Twenty years of my life

Introduction

When I wrote Who's Who, sixteen or seventeen years ago, I used to receive shoals of funny letters from people who wanted, or did not want, to be included, and now, when I have not edited the book for more than a dozen years, I still receive letters of criticism on the way in which I conduct it, and usually consign them to limbo. A few months ago, however, I received the subjoined letter, which is so out of the ordinary that I quote it to show what illustrious correspondents I have. I must not attach the author's name, though every grown-up man in the civilised world would be interested to know it.

" Dear Sir,

" Kindly cease to omit my name from your everincreasing list of persons as annually placed before the public for sale at any price it is worth. Just put me down in place of Victoria Alice, who is an American pure and simple, while I am left out in the cold. I am the daughter of

King Edward VII i I am the legal spouse of

Nicholas II, Czar of Russia, being legally married to him in 1890, Aug. 14, a ratification of which occurrence was held by me in hallway of British Embassy, Paris, France, 1900, same date. Just give me a notice, will you, instead of harping on the sisterhood of King George V, who form among themselves a similar affair to that held by female contingent of Synagogue, doing more damage in the community, and eventually in the world, than any one set of people anywhere, with method so secret that even Rabbi is unable to uncover the original design known as main point in England.

" Sincerely,

" Etc., etc.

If I could tell all I know about the interesting people I have met, the book would read like my own Who's Who re-written by Walter Emanuel for publication in Punch. As it is, the book contains a great deal of information about

^ 'riiis portion of the letter could not be printed.

viii INTRODUCTION

celebrities which could never appear in Who''s Who, and all the best anecdotes which I remember about my friends, except those which would turn my friends into enemies, and even some of those I mean to give in this preface, minus the names, to prevent their being lost to posterity.

The twenty years of my life which I here present to readers are the twenty years which I spent at 32, Addison Mansions, Kensington, during which I was in constant intercourse with most of the best -known writers of the generation. The book is therefore largely taken up with personal reminiscences and impressions of them— indeed, not a few of them, such as Conan Doyle, J. K. Jerome, I. Zangwill, H. A. Vachell, Charles Garvice, Eden Phillpotts, Mr. and Mrs. C. N. Williamson, Mrs. Croker, Mrs. Perrin, Madame Albanesi, Compton Mackenzie, and Jeffery Farnol's mentor, wrote specially for this book an account of the circumstances which led to their being authors. For it must be remembered that the majority of authors start life in some other profession, and drift into authorship as they discover their aptitude for it. Conan Doyle was a doctor, in busy practice when he wrote The White Company ; Jerome was a lawyer's clerk when he wrote Three Men in a Boat ; both Hardy and Hall Caine began as architects ; Zangwill was a teacher, and W. W. Jacobs was a clerk in the General Post Office.

An index of the authors of whom personal reminiscences are told in this book will be found at the end.

Its earlier chapters deal with my life prior to our going to Addison Mansions, giving details of my parentage and bringing-up, of the seven years I spent in Australia and the United States, and my long visits to Canada and Japan. From that point forward, except for the four chapters which deal with the writing of my books, the present volume is occupied chiefly with London literary society from 1891 to 1911.

It was in the 'nineties that the late Sir Walter Besant's efforts to bring authors together by the creation of the Authors' Club, and their trade union, the Authors' Society, bore fruit. English writers, who had hitherto been the reverse of gregarious, began to meet each other very often at receptions and clubs.

In those days one made new friends among well-known authors, artists, and theatrical people every day, at places like the Authors', Arts, Vagabonds, Savage, Hogarth and Argonauts' Clubs, the Idler teas, and women's teas at the Pioneer Club, the Writers' Club, and the Women Journalists', and various receptions in Bohemia. It was almost an offence

INTRODUCTION ix

to spend an entire afternoon, or an entire evening, in any other way, and though it made inroads on one's time for work, and time for exercise, it gave one an intimacy, which has lasted, with men and women who have since risen to the head of their professions. That intimacy is reflected in these pages, which show a good deal of the personal side of the literary movement of the 'nineties and the literary club life of the period.

I have endeavoured in this book to interest my readers in two ways— by telling them the circumstances in my bringingup, and my subsequent life, which made me a busy man of letters instead of a lawyer, and by giving them my reminiscences of friends who have won the affection of the public in literature, in art, and on the stage.

As I feel that a great many of my readers will be much more interested in my reminiscences than in my life, I advise them to begin at Chapter VI — or, better still, Chapter VIII — from which point forward, with the exceptions of Chapters XVI-XIX, the book is taken up more with the friends I have had the good fortune to know than with myself.

