Australian authors in London centre round the Royal Colonial Institute, and the British Australasian, the editor of which, Mr. Chomley, is the secretary of the literary circle at the Royal Colonial Institute, which meets on Thursday nights, and has most interesting papers and discussions.

Both the former librarian (my old friend, J. R. Boosè, who is now the secretary) and the present, P. Evans Lewin, who was for a brief period the chief librarian of South Australia, have kept the track of nearly every book which has been published about Australia or by an Australian, and Australian authors and journalists make a regular club of the Institute when they are in London.

CHAPTER XXI
MY NOVELIST FRIENDS: PART I

By far the greater number of my literary friends have been novelists. I have counted no less than two hundred and seventy male novelists who have visited us at Addison Mansions, and I have no doubt that I have forgotten enough to bring the number up to three hundred.

Of Walter Besant, a short sturdy man, with a bushy brown beard and blue eyes behind spectacles, which could be very merry or very indignant, I have spoken elsewhere. Besant, who pronounced his name with the accent on the second syllable (it is said because people always pronounced the famous theosophist’s name with the accent on the first syllable, though the recollection of its Byzantine etymology may also have guided him), was very outspoken. He could not abide the famous Annie Besant; he considered that she was a millstone about his brother’s neck, and made no bones over saying so. That brother was a master at Cheltenham College when I first went there. But I do not remember if I ever saw Mrs. Besant there, though we saw the masters’ wives as a body in the College Chapel every Sunday morning. Another matter on which he was outspoken was his repulsion for George Eliot—not her works, but her personality. He once said to me that her head reminded him of a horse’s, and on another occasion said that no woman’s face had ever struck him as more sensual.

His own personality was splendid. He was so genial, though such a fighter; he was so splendidly full of energy, so quick to catch on to ideas, so masterful and wide-grasping in carrying them out; so absolutely friendly; such a good enemy, and so astonishingly warm-hearted. I never had a greater personal feeling of respect and affection for any great man than for Besant.

All the world knows how much he effected for authors, and how much he sacrificed for them. He made as large an income as any great novelist of his time, but he might have made much more and lived another twenty years, if he had not slaved for his brother authors.

George Meredith, who succeeded him as head of the literary craft, was never at Addison Mansions, though his daughter came twice with Lady Palmer. 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. His face was singularly beautiful in its old age, surmounted by a fleece of snow-white hair, and illuminated by bright blue eyes, absolutely clear. He was, of course, an excellent talker, and both his voice and his way of using it were strikingly emphatic. 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. A lady whom I introduced to him began, “It must bore you terribly, Dr. Holmes, to have everybody who is introduced to you telling you how they admire your books.”