It was at this period of his life that I first encountered Payn, and I fell at once under his charm. His was not a faultless character, for he was irritable, petulant, and prejudiced. He took the strongest dislikes, sometimes on very slight grounds; was unrestrained in expressing them, and was apt to treat opinions which he did not share very cavalierly. But none of these faults could obscure his charm. He was the most tender-hearted of human beings, and the sight, even the thought, of cruelty set his blood on fire. But, though he was intensely humane, he was absolutely free from mawkishness; and a wife-beater, or a child-torturer, or a cattle-maimer would have had short shrift at his hands. He was genuinely sympathetic, especially towards the hopes and struggles of the young and the unbefriended. Many an author, once struggling but now triumphant, could attest this trait. But his chief charm was his humour. It was absolutely natural; bubbled like a fountain, and danced like light. Nothing escaped it, and solemnity only stimulated it to further activities. He had the power, which Sydney Smith described, of "abating and dissolving pompous gentlemen with the most successful ridicule;" and, when he was offended, the ridicule had a remarkably sharp point. It was of course, impossible that all the humour of a man who joked incessantly could be equally good. Sometimes it was rather boyish, playing on proper names or personal peculiarities; and sometimes it descended to puns. But, for sheer rapidity, I have never known Payn's equal. When a casual word annoyed him, his repartee flashed out like lightning. I could give plenty of instances, but to make them intelligible I should have to give a considerable amount of introduction, and that would entirely spoil the sense of flashing rapidity. There was no appreciable interval of time between the provoking word and the repartee which it provoked.
Another great element of charm in Payn was his warm love of Life,
"And youth, and bloom, and this delightful world."
While he hated the black and savage and sordid side of existence with a passionate hatred, he enjoyed all its better—which he believed to be its larger—part with an infectious relish. Never have I known a more blithe and friendly spirit; never a nature to which Literature and Society—books and men—yielded a more constant and exhilarating joy. He had unstinted admiration for the performances of others, and was wholly free from jealousy. His temperament indeed was not equable. He had ups and downs, bright moods and dark, seasons of exaltation and seasons of depression. The one succeeded the other with startling rapidity, but the bright moods triumphed, and it was impossible to keep him permanently depressed. His health had always been delicate, but illness neither crushed his spirit nor paralysed his pen. Once he broke a blood-vessel in the street, and was conveyed home in an ambulance. During the transit, though he was in some danger of bleeding to death, he began to compose a narrative of his adventure, and next week it appeared in the Illustrated London News.
During the last two years of his life he was painfully crippled by arthritic rheumatism, and could no longer visit the Reform Club, where for many years he had every day eaten his luncheon and played his rubber. Determining that he should not completely lose his favourite, or I should rather say his only, amusement, some members of the Club banded themselves together to supply him with a rubber in his own house twice a week; and this practice was maintained to his death. It was a striking testimony to the affection which he inspired. In those years I was a pretty frequent visitor, and, on my way to the house, I used to bethink me of stories which might amuse him, and I used even to note them down between one visit and another, as a provision for next time. One day Payn said, "A collection of your stories would make a book, and I think Smith and Elder would publish it." I thought my anecdotage scarcely worthy of so much honour; but I promised to make a weekly experiment in the Manchester Guardian. My Collections and Recollections ran through the year 1897, and appeared in book-form at Easter, 1898. But Payn died on the 25th of the previous March; and the book, which I had hoped to put in his hand, I could only inscribe to his delightful memory.