Before concluding, I will give three or four stories too personal to have names attached to them.

I once heard a Bishop, who in those days was a smug and an Oxford Don, remark to a circle of delighted undergraduates, " My brother Edward thinks I'm an awful fool." As his brother Edward was Captain of the Eton Eleven, and amateur champion of something or other, there is no doubt that his brother Edward did think him an awful fool.

I once heard an author, at the very moment that Robert Louis Stevenson, as we had learnt by telegram that afternoon, was lying in state under the sky at Samoa, awaiting burial, say, replying to the toast of his health at a public dinner, that he had been led to write his most popular book by the perusal of Stevenson's Treasure Island.

" I said to myself," he naively remarked, "that if I could not write a better book than that in six weeks, I would shoot myself."

The same man, when another of his books had been dramatised, and he was called before the curtain on the first night of its production, informed the audience that it was a very good play, and that it would be a great success when it was decently acted. So complacent was he about it that the friend who tried to pull him back behind the curtain by the tails of his dress-coat failed until he had split the coat up to the collar.

X INTRODUCTION

This man has the very best instincts, but he has a genius for poking his finger into people's eyes.

I once knew the brother of a Bishop, who left the Church of England, and went to America to be a Unitarian clergyman, because he wished to marry a pretty American heiress, and he had a wife already in England. By and by his new sect heard of it, and expelled him with conscious or unconscious humour for " conduct incompatible with membership in the Unitarian Church." He hired a hall from the piano company opposite, and nearly the whole congregation moved across the street with him. Except in the matter of monogamy, he was a most Christian man, and his congregation had the highest respect and affection for him and his bigamous wife ; and this in spite of the fact that he constantly alluded to the Trinity as he warmed to his subject in sermons for the edification of Unitarians. If he noticed it, he corrected himself and said Triad. He was one of the most delightful men I ever met, and his influence on his congregation was of the very best.

In the days when I saw so much of actors at our own flat, and went every Sunday night to the O.P., I was once asked to arbitrate in a dispute between an actor-manager and the critic of a great daily, who had exchanged " words " in the theatre. The critic either dreaded the expense of a lawsuit, or had no desire to make money if he could obtain the amende honorable. I heard all they had to say, and then I turned round and said to the great actor, " Did you say that about

Mr. ? " and he replied with an Irishism which I got

accepted as an apology: " I really couldn't say; I'm such a liar that I never know what I have said and what I haven't said."

These are stories to which I could not append the names, but the reader will find as good and better if he turns up the names of S. H. Jeyes, Oscar Wilde and Phil May in the index.

CHAP.

I

V

VI VII VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX

Contents

I GO TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA

BACK TO CANADA AND THE UNITED STATES

LITERARY AT-HOMES AND LITERARY CLUBS

Chapter I

I WAS born on February 5, 1856, in the town-house of my maternal grandfather. My father, a soHcitor by profession, who died in the last days of 1910, at the age of eighty-six, was almost the youngest of the sixteen children of my paternal grandparents, John Baker Sladen, D.L., J. P., of Ripple Court, near Dover, and Etheldred St. Barbe. The name St. Barbe has been freely bestowed on their descendants because the first St. Barbe in this country has the honour of appearing on the Roll of Battle Abbey.

My maternal grandparents were John Wheelton and Mary Wynfield. Mr. Wheelton (I was never able to discover any other person named Wheelton, till I found, among the survivors of the loss of the Titanic, a steward called Wheelton ; truly the name has narrowly escaped extinction), from whom I get my third Christian name, was in business as a shipper on the site of the General Post Office, and was Master of the Cordwainers' Company. He was Sheriff of London in the year of Queen Victoria's marriage. Though he lived at Meopham near Tonbridge, he came from Manchester, and I am, therefore, a Lancashire man on one side of the house. But oddly enough I have never been to Manchester.

Charles Dickens, when he first became a writer, was a frequent guest at his hospitable table, and has immortalised him in one of his books. He was in a way immortalised by taking a leading part in one of the most famous law cases in our history, Stockdale versus Hansard. As Sheriff he had to levy an execution on Hansard, the printer to the House of Commons, who had published in the reports of the debates a libel on Mr. Stockdale. The House declared it a breach of privilege, and sentenced the Sheriff to be imprisoned in the Speaker's house, from which he was shortly afterwards released on the plea of ill-health. But with the City of London as well as the Law Courts against them, the members of the House of Commons determined to avoid future collisions by bringing in a bill to make the reports of the proceedings of Parliament privileged and this duly became law.

