portico. There are as yet no motors—no taxi-cabs—in this procession. Somehow those panting vehicles would not have harmonized with the sentiments of a Lyceum audience. We cross the threshold. On the right is the box-office, and through the aperture you see the benign and reverend face of Mr. Joseph Hurst, placid, gold-spectacled, serene. The vestibule is spacious, heavily carpeted, and from it an immensely wide flight of steps, covered in soft, thick stair-carpets, leads to the back of the circle. On each side of this stairway stand little boys in Eton suits. They are infant vergers in this temple of art; for Irving has disestablished the female programme-seller—she was perhaps a too frivolous person—and has installed these youths in clean collars and short jackets to conduct the patrons to their seats, and to see each one provided with a bill of the play. The lights are subdued. The arriving visitors do not indulge in the laughter and gay, irresponsible chatter of people entering a house of opera-bouffe. Here is more serious business, be assured. Our voices, as we advance to the foot of the stairs, are subdued, like the lights. The moving crowd has more the aspect of a congregation than of a theatrical audience.

At the top of the stairs stands a tall man in a reddish beard. He is in evening-dress, but wears no decoration of any kind. Yet he is there to receive this distinguished throng. There is a gracious bow to each as he passes, and to some an extended hand and a sedate greeting given in a rich Dublin brogue. For the gentleman in the red beard is Mr Bram Stoker, the business man, chief bottle-holder and Boswell, of the Lyceum manager. Bram is one of your genuine hero-worshippers. He abandoned a big berth under the Dublin Corporation to follow the fortunes of the Chief. He makes much of his hero’s friends on the Press, and does his best to conciliate his detractors. He manages Irving’s finances—as far as the manager will permit their supervision. And he writes the Chief’s after-dinner speeches and his lectures on Shakespeare and the musical glasses. As he smiles on us now, he little foresees what the future holds for Irving and himself. No gloomy anticipations intrude as we pass the well-pleased priest of the vestibule. The Irving regime is for all time, and the “wing of friendship shall never moult a feather.” Alas for the futility of human foresight! Poor Bram has himself now gone to solve the great mystery.

At last we have reached our stalls—you and I—and have time to look about us. The attendant acolyte has provided us with programmes. There is a subdued air of expectancy abroad. Conversation is carried on in decorous accents. There is no laughter. Even the deep bass of Jo Knight is tempered to the occasion. The orchestra files in. Mr. Hamilton Clarke takes his place above the tuneful choir. The popular parts of the house are crammed. The seasoned playgoers who have fought their way through the “Cowshed” to the front row of the pit point out to each other the eminent persons as they proceed to their stalls. They are not always infallible in their identification—these quidnuncs of the pit. Mr. Moy Thomas is confidently pointed out as Sir Garnet Wolseley. “Looks diff’rent in his uniform, don’t he?” observes the lady recipient of the information. I have heard them point out Lennox Browne as the Duke of Argyll, Sir Francis Jeune as Lord Leighton, and Mr. Hume Williams as Mr. Walter of Printing-House Square—a gentleman rarely seen at these functions, and one whose name, one would imagine, would hardly be known to the public of the pit. These illuminating asides were always delivered with the utmost confidence. And upon one such occasion I was overjoyed to hear myself identified and accepted as Cardinal Manning—an ecclesiastic to whom the theatre was anathema, whose priests were forbidden the playhouse, although, strangely enough, they were left free to patronize the music-halls.

