and to some extent included theirs, by reason
of considerable overlapping. Her evenings were
naturally of a more musical character, and I can
still hear the voices in song of Edith Wynne
("Eos Cymru " — Nightingale of Wales), whom
243
Mid- Victorian Memories
we had seen married to an Armenian barrister in
the Chapel of the Savoy, and of Grace Damian,
the young contralto, then at the outset of what
promised to be a brilliant career. I am not sure
whether Mme. Parepa-Rosa was ever present on
any occasion, though we knew her well — Carl
Rosa, by the way, had been one of my wife's
contemporaries at Leipzig. My wife's sister,
also, now and then sent us a musical visitor from
her side of the Atlantic : notably Dr. Eichberg,
the German violinist, to whom Boston had given
a refuge and a home, and presently the homage
of disciples to a master. His widow, still a
charming young woman at over eighty, and their
daughter, Mrs. John Lane, are still among my
friends. Not that our music was invariably up
to " concert pitch." Mr. T. P. O'Connor, a
frequent and ever-welcome visitor, may remember
a lady's impassioned rendering of " The Wearing
of the Green." And I wonder whether any living
amateur, even if lodging and boarding in the very
cheapest of suburban backwaters, with a family
that advertises itself as " musical," has any know-
ledge of the sentimental twaddle that formed the
staple of the songs sung in the drawing-rooms of
our time. If by any chance he has, he or she will
know the name of Miss Elizabeth Philp, who
was among the most popular offenders in that line
244
Dr. Franz Huefter
of business. And if so, he or she will be dismayed
to learn that Miss Philp was a thoroughly good
fellow, with a bluff, downright manner, and a
moustache fit for a dragoon, who, at the end of
an evening, and with an audience reduced to a
few on whom a little frivolity would not be thrown
away, would, by special request, break into — not
into any stuff of her own : she had too much
sense for that — but into the lamentations of
" Betsy Waring," who went " out a-charing," and
wound up with a realistically rheumatic yell
calculated to startle the inhabitants of the neigh-
bouring Zoological Gardens into a howl of
sympathy.
I have spoken of our house on its Wednesdays
as common ground of several interesting circles,
and Dr. Franz Hueffer was their common point
of intersection — an assertion which shows, not
my ignorance of geometry, but my acquaintance
with Dr. Hueffer. For he was ubiquitous : at
whatever point one touched the circumference of
any circle, there, conspicuously, was he. I first
met him at the Marstons', where a foreigner was
a rarity : how or whence he came there nobody
seemed to know. Nor, for that matter, after a
first moment of casual curiosity, did anybody
seem to care to know. One may take for granted
that he did not come to London without influential
245
Mid- Victorian Memories
introduction based upon solid reputation at home ;
but, even so, never can there have been a case of
more instant and matter-of-course acceptance of a
stranger on his intellectual merits alone, without
any sort of prestige to herald him, or personal
charm. Another man might have possessed all
his encyclopaedic attainments, as scholar, linguist,
musician, and every advantage of prestige and
personality to boot, and yet have had to spend
many pushful years in achieving the position into
which Hueffer stepped at once, and apparently
without the slightest effort of his own. Quiet
and unpretentious in manner, he never seemed
to seek so much as recognition, much less dis-
tinction ; but it came. I do not know that he
turned his depth and width of knowledge to any
public account. But there it was, and nobody
thought of questioning his authority on any subject
he pleased.
Among his specialities was the poetry of the
Troubadours. Equally remote from common
knowledge, at least during the 'seventies and
'eighties, was Ralston's, of the British Museum —
namely, Russian language and literature. He
once told a number of Russian folk stories to a
delighted audience in St. James's Hall, among
whom I remember Carlyle, old, bent, and feeble,
wrapped in a shepherd's plaid, and reverently
246
Miss Sheddon
supported to his seat by the lecturer's arm. Far
down sideways had the lecturer himself to stoop
to give the support so pathetically needed, for
his growth had left six feet — I forget by how
many inches — far behind ; but to be gracious is
better than to be graceful. Ralston had inherited
a claim to a great estate and fortune which,
however, he did not care to pursue, whether out
of a philosophic indifterence to riches, or of a
prudent avoidance of the uncertainties and
anxieties of litigation, or of consequent inter-
ference with his chosen pursuits, or of the
indolence that so often goes with an abnormal
number of feet and inches, or of a combination
of some or all of these considerations, I do not
know. But he had a sister, Miss Sheddon, who
was neither indifferent, nor prudent, nor indolent.
