I suppose that "The Crown" meetings were mutual admiration parties of a kind, but of an innocent kind. I recall a callow youth (who had squandered his patrimony in Paris), with a slender volume of reminiscent verse, button-holing me and saying: "Really, you know —— (a member of the company) is a genius. His command over vocables is something stupendous." Blank has since made a name for himself, but I remember looking at him at the time, innocently wondering whether he was a genius, and, if so, what vocables were.
But in spite of the ready assistance offered to all hands to think well of themselves, the gatherings usually netted one something worth while in the end, either in criticism or incident. They call to mind now a series of gatherings held a number of years later in New York among a collection of American writers. And this thinking of the two combinations reminds me of what George Augustus Sala once said to me in Rome. I had gone to him, according to agreement, to ask him what he had to say to a young man, anxious to do well in journalism, about writing in general. He was sitting at breakfast when I dropped in at his hotel, very much surrounded by macaroni and the local newspapers.
"And what are your pleasures?" Sala began without warning, as if I had gone to him for medical advice.
I was so upset by this beginning of things that, for the life of me, I could not think for a second or two what my pleasures were. I finally managed to say that I enjoyed whist.
"Stop it," said Sala, his Portuguese eyes fairly boring through me. "Stop it. Whist means cards, and cards mean gambling. Stop it."
After a pause, "What are the other pleasures?" If whist meant gambling, I reasoned that tobacco must premise opium. However, I admitted that I liked tobacco.
"Not strange—not strange," said Sala. "One who writes needs a smoke. What else? Are you a woman-hater?"
"No, sir, I'm not," I replied most emphatically. Sala looked at me queerly, but did not pursue the subject. I had been introduced to him by a man who, wrongly or rightly, had the reputation of saying cross things about women.
"Do you drink?" Sala continued in a moment.
"Yes, when I feel like it."