told us, Prussian soldiers had recently been
quartered there, and, though not at all bad
fellows, had, through racial gaucherie, ignorance,
and indifference to the furniture as well as to the
feelings of others, done a good deal of smashing.
They certainly had ; the proverbial bull in the
china shop could not have done more. Our host
could not even offer us chairs. But the Prussians
had left the grand piano fairly sound ; so while
we sat upon something, he sat upon something

149



Mid-Victorian Memories

else and entertained us with Offenbachian airs.
It was like listening to a ghost of the times before
Sedan. There is a conventional tradition that
the Americans are an eminently cool-headed and
the French an eminently light-hearted people.
The general truth of the tradition by no means
bears the test of observation. But at any rate
never could cool head and light heart have been
more closely united than in that young fellow,
American by birth, French by adoption.

It was my fate to be in Versailles during the
least eventful period of the siege, roughly speaking
between the sortie of General Vinoy and the
beginning of the bombardment, while negotia-
tions were still pending. Of what was going on
in Paris of course we knew nothing ; in greater
France little beyond the rumours of the restaur-
ants — which, by the way, must indeed have had
a quite abnormal experience of the good blown
by an ill wind, so constantly were they thronged
and so plentifully supplied. Our occupation
mainly consisted in trying to get hints and ink-
lings of where might be the likeliest chance of
seeing something during the day, or rather the
unlikeliest of seeing nothing, and putting our
fellow news-hunters off any scent that we fancied
might be worth following. We were engaged
in business, in which generosity must needs give

150



At Versailles

place to justice — ^justice to ourselves. I cannot
say that I was sorry, either for myself or for the
World, when my service came to an end.
General Sheridan paid a visit to Versailles, and
naturally every American in the place lost no
time in interviewing, or trying to interview, that
illustrious American soldier. I say "trying" to
interview : for, as an American for the nonce,
I found myself one of a crowd of journalists at
a sort of informal lev^e, and I had not been an
American long enough to have acquired more
push than I have by nature — which is none.
After the formal handshake I was reduced to
silent speculation on the pronouncedly Mongolian
type to which the General's features belonged.
But I did better than that, after all : for, by over-
hearing the name of "Maclean" pronounced
close by, I discovered what had hitherto been the
proverbial needle in the pottle of hay— the verit-
able, though vanished, correspondent of the New
York World. I forget the reason for the
stoppage of his correspondence ; anyhow, he was
as ready to resume the duties of his post as I to
resign them.

One need not have seen a small fraction of a
battle— and no human eyes, though aided with
the best of field-glasses, can see more — in order
to realise victorious invasion. I did realise it, in

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Mid-Victorian Memories

many a ruined and deserted village, or half empty
and wholly demoralised town ; at the sight of
troops of homeless peasants, women mostly, con-
veying, as best they could, their young, their old,
their infirm, and other burdens without conjectur-
able goal or aim ; in the general epidemic of
helpless dejection ; among the swarm of nonde-
script and cosmopolitan speculators who followed
in the invader's wake for whatever pickings might
be found. My homeward route was along the
main line of the German advance ; and not a
returning train but bore its freight of wounded
men. No : one need not see the fighting to see
something, nay much, of war.

My very last visit to Paris was two years later,
when the work of the Commune was still plainly
to be seen, and the City of Light had not even
yet recovered from its gloom. I did not catch a
smile on even a British face when a French
guide, showing a party of tourists round Notre
Dame, pointed out the spot where — according to
him, though not to history — Archbishop Darboy
had perished "praying for his Executors." I felt
quite disappointed that he did not add " Adminis-
trators and Assigns."



