But the Hotel Cecil, where we held the Vagabond dinners, was not as bad as the Savage Club. In the old days there, if you did not wish to spend your evening glued to one chair, listening to singing, you had to stand in a tiny bar, the size of a scullery, and hear the same jokes from the same steady drinkers, just as you would have heard the same songs every Saturday evening if you had stayed in the room all the time. The Savage is a much more literary club now, and the accommodation is better arranged. I do not want to say anything against the old Savage. Those performances were good enough for anybody to listen to once, even King Edward VII, who, when he was Prince of Wales, dined there, and said that he had never enjoyed himself so much in his life. What I objected to was the constant repetition of the same performance Saturday after Saturday, without having any place for members to sit and talk if they did not want to hear the music. But I have been to many Bohemian dinners in my time, and I have not met many men, except Walter Besant, who confessed that performances made him feel, as they make me, that he would have a nervous breakdown if he listened to them for half-an-hour longer. I have noticed that most men, when they go to a club of this kind, where there are a number of really eminent people in the room, have no objection to listening to one vapid song after another, instead of being introduced to, we will say, Lord Kelvin, or Tennyson, or Sir Henry Irving, and this though they could have an equally good performance any night of their lives by paying for a seat in the promenade of a music-hall. When will people understand that the two sorts of entertainments ought to be kept separate—that the great object of a literary dinner is for one to meet men who write, or the people whom all the newspapers are writing about? You can go to a concert by paying for it; you cannot meet these people by any other means except introduction, and the hour or two after you have done eating at a public dinner is all too short a period for the chance of introduction to the world’s workers.
CHAPTER XIV
LITERARY CLUBS: THE SAVAGE CLUB
I was for a number of years a member of the Savage Club, and I was an honorary member there for a long time at an earlier period, when I first came home from Australia and the waiting list was full.
I sometimes hinted to the then secretary that I had out-lived my month of honorary membership several times over. His answer was invariably the same: “Rules are intended to be enforced against disagreeable people.” I remained an honorary member till I went away to America in 1888. Some years afterwards, when I returned from America, I became an ordinary member.
At first I loved the Savage. There were not many author-members, it was true, who ever put in an appearance, except Christie Murray and Patchett Martin—Barrie was a member, but he was never there. The Club did not run to authors. What celebrities there were were chiefly actors and artists. But it was a club that consisted more of the admirers of the arts than their professors, men who packed the dinner-table every Saturday night, and made an enthusiastic audience for the actors and musicians and reciters, who did “turns” to amuse the company and get their names known to the public, if they were not already popular favourites, like W. H. Denny, Fred Kay, Odell, Willie Nichol and Reggie Groome.
I have known the Savage Club long enough to remember Brandon Thomas and Seymour Hicks being regarded as brilliant amateurs, who never would be anything more. But both were very favourite performers at giving sketches accompanied by the piano. Penley was often there, but never would perform. One of the favourite jeunes premiers of musical comedy—I forget which—used to sing “I’ll sing thee Songs of Araby” every Saturday night.
Before I went to America, while I knew hardly any one in Bohemia, and it was all new to me, I loved those Saturday nights. We had a bad half-crown dinner, in which I generally sat between quite uninteresting people—well-off furniture dealers and that kind of thing, who were most of them, however, keen and intelligent patrons of music and the drama, and belonged to the Savage for that reason. Most of them, too, were old members, with a large number of friends at whom they fired good-humoured banter across the tables. I found them willing to take one into their good-fellowship in the readiest manner, and occasionally one was rewarded by finding oneself near an affable celebrity.
But the conversation was seldom in the least bit intellectual. Books were treated as non-existent in the Savage of that day. There were hardly any, even in the library, except poems given by the poets themselves. I was always heartily glad when the dinner was over, and the fusillade of ordering drinks was over, and the performance began.
The club-house was situated then, as now, in Adelphi Terrace, a fine row of Georgian houses standing on a sort of marine parade above the bank of the Thames. If you looked over the railings on the opposite side of the road, you would expect to find a beach like Brighton’s. I have never yet looked over these railings, so I don’t know what there is below, but there must be vaults, which are used for something, under the road, in such a valuable locality.