Among the crowd of humorists who honoured Addison Mansions with their presence it is natural to mention first the famous author of Three Men in a Boat. There is no author for whom I feel a greater affection, though, as he once said, “You and I are sure to have a diametrically opposite opinion upon almost any point which may turn up, because we were born the poles apart.” I was at the time his chief and only book critic on To-day. I believe I was called the literary editor, though all the patronage of the position was exercised by himself. It is patronage which constitutes an editor; the sub-editor can perform the duties. I believe also that it was I who suggested the name To-day. At any rate, it was I who helped him to formulate the paper, and for the first year or so it was my duty to do all the book reviews in it, and my duty to receive all the ladies who came to see Jerome about the paper. Of course, they mostly came in search of work or fame: those who wished to be written about were very numerous, and expected to succeed by making what is called the “Glad Eye” at him. He was terribly afraid of the “Glad Eye”; it made him turn hot and cold in swift succession. He was unable to say “no” to a siren, and equally unable to say “yes” when he meant “no.” He was also an intensely domesticated man, entirely devoted to his family, and without the smallest desire for a flirtation. So it fell to my lot to pick up the “Glad Eye,” a very agreeable job, when you have not the power to give yourself away. I had no patronage to bestow upon them. The only thing I could do for them was to write about them if they were sufficiently interesting, which frequently happened in that age of personal journalism. And, if they were quite harmless worshippers, without any ulterior designs, I occasionally induced Jerome to be worshipped for a minute or two. I made many lady friends at this period, especially from the Stage.
Jerome hardly ever answered letters. He used to say, “If you keep a letter for a month, it generally answers itself.” But he did not keep them. He tore them up directly he had glanced at them. He knew at one glance—probably at the signature—if he wanted to read a letter, and, if he did not, he tore it up without reading it. He had a horror of accumulating papers. He sometimes asked me to answer letters, as he had faith in me as a soother. It was never part of my duties to write “yes,” I had to gild “no.” He prefered to word his own acceptances, so as not to say more than he meant. He did not even want me to read the manuscripts. He prefered to read them himself. It did not take him long, because if he did not come across something worth publishing by the second page, he did not read any further. “You must grab your reader at the beginning,” he used to say.
He was a very pleasant man to write reviews for. He believed in generous criticisms. “You can have a page or two pages for your book of the week,” he said, “according to its importance”—he decided that when I chose my book—“but you can only have a page for the rest of the books that come in, so you can’t afford to waste your space on bad books. If you can’t say anything good about them, you obviously can’t afford them any space. You can praise things up as much as you like if you can be convincing about it: don’t be afraid to let yourself go about the book of the week: I am sick of the Spectator and the Athenæum, you never get a full-blooded review out of them, unless it’s to damn something. The more knowledge you can show about the subject of the book you are praising, the better. But above all things, recommend it in the paper just as you would recommend it to a friend: use the same language as you would to a friend: be natural. And, whatever you do, beware of the Club Man. When I read an article or a story, I always ask myself what a Club Man would think of it; and if I know that he would like it, I turn it down: his opinions are dead opposite to the Public’s.”
The likes and dislikes of the Club Man was one of the matters in which my opinion was dead opposite to Jerome’s. The Club Man and the Man in the Street between them fill the ranks of the average patriotic citizen. It is they who pull the nation through in a crisis, and the City of London leads them. At ordinary times their voice is drowned by the noise of the Radical Party, and the giant Middle-class, to whom all appeals for national safety have to be addressed—the blind Samson sitting chained in the house of his enemies—cannot hear their warnings.
In any case, it is so hard for a book to be popular at clubs, where people go to be interested and amused, that if it is popular there, it will be popular anywhere, except with the Nonconformist Conscience.
Jerome had written Three Men in a Boat and The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow before I met him, and was consequently in enjoyment of world-wide fame. He had established in the Idler a monthly which had no equal then as a magazine of fiction, and had a sale of a hundred thousand copies a month, when he started To-day. He started it not only to amuse, but to educate Public Opinion, when it had secured attention by its brightness, for he had very strong views which he was eager to preach.
He was more of a Conservative than a Radical in those days; he had not despaired of the Conservatives, then, though he was baggy about beastly little nationalities. Suffragism had not then begun its March of Unreason, and we were all in favour of giving woman a vote. But I am bound to register the conviction that, if Suffragism had been a burning question then, the paper would have been full of it, and enjoying a circulation of a million, or whatever number the adult women suffragists run to. I can picture Jerome, a man famous for his hospitalities, being reduced to a hunger-strike by the ardour with which he would have espoused the idea. He was always tilting against some abuse, always asking for litigation. And he got it—or I suppose he would be editing a newspaper now, instead of delighting both hemispheres with his plays. I say advisedly “both hemispheres,” because he has a considerable public as a dramatist in America.
One of the first books on which I let myself go, and wrote an absolute appreciation, was that magnificent historical novel of Stanley Weyman’s, A Gentleman of France. Jerome was delighted with the way I handled it.
Seeing Jerome so much in the office led to our being a good deal at each other’s houses. He was living at that time in one of the nice old villas in St. John’s Wood. The chief thing I remember about it was its cattiness and its scrupulous tidiness. When you stay with him in the country, you cannot leave your stick and hat in the hall, handy for running out, as you might at Sandringham or Chatsworth. They are at once arrested, and are very lucky if they get off with a warning from the magistrate.
One of my diametrical divergencies from Jerome is in the love of cats. I cannot respect a cat. To me it is a beast of prey, a sort of middle-class tiger, operating in a small way, but at heart a murderer of the Asiatic jungle. Jerome loves them, and makes dogs of them: he used to fill the Idler with Louis Wain’s human deductions from cats. He has a telephone to their brains. I agree with Lord Roberts, who knows by instinct when there is a cat in the room, though it may be wholly concealed, and cannot enjoy himself until it is removed.