On these first nights at the Lyceum the occupants of the stalls and boxes the gathering is representative of various strata of Society. High finance and high philanthropy are there in the person of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who was long and generally supposed to have financed the Lyceum. This has now been officially contradicted by the authorized biography. All I can say is, that the Baroness might have done worse with her money. Sir George Lewis, eyeglass duly adjusted, stands surveying the house and nodding to his many acquaintances. On hearing of the death of Sir George an old friend of his spoke of him as having gone to learn “the great Secret.” “They will find,” said a lady, “that it is no secret from Sir George.” The higher branch of the profession is represented by Sir Edward Clarke, always looking fierce, and always feeling much the reverse, his short, square figure and “Dundreary” whiskers savouring much of the “City” which he loves, and in which he began life. Frank Lockwood, towering, genial, and majestic, does not permit his natural humour to become abated even in this grave gathering. Mr. Watts-Dunton, brisk and beady-eyed, busies himself with his playbill, and makes no pretence of hearing the remarks which Mr. Percy Fitzgerald passes on to him. Clement Scott, self-conscious and upheld by a sense of the importance of the occasion—and of his own—divests himself of his fur coat, and settles himself in his stall, assuming an expression of the deepest melancholy. Edmund Yates—evidently bored by, and sceptical concerning, the pervading air of gravity—discusses mere World-ly matters with his accomplished critic, Dutton Cook. Oscar Wilde, seated beside his pretty wife, preserves the cynical smile which characterizes him. Joseph Hatton—one of Irving’s most devoted literary henchmen—beams, like another Mr. Fezziwig, “one vast, substantial smile.” Knight is accompanied by a lady of great personal attractions—of a classic beauty, one might have said. It is the accomplished pluralist’s daughter. Frank Marshall, of the leonine head, looks as though he were anticipating one of the great moments of his life. And so he is. His admiration of Irving is sincere and whole-hearted. In his view Irving can do no wrong. Charles Dunphy, of the Morning Post, seated next to Howe, of the abhorred Morning Advertiser, takes a mental note of the Society persons who are present, and inquires after the health, I hope, of Howe’s father. For Howe is the son of the veteran actor of that name, now a member of the Irving company, and the son is present to sit in judgment of his parent. It is—to quote a phrase of Labouchere’s, in his speech to the jury in a famous libel case—a reversal of the old Scriptural legend: “Instead of Abraham offering up Isaac, we are presented with the spectacle of Isaac offering up Abraham.”

On these first nights at the Lyceum there are a great many persons present whom one never sees on other occasions or at other theatres. If Bram Stoker had his way, they would not be sitting here and now. Mr. Stoker’s eye is ever on the main chance, and he resents the sort of dead-head out of whom you cannot get even a newspaper paragraph. But Irving has his way in all these matters, and the presence of this unproductive contingent testifies to a trait only too rare both in men and managers. Princely in his hospitalities, generous to a fault, Irving was above all capable of a lasting gratitude. These dead-heads were the recurring evidence of this sentiment. They were those who had been kind to him in early days, those who had faith in him when, as yet, the public had not accepted him. These he never forgot. And it is one of the little circumstances in his career as manager which I like most to remember. For, truth to tell, there are some of them that I would quite willingly forget.

Byron Webber, burly and black-bearded, appears rather restive under the restraint of the Lyceum auditorium. Tom Catling’s genial smile indicates that no amount of exterior depression can affect a spirit tuned to gentle enjoyment wherever two or three of his fellow-creatures are gathered together. Among the others who are constitutionally incapable of assuming the grave expression suitable to the occasion are Bendall the bland; Chance Newton, the Aristarchus cum Autolycus of the stalls; Burnand, beaming beatific—of Punch. . . . But the orchestra has ceased, and the curtain is going up.

One could not but admire Irving. He compelled admiration. But I never could enroll myself among the congregation of his worshippers. He had a magnetic and dominating personality; he was that strange portent—a gentleman of Nature’s own making; he was princely in his dealings; he was an accomplished stage-manager; his ideals were of the highest. But, in my opinion, he was never a great actor. He most nearly approached histrionic genius when cast for a part in which his outstanding mannerisms became utilized as qualities. In parts where they could not be made characteristic of the part, they were excrescences. Thus, I have always held that the actor’s best parts were Digby Grand in “Two Roses,” and Mathias in “The Bells”; and his most deplorable efforts, Othello and Macbeth.

But whatever his shortcomings, he deserved better of his day and generation than to have been made the subject of Mr. Brereton’s “Life.”