Another remarkable man of letters, wholly remote from the world, was Richard Holt Hutton, for thirty-six years (1861-1897) the honoured Editor of The Spectator. Hutton was a "stickit minister" of the Unitarian persuasion, who had been led, mainly by the teaching of F. D. Maurice, to the acceptance of orthodox Christianity; and who devoted all the rest of his life to the inculcation of what he conceived to be moral and religious truth, through the medium of a weekly review. He lived, a kind of married hermit, on the edge of Windsor Forest, and could hardly be separated, even for a week's holiday, from his beloved Spectator. His output of work was enormous and incessant, and was throughout critical and didactic. The style was pre-eminently characteristic of the man—tangled, untidy, ungraceful, disfigured by "trailing relatives" and accumulated epithets; and yet all the time conveying the sense of some real and even profound thought that strove to express itself intelligibly. As the style, so the substance. "The Spectator," wrote Matthew Arnold in 1865, "is all very well, but the article has Hutton's fault of seeing so very far into a mill-stone." And, two years later, "The Spectator has an article in which Hutton shows his strange aptitude for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick." Both were sound criticisms. When Hutton addressed himself to a deep topic of abstract speculation, he "saw so very far into it" that even his most earnest admirers could not follow the visual act. When he handled the more commonplace subjects of thought or action with which ordinary men concern themselves, he seemed to miss the most obvious and palpable points. He was a philosophical thinker, with a natural bent towards the abstract and the mystical—a Platonist rather than an Aristotelian. He saw things invisible to grosser eyes; he heard voices not audible to ordinary ears; and, when he was once fairly launched in speculation on such a theme as Personal Identity or the Idea of God, he "found no end, in wandering mazes lost."
But the very quality of aloofness from other men and their ways of thinking, which made it impossible for him to be the exponent of a system or the founder of a school, made him a peculiarly interesting friend. In homely phrase, you never knew where to have him; he was always breaking out in a fresh place. Whatever subject he handled, from impaled Bulgarians to the credibility of miracles, was certain to be presented in a new and unlooked-for aspect. He was as full of splendid gleams as a landscape by Turner, and as free from all formal rules of art and method. He was an independent thinker, if ever there was one, and as honest as he was independent. In his belief, truth was the most precious of treasures, to be sought at all hazards, and, when acquired, to be safeguarded at all costs. His zeal for truth was closely allied with his sense of justice. His mind came as near absolute fairness as is possible for a man who takes any part in live controversies. He never used an unfair argument to establish his point, nor pressed a fair argument unduly. He was scrupulously careful in stating his adversary's case, and did all in his power to secure a judicial and patient hearing even for the causes with which he had least sympathy. His own convictions, which he had reached through stern and self-sacrificing struggles, were absolutely solid. By the incessant writing of some forty years, he enforced the fundamental truth of human redemption through God made Man on the attention of people to whom professional preachers speak in vain, and he steadily impressed on his fellow-Christians those ethical duties of justice and mercy which should be, but sometimes are not, the characteristic fruits of their creed. It was a high function, excellently fulfilled.
The transition is abrupt, but no catalogue of the literary men with whom I was brought in contact could be complete without a mention of Mr. George Augustus Sala. He was the very embodiment of Bohemia; and, alike in his views and in his style, the fine flower of such journalism as is associated with the name of the Daily Telegraph. His portrait, sketched with rare felicity, may be found in Letter XII. of that incomparable book, Friendship's Garland. "Adolescens Leo" thus describes him—"Sala, like us his disciples, has studied in the book of the world even more than in the world of books. But his career and genius have given him somehow the secret of a literary mixture novel and fascinating in the last degree: he blends the airy epicureanism of the salons of Augustus with the full-bodied gaiety of our English cider-cellar. With our people and country, mon cher, this mixture is now the very thing to go down; there arises every day a larger public for it; and we, Sala's disciples, may be trusted not willingly to let it die."
That was written in 1871; and, when sixteen years had elapsed, I thought it would be safe, and I knew it would be amusing, to bring Sala and Matthew Arnold face to face at dinner. For the credit of human nature let it be recorded that the experiment was entirely successful; for, as Lord Beaconsfield said, "Turtle makes all men equal," and vindictiveness is exorcised by champagne.
The Journalist of Society in those days was Mr. T. H. S. Escott, who was also Editor of the Fortnightly and leader-writer of the Standard. I should be inclined to think that no writer in London worked so hard; and he paid the penalty in shattered health. It is a pleasure to me, who in those days owed much to his kindness, to witness the renewal of his early activities, and to welcome volume after volume from his prolific pen. Mr. Kegan Paul, essayist, critic, editor, and ex-clergyman, was always an interesting figure; and his successive transitions from Tractarianism to Latitudinarianism, and from Agnosticism to Ultramontanism, gave a peculiar piquancy to his utterances on religion. He deserves remembrance on two quite different scores—one, that he was the first publisher to study prettiness in the production of even cheap books; and the other, that he was an early and enthusiastic worker in the cause of National Temperance. It was my privilege to be often with him in the suffering and blindness of his last years, and I have never seen a trying discipline more bravely borne.