W. D. Howells only came once to see us at Addison Mansions, but I saw more of him when I was living in New York, when he used to come in at tea-time to that little hall-room we had for a sitting-room in that boarding-house in West Forty-second Street. It gave me pleasure to see him under my own roof, because I remembered how eagerly I bought and read his novels when I was at Oxford, and David Douglas was bringing out A Chance Acquaintance, Their Wedding Journey, and so on, in the dainty little shilling paper volumes which were the fortunate precursors of the modern sevenpenny. Howells was rather a stout, bull-necked man, very capable-looking, and in those days had a thick mop of grey hair. In after years we knew his Italian books, written while he was a Consul in Italy, almost by heart. They are photographic in their fidelity.
George W. Cable was another American who came to the flat but once. Like Howells, he seldom honoured England with a visit. His books, and John Burroughs’, too, I first knew in the little David Douglas Library, and I well remember reading his Old Creole Days all night, because I was so fascinated with it.
I was staying at the house of my sister’s father-in-law, the Court Lodge at Yalding, at the time, and the month was June—I had just come down from Oxford. At some impossibly early hour—midnight seemed only just to have slipped past—the dawn streamed in, and made me blow my candle out, and the birds began their comment on the peach garden. Five-and-thirty or forty years have passed since then, but the delight of Cable’s poetical touch remains still in my memory. Cable always rather reminded me of Hardy, though being a Southerner from New Orleans he is darker skinned. When he wrote Old Creole Days, he was the idol of the South, but later, when he took up the colour question on the other side, he would have been torn to pieces by the mob of New Orleans if they had got hold of him, so he took up his residence in Massachusetts.
I always slept in the haunted room in that house, a very old house, with a kitchen and vaulted cellars going back to the time of Edward III. It contained a very large cupboard, between the old-fashioned chimney-piece and the window, in which somebody is supposed to have been bludgeoned to death, the corpse afterwards being dragged across the floor, and when the window had been thrown up with a bang, flung on the flags below. At one particular season of the year, the noises which indicate this procedure plainly have been heard by various people. I have forgotten when it happened, but it must have been a very long time ago, for everything to have been done so openly.
I have slept in that room repeatedly, alone, and never heard the noises or thought about it being haunted, but I should not like to sleep in the kitchen, for it was only separated by a moth-eaten sort of door from the wickedest-looking cellars I ever remember, which, unless something has been done to them since then, lose themselves in pitch-dark spaces.
Another author, whose delightful essays on nature used to be brought out in those dear little volumes of David Douglas’s, and whom I read with even more enthusiasm in those days, was John Burroughs, whom I visited in his home at West Park, on a broad reach of the Hudson. He told me that he wrote most of those essays when he was a clerk in the Treasury at Washington, where his duties were to sit opposite the safes, and see that no improper person had access to them. I have forgotten what safes, but I suppose they were those which contained the United States gold reserve. He used to project the scenes in Wake Robin and Pepacton on the blank doors of the safes in his mind, as the cinema projects dissolving views on the lecturer’s sheet. The sedentariness of this pursuit gave him acute indigestion, and he was advised that nothing but manual labour and a vegetable diet would cure it. When I was with him, I think he lived entirely on asparagus, lentils and onions. He could eat about three pounds of asparagus at a sitting, as I suppose other people could if they weren’t going to have any meat or pudding. He told me one thing which filled my soul with joy. As manual labour was part of the cure, he started a vineyard, in a position chosen with great care, on a steep sloping bank of the Hudson facing due south. His grapes ripened here three or four weeks before any one else’s, with the result that he got a hundred pounds a ton for them instead of four pounds. Bravo, literature!
Henry James, in virtue of his long sojourn among us, belongs to England almost as much as he does to America. He still lives in London in the winter, but in the warm part of the year he retires to a delightful Georgian house on the crest of the hill at Rye, one of the most old-world places in England. Henry James’s house and garden are exactly what you would choose for him—the most refined and dignified and subtle novelist in the language. The house is called “Lamb’s House,” but it has nothing to do with Charles Lamb, though it is exactly the house which he would have chosen, when fortune came to him. All the garden is adorable, but especially the Dutch court behind the house, and the kitchen-garden, surrounded by the most ancient cottages in Rye, with roofs red and chimneys bewitched. Between the garden and the kitchen-garden is a red-brick Georgian pavilion, facing the top of the street, as the Tempietto faces the long sloping lane which leads up to the Sculpture Gallery of the Vatican, and it is not less beautiful than the Tempietto.
Everything is appropriate; the novelist even bought the cottages at the back of the kitchen-garden, to prevent them being rebuilt, and thus ensured the permanence of a perfect setting. He has a singularly noble head and face, the type one would like to imagine for a Cicero.
Richard Whiteing, who leapt into fame at a comparatively late age, with No. 5, John Street, after having been one of the most important newspaper writers in England for many years, is another man whom you would pick out in any crowd for his splendid head.
Sir Gilbert Parker, who was a regular habitué of our at-homes before he went into Parliament and became such an overworked man, was in those days a slim, black-bearded Colonial, with noticeable blue eyes. He was born in Canada, the son of a British officer stationed out there, and knew Australia as well as Canada—in fact, I met him because we had both been in Australia. He was at that time a busy journalist and in the first flush of his success as a novelist, and no one could have deserved it better, for his novels had the historical fidelity and felicity of Francis Parkman, in addition to their graceful and romantic style. In spite of the solid work he has done in politics, he will be remembered as an author more than as a politician, though now we clap him on the back for the splendid spade-work he does for the Conservative Party. As a writer he fires the imagination, like the bugles in his famous story.