She devoted herself to the prosecution of the
claim, and it was she who, when it reached its
final stage, addressed the House of Lords in a
speech of extraordinary ability three whole weeks
long. B. T. Williams had frequendy advised her
on legal points that arose during the progress of
the suit, and told me that for grasp of facts, and
in the mastery of complicated questions of English
and Scottish law, she had not a superior at the
Bar. I think my last piece of professional work
was to look up one such point to which he was
247
Mid- Victorian Memories
unable to attend. I met her once : and carried
away the impression that her brother had chosen
the wiser part, and that even if she won her battle
she had lost all that makes life, and especially a
woman's life, worth living. As Alan Fairford
wrote to Darsie Latimer concerning the case of
Poor Peter Peebles versus Plainstanes : " I must
allow that my profession had need to do a great
deal of good if, as is much to be feared, it brings
many individuals to such a pass." Who was it
that suggested the formation of a company for
bringing frivolous actions against eminent lawyers ;
who, as knowing the nature of a law suit, might
be counted upon to pay on demand rather than
defend ?
Are there still readers of " Hugh Conway's"
" Called Back " — the story in a then new manner
that in 1883 at once took the whole novel-reading
world by storm, kept readers, however sensation-
proof they might esteem themselves, out of their
beds, and was recognised by those whose business
was to watch literary tendencies, as a new de-
parture in popular fiction — and not, as many of
them predicted, for the better ? One critic, who
took his responsibilities very seriously indeed,
declared to me that the success of " Called
Back " meant the ruin of English fiction for ever.
As things turned out, I think it will be allowed
248
" Hugh Conway "
that the early 'eighties did contain the date of the
beginning of a revolution in the character of
demand and supply. For this there were of
course many reasons, some obvious, some obscure.
But, looking back, with the advantage of these
thirty years of later light, I am as sure as ever
that " Called Back " was not only a signal of the
revolution but one of its active influences, in
default of which a new departure might have
been postponed or have taken another form. In
literary economy, at any rate, supply often pre-
cedes demand ; and no historian of British fiction
can afford to dismiss " Hugh Conway's" novel as
a mere sensational romance that was lucky enough
to get more than the proverbial nine days of
extraordinary vogue. It was the last novel that
everybody read and talked about ; not merely the
portion of everybody that has read, or the smaller
portion that has discussed, outside print, the most
popularly successful novel of the following thirty
years. I could not contrive to care for it on its
merits, though I had been acquainted with "Hugh
Conway," under his everyday name of Frederick
John Fargus, for some years before it appeared,
and took therefore a more friendly than hopeful
interest in its prosperity. Fargus was about the
last man from whom one would have expected a
sensation of that sort — an auctioneer, with plenty
249
Mid- Victorian Memories
of business, at Bristol, where his novel found its
fortunate publisher ; without literary connections,
or any previous literary reputation. My first
knowledge of him was as the writer of some little
poems sent me for my opinion, and graceful
enough in form and conception to be accompanied
with a compliment when returned. The next
step in our acquaintance was his sending me a
story of which I forget both title and subject, but
which, I do remember, was not in the least prog-
nostic of " Called Back," and struck me as fit for
recommendation to John Blackwood. He called
on me when, soon after this, business brought
him to London ; and never failed afterwards to
visit us of a Wednesday evening when he
happened to be in town. I do not think, how-
ever, that he extended his acquaintance beyond
myself thereby. For he was almost, if not quite,
as deaf as a post ; so that attempted introductions
were only too apt to fail, when everybody else
knew everybody else, and it was not easy to hear
one's own self s voice at times.
Among our neighbours of Regent's Park, of
whom we saw much on these and other occasions,
were the Hepworth Dixons. Dixon I remember
as without a rival in the difficult art, perhaps the
most difficult of all arts, of after-dinner speaking.
