Henry Harland, who justly made such a prodigious hit with that exquisite book, The Cardinal’s Snuff-box, I knew well in America. Stedman introduced us at one of his at-homes. He wrote then under the pseudonym of “Sidney Luska,” and was best known for some big action he had had with some firm of publishers in New York, the American Cassells, I think. He was a very opinionated man, and I did not at the time believe that he would ever write so fine a book as The Cardinal’s Snuff-box, which breathes the very air of Italy, and is the most exquisite idyll of Italian life which we have in the language. But it is only just to him to say that Stedman, in introducing him, spoke of him in terms which should have made me believe this. He was born in St. Petersburg, and looked rather like a Russian. He would have been fifty-two if he had been alive. Lane always believed in him, and made him editor of the Yellow Book. He and his pretty little wife had a flat in Cromwell Road, and were popular in the “precious” section of literary society. 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. A small, dark man, with very bright eyes, and a sympathetic manner, except when he is moved to indignation, he was born to dominate great audiences, especially when he is telling them of wrongs which need practical redress. The wonders of the Lord which he saw when he went down to the sea in ships, made such a profound impression on his imagination that they fill the pages of his books with eloquence and knowledge. With the exception of Joseph Conrad, he has no rival among living writers as a sea-novelist. I think I met him at the Idler first. I know that we became friends from the first day.
Dion Clayton Calthrop, that prince of light novelists, who is always finding fame by some new stroke of genius, was our neighbour for several years at Addison Mansions. He is such a distinguished-looking man that I used to watch him and wonder who he was, until one night I met him through a mutual friend. It is not surprising that he is so brilliant, because he is the son of John Clayton, the actor, and grandson of Dion Boucicault.
When I asked Calthrop, who started as an artist, what made him take up writing, he said—
“I really took up writing owing to a bout of insomnia when I was living in Paris, and as I was painting in the schools all day, I tried to write at night. I read the sketches to Norman Angell, a friend of mine (who wrote The Great Illusion), and through him met Manuel, the artist, and through him they were published in The Butterfly.
“I believe in many irons in the fire; people specialise too much, so I have books, plays, dress designs, or scene models, and a picture or two, all going at once, and it is a great cause for regret to me that I cannot write music. In the great days of Art, artists were so interested in life that they tried everything—why shouldn’t we? I even have a rock-garden full of Alpine flowers on my writing desk—true, it is only four feet by one—but it is very interesting to see flowers grow as you work. As a matter of fact, I am writing against an Alpine crocus, trying to finish a book as it comes into bloom.”
Desmond Coke, one of the most brilliant of our younger novelists, I met in 1904 through his mother, Mrs. Talbot Coke, who had been my colleague on the Queen, the wife of one of our generals in the Boer War. Mrs. Talbot Coke was at the time—as she is still—one of the principal contributors to Hearth and Home, a paper which served as a literary cradle to Robert Hichens, whilst it was sub-edited by no less a personage than Arnold Bennett, who was just beginning to write his series of great novels about the pottery towns.
Desmond Coke, who, under the pseudonym of “Charbon,” wrote the reviews in a lively strain, possibly sometimes more welcome to his readers than to the novelist reviewed, was at the time I speak of fresh from Oxford, which he had made his own in fiction with that delirious skit on feminine fiction, Sandford of Merton. Since then he has written a number of novels, distinguished for their original ideas. He has long been a keen collector, as his chambers in a backwater off Oxford Street show, and has of late turned his collecting to good account by writing the classic on The Art of Silhouette. He is very accomplished, and is one of the chief pillars of Chapman & Hall’s publishing house. The announcement, however, that Mr. H. B. Irving has secured his three-act play, One Hour of Life, proves that here is yet another novelist who, given the opportunity, would gladly exchange the quiet covers of Bookland for the more adventurous and hectic boards of Theatredom!
E. H. Cooper was a very dear friend of mine, who came near being one of the conspicuous figures of his time. He had a short life and a merry one—merry, at all events, for his friends. He was, perhaps, too cynical ever to be quite merry himself, except with children. His father was a Staffordshire country gentleman, with an estate adjoining the Duke of Sutherland’s, and the Duchess and her children and her nephews and nieces were much attached to that wayward genius. While he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, he contracted the taste for gambling on horse-races, which kept him a poor man, but enabled him to write one of the best racing novels of the language—Mr. Blake of Newmarket. That did not prevent him from writing delightful children’s books, inspired by the Duchess’s children. He was a very handsome and romantic-looking man, with wonderful iron-grey eyes, but, like Byron, was born lame. For a brief time he edited the Daily Mail, as a locum tenens, I believe, and for a long time he was Paris correspondent of the New York World. Once, during that period, he made a big coup at Chantilly, and for some days pressed me with letters and telegrams to go and stay with him for a week at Paris and “paint the town absolutely red” at his expense. We were to stay at the Ritz. He said he was going to be really rich for a week, and it would supply me with the material for a whole novel. But if he was determined to waste his one stroke of luck, I was not going to be a party to it, and I not only refused, but did my utmost to wean him from the idea—unsuccessfully, I think. If Cooper had really given his mind to novel-writing and journalism, he might have made a great name, for he was brilliantly clever, and his distinction of manner made him an impressive figure in society.
We were drawing near the end of our time at Addison Mansions when I met Jeffery Farnol. Farnol, who is still young, is as likely as any one to rank among the foremost novelists of his time. His Broad Highway is one of the best books produced by the generation, and The Amateur Gentleman was a good successor to it. He is an Englishman born, but lived some time in America, where he made his living as a scene-painter. There he wrote his great novel, and after disappointments in searching for a publisher he sent it to Shirley Byron Jevons, at that time editor of the Sportsman, a relative of the celebrated Professor Stanley Jevons, the Political Economist, and brother of Dr. Frank Jevons, Vice-Chancellor of Durham University, he himself being now connected with literary journalism. Shirley Jevons at once recognised it as something like a work of genius, and taking it to the old firm of Sampson Low, Marston & Co., Ltd., told them that they must publish it. It made its way a little slowly at first, but then the public, led by the strong convictions of one man, swept him on to fame on an irresistible tide. Farnol was born in Birmingham thirty-five years ago. His parents came to London when he was seven, and he has made a suburb of it, Lee, in Kent, his permanent home, though business may take him to the United States for months at a time.