Twenty Years of My Life

by Douglas Brooke Wheelton Sladen

As Mr. Spooner was nephew of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the insult was of a peculiarly aggravating nature, and he ploughed him then and there. As my name also came low down in the alphabet, I was a witness of the whole performance.

Herbert Trench, the poet, who, when he became a theatrical manager, discovered the “Blue Bird,” often came, a very handsome Irishman of the blue-eyed and black-haired type. I met him when he and I were fellow members of the House Committee which discussed the poorness of the dinners at the old Authors’ Club.

Frederick Langbridge, the charming poet, who was joint author of Martin Harvey’s evergreen “Only Way,” only came once or twice, because, like Dean Swift, he was exiled by an Irish preferment. He is Rector of Limerick.

Wilde once brought a friend with him, whose name was Barlass. He wrote poetry which Wilde admired, though it had no market, and claimed to be a descendant of the Katherine Douglas who barred the door with her arm when the bolt had been stolen, to save King James III of Scotland from his murderers, and was nicknamed Katherine Barlass. I have a volume of his poems still, but the thing I remember best about him was an episode which happened when we were both at Wilde’s house in Tite Street one day. Upstairs in the drawing-room he had asked Wilde, “What do you think of George Meredith’s novels?”

Wilde, having nothing effective to say at the moment, appeared not to hear him. But as he was going out of the front door, he said, “George Meredith is a sort of prose Browning,” and when Barlass was halfway down Tite Street, he called after him, “And Browning also is a sort of prose Browning.”

Bliss Carman wrote some of the most delightful poetry of them all. Born in Canada, where they have eternal sunshine in summer, and brought up in those parts of the Maritime provinces where little mountains and little lakes and little rivers and little forests combine with a bold coastline to make Acadia an Arcady, it was only natural that he should be able to transfigure in his poems the Old World Arcady, with Pan, Faun, Syrinx and Adonis, and all the lovely rabble of mountain, sea and woodland nymphs.

Carman could write from a typical Canadian inspiration also. He could make you see Grandpré, and the lives of the men who won Canada from the wilds and maintained a seignorial grace of life in the new France, which was born in the days of the Roi Soleil, and lived under the white flag till it went down in the glorious sunset on the heights of Abraham. Carman’s poetry is rich in romance, and he was a romantic figure, for with his great stature and fair hair, and blue eyes, he looked as if he might have been one of the Norsemen led to the far north of the continent by Leif, the son of Erik, a thousand years ago, whose descendants were discovered roaming in the Arctic only the other day. As a matter of fact, he was descended from one of the most famous men among the United Empire loyalists, who left the United States when they could no longer live there under the British flag, and gave Canada her unconquerable backbone.

I should have mentioned ere this two dear friends of ours who are both dead—William Sharp and Gleeson White. White was one of my oldest literary friends. We knew him when we were living at Richmond before we went to America, and saw a lot of him during the three years we were there. We came home, I think, just before him. William Sharp introduced him to us. Sharp, who was the friend of nearly every well-known author of his time, began life as poet and critic. As general editor of the “Canterbury Poets,” his name is a household word. There was no wider-minded critic, none who had a wider knowledge of the poetry and other verses of his day. But his chief contribution to literature consisted of the works of “Fiona Macleod,” which were never acknowledged as his during his lifetime, though he never denied their authorship to me. We saw him frequently, not only at Addison Mansions, but abroad, for, like ourselves, he was an insatiable wanderer over Italy and Sicily.

Gleeson White did not write much verse himself, but he edited a volume of society verses under the title of Ballades and Rondeaux, in the “Canterbury Poets,” which had a really public effect. It collected the best examples of the ballades and rondeaux, and verse in other old French forms, written by Gosse and Dobson, and Lang, and other well-known writers, in such a convenient form, and gave the rules for writing them so clearly, that everybody who had any skill in versifying set to work to write ballades and rondeaux, and bombard the magazines and newspapers with them. There was a rage of ballade-writing which can only be compared to the limerick competitions of Pearson’s Weekly. Of Gleeson White’s accomplishments as an art critic I have spoken elsewhere.

Edgar Fawcett, the New Yorker who was so often at our parties on both sides of the Atlantic, was one of the best American writers of ballades, though thousands of American writers, according to the sardonic Miss Gilder, turned them out by machinery.