CHAPTER VII
THE PASSING OF THE PURITAN SABBATH

In the course of the decades of which I am writing, London became the centre of a silent, gradual, irresistible, and altogether welcome revolution. It witnessed the passing away of the Puritan Sabbath and the evolution of the Rational Sunday. So quietly did the change evolve itself that no man could mark the hour or the year of its completion. But the historian of the passing moment, the working journalist of the period affected, had at all events a unique opportunity of noting the events which led to our gradual emergence from the national gloom generated in these islands more than three centuries ago.

London in the sixties and early seventies was the saddest and most gloomy capital in Europe. In the morning church bells clanged over empty streets. An expression of misery might be read on the faces of the few hurrying pedestrians. A curious silence pervaded the thoroughfares. At the hours for repairing to church or chapel, sad-faced men and women, and demure little hypocrites of boys and girls in stiff Sunday best, made dutiful marches. After church came the awful midday meal of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and apple tart. The afternoon was usually devoted to sleep.

The proletariat as a rule remained in bed until the public-houses opened. Crowds of soddened creatures, suffering yet from the effects of Saturday night’s carousals, clustered round the doors of the gin-palaces, eager to obtain “a hair of the dog that bit them.” When at last the portals did open, a clamorous congregation besieged the bars, and one beheld, perhaps, the origin of the phrase which tells of those who do “a roaring trade.” In the Seven Dials, in Clare Market, across the water in Southwark and Blackfriars, the “pub” proclaimed itself as the most popular institution in all England. It is quite impossible for the younger generation to picture the scenes that were witnessed on Sunday nights just before and just after closing hour at these houses of refreshment. At that time Great Britain might easily have boasted of being the most drunken nation in the world. As the doors of the taverns swung open to admit or to vomit forth a votary, one caught a glimpse of pictures Hogarthian in their stark and shameless debauchery. I can recall even now the gust of hot, pestilent air that issued out, and caught the throat and nose of the passing citizen; the clamorous boom of a hundred excited conversations pierced and punctuated by the shrill declamation and hysterical shriek of women—sometimes suckling their young in the mephitic miasma of a moral hell.

And who can blame them? They had no other resource. Here, at least, they might woo a temporary forgetfulness. By hereditary custom amusement was taboo for ever for them and for their children. So they slept on a Sabbath during the close time for publicans, and then they proceeded in droves to their favourite houses of call, there to make beasts of themselves. The streets of London on Sunday night, when the time arrived for the eviction of the publican’s customers into the night, presented a sad spectacle. In some parts of the Metropolis the scenes enacted were a disgrace to even what small civilization existed in those regions. Brawls, assaults, free fights, licence, “language,” brought to a lurid close the hours of the holy day.

Thus the proletariat. And the more favoured classes—how of them? Well, they were—or such of them as were acquainted with Fellows of the Zoological Society—at liberty to visit the Zoo! By a great many worthy persons even this educational diversion was regarded with extreme disfavour. And I have known a father of a family, a gentleman of position, a person of business aptitudes, and in the ordinary affairs of life accredited with more than his share of common-sense, refuse to permit his daughters to make use of Fellows’ tickets admitting to the Gardens on Sunday. Quite gravely—and quite honestly, I believe—he explained his action on the ground that a visit to the Zoo on Sunday was a breach of the Commandment which adjures us to “keep holy the Sabbath day.” How many fathers would adopt that course to-day? And supposing the paternal prohibition were uttered, how many daughters do you suppose would regard it? The fact that rest may also mean recreation has become an article of the Londoner’s creed. The parks are now provided with excellent bands. The environs of the city are supplied with golf-links. The lawn-tennis courts of the suburbs are used on Sundays by those to whom the Sabbath is, perhaps, the only day in the week on which they can be sure of a game. In the evening there are concerts. The innocent gaiety of Society is catered for at a hundred West End restaurants and hotels. While the bike and the motor have taken roving Londoners farther afield for their well-earned seventh-day cessation from work. The Puritan Sabbath has died the death. The Rational Sunday has come to stay.