Its most prominently recognised professors were
250
After-Dinner Speakers
unquestionably Sir Frederick Leighton, Edwin
Arnold, and George Augustus Sala. But the
first was too rhetorically florid ; his elaborately
polished but monotonously fluent eloquence was
fitter for delivery from a platform or a pulpit than
where lectures or sermons are the last things that
men meet to hear. Besides, his high-pitched,
rather rasping voice was irritating to sensitive
ears. Arnold was too egotistical. There was
one favourite point which he never failed to make
— at least I must presume so, seeing that he
never did fail, so much as once, to drag it into
any and every speech of his that came, as not
seldom happened, in my way. •' When first," he
used in all seriousness to tell us, " I saw the
announcement of a daily newspaper for a penny,
I said to myself, ' That will be either the greatest
of blessings or the greatest of curses : / must be
there ! ' " That, but for him, the Daily Telegraph
might have been a curse instead of a blessing,
his hearers would be allowed to conclude. My
inability to recall the characteristic merits or
demerits of Sala as an after-dinner speaker is
some evidence, to myself at least, that he did not
display conspicuously much of either — but then
his reputation had no doubt been won before my
time, and a reputation of that sort is harder to
lose even than to gain. Dixon had the several
251
Mid- Victorian Memories
happy knacks of adapting himself to the occasion
whatever it might be ; of never giving the impres-
sion of previous preparation ; of an easy, conver-
sational style ; and, above all, of knowing exactly
how and when to sit down. And whoever can,
with an apparently modest self-assurance, bring
these principles into united practice has mastered
what I have deliberately called the most difficult
of all the arts that are. None of its American
practitioners have I happened to hear.
Another near neighbour and visitor was the
wife of Charles Dickens. Of course I have
known it to be taken for granted that she was the
Dora of " David Copperfield." Anything more
absurd was never assumed, unless she had under-
gone a miraculous change of nature between youth
and middle age. Without that, the shrewd,
sensible, practical Scotswoman, with the hearty
laugh, had assuredly never been Dora. I suspect,
though solely by way of a guess, that some in-
capacity for unlimited idolatry, or at any rate for
being blind to specks and foibles, was the real
root of the matrimonial muddle ; for, I suppose,
not the most thorough partisan of Dickens would
deny that he was too sensitively vain to put up
with any less worship than that of an uncritical
devotee. Of him I never heard from her the
remotest word.
252
Our Neighbours
Next door to us in Regent's Park Terrace
lived Florence Marryat, Captain Marryat's
daughter, herself among the popular novelists
of her day, and, among many eccentricities of
character, a spiritualist of the most advanced
fashion. Neighbourhood, however, did not
develop into acquaintance, beyond recognition
v^hen we happened to meet at other people's
houses. With other inhabitants of the Terrace
we became on more or less intimate terms :
David Law, the etcher ; Mrs. Louis Diehl,
formerly, as Alice Mangold, a pianist of distinc-
tion, then the authoress of many novels of merit,
with a history of Greek philosophy thrown in — I
saw the announcement of a new novel from her
pen only the other day ; George Neville the
actor and trainer for the stage, Henry Neville's
brother; Dr. Lewis, an able physician, with an
interesting and far-reaching theory concerning
the correspondence of the constitution, functions,
and diseases of the human frame with counter-
parts in external Nature regarded as a single
whole : every man being thus a microcosm, or
complete image of the universe on a reduced scale.
So, as the Terrace consisted of no more than
twenty-two houses, with the occupation of more
than twenty-seven per cent, of them by authors,
artists, and scientists, we might be pardoned for
253
Mid- Victorian Memories
regarding ou7' Terrace as something aloof and
apart from any ordinary Terrace, Gardens, or
Square. And, on the whole, I think we were
corporately queer enough to merit ample recogni-
tion of our claim.
254
CHAPTER XVIII
The Grap/a'c— Arthur Locker— The G/ode again—Captain
Carlisle, and others — The Marvin case— A small beer
chronicle : Fog : Fire : " G. A. S."
