London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

"I knew you, John Burns, I knew you. Your photographs are like you. The voice is what I imagined it would be. Sit, gentlemen, sit. There, by the window. No better view in England, I really think. I comfort myself with it. It is good enough for parliament-men and our scribbling kind," said Meredith, smiling roguishly at me. The grasp of his hand was firm and generous. His voice had rich, deep tones. But he looked a fragile being.

"Like the schoolboy, I can say, 'This is n't writin', it's readin','" and he pointed to the manuscript.

"Chapman and Hall-ing," I ventured to say.

"That's right," said Meredith, "you see the slave bearing his burden."

If John Burns' photographs were faithful, so were Meredith's, or so was the one with which I had been familiar. His beard and hair were grey, almost white then. He looked older than he was. He was only sixty-five. Only sixty-five, and I thought him old! He lived to be eighty-one. I liked his voice. I had been told that it was high and shrill. It was nothing of the kind. It was mellow, clear, and his speech was scholar-like, with quaint shafts of wit. They used to tell of his "artificial talk." I heard none of it. He was as natural as his roses. But there might be prickly thorns under the rose.

Meredith gathered his papers and put them aside. He leaned back in his big, comfortable chair, and said "now let's talk" as another man might say "let's have a drink." And we three sat, and talked and remade the world like a lot of youngsters. We knew better, each of us, knew that the dreams we were indulging would never be realised, that probably we would never call them up and look at them again—we would n't dare—they would be buried with us, no doubt. Some other youngsters might dream similar dreams by and by. No doubt they would. But to-day was to-day. And to-morrow I would be twice as old as Meredith, though half his years, and know in all my body half as much as his little finger knew. That very day he was the youngest of the three. He bubbled quietly, like champagne in a hollow-stemmed glass. The conversation capered. We might have been lads out of school, and we ragged the authorities. Meredith was the youngest and gayest of the three, Burns the most enthusiastic, and I came dragging on with not exactly timorous whoop-hurrahs! And it was June, and high noon, with roses everywhere, and still more roses, and the humming of bees. And the big world was far away—a million miles.

It was "a fine Radical day" no doubt, in more than the limited political sense. Burns was the only political Radical of the three. He called me "a crusted Tory." I don't remember what he called George Meredith, who left us guessing, I think, as some of his printed pages were likely to do. Anyway, we did n't talk books. Life was better. And there was a lot of life to talk about yet, at the end of an age. Besides, our host was pressing us to stay to luncheon.

Down the garden path we strolled, still talking. Meredith said, as we seated ourselves at table: "I 'm here alone at present: you come like a rescuing expedition. This talk is a shower on parched land." After luncheon the talk went on, under trees, and tea-time had come before we knew it. After tea a walk over Box Hill.

You will have gathered by this time that the talking was not about Meredith or his books. He guided us from those high pastures where we would have liked to browse to the lower marshes where we might stumble as we pleased over politics, Home Rule and no rule, free trade and protection, dear food and cheap food, municipal administration, the housing of the poor, socialism, and all those everlasting puzzles which England is discussing now as she discussed them thirty years ago. They were very dear to John Burns. They seemed interesting to Meredith. He enjoyed talking another man's shop; at any rate, he enjoyed talking Burns' shop so much that the talk scarcely touched on books. It may be mentioned at this point that John Burns, even at that time, owned probably more books than Meredith, and knew the insides of them. Whether or not he knew the insides of more books than did Meredith is another matter. Meredith, you know, was a publisher's reader.

I did manage, while we were at tea, to get in a word about "One of Our Conquerors" and its tribute to good wine, certain passages which could have been written only by a connoisseur.

"Ah, I 'm that; yes, I 'm that! Burns would n't appreciate that, but you do." And I spoke of a certain description in the same book, a view from London Bridge, westward, in the late afternoon. And the man chasing his hat in a high wind. I said I had taken an American friend there recently, and he had had to chase his hat, and then, for solace, we had gone to the restaurant in the city, the one described by Meredith, and had had food, and cracked a bottle of the delicate wine which, with tender ritual, had been opened and served to the two men in the story.