And what were the causes—immediate and remote—which have led up to this very important and desirable result? It was not effected by any systematic preaching of a propaganda. Moral and social reforms are not secured in that way. Politicians, keen to observe the tendency of public taste, sometimes attempt to run with it, and then accept the honour of having created it. Perhaps in the whole history of legislation no more delightful instance of this has been afforded than in some of the enactments of the Administration. They brought in a measure of spoliation called a Licensing Bill, and they included in their Finance Bill a crushing tax on spirits. The avowed object of both measures was declared by their authors to be to stamp out the curse of drink. Chadband himself never rose to such heights of hypocrisy, or uttered, with Puritan unction, such atrocious cant. The moment selected by Mr. Asquith and his friends for making Great Britain sober was the moment when it had become patent to the world that Great Britain had grown sober on its own account!

The efforts of the Sunday League must not be omitted in any attempt to assign their places to the influences at work in the emancipation of the English from the slavery of the Puritan Sabbath. The League came forward at what is called “the psychological moment” to supply a demand which the growing intelligence of the people had created. The first great impetus given to the rational observance of a seventh day was given by the general adoption of the bike by the youth of both sexes. This easy, safe, quick, and inexpensive mode of transit gave almost immediate pretext for revolt against the ancient domestic enactments. The call of the long white roads sounded in the ears of the boys and girls. Wider vistas opened up before them. Inaccessible places were brought near. Even the attractions of the Sunday dinner of roast beef no longer allured those who wished to be early afield. The roadster triumphed. The old restrictions were swept away like cobwebs.

Another factor in the silent revolution was the lure of the Thames. This, indeed, began to call to the jaded senses of the overworked Londoner at an earlier date than that of the invitation of the bike. In the early seventies I have sculled from Kingston up to Sunbury Lock on a Sunday afternoon without meeting more than a dozen other craft. And during those same years I have idled between Marlow Bridge and Temple Lock without encountering a skiff on the whole reach. The fatuous fisherman, indeed, attached his unwieldy punt to the ripecks stuck in the river-bed, and invented fish stories while he waited for the infrequent bite. Save for him the upper reaches were deserted. The beauties of the river discovered themselves for him and for the swans.

To-day the Thames has become the River of Pleasure. Music floats from club lawns; every reach from Richmond up to Wargrave is joyous with the laughter from skiffs and punts and launches. The locks, ever filling and emptying, give entrance and egress to as many river craft on this one day as in earlier times passed in the whole three hundred and sixty-five. There is a line of house-boats on nearly every reach, and from beneath their awnings, white or striped or apple green, there come the strumming of the banjo and the pop of the champagne cork. On the lawns sloping from week-end houses to the stream happy groups assemble. The men in flannels, the girls in white and cream-coloured fabrics, make for the tennis-courts or for the flotilla moored to the landing-stage in which the lawn meets the river. Yes; in any attempt to assign the causes which were instrumental in banishing the Puritan Sabbath from London, the Thames must be accorded a place of honour. The Thames first showed the Londoner the way out. And the motor car continued and extended the exodus.

It must not be supposed that the old order was permitted to yield place to new without a word of protest here and there. Among other of the many remonstrants were the Reverend and Right Reverend Fathers in God forming the Upper House of Convocation. The action of this episcopal court brings me to the point at which the Press touches the question, and renders this matter of Sunday observance germane to the general scheme of my book.

Singular as it may appear, the original factor which set the Upper House of Convocation reflecting on the matter was an article by Mr. “Jimmy” Davis in his own paper, the Bat. That a gentleman of the Jewish faith should have succeeded in influencing the episcopal chiefs of the English Christians may, on the first blush of it, appear strange. But it is not more strange than the other fact that some of those very Bishops owed their preferment to a Jewish Prime Minister. The whole incident of Jimmy’s interposition, and its results, make an interesting story, though a long one, I am afraid. At this juncture, then, let me address you, who have followed me thus far, in the words that appear in the middle of the stodgy parts of Carlyle’s “Frederick the Great”: “Courage, reader!”

