Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

“ Like most real humorists whom I have known, and I have known many from Mark Twain and Bill Nye downwards, Jerome is not a “funny man” in ordinary life. He is, on the contrary, except when he is on his legs, before an audience, or taking his pen in his hand, apt to be a very serious man, though his conversation is always illuminated by flashes of wit. He is much more apt to air strong opinions about serious questions. The Jerome you see in Paul Kelvin and The Third Floor Back is the real Jerome. He is the loyalest friend and most tender-hearted man imaginable. ”

“ Each mausoleum has a beautiful temple beside the tomb. The presence of so many temples has led the Japanese to exhaust their landscape art on Shiba with lake and cherry-grove and cryptomeria. Such natives as do not go there for religion are attracted by the pleasure city, with its famous tea-houses, like the Maple Club, its shows, and, above all, by its dancing. Here you may see the No-dance, the Kagura-dance, and some of the best Geishas.
But the chief charm of Shiba to me was its absolute Orientalness compared to the rest of Tokyo. ”

“ She had written On the Face of the Waters, one of the finest historical novels in the language; she was a hard and earnest worker in all sorts of movements, and as a fighting speaker there were few to match her. She could make a good set speech, but her set speeches were nothing to the oratory of which she was capable if, when she was totally unprepared, indignation stung her into springing to her feet to denounce the offender. Then her words came as blows come from a man who hits another man because he is incensed beyond endurance. A face full of life and expression added force to her words. ”

“ No one could have expressed the good and the bad in the American character with the same light touch and ruthless penetration. His is just the pen to depict the iron courage and the insight of genius which, with or without chicanery, lead to the amassing of millions—the selfishness, made endurable by grit and personal charm, of the American woman—the brilliant wit and pathetic lack of humour in Americans as a nation—the business side of sport. ”

“ I only had the privilege of knowing him towards the end of his life, when his time and his health were far too precious to be spent on going to at-homes, though he was very kind about having younger authors introduced to him at the parties which Lady Palmer gave in his honour when he was staying with her. Once seen, George Meredith could never be forgotten. You were delighted to find that a man who had created a literature within a literature, the writer who by common acclaim is the greatest of all English novelists, was so rare and impressive in his appearance and speech. ”

“ He told his audience that it came to him in an instant, like all great things in life, which hit on the head like a bullet. He was reading some peculiarly diabolical misrepresentations by the German editors. “Yet these men,” he told himself, “were, in the ordinary affairs of life, honest men. Many books have been written from our standpoint; but, in the first place, a German editor cannot buy a book which costs six shillings or more, and in the second place, he has not got time to read through it. The only thing is to give him free of cost something which he can read in an hour. ”

“ Wrapped up in furs, people so despised the intense cold that there was not one closed sleigh—at Montreal in winter all the cabs were sleighs. By day we sleighed up the mountain for tobogganing and came back in time for tea-parties; by night we sleighed to dances or picnics. The merry jingle of sleigh-bells was never out of one’s ears; and everything was so delightfully simple—it was always beer and not champagne—and every one took an interest in Australia and Colonial poetry. The tea-parties were generally impromptus got up on the telephone. ”

“ Why should it be a paradox for one who loves beauty and harmony, and strives to realise it in his work, but who sees around him a world scrambling for money, glutted with riches at one end of the social scale, and penniless and destitute at the other, while all the time the bounty of Nature and the invention and labour of man provides abundance—but only for those who can exchange the necessary counters, and for those who hold the keys of the means of the maintenance of life? ”

“ If Gissing had not died, and there was no reason why he should have died if he had taken ordinary care of himself—he would only be fifty-six if he were alive now—he would have had a reputation like Barrie or Bernard Shaw by this time, for even during his lifetime people were just beginning to wake up to the extraordinary qualities of his writing. I am not comparing him to either of those two; I only make the comparison because everything pointed to his having popularity. Every now and then some excellent writer achieves popularity. No one knows why. ”

