Fifteen years is a long time in the literary world, and Charles Marriott’s The Column, which threw everybody into fever-heat somewhere about 1902, is, I suppose, forgotten. It was a “first” novel. Uncritical Ouida loved it; W. E. Henley unbent and wrote a Meredithian letter to its author; W. L. Courtney seized some of his short stories for The Fortnightly Review; and I suppose (though I really don’t know this) The Spectator wrote five lines of disapproval. It was a brilliant book; fresh, [135] ]original, provocative. It promised a lot: it promised too much; the author has since written many distinguished books, but none of them is as good as The Column said they would be.
Marriott was living at Lamorna, a tiny cove in Cornwall, when I first knew him. He was tall, lantern-jawed and spectacled. He was interested in everything, but it appeared to me even then that he was a little inhuman. He lacked vulgarity; rude things repelled him enormously, unnaturally; he had no literary delight—or else his delight was too literary: I don’t know—in coarseness. Fastidious to the finger-tips, he would rather go without dinner than split an infinitive. Since those days Marriott has gone on refining himself until there is very little Marriott left. Even the longest and the thickest pencil may be sharpened too frequently.
Many years after I met him at an exhibition of pictures in Bond Street. He was then almost old, tired, preoccupied. He is quite the last man to be a journalist; his art criticism is wonderfully fine, but a life standing on the polished floors of galleries between Bond Street and Leicester Square is soul-corroding and heart-breaking. Marriott’s mind no longer darts and leaps. It moves gently, very gently.
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Max Beerbohm is not so witty in conversation as one might expect. On the spur of the moment he has little verbal readiness; his mind is purely literary. He bears no resemblance to his late brother, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, one of the cleverest conversationalists I have ever met.
A short, mild and debonair figure received me one May afternoon in a house which, if not in Cavendish Square, was somewhere in its neighbourhood. In my later schoolboy days Max was very much cultivated by those of the younger generation who liked to think themselves [136] ]enormously in the swim. We used to “collect” Max Beerbohm’s—not his caricatures, for they were far and away beyond our means; but his articles. I remember a rather startling article of his in The Yellow Book which I had bound in lizard-skin, and a friend of mine had all Max’s Saturday Review articles beautifully typewritten on thick yellow paper and bound in scarlet cardboard. Max was precious, Max was deliciously impertinent, Max was too frightfully clever for words.
When I called upon him four or five years ago I had, I need scarcely say, long outgrown my early infatuation, for he had begun to “date,” and was safely in his niche among the men of the nineties. But half-an-hour’s talk with him revived some of the old fascination. He had “atmosphere”; his personality created an environment; he brought a flavour of far-off days. We talked quite pleasantly of his art, but he said nothing that has stuck in my memory, and my questions seemed to amuse rather than interest him. His small dapper figure gave one the impression of a schoolboy who had grown a little tired, who had prematurely developed his talents, and who had just fallen short of winning a big prize.
He led the way to the front door, shook me by the hand, looked at me meditatively for a moment, smiled faintly, and ... vanished.
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Of Israel Zangwill I can give only an impression. I see him now as I saw him one hot afternoon at his rooms in the Temple. A dark man, a spare man, a man very much in earnest and anxious to be just. He was perspiring slightly, I remember, and he bent forward a little so as to hear and understand every word I said. I had a request to make: a favour to ask. He listened patiently, gave me a cup of tea, and stirred his own. For a little he ruminated. Then he turned to me and lifted his eyebrows—lifted his eyebrows rather high. I repeated my [137] ]request, giving further details. I was a little confused. He studied my confusion, not cruelly, but in the way that a trained observer studies everything that comes under his notice. Then: “Ye-es,” he said; “I see. I see.” And then there was a minute’s silence.