Englishwomen as a class are much better speakers than Englishmen.
We got along comfortably at the Authors’ Club with entertaining eminent persons, and expecting them to speak in recognition of the compliment, until Sir Augustus Harris was asked to propose the health of Isidore di Lara, whose opera he had just presented at Drury Lane. Harris made a long speech, in which he told us all that he had done for grand opera, how much money he had spent, what singers, male and female he had discovered and the rest of it, and was very pleased with himself, and after about half-an-hour sat down without making the slightest allusion to di Lara. Oswald Crawfurd, I think it was, who noticed the omission, and, springing to his feet, proposed the toast.
After this it was felt that we ought to do something to strengthen the programme, and Besant proposed a form of entertainment which had come up in the United States since I had lived there. A man with the eminent name of Luther had hit upon an idea for giving authors a fourth profit on their works, and making them all contributors to his own profit. He called it “Uncut Leaves.” Under this name he offered all the most eminent authors in America a generous price if they would read their productions in a lecture hall before they were published serially, so that they received money for recitation as well as for serial rights, book rights and dramatic rights. I believe it went very well in America for a while, but in London it was impossible to persuade a Meredith or a Hardy to listen to such a proposal. To start with, only a funny man had a chance of getting an English audience to listen to him reading his own productions.
Later on we did try the anecdotes with some success at informal dinners.
In any case the Authors’ Club dinners and entertainments became a great success. It was the most popular literary institution of the day, both at its temporary first home in Park Place, and afterwards at its proper house in Whitehall Court. Some of the most eminent men were its guests. Among them, besides great authors, were great prelates, great generals, great admirals, great politicians, who enjoyed being entertained by the Authors’ Club better than at public banquets, because they only had to speak to fifty or a hundred men instead of addressing huge assemblies, and the formal part of the proceedings lasted such a short time that they might chat afterwards in the smoking-room or the billiard-room with their hosts, who always had among them men whose books they had been admiring for years. While Besant lived he was a great inspiration, and when he died his place was taken by others who had sprung to the forefront of literature in the interval.
The Authors’ Club differed from the original Vagabonds Club because only the Speaker or Speakers of the evening spoke, and the dinner was a more luxurious one. Most of the literary Vagabonds went to the Authors’ Club too, but at the Authors’ you met a fair sprinkling of the older authors like Sir Walter Besant, and, occasionally, Thomas Hardy. The gatherings were much larger. The Club contained many more members, and the bringing of guests was much more usual. Besant and Oswald Crawfurd brought a great many, generally distinguished men.
If the names of everyone present at some of those dinners were published now, people would be astonished to see what a high percentage of them have become household words.
CHARLES GARVICE
Drawn by Yoshio Markino
Among them were John Hay, the greatest man the United States ever sent us as an Ambassador; the old Lord Chancellor; the old Lord Chief Justice; Lord Avebury, who invented the “bank-holidays” known as “St. Lubbock’s-days”; Lord Strathcona, the father of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the synonym for patriotic munificence in these latter days; Lord Wolseley, then Commander-in-Chief; Sir Ian Hamilton, who won the important battles of Wagon Hill and the Diamond Hills in the South African war; Sir Edward Seymour, the great Admiral, who won as much reputation by daring to be a failure on his march from Tientsin to Peking as he did by all his successes; Admiral Sir William Kennedy, the wittiest speaker in the navy; Admiral Sir Hedworth Lambton, now Sir Hedworth Meux; and Admiral Sir Percy Scott, who saved the situation in the South African war by converting his 4·7 ship guns into field guns to meet the Boers’ “long Toms”; Bishop Creighton, and Bishop Ingram, of London; Bishop Gore, then of Worcester; Sir Robert Ball, the astronomer; Sir Leslie Stephen, the father of The Dictionary of National Biography; Sir Alma Tadema; Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Macaulay’s nephew, who wrote two of the greatest biographies in the language, The Life of Macaulay and The Life of Fox, and has sons who rival him; Sir William Ramsey, F.R.S.; two famous brothers, the late Rt. Hon. Alfred Lyttleton, the greatest of all the giants of sport on record except C. B. Fry (who made the same impression on Parliament as he had made on his Eton schoolfellows by his loftiness of character), and his brother Edward, almost equally great in cricket, the head master of Eton; with authors like Rudyard Kipling, Ian Maclaren, Doyle, Barrie, Anthony Hope, Augustine Birrell, and Henry Arthur Jones. There are others equally eminent, if I could only remember them.