“ The likes and dislikes of the Club Man was one of the matters in which my opinion was dead opposite to Jerome’s. The Club Man and the Man in the Street between them fill the ranks of the average patriotic citizen. It is they who pull the nation through in a crisis, and the City of London leads them. At ordinary times their voice is drowned by the noise of the Radical Party, and the giant Middle-class, to whom all appeals for national safety have to be addressed—the blind Samson sitting chained in the house of his enemies—cannot hear their warnings. ”

“ One of my diametrical divergencies from Jerome is in the love of cats. I cannot respect a cat. To me it is a beast of prey, a sort of middle-class tiger, operating in a small way, but at heart a murderer of the Asiatic jungle. Jerome loves them, and makes dogs of them: he used to fill the Idler with Louis Wain’s human deductions from cats. He has a telephone to their brains. I agree with Lord Roberts, who knows by instinct when there is a cat in the room, though it may be wholly concealed, and cannot enjoy himself until it is removed. ”

“ Florence is Renaissance in architecture, Gothic in feeling. Its inhabitants, native and foreign, live in the past. It was here that I, born with a passion for realising the Middle Ages, acquired the undying desires which have taken me back so often and for such long periods, and have inspired me to write so many books about Italy and Sicily. From the very beginning I plunged into the life of Florence and the study of things Italian with extraordinary zest. ”

“ We were in Rome together at the time that he was writing the Eternal City, and in Egypt together while he was writing The White Prophet.
No one could be in the presence of Hall Caine for five minutes without knowing that he was in the presence of a remarkable man. His resemblance to Shakespeare is extraordinary, not only in the dome-like expanse of his forehead and the Elizabethan slope of his beard, but in the burning eyes and the shape of the eyecups. He looks the genius that he is. ”

“ When you see her in a drawing-room, you think instinctively of Sarah Bernhardt’s great parts, and rightly, because she was Sarah’s understudy in them in Paris before she came to England. If any actor-manager had wanted a leading lady for tragedy, she would have been one of the most famous actresses on our stage to-day, for she had the divine fire. But London does not run to tragedies, except for the glorification of an actor- or actress-manager, so she had to descend to being the villainess of melodramas generally finishing up with suicide in the last act. ”

“ When will people understand that the two sorts of entertainments ought to be kept separate—that the great object of a literary dinner is for one to meet men who write, or the people whom all the newspapers are writing about? You can go to a concert by paying for it; you cannot meet these people by any other means except introduction, and the hour or two after you have done eating at a public dinner is all too short a period for the chance of introduction to the world’s workers. ”

“ You thank whatever gods there be for having made you a writer. The book or the play finished, the artist takes his departure, to dream of fresh triumphs. The shopkeeper—possibly a married shopkeeper with a family—comes into the study, finds the manuscript upon the desk. Then follows the selling, bargaining, advertising. It is a pretty hateful business, even with the help of agents. The book or the play you thought so fine, you thought that every one was bound to like it. Your publisher, your manager, is doubtful. ”

“ There are few old men whom I have met to whom I should so unhesitatingly apply the word majestic. The whole face, with its well-trimmed beard and unexaggerated features, reminded me of the bearded Zeus in the group of the three gods on the frieze of the Parthenon.
He was very gracious also to young authors, though it must have been a severe tax on him to have so many worshippers introduced to him. For George Meredith was not a man like Oliver Wendell Holmes. ”

“ As soon as we had left the mountain heights of Arezzo and Cortona, the Etruscan eyries from which the Romans marched 229down to their red fate on the shores of the lake Trasimene, we learned how hot mid-Italy can be in midsummer. Even on the rock of Perugia, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, you could not walk on the sunny side of the street without an umbrella on account of the risk of sunstroke, and the heat was almost unendurable as we drove across the hills the thirty or forty miles to Todi, a little city which the Gods of the Middle Ages have kept to themselves. ”

