CHAPTER III
I GO TO THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA
The only literary at-homes I had been to before I went to America were Edmund Gosse’s in Delamere Terrace, Louise Chandler Moulton’s in Weymouth Street, and W. E. Henley’s in an old house in which he resided at Chiswick.
I have written elsewhere how the Gosses used to receive their friends on Sunday afternoons. Not many came, but those who did come were generally famous in the world of letters.
Mrs. Moulton, on the other hand, often had a crowd at her receptions. It was in her drawing-room that I first met Sir Frederick Wedmore, Mrs. Alexander the novelist, and Coulson Kernahan, and Theodore Watts. She herself was a charming poet, and liked entertaining poets. I met her first at Sir Bruce and Lady Seton’s, at Durham House, which at that time contained the finest collection of modern paintings in London.
THE AUTHOR
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It was fortunate that Henley’s friends were devoted to him, because he was an invalid and could not get about. He was already a great power in journalism. His paper, called at first The Scots Observer, and later on The National Observer, had taken the place of the Saturday Review, which was not at that time conducted with the ability of the old Saturday. The men who gathered round him were very brilliant. I forget what evening of the week it was that he was at home, but whatever evening it was he kept it up very late, with much smoke and consumption of whiskey; and the conversation was always worth listening to. Henley was a magnificent talker, with a fund of curious knowledge, and he had a knack of turning the conversation on to some strange kind of sin or some strange kind of occultism, which was thoroughly threshed out by the clever people present. He rather liked morbid subjects.
Edmund Gosse gave me introductions to H. O. Houghton, head of the publishing firm of Houghton, Mifflin & Co., and he and Henley and Katherine Tynan gave me introductions to various authors. But my most useful introduction I had through my chief American friend of that time, Ada Loftus, who made the London correspondents of the New York Herald and the Boston Globe give full-length announcements of my approaching visit to America—as long as they would give to William Watson now. They labelled me in those announcements the “Australian Poet,” and that label stuck to me during the whole of that visit to the United States. They asked Mrs. Loftus, I suppose, what I had done, and she told them that I had written several volumes of verse about Australia. Be that as it may, those friendly announcements resulted in so many hospitalities being offered to us by American authors and literary clubs that we really did not need our introductions, especially in Boston, where Mrs. Moulton was waiting to welcome us, and where I had old schoolfellows—the Peabodys—connected with most of the leading families.
But I did present the introduction to Mr. Houghton—when does an author neglect an introduction to a publisher?—and he showed us innumerable kindnesses all the time we remained in Boston. It was to him that I owed the invitations from Oliver Wendell Holmes and Whittier, and Longfellow’s family to visit them in their homes—inestimable opportunities. We spent three months in Boston, seeing all the best of Boston literary society and the University bigwigs at Harvard, and then we went for a month to New York until it was time for the ice-carnival season at Montreal. At New York, with Edmund Clarence Stedman, the first of American critics, as a godfather, the hospitalities of Boston were repeated to us. But this was not our principal visit to New York.
Our first trip to Canada was intensely interesting to us, because there we were in a new world, where the temperature was below zero, and the snow several feet high in the streets, and the ice several feet thick on the great river, up which ocean liners come from spring to autumn. The ice-palace was already built, and rose like a mediæval castle of alabaster; in the centre of the city the habitants were selling their milk in frozen lumps in the market; all the world wore furs, for the poorest could buy a skin of some sort made up somehow. There were still buffalo-skin coats in those days in plenty, at three pounds apiece, and those who could not afford a fur cap to their liking, wore a woollen tobogganing tuque, which could be drawn down over the forehead and the ears, just as some of the younger women and the children wore their blanket tobogganing coats.