"And," said I, "although you disguised the restaurant and the label, I will not disguise from you the fact that my friend is also a connoisseur of the bright and beautiful, the American celebrator of choice things and moments—Thomas Bailey Aldrich—and that he rose at a point in our simple feast and said, with reverence: 'I salute George Meredith.'"

Meredith's eyes twinkled. He rose, lifted his straw hat, bowed, and said: "The Author of 'Marjorie Daw', I am your obliged and humble servant."

And so the honours were even between Aldrich and himself.

Burns put in his word here. "We must go for the five-thirty train. Good-bye, Mr. Meredith, we have had the—"

"No, no, John Burns! It 's not to be heard of! Both of you are to stay for dinner! Mark you that, John Burns. Never, never shall I forgive you two if you leave a poor lone man of ink without dining at his table. The thing is forbidden, forbidden absolutely, John Burns."

Is it strange then that we stayed for dinner, having already taken luncheon, tea, and a stroll with the magician of Box Hill? Not only did we stay, but we stayed till nearly midnight, having just time to catch the last train for London.

And this is a very pleasant part of my recollections of the day:

Our host, when he had shown us to the dining room, excused himself for a moment, lighted a candle, and, opening a door in a corner of the room, descended to the cellar. In two or three minutes he reappeared, his delicate face lighted by the candle which he held in his left hand directly behind a dusty half-bottle of wine, through which the light shone softly in a ruby glow. One saw first the wine, then the light, then the face, as ascending the stairs they entered from below, mounting slowly with exquisite care lest the wine be shaken. Slowly, and with great care, Meredith wrapped a napkin around the bottle, and drew the cork, placing the bottle at my plate and saying, with the most gracious, old-world courtesy: "For one who knows and appreciates, from one who appreciates and knows."

There was "approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley!"

"John Burns is a teetotaller, they say," added Meredith. "Of such is not the kingdom of my heaven. Burns says you discovered him. What do you think of your discovery? Tell me how it came about."

"Burns does not embody my idea of a modest man," said I. "As for that, there seems to be some doubt, nowadays, whether modest men should be permitted to live. What does Gilbert say:

"'You must stir it, and stump itAnd blow your own trumpet,Or, bless me, you have n't a chance!'

"Well, I came upon Burns first, in '89, when he had London scared (of course London would n't confess that it was scared but it was) and he was 'stumping it' at the dock gates, and from cart-tails on Tower Hill, and was listened to by thousands and tens of thousands of hungry men, and their wives, and youngsters—"

"'Agitating the dregs of London', the newspapers put it," said Meredith.

"All for sixpence an hour," said Burns.

"You have the floor!" said Meredith to me.

"I told you he is not accurately described as a modest man. This is my story," I continued, "the story as I see it. London had heard of him—when was it?—in '86, or so, when he led a crowd of East Enders to Trafalgar Square where mass meetings were not permitted, and the crowd got out of hand and smashed plate-glass windows, and Burns got his head broken, or nearly so, and went to gaol."

"'Serve the brute right!' I remember the run of thoughtful British opinion," put in Meredith.

"I was not in England at the time, but I remember the verdict," I said.

"The trouble was," said Burns, "I hadn't been introduced to the authorities. There I touched a fundamental British prejudice. The affair secured me the introduction, and opened Trafalgar Square—"

"To the mob," said Meredith.

"To mass meetings," said Burns.

"I am playing British chorus," was Meredith's rejoinder.

"Second chapter," said I. "There came the year of the Great Dock Strike. The casual labourer swarmed out of chaos, and struck for a sane, not to say 'civilised' method of hiring, and sixpence an hour."

"And the dock companies, or whatever they were, were not sane, and, also, they had n't a sixpence, they said"—thus Meredith.

"Which was absurd, Mr. Meredith, as you are on the point of adding," I went on. "We don't know how many thousands of men were thrown out of work. Nobody knows to this day, but here is what I am coming at; there were thousands of them, and there was great suffering in their families. Well, when I first saw Burns he was organising kitchens, and feeding women and children, and making ten speeches every twenty-four hours, and sleeping an hour or two when he could find time and a place to lie down. Some nights he did not sleep at all. The night before I met him he slept four hours in his clothes and boots. In three days he made thirty-six speeches; in three weeks he averaged ten speeches a day, out of doors. He is hoarse still, no wonder.

