After one of his visits to London, I asked Flynt if he had seen much of Symons.
"Symonsky put me up, you know," he replied; then with a quick, side glance and a smile, as he lighted a cigarette, "but, to be perfectly frank, when I went to bed, he was getting up!"
Here we have defined in a sentence the difference between the two men. Their natures, like their lives, were never parallel; they only just touched one another's imaginations in passing!
Flynt was then studying London's Under World—the great city's blackest corners and darkest ways; while Symons, as it chanced, was seldom out of the lime-light circle of London concert halls, preparatory to writing his "London Nights."
Both men were the sons of clergymen, and launched in life's calmest, safest waters, at about the same time, though on opposite sides of the Atlantic. It was their own volition which led them to take to life's high seas. Symons went from his small town to London, which, in spite of continental sojourns, has remained his permanent mooring. Flynt took to the "open" at an early age, and tied up in whatever harbor the storm drove him. American by blood and birth, he felt at home in Russia, Germany, France, or the British Isles, if given the Mask of No Identity.
One of the swiftest currents of London life flows down the Strand. There, Josiah Flynt, in what disguise he chose, could do his "work," and, when he would, step over the sill of the old Temple and find a welcome from his friend, who had chambers in Fountain Court, that silent square of green, which slopes to the Thames, and is kept fresh and cool by its jets of water and great shade trees. Symons lived in the building to the right, after entering the Court, and up a winding flight of old stone steps.
It was in these bachelor quarters of his (he has since married and moved away) that I first saw Symons, the year after Flynt's "Tramping with Tramps" had appeared in the Century Magazine. I had been invited, through a mutual friend, for tea, one cool afternoon in June, and we sat on an immense tufted sofa, before the grate, while our host stood, back to the fire, and talked of other people's work.
I can see him now, big, blond and very English, his hands deep in the pockets of his gray tweeds; an old, brown velveteen jacket, faded blue socks and soft tan slippers, harmonizing with his "stage-setting"—well mellowed by time. Books lined the walls, and a spinnet, on which Symons played, when alone, stood in one corner. He had prepared tea and elaborate sweets for us, and then forgot to offer them, so busy was he, talking of his friend, Christina Rossetti, whose poems he had just edited! When he spoke of Olive Schreiner, some one asked him if she was interesting, and I remember quite well Symons' reply: "I stood all one night listening to her talk!"
Even at nineteen, in his "Introduction to the Study of Browning," commended by Robert Browning himself, Symons had proved himself to be an artist, and he is always lyric. Flynt was never an artist in the same sense, in his literary work—and epic to the end! He knew and understood the ways of men, and had the gift of words; but when he wrote for publication, his imagination seemed chained to earth. It may be that he was too much "on the inside" to get his subject in perspective. Then, too, it must be remembered that Flynt was the tramp writing, not the literary man tramping.