152



CHAPTER XII

The Globe in the early 'seventies— Dr. Mortimer Granville
— "Tom" Purnell, ultivms Bohemorum — John Churton
Collins

My journalism at home had hitherto been repre-
sented by some half-dozen " social " leaders in
the Echo and the Star, edited respectively by
Arthur Arnold and John Morley. Shordy, how-
ever, after the Franco- Prussian episode my legal
career was brought practically to an end by an
engagement, requiring daily attendance at the
office, to write "Notes of the Day" for the
Globe. The editor of that paper, Dr. Mortimer
Granville, had not yet succeeded in raising it to
the position that it reached during his reign and
afterwards maintained ; but he made one feel
that he was not the man to fail, though it would
have been exceedingly difficult to state a reason
for so hopeful an impression. He was the most
unknowable person that I ever knew (I am
conscious of the bull) ; notwithstanding our daily
relations, he was as much a mystery at the end
of them as at the beginning. All that we of his

153



Mid- Victorian Memories

staff knew, or thought we knew, of his previous
history was that he had practised medicine some-
where in the provinces ; of his present life,
nothing. He seemed to be entirely without
associates, and nobody, in schoolboy language,
knew him at home. How he stepped out of the
consulting-room of a country doctor straight into
the editorial chair of a London evening paper
was presumably no mystery to the Globe s owners ;
at any rate, they could not have chosen their man
better, as the leaps and bounds by which the
paper prospered plainly showed. Yet he could
not be classed among the " strong " editors.
He was a veritable bundle of excitable nerves.
I have seen his big frame literally of a tremble,
and his sallow complexion grow yet more sallow,
before having to face a meeting of the Directors ;
and his tempers during the daily production of
the paper would have sent the members of his
staff crazy had they been half as nervous as he.
Being who and what we were, we soon learned
to take his impatient and sometimes even in-
sulting messages as among the mere ordinary
incidents of the morning's work, to be either
disregarded or promptly repaid in kind, and then
forgotten. Indeed, it was impossible to remember
such meteoric flashes in the amiable calm that
invariably followed the daily storm. His secret

154



Writing for the Globe

of success is, under such temperamental condi-
tions, hard to conjecture ; but he must have
possessed that secret — among-, I fancy, many
others of other kinds. For, after quitting the
Globe — I no more know why than why he came
there — he returned to his original profession, and
acquired a lucrative and fashionable practice,
chiefly, I believe, as a specialist in nervous dis-
orders.

The production of an evening paper was a
much more leisurely affair then than now, as a
subsequent connection with the Globe under later
conditions enabled me to realise. At any rate,
apart from the self-tormenting temperament of
our chief, it was so with us. The small editorial
staff^ nominally three or four strong, but actually
two or three (one having to be deducted for
special and peculiar reasons presently to be
shown) assembled at a not peremptorily ten
o'clock in a pleasant room in the Strand with a
pleasant prospect — the Chapel of the Savoy in
the foreground, and, for the distance, the Surrey
hills. The leading article was seldom written on
the premises, but usually sent in by Pigott, the
Licenser of Plays, from outside. There was
always plenty of what is called inside matter in
type ; so all we had to do among us was to fill
up three columns with "Notes of the Day " ;

155



Mid- Victorian Memories

and many of these were Notes of Yesterday, as
having been written the previous afternoon.
And as to pace, if we had finished by not later
than half-past one, we had done very well. Any-
body who will take the trouble to work out the
question, If three men fill less than three columns
of neither small nor close type in three hours
and a half, what is the rate of speed per man ?
will, I am sure, though I have not myself done
the sum, acknowledge that, in speaking of the
pace as leisurely, I have not fallen into mis-
description. We had, in fact, plenty of time
for discussing our " Notes " — and other things
as well.

But I have said that one of our strength on
paper had invariably to be deducted in practice.
And it was invariably " Tom " Purnell, who had
a truly marvellous talent for getting his work
done by others. Mr. Comyns Carr, who was
also one of us, tells, in his Reminiscences, how
Tom would turn up, looking the picture of
misery, complaining of a racking headache, and
beseeching us to supply his notes, sending them
up, of course, as from him ; for no notes, no
pay. Nobody had ever the heart to say No ;
indeed, he was off and away before he could be
refused. But when the morning's work was
over, there returned an entirely different Tom ;
156