"I lost sight of him for a bit, and found him again on Tower Hill, speaking to a big crowd. His platform was a dray. When he stopped speaking and jumped down from the dray, I introduced myself to him, said I was mightily interested, and that I wanted to interview him.

"'All right,' said he; 'begin!'

"If he were not modest, I was. 'Not here,' said I, 'let's go where we can talk in quiet.' So I tucked him into a hansom and, followed by a yelling crowd which we soon left out of sight, we drove to a club of mine in the West End, where we had a long talk. The immediate results were—oh, well, some articles in which I tried to show the world the real John Burns."

"That was the discovery?" asked Meredith.

"Burns calls it so. He was no more modest about being discovered then than he is now. He has a way of telling you straight what he thinks, or what he 's at, or of telling you that he won't tell you."

"I 've noticed that. John Burns, are you under any delusions about popularity? I think you are not."

"I 'm not," said Burns. "When the crowds are cheering their loudest, I am asking myself how soon they will hang my carcass on the outer walls."

"A cheering and useful inquiry," observed Meredith. "My impression is that you have a long course to cover. But leaders of the people are wisest when they remember that there are outer walls for the hanging of carcasses."

"The confessions of Radicals strengthen the soul," said I.

"These are not confessions; they are articles of faith," exclaimed Burns.

I intimated that my faith in a political sense was as a grain of mustard seed, human nature being what it was, and political stupidity unconquerable. Gladstone being mentioned by our host, I asked Burns to tell his Gladstone story, that is, what the G.O.M. said to him, and what he said to the G.O.M. at their first meeting.

"It was in the lobby of the House of Commons," Burns explained, "soon after my election. You know I was not what might be called a worshipper of that wonderful man. A bit too independent for his liking, perhaps."

"And the only thing he would dislike, perhaps," said Meredith, smiling.

"Well, you know. I was in the lobby, talking with a front-bench Liberal when the great man passed. The member with whom I was talking took me up to him and presented me. The G.O.M. bowed, and we shook hands. He said:

"'It gives me pleasure, Mr. Burns, to see you here, to welcome you to the House of Commons.'

"I replied, 'Believe me, sir, my pleasure is equal to your own!'

"A hit, a palpable hit!" cried Meredith. "I can see Gladstone drawing in his horns."

"He stiffened a bit, and we went our ways. That is all there is of the story," added Burns.

"The one about the docker and the matches is not bad," said I.

"Let me have it," begged Meredith.

"At one of my meetings near the dock gates, a fellow shouted: 'Burn the docks; break in and burn the docks!' He interrupted me two or three times with that cry. The crowd was sullen. It had n't got its sixpence yet. I must stop the roaring fellow, or his mates might get out of control. I borrowed a box of matches from the nearest man. 'Catch!' I cried to the noisy chap. He caught it as I flung it over the heads of the crowd. 'Now, then,' I called to him, 'if you are crazy, if you don't care what happens to all these men and their wives and children, and if you want to ruin this strike, go, fire the docks!' But the man did n't move. I waited, but still he did n't move. Then I said: 'Your hand has n't the courage of your mouth. Take the matches from him, men, hand 'em back to me. Make way for him. He 's shown that he 's a braggin' coward. Out with him!' He skulked away, hooted by the crowd. I suppose that was the origin of the yarn that I was inciting the mob to burn the docks."

"That's the way history is written, John Burns. Have you found your dockers suspicious regarding you?" Meredith put the question with a naïve air.

"Of course. Men of their kind are always suspicious, until they know you. Why should n't they be? Whoever went among 'em before those days with any other purpose than to get the best of 'em?"

"They suspected your decent clothes," said I.

Burns laughed. "One morning I appeared in a new suit of blue serge like this, and a new straw hat, like that. 'Where'd you get 'em, Burns?' one man shouted. 'He 's makin' more 'n sixpence out o' us,' yelled another. Then I had to explain, anyhow, I did explain, that Madame Tussaud's had given me a new suit, so that they could put my old one on a wax figure of me. Tussaud's wanted my old hat, but my wife would n't part with that. She wanted it as a trophy."