I have in my possession an enormous silver epergne, supported by allegorical figures of Justice and others, which the City of London presented to my grandfather in honour of this occasion, with a few survivors of a set of leather firebuckets, embellished with the City arms, which now do duty as waste-paper baskets.

I was baptised in Trinity Church, Paddington, and shortly afterwards my parents went to live at 22, Westbourne Park Terrace, Paddington, continuing there till 1862.

It was in this year that my last sister, Mrs. Young, was born, just before we changed houses. My eldest sister, who inarried the late Rev. Frederick Robert Ellis, only son of Robert Ridge Ellis, of the Court Lodge, Yalding, Kent, and for many years Rector of Much Wenlock, was born in 1850. My second sister, who married Robert Arundel Watkins, eldest surviving son of the Rev. Bernard Watkins, of Treeton, and afterwards of Lawkland Hall, Yorkshire, was born in 1851 ; and my brother, the Rev. St. Barbe Sydenham Sladen, who holds one of the City livings, St. Margaret Patten, was born in 1858.

My father, having become better off by the death of my two grandfathers in 1860 and 1861, bought a ninety-six years' lease of Phillimore Lodge, Campden Hill, which I sold in 1911.

I believe that I never left London till I was four years old, when we all went to stay with my uncle, the Rev. William Springett, who still survives, at Dunkirk Vicarage, near Canterbury. While we were there I first saw and dipped my hands in the sea, which I was destined to traverse so often, at a place called Seasalter, to which we drove from Dunkirk.

From 1862 to 1868, when my mother died, we children generally spent the summer at Brighton, from which my father went away to a moor in Yorkshire for the grouseshooting. As a child, I soon grew tired of Brighton, which seemed so like a seaside suburb of London. I used to think that the sea itself, which had no proper ships on it, was like a very large canal. I longed for real sea, like we had seen at Deal, where we went to stay in my grandmother Sladen's dower-house, shortly after our visit to Dunkirk. There we had seen a full-rigged ship driven on to the beach in front of our house in a gale, and had seen the lifeboat and the Deal luggers putting out to wrecks on the Goodwin Sands, and had seen the largest ships of the day in the Downs. I loved the woods we had rambled in, between Dunkirk and Canterbury, even better still. I never found the ordinary seaside place tolerable till I became enamoured of golf. Without golf these places are marine deserts.

I never tasted the real delights of the country till we went in the later 'sixties to a farmhouse on the edge of the Duke of Rutland's moors above Baslow, in Derbyshire. With that holiday I was simply enchanted. For rocks meant fairyland, as they still do, to me. And there I had, besides rocks, like the Cakes of Bread, the clear, trout-haunted mountain-river Derwent, and romantic mediaeval architecture like Haddon Hall. Besides, we were allowed to run wild on the farm, to sail about the shallow pond in a cattle-trough, to help to make Wensleydale cheeses (this part of Derbyshire arrogates the right to use the name), and to hack the garden about as much as we liked. It was there that I had my first real games of Red Indians and Robinson Crusoe, and there that I had the seeds of my passion for architecture implanted in me.

We drove about a great deal — to the Peak, with its caverns and its queer villages, to the glorious Derbyshire Dales, and to great houses like Chatsworth. Certainly Baslow was my fairy-godmother in authorship, and my literary aspirations were cradled in Derbyshire. My father gave me a good schooling in the beauties of England. We were always taken to see every place of any interest for its scenery, its buildings, or its history, which could be reached in a day by a pair of horses from the house, where we were spending our summer hoHdays. He had the same iiair for guide-books as I have, and taught me how to use them intelligently.

Up till 1864 I was taught by governesses with my elder sisters. There were three of them, Miss Morrison, Miss Bray, and Miss Rose Sara Paley, an American Southerner, whose parents had been ruined by the Civil War. She was a very charming and intelligent woman, and taught my eldest sister to compose in prose and verse. For a long time this sister was the author of our home circle. I was too young to try composition in those days, but seeing my eldest sister do it familiarised me with the idea of it. I also had a music mistress, because it was hoped that playing the piano would restore my left hand to its proper shape, after the extraordinary accident which I had when I was only two years old. She was Miss Rosa Brinsmead, a daughter of the John Brinsmead who founded the famous piano-making firm. The point which I remember best about her was that she had fair ringlets like Princess (now Queen) Alexandra, who had just come over from Denmark and won all hearts.

The accident happened by my falling into the fireplace, when my nurse left me for a minute. To raise myself up I caught hold of the bar of the grate with my left hand, and scorched the inside out. It is still shrivelled, though fifty-five years have passed since that awful day for my mother, when she found her only son, as she thought, crippled for life.