" Tom " Purnell

jaunty, cheerful, in all the happy consciousness
of money earned and duty done. And the trick,
however regularly repeated, never failed. It
was not, however, such a novelty to me as to
Carr, for I had known him and had been occa-
sionally among his amused victims for years ;
ever since I had met him in Pump Court in
company with B. T. Williams, who had known
him from when both were boys. His journalistic
pay — I dare not call it work — was not confined
to the Globe. He was also "Q" of the Athenceum,
and considered himself unfairly injured when that
pen-name was adopted by another " O." He
reviewed books, and sometimes plays, for the
Sunday Times : my solitary specimen of dramatic
criticism was the result of a visit to the Princess's
as his unpaid deputy. He also contributed a
weekly London letter to a country paper ; as to
one of which there is a characteristic story.
Having got two of his press friends to write it
for him, they treacherously concocted a wild
tissue of outrageously incredible Royal scandal,
and forgot, until their joke was past recall, to
tremble for the probable result of it to Tom.
To their amazed relief, he came to them beaming-,
with a highly complimentary letter from the
editor of the paper, asking for more in the
same style. Strange, however, as it may seem,

157



Mid-Victorian Memories

incredible to any who remember him, I can
vouch for his authorship of at any rate one
article, for I witnessed its production. He had
promised an obituary notice of some one of
whom he had special knowledge — I forget who
it was — for the Law Magazine. On the evening
of the day when it was due he came to me in
Pump Court, without the notice, but with a
promise for to-morrow. I knew what that meant ;
so I insisted on his not leaving the room till the
notice was in my hands. He pleaded for five
minutes' leave of absence in order to get a
preliminary drink ; but I knew what that would
mean, too. In short, I was for once in my life
inexorable, and maintained a commanding posi-
tion between the writing-table and the door
while he, after a sigh of resignation, did actually
and visibly turn out the promised notice then and
there. Few men have anything so remarkable
to boast of as getting copy out of Purnell.

He was Ultimus Bohemorum : the last of the
Bohemians. For I do not count among that
fraternity those who play at what they like to
think Bohemianism by way of a pose, or the
hangers-on of literary and artistic clubs for the
sake of advertisements or half-crowns. Purnell
was a true-born Bohemian, without ambition,
foresight, or purpose : he lived for the day, or

158



" The Last oi the Bohemians "

rather for the hour. He certainly did most
energetically advertise, but never himself — always
his friends : and never, though he must have
been in very narrow straits at times, did I know
or hear of his "borrowing" — so the process is
technically termed — so much as a farthing". He
used to boast of being " the poorest man in
London " : and it is true that his pockets were
chronically empty. But then, on the other hand,
his wants were singularly few, and those few cost
little, some of them nothing, to supply. His
tastes and pleasures were inexpensive and so
little refined as to argue deficient sensibility. To
music he was virtually deaf: to pictures at any
rate purblind : and I doubt if he possessed organs
of taste or smell save in the most rudimentary
form. I suppose it would be an exaggeration
to suggest that he could not have told a pint of
Guinness from one of Clicquot, or the flavour
of the finest Habana from what he termed a
" draw " ; but I am sure that he would be .equally
content with either. He was not intemperate »*
he did not play ; he could not justly be said to
dress ; he lodged, I should say very cheaply
indeed, over a small shop in the Camden Road ;
he belonged to no clubs ; and he could indulge
his ruling interest in theatrical life at no cost at
all, for there was probably not a theatre of which

159



Mid-Victorian Memories

he had not the freedom both before and behind
the scenes. His frail figure with its eager,
forward pose, his keen, restless eyes, not less
bright and piercing" when the flowing hair and
pointed beard had turned to white from brown,
were familiar not only there but in painters'
studios, newspaper offices, and gatherings of
literary coteries. His social range was without
bounds, and I think that he not only regarded
all his world as a stage, but himself as stage-
manager. In that capacity he certainly engineered
the historic meeting of Swinburne and Mazzini
at Karl Blind's ; and — though here the amount
of historic certainty may require discounting —
never did his slightest acquaintance become in
any way distinguished without his declaring " I'm
the poorest man in London, but I made him (or
her) : he (or she) would be nowhere if it hadn't
been for me." Never was creature so innocent
of envy, or so sincerely happy in the success of
a friend. In that finest of senses, his friends'
successes were truly his own.

