As I began with foreigners I will deal with them before passing on to the many interesting Anglo-Saxons who assembled in those rooms during those twenty years.
August Strindberg, the Scandinavian novelist and dramatist, was to have come to see us when he was in England in the ’nineties. He forwarded an introduction, but did not follow it up owing to the distance of his sojourning place. Before he left Scandinavia, he had asked a friend who was supposed to know all about England for a nice healthy suburb of London, far enough out for the air to be pure. The friend suggested (without, I think, any idea of practical joking) that Gravesend should be the place, and at Gravesend Strindberg remained during the whole of his stay in London, doubtless composing novels or dramas upon London society.
Many well-known Frenchmen naturally came to see us, like Gabriel Nicolet, the artist, and Eustache de Lorey, who had been an attaché of the French Legation in Teheran, and who afterwards collaborated with me in Queer Things about Persia and The Moon of the Fourteenth Night. Since his return from Persia he had become eminent as a composer. He wrote the music of one of the most popular songs in Les Merveilleuses, in addition to being the composer of the opera Betty, which was produced in Brussels, with Mariette Sully in the leading part. Melba herself contemplates appearing in the leading rôle in his second opera, Leila. De Lorey had made some most adventurous expeditions, including one with Pierre Loti in Caucasia, and he was such a brilliant raconteur of his adventures that I asked him why he did not make a book of them. He replied that the travel-book is not the institution in France which it is in England, and that though he spoke English fluently, he could not write a book in English. Finally we decided to collaborate as related in a later chapter.
We had many Asiatic visitors, but no Africans, I think, unless one counts Englishmen who had won their spurs in the dark continent, like Sir Frederick Lugard. Decidedly our most interesting Asiatic visitors were Japanese like Yoshio Markino and Prof. Nakamura. Prof. Nakamura was for three years a pupil of Lafcadio Hearn. He came over to England for the Japanese Exhibition, and remained here a few years, studying educational methods for the Japanese Government.
He said that Lafcadio Hearn would see nothing of his pupils because he was only interested in the Old Japan, and was afraid of introducing modern ideas if he saw much of any Japanese who were not absorbed in the same studies as himself. I remember Bret Harte pleading much the same objection to revisiting California.
Yoshio Markino has been one of our most intimate friends for years. I cannot say in what exact year he first came to 32 Addison Mansions. I know that I first met him through M. H. Spielmann, who wrote to me telling me all about Markino’s powers as a black-and-white artist, and asking me to get my editor friends to give him some work, of which he stood in need. Not until he published A Japanese Artist in London at my suggestion, and with a preface written by me, a few years after, did I know how badly he stood in need of that work; Japanese etiquette prevented him from intruding his private affairs upon a stranger. I was successful in getting him a little illustrating work, and I got him some translating work, better paid, I suspect, than original contributions of men like the late Andrew Lang to the great Dailies. It came about in this wise: I was anxious to include in More Queer Things about Japan, a translation of a Japanese life of Napoleon, which had come into my hands. There were five volumes of it with extremely amusing illustrations. Neither I nor the publishers knew what a small amount of words can make a volume in Japanese. The publisher looked at the volumes and thought that he was making a very shrewd bargain when he offered five pounds a volume as the translator’s fee. Each volume proved to contain about a thousand words, so Markino got five pounds a thousand, when the publisher meant to offer him about five shillings.
After this I lost touch of Markino for a long time, till Miss E. S. Stevens, who had been my secretary, and was then doing work as a literary agent, invited us to meet him at her Club. Very soon after that I was at the annual soirée of the Japan Society with Miss Lorimer and another girl, and my cousin, Sampson Sladen, who was then only third in command of the London Fire Brigade, when we ran across Markino, who remained with us all the evening. He invited myself and the members of our household to the exhibition of the sketches which he had painted to illustrate The Colour of London. From that time forward his visits were very frequent till we left London, and on two separate occasions he went to Italy with us for several months.
It was on the first of these occasions, while we were all staying at 12 Piazza Barberini in Rome, that he showed me a letter which he had written to Messrs. Chatto & Windus about the second of the volumes he illustrated, The Colour of Paris. The letter was as brilliant, as interesting, as amusing, as one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s or Lafcadio Hearn’s. I saw that he was a born writer, and from that time forward did not rest until I had persuaded him to write his first book, A Japanese Artist in London. I got him the contract from the publisher for this book and wrote the preface.
While we were in Paris he brought us an invitation to dinner from the brilliant Parisian who was afterwards our dear friend, poor Yvonne, who died the other day after months of suffering. When we arrived she had a terrible headache, and we had to have our dinner without her, presided over by her niece, a gay and pretty child of thirteen, who made as self-possessed a hostess as any grown-up. We talked a great deal that night over Italy, and a great deal more when Markino came to see us at the little Cité de Retiro, near the Madeleine, and the result was that he decided to do a book on Italy with Miss Olave Potter, he supplying the pictures, and she the letterpress—the book that took form as The Colour of Rome, which Messrs. Chatto & Windus promptly agreed to commission, and of which I shall have more to say elsewhere. That winter and the summer of another year we all spent together in Italy, and the painting of the illustrations for The Colour of Rome led indirectly to Markino’s writing A Japanese Artist in London, and the beginning of his brilliant literary career.
Markino’s writings achieved such an instant popularity with English readers that I feel sure that they will like to know his habits of work, which I had the opportunity of observing during the two long visits he paid with us to Italy. For a painter of architecture and landscape his method is unique. Take, for instance, the story of the illustrations to Miss Olave Potter’s book, The Colour of Rome. First of all, since he was a stranger to Rome, and knew neither its beauty spots nor its most interesting monuments, we took him walks to see all the most illustrable places. He selected from them the number he had promised to paint. Sometimes he took more than one walk to a place before he commenced the study for his picture, but intuition is one of his gifts, and he was seldom long at fault in discovering the best standpoint.