We sat at table all the evening talking, George Meredith, John Burns, and I. Of all the men one had ever heard talk, I can't remember one who had a charm of voice and speech excelling Meredith's. I can feel its fascination now across the interval of nearly thirty years. It was, I have said, a musical voice, but it was more than that. It was rich and deep and delicate. The enunciation was perfect with a perfection that was rare and individual; his voice was an instrument with many banks of keys. Charm was its characteristic, charm that no one could describe, although many have tried to do so. And his eyes, you could say, were bluish-grey, or grey-blue, but you could not say—as they twinkled, or flashed, or seemed at rest like little lakes, pellucid, undisturbed, or lighted instantly as some humorous or sympathetic thought moved behind them—you could not say how, or why they held you, or had the power, a pleasant power, of searching you, looking through you. There was nothing that you could describe in so many words, but there was much that you could feel and like. Even when Meredith spoke of man, or woman, or deed that he did not like, and spoke with dramatic force, his gaze would not blaze or harden. He seemed to be searching serenely beyond the surface for the element of comedy, searching with sympathy and humour for the thing that he could understand, and understand better than any one else in the world. You could always touch him with a sympathetic humour. He did not like wise owls, or rather the owlishness which the run of humans take for wisdom.

His strength, George Meredith's strength, was in his perceptions, his appreciations; physically he was frail, or was frail then! You would n't have supposed him ever to have been a great walker and a man of athletic tendencies. But he had been. Now he walked rather slowly, with a stick, and seemed glad to stop every few minutes. His face made me think of a cameo, by the delicacy of its carving. There was exquisite beauty in it, and the voice enhanced that. But even the most delicate lines were firmly carved. If you handled him roughly you might bend him, but you could not break his spirit. At the time I speak of, he was beyond his years, far beyond them; physically, but in no other way, he seemed an old and fragile man. And yet neither voice nor eyes suggested anything of the kind. In spirits and outlook he retained the keenness of mighty youth. When he talked with us he was of no age at all, the agelessness of the eternal; it was only when he walked with us about his garden, or over Box Hill, that the flesh betrayed, now and then, its limitations. If you had had his eyes, you might have looked through his body. A strong wind might have carried him away. But he lived sixteen years after that, and, for all his touch of melancholy, they were happy years.

Others could tell other tales of him and have done so; have said, for one thing, that he was quick and tempery. What they meant was that his highly sensitive make-up had n't its times or seasons, but were on and off quite unexpectedly, as is usually the case with highly sensitive folk. Men do not study such sensitive creatures with the object of avoiding trouble; they blunder and thunder on and then are amazed, when they have struck a nerve centre, to find that it has its own method of reacting. And then George Meredith had been more than half his life a reader for publishers. And all his life he was writing poetry and novels! Now if there is any act less likely than another to insure peace of mind, it is the reading of other persons' manuscripts. And to do that regularly, professionally, for several decades, while you prefer to be a poet and love to be a novelist, is to give oneself to occupations which not only jar upon each other, but upon the nerves of him that undertakes the triple task. Meredith must have had a rare power of concentration to preserve his own authorship from saturation in the flood of manuscripts in which he swam for forty years. His experiences would have paralysed the creative capacity in most men.

I can suppose only that they who found his talk "artificial" must have touched some spring in him that Burns and I did not press. We found him entirely free from artificiality. No pair of strangers could have been more agreeably entertained. And yet we inflicted upon him a long day. They say he was "gey ill to live wi'." Perhaps he was; perhaps he was not. But why should n't he have been? Most writers are. And why should n't they be? They are of a sensitive sort, in greater degree, or less. Their business is mainly to observe, to consider, to speak with ink. These things require concentration of mind. And while the world is running in and out, and kindly intentioned persons are making suggestions which have no relation to the business in hand, or wondering why their wish cannot have precedence, or why their opinion is not the most important thing in the universe, the poet's work, or train of thought, has to get on, or the novelist's, or the reader of manuscripts'. It may be true that no creative gentleman has a right to moods, but at least he has a right to tenses. No such plea is put forth for the rest of mankind. Probably the fact is that the person criticising considers his own mood the more important of the two. Artistic sensibilities are as difficult for their possessors to endure all the time as they can possibly be for any one else to encounter a part of the time. But who ever thinks of that?