How he came to hold his unique position in
literary, artistic, and theatrical London must have
been due in some measure to this talent for
sympathy. Wholly to this, perhaps : for I can
account for it no otherwise. He never spoke of
his early life, but I have heard that he had tried
i6o



PumelFs Peculiarities

to keep a school at Tenby, whence he came — a
strange sort of a schoolmaster he must have
been ! — and he had begun life in London as
Secretary to the Trustees of Dr. Williams's
Library. Presumably the office required some:
degree of punctuality and other attention to
business : and any degree, however small, would
very speedily become intolerably great to Tom
Purnell. At any rate he soon left the Library
and became the free lance that I knew so well.

With the queer inconsistency of many a man
who refuses to believe in anything that he does
not think he knows, he had a stock of super-
stitious observances. He had, or professed, a
conviction that there was some occult connection
between himself, the hour of midnight, and the
colour blue. Consequently a bright blue necktie,
on all occasions, was as distinctive a feature of
him as his eyes ; and at the height of the most
eager or the most thoughtless night-talk he would
fall into an anxious silence if, and while, he
heard a clock strike twelve. Another fancy of
his was to carry his week's wage straight from
the Globe office to a neighbouring tavern where
he was known, and to change it as evenly as
possible into five-shilling pieces, a supply of the
coins being kept ready for his expected call. Some
early association, however, probably suffices to
M i6i



Mid-Victorian Memories

explain his visit to a church exactly once a year,
namely, on Easter Sunday, and there to join in
the Easter hymn. It was the last thing one
would expect of him ; but rather than forego that
function I believe that he would have let his blue
necktie be torn away.

I have already mentioned Comyns Carr as
among our editorial staff! My recollections of
him are uniformly pleasant ; but as he is, happily,
a fellow-survivor of those Mid- Victorian days,
and has published his own reminiscences of them,
I must salute him with a very cordial bow and
pass on. Would that I could thus salute among
our fellow-survivors another colleague whose
pathetic death some five years ago moved many
hearts when it happened, and many more when
the whole of his life-story was told — Professor
John Churton Collins. Of course he was no
professor then, but a young enthusiast fresh from
Balliol, so saturated with the poetry of Greece
and Britain that it overflowed. With little en-
couragement, or indeed with none, he would
burst into a declamation of some speech or chorus
from Sophocles, evidently and touchingly taking
for granted that we revelled in its sound and
sense as fully as he. He had a prodigious
memory ; but, like most people so gifted, was apt
to trust it too implicitly, as one incident plainly
162



John Chiirton Collins

showed. He had written what we called a
"Turnover" (an article over-running the last
column of the front page, so that, in order to
finish it, a reader must turn to the next), showing
how frequently common quotations are mis-quo-
tations. That was easy enough, for one of his
wide reading and ready memory. Unluckily,
however, the greater number of his corrections
were as incorrect as the mis-quotations that
they were meant to be-pillory. Painful were the
ensuing letters from correspondents each of whom
was pleased, in one instance of mishap or another,
to be able to correct the correction, and to catch
the Globe tripping. I certainly never afterwards
heard Collins charged with inaccurate scholarship:
so he may have learned, by this experience, that
verification of references is not more important
than of quotations.



163



CHAPTER XIII

The "Decemviri" — Algernon Charles Swinburne — James
MacNeill Whistler— Joseph Knight— The Marston circle
— Dante Gabriel Rossetti— William Morris — Dr. Richard
Garnett — Astrology— Philip Bourke Marston— Oliver
Madox Brown — Louise Chandler Moulton — " Fiona Mac-
leod" — Arthur O'Shaughnessy — "Nelly" — Mrs. Lynn
Linton

Among the incidents of Tom Purnell's general
stage-managership was the formation of a small
society in which no two members should repre-
sent the same Art or Profession. We called our-
selves the " Decemviri," as limiting our number to
ten ; in fact, we were never more than nine, a
vacancy being purposely left in case of some
future overwhelming claim to be of our company.
Our only rule was to dine together not less often
than once a month either at some restaurant or at
the house of some member who could conveniently
entertain, with unlimited licence for irregular
meetings. We had neither president, nor secretary,
nor treasurer; indeed the latter would have been
an especially superfluous office, because we had no
subscriptions. The place and date of each meet-
164



The " Decemviri "

ing were settled at the close of the preceding,
and information thereof forwarded to an absentee
by any one who would volunteer for that excep-
tional duty. Poetry was represented by Swin-
burne ; painting by Whistler ; criticism by Joseph
Knight ; the stage by Dominick Murray ; archi-
tecture by Jekyll, in rising repute for ornamental
design — " Jekyll of the Gates " was his regular
designation on account of a work that had won
special attention ; journalism by Purnell ; fiction
by myself ; law by B. T. Williams ; medicine by
Dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson, who had not
yet entered upon his anti-alcohol crusade. . . .
Of all the nine I alone am left alive.