“ Wandering through that fair at the Ginza took one into the very heart of Japan: it is held to enable people to settle their debts before New Year’s Day.
Apart from the obituary parks of Shiba and Ueno, Tokyo is not reckoned rich in temples, though it has a few very famous temples in the suburbs, and more than a few within a short excursionary distance. But Shiba and Ueno—and especially the former—present an epitome of Japanese life, art, scenery and history. ”

“ Jerome’s neighbour in those days, Joseph Hatton (than whom there could have been no more striking contrast to him) , was one of his and my dearest friends. There were few men so dear to their friends as Joe Hatton. He had an enormous circle of them in literature, and on the stage, and so won their hearts with his geniality and loyalty that they forgot how eminent he was, and treated him as a brother. But Joe Hatton, in addition to the vast amount of work he did as editor and critic, wrote some of the best novels of his day. ”

“ Another Arctic explorer who often came to see us after he had got back from his three years in the Arctic circle, was Fred Jackson, who conducted the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition. Jackson was a very adventurous man. He had made an expedition across the Great Tundra Desert, and another across Australia, before he went to Franz Josef Land. With his swarthy face, bright dark eyes, and general air of joie de vive, Fred Jackson looks much more like the manager of some great English business concern in the Tropics than an Arctic explorer. Yet he was an Arctic explorer, and a very hardy one. ”

“ His early death was a great loss to literature.
Frank Bullen is one of the most interesting personalities I have met in literature. He is so many-sided in his abilities and his experiences. After being an errand-boy, and everything up to chief officer on a sailing-ship, and a clerk in the meteorological office at Greenwich, he became a writer, an orator and a philanthropist. No one has done more for the men of the Merchant Service, for while he did all that man could for them practically, he enlisted the sympathies of the world for them in his books. ”

“ Adrian Ross, who is a Russian by birth, looks like a Russian with his big, burly form, and fair beard and glasses, when you see him taking the chair at some feast of reason like the Omar Khayyam Club. He is one of the chief Omarians, and might, if he devoted himself to it, write just such a poem as Fitzgerald’s “Rubaiyat” himself, for he has the gift of form, the wit, and the width of knowledge, to draw upon. In the same way, if he had been born early enough, he would have written some of our best ballades and rondeaux. ”

“ Kipling I regard as the genius of the junction of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and England owes an incalculable debt to his patriotism and eloquence. If Doyle is the voice of the literary profession, Kipling is the voice of the country. He speaks for the manhood of England in a crisis. All through the African War a letter or a poem from Kipling was the trumpet voice of national feeling. No poet who has written in English has ever inspired his countrymen like Kipling. ”

“ Some of them remembered too, that he was a Scholar of his College, and got a First. None of them, I am quite sure, knew that he would have been unable to go to Oxford at all, because he had no money to go on, except his scholarship at Wadham, if he had not borrowed the money, and repaid it out of his own earnings after he left the university. Could anything be more magnificent than that the man who holds the record of all Englishmen, and for that matter, that of all recorded men, for achievements in games, should have paid for himself at the university? ”

“ I have no older friend in journalism than Sidney Low. We went to Oxford, I think, on the same day—he was a Scholar of Balliol and I was a Scholar of Trinity—and we certainly knew each other very well there, and have been intimate friends ever since. His ability received early recognition. Before he had left Oxford ten years, he was editor-in-chief of a great London daily, and he has written books which have become standard works, like the Dictionary of English History, which has been through half-a-dozen editions. ”

“ My most intimate artist friend is Réné de l’Hôpital, who, in spite of his name and his descent, speaks not a word of French. De l’Hôpital is one of those happy portrait-painters who can get a likeness; but he is more than that; if he had a literary turn, he could write as good a book as any one on “collecting” economically, for he has a wonderful knowledge of old furniture and its West-end and East-end values. ”