The middle of 1880 I regard, as I have said, as
the date of a new departure. Even as, without
definite or deliberate intention, I had drifted from
law to letters, so now I ceased to be a writer of
fiction who was also more or less a journalist, and
became a journalist who was more or less a writer
of fiction. Should any ill-natured critic sarcas-
tically suggest that I have stated a distinction
without a difference, I do not feel concerned to
reply. What has concerned me is that, just as
I had looked to literature to keep me going while
waiting for a sufficiency of briefs, I now looked to
journalism as a crutch to support the production
of novels ; and that in both cases alike the crutch
refused to be thrown away.
I had never ceased to review all new novels for
the Globe', and now, in 1880, I was asked to
undertake the same office for the Graphic also.
My acceptance of it proved to be the beginning
255
Mid-Victorian Memories
of a connection with that journal which lasted,
without a single break, till I resigned it in 191 2
— two-and-thirty years almost to a day. Under
its five successive literary editors during that
period I must have read — yes, read — and noticed
between six and seven thousand novels, and some
hundreds of other books, many of the most
important of these being dealt with in long and
full reviews : to say nothing of a number of Notes
of the Week and a couple of stories. It was a
connection on which I look back, in spite of its
length, with unqualified interest and pleasure ;
and with all my five editors, despite all character-
istic differences, I was always on the best of
terms. Only the first of them, however, falls
within the scope of these Reminiscences ; his
successors will, I trust live long enough to find
time and leisure to write their own. This was
Arthur Locker, who had been literary editor of
the Graphic from the issue of its earliest number
in 1869, and must therefore be credited with a
share in the success that attended it from the
very beginning. Whether his qualifications were
such as are required of an up-to-date editor of
to-day, I am by no means sure. He was of an
old-fashioned journalistic school which regarded
push, hurry, even advertisement, as odious as —
well, as they are. But the school was not yet
256
Arthur Locker
old-fashioned : it was only passing out of fashion :
and meanwhile Arthur Locker was among the
very best of its representatives — courteous in the
fullest and truest sense, which includes form as
well as spirit ; sensitively considerate, yet an
always vigilant critic, capable of prompt severity
when the quality of " copy " fell short of what he
held its contributor to be capable of supplying.
I remember him with a personal affection which
I know to have been shared by all who knew
him, and especially by all who came under
his firm while gentle rule. I do not mean
to suggest for a moment that the standard of
journalism at its best has fallen lower than it
stood in his time. New conditions require
correspondingly new methods ; these may be just
as honourable as the old, and doubtless in most
cases are. But they at any rate imply a certain
loss of dignity and an openly commercial attitude
from which Locker, had he lived into such
changes, would have fastidiously recoiled, and to
which some of us who have lived into them can-
not manage to adapt ourselves kindly.
My next dive into journalism as a profession
(if such it can be called) proved an almost com-
plete immersion for twelve years. This was a
return to daily work on the Globe, under much
more exacting conditions than had prevailed dur-
S 257
Mid- Victorian Memories
ing the reign of Dr. Granville. Captain, after-
wards Sir George, Armstrong, now sole proprietor
of the paper, was his own editor, and it was as
assistant in that capacity that I engaged myself to
revise all editorial matter, and to write the leading
article thrice a week besides a daily " Note of the
Day." The conditions of the Globe had indeed
changed while I had been but its reviewer of
Recent Fiction. Its premises had been moved
to their present position on the opposite side of
the Strand ; and instead of our former pleasant
room, with its view of the river and the Surrey
hills — now occupied by the editor of the newly
established People — I was settled in one with
whitewashed walls, with no furniture but three
tables exactly alike and three chairs ditto, lighted
by a window just under the ceiling, and with no
view but that of a staring synchronised clock that
was never a fraction of a minute fast or slow.
That clock was the ruler of the room. For
whereas in Dr. Granville's time we did very well
if we started work at an easy ten and, without
any leader to write, nothing indeed but two or
three notes apiece, finished between one and
two ; now, work had to be started at nine sharp
and finished at twelve sharp in order to catch
certain trains ; and to get through one's leader
and one's note, on subjects never given out
258
Work on the Globe
beforehand, with revising work as well, and ques-
tions to answer, took up every second of the
three hours. Then, for me at least, followed an
hour or two of such revision as could be post-
poned, as of what we called " Turnovers " and
" Middles." But this could be done at leisure ;
and fortunate I was in being able to share the
leisure with such an occupant of the second of
the three tables as Captain (he had held that rank
in one of the Highland regiments) l^homas
Carlisle.