Among our systematic informalities was that
we kept no minutes or any record of our meet-
ings. This, though it made for ease and freedom,
I now regret, since an account of a club of such
a sort, counting Swinburne and Whistler among
fewer members than one's fingers, would be
interesting in fuller detail than I, its only
potential historian as the last of the Decemvirs,
can, in my notelessness, now supply. There
was good talk among us — how could there
fail to be where those two met, and with Joseph
Knight there also, whose talk was yet better than
theirs ? I am, alas, no Boswell, or it might be
that the fame of our club might run that of Tlie

165



Mid- Victorian Memories

Club hard. How far my recollections have been
turned by time into a rosy twilight, of course I
cannot know. Yet, even though the rose-light
be extreme, I am not sure that we could not
quite well have held our own against our historic
rival. The eloquence of Burke and the humour
of Goldsmith are by no means conspicuous in
such table-talk of theirs as has been handed down,
and we were free from any Johnsonian oppres-
sion. Then, too, we were by our very constitu-
tion exempt from the besetting vice of purely
literary coteries, as I heard it illustrated, at a
gathering of one of them, by the novelist David
Christie Murray. " I keep my good things for
my books," said he, in his weightiest way.
"Then, my dear Murray," instantly retorted
Byron Webber, " why on earth don't you put
'em there ? "

The first meeting of the Decemviri was held
at a French restaurant — I forget its name, and if
it still exists should be unable to identify it — in
Old Compton Street, Soho. In the same quarter
we continued to meet, unless at Whistler's in
Chelsea, or at Knight's in Camden Square, or,
more frequently, for Sunday supper at the
Dominick Murrays' lodgings in the Hampstead
Road."]^,. I have; put the last surname in the plural
because, though we were an essentially male
i66



Meeting-places of the Society

society, Mrs. Murray always presided at her own
table, and nothing would have been farther from
our pleasure than the withdrawal of so good a
comrade when her duty as hostess was done.
She was Miss Josephine Fiddes on the stage.
I have none but the kindliest memory of her,
save for one incident beyond the pale of pardon.
She was a warm-coloured brunette, with hair as
black as hair can be ; and one Sunday evening,
on entering the room, I was appalled to find it,
not suddenly grown white, but transmuted to
brilliant gold. The fashion of golden locks for
actresses, and their imitators, was just setting in ;
and had carried her away.

The Decemviri never dissolved. I am the
Decemviri. Nor is it possible to fix a date at
which they ceased to meet. No meeting can be
called the last, because none was so considered.
But there were two points in our constitution that
made for certain though, in our case, long-post*
poned decay. One was the limitation of our
number. Our very title, '* the Ten," prevented
us from receiving new members unless to supply
vacancies ; and there might not be a single
vacancy for half a century to come. The other
was the very reason for our existence — that we
should be of different vocations, so far as some
unavoidable overlapping allowed. This, though

167



Mid- Victorian Memories

it brought us the better together at first, inevit-
ably tended to separation as our lines of life more
and more diverged. Opportunities, and then
possibilities, of coming all together at a given
place and given time gradually grew rarer and
rarer, until we ceased to be comrades, while in
no case ceasing to be friends. And then, when
vacancies did occur, should we have had the heart
to fill them ? I think not. After all, when I
wrote " I am the Decemviri," I wrote wrong.
Counting ghosts, there are eight more. And
anything more intensely, more immortally alive
than a Ghost no memory of mine can conceive.

I saw but little of Swinburne in after years ;
and from what I have read about him in the
way of descriptive portraiture, either his personal
appearance must have considerably improved
with age — as indeed very frequently happens ;
or else the portrayers must have idealised pretty
freely, seeing the poet's reflection in his outward
form. At that time there was something femininely
feline in his features, narrowing downwards from