While freedom was thus making for itself wider boundaries, Jimmy Davis was very much in the movement. And being in the movement, he would naturally take an interest in the Pelican Club, which was the most advanced, unconventional, and at times rowdy, protest that had so far been made against the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy. Although I was a member of the Pelican Club myself, I do not remember whether Davis was. Nor need I take the trouble to make inquiries, as the fact does not affect my narrative. Probably he was not. For the institution was founded by a gentleman who had at one time been in his employ in an inferior capacity. Certainly I never met him on the premises.

The Pelican Club was founded by Mr. Ernest Wells—familiarly known as “Swears-and-Swells.” Its membership was composed chiefly of rapid men-about-town, and its principal functions were given on Sunday nights. These were concerts at which the comic element preponderated, and boxing contests conducted in a properly-appointed ring. Suitable premises were secured in Denman Street, a shy thoroughfare close to Piccadilly Circus. The place had formerly been used as the factory of a carriage-builder. The ground-floor was very spacious and very lofty, and in every way was adapted to its new purposes. There was a gallery above, off which opened card-rooms, bedrooms, and other apartments. A bar was fitted up close to the entrance, and the whole place was soon transformed into an extremely bright and cheery institution. Having secured the premises and decided on the lines on which the institution was to be run, there remained for the enterprising founder the important question of obtaining members.

Mr. Wells called in to his assistance Mr. “Willie” Goldberg. A word or two concerning that remarkable little man may not be out of place. John Corlett and Reggie Brooks were taking a walk one day in the neighbourhood of Maidstone, when they came on the encouraging spectacle of a small man sitting by the roadside, and sniggering over the front page of Corlett’s newspaper. The sight was so agreeable and flattering to the wayfarers that they stopped to inquire into the exact source of the stranger’s mirth. The conversation thus commenced ended in the engagement of the small man on the staff of the Pink ’Un. And it turned out to be one of the best engagements that Corlett ever made. Goldberg was a ’Varsity man, his career at Oxford having been, if not brilliant, at least much more than respectable. When he left the University, he obtained a Government appointment, which, in his own phrase, he “chucked.” When encountered by Corlett on a Kentish highway, he was just idling along. He was a born Bohemian, and he idled along until the day of his death.

Now, when Goldberg joined Corlett’s staff, the paper to which he was called upon to contribute was the favourite periodical literature of what constituted the rapid section of Society. And Goldberg not only catered, in his way, for the literary thirst of men-about-town, but he became personally identified with that contingent out of doors. The “Johnnies,” the “mashers,” the “rowdy-dowdy boys,” the “sports,” of the joyous days made much of him. Indeed, they made so much of him that he went to his grave a good quarter of a century before there was any absolute necessity for making that journey.

Here, then, was the man for Ernest Wells. Goldberg was in a position not only to introduce members, but to “boom” the enterprise in the Press. “Willie” at first showed himself coy. But the offer of a share in the concern proved an irresistible lure. An agreement was drawn up, and the Pelican Club became the joint property of Ernest Wells and William Goldberg. The latter gentleman at once set himself to the task of collecting members. And the collection which he succeeded in making as a nucleus certainly promised something in the way of clubs that the West End had yet seen. There were Major “Bob” Hope Johnstone, “Hughie” Drummond of the Stock Exchange, his brother Archie Drummond of the Scots Guards, Captain Fred Russell, “Billy” Fitzwilliam, the Marquis of Queensberry, “Kim” Mandeville (afterwards Duke of Manchester), Arthur Roberts the comedian, and the brothers Horn—not the boxers of that name, but a couple of rich young men.

From such a start the club naturally grew in numbers, and made for itself exactly the sort of reputation which the proprietors desired. Denman Street became the liveliest comer in the swagger end of London. Boxing contests on a Sunday night hit the imagination of the town. A certain general curiosity was excited. Membership, which was restricted, was eagerly sought. The shekels came rolling in. The Pelican, it was believed, had come to stay.