Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

At Rome, for instance, where I very often had lunch with him in his flat at Trinità del Monte, overlooking the city, and went for walks with him, he was very full of the Vatican, where he constantly went to see certain cardinals, who were most indiscreet in their confidences.

He was intimate with the Italian Government, too. I met various members of the Cabinet at his table, and one of them, Ferraris, then Postmaster-General, as well as editor of the Antologia Nuova, has done me many acts of friendship since.

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. I can see him now as he so often came to our house, a rather small man with a brown beard, a lift of the chin, a ready smile, and such very bright sympathetic brown eyes. He used to bring his pretty little daughter with him before she was grown up. How proud he was of her first successes on the stage, and the fairy-book she wrote! He had a house with a very nice garden in St. John’s Wood, where he gave parties at which one met all the leading actors and actresses of the day. They could always spare time for a reception at Hatton’s, as actors always stopped for a word with him at the Garrick Club on Saturday nights.

Of Doyle, Kipling and Barrie, Anthony Hope and Frankfort Moore, I have spoken in another chapter.

Stanley Weyman was such a rare visitor to London that he was not often at our house. But I have corresponded with him a good deal. I knew when I made A Gentleman of France my book of the week in To-day, and hailed the author as an historical novelist of the first rank, on what a solid basis his work rested, for we were at Oxford at the same time, and he took his First in History almost in the same term as I took mine. He is a very fair man, with an eyeglass, much more like a soldier than an author.

Poor Crockett, a big tall man, with a fair beard, the type of the Saxons who fought against the Conqueror at Hastings, was not very often in London, but when he was there, he was a conspicuous figure at our at-homes. We had many tastes in common, including Italy. Crockett asked my advice when the question arose of his giving up the ministry. He was at that time Free Church minister of Penicuik, a little place in Midlothian, with a salary, as far as I remember, of a hundred or two a year, but as an author was making a thousand or two a year, and able to earn a good deal more if he could save the time which he had to devote to his clerical work. His congregation were aghast at the idea of losing their beloved minister just as he had sprung into Anglo-Saxon fame, and, with Scottish casuistry, represented to him that it would be wrong for him to neglect the work of the Lord for any worldly object. Crockett thought, and I agreed with him, and decided him, that he would be more certain of doing good if he allowed some man to whom the minister’s stipend was necessary to be minister of Penicuik, while he did his teaching and his preaching with his pen.

F. W. Robinson’s short, thick-set figure, and heavy moustache, were as conspicuous. It is strange how soon poor Robinson has been forgotten. His work was popular with readers, and treated with respect by critics, and he was one of the bigwigs at literary clubs and receptions, but with his death all memory of him seemed to pass away, except among his old friends.

G. A. Henty, on the other hand, though he has been dead for years now, seems to stand before us still, with his great beard, his great pipe, his great body, and his breezy personality. Henty loved clubs and literary gatherings. The Savage was his particular stronghold, when he had said good-bye to war-correspondenting in distant lands. He was the typical chairman there, with his Father Christmas beard, and his volumes of smoke, and his bluff personality. He had been as popular among his fellow-correspondents. Was it not Henty who lost his only pair of boots, when the British army marched into some capital (I think it was King Theodore’s in Abyssinia), and took his place in the triumph in carpet slippers, riding on a pony?

Henty’s work as a war-correspondent gave him the copy for those wonderful books which made him the boys’ Dumas. He was a great personality, and, as I saw, on the only two occasions when I ran across him in a crisis, a born ruler of men.

He often came across from his house on Clapham Common to our at-homes, and looked like a strayed Viking, or a master-mariner, among the other authors and authoresses. Sailing was his hobby.