To show what manner of man he was — " was "
is a sad word to write of him — a single recollec-
tion will serve. He had once written a novel,
which came to me in the ordinary course to review
for the Globe. It was utterly, hopelessly, desper-
ately bad ; and I said so. We used to slash in
those days. We liked to show how cleverly we
could break a butterfly on a wheel : so we called
trash, trash ; instead of hailing it, according to
present practice, as an epoch-making work of
genius, and generally saying of it what its pub-
lishers would like us to say. The novel was
anonymous. And with such bitter contempt did
I treat it that Armstrong, who knew its author-
ship, would, out of consideration for one of his
staff, have suppressed the review. It was the
author himself who insisted upon its appearance,
259
Mid- Victorian Memories
out of deference to a reviewer who, he urged, had
been trusted by the Globe to judge the novel, and
whose judgment must therefore stand. Never
had I seen or heard of Carlisle until my return to
the Globe : nor did he know anything of me
except as the ferocious critic of his solitary novel.
Yet nothing could have been kinder than his
reception of me into the room that we were
henceforth to share. Everything he could do to
ease my far from easy position he did ; and it was
not for some years after we had become intimate
and confidential companions that he confided to
me his authorship of the novel that I had so
scornfully condemned. Every day for twelve
years we spent from three to four hours together
at neighbouring tables in the same room ; and no
word ever once passed between us that I would
wish recalled.
Regular and punctual in all his habits as that
synchronised clock, and with a military stiffness
of carriage, he was the last man in whom one
would expect to discover the boyish spirit that
made him the comrade of his boys, sharing all
their interests, not merely as an affectionate
father, but for his own active enjoyment, and
as if he were actually one of them — one, like
Milton's Adam, of his own sons. But it was
certainly this same spirit, with its dash of
260
Captain Thomas Carlisle
adventurous frolic, rather than any professional
zeal, that prompted his most notable piece of
journalism in the service of the Globe. In order
to explore some of the odd by-ways of life, he
took a crossing, and stood at it, costumed for
the part, and with broom in hand, in the character
of an old soldier brought to that condition. He
escaped the chance of recognition by any former
brother-officer — the crossing was in clubland :
and his receipts in pence (I forget the amount)
were enough to show that a crossing-sweeper's
was by no means a bad business in muddier and
less municipally managed times than these. On
another occasion he was one of a party of
Christmas waits : an enterprise which he found
required a strong head to stand one sort of
warm reception on a frosty night, and ears
proof against bad language in order to be
content with another. His notion of a holiday
was the hardest exercise he could find. A
hundred and thirty miles on a tricycle in a
single day must be the ne plus ultra of hard and
utterly uninteresting labour ; indeed I should
have thought it impossible. Yet twice did
Carlisle, when well into middle age, thus take
his pleasure — sixty-five miles from Notting Hill
to Stockbridge, and then another sixty-five back
from Stockbridge, mostly in the dark, to Notting
261
Mid- Victorian Memories
Hill. If this was pleasure, as no doubt it was,
then the much-abused treadmill must have been
nothing less than joy.
The third table had several successive occu-
pants, each of whom left as soon as his note
was written, or whatever his work might be, so
that we practically had the room to ourselves.
Among those whom I remember as sitting there
were Mitchell, a distinguished Oxford man, a
member of the French as well as of the English
Bar, a winner of the Diamond Sculls, a champion
light (or was it middle ?) weight, who afterwards
went out to Bangkok as legal adviser to the
King of Siam. His notion of a holiday was
flying hawks on Salisbury Plain, of whom a
hooded pair would sometimes be perched at
hand, in waiting for their journey. Another was
Davenport Adams, the author of a well-known
dictionary of the drama. Another was Noble, a
specialist on Russian affairs, whom I remember
chiefly for three remarkable reasons : first, that
he never spoke unless spoken to, and then in the
irreducible minimum of indispensable words ;
secondly, that his copy never needed the altera-
tion of a single word ; thirdly, that he suddenly
vanished without, as was ascertained, owing
anybody a penny, but, on the contrary, with
money due to him. It was another case of the
262
Dr. Sebastian Evans