But though it chapped terribly every winter, and would not open properly for the next three or four years, I soon got back the use of my hand, and no one now suspects it of being the least disfigured till I hold it open to show them. The back was uninjured, and it looks a very nice hand by X-rays, when only the bones are visible.

The doctor recommended that, being a child of a very active brain (I asked quite awkward questions about the birth of my brother shortly afterwards), I should be taught to read while I was kept in bed, as the only means of keeping my hand out of danger, and I was given a box of letters which

I always arranged upon the splint of my wounded hand. By the time that it was well I could read, and on my fifth birthday I was given the leather-bound Prayer-book which I had been promised whenever I could read every word in it. I have the Prayer-book still, half a century later.

Poor Miss Brinsmead had a hopeless task, for though I could learn to read so easily, I never could learn to play on the piano with both hands at the same time, except in the very baldest melodies, like " God Save the Queen," and the " Sultan's Polka." These I did achieve.

In 1864 I was sent to a dame's school in Kensington Square, kept by the Misses Newman, from which I was shortly afterwards transferred to another kept by Miss Daymond, an excellent teacher, where I had Johnny and Everett Millais, and sons of other great artists, for my schoolfellows.

In 1866, though it nearly broke my mother's heart, I was sent to my first boarding-school. Temple Grove, East Sheen — in the old house where Dorothy Temple had lived, and Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, the greatest of that illustrious race, was born — the school, moreover, which had numbered Benjamin Disraeli among its pupils. How many people are there who know that Dizzy was schooled in the house in which Palmerston was born — those two great apostles of British prestige?

Here I stayed for three years before I won the first junior scholarship at Cheltenham College, and here, from my house-master, I had a fresh and wonderful department of knowledge opened to me, for he used to take me naturalising (both by day and by night, when the other boys were in bed) on Sheen Common, then wild enough to have snakes and glow-worms and lizards, as well as newts and leeches, and rich in insect prizes. I won this favour because he accidentally discovered that I knew " Mangnall's Questions " and " Common Subjects " by heart. But though he was Divinity Master, he never discovered that I knew my Bible quite as well.

He also taught me to lie. I had never told a lie till I went to Temple Grove. But as he prided himself on his acuteness, he was constitutionally unable to believe the truth. It was too obvious for him. When I found that he invariably thought I was lying while I still obeyed my mother's teaching, and was too afraid of God to tell a lie, I suddenly made up my mind that I would humour him, and tell whatever lie was necessary to this transparent Sherlock Holmes. After this he always believed me, unless I accidentally forgot and told him the truth. And I liked him so much that I wished him to believe me.

He did not injure my character as much as he might have done, because I was born with a loathing for insincerity. The difficulty came when he and Waterfield, the head master, questioned me about the same thing, for Waterfield mesmerised one into telling the truth, and he tempted one to tell a lie. It reminds me now of Titian's " Sacred and Profane Love."

At Temple Grove I acquired my taste for games and taste for natural history.

In 1868, my mother, to whom I was passionately attached, died. I used to dream that she was alive for months afterwards. And the great theosophist to whom I mentioned this sees in it an astral communication. To divert my thoughts from this, the greatest grief I had ever had, I was sent to stay with my cousin, Colonel Joseph Sladen, who had already succeeded to Ripple Court, and was then a Gunner Captain, stationed at Sheerness. He belonged to the Royal Yacht Squadron, and had a schooner yacht in which we used to go away for cruises up the Channel. I was a little boy of twelve, and his two eldest sons, Arthur Sladen, now H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught's Private Secretary in Canada, and Sampson Sladen, now the Chief of the London Fire Brigade, were hardly more than babies, but I enjoyed it very much, because I was interested in the yachting and in the firing of the hundred-pounder Armstrongs, which were the monster guns of those days. We went in my cousin's yacht to see the new ironclad fleets of Great Britain and France, and we went over the Black Prince and the Minotaur, the crack ships of the time.

A year after that, exactly on the first anniversary of my mother's death, I went to Cheltenham College, where I had taken a scholarship. I was at Cheltenham College six years, and took four scholarships and many prizes at the school, the most interesting of which, in view of my after life, was the prize for the English Poem. I was also Senior Prefect, Editor of the school magazine. Captain of Football, and Captain of the Rifle Corps. I shot for the school four times in the Public School competitions at Wimbledon, and in 1874 won the Spencer Cup, which was open to the best shot from each of the Public Schools. I was the school representative for it also in 1873.

