Sir Henry Rider Haggard I ought to have mentioned long before this, since he has been one of the recognised heads of the novelists’ profession for many years. Haggard had the good fortune for an imaginative man to go out to South Africa when he and the South African question were young. He was on the staff of Sir Theophilus Shepstone, the Official Commissioner in the Transvaal, and actually assisted in hoisting the British Flag over the Republic in 1887. His first book, published in 1882, was about South African politics, but in 1884 he began as a novelist, with Dawn, and in 1886 he achieved world-wide fame with King Solomon’s Mines, one of the finest romances ever written. She came out a year later, and confirmed the success. He has written many other famous novels. For years he was always quoted as the most successful novelist—but that was before the days of “booming,” a practice against which Haggard has steadily set his face. He told his agent that he would not ever write to order, unless he was driven to it—that the bare fact of having signed a contract to produce a given thing by a given time paralysed his pen. Besides writing novels of increasing seriousness, Haggard, like Doyle, has proved himself a patriot, with the deepest sense of his responsibilities as a citizen. He has twice tried to get into Parliament, with a view to legislation for restoring agriculture in England, and he has given his time lavishly, both to the investigation of the agricultural question and to serving on various Commissions, as well as to writing books on various subjects connected with the land. He came back from South Africa and went to live in his native Norfolk many years ago, but in spite of this he has done his duty in attending literary gatherings. His active figure, and close-trimmed beard, give him the cut of a naval officer.
His brother, Major Arthur Haggard, who has seen much service in Africa, and written well-known books, has done patriotic service for his country in another way by organising the Union Jack Club and the Veterans’ Club for soldiers and sailors.
Another visitor to Addison Mansions in latter days was William Romaine Paterson, better known as “Benjamin Swift”—a man of extraordinary ability, whom I should not be surprised to see in a Radical Cabinet. The moment you meet him you are aware that you are in the presence of an intellect of the first rank, and an uncompromising personality. A deep reader and thinker, he has the gift of clear expression and glittering sarcasm. I have seldom heard a more effective speaker. He has already written a number of remarkable novels. He is a born leader, and he looks it, with his commanding figure, his face, of the eagle type, and his burning eye.
I ought to have mentioned Morley Roberts before, because he was a man of whom I saw much in those days. He was often at our at-homes, and nearly always in the Authors’ Club when I went there. He was the greatest personality there in those days—not only as an author whose books every one in the Club admired, long before the public took them at their true value, but for his wide and deep knowledge, and for the adventures he had successfully concluded with his splendid physique. We always felt that Morley Roberts was essentially a man, that the strength of his books was due to the daring life he had led. I have very seldom heard Morley Roberts make a speech, but I have seen him hold a whole room of brilliant men from his easy-chair beside the fire, while he unfolded some curious piece of knowledge with surprising power and interestingness. It was he who said that books of adventure are generally written by sedentary cowards for sedentary cowards.
I met Morley Roberts first at a garden-party given by Rosamund Marriott Watson, the poetess, whose husband I have for many years considered one of the finest novelists of the day. She introduced us to each other because we had both been to Australia, and I rather think that she accused him as well as myself of having wooed the Muse of Poetry (though there was no Muse of Poetry among the immortal nine). After that he came a good many times to our house, though he never was fond of at-homes, and I don’t remember his ever coming back after his long illness. A very strong man, six feet high, or thereabouts, with a commanding face, and flashing dark eyes, he was always one of the most conspicuous figures in the room. He had been a sailor before the mast, a navvy out west, a hand on a ranch, and I don’t know what all in his adventurous youth.
It seems incredible to think that Somerset Maugham, who is barely forty, should have been a long time coming into his own, yet ten years elapsed between the publication of Liza of Lambeth and the production of Lady Frederick, and in the interval he had written those delightful books The Merry-go-Round and The Bishop’s Apron. He came to us with a mutual friend in the year 1897, when he had just written Liza. I remember, when I read it, venturing, as an old reviewer, to prophesy that such a writer must leap into fame forthwith. I was sure of it when I read The Merry-go-Round, but the public did not quite answer to my expectations. I have always heard that Liza of Lambeth was inspired by the gruesome sights and sounds which were his environment when he was at St. Thomas’ Hospital, that he lodged in some street where, from his back windows, he could see the she-hooligans hitting each other with their babies. He is, a rare thing for an author, an admirable dancer.
Another man born in the same year, 1874, who came to his own through plays, and was even longer in doing it, is Edward Knoblauch, the author of Kismet, and joint author of Milestones. Knoblauch, who is an American, born in New York, and educated at Harvard, and his sister, came to us with Lena Ashwell a good many years ago. Knoblauch was Lena’s reader at the Kingsway, and collaborated with the Askews in The Shulamite, in which she created such a splendid character. He had already adapted The Partikler Pet for Cyril Maude. But he was writing plays for years before he had a single one accepted, and it was not until 1911 that he sprang into general fame with Kismet, quickly followed by Milestones.
Louis Napoleon Parker, another old member of the Authors’ Club, is a very old friend of mine. I think it was Adrian Ross who introduced us, when he first came up from Sherborne School, where he was appointed Director of Music upon leaving the Royal Academy of Music. Strangely enough, one who has composed such delightful music is extremely deaf. For many years, of course, he has been one of our leading and most prolific playwrights, and only a short while ago he composed the incidental music for his drama, Drake. Parker, who was born in France, and might almost pass for a Frenchman, has been the translator of some of the most celebrated French plays which have been “Englished” for our stage—Chanticleer, L’Aiglon and Cyrano de Bergerac among them. He has had yet another sphere of activity in producing the series of splendid masques which are associated with his name. He is, indeed, practically the inventor of the masque in its present form, such as the Sherborne pageant, the Warwick pageant and the York pageant.