We talked on through the evening, without leaving the dining room. I caught Burns looking apprehensively at the clock. "Yes," said I, "we can catch it if we go at once. It's the last train." There was a hurried leave-taking, and we were off. We left the kind old gentleman standing in the doorway, holding a lamp which lighted us down the path and shone full upon his face.

"Well?" said Burns, when we were seated in the train.

"A glorious day!" I answered.

"Never a better," said Burns.

Surely we never went through a better day together, and we went through many.

Late one afternoon in 1907, I was crossing the outer lobby of the House of Commons just as John Burns was crossing it in the opposite direction. He saw me first and called out to me.

"Where have you come from now?" he asked, when we had shaken hands. "And how long is it since we met?"

"America this time," said I. "I 've been there four years. But it must be seven years since I 've seen you."

"Gadabout!" said he. "Did you ever have another Meredith day?"

"No," said I, "nor anything like it. Let's go again."

"Let's," was his response.

But we did not go again, for, as it turned out, another ten days called me back to America. Burns, of course, was already in the Cabinet, but he wore a blue serge suit, just as of yore.

In 1913 when again I came to England, I did not see him. I had several months in the country but only ten days in town, when I fled with an attentive influenza which Freshwater drove away.

But in 1916, having come the day before from a liner at Liverpool, I was walking in Victoria Street just as Burns turned a corner.

"The oddest thing," said he. "I was just thinking of our day with Meredith. Let's talk. But don't talk politics. Which way are you going?"

"Any way," I said. And we strolled into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.

CHAPTER XVI

PARNELL

The man most talked of in '88-'90 was not Mr. Gladstone but Mr. Parnell. The Parnell Commission "had shaken the earth", as an Irish writer said in a moment of unusual restraint. And during its long-drawn life, as during the events which immediately had preceded it, "the uncrowned king of Ireland" was the foremost topic of conversation and of newspaper attention. From the ordeal of the Commission he emerged with triumph, a triumph which in its turn caused some planetary commotion, only to be met with the divorce suit of Captain O'Shea, and the subsequent storms, and snarls, and hopeless desertions of Committee Room Fifteen. Thence to heartbreak and death was but a short and rapid decline.

I knew Parnell but slightly; no one knew him well. Lord Salisbury did not know him at all, had never taken the trouble to cross the lobbies between the Houses of Lords and Commons and look at him or listen to him. "I have never seen him," said Mr. Gladstone's rival. And it was common report that the men who knew Parnell least of all, and least of all about him, were his own followers. Even that is possible, if it seems unlikely. One of his most conspicuous followers, who wrote conspicuously and talked about him and about Home Rule, I knew very well, and for years I wondered if he really knew as little as he said he did about his chief's ways and work and wisdom. He made a great mystery of them, as many of the Irish members did, or pretended to do. They told you that he kept them at arm's length, scarcely nodded to them, or, if he nodded, did so in a manner that was cold and distant beyond belief. They were the dust beneath his feet. But they told you that they did not resent this treatment; it showed the superiority of the man.

Whether they resented it or not, you may form your own opinion by what they did to him when they got the chance. But before the squalls and gales arose in Committee Room Fifteen, he had held them together; they were a disciplined body. No man before his day had been able to hold them together, to discipline them, to force his will upon them. No other parliamentary leader of the Irish before him produced results. But he produced them. His followers feared him, and they feared him because he was so unlike themselves, so un-Irish. His "mystery" lay in his immense capacity for holding his tongue; in his aloofness; in his concentration. He knew how to get from the rest of the United Kingdom, from the English and Scotch and so on, what he wanted; as a rule, his followers did not. He knew how to play the political game in the British way, with additions of his own; his followers did not. They had not the patience; they may have had other qualities more captivating than his, but they had not the patience or the art of command.