William Hudson, the wine-merchant, had a house-boat right away from the more crowded reaches of the Thames. She lay off the Mapledurham meadows, belonging to the Blount family. Hudson’s boat was called The Little Billee, and he kept moored near by an excellent steam-launch, the Martlet, and a whole flotilla of skiffs, punts, and canoes for the use of his visitors. In the internal fittings of the Little Billee Hudson went in not so much for airy grace as for solid comfort. And no man on all the Thames gave better weekend dinners. He liked to have around him guests who could talk, and who could talk well. All sorts and conditions of people met at his board, but one never met there a man who was not interesting. Travellers, authors, journalists, merchants, Conservative Members of Parliament, and Irish Nationalist Members of the same august assembly, I have met at Hudson’s week-end parties on the Little Billee. And if the after-dinner talk was always kept up to the right conversational pitch, much of the credit was due to the keenness and tact of a host who delighted in the conversational “give and take” of clever men.
On the upper and on the lower reaches of the Thames the upper and the lower reaches of literature—if I may so describe them—were represented. Thus, at Kelmscott, by Lechlade, Rossetti and Morris were producing enduring work; while down at Isleworth Mr. Le Queux was reporting at County Courts and Boards of Guardians for the Middlesex Chronicle, innocent as yet of the many sensational crimes which, in six-shilling volumes, he has since committed; and at Richmond Mr. Bloundelle Burton was daily treading on historic ground without so much as contemplating the historic novel. At Teddington, Blackmore, having abandoned Devonshire and the novel of the West, was devoting himself to the pleasurable and profitable pursuit of market gardening. All sorts and conditions of the cultivators of literature sought the banks of the Thames; and if Edmund Yates, of the World, had a delightful place at Goring, Purkiss, of the Police Gazelle, had a still more luxurious home at Shepperton.
In the eighties, too, the river began to have a literature of its own. Of these, Lock to Lock lingers on to this day. The Thames was a more serious and a more pretentious paper. It was under the editorship of one of the Mackays—William, I think—and to its powerful and continuous advocacy the public are indebted for the lock below Richmond, an improvement which can only be appreciated by those who can remember the exposed bed of the river between Isleworth and Teddington at the height of a hot summer. During one such year it was possible to walk across that part of the river which was supposed to run between Twickenham foreshore and Eel Pie Island.
To one who comes early under the subtle influence of the Thames there is no other water which shall ever possess the same attraction. One falls in love with it, and thereafter can see only its perfections. No stream has been so celebrated in verse. From Spenser and Drayton to Cowley and Pope, from Cowley and Pope to Matthew Arnold and Theo Marzials, there stretches a long list of illustrious versifiers who found inspiration in the Thames. And if Pope might so exaggerate the objects of his poetic vision as to behold “. . . the Muses sport on Cooper’s Hill,” the more modern bard, Mr. Theo Marzials, may be forgiven for metamorphosing the Twickenham ferryman. The song presents that waterman as a dashing young Lothario. The unhappy fact is that, at the time when Marzials wrote the once popular song, the ferryman was a fat, oleaginous old man named Cooper, with no sentiment of any kind about him save a sentimental feeling for beer.
Through all my memories of the journalistic life the Thames sings softly. When I look back, a thousand delightful recollections of its bosom and its banks inevitably obtrude, even while I try to concentrate on the busy haunts of men. “Sweete Temmes!”
CHAPTER XIX
THE PRESS IN TRANSITION
“Old familiar declining and falling off.”—Silas Wegg.
“All things earthly,” said the wit, “have an end—except Upper Wimpole Street.” And the end of the Press has been cheerfully foretold by the Jeremiahs of Fleet Street. So obvious, I have been recently informed, have become the symptoms of disintegration and decay in the institution known under the style and title of “The Daily Press” that the publicist who would call attention to the fact must be prepared to hold himself rather cheap.
Now, it is almost a truism to say that there is in the older members of any profession an intuition which compels them to regard their own early days in a calling as indicating the high-water mark of that vocation, whatever it may have been. The reason for this curious attitude of the human mind is not very far to seek. To parody Lytton, “the youthful and the beautiful are one.” And a profession regarded by one who is young, ardent, impressionable, and credulous, will not appear the same thing to him when he views it, in its new developments, with old eyes and in a spirit of detachment. That which differs in the new constitution from the conditions of the old he will regard as bad or puerile or reactionary. The old things he sees through a golden haze; the new he regards with the rheumy eyes of the valetudinarian.
In the old newspaper man this instinct to depreciate the present I have found very strong. His pose is invariably that of the laudator temporis acti. In all its departments and through all its methods he observes what Wegg calls “the Decline-and-Fall-Off” of the daily paper. Old actors are very much like old pressmen in this respect. Their early days were always “the palmy days.” And as there have always been living old actors to impress this fact on the minds of successive generations, it is obvious that all time, past and present, was and is that blessed period known as “the palmy days.”