Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

With Pett Ridge, it is natural to mention W. W. Jacobs, our best sea humorist. People used to be surprised that the small, slight, youthful-looking man, who was known to them as a clerk in the General Post Office, should be the delineator of those inimitable captains and bo’suns and hands before the mast of little sailing-craft which ply round our coasts. He was one of the men to whom the members of the general public, who strayed to literary dinners, were most anxious to be introduced. Their admiration made him shy, and it was a long time before he grew accustomed to do himself justice in his public speeches, for he is one of our most genuine humorists. He owed his unique knowledge of coasting-craft and their navigators to the fact that his father owned a wharf on the Thames, and that it was one of his chief pleasures as a boy to go down to the wharf and make friends with the sea-dogs. After his marriage he went to live in Essex, but, as a bachelor living in London, he was a very familiar figure at our at-homes. To those who frequented literary gatherings in the days of which I am speaking, it is natural to think of H. G. Wells with Pett Ridge and Jacobs, but Wells was much less seen at these gatherings, because he lived out of town at Worcester Park. He was already married when I made his acquaintance, and had got through the first marvellous part of his career, on which he draws for so many of his books.

He and his wife found a great difficulty in coming to our at-homes, because they were such very late-at-night affairs. Once they stayed with us, sleeping at the Temperance Hotel round the corner, called rather inappropriately the “London and Scottish,” because all our bedrooms were turned into sitting-rooms for the night. The pair of them looked ridiculously young. Wells was very boyish in those days; he was slight in figure and youthful in face, with thick, rebellious, fairish hair, and a charmingly impulsive manner. It seems odd to think now that then he suffered from such very bad health that he was not expected to live long. Those were the days in which he used to write about flying men and scientific millennia, most brilliant books which told the British public that a genius had dropped from heaven, whose crumbs were picked up by Mr. John Lane. Wells became a Vagabond at a very early date, but he disliked making speeches, and, in point of fact, hardly ever did make one in his early days, so his wonderful literary gift was not recognised so quickly as it would have been if he had been constantly making speeches before literary clubs and other large audiences.

A feature of Wells’ writing is his marvellous versatility. He will make a hit on entirely fresh lines, indulge the public with a few other books on these lines, and then, before they have time to tire of them, break out in another fresh vein. It is hard to believe that the same man wrote Select Conversations with an Uncle and Marriage, though it is true that seventeen years elapsed between their publication, and there were many changes of style between the two. In those days he was only a brilliant novelist; now we recognise in him a profound thinker, a solver of social problems, even if we ourselves are Conservatives.

In the New Machiavelli and Marriage there is intuition in every page and almost every line. You can read them with sheer delight for the writing alone; they do not depend on the story, however excellent.

Another humorist who was a constant visitor was Max O’Rell—the genial and irascible Frenchman who, as Paul Blouet, the name to which he was born, was principal French master at St. Paul’s School. Max O’Rell lived in a house with a garden at St. John’s Wood. We were very fond of him and his pretty wife, and much shocked when the two blows fell so quickly upon one another. Max O’Rell fought for France against the Germans, and he always looked a fighting man, with his strong figure and belligerent moustache. He was a fine fencer, and had, I am sure, fought duels in his time; with his temperament he could not have kept out of them; he was up in arms in a moment. I remember how fiercely he turned upon Norma Lorimer for using the expression, “The British Channel.”

“Why British?” he asked.

But he was quite floored by the repartee, “Because of the weather.”

Max O’Rell was always quick at repartee himself—except in America. Of America and Americans he always spoke in public with his tongue in his cheek, but in private he was “screamingly funny” about them. He should certainly have left a posthumous volume of unpalatable truths about America. It would not have hurt him in the Great Beyond, and it would have convulsed the English-speaking world. He must often have felt in America as he felt at Napier, New Zealand, where the audience at the Mechanics’ Institute, or some such place, would have none of him.

“I am good enough for London and Paris,” he said, speaking to me about it afterwards; “I am good enough for New York, Boston and Chicago; I am good enough for Melbourne and Sydney. But I am not good enough for Napier, New Zealand—Napier, with its five thousand inhabitants, etc., etc.”

He had the same staccato style in his lectures and after-dinner speeches as he had in his John Bull and His Island and his other famous books, and he easily drifted into it in his conversations.