At Cheltenham, I suppose, I laid the foundations of my literary career, because, besides editing the school magazine for a couple of years, and writing the Prize Poem, I read every book in the College library. It was such a delight to me to have the run of a well-stocked library. The books at home were nearly all religious books. I was brought up on the sternest low-Church lines ; we went to church twice a day on Sunday, besides having prayers read twice at home, and hymns sung in the afternoon. The church we attended was St. Paul's, Onslow Square, where I had to listen to hour-long sermons from Capel Molyneux and Prebendary Webb- Peploe. The dull and long services were almost intolerable, except when Millais, the great painter, who had the next pew, asked me into his pew to relieve the crush in ours. Millais sat so upright and so forward when he was listening that my father could not see me, and I used to bury my face in the beautiful Mrs. Millais' sealskin jacket; I had such an admiration for her that I did not go to sleep. Millais — he was not Sir John in those days — did not make his children go to church ; I suppose he went because he was fascinated by the eloquence of the sermons. Molyneux, Marston and Peploe were all great preachers, though they bored an unfortunate small boy to the verge of nervous prostration. We were only allowed to read Sunday books on Sunday, and the newspapers were put away, as they were to the day of my father's death in 1910.

After my mother's death I always longed to get back to school, because, though we had to go to chapel every day.

and twice on Sunday, there was not that atmosphere of rehgion which made me, as a small boy, begin to feel unhappy about lunch-time on Saturday, and not thoroughly relieved till after breakfast on Monday. I hated Sunday at home; the two-mile walk to and from church was the best part of it.

I have forgotten two other preparations for a literary career which I perpetrated at Cheltenham. I and my greatest friend, a boy called Walter Roper Lawrence (now Sir W. R. Lawrence, Bart., G.C.I.E.), who afterwards rose to a position of the highest eminence in India, wrote verses for the school magazine, and I published a pamphlet to avenge a contemptuous reference, in the Shotover Papers, and was duly summoned for libel. The late Frederick Stroud, the Recorder of Tewkesbury, who was at that time a solicitor, got me off. I never saw him in after life, which I much regretted, because he was, like myself, a great student of everything connected with Adam Lindsay Gordon, the Australian poet. He died while I was writing our life of Gordon.

At the beginning of 1875 I won an open classical scholarship at Trinity College, Oxford, where I commenced residence in the following October. At Oxford again I read voraciously in the splendid library of the Union.

There my love of games continued unabated. I shot against Cambridge four years, and won all the shooting challenge-cups. I also played in the 'Varsity Rugby Union Football XV when I first went up.

I had delightful old panelled rooms on Number 7 staircase — a chance fact, which won me a great honour and pleasure. One afternoon, when I came in from playing football, the College messenger met me, saying, " Grand company in your rooms this afternoon, Mr. Sladen — the President, and all the Fellows, and Cardinal Nooman," and he added, " When the President looked at your mantelpiece, sir, he cor fed.'' My mantelpiece was strewn with portraits of Maud Branscombe, Eveleen Rayne, Mrs. Rousby, and other theatrical stars of that day — about a couple of dozen of them.

Shortly afterwards the President's butler arrived with a note, which I supposed was to reproach me with the racy appearance of my mantelpiece, but it was to ask me to spend the evening with the President, because Cardinal Newman had expressed a desire to meet the present occupant of his rooms.

The Cardinal, a wan little man with a shrivelled face and a large nose, and one of the most beautiful expressions which ever appeared on a human being, talked to me for a couple of hours, prostrating me with his exquisite modesty. He wanted to know if the snapdragons, to which he had written a poem, still grew on the wall between Trinity and Balliol; he wanted to compare undergraduate life of his day with the undergraduate life of mine ; he asked me about a number of Gothic fragments in Oxford which might have perished between his day and mine, and fortunately, I had already conceived the passion for Gothic architecture which pervades my books, and was able to tell him about every one. He told me the marks by which he knew that those were his rooms ; he asked me about my studies, and hobbies, and aims in life ; I don't think that I have ever felt any honour of the kind so much.

At Oxford I spent every penny I could afford, and more, on collecting a library of standard works, and I have many of them still. I remember that the literary Oxonians of that day discussed poetry much more than prose, and could mostly be classified into admirers of William Morris and admirers of Swinburne, and I think the Morrisians were more numerous. All of them had an academic admiration for Matthew Arnold's poems, and could spout from " Thyrsis " and the " Scholar Gipsy," which was compared with Keat's " Ode to a Nightingale."

Thackeray's daughter (Lady Ritchie) was at that time the latest star in fiction, as I occasionally remind her.

I had the good fortune to know some of the greatest of the authors who lived at Oxford when I was an undergraduate — Max Miiller, Bishop Stubbs the historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, Lewis Carroll, Dean Kitchin, Canon Bright and W. L. Courtney.