An index of the authors of whom personal reminiscences are told in this book will be found at the end.
Its earlier chapters deal with my life prior to our going to Addison Mansions, giving details of my parentage and bringing-up, of the seven years I spent in Australia and the United States, and my long visits to Canada and Japan. From that point forward, except for the four chapters which deal with the writing of my books, the present volume is occupied chiefly with London literary society from 1891 to 1911.
It was in the ’nineties that the late Sir Walter Besant’s efforts to bring authors together by the creation of the Authors’ Club, and their trade union, the Authors’ Society, bore fruit. English writers, who had hitherto been the reverse of gregarious, began to meet each other very often at receptions and clubs.
In those days one made new friends among well-known authors, artists, and theatrical people every day, at places like the Authors’, Arts, Vagabonds, Savage, Hogarth and Argonauts’ Clubs, the Idler teas, and women’s teas at the Pioneer Club, the Writers’ Club, and the Women Journalists’, and various receptions in Bohemia. It was almost an offence to spend an entire afternoon, or an entire evening, in any other way, and though it made inroads on one’s time for work, and time for exercise, it gave one an intimacy, which has lasted, with men and women who have since risen to the head of their professions. That intimacy is reflected in these pages, which show a good deal of the personal side of the literary movement of the ’nineties and the literary club life of the period.
I have endeavoured in this book to interest my readers in two ways—by telling them the circumstances in my bringing-up, and my subsequent life, which made me a busy man of letters instead of a lawyer, and by giving them my reminiscences of friends who have won the affection of the public in literature, in art, and on the stage.
As I feel that a great many of my readers will be much more interested in my reminiscences than in my life, I advise them to begin at Chapter VI—or, better still, Chapter VIII—from which point forward, with the exceptions of Chapters XVI-XIX, the book is taken up more with the friends I have had the good fortune to know than with myself.
Before concluding, I will give three or four stories too personal to have names attached to them.
I once heard a Bishop, who in those days was a smug and an Oxford Don, remark to a circle of delighted undergraduates, “My brother Edward thinks I’m an awful fool.” As his brother Edward was Captain of the Eton Eleven, and amateur champion of something or other, there is no doubt that his brother Edward did think him an awful fool.
I once heard an author, at the very moment that Robert Louis Stevenson, as we had learnt by telegram that afternoon, was lying in state under the sky at Samoa, awaiting burial, say, replying to the toast of his health at a public dinner, that he had been led to write his most popular book by the perusal of Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
“I said to myself,” he naïvely remarked, “that if I could not write a better book than that in six weeks, I would shoot myself.”