Celebrities and I

Preface

With the exception of Balzac and two or three others whom my father came across, all the persons I have written about in this volume I have met. I do not criticise the works of these illustrious people, I simply try to render sincerely the impressions they have made upon me. It is curious that the celebrities I have known in my childhood and early youth are far more living to me than those I meet at present. This may be owing chiefly to my having heard them discussed in after life by my father who was a literary man, and by my mother who had a salon in Paris (my birthplace). She was a brilliant talker, and had the power of making the people she admired stand vividly before me.

When I was still a child, Thackeray’s delightful personality made a far deeper and lasting impression on me than Robert Browning’s, for instance, whom I knew more or less all my life, till his death. Le Comte

Alfred de Vigny (author of Cinq Mars , Chatter ton, etc., etc.), is far more living to me than even Lord Leighton who died a few years ago. The shortness

4 or length of particular recollections set down here has nothing to do with the importance of the subject ;

Vlll

Preface and though now and then I may be a little indiscreet (the public will forgive me, as it generally loves indiscretions), I have invented nothing, and endeavoured to see the best in everyone I have known. I have tried to render directly and simply what I have seen and felt ; and I hope that this volume, more or less a record of my life, will interest and amuse my readers as much as it has interested and amused me to write it.

With the exception of a few chapters nothing has previously appeared. I thank Messrs Macmillan for allowing me to reproduce some reminiscences of celebrities I have known which appeared in Temple Bar, and I am under a similar obligation to the Editors of the Sphere and Tatler as regards a short paper on Ellen Terry, and one on the Brownings at Asolo.

October 1902.

H. C.